Napoleon had allowed petty emotion—the desire to humiliate, revenge himself, and force obedience—to infect his strategy. Had he stayed focused on his long-term interests, he would have known that it was better to weaken Prussia and Austria psychologically rather than physically—to seduce them with apparently generous terms, transforming them into devoted allies instead of resentful satellites. Many in Prussia had initially seen Napoleon as a great liberator. Had he only kept Prussia as a happy ally, he would have survived the debacle in Russia and there would have been no Waterloo.
