← Back to the front page

Geriatric Glory: Historic Figures Who Did Amazing Things In Their Old Age

Khalid Elhassan December 19, 2023 28 min

Benjamin Franklin was a babe magnet, well into his old age. New York Post

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.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.