Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon is present here less as a character acting in a narrated scene than as the center of a retired soldier’s chosen historical identity. The soldier’s continuing hope for the Emperor’s triumphal return makes the retreat from Russia a personal past he must keep realizing, even as that commitment worsens his present misery.

The Emperor as the Soldier’s Chosen Past

Under the Restoration, the retired soldier’s past is that of a hero of the retreat from Russia. The account presents this identity not as a fixed inheritance that determines him, but as something formed through his continuing choices: he refuses to join the government of Louis XVIII and the new customs, keeps hoping for Napoleon’s return, and even conspires to hasten it. By preferring the life of a retired soldier to that of an active one, he chooses to understand himself through his former association with the Emperor’s cause.

This choice is historically specific but not inevitable. Another soldier, by choosing to go over to the new government, would not have made the same past his own. Napoleon’s return therefore functions as the future hope that gives the old retreat its meaning in the present: the soldier’s loyalty makes him a hero of that retreat, while that heroic past in turn helps explain why he continues to long for the Emperor.

Loyalty Made Visible in Conduct

The past does not act upon the soldier deterministically. Once he has chosen the identity of a soldier of the Empire, however, his behavior gives that past a public reality. He tries to make his former glory recognizable to others, and officials respond to these old soldiers as figures who may represent a danger. Their treatment helps establish the soldier’s past as an objectivity-for-others, not merely a private memory.

The soldier then acts in a way that will make him worthy of the past he has chosen to compensate for present failure. He becomes intransigent and loses every chance of receiving a pension. His conviction that he cannot be unworthy of his past turns loyalty into a practical constraint: what began as a free identification with Napoleon’s cause becomes a demand that governs his conduct.

Historical Meaning and Its Cost

The Emperor’s hoped-for return links the soldier’s past to a future that has not yet arrived. The soldier’s identity is consequently neither a simple record of what happened nor a destiny imposed by history. It is a commitment, renewed through refusal, hope, and conspiracy; once chosen, it organizes how he lives and how others regard him.

That commitment has a price. The soldier’s poverty and bitterness accompany his continuing attachment to Napoleon, while his intransigence further closes off the possibility of a pension. The example shows how a freely chosen past can become compelling without becoming an independent force: by willing that past, the soldier also wills the conduct through which it is repeatedly realized.