Springtime in Paris

March 1814

In December 1812, Tsar Alexander I issued a manifesto proclaiming an end to what came to be known in Russia as “The Patriotic War” (Отечественная война, literally “The Fatherland War”). Indeed, in the historical memory of your average Russian, the war against Napoleon is strongly associated with the year 1812. Few remember what happened next or realize that fighting actually continued for another year and a half, or that it ended only after long campaigns beyond Russia's borders resulting in countless deaths (suffice it to remember the Battle of Leipzig, which took thousands of Russian lives) and, ultimately, brought the anti-French Sixth Coalition all the way to Paris. It was around this time that Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy quipped:

Казалося, ну ниже

Нельзя сидеть в дыре

Ан глядь, и мы в Париже

C Louis le Désiré.

Just when it seemed things would not go our way

Look! We're in Paris with Louis le Désiré.

Louis le Désiré was, of course, No. XVIII, brother of the guillotined No. XVI. The erstwhile Count of Provence, after years wandering Europe in exile, forgotten by most and of little use to anyone, at the advanced age of 58 suddenly found himself on the French throne. Meanwhile, Alexander I, who just two years earlier had seen enemy forces reach Moscow, now became the great liberator of Europe – “Agamemnon” as the newspapers flatteringly gushed, comparing him to the Homeric hero whom all the kings of the Achaean alliance called on to lead their armies.

The events of 1813 and 1814, referred to in Russia as “the foreign campaigns of the Russian Army,” have clearly not been given their due, neither by historians nor the wider public. One scholar even compiled a list of reasons for this failure of appreciation, a list that included War and Peace, with its over-emphasis on Kutuzov and the transformation of the heroes of 1812 into patriotic icons, and the Soviet desire to extol what Lev Tolstoy called “the cudgel of the people's war” and to de-emphasize military successes achieved purely by the army of the autocracy.

Meanwhile, military historians have written extensively about the strategic genius demonstrated by Napoleon during 1813 and 1814, along with the determination exhibited by his armies, which fought with increasing ferocity the closer they came to Paris. By implication, Napoleon's opponents were forced to exert ever-greater effort and their commanders had to be increasingly inventive. Even Napoleon called the strategy used in taking Paris “a beautiful chess move.”

On March 19, 1814, the forces of the anti-French coalition entered Paris. The parade of allied troops lasted four hours, and witnesses reported that regular cries of “Hail Emperor Alexander” emanated from the crowd. Of course one might assume that these stories are figments of the Russian monarchist imagination, but amazingly the recollections of everyone involved in the three-month Russian occupation of Paris – occupiers and occupied alike – are almost exclusively favorable.

On the Russian side, pleasant memories of the experience are reflected, for example, in the fact that, upon returning to Russia, Cossacks gave their villages French names (one can still find Paris [Париж] and Fère-Champenoise [Фершампенуаз] in Siberia). And for Parisians, the Russian troops, especially the exotic Cossacks, made quite an impression. It is not just that they thought the Cossack uniforms showed real flair or that the Russian word быстро (quickly) inspired a neologism* that wound up enduring as the name for a place where you could get a quick bite – a bistro. Apparently relations between the conquered and the conquerors were truly friendly. Before the withdrawal from Paris a parting message was published titled, “A Russian Farewell to the Parisians.” Its anonymous author wrote: “Farewell Champs-Élysées, and farewell to you too Champ de Mars! We made you the site of our bivouacs, built you over with huts, cabins, and booths that served as our tents. The city's darling beauties visited their roaming neighbors. They were not frightened by the martial clamor and sprung over heaps of weapons like zephyrs.” Such was the peaceable, amicable, and even frolicsome ending to a long and bloody war.

Contemporaneous painting of Russians in Paris, 1814.

But there was another element to the conclusion of the war that was not immediately evident. Many young officers who endured the 1812 campaign, fought in Prussia and France, and withstood artillery barrages during the Battles of Borodino and Leipzig, were now able to take an unhurried look at how their enemies lived. Most of them had been raised on the French language and culture and many spoke Napoleon's language better than their own, yet before 1814 almost none of them had ever been to France. Since their childhoods coincided with the French Revolution and their youths with the Napoleonic Wars, they could hardly have had an opportunity to make such a trip.

Now, however, the flower of Russian youth had passed through post-revolutionary France and entered Paris. This experience confirmed something they had long suspected but had never been able to verify firsthand. They saw with their own eyes how much better the French peasants – free masters of their own farmsteads – were living than Russian serfs, and they witnessed the sense of freedom and independence enjoyed by French citizens compared with the subjects of the Russian tsar. The vanquished turned out to be freer and better off than the victors.

On top of this was the bitter realization that the Russian peasants who made up the vast majority of the Russian Army's recruits and fought so bravely to defeat the most formidable army of the day would not be justly compensated. Surely the justest recompense for a peasant soldier who had risked his life for his country was his freedom and the long-awaited abolition of serfdom.

It was not to be. On August 30, 1814, after the capture of Paris and Napoleon's abdication, a new manifesto was published: “On the Liberation of the Russian State from an Invasion by the Gauls and the Twelve Nations with Them.” While members of Russian society's other estates – the nobility, the clergy, the merchant class – were given various rewards, the peasantry was expected to take comfort in the words, “The peasantry, our faithful people – may they receive their recompense from God.”

Upon their return from Paris, the young members of the Russian nobility were able to ponder all this. About a year and a half later, the first secret societies were established. The noblemen's erstwhile patriotic fervor and adoration of the tsar deflated, they now turned their attention toward gaining freedom for their country through conspiracy. Eleven years after the capture of Paris, many of those who had proudly walked its streets in 1814 now gathered on St. Petersburg's Senate Square in an attempt to overthrow the autocracy. Later, during the interrogations that followed their defeat, one reason cited by many Decembrists for their decision to found secret societies was the impressions left by their time abroad during the Napoleonic wars.

Bivouacs on the Champs Elysees, 1814.

A century and a half later, Soviet soldiers were similarly influenced by their time in Europe after World War II, when they learned that people in Germany and Czechoslovakia, despite the desolation of war, lived much better than their malnourished Soviet counterparts. Stalin solved this problem by quickly dispatching tens of thousands of returning soldiers to labor camps.

Alexander I was not Stalin. He understood perfectly well how much the revolution had given the French and wanted to introduce similar reforms in Russia, but he never worked up the courage to do so. The job was left to the young officers who returned with the troops from Paris. They failed – yet another tragic chapter in Russian history.