Napoleon I
emperor of France
French in full Napoléon Bonaparte, original Italian Napoleone
Buonaparte, byname the Corsican or the Little Corporal, French byname Le
Corse or Le Petit Caporal
born August 15, 1769, Ajaccio, Corsica
died May 5, 1821, St. Helena Island
Overview
French general and emperor (1804–15).
Born to parents of Italian ancestry, he was educated in France and
became an army officer in 1785. He fought in the French Revolutionary
Wars and was promoted to brigadier general in 1793. After victories
against the Austrians in northern Italy, he negotiated the Treaty of
Campo Formio (1797). He attempted to conquer Egypt (1798–99) but was
defeated by the British under Horatio Nelson in the Battle of the Nile.
The Coup of 18–19 Brumaire brought him to power in 1799, and he
installed a military dictatorship, with himself as First Consul. He
introduced numerous reforms in government, including the Napoleonic
Code, and reconstructed the French education system. He negotiated the
Concordat of 1801 with the pope. After victory against the Austrians at
the Battle of Marengo (1800), he embarked on the Napoleonic Wars. The
formation of coalitions of European countries against him led Napoleon
to declare France a hereditary empire and to crown himself emperor in
1804. He won his greatest military victory at the Battle of Austerlitz
against Austria and Russia in 1805. He defeated Prussia at the Battles
of Jena and Auerstedt (1806) and Russia at the Battle of Friedland
(1807). He then imposed the Treaty of Tilsit on Russia, ending the
fourth coalition of countries against France. Despite his loss to
Britain at the Battle of Trafalgar, he sought to weaken British commerce
and established the Continental System of port blockades. He
consolidated his European empire until 1810 but became embroiled in the
Peninsular War (1808–14). He led the French army into Austria and
defeated the Austrians at the Battle of Wagram (1809), signing the
Treaty of Vienna. To enforce the Treaty of Tilsit, he led an army of
about 600,000 into Russia in 1812, winning the Battle of Borodino, but
was forced to retreat from Moscow with disastrous losses. His army
greatly weakened, he was met by a strong coalition of allied powers, who
defeated him at the Battle of Leipzig (1813). After Paris was taken by
the allied coalition, Napoleon was forced to abdicate in 1814 and was
exiled to the island of Elba. In 1815 he mustered a force and returned
to France to reestablish himself as emperor for the Hundred Days, but he
was decisively defeated at the Battle of Waterloo. He was sent into
exile on the remote island of St. Helena, where he died six years later.
One of the most celebrated figures in history, Napoleon revolutionized
military organization and training and brought about reforms that
permanently influenced civil institutions in France and throughout
Europe.
Main
French general, first consul (1799–1804), and emperor of the French
(1804–1814/15), one of the most celebrated personages in the history of
the West. He revolutionized military organization and training;
sponsored the Napoleonic Code, the prototype of later civil-law codes;
reorganized education; and established the long-lived Concordat with the
papacy.
Napoleon’s many reforms left a lasting mark on the institutions of
France and of much of western Europe. But his driving passion was the
military expansion of French dominion, and, though at his fall he left
France little larger than it had been at the outbreak of the Revolution
in 1789, he was almost unanimously revered during his lifetime and until
the end of the Second Empire under his nephew Napoleon III as one of
history’s great heroes.
Napoleon was born on Corsica shortly after the island’s cession to
France by the Genoese. He was the fourth, and second surviving, child of
Carlo Buonaparte, a lawyer, and his wife, Letizia Ramolino. His father’s
family, of ancient Tuscan nobility, had emigrated to Corsica in the 16th
century.
Carlo Buonaparte had married the beautiful and strong-willed Letizia
when she was only 14 years old; they eventually had eight children to
bring up in very difficult times. The French occupation of their native
country was resisted by a number of Corsicans led by Pasquale Paoli.
Carlo Buonaparte joined Paoli’s party, but, when Paoli had to flee,
Buonaparte came to terms with the French. Winning the protection of the
governor of Corsica, he was appointed assessor for the judicial district
of Ajaccio in 1771. In 1778 he obtained the admission of his two eldest
sons, Joseph and Napoleon, to the Collège d’Autun.
A Corsican by birth, heredity, and childhood associations, Napoleon
continued for some time after his arrival in Continental France to
regard himself a foreigner; yet from age nine he was educated in France
as other Frenchmen were. While the tendency to see in Napoleon a
reincarnation of some 14th-century Italian condottiere is an
overemphasis on one aspect of his character, he did, in fact, share
neither the traditions nor the prejudices of his new country: remaining
a Corsican in temperament, he was first and foremost, through both his
education and his reading, a man of the 18th century.
Napoleon was educated at three schools: briefly at Autun, for five
years at the military college of Brienne, and finally for one year at
the military academy in Paris. It was during Napoleon’s year in Paris
that his father died of a stomach cancer in February 1785, leaving his
family in straitened circumstances. Napoleon, although not the eldest
son, assumed the position of head of the family before he was 16. In
September he graduated from the military academy, ranking 42nd in a
class of 58.
He was made second lieutenant of artillery in the regiment of La
Fère, a kind of training school for young artillery officers. Garrisoned
at Valence, Napoleon continued his education, reading much, in
particular works on strategy and tactics. He also wrote Lettres sur la
Corse (“Letters on Corsica”), in which he reveals his feeling for his
native island. He went back to Corsica in September 1786 and did not
rejoin his regiment until June 1788. By that time the agitation that was
to culminate in the French Revolution had already begun. A reader of
Voltaire and of Rousseau, Napoleon believed that a political change was
imperative, but, as a career officer, he seems not to have seen any need
for radical social reforms.
The Revolutionary period » The Jacobin years
When in 1789 the National Assembly, which had convened to establish a
constitutional monarchy, allowed Paoli to return to Corsica, Napoleon
asked for leave and in September joined Paoli’s group. But Paoli had no
sympathy for the young man, whose father had deserted his cause and whom
he considered to be a foreigner. Disappointed, Napoleon returned to
France, and in April 1791 he was appointed first lieutenant to the 4th
regiment of artillery, garrisoned at Valence. He at once joined the
Jacobin Club, a debating society initially favouring a constitutional
monarchy, and soon became its president, making speeches against nobles,
monks, and bishops. In September 1791 he got leave to go back to Corsica
again for three months. Elected lieutenant colonel in the national
guard, he soon fell out with Paoli, its commander in chief. When he
failed to return to France, he was listed as a deserter in January 1792.
But in April France declared war against Austria, and his offense was
forgiven.
Apparently through patronage, Napoleon was promoted to the rank of
captain but did not rejoin his regiment. Instead he returned to Corsica
in October 1792, where Paoli was exercising dictatorial powers and
preparing to separate Corsica from France. Napoleon, however, joined the
Corsican Jacobins, who opposed Paoli’s policy. When civil war broke out
in Corsica in April 1793, Paoli had the Buonaparte family condemned to
“perpetual execration and infamy,” whereupon they all fled to France.
Napoleon Bonaparte, as he may henceforth be called (though the family
did not drop the spelling Buonaparte until after 1796), rejoined his
regiment at Nice in June 1793. In his Le Souper de Beaucaire (Supper at
Beaucaire), written at this time, he argued vigorously for united action
by all republicans rallied round the Jacobins, who were becoming
progressively more radical, and the National Convention, the
Revolutionary assembly that in the preceding fall had abolished the
monarchy.
At the end of August 1793, the National Convention’s troops had taken
Marseille but were halted before Toulon, where the royalists had called
in British forces. With the commander of the National Convention’s
artillery wounded, Bonaparte got the post through the commissioner to
the army, Antoine Saliceti, who was a Corsican deputy and a friend of
Napoleon’s family. Bonaparte was promoted to major in September and
adjutant general in October. He received a bayonet wound on December 16,
but on the next day the British troops, harassed by his artillery,
evacuated Toulon. On December 22 Bonaparte, age 24, was promoted to
brigadier general in recognition of his decisive part in the capture of
the town.
Augustin de Robespierre, the commissioner to the army, wrote to his
brother Maximilien, by then virtual head of the government and one of
the leading figures of the Reign of Terror, praising the “transcendent
merit” of the young republican officer. In February 1794 Bonaparte was
appointed commandant of the artillery in the French Army of Italy.
Robespierre fell from power in Paris on 9 Thermidor, year II (July 27,
1794). When the news reached Nice, Bonaparte, regarded as a protégé of
Robespierre, was arrested on a charge of conspiracy and treason. He was
freed in September but was not restored to his command.
The following March he refused an offer to command the artillery in
the Army of the West, which was fighting the counterrevolution in the
Vendée. The post seemed to hold no future for him, and he went to Paris
to justify himself. Life was difficult on half pay, especially as he was
carrying on an affair with Désirée Clary, daughter of a rich Marseille
businessman and sister of Julie, the bride of his elder brother, Joseph.
Despite his efforts in Paris, Napoleon was unable to obtain a
satisfactory command, because he was feared for his intense ambition and
for his relations with the Montagnards, the more radical members of the
National Convention. He then considered offering his services to the
sultan of Turkey.
The Revolutionary period » The Directory
Bonaparte was still in Paris in October 1795 when the National
Convention, on the eve of its dispersal, submitted the new constitution
of the year III of the First Republic to a referendum, together with
decrees according to which two-thirds of the members of the National
Convention were to be reelected to the new legislative assemblies. The
royalists, hoping that they would soon be able to restore the monarchy,
instigated a revolt in Paris to prevent these measures from being put
into effect. Paul Barras, who had been entrusted with dictatorial powers
by the National Convention, was unwilling to rely on the commander of
the troops of the interior; instead, knowing of Bonaparte’s services at
Toulon, he appointed him second in command. Thus, it was Napoleon who
shot down the columns of rebels marching against the National Convention
(13 Vendémiaire year IV; October 5, 1795), thereby saving the National
Convention and the republic.
Bonaparte became commander of the Army of the Interior and,
consequently, was henceforth aware of every political development in
France. He became the respected adviser on military matters to the new
government, the Directory. Also at this time, he came to know an
attractive Creole, Joséphine Tascher de La Pagerie, who was the widow of
General Alexandre de Beauharnais (guillotined during the Reign of
Terror), the mother of two children, and a woman of many love affairs.
From every point of view, a new life was opening for Bonaparte.
Having proved his loyalty to the Directory, he was appointed commander
in chief of the Army of Italy in March 1796. He had been trying to
obtain that post for several weeks so that he could personally conduct
part of the plan of campaign adopted by the Directory on his advice. He
married Joséphine on March 9 and left for the army two days later.
Arriving at his headquarters in Nice, Bonaparte found that his army,
which on paper consisted of 43,000 men, numbered scarcely 30,000
ill-fed, ill-paid, and ill-equipped men. On March 28, 1796, he made his
first proclamation to his troops:
Soldiers, you are naked, badly fed.…Rich provinces and great towns
will be in your power, and in them you will find honour, glory, wealth.
Soldiers of Italy, will you be wanting in courage and steadfastness?
He took the offensive on April 12 and successively defeated and
separated the Austrian and the Sardinian armies and then marched on
Turin. King Victor Amadeus III of Sardinia asked for an armistice; and,
at the peace treaty in Paris on May 15, Nice and Savoy, occupied by the
French since 1792, were annexed to France. Bonaparte continued the war
against the Austrians and occupied Milan but was held up at Mantua.
While his army was besieging this great fortress, he signed armistices
with the duke of Parma, with the duke of Modena, and finally with Pope
Pius VI.
At the same time, he took an interest in the political organization
of Italy. A plan for its “republicanization” by a group of Italian
“patriots” led by Filippo Buonarroti had to be shelved when Buonarroti
was arrested for complicity in François-Noël Babeuf’s conspiracy against
the Directory. Thereafter, Bonaparte, without discarding the Italian
patriots altogether, restricted their freedom of action. He set up a
republican regime in Lombardy but kept a close watch on its leaders, and
in October 1796 he created the Cisalpine Republic by merging Modena and
Reggio nell’Emilia with the papal states of Bologna and Ferrara occupied
by the French army. Then he sent an expedition to recover Corsica, which
the British had evacuated.
Austrian armies advanced four times from the Alps to relieve Mantua
but were defeated each time by Bonaparte. After the last Austrian
defeat, at Rivoli in January 1797, Mantua capitulated. Next he marched
on Vienna. He was about 60 miles (100 km) from that capital when the
Austrians sued for an armistice. By the preliminaries of peace, Austria
ceded the southern Netherlands to France and recognized the Lombard
republic but received in exchange some territory belonging to the old
Republic of Venice, which was partitioned between Austria, France, and
Lombardy. Bonaparte then consolidated and reorganized the northern
Italian republics and encouraged Jacobin—radical republican—propaganda
in Venetia. Some Italian patriots hoped that these developments would
soon lead to the formation of a single and indivisible “Italian
Republic” modeled on the French.
Meanwhile, Bonaparte grew uneasy at the successes of the royalists in
the French elections in the spring of 1797 and advised the Directory to
oppose them, if necessary, by force. He sent General Pierre Augereau to
Paris, along with several officers and men to back the coup d’état of 18
Fructidor, year V (September 4, 1797), which eliminated the royalists’
friends from the government and legislative councils and also enhanced
Bonaparte’s prestige. Thus, Bonaparte could conclude the Treaty of Campo
Formio with Austria as he thought best. The Directory was displeased,
however, because the treaty ceded Venice to the Austrians and did not
secure the left bank of the Rhine for France. On the other hand, it
raised Bonaparte’s popularity to its peak, for he had gained victory for
France after five years of war on the Continent.
Only the war at sea, against the British, continued. The directors,
who wanted to launch an invasion of the British Isles, appointed
Bonaparte to command the army assembled for this purpose along the
English Channel. After a rapid inspection in February 1798, he announced
that the operation could not be undertaken until France had command of
the sea. Instead, he suggested that France strike at the sources of
Great Britain’s wealth by occupying Egypt and threatening the route to
India. This proposal, seconded by Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, the
foreign minister, was accepted by the directors, who were glad to get
rid of their ambitious young general.
The expedition, thanks to some fortunate coincidences, was at first a
great success: Malta, the great fortress of the Hospitallers, was
occupied on June 10, 1798, Alexandria taken by storm on July 1, and all
of the delta of the Nile rapidly overrun. On August 1, however, the
French squadron at anchor in Abū Qīr Bay was completely destroyed by
Admiral Horatio Nelson’s fleet in the Battle of the Nile, so that
Napoleon found himself confined to the land that he had conquered. He
proceeded to introduce Western political institutions, administration,
and technical skills in Egypt; but Turkey, nominally suzerain over
Egypt, declared war on France in September. To prevent a Turkish
invasion of Egypt and also perhaps to attempt a return to France by way
of Anatolia, Bonaparte marched into Syria in February 1799. His progress
northward was halted at Acre, where the British withstood a siege, and
in May Bonaparte began a disastrous retreat to Egypt.
The Battle of the Nile showed Europe that Bonaparte was not
invincible, and Great Britain, Austria, Russia, and Turkey formed a new
coalition against France. The French armies in Italy were defeated in
the spring of 1799 and had to abandon the greater part of the peninsula.
These defeats led to disturbances in France itself. The coup d’état of
30 Prairial, year VII (June 18, 1799), expelled the men of moderate
views from the Directory and brought into it men who were considered
Jacobins. Yet the situation remained confused, and one of the new
directors, Emmanuel Sieyès, was convinced that only military
dictatorship could prevent a restoration of the monarchy: “I am looking
for a sabre,” he said. Bonaparte did not take long to make up his mind.
He would leave his army and return to France—in order to save the
republic, of course, but also to take advantage of the new circumstances
and to seize power. The Directory had, in fact, ordered his return, but
he had not received the order, so that it was actually in disregard of
his instructions that he left Egypt with a few companions on August 22,
1799. Their two frigates surprisingly escaped interception by the
British, and Bonaparte arrived in Paris on October 14.
By this time French victories in Switzerland and Holland had averted
the danger of invasion, and the counterrevolutionary risings within
France had more or less failed. A coup d’état could therefore no longer
be justified by any need to save the republic. Sieyès, however, had not
given up his project, and now he had his “sabre.” From the end of
October he and Bonaparte were in league together planning the coup, and
on 18–19 Brumaire, year VIII (November 9–10, 1799), it was carried out:
the directors were forced to resign, the members of the legislative
councils were dispersed, and a new government, the Consulate, was set
up. The three consuls were Bonaparte and two of the directors who had
resigned, Sieyès and Pierre-Roger Ducos. But it was Bonaparte who was
henceforth the master of France.
The Consulate » Consolidation of power
Bonaparte, now 30 years old, was thin and short and wore his hair cut
close—le petit tondu, the “little crop-head,” as he was called. Not much
was known about his personality, but people had confidence in a man who
had always been victorious (the Nile and Acre were forgotten) and who
had managed to negotiate the brilliant Treaty of Campo Formio. He was
expected to bring back peace, to end disorder, and to consolidate the
political and social “conquests” of the Revolution. He was indeed
exceptionally intelligent, prompt to make decisions, and indefatigably
hardworking but also insatiably ambitious. He seemed to be the man of
the Revolution because it was due to the Revolution that he had climbed
at so early an age to the highest place in the state. He was not to
forget it; but, more than a man of the Revolution, he was a man of the
18th century, the most enlightened of the enlightened despots, a true
son of Voltaire. He did not believe in the sovereignty of the people, in
the popular will, or in parliamentary debate. Yet he put his confidence
more in reasoning than in reason and may be said to have preferred “men
of talent”—mathematicians, jurists, and statesmen, for instance, however
cynical or mercenary they might be—to “technicians” in the true sense of
the word. He believed that an enlightened and firm will could do
anything if it had the support of bayonets; he despised and feared the
masses; and, as for public opinion, he considered that he could mold and
direct it as he pleased. He has been called the most “civilian” of
generals, but essentially he never ceased to be a soldier.
Bonaparte imposed a dictatorship on France, but its true character
was at first disguised by the constitution of the year VIII (4 Nivôse,
year VIII; December 25, 1799), drawn up by Sieyès. This constitution did
not guarantee the “rights of man” or make any mention of “liberty,
equality, and fraternity,” but it did reassure the partisans of the
Revolution by proclaiming the irrevocability of the sale of national
property and by upholding the legislation against the émigrés. It gave
immense powers to the first consul, leaving only a nominal role to his
two colleagues. The first consul—namely, Bonaparte—was to appoint
ministers, generals, civil servants, magistrates, and the members of the
Council of State and even was to have an overwhelming influence in the
choice of members for the three legislative assemblies, though their
members were theoretically to be chosen by universal suffrage. Submitted
to a plebiscite, the constitution won by an overwhelming majority in
February 1800.
The Consulate » Program of reforms
The Consulate’s work of administrative reform, undertaken at Bonaparte’s
instigation, was to be more lasting than the constitution and so more
important for France. At the head of the government was the Council of
State, created by the first consul and often effectively presided over
by him; it was to play an important part both as the source of the new
legislation and as an administrative tribunal. At the head of the
administration of the départements were the prefects, who carried on the
tradition of the intendants of the ancien régime, supervising the
application of the laws and acting as the instruments of centralization.
The judicial system was profoundly changed: whereas from the beginning
of the Revolution judges had been elected, henceforth they were to be
nominated by the government, their independence assured by their
irremovability from office. The police organization was greatly
strengthened. The financial administration was considerably improved:
instead of the municipalities, special officials were entrusted with the
collecting of direct taxes; the franc was stabilized; and the Banque de
France, owned partly by shareholders and partly by the state, was
created. Education was transformed into a major public service;
secondary education was given a semimilitary organization, and the
university faculties were reestablished. Primary education, however, was
still neglected.
Bonaparte shared Voltaire’s belief that the people needed a religion.
Personally, he was indifferent to religion: in Egypt he had said that he
wanted to become a Muslim. Yet he considered that religious peace had to
be restored to France. As early as 1796, when he was concluding the
armistice in Italy with Pope Pius VI, he had tried to persuade the pope
to retract his briefs against the French priests who had accepted the
Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which in practice nationalized the
church. Pius VII, who succeeded Pius VI in March 1800, was more
accommodating than his predecessor, and, 10 months after negotiations
were opened with him, the Concordat of 1801 was signed reconciling the
church and the Revolution. The pope recognized the French republic and
called for the resignation of all former bishops; new prelates were to
be designated by the first consul and instituted by the pope; and the
sale of the property of the clergy was officially recognized by Rome.
The concordat, in fact, admitted freedom of worship and the lay
character of the state.
The codification of the civil law, first undertaken in 1790, was at
last completed under the Consulate. The code, promulgated on March 21,
1804, and later known as the Napoleonic Code, gave permanent form to the
great gains of the Revolution: individual liberty, freedom of work,
freedom of conscience, the lay character of the state, and equality
before the law; but, at the same time, it protected landed property,
gave greater liberty to employers, and showed little concern for
employees. It maintained divorce but granted only limited legal rights
to women.
The army received the most careful attention. The first consul
retained in outline the system instituted by the Revolution: recruitment
by forced conscription but with the possibility of replacement by
substitutes; the mixing of the conscripts with old soldiers; and the
eligibility of all for promotion to the highest ranks. Nevertheless, the
creation of the Academy of Saint-Cyr to produce infantry officers made
it easier for the sons of bourgeois families to pursue a military
career. Moreover, the École Polytechnique, founded by the National
Convention, was militarized in order to provide officers for the
artillery and engineers. Yet Bonaparte was not concerned about
introducing new technical inventions into his army. He put his trust in
the “legs of his soldiers”: his basic strategic idea was a fast-moving
army.
The Consulate » Military campaigns and uneasy peace
The first consul spent the winter and spring of 1799–1800 reorganizing
the army and preparing for an attack on Austria alone, Russia having
withdrawn from the anti-French coalition. With his usual quick
assessment of the situation, he saw the strategic importance of the
Swiss Confederation, from which he would be free to outflank the
Austrian armies either in Germany or in Italy as he might see fit. His
past successes made him choose Italy. Taking his army across the Great
St. Bernard Pass before the snow melted, he appeared unexpectedly behind
the Austrian army besieging Genoa. The Battle of Marengo in June gave
the French command of the Po valley as far as the Adige, and in December
another French army defeated the Austrians in Germany. Austria was
forced to sign the Treaty of Lunéville of February 1801, whereby
France’s right to the natural frontiers that Julius Caesar had given to
Gaul—namely, the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees—was recognized.
Great Britain alone remained at war with France, but it soon tired of
the struggle. Preliminaries of peace, concluded in London in October
1801, put an end to hostilities, and peace was signed at Amiens on March
27, 1802.
General peace was reestablished in Europe. The first consul’s
prestige increased still more, and his friends—at his
suggestion—proposed that a “token of national gratitude” should be
offered to him. In May 1802 it was decided that the French people should
vote in referendum on the following question: “Shall Napoleon Bonaparte
be consul for life?” In August an overwhelming vote granted him the
prolongation of his consulate as well as the right to designate his
successor.
Bonaparte’s conception of international peace differed from that of
the British, for whom the Treaty of Amiens represented an absolute limit
beyond which they were under no circumstances prepared to go. The
British even hoped to take back some of the concessions they had been
forced to make. For Bonaparte, on the other hand, the Treaty of Amiens
marked the starting point for a new French ascendancy. He was, first of
all, intent on reserving half of Europe as a market for France without
lowering customs duties—to the indignation of British merchants. To
revive France’s expansion overseas, he also intended to recover
Saint-Domingue (Haiti; governed from 1798 by the black leader
Toussaint-Louverture), to occupy Louisiana (ceded to France by Spain in
1800), perhaps to reconquer Egypt, and at any rate to extend French
influence in the Mediterranean and in the Indian Ocean. In continental
Europe he advanced beyond France’s natural frontiers, incorporating
Piedmont into France, imposing a more centralized government on the
Swiss Confederation, and in Germany compensating the princes
dispossessed of territory on the Rhine under the Treaty of Lunéville
with shares of the secularized ecclesiastical states.
Great Britain was alarmed by this expansion of France in peacetime
and found it scarcely tolerable that one state should command the
coastline of the Continent from Genoa to Antwerp. The immediate occasion
of Franco-British rupture, however, was the problem of Malta. According
to the Treaty of Amiens, the British, who had taken the island on the
collapse of the French occupation, should have restored it to the
Hospitallers; but the British, on the pretext that the French had not
yet evacuated certain Neapolitan ports, refused to leave the island.
Franco-British relations became strained, and in May 1803 the British
declared war.
The empire
The peace settlement had brought about the life consulate; the return of
war was to stimulate the formation of the empire. The British
government, which would have been glad to see Bonaparte deposed or
removed by assassination, renewed its subsidies to the French royalists,
who resumed their agitation and plotting. When a British-financed
assassination plot was uncovered in 1804, Bonaparte decided to react
vigorously enough to deter his opponents from any more such attempts.
The police believed that the real head of the conspiracy was the young
duc d’Enghien, a scion of the royal house of Bourbon, who was residing
in Germany, a few miles across the frontier. Accordingly, with the
agreement of Talleyrand and the police chief Joseph Fouché, the duke was
kidnapped on neutral soil and brought to Vincennes, where he was tried
and shot (March 21). This action provoked a resurgence of opposition
among the old aristocracy but enhanced the influence of Fouché.
The empire » Founding the empire
In the hope of consolidating his own position, Fouché now suggested to
Bonaparte that the best way to discourage conspiracy would be to
transform the life consulate into a hereditary empire, which, because of
the fact that there would be an heir, would remove all hope of changing
the regime by assassination. Bonaparte readily accepted the suggestion,
and on May 28, 1804, the empire was proclaimed.
Though there was little change in the organization of the government
of France, Napoleon as emperor revived a number of institutions similar
to those of the ancien régime. In the first place, he wanted to be
consecrated by the pope himself, so that his coronation should be even
more impressive than that of the kings of France. Pius VII agreed to
come to Paris, and the ceremony, which seemed equally outrageous to
royalists and to the old soldiers of the Revolution, took place in
Notre-Dame on December 2, 1804. At the last moment, the emperor took the
crown from the pope and set it on his own head himself.
The imperial regime also instituted its symbols and titles. Princely
titles were brought back for the members of Napoleon’s family in 1804,
and an imperial nobility was created in 1808. As opposition was still
lively, Napoleon intensified his propaganda and imposed an increasingly
strict censorship on the press. A dictatorial regime allowed him to
carry on his wars for years without worrying about French public
opinion. Having been president of the Italian Republic (as the Cisalpine
Republic was renamed) since January 1802, Napoleon in March 1805 was
proclaimed king of Italy and crowned in Milan in May.
The empire » War with Britain
From 1803 to 1805 Napoleon had only the British to fight; and again
France could hope for victory only by landing an army in the British
Isles, whereas the British could defeat Napoleon only by forming a
Continental coalition against him. Napoleon began to prepare an invasion
again, this time with greater conviction and on a larger scale. He
gathered nearly 2,000 ships between Brest and Antwerp and concentrated
his Grand Army in the camp at Boulogne (1803). Even so, the problem was
the same as in 1798: to cross the Channel, the French had to have
control of the sea.
Still far inferior to the British navy, the French fleet needed the
help of the Spanish, and even then the two fleets together could not
hope to defeat more than one of the British squadrons. Spain was induced
to declare war on Great Britain in December 1804, and it was decided
that French and Spanish squadrons massed in the Antilles should lure a
British squadron into these waters and defeat it, thus making the
balance roughly equal between the Franco-Spanish navy and the British. A
battle in the entrance to the Channel could then be fought with some
chance of success.
The plan failed. The French squadron from the Mediterranean, under
Admiral Pierre de Villeneuve, found itself alone at the appointed
meeting place in the Antilles. Pursued by Nelson and not daring to
attack him, it turned back toward Europe and took refuge in Cádiz in
July 1805; there the British blockaded it. Accused of cowardice by the
angry Napoleon, Villeneuve resolved to run the blockade, with the
support of a Spanish squadron; but on October 21, 1805, he was attacked
by Nelson off Cape Trafalgar. Nelson was killed in the battle, but the
Franco-Spanish fleet was totally destroyed. The British had won a
decisive victory, which eliminated the danger of invasion and gave them
freedom of movement at sea.
The British had also succeeded in organizing a new anti-French
coalition consisting of Austria, Russia, Sweden, and Naples. On July 24,
1805, three months before Trafalgar, Napoleon had ordered the Grand Army
from Boulogne to the Danube (thus ruling out an invasion of England even
if the French had won at Trafalgar). In the week preceding Trafalgar,
the Grand Army won an outstanding victory over the Austrians at Ulm, and
on November 13 Napoleon entered Vienna. On December 2, 1805, in his
greatest victory, he defeated the combined Austrian and Russian armies
in the Battle of Austerlitz. By the Treaty of Pressburg, Austria
renounced all influence in Italy and ceded Venetia and Dalmatia to
Napoleon, as well as extensive territory in Germany to his protégés
Bavaria, Württemberg, and Baden. The French then proceeded to dethrone
the Bourbons in the Kingdom of Naples, which was bestowed on Napoleon’s
brother Joseph. In July 1806 the Confederation of the Rhine was
founded—soon to embrace all of western Germany in a union under French
protection.
In September 1806 Prussia entered the war against France, and on
October 14 the Prussian armies were defeated at Jena and at Auerstädt.
The Russians put up a better resistance at Eylau in February 1807 but
were routed at Friedland in June. In Warsaw Napoleon fell in love with
Countess Marie Walewska, a Polish patriot who hoped that Napoleon would
resurrect her country. Napoleon had a son by her.
The Russian emperor Alexander I could have continued the struggle,
but he was tired of the alliance with the British. He met Napoleon at
Tilsit, in northern Prussia near the Russian frontier. There, on a raft
anchored in the middle of the Nemen River, they signed treaties that
created the Grand Duchy of Warsaw from the Polish provinces detached
from Prussia and, in effect, divided control of Europe between the
emperors, Napoleon taking the west and Alexander the east. Alexander
even made a vague promise of a land attack against the British
possessions in India.
The empire » Blockade and the peninsular campaign
As Napoleon could no longer think of invading England, he tried to
induce capitulation by stifling the British economy. By closing all of
Europe to British merchandise, he hoped to bring about a revolt of the
British unemployed that could force the government to sue for peace. He
forbade all trade with the British Isles, ordered the confiscation of
all goods coming from English factories or from the British colonies,
and condemned as fair prize not only every British ship but also every
ship that had touched the coasts of England or its colonies.
For the blockade to succeed, it had to be enforced rigorously
throughout Europe. But, from the beginning, England’s old ally Portugal
showed itself reluctant to comply, for the blockade would mean its
commercial ruin. Napoleon decided to break down Portuguese opposition by
force. Charles IV of Spain let the French troops cross his kingdom, and
they occupied Lisbon; but the prolonged presence of Napoleon’s soldiers
in the north of Spain led to insurrection. When Charles IV abdicated in
favour of his son Ferdinand VII, Napoleon, seeing the opportunity to rid
Europe of its last Bourbon rulers, summoned the Spanish royal family to
Bayonne in April 1808 and obtained the abdication of both Charles and
Ferdinand; they were interned in Talleyrand’s château. After the bloody
suppression of an uprising in Madrid, insurrection spread across the
whole country, for the Spaniards would not accept Joseph Bonaparte, king
of Naples, as their new king.
The subsequent defeat of his forces in Spain and Portugal were
sensational blows to Napoleon’s prestige. Soon the Iberian Peninsula, up
in arms, became a bridgehead on the Continent for the British. Under the
energetic Arthur Wellesley (later 1st duke of Wellington), in command
from 1809, the Anglo-Spanish-Portuguese forces were to achieve decisive
successes.
At the Congress of Erfurt (September–October 1808), a conference with
Alexander I, Napoleon assembled a great concourse of princes to impress
the Russian emperor in an attempt to extract promises of help. Whether
impressed or not, Alexander would make no definite commitment.
Alexander’s refusal, furthermore, was partly prompted by Talleyrand, who
had become dismayed by Napoleon’s policies and was already negotiating
with the Russian emperor behind his master’s back.
By early 1809, however, with most of the Grand Army thrown into
Spain, Napoleon seemed on the point of overcoming the revolt. Then, in
April, Austria launched an attack in Bavaria in the hope of rousing all
of Germany against the French. Napoleon once again defeated the
Habsburgs (July 6) and by the Treaty of Schönbrunn (October 14, 1809)
obtained the Illyrian Provinces, thus rounding out the “Continental
System.”
The empire » Consolidation of empire
In 1810 Napoleon’s fortunes were at their zenith, despite some failures
in Spain and Portugal. He considered himself Charlemagne’s heir. He
repudiated Joséphine, who had not given him a child, so that he could
marry Marie-Louise, daughter of the Austrian emperor Francis I. The
birth of a son, the king of Rome, in March 1811 seemed to assure the
future of his empire—now at its greatest extent, including not only the
Illyrian Provinces but also Etruria (Tuscany), some of the Papal States,
Holland, and the German states bordering the North Sea. The empire was
surrounded by a ring of vassal states ruled over by the emperor’s
relatives: the Kingdom of Westphalia (Jérôme Bonaparte); the Kingdom of
Spain (Joseph Bonaparte); the Kingdom of Italy (with Eugène de
Beauharnais, Joséphine’s son, as viceroy); the Kingdom of Naples
(Joachim Murat, Napoleon’s brother-in-law); and the Principality of
Lucca and Piombino (Félix Bacciochi, another brother-in-law). Other
territories were closely bound to the empire by treaties: the Swiss
Confederation (of which Napoleon was the mediator), the Confederation of
the Rhine, and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Even Austria seemed bound to
France by Napoleon’s marriage to Marie-Louise.
The political map of Europe, which had been so complicated before
1796, was now greatly simplified. Yet the frontiers did not coincide
either with geographic features or with “nationalities.” Whatever he may
later have said, Napoleon, while he was in power, was not interested in
realizing either German or Italian unity. Yet, by reducing the number of
states, by pushing the frontiers about, by amalgamating populations, and
by propagating institutions like those that the Revolution and
nationalism had created in France, he prepared the ground for German and
Italian unification. National feeling in Europe, stirred by French ideas
and by contact with Frenchmen, in turn gave rise to the first resistance
against French domination. From 1809 onward, Spanish guerrillas,
supported by British troops, were harassing the French, and the Spanish
national Cortes (parliament), convened at Cádiz by the
insurrectionaries, in 1812 promulgated a constitution inspired by the
ideas of the French Revolution of 1789 and by British institutions.
The empire » Disaster in Russia and its aftermath
Since the Congress of Erfurt, the Russian emperor had shown himself less
and less inclined to deal with Napoleon as a trusted partner. In the
spring of 1812, therefore, Napoleon massed his forces in Poland to
intimidate Alexander. After some last attempts at agreement, in late
June his Grand Army—about 600,000 men, including contingents extorted
from Prussia and from Austria—began to cross the Nemen River. The
Russians retreated, adopting a scorched-earth policy. Napoleon’s army
did not reach the approaches to Moscow until the beginning of September.
The Russian commander in chief, Mikhail I. Kutuzov, engaged it at
Borodino on September 7. The fight was savage, bloody, and indecisive,
but a week later Napoleon entered Moscow, which the Russians had
abandoned. On that same day, a huge fire broke out, destroying the
greater part of the town. Moreover, Alexander unexpectedly refused to
treat with Napoleon. Withdrawal was necessary, and the premature onset
of winter made it disastrous. After the difficult crossing of the
Berezina River in November, fewer than 10,000 men fit for combat
remained with Napoleon’s main force.
This catastrophe heartened all the peoples of Europe to defy
Napoleon. In Germany the news unleashed an outbreak of anti-French
demonstrations. The Prussian contingents deserted the Grand Army in
December and turned against the French. The Austrians also withdrew
their troops and adopted an increasingly hostile attitude, and in Italy
the people began to turn their backs on Napoleon.
Even in France, signs of discontent with the regime were becoming
more frequent. In Paris a malcontent general, Claude-François de Malet,
nearly succeeded in carrying out a coup d’état after announcing on
October 23, 1812, that Napoleon had died in Russia. This incident was a
major factor in Napoleon’s decision to hasten back to France ahead of
the Grand Army. Arriving in Paris on December 18, he proceeded to
stiffen the dictatorship, to raise money by various expedients, and to
levy new troops.
Thus, in 1813 the forces arrayed against France were no longer armies
of mercenaries but were those of nations fighting for their freedom as
the French had fought for theirs in 1792 and 1793; and the French
themselves, for all their courage, had lost their former enthusiasm. The
emperor’s ideal of conquest was no longer that of the nation.
In May 1813 Napoleon won some successes against the Russians and
Prussians at the Battles of Lützen and Bautzen, but his decimated army
needed reinforcements. The armed mediation of Austria induced Napoleon
to agree to an armistice, during which a congress was held at Prague.
There Austria proposed very favourable conditions: the French Empire was
to return to its natural limits; the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and the
Confederation of the Rhine were to be dissolved; and Prussia was to
return to its frontiers of 1805. Napoleon made the mistake of hesitating
too long. The congress closed on August 10 before his reply arrived, and
Austria declared war.
The French were even worse off than in the spring. The allies were
gaining new troops every day, as one German contingent after another
left Napoleon to go over to the other side. The greatest debacle since
Napoleon came to power was the Battle of Leipzig, or “Battle of the
Nations” (October 16–19, 1813), in which the Grand Army was torn to
shreds. That defeat degenerated fast into collapse. The French armies in
Spain, forced to retreat, had been defeated in June, and by October the
British were attacking their defenses north of the Pyrenees. In Italy
the Austrians took the offensive, crossed the Adige River, and occupied
Romagna. Murat, now openly a traitor to the emperor who had made him
king of Naples, entered into negotiations with the Viennese court. The
Dutch and the Belgians demonstrated against Napoleon.
The empire » Downfall and abdication
In January 1814 France was being attacked on all its frontiers. The
allies cleverly announced that they were fighting not against the French
people but against Napoleon alone, since in November 1813 he had
rejected the terms offered by the Austrian foreign minister Klemens,
Fürst (prince) von Metternich, which would have preserved the natural
frontiers of France. The extraordinary strategic feats achieved by the
emperor during the first three months of 1814 with the army of young
conscripts were not enough; he could neither defeat the allies, with
their overwhelming numerical superiority, nor arouse the majority of the
French people from their resentful torpor. The Legislative Assembly and
the Senate, formerly so docile, were now asking for peace and for civil
and political liberties.
By the Treaty of Chaumont of March 1814, Austria, Russia, Prussia,
and Great Britain bound themselves together for 20 years, undertook not
to negotiate separately, and promised to continue the struggle until
Napoleon was overthrown. When the allied armies arrived before Paris on
March 30, Napoleon had moved east to attack their rear guard. The
Parisian authorities, no longer overawed by the emperor, lost no time in
treating with the allies. As president of the provisional government,
Talleyrand proclaimed the deposition of the emperor and, without
consulting the French people, began to negotiate with Louis XVIII, the
brother of the executed Louis XVI. Napoleon had only reached
Fontainebleau when he heard that Paris had capitulated. Persuaded that
further resistance was useless, he finally abdicated on April 6.
By the Treaty of Fontainebleau, the allies granted him the island of
Elba as a sovereign principality, an annual income of two million francs
to be provided by France, and a guard of 400 volunteers. Also he
retained the title of emperor. After unsuccessfully trying to poison
himself, Napoleon spoke his farewell to his “Old Guard,” and after a
hazardous journey, during which he narrowly escaped assassination, he
arrived at Elba on May 4.
Elba and the Hundred Days
“I want from now on to live like a justice of the peace,” Napoleon
declared on his little island. But a man of such energy and imagination
could hardly be expected to resign himself to defeat at age 45.
In France, moreover, the Bourbon Restoration was soon exposed to
criticism. Though in 1814 the majority of the French people were tired
of the emperor, they had expressed no wish for the return of the
Bourbons. They were strongly attached to the essential achievements of
the Revolution, and Louis XVIII had come back “in the baggage train of
the foreigners” with the last surviving émigrés who had “learnt nothing
and forgotten nothing” and whose influence seemed to threaten most of
the Revolution’s achievements. The apathy of April 1814 quickly gave way
to mistrust. Old hatreds were revived, resistance organized, and
conspiracies formed.
From Elba Napoleon kept a close watch on the Continent. He knew that
some of the diplomats at Vienna, where a congress was deciding the fate
of Europe, considered Elba, between Corsica and Italy, too close to
France and to Italy and wanted to banish him to a distant island in the
Atlantic. Also he accused Austria of preventing Marie-Louise and his son
from coming to join him (in fact, she had taken a lover and had no
intention of going to live with her husband). In addition, the French
government refused to pay Napoleon’s allowance, so that he was in danger
of being reduced to penury.
All these considerations drove Napoleon to action. Decisive as ever,
he returned to France like a thunderbolt. On March 1, 1815, he landed at
Cannes with a detachment of his guard. As he crossed the Alps, the
republican peasants rallied round him, and near Grenoble he won over the
soldiers dispatched to arrest him. On March 20 he was in Paris.
Napoleon was brought back to power as the embodiment of the spirit of
the Revolution rather than as the emperor who had fallen a year before.
To rally the mass of Frenchmen to his cause, he should have allied
himself with the Jacobins, but this he dared not do. Unable to escape
from the bourgeoisie whose predominance he himself had assured and who
feared above all else a revival of the radical experiments of 1793 and
1794, he could only set up a political regime scarcely distinguishable
from that of Louis XVIII. Enthusiasm ebbed fast, and the Napoleonic
adventure seemed a dead end.
To oppose the allied troops massing on the frontiers, Napoleon
mustered an army with which he marched into Belgium and defeated the
Prussians at Ligny on June 16, 1815. Two days later, at Waterloo, he met
the British under Wellington, the victor of the Peninsular War. A savage
battle followed. Napoleon was in sight of victory when the Prussians
under Gebhard Blücher arrived to reinforce the British, and soon,
despite the heroism of the Old Guard, Napoleon was defeated.
Back in Paris, the parliament forced Napoleon to abdicate; he did so,
in favour of his son, on June 22, 1815. On July 3 he was at Rochefort,
intending to take ship for the United States, but a British squadron
prevented any French vessel from leaving the port. Napoleon then decided
to appeal to the British government for protection. His request granted,
he boarded the Bellerophon on July 15. The allies were agreed on one
point: Napoleon was not to go back to Elba. Nor did they like the idea
of his going off to America. It would have suited them if he had fallen
a victim to the “White Terror” of the returned counterrevolutionaries or
if Louis XVIII had had him summarily tried and executed. Great Britain
had no choice but to send him to detention in a far-off island. The
British government announced that the island of St. Helena in the
southern Atlantic had been chosen for his residence; because of its
remote position, Napoleon would enjoy much greater freedom than would be
possible elsewhere. Napoleon protested eloquently: “I appeal to
history!”
Exile on St. Helena
On October 15, 1815, Napoleon disembarked in St. Helena with those
followers who were voluntarily accompanying him into exile: General
Henri-Gratien Bertrand, grand marshal of the palace, and his wife; the
comte Charles de Montholon, aide-de-camp, and his wife; General Gaspard
Gourgaud; Emmanuel Las Cases, the former chamberlain; and several
servants. After a short stay at the house of a wealthy English merchant,
they moved to Longwood, originally built for the lieutenant governor.
Napoleon settled down to a life of routine. He got up late,
breakfasting about 10:00 am, but seldom went out. He was free to go
anywhere on the island so long as he was accompanied by an English
officer, but he soon refused to comply with this condition and so shut
himself up in the grounds of Longwood. He wrote and talked much. At
first Las Cases acted as his secretary, compiling what was later to be
the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène (first published in 1823). From 7:00 to
8:00 pm Napoleon had dinner, after which a part of the evening was spent
in reading aloud—Napoleon liked to hear the classics. Then they played
cards. About midnight Napoleon went to bed. Some of his time was devoted
to learning English, and he eventually began reading English newspapers;
but he also had a large number of French books sent from Europe, which
he read attentively and annotated.
St. Helena had a healthful climate, and Napoleon’s food was good,
carefully prepared, and plentiful. His inactivity undoubtedly
contributed to the deterioration of his health. The man who for 20 years
had played so great a role in the world and who had marched north,
south, east, and west across Europe could hardly be expected to endure
the monotony of existence on a little island, aggravated by the
self-imposed life of a recluse. He had also more intimate reasons for
unhappiness: Marie-Louise sent no word to him, and he may have learned
of her liaison with the Austrian officer appointed to watch over her,
Adam, Graf (count) von Neipperg (whom she eventually married in secret
without waiting for Napoleon’s death). Nor did he have any news of his
son, the former king of Rome, who was now living in Vienna with the
title of duke of Reichstadt. Though the severity of Sir Hudson Lowe has
been much exaggerated, it is certain that this “jailer,” who arrived as
governor of St. Helena in April 1816, did nothing to make Napoleon’s
life easier. Napoleon from the start disliked him as the former
commander of the Corsican rangers, a band of volunteers composed largely
of enemies of the Bonaparte family. Always anxious to carry out his
instructions exactly, Lowe came into conflict with Las Cases. He saw Las
Cases as Napoleon’s confidant and had him arrested and expelled.
Thenceforward, relations between the governor and Napoleon were limited
strictly to those stipulated by the regulations.
Napoleon showed the first signs of illness at the end of 1817; he
seems to have had an ulcer or a cancer of the stomach. The Irish doctor
Barry O’Meara, having asked in vain for a change in the conditions under
which Napoleon lived, was dismissed; so also was his successor John
Stokoe, who was likewise thought to be well-disposed toward Napoleon.
The undistinguished Corsican doctor who took their place, Francesco
Antommarchi, prescribed a treatment that could do nothing to cure his
patient. It is uncertain, however, whether Napoleon’s disease was
curable at all, even by 21st-century methods. There has been continuing
controversy about the cause of his death, but the evidence used by some
to support the theory that Napoleon was poisoned is not considered
conclusive by many scholars.
From the beginning of 1821, the illness became rapidly worse. From
March, Napoleon was confined to bed. In April he dictated his last will:
I wish my ashes to rest on the banks of the Seine, in the midst of
that French people which I have loved so much.…I die before my time,
killed by the English oligarchy and its hired assassins.
On May 5 he spoke a few coherent phrases: “My God…the French
nation…my son…head of the army.” He died at 5:49 pm on that day, not yet
52 years old. His body was dressed in his favourite uniform, that of the
Chasseurs de la Garde, covered by the gray overcoat that he had worn at
Marengo. The funeral was conducted simply, but with due propriety, in
the Rupert Valley, where Napoleon had sometimes walked, beside a stream
in which two willows were reflected. The stone covering his tomb bore no
name, only the words “Ci-Gît” (“Here Lies”).
The Napoleonic legend
Napoleon’s fall set loose a torrent of hostile books designed to sully
his reputation. One of the least violent of these was the pamphlet De
Buonaparte, des Bourbons, et de la nécessité de se rallier à nos princes
légitimes, pour le bonheur de la France et celui de l’Europe (1814; On
Buonaparte and the Bourbons, and the Necessity of Rallying Around Our
Legitimate Princes, for the Safety of France and of Europe) by the
vicomte de Chateaubriand, a well-known writer of royalist sympathies.
But this anti-Napoleonic literature soon died down, while the task of
defending Napoleon was taken up. Lord Byron had published his Ode to
Napoleon Buonaparte as early as 1814; the German poet Heinrich Heine
wrote his ballad Die Grenadiere; and in 1817 the French novelist
Stendhal began his biography Vie de Napoléon (Life of Napoleon). At the
same time, the emperor’s most faithful supporters were working toward
his rehabilitation, talking about him, and distributing reminders of
him, including engravings. They idealized his life (“What a novel my
life is!” he himself had said) and began to create the Napoleonic
legend.
As soon as the emperor was dead, the legend grew rapidly. Memoirs,
notes, and narratives by those who had followed him into exile
contributed substantially to it. In 1822 O’Meara, in London, had his
Napoleon in Exile; or, A Voice from Saint Helena published; in 1823 the
publication of the Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de France sous
Napoléon, écrits à Sainte-Hélène sous sa dictée (Memoirs of the History
of France During the Reign of Napoleon, Dictated by the Emperor at St.
Helena) by Montholon and Gourgaud, began; Las Cases, in his famous
Mémorial, presented the emperor as a republican opposed to war who had
fought only when Europe forced him to fight in defense of freedom; and
in 1825 Antommarchi published his Derniers moments de Napoléon (The Last
Days of Emperor Napoleon). Thereafter the number of works in Napoleon’s
honour increased continually; among them were Victor Hugo’s Ode à la
Colonne (“Ode to the Column”), the 28 volumes of the Victoires et
conquêtes des Français (“Victories and Conquests of the French”), edited
by Charles-Louis-Fleury Panckoucke, and Sir Walter Scott’s Life of
Napoleon Buonaparte, Emperor of the French. Neither police action nor
prosecutions could prevent books, pictures, and objects evoking the
imperial saga from multiplying in France.
After the July Revolution of 1830, which created the “Bourgeois
Monarchy” under Louis-Philippe, thousands of Tricolor flags appeared in
windows, and the government had not only to tolerate the growth of the
legend but even to promote it. In 1833 the statue of Napoleon was put
back on the top of the column in the Place Vendôme in Paris, and in 1840
the king’s son François, prince de Joinville, was sent in a warship to
fetch the emperor’s remains from St. Helena to the banks of the Seine in
accordance with his last wishes. A magnificent funeral was held in Paris
in December 1840, and Napoleon’s body was conveyed through the Arc de
Triomphe in the Place de l’Étoile to entombment under the dome of the
Invalides.
Napoleon’s nephew Louis-Napoléon exploited the legend in order to
seize power in France. Though his attempts at Strasbourg in 1836 and at
Boulogne in 1840 were failures, it was chiefly because of the growth of
the legend that he won election to the presidency of the Second Republic
with an overwhelming majority in 1848 and was able to carry out the coup
d’état of December 1851 and make himself emperor in 1852.
The disastrous end of the Second Empire in 1870 damaged the
Napoleonic legend and gave rise to a new anti-Napoleonic literature,
best represented by Hippolyte Taine’s Origines de la France
contemporaine (1876–94; The Origins of Contemporary France). World Wars
I and II, however, together with the experience of the 20th-century
dictatorships, made it possible to judge Napoleon more fairly. Any
comparison with Stalin or Hitler, for instance, can only be to
Napoleon’s advantage. He was tolerant; he released the Jews from the
ghettos; and he showed respect for human life. Brought up on the
rationalist Encyclopédie and on the writings of the philosophes of the
Enlightenment, he remained above all a man of the 18th century, the last
of the “enlightened despots.” One of the gravest accusations made
against Napoleon is that he was the “Corsican ogre” who sacrificed
millions of men to his ambition. Precise calculations show that the
Napoleonic Wars of 1800–15 cost France itself about 500,000
casualties—i.e., about one-sixtieth of the population—with another
500,000 imprisoned or missing. The loss of these young men did not
greatly affect the growth of the population, however.
The social structure of France changed little under the First Empire.
It remained roughly what the Revolution had made it: a great mass of
peasants comprising three-fourths of the population—about half of them
working owners of their farms or sharecroppers and the other half with
too little land for their own subsistence and hiring themselves out as
labourers. Industry, stimulated by the war and the blockade of English
goods, made remarkable progress in northern and eastern France, whence
exports could be sent to central Europe; but it declined in the south
and west because of the closing of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.
The great migrations from rural areas toward industry in the towns began
only after 1815. The nobility would probably have declined more swiftly
if Napoleon had not restored it, but it could never recover its former
privileges.
Above all, Napoleon left durable institutions, the “granite masses”
on which modern France has been built up: the administrative system of
the prefects, the Napoleonic Code, the judicial system, the Banque de
France and the country’s financial organization, the centralized
university, and the military academies. Napoleon changed the history
both of France and of the world.
Jacques Godechot
Encyclopaedya Britannica
