The French Fuhrer: Genocidal Napoleon was as barbaric as Hitler, historian claims

[Copper]

Three days after the fall of France in 1940, Napoleon, lying in his marble tomb in Paris, received a visit from his greatest admirer.

Adolf Hitler, on his one and only visit to the French capital, made an unannounced trip to the tomb in Les Invalides.

In his white raincoat, surrounded by his generals, Hitler stood for a long time gazing down at his hero, his cap removed in deference.

He was said later to have described this moment as 'one of the proudest of my life'.

The next day, during his official sightseeing tour of Paris, Hitler again visited Napoleon's tomb to salute him.

Conscious that his hero was known to the world simply as Napoleon, Hitler boasted that he would not need a rank or title on his gravestone. 'The German people would know who it was if the only word was Adolf.'

Throughout the war, Hitler had sandbags placed around Napoleon's tomb to guard against bomb damage.

Wooden floorboards were laid across the marble floor of Les Invalides so that they would not be scarred by German jackboots.

Until recently, the French would have been incensed by any comparison between Napoleon and Hitler.

But to their rage and shame, new research has shown that France's greatest hero presided over mass atrocities which bear comparison with some of Hitler's worst crimes against humanity.

These reassessments of Napoleon have caused anguish in France. Top politicians backed out of official ceremonies to mark what was possibly Napoleon's greatest victory, the battle of Austerlitz, when Napoleon's Grande Armee defeated the combined armies of Austria and Russia in just six hours, killing 19,000 of their adversaries.

A street in Paris named Rue Richepanse (after Antoine Richepanse, a general responsible for atrocities in the Caribbean) has recently had its name changed to Rue Solitude.

During his reign as Emperor, concentration camps were set up and gas was used to massacre large groups of people.

There were hit squads and mass deportations. And all this happened 140 years before Hitler and the Holocaust.

Claude Ribbe, a respected historian and philosopher and member of the French government's human rights commission, has been researching Napoleon's bloodcurdling record for some years.

He accuses him of being a racist and an anti-Semite who persecuted Jews and reintroduced widespread slavery just a few years after it had been abolished by the French government.

The most startling of these findings, the attempted massacre of an entire population over the age of 12 by methods which included gassing them in the holds of ships, relate to the French Caribbean colony of Haiti at the turn of the 19th century.

In Ribbe's words, Napoleon, then First Consul, was the man who, for the first time in history, 'asked himself rationally the question how to eliminate, in as short a time as possible, and with a minimum of cost and personnel, a maximum of people described as scientifically inferior'.

Haiti around 1800 was the world's richest colony, a slave-powered export factory which produced almost two-thirds of the world's coffee and almost half its sugar.

The black slaves were lashed and beaten to work and forced to wear tin muzzles to prevent them from eating the sugar cane.

If the slaves were fractious, they were roasted over slow fires, or filled with gunpowder and blown to pieces.

When the slaves began to fight for their freedom, under the leadership of a charismatic African military genius called Toussaint L'Ouverture, Napoleon sent 10,000 crack troops under the command of his brother-inlaw, General Leclerc, to crush Toussaint and restore slavery.

In 1802, a vast programme of ethnic cleansing was put in place. Napoleon banned inter-racial marriages and ordered that all white women who'd had any sort of relationship with a black or mulatto (person of mixed race) be shipped to France.

He further commanded the killing of as many blacks in Haiti as possible, to be replaced by new, more docile slaves from Africa.

The French troops were under orders to kill all blacks over the age of 12. However, younger children were also killed - stabbed to death, put in sandbags and dropped into the sea.

The Haitians fought to the death for independence, which they finally declared in 1804.

Prisoners on both sides were regularly tortured and killed, and their heads were mounted on the walls of stockades or on spikes beside the roads.

Non-combatants, too, were raped and slaughtered. According to contemporary accounts, the French used dogs to rip black prisoners to pieces before a crowd at an amphitheatre.

Allegdly on Napoleon's orders, sulphur was extracted from Haitian volcanoes and burned to produce poisonous sulphur dioxide, which was then used to gas black Haitians in the holds of ships - more than 100,000 of them, according to records.

The use of these primitive gas chambers was confirmed by contemporaries. Antoine Metral, who in 1825 published his history of the French expedition to Haiti, writes of piles of dead bodies everywhere, stacked in charnel-houses.

'We varied the methods of execution,' wrote Metral. 'At times, we pulled heads off; sometimes a ball and chain was put at the feet to allow drowning; sometimes they were gassed in the ships by sulphur.

'When the cover of night was used to hide these outrages, those walking along the river could hear the noisy monotone of dead bodies being dropped into the sea.'

A contemporary historian, who sailed with the punitive expedition, wrote that: 'We invented another type of ship where victims of both sexes were piled up, one against the other, suffocated by sulphur.'

These were prison ships with gas chambers called etouffiers, or 'chokers', which asphyxiated the blacks, causing them terrible suffering.

Even at the time, there were French naval officers who were appalled at this savagery, claiming they would rather have braved a court martial than have forgotten the laws of humanity.

But from the Emperor's point of view, gassing was a way of cutting costs. Ships continued to transport prisoners out to sea to drown them, but corpses kept being washed up on beaches or tangled in ships' hulls.

Toussaint, who called himself the Black Napoleon, was kidnapped after accepting an invitation to parlay with a French general and shipped back to France in chains, where he died of pneumonia after being imprisoned in a cold stone vault.

Guadeloupe, an island to the east, suffered a similar fate to Haiti's.

Once again choosing not to recognise France's abolition of slavery, Napoleon in 1802 promoted a comrade of his, Antoine Riche-panse, to the rank of General, and sent him with an expeditionary force of 3,000 men to put down a slave revolt on the island.

During his purge, General Richepanse slaughtered any men, women and children he encountered on his route to the capital. Then he worked through a plan of extermination apparently approved by the First Consul.

A military commission was set up to give what followed a veneer of legality. Some 250 'rebels' were shot in Guadeloupe's Victory Square. Another 500 were herded down to the beach and shot there.

Richepanse and Lacrosse, the former colonial governor now restored to power, thought of piling up the dead in vast mounds to intimidate the islanders, but gave up the plan for fear of starting a disease epidemic.

Instead, using a technique which the French were to copy during the Algerian War, they sent death squads into every part of Guadeloupe to track down farmers who were absent from their homes.

These men were treated as rebels. A bounty was promised for each black man captured, and the rebels were summarily shot or hanged. The ferocity of the repression sparked another uprising, which Lacrosse subdued with the most barbarous methods yet.

'Being hung is not enough for the crimes they have committed,' he said. 'It is necessary to cut them down alive and let them expire on the wheel [prisoners were bound to a cart wheel before having their arms and legs smashed with cudgels].

'The jails are already full: it is necessary to empty them as quickly as possible.' In this he was successful, hanging, garotting and burning the rebels and breaking their limbs on the wheel.

Lacrosse developed possibly the most fiendish instrument of slow execution ever created.

The prisoner was thrust into a tiny cage and had a razor-sharp blade suspended between his legs. In front of him was a bottle of water and bread, neither of which he could reach.

He was stood in stirrups, which kept him just above the blade, but if he fell asleep or his legs tired, he was sliced by the blade. Neither fast nor economical, it was pure sadism.

After four months in Guadeloupe, the French lost patience with the islanders, and the ferocity of their repression reached new heights.

Blacks with short hair were shot out of hand, since the expeditionary force considered short hair to be a sign of rebellion. Orders were given that 'the type of execution should set a terrifying example'.

The soldiers were encouraged 'to cut open insurgents, to strangle and to burn them'. French officers spoke proudly of creating 'torture islands'.

In a letter to Napoleon, his brother-in-law Leclerc wrote: 'It is necessary to destroy all the negroes of the mountain . . . do not leave children over the age of 12.'

Ribbe, in his work in progress, sees continual affinities between Napoleon and Hitler. He argues that many of Napoleon's actions were later echoed in Nazi Germany, right down to his enthusiasm for slavery reflecting the grim message 'Arbeit Macht Frei' ('Work Sets You Free'), which appeared over the gates of Auschwitz.

Napoleon, like Hitler, also used his own army like cannon fodder when the occasion demanded.

His retreat from Moscow in 1812 squandered the lives and courage of 450,000 soldiers of the Grande Armee; many of them were found frozen to death while embracing each other to harvest a last flicker of warmth, in what was one of the bitterest winters in living memory.

Nothing shows more clearly the contempt the Emperor showed for his minions than the bulletin announcing the destruction of his Army.

Napoleon blamed his horses and ended by declaring that his health had never been better.

As theatres for Napoleon's callousness, Haiti and Guadeloupe were too far away to attract much public notice, let alone condemnation.

Syria was a different matter. In the war between France and the Ottoman Empire (most of it modern-day Turkey), Napoleon led the siege of the ancient walled city of Jaffa, whose harbour he needed as a vital shelter for his fleet.

The city fell on the fourth day, whereupon Napoleon's troops ran amok through the town, slaughtering Christians, Jews and Muslims indiscriminately.

To escape the slaughter, part of the garrison locked themselves into a large keep.

Napoleon sent his officers, who negotiated their surrender and marched them back to the French camp.

Rations were short, so Napoleon now decided that he had been too magnanimous.

For three days he kept the 4,000 mostly Turkish prisoners with their arms tied behind their back; then the massacre began.

Somewhere between 2,500 and 4,000 men were slaughtered there and then, either by shooting them or by running them through with bayonets.

Shortly afterwards plague broke out, decimating the troops on both sides. With real courage, Napoleon led his general staff on a tour of the plague-infested hospitals.

It did not deter him from suggesting to the doctors that seriously ill French troops who could not be evacuated should be given a fatal dose of the opiate laudanum. The doctors forced him to back down.

From Jaffa, Napoleon marched to Acre, a city constructed on a peninsula and therefore impregnable, given that there was British control of the seas. Napoleon launched seven major assaults; each one failed. Marching back to Cairo, Napoleon left 2,200 of his troops dead, and 2,300 more seriously ill or wounded.

As far as Napoleon was concerned, these wounded were already dead men. Most of them he left behind, knowing that the Turks would cut off their heads as soon as his army left. They did their best to follow his retreat, crying out not to be abandoned.

They straggled along, their throats parched in the debilitating heat, which reduced their cries to a croak. Injured officers were thrown from their litters and left to die in the dunes.

Soldiers were abandoned in the cornfields, which were still smouldering in the devastation of crops and villages ordered by Napoleon. In all, some 5,000 Frenchmen lost their lives.

If Hitler learned any lessons from Napoleon, one must have been that victory required callousness, not just in the leader but in those around him.

'Like those working in the Nazi system, the French carrying out Napoleon's killing did so with little thought to morality,' Claude Ribbe says today. 'There was no sense of good or evil: it was just a matter of getting a difficult job done. In the end, the killing methods had to be efficient and cheap.'

So is Napoleon to be feted as a great leader or denounced as a dictator? A poll published in Le Figaro in 2005 found that nearly 40 per cent of Frenchmen regarded Napoleon as 'a dictator who had used all means to satisfy his thirst for power'.

However, considering what was done in Napoleon's name in Haiti and Guadeloupe, there is one memorial which deserves to be added.

Next to the unknown soldier at the Arc de Triomphe should be erected the Tomb of the Unknown Slave.

• Le Crime de Napoleon, by Claude Ribbe (Editions Priv & Egrave;).

[Steel God]

What is it with historians these days? Are they so indoctrinated with political correctness that they are no longer capable of viewing events through the lens of the age in which they occur? We are constantly bombarded with "historians" and "academics" who wish to go back 200 years and judge men, nations, and actions through the lens of the 21st century. We can agree that such things are horrible without putting on our holier than thou hats of the 21st century. To condemn Napoleon as a genocidal maniac because of Slave policies and programs he enacted in the closing years of the 18th century and the early years of the 19th century when the rest of the "civilized" world was doing likewise is revisionism, pure and simple. England did not abolish slavery until 1833, and did not emancipate until 1838. The French did abolish slavery in 1794 but it's during the height of the Revolution, and it, like so much else, was lost in the passions of excess the Revolution spawned. It was mad legal again in 1796, in large part because of the revolt in Haiti, which had been going on since 1791, three years before it was outlawed. Slavery in America was not abolished until 1865. Slavery in Brazil lasted until 1888! Slavery as a practice was a gruesome and horrible period in human history, and it wouldn't be stamped out completely on a national level until almost 100 years AFTER Napoleon. But to judge Napoleon for his treatment of slaves like he was acting in a vacuum is nonsense. He was a man of his age, and a man of genius.

Likewise, and perhaps more disturbing, is the effort to diminish the horror that is Hitler by comparing him to Napoleon. While Napoleon was a man of his age, and guilty of the crimes and excesses that the ages of empires produced, Hitler does not have that excuse. His dark dreams, while having their roots in another age, were committed in the middle of the 20th century, 100 years removed from European slavery and it's excesses. To attempt to drag Napoleon down to Hitler's level diminishes the horrors Hitler perpetrated as a goal of his nation and his government.

[fastphil]

Likewise, and perhaps more disturbing, is the effort to diminish the horror that is Hitler by comparing him to Napoleon. While Napoleon was a man of his age, and guilty of the crimes and excesses that the ages of empires produced, Hitler does not have that excuse. His dark dreams, while having their roots in another age, were committed in the middle of the 20th century, 100 years removed from European slavery and it's excesses. To attempt to drag Napoleon down to Hitler's level diminishes the horrors Hitler perpetrated as a goal of his nation and his government.

I'm sorry but Hitler does have that excuse. To say that Hilter was an aberation of his age, is somewhat overstating your case. How many died under Stalin's Pogroms, or Japan's rape of China? How many have died in Africa and Asia over colonial rule or fighting amongst themselves for power? What about the 'killing fields' in Cambodia? How many in Red China have died or been re-educated.
Do you remember 'Ethnic Cleansing' in Bosnia or Iraq? And what does this say for the countries that stood by and watched it all happen?
Man is still the 'Killer Angel'.:kill: and Hiltler was a product not an aberration.:(

[Justin MacDuro]

I think that he only did the same that others but in a large scale .
Here in spain there was concentration camps for gipsys , jewish and morish people and sometimes they were killed , forced to change his religion and way of life or just kicked from Spain . In Itali , Portugal , Rumania ,Germany , Russia , EEUU and more contries was the same , massacres and brutality to keep the control .

I think that the difference between Hitler and the past times (including Napoleon) are the stablishment of the Human rights , the democracy and liberty for all people .
As Steel God sais Napoleon was a man of his age and he just did things from that age .If we start to judge all past empires we will never found one of them with no crimes or horrors .

[Mikey_FGM]

Great Article Bootie,
Thanks for sharing.

A street in Paris named Rue Richepanse (after Antoine Richepanse, a general responsible for atrocities in the Caribbean) has recently had its name changed to Rue Solitude.

Interesting new name, Rue "Solitude".
Solitude: Isolation or seclusion.

Napoleon, then First Consul, was the man who, for the first time in history, 'asked himself rationally the question how to eliminate, in as short a time as possible, and with a minimum of cost and personnel, a maximum of people described as scientifically inferior'.

Sulphur was extracted from Haitian volcanoes and burned to produce poisonous sulphur dioxide, which was then used to gas black Haitians in the holds of ships - more than 100,000 of them, according to records.

If Hitler learned any lessons from Napoleon, one must have been that victory required callousness, not just in the leader but in those around him.

Beyond the colorful banners,
Beyond the pomp of the march,
Beyond the ecstasy of the ceremony,
Beyond the hypnotizing veil of propaganda,
Beyond the blatant lies of self serving historians,
The Truth.

Napoleon, Hitler, these are gross examples of what war requires of men: The denial of your humanity,
And the sacrifice of your will to the alter of Power.

These were not "Men of their Time".
These were Timeless men,
And their lives Meta-Metaphors for our own.

[Kingmaker]

HiHi

Can I suggest that what the article really demonstrates is Sloppy Historical reasoning and a shameless attempt at self glorification/Political correctness by the author Claude Ribbe (Looks like we have another ‘Roots’ here)

Hitler being a product of, and I use the term very loosely, ‘Western Civilisation’, would be well aware Genocidal ideology long before he ever heard of Napoleon, in fact his culture was/is immersed in it, one of the most widely read books of all time and a foundation stone for much European/Western thought is full of the extermination & enslavement of inferior beings, ie ‘the Bible’

Consider the actions of the Hebrew tribes, whereby the annihilation or enslavement of inferior tribes such as the ‘Canaanites’, ‘Moabites’, ‘Shuanammites’, ‘Ainthadaf#cksincefridaynightites’ was considered a ’Goodthing’, pleasing in the eyes of the Lord etc. etc. in fact being an ‘ite’ in those days didn’t seem to hold out great prospects for a healthy lifestyle at all! What a role-model for an unbalanced mind like Hitler.

The knowledge about the atrocities conducted during the Revolution/Napoleonic era has long been out there, albeit maybe not in such detail; which actually poses the question as to why it is now considered such a shocking revelation, dare I suggest it’s because the author is black?

Personal opinion, but I have always considered Napoleon to be a Dictator, brilliant field commander yes, Good guy No!

All the Best
Peter