principles. It is possible to see him as a man of the Revolution only if one
ignores the social and political tendencies of the early years 1789--93, to
say nothing of the radical phase in 1793--94. Those who claim that
Napoleon was in tune with Revolutionary principles are forced back on
the absurd argument that the Revolution was really about returning to
the status quo ante, before the legacy of the American war of 1775-83,
which almost bankrupted France, forced Louis XVI to tamper with a
fragile social fabric. On this view the Revolution was purely an economic
and administrative transformation, and Jacobinism was simply the
Revolution taking a wrong turning; equality and fraternity and all the rest
of it was just so much hot air. Another influential view is that French
history is a perennial quest for social order, which is why it is punctuated
by bouts of absolutism and Caesarism; the obvious implication is that
Napoleon was an organic growth but the Revolution was an aberration.
But this view of the Revolution, and hence of Napoleon, is nonsensical,
and is really only a modern gloss on the way the men of Thermidor
rationalized their recantation of the principles of 1789: they denied there
ever were such principles. The other main way some historians try to
present Napoleon as a man of the Revolution is to say that he was so
unintentionally, that his armies spread the doctrines and ideologies of the
Revolution by their victories. Some even claim that by his later assaults
on the Inquisition in Spain and his overthrow of feudalism in Italy, he
was at once the precursor of Italian unity and a kind of proto-apostle of
European unity. But it must be stressed once again that Napoleon merely
abolished feudalism and in no sense ushered in true equality. What
happened was that Napoleonic victories gave the French a sense of
superiority and that they therefore proselytized for certain Revolutionary
ideals such as 'civil liberty' in conquered territories, much as though they
were late-Victorian missionaries bringing the gospel to the heathen in
benighted Africa.
Napoleon himself always made his position crystal-dear to his
intimates. He told them he became disenchanted with the Jacobins very
early because they prized equality over liberty. He always favoured the
old nobility over the Jacobins and, beyond France, his attempts to
introduce even the most basic rights of the Revolution were spasmodic.
Outside France, administrative positions in the conquered territories
were invariably filled by nobles, which made it impossible to carry out
radical agrarian reforms and in turn meant that the peasantry outside
France was always lukewarm about him. His apologists say that he
favoured the foreign nobility because of the poor level of education
outside France, but the truth is that for Napoleon la carriere ouverte aux
marcin
(Marcin)
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