Macron paid tribute to Napoleon Bonaparte, one of the p …

From Paris

“After having undergone the despotism of one’s person, one must now undergo the despotism of one’s memory”, wrote the immense writer Châteaubriant (1768-1848) in his most monumental work: Memories from beyond the grave. With this sentence, Châteaubriant was referring to one of the most controversial figures in the history of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, whose death on May 5 marks two centuries and to whom French President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute with a floral offering placed at the foot of his tomb located under the sumptuous dome of the Invalides.

Many would have preferred to escape the “despotism of his memory” 200 years later, however, others identify with this turbulent little character, a complex, tyrannical, expansionist and seductive figure who runs through the whole of the national novel. Among many riots, Napoleon is the protagonist of the bloody military campaigns (Russia), of the coup d’état which, on November 19, 1799, marked the end of the French Revolution of 1789, and of an authoritarian style of exercise of power. . Small for his stature and tall for his colonial exploits and catastrophes, Napoleon Bonaparte provokes bitter debates which remove any conciliatory idea of ​​celebration. Emmanuel Macron fully assumed it.

After President Georges Pompidou in 1965, only Emmanuel Macron dared to publicly honor Napoleon. The controversy raised by this gesture is all the more intense as Napoleon, 8 years after its abolition, re-established slavery in 1802. On May 10, 2001, the Taubira law (name of the former Minister of Justice) was adopted in France, by which slavery was registered as a crime against humanity.

“Napoleon Bonaparte is part of us”, declared the French president. Macron explained that he was looking to organize a “clarification commemoration”. In this attempt, he operated like a surgeon, removing the bad and saving the good. The president underlined the Napoleonic “faults” such as the reestablishment of slavery and praised his qualities as “strategist, builder and legislator” and, added, to the man who “set civil equality in stone. between men and women with the civil code. and the protection of the law for all with the penal code ”. The presidential tribute is … largely generous with regard to “equality between men and women”. One of the most bitter criticisms addressed to the emperor lies precisely in the fact that Napoleon inscribed in the civil code the inferiority of the woman vis-à-vis her husband.

The correct memory line is dissolved and it is impossible to take stock. His nostalgic supporters worship him for his abilities as a military strategist and have even placed him the crown of precursor of the modern state, revere him as a visionary and compare him to Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar or Charlemagne. His detractors, on the other hand, would like to keep him away from any commemoration because of his political despotism, the hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by his military campaigns, the reestablishment of slavery and the repression of freedom of expression. Perhaps his death is the best summary of his history, both tyrannical and stormy: Napoleon Bonaparte died far from his family and his country on May 5, 1821 on a lost island in the South Atlantic, Saint Helena. , where they were exiled by the British after their last catastrophic military defeat at the Battle of Waterloo.

The exercise of the tightrope walker in history has other connotations if you look at Napoleon Bonaparte from the French overseas departments and territories, far from European France. In Guadeloupe, Martinique and Reunion, many inhabitants descend from slaves resulting from the Napoleonic delusions. The FKNG, the International Committee of Black Peoples, has repudiated the Parisian commemoration: “no victim can celebrate his executioner,” said the FKNG. Paradoxically, Macron celebrated Napoleon, but did not attend the 150th anniversary celebrations of the Paris Commune. On March 18, 1871, the Paris Commune was proclaimed, which was, in a way, the first government assumed by the working class. It only lasted 72 days during which it was proclaimed, among so many other achievements, the separation of Church and State. The Commune was repressed with blood and in May of the same year, 20,000 members of the community died at the hands of the army of Versailles. Napoleon the conqueror and the slave will have more honors on May 19. On this day, the museums reopen, as well as an exhibition on the great moments of his life in the Grande Halle de La Villette.

Napoleon Bonaparte is two contradictory things: a dark legend and a happy fable. Between the homage of President Georges Pompidou in 1965 and the one now assumed by Macron, five presidents have passed without any of them risking publicly saving a tyrant for some and a hero for others: Giscard d’Estaing , François Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande. Emmanuel Macron, the youngest and least unsuspected of all, tried the impossible.