Napoleon died 200 years ago, 5 May 1821, on the island od St Helena.
He was 51 years old.

“To concede nothing to those who would erase the past because it does not suit their image of the present.” That was the purpose of the speech France’s President, Emmanuel Macron, delivered last week to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the death of Napoleon Bonaparte.

You are not responsible for France’s past,” Macron told the students, “nor are you its guardians. It comes to you as an inheritance, without a testament attached,” he went on to say, using a phrase every French student would recognise as a quotation from the poet and resistance hero, Rene Char. “You may choose to love it; and so too you may choose to criticise it.”

“But first of all” — and here he paused for emphasis — “you must learn it”: which means “facing it directly and as a whole”, imbued “with a love of knowledge” and “resisting the temptation to judge yesterday by today”. That is the foremost duty “a free people” owes its ancestors who secured the freedoms it enjoys — but it is also a free people’s greatest privilege, because it is only by “understanding its past” that it can freely “forge its future”. And just as those who shred their map are condemned to lose their way, so those who abandon historical truth are condemned to forsake their liberty.

Whether Macron’s young audience grasped the significance of his words no one can say. But they would surely resonate in China, where — under regulations extended just a few weeks ago to Hong Kong — any mention in a classroom of the horrors of the Great Leap Forward or of the Cultural Revolution is severely punished. Nor would their meaning be lost on students in Turkey, as the Erdogan regime’s ongoing “reform” of the history curriculum slowly but surely removes all references to the secular, modernising principles of Kemal Ataturk, while portraying the country’s difficulties as the result of an incessant struggle against “infidels” and “crusaders”.

And the relevance of Macron’s speech would have been readily apparent in Russia, too, where schools have, since 2016, been forced by the aptly named “Ministry of Enlightenment” to adopt a “uniform” history curriculum based on “the one true history” — a history that downplays the crimes of the KGB and promotes Vladimir Putin’s territorial expansionism.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/national-curriculum-we-should-grasp-...