DISCLAIMER: Please note that the following "history lesson" is meant to be a personal opinion and commentary on historical knowledge. As such, I will not be citing sources. I do understand that historians do a lot of difficult work attempting to sift through the ashes of the past. I would not like to take credit away from these dedicated individuals. For this particular piece, my inspiration, and perhaps some of my more obscure facts, have come from Edith Saunder's The Hundred Days and Jeremy Black's The Battle of Waterloo. If this style of not citing facts in a blog post bothers you, please email me at breadcrumb124@gmail.com and I will be more than happy to provide you with exact citations...or else I'll admit that I'm simply shooting the breeze and was unable to pull the wool over your eyes (that's right. I did just use two cliche idioms in one sentence. I bet you wish you were this awesome.)
It's a conversation that I'm sure you've had many times. It seems to come up when discussing the grand over-arching history of the world. Or it comes up if you're just plain tired of that accent. Regardless, we, here in America, have a strong distaste for the French. Alright, I'll admit, it's more of a national loathing. Perhaps it's irrational and perhaps not. Inevitably the topic arises that the French love two things: the color pink and running away from a fight. Predictably, the one person in the discussion who has French roots, or just loves French wine, brings up that last ditch effort to save face in light of a history of failures (this is said with a great deal of sarcasm). We all know who saved the French, right? (Hint: it wasn't King John II or Vercingetorix...yeah put that one in your pipe and smoke it...) Obviously the savior of French national pride is none other than Napoleon Bonaparte (it's always been interesting to note that we call him "Napoleon" rather than "Bonaparte". Especially in light of how he refer to men like "Patton", "Hitler", "Wellington"...but I digress). Ok, I said it. We all know that Napoleon made France a great nation; he conquered Europe; he improved the infrastructure of the country (that's a fancy way of saying he had things and stuff built...like roads); Napoleon even worked to codify the laws. Basically, he was a great guy...well, not in stature; everyone knows that he was really short (like 5' 6"). But at least he had a big ego to go with it. At any rate, he saved France from the ignominy of being the most worthless nation on the planet...or did he? Was he really a great conqueror? Was he a military genius?
The truth about Napoleon seems to be that he was an energetic and ambitious man. He made some good decisions, some extremely bad ones, and then a few that were neither good nor bad. It is these latter decisions that concern us. For we know that the good ones were certainly good. Like joining the military in a turbulent time; or reorganizing the army to operate under the corps system; or even in his initial ability to pick subordinates. We also know which decisions were remarkably awful. For example, his decision to invade Russia; or his decision to place family members on the thrones of European nations; or his decision to return from exile when the Coalition leaders were all together in Vienna. But there is one major decision that he made that will be debated by historians for generations to come. That decision, of course, is the one that led to the final battle of his career. Waterloo. We use this term now to refer to someone who has had some success earlier but has now experienced a career ending event (like a nation that tries to hold onto its colonies in Southeast Asia and ends up having its military forces decimated by, supposedly, "primitive" guerrillas. Sorry France, I couldn't resist...). Napoleon's defenders will say that he had no choice in the matter. That he did the best he could with what he had. Or that he would have won the battle if such and such a general had done his job. There's also the defense that his physical ailments finally caught up with him. This event has always interested me because a great general was finally humbled before his adversaries.
If you'd like to know what happened to Napoleon at the infamous Battle of Waterloo, stay tuned. Next week, I will give you my in depth thoughts on what went wrong and why the defenders of French martial history should be ashamed to use Napoleon as their key point. Also, my own defense of the French will be upcoming (I promise I don't hate them.).
~The Piebald Penguin
