Methodology

How this site knows what it knows — and how it says what it doesn't.

The certainty labels

Every factual claim of consequence on this site carries one of these labels:

• Documented — fixed by a primary record: civil registers, official acts, treaties, Napoleon’s own letters and proclamations, the text of the will. Example: the coronation date, the “Impossible is not French” letter.
• Reported — recorded by contemporaries (memoirs, witness accounts) with no surviving autograph or official document. Example: the Pyramids address, the deathbed words. Where witnesses disagree, the page says so.
• Attributed — commonly credited to Napoleon, but no contemporary source has been located in the sources checked for this site. Example: “Victory belongs to the most persevering.” Included because the lines are famous; never presented as verified.
• Conventional — the standard dating or period label historians use, where the underlying event is documented but minor variations exist in how it is bounded (e.g., “the Hundred Days”).
• Disputed — the evidence genuinely points more than one way, and scholarship has not settled it. Example: the exact circumstances of Berthier’s death.
• Misattributed — credited to Napoleon with no contemporary source, and in some cases traceable to another origin or demonstrably modern. Collected on Sayings so they can be recognized.

The labels are the site’s contract with the reader. A page may be wrong; it may not be vague about how sure it is.

The quotation policy

1. Documented first. A quotation is only quoted as Napoleon’s without qualification if it appears in his correspondence, an official act, or the will.
2. Reported with its channel. A memoir quotation names the memoirist (Las Cases, Montholon, Jomini) so the reader can discount the witness.
3. Attributed with the gap stated. If no contemporary source was found, the entry says so explicitly.
4. Nothing invented. No quotation has been composed, modernized beyond standard translation, or given a source it does not have. French originals are given as they appear in the cited source.
5. Misattributions are quarantined. Famous fake quotes live in their own section, labeled, so they are never mistaken for the real record.

Dating conventions

• All dates are Gregorian unless stated otherwise.
• Revolutionary-calendar dates (13 Vendémiaire, 18 Brumaire) are always given with their Gregorian equivalents, converted per the standard tables.
• Battlefield and treaty dates are the conventional ones used in military and diplomatic histories.
• Uncertain or approximate dates are marked (“c.”, “around”, “late”) — never silently rounded.

Numbers

Army strengths and casualty figures for the Napoleonic wars are historians’ estimates, and they disagree. This site gives the commonly cited ranges and says they are estimates. Napoleon’s own bulletins are never used for casualty claims — they are propaganda documents, and the site treats them as such.

Neutrality

Napoleon is a contested figure — liberator to some, tyrant to others, and the scholarship itself is divided (see Legend vs. Scholarship). This site’s policy:

• Report what happened; do not celebrate or condemn in the narrative voice.
• Present contested judgments (the ruler’s verdict, the death controversy) with the positions attributed, not as the site’s own conclusion.
• Keep the legend and the record in separate, labeled containers.

What the site will not do

• Invent quotations, dates, citations, or scholarly consensus.
• Present a memoir’s claim as a document’s fact.
• Use AI-generated imagery for historical content (generated art appears only for the stream’s dramatization character, labeled as such — see the Stream page).
• Treat the absence of evidence as evidence. “No contemporary source found” means exactly that — not “he never said it.”

Correction policy

This site expects to be corrected. If you can produce a primary source for:

• any quotation labeled Attributed,
• any item in the misattributions list on Sayings,
• any date or fact labeled Disputed or Conventional,

the relevant page will be updated, the label changed, and the new source cited. A correction that removes a beloved fake quote is a feature, not a bug.

Source notes

• The methodology above is the site’s own editorial policy, written 2026-09-26. It governs all twelve pages.
• Certainty labels are applied per-claim on Timeline, Sayings, and Campaigns; the narrative pages (Biography, People) state the basis of disputed points inline.
• Image policy: real public-domain images for historical content; AI-generated art only for the dramatization character, always labeled — full provenance in the image credits on this page.
• Stream honesty: the Stream page’s player configuration is empty (no channel ID, no video ID) until the owner supplies one; the build’s QA asserts this on every run.