Andrew Roberts: evaluation

Transcript context

…Obviously, the biography of Napoleon must end tragically, and I notice this about many other biographies of great people I read. It is often what makes them great in the first place, they keep making these double or nothing gambles that catapult them to the top. And then, of course, at some point, your luck runs out. That’s obviously an oversimplification in every single case. But I wonder if this is also a pattern you notice in the lives of great figures. You could say, for Elon, having his reputation and fortune wasted away at the altar of Twitter could be an example of one such thing. But what is your reaction to that? Yes, of course, hubris is the occupational hazard of hugely successful people, needless to say. I mean, it’s probably also the occupational hazard of lots of other people, but we just don’t know about it because they’re not usually successful. But one does tend to get stuck in one’s ways. One can’t necessarily teach an old dog new tricks. You can’t necessarily reinvent yourself and therefore you go down the same old paths. I would say in Napoleon’s defense, of course, not least that idea that when he invaded in 1812, which is the key moment, after that nothing good happens, and before that, lots and lots of good things happen. But the key thing about that is that, look, he had beaten the Russians twice before. He was invading with an army of 615,000, which was the same size as Paris at that time. He knew that the Russian army was only about half the size of his and he didn’t want to go too far into Russia, which of course, as I mentioned earlier, changed in the course of the campaign. But it wasn’t an insane hubristic mad decision to go to war against Russia in 1812. What was hubristic, mad, and insane was to try to beat Britain by imposing a continental blockade on the entirety of Europe, and therefore attempting to crush Britain by stopping smuggling, which was completely rife, and to stop every other country from entering into free trade with Britain. It was that belief that protectionism could somehow win the war against Britain. That was the mad thing. And that’s what led him into the Peninsula campaign, which cost him a quarter of a million. Wow. Actually, if you have somebody like Napoleon, who for his entire life has succeeded in ways that nobody else is succeeding or could anticipate or people tell him, well, that’s not possible, and he accomplishes it. Obviously, he has to take advisors with a grain of salt, knowing that he has been able to do things that others have not been able to do, but he also has to recognize his limits. And this is not just a question with Napoleon in particular, but just in general. How does somebody who is at the tail end of multiple distributions not fall back to mediocrity when making judgments about themselves, but also recognize their limits?…

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