For all the extravagant jewelry and fine dining the ruthless Napoleon loved to shower himself in, his troops basically died as disposable slaves.

Binder says. “We have these paintings in the museums of soldiers in shiny armors, of Napoleon on his horse, fit young men marching into battle.”

“But in the end, when we look at the human remains, we see an entirely different picture,” she says.

It’s a picture of lifelong malnutrition, broken feet from marching too far, too quickly, and bodies riddled with disease.

Napoleon was truly a horrible human. The Grande Armée marched without adequate supply lines because his plan was literally to rape and pillage the land—as if his soldiers could sustain themselves while marching hundreds of miles into hostile territory. When Russia came up empty, hundreds of thousands of his own men starved and froze to death. Meanwhile, his baggage train advanced and retreated with his expansive silver dinnerware and fresh steaks.

Scientists are thus proving a subtext of the well-known disasters, that Napoleon never was building a professional army. He was instead rapidly extracting every ounce possible from expendable human material in a hopeless imperial ambition that couldn’t last.

Authoritarian systems consistently demonstrate this pattern of toxic leadership that treats humans as disposable, while maintaining elaborate fake performances of power and legitimacy to hide their dangerous extraction.

The gap that emerges between the story telling of museum paintings, and the facts from modern bone pathology, isn’t just about artistic license; it’s evidence of horribly corrupted power systematically erasing human cost in projects and logs.

Devastating supply line failure killing his own men wasn’t from logistical incompetence—it was a strategy of “efficiency” coming to bear. The fail faster doctrine of Napoleon, in fact failed faster, to the tune of 400,000 of his own soldiers destroyed for… nothing.

Napoleon is still framed falsely as a military genius rather than as mass murderer, someone who burned everything he touched, destroyed human lives at an industrial scale and then “efficiently” lost it all. His “strong man” propaganda continues to work centuries later, which should make us deeply skeptical of how current authoritarian systems (e.g. Trump) present their own real costs.