📍 🇫🇷 🇩🇪 Hitler & Napoléon's mirrors

Two tributes here, one paid in 1806 by Napoleon (1769-1821) to the tomb of Frederick II (1712-1786), the great Prussian leader who dominated his youth; the other by Hitler to Napoléon himself at the Invalides on June 28, 1940 right after vanquishing the French Army.

At a first glance, it is the same manner of marking victory. A mirror effect reinforced by Ponce-Camus's painting at the Invalides Army Museum. Both leaders are in white while their staff is shown wearing darker tones.

Present in the Nazi delegation, Albert Speer was astonished by the Führer's sense of reciprocity, by the unusual elegance, by the rushed pace too (three hours in all, Hitler's sole Parisian stroll in his lifetime); finally the German leader concluded in the return flight: "I have often wondered whether it is not necessary to destroy Paris... but when we will have finished Berlin, Paris will be only its shadow. So why destroy it?"

Chilling.

____ Sources ____

>> Albert Speer, “Inside the Third Reich”, 1969