one is serving the ambitions of this or that man? The great aim must be to
learn to make war, which is the only skill that can free us.'
Napoleon was also seen as a very useful partner by a rising capitalist
class. For bourgeois entrepreneurs the Empire was a gold mine, which
combined the maximum of opportunity with the minimum of risk. Qp.ite
apart from the myriad entrepreneurial opportunities created by an era of
rapid change and the sale of national property, there were vast fortunes to
be made from the Napoleonic wars themselves, in everything from
armaments to military victualling. The centralized administration and the
efficient police force combined to provide the certainty and predictability
economic investors traditionally like. Freemasonry, the ideology of the
rising capitalist class, was spread rapidly over Europe by the many
Jacobins and freethinkers in Napoleon's armies.
However, the misleading traditional picture of an Empire that satisfied
nobody contains some truth; of their very nature, acts of resistance and
dissatisfaction tended to make more of an impact than active or passive
acquiescence. But the level of armed resistance was low. Apart from
Spain, there were only two revolts that seriously challenged French
authority: in Calabria and the Tyrol. In both these areas, significantly
there was a long-standing tradition of military mobilization and National
Guard service. The trouble in Calabria, which eventually obliged Murat
to use draconian measures, was a mixture of xenophobia by bands of
brigands and pot-stirring by the British operating from Sicily; Napo
leon's old nemesis Sir Sidney Smith was active in this process. The revolt
in the Tyrol looked like a peasant jacquerie, but turned out to be more
than just an insurrection on economic issues. It was a confused would-be
independence movement, harking back to an alleged golden age in the
Tyrol, Catholic, xenophobic and anti-semitic - in a word, the classic
counter-revolutionary movement. Sidney Smith's role as agitator was
here played by Archduke John, who had not the slightest intention of
accepting an independent Tyrol.
Elsewhere, discontent took the form of banditry, desertion, absentee
ism or, at a lower level, grumbling, alienation and the occasional
demonstration or riot. There were very many reasons why Napoleon's
formal and informal subjects should have been discontented with his
Empire. Perhaps the overriding grievance was his insatiable demand for
manpower, which in turn led to tough conscription policies. At the
beginning of his reign Napoleon boasted that demography was on his
side, because in 1789 three-quarters of France's 28 million inhabitants
were under fo rty, and therefore there was no limit to the numbers of men
he could raise. In France only 7% of the male population was drafted (as
marcin
(Marcin)
#1