The wheel of history had turned full circle: in fact it may even have gone into reverse. The regime of Louis XVIII was more autocratic and reactionary than that of his more intelligent older brother, Louis XVI. It was less reformist and enlightened and was dominated by a seesaw struggle between the ultras and aristocratic moderates like the Duc de Richelieu and Decazes. Worst of all it was propped up by an army of humiliating occupation under the didactic Wellington.
It can safely be said that France after 1815 was more backward economically, probably politically and, intellectually, and certainly socially – with large numbers of former soldiers and bandits marauding around that devastated country – than it had been before the Revolution of 1789. In a quarter of a century, both the Revolution and Napoleon had succeeded in returning the country back to what it was before the whole process had begun, with a poorer economy than the one expanding sharply under Louis XVI.
Yet many subsequent historians claimed that there were much greater underlying changes, that the revolutionary and Napoleonic period precipitated a great leap forward in European history from the dynastic autocracies that had frozen the region for so long. In particular, the revolutionary period is said to have ushered in a greater thirst of ordinary people for their rights: the Napoleonic period was a middle-class revolution. Marxist historians have long held this view.
There is a truth here; but it may be that the economic changes that preceded the Revolution under Louis XVI were primarily responsible for both the emergence of a ‘proletariat’ – the Paris mob – and a bourgeoisie. As the historian Alfred Cobban has shown, the main instigators and beneficiaries of the Revolution were not the new middle classes, but minor functionaries and civil servants under the ancien régime, a class of intellectuals who felt they had not received their true deserts in life. Certainly by 1815 the Paris mob was utterly cowed and the bourgeoisie was little more politically dominant than before the Revolution, while aristocratic reactionaries were more powerful than before 1789. Equally this return to an aristocratic ice age was accompanied by economic progress and the general evolution of political thought into a continuing struggle between reactionaries and progressives.
Yet it is possible to argue that this exact process was underway in the enlightened and progressive, if politically autocratic, period before the Revolution. Who was the more enlightened – Voltaire, Robespierre or Napoleon? The process might have moved peacefully ahead in an evolutionary way and perhaps faster through gradualist reform, inevitably so if new industrial methods were imported from Britain, than through the violent upheavals of revolution and wars of conquest.
Further, France, a state at least as powerful as Britain before the industrial revolution, was crippled politically and economically for decades after 1815. It remained a largely backward agrarian country: its own industrial revolution was seriously postponed, its bourgeois economic class in its great trading cities had lost money and competitive advantage with Britain, and it had deindustrialized, if it had ever really industrialized. Possibly the same would have occurred if there had been no revolutionary or Napoleonic periods: yet given the pace of economic change in France before the Revolution, and the intellectual ferment of the period, it seems unlikely.
What is undeniable is that France was considerably worse off economically and more backward politically in 1816 than in 1788, and that the industrial revolution had been limited to military-related manufacturing, which was not particularly efficient. While Britain was undergoing a dramatic industrial revolution during this period, France in many respects fell way behind, and ceased to be a major economic and political rival to Britain until the late twentieth century.
In political terms, the stability of French institutions before 1789 was never to recover – arguably to this day, with nearly two centuries of unsatisfactory constitutional experiments succeeding each other, from an absolute monarchy to bourgeois constitutions, to a Second Empire to a bourgeois struggle with the working class represented by the Paris Commune, to the chaotic Third Republic. This was followed by an era of weak governments under the Fourth Republic and then a renewed ‘strong’ government with an unsatisfactory coexistence of president and parliament in the Fifth.
Even France’s population growth became sluggish after the Napoleonic period. The enduring legacy of the revolutionary-Napoleonic period was quite different to that intended: a massive further centralization of the French state with the elimination of traditional local legal freedoms and autonomies and an independent aristocracy and gentry. If the court of Versailles was too centralized, the court of Napoleon was virtually all-powerful, a military dictatorship. France never recovered from this: right up to modern times, it has veered between a parliamentary and an autocratic centralist system with the latter usually winning, most recently with the imposition of the Gaullist constitution after 1959.
Napoleon sought to impose the same upon the countries he conquered, sweeping away local ‘feudal’ privileges, many of them arbitrary and unsatisfactory, ancient structures of princedoms, merchant guilds and complex legal demarcations in favour of a unified Code Napoleon. This has been cited as one of his greatest and most lasting achievements. In fact the Code Napoleon was far from ideal, too inflexible to take account of local circumstances and traditions; it was also state-centred, lacking the guarantees and pluralisms that defined and defended the rights of individuals, insisting that the individual prove his lack of guilt rather than the presumption of innocence, and giving central authority through the magistrature virtually absolute powers over the citizens. Local circumstances over the past two centuries have modified its often harsh and arbitrary, if effective, application. But it is far from certain that the Code Napoleon was an improvement upon existing legal systems, complex, fragmented and sometimes iniquitous as they might be.
The much shorter-lived attempt by revolutionary and Napoleonic France to ‘liberate’ other countries from archaic and oppressive feudal rulers was, if this interpretation is correct, almost entirely bogus. Napoleon looted and extorted colossal taxation and tributes from France’s subject systems on a par with the Aztec empire in Mexico. He imposed his own extended clan as rulers of most of his dominions in a fashion that harked back to the Middle Ages; the clan ruled arbitrarily and without check by either constitutional institutions or local traditions.
He dispensed with revolutionary institutions, substituting an empire and monarchy far more showy, absolute and despotic than those of their traditional rulers and creating a phoney new aristocracy which depended upon his favour. He behaved more like an Emperor of China or oriental despot than any kind of progressive political modernizer rooted in enlightenment thinking or political philosophy.
It has been said that he catalysed a ‘bourgeois’ revolution in those countries, advancing the middle class and destroying the feudal aristocracy. In fact he and his clan of flashy nepotistic neo-monarchs promoted their own friends and sympathizers, whether from the old aristocracy – some of whom were happy to collaborate – or the merchant bourgeoisie. But there was no attempt to transform the economies of these countries and seed a new capitalist bourgeoisie of the kind being created for example in Britain. Countries like Italy and Spain remained steeped in agrarian poverty until well into the twentieth century.
He has been credited with stimulating a sense of ‘modern’ ‘nationalist’ sentiment which never existed before, and has even been described as the father of the modern European nation state. Neither revolutionary France nor Napoleon ever intended anything of the kind: invasion, domination, subjugation and the reduction of these countries to tributary status were France’s objectives. Napoleon stamped vigorously on any spark of Prussian nationalism, for example. The emergence of Prussian nationalism had occurred long before 1789, and France was determined to crush it. The emergence of a Prussian-dominated Germany – for good or ill – took place decades later.
In Italy, the widespread admiration for Napoleon which emerged towards the middle of the ninete
enth century was merely an expression of hostility to autocratic Austrian domination reimposed, along with Papal domination of the centre and the Bourbon state in the south, after 1815. Its unification was neither advanced nor held up during the Napoleonic period: it was merely frozen for a quarter of a century.
In Austria, the revolutionary and Napoleonic interregnum had virtually no impact on the hold of the Habsburgs upon their far-flung, mostly peasant empire: nor until the 1914–18 war did this change. In Spain, Napoleon’s defeat was followed by the imposition of the most repressive, reactionary monarchy the country had endured for half a century, that of Ferdinand VII. True, his exactions provoked an angry struggle with liberals; but the latter had been emerging before the Napoleonic intervention and might indeed have taken power gradually and constitutionally had the ravages of Napoleonic rule never occurred.
Russia, of course, was not affected at all by revolutionary and Napoleonic ‘progress’ for more than a century, its Romanov dynasty becoming largely entrenched in resistance to change during the Napoleonic wars. In Britain, it is possible to ascribe the coming to power of a deeply conservative clique under Lord Liverpool, Castlereagh and the Wellesleys to a reaction against Napoleon (although there were other reasons too). The wars virtually squeezed out the moderate centre represented by Pitt, Grenville and Canning.
In 1816 Europe in fact was far less ‘progressive’, ‘middle-class’, ‘democratic’, ‘nationalist’, ‘anti-feudal’ and even democratically evolved than in 1788. The revolutionary Napoleonic period had set the clock back, not forward, except in one crucial respect: the expansion of the role of the central state, fuelled by the military imperative – in Napoleon’s case to conquer, in other cases to resist him – a legacy that was to last well into the twentieth century and which in many respects is continuing.
In other important ways, Europe had regressed: its peoples had been decimated by wars which reduced Europe’s population by anything up to a tenth, left few regions untouched, conscripted enormous quantities of cannon fodder, wrecked farmland, trade and commerce and left barely a family unaffected by the first modern, total war, scything through not just particular regions, elites and armies but entire populations.
The second issue that must be addressed is that of the ‘Napoleonic myth’. To what extent is it believable that Napoleon himself was the instigator of the Napoleonic wars, or was the phenomenon altogether more complex? Most historians have of course taken this myth for granted, supported not just by much – certainly not all – of French historiography and Napoleon’s own self-serving account, but by the opprobrium and denigration heaped upon him by his detractors.
Yet if the concept of one-man rule in a small state as far back as the Middle Ages has to be heavily qualified, it seems absurdly far-fetched in the case of a colossal machine such as that over which Napoleon presided. He was certainly one of the greatest autocrats in history, as the undisputed leader of perhaps the most authoritarian military machine presiding over the biggest empire in history, spanning the most prosperous continent in the world.
But he was also a child of his own age and circumstances – in particular French history and the French Revolution – and the nature of his power, and indeed personality, evolved over time. Napoleon emerged from the turmoil of the Revolution to pursue specifically French national objectives, of a kind that had existed for centuries under the Bourbons, with a newly mobilized population and army at his disposal.
It was Dumouriez, the French revolutionary general who ended up becoming a counter-revolutionary, who first won the string of victories that prevented revolutionary France being invaded. It was under Robespierre and the Jacobins that mass mobilization and totalitarian terror were instituted – under penalty of death. This in turn created the first great conscript army of Europe to face the old-style aristocratic volunteer forces or peasant levies and feudal armies of the rest of Europe. It was Carnot who really created the levé en masse and the huge military machine that was to terrorize Europe at a time when Napoleon was just a rising junior officer. Carnot presided over France’s revolution in military tactics, including the division of armies into semi-autonomous corps with great flexibility and freedom of action; the idea of striking in columns at the centre of traditional lines; the importance of flanking attacks or attacks on the ‘derrière’ – always a French obsession. Carnot too was responsible for the promotion of esprit de corps and the army as a privileged, well-paid, self-contained caste separate and above the mass of the people from which they were recruited (as opposed to the downtrodden militia of feudal rulers); and the virtual liberation of those military castes from normal conceptions of law and civilized behaviour to live off the land and plunder and rape as they pleased.
Most of these ideas had been pushed by reformers in the French army in the half-century prior to the Revolution, and some of them had been pinched from the Prussian ruler Frederick the Great’s military innovations. Napoleon was not original in these ideas; but he was picked and promoted by his superiors, including Carnot and the Directory’s Barras, because he was enormously energetic, pragmatic and skilful in their execution. When he finally staged his coup d’état in 1801, it was because a consensus had developed that a strong leader was necessary to end the corruption and near paralysis of the Directory and to prosecute France’s wars.
However, dynamic though he was, Napoleon at that stage was anything but omnipotent: he had been promoted by conservative financial interests to abort further revolutionary agitation and to avoid a Bourbon restoration. He enjoyed support from the peasantry and depended on continuing military success. Above all he was the choice of a group of senior generals, and what the army had proposed, it could also dispose of. After becoming Emperor in 1804, whether as a personal vanity, in resignation to the anxiety of his supporters about a Bourbon restoration or as a simple reminder to its lingering and aspiring followers that the Revolution was over, he still depended on the loyalty of his generals and a coalition of civilian interests to stay in power.
His hand was immensely strengthened by the string of crushing military successes from 1805 to 1807 against Austria and Prussia which also boxed in Russia; and it was at this stage that his hubris really seemed to get the better of him. He no longer felt he had to kowtow to domestic supporters and he believed that he was militarily invincible. But his legitimacy derived not from his ludicrous coronation robes or laurel crowns or Roman emperor-style statues but from the fact that he had restored stability and leadership to France and delivered handsome victories and plentiful spoils – which were now a substitute for nonexistent economic development. Realistically and shrewdly he had to call off his projected invasion of Britain, while less realistically he hoped that he could strangle France’s oldest and most powerful foe economically.
In examining Napoleon’s pronouncements, it is always necessary to disentangle bombastic rhetoric designed to inflame his followers, which fuelled ideas that he was simply a megalomaniac, from the realism underneath, which sometimes evidently became confused in his own mind, particularly in the later years. He then made the colossal and hubristic blunder of invading Spain, which posed no threat to France and which he regarded as a province to be annexed with little resistance. Ostensibly this was part of his anti-British strategy, in fact it was merely to add to the empire. Within a short time he understood the scale of his mistake – as his refusal to command the troops after the first campaigns showed – but he could not admit his errors in public, and the war continued as a vast, futile haemorrhage of French armies and men.
At that point Napoleon seemed to abandon his hubristic phase, and grew into – or in the modern phrase reinvented himself as – a peaceful statesman determined to maintain French domination of Europe, but seeking alliances, as through his marriage with Marie Louise of Austria, and engaging in no further territorial land grabs, other than occasionally bullying small states. The Spanish quagmire had, in a sense, tamed him. If Europe had been prepared to settle down to
a period of French domination, Napoleon might perhaps have died peacefully on his throne as the founder of a new, long-lasting French dynasty.
But the resistance in the Iberian Peninsula, abetted by the British expeditionary force, became increasingly lethal and widespread; and Europe had not been prepared to accept peace on French terms. Napoleon’s own penchant for blustering to secure his ends had been more effective when countries were recoiling from his military successes than when he was exposed to be a merely mortal, if outstanding, military commander. At that stage diplomacy was required.
Finally Napoleon’s erstwhile but unreliable ally, the Tsar of Russia, himself effectively declared war on France. This initiated the third phase of Napoleon’s rule: from peaceful despotism he was forced to resort again to war, this time under pressure from a hostile foreign power. The Russian campaign has been presented as aggressive and madcap and initiated by Napoleon; but it was in fact a hugely mishandled defensive campaign. Only in his wilder moments did he declare he would conquer the whole country or use it as a gateway to the east. He blundered forward in the hope of inflicting a single huge defeat on the Russians and preventing them ever threatening his eastern dominions. After the retreat from Moscow he could still have preserved his empire. But his inept diplomacy and his enemies’ sense of his vulnerability ultimately led to the disaster of Leipzig which brought about his downfall.
Thus the revolutionary wars and the career of Napoleon can be divided into four entirely distinct phases – those of revolutionary change and French aggrandisement from 1792 to 1801, those of French imperialism from about 1803 to 1808, those of imperial consolidation from 1808 to 1812, and those of self-defence and eventual collapse from 1812–1814.
The War of Wars Page 98