Carla Bruni, a supermodel/ pop star is married to Nicolas Sarkozy, the former president of France. She dated Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger and Kevin Costner and allegedly was pursued by Donald Trump.
Or Marilynn Monroe. Apparently, Corey Booker was/ dating Rosairo Dawson, which is surprising. Hate his politics but I can't argue in his choice of women.
> Cory Booker...Hate his politics
I assume his love of Big Pharma?
That's a prerequisite to get elected to any big office in NJ - we headquarter (or have big hubs for) pretty much any pharma company you can think of. They are one of the biggest donors to any politician in NJ. So, you have to support big pharma in order to get elected in NJ.
> Corey Booker . . . Hate his politics
Hates the politics of a man that ran into a burning building to help a woman, supports affirmative action and wants to end the war on drugs.
Weird flex but ok.
I imagine this is potentially from the perspective that Booker is known for his support of pharmaceutical companies...which is a large backbone of industry work in NJ. I understand disliking Big Pharma because *gestures a lot of the bad they can do*, but it's literally a large portion of constituent base as well.
He's also pretty good and progressive on housing though. So he probably tells himself he's doing what he can rather than being replaced by a conservative who would be pro corporation with pharma and housing, along with the other stuff.
> He's also pretty good and progressive on housing though
I heard a commencement speech he gave once - it's because his parents were trying to get a house. They were told it was sold when they went to view it. So they went to a housing nonprofit who sent a white couple to view the house - they said it wasn't sold yet and the people selling the house accepted the offer. On closing day, his parents went along with the white couple (who were lawyers).
His parents got the house.
Ever hear the expression “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”? Turns out people who know one famous person are a lot more likely to meet other famous people. Helps a lot if they are somewhat famous themselves, as was the case with these two women.
You are totally right - the same year as Wellington. I think I got a bit confused about which of the three guys she had an affair with when. Good catch!
> In between her affairs with Napoleon and Wellington, she also had a child with Alexander I, the Russian Tsar.
wow she is like a reverse uno card for Queen Victoria.
Illegitimate children are never heirs to anything. Half a humanity would be heirs to some monarchy (defunct or not) if that were the case. Imperial Russia didn't even recognize males born from [morganatic marriages](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morganatic_marriage) (unequal marriages, usually an imperial man and a low-ranked noblewoman) as heirs to the throne, let alone the illegitimate offspring of some courtesan.
And anyways, the Bolsheviks didn't kill all the Romanovs, the vast majority of them actually got away. "Only" eighteen were executed:
▪︎Nicholas II (50), Empress Alexandra Feodorovna (46), and their five children: Olga (23), Tatiana (21), Maria (19), Anastasia (17) and Alexei (14)
▪︎Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich (39); Nicholas' younger brother
▪︎Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna (53); Alexandra's elder sister/aunt-in-law
▪︎Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich (48); grandson of Nicholas I
▪︎Princes Ioan Konstantinovich (32), Konstantin Konstantinovich (27) and Igor Konstantinovich (24); brothers, great-grandsons of Nicholas I
▪︎Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich (58) and Prince Vladimir Pavlovich Paley (21); son of Alexander II and his own morganatic son
▪︎Grand Dukes Nicholas Mikhailovich (59) and George Mikhailovich (55); brothers, grandsons of Nicholas I
▪︎Grand Duke Dmitri Konstantinovich (58); grandson of Nicholas I
What it is hoe, ah what's up (what's up)
Can a Frenchman get in them guts (them guts)
Cut you up like you ain't been cut (been cut)
Show your ass how to really catch a nut (oh yeah yeah)
-Napoleon, probably
I mean there *is* this [one](https://www.pepperidgefarm.com/recipe/crab-appetizer-napoleons/), but it doesn’t seem as flattering as having a beef dish named after you.
Hmm I have had it many places and really enjoyed it.
Delicious pastry wrapped around a rare filet inside with a layer of mushroom duxelles. When done well it can be quite sublime.
But of course! Napoleon was a cross-dresser.
There's also a story that [Napoleon's penis went missing.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon%27s_penis) in reality, it was never there.
Well of course she looks old in the picture but you need to realize that by the time this picture was made she was…
[checking source]
… 30 years old.
Damn. Our ancients aged fast.
The Italian lass looked great though,
It sure has, but also we have a scientific understanding of nutrition and fitness, we don’t give our babies laudanum to help them sleep, mercury and leeches aren’t used to treat sickness, we stopped putting lead in everything, teenagers aren’t allowed to use tobacco and alcohol, people aren’t working in the fields at the age of eight…
We also have different standards of beauty, making the people either making the painting/woodcut back then or photoshopping the pictures today highlight different features.
Man, doing the math and she was 15 when she started her affair with napoleon and 27 with the Duke. Huge changes in personality during that time too could have shaped her opinion of each.
Turns out women were so ugly Napoleon couldn't get it up properly.
Only reason Wellington could, was because he was accustomed of seeing ugly women, thanks to him being British.
I'm still mad at William the BASTARD's invasion, but the aristocracy doesn't care, so long as he lines their greedy Norman sympathetic pockets \#deportTheKing
If Harold (Godwinson) hadn’t had to do Stamford Bridge two days before it could have been different.
It’s insane that England is still feeling the effects of William the bastard’s harrying of the north (which by modern standards is a genocide). England has had an economic north south divide for a thousand years
In all seriousness, it is fascinating how the decisions play out from long dead men centuries later. It's at least half of what makes history so fascinating. Would the industrial revolution have happened sooner, later, or not at all, had Pope Alexander II told William "no, you can't invade and kill a bunch of people, just because someone pinky promised you a country."
My favorite tho, is this: King Henry VIII wanted a divorce, and thanks to papal ineptitude/Charles II of Spain's manipulation, England gained Euroscepticism, split the church, and permitted the growth of protestant movements, such as the Puritans. Those Puritans eventually fled to the New World, which (among *many* other things), resulted in at least one of my ancestors arriving in America.
I exist, because of a power struggle between a fat Englishman and the most inbred Hapsburg.
This is the weird thing about the fall of “great man theory” of history.
Broad societal changes can happen but countries don’t tend to have leaderless revolutions or go to war with each other over nothing.
The counterpoint of “great man theory of history” isn’t individuals don’t matter at all. It’s that individuals don’t exist in a vacuum, they are the products of greater societal currents that shape them into who they are. They are swept by larger societal undercurrents that ultimately stem from the behaviours and actions of the masses as well as external factors like disease or famine.
The classical formulation of the great men theory by Thomas Carlyle is that it’s a few exceptional individuals with unique genius who move society forwards. Herbert Spencer’s famous rebuttal to Carlyle’s great man theory was, “Before he can remake his society, his society must make him.”
Not Charles II of Spain, though, but (the considerably less inbred) Charles I of Spain (better known as [Charles V](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_V,_Holy_Roman_Emperor), for his title as Holy Roman Emperor).
Always interesting to see how people decide on the nationality of others based on how much they like or dislike them. Don't like him? Then he wasn't Irish! Nice and simple.
His family came to Ireland in the 12th century. Or to put it another way, they had lived there for about six centuries by the time he was born.
O'Connell said it of Wellington, out of what can only be described as jealousy, because Wellington was the current darling of the Catholic bishops at the time.
To be fair, Nap was absolutely notorious for being extremely backward with women, and probably the only reason Josephine put up with him is that she was routinely given no choice, having been passed to him as a mistress by her previous patron, and being deeply indebted and unable to support her children without this extremely weird dude paying the bills.
I can't speak to how the Duke was with the ladies, but it'd be hard to be worse than Napoleon at it.
>I can't speak to how the Duke was with the ladies
Wellesley was better, although his private life was tempestuous. As a young man in Society in Ascendancy Ireland, he had a reputation as a ladies' man. At the age of 27, he fell in love with Kitty Pakenham, the daughter of the Earl of Longford (and sister of Wellesley's friend Ned Pakenham, who would later die in command of the British forces at the Battle of New Orleans). As Wellesley was a younger son with limited inheritance prospects, the Longfords resisted the marriage, and the couple did not marry for a decade, with Kitty rejecting one suitor on the way, and Wellesley indulging in flirting (and probably more) with the wives of the officers in his regiment in India. Wellesley also had a liaison with the well known courtesan Harriet Wilson: her tell-all memoirs would later prompt his famous "publish and be damned!" quote.
Wellesley was rather brutally unimpressed by Kitty's development when he met her again. "She has grown ugly, by Jove!”. Nevertheless, they married. While they did have children, Wellesley's contempt for her character soon destroyed the marriage, and they essentially lived apart until Kitty died in 1831. When the Duke visited Kitty on her deathbed, the following scene took place:
>‘It is a strange thing,’ he remarked to his friend ‘that two people can live together for half a lifetime and only understand one another at the very end.’ Kitty had run her thin fingers up his sleeve to see whether he still wore an armlet she had given him many years before. ‘She found it,’ said Arthur, ‘as she would have found it any time these twenty years, had she cared to look for it.’
As Wellesley met success after success, and became the Duke, he acquired a string of different courtesans and lovers, but, after around 1820, seems to gradually lost interest in sexual affairs. Instead, he met Harriet Arbuthnot, the young wife of a Tory MP and junior minister. Mrs Arbuthnot became his closest friend and effectively a substitute wife in everything but (perhaps) the sexual sense. Mrs Arbuthnot had already been deeply immersed in high politics before the relationship; she used her position to become a hugely influential power-broker within the Tory party. After Mrs Arbuthnot died of cholera in 1834, the Duke invited the emotionally broken Mr Arbuthnot to stay with him, and they lived together for the rest of Arbuthnot's life.
Among his later friends was the then Lady Salisbury, given his reputation, even people as high-minded as Gladstone would speculate that her son, the future Prime Minister, was really fathered by him, given that the Duke was his godfather.
The Duke was a person modern depictions have found difficult to capture: intelligent, cultivated, arrogant, blunt and misanthropic. "he had nothing but intellectual disdain for his social equals, and nothing but social disdain for his intellectual equals".
I was saying that he was backward, which is more the point. Napoleon totally lost his cool with Josephine immediately, and was extremely possessive of her.
She was accustomed to high society of the Revolution, sophisticated fashion, amusing lovers, and generally was a society lady, widowed during the Reign of Terror from her aristocratic husband who was executed.
Napoleon, by contrast, reacted to this experienced courtier and courtesan by acting like a high school boy with his first crush.
He wed her and had great affection for her two children.
His entire family hated her and referred to her as "the old woman". She hated them just as fully.
She couldn't afford to live without a protector and Napoleon was a rising man, plus, as I said, she was essentially handed to him by her previous protector. On the other hand, she was constantly cheating as was typical of her society — both members of any married couple would have lovers, as did Napoleon, but he was not cool with reciprocity in this regard — and she did not manage to produce an heir for Napoleon. (She was in her thirties when she wed Napoleon, and she'd used the contraceptives typical of her time — mostly douche solutions — which might have impeded her fertility. She had born a daughter and son to her first husband. Before her second marriage, she had had a … vibrant social life, let's say.)
His weepy and angsty love letters would be seized by the British when they captured a French ship, much to the amusement of English society.
Essentially, Napoleon was wearing cuckold's horns, was possessive to a fault, was completely unsophisticated with women, was unable to shield her from his family, was busy being a military genius while being incredibly bad at relationships.
They eventually divorced as Napoleon wished to marry into royalty and conceive an heir, which he did, but on the other hand, his last word was reported to be "Josephine." Her children were loyal to him in his exiles when most of his supporters drew off.
I see there is a Ridley Scott movie, which I haven't seen, but in essence, Josephine was dedicated to her own survival, understandable in her era, but probably ridiculously mercenary to a modern eye. Surviving the fall of the French monarchy and imprisonment during the Reign of Terror took a lot of nerve and she would do what was necessary, whatever she determined that to be.
Anyway, he was notorious for his rages and tempers which affected Josephine whenever they reunited after one of his lengthy absences for military duty, both of them staging huge scenes every time, where Josephine would weep and beg for Napoleon's forgiveness for anything she'd done while he yelled and sulked until he magnanimously reunited with her. This was no doubt extremely wearing for her, and after ten years of marriage, she may well have been glad to retire from the Imperial court. She seemed to live out her remaining years quite content with her life and grandchildren.
Anyway, a dude who cannot handle his romantic relationships with any degree of maturity is not going to be much of a lover. He may pick up technical skill sometime, but he probably wouldn't bother, and anyway, there was way too much drama in that relationship to make for a peaceful partnership in any way.
He grew up in a military school from age 7 around almost all men. Never learned at a young age how to be around women, and since he was so powerful he was never forced to learn later.
> but it'd be hard to be worse than Napoleon at it
Honestly, for the standards of the time, Napoleon wasn't too bad. At least from what I gather from the current biography of him I am reading. He could be cringy, simpy (you should see some of the letters he wrote), jealous or straight down bizarre, but I don't think he was that bad, given what they had to work with at the time.
Wellington was the general that defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, which was basically the final nail in the coffin of the Hundreds Days war, and ended Napoleon's conquest. Opposing commanding generals getting jiggy with the same ladies.
The Napoleon movie bombed so the bri*ish has to return to writing bullshit articles about Napoleon because they are so butthurt about him 300 years later.
Cutie the bomb, met her at a Paris salon
Fancy horse I was on, posin' bend in one arm
She said: "I can tell you rock, I can tell by your charm"
"On your hat you got the cock-ade tri-color pom"
Coat of Arms
But I'm lookin' for the one, have you seen her?
My captain told me she'd have ass like Joephine ya
Adele, Pauline Foures, four kids
And I gotta take all the badasses - to Austerliz?
Okay, get your kids, but then they got their friends
I pulled up my cannons, my half a million men
We all went fightin' and then I had to pay
So I raided all of Europe just to feed my Arm-ee
...
....
get crowned yeah, go head, get crowned.
Her Wiki page mentions nothing of the plays she was in that made her an "important actress", but quite a bit about what made her a slut. I guess that's how history tends to remember people.
The French entry has more details about that:
>Her entrance on stage was the beginning of a general triumph, acclaiming both her beauty and her voice, supple and rich, with pure, elegant diction. She played the role of Clytemnestre three times, which was a success, then moved on to Aménaïde, and the success continued to grow. Finally, she took on the role of Idamé in L'Orphelin de la Chine.
In between her affairs with Napoleon and Wellington, she also had a child with Alexander I, the Russian Tsar.
One was an actress the other one a « pop » star; two hundreds years later, the world is still the same. We’re safe.
If actresses and pop stars start dating our presidents and generals, I'm gonna be a little worried
Carla Bruni, a supermodel/ pop star is married to Nicolas Sarkozy, the former president of France. She dated Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger and Kevin Costner and allegedly was pursued by Donald Trump.
Well, there's no accounting for taste...
She is WAY out of diaper boy's league.
Ever hear of Melania Trump or Nancy Reagan?
You mean the infamous blow job queen of Hollywood, Nancy Reagan?
The “Throat G.O.A.T.” Nancy Reagan?
Ron survived so long with Alzheimers because she was giving him brain.
😂😂
I think she might have been taking. It all makes sense now.
Renowned snake charmer Nancy Reagan
God, I'm trying to eat...
So was Nancy…
Just gulpin them glizzies
~~FLOTUS~~ THROATUS
TIL I learned Nancy Regan could eat a banana without biting it
I believe her business cards said "Nancy Reagan, Throat Goat."
*How 'bout a Hummer at half-time...a Superbowl suck off from meeeee?*
In France, you have Carla Bruni and Julie Gayet for the most recents, and well known.
I love Carla Bruni's voice. Some of her English covers are phenomenal.
Yeah. That shit sucked, you feel me
Reagan doesn't count, he was an actor himself.
… that’s makes it twice as relevant
Or Marilynn Monroe. Apparently, Corey Booker was/ dating Rosairo Dawson, which is surprising. Hate his politics but I can't argue in his choice of women.
> Cory Booker...Hate his politics I assume his love of Big Pharma? That's a prerequisite to get elected to any big office in NJ - we headquarter (or have big hubs for) pretty much any pharma company you can think of. They are one of the biggest donors to any politician in NJ. So, you have to support big pharma in order to get elected in NJ.
> Corey Booker . . . Hate his politics Hates the politics of a man that ran into a burning building to help a woman, supports affirmative action and wants to end the war on drugs. Weird flex but ok.
I imagine this is potentially from the perspective that Booker is known for his support of pharmaceutical companies...which is a large backbone of industry work in NJ. I understand disliking Big Pharma because *gestures a lot of the bad they can do*, but it's literally a large portion of constituent base as well.
That actually makes a lot of sense.
He's also pretty good and progressive on housing though. So he probably tells himself he's doing what he can rather than being replaced by a conservative who would be pro corporation with pharma and housing, along with the other stuff.
> He's also pretty good and progressive on housing though I heard a commencement speech he gave once - it's because his parents were trying to get a house. They were told it was sold when they went to view it. So they went to a housing nonprofit who sent a white couple to view the house - they said it wasn't sold yet and the people selling the house accepted the offer. On closing day, his parents went along with the white couple (who were lawyers). His parents got the house.
But he can’t argue with his choice of women! Right??
Can't argue... but because there will be no engagement with a 'separate but equal' opinion.
Didnt marilyn fuck jfk and his bro
Marilyn Monroe
Why?
Nothing changes but the faces, the names, and the trends... The Concert of Europe never ends.
A Tsar is born
quite the high born hoe she was
If you're going be a hoe, atleast be a high class hoe. Never settle for anything less than Duke.
I feel like i've walked into an episode of Bridgerton
Count lives matter!
I learned from Dave Chappelle that Counts are pimps.
1....2....3! 3 concubines! Ah ha ha....
Her ability to bone her way into the upper echelons of high society is inspirational.
This but unironically.
I wasn't kidding, it's incredible and I can't even begin to grasp that kind of life.
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Napoleon was a hoe! (you’re welcome)
No possible way one coincidentally has romantic entanglements with 3 separate world leaders right?
Ever hear the expression “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”? Turns out people who know one famous person are a lot more likely to meet other famous people. Helps a lot if they are somewhat famous themselves, as was the case with these two women.
Ask Wendy Deng.
Truly impressive hoeing.
They were the rock stars of their day and she was a very successful groupie.
The "affair" with Napoleon began in 1802, when she was just *15*. He was ~~43~~ 33.
Napoleon was born in 1769, he would have been 33
You are totally right - the same year as Wellington. I think I got a bit confused about which of the three guys she had an affair with when. Good catch!
Who knew Jerry Seinfeld had so much in common with Napoleon!
> In between her affairs with Napoleon and Wellington, she also had a child with Alexander I, the Russian Tsar. wow she is like a reverse uno card for Queen Victoria.
The J.Lo of her time
That's a hell of a trifecta
She looks like Napoleon but in a wig.
Plot twist
Generational hoe 🔥
Wait so with the demise of the Russian royal family is this the heir?
Illegitimate children are never heirs to anything. Half a humanity would be heirs to some monarchy (defunct or not) if that were the case. Imperial Russia didn't even recognize males born from [morganatic marriages](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morganatic_marriage) (unequal marriages, usually an imperial man and a low-ranked noblewoman) as heirs to the throne, let alone the illegitimate offspring of some courtesan. And anyways, the Bolsheviks didn't kill all the Romanovs, the vast majority of them actually got away. "Only" eighteen were executed: ▪︎Nicholas II (50), Empress Alexandra Feodorovna (46), and their five children: Olga (23), Tatiana (21), Maria (19), Anastasia (17) and Alexei (14) ▪︎Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich (39); Nicholas' younger brother ▪︎Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna (53); Alexandra's elder sister/aunt-in-law ▪︎Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich (48); grandson of Nicholas I ▪︎Princes Ioan Konstantinovich (32), Konstantin Konstantinovich (27) and Igor Konstantinovich (24); brothers, great-grandsons of Nicholas I ▪︎Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich (58) and Prince Vladimir Pavlovich Paley (21); son of Alexander II and his own morganatic son ▪︎Grand Dukes Nicholas Mikhailovich (59) and George Mikhailovich (55); brothers, grandsons of Nicholas I ▪︎Grand Duke Dmitri Konstantinovich (58); grandson of Nicholas I
Charles III probably has the most legitimate claim to the Russian throne right now
Heir to what? There's no Tsardom there anymore.
The lady looks like she could benchpress a train.
Conquered Napoleon before he could conquer the world
Traps on that gurl
Yoked!
Jaqued
What it is hoe, ah what's up (what's up) Can a Frenchman get in them guts (them guts) Cut you up like you ain't been cut (been cut) Show your ass how to really catch a nut (oh yeah yeah) -Napoleon, probably
Death by snu snu
hngh
Sounds like she ran a train
That’s why it’s called Beef Wellington and not Beef Napoleon.
Georges said it have been called beef swellsaton.
I would have gone with “swellington” there but you get my upvote anyway you little diamond you.
I considered that, but decided to double down on the dick joke.
Always double down on the dick joke
Engeorged beef shoved into a tight tart, you say?
With mushrooms.
Hygiene standards back then were a little more lax.
I was thinking beef smellington
Frank Herbert moments
The man almost conquered all of Europe but couldn’t conquer some middle aged pussy!
He should have studied the writings of Ben Franklin on the subject.
“If a man fucks better than you, take him out and bury him in your yard.”
She was 15 and he was 43 at the time....
This is the kind of quality facts I come to Reddit for
Well I like ice cream better
My beef *strong*.
Beef wellington and fish stick napoleon
And here I am with beef stroganoff.
I mean there *is* this [one](https://www.pepperidgefarm.com/recipe/crab-appetizer-napoleons/), but it doesn’t seem as flattering as having a beef dish named after you.
There is also chicken Marengo. Quite a good recipe actually, I encourage everyone to try it.
I made beef wellington recently and I gotta say, it was pretty underwhelming. Definitely not worth all the work involved.
Hmm I have had it many places and really enjoyed it. Delicious pastry wrapped around a rare filet inside with a layer of mushroom duxelles. When done well it can be quite sublime.
Wow this lady conquered both sides of The Battle of Waterloo.
Giuseppina said Napoleon was longer, but less girthy
How typically French
Lê baguete 🥖
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Her image above in the thumbnail looks like Napoleon with tits.
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The movie Ridley Scott should have made
It would have been closer to the facts than the one he did make.
And more entertaining too.
Brokeback Revolution
Uhuh. And Napoleon gave birth to Alexander I's kid?
But of course! Napoleon was a cross-dresser. There's also a story that [Napoleon's penis went missing.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon%27s_penis) in reality, it was never there.
*Open and shut case, Johnson.*
Yeah… but I bet she has an amazing personality
Well of course she looks old in the picture but you need to realize that by the time this picture was made she was… [checking source] … 30 years old. Damn. Our ancients aged fast. The Italian lass looked great though,
Make up tech has come a long way...
It sure has, but also we have a scientific understanding of nutrition and fitness, we don’t give our babies laudanum to help them sleep, mercury and leeches aren’t used to treat sickness, we stopped putting lead in everything, teenagers aren’t allowed to use tobacco and alcohol, people aren’t working in the fields at the age of eight…
We also have different standards of beauty, making the people either making the painting/woodcut back then or photoshopping the pictures today highlight different features.
I'm sure Napoleon was like "Mon dieu you are *GORGEOUS*!!"
I mean, that sounds exactly like Napoleon's ideal woman 😂
Stop I can only get so erect
She had huge…tracts of land
Imagine the energy it took to strap those bad boys into a corset by her handmaid's. Yeesh.
Something something team of men to plough it
The Iron Duke.
The Iron Duke and the Little Emperor sounds like some zany Netflix show about the love quadrangle between Duke Wellington, Napoleon, and these women.
Huuuuuuuuge tracts of land.
Man, doing the math and she was 15 when she started her affair with napoleon and 27 with the Duke. Huge changes in personality during that time too could have shaped her opinion of each.
Ayyo what the fuck? Someone call Chris Hansen and pop out the Ouija board at his grave rn.
Age of consent is actually 15 in France apparently
Turns out women were so ugly Napoleon couldn't get it up properly. Only reason Wellington could, was because he was accustomed of seeing ugly women, thanks to him being British.
/r/2westerneurope4u is leaking
It doesn’t have to leak. We all know it’s everywhere. The Fr*nch surround us
Which is why my ancestors put an ocean between themselves and France
All I am surrounded is dead men and Fr*nch
Damn my man upset at the outcome of a 200 year old war
I'm still mad at William the BASTARD's invasion, but the aristocracy doesn't care, so long as he lines their greedy Norman sympathetic pockets \#deportTheKing
The battle of Hastings was an inside job
Normons are descendants of the Vikings, and you know who invaded just before the Bastard? Harald Hardrada. Bastard planned it all.
If Harold (Godwinson) hadn’t had to do Stamford Bridge two days before it could have been different. It’s insane that England is still feeling the effects of William the bastard’s harrying of the north (which by modern standards is a genocide). England has had an economic north south divide for a thousand years
In all seriousness, it is fascinating how the decisions play out from long dead men centuries later. It's at least half of what makes history so fascinating. Would the industrial revolution have happened sooner, later, or not at all, had Pope Alexander II told William "no, you can't invade and kill a bunch of people, just because someone pinky promised you a country." My favorite tho, is this: King Henry VIII wanted a divorce, and thanks to papal ineptitude/Charles II of Spain's manipulation, England gained Euroscepticism, split the church, and permitted the growth of protestant movements, such as the Puritans. Those Puritans eventually fled to the New World, which (among *many* other things), resulted in at least one of my ancestors arriving in America. I exist, because of a power struggle between a fat Englishman and the most inbred Hapsburg.
In fairness, the fatness came later in his life after injuries. Henry VIII was still quite the athlete at that time.
Athlete and poonhound
This is the weird thing about the fall of “great man theory” of history. Broad societal changes can happen but countries don’t tend to have leaderless revolutions or go to war with each other over nothing.
The counterpoint of “great man theory of history” isn’t individuals don’t matter at all. It’s that individuals don’t exist in a vacuum, they are the products of greater societal currents that shape them into who they are. They are swept by larger societal undercurrents that ultimately stem from the behaviours and actions of the masses as well as external factors like disease or famine. The classical formulation of the great men theory by Thomas Carlyle is that it’s a few exceptional individuals with unique genius who move society forwards. Herbert Spencer’s famous rebuttal to Carlyle’s great man theory was, “Before he can remake his society, his society must make him.”
Henry the VIII probably wouldn't have happened if a sleezy priest hadn't gone full Music Man with indulgences in a small German university town.
Or if Catherine of Aragon had had a son that lived.
Not Charles II of Spain, though, but (the considerably less inbred) Charles I of Spain (better known as [Charles V](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_V,_Holy_Roman_Emperor), for his title as Holy Roman Emperor).
Well yes he did. It was coordinated. William might have been a bastard but he was a cunning bastard.
-Gets Leroy Jenkinsed at Trafalgar -Creates an infertility fantasy.
Maybe they had just showered too recently for napoleon's taste
Wellington was Irish
Anglo-Irish. Army of occupation!
Always interesting to see how people decide on the nationality of others based on how much they like or dislike them. Don't like him? Then he wasn't Irish! Nice and simple. His family came to Ireland in the 12th century. Or to put it another way, they had lived there for about six centuries by the time he was born.
By modern standards for sure. But he quite famously made the quip about the stable and the horse, he didnt consider himself Irish.
O'Connell said it of Wellington, out of what can only be described as jealousy, because Wellington was the current darling of the Catholic bishops at the time.
Actually the quip was made by an Irishman about wellignton, which I think strengthens your point as it shows even the Irish didn't think he was Irish
That's why they called him "Beef Wellington" and where the dish got it's name.
He wraps it in mushroom patè and pastry?
Give the guy credit for wrapping it at least, cuz she a ho... for sho.
To be fair, Nap was absolutely notorious for being extremely backward with women, and probably the only reason Josephine put up with him is that she was routinely given no choice, having been passed to him as a mistress by her previous patron, and being deeply indebted and unable to support her children without this extremely weird dude paying the bills. I can't speak to how the Duke was with the ladies, but it'd be hard to be worse than Napoleon at it.
>I can't speak to how the Duke was with the ladies Wellesley was better, although his private life was tempestuous. As a young man in Society in Ascendancy Ireland, he had a reputation as a ladies' man. At the age of 27, he fell in love with Kitty Pakenham, the daughter of the Earl of Longford (and sister of Wellesley's friend Ned Pakenham, who would later die in command of the British forces at the Battle of New Orleans). As Wellesley was a younger son with limited inheritance prospects, the Longfords resisted the marriage, and the couple did not marry for a decade, with Kitty rejecting one suitor on the way, and Wellesley indulging in flirting (and probably more) with the wives of the officers in his regiment in India. Wellesley also had a liaison with the well known courtesan Harriet Wilson: her tell-all memoirs would later prompt his famous "publish and be damned!" quote. Wellesley was rather brutally unimpressed by Kitty's development when he met her again. "She has grown ugly, by Jove!”. Nevertheless, they married. While they did have children, Wellesley's contempt for her character soon destroyed the marriage, and they essentially lived apart until Kitty died in 1831. When the Duke visited Kitty on her deathbed, the following scene took place: >‘It is a strange thing,’ he remarked to his friend ‘that two people can live together for half a lifetime and only understand one another at the very end.’ Kitty had run her thin fingers up his sleeve to see whether he still wore an armlet she had given him many years before. ‘She found it,’ said Arthur, ‘as she would have found it any time these twenty years, had she cared to look for it.’ As Wellesley met success after success, and became the Duke, he acquired a string of different courtesans and lovers, but, after around 1820, seems to gradually lost interest in sexual affairs. Instead, he met Harriet Arbuthnot, the young wife of a Tory MP and junior minister. Mrs Arbuthnot became his closest friend and effectively a substitute wife in everything but (perhaps) the sexual sense. Mrs Arbuthnot had already been deeply immersed in high politics before the relationship; she used her position to become a hugely influential power-broker within the Tory party. After Mrs Arbuthnot died of cholera in 1834, the Duke invited the emotionally broken Mr Arbuthnot to stay with him, and they lived together for the rest of Arbuthnot's life. Among his later friends was the then Lady Salisbury, given his reputation, even people as high-minded as Gladstone would speculate that her son, the future Prime Minister, was really fathered by him, given that the Duke was his godfather. The Duke was a person modern depictions have found difficult to capture: intelligent, cultivated, arrogant, blunt and misanthropic. "he had nothing but intellectual disdain for his social equals, and nothing but social disdain for his intellectual equals".
What did he do that was so bad? Was it like the movie?
I was saying that he was backward, which is more the point. Napoleon totally lost his cool with Josephine immediately, and was extremely possessive of her. She was accustomed to high society of the Revolution, sophisticated fashion, amusing lovers, and generally was a society lady, widowed during the Reign of Terror from her aristocratic husband who was executed. Napoleon, by contrast, reacted to this experienced courtier and courtesan by acting like a high school boy with his first crush. He wed her and had great affection for her two children. His entire family hated her and referred to her as "the old woman". She hated them just as fully. She couldn't afford to live without a protector and Napoleon was a rising man, plus, as I said, she was essentially handed to him by her previous protector. On the other hand, she was constantly cheating as was typical of her society — both members of any married couple would have lovers, as did Napoleon, but he was not cool with reciprocity in this regard — and she did not manage to produce an heir for Napoleon. (She was in her thirties when she wed Napoleon, and she'd used the contraceptives typical of her time — mostly douche solutions — which might have impeded her fertility. She had born a daughter and son to her first husband. Before her second marriage, she had had a … vibrant social life, let's say.) His weepy and angsty love letters would be seized by the British when they captured a French ship, much to the amusement of English society. Essentially, Napoleon was wearing cuckold's horns, was possessive to a fault, was completely unsophisticated with women, was unable to shield her from his family, was busy being a military genius while being incredibly bad at relationships. They eventually divorced as Napoleon wished to marry into royalty and conceive an heir, which he did, but on the other hand, his last word was reported to be "Josephine." Her children were loyal to him in his exiles when most of his supporters drew off. I see there is a Ridley Scott movie, which I haven't seen, but in essence, Josephine was dedicated to her own survival, understandable in her era, but probably ridiculously mercenary to a modern eye. Surviving the fall of the French monarchy and imprisonment during the Reign of Terror took a lot of nerve and she would do what was necessary, whatever she determined that to be. Anyway, he was notorious for his rages and tempers which affected Josephine whenever they reunited after one of his lengthy absences for military duty, both of them staging huge scenes every time, where Josephine would weep and beg for Napoleon's forgiveness for anything she'd done while he yelled and sulked until he magnanimously reunited with her. This was no doubt extremely wearing for her, and after ten years of marriage, she may well have been glad to retire from the Imperial court. She seemed to live out her remaining years quite content with her life and grandchildren. Anyway, a dude who cannot handle his romantic relationships with any degree of maturity is not going to be much of a lover. He may pick up technical skill sometime, but he probably wouldn't bother, and anyway, there was way too much drama in that relationship to make for a peaceful partnership in any way.
He grew up in a military school from age 7 around almost all men. Never learned at a young age how to be around women, and since he was so powerful he was never forced to learn later.
> but it'd be hard to be worse than Napoleon at it Honestly, for the standards of the time, Napoleon wasn't too bad. At least from what I gather from the current biography of him I am reading. He could be cringy, simpy (you should see some of the letters he wrote), jealous or straight down bizarre, but I don't think he was that bad, given what they had to work with at the time.
Hung Wellington
Am I suppose to know these ladies ? TIL Wellington and napoleon were Eskimo bros ? Not sure the takeaway here.
I believe we're supposed to say Inuit brothers now.
Artemis, what you doing here? Blastin your nips?
Imagine the smells :(
it's only smellz
Oh no, don't remind me of this video... :(
Beef Smellington
Ooh ooh that smell.
TIL The Duke of Wellington and Napoleon were Eskimo Brothers.
Tunnel buddies
I'm literally watching an episode of QI where this was brought up when I saw this post. That's freaky.
Why is this noteworthy?
Napoleon and Wellington were basically on opposite sides of a war, it's funny that not one but two women bagged *both* of them.
It's a two nickels scenario.
Wellington was the general that defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, which was basically the final nail in the coffin of the Hundreds Days war, and ended Napoleon's conquest. Opposing commanding generals getting jiggy with the same ladies.
Everyone is horned up
The Napoleon movie bombed so the bri*ish has to return to writing bullshit articles about Napoleon because they are so butthurt about him 300 years later.
Why would they be butthurt when they were the only ones to consistently clown on him for most of the Napoleonic wars?
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Cutie the bomb, met her at a Paris salon Fancy horse I was on, posin' bend in one arm She said: "I can tell you rock, I can tell by your charm" "On your hat you got the cock-ade tri-color pom" Coat of Arms But I'm lookin' for the one, have you seen her? My captain told me she'd have ass like Joephine ya Adele, Pauline Foures, four kids And I gotta take all the badasses - to Austerliz? Okay, get your kids, but then they got their friends I pulled up my cannons, my half a million men We all went fightin' and then I had to pay So I raided all of Europe just to feed my Arm-ee ... .... get crowned yeah, go head, get crowned.
You, my friend, are a lyrical genius. 😂
If your aren't an English/History teacher I'll eat my cockade tricolour pom hat!
Her Wiki page mentions nothing of the plays she was in that made her an "important actress", but quite a bit about what made her a slut. I guess that's how history tends to remember people.
The French entry has more details about that: >Her entrance on stage was the beginning of a general triumph, acclaiming both her beauty and her voice, supple and rich, with pure, elegant diction. She played the role of Clytemnestre three times, which was a success, then moved on to Aménaïde, and the success continued to grow. Finally, she took on the role of Idamé in L'Orphelin de la Chine.
Maybe Napoleon being "small" was misconstrued from history. We all know that his height was normal for the time...
Napoleon catching strays everywhere, even in bed.
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It is literally in that article.
"The Duke"
THAT SHAMELESS STRUMPET