Napoleon: Two centuries of life after death
historytoday.com
historytoday.com
"Charles Minard's map of Napoleon's disastrous Russian campaign of 1812"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Joseph_Minard#/media/F...
The classic “Waterloo” remains undefeated
For example, no matter what you think of the guy, Napoleon was a bonafide military genius. In the movie, they made him seem like just one more of the bunch. Napoleon was famous for never being bothered by the gore of battle and the buzzing of billets, in the same vein as general Grant. In the movie they made him seem like a scaredy cat
In “Waterloo” you could see why French soldiers joined his cause in droves. Extreme charisma
That's not a question meant to be sarcastic: you know more about him than I do, so that always has seemed like a terrible choice of timing.
Actually maybe Putin is one example where this may be in fact happening.
They're criminal minds of a certain type, and criminal minds often harbor a secret compulsion to be stopped or caught.
> Actually maybe Putin ...
Maybe this is why democracies have been somewhat long-lasting, because no one mind bears the full madness of crimes of the magnitude e.g. the U.S. or Britain commit fairly continuously.
Edit: arguably, getting invaded and going back to a republic after a few years shouldn't count as a regime change either. The German occupation was temporary and the country reverted back to a republic immediately after. That's more of an argument for the resilience of democracies than against it.
The Third Republic was also more responsible for its own end than you give it credit for. A minority of the government wanted to keep fighting, from Algeria if necessary, rather than surrender, but the majority were defeatists and fascist sympathizers. The armistice and collaboration was a deliberate choice that came from within the system, as was the reform of the Third Republic into the autocratic Vichy state. In fact, Germany didn’t even completely occupy France until after Operation Torch, when Darlan, the de facto leader of the Vichy government (Petain at this point being more of a figurehead), switched sides and openly cooperated with the Allies, ordering an end to French resistance in North Africa.
That's fair, but wouldn't you say that the coup was made possible by the fourth constitution's bad design and not really attributable to the country's being a democracy? I don't know much about how that constitution was written, but just coming out of a war and an occupation with a collaborationist government can't have made the process easy.
> The Third Republic was also more responsible for its own end than you give it credit for. A minority of the government wanted to keep fighting, from Algeria if necessary, rather than surrender, but the majority were defeatists and fascist sympathizers. The armistice and collaboration was a deliberate choice that came from within the system, as was the reform of the Third Republic into the autocratic Vichy state. In fact, Germany didn’t even completely occupy France until after Operation Torch, when Darlan, the de facto leader of the Vichy government (Petain at this point being more of a figurehead), switched sides and openly cooperated with the Allies, ordering an end to French resistance in North Africa.
The question is, was loss in mainland France avoidable or not? Again, not much of a history buff, but France was defeated extremely quickly, so the choice the government had wasn't between "fight to keep the current republic" and "collaborate", but more between "lose the mainland and go resist from abroad" and "abandon control of the mainland to the Nazis and collaborate". That doesn't make the Vichy government any more moral but it does mean that the republic's end would have been forced from the outside in any case.
There’s no way to design a constitution on paper to avoid the risk of a military coup, especially not if you want to keep an effective military at the same time. Civilian control of the military is an institution that needs to established with generations of indoctrination. The United States has done an unusually effective job of this, which would come as a happy surprise to our founders, who feared the inherent risks of a standing army.
1958 is also a little late to try and cast blame on the circumstances of the Second World War. The coup had more to do with the fact that the democratically elected government of France was willing to allow Algerian independence and the military was not. Algeria was still lost in the end, but the military was more willing to accede to the personal authority of De Gaulle rather than the institutional authority of the elected government.
> The question is, was loss in mainland France avoidable or not?
Yes. France had more and better tanks than the Germans at the start of the war and a large enough army that, if properly used, they could have effectively defended their country. Even the surprise of Germany’s incursion through the Ardennes could have been countered if not for blunders on the part of the French.
> France was defeated extremely quickly, so the choice the government had wasn't between "fight to keep the current republic" and "collaborate", but more between "lose the mainland and go resist from abroad" and "abandon control of the mainland to the Nazis and collaborate"
Algeria wasn’t an overseas colony of France; it was just as much a part of France as Lyon or Bordeaux. And as I pointed out earlier, France didn’t even lose control of all of the “mainland” until Germany reacted to Darlan’s sudden shift in loyalty in 1943.
Most countries that were conquered by Germany maintained governments in exile rather than willingly collaborate. France’s government was an exception to this rule, though Britain did what it could to establish the fiction that De Gaulle represented a “government in exile”, and since Germany eventually lost the war, that fiction became a more palatable narrative for France’s wounded national pride. That’s not what actually happened though.
If the Republican government actually stood firm against Germany and was forced out of Europe and into Algeria until it could, with the help of its allies, recover its territory, I might agree with your argument that it’s not fair to consider 1940 the end of French democracy. The problem is that the military defeat in 1940 and the transformation of the Third Republic into an autocracy were largely products of French internal politics. The French cabinet and military did not value or respect either their democracy or their alliance with Britain, with many of them of the attitude that they should have sided with the Germans all along. At least, until the Germans started losing. Even then, relations with Britain were strained to the point that the United States had to manage the alliance from Torch onward.
You dont seem to realize France was in an existential threat the whole time since the Revolution in 1789 up to when Napoleon was deposed.
There was never a time that they could have called it a day if they did not want it to turn back into a monarchy
Russia was not sitting still, While Napoleon was busy fighting in Spain, Russia with the Tsar Alexander was attacking Sweden and Turkey - they were just as expansionist as ever. There were rumors that Russia was going to march on Warsaw next, too. Russia was also preparing for a larger army to go further into Europe. Both countries were preparing for a clash, and it does not really matter who stroke first.
The same thing happened between Hitler and Stalin in 1941: they distrusted each other's and both eventually had plans to turn against each other.
Napoleon actually successfully invaded Russia, and he took the seasons into account. What he didn’t count on was the Russians deliberately going scorched earth on their own territory and even setting fire to their own capital.
For several days Napoleon sought to parlay with Tsar Alexander after capturing Moscow, hoping to reach a settlement. The Russians wisely kept him and his army waiting until they were forced to begin retreating due to a lack of supplies.
In other words, your explanation is that Napoleon failed because he assumed that his enemies were idiots.
Usually, when a dictator or wannabe-dictator overextends their forces and fails, it's because they didn't know what they were doing. But Napoleon was an experienced military commander. He understood the importance of logistics, and he should have assumed that his enemies understood it as well. He knew Russians had resorted to scorched earth defense before, and his forces had already faced it in Portugal earlier.
Also, Napoleon didn't reach the capital. At that point, Moscow was just a major city with symbolic importance. The capital had been moved to St. Petersburg about a century earlier.
Where do you get that notion? Hindsight much?
Not every enemy burns their own capital out of spite because they can't fight back. Actually, this almost never happens, so if you were following the typical scenario based on prior history, this would be very unlikely to happen.
Scorched earth is what Russia does. Peter the Great had used it to repel the Swedish invasion during the Great Northern War. Napoleon himself had studied that invasion and tried to learn from it. Instead, he repeated the failure of Charles XII on a larger scale.
Napoleon himself had faced scorched earth in Portugal during the Peninsular War a couple of years earlier. It was effective.
In other words, Napoleon knew that Russia had a habit of using scorched earth, and he knew that it was effective against his forces. The reasonable assumption was that Russia would use it again.
Also, Moscow was not the capital, and Napoleon had already lost the majority of his army before reaching it.
In 1812, Napoleon suffered huge losses in the first weeks of the invasion, before fighting a single major battle. His army could not find enough food in Russia. In 1941, the total number of Axis military deaths during Operation Barbarossa was comparable to what Napoleon suffered in those first weeks, despite many battles and much larger scale. When the invasion failed, the troops mostly just stayed there and tried again next year.
They were not burning capital "out of spite". Not everyone is like French who surrender Paris to protect art.
I am not sure how history would have gone had Napoleon won there: France was again confined to its orld borders, Napoleons alliances across Europe were history and Spain a lot stronger. All in all, pretty much the situation he found himself in before the first coalition. Or maybe the Prussians would again have fallen in line, Great Britain exited the war. Highly unlickely so, if you ask me.
No? They showed how he excelled to eventual be crowned as a king of France due to his military's success.
If someone was capable of separating the Napoleon they read about in books from the Napoleon on the screen and was interested in watching a movie with some good cavalry charges glued together by a story about some undeserving wuss finally getting his comeuppance, would you recommend it in that case?
I’d rather watch “The Terror” again
I personally would have walked out of the movie, but I was seeing it with a group of people and didn’t want to be too overly negative. (Afterwards I found out that most felt the same.)
I'm plo[w|ough]ing my way through Adam Zamoyski's "Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna". It has lots of maps and pictures of the dramatis personae but it's still very confusing. And I know it's been simplified for a modern audience, and to keep the book to a reasonable length.
1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/138831.Rites_of_Peace
As for books, I recently picked up a copy of The Wars Against Napoleon on the (very) cheap by luck, so I'm about to devour that. It's not a meaty volume by any stretch, but I've been meaning to read it for the better part of a decade now, so better late than never.
then again I love gladiator and walked into that one knowing it's not gonna be a real representation of historical accuracy. i am always curious what other folks interpretation of Napoleon (and other rome emperors for that matter) and it's very interesting to see this is what Ridley thinks of him. Definitely a new perspective worth dinner table chat.