Macron treads diplomatic line over Napoleon's anniversary

French President Emmanuel Macron said the country's hugely divisive former emperor Napoleon Bonaparte "is part of us" in a speech to mark the 200th anniversary of his death.

Speaking to an audience of historians and secondary school students at the Institute de France, the academy to promote the arts and sciences set up by Napoleon, before going to lay a wreath at his tomb in Les Invalides, Macron was deliberately neutral in his choice of words about someone whose legacy continues to provoke such contrasting opinions.

"We take responsibility for all," he said, adding "we are not engaged in an exalted celebration, but in an exalted commemoration".

Napoleon ruled France from 1799 to 1815, and was a successful military strategist who introduced many features that are still present in French life to this day, such as the school and legal system. But critics say his military ambitions, which never recovered from his failed invasion of Russia in 1812, inflicted death and suffering on thousands of people, and that he reintroduced slavery in the Caribbean sugar industry, in a move to challenge the economic might of rival England.

The Daily Telegraph quoted French historian Mathilde Larrere as saying there was a "racist dimension" to that decision, and equalities minister Elisabeth Moreno was even more direct in her criticism, calling him "one of the biggest misogynists" to walk the Earth.

Macron made no attempt to skirt around the slavery issue, calling it "a fault, a betrayal of the spirit of the Enlightenment", but added that Napoleon "could be both the soul of the world and the devil of Europe" and said "we love Napoleon because his life gives us a taste of what is possible if we accept the invitation to take risks … few destinies have shaped so many lives beyond their own".

Following his army's defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Bonaparte was exiled to the South Atlantic island of St Helena, where he died on May 5 1821, aged 51, with his exact cause of death never known, but believed to have been stomach cancer.

Many of Macron's predecessors have steered clear altogether of engaging with Bonaparte's legacy, such is the controversy that still surrounds him.

When he assumed power, he overthrew the first republic that had been in place since the French Revolution of 1789, and in an article in Le Figaro newspaper, left wing member of the French national assembly Alexis Corbiere said: "The Republic should not pay an official homage to the person who buried the first republican experience of our history by installing an authoritarian regime."