Pour Napoléon
Pour Napoléon
Thierry Lentz
Publisher: PERRIN (March 11, 2021)
Language: French
Paperback: 224 pages
ISBN: 978-2262094515
Tired of it! Tired of these teams of the aggressiveness, the gripe and the discontent against Napoleon! The rant of an angry historian. Exasperated by the controversies that arise all the time about Napoleon, particularly relating to slavery, the patriarchy, his dictatorship or the wars that the emperor waged, Thierry Lentz responds to them in this well-argued essay, with a lively and personal tone. Twenty very lively chapters pulverize the false trials, based for the most part on ignorance and anachronism, sometimes on ideological blindness and self-righteousness, even hatred of France and its history, before which politicians bend too often. Above all, the impeccable historian, without systematically defending Napoleon, recalls the decisive and lasting role played by the Consulate and the Empire in the construction of contemporary France, even in our present and our intimacy. Yes, Napoleon lives in us, and the French, as a whole, are not mistaken, who recognize in him a national hero, before and alongside Charles de Gaulle.
Perhaps Thiers had a better understanding of Napoleon after, as Minister of the Interior in 1834, putting down rioting by silk workers in Lyons with artillery-with some 400-900 casualties, heading "the Party of Order" in 1848 and crushig the Commune in 1871.