Napoleon’s Legacy
For nearly twenty years, from first bursting onto the stage with a series of brilliant campaigns in Italy in 1796 until finally stepping off it after his climactic final defeat at Waterloo in 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte towered over Europe in a way few figures have done before or since. Born into provincial obscurity on a rugged island hundreds of miles away from the opulent royal court of Versailles or the bustling city of Paris, he would be carried to dazzling heights through an unique combination of ambition, talent and fortune. By the age of 28 he was being hailed as the savior of the Revolutionary France; four years later he had succeeded where all the kings and emperors of Europe had failed by bringing the Revolution to an end. At 38 he was master of an empire stretching from Spain to Poland and Naples to Hamburg; eight years later he was a defeated exile. Throughout this breakneck journey, Napoleon ushered in a series of changes that would leave a permanent imprint on the world.
The furious pace with which Napoleon ascended to power was facilitated by the French Revolution. Inspired by a century of anti-royalist writings spread through the cafés of enlightenment-era Paris as well as by the success of the American revolution in overthrowing the shackles of a distant British king and spurred by the crippling famines, economic recessions and royal apathy rolling through France throughout the 1780’s, the people of Paris rose in revolt. Events escalated rapidly from there, and by 1793 the feckless king Louis XVI had lost his head to the guillotine.
In many ways the new order established in France was a massive leap forward. Slavery was abolished; the idea of universal rights and universal male citizenship broke into the mainstream; promotion to important positions was no longer determined by the nobility of one’s blood but by one’s talent and dedication. Yet for all the social progress the revolution had encouraged, France soon fell into serious danger. The monarchs of Europe had no interest in consenting to one of their members being overthrown by a radical republic, and their armies were soon laying siege to France. Famine did not magically come to a close with the fall of the king, and as bread prices continued to rise many regions, most notably the Vendée in the north-west, rose in counter-revolution, hoping to restore the monarchy. While these crises unfolded, the government in Paris was co-opted by the ultra-radical Jacobins. During the terrifying period that followed the guillotines of Paris ran nonstop as nearly anyone with the slightest royalist connections or sympathies was put to death. 16,000 were officially executed, at least 300,000 were imprisoned. [Dwyer, 5] Fittingly enough, the Reign of Terror came to an end with the execution by guillotine of Robespierre — its primary architect. The Jacobins were succeeded in power by the less radical Directory, but the entire history of this body would be a sequence of weak economic policies, restrictions of the press, rigged elections, and endless corruption. [Herold, 57–65]
Despite all the political chaos it was engulfed by, Revolutionary France still succeeded in holding its own against the royal foreign armies knocking on its door. In large part this was due to the willingness of the revolutionary government to experiment with conscription to build up armies far larger than had been possible in the past. By late 1793, France was capable of fielding 750,000 soldiers.[Bell, 148–149] France’s victories were also enabled by the rapid promotion of talented generals who could never have hoped to reach positions of importance under the ancien régime. The most brilliant of these was Napoleon Bonaparte. After his promotion to the command of the army of Italy he led a whirlwind campaign that transformed the situation from stalemate to total French victory and made the young Corsican the most popular man in the country. From there, Napoleon’s journey to supreme power would take him along a glorious adventure in Egypt and a close-run coup d’état. Just three and a half years after bursting onto the international scene Napoleon had established himself as ruler of France.
Napoleon would rule France for 15 years and, during this time, he would lead his armies back and forth across the continent, assembling a vast empire and time after time trouncing and humiliating the forces of the monarchs who had ruled Europe for centuries. Only when all of the monarchs of Europe united against him and put into practice the tricks they had learned during years of fighting against him was Napoleon finally defeated. During this period, Napoleon put into place at least two changes that would go on to totally revolutionize the world.
The first of these was his civil code, given the self-promoting title of the Code Napoléon. France was a country with a desperate need for an unifying legal code, since the country was held together by a patchwork of different laws at the time of the Revolution, the result of centuries of feudal lords holding lawmaking powers within their own domains. To further complicate the matter, the Catholic Church claimed to have control over several legal areas, most prominently marriage and family life. The situation was complex enough to prompt the philosopher Voltaire to write that a Frenchmen “changes his law almost as often as he changes horses.”[Napoleonic Code] Throughout the revolutionary period, there had been many attempts by politicians to reform French law, but each had come to a stop as a result of clashes between various factions. Almost immediately after coming to power, Napoleon resolved to solve the issue once and for all, assembling a large squad of the country’s best lawyers and personally attending meetings to determine the direction of the project.[Herold, 147–150]
The civil code would prove to be one of Napoleon’s greatest achievements, as he himself noted, “My real glory is not the forty battles I won, for Waterloo’s defeat will destroy the memory of as many victories.…What nothing will destroy, what will live forever, is my Civil Code.” The code set in stone many of the ideas born, but never codified, during the revolution: freedom of person and contract, the equality of all male citizens, the destruction of the hereditary noble class, religious toleration, and the separation of church from state. [Price, 14] As Napoleon’s Empire rapidly expanded, so did the reach of his laws. Perhaps the greatest testament to the success of these laws is their longevity. Even after Napoleon was defeated and replaced by the Bourbon monarchs, who utterly despised him, no effort was ever made to remove what the former emperor called “My real glory.” Instead Napoleon’s name was simply wiped off the title. Even today, the Code Napoléon’s influence is widespread, forming the basis for legal systems across Europe, South and Central America, the Middle East, and nearly all of the region’s colonized by France during the nineteenth century. [Herold, 150]
Another change that Napoleon did so much to advance was much less positive, but no less influential: the development of total war, the pursuit of victory at all costs through the full mobilization of all a nation’s resources. This was not in any way Napoleon’s brainchild. It had first come to the fore with the mass conscriptions that were so key to saving Revolutionary France. But if Napoleon was not the inventor of total war, he was certainly its first master and the ruthless pragmatism with which he conducted his conflicts would ultimately change warfare forever, paving the way for the great tragedies of the twentieth century world wars. Napoleon had all of the traits necessary to develop a state perfectly honed for total war: the cold ruthlessness, the precisely detailed administrative genius (he was known for remembering the position, command, numbers and condition of every unit in his army) and the burning ambition to build his power base. Napoleon used several methods to maximize the number of soldiers he could call on. He extended conscription massively. Between 1799 and 1813 more than two million Frenchmen were conscripted into Napoleon’s armies, a number that would be even higher if we included the hundreds of thousands of men conscripted in the vassal states Napoleon established during his conquests.[Price, 34] Napoleon also divided France into 130 prefectures, administrative units specifically designed for maximizing the flow of new soldiers into his armies, reducing evasion, and reporting on public morale. [Price, 89–91]
By the end of Napoleon’s reign, his policies of total war had been adopted throughout Europe, completely changing the face of war. During Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, the Russian government was willing to burn down or destroy practically anything that might give the French much needed supplies. The German kingdoms of Austria and Prussia both experimented with conscription systems clearly influenced by Napoleon to raise vast armies. Spain fought a brutal guerilla war, full of bloody massacres committed by both sides, and Britain attempted to use its excellent navy to strangle French trade. These strategies made the Napoleonic wars into the first total wars the world had ever seen, a tragic precursor to the even larger calamities of the twentieth century.
Even today, Napoleon remains a polarizing figure, adored by some and despised by others. In large part this is due to the complexity of the vast legacy he left behind. On the one hand he saved, codified and spread across Europe the ideas of the French Revolution — liberty, equality, and fraternity. On the other he was a tyrant whose endless pursuit of victory at any costs led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and readied Europe for the era of world wars that would break out just under a century later. Napoleon’s legacy truly is a puzzle, but while the positives and negatives he left on the world may be debated forever, the one element nobody can argue is the size of his impact.
Bibliography
Bell, David Avrom. The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Modern Warfare. London: Bloomsbury, 2008. Print.
Dwyer, Philip. Citizen Emperor. N.p.: Bloomsbury, 2014. Print.
“French Revolution.” French Revolution. New World Encyclopedia, 22 July 2016. Web. 19 Apr. 2017.
Herold, J. Christopher. The Age of Napoleon. London: Phoenix, 2003. Print.
“Napoleonic Code.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 29 May 2015. Web. 19 Apr. 2017.
Price, Munro. Napoleon: The End of Glory. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016. Print.
“Reign of Terror.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 15 May 2015. Web. 19Apr. 2017.
