''Napoleon's Crimes: A Blueprint for Hitler'' (french: Le Crime de Napoléon) is a book published in 2005 by French writer

Claude Ribbe Claude Ribbe (born 13 October 1954) is a French writer, activist and filmmaker. Early life and education Ribbe was born in Paris and is alumnus of the Ecole normale superieure. Career Ribbe has specialised in the history of colonialism in the ...

, who is of Caribbean origin. In the book, Ribbe advances the thesis that

Napoleon Bonaparte Napoleon Bonaparte ; it, Napoleone Bonaparte, ; co, Napulione Buonaparte. (born Napoleone Buonaparte; 15 August 1769 – 5 May 1821), later known by his regnal name Napoleon I, was a French military commander and political leader wh ...

during the Haitian Revolution ''first'' used

gas chambers A gas chamber is an apparatus for killing humans or other animals with gas, consisting of a sealed chamber into which a poisonous or asphyxiant gas is introduced. Poisonous agents used include hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide. History ...

as a method of mass execution, 140 years before

Hitler Adolf Hitler (; 20 April 188930 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was dictator of Nazi Germany, Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his death in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the le ...

and the

Nazis Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in N ...

. His accusations in the book has caused a minor political and academic storm when it was published, and its premise remains under contention to this day. In the early 19th century, Napoleon had reinstated

slavery Slavery and enslavement are both the state and the condition of being a slave—someone forbidden to quit one's service for an enslaver, and who is treated by the enslaver as property. Slavery typically involves slaves being made to perf ...

in the

French colonies From the 16th to the 17th centuries, the First French colonial empire stretched from a total area at its peak in 1680 to over , the second largest empire in the world at the time behind only the Spanish Empire. During the 19th and 20th centuri ...

of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) and Guadeloupe were hit by a series of massive slave rebellions. Napoleon, as the person responsible for the reinstatement of slavery after the First French Republic had abolished it, was in charge of putting the slave revolts down, and he did so with brutal efficiency. Ribbe claims that some of Napoleon's men refused to do as they were ordered, and then later wrote journals describing the

massacre A massacre is the killing of a large number of people or animals, especially those who are not involved in any fighting or have no way of defending themselves. A massacre is generally considered to be morally unacceptable, especially when per ...

. From these passages, he claims that Napoleon's troops burnt sulphur (readily collected from nearby

volcano A volcano is a rupture in the Crust (geology), crust of a Planet#Planetary-mass objects, planetary-mass object, such as Earth, that allows hot lava, volcanic ash, and volcanic gas, gases to escape from a magma chamber below the surface. On Ear ...

es) to make sulphur dioxide gas, which is extremely poisonous. This would have been effective at helping to quell the rebelling Caribbean slaves. Ribbe's most controversial accusation is that the holds of ships were used as makeshift gas chambers; and that up to 100,000 black slaves were murdered in them. These revelations are still in considerable academic dispute, but when the book was published, the French establishment was quick to condemn his allegations. The French newspaper ''

France Soir ''France Soir'' ( en, France Evening) was a French newspaper that prospered in physical format during the 1950s and 1960s, reaching a circulation of 1.5 million in the 1950s. It declined rapidly under various owners and was relaunched as a popul ...

'', a populist tabloid, for instance, published a stinging editorial, calling the claims of the book insane. The French historian Pierre Branda wrote a critical analysis of Ribbe's book, stating that it is mainly based on suppositions and that the sources are few and often quoted and referred to with heavy omissions. The book was written in a context of social tension for the bicentenary of Austerlitz and in the same timeframe as the Affaire Olivier Grenouilleau, where the author is strongly implicated. Jérôme Gautheret, in ''

Le Monde ''Le Monde'' (; ) is a French daily afternoon newspaper. It is the main publication of Le Monde Group and reported an average circulation of 323,039 copies per issue in 2009, about 40,000 of which were sold abroad. It has had its own website si ...

'', considers that « ''Le Crime de Napoléon'' n’est pas un livre d’histoire » "is not a history book" and describes it as « charge polémique dirigée contre les « historiographes officiels » "a polemical charge directed against the "official historiographers"" and a "pamphlet" that does not really contribute to a “critical re-reading of the colonial fact”. Nicolas Lebourg denounces “this type of anachronism, ..describing the slave trade as a Holocaust in wedges”.
Nicolas Lebourg, lesinrocks.com, 18 janvier 2013

References

* *A newspaper report
Napoleon's genocide 'on a par with Hitler'
appeared in the '' Daily Telegraph'' in late 2005 about the controversy. Retrieved July 2006 *Une thèse montée de toutes pièces: ''Le Crime de Napoléon'' de Claude Ribbe (French) http://www.napoleon.org/fr/salle_lecture/articles/files/critiqueribbe_branda_decembre2005.asp

External links

Napoléon Bonaparte
- article on Haitian history wiki 19th century in France 2005 non-fiction books Pamphlets Napoleonic Wars books Human rights abuses in Haiti Books about the Haitian Revolution {{poli-philo-book-stub

See also

References

External links