General Napoleon Bonaparte on board the flagship L’Orient on his way to Malta. Engraving by Vernet.

The letter ‘Commemorating September 2, 1798’ (The Sunday Times of Malta, August 16) by Charles Attard manifests all the symptoms of what Paul Ricoeur calls la maladie d’histoire unfortunately afflicting many Maltese today after two centuries of manipulated collective memory.

The accompanying sketch from Rev. Salvatore Laspina’s Outlines of Maltese History is a sad reminder of the heinous brutality committed by the ‘Maltese’ insurgents.

Laspina’s colonial publication fails to relate how, after murdering Masson and winning against a 60-strong French garrison, the locals took no prisoners, preferring instead to massacre them all, disembowel them and making a meal out of their cooked livers. Scholars Crawford and Foster warn that history textbooks are powerful agents of collective memory where “what is to be remembered and forgotten becomes ideological”.

Answers to Attard’s quiz on the French period are found in my research. Some may also wish to obtain a free copy of the current University publication Think from newsagents.

Most insinuations camouflaged in the questions were disseminated by authors like ‘historian’ Mgr Panzavecchia and novelist Ġużè Muscat Azzopardi, who unfortunately contributed handsomely to our present malaise of blocked memory.

Regarding Dun Mikiel Xerri’s ill-fated trial and execution in Valletta, the priest knew the risks when in 1799 he plotted with Russian spy Lorenzi against a military government in a war zone.

One of his men disclosed the names of the ringleaders. The Lorenzi-Xerri plot was suspected to have been organised on behalf of the Czar. After its failure, Xerri’s Żebbuġ compatriot, Canon Caruana, expressed relief with Alexander Ball, suggesting the plotters had planned to raise the Russian flag on the palace.

Another letter, entitled ‘Bonaparte in Malta’ (The Sunday Times of Malta, August 23) by Thomas Zerafa selects an observation by Ransijat. This only reinforces his apparent analysis objectivity published in Paris in 1801. He expands on all the causes that led to the rising. Doublet’s report is much less reliable having been recounted some 20 years later, petitioning British favour to return from exile to his Maltese family; he died a few months after arrival in 1824, aged 74.

The figure of 20,000 victims often appeared after 1801 in numerous Maltese petitions to improve conditions, including that of Mitrovich in 1835, who complained to the British Parliament of Malta’s justice system being worse than under the French. Later research calculations, however, indicate the number was nearer to 10,000.

The exaggeration was meant to emphasise the Maltese heroic role during the blockade, which the British habitually minimised. Financial ‘compensation’ from post-Napoleonic France to Britain was awarded for all Napoleonic conflicts, including Malta; no funds ever reached the island.