There are millions of slaves around the world. No government explicitly allows slavery, but plenty turn a blind eye to it, Mauritania being one of the more egregious ones.
The post isn’t American specific per se. Poster is just implying that people on porn sites are in essence sex slaves. It’s slight sarcasm. At least that’s my take.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
This is just one piece. You will find more if you look. Britain's slavery history is anything but what it seems it is.
Are you British by any chance? Genuinely curious. I am asking because Britain is known to have, not whitewashed, but pretty much completely removed their barbarous colonial past and acts from the their own citizen's history books.
In context France this was after the Treaty of Amiens when the UK returned colonies seized from France during the French Revolution and in which slavery had therefore never been abolished. I believe that the reinstatement really applied only to Guadeloupe and French Guiana.
You could also have mentioned that he abolished restrictions and discriminations imposed on the Jews in every European country he conquered.
> You could also have mentioned that he abolished restrictions and discriminations imposed in the Jews in every European country he conquered.
Decriminalization of homosexuality as well. Many things can be criticised but he did largely spread the progressive ideals of the French revolution all over Europe, where they stayed durably .
Did those ideals applied to the residents in the colonies? Were “colonized” people benefiting from being equal to the French citizens in the mère patrie?
Of course not, which is why I explicitly mentioned Europe.
The people in the colonies (displaced slaves as well as French settlers) were very far from being equal to those in Europe, which is hardly specific to France though.
People were willing to die for the revolution and Napoleon. Apparently, self-determination and free will doesn’t apply if you don’t agree with their politics.
Napoleon did all he could to overthrow the advances the revolution made. He was anti-revolutionary. For example, he reinstated slavery in 1802 in the French colonies after the revolutionaries made it illegal in 1794!
Not exactly: "the law only “maintained” slavery where it had not been abolished, i.e., in law, in the colonies occupied by the British from 1794 to 1802 (Martinique essentially) and, in fact, in those situated east of the Cape of Good Hope."
"Formally, the law only “maintained” slavery where it had not been abolished, i.e., in law, in the colonies occupied by the British from 1794 to 1802 (Martinique essentially) and, in fact, in those situated east of the Cape of Good Hope.
But in the instructions he gave to the captains general who were to administer the “reconquered” colonies, Bonaparte asked them to re-establish slavery everywhere, when they deemed it appropriate. This is what they would do in Saint-Domingue, Guyana and Guadeloupe."
And mind you, this is from napoleon.org, a pretty pro-Napoleon source.
Watched it yesterday and hated it. I was looking forward to it too based on the trailers but it turned out to be a big hit ahistorical hit piece.
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
It always puzzled me not just with Napoleon but a couple other recent European expansionist dictators, why they kept overextending their reach. Why did they not just stop at a reasonable point and reinforce the conquest, instead of losing it all.
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.
Are democracies long lasting? The longest lasting French Republic lasted from 1870 to 1940, 70 years. The current one started in 1958 so it will be the longest lasting by 2028. In contrast, the pre-revolution Kingdom of France lasted from 987 to 1792.
The current French fifth republic started when De Gaulle had a new constitution written, during the fourth republic. A democracy changing its rules by referendum while staying a democracy shouldn't really count as a new regime.
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 Fourth Republic was overthrown by a military coup. De Gaulle did manage to restore democracy with his new constitution, largely because the military respected him personally more than they respected the institutions of the Fourth Republic. Military coups are not a sign of a resilient democracy and it’s a very rare thing for a military to reliably subordinate itself to a constitutional government.
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 Fourth Republic was overthrown by a military coup. De Gaulle did manage to restore democracy with his new constitution, largely because the military respected him personally more than they respected the institutions of the Fourth Republic. Military coups are not a sign of a resilient democracy and it’s a very rare thing for a military to reliably subordinate itself to a constitutional government.
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.
> 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?
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.
But again what was the march on Russia for? Why not save those troops reinforcing the homeland instead of gallivanting who knows where in the middle of winter?
Napoleon wanted to do a naval blockade against England. It was possible to do it through the countries he now controlled, but Russia made it impractical to implement such a blockade since they were too big to be influenced in other ways.
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.
The Russians were pulling out of the Continental System (embargoing the UK). If Napoleon let Tsar Alexander do this without consequences, it would break apart the order Napoleon had sought to create in continental Europe. Most nations in Europe at the time hated this system because it hurt their economies, and made them effectively subservient to France. You can imagine how one nation breaking away from this system unpunished could trigger a cascade of rebellions.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
That was my interpretation of the explanation in the comment I replied to.
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.
Scorched earth had lost most of its military significance by WW2. The USSR tried it in 1941, but it failed, because trucks had revolutionized warfare. They could transport food over long distances, allowing armies go to places where they previously couldn't and stay there.
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.
There are lots of reasons for this which the YouTuber Caspian Report covers well [0][1]. In short, it's to strengthen their warm water port access; Ukraine being relatively flat so making sure they control the lands up to the natural border of the Carpathian mountains lest NATO invades; et cetera.
I wanted to watch it but seeing the "ice lake trap" in the trailer I figured I should read some reviews before going. And yeah it seems brit propaganda about napoleon rather than actual facts, at least according to what I read.
Arguably, I know more about WW1 and 2 than the Napoleanic wars. I always had the impression so, tgat Napoleon came incredibly close to winning at Waterloo. Two things, mainly, sealed his defeat: one of his Generals failure to pin, defeat of aggressivle pursue Blüchers Prussian army and said armies arrival at the Battle of Waterloo. And arrival Napoleon didn't exepect due to his generals "failure" mentioned above.
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.
We must have seen different movies, because this one didn't showcase any of his genius. Instead, they opted to show an unambitious little man (not talking about his height) whose fortunes are pushed forward by others rather than himself. Very odd indeed.
Is that the only thing to hate about it? That's it's ahistorical?
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?
No the movie really just was bad. I’m not even sure what the goal of the movie was. To make Napoleon look bad? To show his human side with his relationship with Josefine? Honestly afterwards I just have no idea. Really it was just a weird speed run through history. They just jumped from random event to random event over the course of like 25 years. Contrast this with the movie Lincoln which portrayed him during a relatively short period of his life. Ignoring everything else (there are many reasons why the Lincoln film is much better), the fact that the Napoleon film tries to cover so much really is an odd choice.
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.)
Seconded. If you don't already know your Napoleonic history, you'll find it impossible to follow, if you do, you'll find it impossible to endure, and in either instance you'll be bored to tears.
Very pithy! And almost certainly spot-on accurate. Thanks! You could have a side hustle in capsule movie reviews.
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.
Thanks for the feedback. I really do appreciate it. Under the advice of half the people I've ever known in my life, I recently decided to give becoming a writer a genuine crack. Of course, once you start trying to make this a reality the voices start spinning reasons why you're no good and bound to fail, so this little bit of encouragement made my day.
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.
I read andrew roberts napoleon front and back three times and I still love the new movie. must be the odd one out.
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.
How does it read? Does it takes a serious and insightful approach like Stephen Kotkin's biography of Stalin, or is it more BBC documentary level simplistic narrative?
I'm in the middle of it right now. It definitely doesn't suffer from pop-history. I also read Andrew Robert's Churchill biography and thought it was excellent. Not quite to the level of The Last Lion, but that's mainly because it's much shorter.
It's good - spends a lot of time debunking claims from previous bios and memoirs that dont hold up under an examination (e.g. some memoirs werent written until decades after the events, and others with fantastic claims were likely cash grabs as the authors were destitute). he sticks to the letters written by napoleon/written to him by others, and doesnt mince words during stuff like the slaughter at jaffa. there was a really interesting retelling of napoleon's near drowning during a sightseeing tour in egypt at the moses-parted-the-sea spot, and the grim telling of josephines back story helps the reader understand how her actions were part survival instincts instead of pure lust.
94 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadFor context: Napoleon reintroduced slavery in certain colonies 1802, after its abolition in the French Revolution.
It was finally abolished by France during the Second Republic, in 1848.
The US only abolished slavery in December 1865.
Britain did so in 1834 throughout its realm.
Mauritania, a country in Africa, was the last in the world to abolish slavery in 1981.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Nope.
https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/t...
This is just one piece. You will find more if you look. Britain's slavery history is anything but what it seems it is.
Are you British by any chance? Genuinely curious. I am asking because Britain is known to have, not whitewashed, but pretty much completely removed their barbarous colonial past and acts from the their own citizen's history books.
You could also have mentioned that he abolished restrictions and discriminations imposed on the Jews in every European country he conquered.
Decriminalization of homosexuality as well. Many things can be criticised but he did largely spread the progressive ideals of the French revolution all over Europe, where they stayed durably .
The people in the colonies (displaced slaves as well as French settlers) were very far from being equal to those in Europe, which is hardly specific to France though.
Also french soldiers could become and did become officers, british bought the rank.
The man was loved, especially because people knew how life was in antirevolutionary countries.
https://www.napoleon.org/en/history-of-the-two-empires/artic...
"Formally, the law only “maintained” slavery where it had not been abolished, i.e., in law, in the colonies occupied by the British from 1794 to 1802 (Martinique essentially) and, in fact, in those situated east of the Cape of Good Hope.
But in the instructions he gave to the captains general who were to administer the “reconquered” colonies, Bonaparte asked them to re-establish slavery everywhere, when they deemed it appropriate. This is what they would do in Saint-Domingue, Guyana and Guadeloupe."
And mind you, this is from napoleon.org, a pretty pro-Napoleon source.
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.
[0] https://youtu.be/MkrLUFAcjH0?si=NHIYuq1xm4e-D0kT
[1] https://youtu.be/nR7XAcArAa0?si=lIyM2vWVF50LKvnu
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterloo_(1970_film)
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.
"Charles Minard's map of Napoleon's disastrous Russian campaign of 1812"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Joseph_Minard#/media/F...