Retreat from Russia

Retreat from Russia is presented not as a past that mechanically determines a person, but as a past a retired soldier chooses in light of the future he still hopes to realize. Under the Restoration, the soldier makes himself a hero of the retreat by rejecting the government of Louis XVIII, hoping for the Emperor’s triumphant return, and conspiring to hasten it; that chosen identity then organizes his conduct and deepens the cost of his present poverty.

The Past Chosen Through a Future

The retired soldier’s past is defined by a project that remains alive after his military career has ended. He chooses not to join the new government and its customs, continues to hope for Napoleon’s return, and even conspires to bring it about. By preferring the status of a retired soldier to that of an active one, he takes the retreat from Russia as his own heroic history. The past is thus disclosed in the light of a hoped-for future: a different soldier, committed to the new government, would not have chosen the same past.

From Chosen Identity to Conduct

The example does not make the retreat an independent force that predetermines the soldier’s behavior. His past does not act before it has been taken up and constituted by his choice. Once he has chosen the identity of a soldier of the Empire, however, his conduct realizes it; choosing this past and making it real through behavior are not separate processes. He seeks to establish his former glory as an intersubjective reality, so that others, including officials who react to the danger posed by old soldiers, encounter it as an objectivity for them as well.

Poverty, Recognition, and Constraint

The soldier lives in almost indecent poverty, is embittered, and longs for the Emperor’s return. These conditions are bound to his chosen history: he suffers as a hero of the retreat from Russia, rather than merely possessing that history as a detached fact. In the eyes of others, the past becomes available for judgment; in his own conduct, it becomes a standard he feels compelled to meet. He is intransigent and loses every chance of a pension because he cannot act as though he were unworthy of the past he has claimed.

A Past That Devours Its Chooser

The soldier’s case clarifies the passage’s broader account of freedom and temporal identity. A person chooses a past in view of an end, but the chosen past then imposes itself—not as a separate, self-sufficient power, but as the materialization of the end the person is. Once it appears in the world, it also enters an immense network of relations with other histories and with other people’s evaluations. The retreat’s significance therefore lies both in the soldier’s free appropriation of it and in the consequences of having that appropriation become visible, judged, and difficult to escape.