It is not necessary to insist too much for a Frenchman to start talking about Napoleon Bonaparte.
At the bar in Chez François, a tavern on the outskirts of Laffrey, a town of half a thousand people in the Alps, the discussion heats up fast.
"He is a dictator," says Michel-Joseph, a retiree from the telephone company.
Alain, who worked in construction, smiles: “Leave it alone.
It only killed twenty million people. "
And underlines: "Only."
In reality, the figure is much lower.
The third, Michel, quietly attends the dialogue.
PHOTO GALLERY: From the Côte d'Azur to Paris, in the footsteps of Napoleon
Then they talk about President Emmanuel Macron: another "dictator", they say.
In the presidential elections of 2022, Alain and Michel will vote for Marine Le Pen, candidate of the extreme right;
Michel-Joseph, no.
"I'm on the left," he says.
Not to mention getting vaccinated against covid-19, they do not trust: in that, the three coincide.
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Macron asks to assume Napoleon's legacy without hiding his shadows
Napoleon
France commemorates, but does not celebrate, the bicentennial of Napoleon's death
As you go through the gate, a path leads to a meadow. On a promontory, an equestrian statue stands, protected by a fence and monitored by cameras. As if someone were going to knock her down or the rider could get away. It's Napoleon. The general and the consul; the dictator, the Emperor of the French. The man who conquered Europe and lost it, the one who left a trail of blood, but also laws and decrees created by modern administrations.
This is a journey of almost 900 kilometers in the footsteps of what Napoleonic mythology calls the
flight of the eagle
: the landing on the Mediterranean coast, on March 1, 1815, after 300 days of exile on the island of Elba, and the prodigious reconquest of power in Paris on the 20th of the same month. "The invasion of a country by one man," would summarize Chateaubriand. Thierry Lenz, historian and director of the Napoleon Foundation, says: "There is something of a miracle, although he did not leave anything to chance in the preparations."
He was on horseback and many of his soldiers — a thousand at first, more as they approached the capital — on foot;
the envoys of EL PAÍS travel by car.
They took 20 days;
us four.
He traveled through a pre-industrial France with poor communications;
we are going through a country trying to overcome a pandemic: country and city, mountain and plain, empty and overpopulated France.
Agnès Mathieux, dressed in costumes from the Napoleon era on the beach of Golfo-Juan.David Exposito
Napoleon: absent and present during the journey. Legendary and remote, but in 2021 France it's never far away. Hero, criminal. Exalted 200 years after his death, but never sure of his place in history. “Here comes the Emperor”, announces a woman sitting on a terrace on the seafront in Golfe-Juan, a tourist town between Nice and Cannes where the journey begins. A man in vintage clothes has just passed by: the bicorn, the jacket, the medals.
A few meters away, on what is now a beach with families and pensioners under umbrellas or in the sun, Napoleon disembarked with his faithful.
And he proclaimed: "The eagle, with the national colors, will fly from bell tower to bell tower up to the towers of Notre Dame."
The temperature is approaching 30 degrees, the rays fall vertically and the man in vintage clothes and his wife, also vintage, resist the heat and humidity of the Côte d'Azur.
Their names are Agnès and Daniel Mathieux.
He, ex-military and former employee of France Télécom, the former telecommunications monopoly.
She was an Air France stewardess and a regular on Concorde flights for years.
They are both fond of historical reconstructions.
They spend thousands of euros on costumes, reconstruct battles, commemorate events.
Contrary to what the woman on the terrace believed, he does not play Napoleon. He introduces himself: "I am Colonel Baron Antoine Darnay de la Perrière, Director General of the Italian Post Office." And she: "And I, Baroness Adelaïde Soukanye de Landevoisin." They say it with conviction and point out that their thing is not to dress up. They study history. They worship it. Mathieux explains: “Napoleon is the
grandeur
of France. And I admire him as a military strategist. But the Napoleon I prefer is the one who created the Civil Code, the baccalaureate, the Council of State. In just a few years it gave France institutions that still exist and which were also imitated all over the world ”. And she adds: "By putting on those dresses, we dream of being a bit like them."
In Golfe-Juan the road starts that follows the same path that Napoleon and his men followed in an exhausting march through the Alps, along snowy and steep roads, but avoiding the busiest routes and regions favorable to Louis XVIII, the Bourbon who occupied the throne.
Behind each dry and depopulated mountain, another one is the same, and another.
A downpour falls from a thousand meters above sea level.
Hail
Each town has its legend.
Here he ate an omelette;
a mule with a treasure fell down this ravine.
And there a monument in honor of his fleeting passage, or the tree under which he rested.
Even the wall he peed on.
"He passed and peed"
"Eishi Lou 5 de Mars 1815, Napoléon 1é P. P".
The phrase, on the wall of a stone house at the exit of a town of 1,600 inhabitants called Volonne, is inscribed in Provençal, and has been interpreted as a commemoration of the exact point where Napoleon literally "passed and peed."
Jean-François Popielski, a councilor in Volonne and passionate about its history, distrusts this version.
“When it is said that he peed,” he reflects, “there may be several interpretations.
The first is that he is a man like the others.
The second is that they make fun of him ”.
Napoleon, like any semi-divine or Luciferian figure, has his legends and his relics, his cult.
And his pilgrimage.
"Napoléon stopped here. Why not you?", Reads this welcome sign at the entrance to the town of Malijai, in the Provence region.David Exposito
Joining the conversation with Popielski is Rémy Bourdon, a young history teacher at an institute near Dijon and a specialist in Napoleon, to whom he devoted a thesis on his golden and black legends about the
flight of the eagle
. And he decided to go from theory to practice and walk the path between Golfe-Juan and Grenoble.
"There are those who walk the Camino de Santiago, but I'm not particularly a believer," says Bourdon as he pauses on his way. "As I had studied this in the books on the front and back, I wanted to see it with my eyes." He left Golfe-Juan on July 15, walks between 20 and 30 kilometers a day, every two days he takes a break, and plans to reach Grenoble on August 11. "The difficult thing is not the slopes," he confesses. "The difficult thing is to cross a town and see people eating ice cream on the terraces."
Two days after Volonne, Napoleon reached the Laffrey meadow. He ran into the king's troops. The contemporary motorist, if he gets lost, passes by. The meadow is more modest than imagined. If it weren't for the statue, he would forget that here “the fate of the most novel and most beautiful company of modern times was decided,” as Stendhal would write. It is a Hollywood scene, but period testimonies and various historians concur: it happened as is. Napoleon got off his horse. On foot and unarmed, he approached the soldiers who had orders to block him. "It's me," he told them. "Recognize me." He took a few steps forward. "If any soldier among you wants to kill his emperor," he continued, "go ahead." Silence. A few seconds later, the soldiers dropped their rifles and exploded in jubilation: "Long live the Emperor!"
Statue of Napoleon in Laffrey, where he confronted the soldiers of the royal army, whom he convinced to ally with him without shedding a drop of blood.David Exposito
Legend has it - another - that the headlines in Paris began to change there.
When leaving Elba they warned: "The cannibal has come out of his lair."
Upon arriving in Paris they celebrated: "His Imperial and Royal Majesty has entered his castle in the midst of his faithful subjects."
The ogre had metamorphosed into an eagle.
From there, he did not stop adding accessions.
Nothing stopped him anymore.
Louis XVIII had sent Marshal Ney, Napoleon's old crony, to stop him, and Ney promised to bring him "in an iron cage."
He soon concluded that "you cannot stop the sea water with your hands."
Entrance to Volonne, the town where Napoleon is said to have stopped to piss on his way to Paris.
David Exposito
In Grenoble, the first city after the meeting in Laffrey, the route becomes a highway.
No more winding roads, peaks, and chasms;
the landscape becomes indistinct: service stations, trucks, tolls.
After Lyon, you have to take secondary roads to follow exactly the eagle's itinerary.
Towns with cathedrals where nothing ever happens.
German or Dutch tourists lost in the maze of downtown streets, full by day and without a soul at dusk.
Corners where time stopped decades ago.
"Small cities where one discovers a country (...) the real France," wrote the American James Salter, who located a novel of his in one of these towns, Autun.
In the novel, the lovers met at the Saint-Louis et de la Poste de Autun, which has been closed for many years, with a price list for the year 2012 on the façade.
Through the door you can see the dusty reception, the inner courtyard.
It is not possible to visit the room where Napoleon stayed on March 15, 1815. "I am not in Autun", explains by phone a person in charge of the owner company, "and the person who could open the hotel for him, either".
Rémy Bourdon, a young man who makes the way from Golfe-Juan to Grenoble following Napoleon's route.David Exposito
Auxerre, Sens, Fontainebleau: in the final section, the stages are names on the motorway panels. When Napoleon entered Paris, on the southern outskirts, the
banlieue
, Louis XVIII had already given the fright. The monarchical historian Jacques Bainville described in an 1831 biography "the magical and miraculous entry into these Tuileries in which Napoleon triumphs, a man not only extraordinary, but also supernatural." And he quoted a testimony: "I believed I was witnessing the resurrection of Christ."
In 20 days, without shedding a drop of blood, he had regained the throne and founded a myth that subsequent French leaders have dreamed of emulating, sometimes successfully as General de Gaulle: the audacious young man who, along with a handful of foolish, reach the top;
the providential man who, after an exile, returns to save the country.
Always comes back
The entry into Paris, however, was not the end of the story.
The Hundred Days, parenthesis that had begun with the trip from Golfe-Juan, ended with the collapse of Waterloo and the exile on the island of Santa Elena, in the middle of the Atlantic.
He died on May 5, 1821. He was 51 years old.
But Napoleon, the man who did not stand still, always comes back.
In 1840 his remains were repatriated to Paris and now they rest in the Invalides military complex.
His tomb is the most impressive in Paris and France.
Maybe from Europe.
Napoleon's tomb in the Invalides complex in Paris.David Exposito
"We have, in the heart of Paris, the grave of a dictator financed by a state that calls itself democratic," denounces Louis-George Tin, president of the Representative Council of Black Associations in France.
Napoleon was the author of three crimes.
A political crime in France, a coup: he was a dictator.
War crimes in Europe, from Spain to Russia.
And a crime against humanity in the colonies, where he reestablished slavery ”.
France, according to Tin, should learn from the example of Spain in bringing Franco out of the Valley of the Fallen.
It is not risky to say that it will not happen in the near time.
In May, when commemorating the bicentennial of his death, Macron asked "not to give in to the temptation of an anachronistic process that would consist of judging the past with the laws of the present."
And he declared: "Napoleon Bonaparte is part of us."
The journey ends in front of the sarcophagus and under the golden dome.
You need, to enter, the health certificate.
There are no queues and the few visitors are English, Spanish, German;
little is heard speaking French.
He is and is not.
It is the sand in Golfe-Juan and the tinsel in Paris;
the road and the marble.
He is at the center of everything and is invisible among statues that commemorate his deeds in the Invalides, a national temple, the French equivalent of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, or a mausoleum like Lenin's in Moscow, Mao's in Beijing.
Nothing will move it.
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