Napoleon

Geoffrey Ellis

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317874690
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: World History

This invaluable account provides an excellent introduction to the nature and mechanics of Napoleon's power, and how he used it. It explores Napoleon's rise to fame as a soldier of the French Revolution and his aims and achievements as first consul and emperor during the years 1799-1815.

Chapter 1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315837710-1

This book is not a biography of Napoleon nor an attempt to trace his military and political career in narrative terms. The sub-divisions of its six main chapters sometimes follow a broadly chronological sequence, but its overall approach is essentially topical. While it draws on my own research into the archival and printed primary sources for Napoleonic history, it is also primarily a synthesis of earlier secondary accounts, both old and more recent, of which many may not be familiar to general English readers. It is an attempt to offer them a series of over-views which deal in turn with Napoleon's rise to fame as a soldier of the French Revolution, with his aims and achievements as first consul and emperor during the years 1799–1815, and with the many different reactions to his rule among not only his contemporaries but observers of later generations as well. My binding theme is the nature of Napoleonic power: how it was pursued and won; how it was first elaborated in the extended frontiers of France and then expanded well beyond them; how its initial impact through military conquest was followed up by political subjugation and economic exploitation; how it was resisted; how it was finally lost; and how perceptions of it lived on in both the heroic and black legends of Napoleon well into the twentieth century.

In an earlier and shorter published work, I was less concerned with Napoleon, the man, than with the implementation and effects of his policies, and with the underlying structures of his regime.1 Such an approach reflected the more recent trends in Napoleonic historiography, away from personalities and towards the wider context in which Napoleon and his subjects lived and worked. The first unmistakable conclusion to emerge was that there had been as much continuity as change across the apparent watershed of Napoleon's coup d'état on 18 Brumaire. In view of it, the innovatory and radical nature of his reforms, which had so often been assumed by earlier writers, seemed rather less self-evident. The more one looked at the real aims and effects of his rule in France itself, the more they bore the aspect of a grand consolidation, adaptation, and extension of his Revolutionary inheritance, especially in the earlier years. As first consul (1799–1804), he owed much to the officers and men, to the tactics and weaponry, and to the territorial conquests of the reconstituted line armies of the mid- to later 1790s, in which he had of course played a spectacular part himself. He accepted the Revolutionary sales of the property confiscated from the Church and the émigrés, and indeed formally reaffirmed them in his Civil Code of 1804. In recruiting the administrative and legal personnel of his civil state, he drew heavily on the professional élites of the Revolutionary regimes before him. Similarly, the more one investigated his impact on the conquered territories beyond French frontiers, the clearer still it became that he could not always be considered a uniquely radical innovator.

Some readers will no doubt regard this as a modish ‘revisionist’ approach, aimed primarily at demystifying the ‘myth of the saviour’ and his heroic legend. So be it. The present volume at least, as seems appropriate to a series concerned with the central theme of ‘Power’ in particular episodes associated with major historical figures, has more place for Napoleon the man — for the formation of his character in the years before he gained power, for his own perception of power, for the influence this had on his exercise of power, in short for the whole nature of his personal ambition. Indeed, the chapters which follow might be seen as inter-related manifestations of an essentially personalized system of power. As such, they reassess the value of the older ‘classic’ accounts which have established themselves in the rich seam of Napoleonic historiography over the years. These include a huge and colourful variety of views on Napoleon's character, aims, and achievements, both adulatory and otherwise, evident in writings from the earliest days.

English readers will probably be most familiar with that historiographical debate through Pieter Geyl's long-serving study Napoleon: For and Against, first published in 1949, which was deliberately confined to French writers.2 Yet, even in those terms, the debate on the major recurring themes in Napoleonic historiography has moved on a good deal since Geyl's time, and the whole subject now seems ready for review. That is one of my objects here, and it is supplemented by another: to provide a critical survey of the earliest (often contemporary) German, Italian, and British writings on Napoleon in my penultimate chapter. Geyl never set himself this latter task, and, as far as I know, such a synthesis of the wider and more immediate European reactions to Napoleonic rule has never before been available to English readers in a general text.

In the course of this volume, then, we shall be confronting the older and more flamboyant images of Napoleon which dominated the historiographical debate up to the Second World War with the findings of more recent research. This will imply a reappraisal of earlier writings in which he often appeared as a sort of ‘superman’ or ‘super-demon’, who seemed somehow larger than life, and who (for his admirers at any rate) could not be judged by the standards of ordinary mortals. It will also imply a reconsideration of the great thematic accounts which sought to subsume his ambition and achievements in a ‘grand idea’ — such as Adolphe Thiers's notion of a ‘universal empire’, Albert Sorel's insistence on the ‘natural frontiers’ of France as the determining priority of Napoleonic imperialism, Frédéric Masson's detailed exposition of an evolving Corsican ‘clan spirit’, Émile Bourgeois's more exotic construction of an ‘oriental mirage’, the ‘Roman imperial ideal’ elaborated by Edgar Quinet and Édouard Driault, and the various versions of the ‘Carolingian motif associated with Leopold von Ranke, Charles Schmidt, Marcel Dunan, and Hellmuth Rössler, among others.

A more recent historiographical trend, influenced no doubt by political developments within the enlarged European Union today, also needs to be confronted. There are signs that some writers are now reconstruing Napoleon's great ambition of nearly two hundred years ago as an early anticipation of ‘European integration’. If much of this seems tendentious and specious, Stuart Woolf 's more scholarly variant of the analogy certainly merits more serious consideration. Basing his detailed account on the presupposition of a French administrative ‘model’ of ‘modernity’ and ‘uniformity’, one which could be exported to all the annexed lands and satellite states of the Napoleonic Empire, he examines the cases for and against the efficacy of its implementation there.3 His general conclusion suggests a crucial social distinction, for, as he puts it, ‘the pressure for the integration of elites that was an intrinsic part of the Napoleonic philosophy of administration widened the social gap between the propertied and property-less. This was the final and most profound heritage of the Napoleonic experience.’4 The issues raised by this argument are an important part of the present study, too.

Otherwise, however, the whole notion that Napoleon was an early architect of the modern ‘European idea’, topical though it may be, seems at variance with the hard evidence of his declared priority of Trance first’ (la France avant tout), as he once bluntly put it in a letter of August 1810. The one-sidedness of his military exactions, of his Continental Blockade against Britain, of his ‘reserved markets’ in Italy, and of his expanding ‘spoils system’ in the subject states of the ‘Grand Empire’ all suggest that the argument is simplistic and fundamentally flawed. On the other hand, we need not doubt that Napoleon's Imperial idea and imperial conquests*reached out far across the ‘natural frontiers’ of France to incorporate Spain and Portugal (however tenuously in fact) beyond the Pyrenees, the whole of the Italian mainland beyond the Alps, a significant slice of the Adriatic hinterland further east, most of Germany beyond the Rhine, and the larger part of Poland.

* Throughout this work, ‘Imperial’ (with a capital I) refers to the officiai delimitations of the French Empire or to Napoleon's own policies or ambitions as emperor within that formal context; ‘imperial’ (with a small i) refers to the process of empire-building (e.g. through conquest) in a more general sense. ‘Grand Empire’ refers to all the states which lay beyond the official frontiers of the French Empire but which, at one time or another, came under Napoleonic rule in some form.

While all this clearly did amount to a wider European vision, the crucial question remains: how well were its constituent parts actually ‘integrated’? To find an answer, we need to go back a stage in time and consider at what point Napoleon's Imperial vision had emerged as a clearly formulated policy even within the extended frontiers of France itself. ‘I am of the race that founds empires’, he once remarked to Emmanuel de Las Cases, his companion in exile on St Helena.5 In retrospect, that may well have seemed to both a poignant reaffirmation of his destiny, in which we are assured he passionately believed from an early age, ambitious Corsican that he was. But just how early did this Imperial design really begin to influence his actions? Was it all part of a preconceived plan evident even before Brumaire, or did it form in a more gradual and pragmatic way, as opportunities for wider conquest and greater glory opened up to him?

Those are questions which this study attempts to answer through empirical analysis. The picture of the emperor which ultimately emerges is neither as glorious as his arch-admirers, nor as demoniacal as his arch-enemies, have tried for so long to propagate. The Napoleon of this account cannot be subsumed in a single grand image but is a more changeable and contradictory character, of mercurial moods and only too fallible judgement, constantly adjusting to the immediate situation before him, and trying to exploit it to his own advantage. His capacity for brilliant improvisation on the field of battle is legendary; his adaptations to changing circumstances in the French civil state are perhaps less well known. Moreover, it is really only during the last thirty years or so that important research on Germany, Italy, and Poland has revealed the extent to which Napoleon, the great ‘radical’ reformer, in practice made his compromise with the old feudal order there, so as to extract his military and fiscal levies and to fuel his ‘spoils system’ more effectively. Among other effects, this undermined the application of his Civil Code (Code Napoléon) in those countries, and his role as a lawgiver there was vitiated.

In his exercise of power, whether at home or further afield, Napoleon was above all a realist As a civil ruler, for instance, he grasped early on that he would need the services of professional loyalists and the support of a social élite. He set out to secure both, by offering them the sort of careers and promotional prospects that would bind them more closely to him, and later by lavishly bestowing honours and material rewards on many of them. In this way, he aimed to establish a system in which the professional and propertied classes would more firmly associate their interests with his regime. While he presumed upon his own popular appeal, not least in the early plebiscites, he was largely indifferent to the popular masses. After the Revolutionary upheaval, he sensed that the French people as a whole wanted stable government and an orderly society, and that peasants and artisans alike would acquiesce in his rule, even if they had no direct part in it. Recognizing the traditional Catholicism of the vast majority of his subjects, he calculated that they would rally behind his Concordat with Pope Pius VII in 1801 and welcome the latter's formal acceptance of his coup. In his later rupture with the pope, however, he unre-alistically failed to honour the distinction between temporal power and spiritual authority, and the break with Rome ultimately weakened his position.

Given all this, how might Napoleon's ambition then be redefined? We must resist the temptation of thinking that there is one vital insight, be it a particular directive, or letter, or speech, or conversation, or recorded utterance, which provides a conclusive answer. It would be more helpful to identify the constants in Napoleon's character and actions, and see how far these take us. A Corsican by birth, his concept of empire was rooted in a strong sense of clannish honour, which naturally encompassed the dynastic furtherance of his family along with his own imperial ascent. A professional soldier by training and in mentality, he thought that civil society could also be ordered hierarchically on martial lines. A man of extraordinary will-power, supremely confident in his own abilities, utterly convinced that he was always right, intolerant of opposition, and driven by a strong sense of his personal destiny, he was by nature egotistical, authoritarian, and ambitious.

And yet, if Napoleon was thus unquestionably inspired by a vision of his own power and glory, he had to pursue it in a real world of unobliging obstacles and setbacks, more especially at sea. Since his power was effectively land-locked, its practical extensions can be properly understood only in continental terms. Moreover, since his continental conquests themselves did not come all at once, but in stages, especially during the critical campaigns of 1805–7, his ‘Grand Empire’ was forged by the same logic of military circumstances, step by step, in ways which had not always been foreseen. Its dynastic embellishments, that is his family placements on the satellite thrones, followed in their turn, and could be seen as acts of improvised opportunism rather than preconceived planning. Indeed, all its other social accretions, most notably the titles and land-gifts with which he endowed his Imperial nobility, were no less dependent on the prior spoils of conquest. What made Napoleonic imperialism possible was its gradualism, and its course was determined by the chronology of war.

Such empirical evidence suggests that Napoleon's ambition was not driven by any over-arching ‘master-plan’ or ‘grand design’, present from the start and systematically worked out, but that it grew by an evolving process of pragmatic opportunism, which eventually over-reached itself. Military strength underpinned the whole edifice of his rule in France, in the annexed territories which lay within the formal frontiers of the French Empire, and in the subject and allied states beyond them. His dynastic claims, even when they seemed to have been recognized by marriage with the ancient house of Habsburg and enhanced by the birth of an heir, never gave him the legitimacy he so dearly sought to secure the future. The edifice fell when Napoleon was no longer able to sustain its essential military base, and with its collapse his dynastic pretensions quickly evaporated as well. In this sense, the end of his ‘Grand Empire’ and even of the French Empire itself was already implicit in the military preconditions of their formation. None of his own annexations survived his fall in 1815. We are thus left with the great paradox of his rule. As a military conqueror of legendary fame, he ultimately surrendered a very much smaller territorial state than he had inherited; but, as a civil ruler, his legacy to France was monumental and altogether more enduring. In the final analysis, this was where his great work of ‘integration’ truly lay.

Notes And References

• 1. Geoffrey Ellis, The Napoleonic Empire, Macmillan Studies in European History, Basingstoke and London, 1991.
• 2. The edition used in this work is Pieter Geyl, Napoleon: For and Against, Harmondsworth, 1986 impression (Peregrine Books).
• 3. Stuart Woolf, Napoleon's Integration of Europe, London, 1991.
• 4. Ibid., p. 245.
• 5. Quoted in Harold T. Parker, ‘Napoleon's Changing Self-Image to 1812: A Sketch’, The Consortium on Revolutionary Europe: Proceedings 1983, Athens, Ga, 1985, pp. 457, 463 n. 26

Chapter 2 Prelude to Power: The Formative Years, 1769–99

DOI: 10.4324/9781315837710-2

The traditional biographical approach to Napoleon's life and military career before Brumaire has been ploughed so many times in earlier accounts that nothing very new now seems likely to come from it. And so, while this chapter retains a basic chronological thread, its arrangement is deliberately more topical than narrative. Since Napoleon was thirty years of age when he seized power in November 1799, we may assume that by then his fundamental character had already formed and that his military career had advanced spectacularly enough to make his coup d'état conceivable in the first place. Moreover, since the coup also marked the beginning of a political and military regime which was to become increasingly a manifestation of personalized power, it seems appropriate to seek its origins in the formation of Napoleon's own personality.

Two questions are chiefly at issue here. How far had Napoleon's essential character been moulded by the various influences of his Corsican upbringing and subsequent education on the French mainland? And how far had the opportunities opened up to aspiring young officers by the reforms and wars of the Revolution contributed to the same process and assisted his own military career? Taken together, the answers to these questions will also help to clarify the genesis of his earlier ambition, from would-be liberator of Corsica to actual ruler of France. Expressed in terms of power, that same evolution marked the transition from boyhood dream to adult reality.

Napoleon's Youth and Education

Corsica had a long history of invasion but rather patchy colonization by outsiders, as Dorothy Carrington has shown in her brilliant portrait of its land, people, a...