Will we ever truly understand Napoleon

Will we ever truly understand Napoleon Bonaparte? Different countries, different peoples understand him, remember him, comprehend him, in vastly different ways. Just as today's Mongolian people regard Genghis Khan as a national hero, the rest of the Eurasian continent and eastern Europe have nightmarish memories of him as demonic mass murderer, pillager, and rapist. You will find the French people revere Napoleon as a demigod-like hero while the British liken Napoleon to something of a latter day Attla the Hun with some Hitler and Stalin thrown into the mixture. Then you have us Americans, with our pitiful grasp of history, with little to no opinion of him except that he was some kind of little guy who was a big-time general back in 'ancient' Europe, meaning, the early 19th century. We don't even know for sure his exact height. The British say he was 5'4" the little man yet modern scholars are now claiming he was probably 5'6", not a midget in any sense of the word.

The British were so consumed by their struggle with Napoleon that while successful in their short conflict with the Americans, 1812-1815, they totally forgot about it since it took till the summer of 1815 to finally dispose of Napoleon in his ill-fated comeback. (Side Note: (The Americans ill-advisedly launched four failed invasions of Upper Canada, poorly planned, poorly organized, poorly supplied, ill-coordinated, and poorly led. The British and Canadians fended off all four, badly-executed invasions and by the end of 1814 the Brits were ready to invade New York. But by this time both sides had had enough of a futile, worthless conflict that promised no gain. An armistice ended the conflict. The Brits immediately forgot about the little side-show in far-off North America. The yanks re-invented 1812 into a glorious short war that beat back a British attempt to reconquer its former 13 colonies but by the late 20th century had forgotten the conflict as well. The Canadians jubilently celebrated 1812 all the way until the end of the 20th century but by now lost most of their historical interest in such a long-ago conflict, given the past near seventy years alliance with the U.S.).

There's two lessons from Napoleon that still stand today.

1) The stereotype psychological, 'Napoleon complex' is lingua fraca, a short, inadequate, insecure guy who overcompensates, and/or any dude with delusions of grandeur.
2) For the more educated, Napoleon is the classic example of overreaching. Like the mid-20th century Hitler, both men perceived that lasting peace was not possible if they simply waited for their enemies to grow strong again and re-unite. In Napoleon's case, he fended off four, enemy coalitions and he had legitimate reason to fear that it was only a matter of time before another hostile coalition formed against him, and historians feel that it would have happened. Hitler thought the Russians were planning to invade eastern then western Europe. There is a growing belief that Hitler might have been correct. If so, both men intended to get the first punch in against the Russians before they could land the first, overwhelming blow. Only in hindsight can we argue that had Napoleon waited for his enemies to strike first, he could have used his previous successful strategms of marching out fast to defeat his enemies piecemeal before they could all coalesce into one unstoppable juggernaut. We'll never know. Perhaps, like Hitler, Napoleon was doomed from the start. The candle that burns the brightest burns half as long.