History of Modern Europe

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Did Napoleon Bonaparte carry forward the French Revolution or did he reverse it?

By- Umar Javed (073)

Nishant
Udit
Napoleon Bonaparte came from a minor nobility of Corsica and became the ruler of France
and one of the most successful military leaders in history. Napolean was a product of the
French Revolution who used its virtues to eventually become the most powerful man in
France, if not for the revolution French society would never have opened up for Napoleon.
Creating a French Empire and establishing French hegemony over Europe constituted
Napoleon’s most important and consistent objectives. Achieving these goals obviously
signified that Napoleon himself would become the dominant leader on the Continent. To
accomplish these goals, Napoleon launched numerous military campaigns, occupied many
countries, and incessantly reshaped the map of Europe. He expanded the borders of France,
abolished old states, and formed new satellite kingdoms. Increasing and diminishing borders
of allies and foes whenever he deemed that French interests dictated these changes, he
reorganized the territorial structure of foreign countries. Napoleon toppled old dynasties,
replacing them with new governments, headed mostly by his relatives. In order to maintain
his Grande Armée and sustain European expansion, Napoleon needed to exploit the human
and economic resources of his subject states, since France alone could not support his vast
imperial enterprise. He recruited hundreds of thousands of European troops into his army,
imposed high taxes, and requisitioned considerable quantities of supplies throughout
occupied Europe. He tried to establish France’s economic supremacy by forcing European
states to grant French industry and commerce special favors. To win his economic war
against Britain, his fiercest enemy, Napoleon coerced the rest of Europe to join the
Continental Blockade, his most significant policy after 1806.
The growing power and effectiveness of the State significantly changed the relations between
State and civil society. The Napoleonic State became more intrusive and authoritarian,
gaining more control over its citizens’ lives than the ancien régime had ever conceived of.
State officials and police personnel frequently penetrated the most remote corners of the
country and forced citizens to obey the law and acknowledge the State’s existence, thereby
creating tension and arousing resistance to its policies. The Napoleonic State tolerated no
criticism or challenge, and through the establishment of censorship and a network of spies, it
stifled any form of opposition and free speech. The authoritarian structure that Napoleon set
up in France was extended to his subject states. Clearly, under those conditions, political
participation was nonexistent and depoliticization was rife.
After Napoleon’s Coup of 18 Brummaire the Constitution of Year VIII, comprising ninety-
five articles hastily tossed together, made no mention of the rights of the citizen other than a
guarantee against nocturnal house searches, and it was very incomplete in its organisation of
public powers. In its brevity and obscurity, the constitution conformed to Bonaparte’s desire
to preserve a free hand for himself. Above all, it established the omnipotence of the First
Consul, and except for the right to make peace or war, which was of little consequence at this
time, Napoleon held complete executive power. He appointed the ministers and the other high
government officials; only the justices of the peace were to be elected. He alone possessed
the right to initiate legislation. The legislative power was reduced to a mere deliberative
process and to a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ vote on bills introduced by Bonaparte.
The French Revolution had virtually wiped Catholicism out of existence in the country, all
because of the radical ways in which the Enlightenment had evolved. Many of those involved
with the Enlightenment movement were either atheist or deist, meaning that God was not a
deciding factor in many of the developments brought about by the Enlightenment thinkers.
Ironically, several years after the death of Robespierre Napoleon, also a deist, was able to
bring back the church which had so brutally been discriminated against only a few years
earlier. The Concordant of 1801 signed between Napolean and Pope Pius VII which restored
the Catholic Church in France. Catholic clergy returned from exile, or from hiding, and
resumed their traditional positions in their traditional churches. While the Concordat restored
much power to the papacy, the balance of church-state relations tilted firmly in Napoleon's
favour. He selected the bishops and supervised church finances.
While Napolean maintained the legal and administrative reforms, Napoleon's regime was
decidedly autocratic and centralized power in his own hands. on 18 May 1804, the Senate
drew up the Constitution of the Year XII, proclaiming Napoleon as Emperor. Using the
royalist conspiracy against Napoleon, the authorities decided to transform the Consulate into
a hereditary Empire, thereby establishing the Napoleonic regime on a more permanent
foundation. A plebiscite confirmed Napoleon as an Emperor, once again by a huge majority.
On 2 December 1804, with Pope Pius VII present, Napoleon and Josephine were crowned at
the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris in an ostentatious ceremony. The formation of the
hereditary Empire cemented the dictatorship of Napoleon, who found it unnecessary to call
for more plebiscites .The Legislative Body lost any power; its sessions became more rare, and
after 1812 it ceased convening.
In May 1802, Bonaparte took an important step toward the formation of a French aristocracy
when he founded the Legion of Honor. It signified a departure from the Revolutionary
policies that had abolished all exclusive orders and titles. That institution “was meant to
consecrate the preeminent place of the army in society.” Of 32,000 members that Napoleon
introduced into the Legion of Honor, only 1500 were civilians. Endowing senators with
senatories, which included a residential palace and a substantial annual income, constituted
another step toward the resocialization of French society. Upon the creation of the Empire in
1804, Napoleon granted the title of Prince and an annual endowment to each member of his
family. Beginning in 1806, Napoleon awarded military officers with hereditary fiefs in the
Italian Peninsula, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, and German states. In March 1808, Napoleon
proclaimed the imperial nobility, establishing a hierarchy of princes, dukes, counts, barons,
and knights, and authorizing its members to possess a coat of arms. Through the imperial
nobility, the Emperor aimed at creating “an elite with a vested interest in the preservation of
the Empire and the Bonapartist dynasty.” The creation of a national nobility constituted a
departure from the ideals of the French Revolution and can be viewed as the restoration of
one of the most offensive characteristics of the Old Regime.
All this to say the relationship between the ideals of the French Revolution and Naploean’s
Empire was a complicated one. Napoleon did maintain and build upon many of the
substantive reforms introduced during the Revolution. The Napoleonic rule, along with the
preceding Revolutionary decade, brought the Old Regime to an end and launched the
modernization of French state and society. Napoleon destroyed the Revolutionary ideals of
popular sovereignty and free speech, and restored monarchical rule. Yet at the time same, he
consolidated many significant changes of the Revolution and established many of France’s
laws and institutions that have lasted to the present day. In fact, Napoleon carried out many of
the Revolutionary reforms more effectively than his predecessors and initiated important
innovations himself. Napoleon was a forerunner of change, launching reform policies that
paved the way for the long process of modernization of European states and societies. In the
context of early nineteenth-century Europe, modernization meant a number of elements:
centralized states with professional bureaucracies based on merit; uniform taxation;
conscripted national armies; a state police force; the end of the privileged position of the
nobility and its monopoly over power; secularization through the reduction of Church power
and its subjection to the State; ; property rights; dissolution of the seigneurial system; the
formation of national markets; and the emergence of nationalism. Revolutionary France had
launched many of these changes and Napoleon disseminated these reforms throughout
Europe. Napoleon succeeded in replacing a great deal of the traditional structure with new
laws and institutions in many of his subject states, thereby facilitating their passage into the
modern period.
Bonaparte, who served as First Consul during the Consulate years, launched numerous
dynamic changes aimed at consolidating the central state and establishing his authoritarian
power. He constructed a strong executive and an effective administration, ended the conflict
with the Church, stabilized financial conditions, established law and order and crushed the
royalist opposition, introduced legal uniformity through the Civil Code, implemented
successfully military conscription, and formed a central secondary education system.
The most significant internal change launched by the Napoleonic regime was the construction
of a centralized bureaucratic state characterized by uniform and rational administrative,
financial, legal, and military structures based on the French system. John Davis said “What
had remained only aspiration in even the most powerful of the eighteenth-century monarchies
was finally put into practice in the systematic reorganization of the administrative,
bureaucratic and financial institutions that was carried through in the brief period of French
rule.” The Napoleonic state was a streamlined, central, and uniform administration designed
to carry out government orders efficiently. The First Consul appointed a hierarchy of officials
to run the departments, elevating state centralization and administrative unity to new heights.
They were chosen on the basis of skill, experience and merit rater than their social status.
At St. Helena, Napoleon is reported to have remarked, “My glory is not to have won forty
battles, for Waterloo’s defeat will destroy the memory of as many victories. But what nothing
will destroy, what will eternally live is my Civil Code. “Along with the secondary education
system, the Civil Code was the most durable legacy of the Napoleonic period and laid the
foundation of national unity. It has remained the basis of French civil law to the present day
and is known for its brevity, clarity, and accessibility. In the view of Jean Tulard, “The Civil
Code legitimized the abolition of the Ancient Régime.” It Ratified important Revolutionary
principles, including legal equality, careers based on merit, an end to feudal privileges,
freedom of religion, secularization of the law, and freedom of occupation. Most significantly,
the Code embodied a modern concept of property ownership. Its framers believed that
property was the cornerstone of society, thus the Code guaranteed the gains made by property
owners during the Revolution. It confirmed the right of proprietors to use and dispose of their
possessions as they saw fit. Owing to its simple, concise, and coherent style, the Civil Code
had immense influence and attraction outside France. Napoleon used the Code as a tool of
domination and ordered its introduction in his satellite states, including Belgium, the
Netherlands, parts of Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. Ultimately, the relationship between
Napoleon and the French Revolution is a complex and multi-layered one, defying simple
categorization as either a continuation or a reversal. Napoleon simultaneously upheld and
undermined the revolutionary legacy, representing a transitional figure between the old order
and the new. His rule marked both the culmination and the unraveling of the revolutionary
project, setting the stage for the further political and social transformations of the 19th
century.
Perhaps the best way to characterize Napoleon's relationship to the Revolution is as a
pragmatic and instrumental one. He was less concerned with the ideological purity of the
revolutionary cause than with using its reforms and institutions to consolidate his own power
and achieve his strategic objectives. In this sense, Napoleon represented a shift away from the
lofty, universalist ambitions of 1789 towards a more narrowly nationalist and authoritarian
model of state-building.