what were the ideology of hitler and Napoleon compare?
Answers
Explanation:
A purely ideological interpretation of history can impel historians to form erroneous conclusions on the nature of regimes and historical fact.
The Napoleonic episode offers a case study.
For a long time, historians were unable or unwilling to avoid simplification. Two sides – those “against” and those “for” Napoleon – clashed on a sterile battlefield where ideological monocausality defined the wars fought by the various European powers.
It is thus that one school of history, in a rather authoritarian step, came to place the First Empire in the category of “military dictatorship” with the aim of enhancing the Revolution's prestige: I sought to refute such a conclusion at the Consortium on Revolutionary Europe just a few years ago, and I shall not be returning to it here.
It is in a slightly similar vein, however, that this article will seek to discuss a more contemporary branch of this tree of historiography.
In general terms, this particular branch maintains the following idea: that the Napoleonic Wars can be reduced to a history in which a benevolent and liberal Britain rose up initially against bloodthirsty Jacobinism, and subsequently against Napoleon, to prevent the continent from falling under the yoke of a “tyranny” intent on subjugating it.
Thus Britain's Endseig was one of “good” over “evil”, a Manichaean vision which denies the inherent complexity of our world and its history. Such is the view presented, for example, by Henry Kissinger, in his synthetic work on European diplomacy.1