Word: napoleonism
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...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 Armée 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...
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...
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...
...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 à Napoléon. In j'accusé 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...
...more widely held view was expressed by an Ajaccio lycée history teacher, André 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...