Napoleon's Biggest Mistake

Originally posted by Timotheus He overextended himself. He went too far, too fast, chiefly by delving into Russia and not making peace with England.

Napoleon wasn't getting peace with the UK short of somehow defeating it. There was a brief period in 1802 when he had beaten the entire reactionary league ranged against revolutionary France, to the point where even the UK saw fit to accept signing a peace treaty.

At that point it momentarily looked as if he had gotten away with it. He had secured most of the gains of the French Revolution, of course setting hemself up as the first liberal dictator in history. The future looked bright. And at that point the UK decided this order of things wasn't satisfactory and started the war again.

From then on it was Britian feeding the opposition to France. Trafalgar removed any threat of Napoleon taking it on directly. Instead he was forced to fight the British proxies one after the other, including the Russians.
That was a mistake first in the sense that Napoleon expected the Russians to march their army out of Russia proper and line up for defeat, like they had done before, and secondly because at the point when he realised the Russians weren't coming, he went in to find them. Otoh, he needed to settle the Russians and playing a waiting game with them seemed just as risky.

It might be that his biggest miscalculation was in fact thinking he could ever make himself palatable to the royal houses of Europe by marrying into one of them, making France safe that way.
The reactionary monarchies were dead set on crushing the French Revolution and the state it had created, the minder of which Napoleon had become.

Spreading the revolution, trying to trigger similar movements in other countries, REALLY overturning the apple cart of the monarchies, could have worked better for him in the end. It would have made the conflicts even more desperate, but it might have turned more of Europe into liberal democracies sooner.
In the end he wasn't enough of a radical revolutionary. He kept trying to make peace with the monarchs instead of kicking over their thrones.

It seems to me that Unicorn and Joinville repeat the "usual history" that can be found in every good history book in a college.

Just because it's oft repeated in good books does not invalidate its factual accuracy.

President Thomas Jefferson wrote this prediction in an April 1802 letter.

Bruno, I was not meaning to disparage thinking, just that we don't have to reject something because it's the commonly held idea. I hold a lot of ideas, more socially than as a historian, that are very anti-Establishment, but I don't just go against the Establishment because it's the Establishment. I have reasons. And I know you've put forth your reasons, I just don't find them very convincing.

Now, if Napoleon had prioritised the navy, I think he would have gotten into a naval arms race the same way Britain did with Germany near the start of WWI. (Massie's work is a classic on the matter.) I also think it would have ended the same way as the arms race with Germany did: Britain victorious, though maybe not in so few battles as was done with Nelson. The French had no admiral the equal of Nelson, nor, as Nelson believed, no sailors the equal of British ones. I think it may have prolonged the naval war, but not affected its outcome in any material way.

To walk into the mosque of Cairo with his shoes on which cost him the Egyptian campaign. Plus the invasion of Russia.

It's hard to judge Napoleon's biggest mistake, since one mistake usually can't bring the French Empire to her knees.

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