I am writing in response to Paolo Bernardini’s recent call for a public debate over the presence of the Napoleon death mask in Mugar Memorial Library (“Is Mugar the place for a tyrant’s death mask?” Sept. 18, p. 8). Using names like “tyrant” and “assassin,” Professor Bernardini compares Napoleon to Goering, Hitler and Stalin and suggests that we should be outraged by the presence of the Napoleon image on campus.

While I welcome a debate over Napoleon’s place in history, I find Bernardini’s remarks misguided. In his letter, he asks, “Would BU freely exhibit a death mask of Adolf Hitler? Would students and faculty alike be outraged by this?” The comparison to Hitler is needlessly inflammatory and wrongheaded. Yes, both Napoleon and Hitler were responsible in very different ways for the deaths of many people; the same could be said of nearly every military leader and commander-in-chief (Harry Truman, for example). Yet unlike Hitler, Napoleon stood for something that we still admire: the spirit of democratic revolution against aristocratic and religious tyranny.

The Enlightenment ideas that propelled Napoleon’s armies forward are fundamentally the same ones that inspired the patriots at Concord and Bunker Hill. I admit there is much to be said against Napoleon, who in fact betrayed these principles and ravaged Europe with an imperial ruthlessness, but his legacy will always be a divided one. The death mask serves as an ideal touchstone for such debates, public and private. A university, and especially a university library, seems to me the proper place for such conversations to begin.

Andrew Stauffer

English Department