France sidesteps Battle of Waterloo bicentenary
The Prince of Wales is expected to attend, along with a Bonaparte lookalike, 5000 costumed soldiers and 200,000 spectators, but France has decided to keep its distance from next month’s bicentenary of the battle of Waterloo.
Only the French ambassador to Belgium is due to represent Paris at the re-enactments and services on the battlefield in the Brussels suburb on June 18, officials confirmed yesterday.
Critics have deplored the effective boycott of the commemoration of the nation’s most notorious military debacle. Two centuries on from Bonaparte’s last stand, France remains sensitive over the mixed legacy of its great national hero.
Yves Vancer Cruysen, a Waterloo town councillor, said: ‘‘France has a real problem with its Napoleonic history. There is a popular fascination but a political difficulty with his legacy.’’
France has played little part in the two years of Belgian-led preparations for the bicentenary, which will culminate in two reenactments, with Bonaparte played by Frank Samson, a Parisian lawyer.
The Duke of Wellington will be played by Alan Larsen, a New Zealander.
Samson claims that Napoleon won the image battle even if he lost against the British and the Prussian army of Marshal Gebhard von Blucher, with some 50,000 dead or wounded in one day. ‘‘In terms of public relations, in terms of his historical importance, it’s clear that he won at Waterloo,’’ Samson said earlier this year.
Only 5 per cent of the reenactment troops will be French, with Belgians and Germans playing most of the Grande Armee, which numbered 69,000 troops in 1815. A 40 million visitor centre was opened yesterday at the site, with grumbling from French historians that Britain had used its participation in the project to amplify its own military glory. The British had used the French absence to ‘‘weave their own web’’ at the site, said Jacques-Olivier Boudon, a Sorbonne University professor who leads the Institut Napoleon and has been advising the memorial organisers.
He regretted that France had not set out memorial plaques at the site as Britain had. It had lost an opportunity ‘‘to show the diversity of points of view on the battle,’’ he told le Figaro.
‘‘It is not an issue for us,’’ said a diplomat. ‘‘History exists but we don’t mark all these events. A century after Waterloo, the French and British were shoulder-toshoulder in the Great War trenches and now we are together fighting Islamic State.’’ In March, French sensitivity was displayed when France prevailed on Belgium to scrap the release of commemorative 2 coins that featured the hill-top lion that symbolises the battlefield. It complained that ‘‘the circulation of coins bearing symbols that are negative for part of the European population seems harmful to us in a context in which governments of the eurozone are trying to reinforce unity and co-operation within monetary union’’.