Before we start thinking about Napoleon’s legacy, we should explore a key aspect of his story: just how great a military commander was he, and what were his greatest successes?
David Andress
He’s one of the greatest military commanders of all time. He was also a highly charismatic individual and, every time you talk about Napoleon, you have to bear that in mind alongside the fact that he was a terrible person, politically speaking. He was staggeringly successful at doing things with military force – the problem was, that wasn’t always a good idea. The story of Napoleon’s life from the mid-1790s onwards is essentially one of balancing his personal charisma, drive, ambition and outstanding leadership qualities with what he actually did in the political sphere, the systems he set up, and what they said about what he thought about everyone else who wasn’t him.
Laura O’Brien
I completely agree. One of the reasons he continues to excite such interest is the tendency to view him through a binary prism: he is either the worst person who ever lived, or a perfect genius who was really hard done by. This is the classic historian’s answer, but we need to think about his reputation in a more complicated, nuanced way. We have to recognise what Napoleon achieved – which was exceptional – and the way he was able to capture the imagination to such an extent that he still informs how we understand leadership.
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Denne historien er fra Christmas 2023-utgaven av BBC History UK.
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Viking mussels
ELEANOR BARNETT digs into archaeological research to recreate a Viking-cum-AngloSaxon seafood dish from medieval York
Fingers, frog's and fairies
Fortune telling was all the rage in the 16th and 17th centuries, and practitioners would stop at nothing to tap in to the supernatural. Martha McGill tells a story of Highland seers, tarot cards and encounters with the spirit world
Nothing matches being with Alexander the Great on foot in the Hindu Kush
AT OUR LITTLE FILM COMPANY, MAYA VISION, we recently took the decision to digitise all of the rushes of our key films so that we could dispose of hundreds of boxes of tapes that had been kept in storage, throwing out stuff we thought we would never need again.
Library of the dead
Highgate Cemetery, created as a fashionable resting place for wealthy Victorian dead, is a veritable who's who of London's great and good. PETER ROSS roams the avenues of this most atmospheric necropolis
Slavery, exploitation and racism. These tragedies have long dominated histories of Africa. But there's another way to tell this story. And it's one that puts Africans right at the centre of their continent's extraordinarily rich and vibrant past
An 1414, in the Chinese city of Nanjing, a giraffe caused a stir. Amid a crowd of shocked, noble spectators, an official, leading the creature via a rope tied round its face, presented it to China's Yongle emperor. His officials said it was a qilin - an auspicious unicorn - which his sage governance had made appear.
England's forgotten hero
When the Hundred Years' War was reaching a climax, one man was fighting tenaciously to secure the English claim to the French crown. So why, asks Joanna Arman, is Henry V's formidable brother, John, Duke of Bedford, not better known?
HENRY III AND THE MAGNA CARTA THAT MATTERED
King John's sealing of a charter at Runnymede in 1215 is one of the most feted moments of the Middle Ages. Yet, writes David Carpenter, it was the charter issued by his son 10 years later that became fundamental to England's history
Gutenberg publishes a pioneering new book
‘The printing press triggers an information revolution
How empire ruptured rural Britain
We know that enslaved Africans and their descendants suffered in the distant colonies of empire. But, as Corinne Fowler explains, the colonial system also had dire impacts on people in the countryside of the 'motherland'
"I FELT VERY ALONE IN A WORLD GONE HORRIBLY MAD"
It was a moment of possibilities, dislocation and dread. Dan Todman tells the story of the 1.5 million urban Britons evacuated to the countryside at the start of the Second World War
