Napoleon: a Historical Perspective

By Jose Gomez-Rivera III

Napoleon has long suffered from his detractors. This book is not a biography, but a perspective based on over a decade of my lectures on the subject and an effort to base a historical analysis of the era on sound historical sources and in the proper context in order to redress what; I view, as the failings of Napoleonic historiography. the historical analysis and interpretation of Napoleons role, actions and consequences to be flawed and tainted by a popular acceptance of historical interpretations proffered by British and commonwealth scholars that have portrayed him as a reactionary dictator driven by insatiable ambition to heights and then brought low by a coalition of liberating nations. This interpretation is, at best, misleading and the byproduct of British political goals during the Napoleonic Wars; brilliantly articulated and proselytized with wartime propaganda, and their aftermath. Propaganda often outlasts its purposes to become national myth. In this case, it has retained its hold on popular opinion as a result of intellectual laxity and resistance in challenging existing norms and opinions; which affects both the general reader as well as historians. Now let the debate begin.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493162963

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NAPOLEON

A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

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JOSE GOMEZ-RIVERA III

Copyright © 2014 by Jose Gomez-Rivera III.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 02/11/2014

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter I The Revolutionary Legacy

Chapter II The French Revolution in Europe

Chapter III The Revolutionary Coalition Splinters and Napoleon Rises

Chapter IV Napoleon and Revolutionary Consolidation

Chapter V Napoleon and Europe

Chapter VI Napoleon and the Hundred Days

Chapter VII Conclusion

Bibliography

"We have finished the romance of the Revolution, we must

now begin its history, only seeking for what is real and

practicable in the application of its principles, and not

what is speculative and hypothetical."

Napoleon after 18th-19th Brumaire (8th-9th November 1799)

INTRODUCTION

After teaching a Western Civilization survey course for over a decade and having been a Foreign Service Officer in an earlier life, I have found the historical analysis and interpretation of Napoleon’s role, actions and consequences to be flawed and tainted by a popular acceptance of historical interpretations proffered by British and commonwealth scholars that have portrayed him as a reactionary dictator driven by insatiable ambition to heights and then brought low by a coalition of liberating nations. This interpretation is, at best, misleading and the byproduct of British political goals during the Napoleonic Wars; brilliantly articulated and proselytized with wartime propaganda. Propaganda often outlasts its purposes to become national myth. In this case, it has retained its hold on popular opinion as a result of intellectual laxity and resistance in challenging existing norms and opinions; which affects both the general reader as well as historians. The flawed and prejudicial analysis of the Napoleonic period and legacy are also byproducts of applying a modern distaste for war and those who excel at war; viewing warfare as an illegitimate option regardless of purpose or outcome. Placing blame and opprobrium on Napoleon without adequate analysis of the historical record, critical historiography issues condemnations based on, often poorly, translated axioms rather than actions and historical sources. National prejudices have combined with modern social prejudices and less than critical historical methods to obfuscate and impede a proper analysis of the Napoleonic record. Finally, there has been a failure of historical context by failing to examine Napoleon’s action in the setting of the French Revolution and the contemporary realities underlying that period.

Napoleon’s greatness, as well as the causes for his ultimate downfall, must be pegged to his unique political, social and economic reconstruction of the revolutionary coalition that came together in 1789 but unraveled as a result of the increased radicalization of the process. He managed to bring together the disparate strands of revolutionary support and cobble together a surprisingly resilient government. This feat saved the essential achievements of the French Revolution by sustaining them against widespread attacks. Napoleon managed this impressive achievement by pursuing a Grand Strategy that called for pragmatic moderation while consolidating liberal reforms and revolutionary institutions. While he was managing the process, he was not completely free to act independently or against the interests of the peasantry, Bourgeois, the army, bureaucracy and moderate republicans that provided legitimacy and support for his government. Some of the intransigence and hubris attributed to Napoleon are better laid at the doorstep of the difficult tightrope act he pursued. Revolutionary territorial advances, alliances, the spread of reform and aggressiveness in foreign policy were demanded by these groups and constituted the legitimizing glue that held the coalition together as much as they were Napoleon’s own initiatives. What is clear is that in pursuing this political objective, the consolidation of the French Revolution, he transformed the character of Europe and unleashed progressive and revolutionary forces on a traditionalist continent and world.

His Civil Code was one of the most liberating and influential achievement in human history, particularly impressive if set in the context of an age still dominated by aristocratic privilege where birth and tradition had deep roots in all aspects of society. It established equality before the law, defendant’s right to counsel, freedom from arbitrary arrest, careers open to all on the basis of ability and, although he isn’t credited for this because he took a step back from the admittedly even more progressive policies of the National Convention, greater rights for women than anywhere else in Europe, with the exception of Great Britain. This alone makes Napoleon and his government undeniably revolutionary if set in proper historical context.

The context, of course, being a Europe where contending forces were arrayed on the side of political revolution or in support of a traditional hierarchy based on the remnants of the feudal ideal. In hindsight, the ultimate collapse of the traditional order is obvious, although a strong historical argument can be made that the end of the traditional order came in the wake of 1914, but its demise, however, was not obvious, predictable or real in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The feudal order may have been on its last legs, but it fiercely hung on into the twentieth century. Indeed, feudal prejudices and legitimacy of traditional hierarchy retained influence and weight throughout the nineteenth century, dominating the unification of Germany and Italy. Cavour and Bismarck did not bring about a liberal consolidation of the disparate principalities and kingdoms to create their respective states, but created them in the context of monarchy and, in the Prussian model, a very conservative one. The triumph of liberalism and dislodging of tradition were very much in the distant future at the end of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth.

Consequently, Napoleon’s actions challenging traditionalist principles were revolutionary and were perceived that way within France, where most of the groups that supported the revolutionary cause with the exception of small pockets of intransigent Jacobins reassembled a supportive Napoleonic coalition. The enemies of revolution, typically, viewed Napoleon as the embodiment of the revolution and opposed him on those grounds; fearing not only the spread of French dominion but the more terrifying revolutionary transformation that French armies brought.

Napoleon also established the right of freedom of conscience as he made religious freedom a cornerstone of his Concordat with the Pope in 1801. He refused to allow religious persecution and freed the Jews from legal segregation, closing down the ghettoes. He consolidated the gains of the French Revolution without the bloody political massacres of the Radical phase (1792-1794). None of the European monarchies allowed dissidence from official churches, fearing the potential chaos threatened by the elimination of basic institutions and doctrines providing unity, political education and legitimacy to monarchy. Napoleon remarkably established religious freedom, restored religious peace for a vast majority of Frenchmen and infused his government with renewed political support.

Napoleon was a revolutionary force in Europe. The Napoleonic Wars (1796-1815), arguably an arbitrary characterization since these conflicts unquestionably originated in the French Revolution and not from Napoleonic initiative, with the terrific loss of life; historians estimate half a million casualties during the period, resulted principally from royalist armed opposition in an attempt to crush revolutionary principles and institutions that Napoleon spread and represented. The Ancien Régime recognized in Napoleon the Revolution on horseback and could not allow him to challenge the feudal principles that sustained the old order. Pitt the Younger, Metternich and Alexander I of Russia all shared a common set of beliefs on the nature of legitimate political order and stability that subscribed to a divinely ordained hierarchy, expressed in the Great Chain of Being. This paradigm held that all creation has been set into an eternal order, where monarchs rule, aristocrats held sway and peasants served while religion reinforced and legitimized its continuation. Any attempt to overturn this order was rebellion not only against political authority but also challenged providence itself. Napoleon represented the very essence of the revolutionary threat; unacceptable in London, Vienna, Berlin and St. Petersburg.

Napoleon, however, tried to make peace, but the price demanded was betrayal of the revolution by eradicating its unique institutions and restoring the Ancien Régime—a price he wasn’t willing to pay. The letter from the future Louis XVIII calling for restoration after Napoleon’s coup in 1799 and its rejection amply demonstrate the wide gulf that separated traditional monarchy and Napoleon.

This is what he wrote Napoleon in September of 1800:

General,

You must have long known that you have earned my esteem. If you ever doubted that I was able of gratitude, chose your own place, decide the fate of your friends. As for my principles, I am merciful by nature, I shall be all the more so by reason. No, the victor of Lodi, Castiglione, Arcole, conqueror of Italy and Egypt cannot prefer a vain fame to glory. However you are wasting precious time; we can ensure the peace of France.

Napoleon’s response to Louis XVIII establishes the ideological divide:

Sir,

I received your letter. I thank you for the kind things you write about me. You must not wish for your return to France. You would have to step upon 500,000 corpses. Sacrifice your interest to the peace and happiness of France; history will remember it to your credit. I am not indifferent to your family’s misfortunes. I will be happy to contribute to the comfort and tranquility of your retreat.

Bonaparte¹

His brilliance on the battlefield was truly the sword and shield of the revolution. Diplomatic correspondence demonstrates that Napoleon attempted diplomatic solutions and accommodations whenever possible, but that the allies rejected them, as they pursued an ideological crusade to crush the spreading revolution.

Napoleon was not without flaws and his policies not always progressive. His attempt to reconquer St Domingue and reestablish slavery was a great, perhaps, unforgivable act. He did rely on an extensive and powerful secret police; institutionally extending political censorship. He did crown himself Emperor of the French in 1804, an action long portrayed as a betrayal of the French Revolution, but misinterpreted. The Imperial Oath, for example, bound Napoleon to a defense of Revolutionary principles belying the idea that the imperial system restored the Ancien Régime. The oath, rather, is a defining political statement which more than anything else defines the Napoleonic system and its complex Grand Strategy. It reads:

I swear to maintain the integrity of the territory of the Republic, to respect and cause to be respected the laws of the concordat and the liberty of worship, to respect and cause to be respected equality of rights, political and civil liberty, the irrevocability of the sales of the national lands; not to raise any impost, nor to establish any tax except in virtue of the law; to maintain the institution of the Legion of Honor; to govern in the sole view of the interest, the welfare and the glory of the French people.²

The terms of this oath were in revolutionary opposition to the norms underlying the authority and legitimacy of traditional monarchies. Prince Klemens Von Metternich, the very champion of traditionalism as Minister of Hapsburg Austria, expressed this powerful ideological conflict from the traditionalist viewpoint in his Political Testament.

Metternich writes:

France had the misfortune to produce the greatest number of these men. It is in her midst that religion and all that she holds sacred, that morality and authority, and all connected with them, have been attacked with a steady and systematic animosity, and it is there that the weapon of ridicule has been used with the most ease and success. Drag through the mud the name of God and the powers instituted by His divine decrees, and the revolution will be prepared! Speak of a social contract, and the revolution is accomplished… Nevertheless the revolutionary seed had penetrated into every country and spread more or less. It was greatly developed under the régime of the military despotism of Bonaparte. His conquests displaced a number of laws, institutions, and customs; broke through bonds sacred among all nations, strong enough to resist time itself; which is more than can be said of certain benefits conferred by these innovators. From these perturbations it followed that the revolutionary spirit could in Germany, Italy, and later on in Spain, easily hides itself.³

The Austrian minister condemned revolutions, liberal constitutions and Napoleon as their champion. Metternich pointed out that Napoleon’s conquests displaced a number of laws, institutions… broke through bonds sacred among all nations, emphasizing the revolutionary character of the Napoleonic regime. He lumped liberals, republicans and Bonapartists in the same revolutionary camp; echoing the views of royalist Europe, in some quarters extending to Regency Britain. The only conclusion possible was Napoleon had to be defeated not