Ranking the 26 Marshals of Napoleon/Q&A session @generalsandnapoleon

@generalsandnapoleon is going live to answer questions and discuss Napoleon, his family members, his marshals, his opponents, and his legacy. I also rank all 26 Marshals in order! Feel free to join in on the conversation! Thank you for watching.

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[d.s.archer]

11:05 Regarding Victor voting for the death of Ney – which was unquestionably despicable - I read on a French website that Victor “All the rest of his life, he will regret it, and he will no longer want to receive anyone on his [Victor’s] birthday, December 7 “: December 7 happened to be the same day Ney was executed.

[d.s.archer]

20:30 Glad you placed Gouvion Saint-Cyr in the Top 10. Also, bravo you mention that he tried to save Ney from the firing squad.

[Mulvers]

Enjoyed the catch-up on this, will try and catch any others live! Only recently found the podcast and I'm working through the episodes, just listened to the Kutuzov one. Much appreciated thank you!

[d.s.archer]

5:12 Napoleon dubbed Brune “The Bold Plunderer” a rather dubious nickname. “When he [Brune] was made a marshal [in 1804] it was of him that people were able to say that a crutch would have suited him better than the baton, too short as that was for his stature and too heavy for his arm.” General Thiebault

Poor Brune: not the luckiest man to wear the uniform of a Marshal of the Empire!

[d.s.archer]

6:23 Grouchy also receives too-little credit for extricating his wing of the Army of the North – Vandamme’s III Corps and Gerard’s IV Corps, plus cavalry and artillery - from Wavre (right after the Battle of Waterloo), foiling every attempt by the Prussians to surround and destroy his wing, and getting his wing safely to Paris. Had Napoleon and/or the French wanted to fight on, Grouchy's wing could have served as the nucleolus of a new army.

[d.s.archer]

18:18 Bernadotte certainly had a high opinion of himself. As Crown Prince Charles John, upon bringing Sweden into the Sixth Coalition in 1813, one of his conditions was to be made allied commander-in-chief, superseding even the Tsar; obviously this didn’t happen. In regard to his questionable conduct during the battles of Jena-Auerstadt, in private Bernadotte huffed: “I might have felt piqued at receiving something like orders from Davout, but I did my duty.” (!)

[d.s.archer]

15:30 Bessieres is too often viewed as some kind of a saint, which he was certainly not. His wife suffered cruelly at his hands. Unbeknown to her, Bessieres had a mistress named Virginie, a young opera singer in Paris. When Bessieres’s grief-stricken widow received his effects after his death, her distress was greatly increased by the discovery of his adultery.

Also, since you like to compare Napoleon’s Marshals to U.S.A. Civil War generals, Bessieres’s advising Napoleon not to use the Imperial Guard at Borodino (1812) was comparable to General Porter telling General McClellan not to use his (Porter’s) V Corps at Antietam (1862): we all know how both battles turned out.

[d.s.archer]

31:54 In “The Emperor's Friend: Marshal Jean Lannes” (2001), author Margaret S. Chrisawn points out there is a fair amount of disagreement over what Lannes said to Napoleon as the former was on his death-bed, but she makes a convincing case that whatever Lannes said was not kind: “Lannes had made a career out of blunt, profane, and ‘distressing’ comments to Napoleon. Having survived them, he could well afford to go out of this world in his usual style”.

[d.s.archer]

28:58 “Ney only got what he deserved. I regret him as a man very precious on the battlefield, but he was too immoral, TOO STUPID [emphasis added] to be able to succeed.” Napoleon on Saint Helena