COVER N.9 - France

Postmarks: machine applied "Illegible FRANCE" and manual "Corbigny - Nievre"
Posted on the 5th June, received on the 11th June.
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A large C5 envelope, for nothing smaller would accept the outstanding bloc-feuillet that graces the left side of the cover, measuring an hefty 143 x 105mm, shone inside my mailbox today. I've wrote of generosity on this same blog, and the warming and kind handwritten words inside only serve to prove me right. Thank you so much Jean-Pierre.

Nothing epitomises better the  sentiments  and  reactions a name evokes, famous and everlasting as it may be,  than the well-known gesture Ludwig van Beethoven  had on the manuscript of his third symphony, when he furiously scrapped off with a knife, to the point of actually cutting off  a piece of the paper with the offending name, the initial dedication he had enthusiastically  written  two years before.

Bonaparte.

A soldier by trade, that at some point in history personified  the ideals of the French revolution  - Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité – and the struggle for a freer and equalitarian society, but who could not resist the temptation for personal grandeur and egocentrism, making himself an example of what he fought against, as he declared himself emperor of an empire that would stretch from Spain to what is now Poland and led Europe into more than a decade of fierce wars of expansion that would end in 1815 in the fields of Waterloo, in what is now Belgium.

Whatever the Beethoven in you might think, Napoleon’s  legacy to Europe (and to the world for that matter) cannot be underestimated. The end of feudalism, important reforms  in the education system, the separation of Church and State, the introduction of the metric system in France, but most of all, the Napoleonic Code that would set  the base for many of the legal systems now in force in Europe (including the Portuguese) are examples of an heritage that ironically would come full circle, when the European Council in 1972 elected a fragment of Beethoven’s ninth symphony as the official hymn of Europe.

The beautiful miniature sheet issued by La Poste on 19APR2021, on the occasion of the 200^th anniversary of Napoleon’s death, contains two 1,50€ stamps enclosed by a fitting neoclassical  “empire style” border.