When you’re famous for things like being the Emperor of France and conquering half of Europe, things like “being a dick at parties” kind of get overlooked by historians. Which is fine, those first two things are probably important, we guess. But for the sake of posterity, lets talk about the third thing anyway. Because, well, how often do you get a chance to shit-talk Napoleon?
According to historic sources presumably compiled by elderly men wearing incredibly fetching suede jackets, Napoleon was a total and utter penis in every sense of the word. Though he was a tactical genius, often described as being similar to a chess grandmaster on the battlefield, in face-to-face dealings he could be a little, abrasive.
One of Napoleon’s more annoying habits is that he really hated losing, which is an excellent quality for a military general, but a shitty quality for absolutely anyone else. Napoleon’s inability to handle losing like grown-ass man, resulted in him cheating at pretty much every game he ever played. While it is noted that Napoleon would return any money he won via cheating, that doesn’t exactly paint the guy in a positive light. He still fucking cheated, the fact he gave the money back just proves that he was only cheating to fuel his own ego instead of to win money, which just makes him seem petty. We mean, Napoleon was one of the most powerful men on Earth at the time, he didn’t need to win to feel like a big shot, he could just look out his window and see the 80,000 men sworn to obey his every command to do that.
One of Napoleon’s more dick-headish habits was walking up to women at parties who happened to be wearing clothing he didn’t like and throwing food at them. Exactly why Napoleon did this isn’t known for sure, but a leading theory is that Napoleon did it to promote the local French textile industry. Which explains why the clothes he seemed to show a particular disdain for were made in England and also why his own wife bought 900 dresses a year.
So yeah, the next time you see an article, story or documentary talking about Napoleon and it talks about how great of a military leader he was. Just remember that he cheated at cards and threw glasses of wine at women wearing clothes he didn’t like.
