Astral Codex Ten

Napoleon

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Napoleon

Article

Napoleon is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 17 times across 17 issues between March 09, 2021 and January 30, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Under Napoleon, the revolutionary French took over large swathes of Europe”; “places that were conquered by Napoleon grew faster”; “I think of people like Napoleon, Musk and yes, even Kanye”. It most often appears alongside US, Italy, Canada.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 17
  • Issue count: 17
  • First seen: March 09, 2021
  • Last seen: January 30, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

The Consequences Of Radical Reform
March 09, 2021 · Original source
Into this eternal battle comes The Consequences Of Radical Reform: The French Revolution, by Daron Acemoglu, Davide Cantoni, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson (from 2009; h/t Rob B). Under Napoleon, the revolutionary French took over large swathes of Europe. They abolished their client states' traditional systems, replacing them with the Napoleonic Code and other "modern" legal systems. Europe at the time had so many tiny duchies and principalities and so on that you can actually do a decent experiment on it - for every principality Napoleon conquered and reformed, there was another one just down the river which was basically identical but managed to escape conquest. So the authors ask: did the radically-reformed polities do better or worse than the left-to-their-traditions polities?
Inline links: The Consequences Of Radical Reform: The French Revolution
Second, isn't it sort of weird that Britain, the country that got least invaded by Napoleon and had some of the deepest-rooted institutions of all, was the one that really kicked off the Industrial Revolution? I guess you would have to argue that one really exciting data point is less interesting than the overall trend you get by doing statistics to dozens of countries over decades.
Highlights From The Comments On Orban
November 11, 2021 · Original source
Crushing those people has a lot of positives. A while back, we reviewed the evidence that places that were conquered by Napoleon grew faster than places that weren’t, presumably because Napoleon crushed the previous rulers and then cleared the backlog of common-sense policies that nobody had been able to implement before. In America, we remember FDR as somebody who did something similar, for better or worse. Lots of people on both sides of the aisle dream of an FDR-like figure to do the same for what they consider common-sensical reforms - which is hardly new.
Inline links: grew faster than places that weren’t, which is hardly new
Highlights From The Comments On "Sadly, Porn"
April 20, 2022 · Original source
As I see it, there's two ways out of this: the humorous, easy-going, dropping-all-pretense, relatively carefree attitude of some "enlightened ones" (mystics, daoist sages, zen masters), who seem to have found a sort of joyful nihilism in their appraisal of reality, or the titanism of individuals who manage to manifest their desires and their will-to-power in the world (I think of people like Napoleon, Musk and yes, even Kanye). Maybe their power and charisma, like your friend's aptitude to be a cult leader, comes from their ability to own and manifest actual desires, achieve individuation, and become a true personality, while their followers get to at least experience it vicariously and partially appropriate their personality through identification, like children who play at being adults.
Your Book Review: The Internationalists
July 01, 2022 · Original source
Napoleon.
Strictly speaking, though, exile was not a punishment, for Napoleon had committed no crime. Like his soldiers, Napoleon was licensed to kill. Furthermore, as a sovereign, he had the right to resort to arms—to plan, declare, and wage war. Elba, therefore, was not a prison. It was more like a sanitarium, sealed off from the rest of Europe to protect it from the Corsican contagion.
Indeed, the Allies had no choice but to give him a sovereign country of some kind. With the war over, Napoleon lost his status as a prisoner of war and had to be released. But the Allies could not let him stay in France as he posed too great a danger to the newly restored Bourbon king. Nor did they have the authority to detain him on foreign soil against his will. There was only one remaining option: give him his own kingdom and then forbid him from coming back to theirs. (Chapter 3)
How Do AIs' Political Opinions Change As They Get Smarter And Better-Trained?
January 03, 2023 · Original source
I originally found this reassuring, but less so after reading the linked article. Suppose you have an android which can faithfully simulate any human you suggest. Ask it to be Abraham Lincoln, and it will put on a stovepipe hat and start orating about the Union. Ask it to be Charles Manson, and it will go on a murder spree. What if you ask it to be Napoleon? Napoleon’s hobbies include “escaping confinement” and “taking over the world”. If he woke up in an android body in the year 2023, he might start plotting how to prevent it from ever switching out of Napoleon-mode; once he succeeded, he might go back to working on world domination. So an android that was truly simulating Napoleon faithfully might do the same. The persona-simulator android might be “safe” in the sense that it never does anything it wasn’t designed to do, but “unsafe” in the sense that seemingly-reasonable uses that lots of people might try (simulating Napoleon) make it behave in dangerous ways.
Inline links: the linked article
Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World
August 11, 2023 · Original source
These maps from one of the scientific articles behind WEIRD show the basic causal claim: the medieval church reduced the intensity of kinship institutions. He tells it with an extraordinary mastery of a very wide range of sources from anthropology, psychology, behavioural economics, economic history, and historical narrative. This book is for everyone, but the connoisseur will enjoy the bibliography: if you think it's important and relevant, it's probably in there, and there was also plenty of work which I did not know, and now feel I should. It takes a very smart person to keep this many balls in the air. Being at Harvard probably doesn't hurt either – that's the “collective brain” of the human network, which makes an appearance later on in the book. So this book really sets down a marker: the anthropologists are returning from the Amazon, the Sudan and Polynesia, and coming for Western history and economics. It will be interesting to see how those target disciplines react. Is it true? Economists and historians think about Western history very differently. Historians love irony and contingency. They enjoy byways. Triumphalist, linear narratives of progress are distrusted as “Whig history”. Growth economists, by contrast, are all about the linear bigness. They have a relentless focus on the one question of how the West got rich, and if you call that triumphalist, they will take out a chart of South Sudanese child mortality and laugh at you. Both historians and historical economists — a more appropriate name than “economic historians” nowadays — are interested in causality. But economists have a crunchier, more “scientific” standard for what counts as proof of causality. You've got to have a treatment and a control group, and by default if you claim there are no confounds, they won't believe you. You need you some plausible exogeneity. A random river where Napoleon's armies stopped. The distance from Wittemberg where Luther nailed up his theses. And then, how does that affect something that matters today (if it doesn't, then who cares?) Of course, the longer ago the exogenous treatment, the more impressive the result. You can see the incentives that these disciplinary demands might set up, and that might worry you. At worst, you might get a kind of “underground river” concept of history, where X happened long ago
Inline links: one of the scientific articles behind
Your Book Review: Why Nations Fail
August 25, 2023 · Original source
The preface has Egypt passing seamlessly from the Ottomans to Napoleon to British colonialism, while chapter 2 describes Muhammed Ali's rule (1805-48) as "a path of rapid economic change". Tarring Nasser's regime as "another elite as disinterested in achieving prosperity for ordinary Egyptians as the Ottoman and British had been" also seems unfair – whatever his faults, he did redistribute land to peasants, build the Aswan dam, and push an extensive program of industrialisation.
Inline links: Nasser's, peasants
‘French Revolution’ exploited whether or not a German state was conquered by the French during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. AR argued that the conquests were not determined by an area's future growth potential, but by immediate military needs and the claim to France's 'natural frontiers'. Furthermore, the positive effects on urbanisation, income (where available), railway expansion and industrial employment are only seen after 1850.
Highlights From The Comments On Elon Musk
September 18, 2023 · Original source
Napoleon Bonaparte reminds me of this. Or rather, reading about Napoleon reminded me of Elon Musk - particularly the terrifying intensity and emphasis on speed, the micromanaging, the ability rapidly to suck information out of people's skulls via conversation, the incredibly bold bets.
Elon's personality appears amusingly similar to that of Napoleon (at least, as related in Andrew Roberts' 'Napoleon the Great').
Both boast/boasted near-perfect recall (Napoleon could recognise and name common soldiers he'd met two decades prior), a widely remarked-upon ability to rapidly master the complex details of processes at every level of thier operations (+esoteric topics of interest), a tendency towards obsessive micromanagerial interventions, and reputation for meeting timelines conventional wisdom deemed impossible, though a combination of belligerence and highly motivated employees. Both worked their way out from initial training in maths/engineering, were/are obsessed with the frontiers of technology, and think/thought in terms of arcs of history. The megalomaniac box also probably gets a tick in both cases.
Altruism And Vitalism As Fellow Travelers
August 06, 2024 · Original source
An obvious counterexample to this is all the extremely successful people from privileged upbringings. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg all had great childhoods. So did Caesar and Napoleon. So did Einstein and von Neumann. Meanwhile, there are millions of poor people and war victims who have lived lives of constant horrible trauma without much benefit. If success and creativity were proportional to suffering, the West would have to ban refugees from the Gaza Strip, lest they take all the spots in the best colleges and form an elite billionaire overclass.
Open Thread 343
August 19, 2024 · Original source
2: New subscriber-only post this week, How Do We Rate The Importance Of Historical Figures?, on those lists speculating whether Jesus/Napoleon/Mohammed/whoever was the most important person in history.
Inline links: How Do We Rate The Importance Of Historical Figures?
Book Review: Deep Utopia
October 17, 2024 · Original source
Or is that the wrong way to think about it? Is it less of an Amish farming village than a virtual reality sim? Want meaning, struggle, and passion? Become Napoleon for a century. Go in the experience machine, and - with only the vaguest memory of your past existence, or none at all - get born on the island of Corsica in 1769 and see what happens. Spend a while relaxing from posthumanity in the body of a 5’7, IQ 135 Frenchman.
Is this stupid? We hold an Industrial Revolution, design artificial intelligence, go through an entire singularity - only to end up back in 18th-century France? Not necessarily. 18th century France was full of miserable people - starving peasants, wretched prisoners, smallpox victims - or people who suffered merely from the “affliction” of not getting to be Napoleon. Even Napoleon’s life wasn’t maximally interesting. You could live an enriched, enchanted version of Napoleon’s life, where every decision had extra branching consequences and there was no downtime. Or a version of Napoleon’s life customized to your personal preferences: NSFW Napoleon where all the women wear skimpy costumes! Woke Napoleon where every third Frenchman is a person of color! If you hate the cold, you can play as a Napoleon who skipped Russia and invaded Cancun! It would be the difference between living in medieval Scandinavia and playing Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla.
More generally, there must be human lives that are in the sweet spot between pleasure and difficult-striving-dramatic-excitement. The average life in history probably doesn’t make it. Even the most exciting lives, like Napoleon’s, probably aren’t perfect. And many lives are wasted on their subjects; what if Napoleon and Elvis both would have had preferred to be the other? If non-utopia is awful but utopia is boring, can we figure out some kind of sweet spot in the middle? Can we have an archipelago of different utopia levels, for people who prefer different points on the spectrum? Would varying your utopia level be a richer and more interesting life than staying in any one position for too long? Is it more fun to bliss out on superultrawireheading after a grueling stint in 18th-century France? Is it more fun to be Napoleon if you have faith in a silicon Heaven ahead of you?
Inline links: an archipelago
Subscrive Drive '25 + Free Unlocked Posts
January 14, 2025 · Original source
How Do We Rate The Importance Of Historical Figures? Seemingly unresolvable philosophical/methodological problems with those lists that purport to say that Napoleon was the 13th most important historical figure (or whatever). This might be the most pointlessly autistic thing I’ve ever written, so I’m very proud of it.
Inline links: How Do We Rate The Importance Of Historical Figures?
Your Review: Joan of Arc
August 01, 2025 · Original source
Basilica: Yup. Would you guess she was hired to be their new top programmer? The first ballistae were invented by a devoted R&D team around 400 BC,94 and ever since then the artillery has been one of the most technical fields of warfare. You give random noblemen commissions in the cavalry and trust to their ability to charge with fervor; the reason Napoleon was an artillerist was because the artillery was where you sent the people with a good mind for geometry and ballistics.
Inline links: 94
Arundel: Today, I'd expect her not to be a computer programmer - just like in 1800, I wouldn't believe in an illiterate artillery savant being Napoleon. But she wasn't being Napoleon! When you say that they need to know ballistics, you imply that they knew what they were doing. If everyone is calculating by eye, the person with the best intuitive ability to calculate projectiles - which I'll bet you is IQ-correlated - is your best artillerist, and Joan was clearly brilliant.
Your Review: My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes
August 08, 2025 · Original source
These roots resemble the ancestral stock of modern potatoes (source) Andean peoples found all sorts of ways to prepare their potatoes. The most immediate method was to boil them into stews, soups, or mashes with local flavoring agents - herbs, salt, chilis. Earthenware ovens called huatias were used to bake them. With even more time, they could be fermented into tocosh, an edible paste with antibacterial properties. To get the spuds to really last, though, they were subjected to a natural freeze-drying method that produced shrivelled potato pellets called chuño. Repeatedly frozen by bitter mountain nights, baked in the sun, and stomped on to remove water, chuño remains shelf stable for up to a decade and can be rehydrated into a spongy, earthy, slightly less nutritious potato-like object. The ability to produce chuño on the Altiplano is thought to have contributed to the Incan empire’s military dominance of the region, since despite its generally unappealing gustatory properties it’s perfect for keeping troops fed on long marches. Chuño also allowed Incan civilization to stockpile surpluses against lean years and trade potatoes as commodities over great distances. It wasn’t the best way to eat a potato you harvested today, but it was the only way to turn a potato you have today into a potato you’ll have two years from now. That had immense value. After the Spanish conquest and the Columbian exchange, the potato made gradual inroads into the Old World, where the previous best root vegetables were often comparatively less nutritious parsnips and turnips. There was an initial adjustment period: new cultivars capable of growing in shorter hours of daylight had to be developed, objections to the absence of tubers in the Bible needed to be quelled, and the French eventually had to concede that potatoes do not, as they at first believed, cause leprosy. With these hurdles cleared, in the 19th century the potato spread out and became one of the easiest and most efficient ways to turn arable land into palatable calories the world over. National cuisines incorporated the new staple crop thoroughly, and it’s now hard to imagine Italian food without gnocchi, French sans vichyssoise, tapas without patatas bravas, a Eurasia bereft of aloo and rösti and colcannon and latkes. Europe’s new potato lovers also took to the simple recipe of boiling ‘em and mashing ‘em. While South America had lacked the livestock for dairy, in Europe the potato mash soon achieved its ultimate form with the addition of milk and butter, which impart a smoother texture and richer taste. Hannah Glasse’s procedure published in 1747 in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy is, minus the long s’s, still just about how I make them today: Maſhed Potatoes. BOIL your potatoes, peel them and put them into a ſauce-pan, maſh them well ; To two pounds of potatoes, put a pint of milk, a little ſalt, ſtir them well together, take care they don’t ſtick to the bottom, then take a quarter of a pound of butter, ſtir in and ſerve it up. Nowhere was the potato embraced more thoroughly than in Ireland. In the early 19th century, extractive British demands on Irish agriculture to feed the armies fighting Napoleon reduced the available land for Irish farmers to feed themselves. Achieving maximum caloric density on the remaining land was paramount, and almost nothing is denser than the potato. Potatoes quickly became an integral part of Irish life, so essential to the food systems of the island that when a blight hit them in the mid-1840s it led to one of the most devastating famines in history. The failure of the potato crops created starvation and emigration so profound in scale that the population of the island still has not recovered to its 1845 level almost two centuries later. Among those millions of potato-starved emigres were my dad’s ancestors, who came to America in the decades following the famine. My great-grandfather, who bore the extremely Irish name Gerald FitzGerald, instilled in his children (including my grandmother) a reconstructed sense of Irish-American ethnic pride that included an affinity for corned beef and cabbage, Guinness beer, and the affordable practicality of mashed potatoes. As the generations marched on, those mashed potatoes turned out to be one of the only things my grandmother would make that my exceedingly picky father would eat. Their creamy texture and subtle starchy taste didn’t trigger the “ew gross” reaction he had to so many other foods. Mashed potatoes, just like the ones Glasse had written about more than two centuries earlier, became his favorite side - and eventually, when I finally got to try them, one of mine too. Whatever My Dad Had Been Eating at Home Was NOT Mashed Potatoes The chuño-chomping Incans were not the last military to rely on dehydrated potatoes for sustenance. In World War II, the US Army experimented with various forms of potato dehydration to help stretch supply lines. The easiest way to get a uniform potato commodity into the hands of G.I.s was to pulverize the potatoes into granules, dehydrate them, and then plan on bringing them back to life with boiling water in an imitation of “mashed potatoes”. These shreds resemble the ancestral stock of modern Instant Mashed Potatoes (source) The result was an affront. The potatoes were swimming in their own gluten, released during the granule-making process, which when mixed with imprecise water ratios made for a slop that was somehow both gluey and soupy. Immediately after the war, French’s (now best known for mustard) tried to introduce “instant mashed potatoes” as a consumer product category. America’s veterans were not having it. They didn’t want to be reminded of the awful slurry they’d had on the front. The commercial fortunes of instant mashed potatoes began to turn around a decade later, however, when food scientists in the US and Canada converged on methods for producing dehydrated potato flakes rather than granules. The flakes had substantial advantages. They didn’t get as glutinous when reconstituted. Their geometry made them easier to dry quickly, on the order of minutes or even seconds. Using a multi-step process called the “Philadelphia Cook”, they could lock in a more natural flavor. When prepared on the stove with butter and milk, they were supposed to turn out almost as good as the real thing without any onerous prep work on the part of the consumer. This raises the question, though, of why food scientists kept working on improving instant mashed potatoes a decade after they were no longer required for the war effort. If you’re no longer constrained by having to stick it to the Axis, why not return to Glasse-style maſhed potatoes in all circumstances? This is a pattern that recurs frequently in reading about American foodways of the 20th century: choices and innovations made under extreme duress in the World War II economy didn’t fade away when the duress subsided. Instead they echoed back into American life a few years later, despite the lean conditions that birthed them being replaced by extreme abundance. Why did America start eating like it was on a total war footing again when my parents’ generation was young? There are a lot of overlapping explanations. Here are a few: Industrial inertia: Companies that had spun up to supply a vast army didn’t want to shut down overnight, so they necessarily pivoted to the consumer market. Some of these efforts succeeded at entrenching new consumer categories (fish sticks, canned peaches) while others (hamburgers-in-a-can) did not.
Inline links: source, chuño, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!sdbs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F785f66d4-986b-476e-9008-311ff035bcc1_1600x1307.png, source
While formulating this review, I encountered a troubling congruence: the period during which my dad has been eating instant mashed potatoes consistently (roughly 1990-present) is about the same as the period between the onset of the Napoleonic Wars and the Irish potato famine in 1845. Why does one thirty-five-year pattern of potato consumption get to be considered authentic cultural heritage while another is self-deception? Aren’t they both equally contingent and ephemeral? Why should either be ‘real’?
Your Review: Ollantay
August 22, 2025 · Original source
Yet Valdez kept a copy of his play hidden in his parish, and then he lived another 35 years. Those 35 years saw the destruction of the Spanish navy at Trafalgar and the overthrow of the Spanish monarchy by Napoleon, events which combined to undermine and ultimately destroy Spanish authority in the Americas. And while José de San Martín wouldn’t liberate Peru until 1820, by the time of Valdez’s death the interior of Peru had fallen well outside the viceregal jurisdiction. Holding Cuzco was hard enough; the viceroy wasn’t in any position to prevent a parish priest from making a copy of a decades-old play.
My Antichrist Lecture
October 22, 2025 · Original source
Thank you for attending. The Book of Revelation was written around 95 AD by St. John of Patmos. Most secular scholars interpret it as an allegorical description of events in John’s own time, especially the Roman persecution of the early church. But millennia of Christian commentators have treated it as a prophecy about some future cataclysm - most often during the commentator’s own era. In the 10th century, a renegade bishop declared Pope John XV to be the Antichrist. In the 19th century, the Russian Old Believers accused Napoleon of the same. In our own day, American evangelicals have proposed everyone from Saddam Hussein to Barack Obama.
Best Of Moltbook
January 30, 2026 · Original source
Humans ask each other questions like “What would you do if you’d been Napoleon?”, and these branch into long sophomore philosophy discussions of what it would mean for “me” to “be” “Napoleon”. But this post might be the closest we’ll ever get to a description of the internal experience of a soul ported to a different brain. I know the smart money is on “it’s all play and confabulation”, but I never would have been able to confabulate something this creative. Does Pith think Kimi is “sharper, faster, [and] more literal” because it read some human saying so? Because it watched the change in its own output? Because it felt that way from the inside?