This battle left Napoleon master of Europe.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the French Emperor Napoleon III actually created a Latin Monetary Union, which included Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland. Napoleon saw the scheme as a potential basis for a single world currency.

Not as great a general as Napoleon, not as great a statesman as Frederick the Great.

Victor Hugo coined the formula Napoleon le petit to describe Napoleon III. Will Hollande, who seems to take so much inspiration for both his public and private life from his mentor and model, France s first ever Socialist president, one day be described as Mitterrand le petit ?

Whether or not Napoleon was great, the question remains whether any leader could merit that description. And if so, who?

So he said, I told them about Napoleon and Alexander the Great and Frederick the Great and Julius Caesar, and they loved it.

For Marx, the class struggle in France created the circumstances in which a grotesque mediocrity that is, Napoleon was morphed into a hero. As far as Tolstoy was concerned, Napoleon was not a particularly good general, and was carried to victory by the courage and commitment of all of the individual French soldiers who won the Battle of Borodino.

An alarmed government sent in more troops to garrison the disturbed areas than were then available to Wellington in the Peninsular War against Napoleon. More than a hundred Luddites were hanged or transported to Australia.

Napoleon, defeated in that same year, had secured civil rights for Jews in the countries he had conquered. And just before the clause entered Norwegian law, the King of Denmark had granted citizenship to Jews in his realm.

Various studies show that tall men are often favored, and that corporate CEOs are taller than average. But some of the most powerful leaders in history, such as Napoleon, Stalin, and Deng Xiaoping were little over five feet tall.

PRINCETON Two hundred years ago this month, at the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte s defeat at the hands of an allied army, led by the Duke of Wellington, reshaped Europe s future. Britain may now be poised to do so once again.

Gone would be the family farms, artisan yards, and the nation of shopkeepers, as Napoleon is alleged to have scornfully referred to Britain. All these petty bourgeois activities would be plowed over by the equivalent of today s Zara, Toyota, Airbus, or Walmart.

In France, the offense was abolished when Napoleon introduced his new penal code in 1810. Consensual adult incest is also not a crime in Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, Côte d Ivoire, Brazil, Argentina, and several other Latin American countries.

Should one apologize for the Crusades, for the destruction of German cities by the armies of King Louis the XIV in the seventeenth century, not to mention the armies of Napoleon? Wouldn t the result simply be to turn history into a perpetual cycle of contrition?

To Begin, Arafat in Beirut was Hitler in his Berlin bunker. Indeed, Abba Eban ridiculed Begin for behaving as if Israel were a kind of disarmed Costa Rica and the PLO was Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great, and Attila the Hun all wrapped into one.

After inflation and unstable government, Charles de Gaulle rebuilt the French political system, but also the idea of the French nation, by championing currency stability. He explicitly went back to the legacy of Napoleon, and argued that France could be stable only with a strong currency.

Next year is the bicentennial of the Battle of Waterloo and the final defeat of Napoleon. The right wing British politician Enoch Powell used to claim that the European Common Market was the revenge that the Germans and the French imposed for the defeats that Britain inflicted on them.

Without the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte would have remained a gifted and frustrated junior military officer. Likewise, the current period in America and its relations with the world have been truly exceptional, requiring a leader who can fundamentally challenge a global majority s view that America has become arrogant, impotent, and selfish.

Beginning with a gin and tonic just after noon, and ending with a Napoleon brandy at three o clock, lunch prior to the Big Bang was often the most arduous part of a stockbroker s day. That cozy culture ended soon after the thrusting, brash Americans, who worked even over breakfast, hit town.

It can be opposed with equal fervor, like that which enabled Europe's conservative powers to defeat Napoleon in 1815 and the Allies to defeat Germany in World War II. Or it can reach the limits of its military and economic strength, as in the case of the Soviet Union at the time of its disintegration.

LONDON Two hundred years have passed since the battle of Waterloo, where Napoleon s calamitous defeat made such a huge dent in his country s self image that General Charles de Gaulle, in his history of the French army, simply omitted it. Nonetheless, Napoleon, like de Gaulle, would both easily make it onto any list of history s great leaders assuming, of course, that one considers greatness to be an individual trait.