It’s easy to say nice things about Napoleon now that he’s safely six feet under. He trashed a lot of Europe in ways that never healed. People moved on, as they always do, and now it is possible to say that certain things got better because of what Napoleon did. But that doesn’t mean it was all good at the time. A lot of people who followed Napoleon would have been looking around going, “Wait, why are there all these dead bodies everywhere? Are we the baddies?” And they would have been right to ask.

I don’t know if that was just a case of power corrupting, though, I think Napoleon was one of those people who just wakes up every morning and says “today, I’m going to conquer [insert random town],” and somehow manages to do it. And, sure, maybe he had a net positive effect in the long run, but at the time, anyone following him was wading through buckets of blood.