Eric's Reviews > Defeat: Napoleon's Russian Campaign

A must for disaster junkies, fans of slow breakdown and group degeneration—anyone who can’t get enough of that horrible sorting which leaves some of the shipwrecked with their wits and capacity for teamwork, others with nothing but predacious urges and a callous despair. Also a plum if you like Romanticism. Once the retreat from Moscow begins, every page is a canvas of Delacroix or Géricault: pathetic calamities under exotic skies, in turbulent colors.* (Negligible cannibalism, which is a surprise, but there are cities in flames, emptied jails, starving plundering mobs; and Ségur does infant-clutching dashes across ice floes in the pitch dark better than Mrs. Stowe.) And “Bonaparte”—the British favored his surname, that of a swarthy stage villain if you imagine the Duke of Wellington’s pronunciation—is fascinating, better than all his Byronic copies and duplicates; grandiose in optimism and in fatalism, in paralysis and in combat; here an emperor sighing and sluggish amid his entourage, distracting himself with long dinners and pompous reviews in the courts of the Kremlin—as the first flakes fall—there a reinvigorated chieftain waving his sword and marching in the snow, rallying the Old Guard to fight a way through the blizzard and the Cossacks (though Ney is the hero, the conspicuous individual of the retreat).


Defeat is the graspable handle NYRB Classics has given this abridgement of General Philippe-Paul de Ségur’s Histoire de Napoléon et de la Grande-Armée pendant l’année 1812, published in 1824. In his original two volumes, Ségur interleaved tedious statistics and technical disquisitions in archaic military French with a vivid memoir of Napoleon and the Russian campaign that incensed hardcore Bonapartists. A few years after publication, Ségur fought and was wounded in a duel with another of the emperor’s former aides. I had to work to imagine this book as a scandalous takedown or tell-all. While Ségur did not think Napoleon a faultless demigod, he did see him among the Great Men, with exceptional (if fallible) powers of concentration and self-mastery, a majestic (though volatile) pride, and (usually) decisive timing; the hubristic human genius, in short; the hero fated to fall. And Ségur’s view of the Russian campaign as a clash of higher and lower civilizations is no less mythic, and really quite chauvinist. Russia was still the barbarous domain of superstition and slavery, whatever Napoleon’s political overreach and blunders in the field. Its greedy lords scorched the earth to keep Enlightenment from the priest-ridden, icon-bludgeoned serfs, and its generals resorted to guerilla tactics because cowed by the puissance of the Grande Armée. Ségur even calls the Russians the spectators, not the authors, of the army’s woe.


Ségur’s history/memoir was a major source of War and Peace (and of more obscure works by Chateaubriand and Hugo). It is a salute to Ségur’s dramatic craftsmanship that Tolstoy lifted whole scenes from the Histoire, even as he sought to correct the book’s Great Man bias and disdainful picture of the Russian people at war. It is a ridiculously entertaining narrative. I love that the action is a welter of insane shit, yet the style remains terse, sententious, and the figures classically posed—just the style you'd expect from a remnant of the old military nobility (as Louis XVI's Minister of War Ségur’s grandfather appointed a fifteen-year-old Napoleon to the École Militaire) and a writer whom Baudelaire, after visits among the grayhead Academicians, called a Romantic Tacitus, Xenophon with a glaze of le pathétique. I’m also grateful to Ségur for interesting me in War and Peace. That novel has never been high on my list of Tolstoy priorities, certainly far below Hadji Murad, The Death of Ivan Ilych, and a badly needed return to Anna Karenina; but now in bookstores I heft copies and sample translations, while wishing I had nothing to do but read.


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*To choose from literally hundreds of examples…Marshal Ney’s rearguard of the retreat, like the army as a whole, was a core of still-disciplined units marching in formation amidst a desperate horde of unarmed, leaderless stragglers scrambling about in unrecognizable tatters of uniforms. This is what happened when Ney was cut off and attacked:

Our unarmed stragglers, still numbering about three thousand, were terrified by the noise. This herd of men surged madly back and forth and rushed into the ranks of the soldiers, who beat them off. Ney succeeded in keeping them between himself and the enemy, whose fire the useless mass absorbed. Thus the timid served as a protection for the brave. Making a rampart of those poor wretches for his right flank, the marshal moved backward toward the Dnieper, which became a cover for his left.