FRANCE: The cult of Napoleon

I said: Napoleon was defeated at sea by Nelson and on land by Wellington. Living in France, Christopher Jones has caught the Napoleonic bug. 

He writes: Wrong! Napoleon defeated Napoleon. And in the sweepstakes of history, Napoleon always beats Wellington. The Iron Duke never confronted Napoleon before 1815, and judging by his catastrophic tenure as British PM,  it is a wonder that anybody today wants to remember him. While it is true that Nelson defeated the combined Franco Spanish fleet at Trafalgar, and got killed in the process, it did not stop Napoleon from gobbling up the rest of Europe. (Note: there is an interesting running discussion in Spain about this naval battle:  many Spaniards think that if the French had followed the Spanish lead, they would have won.  Spain still believes in its superior seamanship) Napoleon's real defeat occurred after 1813, when he was offered peace in exchange for his abandoning his idea of the French empire, and simply remaining as Emperor of France.  He refused.  He was eventually defeated and removed from power.  Curiously, in the various discussions of French "ingratitude" for refusing to send troops to Iraq, most forget to mention the name of a country that deserves all our "gratitude" for its central role in defeating the Napoleonic empire: Prussia.

RH:  Apparently the cult of Napoleon leads to belittling Nelson and Wellington, the Iron Duke, who became Prime Minister in 1828 and in 1829  pushed through parliament the Catholic Emancipation Act. He was a steadying influence in political life.  See Philip Guedall, The Duke (1976).  To describe his tenure as PM as "catastrophic" is unfair.