More and more colourful performances to attract visitors to the island are being held. In relation to the Malta Tourism Authority’s scheme for local councils, recently it was appropriate for the Minister of Tourism to advise that “we should not try to be something we are not” (November 14).

One might also add: we should neither portray something that is not, at least historically.

Year after year, event after event, re-enactments have become a regular feature on our tourism calendar. During the month of November, Alarme! was once again promoted as “portraying the French invasion and occupation under Napoleon Bonaparte (1798-1800)”.

While I am sure that every effort goes into presenting as authentic a visual effect as possible, it is about time that the organisers started consulting history archives for a true depiction.

I fail to understand how, 200 years later, we are still mistakenly referring to Malta’s first republic, instituted after a legal convention between the Order and General Bonaparte in 1798, as an occupation. The republic’s Commission of Government was formed of 10 members, eight of whom were Maltese. The deputies of all the municipalities were also Maltese.

It is true the peasants’ revolt started a two-year blockade but that does not make the republic any less historic, formal and legally instituted, especially when one remembers that prominent members of the Maltese nobility had urged Grand Master Hompesch to sign the convention and two of the eight members of the commission were ecclesiastics.

The French republic in Malta ushered in a new page in Maltese governance, so much so that the island’s most influential leaders in 1802 objected to reverting to the Order’s rule as had been agreed between France and Britain in the Treaty of Amiens.

When the British colonisation of Malta formally followed in 1814, it gave the island its third set of rulers in less than 16 years.

Strictly speaking, not one of the three entities occupied the island; they governed it.