AS A RULE, THE MARKET for historical reputations is volatile, subject to prevailing fads and changing perspectives. Napoleon Bonaparte’s stock, by contrast, remained at a premium for a long time, but it has been falling steadily for a while now, so much so that it is now beginning to look overpriced.
The idea of the emperor as a military genius who refashioned the “art of war” in his own image, created and carefully curated by Napoleon himself, then perpetuated by heavyweight strategic writers such as Jomini and Clausewitz in the early nineteenth century and further burnished by generations of historians, has fallen out of fashion of late.
Recent scholars have tended to will see to that.
