Short answer: yes, that’s the story—and it’s wonderfully absurd. Picture the most famous general in Europe, fresh off a diplomatic triumph, stepping into a celebratory rabbit hunt. The cages open. The rabbits charge… not away, but straight at Napoleon. He backs up, then bolts for his carriage with a furry tide in pursuit. The tale sits at the crossroads of slapstick and history, and it’s too good not to tell. According to the most-cited account, the hunt took place in 1807, after the Treaties of Tilsit, and Napoleon’s chief of staff, Louis-Alexandre Berthier, had helpfully procured a great many bunnies for the occasion. They were tame. They thought the men with baskets and coats were food. Chaos followed.
The “rabbit attack” in plain English
Napoleon went hunting. He expected skittish game. What he got was a herd of house-raised rabbits who rushed the lunch buffet. If you’ve ever met a pet rabbit at feeding time, you know the vibe: zero fear, maximum enthusiasm.
Eyewitness color comes from the 19th-century memoirs of General Paul Thiébault. He paints a scene straight out of farce. Rabbits “collect in a body,” close ranks, and surge toward the emperor. Staff officers scramble. Coachmen swing whips. Napoleon staggers under a tide of soft persistence. At some point he retreats to the carriage, which—depending on the retelling—also becomes a target for adventurous climbers. Whatever the exact headcount of bunnies, the hunters yield the field.
Now, did Thiébault embellish? Almost certainly. Memoirs often do. But the bones of the story have survived two centuries of retelling because they feel right in a very human way. Power meets pantry-trained rabbits. Power loses.
Why the rabbits charged, not fled
Wild hares run. Farm rabbits don’t. These animals lived around people and associated footsteps, coats, and baskets with food. Release a lot of them at once and they won’t scatter like wild game. They’ll storm the buffet line. Behavioral mismatch is the cleanest explanation. No mystique required.
Also, the setup matters. A “put-and-take” hunt—where animals are released for sport—breaks the normal predator-prey script. There’s no learned wariness, no flight practice. Switch the quarry to domesticated stock and you’ve turned a hunt into a picnic with gate-crashers.
Berthier’s bad day
Berthier, Napoleon’s chief of staff, was a logistical wizard who could make an army appear where no army ought to fit. He could draft orders with metronomic precision. He could not, on this day, organize a rabbit hunt.
If you manage big operations, this part stings. One wrong assumption up front (buying tame rabbits instead of trapping wild ones), and the whole plan collapses in slapstick. The story also hints at a staff culture that tried very hard to please the boss. Too hard, maybe. Someone picked “simply buy a thousand bunnies” over “trap a few dozen wild hares.” Easy option chosen. Wrong animals acquired. Cue stampede.
What the sources say—and what they don’t
We do have a period voice for this, and you can read it yourself. Thiébault’s memoirs (English translation, 1896) carry the most famous passage—with its glorious line about the rabbits “turning the Emperor’s flank.” It’s tongue-in-cheek, but it’s also specific: the rabbits mass, they push, they force a retreat. That’s the heart of the legend, and it’s the bit everyone remembers. Internet Archive
Modern treatment of the episode tends to lean into the humor. A short segment from the Smithsonian’s team frames it as a hunting day gone wrong—Napoleon loved hunting, wasn’t a crack shot, and a well-meant assist with “easy” quarry backfired in spectacular fashion. That framing matches the common-sense read: this was less a military rout than a logistics gag. Smithsonian Institution
What we don’t have is a courtroom-tight bundle of cross-checked eyewitness reports. No official bulletin. No imperial diary entry listing “defeated by rabbits” between notes on artillery parks. It’s a richly told anecdote, not Waterloo.
How many rabbits?
Numbers vary wildly in retellings. Some say “hundreds,” others “thousands.” Inflated counts grow with time because bigger piles of bunnies make for funnier paragraphs. What matters is behavior, not headcount. A couple hundred domesticated rabbits moving as a mass can look like a furry tide. In a confined setting, a “few hundred” is plenty to turn a solemn hunt into a scrambling retreat.
The scene, beat by beat
Post-Tilsit glow. The court’s feeling triumphant.
A hunt is planned on a private estate.
Rabbits arrive in bulk, but they’re farm stock.
Cages open. The rabbits orient toward the people.
First wave surges. Surprise, laughter, backpedaling.
Staff try to shoo the animals. Whips crack. Little effect.
Napoleon withdraws to the carriage. Dignity, dented.
The rabbits inherit the field like tiny victors with twitching noses.
You don’t need much imagination to hear the laughter and see the helplessness. Anybody can be undone by a small, simple oversight.
Why this story sticks
Because it’s about image. Napoleon controlled symbols as ruthlessly as he moved corps. Eagles, laurel wreaths, the hand-in-waistcoat pose—that was propaganda as architecture. And then along comes a caper that says: the emperor of Europe ran from rabbits. Of course people repeated it.
It’s also about nature’s veto. You can plan parades and treaties. You can’t negotiate with a hundred hungry herbivores who think your boots mean lunch. The trivial becomes mythic, because it pricks the bubble of invincibility.
What it says about Napoleon, the person
The best tales about powerful people shrink the stage to human size. Here, the man who could reorder maps gets flustered by a furball swarm. Did he laugh? One hopes so. Even true believers need a day off from solemnity. The picture of Napoleon hustling into his coach while beribboned officers wave off bunnies with riding crops is so vivid you can almost smell the grass.
And the aftermath? If you’re Berthier, you never live this down. If you’re the emperor, you don’t mention it on campaign. But inside the circle, it becomes a running joke, a reminder that sometimes the field defeats you in its own way.
The historian’s caution
Take all colorful memoir episodes with a pinch of salt. Veterans shape stories. They polish timing. They add drama. That said, Thiébault’s passage reads like a thing a proud army would tease itself about in private. It scans. It’s in character. It carries the ring of a yarn told often.
The good news: you don’t have to choose between “true in every detail” and “pure invention.” There’s a sensible middle. A hunt was arranged, tame rabbits were released, they mobbed the party, the emperor retreated, and everyone laughed about it later. The embroidery—the phalanxes, the “turning of the flank”—is a stylist’s wink, not a reason to toss the whole episode.
A tiny lesson with a big echo
Leadership lives and dies in the assumptions you don’t check. Berthier’s team assumed “rabbits are rabbits.” They weren’t. The most serious staff in Europe forgot the difference between wild and domesticated behavior, and that’s all it took.
Also, let the record show: if you’re going to stage a symbolic triumph, maybe don’t rely on hungry animals to behave on cue.
Two solid places to go deeper
Read the original passage in Thiébault’s memoir (English translation)—the famous bit appears in Volume II and is deliciously over-the-top.
Thiébault’s memoir (English translation)Watch the Smithsonian Channel’s short segment that lays out the hunt and why it went sideways.
Smithsonian Channel segment on Napoleon and rabbits
Final thought
“Napoleon was once attacked by rabbits” sounds like a meme. It’s better than that. It’s a reminder that history isn’t just battles and borders. It’s also picnics, bad assumptions, and one perfect afternoon when the world’s most important man had to tiptoe backwards from a determined cloud of fluff. And that, somehow, makes the whole era feel more real.
