It’s a former gas station, inhabited by a retired couple, on the edge of a small country road. With its flower boxes, garden gnomes and porcelain animals, you can’t miss it. But what catches the eye even more are two large pictures hanging under the awning where petrol pumps once stood. Two reproductions of paintings showing columns of soldiers and horses in a snowy landscape. Between the two, a sign indicates “1871”.
Soldiers… 1871… One thinks of the war between France and Germany. At the same time, one wonders: why cultivate the memory of it here, in Verrières, a Swiss village of 650 inhabitants whose link with this conflict cannot be seen a priori? To get the answer, the two retirees who live there won’t be asked to give you a history lesson on the fly: “Do you see these houses, 100 meters away? This is where the border with France is. Well in 1871, when the Prussians won the war, that’s where General Bourbaki’s retreating French army came. And it is here, on the road in front of us, that these unfortunate soldiers were picked up by Switzerland. »
At Les Verrières, Daniel and Lucette Haldi are not the only ones to maintain the memory of this episode which is entitled to a few lines, at best, in the history books. As soon as the border is crossed, motorists coming from France cannot miss the sign “Welcome to the land of the Bourbaki”.
A kilometer further on, a bistro offers “Bourbaki beer”of the’“Absinthe Bourbaki”of the “Bourbaki jam”of the “bourbaki cookies” and even a small museum where leaflets point out a “Bourbaki didactic course”to be done on foot in an hour and punctuated by about ten stages: the Protestant temple of the village, transformed for the occasion into a field hospital, a stele recalling that 33 French soldiers are buried here, a “lime tree of peace” planted in 2013, a period wagon or even the house where the signature was made, in the early morning of the 1er February 1871, the convention authorizing General Bourbaki’s army to enter Switzerland on condition that they lay down their arms.
In total, nearly 88,000 French soldiers entered Switzerland between 1er and February 3, 1871. Surrounded by the Germans in Pontarlier (Doubs), about fifteen kilometers from the border, they had not been warned that the armistice signed on January 28 excluded the area where they were, which led them to retreat in haste from an enemy who continued to fight. As for General Charles Denis Bourbaki (1816-1897), he was no longer in a condition to command his troops. On January 26, to avoid the dishonor of a surrender, he had attempted suicide with a bullet to the head. Without success.
You have 86.95% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.