I would not say they are lacking in popular attention. The Napoleonic Wars receive far more attention than other periods and events in the eighteenth and nineteenth century such as the Seven Years War or the Franco-Prussian War. There are numerous Napoleonic reenactor groups and Napoleonic miniature wargames and boardgames like Bonaparte at Marengo have a visible consumer base, especially in Europe. The great man himself is arguably the most-written about individual after Hitler. There is also much greater variety among Napoleon biographies between various pro- and critical arguments than those of the German dictator, which aside from Neonazi trash, are universally condemnatory.

Nonetheless, there is a notable decline in the contemporary relevance of the Napoleonic Wars to modern Europe. European media treated the recent round of bicentennials of Napoleonic battles as media curiosities, such as 2006 reenactment of Napoleon's entry into Berlin, and commentators on Waterloo's bicentennial struggled to frame the event's relevance. This was not true of the earlier centennial celebrations. The tsarist state invested a good deal of time and effort to commemorate the Battle of Bordino in 1812, and not to be outdone, Kaiser Wilhelm II commemorated the Völkerschlachtdenkmal in a very pompous ceremony in 1913. Monuments to the Napoleonic Wars were major sites erected by the state throughout the nineteenth century, such as Kelheim's Befreiungshalle, Wellington's massive Aldershot equestrian statue, Waterloo's Lion's Mound, or Napoleon's tomb. These and other nineteenth-century monuments were not empty genuflections to the past, but often laden with contemporaneous political meaning. The return of Napoleon's body from St. Helena to Les Invalides was an attempt by the July Monarchy to restore its flagging credibility through an appeal to French nationalism and Napoleonic gloire.

This underscores the fundamental difference between the popular reception of the Napoleonic Wars in the nineteenth century and that of 2017. While Napoleon was certainly quite relevant to the political culture and memory of nineteenth century states, WWI and WWII fulfill this role for the twentieth century. The World Wars destroyed and created new institutions and irrevocably altered the fabric of world society. Napoleon may have been a midwife to various nationalist movements, but the World Wars played a much bigger role in defining national identity for its participants. Many Americans' self-image as "a global force for good" is validated by its participation in WW II, while both the Russian and the UK politicians tap the nostalgia of the war imagery for their own platforms, sometimes with little care to accuracy such as when the anti-immigrant Britain First's Facebook post used a Spitfire flown by a Polish squadron to talk about how Britain was under siege by immigrants. The common Polish motif of Poland as the Jesus of Europe (he suffered, died, and was resurrected) uses WWII as the capstone for national memory, and the Napoleonic interlude of the Duchy of Warsaw often features as yet another attempt by the great powers to toy with Poland.

Given the weight of this recent history, it is not surprising that the Napoleonic Wars get short shrift in secondary education. They helped set the stage for the nineteenth century, but they do not really form the basis for the existing geopolitical order in the way the World Wars did.