Stalin's Contributions to History

[Masada]

Do you mean the half a million french Germans, or half a million russians in their own scorched earth, hit and run campaign ? This is not evidence of Napoleon Hitler as a mass murderer, maybe the development of a megalomania overconfidence.

Let's substitute all instances of Napoleon for Hitler and French for Germans just to see if that statement makes a wit of sense. It doesn't. Next.

Well, there´s war and ´just war´, isn´t there? (And then there´s War on Drugs, War on Terror and what not, but let´s nog get into that...) Anyway, as concerns war ethics is usually the first victim, yes.

Yes, because it was totally a 'just war' against the presence of Russian drugs in Parisian streets and against the omnipresent spectre of Russians blowing themselves up. Stop apologising for a blatant piece of military aggression.

 

[vogtmurr]

somehow this technique of substituting names and situations into another argument has become popular around here. Is it intended to make the originator of the argument look foolish or fascist ? I dont know but I think its just childish. The same people will tell you how different this situation is from that and so on, etc. when you try to make a similar comparison, such as the US-Mexican war of 1847.

What half million casualties are we talking about and how do they constitute evidence of civilian atrocities on a mass scale, by Napoleon ? Nobody's directly answered my observations on the topic of Napoleon's treatment of defeated states. They skirt the issue or talk about France's aggressiveness, even after Napoleon was already dead. The answers I've been given seem to suggest that France dragged all the coalition members unwillingly into every war, 1792-1815.
Yes indeed war is what it is, and when you hold the advantage you will tend to take the offensive against the enemy. So is that blatant agression because Napoleon usually had the advantage ?

 

[Dachs]

1797 is the perfect example of how Napoleon treated defeated states. His treatment of Prussia in 1806 is a great example of how he treated his friends. The Spanish farce in 1808 is a fantastic demonstration of how he ignored other states' sovereignty. The Swiss intervention in 1802-3 is a grand way to show how he disregarded the treaties that he signed.

Also on the agenda: Napoleon's Italian consolidation (direct contravention of his 1801-2 treaties), his revolution in the Netherlands (same) that made it into a kingdom, the vassalization of defeated Prussia from 1807, the manipulations of the Rheinbund states, and the thankless way he treated Bavaria after the 1809 war. AND MANY OTHERS.

Did you just kind of ignore my post on the last page answering all of your questions, or something?

 

[Masada]

The entire subtext of this discussion has been something along the lines of: ITS ALL GOOD IF A FRENCHMAN DOES IT IN THE NAME OF LIBERTY EVEN IF THE ACTUAL RESULTS MAY VARY!

somehow this technique of substituting names and situations into another argument has become popular around here. Is it intended to make the originator of the argument look foolish or fascist ?

Er, because it is foolish.

 

[say1988]

It varied even within classes of one country. In 1814, you had guys like the Humboldts who considered the 1813-4 war to be an apocalyptic clash between German and Frenchman, and who amassed a long laundry list polemic of Evil Stuff French People Did to Germany for the Vienna congress. That's more of an attitude in Prussia specifically, and among elements of the army and bureaucracy in particular, though. Most other states' decisionmakers had little problem viewing the whole conflict as a war against Napoleon.

That is kind of what I was thinking.
Then if the war was viewed as against Napoleon, then removing him as a threat (whether he ramained in power or not) which does not necessarily require breaking France's power, as a whole.
In WWI it was commonly viewed that the problem was Germany itself (in no small part due to fun propaganda), not just the Kaiser or any person/group in power, and hence, some saw that the entire country needed to be broken.

 

[Tee Kay]

Umm no, he did stage a coup d´état, but after being First Consul he decided for Emperor. Even Napoleon III isn´t commonly referred to as dictator. But the term became widely used for 20th century potentates.

I use dictator in the sense of an autocratic ruler who wields absolute/near-absolute power.

Military campaigns tended to become more bloody affairs with the advent of conscription, yes. Before that armies were usually relatively small in size, which, taking into account the logistical nightmare of providing for a huge army without modern means of transportation, isn´t that surprising. The Battle of Cannae could be called a massacre, but Hannibal didn´t get labeled mass murderer for it, on the contrary.

No, I mean, massacres like:

from this site

ATROCITIES:
* Chartrand, The Portuguese Army of the Napoleonic Wars: 2,969 people reported murdered by French near Coimbra, Port.
* Rothenburg, The Napoleonic Wars: After fall of Jaffa, Nap. had 2,500 POWs shot.

 

[Karalysia]

But the term became widely used for 20th century potentates.

Do you deny that Sulla, Metellus or Julius Caesar were dictators?

 

[Masada]

Acid test: Are they French?

If yes, then no; if not, then yes.

 

[vogtmurr]

1797 is the perfect example of how Napoleon treated defeated states. His treatment of Prussia in 1806 is a great example of how he treated his friends. The Spanish farce in 1808 is a fantastic demonstration of how he ignored other states' sovereignty. The Swiss intervention in 1802-3 is a grand way to show how he disregarded the treaties that he signed.

Also on the agenda: Napoleon's Italian consolidation (direct contravention of his 1801-2 treaties), his revolution in the Netherlands (same) that made it into a kingdom, the vassalization of defeated Prussia from 1807, the manipulations of the Rheinbund states, and the thankless way he treated Bavaria after the 1809 war. AND MANY OTHERS.

Did you just kind of ignore my post on the last page answering all of your questions, or something?

I did see some of these examples before, and I will acknowledge I know about some of them but not the fine details of all of them. Therefore, I have made blanket statements to the effect that "yes he did make demands on conquered enemies", and "tried to install unpopular governments" as a way of securing his borders. So every time he won over these coalitions, he was just going to say "here's all your strategic fortresses and prisoners back. Lets sing kumbaya till next year !". And you know some of these strategic fortresses were in Dutch lands which he eventually annexed outright. I agree that after 1807 Napoleon's activities were pretty well naked imperialism, which is pretty much the way they did things in those days.
Surprise news flash: Being a successful conquering emperor was still a noble pursuit in those days ! Frederick launched preemptive strikes on Saxony and Silesia and hes considered a pretty enlightened king. Its also true that Napoleon did not always anticipate the resistance or resentment his regime engendered in some of these areas.

Where I still set Napoleon apart though, is despite your long list of nasty things he did, there was still a Prussia, Saxony, Austria, Piedmont (most of the time) to sign those treaties. Most European wars in enlightenment / early modern went to and fro with neither side gaining a complete advantage to the extent that Napoleon did repeatedly. I'm sure you know he could have dictated harsher terms than he did. Thats the key: having the power to crush your opponents utterly and choosing not to exercise it to that extent, so that they can come back and nip your heels yet again and again and again. The proof is in the pudding for everyone to see ! I'm beginning to feel you like to bury the argument in details which miss the big picture. What about the disciplinary measures he took towards looters on occasion ? or the emancipation of jews ? yeah he was well rewarded for that.

ITS ALL GOOD IF A FRENCHMAN DOES IT IN THE NAME OF LIBERTY EVEN IF THE ACTUAL RESULTS MAY VARY! .

I don't see how you could misconstrue anything I said into this, but in the earlier years Napoleon may actually have believed he was a liberator. I think the Duchy of Warsaw and a few other places in Germany and Italy believed it.

Er, because it is foolish.

yes substituting dates and names into an argument is foolish. You're not the one who started it, but I have to admit it worked quite well in your example. I'm still waiting for an explanation of these half-million casualties in Russia you've laid at Napoleon's feet.

No, I mean, massacres like:

from this site

So thats it ? 25 years of warfare and that pitiable little list of atrocities ?
The execution of Turkish prisoners in Jaffa was after he parolled them, and then recaptured them in action. Not exactly an unusual punishment at the time, especially when youre a little army wandering around the fringes of the Ottoman Empire. (It bears a striking resemblance to Richard I after the capture of Acre).
The Spanish war was bound to get nasty when it became a people's guerilla movement, but that suppression happened under his generals who exercised the option of mass executions - we are all familiar with Goya's paintings. There were some civilian uprisings in Italy that were crushed brutally, and there must be others, but I do not see any mass destruction or massacres on a scale which would almost be expected from Napoleon's long campaigns. You guys have to put this in the perspective of the times, and any war. You can't always be nice to the locals when you're hungry and been campaigning for years in some god forsaken part of Europe far from home.

Oh, and another surpise news flash. In Haiti, the British ended up assisting the suppression of the revolt, and played a pretty active role too. Yet by 1816 Haiti was free, and there was no slavery.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

You can't have a "war in the Enlightement." That's like have a war in the Scientific Revolution, or a war in post-modernism. Stop referencing history like its some sort of video game.

 

[Lone Wolf]

At least, Napoleon had style. And style is the only thing that ultimately matters.

 

[vogtmurr]

You can't have a "war in the Enlightement." That's like have a war in the Scientific Revolution, or a war in post-modernism. Stop referencing history like its some sort of video game.

ok well if thats your worst criticism i got off easy. The full phrase was "war in the Enlightement / early modern " implying a historical era. Stop preaching like a college sophomore

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

ok well if thats your worst criticism i got off easy. The full phrase was "war in the Enlightement / early modern " implying a historical era. Stop preaching like a college sophomore

Then stop speaking about history as a high school senior would.

 

[Agent327]

The word dictator comes from the Roman Republic. Given that Napoleon served as First Consul in what constituted literally a dictatorship, a highly repressive proto-fascist state, I have no inclination to not say he was a brutal mass murderering dictator.

Okay. Except that

a) he wasn´t a dictator (literally or figuratively)
b) he wasn´t a mass-murderer (a 20th century term).

He was kind of brutal in his attitude towards women - boorish actually. I suppose you mean he was a de facto dictator. That´s perfectly arguable.

Let's substitute all instances of Napoleon for Hitler and French for Germans just to see if that statement makes a wit of sense. It doesn't. Next.

Yes, let´s substitute the 1800s for the 1900s just to see if that statement makes a wit of sense. It doesn't. Next.

Yes, because it was totally a 'just war' against the presence of Russian drugs in Parisian streets and against the omnipresent spectre of Russians blowing themselves up. Stop apologising for a blatant piece of military aggression.

Never knew the Russian campaign was about drugs; very enlightening.

I use dictator in the sense of an autocratic ruler who wields absolute/near-absolute power.

Yes, I´ve noticed using hsitorical terms in an ahistoric fashion. Autocracy is quite something else than dictatorship though.

No, I mean, massacres like:

from this site[/QUOTE]

Yes. Napoleon never was in Portugal (or Spain, for that matter). At Jaffa he was isolated and had to retreat; that doesn´t excuse executing military who had surrendered, but it would have been impossible to feed them. But Napoleon treated his own soldiery just as harshly when it came to it: he escaped by ship back to France, leaving his armies to fend for themselves. (Which, surprisingly, they did too, for a while.)

Do you deny that Sulla, Metellus or Julius Caesar were dictators?

Oh great, more quoting out of context. May I suggest you reread where I mentioned Caesar?

 

[say1988]

What is your definition of dictator?
Based on the OED and Mirriam-Webster, Napoleon definitely was one.

 

[Dachs]

I did see some of these examples before, and I will acknowledge I know about some of them but not the fine details of all of them. Therefore, I have made blanket statements to the effect that "yes he did make demands on conquered enemies", and "tried to install unpopular governments" as a way of securing his borders.

See, you're making the assumption that his intent was to "secure his borders". Why is that necessarily the case? Should we refer to Hitler's creation of the General Government or his relationship with Vichy France as "securing his borders" too? Or to Alexander's march into Baktria? Or Caesar's conquest of Gaul? Some historians do that for all of those, but seems to me like they're stretching the truth just a teensy bit there. Sounds like a weasel-word phrase to deflect criticism of Napoleonic policy as a criminal enterprise.

So every time he won over these coalitions, he was just going to say "here's all your strategic fortresses and prisoners back. Lets sing kumbaya till next year !". And you know some of these strategic fortresses were in Dutch lands which he eventually annexed outright. I agree that after 1807 Napoleon's activities were pretty well naked imperialism, which is pretty much the way they did things in those days.
Surprise news flash: Being a successful conquering emperor was still a noble pursuit in those days ! Frederick launched preemptive strikes on Saxony and Silesia and hes considered a pretty enlightened king. Its also true that Napoleon did not always anticipate the resistance or resentment his regime engendered in some of these areas.

I don't really consider the rape of Silesia or the invasion of Saxony to have been a particularly upstanding moral thing to do, either, chief, and I don't hold Fred in very high regard either.

But this goes beyond saying "Napoleon was a dick because he conquered territory". Napoleon was a dick because he didn't merely take this stuff over, but he broke the rules of international relations in doing it (because, like in everything else that the man did, he believed that no rules or limitations applied to him - something that served him well in the military for a long time). Now, he didn't genocide the Jews, or the gypsies, or the Slavs, or the gays, yeah. But his foreign policy looks an awful lot like Hitler's. Hitler catches a ton of [crap] for the annexation of Bohemia-Moravia in March 1939, and rightly so. He violated an agreement he'd made only a few months before. But Napoleon doesn't get condemned for the exact same thing when he did it to Italy, the Netherlands, and arguably Switzerland? It's pretty amazing doublethink going on here.

Where I still set Napoleon apart though, is despite your long list of nasty things he did, there was still a Prussia, Saxony, Austria, Piedmont (most of the time) to sign those treaties. Most European wars in enlightenment / early modern went to and fro with neither side gaining a complete advantage to the extent that Napoleon did repeatedly. I'm sure you know he could have dictated harsher terms than he did.

Like what? How would he have enforced harsher terms than the ones he actually got, with the victories he got? The reason he left Austria alive wasn't because of its own sake, but because he had no clue as to how to deal with it. You can see it from his letters. He had no interest in keeping Austria alive, but he didn't have the resources to annex it and couldn't be assed to conquer the whole thing anyway. He couldn't replace it with a Hungarian state because the Hungarians didn't even want to do that. So he just beat it up a few times, then turned it into a Bavaria writ large, essentially a lackey for his Russian and Near Eastern policies. And even then, his foreign policy worked against it, especially in the Near East.

Thats the key: having the power to crush your opponents utterly and choosing not to exercise it to that extent, so that they can come back and nip your heels yet again and again and again. The proof is in the pudding for everyone to see ! I'm beginning to feel you like to bury the argument in details which miss the big picture.

I'm beginning to feel you like to make up a big picture that agrees with your own views and then use it to "disprove" all of those niggling details that mess with it. I have yet to see you demonstrate that Napoleon was treacherously attacked by his neighbors, having been minding his own business without provoking them at all, for any of his wars. Instead, you dismiss facts that disagree with your assumption of Napoleon-as-wronged party and claim that they are trifles that don't bear on your actual argument. There are an awful lot of these "trifles" by now, dude.

 

[LightSpectra]

Okay. Except that

a) he wasn´t a dictator (literally or figuratively)
b) he wasn´t a mass-murderer (a 20th century term).

He was both.

He was kind of brutal in his attitude towards women - boorish actually. I suppose you mean he was a de facto dictator. That´s perfectly arguable.

How was he not a de jure dictator as First Consul? He was a dictator in everything but name.

 

[vogtmurr]

OK. Maybe I was a wee bit over the top there. It would have been a stretch to think he could or would go all Genghis Khan-like on the rest of Europe.
I think fundamentally you guys are exposing the absence of morals in all wars of agression. It requires a general thread of its own; we picked on Nappy in particular. But he had some 'help' too; the coalitions couldn't live with his early successes and broke the peace on occasion, leading to ever greater penalties as his victories accumulated. I have not provided enough evidence for this as you have for the contrary but it is there, it takes two to tango.

I still can't see him as an arch-villain, and neither did many parts of Europe outside France. I'm not sure how the reformed Dutch and Swiss republics felt about it, but up until around 1807 they weren't entirely unwilling associates, along with Danes, Poles, Saxons, Bavarians, and many Italians. Intentionally or not, he brought about some cool changes: ended the Holy Roman Empire, sowed the seeds of Italian and German unification, stirred a fascination with antiquities in Europe, was a catalyst for the independence movements in the Spanish new world, and he also has the Code to his credit. Britain gained the most from his wars.

@Masada: The loss of 500,000 French and allies in Russia is where his military downfall began, and that can be laid at his feet.
@Cheezy - the term [Age of] Enlightenment refers to an era which is generally held to have ended with Napoleon, as well as an intellectual movement, while monarchs continued to practise wars of agression. We typically overlook these things when the context is obvious so there's no need to get silly about it. I like to use an economy of words, not to trivialize history, even if we are comparing the scale of massacres.. If I want I can capture the essence with the best of them.

Anyway, this thread is supposed to be about Stalin. This was a continuation from another thread but I'm done . Lets keep it real from now on.

 

[Agent327]

He was both.

Because... ?

How was he not a de jure dictator as First Consul? He was a dictator in everything but name.

Alright: he was de iure First Consul; de facto you might say he was dictator - given that the modern term dictator has a different meaning from the ancient one. Anywho, as said, he changed his mind to being emperor (thereby triggering the Austrian monarch to do the same). Hitler on the other hand - and someone like Caesar - were actually dictator by law (they didn´t have to pretend to be consul, although Hitler was chancellor and later president and Caesar combined various functions).

But I agree with vogtmurr. Let´s get back to the dictator this started with. Or are we done with the man?

 

[say1988]

If Napoleon wasn't a dictator because he declared himself Emperor, then Hitler wasn't a dictator because he was Chancellor and Führer. And Kim Jong-il isn't a dictator because he is a Supreme Leader. Under this theory there have been basically no dctators in since the mid 19th century.