I could not help appreciating Joseph Farrugia’s contribution on the French period (‘The French blockade’, The Sunday Times of Malta, February 2), which he felt was not given “its due importance”.

A lot has been written about it – numerous accounts and no fewer than a dozen novels – but regrettably most authors repeated early imprecise narratives.

For the sake of precision, Giovanni Faure (1913), who built his account of the brutal massacre of the French garrison in Mdina from oral history, was not the only author who reported the fact and definitely not the first one either.

Lamenting on how “no one remembers” this day, Farrugia indirectly draws attention to the total lack of commemoration of all the dead of the 1798-1800 conflict.

Research indicates that the figure of 20,000 victims asserted by early Maltese petitioners and authors was intended to exaggerate the suffering to score a stronger point with their new British protectors when fighting for their rights early in the 19th century.

At the time, British officials bragged about having ‘saved’ the Maltese from the French and, at least up to 1952, would not allow any remembrance services.

I totally disagree with Farrugia when he suggests September 2 as another national day. Given the situation in 1798, with prominent citizens divided into some five ‘political parties’ according to foreign interests and sympathies, if one were to mark a national day each time the Opposition seeks overseas support for their own agendas against the government of the day, this country would end up with countless national celebrations.

Historically, political groups in small communities are known to have militated within foreign powers to undermine their incumbent local rivals. After Canon Caruana sought British aid from nearby Naples against the French-installed Maltese government, the rest of the island did not reverse the situation most probably because, unlike Corsica, Malta was not physically close to France.

In Corsica in the 1790s, when Pascale Paoli set up the Anglo-Corsican kingdom under British monarch George III, a reversal was possible with the aid of the French military that helped the islanders get rid of their one-time hero and retain French adherence.