During the 19th century emerged in France a cultural production, focused on entertainment, whose subject matter was the army and its representative characters. The genre of the “comique troupier” or coarse comedy focused on military characters first appeared in the theatres of the Restoration, then spread to the newspapers, especially in the satirical illustrated press, to popular literature and to the stages of the cafés-concerts, and built up the role and image of the army in the popular imagination. These texts and these pictures depict social types that reinforce gender norms and arouse laughter by repetitive rhetorical devices. If the authors first pinpointed the defects of an institution that long stood aloof from the nation, this critical function tended to wane after the generalization of the military service in 1872. At the end of the nineteenth century, this hybrid production was responding to a public eager to know more about army life, while nonetheless continuing to have from the point of view of the institution itself a role as crotic that the army had to take into account.