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