W HENEVER POSSIBLE, I like to read books in their historic or geographic context. So flying to Paris earlier this week, and despite Ryanair’s stringent baggage rules, I packed my copy of War and Peace. It was either that or a second pair of shoes.
And the pay-off for choosing the book was an instructive hour or two spent in the neighbourhood of Place Vendôme.
Thanks to Napoleon, a part of that chic Parisian square will be forever Russia. Or Russian military hardware, at least. In any case, the ugly green column in the middle of the square is composed of former cannons, seized from the tsar’s army during the Battle of Austerlitz (1805) and later melted down as a tribute to the Little Corporal’s military genius.
He commissioned the tribute himself, by the way. And he was also apparently prone to exaggerating how many guns were taken in the rout: perhaps another symptom of his small man syndrome. But whatever the total, there were enough cannons for a very big column, with a statue of Napoleon on top.
Austerlitz was certainly one of his greatest tactical triumphs. As described by Tolstoy, the hapless Russians were lured into a trap, thinking themselves to have vast numerical superiority and better position, and interpreting Napoleon’s erratic behaviour beforehand as the nervousness of a man wanting to avoid war.
Sadly for them, he was faking it. He had in fact chosen his ground. And by the morning of the battle, in Tolstoy’s words, he was able to study from afar the movements of 80,000 Russian troops, doing exactly what he wanted them to do, with the confidence and complacency “seen on the face of a happy boy in love”.
He watched in silence for a long time. Then, finally, “he took his glove off his handsome white hand, made a signal with it to his marshals, and gave orders for the battle to begin”.
Later that day, with 15,000 Russians dead or wounded and almost as many more taken prisoner, the book describes Napoleon touring the battlefield, his happiness now even more profound. Tolstoy portrays him through the eyes of one of the novel’s main protagonists, the Russian Prince Andrei, who has been grievously wounded while trying to save his regiment’s flag.
Although they were on opposing sides, Prince Andrei had hero-worshipped Napoleon and wanted to be more like him. He had cheerfully gone to war to escape the horrors of marriage and domestic life. Now, stricken on the battlefield, he hears his idol pay him a posthumous compliment.
“That’s a fine death,” remarks Napoleon from horseback, as he studies the prostrate prince beside his flagstaff. Then, hearing the supposedly dead man groan, Bonaparte orders that he be attended personally by his own doctor.
But the generous gesture does not impress the recipient. Suddenly, studying him with the eyes of a man facing death, Prince Andrei finds everything about his former hero to be vain and petty and evidence of his exultation in the misery of others.
It’s bad enough be dying, the prince thinks, without having to watch Napoleon being smugly magnanimous, just because he’s so happy with the way things have turned out.
AS THE PLACE VENDÔMEmonument indicates, the French are bracingly unapologetic about their history. But they are notoriously prone to violent mood swings about it too. Thus, like many parts of Paris in recent centuries, the Vendôme column has had its ups and downs.
It was barely erected when, in the wake of Waterloo, with the city occupied, a mob tried to depose Napoleon from the top of it. They tied ropes around the statue’s neck and tried to pull it down using horses. In the event, however, the bronze version of Bonaparte proved more obdurate that the real thing.
The Communards of 1871 tried harder. And this being the dawn of Belle Époque France, they had aesthetic as well as political objections: the painter and communard Gustave Courbet complaining that the column was not only a glorification of imperialist war but that it was also “devoid of all artistic value”.
It was duly dismantled. But so too, soon, was the Commune, and with conventional government restored, the column was restored as well. Unfortunately for Courbet, he was then ordered to pay the cost, in 33 annual instalments. The debt would have followed him until the age of 91, except that, with exquisite timing, he died prematurely (from the effects of drinking) a day before the first payment was due.
Napoleon nevertheless rose again to the top of his column, from which today he still surveys the wealthy tourists who venture out from the Ritz and other hotels to spend their money in Place Vendôme’s ultra-plush shops.
Those shops famously include Charvet, where on visits to Paris, a certain former taoiseach used to buy his shirts. The same man had a somewhat Napoleonic demeanour, too, so it may have been more than the collars that rubbed off on him in Place Vendôme.
As for me, any temptation to emulate Charles Haughey’s shirt purchases this week had to be offset against Ryanair cabin-baggage rules. Cost hardly came into it. Which said, I noticed in passing that even a Charvet tie would have cost more than my flight to Paris, taxi to Dublin Airport included.