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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
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
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