Napoleon was a bloody dictator, he shouldn't be celebrated by someone supposed to represent the republic like Macron. Did he celebrate the first french republic in September?
No, because he is from/married into the old french bourgeoisie, that's who he represents and works for given his terrible record.
Reminder that "bourgeoisie" means "the middle class". Most of us here on HN are bourgeoisie or higher. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with being from the middle class.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with government people being middle class either, in an ideal economy, bourgeoisie is the most common kind of citizen.
The French overthrew and executed much of their upper class, so their middle class became the elite there, and that's why the term is used in that way. Compared to the UK where there is still an upper class.
> Reminder that "bourgeoisie" means "the middle class"
No, "bourgeoisie" doesn't mean "middle class". I'm using the Marxist definition of the word, I'm not including a household on teacher's salary who own a home. That's what the actual middle-class is in France.
What you say about Napoleon's political ambition is true. But talking about Napoleon only as a dictator is not understanding the historical context. The Republic was also very bloody; the times were bloody, not just under the rule of the corsican.
Isaac Newton dealt in slaves, Euler worked directly under the order of a bloody dictator... yet we can still talk and study their life, right?
Remember, we will all look terrible in 200 years from now, maybe because we use gasoline, or eat meat, or buy products made by children, or our capitalism, or our positino towards sex change or racial equality or whatever will shock people's future ethics and morale value. Maybe when I went shopping this morning I committed 15 cardinal sins of the future.
The legacy of Napoleon is much more complex than that.
Want it or not, he's both a terrible conqueror animated by a thirst for power at all cost and also a builder of modern institutions still in use today.
The same things could be said of most kings, queens and emperors of Europe across the ages. Reigns without mercy, enslaving and conquering, abusing and torturing, yet they cemented the future and a good portion of the institutions they set up are still in use today in one form or another. And yet people still honour their memory and their legacy.
Napoleon's reign caught up because the state was in trouble at the end of the XVIII century (insecurity, lack of funds, a general state of disarray). The rapid change in political structure -with all its instabilities- after the Revolution made (some) people yearn for stability. And thus Napoleon seized power through a coup.
And that's how the country got governed by a dictator, who proclaimed himself Emperor and started to chip away at people's freedoms in the name of stability.
> The legacy of Napoleon is much more complex than that. Want it or not, he's both a terrible conqueror animated by a thirst for power at all cost and also a builder of modern institutions still in use today.
No, it's Sarkozy all over again "virtue-signaling" to his electorate, who asked teachers to "souligner l'aspect positif de la colonisation".
Probably a technicality but slavery was never authorized in mainland France. It was only in the colonies.
I know it didn't change anything for those who were enslaved, but it may also be good to remember that it was a time when all major powers used slaves, and France made a point of never allowing it in the actual country.
This is really key here. There's a trend to hold people of the past up to standards of the present, but the world was extremely different then. Before the advent of farming machines and nitrogen fixation, labor dictated the power of a nation, labor relations and unions weren't a big thing, and a huge majority of the population worked in agriculture. Because there were no nuclear weapons capable of destroying the entire planet, superpowers commonly fought for resources, meaning the surviving nations had to be strong. The world is different.
None of what I stated contradicts what you said. But limited resource availability and geopolitical instability made that political decision to remove slavery much more difficult than it is today.
Did it, really? Was France resource starved when Napoleon decided to take over Russia too? Or rather, was he power hungry, ambitious and did not cared? Why do you assume that 1948 decision was super hard due to missing resources?
Napoleon contemporaries did characterized him as power hungry tyrant. This is not just projecting current values. People in the past had opinions too.
There's a trend of assuming that people in the past were simple, without agency and that society was uniform. Contemporary people do make own decisions, some of them harmful and egoistic. We don't blame current political decisions (including stuff like what Isis did) purely on circumstances. The past people deserve the same treatment.
> We don't blame current political decisions (including stuff like what Isis did) purely on circumstances.
People who study politics absolutely use circumstances to explain political outcomes. Historians discuss the economic impacts of WW1 when talking about the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany. People discuss the complex political history of the middle east and its long history of resisting superpowers combined with the power vacuum when the US left the region when discussing the rise of ISIS. Power vacuums and food/water scarcity are often the root cause of political instability.
Crazy individuals do crazy things, but those crazy individuals gaining power is always a result of the political system in place at the time.
> Historians discuss the economic impacts of WW1 when talking about the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany.
The discuss it a little. The books I have read about rise of Hitler did not blamed "economic impacts of WW1" all that much. That was far from being a single or primary thing.
The choices, values and opinions of major actors plays huge relo.
Slavery was wrong then and it is wrong now. societal consensus cannot be excused because it was in the past.
Highlighted and rightfully acknowledged but slavery cannot be simplified to just forced labour when rape, murder and unethical experimentation was also performed. I think it’s incorrect to assume that this should not be criticised with the standards of today as to do so is to ignore that it is a very human issue to value the life of another so poorly and assume we were all barbarians only 300-400 years ago which is not the case.
Wrongness has no bearing on the strength or stability of a nation. There are plenty of strong authoritarian regimes around the world. Political structures care about stability and relative strength, not morality.
The Knights Hospitaller were at the time occupying Malta, and they were basically pirates who raided Muslim (and sometimes Christian) merchant ships. They were still enslaving people and engaging in slave trade. They got kicked out by Napoleon on his way to Egypt, and in the process he abolished slavery on the island.
And Napoleon put an end to that in parts of Czarist Russia. Even after Napoleon was defeated, serfdom was not reinstated in those parts. While in other parts of the empire it kept on for another 6 decades.
Slavery absolutely existed in mainland France under the Romans. The coronation of Charlemagne made the popes feel empowered to order Christians to stop enslaving other Christians or selling the latter outside Europe. Believe it or not, Venetian slave traders used to kidnap civilians in Rome and sell them to the Arabs. The growing influence of the papacy lead to the gradual replacement of chattel slavery by serfdom around the tenth century. Finally, in 1315, bonded labor was abolished in France by Louis X, proclaiming that "France means freedom".
A similar process transpired in England, with slavery abolished by William the Conqueror and serfdom dying out in the fifteenth century as courts refused to enforce the contracts.
Unfortunately, all of this brilliant progress was undone in a desperate Europe facing a massive Ottoman invasion at the dawn of American colonization which led Popes and Emperors to authorize horrific measures, that ultimately corrupted the European conscience and led to a new era of slavery and genocide.
The Ottomans cannot carry all the blame, but remembering that "we" (qua the West) built our system of racism from a position of weakness may help persuade some people to let it go away. I think. Who knows?
Something that I don't see mentioned in the article is that slave-owners in the French Caribbean threatened to switch to the British side following the abolition of slavery -as slavery had not been abolished by the British at that time, a fact that is also not mentioned in the article.
Napoleon reinstated slavery for a lot of reasons. None of them good but it looks like inaction would not have been such a bounty for the local populations either way...
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 69.9 ms ] threadNo, because he is from/married into the old french bourgeoisie, that's who he represents and works for given his terrible record.
The first republic is the foundation of the french state. What's next, Macron celebrating Louis the XVI?
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with government people being middle class either, in an ideal economy, bourgeoisie is the most common kind of citizen.
No, "bourgeoisie" doesn't mean "middle class". I'm using the Marxist definition of the word, I'm not including a household on teacher's salary who own a home. That's what the actual middle-class is in France.
Isaac Newton dealt in slaves, Euler worked directly under the order of a bloody dictator... yet we can still talk and study their life, right?
Remember, we will all look terrible in 200 years from now, maybe because we use gasoline, or eat meat, or buy products made by children, or our capitalism, or our positino towards sex change or racial equality or whatever will shock people's future ethics and morale value. Maybe when I went shopping this morning I committed 15 cardinal sins of the future.
The same things could be said of most kings, queens and emperors of Europe across the ages. Reigns without mercy, enslaving and conquering, abusing and torturing, yet they cemented the future and a good portion of the institutions they set up are still in use today in one form or another. And yet people still honour their memory and their legacy.
Napoleon's reign caught up because the state was in trouble at the end of the XVIII century (insecurity, lack of funds, a general state of disarray). The rapid change in political structure -with all its instabilities- after the Revolution made (some) people yearn for stability. And thus Napoleon seized power through a coup.
And that's how the country got governed by a dictator, who proclaimed himself Emperor and started to chip away at people's freedoms in the name of stability.
A somewhat still-current cautionary tale...
No, it's Sarkozy all over again "virtue-signaling" to his electorate, who asked teachers to "souligner l'aspect positif de la colonisation".
I know it didn't change anything for those who were enslaved, but it may also be good to remember that it was a time when all major powers used slaves, and France made a point of never allowing it in the actual country.
This is really key here. There's a trend to hold people of the past up to standards of the present, but the world was extremely different then. Before the advent of farming machines and nitrogen fixation, labor dictated the power of a nation, labor relations and unions weren't a big thing, and a huge majority of the population worked in agriculture. Because there were no nuclear weapons capable of destroying the entire planet, superpowers commonly fought for resources, meaning the surviving nations had to be strong. The world is different.
That is not a question of change within centuries, that is various people at that time making active decision to keep or abolish slavery.
Napoleon contemporaries did characterized him as power hungry tyrant. This is not just projecting current values. People in the past had opinions too.
There's a trend of assuming that people in the past were simple, without agency and that society was uniform. Contemporary people do make own decisions, some of them harmful and egoistic. We don't blame current political decisions (including stuff like what Isis did) purely on circumstances. The past people deserve the same treatment.
People who study politics absolutely use circumstances to explain political outcomes. Historians discuss the economic impacts of WW1 when talking about the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany. People discuss the complex political history of the middle east and its long history of resisting superpowers combined with the power vacuum when the US left the region when discussing the rise of ISIS. Power vacuums and food/water scarcity are often the root cause of political instability.
Crazy individuals do crazy things, but those crazy individuals gaining power is always a result of the political system in place at the time.
The discuss it a little. The books I have read about rise of Hitler did not blamed "economic impacts of WW1" all that much. That was far from being a single or primary thing.
The choices, values and opinions of major actors plays huge relo.
Slavery was wrong then and it is wrong now. societal consensus cannot be excused because it was in the past.
Highlighted and rightfully acknowledged but slavery cannot be simplified to just forced labour when rape, murder and unethical experimentation was also performed. I think it’s incorrect to assume that this should not be criticised with the standards of today as to do so is to ignore that it is a very human issue to value the life of another so poorly and assume we were all barbarians only 300-400 years ago which is not the case.
Slavery absolutely existed in mainland France under the Romans. The coronation of Charlemagne made the popes feel empowered to order Christians to stop enslaving other Christians or selling the latter outside Europe. Believe it or not, Venetian slave traders used to kidnap civilians in Rome and sell them to the Arabs. The growing influence of the papacy lead to the gradual replacement of chattel slavery by serfdom around the tenth century. Finally, in 1315, bonded labor was abolished in France by Louis X, proclaiming that "France means freedom".
A similar process transpired in England, with slavery abolished by William the Conqueror and serfdom dying out in the fifteenth century as courts refused to enforce the contracts.
Unfortunately, all of this brilliant progress was undone in a desperate Europe facing a massive Ottoman invasion at the dawn of American colonization which led Popes and Emperors to authorize horrific measures, that ultimately corrupted the European conscience and led to a new era of slavery and genocide.
The Ottomans cannot carry all the blame, but remembering that "we" (qua the West) built our system of racism from a position of weakness may help persuade some people to let it go away. I think. Who knows?
Napoleon reinstated slavery for a lot of reasons. None of them good but it looks like inaction would not have been such a bounty for the local populations either way...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4tWz0iOCzY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slx4IsfsZPA
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46129990
https://www.france24.com/en/20181108-macron-stokes-anger-wit...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_P%C3%A9tain