by Dukasaur on Sat Oct 25, 2014 10:36 pm
As a general, Napoleon was every bit as brilliant as the legend would have it. There's no doubt that in battle after battle, he made all the right moves.
As a politician, not so much. Napoleon was arrogant, dishonest, and opportunistic. He broke treaty after treaty, turning friends into enemies and turning lukewarm enemies that could be bargained with into bitter enemies that would bargain no longer.
After the treaties of Luneville in 1801 and Amiens in 1802, France had everything she had asked for in the Wars of the Revolution. The other European nations accepted the very debatable French claim to control everything on the west bank of the Rhine, the British returned her colonies and folded up their blockade, the Pope accepted the Revolutionary confiscation of Church lands in France, the Austrians accepted French hegemony over Northern Italy, and everybody recognised the Helvetian, Cisalpine, and Batavian republics. Basically, everything France had asked for, France had gotten. It was total success, time to send home the army and live in peace and prosperity for the rest of their lives.
Napoleon's inability to settle down and enjoy the peace, his arrogant decision to meddle in the domestic affairs of the Batavian and Helvetian republics in clear violation of the treaties, his contemptuous ultimatums to the British and the Russians, and his existing violations of the Concordat with the Pope, all contributed to the resumption of hostilities with Britain in 1803 and with most of the rest of Europe in 1804 and 1805.
After that came some more brilliant victories on the battlefield, which in turn yielded more opportunities for favourable peace treaties, but over and over again Napoleon found himself arrogantly demanding that one of his defeated enemies yield to him on one issue or another, which inevitably brought them back to the war. Arrogance, greed, opportunism, perhaps a bit of paranoia, all led to him throwing away one good peace after another.
At least four million people died in the Napoleonic wars, and tens of millions were impoverished, and it was all unnecessary. This is what you have to understand about Napoleon. He stands as a monument to the futility of greed. He was crushed not because he failed to defeat his enemies (he defeated most of them several times!) but because hubris prevented him from enjoying the very generous spoils of war that his defeated opponents were prepared to give up. All those dead, all those crippled, all those left homeless, all for nothing. For sure in 1802, and probably several times thereafter, there was a chance for France to just stop fighting and to keep everything, and he threw it away.
Now, just briefly to touch on some of your other questions:
Was he a positive influence overall? Definitely not. As already pointed out, the Napoleonic Wars were completely futile and stupid, and a huge burden to France in every way. But it doesn't stop there. Napoleon meddled in every aspect of society in France and in the occupied territories. He rewrote the legal code, micromanaged the economy, wrote or had written massive sets of regulations. He wasn't a communist, but might as well have been. Nothing went on in Napoleon's empire that didn't have a tiresome body of regulations attached to it. You could easily compare Napoleon to any of the major socialist failures of the 20th century, and he would be at home in their presence.
Did he practise what he preached? Now, that's a tough one, because he didn't really preach. Napoleon rode to power on the coat-tails of the Revolution, but he wasn't really a Revolutionary. If anything, as time went on he became more reactionary every year, and his promotion of his relatives to royal positions throughout the occupied lands was obviously an old-fashioned dynastic power grab. So, it would be easy to call him a hypocrite, but it's only partially true, because he never really claimed to be a Revolutionary. Revolutionary slogans were chanted in his name, and he tolerated them because of their propaganda value, but he didn't really encourage them or try very hard to make anyone believe that he agreed with them.
“Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.”
― Voltaire
