# Napoleon's Wars  ## Metadata - Author: [[Charles Esdaile]] - Full Title: Napoleon's Wars - Category: #napoleonic-campaigns ## Highlights - The real error was Napoleon’s treatment of the rest of the Continent. Such was the loathing and distrust with which Britain was regarded in Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, Austria and Russia that a policy of conciliation and respect might well have won the emperor the active support of the whole of Europe, and made it very difficult for Britain to continue the war. From the beginning, however, the Napoleonic imperium showed itself to be bent on nothing more than exploitation; even the reforms that it brought in amounted to little more than attempts to produce more men and money. ([Location 182](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00452V3WS&location=182)) - Hence, in part at least, the new stress on the role of propaganda, and hence too the fact that field armies suddenly got much bigger. ([Location 284](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00452V3WS&location=284)) - Ironically, then, the greatest hero in French history had presided over nothing less than a total collapse in France’s international position, leaving Britannia to rule the waves and the rest of Europe to contend with the emergence of what would ultimately become an even greater threat to its security than France had been. ([Location 365](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00452V3WS&location=365)) - Had Louis XVI appeared on horseback to defend the Tuileries in 1792, he told Joseph, the palace would never have fallen. But the principle was political as much as it was military: the mob had to be defeated. Uncivilized and brutal, in Napoleon’s eyes it would inevitably run amok the moment the bounds of order and discipline were relaxed. Indeed, as an eyewitness to the storming of the Tuileries in August 1792 he had seen the ferocity of which it was capable all too clearly – the defenders had in many cases literally been hacked to pieces. Gratuitous defilement and mutilation had been very much the order of the day, and within a few days further horrors had come in the terrible atrocities known as the September massacres. ([Location 733](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00452V3WS&location=733)) - The French Revolutionary Wars were not a struggle between liberty on the one hand and tyranny on the other. ([Location 826](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00452V3WS&location=826)) - The peoples of Europe were in effect mere pawns to be mobilized or called to endure suffering exactly as their rulers thought fit. ([Location 864](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00452V3WS&location=864)) - A Bourbon on the throne of France might be a good thing in many respects, but in the end it was something that could be sacrificed to expediency, especially as the belligerents were divided as to what ‘restoration’ should actually mean, with the British, at least, advocating some sort of constitutional settlement and others looking to a reconstituted absolutism. ([Location 955](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00452V3WS&location=955)) - Austria was to receive compensation in Germany, and second, Prussia was to be excluded from this settlement (to accommodate this position, Napoleon unilaterally renounced France’s claim to all Prussia’s Rhenish territories). Characteristically, however, Napoleon’s magnanimity was the fruit of calculation: knowing that his rivals Hoche and Moreau were on the brink of a fresh invasion of Germany, the future emperor was desperate to stop the war before they stole some of his glory. ([Location 1024](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00452V3WS&location=1024))