---
created_at: '2014-12-23T02:38:24.000Z'
title: How Good Was Napoleon? (2007)
url: http://www.historytoday.com/jonathon-riley/how-good-was-napoleon
author: diodorus
points: 104
story_text: ''
comment_text: 
num_comments: 79
story_id: 
story_title: 
story_url: 
parent_id: 
created_at_i: 1419302304
_tags:
- story
- author_diodorus
- story_8786550
objectID: '8786550'

---
![Surrender of Madrid (Gros), 1808. Napoleon enters Spain's capital
during the Peninsular
War](//www.historytoday.com/sites/default/files/napoleon_madrid.jpg
"Surrender of Madrid (Gros), 1808. Napoleon enters Spain's capital during the Peninsular War")By
1805, the year that Napoleon became sole head of state and supreme
warlord of France, the notion of strategy was recognizably modern. Joly
de Maizeroy had written in Théories de la Guerre (1777): ‘Strategy ...
combines time, places, means, various interests and considers all ...
\[Tactics\] reduces easily to firm rules, because it is entirely
geometrical like fortification.’ Achieving strategic objectives through
means as diverse as diplomacy, economic power, information warfare and
military power is not too far from this line of thought. The sort of
strategy practised by Napoleon, his allies and some of his opponents,
should be distinguished from that of his implacable enemy, Britain. Its
worldwide empire, economic base, and naval reach, all meant that it was
able to conduct strategy through other means than military power.
Revolutionary and imperial France was not in this position – it had to
use military force not in addition to the other instruments of national
power, but in order to access them. Military power for Napoleon must be
seen therefore as diplomacy, not merely, as in the Clausewitzian sense,
an addition to it.
