NAPOLEON

NAPOLEON (1769–1821), French general, first consul (1799–1804), and emperor of the French (1804–1814/1815).

Perhaps only the improbable national history that gave the world Joan of Arc could also produce as outsized a figure as Napoleon Bonaparte. This height-challenged second son of an obscure Corsican family grew up to rule France and much of Europe for a decade, and he has dominated world-historical memory and imagination ever since. He remains one of the most written-about figures since Jesus Christ.

coming of age

Napoleone Buonaparte (in the original Italian spelling) was born in Ajaccio on the island of Corsica on 15 August 1769. The Corsica that produced Napoleon had been ceded to France by Genoa, the year before his birth; its culture was thus Italian, as indeed it has in many ways remained. The island was a strange and wild clime, offering an explosive combination of the primitive and promising, the reactionary and revolutionary, and its inhabitants proved most difficult of assimilation. The Buonaparte family into whose midst Napoleon arrived as the second child of five brothers and three sisters offered a most Corsican combination of the ambitious and the idealistic—Carlo, the future emperor's father, being at one and the same time frantically ambitious to improve his family's social lot, yet strongly committed to the progressive forces on the island. The latter were represented by Pasquale Paoli, the Corsican republican hero of the 1750s, who was driven (by the Genoese) into exile in England, but was hoping to return.

The paradoxes and conflicts continue. Napoleon, like his siblings, was sent to school in France. He finished his studies at the elite Royal Military School in Paris. A second lieutenant of artillery, at the tender age of sixteen (1785), he was nevertheless strongly torn between his abiding feelings of Corsican patriotism and his shrewd understanding that "making it" could likely occur only in France.

The great Revolution of 1789, which restored Paoli to power in Corsica, thus seemed to Napoleon to be a divine surprise, for it offered him the opportunity to return to his beloved native land and play a historic role. In the intervening years, however, the young officer, despite his best intentions and apparent feelings, had in fact become quite "French"; certainly his political views were strongly identified with the Revolution. Thus, when Paoli and most Corsicans gradually turned against the Revolution, Napoleon unhesitatingly chose "the French party." In 1793 he and his family were forced to flee the island for the mainland. He left without looking back. Corsica never again interested him; for better or worse, he was French.

The ensuing five years, before great military and political success crowned Napoleon, were a painful and frustrating time for the young officer, alternately thrilling and boring. Napoleon's close identification with the Jacobin party both advanced and inhibited his career. He played a critical role in winning the siege that reclaimed Toulon from the English (1793), and for this was promoted to brigadier general, at age twenty-four. But with the fall of his protector, Maximilien Robespierre, in mid-1794, the young man lost his political base; the new regime, the Directory, left him to cool his heels for a time.

Nevertheless, with France at war against much of Europe, the government badly needed this officer's unique military and strategic talents. In October 1795 (Vendémiaire Year IV, according to the Revolutionary calendar), Napoleon was given an important position in the force that suppressed a counterrevolutionary movement in Paris. For his sterling services, he was made full general and named to command the Army of the Interior. Some months later, in early 1796, he received command of the French Army of Italy.

early campaigns and state-building: italy and egypt

The wars associated with the adjective Napoleonic attained a degree of violence previously unknown in Europe, yet paradoxically this first campaign in Italy, which established Bonaparte's name, was more typical of the Old Regime's war of maneuver and limited engagement—typical, but speeded up. The general's compact French divisions not only floated like butterflies and stung like bees, they also darted among the foothills and plains of northern Italy with the speed and suddenness of hummingbirds. In less than a fortnight, they knocked the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia out of the war. The ensuing twelve months saw them defeat several leading Austrian generals on battlefields whose names have come down to posterity (Lodi, Arcole) more thanks to paintings and myths than to the strategy deployed.

Bonaparte excelled as diplomat, as well; he played the key role in negotiating the Treaty of Campo-Formio (1797), which resulted in the French being anchored in northern Italy, while the Habsburgs were driven out, except of Venice. The "Jacobin general" put more of his imagination into state-building than into military campaigns or even diplomacy (thereby differentiating himself from Alexander the Great and Caesar, who were mainly conquerors). To be sure, all of northern Italy was heavily taxed and some of its best art was despoiled for French museums, but when Lombard patriots pressed Napoleon to overthrow their old regime and declare a republic, he did so. The resulting Cisalpine Republic saw the adoption of French constitutional models and methods, but made space, too, for Italian flourishes. Despite orders from Paris, Napoleon refused to humiliate the pope, and moreover he leaned on the oligarchical old city-state of Genoa to reform itself under a new name, the Ligurian Republic. No less a Napoleon critic than the historian Michel Vovelle finally speaks of the general's "noble ambition which in a certain sense played a positive role in the origins of Italian unity" (Vovelle, p. 184; author's translation).

The French invaded Egypt (1798) for numerous geopolitical and economic reasons, but Napoleon probably chose the assignment because the Alexandrine dimensions of it captured his imagination. The French army racked up legendary victories at the Pyramids and Mount Tabor, but military disaster struck them early on, when a British fleet under Admiral Horatio Nelson destroyed their ships in Aboukir Bay, thus marooning the French in Egypt. Like Xenophon and his Spartans in the fourth century b.c.e., Bonaparte met the challenge head on, keeping his army together and marching as far north as Syria—where the British finally bested him at Saint-Jean-d'Acre, and he returned to Egypt.

Again, it was in state-building that Napoleon flourished more than in warfare: despite local rebellion and religious conflict, he proved himself far more knowledgeable and appreciative of Islam than most modern conquerors have usually been, and he succeeded in winning over a large part of the educated and economically productive local elites to the French cause. The French remained nearly three years in Egypt, and in that time they laid many of the infrastructural and political foundations for a long-term, thoroughly "modern" colony in the nineteenth-century sense of the term. External factors alone were what drove them out: a British expeditionary force finally, barely, defeated Bonaparte's successor general, in the summer of 1801. If that officer had held out for four more months—that is, until the peace discussions between England and France got underway—the French hold on Egypt might well have survived until the twentieth century.

In any case, the expedition made one permanent important cultural achievement: the active presence of scores of French scientists, artists, and scholars, whom Napoleon had insisted on bringing (at considerable expense) in the first place, led, in the fullness of time, to the creation of the modern science of Egyptology.

With great daring (given that the Mediterranean was considered a "British lake" in 1799), Napoleon stealthily quit his army and returned to France, in late summer. The Directory, never politically stable, was in crisis—the object of machinations by numerous parties—and Bonaparte wished to play his part. Singularly famous and popular, the young general was courted by all sides, but ultimately chose to ally himself with the moderates around Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, a political theorist famed for his role as polemicist in 1789. Opposing both the royalists and the neo-Jacobin radicals, while skillfully conspiring with elements within the Directory itself, the Bonaparte-Sieyès group seized power—albeit, just barely—on 9 November 1799 (18 Brumaire Year VIII). The key point to note is that, technically speaking, their action was a "legal" coup d'état, because the men succeeded in getting a rump parliament to ratify their actions. This was the first use of a political ploy with a long future in world history.

power—the consulate

It is one thing to seize power—many parties and figures had done that in the long and tortuous decade since 1789. But it is quite another to hold on to power and accomplish something significant with it. This is what Bonaparte managed to do—firmly establishing himself under the Roman title of "first consul" (read: dictator) of the French Republic, while drawing into collaboration most of the great political, legal, and scientific minds of an era rich with such greatness. If he succeeded in bringing off so unprecedented an accomplishment, it was in part because Bonaparte saw to the creation of a new style of regime in the long and rusé (stuffed) annals of European history: a civil (not a military) dictatorship based nominally on "national sovereignty," functionally on a form of democratic mobilization (that is, on some use of the franchise and elections, notably countrywide plebiscites), and more generally on accenting an aroused and persuaded public opinion.

If Bonaparte seemed to strike out in all directions in the early years after his accession to power, the acts he performed or oversaw—from the small and symbolic to the large and material—were yet characterized by a high degree of coherence. For what he in fact managed to do was bring to port the manifold projects that the Revolution had conceived but failed to accomplish.

The "granite blocks," as these reforms may be called, by and large remained the plinth on which the French state continued to reside into the twenty-first century. They include administrative centralization (the prefectures), legal consolidation (the Napoleonic Code), a stabilized currency (the Bank of France and the franc), individual honorifics (the Legion of Honor), national education (the lycées, the University, the grandes écoles), and social peace (the Concordat with the Catholic Church). It is difficult to give a summary description or judgment on these measures, for many contemporaries saw them as "counterrevolutionary," while others saw them as precisely the opposite: the consolidation of 1789.

Two centuries on, the "granite blocks" may be viewed as the means by which a property-owning society of the eighteenth century, led by an Enlightenment general, strove to make a good exit from the most extravagant political ordeal of modern times (the French Revolution)—an ordeal that the general and his supporters regarded both as greatly admirable and greatly pernicious. For they had lived out Charles Dickens in advance of his writing (in A Tale of Two Cities): they had lived the best of times and the worst of times, and their great challenge lay in separating the two. Less than agonizing over what they had seen, they worried about what could happen if the ordeal of revolution continued. And so they stopped it while simultaneously consolidating it.

Bonaparte, in short, sought to escape "politics," as that word had come to be understood in the democratic contestation developed since 1789. Instead, the regime, to put it paradoxically, mounted a peculiarly French form of "apolitical politics": that is, government by a drummed-up "national" consensus around efficient administration, a cult of the leader, and the pursuit of military victory and French imperial glory (rather than by rival political parties, opposition newspapers, and critical parliaments).

Once again, the point is not that the Consulate attempted such a contradiction as an "apolitical" or "national" politics—many governments (before or since) have tried—but rather that Napoleon largely succeeded for nearly a decade at running the state without the usual checks and balances and partisan competition familiar to nearly all regimes of law. This said, however, a stubborn and dangerous counterrevolutionary opposition continued to stand against the Consulate and empire in some of France's western provinces, while from Switzerland, a small but prestigious and persistent political opposition smoldered among moderates and liberals congregated around the writer Germaine de Staël and the political theorist Benjamin Constant (and other "idéologues," as they were known).

war and empire

The steep price exacted for this unprecedented experiment in "national" governance was that France largely exported its domestic conflict in these years. That is, for most of Napoleon's tenure, the nation was at war. Indeed Bonaparte justified the transformation of the dictatorial Consulate into an authoritarian empire in the failure of the Treaty of Amiens (1802) and the return of armed conflict with England and its allies. Pope Pius VII was persuaded to come to Paris for the coronation (2 December 1804) of Napoleon as the first emperor of the French—a title that emphasized the formal, if empty, role of "national sovereignty" in the eclectic, nominally democratic regime that he put together. (The empire officially remained a "republic" until 1807.)

The War of the Third Coalition (1805–1807) saw Napoleon score his greatest single victory, at the Battle of Austerlitz, where his superior strategy defeated the larger combined armies of Austria and Russia. On the other hand, the British had again destroyed the French fleet (at the Battle of Trafalgar), so that Napoleonic hegemony was confined to the European continent. Great Britain ruled the seas along with France's extensive colonial holding. Later in the war, Napoleon inflicted sharp defeats on Prussia and Russia, at Jena-Auerstedt, Eylau, and Friedland. The Treaties of Tilsit (1807) confirmed French control of western and central Europe, while reserving a degree of Russian predominance in the east. But Tsar Alexander I was obliged to defer to French policy, and this proved distasteful and difficult for him. The Austro-French war of 1809 saw the French victorious at Wagram, and Habsburg power broken at the Treaty of Schönbrunn (1809).

As Britain's allies met disaster on land, the only way left for the English and French to carry on the war was in the economic realm. Britain's order in council (1806) created a maritime blockade of the Continent by the British fleet, matched by Napoleon's Berlin and Milan Decrees (1807), with which the French cut off all European trade with the British Isles. This "trade war" severely wounded both sides, but it ultimately inflicted greater harm on Europe, for it cut the Continent off from the spices and raw materials of Africa, India, and South America.

The war and the blockade "obliged" the French, as they saw it, to take control of the entire European littoral, which their leader's and his army's military skill permitted them to do. For the first time in European history since Charlemagne, if not since Rome, one power dominated the Continent. Napoleon's writ, at one time or another, ran from Lisbon to Moscow, and Naples to Copenhagen.

Unlike earlier empires, however, the French First Empire was no homogeneous structure, geopolitically speaking. Its "inner" core included modern-day Belgium, northern Germany and the Rhineland, northern Italy, the Dalmatian coast, and even a slice of eastern Spain; these areas were outright annexed to France and run as "departments." The "outer" empire included entire kingdoms and principalities (Spain, Holland, Westphalia, etc.) that were ruled by members of Napoleon's family, all of whom paid homage to the emperor. Finally, there were the vast areas of direct French influence—subordinating alliances that were forced on the Great Powers that had lost wars to Napoleon: Prussia, Russia, and Austria. Relations between the latter and France were further "thickened" by Napoleon's marriage in 1810 to Marie-Louise, the daughter of the Austrian emperor, Francis I. (Napoleon had secured an annulment of his marriage to Josephine because she could no longer have children.) The new empress bore him a son, grandly christened the king of Rome.

The year of the imperial prince's birth (1811) proved to be the high-water mark of Napoleonic power, and is a good place to try to sum up the balance sheet of his empire. This is a field in which contemporary scholarship has taken great strides, though it must also be said that the deepening of knowledge of the interface between the French and their subordinate lands has not led to many valid generalizations. On the one hand, it is clear that French influence always entailed some measure of progressive reforms, administrative, legal, and socioeconomic—changes that essentially forced degrees of "modernization" down the throats of old regime cultures, just as the Revolution had done in France. On the other hand, it is equally sure that the empire was always regressive in its extortion from occupied lands of money, manpower, and cultural artifacts.

Where complexity arises is in giving a detailed portrait of the interface over time between the French and the myriad social strata and political parties of the occupied lands. In some regions (e.g., northern Italy, Belgium) the newcomers were welcomed, and their departure left many locals (notably liberals in sympathy with the Revolution) regretful, for the learning and profit they had received and the changes their countries had registered. In other regions (Spain, southern Italy, much of Germany), however, the natives were mostly glad to get the French the hell out, although even in the bloodiest, angriest regions, such as Spain, it must be noted that whole social sectors (e.g., bourgeois city-dwellers in liberal occupations) knew the French departure spelled the end of socioeconomic progress—and worse. (Then, too, not a few historians have commented on how comparatively little bloody revolt the French presence provoked, despite their heavy demands and governance over their empire.) At the end of the day, a number of historians, notably François Crouzet, have commented on the Napoleonic Empire's role in being a first step toward European unification, which would eventually issue in the modern-day European Union.

Yet there were problems and defeats—serious ones—beginning most obviously in 1808, when much of the Spanish population followed some of their leaders in revolt against French rule. This obliged the emperor to march an army across the Pyrenees, and bring Spain to heel. This he did, but it did not last, once he left. He was obliged to send troops desperately needed elsewhere; Spain became a hemorrhage or cancer that seriously diminished the strength of the empire.

Around the same time, relations broke down between Napoleon and the pope over the issue of French domestic and international control over the Catholic Church. Never moderate with opponents, the emperor ordered the arrest of Pius VII and his incarceration in France. This rupture with the church was less immediately debilitating than the Spanish "ulcer," not least because it took several years for French Catholics to learn of the sorry state of relations between their emperor and their pope, but in the long run it cost Napoleon his large consensus in domestic support. French Catholics did not outright turn against him, but when the fortunes of war and diplomacy turned against the emperor, the key Catholic stratum in French public opinion, previously so grateful for the Concordat, no longer gave him unqualified support.

If Britain remained France's unrelenting foe, that nation yet had no means of militarily attacking the empire without reenlisting a major Continental ally. But after 1809, with Europe at Napoleon's feet, this proved hard to do. Franco-Russian relations, however, steadily declined after 1807, despite the apparent friendship between Tsar Alexander I and Napoleon. First, the Romanov realm was economically disobliged by its enforced participation in the Continental System (the name given the French economic blockade of England and subjugation of Europe). Then, too, Napoleon's resurrection of a Polish political entity (the Grand Duchy of Warsaw) infuriated the Russian aristocracy—a ruling class that already loathed the French for exporting elements of their Revolution.

War came in 1812, and Napoleon characteristically chose to attack his foe. He assembled the largest and most international force the world had ever seen—some five hundred thousand men—and led them across the Nieman River in June. His Grand Army inflicted bloody defeats on the Russians everywhere, including Borodino, and it even occupied the old capital of Moscow. But the tsar's government refused to sue for peace, or even negotiate, while meanwhile, the Russian populace began to harass the French. The threat of being trapped in Moscow for the winter led Napoleon to retreat, in the famous anabasis of the winter of 1812, which left his great force reduced to some ten to fifteen thousand combatants.

With France half-exsanguinated by its wars, and more especially the Russian campaign, the other great Continental powers, pressed on and bankrolled by Britain, threw off their yokes and joined Russia. The 1813 campaign in Germany saw the coalition of Russia, Austria, and Prussia defeat Napoleon and his army in several engagements, notably the great Battle of Leipzig (the Battle of the Nations). Surprisingly, the emperor retained his authority within France, and even managed to extract another army out of the exhausted realm. The final campaign—the Campaign of France, fought in and around the Champagne region—proved to be one of Napoleon's most dexterous displays of strategy in a hopeless situation.

Notwithstanding, the French capital fell, and the emperor was forced by his own marshals to abdicate, on 6 April 1814. Napoleon was exiled to the nearby island of Elba, off the northwestern Italian coast. From there, he planned his escape and return to France, no doubt further prompted by word of the plots against his life being fomented by the restored Bourbon monarchy in Paris. Napoleon's actual return—he landed in the Golfe-Juan, near Cannes, at the beginning of March 1815—came as a shock to the Great Powers gathered in Vienna. But the fact that in the next ten days, the majority of the French people, despite all the disasters of the late First Empire, welcomed the man back, who was reproclaimed emperor, struck contemporaries—as well as later observers—as nothing short of stunning.

Hardly less unpredictable was the new regime Napoleon founded. He agreed to share power with the senate and parliament, while granting far greater freedoms to the press and to individuals. The socalled Liberal Empire rallied some of Napoleon's most obdurate opponents (e.g., Lazare Carnot, Benjamin Constant); it endured a hundred days, until the emperor lost the Battle of Waterloo (18 June), and presently was shipped off into permanent exile on the distant South Atlantic island of St. Helena. However brief, this period of the Hundred Days remains one of the mysteries in modern European history—How did the French let it happen? What might the regime have become?

the napoleonic myth

In his six years of confinement on St. Helena, before his death on 5 May 1821, Napoleon produced one of his most far-reaching and lasting triumphs: he dictated roughly two thousand pages of memoirs to several aides, notably Emmanuel de Las Cases, who produced a massive tome entitled Memorial of St. Helena (1823). Though the work is a tissue of self-delusion and contains many contradictions, misinformation, and a few outright lies, it also contains pathos, remorse, and a great deal of thoughtful (and some beautiful) writing. Coupled with the experience of the Hundred Days (the "Liberal Empire"), the St. Helena writings have succeeded in memorializing Napoleon as a sort of liberal and democratic statesman—a friend of the "little people" and a nation builder who foresaw and worked toward the spread of the Enlightenment democratic revolution into the nineteenth century, including—no minor or illegitimate claim—the consolidation of the modern nation-state (notably Italy and Germany).

These writings have done so at least in French and Continental memory. In Anglo-American history, Napoleon has often been assigned an antipodal role: that of forerunner to Adolf Hitler. Neither view is even close to accurate—though the latter one, in addition to being wrongheaded, is also insulting to the French.

The truth is, Napoleon Bonaparte's unique contribution to world history lies in two things: on the one hand, the synthesis he wrought between nominal democracy based on national sovereignty and the plebiscite, as well as on military glory and geopolitical (imperial) aggrandizement; and, on the other hand, the never-ending appeal of the individualist myth of what the "lone man" can do with enough genius, gumption, and luck.

See alsoAusterlitz; Borodino; Concordat of 1801; Continental System; France; French Revolution; French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars; Hundred Days; Jena, Battle of; Napoleonic Code; Napoleonic Empire; Peninsular War; Sister Republics; Trafalgar, Battle of; Ulm, Battle of; Waterloo.

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Steven Englund