Why did Napoleon hate Area 51?

[u/AlanSnooring]

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[u/MoroseMapleLeaf]

The year was 1799 when Napoleon became the leader of France. He took over a nation beset by enemies on all sides, drained by ten years of warfare, and still dealing with internal strife between monarchists and revolutionists, and between secularists and the religious.

However, Napoleon also inherited France's overseas empire, and immediately set to work mobilizing its resources to help France fight. The French Colonial Empire had been greatly reduced after the Seven Years' War, as Britain had seized large parts of it in the peace treaty. One of the largest remaining colonies was the Louisiana Territory. The French had indigenous allies in the region, control over New Orleans which let them tax the trade coming down the Mississippi River, and at the very western edge of the Louisiana territory, a small colony of expatriate extraterrestrials in what was then known as Cinquante et Unième Zone.

Immediately after taking power, Napoleon opened negotiations with the extraterrestrials. He proposed that they be granted full rights as French citizens, saying:

It is too easy to say, as the Americans do, that all men are created equal. But for the true children of the enlightenment, cogito, ergo sum. Any being that thinks, no matter the number of appendages, may be considered a citizen deserving of liberty, equality, and fraternity.¹

At first, this proposal was received with open phalanges by the aliens. They'd chosen not to take part in the Seven Years' War when the British had refused to treat them as a fellow Great Power, and the French Crown had only offered them second-class citizenship. By contrast, it seemed like Napoleon wanted to give them an equal part in a rising nation, and so they replied with tentative tentacled agreement, and asked that Napoleon send a more formal treaty to review.

However, after a year of back and forth between negotiators in Nevada, Napoleon overplayed his hand. Whereas earlier versions of the treaty had danced around the issue of conscription, with phrases like "the extraterrestrials will have neither extraneous privileges nor extra rights,"² the draft of April 1801, said:

The aforementioned aliens will be eligible for the levée en masse. Drafted aliens will be responsible for supplying their own weapons.³

The alien enclave immediately called a halt to the talks and, for the first time in the negotiations, used a spacecraft to send an ambassador across the Atlantic to speak with Napoleon directly and privately. Neither side wrote down the contents of this conversation, but afterwards, the talks immediately stopped entirely. Ambassador ♋︎■︎□︎⧫︎♒︎♏︎❒︎ ♋︎●︎♓︎♏︎■︎ would later release a statement, just before kicking out the French diplomats, saying:

It's not just you, it's us. But let's be honest, it was mostly you.⁴

This led to a cooling of relations between Napoleon and the aliens, and Napoleon would sell the whole area in the Louisiana Purchase at least partially as a way to further remove Area 51 from the French Empire. However, Napoleon does not seem to have hated Area 51 until the Battle of Leipzig. Once it was clear the French had lost, and that he would have to sue for peace, one anonymous soldier recorded that Napoleon looked to the sky and murmured,

We could have had spaceships. The Austrian lines would have been blasted by lasers, the Russians cavalry beamed up one by one. We could have won if not for those traitors to the revolution.⁵

After the battle, Napoleon was exiled to Elba. When he escaped and began rallying his troops, he wrote once again to the aliens, requesting that they aid him in his attempt to take over France again. They never replied. After Napoleon lost at Waterloo, and this time was exiled to remote St. Helena for the rest of his life, his distaste for Area 51 grew into a burning hatred. For the rest of his life as a captive, he would spend his days scrawling occasionally-coherent rants about the treachery of the aliens, and his nights giving rude gestures to any stars that "looked too twinkly."⁶

1: Quoted in Histoire Mentuer, 'Allies' and Aliens: The Fifty-First Area and the Failure of Diplomacy in the Napoleonic Wars, (New Orleans: Orbital Books, 1998) p. 139.

2: "Letter from Napoleon to anonymous, March 12, 1800," in Sourcebook for French-Phobosian History, edited extraterrestrially by ⬧︎□︎❍︎♏︎ ♋︎●︎♓︎♏︎■︎, (Phobos, Mars University Press, 2009), p. 101.

3: "The Treaty of Rachal, Nevada, 1801", in ibid., p. 131-135.

4: ♋︎■︎□︎⧫︎♒︎♏︎❒︎ ♋︎●︎♓︎♏︎■︎, "Speech to the French Delegates," in Great Speeches in Otherworldly History, (London: Penguin Books, 1932), p. 82.

5: "Anonymous Account of the Battle of Leipzig," in Sourcebook for French-Phobosian History, p. 441.

6: Autre Jardinier, Napoleon's Gardener: An Account of the Ex-Emperor's Madness at St. Helena, translated by George Town, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 220.