A tad bit off-topic I suppose, but I never quite understood the admiration many folks have for Napoleon. Consider, for example, his ornate tomb in Paris. Napoleon brought misery and death to almost all of Europe, from Spain to all the way to Moscow. And he ended up as a miserable failure. A George Washington he was not.
(This brief rant is in no way directed at you, C19. Your post was a worthy history post.)
Didn’t Napoleon make a comment after his downfall they wanted him to be another George Washington.
From 1800to 1945, the Europe lost forever its best genetic stock. Historians will note that European culture never recovered.
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.
At one point, Napoleon’s armies had conquered most of Europe. He was to 19th-century France what Alexander was to Macedonia and Caesar was to Rome. And he did it after the hideous Revolution had all but destroyed French society. So it follows that the French would hail him as a savior.
The rest of Europe? Not so much.
And it should be borne in mind that Napoleon wasn’t even French.