Napoleon

Conquest, Reform and Reorganisation

Clive Emsley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317610274
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

Napoleon had a profound impact on the development of both France and Europe, and his career had repercussions across the wider world. His career had all the elements of a classical tragedy: having begun with spectacular military and civil achievements, it ended in exile on the tiny Atlantic island of St Helena.

Almost two centuries after Napoleon's death, historians continue to argue about his aims, his achievements and his legacy. In this thoroughly revised and updated new edition, Clive Emsley brings these historiographical debates up-to-date, and broadens his study to include discussion of the cultural and social impact of the Napoleonic era.

This new edition:

• offers a succinct summary of Napoleon's career

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• examines his impact on France and Europe, as well as including a new chapter on the impact of the Napoleonic adventure on the wider world

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• considers the relationship between Napoleon and the French Revolution

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• outlines the difficulties in assessing his career

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• explores the current debates surrounding Napoleon

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• contains an expanded selection of primary source documents, ranging from state papers to police reports.

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A Chronology, Glossary and Who's Who of key characters are also provided, making this an indispensable textbook for students of nineteenth-century French and European history.

Part I

Introduction

1 ‘My history is made up of facts, and words alone cannot destroy them’

 

 

 

 

 

Commenting on his detractors to the Comte de Las Cases in his lonely exile upon St Helena, Napoleon was right to stress that facts had made up his career. Nevertheless, while words might not destroy these facts, they have to be used to describe the facts and to express interpretations of the facts. In his conversations with Las Cases, and with others, Napoleon spent a considerable amount of time interpreting the facts of his career for posterity. In precisely the same way, supporters of the Bourbon monarchy that was restored to France after his fall, and the chroniclers of the states which contributed to that fall, as well as subsequent generations of historians, have all described, interpreted and reinterpreted the very same facts. As Napoleon also said, with some justice, in Las Cases’s hearing: ‘Everybody has loved me and hated me: every one has been for me and against me by turns. I may truly say there is not a single Frenchman in whom I have not excited interest.’ And that interest was not restricted, and has remained not restricted to the people of France.

Probably no other single individual had such a profound impact on the development of modern France and on that of nineteenth-century Europe as Napoleon Bonaparte. He emerged out of the ferment of the French Revolution which, with its potent ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity and the rights of man, had shaken much of the political and social structure of Europe and in some instances had brought it tumbling down. He has been portrayed both as the heir of the Revolution continuing to spread its ideas, and as its betrayer seeking to replace one hereditary family with another – his own. He himself claimed to have picked up the French crown from the gutter and, for the benefit of posterity, he also told Las Cases that he had ‘closed the gaping abyss of anarchy, and & unscrambled chaos & cleansed the Revolution, ennobled the common people, and restored the authority of kings’.

The sheer scale of Napoleon’s military success and eventual disaster, the scale of his administrative and governmental changes, of his redrawing of European frontiers, all served to generate strong feelings during his lifetime. Subsequently they have all contributed to him becoming a figure of controversy among historians and among others who find in his career contemporary parallels or the roots of many contemporary issues. Napoleon contributed to these controversies himself. From his earliest campaigns he consciously manipulated his image and information about himself. In exile he glossed his career in the memoirs that he dictated, principally to Las Cases, and in the comments that he made about his career to others. This gloss was burnished by the commission established in 1854 by his nephew, Napoleon III, to collect and publish his correspondence. The commission’s expressed aim was to publish in accordance with the image that Napoleon wished to project of himself. And while the 32 volumes that appeared as a result of the commission’s work proved to be an invaluable source for historians, the expressed aim led to a variety of omissions and exclusions of which some historians have been more aware than others. A new collection of the correspondence began to appear in 2004 under the auspices of the Fondation Napoléon and it diligently avoids the bias of the nineteenth-century volumes. Yet, even if Napoleon worked carefully and tirelessly at burnishing his image, and even though his supporters and successors worked similarly, there can be no gainsaying his personal charisma and the qualities that inspired his followers and his soldiers, and, at the end, that even won over some of his captors.

Biography is not always favoured by modern academic historians and several of the best tend to focus less on Napoleon the man and more on his impact on France (Ellis, 1997; Lyons, 1994; Tulard, 1984 are all good examples). There are a clutch of fine recent academic biographies, notably those of Philip Dwyer (2007 and 2013), Steven Englund (2004), Alan Forrest (2011), and that of Michael Broers (2014), which is the first to make use of the new collection of correspondence; but others still become entangled in early nineteenth-century debates as to whether Napoleon was essentially a force for good or evil, and/or have often tended to seek explanations for his behaviour rooted in, for example, Freudian psychology. Once an author becomes enmeshed in such issues the difficulties are accentuated of trying to establish the subject’s overall aims and objectives, as well as the intentions at different moments of a career. For example, did Napoleon have a genuine vision for France, and for Europe? Was he essentially the heir or the destroyer of the Revolution and its ideas? At what point did he decide that he had the ability and the opportunity to take control of France? At what point, if at all in his career, might he have been prepared to hang up his sword and cease fighting? Were his personality and ambitions the principal causes of the Napoleonic wars? Or were his apparently endless wars forced on him by jealous rivals, and especially by the government in London that constituted his most persistent enemy, that funded coalition after coalition against him until his second abdication in 1815, and that guarded him in his lonely exile on St Helena? The debates between nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French historians on these issues were superbly explored by the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl. He might have broadened his coverage to include at least British, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish and Russian historians, though these would, probably, have been rather more ‘against’ than ‘for’. And while Geyl was writing more than half a century ago, his point was well made that ‘History is indeed an argument without end’, and especially with reference to Napoleon (Geyl, 1949, p. 18). More recently R.S. Alexander has broadened the geographical range of Napoleonic historiography with a new analysis and has brought it up to date. Alexander suggests further, that part of the problem with the history of Napoleon is that, while there remain occasional lacunae, there simply is so much that is known about him. Moreover, since Napoleon was both a great publicist and a great opportunist, his words and deeds have enabled his career to be interpreted and reinterpreted, as well as hitched to a variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century political ‘isms’ (Alexander, 2001). There were moments in his career when he appeared a liberal, and others when he was the dictatorial tyrant. He continued the reforms of the Revolution, rejecting the corporatism and privilege inherent in the old regime. But his perception of society and of how it should be structured was hierarchical and authoritarian, and in many ways rooted in the old regime.

What follows is designed as a broad introduction, first to Napoleon’s career, achievements and legacy, and second to some of the debates about and interpretations of his career. The core of the book (Part II) is divided into three principal chapters. The first of these briefly chronicles Napoleon’s career. The second and third chapters survey, respectively, his impact on France and on Europe. The fourth chapter looks beyond the usual Eurocentric focus to consider the impact of the Napoleonic adventure on the wider world. A short conclusion (Part III) returns to the European perspective to address some of the lasting effects of his career and achievements on that continent. The final section of the book (Part IV) is made up of documents selected to illustrate some of the events and issues explored in the main text as well as some of the complexities involved in assessing Napoleon’s career, achievements and legacy. There is also a glossary, a brief who’s who, and a chronology of some of the key events.

Part II

Narrative

2 The career and the man

Making a name

More by accident than design the French Revolution produced a clutch of able young generals. In the early years of the Revolution a few military officers, drawn from the scions of the nobility, emigrated. When war began against the crowned heads of Europe, and when France became a republic, still more left. Those that remained saw their numbers diminish in action on the battlefield or in purges – sometimes because of military failure, sometimes because they were politically suspect, and sometimes they appear simply to have been fingered as necessary scapegoats. Into their shoes stepped a few men who, in the royal army, could rarely, if ever, have risen above the rank of non-commissioned officer. Lazare Hoche, born in 1768, began life as a stable-boy, was a corporal in 1789, and a general four years later. Michel Ney, born in 1769, was the son of a cooper. He enlisted as a hussar in 1788, was made a lieutenant at the beginning of war in 1792, and became a general in 1796. At the same time, young officers of the old regime army, who came from the nobility, who showed loyalty to the Revolution, ability on the battlefield, and who made the right connections, also found rapid promotion. One such was Napoleon Bonaparte.

Napoleone Buonaparte was born in Corsica in 1769, the year after the island had been transferred to French rule by the Italian state of Genoa. He was the second son of a family that claimed Italian noble blood. His father, Carlo (or Charles), had rallied rapidly to the French and had secured recognition of the family’s claim to noble rank. Accounts of Napoleone’s childhood are rare and unreliable. What is certain is that his father seized the opportunity of rewards offered by Louis XVI to his loyal Corsican nobility, and this enabled Napoleone, and his elder brother Joseph, to be educated in France. After five years at the military academy in Brienne, Napoleone transferred to the École Militaire in Paris in 1784, and was gazetted as an artillery officer the following year (Carrington, 1986; Parker, 2001). The artillery was a technical arm. It was not one of the glamorous guards or cavalry regiments of the old regime army and it was unlikely that a young officer of relatively lowly origin, and with a pronounced Corsican accent, would have risen to the greatest military rank, but then came revolution and war.

In the early stages of the Revolution Napoleone returned to Corsica and was elected lieutenant-colonel in the local National Guard. During his years at military school and as a young officer, he appears to have developed a world-view and a personal identity based on a romantic imagining of the island of his birth. In particular he idolised the Corsican patriot leader Pasquale Paoli. Once back in Corsica, however, the idealised picture of his homeland rapidly evaporated. For some time his family had been feuding with Paoli, and in 1793 the entire Buonaparte family was compelled to flee to France. Once back in France Napoleone rejoined the army and transformed himself into a Jacobin revolutionary (Dwyer, 2002). Captain Buonaparte showed courage and ability in commanding the artillery at the siege of Toulon in December 1793 and was promoted to general. But, the following summer, his links with the Jacobins led to him being briefly imprisoned on the fall of Robespierre. During 1795 he hovered in the corridors of power in Paris seeking a command. There he became particularly close to the corrupt, unscrupulous, but politically adept, Paul Barras. On 5 October 1795, working under Barras’s direction, he was available in Paris to command some of the troops who swept away the royalist rising of Vendémiare with ‘a whiff of grapeshot’. Five days later he was appointed Commander of the Army of the Interior. He maintained close links with members of the new government, the Directory, established in November, in which Barras was to remain prominent. On 9 March 1796 he married Barras’s former mistress, Josephine de Beauharnais, who was six years his senior. Two days later he left to take up a new command, the Army of Italy.

It was in Italy that Citizen General Napoleon Bonaparte – his name now without its Corsican spelling – began to make a significant mark. In the twelve months from April 1796 he fought a brilliant campaign against the Austrians in Italy bringing them to sign the preliminary Peace of Leoben on 19 April 1797. He established, under his own presidency and according to his own ideas, sister republics in the north of the peninsula (the Cispadene in 1796, which was expanded into the Cisalpine in 1797, and the Ligurian, also in 1797). He imposed a treaty on the Papacy, and subsequently (May 1797) occupied the Venetian Republic. He sent artistic treasures and cash indemnities back to his political masters in Paris. In the late summer of 1797, at Barras’s request for assistance, he sent his deputy commander, General Augereau, to provide military support for the coup d’état of 18 Fructidor Year V (4 September). But it was also clear that General Bonaparte was increasingly becoming his own man with his own agenda. Many of his actions were taken without reference to the Directory. The Peace of Leoben was negotiated with little regard for the instructions sent from Paris, so too was the follow-up Treaty of Campo Formio (18 October 1797) whereby General Bonaparte, now playing the diplomat in addition to the soldier, secured the French occupation of Belgium, the recognition of the Ligurian Republic, and ceded Venice to Austria. His creation of sister republics gave him his first taste of political leadership and of establishing institutions of state, experiences that none of his military rivals shared. At the same time Bonaparte was beginning to develop his own legend. His victories at Lodi (11 May 1796), Arcola (15–17 October 1796) and Rivoli (14 January 1797) were impressive, but they were made all the more spectacular by carefully crafted reports in the newspapers founded for the Army of Italy; and these newspapers were also distributed in France.

At the close of his successful campaign in Italy Bonaparte appeared the most successful of the young generals (see Document 1). The man who might have become his most serious rival, the Jacobin Lazare Hoche, had died of consumption two weeks after the Fructidor coup. In October 1797 he was appointed to command the army designated for the invasion of England, the French Republic’s last remaining enemy. But Bonaparte was wary of the invasion scheme. The difficulties of such a venture had been demonstrated by Hoche’s aborted expedition to Ireland the previous December, and Britain’s Royal Navy remained a serious threat to any military attempt to cross the Channel. Yet the alternative expedition on which Bonaparte eventually embarked, an invasion of Egypt, was every bit as risky. The Egyptian adventure, with its accompanying train of scientists and savants, provided romance and victories for the Napoleonic legend. It also led to significant intellectual progress, not the least of which was the discovery of the Rosetta stone, which provided the key for deciphering the monuments of ancient Egypt. But if it was ultimately a military disaster, it was not known as such in France until long after General Bonaparte’s return. Moreover it had kept Bonaparte away from the coups and purges that continued to undermine the Directory during 1798 and 1799, and from the military reverses which marked the renewed hostilities with Austria early in 1799. As a result, when he returned to France with a small group of men in October 1799, General Bonaparte could pose as an untainted military saviour who could bring order out of chaos and victory out of defeat. And for the group of politicians plotting a parliamentary coup with the aim of creating a faction-free, properly functioning political system, he appeared the ideal sword for cowering opponents.

In itself the coup d’état of 18–19 Brumaire Year VIII (9–10 November 1799) was not particularly exceptional. General Bonaparte did not distinguish himself personally. He was ill-prepared for a confrontation with civilian politicians and clumsily allowed his impatience to prompt him into a foolish and almost disastrous hectoring of the Directory’s largest legislative chamber, the Council of Five Hundred. The result, however, was to prove significant. It brought to an end the five-man executive Directory and saw the creation of the three-man Consulate. The three provisional consuls who took over in the aftermath of the coup were Roger Ducos, a Jacobin lawyer who had served as a Director since June 1799, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, a former priest, revolutionary pamphleteer and deputy, who had been elected as a Director in May 1799, and Bonaparte.

Mastering France

In recent years historians have begun to reassess the Directory; in particular its attempts to ameliorate the animosities generated by the terror and the violence of the mid-1790s, and to fuse the new concepts of rights and liberties with central authority. Yet the Directory was unpopular and the conspirators of Brumaire knew this. It had failed to bring an end to the interminable wars of the Revolution and, even more serious, especially in the eyes of those men of property who had profited from the early upheavals of the Revolution, it had failed to establish internal security...