Frankly, I usually work with evidence in an effort to strip historical mythology away from an historical event or person, with the occasional verbal barb to enliven proceedings.

Clearly, I am not an admirer of the man or his works and, although he gave his name to an age and also to this fine website, I believe he did incalculable damage, in particular to France, his adopted country. To me, the real nature of his empire is not revealed in his famous victories at Austerlitz and Jena, it is revealed in the behaviour of his army in Spain and Portugal where, for the first time, they faced enemies who refused to give up, in a prolonged campaign that was not completed in a few months but dragged on and on. The fact that he chose to invade a peninsula surrounded on three and a half sides by water, thus giving his most dangerous enemy, Great Britain, a magnificent opportunity to bleed his strength, slowly but surely, does not speak well of his grasp of grand strategy. And I have harped on his economic policies a number of time because there is more to leading an empire than fighting battles and campaigns.

You are just as clearly an admirer of the man. I suspect that you will always be so, even in the face of a huge mass of negative evidence about Napoleon Bonaparte, his government and his army. But since you are much more intelligent than many of his blindly loyal adherents, one can always cherish hope that you might eventually come around to the side of light and reason.

At the same, you should not be surprised if your admiration is not shared by all nor should you protest over much if the evidence demonstrates clearly that your idol has feet of rather common clay.

DG