Napoleon Bonaparte: A Man of War

From Napoleon’s rise to power after the French Revolution in 1799, France was constantly at war. Napoleon held a grandiose view of himself, imagining himself as the new Caesar or the new Alexander the Great. The result was widespread death and destruction, sweeping across Europe with hurricane force. The result was not a grandiose France but a devastated one.  All conquered territories were lost after Napoleon was ousted in 1815. The cost in human lives was staggering.

 

From 1779 to 1815 seven significant wars took place; not counting the French invasion of Egypt and Syria in 1798:

 

1.   The War of the Third Coalition (1805) with the Battle of Austerlitz and the sea Battle of Trafalgar,

2.      War of the Fourth Coalition where France crushed the Prussian Army at the battles of Jena and Auerstedt,

3.     The Peninsular War (1807-14) where French forces attempted to occupy Spain and Portugal,

4.     War of the Fifth Coalition (1809) with Austrian forces,

5.     War of the Sixth Coalition (1813-14) where Napoleon was dealt a crushing defeat by Britain Russia, Prussia and Sweden at the Battle of Leipzig.

6.     The invasion of Russia in 1812.

7.     The Hundred Days and War of the Seventh Coalition (1815 with the final Battle of Waterloo.

 

Wars during this period were meat grinders with staggering losses of life and mutilation.  The French invasion of Russia in 1812 was one such example.  About 600,000 French troops took part, over 400,000 perished by combat, disease, starvation or the wicked Russian winters when temperatures can hit minus 40 degrees Celsius; 200,000 taken prisoners. By December of 1812 Napoleon admitted defeat and escaped to Paris; leaving his army behind to die.  Within three years of this disaster, he put another army to the meat grinder at Waterloo.

 

Infantry during this period was mainly done by squares.  Soldiers would line in multiple rows deep on each side of the square, shoulder to shoulder and fire together at the advancing enemy.  It was a killing field.  At the Battle of Waterloo, for example, about 50,000 men on both sides were killed in one day of fighting just under nine hours. For a description of the infantry square of this period see this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cl7ElFROgts&t=83s

 

The brutality was cataclysmic.  Similarly, in ancient history, at the Battle of Cannae of August 2, 216 BC, during the Second Punic War, between Rome and Carthage, Roman forces lost about 50,000 men killed in one day at the hands of the brilliant Carthaginian General, Hannibal.

 

Despite this litany of killing and maiming perfectly good soldiers, tyrants like Napoleon are admired and feted. He may have been a brilliant military commander but at the expense of hundreds of thousands, even millions of men killed to please his ego. One must ask for what?  What did all this hell bring to France? Many concentrate on his many military exploits and not on how many people he was responsible for killing.