2018-02-23 18:58:03 +00:00
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---
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created_at: '2014-12-23T02:38:24.000Z'
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title: How Good Was Napoleon? (2007)
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url: http://www.historytoday.com/jonathon-riley/how-good-was-napoleon
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author: diodorus
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points: 104
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created_at_i: 1419302304
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---
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2018-03-03 09:35:28 +00:00
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By
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1805, the year that Napoleon became sole head of state and supreme
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warlord of France, the notion of strategy was recognizably modern. Joly
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de Maizeroy had written in Théories de la Guerre (1777): ‘Strategy ...
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combines time, places, means, various interests and considers all ...
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\[Tactics\] reduces easily to firm rules, because it is entirely
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geometrical like fortification.’ Achieving strategic objectives through
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means as diverse as diplomacy, economic power, information warfare and
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military power is not too far from this line of thought. The sort of
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strategy practised by Napoleon, his allies and some of his opponents,
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should be distinguished from that of his implacable enemy, Britain. Its
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worldwide empire, economic base, and naval reach, all meant that it was
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able to conduct strategy through other means than military power.
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Revolutionary and imperial France was not in this position – it had to
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use military force not in addition to the other instruments of national
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power, but in order to access them. Military power for Napoleon must be
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seen therefore as diplomacy, not merely, as in the Clausewitzian sense,
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an addition to it.
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