Napoleon knew the Prussians were coming and could not beat Wellington in time to deal with them thus Wellington beat Napoleon. He was a better General and better man than Napoleon in my opinion. I’ve tried to read histories of Napoleon but the guy makes me sick. You can get some good histories of Wellington. Napoleon was a complete megalomaniac who didn’t give a damn about his soldiers. He had many close calls of his own and was lucky to have such a fiercely nationalistic army.
We will have to differ. IMO, Napoleon was a brilliant general. He knew every one of Julius Caesar’s land battles by heart. He never lost a battle until Waterloo. The weather beat him in Moscow and like 1941, it was a particularly historic cold year completely unexpected.
I will make you even sicker. I think Napoleon was a great man and a great statesman with a noble goal, even if his means were wrong.
The victors write history and it was incumbent on Great Britain to insure that everything written about Napoleon made him seem as evil as Adolph Hitler. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was not perfect. He was no saint. Call him an egomaniac but just about every ruler is on some level.
Napoleon was a product of the revolutionary times that formed him. He absolutely LOVED France and was uber Patriotic. He hated Monarchies and wanted them eliminated. I don’t know if he wanted democratic government or not because he crowned himself Emperor, but there is every evidence that he admired the US Republic and it was a model for what he wanted for Europe, and that being a dictator was just an interim means to an end. We do know that when given the choice, he instituted a Republic in France and wrote a Constitution based on the US constitution — one he kicked himself for making too unflexible to change, unlike ours.
As far as my saying he was a great statesman, like the Roman conquerers, in every nation he occupied he improved th quality of life of the local people by building roads, improving sanitation and the water supply, founding schools, supporting the arts, and other infrastructure and societal improvments. Spain is about the only place that did not occur, because the Spanish people never submitted to him.
In essence, I believe that Napoleon yearned for a United States of Europe under the French banner. His defeat certainly didn’t stop war on the continent and lead to the 2 worst wars this world has ever experienced. Had he been able to pull off a United States of Europe that held Prussia and Germany under its influence — while leaving them their national identities and pride — we might have seen only a fraction of death from war in the 20th century.
Who knows?
Americans are taught by our link to Britain to hate Napoleon and think of him as an evil megalomaniac dictator. The story is much different that that.