DAN SNOW - UNDER THE WEATHER

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Dan Snow – Under the Weather

Snow entitles his March 14th 2015 article for the Daily Telegraph:

‘The French should end their love affair with Napoleon – he was an utterly brutal and callous dictator.’

   Snow writes as if he’s addressing teenagers in a history comic. His grasp of world events is superficial and his knowledge of Napoleon virtually non-existent. His copy reveals a naive exuberance from someone who can’t believe he is writing for a national newspaper, leave alone the fact he is the BBC’s latest ‘historian’.

   He states that: ‘Americans annihilated a race of people as they forged a vast empire…’ No they didn’t, there are tens of thousands of Native Americans still alive and flourishing. What he should have said was - there was mass genocide of the natives by Spaniards and later by other white Europeans. Does he know what the word annihilate means? To help him out - the dictionary definition is ‘destroy completely’.

    He then describes the Vikings ‘whose dragonships penetrated Europes’s great rivers like poison moving through arteries.’ Rather a derogatory comment for someone who presents programmes for the ultra PC BBC. He is trying to be clever with words and as a result he waves his own ignorance like a flag. The Vikings travelled to America; founded York and Dublin; started a colony in Greenland; formed part of the Byzantine Varangian Guard; conquered England and gave Alfred the Great a good run for his money. The Swedish Vikings – the Rus – gave their name to Russia. But none of this is hinted at in Young Snow’s phrase comparing them to ‘poison moving through arteries.’

    He then turns his adolescent history awareness to Napoleon and says with complete impartiality: ‘Two hundred years ago this month, the deposed Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte was rampaging north of Paris, intent on seizing back power.’ Wrong on all counts. Napoleon was not deposed, he had abdicated in 1814, and he already had power in 1815 after his triumphal return to Paris without a shot being fired. Napoleon was immeasurably more popular than the twenty stone Bungy Louis XVIII who had never been voted for by anyone – unlike Napoleon with his plebiscites – and still thought he had a divine right to rule because his porky majesty just happened to be dubbed a Bourbon.

   What Snow really deserves to be taken to task for is not even mentioning that Napoleon wrote personally to all the main rulers in Europe asking for peace after his return to France – the exact opposite of ‘rampaging’. His letter to the Prince Regent was never even given to that obese alcoholic opium addict who spent thousands of pounds on his clothes and palaces while millions of ordinary British people didn’t even have enough to eat. The reason taxes in England were sky high was because the corrupt British Cabinet was hell bent on fomenting war with Napoleon with every chance they could get. Pitt and his cabal of ultra-rich aristocratic accomplices paid for numerous attempts to kill Napoleon. These assassination attempts were nothing less than state-sponsored terrorism. Napoleon believed it beneath his dignity to respond in kind.

   Britain paid for Austria and Russia to attack France in 1805 and for most of the other so-call Coalitions; Prussia declared war on France in 1806; the Russians attacked first in 1807; the Austrians invaded Bavaria, Napoleon’s ally in 1809 without a declaration of war thinking Napoleon too preoccupied in Spain; Russia hoped to attack Napoleon’s ally the Grand Duchy of Warsaw in 1811 but could get no support from the usual suspects. Then, in 1815 the Allies having illegally proscribed Napoleon personally as an outlaw (thereby encouraging yet more assassination attempts), declared war on him as an individual. They would never have dreamt of treating a member of the old Royalty in such a cruel and offhand manner. Their hatred of the French Revolution and their fear of universal human rights spreading to their own backward and repressive countries were so great that they wanted to destroy the one man who freed all Jews in his Empire and gave them equal rights and who allowed people to rise on their own merits unlike the petrified feudal systems that prevailed everywhere else on the Continent.

   Young Snow is wrong in nearly everything he says.

   He thus compounds his ignorance when he states that in 1815 soldiers faced: ‘a fate… condemned by his ambition.’ Was it Napoleon’s ambition that led Canning to order an attack on neutral Copenhagen in 1807? The British Navy bombarded the benighted civilians of Denmark with Congreve Rockets, the first occasion when Weapons of Mass Destruction were ever used on a civilian population. Criminal British politicians and WMD have a long history. The British forces then stole the Danish navy or burnt the remaining vessels they were unable to seize. During the same campaign Wellington had a great victory over clog wearing civilian militia. What a stirring military victory that was for Britannia!

   Was it Napoleon’s ambition that led Nelson to execute Admiral Caraccioli and dozens of unarmed Neapolitan rebels in 1799 who had been promised freedom after they had surrendered? Coming late to the scene Nelson persuaded the Bourbon rulers – at Emma Hamilton’s insistence – to renege on the previous agreement and execute the poor souls who were rotting alive on ships in Naples’ harbour. Ah yes - another British triumph! Nelson actually was a titch unlike Napoleon. Our odious midget admiral stood 5 feet two inches tall as opposed to Napoleon’s 5 feet six. But Emma Hamilton loved him despite the fact he had precious few teeth, one arm and only one eye. She loved him to bits.

    For this massacre Nelson was given £3,000 a year and the Duchy of Bronte by his Bourbon hosts. He was condemned for his actions even by Robert Southey his first biographer and a creature of the Establishment: ‘a faithful historian is called upon to pronounce a severe and unqualified condemnation of Nelson’s conduct.’ (page 195 Life of Nelson). However, Nelson himself gushed to Emma Hamilton: ‘I am now perfectly the great man – not a creature near me.’ In bald truth – Nelson was a murderer.

    Don’t we all just love British fair play? But we certainly don’t get it with Young Snow.

   Was it Napoleon’s ambition that led the United States to declare war on England in 1812 because the Royal Navy claimed the right to board every neutral vessel and seize cargoes that might help the French? No the overweening arrogance of those in power in this country led them to believe they could do whatever they wanted. In fact, believing in might is right, they often could. Britain was the great oppressor in those days – starting at home with its own people, who were imprisoned or transported to Australia, merely for asking for the vote and a few human rights of their own. Some were even massacred by mounted thugs working for the local magistrates, like at Peterloo in 1819. How ironic that one soldier who fought against Napoleon at Waterloo was scythed down by his own militia back in Manchester!

   Yes, everything is Napoleon’s fault!

   Snow ought to read a little more, or indeed anything, about what happened to the Unitarians during the time of those he lauds so much. William Hazlitt has eloquently described the torments and terrors inflicted upon its own population by the self-serving creatures in Parliament at the time of Napoleon. Hazlitt wept when Napoleon died. Snow’s whitewashing of British history provokes tears of laughter from this historian.

   Snow claims that Napoleon: ‘abandoned his army in the depths of a Russian winter.’ Wrong again. As Bourgogne describes in his superb account of the retreat from Russia, Napoleon had heard of the Malet conspiracy back in Paris and his senior officers knew that his place was back in the capital where he could restore order and try and recoup from a disastrous campaign. Bourgogne also mentions British spies at work in Poland. One would expect them to twist the facts at a time of war – there is no excuse for Snow to do the same now.

   Snow says: ‘Napoleon, Caesar, Clive, perhaps even Churchill, are heroes for an age that is past.’ Isn’t it a tad arrogant for a 37-year-old who has never lived through a major war, certainly one with such a poor grasp of history, to tell the rest of us what we should think? To my father’s generation Churchill will always be a hero because of the morale effect of his radio speeches during the War. Caesar boasted of being personally responsible for the death of a million Gauls. Caesar was only a hero to himself. Clive of India is unknown to most British people today. Indeed, the general state of historical knowledge in this country is dire. And Snow went to Balliol – rather proving the point. History as a subject has not been taught well, if at all, in our schools for years.

   Then we come to a real Snowism: ‘Napoleon was a brilliant commander, an able administrator, a man who bent to the arc of history with the heat of his desire.’ Just what exactly is that supposed to mean? Don’t they teach English at Oxford? And what does it say for the linguistic appreciation of the Daily Telegraph when they print such asinine drivel?

   Snow continues with his character assassination, saying that Napoleon was ‘a man who made legions of widows, orphans and invalids as he pursued his version of destiny.’ As if all those Danish civilians were blaming Napoleon in 1807! Napoleon was on Saint Helena being poisoned by Montholon in 1819 when the Manchester militia cut down peaceful, unarmed men, women and children who had come together merely to discuss the future of their country. Hasn’t Snow read anything?

    Napoleon wrote to the Prince Regent asking for peace in early 1805 – months before Trafalgar. The historian Walter Runciman has described how the British Government arrogantly refused even to respond to Napoleon’s attempt to make peace. Snow began his diatribe by claiming that Napoleon was ‘a brutal and callous dictator.’ Runciman states that had that been so, Napoleon would have executed the duplicitous Monarchs whose armies constantly attacked him and which were usually  defeated by him, but instead he forgave them time after time, even marrying Marie Louise the daughter of his longtime enemy Austria. Napoleon repeatedly tried to engage with the old aristocratic families of Europe. He let émigrés return to France and with his own Legion of Honour he tried to install a deserving meritocracy in place of the old traditional aristocracy.

   As to being ‘callous’ – the first thing Napoleon did at the start of the retreat from Russia was to give up his own coach for the wounded. In Coignet’s biography we see him repeatedly describing the Emperor’s efforts to care for the wounded. With Jean  Larrey, Napoleon had the best surgeon in Europe at that time and Larrey made sure the French Army was the first to have a proper ambulance chain. When one of his mounted officers disturbed a wounded Russian soldier after the battle of Borodino, the man cried out, the French officer saying that it was only a Russian. Napoleon reproached him and added: ‘After a victory there are only men.’

    When did Wellington ever give up his coach for a mere soldier? He notoriously called his men ‘scum’. The only useful thing that arrogant Irishman left for posterity was a name for his boots. To him, the common soldier was something to be scraped from the bottom of them. Napier, another Irishman, writer of the monumental History of the Peninsula War and on Wellington’s side during England’s wars against Napoleon lamented that ordinary British soldiers were never even ‘seen’ by their leaders. Their heroic acts were always anonymous and went unrewarded. The ordinary British footslogger was never given a medal and if he was a Catholic he could never become a general. There was no religious discrimination in Napoleon’s Army. Napier compared this blatantly hierarchical system to that of the French under Napoleon and very much preferred the latter.

   To Goethe Napoleon was the greatest man of the C19th. To the German Jew Heine he was the greatest man who ever lived. Nietzsche admired him. Napoleon has given his name to over a dozen settlements in the United States. Around 1,000 books a year are written about him – including my own The Real Napoleon – The Untold Story: over 250,000 now in total. He died in 1821, less than two hundred years ago. Two of my grandparents were born in 1881 and 1890. That is how recent he was alive. And most educated people today have heard of Napoleon – even though his name is often traduced and scorned and manifest lies and misrepresentations are constantly made about him.

      I shall finish with another Snowism - a whole paragraph this time. Our young ‘historian’ in full flow says: ‘Many people, understandably, are sympathetic to anyone, even Napoleon, who threatened the continued domination of Europe by a caste of befeathered Emperors and Prince Bishops. However, as 1918 was to show, the violent removal of this anachronistic vestige did not lead to fully fledged Lockean liberal states springing like Athena from the forehead of Zeus.’

   Don’t you just wish you could write like that? Alas our cub historian tries too hard to impress and instead just spouts a load of drivel. And who is Dan Snow to say that what happened in 1918 has absolutely anything to do with Napoleon? It beggars believe that such a pathetically one-sided piece can actually get published in one of our national papers. And what’s more there’s more Snow on the BBC than on the winter steppes of Russia - and paid for by compulsory licence fee!

   As Napoleon would say: ‘Bah!’

© 2015 John Tarttelin
A Souladream Production

B.Ed., M.A. (History), Fellow of the International Napoleonic Association (Legion of Merit) Author of The Real Napoleon – The Untold Story (Now writing England’s Wars Against Napoleon) and 45 years reading about Napoleon.

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ANTI-NAPOLEON BIAS

Covering Letter sent with earlier Critique

johntarttelin@msn.com

Souladream Productions

December 11th 2015

Dear Sir,

                   The enclosed critique is self-explanatory. I have been a member of the National Geographic Society for about 25 of the last 30 years. In recent years it has been impossible to ignore your extreme and unwarranted bias. You have persisted in portraying Napoleon in a malignant light and in a highly cavalier and arbitrary manner.  Your writers obviously know nothing about the French Emperor or his times and I resent the fact that my financial contributions are blatantly misused for their repeatedly negative and hostile character assassinations. 

                     

                    In the interest of natural justice and fair play I demand that you refrain from this odious practice immediately.

                    Save the tiger, save the whale, save the planet indeed, but do not use funds donated for charitable purposes to malign an historical figure who has no chance of a right of reply. Malicious and mendacious myths should be left to amateurs and social media and not propagated by the Society that I joined to help encourage archeological excavations, conservation and other worthwhile measures designed to aid our planet. 

C. 2015

 A Souladream Production

CRITIQUE OF GREAT EMPIRES by NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

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GREAT EMPIRES

An Illustrated Atlas

National Geographic

(2013 Edition)

Dear Sir,

                I have just read your Atlas that purports to be an accurate account of World history. There is throughout this book a blatantly biased and dismissive account of Napoleon and an utter disregard for his empire.

                 Modern humans have existed for about 200,000 years and today there are about 7.3 billion people. Some 7.5 billion individuals have lived on this planet. In all that time and amidst all those numbers only three historical personages have been known widely by their first names. They are, in chronological order: Alexander, Jesus and Napoleon.

                  After the Bible and its references to Christ, there have been more books written about Napoleon than any other person who has ever lived. He died less than 200 years ago yet there are now at least 250,000 books on Napoleon and 1,000 more are added every year. In your own country more than a dozen settlements have been named ‘Napoleon’ in many different states.

                  The renowned German writer Goethe called Napoleon: ‘The greatest man of the C19th.’ He was the hero of the German Jew Heine. And he was William Hazlitt’s hero in contemporary England. Yet your Atlas virtually ignores him. Worse than that, your writers choose to slander his name and vilify him at every opportunity. This is what your hacks write:

                 ‘In truth, he was one of the many meteoric conquerors with supersize egos throughout history who dazzled the world briefly before they came crashing down, achieving little of lasting significance compared with those who built enduring empires.’ (Page 271)

                 This statement is absolute tosh, and a consummate travesty of history. Your writers are certainly not historians and if that is the best they can do they should stick to fiction.

                  Napoleon gave Jews equal rights in his empire. If he had done nothing else, his memory would have been worth preserving for this act alone. He was also the first person to suggest that Jews be given a homeland in the Holy Land. No wonder he was Heine’s hero. And no wonder that 150 years after his death the Jewish historian Ben Weider set up the International Napoleonic Society to honour his memory and to counteract all the lies and misinformation spread about him over the past two centuries.

                  Ben Weider studied Napoleon and his times for over fifty years. I have been studying Napoleon and his times for over forty years. I simply do not recognize the cartoon character referred to by your jejune and unqualified writers. What academic qualifications have they? And what peer reviewed historical papers or books have they produced? I have read over two hundred books about Napoleon and I have never in over forty years heard of your lamentably informed staff.

                  Without Napoleon the discipline of Egyptology would not exist. He took 177 savants to Egypt and they produced the brilliant Description De L’Egypte - a work of the utmost importance and a cultural icon. Any nation would be proud of such a monumental work of impeccable scholarship. From the start, Napoleon wanted his Egyptian enterprise to be more than a military conquest. What other general in human history has ever undertaken such a venture that redounded to the intellectual benefit and glory of all Mankind? Yet what do your hacks write:

                    ‘… imperial glory seekers such as Napoleon, who invaded Egypt and marveled at monuments that would continue to dazzle onlookers long after the sun set on his ambitions.’ (Page 55)

                    Napoleon’s Description De L’Egypte will last as long as there are people who actually know a little bit about history – it will last forever.

                    Because of Napoleon’s own insatiable intellect, Egypt became the magnet for countless archeologists, writers, painters and historians. And without Napoleon there would have been no Howard Carter, no Tutankhamun’s tomb and no Rosetta stone. Discovered by a French officer during Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign this tri-lingual stone led to the unraveling of the mystery of Hieroglyphics by another great Frenchman - Champollion. There is more extant carving in Egypt than all the other countries in the world put together. Recent satellite imagery has indicated that 97% of Egyptian ruins remain to be unearthed. Without Napoleon’s own intellectual passion that launched the study of Egyptology none of this would even be known.

                    The only other major reference to Napoleon in the Atlas is also on Page 271: ‘Despite Napoleon’s smashing victories on the Continent, he remained hemmed in by the British navy, which shattered his fleet at Trafalgar in 1805. When Russia joined the British in opposing him, he launched a disastrous invasion of that country in 1812 and was forced into exile. Attempting to return to power, he was crushed at Waterloo in 1815 by Britain’s Duke of Wellington.’

                      There is simply no context to this threadbare account of Napoleon’s time in power. He brought peace to France after the Revolution, signed the Concordat with the Pope, instituted the Bank of France, built roads, canals and bridges and beautified cities and had not Britain paid millions to persuade other countries to attack him who knows what else he might have achieved? It was due to Prime Minister Pitt’s malign influence that war in Europe became endemic. Millions from the Bank of England poured into the impoverished coffers of Austria and Russia. They were bankrupt and without this financial aid would never have been able to attack Napoleon in 1805.

                     The British reneged on the treaty of Amiens in 1803, Napoleon was attacked in 1805, in 1806 by Prussia, in 1807 by Russia, in 1809 by Austria and in 1815 the so-called Allies declared war on him despite his plea for peace sent to all the European monarchs who had opposed him in the past. In 1811 Tsar Alexander hoped to attack France but found that nobody else was interested. In 1812, driven to distraction by the Tsar’s treachery (he who was implicit in the murder of his own father and who slept with his own sister), Napoleon launched his ill-fated 1812 campaign. He hoped for one decisive battle - like Austerlitz in 1805 - that would sway the duplicitous Russians back into the fold, but the coldest Russian winter for 100 years doomed the enterprise from the very beginning.

                      The hacks mention Waterloo without any reference whatsoever to the Prussian involvement in the battle. More Germans fought that day than either French or British. Of Wellington’s 69,000 troops less than 24,000 were British. It was a great German victory. Tim Clayton’s excellent recent book Waterloo shows how Wellington’s decimated troops were pushed way back on the ridge of Mont Saint-Jean and without the arrival of Blucher and the Prussians there would have been no Allied victory.

                    As all proper historians know, Napoleon was attacked because he was anathema to the Divine Right monarchs of his day who dreaded that France might export the Revolution to their countries. Napier, the great British historian of the Peninsula Wars says so at the start of his monumental work. And the English historian Walter Runciman stated that if Great Britain had left Napoleon alone and not rejected his calls in early 1805 for peace with such overweening arrogance, then the two countries could have co-existed in peace. But the National Geographic hacks obviously know nothing about all this.

                     In the timeline at the back of the Atlas there is only one tiny reference to Napoleon – again derogatory: ‘1812 Tsar Alexander I withstands invasion by Napoleon Bonaparte.’ (Page 355)

                     The Atlas does not mention Catherine the Great’s hatred of the Revolution, nor Russia’s attacks on France by Suvarov, Tsar Paul and Alexander himself in 1805, 1807, the putative attack in 1811, or the 1815 Coalition against Napoleon.

                     There are many more omissions in this book supposedly about great empires. There is no mention of the Anglo-Saxon empire of Athelstan - the grandson of Alfred the Great - who after the Battle of Brunanburgh in AD 937 affectively created the English nation. He was dubbed the Emperor of the whole world of Britain at the time because of his great victory over the Northern Coalition. England has been a nation for nearly 1100 years but the National Geographic doesn’t seem to realize the fact. There is also no mention of the great Viking Dark Age empires. Without the Vikings who had a settlement in Greenland as late as AD1450, Columbus would have known little of what lay across the Atlantic.

                     According to the hacks, Napoleon was an inconsequential nobody – even though 1,000 books are written about him every year! Yet the Atlas has pages on the so-called Comanche empire and the like and it enthuses about the Dominians of the Mali and Songhai and other household names like the Asante Osei Tutu Opemsoo – what a consummate dude he was. I can’t see a brandy being named after him for quite a while…

                     Throughout, the Atlas reeks of Political Correctness – which is anathema and poison to a genuine historian. It is interesting that Emperor Bokassa of the Central African Republic copied Napoleon’s coronation ceremony exactly when he crowned himself emperor in 1977. This homage to Napoleon nearly bankrupted his country. He did not bend over backwards to emulate our friend Osei Tutu Opemsoo. Didn’t Bokassa know that Napoleon was a ‘nobody’? Perhaps the National Geographic forgot to tell him.

                      The job of an historian is to tell it all as it really was, without fear or favour. Even though I am English, I believe the rule of Napoleon was far better than that of the corrupt and unrepresentative oligarchy that controlled Britain in the late C18th and early C19th. The English politician Canning ordered the British Navy to bombard neutral Copenhagen in 1807 killing 2,000 unarmed civilians – and they also stole or destroyed the whole of the Danish fleet. Nelson had dozens of Neapolitan rebels executed on his own orders in 1799 – murdered in effect. And he was rewarded with the Dukedom of Bronte by the Bourbons for his pains. The British invented concentration camps during the Boer War and hundreds of Boer women and children starved to death in them.

                    There is enough shame and horror to go around. The Germans inaugurated The Final Solution and gassed millions of Jews during the Second World War. That ‘nobody’ Napoleon gave them equal rights. The American empire gave us the My Lai massacre, Agent Orange, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo – and the deaths of 100,000 Iraqis in the search for non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction.

                   Finally, a look today on Google led to 73,100,000 references to Napoleon. The National Geographic has blown both its feet off with its misleading and untruthful caricature of Napoleon. Unfortunately it has a ‘history’ of such things. I add a review I did of its take on Waterloo, a programme entitled Napoleon’s Last Battle shown on British television on March 11th 2009. It was almost physically painful to watch such an embarrassing excuse for proper history.

          John Tarttelin Teaching Certificate (history and geography), B.Ed., (history), M.A. (history), FINS (Legion of Merit) author of the Real Napoleon - The Untold Story and 45 years of reading about Napoleon.

NAPOLEON'S LAST BATTLE
ON NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TELEVISION
MARCH 11TH, 2009, UK

I have just watched an appalling programme about Napoleon and the Battle of Waterloo on the National Geographic Channel. It was replete with all the usual lies and misrepresentations that are made about him. I was so moved by its one-sidedness that I immediately sent the email below in protest. As Ben used to say, the same untruths are constantly repeated - but one expects better from the National Geographic!

Members of the INS might be surprised at just how high some of the same old nonsense comes from.

Dear Sir,

               I have just watched your programme about Napoleon. It was a bigger disaster than Waterloo! This one-sided travesty of a programme is unworthy of the high standards that the National Geographic normally stands for. It was a truly awful production, full of mistakes and factual errors. And there were massive and glaring omissions.

               The final comment: ‘A life written in blood’ is absolutely pathetic and woefully biased against Napoleon. Your programme is an exercise in character assassination - whatever it is - it certainly isn't objective history as I understand the term. Your revolting portrayal of the French Emperor cries out for a reply. It is easy to slander the dead who cannot fight back.

               Your partisan film is worthy of the worst of English High Tory arrogance and nationalism. I expect better from a nation that owed its very existence to the French navy at Yorktown. Without the money given to the Americans by French officers, and the support of De Grasse's navy, Washington, would never have taken Yorktown. (Source: Jay Luvaas P. 152 Clues to America's Past (1976) - National Geographic books).

               Not once in your 'programme' did you mention the fact that Napoleon was nearly always attacked first by the Allies. It was the British that broke the Treaty of Amiens by refusing to evacuate Malta, and it was the British Cabinet and Pitt who paid for the terrorist attacks upon Napoleon perpetrated by the Comte d'Artois the evil younger brother of Louis XVIII, and his infamous group the Chevalier de la Foi. Many innocent French civilians were murdered in these assassination attempts - but absolutely no mention in your dreadful programme.

              You did not mention the fact that the British paid millions of pounds in subsidies to the Austrians and Russians to encourage them to ATTACK  Napoleon in 1805. Your coverage of the Battle of Austerlitz was very vague - no mention of the Pratzen Heights. It was because the Russians and Austrians took control of these that they were convinced that Napoleon was planning a retreat. That led to their overconfidence and their subsequent drubbing.

             After Napoleon's victory, Emperor Francis of Austria said: ‘The English are traders in human flesh’. By then he realized he had been duped into fighting by the British. You say nothing about this.

             There was no mention of the fact that Prussia ATTACKED Napoleon in 1806 - no mention of Prussia at all until 1815.

             You skate over the plebiscite that gave Napoleon the position of Consul for life by 3,000,0000 votes to 8,000. Why did you not mention that no other country in Europe had any elections whatsoever? The most glaring error in your film was that there was not one mention of divine right believed in by all the monarchs of the period. They believed their right to rule came from God himself! THAT is why they were fighting Napoleon and constantly attacking him. The last thing they wanted was for the French to have a Republic (like the one those French officers helped bequeath to you Americans).

            You did not mention that Austria ATTACKED Napoleon again in 1809, thinking that he was preoccupied in Spain. You do not say a single word about Spain - another glaring omission.

            Talleyrand virtually handed Paris over to the Allies in 1814. Napoleon lost power in 1814 because he was betrayed. He was not defeated militarily, and he was not technically a 'prisoner'. He voluntarily gave up the throne after several of his Marshals betrayed him as well, notably Marmont, the Duke of Raguser. That very word in French today means traitor.

            When Napoleon landed in France, you rightly say it was a 'gamble' but you made little mention of the sheer elation felt by millions of French people at his return. Louis XVIII was loathed by the French - and unlike Napoleon, nobody had ever voted for him.

             You say the Allies flocked to Belgium - palpable nonsense. Only the Anglo-Dutch-German and Prussian armies where anywhere near the crucial fighting zone. The reason Napoleon attacked was precisely because he hoped to defeat these two armies in turn before any other of the divine right monarchist armies could enter the fray.

            Why did you not mention the fact that the first thing Napoleon did on his arrival in Paris in 1815 was to write to the Prince Regent in England and the other Allies requesting peace? Were you trying to blacken his name on purpose? He wanted peace - he needed peace. France was a basket case under the Bourbons - they who learnt nothing and forgot nothing.

            You then make a terrible conflation of two battles. You go on about Ney and the cavalry and then talk of Marshal Grouchy going after the Prussians. Hopeless! In fact, despite having a hangover on the day of Quatre Bras, and being slow to get his men to the vital crossroads, Ney held his own. Wellington was lucky that one of his commanders disobeyed a direct order and reinforced Quatre Bras with Allied troops. Wellington hadn't a clue what was going on until the fighting for the crossroads was well underway, and then he had the sense to reinforce those men established there in contravention to his earlier direct order.

            You stated several times that Napoleon hoped to re-establish his Empire when he returned to France in 1815. The fact is he was fighting for his very survival having been proscribed by the Allies at the Congress of Vienna. He had no other option than to fight because they were going to ATTACK him. This international proscription was illegal even in 1815 and Wellington later had the grace to say it should not have been done.

            You state that Napoleon was the 'cause' of six million dead in battle. That is demonstrably a lie. As I have detailed above. MOST of the time, he was the one attacked!

            Your utterly biased, prejudiced and one-sided character assassination is unworthy of the National Geographic. It plays like a rather evil Walt Disney production - bearing little reality to what actually happened during those momentous years. You ought to be ashamed of this 'programme' of defamation. It is an utterly appalling waste of the money given in magazine subscriptions by people such as I. Shame on you!

P.S. I have read nearly two hundred books about Napoleon and yet I have never come across any of your 'contributors' in the thirty-five years that I have been researching the period.

Yours sincerely,

John Tarttelin (M.A History) Sheffield, England. FINS.

© 2015

A Souladream Production