DON’T let’s be beastly to the French. Guests attending a service in London last month to mark the 200th anniversary of our victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo were told not to act in a triumphalist way – and so avoid upsetting the French.

The main service to commemorate the Duke of Wellington’s great victory will be held on 18th June. And we have been told not to celebrate too joyfully on that day either, or at any of this month’s bicentennial events.

I shall ignore this instruction and rejoice greatly. So I was glad to hear Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg say, “Waterloo was a triumph of good versus evil. Napoleon was responsible for between three million and 6.5 million deaths. Two hundred years on, it is ridiculous to spare the blushes of the French by not celebrating the battle for what it was. What next? Will we ask France to apologise for the Battle of Hastings?”

Napoleon should not be celebrated as a hero. He was in his time no different from what Hitler and Stalin were in theirs. He made plain his own ambition from the start: “I wanted to rule the world and in order to do this I needed unlimited power. I wanted to rule the world. Who wouldn't have in my place? The world begged me to govern it.” No, Boney, the world did not beg for your leadership. The world endured twenty years of terror fighting you to the death.

He declared himself emperor and immediately censored the theatres and took control of the press. He dismissed the French nobility and installed his own cronies to run the centralised bureaucracy – as Stalin did with his own favourites and placemen. He ranted and railed against the days of the French monarchy - then formed his imperial court, with himself as sole authority, and packed it with his own family members.

In the French colony of Haiti, concentration camps were set up and gas was used to massacre large numbers of people. As a gesture of national penitence, a street in Paris named Rue Richepanse - after Antoine Richepanse, the general responsible for atrocities in the Caribbean - has had its name changed to Rue Solitude. Napoleon subdued Austria, conquered Egypt and catastrophically invaded Russia. It was in the Russian campaign that he showed his utter contempt for his own fighting men – a grievous sin in a commander-in-chief. Of 600,000 French soldiers sent into Russia, only 9,000 returned.

Everywhere he exercised cruelty and wreaked havoc. In his war on Turkey, he permitted his troops to run riot, looting, raping and murdering indiscriminately. In Jaffa, he captured 4000 Turkish soldiers, kept them for two days with their hands tied behind their backs and then killed them all.

To begin with, people held high hopes of Napoleon: that he would do what was necessary to preserve a tolerant peace and to promote enlightened values. One man who shared these hopes was Beethoven who dedicated his Eroica Symphony to Napoleon – only to scratch the dedication from the title page of his manuscript when it became clear that the man was a monster. When the coalition armies under Wellington and Blucher defeated Napoleon two hundred years ago, they removed the threat to England and liberated the European nations. Moreover, they also liberated France itself from a savage tyranny. France was not the enemy, but its vile dictator was. So the French too should join us in this month’s celebrations. Away with political-correctness and the falsification of history and let joy be unconfined.