User:Kwakerjak/Napoleon (rewrite)
Napoleon Bonaparte was a French military official and later, Emperor of France. He is best known for ending the Reign of Terror that followed the French Revolution, being the first person in the French military since Charlemagne to not suck, pwning most of Europe before losing everything to an Englishman who was named after his boots, and getting really ticked off whenever some smartass remarked that he didn't look very much like Jon Heder.
Also, he was short.
Childhood[edit | edit source]
Napoleon Bonaparte was born in 1756 on the small island of Corsica. His father was Italian and spoke Italian; his mother was Italian and spoke Italian, and Napoleon grew up speaking Italian and learning Italian customs, which, of course, makes Napoleon Italian.[1] Growing up in a town where most men stood at least 6'9", Napoleon was often teased about his rather modest[2] height of 5'4". Many scholars believe that this teasing, which crushed his dreams of playing professional basketball and made Napoleon excessively self-conscious of his physical size, resulted a tendency to overcompensate for this perceived deficiency in all of his personal endeavors. Today, this condition is known as a Napoleon complex.[3]
Early career[edit | edit source]
Of course, Corsica is also boring as hell, so it comes as no surprise that Napoleon joined the French Army as soon as he could. At first, he wanted to be in the cavalry, but his superiors laughed and told him that the Army didn't use Shetland ponies. Unfortunately, Napoleon didn't realize that they were insulting his height until they were out of the room, so he couldn't deliver a snappy comeback. He then tried the infantry, but that turned out to be a bust as well, as everyone assumed he was a drummer boy and wanted to put him up front with the other drummer boys where he would make for a very convenient target.
That left the artillery. Napoloen took to it immediately. There was just something about firing those big, long, powerful cannons that made him feel better about himself. Plus, it takes a lot of cajones to insult a man for being short when he's aiming a 6-foot-long gun right at your crotch. Thanks to this newfound love of bossing people around, he quickly was promoted Captain[4] of his brigade. From this position of authority, he invented[5] several brilliant strategies, including "not surrendering," "trying to figure out what the other guy is going to do ahead of time," and "skipping the wine and cheese parties, getting off your lazy butts and fighting the goddamn battle."
Eventually, Napoleon rose to the top of the French military as a result of his ingenious use of tactics. Well, that, and most of the people who outranked him found themselves beheaded during the Reign of Terror.[6] Since rampant fear and paranoia tend to get a little tedious after a while, the members of the French government (the ones who still had their heads on, at least) asked Napoleon to use the French Army to restore order, because few things can calm out-of-control political situations like the judicious use of military dictatorship.
When one politician pointed out that Napoleon could use this opportunity to seize power for himself, he was quickly rebuked by his colleagues. After all, it wasn't like the French people would allow themselves to be represented in world affairs by a little person, right?
Getting to sit in the cushy seat[edit | edit source]
Well, it turned out that the French people didn't mind Napoleon's shortness at all, as such details are easy to ignore when the person in question has all of the guns. Sure enough, in 1804, he got himself crowned Emperor of France, reasoning that emperors were way cooler than kings. As the new monarch, Napoleon I was entitled to all of the amenities that came with the position, the most notable being an increased success rate at picking up chicks. He eventually married Josephine de Beauharnais, who by all accounts was one of the hottest pieces of ass in France at the time. Granted, she was about a foot taller than he was, but most people were polite enough not to bring that up.
Pwnage of Europe[edit | edit source]
Napoleon naturally aroused the jealousy of other Europeans by being such a great (but small) guy in everything, from military to fashion, from politics to cookery. The British eventually grew weary of him, mostly because he was "so bloody French", as the Duke of Wellington put it. Thus, when Napoleon decided to invade Italy, there was some cause for concern, but everybody figured it was okay becuase he was already Italian to begin with. However, when he decided he wanted Austria, too, an international coalition gathered to stop him. Unfortunately, they forgot to take into account Napoleon's madd skillz at Risk™ and Stratego™, and as a result, the Emperor of France got to add most of Western Europe to his ever-growing list of potential sites for his country estate.[7]
A minor stnank[edit | edit source]
After conquering most of Europe, Napoleon set his sights on Russia to further his goal of making history associate his name with really, really big things.[8] Thus, in the summer of 1812, he gathered the Grande Armée and marched towards Moscow. All went as planned, except for two minor oversights on Napoleon's part. First, he'd intended for his troops to live off the land during their invasion, but Napoleon quickly found out that Russia was pretty much a barren wasteland.[9] Second, Napoleon's map of Europe was apparently not drawn to scale, because the journey from Paris to Moscow took a bit longer than expected, and as a result, by the Napoleon reached the Kremlin's gates, he had to tangle with the Russian military's most potent force: General Winter.
Even though Napoleon's forces numbered 691,501 men[10] while Winter had only -40° C,[11] the battle was surprisingly close. But in the end, Napoleon had to accept defeat, as the vast majority of his army eventually reverted to the pansiness that the French military had been known for in days of yore and started whining and complaining about frostbite and hypothermia and not being able to see their mommies.
However, as official documents of Napoleon's administration point out, this was not a retreat from Moscow; the Emperor merely decided that he'd have more success advancing on Paris.
Exile[edit | edit source]
When Napoleon returned to France, the Allied forces (who had been camping on the outskirts of Paris) ambushed him and and forced him to abdicate his throne. They then banished him to the island of Elba, in the Mediterranean Sea, where he wouldn't be able to bother anyone ever again.
Or rather, he wouldn't have bothered anyone ever again if Amnesty International hadn't complained loudly that excessive boredom of Elba constituted a deprivation of Napoleon's dignity and was therefore a form of torture that had been outlawed by the Geneva Convention. As a solution, it was suggested that the former monarch be given an infantry unit and a ship to keep himself occupied. Though several parties vocally opposed this measure, claiming that Napoleon would almost certainly abuse these privileges, eventually they gave in, just to get the pinkos to shut up.
Waterloo[edit | edit source]
Well, sure enough, Napoleon did abuse his privileges, and within one hundred days, he'd amassed an army of 340,000 and was back in Paris, governing like nothing had happened. After multiple I-told-you-so's were exchanged, the Allies, lead by the Duke of Wellington, went off to put Napoleon in his place again. The two armies met at Waterloo, in present day Belgium. It was a bloody battle, full of carnage and strife, with both sides sustaining massive casualties[12]; but in the end, Napoleon got his ass handed to him on a platter.
Exile (again)[edit | edit source]
The allies exiled Napoleon to St. Helena, which is an island in the middle of the Atlantic (or somewhere around there). This time, the whiny liberals were told to stuff it, and Napoleon didn't get any military units to play with, which left him with absolutely nothing to do, except pacing, counting the dots on the ceiling tiles in his bedroom (14,378), and scrimshaw. They also took away his platform shoes, which meant he had to go back to moping about his shortness.
Napoleon died in exile in 1824. Later, traces of arsenic were found from his hair, suggesting that he had a very bad hair stylist. Some historians cited this as evidence that Napoleon was murdered by poisoning, and it is much easier to agree with them if you want them to shut up, because let's face it, nothing's worse than a pushy historian. Other scholars claim that he died of boredom, and that anyone who thinks otherwise has never had to spend a week on St. Helena. However, for what it's worth, I think it was Col. Mustard in the Conservatory with the Candlestick.
Footnotes[edit | edit source]
- ↑ This little fact never fails to piss off the French, and bringing this up can be a lot of fun at French parties.
- ↑ When I say "rather modest," I of course mean "riduculously puny."
- ↑ And if you need me to tell you how it got that name, you're hopelessly stupid.
- ↑ Or Major, or Sargeant... ah, who cares?
- ↑ Actually, he was pretty much ripping off Sun Tzu, but nobody bothered to check because they were distracted by Napoleon's huge cannon.
- ↑ They were incompetent aristocrats anyway.
- ↑ So called because Napoleon wanted his estate to cover an entire country.
- ↑ And really, at that point the only thing Russia had going for it was its bigness.
- ↑ Also, the only alcohol available was cheap vodka, instead of the more sophisticated champagne that the French troops were used to.
- ↑ And several prostitutes — armies were always followed by prostitutes back then.
- ↑ There might have been a few Russians there, too.
- ↑ A more detailed account of the battle is recounted in "Waterloo," the upbeat pop song by ABBA that won the Eurovision song contest in 1974.
