"Why do you think of Napoleon the way you do?" Topic

I previously wrote on another thread how Adam Zamoyski wrote in his Introductory Note to "1812 Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow" (Harper Collins Publishers 2004)

"No other campaign in history has been subjected to such overtly political uses. From the very beginning, studies of the subject have been driven by a compulsion to interpret and justify that admits of no objectivity, while sheer volume – over five thousand books and twice as many articles published in Russia alone in the hundred years after 1812 – has helped only to cloud the issue."

If one extends this out, there is a mountain of work available on the Napoleonic Wars open to almost any interpretation.

I have previously tried to trace my influences back to the bell top shako on a plastic Airfix soldier, the box art for the figure and a picture of Napoleon at Jena on the first "serious" book I attempted to read whilst still relatively young, and how this may have given me a positive view of Napoleon.

On this forum, Napoleon attracts fairly divergent opinions and as a matter of interest, I would invite members to explain what they perceive to be their influences on the subject and how they have arrived at the view they hold at present.

In short, why do you think of Napoleon the way you do?

You've caught my attention. Good question.

I really can't connect with Napoleon on a political level. It's undoubtedly a personal short-coming but he's been dead for nearly 200 years. In terms of current passions & partisan views he holds no sway.

I will acknowledge I find him attractive in a romantic or dramatic sense.
He is a real-life Oedipus. An Agamemnon betrayed by his own fatal flaw. I see his life & career as a Greek tragedy enacted out in the pages of history.
As a Tragic Hero (please note: Aristotelian 'heroes' may or may not be admirable)he carries with him the seeds of his own destruction & his inevitable fate creates a sense of catharsis.
Probably there are as many Napoleons as there are students of the period. As for those who hold more negative views of him, now I regard them with a benign acceptance.

People look at him from a 21st century perspective, but he did not actually differ much from other leaders before him, the only three differences being that

1) He couldn't trace his lineage to one of the narrow group of families in Europe that considered themselves to be aristocracy
2) He was more successful than others before him at defeating people on the battlefield and expanding national borders at the expense of others.
3) He came at a time when political cartoons and propaganda reached new heights, creating the image of the diminutive Corsican Ogre, which lasts to this day.

People like Louis XIV, Frederick the Great, Charles XII, Gustav Adolphus or Suleyman the Magnificent did just the same thing. Napoleon lead a powerful, rich and populous nation, brimming with self-confidence and took on the rest of Europe, but utterly failed to secure a lasting peace in his favour.

It was expected of kings, emperors and other leaders to go to war once in a while for glory, profit and the chance to knock the neighbours down a peg or two. Napoleon did the same, but on slightly larger scale.

I don't feel the need to idolize the man, he was extremely successful for a while until he took on more than he could chew and everyone in Europe had turned against him. He was a master on the battlefield, but never could secure actual peace.

The Code Napoleon is an impressive document mostly overshadowed by his military life but there is little doubt a fine mind at work there.

Napoleon became my "hero" at age nine.The vast majority of my knowledge of him was culled from the 1959 edition of World Book Encyclopedia until I was in my early teens.I have a longstanding childhood fascination with his career.

He is a fascinating man but I neither love nor hate Him and consider him to be, as Patrick R points out, just another powerful military leader, perhaps the last of that kind for after Napoleon war began to be directed by politicians.

ochoinleicht sums it up nicely, I think. Napoleon was a figure so vastly superior to the others of his time and the fact that he came from humble beginnings makes him doubly attractive, but he carried "the seeds of his own destruction". A tragic figure indeed in the classical sense. I became fascinated with him fairly early (although I have no memory of any particular incident that brought him to my attention). Reading Chandler's "Campaigns of Napoleon" in high school is what really did it for me, I think.

I think part of the fascination here is the 'what if?' factor. Not just 'what if' Napoleon had done this or that on this battlefield or that campaign instead of what he really did, but what if Napoleon had been just a bit nicer, a bit smarter, a bit more decent? What if Napoleon had managed to forge an enduring empire that could have spared Europe and the world from the horrors of the 20th Century?

I'm as fascinated by what might have been as I am with what was.

When I was a boy my first hero was Marshal Ney. I loved his bravery and his indomitable spirit. For me he was the true tragic hero. Anyway, this meant that I never much cared for Napoleon because I resented the fact that he – and his admirers – blamed Ney for the debacle that was Waterloo.

So mine is an emotional rather than a rational response. But my early admiration for Ney has created in me a prejudice against Napoleon that has never really gone away.

Napoleon is a fascinating, almost irresistable character. (And I mean "character" in the best literary sense of that word.) His story has a great arc, like one of those 5-act Shakespeare tragedies: the flawed Hero who had greatness in his grasp, but who let it slip and eventually crash due to his own flaws, fears, stubbornness, or whatever.

I've been teaching an "Age of Napoleon" course at our college for years now, and it's usually packed. Students never get tired of him.

And even though that course (in due scholarly diligence, harrumph harrumph) is really about the whole era: social changes, music, the arts, fashion, economics, politics, nationalism, religion, etc…. Nonetheless the character of Napoleon is what glues it all together, and what keeps most of the students in the room.

Americans in particular love a "rags to riches" story, particularly if it involves an outsider or an immigrant; it's a very old trope in our literary tradition: the Little Guy Makes It Big. It has been a facet of our favorite stories in fiction for ages: Citizen Kane, Rocky, the Godfather, etc.

As a teenager I was fascinated by Napoleon in a sort of hero-worshipping way. As I got older and studied history more deeply, I remained fascinated by him and his period, but in a more circumspect way. I remain in awe of the scale of changes he wrought, even though over the years of research I've come to understand that most of those changes were in fact pretty awful for most people, and that the supposed accomplishments were often greatly exaggerated or simplified by propaganda whose effectiveness can still be felt today.

I was 11 years old and watched Rod Steiger as him in Waterloo. It was around the same time as Sharpe was released on ITV and my grandad started casting his own Prince August figures. Hooked.

Napoleon was kind of a background figure to me to start with as with all the other generals, kings and tsars I was more interested in grenadier guards, 95th Rifles and French Dragoons. Took me a few years to ween off war hammer.

I've never had any genuine negative feelings about him other than being glad we stopped him from invading GB.

While you are all gushing, please keep to the facts. Bonaparte was an aristocrat, minor to be sure, but nonetheless.

I have always resented the "But you HAVE to respect him for…" argument applied to flawed figures.
Thus Robert E Lee was so dignified.
Mussolini made the trains run on time.
The Fuhrer built the Autobahn and loved little children.
The SS were so brave!
(I await with bated breath the outrage at linking the above…)

I resent being told who I HAVE to respect, particularly if I am indifferent or hostile to begin with. No one has the right to demand that I respect someone. Well, they do have the right to tell me but I have the right to not pay any attention to them.

Also growing up, I became an Anglo-phile. 1812 and the American Revolution were aberrations. Being pro-Napoleon somehow meant being anti-Churchill. This naturally leads to being anti-French, and you can't deny that Nappy was the greatest Frog of them all!

Finally, I had a French teacher in high school to whom Nappy could do no wrong.

As for the Code Napoleon… Did he actually write it, or just put his name on something his enlightened advisors slapped together?

So, while I realize he was no different or worse than other thugs in history, I do love to call him The Corsican Ogre, because it annoys the worshipers.

I don't care much for Alexander the Great either, but you can blame VDH for that. That's a whole different thread that someone else is welcome to start.

Why do I think of Napoleon as I do?

As a child, I had a huge admiration for Napoleon, partly because that was contrary to what we were taught in school in the Workers' Paradise. Growing up in a part of Europe that was dotted with Napoleonic battlefields also helped my interest to grow as my father knew places where you could dig up relics, as did the fact that my several greats grandfather served in the Saxon army and disappeared in Russia.

As I grew older, and particularly after I joined the army, I began to think more deeply about Napoleon and my views changed, partly due to my, at the time, developing belief that war should only ever be a last resort and that resorting to war before exhausting other options was tantamount to a crime. However, I was also aware that I was judging him by a very modern metric, which was not really appropriate.

As others have said on this thread, I now see him as a great military commander (except for the occasions when he really messed up), with fatal flaws that ultimately both doomed him and prevented him becoming the truly great European statesman and positive role model that he could have become. A tragic figure in the classical sense and a lesson to us all to keep in touch with reality.

Jurgen

This one made a big impression in my youth:

Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, 1814, La Campagne de France, 1864

I don't have a very deep knowledge of the man or of his military campaigns, but even after a couple of centuries the tragic image of an heroic, flawed figure doomed by overreach still resonates.

Ron

Rod Steiger.

AS a young teenager I read the book "The Grenadier" written in the 1890s I think. Got me started. Huge Lannes fan to this day

As a child I was often in awe of the exploits of "the Great Captains ". N. was a popular figure in our family both for the reasons T. T.states., rags to riches, but also for being a successful Corsican.

As a teen ager however the simple fact that he declared himself emperor of a republic was enough to consign him to the "bad juju " pile (along with Caesar btw) .

Edit : one can be a Great Captain while not being the Indispensable Man.

Bob

Simply: because I'm English; because I'm interested in military history; because I'm a wargamer, and because I'm small (Yes, I have read all the discussion that says N actually wasn't below average height – but the belief that he was influenced my opinion of him when I was younger).

I leave it to readers to decide HOW each of those factors has influenced my attitude, but I will say they are often contradictory…

There is no deeper hatred than that for a false God.

It is bery simple. When I was young, and a foolish young man I was entranced with Napoleon primarily because of all the myths I had read about him and Napoleonic France, and of course when you are young, and powerless, the idea of a young man early in life through his own merit amassing power as he did is better than narcotics.

Then I got older and my studies deepened and I saw what a sham he was, what a tyrant he was, and how he smashed and destroyed everything he touched and especially, how his achievements such as the Code Napoleon were monstrous edifices of tyranny. By the way all you lovers of the Code Napoleon, do you know that under it you are guilty until proven innocent,(not the other way around as it is in English Law) and the state can change and manipulate the methods of trial, rules of evidence and punishments at will and there is no double jeaprody?

But through my studies and experience I came to hate war. All war. I have said this before but it bears saying again. War is a terrible scourge. It takes strong, handsome young men and smashes them in mind and body, leaving them to rot in field and stream and sends them back often shattered in body and mind. It takes father, sons, brothers, fiance's cousins, mothers, daughtes, sisters, aunts and uncles and strips them of their loved ones, and sends them back if they come back, the brutalized and often shattered remnants of the field. It smashes lives and hopes. It makes orphans and widows and for the distaff who do not stand in the line, it exposes them to rape, murder, destruction, poverty, destitution, makes of them prostitutes simply to survive, and upon all it produces universal starvation.

War takes a huge amount of money which is all wasted, money that could much better be spent alleviating suffering feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and being spent on much better things than war. It destroyes the environment. It smashses people lives and houses, and it is a blight of blights upon art and the humanities. Art is the most delicate of flowers of civilization that is blown up, destroyed, burned ravaged, shattered, smashed. How many of the great works of art and literature are gone up in the fires and explosives and vandalism of war? It ruins the enviornment, pollutes the land, and continues to slay long past it's cessation. Go to France and wander around Verdun where you still can't go into some fields without taking your life in your hands from unexploded ordinance.

War destroyes belief, it corrupts and debases morals and not only sexual mores as women must survive, but the sensibilities and sensitivities of men who are debased and rendered cruel, callous, merciless and immune to the love of their fellow man. Want to know what war is about? Watch "Private Ryan" and especially the scene when the mother sees that car winding up the long road on the hill and she knows what that car brings. If you are not moved to tears as her legs go out from under her then you have no heart and no soul and YOU are a casualty of the callousing of feelings which causes war.

Let me tell you about the cost of war. When the Vietnam war was on I was a reporter for a large urban newspaper. One day I had an assignment from my editor to go to an apartment to get a photo and some information on a young man who had just been killed in combat. I got there and knocked on the door, not liking the duty at all, but resolved to do it. The door opened and there standing in front of me was the tall, beautiful blonde girl, heavily pregnant, and she smiled and said cheerily "Hi! Can I help you." I then acted like a complete craven coward. I realized at that moment that she didn't know. I mumbled something that I must have the wrong address and walked away. As soon as she closed the door I RAN, RAN down the stairs. Halfway down the three flights of stairs I saw the two military men coming up the stairs with the attache case. I JUMPED down the stairs trying to get out. Three floors down, just as I was getting to the door the scream hit me. It was a scream I will recall to the end of my days.

THAT was the smashing of a life. THAT was the cost of war.
From that moment I hated war.

But I am no pacifist. This is an evil world and we must resist evil as best we can in any way we can and that means even by the gruesome necessity of war. There are vile, evil, demonic men in the world, and I fully consider Napoleon to be one among them, one of the chief devils of evil, who will scruple at nothing to smash their own peoples lives, and destroy them for their own glory and ego, and they must be stopped. Even if this means war.

As I have said Napoleon is a man who required 10,000 lives a month. I don't care how much he was a military genius, he was a naked and predatory aggressor, a beast who could not stop his psychotic crimes against humanity, and if he had not been defeated would have slaughtered millions more. The British imprisoned him. The Prussians wanted to shoot him. If I was there I would have had him and all his marshalls broken at the wheel.

And war games?

I hate war, but I adore the military virtues. The military virtues, honor, duty, patriotism, chivalry, self-sacrafice, truth, justice, and a desire for peace, along with mercy forbearance, and discipline are the virtues of civilzation. That these are exhibited in war to an exemplary degree along with the vileness of carnage only serves to highlight them. War games are a celebration of these virtues, provided we celebrate them and their practitioners and not those who create war.

From then on, as years went by I came more and more to see the pen-ultimate evil hiding within Napoleon, the same evil in Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Ghengiz Khan, all those who would destroy others for their own ego, and how these must be restrained and destroyed. I changed my mind. I wouldn't have broken his marshalls at the wheel. They were his abettors but they were not I think monstors. For "the monster" as the British rightly called him, I have changed my mind too. I would have him flayed alive slowly in the center of Paris and forced the populace to watch.

He wasn't tragic, he wasn't flawed, he wasn't an object of pathos. He was a sociopathic serial killer by proxy who delighted in the death and suffering of his fellow man and the destruction and degradation of all around him.

Hitler, Stalin, all of them the same, cut from one cloth.

Poverty, disease, death, anguish, cancer, plague, pestilence, cruelty, crime, brutality-- why must we continue to glamorize and make excuses for the beasts that come among us as John the OFM noted-- is there not misery enough in the world for You?

Similar for me… My French mother died while I was a teenager, and so her view of the Napoleonic legend, including the evil British chaining him to a bare rock in the windswept South Atlantic, really made an impact on my youthful self.

The shock of seeing what a large and lush paradise St Helena actually is made me question the rest of the Napoleonic myth, most of which Napoleon wrote himself…

Napoleon is one of the most fascinating and Famous human beings the world has produced. Humble beginning to becoming self crowned Emperor of a Major world power. He led one of Histories greatest Armies (1805-1807), and in the end it took the armies of and entire continent to bring him down.
Kings feared him, Generals of rival armies had the utmost respect for his skills, even when he was not on his game.

And for the most part his soldiers loved him and continued in following him throughout his many campaigns.
For all his delusional haters here the fact remains he has had more books written about him then most any other General, his campaigns are still studied at Military institutions . So he is not with the despots of History but with Alexander, Caeser, Hannibal and Fredrick the Great.

Napoleonic myth, most of which Napoleon wrote himself…

In the western world the English wrote most of it. If you're an American and your primary understanding of Napoleon didn't come from an English or American author you're an outlier on the chart.

This thread isn't about what our opinion of Napoleon is, it is about where our opinion of Napoleon came from. So to answer that, mine originated with Chandler and Schom.

For everyone who'd rather talk about their opinion of him rather than its origin, see another thread. For Ottoathome as I understand your opinion of Napoleon is based on your disgust of war — a valid disgust — I have only to say it is no more an opinion on Napoleon than it is on an opinion on innumerable other world leaders. I do not judge your criteria but conclude that your criteria leaves very few unscathed, as you mentioned Hitler and Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt & Truman would also be included. While President Carter is proud to say that his administration did not kill anyone, US soldiers still died in operations he authorized. I am unaware of any who by that definition are clean.

Cheers,

The Bandit

I'm sorry, that last paragraph was argumentative and I should not have included it.

Cheers,

The Bandit

I do believe the Code Napoleon was created by a committee of legal experts tasked with the job. The work had been under way before Bonaparte became First Consul. Once he was in charge and there was a (short) peace, he spurred the experts to finish the job.

Minor myth: Louisiana law is not based on the Code Napoleon, since France only had control of it for a few weeks before it was sold to the US. Instead state law is based on a mix of French and Spanish common law rather than English common law. I don't care what Stanley Kowalsky said.

My views of him are a skilled operational commander, clever at political intrigue, amoral and over reaching in grand strategy.

Chandler's Atlas of Military Strategy. I'd never been much interested in any of the horse and musket era until I read the section on Napoleon. Chandler using words like 'blitzkreig' to describe the rapid movements of the French in 1806. I was drawn into his descriptions of the strategy of the central position.
So I can be counted among the 'worshipers' and I freely admit it. Besides we all know he was greater than Churchill in every way :p

Nearly forgot!

First point of contact was the pastry. As a small boy the result was positive.

I see him as a representative of a certain time.
Although a very good general he had his bad days.
And for the rest, all politicians of almost all countries of past centureis have blood on their hands; so napoleon is no exeption; maybe more prominent.

Living 20 minutes from Waterloo as a young teenager gave me a love of the Napoleonic era.

As a Yorkshireman the Lancastrians are the enemies of my blood, but when I have to take part in the larger nationalism of England, the French are our favourite enemies – whether in war or rugby, that coloured my opinion of the most prominent personality of the time. Every story needs its villain!

I have a mixed opinion on the man- he was a product of his times, and I feel like I can make no judgement other than to say I would probably have been afraid of him if I lived then, and therefore disliked him, and possibly would have approved of some of his actions, and disapproved of others. I like gaming the period, in part because of the effect he had on the strategy and tactics, and the campaigns he gave to he wargamers of the future. My 'way of seing him' evolves still from the many sources, pro & con that I have read and will read. If I had to say what my gut feeling is, I would put him in a box with all the other men who have presumed temporal greatness includes the mandate to lead others to their deaths, and mail it to the devil in hell. Love playing him in a wargame campaign though. What could be more fun to play at than a multi-layered hero/villain with such an instrument of war at your fingertips?

Say what you will about the man, but he has given us much discussion and some great games to play!!

He created an era that will be talked about for many years to come. Thus when I think of the man he had great charisma, and intelligence. Would I have followed him, no. He was much too averse to the suffering of others.

I don't remember if I studied Napoleon in school before High School, and then only briefly, but it was when I received Avalon Hill's War & Peace for Christmas (my mother wanted me to 'learn a little history') that I first encountered the Napoleonic era. The scenarios which dealt with each of his major campaigns, and the historical summary of each one got me started, and the colorful counters were very attractive. Finding a copy of Chandler in the JROTC library revealed more information and was a whole new topic of military history where before I was only aware of WW2 and the American Civil War.

It was years later, when I had more disposable income that I was able to add more books to my library, and the books summarizing the period were very academic in their treatment of him, so I just found him to be a fascinating figure in a fascinating period. But considering the wake of destruction he left behind him, and the fact that his empire was very short-lived, makes me think he wasn't that great. I still love the uniforms and period for wargaming, and I have some paintings of his battles on the walls of my home, but I don't particularly admire him like I did when I was younger. And if I had lived in that time, I probably would have hated him.

Cheers

Thanks to everyone who posted, enjoyed reading them.