Berezina: From Moscow to Paris Following Napoleon's Epic Fail

LAST DAY. FROM REIMS TO THE INVALIDES (PARIS)

The sun’s rays were finally filtering through. There was a glow pouring through the gaps in the clouds. Washed by the rain the day before, the countryside looked splendid. The highway was empty and we were nearing the end of our trip. The sky was already Parisian: a breath of light.

We were about to rejoin the tracks of the imperial escape, around Meaux. Just outside Reims, in the highway service station, Vassily complained. “The machines aren’t running properly.”

“Yes,” I said. “My Ural is grumbling.”

“Russian engines are built for seventy-two-octane fuel,” Vitaly said.

“Your capitalistic fuel is too refined,” Vassily said.

It was 44°F. The fuel was too delicate and the winter more like spring: Europe truly was a paradise. We had to speed up because we had to keep an appointment on Place des Invalides. The night before, in Reims, I had sent the following message to a dozen or so close people:

“Dear friends,

Tomorrow, we arrive in Paris from Moscow.

We have repeated the itinerary of the Grande Armée during its Retreat from Russia in 1812 on our three Soviet motorbikes with sidecars.

We have paid homage to our heroes.

For them, it was chaos.

For us, one of the most emotionally moving journeys of our lives.

Tomorrow, we will be at the Invalides at 5 P.M.

Come.

Then we’ll go to my place.”

I kept checking my watch. It would be elegant to arrive in the square on the dot. However, around Meaux, we had to stop off in a rest area. Vitaly’s right-hand cylinder wasn’t responding anymore.

And so, at the critical moment of arriving, at the time when we should have honored a reunion, one of our Urals was letting us down. We laid the bike on its side and Vassily plunged into its bowels. I was furious. In actual fact, History was sending us a sign.

According to Caulaincourt, the axle of the imperial vehicle “broke down five hundred steps from the post,” in Saint-Jean-les-Deux-Jumeaux, between Ferté-sous-Jouarre and Meaux. In other words, a stone’s throw from where we were!

For the past two weeks, I had been expecting this kind of meeting point between our journey and the events of 1812, this superimposition of the Imperial tribulations and our own adventures. Historical journeys take on flavor when things repeat themselves identically, in the same locations, several centuries apart. You then get the impression you’re throwing a bridge (a suspension bridge, of course) over time.

That genius Vassily. Within thirty minutes, he had changed the carburetor. We just had an hour left before our appointment.

In the distance, Paris: all gold and zinc. The sun was casting its light through the clouds. The sky was dragging behind. We entered the city. I was feeling the tension of the past weeks relenting inside me. It was like the deflation of a balloon. Whenever I traveled, arriving always produced in me a mixture of relief and sadness: the adventure was over, the dream was dead, transformed into a memory. Later, I would have to leave again and head for “splendid names.” Whenever I reached the top of a mountain wall, there was the same blend of sad joy, of accomplishment. As well as the feeling of another step toward death.

As we passed the sign that we were entering Paris, I felt rid of the worry of my mission. I had seen my ghosts off. I had carried their memory. We had arrived, and I would unload the burden.

We were driving along the Seine.

I had been obsessed with the suffering endured in 1812 by nearly a million men of all nationalities. For weeks, I had wallowed in the memory of Napoleon. At night, I could see them, those distraught civilians and wounded soldiers, those tortured animals, dancing their sabbath before my eyes. I dedicated my sleeplessness to their memory and, during the day, my imagination to their sacrifice.

I thought of those bodies whose indistinct mass constituted the body of an army. Those young men—so alive—those frothing horses sacrificed by the handful upon the signal of a general commanding a movement of his troops. From a tactical point of view, the soldiers were the anonymous pieces of a device. They had no individual value. They were not considered as individual beings. No more than a single drop of water is taken into account when one speaks of the branch of a river. A troop is an abstract category in the mind of those who send it into the breach. It does not correspond to a list of soldiers with distinct names and faces. It’s a faceless mass to which a few thousand elements are subtracted the evening after a battle, when the counting is done.

From the point of view of the hill or high ground on which the general staff stood, what did a battle look like? We get an idea from 19th-century paintings: like a tussle, a fusion of lava flow with indistinguishable particles—in other words, men. There was something fluid about a Napoleonic battle. Troops were slippery tongues crawling toward one another, blending or repelling like a tidal bore.

Did Napoleon, even once in his life, stop considering human losses from just a statistical point of view? Did he once abandon the opera glass of the strategist to consider that the “dead on the field” didn’t just boil down to an expression? Did he realize that, behind these words, there were specific events and human actions hatching? Did he ever place himself on the side of the tragedy? Were his nights troubled by the sight of just one of those corpses? In the silence of the night, did he agonize over having flung open the gates of war and hurled entire nations into the abyss? Was he tormented by ghosts?

We drove past the ministry of fiscal predation, on Bercy. On the opposite bank, the towers of the François-Mitterrand library reflected the clouds.

There was one final question. What was the field of heroic expression nowadays? Would we, two hundred years after the French Empire, agree to charge against the enemy in order to promote an idea or the love of a leader? Would a general mobilization be possible at the dawn of the 21st century? I remembered my 1914 grandfather, who had spent five years wading through the Somme trenches and was in no way bitter about it. His letters, like those of other World War I infantrymen, were full of resignation. They said it was destiny, that you had to serve your country, and there was nothing you could do about it.

Were we capable of this? Of this restraint, of this acceptance?

I had the feeling we weren’t. That we’d lost our nerve. That something had happened since the World War Two. The collective paradigm had undergone a transformation. We no longer believed in a common destiny. Politicians would mutter stuff in their newspeak about “living together,” but nobody believed it, nobody read Renan anymore, and nobody took the trouble to propose the idea of a collective story.

What had happened for a nation to become an aggregate of individuals convinced they had nothing in common with others? Shopping, perhaps? Shopkeepers had managed to pull it off. For many of us, buying things had become a principal activity, a horizon, a destination. We were cultivating our gardens. That was probably preferable to fertilizing battlefields.

In Afghanistan, I’d had a conversation with two young French captains. We spoke for a long time, sitting on a rock, surrounded by the scent of artemisia. We asked ourselves what we would be ready to die for. Our country? I suggested. They exclaimed that they’d quite like to. But it should first be glorified by those who rule it. The young captains added with sadness that this was far from the case. The cause had collapsed. The very word was pedestrian. Nobody wants to die for a shameful idea. Who would throw himself into a game when you’re told it just isn’t worth it? It’s precisely there that Napoleon’s genius had been deployed. The Emperor had succeeded in an enterprise of exceptional propaganda. He had imposed his dream with the word. His vision had been made incarnate. France, the Empire, and he himself had become an object of desire, of a fantasy. He had managed to dazzle men, enthuse them, then involve them all in his project: from the lowliest conscript to the highest aristocrat.

He had told men something and the men had wanted to listen to a fairy story, and believe it could come true. Men are ready for anything, just as long as someone exalts them and the speaker is skillful.

The diminutive Corsican had used every publicity technique. He had staged his coronation, embraced a heritage without doing its inventory, and pictured a new aesthetic. He had distributed new titles, rewritten pedigrees, invented rewards. In his puppeteer hands a new court had been established. The system was based on merit: everybody could bring home the bacon and aspire to high office. You used to be a pork butcher’s boy? You could end up a marshal! It was no longer necessary to be of noble birth, as long as you were driven! He had produced slogans. His responses were imprinted in the collective unconscious. His letters and bulletins had acted as press releases for immediate business and archives for posterity. In battle, he had shaken up old rules. He had raised opportunism into an art of war. His military feats were theatrical. He had baffled war scholars, trusting in his lucky star, manhandling theories. Basking in victories, he had formed a geography of glory. Austerlitz, Wagram, Jena warmed the cockles of the heart, and inflamed minds. In the architecture of legend, he had neglected nothing: with the help of his Napoleonic Code, he had even endowed the Empire with its little red book!

The golden dome was glowing. Goisque had been busy. He had called the military governor of Paris and obtained permission for us drive our bikes into the main courtyard. We cut through a line of tourists. The Japanese were staring, eyes wide. The gendarmes moved back against the railings. Vitaly was proud. He wasn’t used to the constabulary holding the door open for him.

Our small column of Uralist-radical-Napoleonists, as Vassily called it, ventured onto the cobbles. We drove in a row, made half a turn to the left, parked our bikes, and cut our engines at the bottom of the courtyard, at the foot of Napoleon’s statue. We were a few yards away from his tomb. We had stretched an earthly thread from Moscow to this courtyard.

There were a few friends there. They’d come to hug us. They were surprised by the fact that we said nothing. We were just happy standing there, beneath the bronze statue.

I felt as though I was waking up after a two-and-a-half-thousand-mile-long dream.

Who was Napoleon? A wide-awake dreamer who believed life wasn’t enough? What was History? A faded dream of no use to our small-minded present?

The sky darkened, and a few drops fell.

I suddenly felt like going home, taking a shower, and washing off all those horrors.