A Bad Case of Napoleonomania

GOD was bored by him," Victor Hugo once remarked of Napoleon. But the French certainly do not share that feeling. Despite devaluation of the franc, France this week celebrates the 200th anniversary of Bonaparte's birth, gripped by an unprecedented outbreak of Napoleonomania. Traveling by ship and plane to Napoleon's Corsican hometown of Ajaccio (pop. 50,000), more than 200,000 tourists will enjoy fireworks and street dancing, hear President Georges Pompidou deliver the bicentennial address and watch 3,500 French legionnaires, dressed as the Emperor's grognards (grumpy veterans), parade through the spruced-up city.

The Ajaccio festivities are the peak of the celebrations. But every day in 1969 is a Nappy birthday, marked by Napoleonic exhibitions, costume parades, festivals, commemorative ceremonies, solemn Masses or pilgrimages. In one recent week, six major Napoleonic art shows opened in Paris and the suburbs alone. French TV has scheduled no fewer than 80 programs about the Emperor. Some 100 books on Napoleon will be published during the year. Paul Ferrandi, director of Corsica House in Paris, says: "Next to Jesus Christ, Napoleon Bonaparte is the most written-about subject in the world."

The merchandisers are busy, too. A bottle of brandy named for Napoleon is opened with a corkscrew bearing the head of Bonaparte. Napoleon comes in dolls, lampshades, vases, bumper stickers, two-foot-square postcards, cuff links and assorted junk. A cheese manufacturer is distributing 10 million color pictures of Grande Armee heroes. Paris hairdressers decreed the N line: a lock dangling over the forehead. For three dollars, one may acquire a replica of the Emperor's will on pseudo parchment with an imitation red seal. Says an official of the Bonapartist political party that has ruled Ajaccio for over a century: "When we Corsicans put our right hand inside our coat like the Emperor, it's on our heart. Others are feeling for their wallet."

Foreigners are making the most of Napoleon too. The Austrians produce huge red, green and gold candles in the form of the imperial eagle. The Spanish are forging Napoleon's "battle sword" at Toledo--for sale in France, since he was never very popular in Spain. The British fabricate "Napoleon soap," with a color reproduction inside of David's famous painting of the Emperor on a horse. The soap shrinks, of course, but the portrait of Napoleon stays. "Imagine being able to wash your hands with Napoleon," exults Xavier Moreschi, the chief Corsican commercializer of the bicentennial in Paris, who is already actively preparing the celebration of the 150th anniversary of Napoleon's death in 1971. "Sure, they get indignant about that back home in Ajaccio, but a guy who can sell soap when he has been dead almost 150 years must be somebody."

Despite this Napoleonomania, Frenchmen are divided over this most famous Frenchman. Conservatives and Catholics admire Napoleon as the man who ended revolutionary chaos., transformed France into a modern state, reopened the churches, established the bourgeoisie as the ruling class. Communists praise him for destroying feudalism throughout Europe. On the other hand, royalists, socialists, schoolteachers and intellectuals despise him. Royalists regard the self-made Emperor as a "usurper." The others consider him the betrayer of the revolution, a bloodthirsty tyrant whose invasions of Spain and Russia decimated French youth.

"The tone of the controversy was violent from the beginning," says Napoleonic Scholar Jean Tulard. "Even before Napoleon created his own golden legend, his opponents had created the black legend of Napoleon." Two socialist-minded French historians, ex-Naval Officer Louis de Villefosse and his wife Janine Bouissonouse, attack Napoleon ferociously in a recently published book, L'Opposition `a Napoleon. In j'accuse tones, they condemn Napoleon for "reestablishing slavery in the [French] colonies and the black slave trade. We could go as far as to charge him with racism and fascism. No, decidedly, it is not respect for law that he taught Europe, but the religion of force. He was fundamentally antidemocratic. Napoleon's wars of liberation degenerated into wars of conquest. He largely created 19th century nationalism."

A more widely held view was expressed by an Ajaccio lycee history teacher, Andre Fazi: "All things considered, Napoleon's balance sheet seems positive. I'll admit, though, that Bonaparte the revolutionary Consul was more admirable than Napoleon the Emperor. As somebody said, they should have killed Napoleon at the foot of a statue of Bonaparte."

Protesting his final exile to St. Helena, Napoleon declared: "I appeal to history." Last week a guide in Napoleon's birthplace in Ajaccio, taking some liberties with that history, described a movable plank in the floor as "the trap door through which Napoleon had to escape from his admirers when he returned from Egypt." One visitor pointed out that on an earlier visit he had been told Napoleon had used the trap door to escape his enemies, who burned down the house. The guide agreed. "Yes, that's what we used to say, but they've changed our text."

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