Napoleon Isn’t a Hero to Celebrate

Institutions in France should pay more attention to their country’s history of slavery instead of honoring an icon of white supremacy.

March 18, 2021

By Marlene L. Daut

Professor Daut teaches American and African diaspora studies at the University of Virginia. She is the author of “Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism.”

After a year in which statues of enslavers and colonizers were toppled, defaced or taken down across Europe and the United States, France has decided to move in the opposite direction. The year 2021 is being hailed by many museums and institutions in the country as the “Year of Napoleon” to commemorate France’s biggest tyrant, an icon of white supremacy, Napoleon Bonaparte, who died 200 years ago on the island of Saint-Helena on May 5, 1821.

Dozens of events are planned in his honor. The largest will happen this spring, when the Réunion des Musées Nationaux opens its Exposition Napoléon in Paris.

As a Black woman of Haitian descent and a scholar of French colonialism, I find it particularly galling to see that France plans to celebrate the man who restored slavery to the French Caribbean, an architect of modern genocide, whose troops created gas chambers to kill my ancestors.