Louis Mandrin (February 11, 1725 - May 26, 1755) was a French brigand (highwayman) from Dauphiné.
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Born at Saint-Étienne-de-Saint-Geoirs, he became head of the family at 17, on his father's death. The family was well established in the region, although not doing as well as it had been.
His first incident with the 'la ferme générale' (the later day Inland Revenue and tax collectors) was in 1748, under contract to supply to the French army in Italy with « 100 mules less 3 ». He lost most of the animals on the way back to Saint-Étienne-de-Saint-Geoirs, during the crossing of the Alps. He only had 17 beasts left on arrival, and they were in an extremely sorry state. The Ferme générale refused to pay him.
On July 27, 1753 following a brawl his opponent was killed. Louis Mandrin and his friend Benoît Brissaud were sentenced to death. Mandrin fled but Brissaud was caught and hanged in Breuil square in Grenoble. On the same day, his brother Pierre (Mandrin) was hanged for counterfeiting so he declared a personal war against the tax collectors [la Ferme générale].
The tax collectors [la Ferme générale] were hated by the population. They collected all taxes for the King, unspecified sums, levied on salt [gabelle] tobacco and farming. The system was widely abused as they paid the royal coffers only a pre agreed amount; and became powerful and wealthy as a result.
Mandrin joined a gang of smugglers operating in the Swiss Cantons, France and Savoy, which was then a sovereign state. Mainly trafficking tobacco. He soon became head of this gang - a small army of some 300 men which he led and organised like a military regiment. They had warehouses for weapons and stolen goods in Savoy (then a duchy that was part of the kingdom of Sardinia) and believed himself out of the reach from the French authorities. During 1754 he organised six military style campaigns. Targeting only the most unpopular tax collectors which gained him huge support from the local population.
He bought goods (cloth, hides, tobacco, canvas and spices) in Switzerland, which he then resold in French towns without paying the Ferme Générale any of the tax due. The population was delighted with such bargains. Rapidly, laws were passed, forbidding the buying of his smuggled goods; but in [Rodez], he made a show of provocation by forcing Ferme Générale employees to buy his goods at gunpoint.
The Ferme générale, exasperated by this « bandit » whose popularity was ever growing, obtained help from the Royal Army in trying to stop him. He still managed to take refuge in Savoy, near Pont-de-Beauvoisin. The farmer generals then decided to enter the Duchy illegally by disguising 500 men as peasants. They seized Mandrin at the fortified farm in Rochefort-en-Novalaise betrayed by of two of his men. When King Charles Emmanuel III of Sardinia learned of the intrusion on his territory, he demanded from Louis XV that the prisoner be turned over to him, to which the French King agreed. However, the farmers general, anxious to be rid of Mandrin for good, hurried his trial and execution. He was tried on May 24, 1755, then broken on the wheel in Valence, Drôme on May 26, in front of 6,000 onlookers, and endured the torture without a cry. After 8 minutes, he was strangled to put an end to his suffering.
The man was dead but the wrong righting bandit's legend was just beginning. His struggle against the injustice of the Ancien Régime was sung throughout France by a ballad that is still known today, the Complainte de Mandrin whose author remain unknown.
Extremely popular during his life, Mandrin remains famous to this day, in his native Dauphiné, in the Savoie and to a lesser degree, in the rest of France.
This ballad, dated 1755, is excerpted from an opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau, composed in 1733 : Hippolyte et Aricie. It was then covered anonymously under the title by which it is still known. The text was also published as an appendix to a book titled Précis de la vie de Louis Mandrin ("Treatise on the Life of Louis Mandrin").
Since 2002, the brigand lends his name to a walnut flavored beer brewed in Grenoble. Today, the Brasserie artisanale du Dauphiné makes 6 different beers under that brand.