On 13th May, I came across a quote attributed to Napoleon, the French warmonger whose military skills were used by personages hiding in the shadows to turn a large chunk of continental Europe into almost as many battlefields as there were independent kingdoms, principalities and dukedoms, this as far away as Moscow, plunging in the process many European states into debt and thus helping establish a central bank in most of those countries where there was none prior to the Napoleonic wars*. The quote I stumbled across was: ‘Napoleon Bonaparte: Never interrupt an opponent who is injuring himself’ [courtesy of K. Sagzee, see the comment section of https://youtu.be/__nkvIluFMM]. It only took me roughly a dozen minutes to trace the probable source to Antoine-Henri Jomini, a Swiss military strategist who had been promoted from the rank of foreign volunteer to brigadier general in Napoleon’s army (as well as made a baron of the empire) and who published in 1827 a biography of this illustrious French man of war (the original quote in French is from page 180 of the second volume).
As I quickly went through some of the preceding pages of volume II of Vie politique et militaire de Napoléon, translated into English as Life of Napoleon by Henry Wager Halleck (1815-1872), I found out to my astonishment that Napoleon had been the subject of ad hominem attacks by what he deemed to be ‘foreign refugees’ working for the British government. So what was the case in 1805 certainly appears to be still valid some 217 years later – even if in the interval there were the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War, the Japanese-Russian War of 1905, World War One, World War Two, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Israeli-Arab War, the Iran-Iraq War, the Anglo-American/NATO wars against Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, the Russian-Georgian war of 2008 (in large part thanks to a Zelensky figure, Mikheil Saakashvili), the Israel-controlled proxy war against Syria, the war against Yemen, the current war in Ukraine, probably all made feasible only because of the lies and warmongering of the press/mass media.
Now to the passage itself; the English version is from page 304 of Henry Wager Halleck’s translation of Antoine-Henri Jomini’s Vie politique et militaire de Napoléon (pages 8 and 9 in the original version):
Moreover, I had reason to complain of the gross and injurious personal attacks which were daily permitted to appear in the English journals, and in those of the émigrés. England breathed more animosity against me than ever William had shown against Louis XIV.; moreover, the situation of the two powers had been reversed, for now the Pretender to the legitimate throne was in England, and she repaid us with double interest the injury which the Stuarts had sought, with the support of France, to do their sovereign. I had then a double reason to complain. A general, placed by victory at the head of the most powerful state in Europe, daily insulted by journals and pamphlets in which the hand of the English minister was but too manifest, had good cause to be exasperated. My situation and feelings were different from a prince born on the throne, and I could not fail to be indignant that, instead of acknowledging the merit of my military enterprises and of my administration, they, with the most violent animosity, represented my victories as so many butcheries, my government as a despotism, myself as a usurper, my principles and heart as those of a Caligula. I complained of this: they opposed to me the English laws on the freedom of the press: I remarked that foreign refugees had no right to destroy the pacific relations of two powers under shelter of the abuse of the press, and I demanded that these disturbers of the general peace should, by application of the alien bill, be sent out of Europe.
*
La dette, une longue histoire - Le 1
[Search domain le1hebdo.fr] https://le1hebdo.fr › journal › la-grece-la-dette-et-nous › 42 › article › la-dette-une-longue-histoire-715.html
Les guerres napoléoniennes sont à l'origine de la Banque de France (1800), comme de celles de Finlande (1811) et de Hollande (1814). D'autres banques naissent après le Congrès de Vienne avec pour mission de remettre de l'ordre dans les finances exsangues des pays : les Banques d'Autriche (1816), de Norvège (1816) et du Danemark (1818).
Found with the following activated: Switzerland (de), Safe search: moderate, Any time
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dettes+Russie+guerres+napol%C3%A9oniennes&t=ffab&ia=web
Paying the price of war: Britain makes good on historic debts
Debts from bonds issued in 1927 by Winston Churchill going back to the South Sea Bubble, Napoleonic and Crimean wars
Julia Kollewe
Friday 31 October 2014 09.05 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/business/blog/2014/oct/31/paying-the-price-of-war-britain-makes-good-on-historic-debts
https://web.archive.org/web/20141102130655/https://www.theguardian.com/business/blog/2014/oct/31/paying-the-price-of-war-britain-makes-good-on-historic-debts
https://web.archive.org/web/2021*/https://www.theguardian.com/business/blog/2014/oct/31/paying-the-price-of-war-britain-makes-good-on-historic-debts
#3 https://swisscows.com/web?query=%22Napoleonic+wars%22+debt+England++repayed
Lausanne, the
above was published on the
thirty-first day of the fifth
month of the year two thousand
and twenty-two.
