What, then, is the case against Napoleon? There is, first and foremost, the human cost. Some five million soldiers and sailors were killed in the two decades of the Napoleonic Wars—a higher proportion of men at arms than died in either of the World Wars. In his exhaustive two-volume Napoleon and the Struggle for Germany (CUP, £29.99), Michael Leggiere says that the dead and wounded in a single four-day battle, Leipzig (1813), amounted to 92,000 men. That civilian casualties in the Napoleonic era were lower in relative terms than in the 20th century should not obscure the fact that this was a truly global conflict, a total war creating carnage not seen in Europe since the Thirty Years’ War. The harrowing images of Goya’s 82 prints known as The Disasters of War record the depths of cruelty to which one man’s ambition had subjected a continent, as the artist’s own title for his series makes clear: “Fatal consequences of Spain’s bloody war with Bonaparte.”

But the fatal consequences of Bonaparte are not limited to the millions who died at the time. The ideology of the “Great Man” that Napoleon personified was a pernicious one, however brilliant his devotees. From Hazlitt, who wrote an adulatory biography, to Stendhal, who followed his master from Italy to Russia, Napoleon cast a spell over a generation of writers and intellectuals. The magic has never quite worn off, although the sorcerer’s apprentices have grown ever more dangerous. Napoleon cannot be blamed for his posthumous hero-worship, but his example of ruthless self-aggrandisement on a world-historical scale was as unprecedented as it was unforgettable. If it is unfair to see him through the prism of Hitler, it is surely only just to see how Napoleon anticipated the dictators of a later epoch: for example, in his development of a secret police whose tentacles reached throughout Europe. True, the emperor despised Fouché, his minister of police, as “a man who engaged in base intrigues”; but Fouché was his chosen instrument to enforce total control over the Zeitgeist. Napoleon may have loved glory, but he loved power even more; and he unleashed pandemonium on the world.

When the philosopher Hegel glimpsed the emperor riding into Jena after his victory in 1806, the exultant professor wrote that he had seen the “World Spirit on horseback”. In fact, he had seen the four horsemen of the Apocalypse rolled into one: Conquest, War, Famine and Death.