Claude Ribbe: Napoleon Ought To Be Remembered As Inspiration For Hitler
Napoleon massacred more than 100,000 Caribbean slaves and should be remembered as a genocidal dictator and inspiration for Hitler rather than a military genius and founder of modern France, a French historian said yesterday.
"I refuse to bow down before the statue any longer, I have opened my eyes," said Claude Ribbe, a respected black academic and part of a governmental commission on human rights whose book, Napoleon's Crime, is published this week, on the bicentenary of the emperor's great triumph at the battle of Austerlitz this Friday.
"A kind of generalised self-censorship exists about this man in France . . . he furthered the emergence of all the racist and pseudo-scientific theories of the 19th century that were subsequently taken up by the Nazis."
"I refuse to bow down before the statue any longer, I have opened my eyes," said Claude Ribbe, a respected black academic and part of a governmental commission on human rights whose book, Napoleon's Crime, is published this week, on the bicentenary of the emperor's great triumph at the battle of Austerlitz this Friday.
"A kind of generalised self-censorship exists about this man in France . . . he furthered the emergence of all the racist and pseudo-scientific theories of the 19th century that were subsequently taken up by the Nazis."