Excluding Napoleon due to a "winning your campaigns" criteria is a bit silly. You're weighting the loss at the end of his career instead of fairly judging the win/loss record on his entire portfolio of two decades of campaigns.

His grand strategic strategy that aided him in winning many battles resulted, in the end, in the massive career defining loss.

"[it is the] Berezina" is something us Frenchies say when something is a total and utter catastrophe, and it refers to Napoleon's disastrous loss in Russia. Usually Napoleon is remembered more positively for what he did in the legal area with the Civil Code, which remains the basis for civil law in France to this day.

Not only France, but most of Europe, and by virtue of European colonial empires, most of the world except for the British Empire.

The Civil Code, built a lot on Roman law, is very backward concerning the place of women in society, like the obligation for a wife to secure her husband's permission to work and all kind of inequalities.

None of that is enforced today, those are stale laws if they still exist.

That seems quite unwarranted, if two generals fight then success is correlated with the quality of general but not solely determined by it, often the better general will lose simply because the opponent has more resources.

The qualities of a general will be demonstrated both in wins and losses, and whether he's victorious in the end tells more about the military power of a country or king, not about the quality of the general.

> That seems quite unwarranted, if two generals fight then success is correlated with the quality of general but not solely determined by it, often the better general will lose simply because the opponent has more resources.

Right. Indeed, efforts have been made to quantify this that take into account the contribution of other factors (e.g., T.N. Dupuy’s Quantified Judgement Method of Analysis which check later as developed into the Tactical Numerical Deterministic Model.) And Napoleon seems to have come out pretty outstanding, as I recall, in analysis using the QJMA.

One’s skill as a general is only one, relatively minor factor to success on the grand strategic level. Manpower, economic resources, will to fight, and so forth all factor in as well. Imperial France, the Confederacy, and Nazi Germany were all significantly outclassed in almost all of these factors by the time they were defeated.