How Macron was outfoxed by a dead Napoleonic general

Skeletons don’t always lurk in cupboards, some of them hide under dance floors waiting for a particularly rousing party to dislodge them. Such is the story of one of Napoleon’s favourite generals, César Charles Étienne Gudin de La Sablonnière, whose missing remains were discovered under a dance floor in Smolensk in 2019, over 200 years after his death from a cannonball during the French invasion of Russia in 1812. Yesterday, his one-legged skeleton was repatriated to France via a private jet chartered by the Russian oligarch, Andrei Kozitsyn. Not a bad way to travel for a Napoleonic soldier.

The discovery of Gudin’s remains and their passage home unearths some complicated truths for President Macron. Having recently navigated the bicentenary of Napoleon’s death in May with a rousing (if elliptical) speech on the virtues of the Napoleonic era, Macron finds himself once again in the Napoleonic crossfire that divides left from right in France.