Napoleon

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Napoleon Bonaparte was born in Ajaccio, on the island of Corsica, on Aug. 15, 1769. It was by chance that the future ruler of France was born a French citizen. His family had migrated to Corsica from the Italian mainland in the 16th century. The island had been transferred from the Republic of Genoa to France one year before Napoleon's birth. His christening name was Italian. It was spelled Napoleone Buonaparte. As a boy he hated the French, whom he considered oppressors of his native land. A History are two recent additions to the growing literature that testifies to this interest. Both books make fascinating reading. Laqueur's Fascism is a sweeping overview of the two paradigmatic cases of "historical fascism", fascist ...

... has strongly resurfaced recently because it was taken up by Francois Furet. The Passing of an Illusion is a brilliant essay, but not even the talent of this major historian, an expert on the French Revolution, whose recent death has left a great hiatus, can give weight to a theory which not only has worn badly but has generally been considered, everywhere except in German conservative circles, to be one more attempt to take Nazism out of German history. It is not true that fascism 'came into being as a reaction to communism', and it is difficult, for more than one reason, to imagine that there could have been a complicity between fascism and communism.(n50)

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