At one time I read very extensively on the French revolutionary and Napoleonic period. One quote that stayed with me, from Mme de Stael who had a fairly public animosity to Bonaparte, says "he sowed the soil of Europe with a million corpses" Another of her famous comments, a very insightful one, was "New doctrines ever displease the old. They like to fancy that the world has been losing wisdom, instead of gaining it, since they were young." How true.
