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N Napoleonic Wars

Atlas

Trafalgar, Waterloo tourism, Tolstoy's 1812, and school canvases.

Educational history. Casualty figures are documented ranges. This is not operational advice, a ranking of nations, or a how-to for weapons or coups.

At a glance
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Quick answers

Are the scores a ranking of nations or armies?

No. Scores are browsing aids inside an era-bounded atlas — not live league tables of countries.

How many died?

About 3.5-6 million is a working scholarly band, including combatants and civilians, with wide uncertainty for 1812 and for disease.

Was Napoleon a revolutionary or a monarch?

Both: he locked in some revolutionary legal gains, restored hierarchy, and crowned himself. The wars spread both the Code and reaction.

Why did Britain stay at war so long?

Trade, naval security, and a refusal to accept a French hegemony on the Scheldt and in the Channel. Subsidies to allies were Britain's land strategy as much as Wellington's army.

What was the Continental System?

A ban on British goods in French-controlled Europe. It hurt neutrals and allies, encouraged Russia's break, and never starved Britain into peace.

How did 1812 matter?

The Russian campaign destroyed the Grande Armee as a political instrument. Without it, Leipzig and 1814 are hard to imagine at that speed.

Start with this section - Atlas

Austerlitz, Trafalgar, Moscow 1812, Leipzig, Waterloo: five place-names that structure European school maps.

The Peninsula is a long map of sieges (Badajoz, Ciudad Rodrigo) that English novels remember better than English syllabi.

Maps

Empire at Tilsit

1807 high-water of French land power.

Trafalgar approaches

Cadiz to the shoals -- a naval map.

1812 advance/retreat

The Smolensk-Moscow road.

Leipzig approaches

1813 Germany as a coalition map.

Waterloo-Wavre

Two battles, one day, one decision.

Portrayals

War and Peace

The English-language civilian epic of 1812.

Sharpe / Hornblower

British popular serial memory -- Peninsula and sea.

Abel Gance's Napoleon

Silent-film legend-making.

Waterloo (1970)

Soviet-Italian spectacle that still tours on television.

David and Gros

Official paint as wartime media.

HMS Victory tourism

A ship as a national relic.

Rituals

Trafalgar Night

Royal Navy dinners -- a living service ritual.

Waterloo anniversaries

Re-enactors and Belgian commemoration.

Invalides pilgrimage

French state memory at the tomb.

Sayings

"England expects"

"A nation of shopkeepers"

"From the sublime to the ridiculous"

"The nearest-run thing"

Waterloo visitor centres now compete in three languages -- a memory industry.

Russian 1812 churches and Tolstoy remain a parallel atlas Anglophone readers meet as literature first.

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