Pierre's attempt to assassinate Napoleon

Pierre's attempt to assassinate Napoleon is a private act of imagined sacrifice formed amid the public catastrophe of the French occupation of Moscow. Pierre does not reach Napoleon, and the plan cannot alter the course of the war. Its importance is therefore psychological and thematic rather than military: it shows a man trying to give personal shape to an overwhelming historical disaster, even as the surrounding narrative insists that events arise from the movement of masses, material conditions, and forces no individual can command.

Causes and Background

Pierre's design grows out of his response to Moscow's crisis. After the battle of Borodino, he retreats into Joseph Alexeevich's quiet study, where memories of the battle and of his own insignificance and insincerity confront him with the truth, simplicity, and strength he associates with ordinary men. He asks Gerasim for a peasant's coat and a pistol so that he can join the popular defense of Moscow while concealing his identity. At first, his notion that his name possesses a cabalistic connection with Bonaparte remains only one of the passing fancies that often occupy his mind.

The meeting with the Rostovs, however, gives the fantasy a sharper emotional form. When Natasha asks whether he is remaining in Moscow and responds with pleasure when he says that he is, Pierre suddenly imagines that staying would be worthwhile even if the city were taken. The next day he goes to the Three Hills Gate intending not to spare himself or to fall behind the people around him. When he returns convinced that Moscow will not be defended, the possibility becomes, in his mind, an absolute necessity: he must remain in Moscow under an assumed identity, meet Napoleon, kill him, and either perish or end the misery of Europe, which Pierre now attributes chiefly to Napoleon.

Two impulses sustain the plan. One is the desire to sacrifice and suffer in the face of a common calamity. It is the same impulse that drew Pierre toward Mozhaysk and into the immediate vicinity of the fighting, and that made him willing to abandon the luxury and comfort of his accustomed life in order to sleep on a hard sofa and eat the same food as Gerasim. The other is a Russian contempt for everything conventional, artificial, and socially accepted as the greatest good. Pierre is not primarily calculating the practical consequences of an assassination; he is exalting the act of renunciation itself.

Preparation and Movement Through Moscow

On the third of September, Pierre wakes late, uncomfortable in the clothes in which he slept, with a dim awareness of shame concerning his conversation with Captain Ramballe the previous day. The sight of the pistol with its engraved stock restores his awareness of the plan. He knows that Napoleon may enter Moscow before noon and prepares to leave immediately, refusing to dwell on the task awaiting him.

The pistol proves awkward to carry. It is too large to conceal easily under his coat, and it has already been discharged and not reloaded. Pierre therefore takes a blunt, jagged dagger in a green sheath, bought at the Sukharev market with the pistol, and hides it beneath his waistcoat. The substitution is revealing: the weapon is poorly suited to the purpose, and Pierre himself remembers that the German student who attempted to kill Napoleon in Vienna in 1809 had made the mistake of using a dagger. His preparation is thus marked by determination without practical command of the situation.

Pierre leaves with his coat belted, his cap pulled low, and his resolution held inwardly as something terrifying and alien. Moscow is burning in several places: buildings in Carriage Row, the Bazaar, and the Povarskoy are ablaze, as are barges on the Moskva River and timber yards near the Dorogomilov Bridge. The streets are deserted or filled with anxious Russians and French soldiers. Russians stare because they cannot place Pierre within a recognizable social class; Frenchmen stare because, unlike other Russians, he does not look at them with fear or curiosity.

Pierre is so absorbed in the mission that he scarcely registers the immediate world. A French sentinel beside a green caisson shouts at him, and only the repeated threat and the click of the raised musket make Pierre understand that he must cross to the other side of the street. He carries his purpose with terror and haste, fearing not only death but the loss of the resolution itself. The surrounding fire, smoke, military occupation, and frightened population become the material landscape through which an abstract personal fantasy is forced to move.

The Failed Attempt

Pierre's plan is defeated before he reaches the place where he intended to act. He has chosen the church of St. Nicholas on the Arbat as the site of the deed, but Napoleon passed the Arbat more than four hours earlier while traveling from the Dorogomilov suburb to the Kremlin. At that moment Napoleon is in a royal study in the Kremlin, issuing detailed orders to extinguish the fires, prevent looting, and reassure the inhabitants. Pierre knows none of this and continues toward a meeting that is already impossible.

The failure is not caused merely by Pierre's lack of skill. Even without interference, the attempt could not have succeeded because the intended victim was no longer on the route Pierre imagines. The plan is therefore a collision between private conviction and objective circumstance: Pierre treats his intention as an approaching destiny, while the chronology of the city has already rendered it obsolete.

As he nears the Povarskoy, the smoke thickens, the heat becomes perceptible, flames rise beneath roofs, and the streets grow more agitated. Pierre still does not understand that he is approaching the fire. His abstraction is interrupted only when he hears a woman's desperate weeping beside a path, where household goods, a samovar, icons, featherbeds, and trunks have been piled on the dry grass. The scene begins to draw him away from the isolated drama of killing Napoleon and back toward the human catastrophe unfolding around him.

Historical and Narrative Significance

The attempt dramatizes the novel's distrust of heroic explanations of history. The 1812 war begins when millions of men cross the Russian frontier, producing crimes, thefts, forgeries, incendiarism, and murder on a scale that cannot plausibly be explained by one person's intention alone. Contemporary explanations assign the war to diplomatic mistakes, the Continental System, Napoleon's ambition, or the firmness of Emperor Alexander I. Pierre's plan reproduces the same simplifying impulse at a personal level: faced with immense suffering, he identifies Napoleon as the single source and imagines that one decisive act can restore Europe.

The surrounding narrative repeatedly undermines this logic. The Russian army's retreat under Mikhail Kutuzov is shaped by the pursuit of a hundred thousand French troops, hostile populations, exhausted forces, shortages, and the need to preserve heavy equipment. At Braunau, a regiment can present two thousand immaculate men after a twenty-mile march only by keeping them awake all night, while more than half their boots remain full of holes after a march of roughly seven hundred miles. In another campaign, the Pavlograd regiment loses nearly half its men to hunger and sickness despite having suffered only two wounded in action. These details place military outcomes in the realm of supply, fatigue, roads, footwear, food, and disease rather than in the solitary will of a great commander.

The same anti-heroic perspective governs the account of Borodino and the French collapse. The battle brings Russian forces from roughly one hundred thousand against one hundred and twenty thousand to little more than fifty thousand against one hundred thousand, while the French army later falls from seventy-three thousand men between Moscow and Vyazma to thirty-six thousand, with no more than five thousand lost in battle during that stage. Such figures make Pierre's fantasy of ending Europe's misery by killing one man appear both emotionally understandable and historically inadequate.

The historical analysis compares individual commands to waves before a moving ship. The wave seems to anticipate and govern the ship, but close observation shows that its movement is produced by the ship's progress. In the same way, orders issued by historical figures appear to cause events when they are examined in isolation; when their connection with the masses is restored, the figures and their commands prove dependent on events already in motion. Pierre's attempted assassination is a concentrated fictional image of that error. He imagines himself as the decisive agent, yet the city, the army, the fire, Napoleon's earlier passage, and the collective disaster all move according to conditions beyond his command.