On ne distinguait plus les ailes ni le centre:
Il neigeait. Les blessés s’abritaient dans le ventre
Des chevaux morts; au seuil des bivouacs désolés
On voyait des clarions à leur poste gelés
Restés debout, en selle et muets, blancs de givre,
Collant leur bouche en pierre aux trompettes de cuivre.
Boulets, mitraille, obus, mêlés aux flacons blancs,
Pleuvaient; les grenadiers surpris d’être tremblants,
Marchaient pensifs, la glace à leur moustache grise.
Il neigeait, il neigeait toujours! La froide bise
Sifflait; sur le verglas, dans des lieux inconnus,
On n’avait pas de pain et on l’allait pieds nus.
Ce n’étaient plus des cœurs vivants, des gens de guerre;
C’était un rêve errant dans la brume, un mystère,
Une procession d’ombres sous le ciel noir.
La solitude vaste, épouvantable à voir,
Partout apparaissait, muette vengeresse.
Le ciel faisait sans bruit avec la neige épaisse
Pour cette immense armée un immense linceul …
The snow fell, and its power was multiplied.
For the first time the Eagle bowed its head –
Dark days! Slowly the Emperor returned –
Behind him Moscow! Its own domes still burned.
The snow rained down in blizzards – rained and froze.
Past each white waste a further white waste rose.
None recognized the captains or the flags.
Yesterday the Grand Army, today its dregs!
No one could tell the vanguard from the flanks.
The snow! The hurt men struggled from the ranks,
Hid in the bellies of dead horses, in stacks
Of shattered caissons. By the bivouacs
One saw the picket dying at his post,
Still standing in his saddle, white with frost
The stone lips frozen to the bugle’s mouth!
Bullets and grapeshot mingled with the snow
That hailed … The guard, surprised at shivering, march
In a dream now, ice rimes the gray moustache
The snow falls, always snow! The driving mire
Submerges; men, trapped in that white empire
Have no more bread and march on barefoot.
They were no longer living men and troops,
But a dream drifting in a fog, a mystery,
Mourners parading under the black sky.
The solitude, vast, terrible to the eye,
Was like a mute avenger everywhere,
As snowfall, floating through the quiet air,
Buried the huge army in a huge shroud …
* * *
What did Napoleon look like? It is hard to tell, since the visual record is unreliable. Only the Spanish have produced portraits of their rulers that are realistic to the point of cruelty – debased, monstrous princes and degenerate princesses with black bags under their eyes and huge noses painted by Velázquez or Goya. In the hands of French artists, the portrait becomes a smooth, flattering creation; Gérard and Détaille, for instance, give us a young, thin, alert Emperor when Veretchaguine shows him to be stout and puffy. The only example of truth in official portraiture is Rigaud’s portrait of Louis XIV: he painted the aged king’s face but then his studio took over and stuck his face onto a young man’s body. The finished result looks a bit like an alien; you should go and have a look in the Louvre. As for Napoleon – the question has no real answer. His appearance depends on one’s opinion of him.
In many ways, instead of an art gallery one should go to Madame Tussaud’s waxworks museum in Marylebone in London, which contains astonishing casts of historical figures. Every morning during the Revolution, Madame Tussaud used to go to cemeteries where the previous day’s guillotined were buried. She would wash the blood and sawdust from the severed heads, apply a layer of lead protoxide and linseed oil and, using cloth to secure it, take the impressions that would serve as moulds for her waxworks. Marat, Philippe-Egalité, Hébert, Desmoulins, Danton: the death masks she produced, either secretly or in collusion with the executioners, can never be replaced by portraits. Her subjects weren’t posing anymore; they slept, their faces frozen by a brutal death. I was transfixed by the cast of Robespierre’s head, which hangs at the entrance to the Chamber of Horrors. The Terror was coming to an end and one senses that Madame Tussaud was finally able to take her time. The portrait is very precise; the most faithful, so it is said, of her collection. And the fact is that this severed head of Robespierre bears little relation to the familiar portraits of him. In it his face is less thickset, his forehead less bulging, his lips less thin and he has an almost sardonic air.
When Marcel Brion writes a life of Lorenzo the Magnificent, he doesn’t trust the painters. Gozzoli depicts a blond, curlyhaired, vaguely androgynous angel, Ghirlandaio a boxer, Vasari a pickpocket. Instead Brion stops and stares at the death mask: this is the true Lorenzo. He is forty-three years old and there is a whole life etched in the lined, square face, with its crooked nose, toothbrush moustache, broad mouth and non-existent lips; coarse features, which nonetheless emanate an incredible serenity.
Can one form an idea of Napoleon from his death mask? No, not even that is possible. When Napoleon died on Saint Helena, Dr Burton was unable to find the plaster needed for a mould in Jamestown. Gypsum crystals were reported on an island to the south-east, which he sent a sloop to fetch. He calcined them, ground them up and thereby obtained a grey plaster, which he took to Longwood. The previous night an attempt had been made to take a cast using candle wax and tissue paper steeped in limewater. But the results had been inconclusive. When Burton returned, Napoleon had been dead for forty hours. The cheekbones were protruding. The face had altered but a cast was taken anyway, in extremis. As the skin was coming off in places, only one attempt was possible.
Antoine Rambaud, my great-great-grandfather, was thirty when Napoleon camped out in Moscow. What did he think of it? Anything? What did his family in Lyons say? Will the future ever know what we dream of; how we live; that we like Cistercian choirs, or irises, or Peking duck? Will they know our tiredness, our joys, our angers? Only a few avowals will survive us, froth. What does that Merovingian’s femur tell us? What do these remnants of a barber’s basin evoke? What happened in the caves at night, after the auroch hunt? The scholar deliberates, and then delivers his verdict, which is soon refuted by another scholar’s. Honestly – we will never enter the minds of our ancestors; we barely know what they looked like. Paul Morand knew this: ‘Those who come after us will be happy to imagine us as we have never been.’ In one of its exhilarating publications, the College of Pataphysics gives its response, ‘Imagination alone draws crowds to the beetroot fields of Waterloo.’ And the imagination is not the province of academia, but of legend and the novel. The musketeers? They will always be Dumas. The jungle, Conrad. The hollow needle of Etretat belongs to Maurice Leblanc and the road to Trouville to Flaubert. The London fog, hansom cabs, Conan Doyle. Besides, Sherlock Holmes still gets mail at 221b Baker Street, now a blockish, unsightly building. History is not an exact science; it rambles, digresses; it should be left to dreamers who can recreate it by instinct.
To return to Napoleon. No historian is objective about him. He began fashioning his legend during the war of pillage he waged in Italy to bail out the Directory. He created and controlled his image by surrounding himself with publicists, draughtsmen and painters. He never stepped onto the bridge at Areola; he fell in a ditch before he could reach it. In the famous painting one sees him brandishing his standard and leading Masséna’s infantry. In fact Augereau played that role. When Parisians came to look at David’s Coronation, they’d joke, ‘Goodness, the Empress is looking young,’ and burst out laughing. As for the Emperor’s mother, who features prominently, she wasn’t even at the ceremony; she was sulking because her son hadn’t
given her a title. Napoleon invented modern propaganda by detaching official history from facts.
Paintings, drawings and sketches do exist, however, and provide an illuminating record of people’s lives. They have been very helpful to me in travelling back through time, as they were before I could read, when I’d immerse myself in the thick volumes of Larousse’s An Illustrated History of France, published around 1910, with its recreations by academic painters, in photographic detail, of The Pillaging of a Gallo-Roman Villa, or The Excommunication of Robert the Pious. In the following books, the images are more truthful and in many cases the work of first-hand witnesses:
Campagne de Russie (1812), Albrecht Adam and Christian Wilhelm von Faber du Faur, Tradition Magazine, special edition No. 3, available from 25 rue Bargue, 75015 Paris. Sketches of an unmistakable vividness and immediacy. [1]
Napoléon, 1812, la campagne de Russie, part of the collection compiled by Tranié and Carmignani, Pygmalion, October 1997. A remarkable iconography, containing almost five hundred illustrations.
Then come the participants’ accounts. There is an abundance of these and one must know how to navigate one’s way through them to identify particular images, scenes and details. I tend to discard the author’s judgements and retain the colour. When Castellane makes a note of the weather every day or Bausset describes the Kremlin’s apartments or Ali lists the Emperor’s tics or Larrey expatiates on the effects of severe cold in his Mémoires de chirurgie militaire, why should they be lying?
The works I consulted at the Service historique des armées, Fort de Vincennes are listed with their reference numbers preceded by a V for Vincennes.
[Publisher’s Note. We have for convenience numbered those works that have been translated into English, and listed them on page 322–3.]
1. Eyewitness accounts of the campaign and retreat
Ségur, P. P. de, Histoire de Napoléon et de la Grande Armée pendant l’année 1812, Turin, 1831, chez les frères Reycent et Cie, librairie du Roi. The best-known and most literary account, which one can round out with another Ségur, Du Rhin à Fontainebleau, subtitled, ‘Personal memories of 1812”. Gourgaud disagrees with Ségur, devoting an entire volume to his qualifications, Examen critique de l’ouvrage de Monsieur le Comte Ph. De Ségur, Paris, Bossange Frères (1825). He also gave us Napoléon et la Grande Armée en Russie, V. 72794–98. [2]
Caulaincourt, Mémoires, 3 vols, Plon (1933). Meticulous and precious in its wealth of detail, especially concerning the Emperor’s flight by sleigh; Caulaincourt accompanied him and recorded his conversations. Incidentally, as often as I was able, I have Napoleon say what those closest to him report him as having said. [3]
Fain, Manuscrit de 1812, 2 vols, chez Delaulay, Paris (1827). Baron Fain, secretary to the Emperor, has involuntarily become a character in this novel, whom I have treated with a certain licence.
Méneval, Mémoires, V. 9851-53. The other secretary, a more colourful writer than his colleague but who unfortunately fell ill in Moscow. [4]
Constant, Mémoires intimes de Napoléon Ier, Mercure de France (1967). The indispensable confidences of the Emperor’s valet. He does, however, draw heavily on Ségur for the retreat. Illuminating notes by Maurice Pernelle of the Académie d’histoire. [5]
Marbot, Mémoires, tome II, Mercure de France (1983). It is a pity he did not enter Moscow. [6]
Lejeune, Mémoires, tome II, ‘En prison et en guerre‘, Firmin-Didot (1896). [7]
Roustan, Souvenirs. V. 5931. Reminiscences by Napoleon’s most prominent Mameluke.
Louis Etienne Saint-Denis, Souvenirs du mamelouk Ali, Payot (1926) recently reissued. This Mameluke and former lawyer’s clerk gives us a far livelier and slyer account than his compatriot Roustam.
Fezensac, Journal de la campagne de Russie, V. 42037. A lieutenant-general’s account. [8]
Bonnet, Mémoires anecdotiques, Plon (1900).
Bausset, Mémoires anecdotiques sur l’intérieur du palais et sur quelques événements de l’Empire, Paris, Baudoin frères, tome II (1913). [9]
Heinrich Roos, 1812, Souvenirs d’un médecin de la Grande Armée, Perrin (1913).
Miot-Putigny, Putigny grognard de l’Empire, Gallimard (1950).
Rapp, Mémoires, V. 73242-45. [10]
Macdonald, Souvenirs, V. 42739. [11]
Castellane, Journal, V. 9074.
Bourgogne, Mémoires du sergent Bourgogne, Hachette (1978). Many accuse him of invention, but acknowledge it is done with great talent. [12]
Peyrusse, Lettres inédites, Perrin (1894).
Wilhelm von Bade, Mémoires du margrave de Bade, Paris, Fontemoing (1912).
Bourgoing, Souvenirs militaires, Plon (1897).
Ernouf, Souvenirs, V. 43103.
Jean Jacoby, Napoléon en Russie, Mercure de France (1938). Eyewitness accounts.
Roy, Les Français en Russie, Marne (1863). As the preceding item.
Labaume, Relations circonstanciés de la campagne de Russie, V.72785. Thorough and slightly dull. [13]
Faber du Faur, Campagne de Russie, V. 1260.
Stendhal, Œuvres intimes, tome I, La Pléiade (1981). Henri Beyle witnessed the fire of Moscow but set off for Smolensk and Danzig before the retreat. Some of his conversations in the novel are those he describes having in his journal. [14]
La Vouivre booksellers, II rue Saint-Martin, 75004 Paris, publish a very high quality series of books on the Empire, including:
Jean-Bréaut des Marlots, Lettre d’un capitaine de cuirassiers sur la campagne de Russie and Pierre-Paul Denniée, Itinéraire de l’Empereur Napoléon pendant la campagne de 1812.
Alexandre Bellot de Kergotte, Journal d’un commissaire des guerres (1806–1821).
Florent-Guibert, Souvenirs d’un sous-lieutenant d’infanterie légère (1805–1815) and François-René Cailloux, known as Pouget, Souvenirs de guerre (1790-1831).
Bulletins de la Grande Armée, campagne de Russie.
The two volumes of reports by Sir Robert Wilson, England’s representative at the Tsar’s court. Among other things, he reports on the atrocities perpetrated by the moujiks and advances the opinion that not all his allies are gentlemen.
Another bookseller also publishing little-known works from the period is Teisseidre, 102 rue du Cherche-Midi, 75006 Paris. I was struck by:
Louis Gardier, Journal de la campagne en Russie en 1812.
Bismark et Jacquemont, Mémoires et carnets sur la campagne de Russie.
Général comte Zaluski, Les chevau-légers polonais de la Garde (1812–1814)
Pelet, Bonnet, Evert, Carnets et journal sur la campagne de Russie.
Of collections, Mémoires d’Empire, edited by Alain Pigeard, Quatuour, 1997, in a limited run of 300 copies, should not be forgotten.
2. On the Russians and Russia
Schnitzler, La Russie en 1812, V. 35845.
Birkov, Le Mouvement partisan de la guerre patriotique, 1812, V. 18508.
E. Dupré de Saint Maure, L’Hermite en Russie, Turin 1829, 11 vols.
Observations on Russian customs and practices at the start of the nineteenth century.
Godechot, Napoléon, Albin Michel, 1969. Contains two important documents, a French priest’s account of Moscow and Rostopchin’s defence for having ordered the city to be set on fire.
Vassili Verestchagen, Napoléon Ier en Russie, Nilsson, 1897. Fascinating testimonies from Muscovites and Russian prisoners.
Grand, Un officier prisonnier des Russes, V. 35845.
Désiré Fuzellier, Journal de captivité en Russie, editions du Griot, Boulogne. With a very informative preface by a descendant of the author, a historian.
Concerning the mood of occupied Moscow, one may also read Lettres interceptées par les Russes, La Sabretache, 1913. V. 59077.
3. On the army
Alain Pigeard, L’Armée napoléonienne, Curandera, 1993.
Baldet, Vie quotidienne dans les armées de Napoléon, Hachette, V. 17162.
Ferdinand Bac, Le retour de la Grande Armée, 1812
, Hachette, 1939.
Lucas Dubreton, Soldats de Napoléon, V. 61835.
Boutourlin, Histoire militaire de la campagne de Russie, V. 72807–2.
‘Les Sous-Officiers de la Révolution et de l’Empire‘, an article by Gilbert Bolinier published in the Revue historique de armées, no. 2, 1986.
R. Brice, Les Femmes et les armées de la Révolution et de l’Empire, V.4354.
‘De Borodino à Moscou‘, an article by Marc-André Fabré published in the Revue historique de armées, 1960.
Masson, Cavaliers de Napoléon, V.24811.
Chardigny, Les Maréchaux de Napoléon, Flammarion, 1946.
Damamme, Les Soldats de la Grande Armée, Perrin, 1998.
4. Life, customs, fashion
Naturally the two volumes of Vie quotidienne au temps de Napoléon published by Hachette at different periods, that of Robiquet in 1944 and Tulard in 1988. [15]
Histoire et dictionnaire du Consulat et de l’Empire, Fierro, Palluel and Tulard, ‘Bouquins’, Robert Laffont, 1995.
‘Bouquins’, 1998, Le Consulat et l’Empire, in the series ‘Les français par eux-mêmes’.
Philippe Séguy, Histoire des modes sous l’Empire, Taillandier, 1988.
D’Aiméras, La Vie parisienne sous le Consulat et l’Empire, Albin Michel, undated.
Bertaut, La Vie à Paris sous le Ier Empire, Calmann-Lévy, 1949.
5. On Napoleon
Correspondance de Napoleon Ier, published by order of Emperor Napoleon III, tome XXIV, Imprimerie impériale, 1868. Selected letters which one can consult in the Salle des Archives of the Fort de Vincennes.
Stendhal, Vie de Napoléon, Payot, 1969. A new, more complete, edition was published by Stock in 1998. [16]
Bainville, Napoléon, Fayard, 1931. [17]
Ludwig, Napoléon, Payot, 1929. [18]
Savant, Tel fut Napoléon, Fasquelle, 1953. This text was reprinted, with a large number of illustrations, under the title Napoléon, Henri Veyrier, 1954. A purely negative point of view, hence often exaggerated or erroneous.
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