Is POTUS correct in saying that Napoleon's "extracurricular activities" caused the Grande Armée to be decimated?

by RussellJimmys

Quoting Donald J. Trump

Well, Napoleon finished a little bit bad. But I asked that. So I asked the president (Macron,) so what about Napoleon? He said "No, no, no. What he did was incredible. He designed Paris." [garbled] The street grid, the way they work, you know, the spokes. he did so many things even beyond. And his one problem is he didn't go to Russia that night because he had extracurricular activities and they froze to death. How many times has Russia been saved by the weather? [garbled]

I'm fairly sure that Napoleon's sex life didn't have anything to do with the French defeat in Russia, but I thought a historian would be a better person to ask.

Did Napoleon's personal conduct have anything to do with his defeat in Russia?

kieslowskifan

That would be a big no. The latter four years of Napoleon's reign were actually quite stable in terms of his personal and romantic life. His divorce from Josephine was amicable marriage to Marie Louise had resulted a legitimate male heir. Napoleon's affair with Marie Walewska had ended and she had born him a son in 1810. But Napoleon's affections for Walewska had cooled as did his enthusiasm for a resurrected Polish kingdom. The latter fact was something that caused a degree of griping within the military and civilian elites in the Duchy of Warsaw.

Napoleon's love life did not make him invade Russia. That was the due to the complicated politics of the Continental System, the ascent of a Russian war party, the somewhat inevitable failure of the Tilsit system, and Napoleon's own tendency to double-down on policies when they had failed. Nor did Napoleon's crotch make him invade Russia with an army that was too large to handle effectively. And as tempting a historical fanfic it might be, the Emperor's nether region was not responsible for the dysfunctional relationship between Napoleon's corps commanders in the invasion which meant that his initial plan to pin the Russian army at the frontier went belly-up and the Grande Armee had chase the Russian Army into the Russian interior throughout the hot summer of 1812. And, here again, Trump was wrong in that the Grande Armee was a defeated force by the time of its retreat; General Winter added to the misery, but even had the weather been much milder, the Grande Armee was a shattered force after a long chase and a bloody, somewhat indecisive battle at Borodino.

This kind of thinking that pegs grand historical outcomes to individual faults and peccadilloes is a common one, but one historians tend to fight against. It was quite common in older historiography (often from the Victorian era) to mix up moral judgements with historical ones and pin mistakes on some sort of sin such as the baleful influence of a mistress. Whether or not Napoleon was a model of marital fidelity or a philandering rake itself would not have made a difference in 1812. There were much bigger factors at play such as Jerome's inability to get along with other corps commanders and the simple fact that armies were getting much too large by the end of the Napoleonic wars for Napoleon's type of centralized command.

I would also like to note not only is there a lot wrong with Trump's statements from French and Russian history, his statements are almost incomprehensible. They sometimes read like the rushed answers of a student who did not study and is trying to fill the page with something, mixing up BS and jumbling together different parts of history. Those exam answers are never fun to grade.