Here we deal with yet another conqueror, prefiguring Woodrow Wilson by a century and the Wilsonian neocons by 200 years. Napoleon was actually doing Europe a favor by conquering it, taking out one ancien regime after another and replacing them with modern states. One gets tired of the accolades for this man who was, like Alexander, yet another conquering tyrant.
First he betrayed the ideals of newly birthed Republic by installing himself as dictator. The he crowned himself King, er, Emperor, blessed by none other than the Pope himself.
This was not the first time a sovereign had crowned himself. Napoleon’s excuse was that he did not want any arguments among the court elite about who would presume to hand him the crown in the name of the people … Of course, the self-crowning was a matter of Napoleon asserting his political independence, underlining how much he owed his elevation not to the pope but to himself and himself alone. In the age-old conflict between the spiritual and the temporal, Napoleon was vigorously asserting the supremacy of the temporal. This sent not only a political but a personal message.
Soon after, he trampled Europe, making the world safe for demogogueracy, the beginning of a cycle:
Destroy Europe -> Defeat -> Exile -> Try again -> Defeated again -> Exiled yet again.
Not exactly a winning formula!
In 1812, he made the error, always fateful to any conqueror including Hitler 130 years later, of trying to conquer Mother Russia. He ran into the same problem that all would-be Russia conquerors run up against: that nasty beast called the Russian winter.
His army was nearly destroyed in the process:
When one takes into account the Russian military losses – according to one estimate, as many as 300,000 dead – one an reasonably assert that up to one million people died between the end of July 1812, when the expedition into Russia was launched, and February 1813, with the remnants of the army continuing to die from wounds, disease, malnutrition and exhaustion. Of the 27,000 Italian troops only 1,000 made it back. Of the 25,500 Saxon soldiers that went into Russia, 6,000 came back alive. Looking at figures for individual regiments sometimes tells an even bleaker story. Raymond de Montesquiou-Fezensac had 3,000 men under his command. Of those 200 came back with him and another 100 were eventually returned from prison – that is, nine-tenths of his effectives were dead or missing.
Italians: 97% losses (!)
Montesquiou-Fezensac’s regiment: 90% losses
Saxons: 75% losses.
It would be hard to imagine a worse defeat.
Of course, Russia herself was devastated with 300,000 dead. Russia is always willing to sacrifice for the Motherland – see the 27 million lost in WW2.
In the entire campaign, 1 million men died for, frankly, nothing at all.
Hmmm, I just did imagine a worse defeat than the Russian campaign. It was called Waterloo.
The astonishing thing about Waterloo is not so much that Napoleon lost the battle as his reaction to it. In all, 55,000-60,000 men were killed and wounded during that day in the space of a few square kilometres, along with 10,000 horses. But Napoleon still retained control over about 117,000 men in the north, yet he did not attempt to rally his troops, nor continue the fight and bring the battle to the enemy at another point.
Are you kidding? Napoleon suffered 57,000 casualties and lost 10,000 horses in a single day in an area whose perimeter could probably be strolled by a man in an hour. That’s one Hell of a horrific defeat. Followed by Napoleon’s curious frozen inaction with his remaining troops sequestered to the north.
Waterloo along with the Russia campaign turns received knowledge about Napoleon on its head. The great militarist was also a terrible general at least some of the time.
The usual exile followed this, across the seas this time. Europe, torn to a hundred anarchic bits, tried to patch itself together from the devastation and entropy resulting from by one man’s egomania.
Napoleon Bonaparte, great man? Why?
All quotes from Philip Dwyer, Citizen Emperor: Napoleon in Power (2013)
