In his book Souvenirs d’un cadet the young Larreguy de Civrieux remembers watching cannonballs flying towards him while under orders not to move: ‘The balls came at us after ricocheting off a rise in the ground, which meant that we could make out their curved trajectory before they decimated our ranks. Our courage was severely put to the test, and it was despairing to wait for death with total passivity, surrounded by the dying and horribly mutilated.’fn2
The French were of course fired up with patriotism – in contrast to Wellington’s army (or so some French commentators allege). On the morning of the battle, the veteran Hippolyte de Mauduit describes being a man on a mission: ‘Our warlike march on this magnificent morning, in the beauty of nature, had something romantic about it, and yet we were going to death with self-denial and a sort of joy, because gaiety was on all our faces.’
Even the hated French royalists grudgingly admired the spirit of Napoleon’s troops. Louis Rilliet de Constant, serving at the Battle of Ligny with the Prussian army, heard the cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ as the French attacked across open ground, bombarded by cannon fire: ‘What soldiers! They were a legion of heroes or demons … Back from the deserts of Russia and the prison ships of England, fired up by the memories of their past victories and the shame of their recent defeats, but most of all keen to achieve glory and expunge the immense misdeed of their defection to the royalist government [in 1814, while Napoleon was on Elba].’fn3
To the delight of French historians, the heroism of the ordinary French soldier is even confirmed by some Brits. Sir Charles Bell, a Scottish surgeon, treated and sketched the wounded during the Belgian campaign. He produced some horrifically fascinating paintings of arm stumps, entrails spilling out of a stomach wound, bullet holes in a swollen leg, and more. Bell wrote a letter to his brother George, who sent it on to Sir Walter Scott, describing a hundred or more French casualties he had seen in a hospital: ‘Though wounded, exhausted, beaten, you would still conclude with me that these were men capable of marching unopposed from the west of Europe to the east of Asia. Strong, thickset, hardy veterans, brave spirits and unsubdued, as they cast their wild glance upon you – their black eyes and brown cheeks finely contrasted with the fresh sheets – you would much admire their capacity of adaptation. These fellows are brought from the field after lying many days on the ground; many dying – many in agony – many miserably racked with pain and spasms; and the next mimicks his fellow, and gives it a tune – Aha, vous chantez bien! How they are wounded you will see in my notes. But I must not have you to lose the present impression on me of the formidable nature of these fellows as exemplars of the breed in France.’
III
As we saw in Chapter 3, most glorious of all were the Garde Impériale, who are described in French accounts as though they were Leonidas’ 300 Spartans holding off a million Persians. General Cambronne’s men who refused to surrender are depicted as history’s winners, even if they eventually got shredded into flesh fragments by point-blank cannon fire, gaining no strategic advantage in the process – unlike Leonidas, who kept the invading Persians at bay for two days while the bulk of the Greek army was able to retreat.
The Garde Impériale was divided into three units – the Jeune (Young), the Moyenne (Medium) and the Vieille (Old). Moyenne could also mean ‘average’, but mediocrity wasn’t what Napoleon had in mind. The titles simply referred to the order in which the different parts of the Garde had been created – Vieille in 1804, Moyenne in 1806, Jeune in 1808.
The Vieille Garde were known as the élite de l’élite, and were treated more like Napoleon’s brothers in arms than his cannon fodder. Some of the men at Waterloo had been with the Emperor throughout his career. One of the reasons he held them in reserve until the last moment was that he didn’t want to lose too many of his most experienced troops in the early, wasteful stages of a battle.
To join the Old Guard, a man had to have at least ten years of army service, know how to read and write, and possess a spotless record and at least one citation for bravery. They had their own traditions, such as wearing their hair in a powdered plait that they called their queue, or tail (the word also means ‘penis’). This was to help ward off treacherous sabre blows from behind. They also wore earrings – many of which were ripped out by corpse robbers after Waterloo. And the Vieille Garde always carried purses so that they could buy food and drink honourably rather than steal it.
All in all, they set themselves above the common French soldier – literally. A Vieille Garde had to stand at least ‘cinq pieds six pouces’ tall – five feet six inches (yes at that time the French still used imperial measures) – though most were taller. It is said that the men of the two battalions of Premiers Grénadiers de la Garde at Waterloo were six feet four inches tall on average. With their foot-high fur busbies, they must have looked like giants.
The Garde Impériale’s greatest strength was their sense of unity in defence of their Emperor. When formed up in a square they were said to be impregnable. No one except Napoleon himself and his staff was allowed to break the line and enter their square for protection. General Petit, one of the Old Guard’s commanders, boasted that ‘We would fire on anyone who approached, be they friend or foe, for fear of letting one in with the other. It was a necessary evil.’
In his poem ‘Waterloo’, Victor Hugo depicts these heroes marching gloriously to their death in their last-ditch charge, like the heroes of one of the French tragedies that Napoleon loved to watch:
Knowing that they were going to die,
They saluted their god, erect in the storm,
Their mouths crying as one ‘Vive l’Empereur!’,
Then, slowly, to the beat of the drums,
Smiling calmly at the English grapeshot,
The Imperial Guard stepped into the furnace.
[…]
They walked, cradling their weapons, head held high, grave, stoical,
Not one of them retreated. Sleep, heroic dead!
To quote a more recent French historian, Jean Thiry, writing in the mid-twentieth century about the French soldiers at Waterloo: ‘The immortal page of glory that they wrote has made these defeated men the purest heroes in French history.’ And Thiry was a member of the Académie Française, so (to French minds at least) his opinion is incontestable.
IV
Even more important than this general heroism is General Cambronne’s celebrated use of the word merde on the evening of 18 June. This, for Victor Hugo and others, was the supreme moment of the battle.
To neutral and Bonapartist commentators alike, Cambronne’s defiance as his square of Vieille Garde stood facing a line of British cannons just 60 metres away was even more impressive than US Army General McAuliffe’s famous ‘nuts’ in reply to a Nazi invitation to surrender at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. McAuliffe’s GIs were dug in and awaiting reinforcements. Cambronne’s men were standing alone and surrounded by cannons in a cornfield.
Versions of the Cambronne legend vary. In Chapter 3, we saw Cambronne joking that he couldn’t have said that the Garde dies rather than surrenders because he had done neither – he had in fact been wounded in the final onslaught, and taken prisoner. The consensus since then has been that Cambronne’s call for heroic death was probably invented for him by a dramatist called Michel-Nicolas Balison de Rougemont.
It has also been alleged that Hugo invented the merde episode in his novel Les Misérables. But according to the nineteenth-century French historian Henry Houssaye, the use of the M-word was highly credible, because Cambronne was a battle-hardened soldier, well known for his love of swearing. Cambronne himself later admitted that he said ‘some less brilliant words, with a more soldier-like energy’ than his supposed ‘never surrender’ statement. And a sergeant at the battle told Captain Lemonnier-Delafosse that Cambronne shouted, ‘Merde! I won’t surrender!’
In any case, Hugo goes as far as to claim that Cambronne’s defiance was more than mere heroism – with his single expletive, Hug
o says, Cambronne stole overall victory for France: ‘The man who won the Battle of Waterloo wasn’t Napoleon in retreat; it wasn’t Wellington who buckled at four o’clock, and was in despair by five, nor Blücher who didn’t even fight; the man who won the Battle of Waterloo was Cambronne. Unleashing deadly lightning with such a word counts as victory.’
Hugo devotes a whole chapter of Les Misérables to what he calls ‘this word of titanic disdain’, and makes fun of the British: ‘to encompass this victory in one supreme word that is impossible for them to pronounce is to lose the battlefield but win the battle. After the carnage, having laughter on your side is immense.’
In short, for Hugo, Cambronne’s single syllable was more lethal than every cannonball and musket shot fired on that day.
However, one novelist’s opinion doesn’t explain why the story of Cambronne’s legendary swearword has lived on, and even entered the French language. There were no doubt plenty of curses flying around the battlefield that day, in many different languages, but almost as soon as Cambronne’s merde was uttered, the French showed a deep psychological need to cling on to it, and to the men it was associated with, as something deeply meaningful. This merde seems to have been vital to France’s psyche as the nation came to terms with Waterloo and a new period of foreign occupation. And it grew in importance as the nineteenth century progressed, without – as Hugo pointed out – the vast, controlling presence of Napoleon. This was especially true after the swift, humiliating defeat in the 1870 Prussian war, when the French were desperately in need of heroes. Then, with the Prussians again marching victoriously through the Arc de Triomphe, France looked back on Napoleon and Waterloo as a period of national greatness and unity, apparently forgetting that it had all ended in bloodshed and exile.
But even before 1870, the French had begun glorifying Waterloo and saying merde to historical truth. Les Misérables was published in 1862. In 1864 and 1865, the writers Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian co-published a pair of patriotic novels, The Conscript of 1813 and Waterloo, both of which were big hits.
In a similar vein, a picture painted in 1852 by Clément-Auguste Andrieux depicts a surging mass of French cavalrymen emerging from the smoke to crush a line of panicking British redcoats. It is a classic case of French cherry-picking, a picture of a successful charge that occurred at around three p.m. The scene certainly doesn’t warrant the all-embracing title La Bataille de Waterloo 18 juin 1815. But in 1852, with Napoleon’s nephew, Napoléon III, installed as emperor, France needed to be reminded that the Bonaparte family – and the country – had a glorious past.
Incidentally, Napoléon III disliked the painting because it didn’t show his uncle – in his view French glory had to be inextricably linked to the Bonapartes. Today, a lot of French historians would agree with him.
This nostalgia for past glory probably explains why the French celebrate the famous ‘Taxis de la Marne’, the fleet of 600 Parisian taxis that ferried soldiers to the front line in September 1914 to halt the German advance towards Paris. In fact, the 4,000 or so men who went out in the taxis were mainly reservists, and didn’t contribute much to the fighting, but this doesn’t matter – the important thing is that the French were saying merde to the enemy by all means possible.
In the same way, they are keen to remember the Occupation as a time when France was almost entirely populated by a mixture of Nazi invaders and French Resistance fighters. They need to believe that, as a nation, they didn’t just lay down their arms and surrender to Hitler. The Resistance hung in there, blowing up bridges, assassinating Nazi officers and generally saying merde to the occupiers.
This is the only way to counteract the effect of British and American jokes about French submissiveness during World War Two. There is the old one about why Napoleon planted plane trees along France’s main roads – so the Germans could invade in the shade. These jibes hurt the French, as does any reference to the surrender of 1940, which is why they cling on to Napoleon’s glory.
To the merde-sayers, it doesn’t matter if France did lose the Battle of Waterloo. Dominique de Villepin argues that Cambronne and Napoleon created a French taste for glorious defeat. It is what he calls a ‘new idea of Frenchness’ – a feeling that France is doomed to lose but will always remain defiant. In short, merde to everyone and everything.
This merde began shaping the national character immediately after the Napoleonic Wars, when France was able to treasure its role as Europe’s defeated power, and even to relish the fact that it was lagging behind in the Industrial Revolution. In 1822, the writer Chateaubriand went to England and turned his intellectual nose up at what he saw there. In the past, England had been ‘covered in livestock’ and generally ‘charming’. Now, he said, ‘its valleys are darkened by the smoke of forges and factories, its lanes turned into iron ruts, and travelling along these lanes, instead of Milton and Shakespeare, one meets mobile furnaces’. Oxford and Cambridge ‘look deserted, their colleges and gothic chapels, half-abandoned, are eyesores’. England had obviously sold its soul to the gods of industry and was losing its identity just so that it could export its cheap goods all over the world. But thanks to Cambronne, the French had an answer. Merde to the English – we will stick to hand-making cheese, wine, fine clothes and sausages.fn4
Today, this merde attitude allows the French to claim that their whole culture is superior to all others. So what if Hollywood makes blockbuster superhero movies that French cinemagoers love to watch instead of homemade French dramas about adultery among the Parisian middle classes? Merde! The French state will keep on subsidising films that no one goes to see – at least they’re French.
The same applies to language. Emerging nations prefer to speak English rather than French? Merde to them – it’s only because, with Napoleon out of the way, the Anglos were able to colonise the world.
In terms of leaving a lasting mark on the French national psyche, Cambronne certainly won a glorious victory on 18 June 1815.
* * *
fn1 For a more detailed explanation, see my book 1000 Years of Annoying the French.
fn2 Incidentally, the saddest testimony to all this slaughter is that the following year, the fields around Waterloo yielded a bumper grain harvest – no doubt thanks to all the well-mulched human fertiliser.
fn3 It might seem strange for a defector to the royal cause to be calling defection an ‘immense misdeed’ but this only goes to show how complex the French notion of betrayal was at this time – just as it would be again after 1945, when people were trying to explain away their actions during the Nazi Occupation.
fn4 For more about the French scorn for the Industrial Revolution, see Chapter 9.
5
NAPOLEON FLEES … TO VICTORY
‘Il fait le choix de la grandeur en s’abandonnant à son vainqueur.’
‘His [Napoleon’s] decision to surrender to his conqueror shows his greatness.’
– Dominique de Villepin, former French Prime Minister
‘Sa chute fut gigantesque, en proportion de sa gloire.’
‘His fall was gigantic, in proportion to his glory.’
– Charles de Gaulle, former President of France
I
NATURALLY, NAPOLEON DOES not get a universal thumbs-up from the French for providing their country with its opportunity to play the glorious loser. His most vehement French critic is probably Jean Jaurès, the founding father of France’s Socialist party, who in 1911 published a book with the rather frightening title The New Army: the Socialist Organization of France, in which he twisted the knife in the old wound of Waterloo: ‘Napoleon suffered a double defeat: both military and political. Politically and socially, his whole system collapsed.’ Jaurès lambasted the glorification of Waterloo as ‘a mortal peril for … the military institution and for national defence’. Logical, really – no nation wants an army that thinks it’s cool to lose.
Of course Waterloo wasn’t the first time Napoleon had lost on the battlefield. But in th
e past he had always bounced back. And in 1815, so say his fans, he could have gone on to win the war if he hadn’t been prevented from doing so by his own back-stabbing compatriots.
On the morning of 19 June, Napoleon stopped at an inn, the Lion d’Or at Philippeville, south of Charleroi, Belgium, and devoured bread and butter, eggs and wine – his first meal for twenty-four hours. He was obviously still feeling bullish, because he sent a summons to Grouchy. The errant marshal still had 33,000 men under his control, and had finally got himself back into the Emperor’s good books. After his promenade militaire of the previous day, Grouchy had tracked down a Prussian army and given them a sound beating at around eleven o’clock at night – in theory, therefore, France had won the last battle of the day. Now Napoleon wanted these victorious troops to come and rally his own demotivated army of 40,000 survivors and form a rearguard. And as Wellington later admitted, ‘If he [Napoleon] had put himself at the head of that army, we were in a scrape.’
Fortified by his breakfast, Napoleon dictated a letter to his brother Joseph: ‘All is not lost. I think that when I have regrouped all my forces, I will have 150,000 men. The provincial guards and the national guards, who are fit for combat, will provide 100,000 and the regimental depots another 50,000. So I can immediately have 300,000 soldiers ready to oppose the enemy. The English march slowly, and the Prussians are afraid of peasants and won’t dare advance too far. There is still time to save the situation.’
Bonapartist historians are keen to point out that when you add Wellington’s view that Napoleon’s ‘presence on the field made the difference of 40,000 men’, there was no reason why Waterloo should have been the end of the Napoleonic era, or even the end of the June campaign. Napoleon could have fought on over the following weeks, and won.