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How Good Was Napoleon? | History Today

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How Good Was Napoleon?

By **Jonathon Riley** | Published in History Today Volume 57 Issue 7 July 2007

Serving general and military historian Jonathon Riley uses his personal knowledge of command to assess Napoleon's qualities as a strategist, operational commander and battlefield tactician.

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.