Bonaparte and the First French Empire PDF

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KEYWORDS Thermidorian Reaction - was a liberal-conservative counter-revolution that followed the overthrow and execution of Maximilien Robespierre in July 1794. Constitution of 1795 - is the constitution that founded the Directory. Coup of 18–19 Brumaire - overthrew the system of government under the Directory in France and substituted the Consulate, making way for the despotism of Napoleon Bonaparte. The event is often viewed as the effective end of the French Revolution. Whiff of Grapeshot - grapeshot was a form of ammunition from a cannon in Napoleonic times, and it is a quote from Napoleon describing how he dispersed crowds with cannon fire. He fired grapeshot into the crowd, and so a “whiff of grapeshot” refers to that incident.

KEY THINKERS Jacques Louis David - a painter, his most famous work was the ‘Napoleon crossing the alps’. He was not a fan of the directory and grew attached to the story of Napoleon. ------------------------------------KEY QUESTIONS Did Bonaparte represent a return to old monarchical ways? What was the nature of the French conquest of Europe? How might we categorise Bonapartist ideology and practice?

------------------------------------READING NOTES Napoleon Bonaparte, 'Napoleon's account of the internal situation of France in 1804 (much condensed)' in James Harvey Robinson (ed.), Readings in European History (Boston & London: Ginn & Co., 1906), volume 2, 491-494 -

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People were worn out after the revolution and long associated liberty with death, they wanted the ‘dominion’ of an able ruler who they at that point saw as Napoleon under all his successes. People believed Bonaparte would save the nation from the ‘perils of anarchy’. Men who the nation trusted had all one after the other deceived them. There was a belief that only despotism could at that point maintain order in France, Bonaparte also believed so. The factions played into his hands with attempts which he turned to his own advantage. Perhaps if Napoleon had granted a liberal constitution not based so around the military then he ‘might have secured the peace of nations and kings forever’.

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1804, in his statement he said that France was as peaceful as ever with no ‘suggestion of those crimes’ from back during the revolution. He said the French people had decided, free and independent, that their desire was that power should be passed down in a direct line through legitimate or adopted descendants of Napoleon or his brothers. The youth was encouraged to go to school as prizes were established in various branches of science, letters and arts. Industries are ‘striking root’ on France's own soil and driving English trade far away from their shores. French products now equal theirs and will soon compete with them in all markets of the world.

'Decree upon printing and bookselling, 5 February 1810', in Frank Malloy Anderson (ed.), The Constitutions and Other Select Documents Illustrative of the History of France, 17891901 (Minneapolis: HW Wilson Co., 1904), 433-435 -

Printers in Paris were to be reduced by a sixth and whatever gets printed will be subject to the approval of the minister of the interior. An oath will be taken to not print anything with is contrary to the duties towards the sovereign and the interest of the state. Every book that is to be printed had to be registered, numbered, titled and signed by the author then examined by an officer of police. Printed would be totally suspended if you went against the articles. Warrants will not be granted to bookseller till after they have shown proof of their good life and morals and their attachment to France. No book printed or reprinted outside of France can be introduced into the country without a permit from the director. Another weakness of the directory was that it lay in the feebleness of executive authority, it consisted of 5 men, elected by the legislature, who drew straws each year to decide which member would be replaced, this left the stability of the government at the mercy of fortune. The group of 5 were also prone to internal divisions.

Martyn Lyons, Napoleon Bonaparte and the Legacy of the French Revolution (London: Palgrave, 1994), chapter 3: The Coup of Brumaire, 29-42 -

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The directory lasted for four years and was the longest survivor of all the regimes of the First French Revolution. Thanks to Bonaparte it had defeated the royalist threat and was starting to pull the republic out of financial chaos. The Directory record was mostly Bonapartist propaganda, showing him as a saviour who rescued France from paralysis into which corrupt and incompetent politicians had led the revolution. The directory had inherited a huge rate of inflation, the revolutions currency being very unpopular and the republic not being able to pay its employees and army contractors so went through grants of and grain rations. For all these successes the directory still failed to find a lasting solution to Frances political problems.

Michael Broers, Europe Under Napoleon, 1799-1815 (London & New York: IB Tauris, 2014), chapter 2: Consolidation, 1799-1807, 49-97 -

Napoleon set about reshaping the civil and judicial inheritance of the Directory with as much energy and determination as he gave the reform of the army. Napoleon's government was the first since 1791 to get power without recourse to a

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violent purge. By 1794 Napoleon had expelled his critics out of the Tribunal and tightened censorship to a very high level, any way to get rid of his opposition. The 1799 constitution ignored the ‘Rights of Man and the Citizen’ but through code, it gave a citizen a clear, practicable set of legal entitlements where liberty and rights of property were respected. The stabilisation of currency gave tax revenues real value, all of this put in place to strengthen the state and achieve a greater degree of national unity. Napoleon offered the most ambitious land survey ever undertaken in France, the Cadastre Parcellaire. This sought to register every piece of property in France, according to ownership and usage. The survey was mostly done in order to set taxation on a more accurate footing following complaints from officials and property owners. Every area in the Napoleonic sphere of influence was to be part of metropolitan France to be governed by administrative and judicial institutions which were being created by the new Consular regime. The French imposed conscription throughout the Empire and the satellite states. The consulate had two important tasks it had to do, one was to heal the wounds of the 1790s, bothin inside and outside France, from economic and social to political. The second one was to create a sense of loyalty to the regime among its subjects. Catholicism was recognised as the ‘religion of the majority of Frenchmen’ and public worship was allowed again. New Ministry of Religion was created, Churches were restored to the parish clergy and the bishops/priests swore an oath of loyalty to the state. Treasures of the great abbeys and monasteries were seized by state commissioners, to them each book or manuscript seized from the clutches of the Church was something recovered for the benefit of society. The Napoleon regime saw what happened when the French revolutionaries tried to abolish all feudal privileges in 1789. After the abolition of the secular privileges of the Church, logically the abolition of the nobility came next and this happened mostly outside of France in places like the Kingdom of Naples where the assault on feudalism was seen. There was an attack on the powerful barons of the kingdom, where, even if it wasn't seen as a victory it still dealt the barons a series of blows they couldn't recover from. The barons lost vast amounts of land as a result of new policy, but not to the peasants who could not afford to work under the added burden of state taxation. In the end it was the rural bourgeoisie who dominated and emerged as the winners in this process. Napoleon introduced dotations, which were lands, usually former royal domains of deposed sovereign or Church lands, which the emperor seized for himself and then collected their revenues for the distribution to whoever he chose. Once assigned the revenues were to remain within the family of the recipient, descending through the male line.

Philip G. Dwyer, '"It still makes me shudder": Memories of massacres and atrocities during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars', War in History 16:4 (2009), 381-405 -

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On 3rd March 1799, the French army arrived before the walls of Jaffa and started to lay siege on the town. 4 days later, after a breach in the wall had been made, Napoleon sent two people to negotiate the surrender but was met with the appearance of their heads on pikes behind the walls. That same day the town fell and the troops gave themselves up to pillage, rape and murder for two, possibly four whole days, killing anyone that fell in their way regardless of gender or age.

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A doctor who had accompanied the army described it as the soldiers cutting the throats of men and women, fathers and sons on the same piles of bodies, a daughter being raped on the corpse of her mother, soldiers quarrelling about the loot taken from a dying victim’. Over a three day period thousands of people were marched to the beach to be slaughtered, the instruction to save ammunition was given and the soldiers resulted in placing prisoners in squares and advancing around them to stab them with their bayonets. The troops only reluctantly obeyed the order to kill, but obey they still did. Mass killings and atrocities were so widespread that they would appear to be integral if not an accepted part of warfare during the revolutionary and napoleonic periods. These atrocities committed during the war come from accounts found in war memoirs, journals and letters. Details can also be found from newspaper accounts and from official military reports, yet things like letters and diaries can still be self censored as its unlikely soldiers would write to their friends and families to describe their full experience and are more likely to give reassurance. The warfare was based on the law of war, where soldiers would be rewarded for their hardship by things like being able to loot the towns as they were often underpaid. The French penal code of 1796 supposedly regulated the soldiers and dispensed hard punishments for things like lootings and raping, the reality was that these were often set aside. Most of these killings were under the control of the general, Massena yet Napoleon could be just as brutal, known to the eradication of villages for resisting. Resistance was mainly due to survival, though some tried to explain it as the people being worked up into a religious frenzy by priests and monks who had convinced their people they were fighting satan, that being the French. Massacre at Jaffa was justified on the grounds that they represented a burden, and that a number of men who they captured and released a couple of weeks back had broken their vow to not take up arms again. Violence described in this article was nothing out of the ordinary for the 18th century as the rebellion in Ireland in 1798 and the Russian attitude towards the Turks mirrored the extreme violence, although the atrocities may have not been as frequent as that of the French (they were however, often as cruel).

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Part 1 -

Bonaparte switches France back from a republic to a monarchy. The end of Robespierre and the Jacobins comes during the ‘Thermidorian Reaction’ (27th July 1794) which leads to a new form of constitution of 1795. This isn’t a progressive form of a republic, the structure is unstable and at the top, we get the directory of 5, the power-hungry people that have a limited annual rule of power. Under that we have the council of the 500 and ancient, these two have to try and work together to represent different interests.

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In 1795 we see a number of rebellions, lots of conservative and royalist sympathy, people start seeing the monarchical way of rule as a form of stability, especially in the South and West as well as the countryside which included Paris. In October we see many pro-monarchist uprisings, armed and violent trying to overthrow the directory. Since the mob of Paris is sceptical and cant be called in for support, the armed forces of the republic are sent in to deal with the uprising. Napoleon is tasked with putting down this monarchist uprising and as an artillery officer, he decides to be as brutal as possible, in what comes to be known as the ‘Whiff of Grapeshot’ incident. Because of this many people are killed but the director declares him a Hero. The directorates realise they can use the army to distract the population, if the army can win some victories abroad against the enemies of France then the directory can gain some glory as a result of that and the people would perhaps be slightly happier with their ruling. The army turns its attention to the south of Europe, which would later on become Italy as it was mainly kingdoms. They march their armies across the borders into Italy to help radicals in the Italian states to set up their own republics in the image of the Republic of France. All of this warfare allows the officers in the army to make a name for themselves. Jacques Louis David was not a fan of the directory, he was offered places on it but wasn’t accepted as he didn’t see it as a good system. He grew attached to the story of Napoleon. As Bonaparte wanted to expand French territory he later got permission, funding and men to invade the Ottoman, Egypt in 1797. His campaign there is extremely successful, he’s able to defeat the local Ottoman and establish French control temporarily in Cairo and Alexandria, spreading the idea of a republic and revolution. He returns to France in 1798 and starts to make ‘political context’, in 1799 he comes to an agreement that there needs to be a military coup to overthrow the directory and institute a new form of the political system. On the 9th November 1799, Bonaparte takes soldiers to the council of the 500 and overthrows the directory. This was an overthrow of a legitimate civilian government by military forces. As soon as he took power he introduced a new institution in 1799, Bonaparte was the First Consul with dictatorial powers (this was a reference to the consul system of Ancient Rome). This constitution was based on Enlightenment idols of the division of power, we had the senate, tribunate and legislative body. This constitution was only on paper as all power lay in the hands of Napoleon Bonaparte. As he was successful the idea of nationalism grew, the people of France were starting to identify with France as a nation. He showed that he had risen through the ranks through his talent not through birth as the people were used to with the monarchy and the divine right of kings. The harvests at the time were much better and there was the idea of prosperity, new territory, new taxes and reparations for the French state as they expanded. The panic as we saw in previous years was gone. In 1802, we saw a referendum where Bonaparte made himself the first consul, the dictator, of France for life. He brings a new form of monarchy, instead of declaring himself as King of France he declares himself the Emperor, Emperor Napoleon the first. There was a huge focus on him not being the ‘Emperor of France’ but the

‘Emperor of the French’.

Part 2 -

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There was an attempt to reach national consensus, during The Jacobin and Robiespirre rule they tried to introduce things like the hymn and new flag, completely remaking France. The revolution destroys the two estates that have caused problems, the church loses its role within French politics where it usually had incredible power and influence over the said revolution. Archbishops, nuns and priests are forced to flee and are killed as their property is acquired by the ordinary people and its wealth and land redistributed. Napoleon wanted to reconcile both with the church and with the old power elites in France. In 1802 he came to negotiations with the Catholic Church to allow the return of it to France, to give it a role once again. Bonaparte and the pope signed what became known as the Concorde and it allowed the more conservative and religious parts of French society to feel they had a part in the republic, similarly to the aristocrats which were allowed to return and the imperial court was set up. Bonaparte did this to bring in the elites into his system, both old and new, a number of aristocrats who decided their loyalty was to France and not necessarily to the institution of the monarchy. This essentially created a republic with a monarch. Napoleon commissions some of the greatest minds of France and Europe to put together a civil code that will eventually be named after him. It covered law on everything, from military law to family law, property disputes, financial regulations, land ownership, criminal system (Still the basis of modern French law). Bonaparte introduced new military banners to his army with the symbol of the eagle on them which were actually a symbol of the Roman Empire as the Roman legions carried eagles into battle as their standard. (Almost every facist dictatorship and right wing dictatorship that we’ve seen in Europe since Napoleon's time had similarly adopted the eagle as their emblem). The idea of anyone being able to rise up to be a general from an ordinary person was present, the republic wanted to be seen as a system based on equality and meritocracy and so the medal of the Legion of Honour was awarded to anyone from a common private to a great marshal or a general. Cities like Paris were remodelled, numerous monuments stood up as Bonaparte realised Paris was the key to power even if he neglected their cities. He spent the time and effort to make the capital a showcase city. Between him becoming consul in 1799 and his eventual defeat at the battle of Waterloo in 1815, barely two or three years went by without France being involved in one way or another. All of the wealth that's being used on the construction of new buildings and neighbourhoods in Paris as well as all the goods and taxes that are being brought in from outside France are dependent on military success. The Bonapartist state is above all a military state. Bonaparte increases the scope of conscription (compulsory enrolment of persons for military or naval service) so that every year much of the new generation of young Frenchmen are taken into the French army to fight abroad which is hugely disruptive

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and has consequences in France to this day. This meant the state was becoming more intrusive in people's lives, causing the army to come first. The conscription was done by the luck of draw, usually age 18/20, and anyone could go. Those wealthy would pay someone else to go in the place of their sons so it often fell upon the poorest even if it applied to all classes, causing resentment. Many young men would flee to forests and the countryside. Bonaparte gets the hand of the police state, as soon as he became consul he reached out to Fouche who was the head of police through the republics, empires and monarchies. Fouche and Bnaparte, most likely, worked together to create a really authoritarian and expansive police state, engaging in the lives of the French like never seen before. Police were present on all campuses, often turning schools to military academi...