Our plan today was to visit the coastal town of Wimereux but on the way we passed once more through Boulogne-Sur-Mer and stopped first of all at La Colonne de la Grande Armée. This is a monument based on the design of Trajan’s Column in Rome which was begun in 1804 but not completed for forty years or so and is a fifty-three metre-high monument topped with a statue of the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.
Nelson’s column, by the way, in Trafalgar Square in London is shorter at forty-six metres high.
It marks the location of the base camp where Napoleon assembled an army of eighty thousand men all reeking of garlic, impatient and ready to invade England. It was initially intended to commemorate a successful invasion, but this proved to be rather premature and as he didn’t quite manage that it now commemorates instead the first distribution of the Imperial Légion d’honneur.
Have Bag, Will Travel 
Dictator Napoleon was everywhere as often they are, in Spain even as far as Mexico!
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The World will never be rid of dictators but I do have some admiration for Napoleon and all of the good things that he did!
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And we keep on fighting them.
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A small man with huge dreams, many of which were achieved. –Curt
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The tragedy is Curt that he did some really good stuff, a lot of his reforms and ideas are with us still in Europe, his problem was bloated ambition!
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The best thing Nappy did was give us the metric system;
I though he had his fingers crossed in this statue, had to take a closer look
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That was one of the things I was thinking about. We Brits refuse to use it of course!
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Best thing that ever happened, that and going decimal currency too
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I still can’t get my head around metres or kilograms. Do you have miles in Australia or kilometres?
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