There’s a new movie about Napoleon out, so everyone’s favorite diminutive dictator is back in the spotlight. We’re fawning over his military strategy, we’re loving how he saved France from collapse, we’re pretending to like the dessert named after him. I’m using the royal “we,” here, because it’s only all of you that are saying those things. I hate this ugly bastard, always have, and I’m extremely confident that, if I (or Mark Wahlberg) were around, there’s no way Napoleon even makes it to Waterloo.
Napoleon is the biggest swinging dick in the strategy world, but that’s only because he was planning against plumbers and firefighters. I have the almighty power of hindsight and the natural genetic superiority that comes with being born 223 years later. Sure, Napoleon popularized the idea that defeating your opponent quickly was a good thing, but I’d love to see him go undefeated in a Madden 12 season with Phil Rivers at QB while playing on All-Madden. His primitive brain would melt the second I put the controller in his hands. We’re not even gonna mention the fact that I’ve never lost a game of Risk. Luckily, this isn’t all just bluster. My time machine just got out of the shop, with enough juice to go back to the late 1700s and come home. Using this technology, I can correct one of the least satisfying aspects of world history and remove the period of time where France was a military power and empire. I present my infallible five-step plan to defeat Napoleon and save Jaoquin Phoenix’s IMDB average score, and we’re going to start at the very beginning.
Step 1: Steer Young Napoleon’s Upbringing- You probably expected me to just go the “kill the baby” route, but I’m avoiding that for a few reasons. First, I don’t need that kind of low-hanging fruit. Second, his dad was a lawyer, and getting prosecuted for killing a baby was a lot harsher in the 18th century than it is today. I can’t risk a time machine malfunction and get stuck 1769 to get drawn and quartered or whatever they were doing back then. Third, and most importantly, Napoleon’s family is just as much Italian as it is French. I don’t think I need to explain further, but let’s just say Italian’s carry long grudges. I don’t want to come back to this time only to find myself face-to-face with the Buonaparte family’s equivalent of Paulie Walnuts. Instead, we’ll take the more sensible path and pose as long-lost cousin Emilio Buonaparte who’s looking for work as a tutor for the neonate. I confess I’ve never been to Corsica but I have to think 18th century Corsican society was full of pretty gullible people.
Napoleon was mean, ambitious, obsessive, and cold-hearted, which probably meant his mom was really strict, or something. He definitely strikes me as a guy who has “offbeat” opinions about mother-son relations. Those personality traits are obviously good for a dictator, but they’re also great for a basement dwelling internet addicted troll. He was bullied in school and had no friends; there’s rage bubbling barely below the surface that is dying to get unleashed on racist message boards. To cultivate this, I’ll protect him from his annoying mom, I’ll make sure his dad actually shows up to his Warhammer sessions, become his BFF, the whole deal. Once I’ve got my claws in him, I’ll introduce him to the wild west. Napoleon is about as European as it gets, and there’s nothing chronically online Europeans love more than spending all their time criticizing minute parts of American culture. Using the magic of 5G, I’ll be able to slowly introduce him to the various inconveniences that would never plague European life. I’ll show him a picture of every delayed train in New York. “Wow, such a thing would never happen in Austria. Would make sense to just have them all come on time, no?” Tell him that it’s annoying how much more expensive Taco Bell is these days and he’ll reflexively counter with how much better Spain’s portion sizes are and call me fat, and probably ugly. In this stage of the mission I won’t show him his reflection just yet, I’ll break his confidence later. Then I’ll bring up that I had to wait over 45 minutes after showing up on time to my last doctor’s appointment, and, of course, he’ll know to say, “Wow, in Lithuania we all make 15,000 euros a year, eat turnip soup for every meal, and the government takes 80% of our salary in taxes, but my trip to physio only took 30 minutes and it was free. America sounds like a third world country.” When he’s mastered these basic responses, I’ll open the Reddit app and let him dive deep into the world of grievances. Within a month, he’ll be more defensive of European life than a Justin Herbert defender when you imply winning games might actually be a positive trait for a quarterback getting paid $262.5 million. He’ll be transfixed, unable to focus on his studies, his online anger slowly building. Now he’s ready for the true internet. You know Napoleon would be a QAnon guy. His mind is such fertile soil for conspiracy theories that it might only take a week or two before he’s blindly raging (online) about anything and everything, and certainly he’ll be able to connect the dots and see that the inept French government is attempting to fully seize Corsica and assimilate it into French culture. In fact, he’s so angry he’s actually getting off his ass and joining the military to fight for his home. Wait, that’s not what I want. Hmm, it might be time for phase two.
Step 2: Meet on the Battlefield and Demoralize Him- Instead of dwelling on my failure to prevent him from ever joining the military, I’ll just move on to the next stage of my plan. Sadly, once the ball gets rolling on the whole French Revolution thing, I won’t have a good chance to strike for a few years. My best bet will be to go to Italy (I am Emilio Buonaparte, after all), and hang out (avoid dying), slowly building a squad big enough to tangle with an official regiment. Once I tell them that everyone standing in straight lines shooting muskets at each other will just get everyone killed and that things like “cover” and “terrain” are good, they’ll be so impressed they’d follow me anywhere.
Napoleon’s first big boy campaign is in Sardinia, where he thinks he’ll be meeting some Italian farmers and Habsburg inbreds, but instead he’ll see me and my team of paisans. But my crew won’t need to fight, we’re going old school. I assume the first battle here took place in an open field for maximum casualties, so as Napoleon’s army is marching, I’ll walk to the middle of the field and call the little guy forth for a good old meeting of the minds. I’ll start by playing nice. I’m bringing a copy of Guns & Ammo back with me. I’ll give it to the little freak on two conditions: one, he can’t jerk off to it until after I’m a safe distance away. Two, he has to leave and retire. I’d be surprised if that worked, so we’ll just go with the real plan, and you can probably figure out where I’ll go with this.
You can tell me all you want about how he was regular sized for the time and all that, but the fact of the matter is he was 5’6″ at most. He was bullied for being short in that same time where he was supposedly not that short. The guy had insecurities miles deep. The second I stand over him menacingly he’ll freak out. The biggest test will actually be my own mental fortitude. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to alpha a little kid, but it’s pretty easy to feel bad and relent. I need to keep in mind how haughty the average Frenchman is to maintain my discipline (upon further review, maybe the true strategy was to go back and put Max Robespierre in my back pocket. Guy was 5’3″. I’d say shame on all those people who got guillotined if it happened anywhere else, but, no offense to the good people of Paris, it doesn’t surprise me they got dominated by a rogue member of the Vienna Boys’ Choir). After a few minutes of bullying from his former mentor, he’d either be crying in a corner as the old memories from the schoolyard come flooding back or he’ll be so titled that he’ll start acting rashly and recklessly. Realistically, my work is done either way, but let’s just play it out and say it didn’t work, Napoleon advanced with his army, thrashed my ragtag group, and continued as normal. That way, all this planning won’t have been for nothing.
Step 3: Use his Beloved Artillery to Defeat him at the Battle of the Pyramids- We’ve really only got one chance left to stop Napoleon before he becomes emperor, so me and my surviving crew are heading to Egypt, where France was invading for some reason. He must have been feeling all pissy about his annoying mom again or something, because he took it all out on the proverbial drywall that was Mamluk people. Flexed on them with his fancy divisional square technique. Obviously, our goal will be to break said formation. Again I can hear you. “Just use cavalry to break the front of it and send it scattering.”
Laughable. We’re not dealing with some undisciplined children here. What we’re gonna do is break them the old fashioned way: by blasting them with cannons. And not just any cannons (I know the plural is just cannon, but I’ve always hated that. It doesn’t sound right, so I don’t acknowledge it). Napoleon’s very own batch. These pitched battles are days long, so one night we’ll sneak into the French camp, probably slip some of the soldiers a $20 or two, and snag a few of Napoleon’s finest. Though my curiosity would be killing me, I won’t bring a blacklight with me to see just how much Napoleon loved his toys. Anyway, we’ll just hit the square with a couple of cannonballs and things will probably just end. Scourge vanquished, hoisted by his own petard, defeated by his former mentor, the whole thing. But if this ironclad strategy doesn’t totally pan out, I’ve still got more tricks up my sleeve.
Step 4: Befriend the Local Teens- If it gets to this point, you’d be right in calling me a bit of a failure. After all, the target is now emperor and off gallivanting through Europe starting wars for fun. At this point, he’s probably getting remembered no matter what. Some history professor at the University of Texas probably released a book about him in the 80s. But there’s still one thing left we can do to nip this all in the bud, and that involves befriending the countless youths in Paris. No matter the era, teens can take down anyone they set their sights on, and, not to spoil a movie about one of the most famous people in the history of the world, but Napoleon wasn’t exactly an awesome guy. Any teen worth their salt would have a TikTok campaign that would have him begging for his creepy mom in about ten seconds, and these aren’t normal teens. In 19th century France, 15 is the equivalent of 28 anywhere else since there was a revolution every other week.
Listen, he declared himself emperor. Pretty much the exact opposite of what the French Revolution was supposed to be about. That’s gotta be enough to get him out of there, but he also engaged in nepotism, which modern teens would tell you is far worse. I don’t think it’d be presumptuous to say if you brought a camera to any of his countless battlefields, he probably did something bad. We could easily build a social media campaign around him killing someone who surrendered, and I don’t mean one of his own guys. I’ll even plant the seed by writing the first thinkpiece and passing it out like one of the pamphlets everyone was obsessed with back then. “You know, when you really think about it, having a warlord for an emperor when we just overthrew the monarchy like two seconds ago is actually bad.” The teens would distribute it, and pretty soon all the aristocrats would be feeling awkwardly guilty and would do just about anything to make the feeling go away, most notably oust the emperor. I’ll have my core group of teenagers, but, like a pyramid scheme, they’d spread their righteous fury among their little friends fast enough to get a real movement going. There’d be the annoying stick-in-the-mud conservative teen that tries to act like he’s 43, but we’ll ignore that group. Besides, half of them probably died in the last revolution, anyway. My force of naive, burning heart youngers will take on anyone. Sure, he’s got the entire military, but I’ll have enough youths frothing at the mouth to overcome that. Whether a forcible removal or a quiet exit due to overwhelming public shame, Napoleon’s Elba era would begin sooner than expected. I’d be spearheading the very first cancellation (almost puked writing that, but including the word cancel guarantees an extra 200 million rage clicks), and when I returned home there’d be a statue of me in front of the Washington Post, only people would finally be asking whether or not this random guy who didn’t really do anything is worthy of an expensive statue that could easily be melted down to create bespoke pocket watches that can be sold for $1500 each on Etsy. I know this part of the plan seems flimsy, and I admit it is, but it’s like the fourth option, and if it gets to this stage I’ll be in desperation mode. If, somehow, this Hail Mary doesn’t pay off and I’m left looking like a fool, I’ll have to resort to the final, break-glass-in-case-of-emergency option.
Step 5: Just Go Back and Kill him as a Baby
Brian's Den 