I think his conclusion is entirely relevant (p. 159)
"Napoleon's great service to European international politics was to be a very efficient scourge of God. He convinced European princes and statesment that an alternative to eighteenth-century politics had to be found because playing the old game with him was intolerable. They were used to high-stakes poker among heavily armed players ready at intervals to tip the table over and shoot it out; but now they discovered that the game was run by someone who always cheated, held the biggest guns as well as the high cards, made his own rules, always won, and never paid off. And so they had to end this game of poker and invent a new post-1815 game of contract bridge. Napoleon contributed nothing positive to this outcome. Nevertheless, lawless to the end, a law unto himself, he drove Europe into a new system of international politics bounded by law."
So there you have it, NB's greatest legacy was that he was so bad he forced the European nations to formulate international foreign policy on a more legal and restrained basis. This basis lasted for nearly a century until 1914 and there was no general war in Europe during that period as there had been in 1792-1814/5.
This period, quite rightly I hasten to add, is known as the PAX BRITANNICA and it began to fall apart about the time the Old Queen died in 1901.
Sounds like a reasonable conclusion to me. Actually I think I came to the same conclusion a few years back in one our many wrangles over the man on this Forum. I put it, however, somewhat less elegantly than Schroeder. I called NB a mad dog who ran around biting people until they all got together, pooled their resources, and put him down
While it is true that Schroeder only provides two footnotes to sources currently in print (c. 1990), he does provide a bibliographic endnote that discusses some of the principal documentary sources he used. These are:
Correspondance de Napoleon Ier (32 vols, 1858-1870)
Caulincourt, Memoires (1933)
Lettres de Talleyrand a Napoleon (1967)
Romanov, Diplomaticheskie snosheniia Rossii v Frantsii (7 vols, 1905-1914)
Vandal, Vneshia Politika Rossii (8 vols, 1960-67)
Sbornik Imperatorskog Russkogo (148 vols, 1867-1917)
Bailleu, ed., Preussen und Frankreich (2 vols, 1881-1887)
Vivenot and Zeizzberg, Quellen aur Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserpolitik Osterreichs (5 vols, 1873-1890)
Oncken, Oesterreich und Preussen im Befreiungskriege (2 vols, 1876)
Grenville papers in Manuscripts of JB Fortescue (10 vols, 1892-1927)
Castlereagh, Memoirs etc. (12 vols, 1850-1853)
Webster, Foregin Policy of Castlereagh (1931)
JM Thompson, Napoleon Bonaparte (1952)
Lefebvre, Napoleon (2 vols, 1969)
I have not read these, have you?
DG