The Wars Against Napoleon - Book Review
By Jerry D. Morelock, PhD, ARMCHAIR GENERAL Editor in Chief.

Published Saturday, December 08, 2007  | 0 comments  | Print  | E-mail

Book Review: The Wars Against Napoleon: Debunking the Myth of the Napoleonic Wars by General Michel Franceschi and Ben Weider

Release date: December 15, 2007, ISBN: 978-1-932714-37-1

Busting Another Napoleon Myth

The president of the International Napoleonic Society, Canadian entrepreneur Dr. Ben Weider has done it again. The world’s foremost Napoleonic expert took on – and beat! — the entrenched battalions of the “Napoleon-istas” (French academics who consider anything even remotely Napoleonic to be their exclusive “turf”) with his 1982 book, The Murder of Napoleon, and the society’s 20-page, 2004 report, The Poisoning of Napoleon: The Final Proof, that proved beyond any reasonable doubt through exhaustive scientific testing that the emperor’s 1821 death was indeed due to systematic arsenic poisoning (see History’s Mysteries, “The Final Proof: Napoleon Was Poisoned,” July 2005 issue of Armchair General). The Napoleon-istas fumed and howled, yet Weider’s overwhelming evidence (which includes solid confirmation by the FBI’s forensic crime lab in Washington, D. C.) makes their stubborn refusal to accept what Weider has clearly proven seem merely the ranting of spoiled children. Unable to refute Weider’s findings with scientific evidence, they have been reduced to periodically waging a sort of last-ditch guerrilla war through specious “press releases” that present no new evidence but only recycle their warmed-over claims that stomach cancer did in the emperor.

Now, in his latest book, The Wars Against Napoleon: Debunking the Myth of the Napoleonic Wars (Savas Beatie, 2007), Weider teams up with General Michel Franceschi to take on and destroy an even bigger Napoleonic myth. The authors explain, “Among the numerous conventional images concerning Napoleon, that of the megalomaniac conqueror drunk on glory is fixed in the collective imagination. Indefatigable warrior, Napoleon supposedly sacrificed world peace to his insatiable personal ambition. … But is this historically accurate? We do not believe that it is.”

In fact, as Weider and Franceschi prove, even the long-entrenched term “Napoleonic Wars,” itself, is not only misleading, it’s downright wrong! Instead, the authors clearly demonstrate that the armies amassed by the reactionary monarchies of Europe literally fought “wars against Napoleon” to counter the threat he posed to maintaining their l’ancien regimes. Horrified at the prospect of the progressive ideals let loose by revolutionary France in 1789 spreading throughout Europe to infect their own subjugated masses, Europe’s monarchs marshaled their forces to strangle the infant revolution in its cradle. When that failed – and especially after Napoleon emerged and began to regularly thrash the monarchies’ armies – Europe’s frightened kings and princes formed a series of military coalitions that waged “wars against Napoleon” for nearly two decades.

Napoleon

Napoleon on his Imperial throne, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, 1806

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