Am I arguing? I didn't notice. I like Napoleon too and I'm intrigued that someone blames the casualties of the Napoleonic wars on the Revolution rather than, you know, Napoleon.
Events can have an unlimited number of necessary causes or preconditions.
Great men of History can have huge impacts, but usually ride massive tides of population level phenomenon, like economics, culture, and public sentiment.
Of course, it goes without saying. But at some point, I think one has to keep a certain restraint on that blame game. I think blaming the Revolution for Napoleonic wars causalities is crossing the threshold of acceptability.
The Zionist movement had a certain role to play in the Holocaust, didn't it? But most people would consider it a grave error in judgment to attribute blame to this movement for a certain part of Holocaust victims.
Yeah, I see what you mean but just take a much stronger approach. I think that France rampaging around the world was locked in with the French revolution and this is a bigger Factor than Napoleon himself.
One of the big problems with the King was that he was trying to implement tax reform to pay down France's foreign debt. The revolution simultaneously aborted this effort and worsened the situation.
I think an analogous situation that is often taught in textbooks is the impact of the treaty of Versailles on Germany. One could compare the relative impact of the treaty and Hitler on the course of history. I think most historians would argue that the rise of fascism and some war would have happened with or without Hitler as a result of the treaty terms. I think Hitler's personality shaped the scope and detail of that war, and the specific intensity of internal policy. However, without him awar would still have broken out, just with a different individual at the helm.
Moving even further afield you can look at characters like Cortez or Christopher Columbus. I think it's safe to say that Discovery and colonization of the Americas by Europe would have happened 99.9% of the time without them, and in a pretty similar manner. They're essentially replaceable and colonial events were determined almost entirely by the technological differences between continents, and the prevailing social doctrine in Europe. Europeans were bound to discover the Americas, and had spent the prior several hundred years in a cage match practicing the technologies and social structures for warfare and conquest against each other.
I'm not going to argue further on this line, I think we could see approximately where we'd end up agreeing. However, on this:
> Moving even further afield you can look at characters like Cortez or Christopher Columbus. I think it's safe to say that Discovery and colonization of the Americas by Europe would have happened 99.9% of the time without them, and in a pretty similar manner.
I heartily recommend "Civilizations" by Laurent Binet. It's fiction, but oh so delicious. On this very subject.
