512 Ch. 13 • Napoleon and EuropeAbout 2 million men served in Napoleons armies between 1805 and 1814;
about 90,000 died in battle and more than three times that number subse
quently perished from wounds or disease; over 600,000 were later recorded
as prisoners or “disappeared.” Reflecting in 1813, Napoleon put it this way:
“I grew up on the battlefield. A man like me does not give a damn about the
lives of a million men.” Indeed, Napoleon’s armies may have suffered as
many as 1.5 million casualties. The Napoleonic Wars killed about one in five
of all Frenchmen born between 1790 and 1795.
Napoleon’s final legacy was his myth. From Saint Helena, he claimed, “If
I had succeeded, I would have been the greatest man known to history.” The
rise of romanticism helped make the story of Napoleon, the romantic hero,
part of the collective memory of Western Europe after his death. Long after
Waterloo, peddlers of songs, pamphlets, lithographs, and other images glori
fied Napoleon’s life as earlier they had the lives of saints. “I live only for pos
terity,” Napoleon once said. “Death is nothing, but to live defeated and
without glory is to die every day.” Rumors of his miraculous return to France
were persistent long after his death. So powerful was his legend that even
the most improbable seemed possible.
Of the changes in the post-Napoleonic period that profoundly trans
formed the way Europeans lived, none arguably had more important social,
political, and cultural consequences than the Industrial Revolution. Having
begun in England in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, it accel
erated in that country during the first decades of the nineteenth century. It
spread to Western Europe in particular, but affected regions in other
places as well. The Industrial Revolution and its critics would help shape
the modern world.