Berezina: On Three Wheels from Moscow to Paris Chasing Napoleon's Epic Fail

By Sylvain Tesson

“Hilarious, introspective, contemplative, professorial . . . the tale of a historical motorcycle tour quite unlike most any you will ever read.” —Ultimate Motorcycling

Lire Magazine Best Travel Book

Take four friends, put them on two Ural motorcycles (complete with sidecars), send them off on a 2,500-mile odyssey retracing history’s most famous retreat, add what some might consider an excessive amount of Vodka, and you’ve got Sylvain Tesson’s Berezina, a riotous and erudite book that combines travel, history, comradery, and adventure.

The retreat of Napoleon’s Grande Armée from Russia culminated, after a humiliating loss, with the crossing of the River Berezina, a word that henceforth became synonymous with unmitigated disaster for the French and national pride for the Russians. Two hundred years after this battle, Sylvain Tesson and his friends retrace Napoleon’s retreat, along the way reflecting on the lessons of history, the meaning of defeat, and the realities of contemporary Europe. A great read for history buffs and for anyone who has ever dreamed of an adventure that is out of the ordinary.

“Wonderfully mad.” —The Times

“The narration is wry and marked by a cheerful fatalism. Mr. Tesson is a witty and knowledgeable road companion.” —The Wall Street Journal

“From beginning to end, the story of Berezina is enthralling, funny, and terrifying. At the same time, it is magnificently written.” —RTL

“Berezina succeeds brilliantly as a sly commentary on—and a challenge to conventional thinking about—today’s contention between Russia and the EU, and the rutted habits of the popular Western mind.” —On the Seawall

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9781609455552

Sylvain Tesson

Sylvain Tesson is an award-winning French writer and traveller. A geographer by training, he has travelled the world using many different methods of transportation including bicycle, train, horse, and even on foot. The Consolations of the Forest (Penguin, 2013) was adapted into a film in 2016.

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Europa Editions

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Copyright © 2015 by Editions Guérin

Published by arrangement with Agence litteraire Astier-Pécher

All Rights Reserved

First publication 2019 by Europa Editions

Translation by Katherine Gregor

Original Title: Berezina

Translation copyright © 2019 by Europa Editions

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco

www.mekkanografici.com

Cover photo © www.thomasgoisque-photo.com

ISBN 9781609455552

Sylvain Tesson

BEREZINA

Translated from the French

by Katherine Gregor

BEREZINA

To my late mother, Marie-Claude Tesson-Millet

Nevertheless, anything that breathed set forth.

—SERGEANT BOURGOGNE, Memoirs

"Extreme abulia!

In order to escape from it, I sometimes read

the odd book about Napoleon.

Sometimes, other people’s courage acts like a tonic."

—CIORAN, Cahiers, January 17, 1958

"I’m reading the recollections of Captain Coignet,

in which four Frenchmen often triumph

over ten thousand Cossacks. Times have changed."

—PAUL MORAND, Journal inutile, Volume II

"To fight aloud is very brave,

But gallanter, I know,

Who charge within the bosom,

The cavalry of woe.

[. . .]

We trust, in plumed procession

For such the angels go,

Rank after rank, with even feet

And uniforms of snow."

—EMILY DICKINSON

BEREZINA: River in Belarus, a tributary of the Dnieper River, 349 miles long. It was the scene of one of Napoleon’s battles against the Tsar’s troops in 1812, during the famous French Retreat from Moscow.

In colloquial French, a bérézina refers to a disastrous situation.

mapmap

JULY, BAFFIN ISLAND.

SIX MONTHS PRIOR TO DEPARTURE

It’s during a previous journey that the idea of a future one comes to mind. Imagination carries the traveler far from the trap where he’s gotten stuck. While in the Negev desert, he’ll dream of a Scottish glen; in a monsoon, of the Hoggar Mountains; on the west side of the Aiguille du Dru, of a weekend in Tuscany. Man is never happy with his lot, but aspires to something else, cultivates the spirit of contradiction, propels himself out of the present moment. Dissatisfaction motivates his actions. What am I doing here? is the title of a book and the only question worth asking.

That summer, every day, we would brush against moaning icebergs. They drifted by, sad and lonely, suddenly appearing out of the fog, ice-cubes in our evening whisky. Our sailboat, La Poule, sailed from fjord to fjord. The summer light, clouded by steam, nourished the Baffin coastline night and day. Sometimes, we would draw alongside the bottom of a two-thousand-foot wall sticking out of the water. Then we would unwind our ropes and go climbing. The granite was compact, so you had to drive the pitons hard. For this we had Daniel Du Lac, the bravest among us. He was comfortable suspended over the water—more so than on the deck of the ship. In opening up the way, he’d dislodge blocks. Rocks would come pouring down onto our backs and slam into the water with the sound of an uppercut into a guilty jaw.

Cédric Gras would follow, lifted by the virtue of indifference. As far as I was concerned, I dreaded coming back down. The atmosphere on board the ship was not cheerful. In the wardroom, everybody would lap up their soup without a word. The captain talked to us as if we were dogs and, in the evening, treated us as his audience. You had to endure his exploits, and listen to him go on with his opinions about the science in which he’d become an expert: shipwrecks. There are such mini-Napoleons about; they generally end up on board ships, the only place where they can reign over empires. His was sixty feet long.

One evening, Gras and I happened to be on the foredeck. Whales were sighing at the prow, swimming lazily, rolling on their sides: the lifestyle of the large. We should start all over with a real trip, my friend, I said. I’m fed up with this Mormon cruise.

And what’s a real trip? he asked.

It’s a madness we get obsessed with, that transports us into myth; a drift, a frenzy, with History and Geography running through it, irrigated with vodka, a Kerouac-style ride, something that, in the evening, will leave us panting, weeping by the side of a pit. Feverish . . .

Oh? he said.

That’s right. Next December, we have to go the Moscow Book Fair, you and I. Why don’t we go back to Paris on a bike with a sidecar? On a beautiful, Russian-made Ural. You’ll be nice and warm in the sidecar, so you can read all day long. I’ll drive. We can leave from Red Square, go straight west toward Smolensk, Minsk, and Warsaw. And you know something else?

No, he said.

This year marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the Retreat from Moscow, I replied.

You’re kidding.

Why not give these twenty-five hundred miles as a tribute to Napoleon’s soldiers? To their ghosts. To their sacrifice. In France, nobody gives a damn about the Old Guard. They’re all absorbed by the Mayan calendar. They’re talking about the ‘end of the world’ and don’t realize the world is already dead.

You’re not wrong there.

"I say it’s up to us to salute the Grande Armée. Two hundred years ago, there were guys who dreamed of something other than high-speed internet. They were ready to die just so they could see the Moscow domes sparkle."

Except that it turned out to be a slaughter! he said.

So? It’ll be a journey to remember. I promise you, we’ll also come very close to a few disasters.

Alright then.

A moment later, Priscilla joined us in the prow. She came on all our trips. With her cases of photos, essential oils, and yoga moves. We told her about our plan. A cyanotic sun was drifting on the horizon. The sea was made of steel. The tail of a large fin whale was whipping this expanse of mercury. Priscilla suddenly said, Why reconstruct the Retreat exactly?

On the port side, a whale breathed out a puff of steam. The cloud lingered in the light.

For the sheer glory of it, darling. For the sheer glory of it.

A FEW DAYS BEFORE DEPARTURE.

MOSCOW, NOVEMBER

The Moscow Book Fair was a success. Why did the organizers call it a round-table debate when it was a meeting of people who were all in agreement and around a square table? I sat next to Maylis de Kerangal and was intimidated by the beauty of this author of Tangente vers l’est. She spoke of her love for Russia with variety. She snatched away all I would have wanted to say. Her eyes were far apart, a sign of superior people. She was talking about her journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway. I wished I could have been on the train with her, serving her tea, carrying her bags, reading her Boris Godunov in the evening to help her fall asleep.

Gras and I were trying to persuade our audience of the necessity to recreate the itinerary of the Retreat from Moscow. Petrified by Maylis, not quite knowing our stuff, we kept passing the buck to each other. We must have looked like Flaubert’s characters Bouvard and Pécuchet.

Napoleon may have been a bloodthirsty monster— I began.

—but we must admit that in terms of our administration, our land registry, our legal system— Gras continued.

—we owe him everything, I concluded authoritatively.

Not a day goes by in France when we don’t come across regulations sprung out of his brain, Gras said.

Was he a madman? Or a genius? I said. Or an insular prophet who was inspired by Corsican clan divisions to long for unity—

—and even a fusion between East and West? Gras said.

This isn’t really about our escapade, actually—

—Not at all, Gras continued, what we want—

—is to pay tribute to the memory of hundreds of thousands of poor soldiers, victims of having followed their leader, of having believed that a nation, I said.

—could write a collective novel with each and everyone’s blood—

—and touch glory with the tip of its finger—

—and blend in with Napoleon’s soul, as Léon Bloy put it.

We’ll travel by motorbike in memory of these men, I said.

We won’t celebrate anything, Gras said.

We’ll simply recreate the itinerary of the Retreat.

And measure, deep inside us—

—the burden of misery—

—the sum of suffering—

—what a dream of greatness costs in terms of sorrow—

—and the amount of tears needed to reform the world.

Why did these men agree to take part in a marriage of honor, folly, and death? Gras concluded.

They’re close to us, after all. Two hundred years is nothing, I said.

The conference came to a close. Maylis ran away. We went back to our host, a network diplomat, in charge of literary events at the French Embassy.

We were all fired up by our contribution. We went up to her. Do you think our speech made the Russians shudder? I said.

They like Napoleon, don’t they? Will they appreciate our journey? Gras said.

The representative for the diffusion of the French language replied, You have checked into your hotel, haven’t you?

You soon get used to wearing a bicorn. It was late November. There were fifteen of us at the table that night, after the conference at the Moscow Book Fair. Fifteen friends in the apartment on Rue Petrovka, sitting under portraits of Lenin and Beria. The chandeliers held Slavonic candles: they melted at full speed, with translucent sobs. We spoke Russian the way polite Europeans do. There were French present, Slavs, a German, a Balte, two or three Ukrainians: all had been invited by our friend Jacques von Polier, an asthma sufferer, grand seigneur, Russophile, and businessman. I was wearing on my head a replica of the imperial hat, the one you find in lunatic asylums, and which I’d decided not to take off for the whole duration of our campaign. I’ve always been a great believer in the merits of headdress. In ancient times, the hat made the man. This is still the case in the East: you’re identified by what you wear on your head. One of the symptoms of modern times was to make us go out into the streets with our heads bare. Thanks to the bicorn, a mysterious alchemical percolation would perhaps instill into me some of the Emperor’s genius . . .

The bicorn I was wearing was a replica of the diminutive Corsican’s. The hat with the rosette had covered the head of an enigma more than a man. The Emperor was born on a granite island covered in chestnut trees, unaware that he carried within him a monstrous energy. How do we become what we are? It was what we were wondering about Napoleon’s fate. What mysterious string of events led the obscure officer all the way to the coronation in Notre Dame de Paris in 1804? What divinatory power propelled him to the command of half a million warriors feared by the whole of Europe? What star led him to triumph? What genius inspired his technique, worthy of a Greek god: lightning, daring, kairos.

He had persuaded his men that nothing would stand in the way of their glorious march. He had offered them the Pyramids in 1798, the Rhineland in 1805, the gates of Madrid in 1808, the plains of Holland in 1810. He had brought Britain to her knees in 1802, in Amiens, and forced the Tsar of all the Russias to purr softly in Tilsit in 1807. He had ruled the administration, reformed the State, overturned

Reviews for Berezina

[ladycato · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I received an advance review copy of this book via NetGalley.This is a curious sort of travelogue. At first I wasn’t sure I liked it—this concept of the French author and his French and Russian buddies riding Urals to retrace the horrors of the collapse of Napoleon’s Grande Armee sounded flippant. The initial attitude came across as aggravatingly 'br'" as well. However, as the author delved deeper into the terrible tragedy of two centuries ago, it is clear that this is a journey conducted with a profound understanding of the past. I’m a history buff, but I confess, I have never read in detail about this incident. I know it as a catastrophic loss of life to the French and Russians, and that ‘berezina’ still carries deep connotations in French culture. This book puts the horrors in blunt terms and contrasts that with the numerous difficulties presented by the modern journey—recalcitrant motorbikes, bitter cold, customs officials, and all. Sure, the book has a ‘bro’ attitude at times, but there’s also a lot to learn here about an almost incomprehensible tragedy and the stubbornness of Russians motorcycles... and the stubbornness and resilience of humans as well.