Why We'd Be Better Off if Napoleon Never Lost at Waterloo
이강기2015. 10. 6. 11:34
Why
We'd Be Better Off if Napoleon Never Lost at Waterloo
By Andrew Roberts
Smithsonian Magazine
On the bicentennial of the most
famous battle in world history, a distinguished historian looks at what could
have been
(Illustration by Tim
O’Brien)
"Come general, the affair is over, we have lost the day,"
Napoleon told one of his officers. "Let us be off." The day was June 18, 1815.
By about 8 p.m., the emperor of France knew he had been decisively defeated at a
village called Waterloo, and he was now keen to escape from his enemies, some of
whom—such as the Prussians—had sworn to execute him.
Less than an hour earlier,
Napoleon had sent eight battalions of his elite Imperial Guard into the attack
up the main Charleroi-to-Brussels road in a desperate attempt to break the line
of the Anglo-Allied army commanded by the Duke of Wellington. But Wellington had
repulsed the assault with a massive concentration of firepower. "Bullets and
grapeshot left the road strewn with dead and wounded," recalled a French
eyewitness. The guard stopped, staggered and fell back. A shocked—indeed,
astounded—cry went up from the rest of the French Army, one unheard on any
European battlefield in the unit's 16-year history: "La Garde recule!"
("The Guard recoils!")
The next cry spelled
disaster for any hopes Napoleon might have had for an orderly retreat:
"Sauve qui peut!" ("Save yourselves!"). Across
the three-mile battlefront men threw down their muskets and fled, terrified of
the Prussian lancers who were being ordered to pursue them with their eight-foot
spears. In mid-June, darkness would not descend on that part of Europe for
hours. Soon general panic set in.
“The whole army was in the most appalling
disorder,” recalled Gen. Jean-Martin Petit. “Infantry, cavalry,
artillery—everybody was fleeing in all directions.” Napoleon had ordered two
squares of the Imperial Guard to form up on both sides of the highway to cover
such a rout, and he took refuge within one of them as his army collapsed. “The
enemy was close at our heels,” wrote Petit, who commanded the squares, “and,
fearing that he might penetrate the squares, we were obliged to fire at the men
who were being pursued.”
Taking a few trusted aides with him, as well as
a squadron of light cavalry for personal protection, Napoleon left the square on
horseback for the farmhouse at Le Caillou where he had breakfasted that morning,
full of hopes for victory. There he transferred into his carriage. In the crush
of fugitives on the road outside the town of Genappe he had to abandon it for a
horse once again, although there were so many people that he could hardly go at
much more than a walking pace.
“Of personal fear there was not the slightest
trace,” one of Napoleon’s entourage, the Comte de Flahaut, wrote later. But the
emperor was “so overcome by fatigue and the exertion of the preceding days that
several times he was unable to resist the sleepiness which overcame him, and if
I had not been there to uphold him, he would have fallen from his horse.” By 5
a.m. on June 19 they stopped by a fire some soldiers had made in a meadow. As
Napoleon warmed himself he said to one of his generals, “Eh bien, monsieur,
we have done a fine thing.” It’s a sign of his extraordinary sangfroid that
even then, he was able to joke, however glumly.
Timeline of Napoleon's Life
1769 -
Birth
(Baron Francois Gerard/Bridgeman
Images)
Letizia di Bunoaparte barely
makes it home from church in time to give birth to Napoleon, her fourth child,
on August 15 (right, his birth certificate).
1785 - Commissioning as Second
Lieutenant
(adoc-photos/Corbis)
Napoleon completes the two-year artillery
program at the École Militaire in one year; is
commissioned a second lieutenant at age 16.
1789 - Storming of the
Bastille
(CIty of Westminster Archive Center, London/Corbis)
"Calm will return" in a month, he writes, but
the storming of the Bastille unleashes a decade of violence
1791 - King Louis XVI
Captured
(adoc-photos/Corbis)
King Louis XVI is captured trying to escape
France. "This country is full of zeal and fire," writes Napoleon, now a first
lieutenant and a proponent of the French Revolution.
1793 - French Government
Guillotines Louis
(The Print Collector )
The French government guillotines Louis;
Napoleon laments, "Had the French been more moderate and not put Louis to death,
all Europe would have been revolutionized."
1793 - Liberation of
Toulon
(Blue Lantern Studio/Corbis)
Even with his horse shot out from under him,
Napoleon liberates the French port of Toulon from monarchist forces; is promoted
to brigadier general at age 24.
1794 - Imprisonment on Suspicion
of Treason
(Austrian Archives/Getty Images)
As some of his patrons are executed during
France's Reign of Terror, Napoleon is imprisoned on suspicion of treason but
released 11 days later for lack of evidence. He remains faithful to the ideals
of the Revolution.
1795 - Insurrection in
Paris
(adoc-photos/Corbis)
He uses artillery to quell an insurrection in
Paris, saying, "The rabble must be moved by terror."
1796 - Marriage to Joséphine de
Beauharnais
(Leemage/Corbis)
He marries Joséphine de
Beauharnais, a widow with two children, and leaves two days later to
conquer Italy; she cuckolds him within weeks.
1799 - Becoming First Consul
(Christie's Images/Corbis)
After a coup, Napoleon becomes first consul; in
1804 he is declared emperor, to be succeeded by an heir.
1809 - Marriage to Austrian
Archduchess Marie Louise
(Musee National de la Legion D'honneur, Paris,
France/Bridgeman Images)
"You have children, I have none," he
tells Joséphine as they divorce; he soon marries the Austrian
archduchess Marie Louise, who bears an heir.
1814 - Exile to Elba
(The Print Collector/Corbis)
Enemy forces take Paris and restore the
monarchy as Napoleon retreats from Moscow; he is exiled to Elba, which he calls
an "operetta kingdom."
1815 - Escape to Paris
(Corbis)
Napoleon escapes to Paris; King Louis XVIII
flees; Europe's monarchies call Napoleon "a disturber of the world" and unite to
crush him.
1821 - Death
(Bridgeman
Images)
He dies of cancer at age 51 on St. Helena;
while in exile there, he had said, "If I had gone to America, we might have
founded a State
there."
There was no denying that the Battle of
Waterloo had been catastrophic. Except for the Battle of Borodino, which
Napoleon had fought in Russia in his disastrous 1812 campaign, this was the
costliest single day of the 23 years of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.
Between 25,000 and 31,000 Frenchmen were killed or wounded, and vast numbers
more were captured. Of Napoleon’s 64 most senior generals, no fewer than 26 were
casualties. The losses for the Allies were severe, too—Wellington lost 17,200
men, the Prussian commander Marshal Gebhard von Blücher a further 7,000. Within
a month, the disaster cost Napoleon his throne.
Walking the battlefield today, it’s all too
easy to understand why he lost. From the 140-foot-high Lion’s Mound, which was
built in the 1820s on top of Wellington’s front line, one can see what Napoleon
could not: the woods to the east from which 50,000 Prussians started to emerge
at 1 p.m. to stave in the French right flank, plus the two stone farmhouses of
La Haie Sainte and Hougoumont, which disrupted and funneled the French attack
for most of the day.
A vast amount of literature has explored why
Napoleon fought such an unimaginative, error-prone battle at Waterloo. Hundreds
of thousands of historians have pored over the questions of why he attacked
when, where and how he attacked. Yet 200 years after the fact, a different
question must be asked: Why was the Battle of Waterloo even fought? Was it
really necessary to secure the peace and security of Europe?
**********
The future emperor of the French didn’t learn
to speak their language until he was sent to boarding school at the age of 9. It
was not his second language, but his third. Napoleone di Buonaparte was born on
August 15, 1769, on the island of Corsica; for centuries a backwater province of
Genoa, it had been sold to the French the previous year. He grew up speaking the
corsicano dialect and Italian, and his name was Gaulified to Napoleon
Bonaparte as he and his family painfully accommodated themselves to French rule.
In fact, he was extremely anti-French until the age of 20, going through a
period of adolescent angst in which he identified them as the enemy of his
beloved freedom-loving Corsica.
Napoleon’s charming but indolent father, Carlo,
died of cancer when Napoleon was only 15; the schoolboy had to mature early to
help take care of his nearly bankrupt family. Yet at the military academy at
Brienne he still had time to read and reread Goethe’s romantic novel The
Sorrows of Young Werther, identifying with its honest but tragic hero. He
later wrote his own melodramatic novel, Clisson and Eugénie, whose
protagonist is a brilliant soldier crossed in love by a gorgeous but faithless
beauty, clearly based on Eugénie Désirée Clary, a girlfriend who had recently
refused his offer of marriage.
His antipathy for the French notwithstanding,
the youthful Napoleon primarily identified with the Enlightenment and the dreams
of Rousseau and Voltaire. That both were forced into exile by the French State
only increased their appeal for him, as did their praise for the Corsican
experiment that had been snuffed out the year before Napoleon was born. He also
drew inspiration from the American Revolutionaries, who finally triumphed when
Napoleon was an impressionable 14. (After George Washington died, in 1799, the
recently installed French leader ordered that his nation go into ten days of
mourning, compared with a mere two days after his first wife, the empress
Joséphine, died 15 years later.) The French Revolution broke out with the fall
of the Bastille when Napoleon was nearly 20; he eagerly embraced the
Enlightenment ideas it at least initially represented.
Napoleon’s years at Brienne and then at the
École Militaire in Paris (near where the Eiffel Tower is today) taught him the
essence of modern warcraft. He put that knowledge to invaluable use in defense
of the Revolution at the Battle of Toulon in 1793, which won him promotion to a
generalship at the age of 24. Overall, he would win no fewer than 48 of the 60
battles he fought, drawing five and losing only seven (three of which were
comparatively minor), establishing him as one of the greatest military
commanders of all time.
Yet he said he would be remembered not for his
military victories, but for his domestic reforms, especially the Code Napoleon,
that brilliant distillation of 42 competing and often contradictory legal codes
into a single, easily comprehensible body of French law. In fact, Napoleon’s
years as first consul, from 1799 to 1804, were extraordinarily peaceful and
productive. He also created the educational system based on lycées and
grandes écoles and the Sorbonne, which put France at the forefront of
European educational achievement. He consolidated the administrative system
based on departments and prefects. He initiated the Council of State, which
still vets the laws of France, and the Court of Audit, which oversees its public
accounts. He organized the Banque de France and the Légion d’Honneur, which
thrive today. He also built or renovated much of the Parisian architecture that
we still enjoy, both the useful—the quays along the Seine and four bridges over
it, the sewers and reservoirs—and the beautiful, such as the Arc de Triomphe,
the Rue de Rivoli and the Vendôme column.
Not least, Napoleon negotiated the 1803 sale to
the nascent United States of the vast territory called the Louisiana Purchase.
Americans are familiar with their side of the deal: It doubled their territory
overnight at less than four cents an acre and instantly established the country
“among the powers of first rank,” as Robert R. Livingston, President Thomas
Jefferson’s chief negotiator, put it. But the French averted war with the United
States over its inevitable expansion westward, and the 80 million francs they
received allowed Napoleon to rebuild France, especially its army.
Napoleon crowned himself emperor on December 2,
1804, turning the French Republic into the French Empire, with a Bonaparte line
of succession. He felt that this provision for continuity was prudent, given
that the Bourbons launched a series of assassination attempts on him—30 in all.
Yet this return to monarchy did not alleviate the ancien régime powers’ rancor
over the French occupation of lands in Germany and Italy that had belonged to
Austria for decades. In September 1805, Austria invaded Napoleon’s ally Bavaria,
and Russia declared war on France as well. Napoleon swiftly won the ensuing War
of the Third Coalition with his finest victory, at Austerlitz in 1805. The next
year the Prussians also declared war on him, but they were soundly defeated at
Jena; Napoleon’s peace treaty of Tilsit with Russia and Prussia followed. The
Austrians declared war on France once more in 1809, but were dispatched at the
Battle of Wagram and signed yet another peace treaty.
Napoleon started none of those wars, but he won
all of them. After 1809 there was an uneasy peace with the three other
Continental powers, but in 1812 he responded to France’s being cut out of
Russian markets—in violation of the Tilsit terms—by invading Russia. That ended
in the catastrophic retreat from Moscow, which cost him more than half a million
casualties and left his Grande Armée too vitiated to deter Austria and Prussia
from joining his enemies Russia and Britain in 1813.
**********
Napoleon’s relationship with Joséphine was not
the Romeo-and-Juliet story often told. Shortly before their marriage, in March
1796, he was appointed commander in chief of the Army of Italy, where he won an
astonishing series of more than a dozen victories against Austria, the papacy
and local states, all the while writing her scores of erotic, emotionally needy
love letters, even while under enemy fire. But within weeks his bride took a
lover in Paris—the dandyish cavalry officer Lt. Hippolyte Charles, whom one of
their contemporaries said “had the elegance of a wigmaker’s boy.” When Napoleon
finally found out about the affair two years later, he was in the middle of the
Egyptian desert, on his way to Cairo. He responded by bedding Pauline Fourès,
the wife of one of his junior officers—the first of no fewer than 22 mistresses
over the next 17 years.
When he returned to Paris a year later,
Napoleon unexpectedly forgave Joséphine, and they created what amounted—his
mistresses excepted—to a loving bourgeois family environment in which to raise
Joséphine’s children by an earlier marriage at their palaces of Malmaison,
Fontainebleau, the Tuileries and elsewhere. It was only in 1809, when it had
become clear that Joséphine could not bear the son Napoleon needed to continue
the Bonaparte dynasty, that he reluctantly divorced her and the next year
married the Archduchess Marie Louise von Habsburg, the daughter of Emperor
Francis I of Austria. She quickly bore a son, the king of Rome.
Napoleon later said he greatly regretted not
marrying instead the sister of Czar Alexander I of Russia, believing—probably
wrongly—that he would not have had to invade Russia in 1812. In any event, after
he retreated from Moscow, the Continental powers and the British pursued his
army into France. The emperor’s military skill was intact—he won four victories
in five days in the Champagne region in February 1814—but he could not prevent
his boyhood friend and longtime comrade in arms Marshal Auguste de Marmont from
surrendering Paris to the Austrians, Prussians and Russians the next month.
Napoleon abdicated rather than plunge France into a civil war. He was exiled to
the tiny Mediterranean island of Elba in May.
That month Louis XVIII, the head of the Bourbon
family, returned to France “in the baggage train of the Allies,” as the
contemptuous but essentially accurate Bonapartist phrase put it. The Bourbons
began ruling in France for the first time since Louis’ elder brother Louis XVI
and his sister-in-law Marie Antoinette had been guillotined some 21 years
earlier. As Napoleon adjusted to life ruling a much-reduced domain, he kept a
close eye on what was happening in France.
It was said of the Bourbons that they “had
learned nothing and forgotten nothing” when they returned to power. They had not
learned from the French Revolution and Napoleonic Empire that the French people
had changed profoundly and now took for granted meritocracy, low direct
taxation, secular education and a certain degree of military glory. Nor had the
Bourbons forgotten the expropriations and executions suffered by the royal
family, the aristocracy and the Catholic Church during the Reign of Terror in
the 1790s. As a result, they returned to France ill-prepared to effect a grand
settlement that could reconcile the contesting demands of the army, clergy,
aristocracy, peasantry, merchants, Bonapartists, liberals, ex-revolutionaries
and conservatives.
Perhaps the task was impossible, but after nine
months it became clear, even on distant Elba, that Louis XVIII had
failed.
“Is this fair? Is this useful?” Napoleon asked as he led the
discussions that modernized France’s legal system. (Gianni
Dagli Orti / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY)
Victor Hugo wrote of the Waterloo battleground (seen from atop
the Lion’s Mound) as a “morne plaine”—a “dreary plain.” (VPC Travel Photo / Alamy)
**********
On February 26, 1815, he secretly boarded the
largest ship in his tiny fleet and sailed to Golfe-Juan, on the south coast of
France. The British and Bourbon frigates in the area didn’t learn of his escape
until it was too late. Landing on March 1, Napoleon struck north with the 600
Imperial Guardsmen he had brought with him, over mountain passes and through
tiny villages, sometimes on foot when the paths were too steep and narrow to
ride down. The route he took from Cannes to Grenoble—today mapped out as the
Route Napoleon for tourists, hikers and cyclists—is one of the loveliest (if
more vertiginous) trails in the country.
Of course Louis XVIII sent armies to arrest
him. But the commanders, Marshals Nicolas Soult and Michel Ney, and their men
switched sides the moment they came into contact with the charisma of their
former sovereign. on March 20, Napoleon reached the Tuileries Palace in Paris—on
the site of the Louvre today—and was acclaimed by the populace. Col. Léon-Michel
Routier, who was chatting with fellow officers nearby, recalled: “Suddenly very
simple carriages without any escort showed up at the wicket-gate by the river
and the emperor was announced....The carriages enter, we all rush around them
and we see Napoleon get out. Then everyone’s in delirium; we jump on him in
disorder, we surround him, we squeeze him, we almost suffocate him.” It was a
“magical arrival, the result of a road of over two hundred leagues traveled in
eighteen days on French soil without spilling one drop of blood.”
That night Napoleon sat down to eat the dinner
that had been cooked for Louis XVIII, who had fled Paris only hours earlier. Not
one shot had been fired in the Bourbons’ defense. “Never before in history,”
said Parisian wags, “has an emperor won an empire simply by showing his hat.”
(Napoleon’s bicorn hat had long been one of his many instantly recognizable
symbols. This past November, one of his hats was auctioned to a South Korean
businessman for $2.4 million.)
The Allies reacted with shocked disbelief. They
were gathered at a congress in Vienna when news of his escape reached them on
March 7, but initially the representatives of Austria, Russia, Britain and
Prussia had no idea where he had gone. once they established four days later
that Napoleon had returned to France, they issued what has been called the
Vienna Declaration: “By appearing again in France with projects of confusion and
disorder, he has deprived himself of the protection of the law and has
manifested before the world that there can be neither peace nor truce with him.
The Powers consequently declare that Napoleon Bonaparte has placed himself
beyond the pale of civil and social relations, and that as an enemy and
disturber of the tranquility of the world, he has delivered himself up to public
vengeance.”
This language, which seems extremely tough to
modern ears, was a compromise from a draft offered by the French government,
“which virtually called Napoleon a wild beast and invited any peasant lad or
maniac to shoot him down at sight,” as the historian Enno E. Kraehe later put
it. The Austrian chancellor, Prince Klemens von Metternich, softened the wording
because Napoleon was still the son-in-law of the emperor of Austria, and the
Duke of Wellington denounced the language as encouraging the assassination of
monarchs. Nonetheless, the declaration clearly foreclosed any
negotiation.
On April 4 Napoleon wrote to the Allies, “After
presenting the spectacle of great campaigns to the world, from now on it will be
more pleasant to know no other rivalry than that of the benefits of peace, of no
other struggle than the holy conflict of the happiness of peoples.” By then the
Allies had already formed the Seventh Coalition to destroy him and restore the
Bourbons to the French throne, in defiance of the wishes the French people had
expressed in a referendum. Thus they made the Waterloo campaign as inevitable as
it was ultimately unnecessary.
**********
The foremost motive that the British,
Austrians, Prussians, Russians and lesser powers publicly gave for declaring war
was that Napoleon couldn’t be trusted to keep the peace. As one British member
of Parliament put it, peace “must always be uncertain with such a man,
and...whilst he reigns, would require a constant armament, and hostile
preparations more intolerable than war itself.” That may have been true during
his imperial period, but this time around Napoleon’s behavior suggested that the
Allies could have taken him at his word.
He told his council that he had renounced any
dream of reconstituting the empire and that “henceforth the happiness and the
consolidation” of France “shall be the object of all my thoughts.” He refrained
from taking measures against anyone who had betrayed him the previous year. “Of
all that individuals have done, written or said since the taking of Paris,” he
proclaimed, “I shall forever remain ignorant.” He immediately set about
instituting a new liberal constitution incorporating trial by jury, freedom of
speech and a bicameral legislature that curtailed some of his own powers; it was
written by the former opposition politician Benjamin Constant, whom he had once
sent into internal exile.
Napoleon well knew that after 23 years of
almost constant war, the French people wanted no more of it. His greatest hope
was for a peaceful period like his days as first consul, in which he could
re-establish the legitimacy of his dynasty, return the nation’s battered economy
to strength and restore the civil order the Bourbons had disturbed.
And so he resumed building various public works
in Paris, including the elephant fountain at the Bastille, a new marketplace at
St. Germain, the foreign ministry at the Quai d’Orsay, and the Louvre. He sent
the actor François-Joseph Talma to teach at the Conservatory, which the Bourbons
had closed, and also returned to their government jobs Vivant Denon, the
director of the Louvre; the painter Jacques-Louis David; the architect Pierre
Fontaine; and the doctor Jean-Nicolas Corvisart. on March 31, he visited the
orphaned daughters of members of the Légion d’Honneur, whose school at
Saint-Denis had had its funding cut by the Bourbons. That same day he restored
the University of France to its former footing, appointing the Comte de Lacépède
as chancellor. At a concert at the Tuileries he kindled a romance with the
celebrated 36-year-old actress and beauty Anne Hippolyte Boutet Salvetat (whose
stage name was Mademoiselle Mars).
All that Napoleon achieved in just 12 weeks
after he returned to Paris—even as he prepared for the war the Allies had
declared on him.
Like the Bourbons, they were in no mood to
forgive or forget. In addition to their declared distrust, they had less-public
motives for moving against him. The autocratic rulers of Russia, Prussia and
Austria wanted to crush the revolutionary ideas for which Napoleon stood,
including meritocracy, equality before the law, anti-feudalism and religious
toleration. Essentially, they wanted to turn the clock back to a time when
Europe was safe for aristocracy. At this they succeeded—until the outbreak of
the Great War a century later.
The British had long enjoyed most of the key
Enlightenment values, having beheaded King Charles I 140 years before the French
guillotined Louis XVI, but they had other reasons for wanting to destroy
Napoleon. Anything that distracted the British public’s attention from Andrew
Jackson’s victory at New Orleans in January 1815 was very welcome, not least
because the British commander there, Gen. Edward Pakenham, was the Duke of
Wellington’s brother-in-law. More gravely, Britain and France had fought each
other for no fewer than 56 years in the preceding 125, and Napoleon himself had
posed a threat of invasion before Lord Nelson destroyed the French and Spanish
fleets at Trafalgar in 1805. With the French threat removed, the British were
able to sign a peace treaty securing strategically important points around the
globe, such as Cape Town, Jamaica and Sri Lanka, from which they could project
their maritime power into a new empire to replace the one they’d lost in
America. They, too, succeeded, building the largest empire in world history,
which by the dawn of the 20th century covered nearly a quarter of the world’s
land surface. The British could have achieved those goals even if they’d left
Napoleon alone; they had total control of the oceans.
Once it became clear that the Allies were
amassing huge armies to invade France and depose him again, Napoleon acted
swiftly, leaving Paris on June 12 and striking north to defeat the Anglo-Allied
army under Wellington and the Prussian Army under von Blücher before the
Austrian and Russian armies, totaling half a million men, could
arrive.
**********
Wellington later described the Battle of
Waterloo as “the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life.” Initially, the
French outnumbered their opponents, especially in artillery. They were a
homogeneous national force, and their morale was high, since they believed their
commander was the greatest soldier since Julius Caesar. The first stages of the
Waterloo campaign also saw Napoleon returning to the best of his strategic
abilities. He wanted to fight in modern-day Belgium (then officially known as
the Austrian Netherlands, though they no longer belonged to Austria) because the
British and Prussian troops were far apart, and because capturing Brussels would
be a great boost to French morale and might force the British Army off the
Continent altogether. By achieving a brilliant feint toward the west, he managed
to steal a day’s march on Wellington. “Napoleon has humbugged me, by God,” the
Briton exclaimed.
Napoleon wanted to strike at the hinge between
the Prussian and British armies, as he had done on other battlefields for nearly
20 years, and at first it seemed as if he’d succeeded. At the Battle of Ligny on
June 16, he pinned the Prussians in place with a frontal attack and ordered a
corps of 20,000 men under Gen. Jean-Baptiste d’Erlon to fall on the enemy’s
exposed right flank. Had d’Erlon arrived as planned, it would have turned a
respectable victory for Napoleon into a devastating rout of the Prussians.
Instead, just as he was about to engage, d’Erlon received urgent orders from
Marshal Ney to support Ney miles to the west, and so d’Erlon marched.
“Incomprehensible day,” Napoleon later said of
that fateful June 18, admitting that he “did not thoroughly understand the
battle,” the loss of which he blamed on “a combination of extraordinary Fates.”
In fact, it was not incomprehensible at all: Napoleon split his army
disastrously the day before the battle, put his senior marshals in the wrong
roles, failed to attack early enough in the morning, didn’t discern that the
Prussians were going to arrive in the afternoon, launched his major infantry
attack in the wrong formation and his major cavalry attack at the wrong time
(and unsupported by infantry and horse artillery), and unleashed his Imperial
Guard too late. As he told one of his captors the following year: “In war, the
game is always with him who commits the fewest faults.” At Waterloo, that was
undoubtedly Wellington.
If Napoleon had remained emperor of France for
the six years remaining in his natural life, European civilization would have
benefited inestimably. The reactionary Holy Alliance of Russia, Prussia and
Austria would not have been able to crush liberal constitutionalist movements in
Spain, Greece, Eastern Europe and elsewhere; pressure to join France in
abolishing slavery in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean would have grown; the
benefits of meritocracy over feudalism would have had time to become more widely
appreciated; Jews would not have been forced back into their ghettos in the
Papal States and made to wear the yellow star again; encouragement of the arts
and sciences would have been better understood and copied; and the plans to
rebuild Paris would have been implemented, making it the most gorgeous city in
the world.
Napoleon deserved to lose Waterloo, and
Wellington to win it, but the essential point in this bicentenary year is that
the epic battle did not need to be fought—and the world would have been better
off if it hadn’t been.
