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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?
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.
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.
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