42 The New York Review
More Fraternité Than Liberté
Lynn Hunt
A New World Begins :
The History of the
French Revolution
by Jeremy D. Popkin.
Basic Books, 627 pp., $35.00
The Napoleonic Wars:
A Global History
by Alexander Mikaberidze.
Oxford University Press,
936 pp., $39.95
The French Revolution of 1789 aston-
ished the world, and then came Na-
poleon Bonaparte, one of those rare
historical figures who defined an epoch.
The cascade of events between 1789
and Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815
gave birth to much of what we know
as modern politics: revolution as a leap
into the future, “right” and “left” as po-
litical markers, the notion of universal
human rights, the extension of voting
rights to most men, the “emancipation”
of the Jews, the first successful slave
revolt and the first abolition of slavery,
not to mention the use of terror as an
instrument of government and guerrilla
warfare as a tactic of resistance, along
with the police state, authoritarianism,
and the cult of personality as ways of
circumventing democratic aspirations.
Those are just the obvious politi-
cal consequences of these upheavals.
A dangerously unstable element was
added in 1792: warfare that contin-
ued with little respite for twenty-three
years. The fighting eventually touched
virtually every continent and sea, took
the lives of at least four million people
and upended the existence of millions
more, redrew national boundaries, led
to the creation of new states, and struck
fear into the hearts of every traditional
ruler from New Spain (Mexico) to
Java. France’s war with most of Eu-
rope unraveled the fragile democratic
promise of 1789, as national security
undermined rights at home and French
aggrandizement abroad undercut any
notion of liberating other peoples.
It is no wonder, then, that so many
have tried to decipher the meaning
of these events and that consensus
about them remains elusive. Unlike
its counterpart across the Atlantic, the
first French republic has not attracted
warmhearted biographies of its found-
ing fathers because no one seems to
fit the description. The French hero of
the American War of Independence,
the Marquis de Lafayette, at first sup-
ported the revolution but forsook his
command of one of the French armies
in 1792, then spent five miserable years
in Prussian and Austrian prisons. The
ardent republican Maximilien Robes-
pierre argued against the death pen-
alty and the practice of slavery and
then justified the use of the new killing
machine, the guillotine, against sup-
posed enemies of the people whom he
defined in ever broader terms. Napo-
leon, Corsican by birth and allegiance,
established many important French
institutions, from the Bank of France
to the Legion of Honor, yet in the end
he was forced to abdicate by his own
handpicked officials.
While George Washington, John
Adams, and Thomas Jefferson all
died in their beds, Robespierre was
outlawed by his fellow deputies and
guillotined, and Napoleon expired in
exile more than four thousand miles
from France. Lafayette survived to
lead another revolution in 1830 against
the restored Bourbons but was more
celebrated in the United States than
at home. Some seventy US cities and
townships are named after him, yet the
most impressive monument to him in
France, located originally in the gar-
dens of the Louvre but later transferred
to a park along the Seine, was paid for
by American donations and sculpted
by a Connecticut-born artist at the
beginning of the twentieth century.
Napoleon considered Lafayette a “sim-
pleton” who was “not at all cut out for
the great role that he wanted to play.”Rather than a scene of patriotic story-
telling, the historiography of the French
Revolution and Napoleon has been itself
a battlefield. Constitutional monarchists
and liberals favored the aspirations of
1789 and lamented the violence that
came with the republic after 1792; so-
cialists and then Communists focused
more on 1792–1794, where they sought
the sources of their movements; and
after World War II, anti-Communists
combed over the period 1789–1794 in
order to show how democracy ended in
totalitarianism.
A surprisingly large number of his-
tories, from Jules Michelet’s seven
volumes, published between 1847
and 1852, to Simon Schama’s nine-
hundred-page Citizens of 1989, cover
only the period from 1789 to 1794, as if
the fall of Robespierre marked the end
of what mattered and the five years that
followed were somehow only a prelude
to Bonaparte. Since Bonapartism had
its own separate history in the nine-
teenth century, appealing neither to
royalists nor republicans, it is perhaps
not surprising that for many genera-
tions the history of Napoleon’s reign
attracted an entirely different group
of scholars who focused mainly on the
man and his army.A New World Begins by Jeremy Pop-
kin and The Napoleonic Wars by Alex-
ander Mikaberidze aim to break these
molds by highlighting the connections
between the French Revolution and
Napoleon and by avoiding political
partisanship. They succeed in bringing
to bear a wealth of new scholarship to
demonstrate, often in novel ways, the
lasting significance of these episodes.
A renowned expert on the history of
the press and on the slave revolt that
led to the creation of the new state of
Haiti, Popkin incorporates the latest
research on women, empire, plantation
slavery, and the slaves themselves. Mik-
aberidze is better prepared than most
to put the Napoleonic Wars into a truly
global setting because he developed his
fascination with Napoleon while grow-
ing up in the Caucasus and has written
extensively about the Russian army
during this period.
The two books dovetail with surpris-
ingly little overlap because they concen-
trate on different periods. Popkin tells
the story from the 1770s to December
1804, when Bonaparte crowned him-
self Emperor Napoleon, officially end-
ing the republic. Stopping there means
that Bonaparte has a peculiar status in
Popkin’s account. He is in some ways
just one of a multitude of riveting fig-
ures, and the wars that bring him to
power are only one of many crises
facing the revolutionary government.
Popkin’s title suggests his focus on the
revolutionary principles of the 1790s;
the hope for a new world died a slow
death as Bonaparte steadily disman-
tled liberty and equality in the name of
order and stability. For Mikaberidze,
Bonaparte is the main figure, and the
years that precede his coup in 1799
serve as prologue. In this telling, the
domestic politics of France take a back
seat to international diplomatic and
military challenges.
Both authors aim for balance when
judging the actions of individuals.
Mikaberidze necessarily highlights the
decisions made by Napoleon, since theparticipants in the seven different co-
alitions against the French constantly
shifted. He explicitly considers Napo-
leon a genius, and the word “dictator-
ship” hardly enters into his account.
He argues that Napoleon’s seizures of
territory resembled those of his op-
ponents (Austria, Prussia, and Russia
had not hesitated to annex portions
of Poland between 1772 and 1795)
and that his notorious blockade of the
Continent to hobble British commerce
followed from common eighteenth-
century practices, including Britain’s
barricade of all the major French ports
between 1793 and 1799. He insists, in
addition, that Great Britain bore just
as much responsibility as Napoleon for
the continuation of war after the brief
peace of 1802.
The question of balance is trickier
for Popkin because he has so many
more characters to consider. He takes
his motto from Louis-Antoine de Saint
Just, the fiery young comrade-in-arms
of Robespierre who was guillotined
alongside him: “The force of things has
perhaps led us to do things that we did
not foresee.” Popkin applies the line to
all sides, not just to the radical revo-
lutionaries. He portrays Louis XVI
and Marie-Antoinette, for example,
as motivated primarily by their devo-
tion to maintaining traditional insti-
tutions. The king’s greatest failing, it
seems, was that he wanted to be loved
by his subjects, and so in moments of
crisis, he backed down. He could have
ordered the deputies of the Third Es-
tates arrested on June 23, 1789, when
they refused to disperse on his order,
but he did not. He could have more
thoroughly fortified Paris with foreign
regiments to prevent the uprising on
July 14, but he stopped short. Instead,
he went to Paris on July 17 and assured
the people, “You can always count on
my love.”
Right up to the end, Louis kept hop-
ing that if he gave the impression of
acceding to the deputies’ demands, he
could carry on until they fell to squab-Jean-Léon Gérôme: Bonaparte Before the Sphinx, 1886Hearst Castle, San Simeon, California