PARIS – For France, those were the days.

The French aren’t pining for the return of their 19th-century empire, but the 200th anniversary Thursday of Napoleon Bonaparte’s crowning as emperor is a reminder of their country’s former glory.

The Corsican, whose diminutive size belied his continental ambitions, is back in the news for the bicentennial – and the timing couldn’t have been more telling for a country facing an identity crisis and searching for its role in a 25-member European Union and a wider world led by the United States.

‘A little hard’

“History has been a little hard on the French lately,” said Steven Englund, an American award-winning biographer of Napoleon. “And I think they’re looking for reasons to celebrate their own history.”

The Napoleon nostalgia underscores France’s obsession with retaining its influence as a self-appointed EU leader and creating a “multipolar” world – its buzzword for a counterweight to U.S. hegemony.

President Jacques Chirac was a top opponent of the American-led invasion of Iraq, but other than give them a dressing down, he could do little to stop EU candidate nations from backing the U.S.-led war. His ire was partly directed at Poland, a country said to respect Napoleon.

While some foreign critics assail France as living off faded glory, it is in some ways continuing Napoleon’s work – without his use of force – in pressing its vision for a European, multinational alternative to U.S. might.

“He built Europe,” said Thierry Lentz, director of the Napoleon Foundation. “It has only been since the end of the Second World War that we’ve done it without fighting.”

In France, some fondly remember Napoleon’s influence as nation-builder, leaving a huge imprint on architecture, public works and civil administration.

Towns and coins once carried his name. He created the much-ballyhooed Legion of Honor award. His imprint on style survives from the Arch of Triumph to sewers and street lamps in Paris, known as the City of Light.

Critics consider him the megalomaniacal bully of Europe and a forebear of more recent tyrants, such as Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini of Italy or Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

But Napoleon’s ambition and influence are unquestioned. Even after his armies plowed through Europe, soaking its eastern plains in blood, countries like Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain kept many reforms from France’s Republican ideal.

With his legacy so controversial, the government planned no official commemorations of the coronation. “It would have been seen badly in the international arena to celebrate Napoleon when our official policy opposes the preponderance of one power,” said Lentz, whose association is among hundreds created around his legacy.

But France’s defense minister, Michele Alliot-Marie, told Le Figaro magazine that “if Napoleon remains a reference for the French, it’s surely because he appears in our collective memory as the creator of the modern state.”

French media trumpeted the anniversary, and museums are hosting seminars, exhibits and concerts.

Writing in Le Monde newspaper this week, Charles Napoleon, a descendant of one of Napoleon’s brothers, called him “a giant on the road to democracy and Europe.”

But some French take a less friendly view.

“The Napoleon Scandal,” read this week’s cover of Marianne magazine, which blasted his coronation as a “military putsch” that gave way to “the first modern totalitarian regime.”

Napoleon’s armies struck fear across the continent before British military victories and his bold campaign into Russia led to the end of his reign.

France’s policies today can be seen through the prism of the Napoleonic legacy.

The government wants to give more power to France’s regions, a move away from Napoleon’s centralized state. He championed separation of church and state – a policy at the core of a new law that forbids public school students from wearing conspicuous religious symbols to class.

The Dec. 2, 1804, coronation was immortalized in a famed 1808 painting by Jacques-Louis David – commissioned by the emperor – showing Napoleon after he crowned himself. It is the centerpiece of a Louvre Museum exhibit on show through mid-January.

The debate over Napoleon’s legacy, which some place alongside that of historical titans like Charlemagne or Alexander the Great, could continue for years.

“The more you find out about him, the more difficult it is to completely take one side or the other,” said Peter Hicks, a historian and musician who will conduct the Paris National Orchestra at a Mass at Paris’ La Madeleine Church on Thursday to mark the anniversary.

“Part of the fascination is that he’s enigmatic – you can’t pin him down,” he said.