Was Napoleon a Warmonger

Answer 1

Bonaparte is also frequently held responsible for the "Napoleonic" wars and seen as a prime cause of them. It is argued that he should have prevented those wars with better statecraft and convinced the rest of Europe that France's new and ideologically threatening government was not an enemy. Whenever that policy failed, he should have won wars he could not avoid and negotiated generous treaties, making friends of former enemies, showing the world that diplomacy and not warfare was the proper tool of statesmen.

Yet could any one man, acting unilaterally, defy centuries of rivalry and aggression to end the state of recurrent war in Europe? Hardly a decade seemed to pass without one conflict or another in the previous two centuries. Would any leader of the day have even considered a durable peace to be a real possibility, or is this more of a modern-day concept?

Bonaparte's use of war to defend and enrich the state of France was anything but unique, excepting that it was consistently successful, something the Bourbons might have envied him. If waging war is now considered strictly a policy of last resort and inherently wasteful, there doesn't seem to be a major player of Napoleon's day who was above employing it to achieve their aims. It may be fair to accuse Bonaparte of failing to create a durable peace, but a study of his contemporaries and their policies would likely prove there were other guilty parties. -jordan