After Napoleon signed the Treaty of Lunéville, under which Austria ceded Belgium to France, newspapers in France spoke only of the benefits the treaty brought France. Naturally, no one at the time could be expected to realize that it was a war of aggression.
The French and Austrians had fought more than once in Italy and Belgium. By comparison, the New World did not have such a complicated history—provided one "deleted" the history of its indigenous peoples. During the French Revolution, the Jacobins made a clean break: history from three hundred years ago would no longer be traced, meaning no one would ask who had owned the land three hundred years earlier.
In Napoleon's words, between the 17th and 18th of Brumaire, he had erected a copper wall. No one could look back through it; all memories would shatter against it.
Of course, some people would refuse to accept that. But very few families could endure for three hundred years without declining, not even royal families.
Descendants lacked the power to reclaim their ancestors' land, yet Napoleon named those new countries after ancient places, such as the Kingdom of Etruria. Madame de Staël made the astonishing claim that he was using the king's descendants as an experiment. Unfortunately, she was no longer in Paris at the time. In other words, she had lost the podium from which she could speak to her heart's content. Other than a small number of people, everyone had already forgotten her.
She needed Paris badly, because it was filled with quick-minded people like herself. Yet Paris did not need her nearly as much, because Paris never lacked new topics of conversation.
Apart from the fashionable Madame Récamier, the most fashionable topic in Paris was Napoleon's journey to Egypt and the books he brought back about