Forget Waterloo

“Oubliez Waterloo,” these two words, written very large over the reproduction of Baron Charles von Steuben's romantic painting of Napoleon surrounded by a group of adoring soldiers on what looks like a battlefield, formed the motto of a 2007 advertisement campaign by Eurostar, the cross-Channel train system, as it replaced London’s Waterloo Station by Saint Pancras Station, as terminus of the London-Paris journey. Disseminated through the major French magazines and newspapers and posted over the main entrance of the Gare du Nord in Paris, this motto encouraged French travelers to forget an obsession with its past military splendor and live in a post-Waterloo era, the peaceful and exciting era of easy shopping and convenient traveling. But at the same time as Eurostar passengers were encouraged to “forget Waterloo,” the slogan as well as the painting (which is not representing Waterloo but the return of Napoleon from Elba) reminded them of the greatness of the event. Thus the advertisement was cleverly playing both on the banality of the exhortation (now it is time to live in a world of peace and friendly commercial exchanges) and the perverse and paradoxical attachment of the French for a battle that was their “Waterloo,” that signed the end of the legitimate power of their army as inheritor of the Revolution. This article analyzes the relation between defeat and narrative, “the strange translatory process,” according to which, “the French (…) managed to make an epic out of the (Waterloo) defeat” (John Keegan, The Face of Battle).