Ian Germani. Journal of War & Culture Studies. Volume 9, Issue 3. August 2016.
The death of Marshal Jean Lannes at the Battle of Aspern-Essling in 1809 and its subsequent representation in official reports, memoirs and academic painting provides a case study in how the subject of the soldier’s death remains a rich terrain for historical investigation. Studies by André Corvisier, John Keegan, Yuval Harari, Hervé Drévillon and George Mosse identify important dimensions of the topic. Analysis of the death of Lannes in the broader context of Napoleonic warfare identifies this period as a distinctive moment in the history of the soldier’s death. Representations of Lannes’s death reflected the Napoleonic synthesis of old regime and revolutionary ideals of military glory. Soldiers’ memoirs commenting on the death of Lannes and more generally on the encounter with battlefield death reveal a mixture of matter-of-factness and deeper emotion, confirming Harari’s picture of this as a transitional epoch in the soldier’s experience.
On 22 May 1809 Marshal Jean Lannes, Duke of Montebello, was fatally wounded by a cannon ball at the Battle of Aspern-Essling. The incident was recorded in a bulletin of Napoleon’s Grande Armée, which stated prematurely that ‘an amputation has taken place and his [Lannes’s] life is out of danger’ (Garnier, 2013: 446). The bulletin went on to describe the ‘most affecting’ farewell between the Marshal and Napoleon. Napoleon himself reportedly shed tears, saying that only such a blow to his heart could divert his attention from the needs of his army. Lannes, brought back to consciousness by the presence of his Emperor, responded by embracing him and saying, ‘Within an hour you will have lost a man who dies with the glory and the conviction of having been and still being your best friend’ (Garnier, 2013: 446-47). This exchange of words and affection was the inspiration for a painting displayed at the biennial Salon of 1810, by Albert-Paul Bourgeois. Bourgeois depicts the mortally wounded Marshal, his injuries tastefully concealed from view, receiving his Emperor’s solicitude on the field of battle. Surrounding the two figures, rapt with attention, a circle of officers bears witness to this transcendent spectacle of devotion and compassion.
The painting by Bourgeois, just as it hides from view the Marshal’s wounds, likewise fails to reveal how he finally died. Detailed information about both is provided in the memoirs of the chief surgeon to Napoleon’s armies, Dominique-Jean Larrey. Confessing that treating Lannes, a personal friend, ‘was one of the most difficult circumstances of my life’, Larrey described in clinical detail the effects of the cannon ball, which had shattered the Marshal’s left knee before gouging the muscle of his right thigh. Larrey recorded the debates which ensued as he and fellow surgeons considered whether to amputate. Having removed the Marshal’s left leg in a procedure lasting two minutes, during which the patient ‘gave very few signs of pain’, there was hope he might recover. In the following days, however, as he visited Lannes in the home of a local brewer where he was cared for, Larrey recorded that:
I found the Duke extremely weak, deeply sad and with a deathly pallor. His ideas were incoherent and his voice halting; he complained of a heaviness of the head; he was unsettled, felt oppressed, and moaned frequently; he could not bear the weight of his bedcovers, although they were very light. (1812-1817: 282)
A week after the battle, Lannes was afflicted by a series of attacks involving high fever and delirium. Napoleon visited him once more. Finally, ‘the Marshal went into a complete delirium which was of short duration, and he died several hours later in a state that was calm enough. It was’, concluded Larrey, ‘at the end of the ninth day after the accident and the battle’ (1812-1817: 284).
Larrey’s was not the only memoir to tell the story of the death of Marshal Lannes. As Brian Joseph Martin discusses in his work on Napoleonic friendship, Generals Marcellin de Marbot, Jean-Marie-René Savary and Louis-François Lejeune all recounted the tearful encounter between Napoleon and Lannes (Martin, 2011: 41). Napoleon’s valet, Constant, published a memoir in 1830 which not only recounted this battlefield embrace, but also added a deathbed speech. With his last words to Napoleon, Lannes reaffirmed his devotion to the Emperor — ‘I die for you’ — but also offered some ‘last reproaches of friendship’, warning Napoleon against his ‘insatiable ambition’ and calling upon him to put an end to the war (Wairy, 1830: 148). This version of Lannes’s death has been treated with scepticism by memoirists and biographers alike (Martin, 2011: 43).
All these versions of the death of Marshal Lannes — the army bulletin, the painting by Bourgeois, as well as the memoirs of Larrey, Constant and others — are representations of a reality we can only imperfectly perceive. Perhaps we come closest to witnessing the grim agony of Lannes’s death through the account of Dr Larrey, though even in this we are protected by the surgeon’s professional jargon and clinical detachment, which allow only occasional intrusions of sentiment. There is much to be learned by exploring both the reality and the representations of the soldier’s death. This exploration involves asking a number of questions pertaining to the physical realities of military life and death, military culture, the social and demographic context, as well as the conventions and institutions regulating official propaganda and artistic production. Who died? How did they die? How did soldiers reflect upon the prospects of their own deaths as well as upon those of their comrades? How were those deaths reported and memorialized in various media? How did the soldier’s death relate to that of his civilian counterpart? Most importantly, how did these realities and representations change over time? This article explores the context surrounding the death of Marshal Lannes to uncover both the realities and the representations of the soldier’s death in Napoleonic France. Soldiers’ writings provide some evidence that the encounter with battlefield death acquired new meaning as a transformative experience during this period. Napoleonic propaganda, in the form of army bulletins and state-sponsored painting, also progressively transformed the idealized death of the soldier from an act of self-sacrifice on behalf of the nation to one of devotion to the Emperor.
The subject of the soldier’s death is a rich one, the parameters of which were defined in a seminal article by André Corvisier. This identified three fundamental problems to be considered in relation to the soldier’s death:
In the first place, the problem is one of sensibility and ethics: the attitude of the soldier confronting death. Nor can one escape the quantitative problem of the weight of military death in relation to general mortality. From these two problems derives a third, that of the representation of the soldier’s death and its place in the life of a society. (1985: 368)
Since these words were written, many historians have taken up the gauntlet thrown down by Corvisier to examine these problems relating to the soldier’s death in particular periods of French history. Although there has been no survey of the problem as broad as Corvisier’s, whose scope extended from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, several innovative works by cultural and military historians, although not necessarily focusing either on the soldier’s death or on French history, have helped to broaden our understanding of the three problems defined by Corvisier.
This is above all true of the first of Corvisier’s problems, concerning the attitudes of soldiers themselves in the face of death, whether their own or that of others. John Keegan’s ground-breaking book, The Face of Battle, brilliantly deconstructed conventional battle narratives as a prelude to his own, far more convincing reconstructions of the battlefield experiences at Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme. By reflecting on weapons technology and tactics, battlefield topography, and on the evidence provided by soldiers and surgeons, Keegan gave new insight into how soldiers gave and received death in battle. Keegan’s study showed that the incidence and the experience of death in battle have varied considerably over time, as weapons systems, forms of combat and methods of medical evacuation and care have evolved (1978). His work has inspired a plethora of studies focused on battlefield experience and ‘the sharp end’ of war, which are admirably synthesized by Stephenson (2012). In France, Drévillon (2006), and Lagadec and Perréon (2009) are among those who have applied Keegan’s approach to the study of battles from the French past.
The ‘battle studies’ of Keegan and his successors depended heavily upon the evidence provided by soldiers themselves, in their letters, diaries and memoirs. These sources, particularly memoirs, are also the source material for Yuval Harari’s study of The Ultimate Experience (2008), which considers how soldiers made sense of the battlefield experience over a period of more than 500 years, from 1450 to 2000. Harari argues that the period from 1740 to 1865 marked a fundamental cultural transition in the understanding of the battlefield experience, as that experience came to be perceived as a revelatory one. Prior to the mid-eighteenth century, soldiers’ memoirs were laconic and indifferent in their references to battlefield encounters with death, whether these involved the killing of others, their own near escapes, or the deaths of comrades. ‘Most memoirists, if they bother to narrate the death of close friends and cherished commanders, do so matter-of-factly, without consecrating it to any high ideals, without redeeming it by patriotic and heroic slogans […], without lamenting war’s cruelty, and apparently without learning anything from it’ (Harari, 2008: 71). With the rise of the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility, however, says Harari, ‘bodies begin to think’ (2008: 129) and ‘the extreme bodily experiences of war […] [become] a sublime gateway to otherwise inaccessible truths and realities, which change the warrior instead of merely testing him’ (2008: 197). Inflicting or witnessing death became key experiences, prompting memoirists to describe in detail the emotions they inspired. Harari argues that this transition had implications for the third of Corvisier’s problems: the representation of death in battle. Just as soldiers began to describe in detail the extreme physical and emotional sensations that came from the encounter with death, artists too, Harari argues, bore witness to the importance of that experience as a moment of revelation. Their paintings of dying generals did not fail to include the stares of other soldiers as witness to that moment:
Their stares register the experience of combat; and the message to the viewers is that the soldiers are undergoing a deep experience, that the soldiers know they are undergoing a deep experience, and that we viewers are in an inferior position to understand and know what they experience. Death in battle is no longer just heroism. It has also become ‘an experience’. (2008: 225)
Battlefield Pietàs such as Benjamin West’s, commemorating the death of Wolfe (1770) and John Singleton Copley’s The Death of Major Peirson (1783), in Harari’s view, were prime exemplars of this changed representation of death in battle, focusing on the ‘knowing stare’ of the soldier-witnesses (Harari, 2008: 224).
Harari’s book points to the important connection between soldiers’ stories and artists’ representations. It says little about the second of Corvisier’s problems, concerning the relationship between military death and the general mortality within society. A book which says more is Hervé Drévillon’s L’Individu et la Guerre: Du Chevalier Bayard au Soldat inconnu (2013). Drévillon reflects upon how changing demographic realities affected the social and psychological impacts of military death. Comparing the military deaths sustained by France in the War of the Spanish Succession (310,000), the wars of the French Revolution (458,000) and the Napoleonic wars (900,000), Drévillon calculated that the Napoleonic wars, particularly in their final years, were characterized by a significant escalation in military mortality by comparison with the two earlier conflicts. He argues that because the War of the Spanish Succession occurred at a time when society was still afflicted by great demographic crises, such as those of 1693 and 1709, the overall demographic and psychological impact of military losses was less significant than during the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods (2013: 182-84). The implication is that battlefield death was perceived to be less terrible at a time when the ravages of death from epidemic disease, famine, or the endemic violence of civil society were essential facts of life. This would seem to suggest that as civilian mortality has declined and death has been pushed to the margins of modern life, as Philippe Ariès argues (1981: 559-601), the deaths of young men on the battlefield have come to seem increasingly anomalous and unnatural. The massive and enduring psychological impact of the First World War might therefore be explained both by the enormous scale and intensity of the slaughter — the number of Frenchmen who lost their lives in the four years from 1914 to 1918 was similar to the total throughout the entire twenty-three years of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars — as well as by the fact that it was precisely in the years following the war that the Western experience of death was so profoundly transformed. Historians dispute the extent to which the war itself represented a turning-point in attitudes towards death. A study of northern France argues that, despite its unprecedented mortality, the war itself did not disrupt the general trend in attitudes towards death that had developed since the turning-point of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Those attitudes included both sentimentality and resignation, but above all belief in the individuality of deaths and the need for the dead to be interred, if possible, in their own graves, where the living might come to pay their respects (Hardier & Jagielski 2001: 348). A study of Britain, however, concluded that the war ‘shattered what remained of the Victorian way of death’ (Jalland, 1999: 251), and a recent study of nurses’ narratives from the First World War shows the intolerable strain imposed by mass death on the established conventions surrounding the art of dying (Kelly, 2015).
Widespread public revulsion at the soldier’s death did not develop until after the First World War. Prior to 1914, cultural representations provided a generally positive view of war and of military mortality. Harari and Drévillon offer rather different explanations for this. Harari, insisting that the lack of anti-war sentiment in early modern Europe is not to be explained by ignorance or the lack of realistic reporting (of which there was an abundance), argues simply that in the nineteenth century attention became focused excessively upon the prizes to be won in war, and the price to be paid was neglected. The ‘anti-war’ culture of the twentieth century was a corrective to the excesses of the nineteenth (2008: 75). Drévillon develops a rather different argument, to the effect that the military doctrine developed in France in the period leading up to the First World War — the doctrine of the offensive — was sustained by an interpretation of French military history which failed to recognize the distinction between the respect for the intelligence and dignity of the individual soldier that was the basis for the military system of the Revolution, and the ‘mass warfare’ that characterized Napoleon’s system, particularly in its later years. Sustaining this doctrine, says Drévillon, was a cult of sacrifice which frequently had overtones of religious martyrdom. It expressed itself in the celebration of the heroic last stands of Sidi-Brahim (1845), Camerone (1863) and Bazeilles (1870), the latter most famously represented in the painting by Alphonse de Neuville, The Last Cartridges (2013: 266-69). This exaltation of military sacrifice was connected to a mystical nationalism that found expression in the poetry of Paul Déroulède and Charles Péguy and which ‘demanded the humiliation of individual reason’ (Drévillon, 2013: 271). Chief among those who sought to base the military system on the citizen-soldier as a reasoning, consenting individual was Jean Jaurès. He did not prevail, however, and the mass slaughter that followed his assassination was the consequence (2013: 278).
Another study that enriches our understanding of how attitudes towards the soldier’s death have been transformed since the nineteenth century is George L. Mosse’s Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (1990). Like Drévillon, Mosse insists upon the appropriation of Christianity as a central building-block in the celebration of the developing cult of the fallen soldier, although he points out that the funerary monuments designed to commemorate the dead soldiers of the French Revolution took their inspiration from the dead heroes and the symbols of pagan antiquity. Mosse places this cult of the fallen soldier within the broader context of changing attitudes towards death in Western society, as the dead, and the cemeteries which contained them, were moved from the centre to the periphery of urban life, in cemeteries such as Paris’s Père-Lachaise. The new suburban cemeteries provided a setting where the changing seasons of nature were assimilated to Christian notions of death and resurrection, an association which would ultimately find expression in the military cemeteries which began to emerge after the American Civil War and which proliferated during and after the First World War. The cult of the dead soldier — involving the ‘appropriation of nature’ as well as of the symbols of Christianity — was, according to Mosse, essential to the ‘myth of the war experience’. This valorization of ‘the meaningfulness and glory of war’, he says, found its ultimate expression in Germany in the aftermath of the First World War, although it also had significant resonance elsewhere in Europe. In the meantime, during the war itself, images associating the dead or dying soldier with the figure of Christ were manifest in all combatant states (1990: 34-50).
The apogee of the cult of the fallen soldier occurred in France in the opening year of the First World War, during which time 301,000 soldiers were killed, a monthly average of over 60,000 (Audoin-Rouzeau, 2010: 36). A 1915 article by Henri Lavedan in the mass circulation weekly, L’Illustration, was typical in its idealization of these deaths. According to Lavedan, the defenders of the homeland went rapturously to their encounter with death.
Without reproach, without cursing, without malediction, complaint, or sigh, they let themselves fall faithfully into its [death’s] arms with the profound and magnificent assurance, not to have been outplayed, not to have lost the game, but devoting themselves to the very end to the execution of a solemn pact that they would sign again. (Lavedan, 1915: 449)
It was, of course, in the writings of soldiers themselves that an antidote to such idealized representations began to emerge. Henri Barbusse did not deny that the soldier’s death was a sacrifice, but in his novel Under Fire he emphasized the soldiers’ awareness of the terrible price they were called upon to pay:
Despite all the propaganda, they are not inflamed. They are above instinctive reaction. They are not drunk, either physically or spiritually. Fully conscious of what they are doing, fully fit and in good health, they have massed there to throw themselves once more into that madman’s role that is imposed on each of them by the folly of the human race. One can see what vision and what fear and what farewells are in their silence, their immobility, the mask of calm that inhumanly grasps their faces. They are not the sort of heroes that people think they are, but their sacrifice has greater value than those who have not seen them will ever be able to understand. (Barbusse, 2003: 223)
It was disillusioned representations such as this that made the First World War a turning-point in the representation of the soldier’s death.
If we return to the realities and representations of the soldier’s death on the battlefields of Napoleonic Europe, what does the evidence tell us? Firstly, Napoleonic battles could be extremely bloody affairs. The Battle of Aspern-Essling was itself one of the bloodiest, with a casualty rate of 26 per cent (Drévillon, 2013: 186). Four thousand Frenchmen died in the battle and another 15,000 were wounded, the vast majority, like Marshall Lannes, from the effects of cannon- or musket-balls (Parker, 1983: 98). General Marbot provided a vivid account of the battle’s ferocity. ‘On every part of our line the carnage was terrible’, he wrote (1891: 197-98). In the village of Aspern, he said, the fighting was so intense that, in the midst of burning houses, soldiers fought from behind heaps of bodies. General Pelet wrote that the struggle for Aspern was ‘the fiercest positional fight of which military exploits make mention’:
Aspern is crushed beneath a hail of enemy cannon fire, set on fire by shells, congested by the heaped bodies of both sides. Throughout the evening, we fight without cease, within and without; we contest in turn the church, the belfry, every street, every wall. Everything becomes a weapon: we entrench behind carts, harrows, ploughs. The action is so furious in the different streets of the village that the victor in one is then attacked from behind. (1824-1826: 301)
General Marbot experienced the carnage at first hand. Delivering a message from Marshal Lannes to General Saint-Hilaire, he arrived at the latter’s headquarters as it fell under a hail of enemy fire. ‘Many officers were killed’, he wrote. General Saint-Hilaire was struck down and subsequently died under the surgeon’s knife. Marbot himself was hit in the thigh but, as fellow aides-de-camp continued to fall, he remained at Lannes’s side (Marbot, 1891: 196-97). Statistics tell us that the prospect of dying of wounds sustained in combat was actually greater for officers like Marbot than it was for ordinary soldiers; 11.5 per cent of officers serving in Napoleon’s armies died in combat, 6 per cent from illness. For soldiers, the proportions were reversed: 5.6 per cent died in battle, 15.6 per cent from illness. Overall mortality in the Napoleonic armies, taking into account the missing, ran at 40 per cent (Houdaille, 1972, 1995; Delmas, 1992: 328-29). Larrey’s memoirs provide detailed descriptions of the gruesome wounds and terrible suffering endured by officers and men alike. As was the case with Marshal Lannes, many suffered lingering deaths, days or even weeks after receiving their wounds. The effects of shock, infection, tetanus and internal bleeding all took their toll. The ministrations of surgeons may have saved lives but on many occasions they appear only to have added to the torments endured by the dying. It is clear from Larrey’s descriptions of some of his operations that they were often excruciating (1812-1817: 280-340; Parker, 1983: 82-98).
In soldiers’ own stories of how they experienced these realities, the evidence for an increased emphasis upon emotional affect is mixed. Captain Coignet recounted what it was like to be an infantryman under enemy fire at Essling: ‘However one seeks to portray the anguish felt by all who endured in such a position, one will never be able to reproduce it’. He described cannon fire which cut down three lines of men at a stroke, and shells which ‘blew bearskin headpieces twenty feet in the air’ (1888: 161). But other than describing his relief at the realization that a bloody piece of flesh which suddenly attached itself to his arm was not his own, Coignet simply insisted upon the unshakeable courage with which he and his comrades endured these trials. His story of General Dorsenne, blown off his feet by a shell as artillerymen died all around him, is typical. The General, said Coignet, jumped to his feet. ‘Your general is fine’, Dorsenne reassured his men. ‘Count on him, he will know how to die at his post’ (1888: 162). Although he noted the ‘consternation’ caused by the death of Lannes, Coignet was dispassionate in his description of deaths which occurred close at hand, including those of two stretcher-bearers and the officer they were carrying, all killed by a single cannon ball (1888: 163). General Boulart, however, responded much more emotionally to a quite similar circumstance. In command of a battery of guns at Essling, Boulart did his best to evacuate the dead and wounded as rapidly as possible, to remove from the gunners’ eyes ‘the horrible and hideous spectacle of death and of certain wounds’. Two of his men were killed in the act of placing one of their dead comrades in a ditch. ‘I will never forget’, wrote Boulart, ‘the feeling of pain that I experienced, as if I had been the cause of the deaths of those brave men’ (1892: 217).
Captain Coignet’s mixture of bravado and matter-of-factness was echoed by other foot-soldiers who fought in Napoleon’s armies. Jérôme-Etienne Besse, fighting in the Italian theatre during the 1809 campaign, recounted how he, like Coignet, had been spattered by the body parts of other soldiers as a result of a shell that had killed two men and taken off the leg of an officer. Having rescued him from the ravine into which he had been thrown by the explosion, Besse’s comrades used their knives to scrape the human remains from his gore-encrusted uniform. Besse’s only reflection on this harrowing experience was to say that ‘Amidst this misfortune, I had little to complain about’ (1892: 315). Not all soldiers, however, were so matter-of-fact. Alfred-Auguste Ernouf, covered by the blood and brains of a soldier decapitated by a cannon-ball at the Battle of Borodino, confessed that ‘Those horrible stains were indelible upon my uniform; I had them ceaselessly before my eyes throughout the rest of the campaign, like a memento mori’ (1877: 278; Lucas-Dubreton, 1977: 292-93).
The evidence of soldiers’ accounts provides at least some support for Yuval Harari’s view that this was a transitional period in the soldier’s understanding of the battlefield experience. Louis-Jacques Romand had his first experience of combat at Essling, where he was wounded in the abdomen by a musket ball and subsequently operated upon. It is clear from his account that he came very close to death. Romand noted that the night he was forced to spend amongst hundreds of wounded men was ‘the cruellest of my life’, and that ‘half our fine regiment had been victims of the bloody battle’. All the same, his eventual enthusiasm to rejoin his company, ‘to share its dangers as I had had the happiness to take part in its glory’, suggests that he was not deeply transformed by the experience (Romand, 1981: 15-18). Other memoirs, such as that of Sergeant Faucheur, present a similar picture: generally matter-of-fact, occasionally more emotional. Faucheur’s account of his experience at the Battle of Leipzig in 1813 makes no attempt to tell the reader how that experience made him feel.
My captain, behind whom I found myself, had just given the order to wait for his command to fire on the cavalry, when a shell arrived, taking off the back of his head and covering me with blood. The shell, continuing on its way, passing a few centimetres from my face, fell into the square and took off the leg of a master drummer. We awaited the charge without recoiling and opening fire at only twenty-five or thirty paces, we stopped the horsemen’s surge. (Jourquin, 2004: 229)
On the other hand, Faucheur’s description of his reaction in the same engagement to the news that it was the mortally wounded body of an old school friend he had witnessed being carried from the field does indicate an emotional response, though one contained within limits imposed by duty.
At this sad news, I turned my gaze to the sinister procession that the light of the burning villages allowed me still to perceive. Had I been free, I would have attempted to rejoin and to see once more the poor friend whom I had just lost. But discipline kept me at my post. (Jourquin, 2004: 161-62)
Faucheur’s memoir, often dispassionate but occasionally expressing deeper sentiments in response to the encounter with death in battle, is fairly typical. Another example, from the period of the Revolution, presents a similar balance. Tiry, a grenadier in the 60th infantry regiment and one of the defenders of Mainz, reported in a letter to his wife of 27 September 1793, that he had been wounded in fierce fighting: ‘We fought one another with cold steel, killing many […] The gunfire, whereby the enemy battered us with shot, lasted from three to seven o’clock in the morning. Too put out by this gunfire, we took the redoubt by assault, killing thirteen grenadiers’. Tiry’s letter, however, ends on a note of loss which, in its sincerity and simplicity, contrasts with the previously self-satisfied tone: ‘Citizen Marville, my lieutenant, was killed on 15 April, by a shot to the head. I will mourn him all my life’ (Picard, 1914: 27-28).
Although one veteran of Napoleon’s wars later recalled that soldiers viewed the deaths of their comrades with ‘an indifference that […] went as far as irony’ (Rocca, 1814: 84; cited in Pigeard, 2000: 227), there is also evidence that they were sometimes moved to tears by the loss of friends. Charles Parquin stated that ‘a tear fell from my eyes’ when he learned in the course of the 1809 campaign that one of two officers killed in a cavalry action was his friend, Second Lieutenant Henri, who had died following the amputation of a leg: ‘all my regrets were concentrated on my poor Henri’ (Parquin, 1892: 62). General Marbot’s account of Aspern-Essling does not fail to note how he and others were affected by their comrades’ deaths. Napoleon and Lannes were ‘very affected’ by the death of Saint-Hilaire and ‘the sorrow of the Marshal was […] extreme’ when his old mentor, General Pouzet, fell dead at his feet (Marbot, 1891: 197-201). Indeed, according to Marbot, Lannes was still ‘immersed in dark thoughts’ inspired by Pouzet’s death when, sitting with his legs crossed and his hand over his eyes, he received his own mortal wound. Marbot subsequently insisted upon the Emperor’s sorrow at the death of Lannes, whose body ‘he embraced while bathing it in tears’, as well as upon his own: ‘I was overcome by sorrow’ (1891: 212). General Pelet affirmed that the entire army was ‘deeply moved’ by the tearful battlefield embrace of Napoleon and Lannes: ‘In any circumstance, this spectacle would have been harrowing; we were all the more affected, at the end of a battle that cost the army so many brave men’ (1824-1826: 335).
Turning from soldiers’ memoirs to public representations, we can see evidence that the Napoleonic period witnessed a significant evolution in the symbolic meaning attached to the soldier’s death. Napoleon’s propaganda machine inherited a cult of patriotic self-sacrifice that had blossomed during the Revolution. During its most radical phase, the Terror of 1793-94, this had celebrated the ordinary citizensoldiers who had given their lives in defence of the patrie. Later, under the Directory, it was the deaths of generals like Marceau, Hoche and Joubert that were venerated. ‘To die fighting valiantly, was seen in all times and by all peoples, to be the most glorious end for the generous man’, stated a tribute to General Dugommier; but ‘to die to conquer, defend, preserve the freedom of his country, that is the highest degree of happiness and glory’ (Gibelin, n.d.: 1). Napoleon synthesized old regime and revolutionary traditions of military glory (Morrissey, 2014). The tributes to La Tour d’Auvergne, the veteran warrior killed in 1800 who received the title ‘First Grenadier of the Empire’, exemplified this synthesis. As a soldier who had fought for France under both the monarchy and the Republic, La Tour d’Auvergne was held to have emulated his illustrious ancestor, ‘the Great Turenne’, by devoting his life to ‘the honour of his homeland and the legitimate pretentions of a free people’ (Anon, 1799-1800: 14). The name of La Tour d’Auvergne was evoked during the Battle of Aspern-Essling by the commander of the 46th regiment. Ordered by Masséna to retake the village of Essling, the officer reminded his men that La Tour d’Auvergne had died in their ranks and that they conserved his embalmed heart. This invocation, he later claimed, ‘electrified’ his men and spurred them on to accomplish their mission (Séruzier, 1894: 137).
The most important modification made by Napoleon to the cult of military sacrifice was with respect to the value for which the soldier gave his life. Napoleon himself began to take the place of the nation. The 63rd bulletin of the Grande Armée began with the account of the death of Captain Auzouy, who was carried mortally wounded from the battlefield of Eylau in February 1807. ‘Tell the Emperor that I have only one regret’, the dying officer was reported to have said, ‘which is that in a few moments I will no longer be able to do anything for his service, and for the glory of our fine France […] to her my last breath’ (Garnier, 2013: 330-31). Later, in the army bulletin reporting on the Battle of Bautzen in May 1813, there was no mention at all of France in the last words uttered to Napoleon by General Duroc as the Emperor pressed the dying man’s hand to his lips. ‘My whole life’, Duroc was reported as saying, ‘has been consecrated to your service, and I only regret its loss for the use it might still have been to you!’ (Pascal, 1841-1844: 76-77). As Christopher Prendergast has pointed out, these gestures of devotion to the Emperor by dying soldiers were echoed in the painting of the salons. François Gérard’s painting of the Battle of Austerlitz, commented upon favourably by critics for its depiction of a fallen cuirassier clutching his breast as he turns his dying gaze upon his Emperor, provided ‘a model of the appropriately elegant manner of dying on the battlefield’ (Prendergast, 1997: 19). Wounded or dying soldiers expressing willing acceptance of their suffering on behalf of Napoleon were one of the standard themes of Napoleonic painting (1997: 200-01). One might also add that painters adapted the representation of battlefield death to the cultural conventions surrounding the ‘good death’, which emphasized both preparation for and acceptance of death, as well as taking leave of close friends and family. To cite only one example, Parquin, in recounting the death of his friend Henri in the 1809 campaign, was able to console himself with the reflection that the cavalryman’s last words were a request to be remembered to his comrades, past and present, and an expression of satisfaction ‘that I confronted death without blanching’ (1892: 64).
These, then, are the military, political and cultural contexts that help us to make sense of the representations of the death of Marshal Lannes. In Bourgeois’s painting, which like Gérard’s painting of Austerlitz was displayed at the salon of 1810, we can see that the representation of the soldier’s death conformed closely to contemporary expectations in both political and cultural terms. The shattered legs of the wounded Marshal are obscured from sight; only a smear of blood and the pallor of his skin serve to indicate Lannes’s injuries. Nothing distracts him from directing all his remaining energy and attention to the person of Napoleon. The painting was therefore a standard Napoleonic propaganda piece and a very particular manifestation of the cult of the fallen soldier which had developed during the French Revolution. It also reflected the emergence of a new, Romantic and sentimental attitude towards death and the art of dying. Finally, it is possible to see in this painting evidence for Harari’s idea concerning the emergence of a new understanding of war. The enraptured gaze of the officers surrounding the stricken Marshal may indeed suggest that they were participants in a revelatory experience.
Clearly, Bourgeois’s painting of the death of Lannes was a product of its time. It serves to illustrate, however, how the realities and representations of the soldier’s death, considered in specific historical settings as well as over the longue durée, remain a rich terrain for historical investigation. Despite many fine studies of mourning and commemoration, particularly in relation to the First World War but also to other conflicts (Winter, 1995; Becker, 1998; Clarke, 2007; Varley, 2008; Audoin-Rouzeau, 2013), many of the questions raised so long ago by André Corvisier still lack satisfactory answers. Notably, some of the key transitions in the cultural representations of the soldier’s death — from the aristocratic ideal of a ‘fine death’ to the democratic one of patriotic self-sacrifice (in various guises, as we have seen, both Bonapartist and Republican) to the discrediting of both — need to be better understood. The interaction between the cultures surrounding military and civilian death itself needs deeper investigation.
This case study illustrates how, by building on the work of several innovative historians and by using a range of contemporary sources, including printed and visual media, but above all the writings of soldiers themselves, it is possible to develop a better understanding of the realities and representations of the soldier’s death, as well as of how particular historical circumstances caused these to change over time.