Napoleon

My point was simply that  a monarchy does not have to be hereditary. How a monarch is elected is kind of irrelevant to that point. Obviously majority current thinking is that universal suffrage is best, but where was universal suffrage ever instituted anywhere before the 20th century? (There may be an answer to that. If there is it would be interesting.)

The last bit was pretty true of Britain too, mutatis mutandis - given for instance that in Britain you would have to say 'gentry' rather than 'aristocracy'.

The rest of the paragraph however is only due to the fact that Napoleon's 'aristocracy' was a new one, whereas the Bourbon and Prussian ones were old. I have no doubt at all that had Napoleon not been defeated, 'his' aristocracy would have perpetuated itself the same way that the Bourbons and Prussian aristocracies (and just about every other privileged group in history) did.

(In fact many of the new aristocratic families kept their aristocratic trappings, though of the Napoleonic rather than the Bourbon tradition, through the 19th century.)

Pretty well all aristocracies had most of their roots in military success.

Which is?  

Actually Napoleon retained around 200,000 troops in Germany at all times. And the Peninsula couldn't have taken up too many resources - 300,000 troops is certainly significant, but when one considers Imperial France (not including its satellite states, just France itself) never had a standing army of more than 1,100,000 compared to Revolutionary France which had a peak strength of closer to 1,500,000 it becomes apparent that the French could have more than doubled forces in Iberia - 400,000 less troops were in the Imperial armies than the earlier Republican armies of the mid-1790s. Plus since then France's frontiers had expanded - large areas in Italy, the Low Countries and Iberia were annexed directly to France rather than being brought under puppet regimes. When population growth is also factored in it would seem Imperial France would have been able to mobilise around 2,000,000 with relative ease had it wished to - it had at least 3,000,000 more citizens than the Republic ever did. And in addition there were tens of millions outside of France from whom still more could have been conscripted into Imperial armies. It is obvious that the Peninsula wasn't then a huge strain - if it was the French could have devoted far more resources than they did and still retain forces in excess of half a million on the eastern front for conflict with Russia and Austria.

*out of the topic.  You should join with my best friend! He also thinks of "L'Empereur" as being the greatest!

*completely out of the topic: "Daca ai nevoie de un numar de telefon,  da-mi un pm!"

Thank you all who read this for bearing with me!