How is Napoleon viewed today in France?

[Verbose]

Well it is very relevant in fact. I won't go into details here but removing history for maths and sport is bound to create generation of idiots.

Tbh, I don't think people up to highschool are that busy that they can be spared some hours of history. It's a joke. Furthermore, i will say that's because the majority of people have no freaking idea about where they come from that the nationalists have an open way...

Good thing u aren't serious about modernity... because that's the oldest joke that can be.

Oh I fully agree lack of history has the capacity to turn individuals and nations into morons.

Am a bit confused that you might think I'm not serious about modernity however?

 

[-Perceval-]

I must say I was surprised too... tbh I don't believe it.

It was taught until recently at least (left highschool in 99 and saw this subject for sure somewhere in the process). How is Louis XIV that politicaly uncorrect that he can be removed from history books (not saying he was a saint either, but if u don't talk about him, u talk about what?)? Vercingetorix and Clovis aren't french, but uncorrect? (how can a french understand why he got zillions of kings named Louis if he doesn't know about Clovis???)

you don't believe it?
http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-fr...-nos-enfants-n-apprennent-plus-au-college.php

hope your translator will give you a good translation!

I know that clovis is frank and vercingetorix gaul(like caesar is not italian and otto von bismark not "german" but prussian") but still they take a great place in french history and culture, excatly like charlemagne. But i agree with you when you say that it's stupid to don't know clovis when you're sutuddying french kings. In fact i just don't understand our education minister.

I know that Diderot, Montesquieu and Voltaire gave a lot to french history, but there's also other things in our history, The influence of Napoleon is enormous(creation of the code civil by example) not only in france but in all europe. Seems like the government want to remove everything in the french history who don't fit with the actual ideology.

Personnally i think that history should stay neutral; Napoleon, Louis XIV, the crusades, the chevalry etc.. should stay in the programm. Each personn make his opinion on the subject, this is called freedom, a word who seems more and more forgotten in france.

 

[Plotinus]

I would say that skipping Napoleon, or anyone else of comparable stature, is problematic not because people should learn about him in particular but because it makes the study of history too fragmented. In Britain, at least, children tend to be taught certain periods of history in great detail and others are completely omitted. Hence the common charge that secondary-level History consists of nothing but Tudors and Hitler. In a rare moment of lucidity, Michael Gove has said that the History curriculum ought to give pupils an overview of everything, so that they can fit the more detailed studies into context, and I think that's exactly right. It's hard to see why either the Tudors or Hitler are important if you don't have at least a bird's eye conception of history in general that you can slot them into. No doubt that conception will be largely artificial and, I'm sure, dreadfully Whiggish, but it's better than nothing. For that reason, I would have thought that everyone should be taught at least who Napoleon was and what, roughly, he did, as part of a general study of the story of Europe. If Napoleon is being omitted from French syllabuses, it's bad because it's symptomatic of a neglect of the overview, not because the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century is more essential than any other. That's how I see it, anyway.

 

[RRRaskolnikov]

@Perceval: tx for the link (though no translator needed, I am a french )

What can I say, I am speechless. This sets some kind of record. And Sarkozy was praised for his "Bonapartisme" when elected... haha the irony.

@Verbose: sorry I missread you. You were sarcastic but serious. Well imo, modernity is bag which you fill with whatever is usefull for your current agenda. I am sure people were talking about it 2000 years ago. So it's kinda sad to do things based only on it. My pov though.

edit: xpost, @Plotinus: well apparently now the french program isn't fragmented, it has holes worth six centuries...

 

[Ergo Sum]

The figaro article is an editorial critical of the removal of many of these French leaders for more time for world history in cinqieme and sixieme, which for the Americans out there is 7th-8th grade. It's well-argued but I think it would be more informative if we knew the other curriculum changes in France. If, for instance, they're replacing part of french history with some more world history in cinqieme and sixieme and making up with it for more french history later on that might be valuable...learning history later may mean they have a more nuanced/valuable understanding of it...

I might try and fish up an article outlining the curriculum changes and not just focusing on one, maybe you know more about them Raskolnikov?

 

[RRRaskolnikov]

@Ergo Sum: Well, this was part of a bigger reform (I read some more here, the web site of the minister, I didn't find much about it). But actually it seems made to ease reorientation and improve later specialisation of students. Thus it appears that general teaching have been concentrated in the first years. For instance, scientists classes don't do any history at all in the last year of the "lycée" (high-school equivalent I guess) but do a bit more than previously in the first years.

I will try to find more articles.

 

[Marla_Singer]

Well, let's just say the hard cold truth : England won.

We know that History is taught by the winners. And the victory of England over Europe has been complete. It's really interesting to compare French and English articles related to French History in this regard. Generally there are some French resistance, but ultimately, the English version always wins.

As I've told earlier in this thread, it's really hard after two centuries to understand Napoleon considering how Europe evolved since then. If things happened differently, the continent would be totally different. For the best or the worst we will never know, but it would be drastically different. And we don't live in this world... so it's kind of logical Napoleon disappears as a myth.

What is undisputable is that France started to become a secondary power in 1815. And that's the most obvious heritage Napoleon left to the nation. Even the concept of "Nation" in itself, as it prevailed during the French Revolution, can no longer be understood nowadays!

 

[Dachs]

We know that History is taught by the winners. And the victory of England over Europe has been complete. It's really interesting to compare French and English articles related to French History in this regard. Generally there are some French resistance, but ultimately, the English version always wins.

From the point of view of an American who has been frequently taught (in secondary education and even graduate-level courses) that Napoleon was a force for, variously, the Enlightenment, the "good" kind of revolution, opposition to the "Old Regimes" of Europe, an espouser of liberté, égalité, fraternité, a force for United Europe against the nation of shopkeepers, a true genius and hero, and so on, this looks like a gross overstatement along the lines of people whining about how horrible Stalin was and how "everybody" seems to think he was Less Bad than Hitler.

Through his memoirs - and, indirectly, Talleyrand's, which are equally full of ouright fabrications - Napoleon successfully fooled much of the world into thinking he was a Force for Progress. In the annals of military history, at the very least, this is an extremely well documented phenomenon - Napoleon-as-modernizing-force (and by extension, Good Thing) and Napoleon-as-brilliant-general (and by extension, Great Man of History) dominated the scholarly narrative well into the 1980s, and has been hard to eradicate even up to the modern day. Hell, there is a great deal of "Whig military history" involved; Napoleon ostensibly introduced new concepts e.g. total war, therefore was a proper forward thinker, therefore must have been pretty chill. There was no really serious clash of "English" and "French" narratives here; military authors including the noted Swiss Antoine Henri de Jomini, the noted Prussian Carl von Clausewitz, the noted Austrian Karl von Habsburg, and the noted American Dennis Hart Mahan (half of whom fought against Napoleon, one of whom deserted from his army, and one of whom served in battle against the British in 1812-4) all published extensively on how Napoleon put his stamp on military history. All described him in near-reverential terms.

 

[Marla_Singer]

That's very informative Dachs and thank you for that, but it doesn't change anything in my statement.

Napoleon was just one man. And no matter what, no man makes History alone, there was a people behind and ideas behind. Napoleon's defeat wasn't only his own. He has brought with him a whole vision of the future. And the fact Napoleon himself didn't believe in it is quite obvious (as has proven his conduct from 1804 till the end), but it doesn't change that fact.

The perception Europe had of itself drastically changed after 1815. The construction of strong Nation-States based on specific cultures and languages has been the ultimate outcome of these events. Somehow, the idea of German or Italian unifications are born under Napoleon, and Spain, Poland or the Netherlands discovered themselves as nations at the same time. In visiting Europe, it's really striking how strong is Napoleon's impact in the awakening of nations all over Europe.

That's actually the reason why I believe Napoleon has been more signficant in the rest of Europe than he has been in France.

 

[Dachs]

Wait, what does that have to do with what you originally said?

 

[Marla_Singer]

Another thing which must be told is that the France which exists nowadays is demographically a dwarf compared to the France of that time.

If France's population had grown at the average rate of the rest of Europe. There would be 200 million French people nowadays. That's important in order to understand the ambitions of the Frenchmen at the time, and the fear it has raised elsewhere.

However, it is also important to understand that the France of that time was a lot more heterogenous than nowadays : the French kingdom was made of Flemish, Germanic, Celtic, Basque people and a dozen other Latin based cultural groups. It was a country of multiple languages with strong different roots. And even nowadays, we can actually wonder why and how Alsacians from Strasbourg and Catalans from Perpignan feel French, despite belonging to drastically different cultural spheres.

That's in this context that was born during the revolution the concept of Nation as the universal community of citizens emancipating from Monarchs. A concept that History has proven as a failure, maybe even a fraud. However, that failure or fraud has still survived in France throughout the 19th century, and eventually slowly died untill the final debacle of 1940.

It doesn't remain much of this as France actually "normalized" its status in Europe: slowly becoming a nation state like the others based on a dominating culture and language like the others. And its demographical decline has been the major contributor to that trend.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Not every monarch in history conquers just for the sake of it, even when the option is on the table.

Which seems to be why Napoleon stands out so much.