Was Napoleon Bonaparte Good or Evil?

It’s complicated.

As a historian with a sense of humor said of Alexander the Great: "... and when he died, his empire fell apart and everything went back to the way it had been, except that everyone he'd killed was still dead.".

Same for Napoleon. Voting for Evil, here.

He was 'problematic'.

Would have turned out differently if he had had an early psychological intervention.

Napoleon, king of Italy was about 24 when he became General. He had conquered most of Europe by the time he was 35. Emperor of the French, Protector of the Confederation of the Rhine, and King of Italy.

I love the portraits that were done of him. He was a master propagandist.

He’s up there with Cyrus the Great; Alexander the Great; Julius Caesar; and Charlemagne, as accomplished leaders of great nations in wartime.

A hottie,

One of favorite paintings.

I'm fascinated by the Little General. I have Andrew Roberts' biography, which I've been trying to finish for the last two years. Yawn. Anyone know a of good biography that doesn't put a person to sleep?

He created a legal system that is still used in some countries. Mexico, I understand. IIRC, once arrested, you do not have a presumption of innocence.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Napoleon's legacy:

Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture

The United States of America

Short men's paranoia about tiny dick syndrome

Napoleon would ask his wife Josephine not to bathe for several days before he returned to her.

He liked it stinky.

And he was very short and very crazy.

Napoleon had an overdose of a dominant gene which caused him to go out and conquer, pillage, and kill. Many, many people died because of him. Normal and good he wasn't.

No videos back then exist so I can't tell.

Napoleon make America?

I believe the poster meant the Louisiana Purchase, r15. Doubled the size of the United States.

R15 - if the British hadn't needed to keep their resources fighting Napoleon, they could've expended them retaining that runaway colony.

Napoleon was famously the shadow over the continent. Tchaikovsky wrote an overture (in 1812) commemorating his failure in Russia. The fireworks play over the "The Marseillaise" to mock the French loss.

Had Napoleon not kept the British armies and navy so busy, it's possible they could've reconquered that renegade colony. We'll never know.

his inquisitive spirit got the best of him

He was fabulous, OP.

I don't think he was evil. He went around and conquered things. It's not like he sent millions of people to die in gulags or concentration camps, which seems to be the modern standard of evil.

R20, Napoleon led a million of his own soldiers to their deaths in the pointless attempt to conquer Russia. A million of his OWN PEOPLE died because of his stupidity and arrogance, and God only knows how many Russian soldiers and civilians as well.

Conquest isn't a fucking game, it means the deaths of millions of innocents, same as genocide.

how many of those soldiers that marched off were gay?

I always thought gays and women would be less foolish and make wiser, caring decisions, and not etting into dick measuring, sabre-rattling contests of war, but maybe some leaders were gay. maybe it's just not like how I thought. but I wonder what would happen if 'straight' males weren't in charge. maybe nothing would change

sometimes I wonder if it took all those wars to kill off a bunch of violent men who were ready to go to war and kill at the drop of a hat? it that nature? I mean think if we were bears. A bunch of male bears get so riled up they go off and attack groups of other bears? wtf? and the gay and female bears are left at home, like what the f are they doing? whyyyyy? it didn't have to be like this!

but obviously that's a reach because men and gays obviously can be excellent military tacticians. who knows if some were in the closet, and women leaders in the past had no problems burning entire villages.

other than the fiction ones I mean

On the bright side Waterloo is my favorite Abba song.

Lots of leaders throughout history have marched men to their deaths. By that criteria, then Napoleon is evil I guess. I'm a historian but evaluating the relative evil/goodness of a person is not really a historical question.

So-so General. Fabulous pastry chef.

Duke of Wellington was obsessed with Napoleon. This magnificent Canova of Napoleon as Mars. It's just weird and wonderful - Napoleon is all over The Duke's little palace Apsley House.

Josephine had titillating thighs.

He followed two strictly French thought traditions

- "All for the people, but without the people"

- "For humanity, but mostly for France"

R27, if I recall correctly, Wellington was probably publicly mocking Napoleon by reportedly using that looted naked statue of Napoleon as a coat rack for guests arriving at Wellington's mansion :)

He gave us the Metric System; therefore, he’s EVIL.

I´m R29

I kind of regret comparing Napoleon with Hitler, but there are uncanny resemblances.

As famously noted by George Orwell -Though he meant Stalin instead.

He unashamedly considered himself a dictator, in roman terms.

[quote] He created a legal system that is still used in some countries. Mexico, I understand.

Not just Mexico. He wrote (or co-wrote) the famous Napoleonic Code - a foundational legal "civil code" which codified civil laws into a more comprehensive (and comprehensible) system. It was later used in Germany and many other leading civil law countries, even as far as the Arab Peninsula.

[quote] Historian Robert Holtman regards it as one of the few documents that have influenced the WHOLE world.

Mostly, like Alexander the Great, he was a serial killer. His legacy is the death he brought to Europe.

R32, I think in terms of Napoleon's desire for conquest, the comparison to Hitler is actually more apt than to Djugashvili (Stalin). Djugashvili was focused more on consolidating power in an already too-big-to-handle post-Tsarist Empire, which he simply inherited via a coup. The Tsars already did all the conquering for him: a behemoth, gigantic Empire (probably the biggest at the time) which ranged from his native Georgia to the sea border with Japan. Djugashvili didn't have an immediate need to conquer - because he already had too much land and diverse ethnicities and little kingdoms (Chechnya, Central Asia, etc) than he even knew what to do with.

Napoleon in his relatively small France (with numerous, significant, but still faraway colonies) could only dream of the behemoth, almost full-continent-wide Empire that Djugashvili (Stalin) simply inherited from the Tsars without even doing much.

Napoleon preceded Hitler as being the first anti Christ. The third is still on the horizon.

[quote] Napoleon preceded Hitler as being the first anti Christ.

And what am I, chopped liver?

N37 You know, we believe there is stuff beyond the physical world and intelligence entities both superior and parallel to humanity, but we´ll only accept white anti-christs.

Jews, preferably.

Damn, I messed the quotes again at R38

He's hailed as some sort of a hero in Slovenia because under his short-lived rule in these parts school teachers were allowed to teach in Slovenian language for the first time ever (before that only Deutsch was used in classrooms) and that had a huge influence on the development of the local nationalistic movements of the 19th century.

He even has his own monument in Ljubljana:

He had a pivotal and pretty progressive impact on Switzerland and especially Francophone Switzerland. Pushing the french speaking Cantons to greater power and eventual independence (Vaud and Valais) and also finally pushing all of Switzerland to the Confédération des XIX cantons.

R33, that was superseded by the Morse Code.

The Code Napoleon was created by the (gay) Cambaceres during the Directorate, before Napoleon - NB just let it carry on into the system. It wasn't an area he had much interest in. He could have been viewed very positively in many areas, except for the restless aggression and untrustworthiness. Once everyone else in Europe realised he could never be trusted to keep his agreements and could not be lived with internationally, they knew it was a matter of grimly bringing him down, funded by British money and credit.

Not one of the good guys

So, "a goodie" or "a baddie"?

Interesting, R40. I lived in Slovenia for a few years and never knew that.

I think she's tremendous!

He was personally charismatic, and I think he liked order. The way that France is organized into regions and administrations is due to him. Although Cambaceres and his committees drafted the Napoleonic Code, he took a very active role in its revisions and he was interested in it. He even said that the legal codes were the part of his legacy that he hoped would live on after his death. Jews in particular owe him a debt of gratitude, because he made it possible for them to attain the status of citizen and made their legal rights equal to others. He also abolished the Spanish Inquisition, got rid of the authority of eccliesiastical courts over civil affairs, reduced the legal rights of the nobility and strengthened the rights of common people. He made Protestants legally equal to Catholics in Catholic nations.

It's as a military leader that I think he got carried away with his own success and sense of destiny. He also scared the bejesus out of a lot monarchs in Europe who still thought in medieval ways, and still believed the fiction of the divine right of kings. The die was cast for him when he had himself declared Emperor. Had he merely taken to reconstruct and organize France, I think his legacy would be much more positive and history would have treated him more kindly.

R48 He didn´t abolish the Spanish Inquisition, his puppet government might have done it.

But were the Spanish liberals, rebelling against the Napoleonic rule on Cadiz, and seeing an opportunity in the vacuum of power that ensued, who did. And they are credited for doing so.

Also, the SI in 1800 was more close to the FBI than to their usual depiction. They had no religious minorities to prosecute with actual basis, and no real jurisdiction to regular law enforcement so they mostly were devoted to looking for reasons to keep justifying their existence and mostly were corrupt bureaucrats.

They couldn´t survive that century by any chance. Actually, they would have been extinct by the time Napoleon arrived if they hadn´t found a raison d'etre in trying to prosecute revolutionary ideas and intellectuals coming from France.

Napoleon I does not interest me. Sociopaths are a dime a dozen. Napoleon III, on the other hand, is full of interest.

Code Napoleon, the law of the land and then some, still in place, a school system to educate the masses. Banking/financial system, etc. He also envisioned a "United States of Europe." One realm, one coin, one law . I don't think he was evil or good. I think he was a mixture of both. Certainly his wars of conquest got a lot of people killed, and he was forced to sell off some of France's colonial territories...like The Louisiana Purchase. He was also the poster boy for nepotism, conferring "royal status on his brothers and sisters. There was something very comical about that part. Long ago I watched a movie called Desiree, starring Jeanne Simmons and Marlon Brando as Napoleon. I thought Brando captured him. He did have a god complex. His ego was over the top, for sure.

He wasn't poetically "evil", he was just prosaically murderous. But then so were most leaders back then (and even now).

Anyone who kills people without great need and steals their property (without any remote title to it, whatsoever) is a criminal.

Napoleon already had a beautiful country, with a mild temperate climate, beautiful beaches, great wine and Champagne-producing land, legendary cuisine and access to the sea and ocean. If I were the Emperor of France, I wouldn't leave it for anywhere else. What MORE did he need? It's a case of utter Megalomania. The war with France's neighbour, Britain - fine, they had old historic beef. But what did he want with the frozen hell of Eastern Europe. The Eastern Tsars were of course rich like Minas and had magnificent jewellery collections, but their land was largely poor, inhospitable and comparatively barren.

Leaving France behind to try to steal that inferior land is like leaving wine-rich Napa Valley to try to conquer the more barren Dakotas. And it's not like they even knew in the 19th C that the Dakotas and far Eastern Europe have subterranean oil.

He was ambitious.

Too bad not too many French DL ers on here I assume.

He brought order and sanity back to France after the dreadful French Revolution. He stated that if you give the people a full belly with enough food they will be much easier to manage. Good thinking and he did some good things but when he went on a rampage to conquer other countries and had himself crowned Emperor of France it badly backfired on him in time. His self made pedestal was made higher and higher until he was kicked off it and sent into exile.

His wars of conquest were fought to "unite all of Europe." that was his dream or his delusion or WTF ever . And at the time, there were a kazillion minor principalities who were constantly fucking with one another. Kingdom of Naples? Italy, for example was not a united country. It was a collection of city states at odds with one another and allying themselves with other countries like Austria, and France and Spain. Europe was a shit mess. They resented this little Corsican pretender coming along afer the Revolution which murdered the aristocracy. Napoleon was nothing. THey wanted their Bourbons back.

If I were dictator all would love me!

He was good, THEN turned evil.

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Mostly evil.

In countries that Napoleon Bonaparte's ensuing First French Empire conquered during the Napoleonic Wars, he emancipated the Jews and introduced other ideas of freedom from the French Revolution. For instance, he overrode old laws restricting Jews to reside in ghettos, as well as lifting laws that limited Jews' rights to property, worship, and certain occupations.

Historians have disagreed about Napoleon's intentions in these actions, as well as his personal and political feelings about the Jewish community. Some have said he had political reasons but did not have sympathy for the Jews. His actions were generally opposed by the leaders of monarchies in other countries. After his defeat by Great Britain, a counter-revolution swept many of these countries and they restored discriminatory measures against the Jews. Some of which remain to this day.