Napoleon Stone at Melaten Cemetery

The stone belongs to the so-called Napoleon Stones erected from the 1830s onward in many places once occupied by France. There, former soldiers joined together in war and veterans' associations and, from 1834 into the 1850s, put up memorials of very similar design in numerous locations. In Cologne, the association of former Napoleonic soldiers was founded in 1842; eleven years later, on 6 July 1853 and thus almost four decades after the end of French rule, their memorial was unveiled.

That Cologne of all places erected a memorial to Napoleonic soldiers in 1853 is surprising: at the time, Napoleon and France were seen by much of the population, the national movement and the Prussian government as an enemy. In the formerly French-occupied regions of western Germany, however, this Francophobia was matched by a tolerated veneration of Napoleon. The historian Hagen Schulze regarded the Napoleon Stones not as protest but as a politically neutral form of remembrance. At the same time they mark a shift in the culture of memory, since here the individual soldier was commemorated for the first time regardless of military rank. Among those named are more familiar figures, such as Nicolaus Stollwerck (1788–1851), father of the chocolate manufacturer Franz Stollwerck, and the Ehrenfeld factory owner Jacob Wahlen (1788–1845).