Dumas Family Illustrates Color Blindness In France… And The Napoleons and Nazis Who Hated It.

Anybody obsessing about race and color in the first order is a racist (which makes much of the US old mental system racist, as it obsesses about race and color, to this day, and in official census and questionaires). Whereas worrying about those who obsess about race and color is not racist, but prudent. Racists and the color obsessed have obsessive systems of thoughts and emotions, which are reflected all over their mental systems.

Hence the admiration for Napoleon, a systemic, strident racist and enslaver, is an admiration for a racist and enslaver mentality… which shows up clearly in Napoleon’s obsessive fascism. Admiring Napoleon has united the most dangerous sort of scoundrels, worldwide. Admiring Napoleon is actually a form of racism. Several French generals of African ancestry opposed the forerunner of Hitler. Here is a portrait of one of Napoleon’s enemies, général Alexandre Dumas. 

French republican général Alexandre Dumas; Attributed tо Louis Gauffier/ Portrait d’un chasseur dans un paysage, dit portrait d’Alexandre Dumas père/ cm 34/huile sur papier marouflé sur carton/ 32,5 x 25 cm/ (c) Bayonne, Musée Bonnat-Helleu / Cliché A. Vaquero

Napoleon, a Corsican aristocrat, or let’s say hereditary bandit, was thus cut off from a completely different mental tissue than the best minds of the French Revolution, of which there were hundreds, if not thousands. Napoleon was felt, early on, to be a danger for the Republic, and the Revolution, and thus the glory seeking Corsican was encouraged to embark in his Egypt expedition: the French Republic’s leadership hoped he would die there (Napoleon went, in the hope of defeating the Ottomans, spreading the Revolution there, becoming a new Alexander; but he discovered that Islamists had no affinity for the concept of Republic, and besides he couldn’t get to the ammunition in Saint Jean D’Acre, which he besieged in vain, and UK admiral Nelson defeated the French fleet).

A post mortem painting of general Dumas.

The French Revolution and Republic had top generals who were of African descent, such as the father of Alexandre Dumas, Thomas Alexandre Davy de La Pailleterie, represented above in a Nineteenth Century painting (it’s actually inspired by the physionomy of his son, the author of the “3 Mousquetaires” and “Reine Margot”, who immortalized D’Artagnan, head of king’s Musketeers)… For what Dumas the general really looked like, see the sculpture below (which was melted by the Nazis…)

Thomas Alexandre Dumas, of his true name Thomas Alexandre Davy de La Pailleterie, was father of the famous novelist Alexandre Dumas père, whose son, Dumas Fils, was himself a famous writer and author of La Dame aux camélias. These three generations of Dumas have something which sets French civilization away from, and above, racist, color obsessed culture. In France the Dumas trio is famous and was memorialized in an entire city square in Paris…I was exposed to French culture for decades… 

But one day I came across some US writing informing me that Dumas was “black”. I had seen pictures of Dumas and I had not noticed, for decades, that he looked a bit African in some ways! But the US are all about “color” to this day, and many a US citizen has a keen eye for race. However, curiously, while the whites are white and the blacks are black (even when they look mostly white), the Asians are Asian (not “yellow” as they used to be… Some Asians are whiter than white, indeed…), and the RedSkins, well, now are proudly “indigenous”…

The Nazis went out of their way to destroy the memories of the Dumas family. They melted his statue! There are fewer things which the Nazis hated more than descendants of French, or French-like Senegalese with partial African ancestry. They found thousands in Germany and sterilized all of them. (A French-Senagalese military regiment was also assassinated by Rommel’s 7th Panzer division in 1940… To its eternal shame…)

Dumas was not the only man of mixed African parentage to have gained great prominence in Eighteenth Century France. Another son of a nobleman and a freed black woman from Guadeloupe became one of the most renowned fencers—and violinists—of the 18th century. Taking the title Chevalier de Saint-Georges, he went to a prestigious school, he had the patronage of Marie-Antoinette and served in the king’s honor guard. When the American founding father John Adams visited Paris in 1779 he wrote that this “mulatto man is the most accomplished man in Europe in riding, shooting, fencing, dancing, music.”

Raising spectacularly through the ranks, on merit alone, as his father died within days of him entering the army, Thomas Alexandre Dumas, Thomas Alexandre Davy de La Pailleterie, became general in chief of a major French army by age 32.

His mother, Marie-Cessette Dumas (1714–1786) was enslaved in Saint Domingue (now Haiti). His father was a French noble from Normandy, who “bought from a certain Monsieur de Mirribielle a negress named Cesette at an exorbitant price…” Several official documents describe her as pure “African”, “negress”, namely born in Africa, and then transported to Saint Domingue (and explicitly not of mixed race). It’s not clear when she died [1].

Thomas Alexandre Dumas was one of several famous French officers of color. Napoleon famously mistreated another, Toussaint Louverture….

A statue of General Dumas was erected in Place Malesherbes (now Place du Général Catroux) in Paris in Autumn 1912 after a long fundraising campaign spearheaded by Anatole France and Sarah Bernhardt. It stood in Place Malesherbes for thirty years, alongside statues of Alexandre Dumas’s descendants Alexandre Dumas, père (erected 1883) and Alexandre Dumas fils (erected 1906), as well as of Sarah Bernhardt. Offended by this triumph of African ancestry over racism in general, and Austrian troops in particular, the deranged Nazis, challenged by the indomitable warrior spirit of this half African, destroyed it in the winter of 1941–1942. The statue below is more faithful to the appearance of general Dumas than the painting above:

 

Tom Reiss, in his (Pulitzer Prize-winning) biography of Thomas Alexandre Dumas, The Black Count, writes that “[Dumas] was a consummate warrior and a man of great conviction and moral courage. He was renowned for his strength, his swordsmanship, his bravery, and his knack for pulling victory out of the toughest situations. But he was known, too, for his profane back talk and his problems with authority. He was a soldiers’ general, feared by the enemy and loved by his men, a hero in a world that did not use the term lightly.”  

Thomas-Alexandre Dumas was a man of African descent leading European troops as a top general officer. He was the first person of color in the French military to become brigadier general, divisional general, and general-in-chief of a French army with 53,000 soldiers. His military career started under King Louis XVI.

Born in Saint-Domingue, Thomas-Alexandre was the son of Marquis Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, a French nobleman, and of Marie-Cessette DUMAS, a slave of African descent. He was born into slavery because of his mother’s status, but his father took him to France in 1776, spent lavishly on him, and had him educated. At some point the father, destitute, sold the son, and later repurchsed him!

Slavery had been illegal in metropolitan France since 656 CE (re-affirmed in 1315 CE, under Louis X, son of Philippe Le Bel) and thus any slave would be freed de facto by being in France (or anywhere in Western Europe, where Bathilde’s law applied, as most Western European regime’s were descendants of the Frankish/Carolingian/Roman empire…)

His father helped him enter the French military. Dumas took his mother’s name, because his father didn’t want the family name soiled by a low officer’s commission. Dumas Senior rose through the ranks, starting in 1786… in the Queen’s dragoons… Under Lafayette, he helped to kill insurgents… and was later exonerated by a revolutionary tribunal when he explained that to kill those 50 insurgents had saved 2,000…

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General Dumas made few political statements, but those he made suggest deeply felt republican beliefs. One month after the French National Convention abolished slavery in the colonies (4 February 1794), Dumas sent a message to troops under his command, and that was the entire Army of the Alps, fighting Italy’s Austrian occupiers and collaborating Italians, who had been trying to invade France in the name of plutocracy:

“Your comrade, a soldier and General-in-Chief … was born in a climate and among men for whom liberty also had charms, and who fought for it first. Sincere lover of liberty and equality, convinced that all free men are equals, he will be proud to march out before you, to aid you in your efforts, and the coalition of tyrants will learn that they are loathed equally by men of all colors.” 

At that point Dumas was higher in the military hierarchy than Napoleon (who had just been promoted to general from captain, for his exploit of defeating the British in the siege of Toulon). Dumas led the 53,000 soldiers of the army of the Alps to victory, in the battles of Petit Saint Bernard and Mont Cenis. Dumas’ soldiers used revolutionary ice crampons to go up ice cliffs during combat. 

General Dumas joined the Army of Italy in Milan in November 1796, serving under the orders of commander-in-chief Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon was a political navigator, but also a bandit: tension between the two generals began as Dumas resisted Napoleon’s rapacious policy of allowing French troops to expropriate local property. 

In December 1796, Dumas was in charge of a division besieging Austrian troops at the city of Mantua. By Christmas he intercepted a spy carrying a message to the Austrian commander with important tactical information. On 16 January 1797, Dumas and his division halted an Austrian attempt to break out of the besieged city and prevented Austrian reinforcements from reaching Mantua. The French were thereby able to maintain the siege until French reinforcements could arrive, leading to the city’s capitulation on 2 February 1797. 

General Dumas was then forced by Napoleon’s hostility below his rank…. Under General Masséna in February 1797, Dumas helped French troops push the Austrians northward, capturing thousands. It was in this period that Austrian troops began calling him the der schwarze Teufel (“Black Devil”, or Diable Noir in French). 

In late February 1797, Dumas transferred to a division commanded by General Joubert, who requested Dumas for his republicanism (in contrast to Napoleon’s dictatorial tendencies). Under Joubert, Dumas led a small force that defeated several enemy positions along the Adige River. Dumas’s achievement in this period came on 23 March, when the general drove back a squadron of Austrian troops at a bridge over the Eisack River in Clausen (today Klausen, or Chiusa, Italy). For this the French began referring to him as “the Horatius Cocles of the Tyrol” (after a hero who saved ancient Rome). Napoleon called Dumas by this, and rewarded him by making him cavalry commander of French troops in the Tyrol; he also sent Dumas a pair of pistols. Dumas spent much of 1797 as military governor, administering Treviso province, north of Venice. 

The expedition to Egypt was partly conceived by the Republic’s government in the secret hope that Napoleon would die there, but he didn’t. During the return debacle, Dumas was made prisoner, and spent several years in captivity. When finally liberated, he couldn’t restart his military career, as Napoleon’s dictatorship was in its bloom. Dumas soon died of stomach cancer…

His son and grandson would become extremely successful writers, a most honored profession in France. None of the Dumas got promoted and extolled as “black” men, because the French mentality was, and is, and should be, that they were men, great and glorious men, and no appearance could spoil or even interfere in any way, with their essence.

In recent years, though, under US influence, skin color has been advocated as an important factor to consider in France… This is an exact example of racism: judging people on how they look, or where their families came from.

Whereas skin color was not a consideration for advancement or minority status in Rome…for however long Rome lasted… And Rome lasted a long time… In Tenth Century “Francia”, peasants and aristocrats still thought they were living in Rome… And, we actually have strident revolutionary songs and philosphies from the time, where humanity is affirmed, and the equality among people, fustigating the pretentions of plutocrats (evil-power) soon to call themselves “aristocrats (best-power). In these ancient protests of the Tenth Century, which were crushed with mass massacres by the self-declared aristocrats, we see social justice struggling… but color never appears.  

In a way, so far, color blindness has been a Roman (not Greek! [2]) tradition which thereafter lived, and still lives in France. In what became the USA, we know exactly when the decision of brandishing color was taken: at the end of the Seventeetn Century, racist, greedy judges decided that “color” meant people were “aliens” and thus couldn’t own property. So wealthy and not so wealthy people with some African origins were dispossed by the thieves who founded what became the American US judicial system.

It’s no coincidence that the Frankish/Roman empire is at the cultural root of both the British and American regimes. The traditions of the Franks/Romans were the best, or, at least, on crucial points, superior. Thus any deviation should be carefully studied in the present civilization. But that starts with realizing that, until modern time, the color of skin was not a factor.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Dumas in 1801, states “Marie-Cezette” will be in charge of General Dumas’s properties in Saint-Domingue. This evidence makes it unlikely that Marie-Cessette Dumas died earlier.

Thomas-Alexandre Dumas may have deliberately entered a false death date for his mom on the marriage certificate. He had a good reason to claim she was dead at the moment of his marriage in Villers-Cotterêts, France, in 1792. If she were living, he would have been required to consult her opinion on the marital union!

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[2] The Greeks were much more racist than the Romans, and this is why they failed and the Romans succeeded. The Greeks expressed racism towards non Greeks, the Athenians expressed at some point racism against non-Athenians (stupid laws passed under Pericles, affecting his own son), and the Spartans were certainly racist against everybody (and Sparta died from this racism)

 

NAPOLEON: DIRTY & Only Memorable That Way

NAPOLEON ENVY & ADMIRATION IS A GRAVE DISEASE THAT NEEDS TREATMENT. Here is some cure against this still rampant affliction:

Napoleon was no Caesar:

To immediately focus away from what is not at issue here, let me remind the reader I am an admirer of Caesar (although aware of Julius’ flaws, including deporting millions, seizing the last free Greek city-state, Marseilles, and exterminating entire cities). The point though is that Caesar lived in the most difficult times, and, although “Dictator For Life” (a stupid, but understandable idea considering the circumstances; he should have put a ten year limit), Caesar had left the Republic intact (and that cost him his life, as he had not measured the full depth of corruption of his opponents).

Napoleon had none of the excuses of Caesar. And none of his achievements. Even as a general, Caesar was vastly superior, tactically and especially strategically.

Although Caesar led a revolution (complete with redistribution of wealth: consider his Agrarian Reform of 59 BCE), Napoleon buried one. Caesar wanted to save the Republic, Napoleon killed it.

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Why is Napoleon Bonaparte considered a hero?
Napoleon is admired because most people are tempted to become nasty nuts, and are mesmerized by Napoleon for having done so. That’s the positive side. On the negative side, Napoleon’s admirers are plain ignorant. They attribute to him things he wanted gone, while other things he did, they have no idea.

On one thing they are right:  Napoleon was an authentic hero in combat, on the battlefield (as Caesar, a “savage” fighter, “like a wild beast” was). Napoleon was also an expert in calculus… and geometry (there is such a thing as the intriguing Napoleon’s theorem). 

Could Napoleon have been Caesar? Did Napoleon simply chose to be a cretin? I doubt it. Caesar’s background was unequaled; he was the nephew of seven times Consul, populist and supreme general Marius, savior of Rome. Caesar got the best teachers. His first and last words were in Greek, not Latin. 

In comparison, Napoleon, with due respect to Corsican savages, was just one of them. And it showed.

Napoleon in a nutshell: A grandeur deluded, macho, sex-obsessed, misogynistic, vain-glorious, self-obsessed, tyrannical, cruel, jealous, god-crazed, mass-homicidal greedy mafioso assassin disease ridden revolution diverting slave master… What could have gone wrong?

German philosopher Hegel, a philosopher of history who made some valid points in a sea of massively lethal delusion, was transfixed by the dictator. In a letter from Iena to his friend Niethammer, October 13th, 1806, when he had just finished writing The Phenomenology of Mind : ”I saw the Emperor -this soul of the world- go out from the city to survey his realm; it is a truly wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrating on one point while seated on a horse, stretches over the world and dominates it.” (Correspondance, T. I, p.114) [1].

History top biologist, Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck handing the book ‘Zoological Philosophy‘ to Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, 1809 (pastel on paper, 1920 by Ezuchevsky, Mikhail Dmitrievich (1880-1928); 32.5×24.5 cm; State Darwin Museum, Moscow; The French “naturalist historian” Lamarck (1744-1829) published ‘Philosophie zoologique‘ in 1809, in which he outlined the theory of evolution and in particular the smart mechanism now known as Lamarckism (soon to be proven right). [Russian, out of copyright. Soviets were favorable to Lamarckism, for obvious reasons, just as Napoleon had excellent reasons to hate it, preferring Cuvier’s catastrophism… Both Lamarck and Cuvier were right… ]

How Hegel Justified Hitler:

Hegel explains quite a bit the apparition of the likes of Bismarck, and, worse, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Hitler. For Hegel, Napoleon is a hero because he knows “what is necessary and what to do when the time comes” (Lectures, p.35). The historical heroes, including Napoleon, know ”the truth of their times and their worlds because they are aware of the historical necessity : that is why, like Alexander and Caesar, Napoleon is a wise man because he knows the nature of his era.”

Well, actually Caesar is one thing, Alexander, another. Caesar found a collapsing Republic, infused with righteous plutocrats, thoroughly corrupt at a lethal level (Cassius and Brutus, the two  main Caesar assassins, committed serious, even attempted murderous crimes against the Greeks… and that was, by sheer greed, although they were among the wealthiest men in the Republic, so powerful, their corruption was not seriously prosecuted).

Alexander, instead, found a Republic and Direct Democracy, Athens, still recovering from her near-death experience of the Peloponnese War. Alexander actually visited, as the world’s most famous tourist. The truth of the times was that Athens was the treasure. Had he really embraced progress, and the cutting edge of civilization, Alexander would have become Athens’ main weapon. Instead, Alexander adopted an ambiguous role… Which enabled Antipater, Alexander’s senior and successor, to defeat Athens and turned her into a… plutocracy. Also Alexander annihilated Thebes, and Tyre, crimes of the sort not even Hitler committed. Tyre was at the origin of the entire Greek civilization: that’s where Europe came from, or, at least, the alphabet.

For Hegel, annihilating cities such as Thebes, Tyre was a “historical necessity” which made Alexander a hero. Is there anybody reading this who still ponders why Hitler appeared where he did, speaking the same language? How come such a little jerk is viewed as a great philosopher?

Following Hegel like the sheep the shepherd to the slaughterhouse, some say Napoleon made France into a great power. False, even ridiculous, quite the opposite. It’s the Republic which won the minds, and it is the Republic which is still winning them, not the Corsican mafioso. 

Watch Brexit for further edification: in the present UK electoral campaign, all parties are running on populism, that is, Republicanism…

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France had been the superpower of Europe, nearly since the early Franks: 

Roman emperor Julian was elected Augustus by the Parisians in 360 CE (and tried to stem the slide of the empire into superstition). 

Over the next 800 years, the Franks would conquer what they called Europe, from Scotland to Sicily and from the Spanish March to Poland. The Viking even got started after the Franks gave an ultimatum to Denmark (about recovering fleeing, plotting Anglo-Saxons).

One could even say that the Franks, a confederation of Romanophile Germans were created around principles which went beyond what Rome was capable of. So no wonder they conquered Europe, succeeding where the Romans had crucially failed, with the worst consequences for the empire (maybe because conspirators assassinated Caesar five years early)

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Napoleone di Buonaparte, from artillery officer to genius general: 

The future dictator of France didn’t learn to speak their language until he was sent to boarding school at the age of 9. It was not his second language, but his third. Napoleon, that little plutocrat from Corsica, was recognized as noble by the plutocratic Ancient Regime, so he was admitted to artillery (boarding) school (after passing an exam). Bonaparte came out an officer, and a good one: he triumphed at the siege of Toulon, which was occupied by the plutocratic, invading British. Napoleon’s attack plan worked perfectly, and the Brits, finding themselves under French guns, had to flee, giving up on their invasion of France from the south. 

Severely wounded during the Toulon assault, Napoleon was promoted from captain directly to general. Soon, the republican Directoire wisely came to hate Napoleon, and sent it to Egypt, hoping he would die there. After a lunatic and mass murdering campaign, Napoleon couldn’t take an Ottoman fort full of ammunition at Saint Jean d’Acre, in his little completely demented plan to take over the entire Ottoman empire with his small army cut from its bases petered out, and he had to flee. On the positive side, he had freed Egypt from the Ottomans, and offered it to the United Kingdom…

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The legal system set-up by Napoleon was extremely misogynistic. He cracked a joke about it: women had all the power already, so his legal code removed all their rights. This was all the more remarkable as women played a central role in the Revolution and nearly got the right to vote. But Napoleon loved to enslave: he actually re-established slavery, which the Revolution had outlawed.

There is no doubt Napoleon was physically courageous, behaving as a hero many times, in many ways. But one can find plenty of heroes, in the sense of risking one’s life or limb, with many abominable causes.

Much is made of Napoleon’s military genius. However, other French revolutionary generals won great battles before him. A lot of these battles were won from the enthusiasm of the French revolutionary draftees, and also the fact that France had the best engineering, in particular the best explosives. The Polytechnique School, a branch of the military was created during the Revolution just to make sure French military tech was superior.

 

The enormous achievements of the French Revolution (the basis of modern egalitarian law, and UN Charter) are often considered to be due to Napoleon, by the ignorant. For example, on 7 April 1795 the metric system was formally defined in French law: nothing to do with Napoleon. Actually Napoleon hijacked the Revolution, and greatly demolished it, in fact and spirit. Instead of letting Europe unite as a Republic, he grabbed it as a plutocrat, and pressed it like a lemon.

The fact so many admire Napoleon, from Hegel, to all too many people around the planet, and implicitly, the structure of the French state (widely copied worldwide, even by the USA) is a serious problem. Indeed, it’s a glorification of fascism and the Dark Side. 

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Why Napoleon hated evolution: because, by removing “God”, evolution made him responsible for his abominable deeds, his despicable character, and childish impulses:

Lamarck, by then immensely prestigious, offered to the self-declared emperor one of his books on evolution. Napoleon made the research professor who discovered evolution, cry. No doubt Lamarck cried seeing the world at the feet of such an unwise, primitive maniac. Napoleon suggested, even with his favorite Laplace, that the universe had been created by “God”,no doubt to justify his own primitivism: Napoleon’s crude behavior was an act of god, Napoleon was not truly responsible. Not really Napoleon’s fault that he had to kill innocent people he disliked.

Lamarck’s suggested that complexity and the striving for solutions drove evolution. In other words, intelligence drove the universe, not the happenstance of god, and thus, as Napoleon invaded Spain and caused havoc there, and thus, as Napoleon invaded Spain and caused havoc there, Napoleon, not “God”, was responsible for the atrocities in the Iberian peninsula. Spain was among other places that Napoleon, in the guise of propagating the Republican revolution, peppered, as the rest of Europe with his relatives made into the local tyrants…

This being said, the conflict between Napoleon and Lamarck was complicated… And at a very high level of mental debate: Napoleon sided with Lamarck’s deadly enemy Cuvier, himself a top evolutionist, but who believed in evolution generated by catastrophes (like the one which destroyed the dinosaurs). Cuvier has certainly been proven right, yet Lamarck, of course is a towering giant whose time is yet to fully come (Quantum Mechanics makes evolution intelligent, I reckon…) 

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“Come general, the affair is over, we have lost the day,” Napoleon told one of his officers. “Let us be off.” The day was June 18, 1815. Around 8 p.m., the emperor of France knew he had been decisively defeated at a northern French village called Waterloo, and he wanted to escape from his enemies, some of whom—such as the Prussians—had sworn to execute him (the Prussians had been keen to execute the French since 1792…). By 5 a.m. the next day, they stopped by a fire some soldiers had made in a meadow. As Napoleon warmed himself he said to one of his generals, “Eh bien, monsieur, we have done a fine thing.” Extraordinary sangfroid that even then, in the midst of catastrophe, Napoleon was able to joke. However, it was not funny: thanks, in great part, to his antics, racism and oppression were to rule over central Europe, masterminded by Prussia. And British plutocracy was on a roll, and would stay that way for another 204 years (and counting).

What?

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Like Augustus in Rome, Napoleon had not fully defeated the Republic; instead both used the Republic as leverage. As with Augustus, that was good for the tyrant, but it wore out the Republic:

In 1815, after Napoleon, and thus French Republicanism defeat, racism, anti-Judaism, oppression, occupation of Eastern Europe by Prussia and company was reestablished. 

Let me quote from: “Why We’d Be Better Off if Napoleon Never Lost at Waterloo

On the bicentennial of the most famous battle in world history, a distinguished historian looks at what could have been. 

If Napoleon had remained emperor of France for the six years remaining in his natural life, European civilization would have benefited inestimably. The reactionary Holy Alliance of Russia, Prussia and Austria would not have been able to crush liberal constitutionalist movements in Spain, Greece, Eastern Europe and elsewhere; pressure to join France in abolishing slavery in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean would have grown; the benefits of meritocracy over feudalism would have had time to become more widely appreciated; Jews would not have been forced back into their ghettos in the Papal States and made to wear the yellow star again; encouragement of the arts and sciences would have been better understood and copied; and the plans to rebuild Paris would have been implemented, making it the most gorgeous city in the world.

Napoleon deserved to lose Waterloo, and Wellington to win it, but the essential point in this bicentenary year is that the epic battle did not need to be fought—and the world would have been better off if it hadn’t been.[2]”

Yes, but plutocracy would have suffered, and plutocrats don’t like that, do they? if nothing else, their perverse admiration for Napoleon rested on the evidence that Napoleon was the best weapon against the Republican Revolution. There is evidence that, starting in 1812, with the Russian campaign, Napoleon military genius deserted him. In 1812, the Grande Armee, more than 600,000 strong, full of idealistic young Germans and Poles, was poorly managed: too many stupid, frontal battles (instead of the subtle victories an outmanned Caesar had no problem producing). Moreover, the Grand Army had typhus, soldiers were dying like flies, and the campaign should have been delayed. 

At Waterloo, Napoleon split stupidly the French army, and then committed a long succession of mistakes, including the charge of the French horse at the wrong moment, not ordered by him, and waiting for general Crouchy, at the risk of getting the Prussian army instead (as happened). In spite of its remaining revolutionary zeal which had been Napoleon’s not so secret fuel, this was too much for the French veterans.

And why did Napoleon attack the Czar? Long story. And the Czar, allied to perfidious Albion, managed a country with awful serfdom, close to slavery without the possibility of being sold. 

The basic irony, though, is that Napoleon, following earlier revolutionaries, wanted to unite Europe. The philosopher proximally culprit of the French Revolution, personal enemy of Napoleon, Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, had warned them all: don’t try to impose the Republic upon Europe. Fight mostly defensely. Revolution, the Republic, would come all over in time. The revolutionaries didn’t obey Sade. Napoleon sent Sade to a mental asylum. 

However Sade was right: the Republican revolution would self-propagate. It’s now Great British plutocracy itself which is self-imploding, and Europe can be united under Republican, that is French, principles, all over. 

So, now, for the case of Russia… 

Meanwhile, please remember: Napoleon is not even worth forgetting.

Patrice Ayme

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[1]  Hegel in Elements of the Philosophy of Right (& 348) : ” At the forefront of all actions, hence of historical actions, stand individuals or subjectivities which effectively cause the substantial reality to occur. ” In Lectures on the Philosophy of History, a few years later, Hegel teaches that historical heroes ” are practical-minded men. ” (p.35). Napoleon, like Alexander and Caesar, is thus a man of action : he is not what he thinks, neither what he hides, but what he does. In The Phenomenology of Mind, he wrote: ” The real being of man lies rather in his deed; it is in this deed that individuality is effective… the individual is what this deed is. ” (p.231).

You are what you do, not what you eat? Neither: historical heroes act according to what they feel and what they think, most of it, imprinted into them as children: Alexander’s was the exact prolongation of his father Philippe, just even more nutty (bold). Caesar was essentially Marius reborn, just newer and better… And Napoleon was just according to his formation: a classical glorified island bandit, from an island famous for its piracy… by comparison, a young Caesar was captured and held hostage by pirates allied to Mithridates (and Roman plutocrats). After a second kidnapping, Caesar, held for 38 days, promised to his captors that he would seem them crucified, and he did. 

Long after his defeat, Hegel admired in Napoleon the founder of the modern State. In Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel relates and then justifies the coup of Brumaire, 18th. : “Again arises a government organized like the old one ; but the leader and monarch is now a changeable Directoire of five people forming undoubtedly a moral, but not individual, unity. Mistrust was prevailing among them as well and the government was in the hands of the legislative assemblies. It had therefore the same fatal destiny, because the absolute need of a governmental power had made itself felt. Napoleon reinstated it under the form of military power and then placed himself again at the head of the State as a source of individual will ; he knew how to govern and was soon done with the internal. ” (p.342).
Napoleon is thus, to Hegel, the founder of the modern State because its principle is henceforth not the will of all, not the will of a few but the will of the Prince. There is no difference with, say, Alexander the Great, Augustus, Diocletian, Clovis, Philippe Le Bel, Louis XI, Henry VIII, Louis XIV, so Hegel is either an idiot, or a clever merchant who knew all to little history to pretend teaching it, except to the deeply ignorant.

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[2] This is only a very small list of the satanic (Pluto!) ways which arose after Napoleon’s defeat, and thus the Republican Revolution coup d’arret. Jews were racially tortured all over Europe (except France, Britain) after Napoleon/French revolution’s, defeat. As I said, Eastern Europe would not be freed until after the Versailles Treaty of 1919… And the 1914-1945 war can be seen as Waterloo’s revenge, part one. Part two is Brexit.

 

 

 

WHOSE WATERLOO WAS IT?

WATERLOO WAS A VICTORY FOR RACISM, BANKSTERISM, And Other Unsung Horrors

This is the 200th anniversary of the battle of Waterloo. History is our teacher, it’s more instructive, and surprising, than fiction.

Napoleon, at some point, turned into a tyrant, and, just as Roman emperor Augustus, buried the Republic. Or, at least, just as Augustus, much of it. Thus many celebrate Napoleon’s defeat.

However, who won that war? Arguably, Europe’s worst plutocrats, racists, and their banksters. At Waterloo, plutocracy, racism, and banksterism (let alone anti-French sentiment) won. We are living with the consequences. Yet, ultimately, how Napoleon started his career, the Revolution, is winning over civilization. As it has to.

Revolutionary General Napoleon On His Way To Free Italy From Outrageous Plutocracy & Occupation

Not so coincidentally, a white blonde supremacist youth went to a church in the USA , sat quietly for an hour, and then killed nine people there, just because he did not like their color. He probably did not know his own white skin was a recently acquired trait of darker skin ancestors.

What does racism have to do with Waterloo? Everything. The French Revolution had “black” generals, and so did Napoleon (an excellent example being Alexandre Dumas Senior, a top general). French anti-racism was also defeated at Waterloo.

In 1815, after Napoleon’s defeat, Prussian racist laws were extended to all of Germany. If one were of the wrong race, one could not be a lawyer, a doctor, etc. Karl Marx’s father, who was a doctor, was prevented to exercise as a consequence of anti-racism’s defeat at Waterloo.

Poles, in particular, were the object of INSTITUTIONALIZED racism from the Prussian (that is, “German”) empire. Poland was occupied, dismembered, treated worse than most African nations would be treated later under colonialism.

Napoleon went to military school under king Louis XVI, at age nine. He and his elder brother, did not see Corsica again, nor their family, for six years. After it was checked that the Buonaparte family belonged to the Corsican nobility, Napoleon and Joseph attended for free. Napoleon came out as an artillery officer. He stayed in the army as the Revolution happened.

In April 1792, all the plutocrats of Europe attacked France, although France was still, nominally, a Constitutional Monarchy headed by Louis XVI. In that period, Napoleon found himself in Corsica, trying to control Pasquale Paoli, the “dictator” of Corsica, who had led the ephemeral Republic there, before it had been expelled by Louis XVI’s army. Paoli had gone to live in England, handsomely paid by the British government. Twenty years later, the Revolution allowed Paoli to come back. Napoleon, an active Jacobin, organized elections which Paoli president. However, soon enough, Paoli was heading a weird “British Corsican” kingdom.

In July 1792, unbelievably the Duke of Brunswick, who led the plutocratic coalition against Revolutionary France, threatened to “execute” and submit to horrible “supplices” the entire population of Paris.

This is why Auschwitz was not an accident. Nor was the attack on Paris of Kaiser Wilhelm II in August 1914. Threatening publicly to torture to death Europe’s largest city, just because it enjoyed a revolution, was clearly the official launch of the Prussian Will to Genocide. (This did not come out of the blue: the initial invasion of Pagan Prussia by the Christian Teutonic Knights, the Prussian Crusade, was an extremely bloody affair, capped by a genocide of the natives.)

In Fall 1793, British and Spanish forces had seized Toulon. Napoleon, then a 24 year old captain, insisted that the two preceding generals be fired. His battle plan was finally implemented. It worked superbly. The British commanding general was captured, the British and Spanish fleets had to flee under the fire of red hot cannon balls (balls were heated in special ovens so that, when they landed inside a ship, they would set it on fire; many British boats exploded during the attack, some scuttled so that the French could not seize the munitions; the Brits had brought enough explosives to destroy everything on their way to Paris).

Napoleon was severely wounded during the assault by a British bayonet which went through his thigh. He kept on fighting.

After the victory and healing, Napoleon was convoked by the top generals. Wines, and a great meal were served. Laughing, the high command told the Corsican youth to change first to his brand new general’s uniform.

Often the Brits gloat that they saved the world against tyranny, by defeating Napoleon. Well, on the face of what happened in the following 130 years, not so. Prussia, Britain’s pet monster, came back to bite everybody. But not just that. The truth? British armed forces were on the side, of racism, fascism, plutocracy, imperialism, banksterism and exploitation. And this is what launched Napoleon.

Another lie, by the way, is that the Netherlands and Belgium were freed of France… by defeating the French.

Indeed, the Belgiae were always part of Gallia, Gaul, and the Franks were Dutch. Not just this, but, in an eighty year war, France around 1600, freed the Netherlands from Spain (before that the most powerful land army). If France had not been around to intervene each time the Spanish army attacked the Netherlands, the Dutch would be speaking Spanish.

As a telling aside, Edward III of England (grandson of Philippe IV Le Bel of France) launched the so-called 100 year war, at the urging of the count of Artois, who used to fight in a bright red costume and armor, just to make sure his combative nature was fully in evidence. He had been deprived of his land by the King of France. Artois’ land were fully in present day Belgium. Belgium was created, after Napoleon’s defeat, just to weaken France. The obvious truth, in the fullness of history, considering the jurisdiction given to the Francks in 400 CE by the Roman government, the entire west bank of the Rhine is clearly French.

The creation of the Netherlands and Belgium, to a great extent correspond to the attempt of creating a British controlled Provence in 1793.

The inheritance of Napoleon is mixed. Napoleon’s own younger brother Lucien, when he was 17, wrote prescient words about the danger his brother could become. However flawed, his unification of Europe worked in more ways than one. Germany found itself united, and liked it. Poland found itself sort of free, and certainly not grievously racially discriminated against, and loved it. Italy was united, and loved it too (Napoleon III would throw the Austrian plutocrats out at the battles of Magenta and Solferino, in 1856, making, Italy free and whole again).

The invasion of Russia was made necessary by Alexander III’s behavior, and on-going British interference. It failed for similar reason as Athens’ war with Sparta failed: a plague (of unknown nature for Athens, typhus for the Grande Armee). Napoleon’s greatest mistake, was to bend over backwards to integrate the old European nobility plutocracy inside his supranational state. He may as well have tried to cohabit with snakes in his bed.

“It has been a damned nice thing — the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.” the Duke of Wellington, speaking of the battle of Waterloo (which was lost because Marshall Grouchy and his 30,000 man army got lost, and the Prussian Blucher 50,000 men intervened instead).

“Waterloo is not a battle; it is the changing face of the universe.” Victor Hugo, author of Les Miserables.

And the universe did not change for the best. The idea of European supranational state was defeated at Waterloo, and replaced by racism, plutocracy, banksterism, etc. It made both Great Britain and the USA superpowers, while greatly dismantling France, as the War of the Spanish Succession finishing in 1713 already had .

Guess what? The supranational European state is back. Prussia and its racism were been annihilated in 1945. Instead, the German Republic became exactly what the French revolutionaries of 1792 wanted to see next door. And Napoleon was one of these French Revolutionaries. What Napoleon and Grouchy did not succeed to do in 1815, was done by other as Allies and extensions of the French Republic, in 1945.

Now, having saved the ruling banksters, we are being told by the dictators who govern us, that the Greeks need to be punished some more.  And the Republic of South Africa let the war criminal heading Sudan escape (in violation of the International Criminal Court, something undermined by the refusal of the USA to participate, an apparent admission that the policy of the USA is firmly committed to war criminality, looking forward…).

Napoleon started his career fighting for independence, freedom, and against plutocracy. But one does not fight hell with flowers. Napoleon vastly overshot on the Dark Side. In 1815, human rights were defeated, and the way to Auschwitz, cleared. However, the tide has turned in 1945 (after much French sacrifice, and more than 100 million killed in the 1914-45 war).

It’s time for the right side to win more Waterloos. Not only do we need a European Supranational state, but we need a World Supranational state. And it needs to be led by the best ideals of Revolutionary France. The rest is hopeless babble heading irresistibly to humanity’s Waterloo.

Patrice Ayme’

Nota Bene: .17% of the Chinese (PRC) population is incarcerated. 3% of the population of the USA is either incarcerated, or on probation. The world’s highest rate. Plutocracy financed by banksters, also translates as incarceration violence.

A Truth: FRANCE OUTLAWED SLAVERY 1355 YEARS Ago

It is often mentioned that slavery was abolished by the French Parliament in 1794, and in 1848. But that was slavery overseas. It had to be abolished twice because a racist dictator reestablished it. Outremer, plutocracy had in its service a pet demon, Napoleon, a Corsican bandit. So 1794, and 1848 saw laws passed to abolish French overseas racism, not just slavery. In truth the abolition of slavery happened 12 centuries earlier. (This fact is scrupulously ignored by those who want us to believe that all the goodness in the world was the work the pillars of the presently established order.)

“FRANCIA” ABOLISHED SLAVERY In The SEVENTH CENTURY:

The French government abolished the slave trade within the Frankish Empire around 655 CE. That was the work of the immensely fierce Bathilde (“BALDAHILDIS”), queen of the Franks and regent (and soon to be sanctified). Bathilde had been captured in England, sold to a plutocrat, from whom she later escaped. Re-captured, she attracted the eye of the king of Burgundy and Neustria, who bought her for a very high price. He then freed, and married her. Soon after being elected king some more, he died, and Bathilde became reigning queen of the entire Frankish (“Merovingian”) empire.

I, Former Slave, Queen Of the Franks, Abolished Slavery. Her lethally sulfurous reputation has got to be true, considering how controversial outlawing slavery was (Washington and his colleagues didn’t dare!).. and the fact all her sons became kings…

[Luxembourg Garden, French Senate, Paris, Bathilde’s Capital.]

Queen Bathilde proceeded to buy and free slaves, first from her own treasury. Slavery was disapproved by the Frankish Church. It subsisted among the rich and mighty, and in the countryside. Bathilde lowered taxes on peasants so that they would stop selling their own children (the more children they had the less taxes they paid).

Then Bathilde’s French government outlawed the slave trade within the empire. (Owning slaves per se was not outlawed, as it was too injurious and infuriating to mighty Gallo-Roman aristocrats.) Selling or buying slaves was outlawed.

Any slave stepping on Frankish territory was to be freed.

Bathilde’s three sons were all elected kings (she kept directing things, some have claimed ruthlessly, from a monastery near Paris, where she retired).

Bathilde was made into a saint by the Pope in 880 CE, 200 years after her death.

However, the slave trade was not outlawed in Frankish March States such as Venice. Venice merchants, would sell slaves for centuries from southern (present day) Ukraine to the Muslim Caliphate (both outside of the Imperium Francorum).

Yet, this is the foundational act of abolition of slavery. When the Franks invaded Great Britain in 1066 CE, under the Duke of Normandy, they immediately outlawed slavery (more than 20% of England was enslaved).

Holding slaves anywhere in Western Europe was against the law, and stayed against the law. Slaves coming on European territory were freed.

Still there were two exceptions: one systemic, the other anecdotic.

Portugal had been occupied, for centuries, by the Islamists. Islam made slavery legal (although one could do whatever to obedient slaves, there were laws, slaves who tried to escape were typically impaled, to instruct their fellows, as they squirmed sometimes for days). Once freed, the Portuguese king asked the Pope for permission to enslave Africans. That was accorded.

The other exception came within Paris in the 18C: the leaders of the American rebellion held slaves in France, and were told by the French King’s police that they had to cease and desist (Jefferson, future third president of the USA, weaseled his way out)

***

Culprit of the African Slave Trade: African, American & European Potentate & Plutocrats:

I have to excuse the French Prime Minister: a Catalan of Spanish citizenship, he became French only when he was 20, and apparently history was not taught where he came from.

Catalonia was freed from Islamist potentates in the Eight Century by a Frankish army led by Charlemagne himself. So Catalonia became part of the empire of the Franks, slavery was outlawed, and Catalans such as French Prime Minister Valls ought to know their history. But they don’t.

How come the French and Catalans completely ignore the abolition of slavery in the Seventh Century?

Today, from the other side of the planet from France, I opened TV5Monde, the French TV. A banner blared “Commemoration de l’Abolition De L’Esclavage”. By this French leaders, the president, the PM, and the president of the Senate, meant the outlawing of the “traite des noirs”, a three ways trading system also used by Britain, Portugal, Spain, the USA, etc.…

In this system goods were sold by European plutocrats to African potentates who exchanged said goods against slaves who were then sold to plutocrats of European origin who, by then, had become colossal exploiters of the Americas producing massive quantities of sugar, tobacco, precious metals, etc.

In 1794, under the First French Republic, slavery was abolished in overseas French territories. It is instructive to realize that this had to be repeated in 1848, and why.

Slavery overseas was reintroduced by the dictator Napoleon in 1802. (How come that monster is still so admired?)

So Valls, Taubira, Hollande and other well-meaning clowns: you want to condemn erroneous history? Then throw Napoleon’s ashes down the Seine, or something. In any case, stop reverence for the SLAVE MASTER IN CHIEF. Throw him out of the Invalides.

The Second French Republic re-established the abolition of the overseas slave trade.

Do the French know their own history? No. That is pretty bad, because deep French history is THE deep history of Western Democracy.

That slavery was outlawed by Western Civilization in the Seventh Century provides a metric with which to measure civilization.

That Napoleon was a criminal against humanity ought to be taught.

That fact, presently occluded, explains a lot of subsequent abuses against civilization. Why? Napoleon is still widely admired (differently from his imitator, Adolf Hitler). Worldwide, not just by the clueless French.

The other day, I had a heated argument with a francophobic, yet very educated American (USA) woman. She told me France was now despicable, irrelevant, although France used to be great in the time of Napoleon. Wrong. Napoleon was a monster, he should be despised.

You want to teach slavery right? Teach Napoleon right. You want to learn from the past? Learn about Napoleon. Yes, French revolutionary armies freed the Jews in Germany, and Napoleon let that stand. However, as the Corsican dictator e re-established slavery, it is no wonder that Metternich and other German speaking leaders re-established the enslavement of the Jews after Napoleon’s defeat.

Learning just a bit of history always lead to imbalanced minds.

History ought to be told right; in full, to the best of our knowledge.

Ignoring the Frankish empires, and the world’s most advanced constitutions which they imposed by force, which forged Western Civilization is not just incoherent, and stupid, it is criminal. Because, you people who go around admiring Napoleon and his institutions, deep down, what you admire is slavery, Napoleon’s unique contribution against the flow of progress, and, thus, you are not just hypocrites, but ridiculously ineffectual.

Patrice Ayme’

Don’t Feed the Bear: All Putin Needs Is Comfy War

YOU WANT PEACE? MAKE WAR COSTLY

The French and German leaders are meeting again with Putin to make him recover reason: it reminds me of Munich, 1938, when the French and British leaders were trying to make Hitler reasonable.

France and Germany together have a slightly larger population than Russia, but three and a half time the GDP. (By the way, what happened to Britain? Well London is full of Russian plutocrats and banking institutions keen to make Assad and Putin possible; hence the British discretion.)

An Ukrainian in the street interviewed by German TV said it was out of the question to give territory to Putin: if one gives him a finger, he will take the entire arm.

Putin Wants “The Big Country” Back, & Its Prospect of Endless War

In the West, cowardly pacifists say: do not provoke Putin, do as he says, he has nukes and will attack, if lethal defensive weapons are sent to Ukraine. That makes them collaborators of evil.

This is rather curious that pacifists use a fundamentally bellicose argument: don’t try to stop the mad man, he may get offended, and kill everybody.

Indeed, a mad man’s madness with criminal insanity overtones, makes the case for the greatest severity. So the essence of the pacifist whining call for the greatest severity to be applied on Putin, right away.

Because what are pacifists saying? Putin is the most dangerous Leader, ever. So let’s be nice to him.

It is now known that, had the USA and Britain be as firm as France against Hitler in the 1930s, Hitler’s own generals would have made a coup against him.

But, instead, Britain and the USA made concession after concession to Hitler. So Hitler flew from success to success, undermining any mood critical of him. How can one criticize a winner? Clearly, it was unpatriotic. It made the top German generals and marshals who thought that the dictator was completely crazy, and a danger to Germany look like traitors.

Something similar is developing with Putin. As he occupied and annexed territory in Georgia, Moldavia, and now Ukraine, and the West proved incapable to stop him, he looks ever more like a winner. Putin’s avowed goal is to bring back what he calls the “New Russia” (half of Ukraine) and the “Big Country” (the USSR). Pacifists say that the fundamental strategic interest of Russia is at play, so . di, Putin flies from success to success.

So where does Putin stop? This is what pacifists have to know, if they do not want to be simple collaborators of evil.

But of course, they don’t know.

Should we then keep our fingers cross, and hope for the best?

Why?

Because Putin killed only 100,000 in Chechnya? Because Catherine the Great stopped 80 kilometers from Berlin? Not a safe bet: Catherine did not have nukes.

Behaving now as nothing will stop Putin, but for the application of overwhelming force is not safe, but it is the safest strategy. If Putin is completely crazy, overwhelming force won’t stop him. But nothing will anyway, especially after he has fully armed himself, as he is presently doing, Hitler-like.

If Putin is not completely crazy, the threat of overwhelming force will stop him.

Not trying to stop him, if he is not completely crazy, will certainly make Putin completely crazy. Be it completely crazy with greed.

As I tried to explain, Putin, like Hitler before him, and Napoleon, and many (not all) conquerors before him, has discovered that war unites the People behind him, and make all the People think as one, and the name of that one, is Putin. This is what I call the fascist instinct. It is crucial to enable a (relatively) weak primate, far from any tree, to conquer the Savannah and Steppe, heretofore ruled by formidable predators.

Putin’s rule has been a disaster. Thus he needs to activate the fascist instinct in the Russian People. Thus he needs war.

Thus, if pacifists give him Ukraine, Putin will be deeply unhappy: he did not want Ukraine. He wanted war. War gives him fascism, thus the ability to rule. In this light, the reign of Louis XIV of France can be better understood.

After millions of Protestants had left France, and France has lost considerable territory in continuous wars, Louis XIV of France, the self-described “Sun-King” (“Roi-Soleil”) feebly bleated that his advisers had poorly advised him about Protestants: it had not been a good idea to have harassed, despoiled, and submit them to “Dragonades” (occupation of Protestant households by elite troops called “Dragons”).

However, Louis XIV, a dedicated fascist, hater of the “Republic”, lied (as fascists are wont to). Louis XIV had continual wars, and particularly against innocent civilians, because he needed continual wars, because that justified his fascist, personal rule.

Louis XIV was not afraid of war, he was afraid of peace, because peace meant the Parliament may want to re-establish the Republic again (which is what the “Fronde” was all about).

Napoleon faithfully executed the same scheme (because De Sade, one of the Revolution’s principals, had criticized the aggressive, expansionist war making, Napoleon put him in a mental asylum).

The same exact mechanism caused the First World War, with the Kaiser playing the role of Louis XIV. The Jews played the role of the Protestants under Louis XIV.

Soon Stalin would institute continual internal war, to justify the dictatorship of the Politburo which he headed. Hitler repeated the method.

So are we condemned to repeat history? Not so, if we learn how it works.

Putin got his 85% approval rating, from his activation of the fascist instinct.

However, the very latest polls show that the Russian People is getting wary of Putin’s protest of innocence about the war: 70 percent stated that Russia was assisting the breakaway rebels of Donetsk and Luhansk. Good. However, the same polling show that now most Russians think that establishing “Novorossia” (“New Russia”) is a good idea.

In other words, Russians are turning t the Dark Side: they know their dictator is making war in a foreign nation, but they are starting to approve the invasion of that nation, and its annexation.

Why?

Same story as what happened in the German collective psyche after Hitler annexed the Republic of Austria. Then the Germans became favorable to other annexations (Czechoslovakia, some Baltic states, much of Poland, etc.) Because Hitler had proven to be a winner.

As far as the Russians are concerned, Putin is a winner, so he has got to be right. Not right on the facts, but morally right: Ukraine, like Georgia or Moldova, is Russian property.

Want to turn Putin into a loser? Do it on the battlefield. And do like him: play dirty, send efficient weapons stealthily first.

Patrice

CONTRADICTION HAS NO MORAL FORCE.

IT WOULD HELP IF WESTERN CIVILIZATION DETECTED THE CRIMES OF ITS PAST, WHILE CONDEMNING CONTEMPORARY CRIMES.
***

“Mugabe must go, and Mbeki must consider the blood on his hands that tarnishes his legacy.” points out Roger Cohen (Passages, NYT/IHT, July 2, 2008). Mugabe is the dictator of Zimbabwe, and Mbeki the president of South Africa. South Africa could get rid of Mugabe in 24 hours if it wanted (and the UN would approve). Ladislav Nemec (from California) then cogently commented that: “The French did not mind the catastrophe of Napoleonic wars and [Napoleon’s] tomb in Paris is very elaborate, indeed. Glorious days, many of them still believe. And it all happened some 200 years ago and, no doubt, the French consider themselves VERY smart.” (Passages).

This is an excellent and crucial observation about protesting against fascist dictatorships: as long as some fascist dictatorships are admired, why to discriminate against others? What’s good for France would be bad for Zimbabwe? Why?

Was Mugabe as bad for Zimbabwe as Napoleon was for Europe? Certainly not. Certainly Mugabe did not come out of his country and destroy most of Africa, as Napoleon did with most of Europe (from Portugal to Moscow).

Recently millions of French people, expressing a revelation that came belatedly, loudly voiced their view of Napoleon as the enslaver, murderer and dictator that he really was. In particular, French people of mixed African descent have taken note of Napoleon horribly racist slave policies. Napoleon was opposed in his times, and he thought smart to murder, or imprison to death, several of his opponents, in ignominious ways. In modern times, the European Court of Justice would have Napoleon arrested and tried as a criminal. Napoleon’s guilt was clearer than the one of the ex Serbian president.

It’s philosophically intolerable that Napoleon is revered as much as he is (and not just by the French!). From the modern point of view, it’s hard to find anything good about him. He was a good general, true, but he had superlative troops, by far the best in the world at the time (and they made a huge difference, for example at the battle of Austerlitz, where the dogged defense, house to house of forced-marched-through-the-night, rushed-in soldiers held the center miraculously. Austerlitz is viewed as Napoleon’s greatest victory, but clearly, without superlatively experienced and motivated soldiers, he would not have won). After nominating himself “emperor”, he had become a casus belli all by himself.

Napoleon killed two million Frenchmen in useless wars, and few millions more other Europeans besides. Perhaps his most unique achievement was to have Cossacks parading in Paris after his fall.

So why the great Napoleonic cult? At first sight, because Napoleon destroyed the Revolution. That is what the French upper bourgeoisie and the exiled aristocrats wanted. Napoleon was their mindless little tool, as he idiotically went around seeking glory in all the wrong places and the most criminal ways.

In the aftermath of his ill fated reign, the plutocratic French upper class was able to reestablish a lot of the old order, even the monarchy (under a constitutional form). The Napoleonic cult has been a highly successful form of class propaganda. The lower classes were made to revere the one who had precisely reestablished their oppression and culled their numbers, besides mauling the ideals of the French revolution. This class analysis is far from the whole motivation for the cult, though, as we will explain.

Nowadays, if French intellectuals wanted to do something particularly useful, they could reconsider French history in a more critical way. It would make it easier for all of us to understand the mechanisms of the adulation despots bring forth in their subjects.

Another atrocious French dictator, astoundingly admired to this day, was Louis XIV. Louis destroyed lots of Germany, and organized horrible persecutions against non Catholics inside France (after violating the Edict of Nantes of his own grandfather, Henri IV, who had put an end to the religious wars). France lost hundreds of thousands of her best citizens (Some fled to Germany and their descendants would roll back in at general’s rank with the Nazi tanks in 1940! Some French Protestants fled all the way to South Africa, and planted grapes there). Millions more Frenchmen suffered twenty years of “Dragonades” (occupation of parts of France by the King’s “Dragons”, who lived on the land, oppressing, raping, stealing, terrorizing non Catholics, in the hope they would flee the country too). At the end of his life, after a seventy-two year reign, agonizing with gangrene over three weeks, Louis XIV confided that what hurt him the most was how much his subjects suffered (from poverty, famine, etc.). He accused bad advisers, we have to accuse the lack of democracy.

Why the admiration for Louis XIV? Differently from Napoleon, he accomplished some positive things. But, overall, it’s the grip of the fascist instinct that mostly fuels the admiration little men have for great, bad, mean, sun like leaders doing great, bad, mean, glorious horrors. Louis XIV played it like a violin, and some listen to his melody to this day.

Fundamentally men are glorified monkeys, and monkeys are conditioned to follow great, bad, mean, glorious leaders who allow them access to their daily water by the terror they inspire in all beasts alike, and the predators waiting in the shadows. People talk about “glory” to evoke that timeless feeling of being part of an all triumphant mob. It’s the essence of the fascist instinct. Napoleon has been loved throughout the world and history for that extremely wrong reason, and a few others, even worse. Time has come to expose those reasons, to get rid of them. Those same reasons help provide Mugabe’s goons with a lot of intimate pleasure. 

As long as a people as self admiring for their own smartness as the French cannot finalize a verdict of culpability about Louis XIV and Napoleon quite a bit in the way they did about Hitler, there is not enough enlightenment. All the more since there was a genealogy of ideas from Louis XIV, Napoleon, the Kaiser Wilhelm, and finally Hitler. The French admirers of Napoleon were, and are, Nazis at heart in the most important respect of the adulation for brute, overwhelming, lethal force. Amusingly, when Napoleon attacked Russia, a lot of his army was German (and included 20,000 Prussians sent by the Prussian state). The Nazis, self consciously, viewed themselves as the heirs of Napoleon, and tried to do better than him. 

Besides a deeper psychoanalysis, what is also lacking is some moral coherence in the analysis of history. Absent moral coherence, our civilization looks hypocritical and racist. Simply because, as proven by the facts behind this sort of incoherence, it is.
***

Patrice Ayme.
Tyranosopher.