British Anti-Napoleon Propaganda

Really. This thread needs to be put out of it's misery.

As an addendum, you really should read the books especially if you're going to refer to them in postings:

books.google.com

https://www.amazon.com/General-Bonaparte-Revivals-Military-History/dp/0751200395/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=9780751200393&linkCode=qs&qid=1599673489&s=books&sr=1-1

https://www.amazon.com/Swords-Around-Throne-Napoleons-Grand/dp/0029095018/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=swords+around+a+throne&qid=1599673528&s=books&sr=1-2

If you wish to discuss them further, I have all three on my desk ready to refer to any section you might care to read.

But why is Elting above criticism, when every book is critiqued on publication and many years later. Often, the comments will revolve around the approach taken and the material used (viz. the thread on HW and Bowden), with addiction all remarks on how the world has changed in later critiques.

I am sure Elting would have taken the same view as Chandler in that he didn’t mind being proven 100% wrong, because the later researcher must have started with his book. As I said, pretty much everyone starts with these old survey books, but then might do specialist work of their own. There is no appetite to rewrite these surveys, but to focus on subjects they only cover in outline. Surely that is how historical method works - not by setting one author’s work in stone.

@Kevin F. Kiley that’s exactly what I mean. A more modern style would be to reference your sources directly, not direct you to go on a fishing expedition. When you couple this with “you can’t prove a negative” this is merely an exercise in confirmation bias. Perfectly acceptable at the time, but not rigorous enough today.

@Kevin F. Kiley At the risk of repeating myself for the third or fourth time, it’s not about quality or disagreeing, it’s about style. A modern work would generally have considerably higher proportion of footnotes. When this book was written, the internet as we know it did not exist. The iron curtain was still in place. The digitisation revolution had not yet happened. There will come a point (and it already has, for me) when the lack of transparency makes it less useful than it used to be. I think there is a gap in the market for an expanded and modernised study. A Swords 2.0 if you will. Twice a century seems a reasonable cycle time, and in the basis it’s going to take at least a decade to pull together, shouldn’t somebody be starting now?

For me it is not primary sources or secondary, but one cannot follow him from where he got his information, for example about the Régiment de Prusse - so was their clothing and equipment really up to 1810 mostly Prussian?

@Kevin F. Kiley as I’ve said, for me it’s a case of style. Over 700 footnotes (actually 865 in my edition of Swords), but the majority not to citations, but often to more unreferenced assertions. Where there are citations they are mostly to secondary works by other historians Eg Chapter 1, 11 cited out of 33 only 3 or 4 primary sources . Chapter 2 12 cited out of 30, only 3 primary sources. Chapter 3, 5 cited out of 18 only one not another historian. Chapter 4, 4 citations, 1 primary out of 19 footnotes. I won’t bore people with the entire book, but it roughly works out that only 34% of footnotes had citations (and only 16% references to memoirs, souvenirs, correspondence etc, the remainder to secondary works or studies). That works out at 294 citations of all types in a work with a main body of over 670 odd pages. An average citation rate of not quite 1 in 4.8 pages to a primary source, in a work that some claim is the definitive, is not what I’d call copious. I’m sure it was a style that was prevalent and acceptable at the time, but contrast that with a modern work by Dawson or Field where 80-90% of footnotes in most chapters would be to primary sources. I stress, it’s not a question of quality of conclusion, but the style of presentation. In many passages I’d love to agree with him, but he doesn’t give me the data for me to do so in good conscience.

@Kevin F. Kiley As I said, it’s a matter of style rather than quality. I’m also more of a skeptic than an admirer, and it sometimes come shining through. Some of that might be me, but some of it could be generational too, I’m on the cusp but I’m more Generation X than Babyboomer. I’m perhaps more of the HTML literary style, and I wonder how accessible he will be to the hashtag crowd.

@Kevin F. Kiley Apologies for citing him incorrectly, people who have surnames for given names also seem to confuse me. But yes, I precisely mean that whilst using works that are decades old we should do so taking newer research into account. If we don’t, then what incentive is there to carry out research? If that were true, we’d all have our copy of Siborne and tell the last 150 years of authors to go hang? In historical enquiry, you could argue that the pace of change means that large works can have quite a long life. But psychology and behavioural study. Driven by our need to understand marketing and economics change is being driven at prodigious rates with new research being published all the time, using technology like fMR that would have been science fiction in 1970. On a personal level, I find Elting very old fashioned in style, and frankly I use him sparingly because of it. I prefer to have my evidence, analysis and conclusion laid out in a more modern format. I also prefer the author to have had the use of a computer, the internet and archives inaccessible during the Cold War. But that’s just me, I wouldn’t push my views on anyone else.

@Kevin F. Kiley That work by Hackett is now half a century old. In the intervening 5 decades there has been considerable numbers of cognitive behavioral studies into biases and heuristics. In 1970 much ground-breaking research had yet to be done, some of which seriously undermines the confidence that we may feel in our abilities or conclusions. You might want to consider that if you continue to cite it as definitive.

Meanwhile, in answer to the identical OP posed at the Armchair General site, this short essay was shared some time ago. It casts some light on the question. https://forums.armchairgeneral.com/forum/historical-events-eras/napoleonic-era/5213890-british-anti-napoleon-propaganda/page2 21 Aug 20, 10:59 "The question I have regarding this 'information' is how much it has influenced the study of Napoleon himself and how much is still be used by present day authors and historians (the two are not necessarily synonymous)?"

So, the period propaganda is not the issue, the use of it presently as 'history' is. And that use is ahistorical at best.

ENGLISH HISTORIOGRAPHY AND NAPOLEON I

W.H.C. Smith

Goldsmiths' College

University of London

Strange as it may sound, Napoleon himself was the first "English" historian who dealt with the Napoleonic question after the fall of the Empire. His Appeal to the English Nation, written by him and translated into English by Santini and Lord Holland, was the first historical work published on this subject in English. It was moreover a work of propaganda, for the only thing Napoleon wanted was to generate an audience that was favorable to him.

To judge the growing interest which manifested itself in Napoleon in England, it is necessary to understand the situation of this country, and more particularly the state of public opinion during the Napoleonic wars. At the start of the Revolution, France had found in England many supporters among the nobility, the bourgeoisie, and the people. It took the bloody days and the fall of the monarchy to change the opinion of his supporters, then the execution of the King and the beginning of the war for their attitude to harden. But despite strong propaganda directed by the English government against the Revolution, a part of the population - those which one called the "old Jac" -, remained faithful to him. It was a mixture of nobles who displayed their ideas more out of eccentricity than out of conviction, more or less "intellectual" bourgeois and common people. This last fraction doubted the authenticity of the description of the conditions in which France found itself, as presented by the English government, because it knew very well its own conditions of existence in England. Of course, the "old Jacobins" were extremely disappointed by the establishment of the Empire, with its nobility and its anti-Republican tastes. But despite this, many of them claimed that if Napoleon had become a despot, Pitt had always been.

Until 1815, the situation did not change. With the continuation of the war, the patriotic attitude tended more and more to triumph. But there remained a current of sympathy which F. M. L. Thomson revealed in his book published in 1959, The Making of the English Workink Class. This work destroyed the myth of class unanimity in England vis-à-vis war. Note that if Thomson's book is neither a study of Napoleon nor of the war between France and England, it nonetheless sheds light on many aspects that had been ignored or had remained hidden until then.

After Waterloo, the Napoleonic legend was almost as good maintained in England than in France. Complaints about Napoleon's fate resounded in London as well as in Paris, and it was in this climate that O'Meara's stories were published.1

1. R. B. O'MEARA, Napoleon in Exile of a voice from St. Helena, London, 1822.

It is appropriate to point out here a curious fact, and in our opinion important, which the French writers ignore: it is that O'Meara was Irish, and not English, and that he had certainly spent his youth in a middle of Dublin where France and the Revolution were seen from a different perspective than in London. Indeed, Napoleon had his supporters in Ireland, where the Act of Union of 1800 suppressing the Irish Parliament was very unpopular. The bloody repression of the uprising of 1798 had aroused a strong grudge against the English government among a large part of the population. At that time, the French almost arrived in sufficient numbers to support the rebels, and once Napoleon became First Consul, then Emperor, the Irish kept the hope of French intervention.

It is quite possible that all this influenced O'Meara, to whom Napoleon said, "I suppose when you go to England you will publish your book. You can say that you have heard me say a lot of things, and that you have had many conversations with me. You will earn a lot of money, and everyone will believe you. ”2 It turned out that for the unfortunate O'Meara things did not turn out exactly like this, for he was a Bonapartist before his time. However, his work had a much greater impact than Napoleon had hoped. It was with O'Meara that the debate was opened in England itself, and it is not yet closed.

2. Cf. also the Memorial and the preface by Jean Tulard in the Integral edition (1968).

Although the most important of Napoleon's supporters, O'Meara was not the first. In 1816, six years before his Napoleon in Exile, the surgeon Warden, who was treating Gourgaud at Saint Helena, had published his Letters 3, so favorable to Napoleon that the Emperor himself could not dispense with declaring that they still contained "a hundred absurdities and lies".

3. W. WARDEN, Letters written on Board the Northumberland and at S. Helena, London, 1816.

Thanks to the romantic spirit that flourished in literary salons and political, the cult of Napoleon flourished in England. Soon it became fashionable to accept "the great man", the hero and, thanks to Saint Helena, almost the martyr. The Life of Napoleon, by Sir Walter Scott, which appeared in 1827 4, was written in this spirit and it reinforced the attitude of the public. But if it had become possible for the literary and political world to accept man, historians were far from adopting his principles and praising his work. For them, Napoleon remained the tyrant who wanted to submit Europe to his arbitrary power as Philip II of Spain and Louis XIV, they thought, had wanted to do. For if Napoleon was right, the war had been unjust and the famous "principles of liberty" in England were very doubtful.

4. W. SCOTT, Life of Napoleon, Londres, 1827.

Perhaps it is because of this that the two main books published in England on Napoleon before the end of the nineteenth century were more studies of a type of great man than of the politician he really was. We want to speak here of the lives of Napoleon respectively written by Scott and Lockhart 5.

5. J. LOCKHART, Life of Napoleon, London, 1829.

Of course, Napoleonic English historiography was seriously flawed during the nineteenth century, when the field of foreign affairs was then almost ignored. Almost all great historians were interested in the problem of the foundations of government and the development of Parliament as the supreme power of the state. This attitude reflects the superiority attributed to English governmental institutions over all those of Europe. Convinced that their country held the secret of freedom and political stability, English historians imagined that they did not need to look elsewhere. If we accept the thesis that every historian is the historian of his own time, we have good proof of this.

As far as France was concerned, there was never any question of examining the principles of its government, and it should be noted that for most of the 19th century Franco-English relations were quite poor - even during the rapprochement. which took place, by an irony of fate, under the Second Empire.

The fall of the latter in 1870 confirmed all the suspicions that the English intellectual class harbored with regard to the French, judging that they were frivolous, not very serious, and that their defeat was the result of their political mores and their institutions. . The predominance of German thought in the field of history and philosophy provoked an attitude of continual contempt for what happened in France under the Third Republic. Colonial disputes exacerbated relations between the two countries, and the generation of historians who sang the praises of British imperialism wanted to hear nothing of the grandeur of France.

It was with the publication, in 1900, of Lord Roseberry's book, Napoleon, the last phase 6, that the interest of English historians in the problem of Napoleon began to appear. Lord Roseberry wanted to devote himself especially to the last years of the Emperor's life on St. Helena, but he was compelled, by the nature of things, to broaden his study. He examined the sources of the various "Voices of St. Helena", and, engaging in a critical and comparative analysis of the works, he tried to judge their value as documentary sources. After having examined Las Cases, Montholon, O'Meara, etc., he arrives at Gourgaud's Journal, and he considers that it is with him that we begin to arrive at the truth about the Emperor and that we perceive the legend to achieve reality. Roseberry himself makes it truly clear that his object is to dispel the misconceptions that had accumulated for almost a century. It was not simply a question of unmasking O'Meara, Las Cases, and their ilk: Lord Roseberry also attacks Sir Hudson Lowe, whose most serious fault he considers was not to be a gentleman. And he goes even further, by attacking the bases of the anti-Napoleonism of English historians.

6. ROSEBERRY (Earl of), Napoleon, the last phase, London, 1900.

For the first time, then, someone was trying to critically analyze the situation and judge Napoleon as a liberal and a democrat. Roseberry's conclusion is that Napoleon was neither because his overarching ideas were order, justice, strength, and symmetry. But Roseberry admits that given the circumstances in France, Napoleon had no choice. And he adds that it is easy to understand that the Emperor was considered a liberal, since he was an enemy of the Holy Alliance which, after its fall, was to weigh on Europe.

In 1902 appeared The Life of Napoleon, by J. H. Rose, an important two-volume work7. Rose made use not only of Napoleon's correspondence published during the Second Empire, but also of the archives of the Foreign Office, mainly diplomatic documents, ambassadors' reports, etc., and he searched the archives of the Ministry of War and Admiralty.

7. J. H. ROSE, The Life of Napoleon, London, 1902

The portrait of the Emperor, his activities, as well as the picture of France painted by Rose were quite benevolent, but the historian remained steadfastly attached to the idea that England had done Europe a great service by overthrowing Napoleon. In a noble and calm tone, Rose speaks of "us", "our intentions", etc., but he does not wonder if "we" have always been right.

Given the limitations of a political history written at this time, this well-done and well-written book still retains a certain value and, considered as the “classic” life of Napoleon in English, it was reissued several times between 1902 and 1920.

Four years later, in 1906, the Cambridge Modern History appeared, the ninth volume of which was called simply Napoleon 8. In this work, there was no longer any question of treating Napoleon as a tyrant or a despot. The phenomenon of the Revolution and its forces captured and directed by it was now treated from an almost European point of view. It should also be noted that two years before the publication of this History, the Entente Cordiale between France and Great Britain had been sealed and that it was exceedingly difficult for the authors of the work to make severe judgments. on the institutions of an ally, this France of the Third Republic still marked by so many Napoleonic vestiges. Anyway, the chapter called "France under the Empire" was written by a Frenchman, Georges Pariset - which was a good example of Entente Cordiale ...

8. Cambridge Modern History. Vol. IX. 'Napoleon'. Cambridge, 1906.

The war of 1914-1918 changed everything, in the historical field as elsewhere. In Britain, modern historians were interested, like many others, in the origins of war, at the same time as the school dedicated to the study of the Middle Ages flourished. And if one could notice a certain interest in economic and social history, these beginnings were hesitant and rather badly directed.

Regarding Napoleon, it is curious that between 1906 and 1952 no major study was published in England. Of course, there have been translations: Bainville in 1932, Tarlé in 1937. But until J. M. Thompson's book in 1951, no new study on Napoleon appeared in English.

In fifty years, much has changed, although during the war of 1939-1945 English newspapers often drew parallels between Hitler, William II, Napoleon, Louis XIV and Philip II of Spain - the traditional litany of enemies of the Britain. But at the end of the war, a real intellectual crisis accompanied the political and social upheaval that began in 1945. There was no longer any question of the British Empire, whose creaking was heard, but of Europe and the position of England vis-à-vis the rest of the Continent.

The weaknesses of English society itself prompted criticism of the nineteenth-century system and, feeling less confidence in their own institutions and their own destiny, historians saw the time come to take stock of their own country. It seemed unnecessary and sassy to say that Hitler looked like Napoleon. From then on, history became a study, not only of political events, but also of economic, social, and even moral problems.

It was in such a climate that Napoleon Bonaparte de Thompson9 appeared, and although the author does not show himself to be a staunch supporter of Napoleon, criticizing his tendencies towards dictatorship, it should be noted that he expresses his judgments in a good tone. less condescending than the one we had used until then.

9. J. M. Thompson, Napoleon Bonaparte. His Rise and Fall, Oxford, 1951.

In 1963, Felix Markham in turn published a Napoleon 10. In ten years, important new sources on the life of the Emperor had been found. For example, the deciphering of the text of the memoirs of General Bertrand, written in Saint Helena, the discovery of two series of letters from Marie-Louise, one in the Royal Archives of Stockholm addressed to Napoleon, and the others in Montenuovo addressed to the Duke of Reichstadt. In addition, among the latest publications, Markham cited as particularly important the work of Professor Godechot, The Institutions of the Revolution and the Empire 11 and that of Professor Crouzet, The British Economy and the Continental Blockade 12.

10. F. MARKHAM, Napoleon, London, 1963. Markham had already published a small study, Napoleon and the awakennig of Europe, which announced the thesis he was going to develop in his book.

11. J. GODECHOT, Les Institutions de la France sous la Révolution et l'Empire, Paris, 1951.

12. F. CROUZET, L'Économie Britannique et le Blocus Continental 1806-13, Paris, 1958.

Obviously, there was no longer any question of justifying England and its policy towards Napoleon, and it was not only because 150 years had passed since Waterloo. There was much more than that: the certainty that its fate no longer counted for a nation which, for twenty years, had suffered many failures. In particular, the experience of the Suez War in 1958 had caused genuine trauma, especially in intellectual circles. Slowly, almost painfully, the march towards Europe had begun and, with it, the interest in the history of this same Europe.

Markham therefore studied Napoleon without any prejudice and he endeavored, with great success, to place him in his time and to portray him, not only as Emperor of the French, but also as the inspiration for many movements of modern Europe. After having accepted Waterloo for a hundred and fifty years as a victory, we finally began to wonder what were the ideas that had won.

Markham, finally, considered that it would have taken a Shakespeare as well as a Sophocles to do justice to the complexity of Napoleon's personality. To use a word from Aristotle, applying it to Napoleon, "it is a beast or a god".

Napoleon himself said to Saint Helena: "I die before my age, assassinated by the English oligarchy and its executioner [Sir Hudson Lowe]. Soon the English people will avenge me”. In the vocabulary of historians, "soon" is a rather elastic word, but we can say that 150 years later, the revenge has started anyway. {I wonder if that should read "I die before my time."? JF.}

@Kevin F. Kiley In Britain the constitution is not a subject or topic, it’s a career!

@Kevin F. Kiley You misjudge me, my target was most assuredly NOT on your side of the Atlantic!

@Zack White What I find interesting about Dawson’s work is how he takes a forensic approach to things like casualty data. Over at the D’Erlon’s thread, for example, if we presume that the front of the column should take more gunshot casualties it can help give an indication of unit and sub-unit deployment. It also puts paid to some of the more romantic vignettes of La Garde dying heroically rather than surrendering when the data suggests casualties were relatively light in some units and a large number went ‘into the bag’ unscathed. Like you, I don’t necessarily agree with all his conclusions, but I applaud how he has uncovered the data

@Kevin F. Kiley I don’t think he did (and beyond failing to acknowledge we are human, neither did anyone else). You rightly deplore people who write with agendas, but they also read with them too. Like it or not, that includes you and I and indeed everyone else. Because of that the propagandising didn’t stop, but continues to this day. People are complex characters and tend not to be pure heroes or out and out villains. However, we enjoy a good pantomime, but all the cheering and booing does little for advancing real understanding. To illustrate what I mean, let’s take the quote at face value. Some will believe that Wellington is ordering the wholesale slaughter of recalcitrant innocent civilians. Others will take a more nuanced view in light of the known Portuguese government proclamation and that it only refers to persons in authority. Likewise some will seize on the 12-14k starving figure (nowhere near the 40 or 100k quoted elsewhere) as evidence of Wellington’s heartlessness and dishonourable conduct. Others will make the rather obvious point that starving and starved to death are two different things. More still will take the very fact that he is complaining about it as evidence of Wellington’s concern and compassion for their suffering. Because humans are complex, and perfectly capable of holding and expressing dissonant views, no one said that they had to be internally consistent, much less to any construct we make. They are both valid and could be verified to some extent or another. Although sharing the same source neither are ‘correct’, just differing. That is why @Zack White was so wise in establishing our forum rules. Recognising and respecting diversity opinion are, to me, central to advancing understanding.