Napoleon I

First consul (1799–1804) and emperor (r. 1804–14/15) of France

• Born: August 15, 1769
• Birthplace: Ajaccio, Corsica
• Died: May 5, 1821
• Place of death: Saint Helena Island

Napoleon was one of the greatest military generals in history, and he also made lasting contributions to the laws and civil administration of France and other lands. However, he also left a darker legacy—that of dictatorial rule that was the precursor to modern fascism.

Early Life

Although he was a native of the island of Corsica, Napoleon Bonaparte was sent to French military schools in Brienne and Paris, where he became known as “the little corporal” because of his small stature. Commissioned to the artillery in 1785, he later took part in fighting on behalf of the French Revolution (1787–99). In 1793, he was promoted to brigadier general, but he was imprisoned the next year when the forces in power changed from the radical Jacobins to Thermidorean reactionaries intent on stopping the reign of terror that had made the revolution turn on its own members. He was soon released, however, and back in favor in October, 1795, when he dispersed a Parisian mob threatening the government.

A politically helpful marriage and victories in the field, especially in northern Italy, increased Napoleon’s prestige. Other spectacular victories in Egypt, coupled with a weak government at home that was overthrown in 1799, led to his elevation as first consul in the new government. A plebiscite was held confirming his enormous popularity, and by 1804 (and after he made peace with the Roman Catholic Church, one of the revolution’s greatest enemies) he was crowned the emperor of France.

Napoleon’s remarkable early success was in part a matter of good fortune and in part the product of an unconquerable will and energy that took the maximum advantage of every political and military opportunity. Given the chaos of the revolutionary years, it is not surprising that a military man with political prowess should do so well. With France under siege and surrounded by hostile powers, Napoleon’s victories could be viewed (rather romantically) as having saved the revolution from destruction. At the same time, his own steadiness of purpose prevented warring factions from destroying the revolution from within.

Life’s Work

Napoleon I was to keep France in the paramount position to which he had brought it in only a few years. If France was to be secure, it had to dominate the European continent. Thus Napoleon intervened successfully in Austria, Italy, and Germany—all enemies of the revolution. England, with its control of the sea, was a major target, but Napoleon repeatedly failed in attempts to destroy British military power in Egypt and on the European continent.

By 1804, Napoleon had himself proclaimed emperor. What had once been a man of humble origins, whose energies and talents had been released by revolutionary actions, now increasingly became an individual identifying his personal successes with the glory of the state. England, Austria, Russia, and Sweden formed an alliance against him, but on December 26, 1805, he overwhelmingly defeated their armies at Austerlitz. By 1808, he was master of the Continent, with only the sea power of England to thwart his imperial plans.

Although Napoleon had made significant legal reforms in France, he relied increasingly on the force of his own personality to rule. Rather than developing some kind of governmental structure that might perpetuate his rule or forming a strong general staff that could carry through with his military plans, he relied almost exclusively on his own genius. As a tireless worker and supremely organized person, he counted on being able to switch rapidly from one issue to another or from one field of battle to another. He had a detailed grasp of both civil and military matters that was awesome, and he refused to delegate the authority that accrued from his command of the components of power.

Napoleon thought, mistakenly, that he could use members of his own family as extensions of his will. Thus he conferred the thrones of Holland and Westphalia on his brothers Louis and Jerome. He made his stepson, Eugène, a viceroy of Italy and his third brother, Joseph, king of Naples and later of Spain. Few of these familial appointments were successful, either because his relatives were incompetent or because they acted independently of his wishes. However, he continued to act as though he could invent a royal line for himself, having his marriage to Joséphine (who was unable to bear his child) annulled in 1809 so that he could marry the daughter of the Austrian emperor Francis II, Marie-Louise, who bore him a son.

Between 1808 and 1814, Napoleon continued to triumph in war, but at great cost to his country. A defeat he suffered in May, 1809, in a battle with the Archduke Charles at Aspern, demonstrated his vulnerability. Nevertheless, he drove his forces on, invading Russia in June, 1812, with an army of 500,000 men, the largest collection of troops ever mobilized in Europe. Although he made it to Moscow, the Russians had devastated their own country along the route of his advance, depriving him of the sustenance of the land and exacerbating his problems with supply lines that became overextended. With winter overtaking him, the Russians struck back, reducing his huge army to one-fifth of its original size, so that he had to hasten back to Paris to prepare a defense against an invasion. When Paris fell on March 31, 1814, Napoleon abdicated and was exiled to Elba, Italy.

A much lesser man might have accepted the verdict of history. It was a measure of the esteem Napoleon could still compel that he was able to escape and rally France once more. In his effort to reconstruct his empire, he liberalized certain features of the French constitution, but, before he could truly mobilize public opinion, he was forced into battle at Waterloo (June 12–18, 1815), the decisive defeat of his career. In exile on Saint Helena Island, Napoleon assiduously built up the myth of himself as the revolution’s man, the conqueror who had meant to liberate Europe from reactionary elements.

Significance

Napoleon I’s impact on his time and on subsequent events has been extraordinary. First, there was his conceit that Europe could be unified under the rule of one man. Napoleon established a cult of personality, a disturbing phenomenon that would be repeated in the bloody rules of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler in the twentieth century. Hitler, in particular, suffered from delusions of grandeur that had their precedent in Napoleon. Both leaders, in fact, were bold military strategists who imagined that if only they took over the details of command the world could be shaped according to their desires. Napoleon established the modern model for the world-historical individual who believes in the triumph of his will.

The great Marxist critic Georg Lukács has argued that Napoleon’s movement of masses of men across a continent resulted in the development of a historical consciousness in which millions of men suddenly saw their fate linked to the fate of millions of others. Even when Lukács’s Marxist bias is discounted, his evocation of Napoleon’s ability to motivate millions of people takes on an inspiring and frightening aspect. Napoleon took the ideas of democracy, of popular rule, and of government by the majority and turned them into another tool of the dictator. At the height of his own popularity, at crucial periods in his career, Napoleon used plebiscites to legitimate his military and imperial ambitions.

Historians of various biases continue to argue over Napoleon’s significance, for they recognize in his example a powerful lesson on personality and politics. At the beginning of his career, Napoleon was seen as the outcome of a revolutionary movement and as the very type of man whom the forces of history had shaped to rule. However, by the end of his career, large parts of Europe regarded him only as a dictator who camouflaged his tyranny in the rhetoric of the revolution.

The comparison with Hitler is, again, apposite. There is virtually nothing in Hitler’s record that can be salvaged, no vision of a united Europe worth contemplating. The difference between him and Napoleon can be gauged by imagining what would have happened if each man had been able to conquer all of Europe. Hitler’s ideology was founded on excluding and exterminating various groups of people. Napoleon’s ideology was based on the principle of inclusion. Armies were defeated in the field, and, though civilian populations also suffered in the Napoleonic Wars, the emperor had no final solution, no master plan, to rid Europe of undesirable elements. If Napoleon did betray much of the revolution, he also left a code of law and an enviable legacy of civil administration. He is not the monster Hitler was precisely because he evolved from the context of a revolution, which in practice he may have subverted but which he also supported in a way that still influences scholars of this period.

Bibliography

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Lefebvre, George. Napoleon: From Tilsit to Waterloo, 1807–1815. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. Print.

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Schom, Alan. Napoleon Bonaparte. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Print.

Thompson, J. M. Napoleon Bonaparte: His Rise and Fall. New York: Oxford University Press, 1952. Print.