Claude Ribbe is back! As the bicentenary of the death of Napoleon Bonaparte is announced on May 5, the spoilsport resurfaces. To those who do not know him, Claude Ribbe is to imperial celebrations what the Prussian Blücher was to Waterloo: the one who thwarts plans. As an express fact, the writer released, the next day, at Tallandier’s, a biography of General Dumas, Alexandre’s father, who inspired the character of Porthos in The three Musketeers.
This half-breed, son of a slave from Saint-Domingue and of a Norman marquis, whose real name is Thomas Alexandre Davy de La Pailleterie, was the victim of what must be called, at the risk of anachronism, the politics of racial exclusion of Napoleon, banishing “Any officer or soldier of color”. The one who had distinguished himself in the revolutionary wars, earning there the nickname of “Black Devil”, was thus driven out of the army in 1802. Suffice to say that this book is intended as a paving stone in the commemorative pond.
The 66-year-old writer is a repeat offender. In 2005, he had already made growls growl. As the anniversary of the Battle of Austerlitz was being prepared, he had published a burning fire, baptized Napoleon’s Crime (Private ed., 2005, republished in 2013 at Recherches Midi). On the cover, a photo of Hitler meditating in front of the Emperor’s tomb at Les Invalides in 1940. Inside, a charge against Napoleon, accused of being, by his repressive methods, the precursor of the Nazi Führer.
Emergence of another memory
Historians had strangled each other. The criticism had been fierce. But Claude Ribbe pointed to a neglected, even watered down aspect of this agitated period: the one who was still consul had, in 1802, reestablished slavery, abolished by a decree of the Convention in 1794. His emissaries had repressed with unheard-of violence, in Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), those who tried to oppose it.
The manuscript had had some success. Published when the country was experiencing riots in the suburbs and a generation from immigration was trying to impose its own sensitivity on the history of France, this book participated in the emergence of another memory. Today, the author does not deny his point, to its excess. “It was a pamphlet, I assume it, he assures. Bonaparte was guilty of a crime against humanity. Faced with denial, we had to cut things down, like Napoleon, so that we don’t come back to it. Today, we can no longer talk about the character without mentioning the reestablishment of slavery. “
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