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Notes -
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?
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.
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