On the day of the battle nothing gave warning of this sunken lane flanking the ridge of Mont-Saint-Jean; a deep trench running along the escarpment, a hidden furrow in the earth, invisible and therefore terrible.
Hugo spends the bulk of this chapter communicating just how jovial and confident Napoleon was in the lead up to this battle. From praising the “chessboard” he found arrayed before him to talking about how he was going to teach Wellington a “lesson”, Napoleon seems to have the perspective that he knows everything he needs to know and that from that vantage, his victory is ensured.
There are many different angles that we could take when approaching the problem of overconfidence, but the one I want to point out is the one that Hugo ends the chapter with. Hugo let’s us know that there was this feature to the battlefield that napoleon was about to step onto that he was completely blind to. Apparently, this sunken lane, this hidden furrow was a complete unknown to the French and as such, was something easily exploited by their enemies.
There are always unknowns. We will never be fully rid of them. The problem with over-confidence is that we misunderstand the scope of our knowns, resolve all of the unknowns we are aware of, and leave no room for the “unknown unknowns” that tend to hide in the cracks and crevices exposed by the limits of our knowledge.
Napoleon worked on an assumption that the battlefield was a known and he created a plan that hinged on that information. In the end this meant that he launched into a situation where the “map” he carried did not match reality.
One response to this could be an attitude where we approach everything with trepidation. “I must be prepared for the worst at all costs!” This approach can lead to inaction. I believe there is space for a more nuanced approach - we make our plans but we have contingencies and we are constantly scanning for new information. We can be confident. We can take decisive action. We can do those things while still leaving an opening for the reality that we might be wrong.