[foobarian]

It always puzzled me not just with Napoleon but a couple other recent European expansionist dictators, why they kept overextending their reach. Why did they not just stop at a reasonable point and reinforce the conquest, instead of losing it all.

Actually maybe Putin is one example where this may be in fact happening.

[satvikpendem]

There are lots of reasons for this which the YouTuber Caspian Report covers well [0][1]. In short, it's to strengthen their warm water port access; Ukraine being relatively flat so making sure they control the lands up to the natural border of the Carpathian mountains lest NATO invades; et cetera.

[0] https://youtu.be/MkrLUFAcjH0?si=NHIYuq1xm4e-D0kT

[1] https://youtu.be/nR7XAcArAa0?si=lIyM2vWVF50LKvnu

[sufficer]

If nato invades nukes are fired. I don't get all this other useless conjecture from these people.

[ekianjo]

> why they kept overextending their reach.

You dont seem to realize France was in an existential threat the whole time since the Revolution in 1789 up to when Napoleon was deposed.

There was never a time that they could have called it a day if they did not want it to turn back into a monarchy

[foobarian]

But again what was the march on Russia for? Why not save those troops reinforcing the homeland instead of gallivanting who knows where in the middle of winter?

[BuyMyBitcoins]

The Russians were pulling out of the Continental System (embargoing the UK). If Napoleon let Tsar Alexander do this without consequences, it would break apart the order Napoleon had sought to create in continental Europe. Most nations in Europe at the time hated this system because it hurt their economies, and made them effectively subservient to France. You can imagine how one nation breaking away from this system unpunished could trigger a cascade of rebellions.

Napoleon actually successfully invaded Russia, and he took the seasons into account. What he didn’t count on was the Russians deliberately going scorched earth on their own territory and even setting fire to their own capital.

For several days Napoleon sought to parlay with Tsar Alexander after capturing Moscow, hoping to reach a settlement. The Russians wisely kept him and his army waiting until they were forced to begin retreating due to a lack of supplies.

[jltsiren]

> Napoleon actually successfully invaded Russia, and he took the seasons into account. What he didn’t count on was the Russians deliberately going scorched earth on their own territory and even setting fire to their own capital.

In other words, your explanation is that Napoleon failed because he assumed that his enemies were idiots.

Usually, when a dictator or wannabe-dictator overextends their forces and fails, it's because they didn't know what they were doing. But Napoleon was an experienced military commander. He understood the importance of logistics, and he should have assumed that his enemies understood it as well. He knew Russians had resorted to scorched earth defense before, and his forces had already faced it in Portugal earlier.

Also, Napoleon didn't reach the capital. At that point, Moscow was just a major city with symbolic importance. The capital had been moved to St. Petersburg about a century earlier.

[ekianjo]

> he assumed that his enemies were idiots.

Where do you get that notion? Hindsight much?

Not every enemy burns their own capital out of spite because they can't fight back. Actually, this almost never happens, so if you were following the typical scenario based on prior history, this would be very unlikely to happen.

[jltsiren]

That was my interpretation of the explanation in the comment I replied to.

Scorched earth is what Russia does. Peter the Great had used it to repel the Swedish invasion during the Great Northern War. Napoleon himself had studied that invasion and tried to learn from it. Instead, he repeated the failure of Charles XII on a larger scale.

Napoleon himself had faced scorched earth in Portugal during the Peninsular War a couple of years earlier. It was effective.

In other words, Napoleon knew that Russia had a habit of using scorched earth, and he knew that it was effective against his forces. The reasonable assumption was that Russia would use it again.

Also, Moscow was not the capital, and Napoleon had already lost the majority of his army before reaching it.

[throehtjr]

Read about Avar, Mongol, Tatar, Turkish... invasions. This is very common tactic, going all the way back to Alexander the Great.

They were not burning capital "out of spite". Not everyone is like French who surrender Paris to protect art.

[ekianjo]

Napoleon wanted to do a naval blockade against England. It was possible to do it through the countries he now controlled, but Russia made it impractical to implement such a blockade since they were too big to be influenced in other ways.

Russia was not sitting still, While Napoleon was busy fighting in Spain, Russia with the Tsar Alexander was attacking Sweden and Turkey - they were just as expansionist as ever. There were rumors that Russia was going to march on Warsaw next, too. Russia was also preparing for a larger army to go further into Europe. Both countries were preparing for a clash, and it does not really matter who stroke first.

The same thing happened between Hitler and Stalin in 1941: they distrusted each other's and both eventually had plans to turn against each other.

[Exoristos]

> It always puzzled me ...

They're criminal minds of a certain type, and criminal minds often harbor a secret compulsion to be stopped or caught.

> Actually maybe Putin ...

Maybe this is why democracies have been somewhat long-lasting, because no one mind bears the full madness of crimes of the magnitude e.g. the U.S. or Britain commit fairly continuously.

[philwelch]

Are democracies long lasting? The longest lasting French Republic lasted from 1870 to 1940, 70 years. The current one started in 1958 so it will be the longest lasting by 2028. In contrast, the pre-revolution Kingdom of France lasted from 987 to 1792.

[raccoonDivider]

The current French fifth republic started when De Gaulle had a new constitution written, during the fourth republic. A democracy changing its rules by referendum while staying a democracy shouldn't really count as a new regime.

Edit: arguably, getting invaded and going back to a republic after a few years shouldn't count as a regime change either. The German occupation was temporary and the country reverted back to a republic immediately after. That's more of an argument for the resilience of democracies than against it.

[philwelch]

The Fourth Republic was overthrown by a military coup. De Gaulle did manage to restore democracy with his new constitution, largely because the military respected him personally more than they respected the institutions of the Fourth Republic. Military coups are not a sign of a resilient democracy and it’s a very rare thing for a military to reliably subordinate itself to a constitutional government.

The Third Republic was also more responsible for its own end than you give it credit for. A minority of the government wanted to keep fighting, from Algeria if necessary, rather than surrender, but the majority were defeatists and fascist sympathizers. The armistice and collaboration was a deliberate choice that came from within the system, as was the reform of the Third Republic into the autocratic Vichy state. In fact, Germany didn’t even completely occupy France until after Operation Torch, when Darlan, the de facto leader of the Vichy government (Petain at this point being more of a figurehead), switched sides and openly cooperated with the Allies, ordering an end to French resistance in North Africa.

[raccoonDivider]

> The Fourth Republic was overthrown by a military coup. De Gaulle did manage to restore democracy with his new constitution, largely because the military respected him personally more than they respected the institutions of the Fourth Republic. Military coups are not a sign of a resilient democracy and it’s a very rare thing for a military to reliably subordinate itself to a constitutional government.

That's fair, but wouldn't you say that the coup was made possible by the fourth constitution's bad design and not really attributable to the country's being a democracy? I don't know much about how that constitution was written, but just coming out of a war and an occupation with a collaborationist government can't have made the process easy.

> The Third Republic was also more responsible for its own end than you give it credit for. A minority of the government wanted to keep fighting, from Algeria if necessary, rather than surrender, but the majority were defeatists and fascist sympathizers. The armistice and collaboration was a deliberate choice that came from within the system, as was the reform of the Third Republic into the autocratic Vichy state. In fact, Germany didn’t even completely occupy France until after Operation Torch, when Darlan, the de facto leader of the Vichy government (Petain at this point being more of a figurehead), switched sides and openly cooperated with the Allies, ordering an end to French resistance in North Africa.

The question is, was loss in mainland France avoidable or not? Again, not much of a history buff, but France was defeated extremely quickly, so the choice the government had wasn't between "fight to keep the current republic" and "collaborate", but more between "lose the mainland and go resist from abroad" and "abandon control of the mainland to the Nazis and collaborate". That doesn't make the Vichy government any more moral but it does mean that the republic's end would have been forced from the outside in any case.

[philwelch]

> That's fair, but wouldn't you say that the coup was made possible by the fourth constitution's bad design and not really attributable to the country's being a democracy?

There’s no way to design a constitution on paper to avoid the risk of a military coup, especially not if you want to keep an effective military at the same time. Civilian control of the military is an institution that needs to established with generations of indoctrination. The United States has done an unusually effective job of this, which would come as a happy surprise to our founders, who feared the inherent risks of a standing army.

1958 is also a little late to try and cast blame on the circumstances of the Second World War. The coup had more to do with the fact that the democratically elected government of France was willing to allow Algerian independence and the military was not. Algeria was still lost in the end, but the military was more willing to accede to the personal authority of De Gaulle rather than the institutional authority of the elected government.

> The question is, was loss in mainland France avoidable or not?

Yes. France had more and better tanks than the Germans at the start of the war and a large enough army that, if properly used, they could have effectively defended their country. Even the surprise of Germany’s incursion through the Ardennes could have been countered if not for blunders on the part of the French.

> France was defeated extremely quickly, so the choice the government had wasn't between "fight to keep the current republic" and "collaborate", but more between "lose the mainland and go resist from abroad" and "abandon control of the mainland to the Nazis and collaborate"

Algeria wasn’t an overseas colony of France; it was just as much a part of France as Lyon or Bordeaux. And as I pointed out earlier, France didn’t even lose control of all of the “mainland” until Germany reacted to Darlan’s sudden shift in loyalty in 1943.

Most countries that were conquered by Germany maintained governments in exile rather than willingly collaborate. France’s government was an exception to this rule, though Britain did what it could to establish the fiction that De Gaulle represented a “government in exile”, and since Germany eventually lost the war, that fiction became a more palatable narrative for France’s wounded national pride. That’s not what actually happened though.

If the Republican government actually stood firm against Germany and was forced out of Europe and into Algeria until it could, with the help of its allies, recover its territory, I might agree with your argument that it’s not fair to consider 1940 the end of French democracy. The problem is that the military defeat in 1940 and the transformation of the Third Republic into an autocracy were largely products of French internal politics. The French cabinet and military did not value or respect either their democracy or their alliance with Britain, with many of them of the attitude that they should have sided with the Germans all along. At least, until the Germans started losing. Even then, relations with Britain were strained to the point that the United States had to manage the alliance from Torch onward.

[jjtheblunt]

Super interesting point!