The centenary of the Patriotic War of 1812: Participation of the French delegation

Abstract

The article is devoted to the participation of the French side in the celebrations associated with the 100th anniversary of the Patriotic War of 1812. On the basis of French archival documents, first introduced into scientific circulation, the author reveals the actions of the governments and public structures of France and Russia in order to use the celebration of the war anniversary to strengthen the allied relations between the two countries. Despite the fact that the name of the war (the Patriotic War for the Russians and Napoleon's Russian campaign for the French) contained differences in the historical perception of the events of that era, the strategic task of uniting forces against a potential enemy (Germany and its possible allies) forced the state elites of Russia and France to resort to a kind of “reformatting of memory”. The initiative to implement such a project came from the Russian side. This was due to the fact that for the Russian events of 1812 fit into the concept of “memory-victory”, while for the French it was “memory-trauma”. Two countries and two peoples were also divided by the fact that France was a Republic and Russia - a semi-absolutist hereditary monarchy; French society demonstrated a high degree of political and civil liberties, while in Russia the processes leading to this were just beginning. Owing to all these circumstances, parties had shown different degrees of willingness to “memorial reformatting”. In Russia, this process was more easy, which was due to the general dominance of the state and the weak development of social structures, it was also facilitated by the fact that for the owner of the memory-victory was much easier to show a noble indulgence to the once defeated enemy than for the carrier of memory-injury. However, at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, France had already been more concerned about a much more recent national trauma than the one it experienced in 1812-1815 - the trauma of the Franco-Prussian war. This contributed to the fact that the French began to treat the defeat of the Great Army in Russia as a heroic tragedy, which makes it a great honor not even to the one who won, but to the one who lost. © 2019 Institute of History and Archeology of the Ural Branch of RAS. All rights reserved.