[katana]

I’ve always wondered that too. I’m in the middle of reading a long and detailed biography of the man and am finding there actually was a lot to admire. He was a brilliant tactician and as an administrator his laws, the Napoleonic Code, brought European peasantry out of the dark ages. But he was also brash and over confident and in conquering most of the continent his armies devastated and killed on a scale that wouldn’t be seen again until the two world wars. Very complex individual, not all bad and certainly far from all good. But certainly not an evil incarnate like Stalin and Hitler.

[Leaning Right]

Very complex individual, not all bad and certainly far from all good.

Agreed. Napoleon is an excellent example of that old saying 'absolute power corrupts absolutely'.

But certainly not an evil incarnate like Stalin and Hitler.

I mostly agree. But when it comes to ambition - and the willingness to sacrifice soldiers for that ambition - Napoleon was maybe not so different from Stalin and Hitler

[VanDeKoik]

I’ve never understood the whole comparing Napoleon to Hitler meme that I heard as a kid, or the cliche you see in old Warner Brothers cartoons of Napoleon being a dwarf wearing a crazy hat and acting like a mental case.