Gilles Avril: L’Anti-Napoléonon. Mémoires et papiers inédits du chanoine Apuril du Pontreau (Anti-Napoleon: memoirs and unpublished papers from Canon Apuril du Pontreau)

Here is the unpublished and juicy testimony of a relentless opponent of the Revolution and the Empire. He was one of the many renegade priests who fled or were exiled from France at the time of anti-religious persecution, and who refused to return at the time of the Concordat and who locked themselves into an opposition of principle, and as in in this case, a verbally violent one.

You might be surprised that La Bibliothèque Napoléon welcomes such a book, fiercely anti-Bonapartist, and at first appearance of rather “bad faith”.

Precisely, these texts to help us understand better the foundations of an ideology opposed to Napoleon, still little known, that of the “bas-clergé”, and to bring Noël-Antoine Apuril Pontreau into the cohort of authors of the memoirs of the Consulat and the Empire.

Paris: Editions of the Fondation Napoléon – Nouveau Monde Editions, 2006, Series Sources, 212 pages.

To order visit the website of Nouveau Monde Éditions.