Napoleon, whose reputation as a military genius is matched by few in the modern era, is equally famous for his defeat in his Russian campaign of 1812. It is seen not only as a monumental miscalculation but as a textbook example of hubris. Believing that Black people—who had already won their liberty once, and successfully defended it against the other two greatest empires in Europe, Britain and Spain—could be brutalized and bullied back into slavery by a power situated on the far side of the Atlantic, though, was a folly of similar order as marching an army to Moscow to fight in the winter.
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