Marshal Bessieres at the Charge (NAP0061)

Marshal Bessieres at the charge: the hat has already gone

The bicorne is in the air at the top right, torn off by the speed. Below it, a white-haired man with his sword up and his mouth open, on a horse at full stretch: Jean-Baptiste Bessières, duke of Istria, commander of the Imperial Guard cavalry. The hat is not an illustrator’s flourish — it is the one thing in the plate that tells you the actual pace.

Powdered hair dates the man, not the period

Powdered hair belonged to the old regime, and Bessières kept it long after everyone else had dropped it. He was not an aristocrat: his father was a surgeon at Prayssac in the Lot. So it is not an aristocratic pose — it is a methodical man keeping his habits, which says most of what needs saying about how he commanded.

Guard cavalry is not spent

What he commanded was not ordinary cavalry. It was the last mounted reserve of the army, and everybody knew it, the enemy included. A reserve that charges stops being a reserve. That is why the Guard cavalry appears rarely in battle narratives and often at the moments when the day might have turned: it was worth as much for existing as for being used.

The opposite of Murat

The two men led the same arm and had nothing else in common. Murat charged and made sure he was seen; Bessières counted horses, kept accounts, forbade looting and paid for what his men took. The memoirs of the period describe him as the marshal civilians did not dread — which in that war was unusual. The charge at Eylau belongs to Murat, in plate NAP0021. This one belongs to a man who disliked charging without a reason.

Borodino: the marshal who said no

At Borodino in 1812, with the Russian centre broken into, the Guard was asked for to finish the day. Bessières was among those who advised against committing it: eight hundred leagues from Paris, an intact formation was worth more than a complete victory. He has been criticised for that caution for two centuries. It is the exact consequence of the paragraph above — a reserve spent in the middle of Russia cannot be replaced. The battle itself is plate NAP0227.

Rippach, 1 May 1813

He was killed the day before Lützen, on reconnaissance, by a round shot — not in a charge, but doing the work a commander does before a battle: looking at the ground with his own eyes. He was forty-four, and the first of the marshals promoted in 1804 to be killed in the German campaign.