Souvenirs sur la Révolution, l'Empire et la Restauration, the posthumously published memoirs of Louis-Victor-Léon de Rochechouart (1788–1858), offers a firsthand account of Russian military operations along the Circassian frontier in the early nineteenth century. A French aristocrat who fled the Revolution and entered Russian imperial service, Rochechouart served as aide-de-camp to the Duc de Richelieu, governor-general of New Russia, and participated directly in "punitive" expeditions against Circassian communities in the Kuban region around 1809. The memoir was edited and published by his son thirty-one years after the author's death.

The passages concerning Circassia document two distinct operations. In the first, Rochechouart personally commanded a detachment that attacked and burned a village near Anapa, taking women, children, and livestock as captives. In the second, recounted from his brother Louis's direct testimony, a night assault on the village of Emir-Ahmet resulted in the killing of women and children in the absence of the male population. Rochechouart records that the Cossacks, in his brother's words, were "drunk with blood" and could not be restrained; the French original uses the verb égorger (to slaughter) a term softened in subsequent Russian translation of the text.