B Teams in action

Following defeat at Waterloo and a subsequent failure to reconsolidate his political position in Paris, Napoleon made a beeline for the west coast in the hope of escaping to America, but he failed to secure passage on any ship other than HMS Bellerophon. 

There were many reasons to be disappointed with Ridley Scott's Boney biopic last year. The story was too sketchy and none of the characters psychologically interesting enough. 

I guess it will be a few years before we get another big budget take on Napoleon. If it were me, I'd be looking at the period between the calamitous flight from Moscow up to Waterloo. 

Hollywood tends to tell this story as a collection of minor incidents around the pivotal moment when Napoleon arrived back on French soil after getting away from his tiny realm of Elba, and the French army dispatched to take him back into custody instead cries 'Vive L'Empereur!' and joins him for the march to Paris. 

Napoleon V2.0, the so called 100 Days, deserves a more detailed dramatic exploration. Rather than simply going back to where he had been rudely interrupted in 1814, Bonaparte decided to reboot himself as the people's sovereign, the true avatar of the Revolution. 

Or at least some sort of workable trade-off between the ideals of 1789 and the stability he later imposed. To this end he re-abolished slavery, having before de-abolished it, and re-jigged the constitution along more liberal lines, forming two chambers with powers alongside that of the executive. Ironically, it would be these deputies who turned against him after his decisive defeat by the allied coalition. Had this happy compromise been unbeatable, like Spain proved on Sunday, things might have become very interesting indeed. (Though Napoleon in America would have been worthy of a movie treatment in itself.) 

This coalition, which some have compared to a kind of proto-NATO, also had a strong core and some wobbly fringes. Wellington had to face his adversary with an army consisting of 30-40% Dutch and Belgian troops, some of which were little more than militia, while others had only recently fought alongside the French. 

Part of the Duke's problem was that since Napoleon had come a-cropper in Russia the British had gone to war with the US in 1812. Other than the whiteness of the White House the most significant consequence of this conflict was the fact that the best bits of the British army were stuck in North America when Napoleon marched on Brussels, in particular the majority of the regiments with relevant experience of fighting and defeating the French in the Peninsula War.

One could even say however that both sides undertook this most history-adjusting of battles with their second string squad members. Certainly, other than Ney, Bonaparte had very much a B team of advisors and military subordinates around him. His best hope of success, as with Putin vs NATO, was divide and conquer and/or pick off the weak parts of the alliance. 

It almost worked, but he made some critical errors of judgement and the weather didn't help. 

There were many different political and constitutional visions in play during this final phase of Napoleonic aspiration. 

We've seen these last few days how History can pivot on tiny details. Waterloo was rather like an great compilation tape of such 'sliding doors' moments, fully deserving of the title 'Now That's What I Call A Near Run Thing'.