A Matter of Character
We would recommend it to folk who have a vague or general idea that Napoleon went to war against Russia and that bad things happened. It is a sequence of events that has affected the West until present times. [The "dream" for a united Europe--a new model state--comes directly out of Napoleon's revolutionary secularist fervour.]
Napoleon personally survived (just) the horrors of Russia, but from that point on his empire was to all intents and purposes broken. The humanist revolutionary spirit would occasionally break out again, but thereafter it was more out of a longing for past glories. Nevertheless, secularism in France has effectively controlled that country ever since--and now it faces slow demographic decline as a result. Nationalism, of the Napoleonic variety, is a spent force in France: it could never survive the Revolution's tumbrels, nor the eventual defeat of Napoleon. France, now the sick man of Europe, faces the ineluctable, inevitable take over from the Islamic Borg.
The defeat of Napoleon, then, at the hands of Tsarist Russia--or more accurately, at the hands of the Russian winter--marked the beginning of the end. Napoleon was broken; the Revolution was effectively a spent force.
