France: The Rise of Napoléon
During the war with England, the French had obtained the island of Corsica, and, as a result, Nabuleone di Buonaparte was born in 1769 as a French citizen. After translating his name into its French version, Napoléon Bonaparte, the young military officer was part of the army raised to repel the invasion. The initial reason for intervening in internal French affairs was the Queen herself. Allies, Austria and Prussia, attempted to invade and end the Revolution before it was too late for Marie Antoinette. However, the first nationwide draft, the levée en masse, in 1793, put large numbers of men in the field and, in an extraordinary feat, the new government managed to feed, clothe and arm the citizens’ army. Even after the deaths of the King and Queen, the European powers still sought to restore the hereditary right to rule, or, to put it another way, to safeguard the legitimacy of aristocratic power. Revolution had already infected America, to the great cost of Britain, and this rebellious fever must not be allowed to spread to the rest of Europe.
To counter the reactionary European alliance, a young Corsican coporal, Napoléon Bonaparte, rose from the ranks of the French Army by exhibiting his talents with artillery, a relatively modern weapon for modern war. He was a common man, who, for many, personified the promise of the Revolution—success through merit. Napoléon understood artillery—it could be moved, it could be deployed strategically, and with its flexible firepower, artillery could be the decisive edge for victory. Throughout Europe in the fired up imaginations of the commoners, Napoléon was not just a new kind of leader; he was a savior. A man who was a “man of the people,” he was perceived as bringing the ideals of the Enlightenment to the rest of Europe. For the French, the Corsican colonial brought order out of the chaos of a Revolution gone wrong. Lucky to be stationed outside of France, Napoléon avoided the internal politics of the Revolution. For example, many French people outside of Paris were anti-Republican and opposed to the reforms promised by the Revolution. The result was decades of rebellion, collectively called “The Vendée,” also known as the “White Terror,” which carried on until 1813.
Those early years of post-monarchy government is referred to as the First Republic, established in 1792. Far from being a “republic,” in the traditional sense, this Republic included the dictatorship of the Jacobins, the Directory, which employed Napoléon, and the Counsulate, which was dominated by him. Napoléon became the First Counsel in 1799, when he staged a coup d’état, after being soundly defeated by the British in Egypt. This seizure of power is referred to as “The 18 Brumarie,” after the day and month of the coup. The Republic ended and Napoléon was in total control by 1804, during a period of peace, following the Treaty of Amiens of 1802. The French Revolution was over, the experiment in representative government was ended, and dictatorial power was restored. Napoléon invited the émigrés, who had fled for their aristocratic lives to England and America, to come back to France. He reinstated the Catholic Church, but its property was not restored. Dashing the hopes for democracy of European intellectuals from Beethoven to Goya, Napoléon crowned himself Emperor of France and crowned his wife, Josephine, Empress, for good measure. Then he embarked upon a campaign of conquest throughout Europe that would stall the benefits of modern life and the Enlightenment for France and for the rest of Europe.
Under the guise of being a liberator and a bringer of the ideals of the Revolution, Napoléon conquered the Continent. The longstanding problem of the French debt was solved simply: by looting Europe. While many liberals welcomed the weakening of European monarchies, they were soon disillusioned by Napoléon’s iron grip on his “allies” and became restive. Only England stood, alone, against the French. The resistance of Great Britain only made the nation stronger, while the need to control his conquests eventually drained the French who eventually tasted defeat in 1814. Napoléon brought the dark side of modern life—total war—to anyone in his path until his final downfall at Waterloo in 1815.
Napoléon and his total war was an attempt to return to the glory days of the Carolingian Empire, and allowed England to become the dominant industrial and military power while he was consolidating his power. The Code Napoléon turned back the reforms and the ideals of the Revolution, abolishing equality but acknowledged the power of the middle class and the principle of merit as a condition of advancement. Most importantly, the Code spelled out the winners and losers, following the years of upheaval. Slavery was reinstated in the colonies. Women were disempowered and the lower classes were put back in their place and the revolutionary energies were drained by the total war that dominated the decade. Thus, the real losers of the French Revolution were the very class that had led the Revolution—the lower classes.
Unwittingly the proletariat had done the dirty business of eliminating the troublesome aristocrats for the bourgeoisie. The sans-coulottes had demonstrated their lack of judgment in following unqualified rabble-rousers. The lower classes had never supported the Enlightenment ideals that had so inspired the upper classes, and, the proletariat and the peasants were responsible for the end of the Enlightenment itself. The horrors of the Terror demonstrated the futility of relying upon the powers of human reason and rational thinking. The American Revolution had been eminently rational; the French Revolution had been strikingly irrational. The English Royalists in America were allowed to leave or adapt; the French aristocrats had been massacred in public spectacles in town squares all over the country. The lower classes had terrified their fellow French citizens by acting out centuries of rage, earning the sobriquet: The Dangerous Class.
Although leading the way to revolution, the lower classes disqualified themselves for power. The middle-class feared and loathed the undisciplined and unwashed mod and would view any move on the part of the lower classes to protest their status with suspicion and oppression. By behaving less badly, the middle class inherited France and moved into the court of Napoléon, newly empowered under the Empire. The proletariat would have to endure other Revolutions and wait for the century to end before they too would become fully enfranchised. The lower classes, who were promised “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” but got little of the “natural rights” that had been promised. At the end of the Napoléonic wars, one in three lower class men had died, sacrificed for the glory of the nation. And yet, out of the strife and struggle, the modern French Citizen was constructed and the modern French identity came into being within a modern nation state. But there was a cost. An overseas empire had been lost and England was suddenly dominant in Europe, with France as a defeated and diminished power, destined to yearn for those years of patriotic glory under Napoléon.
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