Director of the Fondation Napoléon, historian Thierry Lentz works to deepen knowledge of the Empire. He has published about fifteen books on this subject, the last of which,
Pour Napoléon
, was published in March 2021 by Perrin editions.
This article is taken from the new
Figaro Hors-Série
: “Napoléon.
The epic - the myth - the trial ”, 162 pages, € 12.90, available in newsstands and on the
Figaro Store
.
1 - The gravedigger of the Revolution
The French Revolution is traditionally divided into four periods: the Constituent (1789-1791), the Legislative (1791-1792), the Convention (1792-1795) and the Directory (1795-1799).
The Consulate (1799-1804) and the Empire (1804-1815) would therefore not be part of it.
From this periodization, initially for educational utility, was deduced the accusation that Bonaparte would have betrayed the Revolution.
It is even said that he confessed to it in the proclamation of December 13, 1799 presenting the Constitution drafted in the month following the Brumaire coup:
“the Revolution is fixed on the principles which started it.
It is over ”
.
The second sentence - the first is often forgotten - did it mean that the new regime was turning its back on the Revolution?
By using the verb to
finish
, Bonaparte had cleverly chosen a word with a double meaning: according to the
Dictionary of the Academy
of the time, it could have as a synonym as much to
perfect
(as in "finished product") than to
complete
.
The First Consul thus declared that he wanted to bring the Revolution to a successful end by implementing the principles which "started it".
The proclamation listed them further: representative government, property, equality, liberty, reconciliation of the rights of citizens and the interests of the state.
On all these points, the Napoleonic regime therefore did not renounce the principles of the Revolution.
Only political freedom was not absolutely guaranteed in the following fifteen years, in the name of the superior interests of the state.
2 - A military dictator
It cannot be disputed that the Napoleonic regime was a regime of authority which tended, from the years 1809-1810, towards personal power, supplemented by the placing under supervision and surveillance of political freedom.
That being admitted, it was not for all that a dictatorship: the counter-powers, the force of certain principles limited the action of the executive and the circumstances often reduced its room for maneuver.
Let us add that Napoleon never forgot his training and his youthful convictions, which pushed him towards the moderate currents of the Revolution.
Oath of the army made to the Emperor after the distribution of the eagles at Champ-de-Mars, December 5, 1804
, by Jacques-Louis David, 1810 (Versailles, Château museum).
“Soldiers!
launches Napoleon, these eagles (…) will be wherever your emperor deems their presence necessary for the defense of his throne and his people ”
.
In a unanimous enthusiasm, the soldiers then swear
"to sacrifice [their] life to defend them"
.
© RMN-Grand Palais (Palace of Versailles) / Franck Raux.
Dictatorship is generally defined around three criteria: power installed and maintained by military force;
“arbitrary” decisions, without guarantees or recourse;
a political structure considered illegitimate by the majority of citizens.
The study of each of these points for the Napoleonic regime leads to reject any peremptory conclusion.
The return of the authority of an embodied state was not followed by the systematic use of illegitimate coercion or brute force, nor was the acceptance of the regime by the people and the elites broad, expressed by plebiscites, interim elections, conscription and tax consent, etc.
The origin of the regime does not strictly correspond to the definition of a
military
coup
.
The interlude of the evacuation of the deputies from their meeting room, on 19 Brumaire, in fact changed the beneficiary of the coup (Bonaparte instead of Sieyès) more than its underlying nature.
Subsequently, the army was carefully kept out of power, while obtaining a social visibility and a protocol rank which implied no role in the day-to-day management of affairs.
Noting this, Albert Soboul himself wrote:
"The regime remained essentially civilian."
"[Bonaparte] did not attack freedom, since it no longer existed".
Mathieu Dumas
Someone other than Napoleon, endowed with so many powers, might not have led his boat with so little bloodshed, except for war of course which inevitably causes it to sink.
We can only blame him for two purely political executions, against opponents who did not use force against power: that of the Duke of Enghien, who confessed during his questioning that he intended to take up arms against the Republic. , and that of the bookseller Johann Philipp Palm, distributor of a pamphlet calling for the German revolt against the French.
The death of the former, in March 1804, was a pledge offered to the Republicans at the same time as a warning to the royalists, a few weeks before the proclamation of the Empire.
That of the second, in August 1806, sanctioned a movement intending to detach the “third Germany” (Bavaria, Württemberg, Saxony, Baden…) from the alliance with France, against the appetites of Austria and Prussia.
Apart from these two cases and those of the insurgents of the West and Provence at the beginning of the Consulate, the latter caught in the act of armed struggle, where the sans-culottes had coldly massacred, where the Terrorists had used the guillotine in turn. of arms, where the infernal columns left behind them ashes and trails of blood, Napoleon always preferred to be placed under surveillance, the removal of the metropolitan territory or the capital, even detention in state prison.
The latter accommodated a maximum of 2,500 prisoners, including a majority of "common law" that we did not want to leave in nature.
We can compare this figure to the 500,000 arrests and 20,000 executions of the hot years of the Revolution.
The latter can hardly serve as a counter-example in the matter, which the revolutionary Mathieu Dumas, who became a State Councilor, summed up thus:
"[Bonaparte] did not attack freedom, since it no longer existed".
1807, Friedland
, by Ernest Meissonier, circa 1861-1875 (New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art).
© Gift of Henry Hilton, 1887 / The Metropolitan Museum of Art / CC0
3 - The Unscrupulous Conqueror
Napoleon certainly had immense ambition and was not afraid of war.
However, its foreign policy cannot be understood without considering the geopolitics inherited from past centuries.
He was the continuator of the wars of the Revolution, of course, but also of diplomatic traditions aimed at ensuring French preponderance in Europe, dating back to the reign of Louis XIV.
The continent was not, moreover, divided between the “pro” and the “anti-” Napoleon, otherwise, we would not have had to wait until the fall of 1813 for a general coalition to be formed against him.
Before that, the continental powers had come to terms with French preponderance and tried to derive as much benefit from it as possible.
It was the great success of British diplomacy to succeed in uniting Europe around a common denominator (bringing down France and its leader).
Because the famous "continental system" that Napoleon wanted to found was antithetical to the traditional policy of balance of power led by London.
For the latter, Europe should not be organized and even less be dominated by a single power, not for the sake of the principle, but to guarantee outlets for British products.
All other things being equal, it is still Boris Johnson's policy today.
A century of wars, from that of the League of Augsburg (1688) to Waterloo (1815), was necessary to settle this quarrel.
It fell as the supremacy of the Habsburgs had fallen before it, for the same reasons.
Napoleon was the last to have attempted to realize with his own arms the French dream of preponderance in Europe.
When it became unbearable to the other actors, much through his fault and his intransigence, he fell as had fallen before him, for the same reasons and with the same main enemy, the supremacy of the Habsburgs.
The French dream of preponderance sank in the Waterloo plain.
4 - The founder of the "patriarchate"
It has been said that Napoleon had closed the revolutionary parenthesis of a progressive accession of women, if not to equality with men, at least to a more just place in society.
The said parenthesis, symbolized by figures such as those of Manon Roland, Théroigne de Méricourt or Olympe de Gouges, was in fact of short duration.
Most of these ladies ended up on the scaffold and the "feminist" clubs were ruthlessly closed.
The question does not bounce back when the Civil Code is being prepared.
Women activists had all but disappeared, as had the literature dealing with "equality between the sexes".
Specialized historians are struggling to find any other examples than a few articles contesting the
Draft Law on the Defense of Teaching Women to Read
by Sylvain Maréchal (1801), a pamphlet by Fanny Raoul,
Opinion d'une femme sur les women
(the same year), or certain passages from the novels of Germaine de Staël and Constance de Salm.
Arrival of Archduchess Marie-Louise in Compiègne on March 28, 1810
, by Pauline Auzou, 1810 (Versailles, Château museum).
Napoleon had married her in the hope of securing descendants.
© RMN-Grand Palais (Palace of Versailles) / Franck Raux.
Napoleon was representative of the ambient “misogyny” and, in this regard, his ideas were nothing less than progressive.
The Code illustrates this better than a long speech, with the dismissal of daughters and wives to the status of minors within the framework of a family placed under the authority of the father and the husband, a device that will not be called into question. only from the 1890s. A woman only enjoyed all of her rights if she remained celibate;
but then she had to provide for herself, which was not easy in the society of the time.
On the other hand, a married woman had to obtain the authorization of her husband for all acts of civil life.
Legal inequality - which will last until 1946 and will not completely disappear until 1965 - is still manifested in the rules of adultery (only that committed in the marital home could be reproached to the husband; the adultery of the wife could earn him prison, against a simple fine to the husband) and the strict limitation of divorce.
The jurists of the time considered, however, that the Code offered a woman in consideration for her submission: her father and her husband owed her personal and patrimonial protection.
It took a century and a half to change this situation.
By codifying inequality, Napoleon entrenched it for a long time, but such was the mentality of his time.
Toussaint Louverture, leader of the insurgents of Santo Domingo (Paris, BnF).
He is one of the great figures of the anti-colonial and abolitionist movements.
© Photo RMN - Agence Bulloz
5 - The reestablishment of slavery
The question of the reestablishment of slavery has become sensitive with the eruption of anti-colonialist and, now, racialist movements, which see in it the proof of a “systemic” racism of which Napoleon would be one of the founding fathers.
On his accession, however, he had no intention of going back on the abolition decreed by the Convention on 16 Pluviôse Year II (February 4, 1794).
The revolts in the colonies, in particular the march to independence - under the guise of autonomy - of Toussaint Louverture in Saint-Domingue, the skilful "lobbying" of the businessmen of his entourage and, basically, his indifference to human aspects of the question made him privilege the economic and geopolitical stakes.
The law of 30 Floréal year X (20 May 1802) "maintained" slavery where it had never been abolished, in the colonies occupied by the English from 1794 to 1802 and in those located to the east of the cape. of Good Hope.
While a military expedition was sailing towards the West Indies to retake the sugar islands in hand, Bonaparte added instructions to his generals authorizing them to "reestablish" slavery everywhere else.
At the same time, the legislation of the Ancien Régime was reinstated, in particular the famous Black Code.
It was ultimately little applied due to the almost total loss of the colonies during the war with England.
Napoleon himself was no longer really interested in the question of slavery, which he considered to be settled after 1802. His last act on the subject took place during the Hundred Days.
By a decree of March 29, 1815, he abolished the slave trade, thinking of cutting the grass under the feet of the Congress of Vienna which had taken up the question.
In his mind, slavery was only one factor in the economic revival of the West Indian islands.
There was no “racism” in his approach, just coldness in the decision-making.
However, its recovery and the killings that followed to impose it, even if they did not move the mainlanders, remain a stain on the posterity of the Napoleonic regime.
Its historians have never shied away from the question, let alone attempted to erase these facts and their consequences from their field of study.
They simply gave them the place that was theirs in their day.
Their Haitian colleagues and the French West Indies or specialists of the colonial past are a thousand times right to want to better illuminate these not quite dead angles, to want them a better place and to reasonably cross their history and their memory.
Whether their works serve to reduce the Napoleonic work to these questions and feed other fantasies is another matter.
"Napoleon. The epic - the myth - the trial ”
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