Dear subscribers,
In
Le Rouge et le Noir
, Julien Sorel has
Le Mémorial de Saint-Hélène
de Las Cases
as his bedside book
.
Napoleon not only dominated France and Europe during his lifetime, he also dominated, by the power of his memory, the entire nineteenth century, for better or for worse.
The return of his ashes to the Invalides in 1840 brought together a million French people.
Thirty years later, in 1870, Jules Favre, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the provisional government after Sedan, recounted how he had seen the Cossacks in Paris in 1815 as a child!
It wasn't that old then.
This shows how unreasonable it would have been not to give the bicentenary of Napoleon's death the importance it deserves.
Patrice Gueniffey, a great historian of the Revolution and the Empire, rightly judges that “a desire to belittle genius is at work” in the controversies over the commemoration of Napoleon.
It tells the progressive rise of the Napoleonic legend, depicts the genius
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