PART ONE OF FOUR

Editor’s Note: The core truth about Napoleon is still a matter of debate. Napoleon, opportunist or usurping though he may appear to a modern Marxian obswerver, not to mention Anglo-American mainstream historians tainted with Francophobic hatred and contempt for the French and their revolution, was also seen as a threat by the much more reactionary feudalist regimes still ruling much of Europe in his time.  While Woods sees Napoleon as an upstart opportunist who betrayed the (radical) promise of the French revolution, to the crowned heads of Europe he represented something akin to a Lenin or a Mao, a charismatic leader at the helm of a powerful nation infected with subversive political notions whose spread had to be contained at any cost. Hence the ushering of a period characterized as the “Napoleonic Wars”, the very label an intentional effort to smear Napoleon as a simple warmongering monster. But the fact is that, in large measure, the wars were not so much reckless wars of conquest by Napoleon as wars of necessity to beat back or pre-empt the invasion of France and the destruction of her remaining revolutionary virus by successive coalitions organized by a reactionary England, the great defender of the global status quo in the 18th and 19th centuries. One of the important questions, therefore, is: who was really responsible for these wars?—P. Greanville Continue reading »