Jean Thurel’s Old Age Was Quite Different than Most People’s Old Age
If we have the good fortune to live to be a hundred, odds are most of us would be in a nursing home. Either that, or whiling away the time in a plush living room recliner, with a blanket over our knees, waiting for the Grim Reaper to pay a by-then-overdue visit. That is because we are not Jean Thurel (1698 – 1807). Know where he was on his hundredth birthday? Soldiering in the French Army, in whose ranks he served for ninety years.
Thurel’s long life spanned three centuries. He served three different regimes, as France went from the royal Ancien regime, to a republic after the 1789 French Revolution, to an empire under Napoleon Bonaparte. He enlisted at age eighteen in the Regiment de Touraine, an infantry outfit, and stayed with it for more than seventy five years, until 1792. As seen below, he not only served in the military, but marched and fought in numerous wars, alongside fellow soldiers young enough to be his great grandchildren.