2.1: Introduction

In 1789, the French Revolution began. What had been one of the most powerful and conservative monarchies in Europe was transformed in just a few short years into a radical republic, and France also found itself at war with several of the other most powerful countries of Europe (the French Revolution is described in detail in the previous volume of this textbook). Already by the mid-1790s, the revolutionary government was unstable and many in France worried that their country would be overwhelmed by its foreign enemies. Likewise, the taste for radical reform remained strong in some circles, particularly among workers in Paris, but both open demands for the restoration of a monarchy and fear and resentment at the excesses of revolutionary radicalism were widespread. It was into this context that Napoleon Bonaparte emerged first as a key revolutionary general, and then a powerful and popular dictator.

Considering that he would go on to become one of the most significant French rulers of all time, there is considerable irony in the fact that Napoleon Bonaparte was not born in France itself, but on the island of Corsica in the Mediterranean.  A generation earlier, Corsica had been won by France as a prize in one of its many wars, and Napoleon was thus born a French citizen.  His family was not rich, but did have a legitimate noble title that was recognized by the French state, meaning Napoleon was eligible to join the ranks of noble-held monopolies like the officer corps of the French army.  Thus, as a young man, his parents sent him to France to train as an artillery officer.  There, he endured harassment and hazing from the sons of "real" French nobles, who belittled his Corsican accent and treated him as a foreign interloper.  Already pugnacious and incredibly stubborn, the hazing contributed to his determination to someday arrive at a position of unchallenged authority.  Thanks to his relentless drive, considerable intellectual gifts, and more than a little luck, he would eventually achieve just that.

Napoleon was a great contrast.  On the one hand, he was a man of the French Revolution.  He had achieved fame only because of the opportunities the revolutionary armies provided; as a member of a minor Corsican noble family, he would never have risen to prominence in the pre-revolutionary era.  Likewise, with his armies he “exported” the revolution to the rest of Europe, undermining the power of the traditional nobility and instituting a law code based on the principle of legal equality (for men).  Decades later, as a prisoner in a miserable British island-prison in the South Atlantic, Napoleon would claim in his memoirs that everything he had done was in the name of France and the Revolution.

On the other hand, Napoleon was a megalomaniac who indulged his every political whim and single-mindedly pursued personal power.  He appointed his family members to run newly-invented puppet states in Europe after he had conquered them.  He ignored the beliefs and sentiments of the people he conquered and, arguably, of the French themselves, who remained loyal because of his victories and the stability and order he had returned to France after the tumult of the 1790s.  He micro-managed the enormous empire he had created with his armies and trusted no one besides his older brother and the handful of generals who had proved themselves over years of campaigning for him.  Thus, while he may have truly believed in the revolutionary principles of reason and efficiency, and cared little for outdated traditions, there was not a trace of the revolution’s democratic impulse present in his personality or in the imperial state that he created.

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