Napoleon, Hitler, Putin, Kim and Trump

In his article about Napoleon, the historian Dominic Sandbrook puts his subject into a historical frame of reference. The easiest way of doing so is to compare him with historical figures he is supposed to resemble. Thus:

“There’s never been a historical figure like Napoleon. He’d have hit it off with Putin, was as tyrannical as Hitler and his egomania would have made Kim Jong Un proud…”

And again: “He would, in other words, have got on well with Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump.”

Now, I’ve commented on Sandbrook’s outpourings on several occasions, and you can dredge up those pieces by typing his name into the Search function on my blog. While the topics were different, the conclusion was the same: Sandbrook is the most typical of today’s pop historians.

He combines poor intellectual content with woeful ignorance and lack of scholarly integrity. Sandbrook is essentially a trendy leftie shining the light of his inane politics on history to pick out only what he wants to see. Sandbrook’s commitment to truth is negligible; his commitment to leftie platitudes is absolute.

Yesterday’s article is a case in point. Having acknowledged that Napoleon “was one of the most compelling individuals in all world history”, Sandbrook explains what it was that made him so: “Perhaps the most remarkable thing about him is that he wasn’t actually French at all.”

He then treats his gasping readers to the discovery that Napoleon was actually Corsican. Crikey. Learn something every day. So that was the most remarkable thing about Napoleon? That he was from Corsica? Trust our historians to offer deep insights and startling erudition.

But let’s get back to those chaps whom, according to Sandbrook, Napoleon most resembles. So fine, he sees Napoleon as a tyrant bent on expansionist conquest. That must be the point of putative similarity with Hitler and Putin. But what on earth is Trump doing in that company, other than being disliked by Sandbrook?

Trump is certainly not bent on building a boundless empire. If anything, he is an isolationist, not an imperialist. He may be bossy, but he operates within a system that discourages tyranny, certainly that of a single man. All things considered, mentioning him in the same breath as Hitler, Putin and, come to that, Napoleon is worse than idiotic. It’s irresponsible.

“Yet [Napoleon’s] life overflowed with contradictions,” continues Sandbrook. “A fervent supporter of the French Revolution, he betrayed its ideals by seizing absolute power.”

Considering how many nasty, tyrannical regimes spun out of the French Revolution, one wonders which of its ideals Napoleon betrayed. He certainly never guillotined hundreds of thousands of his political opponents. Neither did he commit what Prof. Rummel called ‘democide’, murder by category. He did fire grapeshot indiscriminately on crowds of Parisians, but that was a royalist uprising against “the ideals of the French Revolution” that Napoleon was upholding, not betraying.

Sandbrook loves the leftie notion of the Enlightenment and the Revolution as much as he hates Donald Trump. Hence another display of vacuous, platitudinous irresponsibility. What else?

“A keen advocate of the Enlightenment, he had an insatiable greed for jewels and money.” Am I the only one to smell a non sequitur here? I’m not aware of asceticism being one of the proclaimed virtues of the Enlightenment. Is Sandbrook perchance confusing it with mendicant monasticism? If not, one can combine advocacy of the Enlightenment with love of lucre. In fact, the two go together hand in glove.

Then we get to the meat of the argument: “He burned with zeal for France but left his country poorer, weaker and scarred by war. And for all his talk of liberty, fraternity and equality, his legacy across Europe was fire and slaughter on a colossal scale, with millions of lives sacrificed to satisfy his vanity.”

The implication is that Napoleon initiated all those wars to stroke his ego and promote his expansionist ambitions. Such indeed is the common perception, but it doesn’t tally with facts. All the Napoleonic wars were either declared on France by enemies of the French Revolution or, like the 1812 war with Russia, provoked by them.

All in all, European countries formed six anti-French coalitions, the first one in 1792, when Napoleon was a lowly captain trying to survive on miserly pay. All six coalitions were inspired and to a large extent financed by Britain, and Napoleon had nothing to do with that.

It’s just that Britain, along with much of the rest of Europe, gasped in horror observing the French Revolution, whose ideals are so beloved of Sandbrook. It wasn’t just moral support and finance, for Britain also waged a seven-year Peninsular War, in which Wellington thrashed Napoleon’s marshals before finishing off the great man himself at Waterloo.

And of course two resounding victories by Nelson, first in the Battle on the Nile and then at Trafalgar, curtailed whatever plans Napoleon might have hatched for striking at the core of the coalitions by invading the British Isles.

For sure, Britain pursued cold-blooded strategic self-interest. The country’s foreign policy was always focused on preventing the emergence of a dominant continental superpower, and France had traditionally tried to cast herself in that role.

Yet the best British thinkers also perceived, correctly, that the French Revolution posed a deadly threat to Western civilisation as it had developed over three millennia. Radical, atheistic republicanism was the enemy of everything Britain held dear, an attitude Burke expressed so powerfully in his Reflections.

That book came out in 1789, before the Revolution belched out by the Enlightenment committed its worst excesses, including regicide. But it wasn’t just Britain – all European states sensed that the Revolution was adumbrating perverse modernity, something they wished to nip in the bud.

Napoleon, on the other hand, using (or, in my view, misusing) his genius for both war and civilian administration, paved the way for the advent of post-Enlightenment modernity. Following a post-Waterloo interlude of a couple of ineffectual Bourbons, Bonaparte’s nephew, Napoleon III, ushered in a modern republic underpinned by the Napoleonic Code.

In short, rather than betraying the Enlightenment, as Sandbrook believes, Napoleon made it triumphant in the long term – much to the detriment of our civilisation. But young Dominic isn’t out of platitudes yet. It’s Russia’s turn.

Both Paul I and his son Alexander I sent troops across the continent to take on French armies from 1798 onwards. France managed to hold her own. When her armies eventually got to be led by Napoleon, the Russians and their allies were routed in every battle, most decisively at Austerlitz in 1805.

Once again, it wasn’t Napoleon attacking Russia and her allies, but the other way around. Eventually, after Napoleon defeated the allies yet again at Friedland in 1807, Alexander was forced to sign the Treaty of Tilsit, whose terms he had no intention of keeping.

The tsar was openly boasting to his courtiers and foreign ambassadors that Tilsit was merely a breather. Russia had gained valuable time to regroup, rebuild her army and strike again.

Alexander was as good as his word. By mid-1812, the Russians amassed a huge army on the border of the Duchy of Warsaw (Poland) that by then had become part of Napoleon’s empire. Bonaparte either had to wait for that juggernaut to roll or launch a pre-emptive strike. The second option was better.

He had no desire to conquer Russia or to march on Moscow. All Napoleon wanted was to win a decisive battle not far from the Polish border (by then the Russian army was led by Kutuzov, the beaten commander at Austerlitz), enforce the terms of Tilsit, neutralise Russia and then take on his real enemy, Britain.

The only reason Napoleon advanced deep into the Russian territory was that Kutuzov wouldn’t engage him, choosing instead to flee chaotically in the direction of Moscow. As the Russian troops retreated, they used a scorched earth stratagem by burning their own towns and villages – often together with their own wounded left behind.

Some 10,000 died that horrific death in Smolensk, another 25,000-30,000 in Moscow, set on fire by the Russians after Napoleon beat Kutuzov yet again at Borodino and advanced on Russia’s second capital. He expected that Alexander would sue for peace, but, after that didn’t happen, Napoleon had to lead his army back to France, leaving the cinders of Moscow behind.    

This is how Sandbrook describes that campaign: “Of about 615,000 men who had marched on Moscow with their Emperor, just 110,000 were still alive when they returned to France, traumatised, emaciated and frost-bitten.”

The 615,000 number is a mendacious product of Russia’s propaganda dating back to the 19^th century. It was important to overestimate the strength of Napoleon’s troops by way of explaining the cowardly flight of the Russian army and its subsequent defeats in every battle.

In fact, a 150,000-strong corps was left behind in Prussia, and Napoleon crossed the Nieman with some 450,000 men. By the time he reached Borodino, his troops numbered only 130,000. Others had been lost to hunger and disease, or else left behind to garrison the captured cities.

Yet Russian, Soviet and again Russian propagandists have bandied about the false number of 600,000 ever since, and some ignorant Western historians have followed suit. Had Sandbrook done elementary research, he’d come across as someone who knows what he is writing about.

As it is, he comes across as an ideologised, not especially bright ignoramus. A typical modern lumpen intellectual, in other words.