The remains of French and Russians who died in Napoleon’s catastrophic withdrawal from Moscow in 1812 were buried on Saturday in a rare moment of unity between the two countries.
Officials and descendants of 19th-century Russian and French army leaders gathered for a wind-hit rite in the western city of Vyazma to rebury the remains of 126 other people killed in one of the bloodiest battles of Napoleon’s Russian campaign.
Snow fell and an army band played at temperatures of less than 15 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Fahrenheit) while uniformed porters carried 8 covered coffins in a cemetery in Vyazma, a city more than two hundred kilometers west of Moscow.
The coffins containing the remains of 120 soldiers, 3 and 3 teenagers were later deposited on the snowy ground to the sound of a shotgun.
The earth had frozen and the coffins had been left on the floor with a white canvas.
“Over the generations, death and time reconcile everyone,” Yulia Khitrovo, a descendant of Russian Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov, a national hero for repelling Napoleon, said at the ceremony.
Prince Joachim Murat, descended from one of Napoleon’s top prominent marshals, also provides dozens of restoratives in uniforms of the time.
The burial took place when France marked the bicentenary of the death of the army leader this year.
The remains were found in a mass grave through French and Russian archaeologists in 2019.
The excavation was carried out through Pierre Malinowski, director of the Foundation for the Development of Russian-French Historical Initiatives, connected to the Kremlin.
The three are said to be “vivandiéres”, who provided first aid and performed canteens in the French army, while the 3 teenage women are said to be percussionists.
It is believed that they all fell at the Battle of Vyazma on 3 November 1812, at the beginning of the withdrawal of the French army from Moscow and before the terrible crossing of the Berezina River.
The rite marked a rare moment of unity between Russia and Europe at a time of intense tensions over a litany of issues, adding to the Kremlin’s harsh crackdown on the opposition.
– ‘Sign of Reconciliation’ –
“The direct descendants of the main actors in the confrontation gather here as a sign of reconciliation to commemorate the Russian and French infantrymen that their ancestors commanded more than two hundred years ago,” Malinowski told AFP before the burial.
The site was first discovered with paintings of structures and was first thought to be one of the many World War II mass graves dotting western Russia.
But studies conducted through the Russian Academy of Sciences later showed that the remains were victims of Napoleon’s campaign, most of them in their thirties at the time of their death, anthropologist Tatyana Shvedchikova said.
Alexander Khokhlov, head of the archaeological expedition, said the discovery of uniform steel buttons helped identify that some of those affected had served in line 30 and 55 Infantry Regiments and the French Army Light Infantry Regiment 24.