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Napoleon’s troublesome legacy
On the bicentenary of the former emperor’s death, those in France’s overseas territories remember a tyrant who reversed the abolition of slavery
REUNION, FRANCE, REUTERS
When France commemorates the bicentenary of Napoleon Bonaparte’s death today, Aurelie Ramassamy will remember a tyrant who reversed the abolition of slavery rather than an emperor often lionized as a hero for his battlefield triumphs.
Like most Creoles on the Indian Ocean island of Reunion, one of France’s overseas departments, Ramassamy is a descendant of slaves. Family folklore says her mother’s ancestors were shipped to the island to labor on its coffee and sugar plantations.
9 April 2021
An immigrant worker rises at four in the morning, stuffs newspaper in his boots to keep out snow, and goes to a backbreaking job where he must ignore the names he’s called. A mother demands to know what other children said to her child at the playground; the child refuses because “those words burn my heart”. A refugee who spent 100 days at sea with the hope of breaking old chains laments that “in La Rochelle harbor I broke my dreams”. Another immigrant worker, whose papers have been stolen, works off the books and is treated “like a dog” by churchgoers who “call themselves Christian”.