Tuesday, June 17, 2008

How Far From Austerlitz? (Book #59)

How Far From Austerlitz? Napoleon 1805-1815 (Alistair Horne, 1998) focuses on roughly the second half of Napoleon's career--the downhill part of it after the peak of Austerlitz. It's interesting enough, and it helped me get a sense of which marshals to use when in my alternative history. But I don't feel like I got any new insights into what made Napoleon tick, and I got annoyed by the sheer number of times Horne compared Napoleon to Hitler. I know he was just comparing the military developments (and there are certainly parallels there, especially WRT the Russian campaigns), but I really can't separate Hitler from genocide enough to be comfortable seeing his name in the same sentence with someone who, whatever his failings and despite the amount of bloodshed he caused, never came close to that level of evil.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

...writing litteraly on the shadow of a couple of old olive trees, that were used by the French army on march/april 1811, to hang local peasants, it is a bit dificult not to equate Napoleon with Hitler....
Nice blog, nice criticism !!
From the Portuguese interland, where 200 years latter they steel speak of the French.