Napoleon: Man of War, Man of Peace
by Timothy Wilson-Smith
Category: Emperors

Napoleon as a man of war was perhaps the cause of more men's deaths than any other warleader before him. The full story of the disruption caused by almost 20 years of warfare will never be told in all its harrowing detail. Across Europe villages were razed by fire and cities destroyed by cannon, monasteries closed and thousands turned into refugees. There were revolts in Ireland, possibly pro-French, and those in Southern Italy, clearly anti-French, all savagely repressed, and the loss of many small states that had dotted the map of Central Europe for centuries. Yet the terrible destruction of wartime does not tell the whole story. The men who eventually brought Napoleon down, chief among them Castlereagh and Metternich, failed to grasp that one of Napoleon's most remarkable gifts was his ability to bring about significant social change that would outlive his own defeat.