Napoleon Crossing the Alps

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

For those who didn't like the Reagan picture.



How do you feel about Napoleon? Even the French are apparently greatly divided.

“The divide is generally down political party lines,” says professor Peter Hicks, a British historian with the Napoléon Foundation in Paris. “On the left, there’s the ’black legend’ of Bonaparte as an ogre. On the right, there is the ’golden legend’ of a strong leader who created durable institutions.”

-- Brian Eads

I don't have a strong 'feels' myself. Is he a great hero-leader, or is he more like a Stalin?

Comments

[serianor.livejournal.com]

He brought back slavery and lowered women's rights, and for that, as a French woman, I can't like him.

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

Wow, I guess you're right.

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In 1801, Napoleon Bonaparte resolved the issue of freedom for slaves in France’s colonies. He restored slavery!

Worse, under Napoleon, slavery was brutally reinstated in those of France’s colonies that his troops could control.

On the French island colony of Haiti, then known as Saint Domingue, Napoleon's troops launched a vast operation of ethnic cleansing in 1802, to stamp out a slave revolt. French troops used sulphur dioxide gas to suffocate slaves: they were shot, drowned, fed to dogs or gassed in the holds of slave ships.

During three weeks of resistance to French rule in Guadeloupe, Napoleon’s generals refused to take prisoners. Instead, they shot men, women and children in their own homes. Hundreds of islanders were executed in cold blood in town squares, on beaches and in military installations.

-- Yahoo Answers (https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070624181246AA3DkXC)

He did not hate women, but he had a low opinion of their intelligence and thought that they should be kept firmly under male control. "We need to restore the notion of obedience" he said when he was forming the Napoleonic Code.

Certain laws that had been passed during the French Revolution granting rights to women, like married women's property rights, the right to divorce, widow's pensions etc, were done away with. The male head of the family was given absolute authority over his wife and children (like the ancient Roman Pater Familias) and he could even have his wife or children imprisoned if he wanted to, without trial.

-- Yahoo Answers (https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090629083128AAC8JlA)

That definitely sounds counter-revolutionary.