But Napoleon is talking about how powerful the press can be at breaking the will I war. The French had a culture of surrender after World War I, guess why most of them didn’t raise much when the Nazis marched in. Them there’s Vietnam, where the press was successful in getting our guys, even eventually our government, to give up on the war.
France lost 1.7 million soldiers in WWI (more than the US has lost in all of its wars combined); when WWII came around and the people were forced to choose between Hitler & Stalin, they simply selected “None of the above”. Afterwards they threw away their lives in the Indochina War they didn’t want to fight (but we insisted was necessary to contain communism), then threw away more lives in the Algeria War.
WWII was an anomaly in which the main combatants (as far as Europe was concerned) were both evil (Stalin & Hitler); other countries that could remained neutral.