Napoleon

Warfare

History Hit

History

4.5 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 3 May 2021

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

He is widely remembered as one of the most exceptional military commanders that the world has ever seen, a man whose influence was so pervasive that an entire era of European history is referred to in his name. Napoleon is just as divisive in death as he was in life, and for this first of two episodes with Zack White, we are discussing the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte and his impact on France. Zack specialises in crime and punishment in the British Army during the Napoleonic Wars at the University of Southampton, and is the creator of the online hub TheNapoleonicWars.net.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone, welcome back to the history hit warfare podcast. I'm your host James Rogers, and this is a special episode to mark the 200th anniversary of the death of Napoleon Bonaparte.
0:09.0	He died on May 5, 1821, on the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic in exile and in abject poverty.
0:18.2	But how did he get to this point?
0:19.8	Well to take us through the life of Napoleon, we have the amazing Zach White. He knows everything
0:24.8	there is to know about the Napoleonic era. He runs a podcast on it, he writes books on it, he teaches
0:30.4	on it, he runs a website on it. He is brilliant. And what we've done is to split this into two parts. In the first part,
0:36.9	Zach takes us through the meteoric rise of Napoleon through the echelons of French power.
0:42.8	And then, in part two, we look at the fall of Napoleon,
0:47.0	especially after the Battle of Waterloo and his defeat by Wellington
0:50.9	and then his ultimate death. So here on the bicentenary of the death of Napoleon Bonaparte is
0:59.2	Zach White to tell us first of all about his life. Hi Zach, thanks for coming on the War Fair Podcast. How you doing today? Thanks very much James I'm very well it's
1:24.1	great to be back on history hits it's hard to believe that it's almost a year now
1:27.3	since I was talking to Dan about the 205th anniversary of Waterloo I'm looking
1:31.5	forward to discussing kind of this ultimate Marmite figure that was Napoleon Bonaparte.
1:35.6	Oh wow I like the way you describe him there the ultimate Marmite figure but you are let's be very clear Napoleon mad or at least mad about the Napoleonic era
1:46.8	You've got your own podcast the Napoleonicist you've edited a new book on the age of Napoleon and you've even got your own website
1:56.4	Napoleonic Wars.net. So yeah you are Napoleon mad. What is it that draws you to this divisive figure? Yeah, I mean I call
2:06.9	myself the baby-faced Napoleon nerd, not least because I look like I'm about 12
2:11.1	years old so it's become a running joke with my friends and colleagues.
2:14.0	It's a really odd thing though that you can't escape Napoleon.
2:17.0	Personally I'm not a huge fan of the guy, which is perhaps a slightly dangerous thing to admit at the start of a podcast episode on his life.
2:24.3	Certainly the Napoleon fans are possibly kind of rage quitting as we speak because when you start to
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