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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27454 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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What do you think of Napoleon's Legacy?

I, an amateur to the Napoleonic wars, wandered away from Ridley Scott's Napoleon feeling more or less pleased with my night. By terrible mistake I related to a friend who loves the Emperor that I enjoyed the movie, and was informed that the entire film was a piece of British propaganda. I objected that the British were hardly in the movie at all, only to be explained that the things Scott chose to highlight or ignore mostly followed the contours of the British perspective on the conflict. For instance, Waterloo is emphasized because the British played a decisive role, even though Napoleon stood no real chance of victory during his return, whereas the larger Battle of Leipzig which really ended Napoleon's bid for domination wasn't even mentioned because the British weren't there. And of course what about the fact that Napoleon only ever declared war twice while Britain was actively funding other countries to oppose France, and so on and so on.

My friend's counter-narrative of perfidious Albion being the real villain behind the Napoleonic wars is likely no more straightforwardly true than the narrative that France alone was at fault, but it's a helpful reminder that even today there remain vastly diverging perspectives on the immense impact of the man, the myth, and the legend of Napoleon Bonaparte.

For instance, there's also of course his political reforms, which are the part I found myself missing the most in the movie, even though they would have been impractical to include. A while back Scott touched upon a study by Daron Acemoglu claiming that long run growth was much higher in the areas that Napoleon conquered, due to him abolishing guilds, monopolies, and other rent seeking institutions. Rebuttals included people arguing that Acemoglu et al forgot to control for access to coal, after which you supposedly see no impact from Napoleonic conquest remaining.

Or military reforms. Was Napoleon a genius for coming up with military reforms like how to mobilize national resources and break armies down into self-sustaining units that could live on the land and rely less on supply trains? I've heard people argue these were really mostly Ancien Regime ideas crafted after their loss in the Seven Years War. Napoleon only took advantage of the flux of the revolution to be the one to ram them through.

And what about Republicanism and liberalism in general? Did he hasten them along by spreading their ideas farther and faster than they ever would on their own, or did he doom them for decades by encouraging the conservative monarchs to see liberals as a threat to be immediately stamped out, rather than a nuissance that could be tolerated?

So how do you feel about Napoleon's legacy? Was he an expansionist warmonger or a peacemaker driven to conflict by other powers? Was he a brilliant military reformer or mostly an opportunist riding off others' inventions? Did he leave a legacy of economic and political dynamism or barely make a dent? What's your take?

I'm not super knowledgeable about the issue, but I'm inclined to him in a negative light. As I understand it, he played an important role in moving Europe from cabinet wars to total war.

Given the historical distance, we maybe can appreciate a romanticised Napoleon as a military genius in the way that people think Vikings or Caesar are cool. But if we take a more serious look, I don't see how Napoleon can be seen as a good or even morally neutral person outside of French nationalistic hero worship or Raskolnikovesque nihilism.

Hard to dislike such a brilliant man, especially since his ideals seem so much closer to mine than those of his enemies. If there wasn’t the appalling death toll. I try to cut him some slack due to the Supreme General Curse.

Goes like this : To ultra-competent warriors like Napoleon and Caesar, almost any ‘fair’ peace terms the enemy offers look like shortchanging, because he alone knows he’s very likely to win the hypothetical war the peace is supposed to avoid. To achieve a meaningful compromise and lasting peace with such a man, you need an enemy wise and ego-less enough to know his own inferiority (as in the case of fabian tactics, which I always found fascinating) , and love of peace from both sides.

Putting politics aside and not having seen the new movie, I wonder how usual it was for young military officers, or politicians for that matter, to marry widows older than themselves who were also known to be promiscuous - because supposedly the new movie focuses a lot on Napoleon's first marriage. I can imagine that there were lots of older widows around after the Revolutionary Wars and the Great Terror, but I'm pretty sure such marriages were still not the norm.

I saw a famous historian, I forget his name, describe him as the most competent person in history. I don't know if that's true, but he has to be at the top of the list. He was absolutely brilliant. Unfortunately for him, even the smartest person in the world can't conquer everyone and he was eventually defeated. He was probably also inevitable considering how out of touch and anachronistic the Old regime was in France. He ushered in a new world that probably wasn't upended until WW1. He was an absolute Chad.

I feel like we are due for a Napoleon in America because there is a bunch of old things that need to be discarded and only a brilliant Chad type person can bring this new world forward.

I tend to see him as a genius warmonger general who had a greedy imperialist mentality and someone who seemed to restrain some of the worst aspects of the French revolution in terms of internal politics and be much less of a fanatic in his direct rule than that. His regime was still authoritarian though. In terms of internal French politics, the France influenced by the French revolution could have had much worse leadership than Napoleon and he helped bring a unified code of law with the Napoleonic Code which is relatively sensible. But of course if I remember correctly, the Napoleonic wars did cost Europe 2% of its population which is pretty bad for those who have to deal with it.

Just reading the man's quotes and it is obvious he was a brilliant, narcissistic and philosophized man. And even with his narcissism he could also be wise and even self critical at times too. https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/210910.Napol_on_Bonaparte?page=1

But at the end of the day he was strongly motivated by his own glory. As some of his quotes also suggest. He is a modern version of Alexander the Great in that way. A less successful one of course.

I don't think that I understand the politics and diplomacy of the era well enough to judge Napoleon as a politician and diplomat. I am only well-read about the military aspects of his rule. I think it is fair to say, at least, that his diplomacy was a failure because it did not manage to secure a lasting peace that would have preserved his empire. However, given how many enemies he had, it is possible that no-one else would have had anything other than a miracle chance of doing better. As a military leader, he is obviously one of the greatest of all time, but his reputation is also stained by the fact that he tended to get lazy in most of his campaigns after 1806, only sometimes putting in really brilliant efforts when he had his back against the wall, like in certain parts of the 1813 campaign and much of the 1814 campaign. Other than those moments, he tended to just order massive frontal assaults - for example, at Wagram and Borodino. It also seems to me that he was unimaginative in the later parts of the 1813 campaign. Surely there must have been some better option than to allow his enemies to force him into battle at Leipzig. The Peninsular Campaign was another failure - he allowed France to continue to devote large resources to Spain without ever forcing a decisive victory there. At Waterloo, too, he had no interesting strategy, he just seemed to hope to overwhelm the British and their allies through an incoherent sequence of frontal assaults. I don't know whether it is more that his enemies caught up to him in skill or that he just became less consistently brilliant as time passed. It is also possible that his big frontal assaults were motivated less by thinking that they were the best course of action and more by needing to handle larger and larger armies, made up of less experienced soldiers than he had tended to have in some of his earlier campaigns, using early 19th century communication techniques.

I do not think that he was so vastly outmatched by his enemies that victory was impossible for him. If he had managed to establish an enduring empire, he would go down in my book a rung higher on the list but as it is, his ultimate defeat colors his legacy too much for me to put him on the very top rung of historical leaders. He goes on the next rung after that one.

At Waterloo, too, he had no interesting strategy, he just seemed to hope to overwhelm the British and their allies through an incoherent sequence of frontal assaults. I don't know whether it is more that his enemies caught up to him in skill or that he just became less consistently brilliant as time passed.

It may be true that he was older and had lost his touch by then, but he was also buffetted by health issues. Reportedly at Waterloo he had stomach issues and hemorrhoids so severe he struggled to sit on his horse. Maybe more importantly, he had lost most of his top commanders and advisors by then and overall machine of his military wasn't going to function the same. Even still, he came closer to winning than I think most realize.

I do not think that he was so vastly outmatched by his enemies that victory was impossible for him.

I think this is definitely true before his first exile, but after he returned he was pretty vastly outmatched. The combined forces of the four armies against him were huge; Waterloo was less than half their total men, which imo likely means even if he had won there it's hard to imagine him losing in the long run.

I'm fairly sure Napoleon's health had started to fail him by the point of the hundred days, which could also be part of why his planning trended less elaborate and brilliant. Especially considering the logistics and communications barriers of the time.

The man was an insane narcissist who relied too much on the tool of war. He was Hitler without (most of) the racism.

How do you reconcile this opinion with most of his wars being defensive? Did the coalitions rely too much on the tool of war?

Easily. Even Napoleon's defensive wars were mostly sparked by his own belligerence. Partly that was through making other powers feel threatened. Partly it was his willingness to provoke his opponents, being undeterred by the prospect of potential conflict. Partly it was through over-extending himself unnecessarily and giving those with grudges reason to think him vulnerable.

I don't think there's any question that many of his opponents also failed in their own statecraft.

It's certainly difficult to disagree that the era that birthed total war was too warlike on the whole. And Napoleon can be blamed for much of this.

Still I think you're being too harsh. Europe was in a state of chaos that is hard to imagine even for us today. Institutions that stood for centuries were overturned every month. Putting your faith in steel in those times in an understandable proposition.

Oh, I forgot to mention his repeated treachery (most notably against Spain, but also others). He proved vividly to everyone that he could not be trusted. That's not how you build stability and peace.

To simplify it: A Napoleon movie which isn't done by the French for a French audience is cultural appropriation.

Also Napoleon was 29 in Egypt campaign and 35 when he crowned himself Emperor. A younger sexier actor should play him.

If we can't handle him at his Waterloo, we don't deserve him at his Austerlitz.

To simplify it: A Napoleon movie which isn't done by the French for a French audience is cultural appropriation.

I'm sure you're not being entirely serious, but this is a silly thing to say. When Europe looks like this at the height of your power, I would say you're fair game for almost any European nation to have a take on. That's not to say that I think any one country has the monopoly on truth when it comes to opinions on Napoleon, but just because modern France and the French people are the inheritors of Napoleon's legacy, doesn't mean that they're the only or best ones to tell his story. It doesn't even mean that a French filmmaker would make a "better" or "more accurate" biopic.

I'm almost inclined to view Napolean as a force of nature rather than as "good" or "bad."

He was a man of incredible talent, incredible will, he was both a man of action and intellectually a total mensch. Thus, anyone who wants to achieve something in the world, can profit from studying his life.

But, what he accomplished, he accomplished for his own visions. The results were in the end catastrophic for the men who followed him, as they starved and froze to death in the Russian winter. The results for France itself were a mixed bag.

But it is hard for me to cry too many tears about the fate of his followers or of his victims. The institutions that fell were old and rotting. The men who followed him, chose to do so, if they were captivated by his amoral visions of conquest and were willing to subjugate themselves to his vision, then I cannot say they deserved better. We all die in the end.

I, an amateur to the Napoleonic wars, wandered away from Ridley Scott's Napoleon feeling more or less pleased with my night.

I haven't seen the movie and don't intend to after reading the American Sun review and others. From what I've heard the main problem is that they turned one of the most charismatic men in history into a mumbling bumbling clingy loser.

Strangely I found that review very funny and largely accurate, but I also enjoyed the movie.

The men who followed him, chose to do so,

AFAICT Napoleon drafted 60k-120k people every year during the wars.

his amoral visions of conquest

What would you say made them amoral?

Amoral means that a choice was made without reference to morality. Immoral means that it is contrary to morality. If Napoleon was motivated solely by glory, his decisions were amoral. They may also have been immoral - that depends on what your moral code is, because Napoleon didn't have one.

I'm almost inclined to view Napolean as a force of nature rather than as "good" or "bad."

This is much how I feel as well. I can't bring myself to particularly like or dislike him, or take a side between his followers and detractors, it's more of a feeling of being very impressed from a far distance.

I'll say I think it was still a decent enough movie, and I was surprised how much I enjoyed it after reading angry reviews like the one linked. Certainly not an incredible movie, and one that'll drive hardcore fans mad, but a decent enough way to spend a few hours.

So how do you feel about Napoleon's legacy?

Morally, Napoleon strikes me as what Spengler characterized as a Caesar: no strong ideology, ambitious, a pragmatically minded autocrat who sweeps into command of an exhausted society. Men like that do not fight for a cause; viewing them in "good" or "evil" terms is a mistake. Had Napoleon not foolishly killed the Duke of Enghien and invited another coalition against France, the right would view him with the vague favorability they do with Salazar or Franco, because he set a house in order after a decade of chaos. His concordat with the pope, rehabilitation of the emigres, and rationalized law code were just what the doctor ordered for France.

Politically, Napoleon is fascinating to me. He successfully defrocked something that looks suspiciously what the online right calls the Cathedral. People who see only the vague outline of history sometimes say that Napoleon tamed the French revolution after its Jacobin excesses. This is incorrect. After the Thermidorian Reaction, France endured a relatively bloodless period under an oligarchy masquerading as a republic, which historians call the French Directory. The Directors held to the ideological center of the French revolution, using press censorship, anarcho-tyranny, and election fixing to ward off their strong left and right flanks. Napoleon staged a coup with the help of a few Directorate insiders who thought him their pawn. After Napoleon got rid of those 'friends', no one stood up for them.

Provoking another war with Europe afterwards was a dreadful mistake. If not for that, he'd get good marks in my book, but he did do it.

That sounds like it would make for an excellent movie.

A lot of my knowledge of Napoleon comes from Wikipedia dives embarked upon during my read of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. (For the record, I was disappointed at that version’s slavish adherence to the stations of Napoleonic canon. A magician routing your armies and remapping Belgium ought to have some effect on strategy.) As a result, I’ve surely internalized more of the British narrative than might be strictly accurate.

The man was brilliant, in the sense that he’d internalized hundreds of years of military reasoning. As a result, he could judge capabilities and limitations at a glance. I think that’s a prerequisite for doing anything truly impressive on campaign. People tend to underestimate the fog of war, and before several of Napoleon’s critical battles, armies blundered past each other or failed to communicate. You can see how a refined intuition would be a huge advantage. Combined with his apparently ridiculous charisma, Napoleon was basically positioned to pull off dramatic reversals. Combined with France’s economic and manpower heft, he was also given a lot of slack. Eventually, though, the odds caught up to him.

His life beggars belief. Show up, terrify the Continent, suffer a setback, and repeat. Very impressive, but also only possible when the economic, tactical, and strategic stars aligned.

A lot of my knowledge of Napoleon comes from Wikipedia dives embarked upon during my read of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

Great book, really brings to period to life. But Susanna Clarke obviously knows nothing about the military side of things.

Eventually, though, the odds caught up to him.

His life beggars belief.

It happens a lot with these Alexander/Caesar/Hitler/Gustavus Adolphus/Tom Brady figures. They win so much and so hard they see themselves as infallible and end up embarrassing themselves on a low-odds gamble, like playing football at 45 or invading Russia.

Not sure that's fair to Brady, you could just as easily say that playing football at 43 was a low-odds gamble, and he won the Superbowl. The man clearly just decided to keep playing until results showed that he actually couldn't keep up the dominance any more. And the difference between him and the others is that there was little or no chance of his gamble throwing away the things he had already accomplished.

While I think the addition was facetious, Brady also totally would be in the league this year if he had a better supporting cast. He wasn't horrible last year, he could probably put up a winning record on any of the Jets, Niners, Broncos. He just wasn't the guy who would carry the team any more.

It happens a lot with these Alexander/Caesar/Hitler/Gustavus Adolphus/Tom Brady figures. They win so much and so hard they see themselves as infallible and end up embarrassing themselves on a low-odds gamble, like playing football at 45 or invading Russia.

A lot of the entrepreneurial types are just built like that. Tendency to continually go all-in since it's all they know, until it eventually falls in a heap. I'm reminded of a small business I used to contract for that was run by a guy who'd gone from millionaire-to-bankrupt about 4 times in his life, and was still plugging away in his late 70's. He wasn't super intelligent, but he had weasel cunning and just kept headbutting brick walls until either he or they broke. Especially since he was aware that if he wasn't pushing himself in business he'd inevitably drink and/or gamble and/or whore away all his money, anyway. Kinda inspiring in its own way.

As an individual, he was world-historically brilliant. The human condition, however, is not exhausted by exceptional individuals. The fact that France has repeatedly taken the wrong side of European history makes me glad he lost. Compare Germany, which was a consistent force for good (BRD GmbH being of course less German than Vichy France was French).

Basically, my litmus test is if someone is allowed to be mentioned in a neutral or positive context by the mainstream, he’s not the hero my people needs – not the Man against Time.

I am trying to figure out what the "wrong side of European history" means. In the American sense, it usually means "bad ideas that deserved to be crushed". In the European sense, I'm thinking more "unable to exercise one's advantages", as they were largely playing from the same ideological rulebook.

(I hope I'm wrong about this, and look forward to any effortpost this inspires.)

Nations are rational agents, but also memetic ecosystems. Few memes have caused as much damage to European civilization (of which North America is an indelible part) as those of equality, civic nationalism, radical individualism, class struggle and plutocratic free market capitalism. France often pioneered and served as a platform for such ideas, which is how it became an inspiration for many generations of subversives, though of course it wasn’t alone in this. Already in the days of Napoleon this led to disastrous consequences, such as granting citizenship to non-European aliens who had been selected for contempt towards the majority population. Today, of course, no one from that era would register as an egalitarian – indeed they would be considered fascists, i.e. non-persons. But so would American WWII vets. This doesn’t change the fact that in retrospect, we know exactly what they fought and died for.

The story of European wars and alliances is a sad one characterized by misadventure, greed and shortsightedness. I do not wish to imply they were directly driven by ideology like the American Civil War was, only that my race would most likely be better off if they played out differently. As things stand, and as of course you know, we are going to become a minority in our own homelands in a few generations, and most of us are so demoralized they don’t see any problem with that, so forgive me for perhaps being a bit melancholic.

A form of civic nationalism worked well for Rome for hundreds of years. I doubt that Rome could ever have managed to extend its power to the entire Mediterranean if they had stuck to an ethnic nationalism model that privileged ethnic Romans hugely above all others.

One could also argue that civic nationalism is what bound France into a nation that has endured the test of time. There was a time hundreds of years ago when the people who inhabited what is now France did not think of themselves as being part of one ethnicity.

There is also, of course, America - the most successful European-based country of all time. The mostly English founding population managed to successfully integrate a very numerous German population, and then other ethnicities as well.

Ethnic wilting was contemporaneous with the decline and fall of the western Roman empire, if not its proximate cause. Hardly a point in favour of "civic nationalism"; the Germanic barbarians that Rome allowed to settle in its lands from the 3rd century onwards were never assimilated, and to use anachronistic language, formed a fifth column.

As for America - large-scale Irish Catholic (and later German) migration was the proximate cause of the collapse of the sort of agrarian yeoman republic that most of that American rebel leaders had envisioned. The sort of Irish people that showed up en masse in the 1840s - starving, illiterate, destitute, non-anglophone and uncivilised - ruptured the white/other distinction that had bounded the USA's participatory democracy for white landowning men, and necessitated the shift to managed democracy: yellow press, chickenfeed for the hoi polloi, the impossibility of complex public arguments and time horizons beyond the next election.

Were I making an argument for democratic universalism - I wouldn't - but if I were, I'd pick an example where a state identity has authentically and comprehensively erased localist ethnic distinctions into a single homogeneous "the people". 19th century France is actually not a bad example. Any country you can think of where ethnic division is still noticeable has not, ipso facto, succeeded in democratic levelling.

I would say that the Roman Empire could only be founded on ethnic nationalism. Over the course of centuries, it survived by slowly granting priviliges/power to ambitious and competent outsiders, starting with the Latins, then the Italians, then to provincials, ramping up with Trajan and peaking with the Illyrian emperors, and ultimately ceding it to barbarians like Stilicho or Alaric. So the seemly mutually exclusive ideas "civic nationalism worked for Roman Empire" and "the decline and fall of the Roman Empire tracks with the loss of its Roman character" can actually coexist.

Imagine the state capacity of Rome like the material of the balloon, and its prosperity as helium. As state capacity contracts, the balloon must release air, otherwise it will pop. It is a "bad thing" for Rome to be leaking power, of course, but necessary for survival. You can only leak power so long until there's no empire left, though.

As for America - large-scale Irish Catholic (and later German) migration was the proximate cause of the collapse of the sort of agrarian yeoman republic that most of that American rebel leaders had envisioned.

Having America remain an undeveloped, agrarian country that exported raw materials and imported manufactured goods was much more the vision of Britain than America, and was basically the relationship of dependency that most empires af the time practiced with their colonies. Some American founders did want an agrarian yeoman republic. Others, famously, didn't, and the most influential British-American founders were pushing policy to leave that dream behind and usher in an industrial future from the moment the country was founded, without any input from the poor, huddled masses of Ireland and Germany. Ironically, Jefferson, face of the whole agrarian-yeoman fad, probably did even more than Hamilton to encourage our infant industries:

The embargo had the dual effect of severely curtailing American overseas trade, while forcing industrial concerns to invest new capital into domestic manufacturing in the United States. In commercial New England and the Middle Atlantic, ships sat idle. In agricultural areas, particularly the South, farmers and planters could not sell crops internationally. The scarcity of European goods stimulated American manufacturing, particularly in the North, and textile manufacturers began to make massive investments in cotton mills

I am not arguing for a form of civic nationalism so extreme and unbounded that one decides to allow large numbers of unassimilated and highly militarized ethnicities into one's lands, and even makes them an essential part of your military forces. I think that is going too far. However, that does not mean that a more circumscribed form of civic nationalism does not work. Rome would never have become a superpower to begin with if it had stuck to ethnonationalism, it had to switch to civic nationalism in order to become a superpower empire.

As for America, the thing is, the agrarian yeoman republic would have been swept away by economic changes one way or another. After the industrial revolution, whether America had imported millions of Irish and other people or not, it would have been forced to switch to a different social/economic/political system one way or another because otherwise it would not have been able to compete with other great powers.

Rome had pretty much completed it's conquests by the time Augustus became emperor. They added a few bits and pieces like Britain and Dacia but nothing huge. The edict of Caracalla was still two centuries away at that point. So I wouldn't exactly call them civic nationalists when they became a superpower. Italians were very much the central ethnicity and the vast majority of the citizen body during their rise.

Italians are not the same thing as Romans. They did not see themselves as Romans. My understanding is that the Roman Republic's early rise to power was based in part on their willingness to assimilate other Italian powers into a new political concept rather than just attempting to utterly crush, enslave, subjugate, and kill them.

More comments

The European rulebook didn’t start out so homogenous.

Germany didn’t unify until 1871. It can trace its origins directly to the confederation formed in Napoleon’s wake. The same goes for Italy, as Italians were dissatisfied with post-Napoleonic rule by Austria and others. Without Napoleon and the French Empire, Europe looks very different in the decades leading up to the Great War.

Napoleon represented a liberal, nationalist, popular movement springing from the French Revolution. Never mind that he was an unapologetic autocrat! He dismantled the Holy Roman Empire, protected religious minorities, deployed the metric system, replaced the legal code, and watched over the implementation of countless other features we now take for granted as modern.

By comparison, his opposition was monarchist and conservative. The Congress of Vienna represented a pushback against liberalism in favor of the existing powers. Simultaneously, states were growing accustomed to the capacity promised by conscription, standardization, and the oncoming industrial era.

The OP is saying that liberalism is the wrong side of history. Judging by his comments on the Germans, I doubt he feels the same about nationalism.

Don't forget Haiti. The French revolutionary government, remarkably, decided to end slavery in Haiti. Napoleon tried to bring it back, causing a horrific Haitian race war that may have made US Southerners more resistant to ending slavery and more willing to fight a civil war to keep it.

It was a disapointment that the movie didn't touch upon the North American / Carribean stuff at all, it would have been a cool way to connect him to events people acrossNorth America feel grounded in, but it really wouldn't have fit anywhere in an already very long movie.

In my view undeniably one of the greatest men of history, Hegel's description of "the world spirit on horseback" a fitting one. Genuinely a liberatory force for much of Western civilization, a forest fire burning away much accumulated dead wood both social and economic, while simultaneously being a bastard for overthrowing the French Revolution to reimplement a monarchy (gotta admit having the pope at the coronation then crowning yourself should be the encyclopedia's example of a "chad move") and attempting to force Haitians back into slavery. Once those die were cast though, the worst thing Napoleon did was lose. I think that if victorious and with more time to reshape Europe in peace, the continent would be in a far better state than how things went with him defeated. But I had a strongly French influenced education.

I think Napoleon was pretty cool, not only for the all of the cool military victories, but also because he dealt the deathblow to the old church-and-king order of Europe. I find it strange that he has such popularity among right wingers for that reason. Pretty much every other Napoleon fan I’ve ever run into online besides myself is a right winger, and usually a pretty edgy one, I don’t think there are many normiecon Napoleon fanboys. Napoleon was obviously not exactly a progressive by today’s standards, nor was he personally a liberal or anything like that, but his overall historical role was certainly to destroy traditional Europe. He was an icon of liberals and revolutionaries in Europe for decades. If I was a reactionary conservative I think Napoleon would be high on my list of historical villains.

A hypothesis: the salient feature of Napoleon to those right-wing fans of his isn’t any policy he enacted, nor any long-term effect of his conquests/rule — but simply the fact that he was a Great Man. Hero-worship seems to be a very online-right-wing thing, whereas a diminishing of the individual’s role in history in favor of institutions and economic conditions is a very left-wing thing.

A further idea is that there’s a useful political axis (besides the standard ones) along the lines of “free will” versus “determinism”. I haven’t thought this through at all, but the idea is that some people are psychologically predisposed towards caring a lot about viewing the world as being able to be shaped by their own human action, whereas other people don’t really mind conceiving themselves as being mere patients of political developments. The former group includes righties who rail against the Deep State while the latter includes neoliberals who post memes glorifying the Fed. At the same time, a Stalin-loving tankie belongs to the former camp, while the latter camp counts grillpilled conservatives among its members. Under this framework, online right wingers fall under the former category, and as such, love Napoleon not because of anything specific he did, but because he (like any other Great Man) embodies the idea that one individual can change history.

ETA: As for why online right wingers have this view in the first place, here’s yet another baseless hypothesis. People whose feel that their views are marginalized by the dominant political/social culture are more likely to want to believe that, even when facing a host of institutions and material factors all arrayed against them, just one man can nevertheless turn the tide and take home victory. It’s certainly an appealing notion for those who haven’t yet succumbed to doomerism. Yet even my blackpilled self can still appreciate the idea of the Great Man, but for personal-psychological reasons rather than political ones: being a Great Man Enjoyer seems to cultivate an internal locus of control (and note that this is, to some extent, more of a right-wing trait at present).

Leftists and left-centrists are prone to hero-worship too, of figures like Lenin, Kennedy, Che, MLK Jr., Obama, etc.

I think one difference between the highly online left and the highly online right, though, is that the right is much more likely to openly hero-worship people based on a "might makes right" principle, whereas leftists prefer to say that when their favorite people cause harm, it is for the sake of the people.

So, for example, it is easy to find highly online right-wingers who think that Roman Emperors were cool basically just because they were strong and powerful and they dominated others and killed whoever stood in their way. Whereas it would be extremely rare to find a leftist who openly glorifies Stalin for being some kind of smart and effective self-aggrandizing conqueror - the vast majority of them would only glorify Stalin because according to them, he helped the people.

Which is not to say that highly online right-wingers do not care at all about being loved by the people, of course. Most of them do. It is hard to find any online Hitler-lover, for example, who does not keep ranting about how "the volk loved their Führer", blah blah blah.

No leftist is very famous for winning great battles against insane odds. Trotsky is about as close as you get to that level but he's still at least a tier below Napoleon, Alexander, Cortes or Julius Caesar. Giap and Mao were more about persistence and skillful execution than aggressive masterstrokes.

Giap's quote sums up their (very successful but less glamourous) methodology: "Accumulate a thousand small victories to turn into one great success."

Bolívar? He gets credited as a centrist, but that’s in comparison to the governments which followed him.

Napoleon was on the political left of his day in an important sense, and Caesar was a populares.

Fidel Castro overthrew Batista's government and seized all of Cuba with an initial force of about 80 men, all but about 20 of whom got killed or captured on the first day of Castro's invasion. It is a rather underappreciated feat of generalship. It reminds me a lot of Cortez conquering the Aztec Empire with a far-outnumbered force, by making allies with the locals.

The Aztec empire could field hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Cuba was not even a regional power.

Castro got crushed, imprisoned and was only released thanks to the mercy of his opponents. There was no Noche Triste where Castro fought his way out of the capital to regroup, he only got out of prison because some politician thought it might be a good look. Then he had an opportunity to come back and start an insurgency.

Castro's leadership during the invasion should not be judged based on the fact that his opponents released him from prison at some point before that. That makes no sense. It would be like discounting Hitler's political feat of raising the Nazi Party to total rule of Germany because he had gotten released from prison after the Beer Hall Putsch.

Taking control of an island of millions of people that is ruled by a government that is supported by the strongest country in the world and which is only about 200 miles away, with only about 80 men, is pretty impressive!

Hitler's coup-launching and general martial abilities were poor. He was very charismatic, as was Castro (and Cortes for that matter). But what were his military feats? I'm focused purely on that. In Hitler's case, it was his generals who did the fighting, he directed grand strategy and messed things up, failing to sufficiently mobilize the German war economy until it was too late.

Castro managed a revolution in a poor, coup-prone country. The US pulled away from Batista the moment he was seriously threatened. They had Cantillo launch another coup against him, the whole thing was a shambles. He didn't face really substantial opposition like Giap did.

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I'm not terribly familiar with French history but didn't he walk back a lot of the more progressive things the various post-Revolution governments did?

Pseudoerasmus made a somewhat adjacent argument that in the broad sweep of things the revolution and Napoleon mostly ended up recreating what we think of as conservative institutions. Or at least that we underrate the extent of the revolutionary nature by which other countries achieved similar reforms:

The French Revolution was seen as 'radical' at the time, only because much of Europe undre 1789 was feudal

From a modern perspective, the French Revolution should be seen as conservative. The Directory & Napoleon, both conservative reactions. Even under the Terror, principle of private property was never under threat. Confiscated lands were privatized. Feudal land redistributed to market relations.

Modern pseudo-Burkeans decry the French revolution in part because they believe England could gradually reform its institutions without violence, without destroying aristocracy & monarchy - except these people overlook England's entire 17th century ;-)

Yes, but on a broader scale he was still significantly to the ‘left’ of most of his continental rivals. Conservatives of the day never really stopped seeing him as the revolution incarnate. And a lot of the changes he reversed were less actual significant material reforms and more silly LARP stuff like getting rid of the revolutionary calendar.

So how do you feel about Napoleon's legacy? Was he an expansionist warmonger or a peacemaker driven to conflict by other powers? Was he a brilliant military reformer or mostly an opportunist riding off others' inventions? Did he leave a legacy of economic and political dynamism or barely make a dent? What's your take?

All of it, to some extent? You outlined many major points, and IMO it's futile to try and pronounce a definitive judgement of the man and his deeds when, as you noted, he's so distorted by controversy and propaganda.

From my perspective the French and the British are villains, and us poor South Germans are the eternal victims of those predatory nations. Our countries were conquered by the man himself, replaced with artificial test-tube states, our young men marched off to freeze to death in Russia as third-rate cannon fodder, and then the Germanies were ravaged by the revolutionary sentiments that we can surely somehow blame on Napoleon, until the Brits' Prussian puppets ended up gobbling up all of Germany, and I probably needn't tell you how that ended for us.

That said, Napoleon, egomaniac scoundrel that he may have been, cuts one hell of a figure. You can practically smell the cope and seethe of those who condemn him. The Elon Musk of his time, but with a grandiose deathwish instead of nerdiness. He's too much of a callous, self-serving conqueror to be painted white, but far too brave, skilled and charismatic to be painted black.

IMO it's futile to try and pronounce a definitive judgement of the man and his deeds when, as you noted, he's so distorted by controversy and propaganda.

He may have been controversial 200 years ago, but these days very few people care enough about those events to pass value judgements. Not even in France:

When it comes to how France should remember Napoleon, the most common response is “he should be marked as a notable historical figure in a neutral or balanced fashion”, at 49%. One in eight (13%) say he should be celebrated, while only 2% say he should be condemned – although a further 8% say he should not be remembered at all.

This is, of course, the natural course of historiography both popular and academic. Few care enough to pass strong value judgements even on more recent figures like Wilhelm II. It is only those events that have developed into Manichean foundation myths, such as the Civil War and World War II, which grow more black and white over time, and each generation is regarded as reprobate by the next one for being too nuanced.

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