The French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815 409representatives, who chose representatives, who chose
a list of representatives from which the first consul
named the legislators. Even with such restrictions,
Napoleon permitted only “a single party and a single
will.”
The nearest approach to popular sovereignty in
Napoleonic government was the plebiscite. Some legis-
lation, such as the constitution itself, was submitted to a
direct vote of adult men. A plebiscite of February 1800
ratified the Constitution of 1799 by a reported vote of
three million to fifteen hundred. Electoral fraud, di-
rected by Lucien Bonaparte as minister of the interior,
doubled the favorable vote. The actual vote fell far be-
low the turnout in 1793; in Paris only 23 percent voted.
It is also noteworthy that Napoleon enforced the con-
stitution before holding the plebiscite.
Napoleon’s reign, from 1799 to 1814, mixed such
techniques with a refined Old Regime despotism and
revolutionary reformism. The trend of his regime, how-
ever, was unmistakably toward dictatorship. “Liberty,”
he said, “is a need felt by a small class of people....
[T]herefore, it may be repressed with impunity.” He
produced his second constitution in 1802, awarding
himself the consulate for life. Two years later, his third
constitution (France’s sixth of the revolutionary era)
created an hereditary empire and reduced the legisla-
tive bodies to mere ornaments. He celebrated with an
elaborate coronation, crowning himself at Notre Dame
Cathedral in December 1804.
Napoleon was not a simple counterrevolutionary,
but he used his autocratic powers to undo some of the
works of the French Revolution. He restricted divorce
to preserve the traditional family. He legalized slavery
again, hoping to boost the economy of Caribbean
colonies. Denouncing the “pretensions of gilded
Africans,” he imprisoned Toussaint Louverture, who
died in a French jail in 1803. And Bonaparte reestab-
lished nobility as an honor for his generals and civil ser-
vants. Whereas Louis XVI had named approximately
ten nobles per year, Napoleon averaged one a day.
Despotism was evident from the beginning of
Napoleon’s rule. In January 1800 he closed sixty of the
seventy-three newspapers in France, and he soon shut
others. “Three hostile newspapers,” Napoleon told his
staff, “are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.”
Next he added censorship of the theatres. Then he
took control of all printing, requiring the submission of
all manuscripts to the government for prior censorship.
Bonapartist thought control even reached into the
mails. He instructed postmasters to open letters and
take notes for him. Fouché’s police enforced such regu-
lations. Although he could sometimes be lenient,
Napoleon usually dealt harshly with his opponents. He
ended Vendéen resistance by ordering an army “to burn
down two or three large villages as a salutary example.”
He jailed political prisoners, including many former
Jacobin colleagues, without a trial. A plot against him
in 1804 led him to execute a dozen people, including a
member of the royal family, the duke d’Enghien, whom
Napoleon seized by invading a neutral country.
Napoleon never silenced all of his critics. A re-
markable example of defiance was given by Germaine
de Staël, Necker’s brilliant daughter, who called
Napoleon “Robespierre on horseback.” She organized a
Parisian salon, with participants ranging from royalists
to Jacobins, as a center of criticism. Napoleon was a
misogynist who referred to women as “machines for
making babies,” but Madame de Staël fascinated him,
and he merely banished her from Paris. She continued
to insist that defending freedom in France was more im-
portant than winning foreign wars.
A balanced portrait of Napoleon must also see an
enlightened side to his despotism. He tried to reunite
France by welcoming home émigrés willing to accept
his regime, and many aristocrats accepted the amnesty
of 1802 to serve Napoleon. A similar compromise
reestablished the Catholic Church. Napoleon had no
religious faith himself, and his motive was purely prag-
matic. He deposed one pope in 1798 and imprisoned
another in 1809. He felt, however, that “[r]eligion is ex-
cellent stuff for keeping the common people quiet.”
This led him to negotiate the Concordat of 1801 with
Pope Pius VII, recognizing Catholicism as “the religion
of the vast majority of French citizens” and permitting
it to be “freely practised.” This treaty cost the Vatican
many concessions. Pius VII accepted the confiscation
of church lands, agreed that priests would be salaried
employees of the state, permitted Napoleon to name
French bishops, and even allowed a clerical “oath of fi-
delity” to the government.
In reestablishing Catholicism, Napoleon preserved
the revolutionary protection of religious minorities.
Protestants received their own state charter in 1802.
Jews obtained new guarantees of their emancipation, al-
though this did not prevent outbreaks of anti-Semitism
in eastern France. Napoleon’s attitudes toward Jews
were sometimes suspect, but his defense of Jewish
emancipation made France a center of nineteenth-
century toleration. The Jewish population of Paris,
which had been fewer than five hundred in 1789,
reached three thousand in 1806, a tribute to his com-
parative toleration. And Napoleon carried Jewish eman-
cipation into regions that his armies conquered,
especially in western Germany.