Under the glittering dome of the Invalides military hospital in Paris, where Napoleon lies buried, France’s great general continues to divide opinion, 200 years after his historic defeat at Waterloo.
The few French tourists who come to pay their respects bicker among themselves:
For Jean-Marie, Napoleon was a “dictator,” but his wife, Claudine, reminds him that he “accomplished great things, including France’s legal system.”
And while another French tourist, Mika, criticizes Napoleon’s “excesses of power,” his girlfriend retorts that he “exported the values of the French revolution.”
Napoleon generally has his fans around the world — even in the “enemy” Britain.
However, in his homeland, public opinion is more nuanced, although the emperor continues to fascinate.
“For me, Napoleon represents good and evil all at once,” history student Alaume Houdry said. “Napoleon carried out some very important reforms. He gave glory back to France. But many lives were sacrificed for his desire for glory.”
David Chanteranne, editor of a magazine devoted to Napoleon, said France was split between “fascination and repulsion,” but stressed there was “huge popular interest in his character, profile and stature as a self-made man.”
People remain fascinated by several aspects of his life — his rise from obscurity to conqueror of Europe, his death in exile and his women (especially Josephine, his unfaithful empress).
Throughout France, fans stage reconstructions of famous Napoleonic battles, collect manuscripts and Napoleon paraphernalia — even down to a chamber pot bearing the great man’s image.
His influence on popular culture in France is also enormous, said historian Jean Tulard, who held the Napoleon chair at the Sorbonne University in Paris from 1967 to 2002.
“Since his death, a book or article has been written about him every year,” Tulard said.
In addition, Napoleon has appeared in more than 1,000 films and there are currently four exhibitions devoted to him running in France on the 200th anniversary of his most famous defeat.
The division of opinion in France is perhaps best reflected in the fact that, in a city not shy of naming squares and streets after historical figures, there is not a single “Boulevard Napoleon” or “Place Napoleon” in Paris.
A small Rue Bonaparte in the capital’s Latin Quarter is the city’s only nod to the man who commissioned some of its most famous monuments, including the Arc de Triomphe and the Pont des Arts over the River Seine.
Chanteranne says the “turning point” for public opinion of Napoleon was World War II.
Before the war, Napoleon was considered a hero of the French Revolution and of the people, he said.
“Afterwards, people incorrectly began to think of him as the precursor of the great dictators of the 20th century, comparing him to Hitler or Stalin,” Chanteranne said.
France began to focus less on the positive aspects of his legacy and more on the “re-establishment of slavery in 1802, the 600,000-700,000 deaths in the Napoleonic Wars and his expansionist foreign policy.”
And the split in French opinion is mirrored in political circles.
On the left-wing of French politics, former prime minister Lionel Jospin has penned a book titled The Napoleonic Evil in which he accuses the emperor of “perverting the ideas of the Revolution” and imposing “a form of extreme domination,” “despotism” and “a police state” on the French people.
At the other end of the spectrum is former right-wing prime minister Dominique de Villepin, a passionate collector of Napoleonic memorabilia and author of several works on the subject.
However, even in the realm of politics, there is no clear-cut dividing line.
Greens senator Jean-Vincent Place denies being a “fan of Napoleon,” but can hold court for hours about this “extraordinary man.”
“At the moment, I’m making plans to be on the battlefield at Waterloo on June 18,” he says.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema