The imperturbable Zouave Pont de l’Alma – Europe1

The Zouave who gave his features the statue, crossed the worst battles with as much composure as its reproduction contemplates water inexorably rise.

No one ever knew what his eyes stared exactly: something to his right, a person, object, or a point somewhere in the studio of his sculptor Georges Diebolt? The question goes back more than a century and a half …

This indecision may be an artist’s care to prevent his statue opposite view all she would have to suffer “in his lifetime.” Look away rats that were running on her stone body, pigeons that were soiling his uniform of drunks who were throwing at him. Also save the vision of corpses floating committed suicide at his feet or Japanese flashes smiling on a steamboat and fingers honor all landlubbers, that populate the Parisian Seine. Humiliated, dirtied, tagged, blackened, rinsed, soaked … For 160 years, the Zouave never flinched. Impassively colossus hewn from 8 tons of limestone, a watchman stone 5 twenty meters high now, for Parisians, the standard of the falling rain and rising water.

Rive right, left bank, the Zouave often had spats in the fleet, sometimes wet panties and only once the Seine shoulders. But he never drank the cup. If the Zouave was drowning, Paris would be immediately overwhelmed. hot shot in 1910, three months of war against the Seine, out of bed Paris is flooded, Paris is soaked, but Paris is mired, Paris is saved. The head of the Zouave was never under water.

Who was he? A survivor of the flood and the Crimean War to the official story. 1853: The first modern war of the 19th century. The telegraph, the boats-vapors and the first military nurses. A war far from the Seine, bordering the Black Sea. An incredible alliance between the French, English and Turkish, to use the Peninsula to the Russians, who had confiscated the Ottomans, 70 years earlier. Crimea or a young French

unit, created during the conquest of Algeria, will make sparks: the Zouaves. Funny fighters dressed in bloomers, of fez with tassel and blue wool belts. Soldiers as disciplined as brave, which will allow the allies to win their first major battle: Alma, named after the river that flows near Sevastopol. It took no more by Napoleon III to a victory and a bridge to pay tribute as well to the Zouaves. One that will be a model for the sculptor will of one of these valiant warriors: André-Louis Gody, a completely unknown type, a native of Gravelines, in the north. A Zouave with a nice build, a pretty face and a beautiful beard. Two weeks without moving to hear the tap-tap of the chisel, paid a gold Napoleon day break. A small fortune Gody will shoot quickly in taverns and brothels.

A Zouave who in truth never set foot in Crimea. At the time, Gody dragged his gaiters in Africa. The small hack historical-artistic does not detract from the military value of the man: 34 years, Constantine Magenta, Blida in Solferino, from Alsace to Lorraine. 1870 Sedan, the French defeat to the Prussians and the capitulation of Napoleon III. Gody end sergeant and messed up: too many wars, too many injuries, too many missing companions …

His last three comrades, he will lose by 70. No, not in 1870 but in 1970! Modernity will because the other three statues. The bridge is considered too narrow, the Alma is expanded. The pomegranate, the gunner and the hunter walk Moved. Of the four original statues, there will be only his. “I am there, I stay” ; a sentence of Mac Mahon became the motto of the Zouaves. Follow his gaze, you will understand …