“This heritage deserves to be better known, highlighted, shared and visited”. Those observations led us to create a Federation for European cities of Napoleonic history. If we look into the great man’s deeds, the French Revolution, the French Age of Enlightenment, the ideals of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ are values which bind us together. Rehabilitating historical sites, encouraging historical research, promoting our museums and our culture through live events, opening up to our country and European citizens is a bit like travelling through the complex, contradictory and sometimes opposing tracks whereby those ideals established themselves in Europe.
The dozens of European cities involved in this movement want to promote their own image, bringing back to life a significant page of their history while discovering common parts to their past. The Napoleonic era has indeed enabled Europe to become aware of itself (through either its support or its opposition to the little Corsican man) and to adopt public institutions inspired by the Enlightenment philosophy.
Our countries and our Europe need to get a stronger awareness of their roots, and thus have a growing self-confidence in regard to taking up the great challenges of their era.
Thus our will to both better understand and highlight our cultural heritage is closely bound to the will to go forward and progress in social and economic matters. Nowadays, the ‘identity’ issue is central to every single crisis. Changes in behaviour are necessary to take up such challenges as developing sciences and technics, bringing underdevelopment under control or managing the environment. Those changes can only be born from Peace, thus from reconciling with the past.
Currently there are 60 cities from Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Russia, Spain and the Czech Republic as well as outside Europe, Alexandria (Egypt), members.
