Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/43539

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Title
Remembering and forgetting in contemporary France: Napoleon, slavery and the French history wars
Author/Creator
Dwyer, Philip
Institution
The University of Newcastle. Faculty of Education & Arts, School of Humanities and Social Science
Description
On the front cover of Claude Ribbe's Le Crime de Napoléon is a photograph of Hitler surrounded by a bevy of generals looking down at the tomb of Napoleon at the Invalides during his visit there after the fall of France in 1940. The message is clear: the author is thus directly associating Napoleon with Hitler and, as we shall see as Ribbe develops his argument, with the Holocaust. Napoleon, Ribbe claims, is guilty of a "triple crime" against humanity: the reintroduction of slavery in 1802; the deportation and killing of large numbers of Africans (or people of African origin); and the massacre of blacks that took on a "genocidal nature" and that prefigured the policy of racial extermination carried out by the Nazis during the Second World War (12-13). "Le crime est si impardonnable", writes Ribbe, "qu'il a provoqué plus de deux siècles de mensonges. Car les faits sont bien connus des historiens, mais volontairement passés sous silence" (13).
Relation
French Politics, Culture & Society Vol. 26, Issue 3, p. 128-140
Relation
http://journals.berghahnbooks.com/fpcs
Date
2008
Publisher
Berghahn Books
Keyword(s)
Napoleon;  Hitler;  slavery;  racial extermination;  French history;  Claude Ribbe;  Le Crime de Napoléon
Resource Type
journal article
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/43539
Identifier
ISSN:1537-6370
Reviewed
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Subject
"French Politics, Culture & Society"
 
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