Honestly? He gets a bum rap by history for two reasons: he was guilty of flagrant, wholescale nepotism on an international scale, and he was French. His biggest flaw was a need to put all of his brothers on thrones, which led to him engaging battles that were irrelevant.

Louis Bonaparte was probably the only one of the brothers besides Napoleon, and he wound up with Aaron Burr as his landlord in New Jersey. They supposedly had long and loud dinner conversations about how history done them wrong. I would *kill* for a time portal to get a transcript.

Agreed. I think those who call him the 'Gravedigger of the French Revolution' need to look to people like Marat, Robespierre, and the Jacobins/Montagnards in general. Napoleon became the Revolution, and that's his genius. One of them, anyway.

During his attack on Jaffa alone, Napoleon "ordered the garrison and 1,400 prisoners to be executed by bayonet or drowning to save bullets... Men, women and children were robbed and murdered for three days" (Wikipedia; doubtless a right-wing revisionist smear job). Honestly, if you have even one person drowned or bayoneted, you are pretty much a piece of shit.
All those forgotten, nameless illiterates who were raped or maimed or murdered or bereaved by this man's soldiers would probably take exception to the characterization of Napoleon as a "cool dude" who got a "bum rap".