H-France Review Vol. 3 (November 2003), No. 126
Philip G. Dwyer, Ed. Napoleon and Europe, London and New York: Longman, 2001. xxi + 328 pp. Maps, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. $23.00 U.S. (pb). ISBN 0-528-31837-8.
Review by David P. Jordan, University of Illinois at Chicago.
Reacting against a number of hideous Paris buildings in the last decade of the twentieth century, a clumsily-named strategy emerged. Façadisme was intended to preserve the look of the city yet allow for modernization, especially of the nineteenth-century building stock that was most threatened. Developers and architects would gut a building, completely remodel its interior and preserve the façade. The skeleton, with some essential bones missing, resembled the original; an illusion of architectural integrity was thus created.[1] This phenomenon of urbanism may serve as a metaphor for the Napoleonic revisionism that is in full swing and introduce the thoughtful, intelligent, and suggestive essays here assembled by Philip Dwyer.
Of the making of books about Napoleon there is no end. What sets this anthology apart, in addition to the quality of the essays, is that Napoleon and Europe is not written from the familiar perspective (and sources) of so many recent (and older) books on the man and his age. Although the traditional topics of Napoleonic studies are treated, the hundreds of contemporary memoirs are not mined for anecdotes and evidence. Napoleon’s obsessive dictations on St. Helena are treated with the skepticism they deserve. His tens of thousands of letters are also prudently handled. In short, Napoleon’s view of his life and times, so seductive and accessible, is elbowed from the center of the vast Napoleonic canvas. The same important questions that have engaged the attention of historians for nearly two centuries are still posed--how did Napoleon govern and administer his empire, how influential were his wars and conquests, to what degree was he beholden to the Revolution, to what degree did his astonishing personality influence the course of events--but new answers are offered because the angle of vision has shifted. There is, for example, no chapter on Napoleon as military commander nor is there a detailed account of any of his sixty battles, but we learn a good deal about these matters. Alan Forrest’s “The Military Culture of Napoleonic France” reminds us that nearly sixty percent of the new nobles created between 1808 and 1814 came from the army. “Honour,” he remarks, “was a quality which Napoleon continued to equate with the military.…” (p. 52). Isser Woloch reinforces the observation (“The Napoleonic Regime and French Society”), pointing out that the “extremely ambitious Rœderer family…which previously made its careers in the courts and in business, sent one son into the officer corps” (p. 66). Old hierarchies as well as traditional career paths were being replaced by a growing regimentation of the state, imitating military values and expressed in clear chains of command, all of which led to Napoleon himself. Careers were open to talent, but the odds heavily favored military careers.
Michael Sibalis (“The Napoleonic Police State”) writes that “a few hundred political prisoners and a few thousand internal exiles in an empire of 30 millions” is a better record, if we can speak in such terms of so grim a comparison, than governmental repression in France during the Terror or 1851-2 or 1871 (not to mention Vichy). Napoleon did not govern by terror, a truth that bears repetition. Sibalis does, however, remind us that Napoleon had Toussaint Louverture brought to France and cruelly imprisoned in the fortress of Joux. The least of the daily humiliation, indeed tortures, that were inflicted on him was the prohibition against addressing him as "general" (p. 91). Napoleon’s unending war with Hudson Lowe on St. Helena was regularly intensified when the British governor refused to deliver mail addressed to the "Emperor." Only General Bonaparte was acknowledged. A nice irony.
Once the essays move outside France proper it becomes increasingly clear how much of the old Napoleonic edifice has been altered by recent research. Among the many virtues of this anthology is the recurrent reminder that Napoleon continued policies inherited from the Revolution. Consulate and Empire alike are closely linked to the Revolution and the First Republic. Geoffrey Ellis (“The Nature of Napoleonic Imperialism”) and Philip G. Dwyer (“Napoleon and the Drive for Glory: Reflections on the Making of French Foreign Policy”) stress continuity, while the latter invokes the ideas of Karen Horney, the psychoanalyst and theorist, as a way of getting at Napoleon’s complex character.
The military dynamic of the Revolution was inherited by Napoleon and in many ways was a juggernaught he rode but could not steer (p. 102). His foreign policy, including the Continental Blockade and the establishment of an empire, “was the logical outcome of policies whose seeds had been planted in the 1790s by the French revolutionaries.…” (p. 123). So too was his struggle with Britain “inherited from the revolutionary governments” (p. 199). Only the obsessive intensity of the struggle and its tactics were Napoleonic. “Unlike Vergennes after 1763,” writes Brendan Simms, (“Britain and Napoleon”) “Napoleon never committed the bulk of French resources to winning the naval and colonial struggle with Britain overseas” (p. 199).
There would have been French hegemony on the Continent after the Revolution without Napoleon, but it would not have taken the specific form it did. Nor would French hegemony have been tied not only to Napoleon’s megalomania but also to his dynastic politics. Everywhere he supplanted the Bourbons he despised--this is John Lawrence Tone’s observation (“The Peninsular War”)--he replaced them with Bonapartes. His marriage to Marie-Louise, which he lamented on St. Helena as a political miscue, recapitulated the French-Hapsburg alliance that had bedeviled Louis XVI, another of the many ironies of Napoleon’s career.
Ellis shrewdly notes that the impact of the Code Napoléon outside France often strengthened the hold of the old elites. In those “subject states where feudal practices were still deeply entrenched” the Code could not codify new property relationships for the old ones had not been abolished by revolution. Consequently “the Allied statesmen at the Congress of Vienna were able to restore much of the old social order east of the Rhine” (pp. 110-111). The observation is reinforced by Michael Rowe (“Napoleon and State Formation in Central Europe”), who insists the German princes and nobles successfully fended off or “at least watered down the extension of the code’s principles east of the Rhine” (p. 211). Napoleon’s imperialism was little more than a spoils system to extract Napoleongeld for “there was nothing definitively 'cultural' about it; nor could it be construed as a mark of the enlightened 'modernity' of his administrative 'model'”(p. 112). Tone says the same of Napoleonic Spain: “… if France and Napoleon represented a new order, it was one of economic ruination and dictatorship, not one of rationalism and progress” (p. 229).
In a similar vein of argument and demonstration, Charles J. Esdaile (“Popular Resistance to the Napoleonic Empire”) and John Lawrence Tone remove the ideology of nationalism from the various guerrilla actions Napoleon stirred up. There were indeed “dozens of insurgent bands…in operation against the French,” but they were not “groups of outraged patriots” (p. 146). In Spain it was impossible to get the guerrillas to fight outside their local areas. Michael Broers (“Policing the Empire: Napoleon and the Pacification of Europe”) insists Napoleon’s major work in the conquered territories was “a process of pacification” to “forge a state powerful and efficient enough to enforce mass conscription on the peoples of western Europe” (p. 161). Only those regions in his 'inner Empire' that were pacified could be ruled and replenish his massive imperial army with peasant fodder. La mission civilisatrice de la France looks quite different through Broers’s lens.
Alexander Grab (“State, Society and Tax Policy in Napoleonic Europe”) examines the economic side of Napoleon’s empire and plays nicely with a paradox: the Emperor’s insatiable need for money for his wars drove his modernization of state tax collecting. Soon after Austerlitz--foreign victory always solidified his political position at home--he restored the hated salt tax and then increased tobacco duties. He “quadrupled indirect taxes between 1806 and 1812” (p. 174). He always needed additional conquests because he needed to exploit conquered enemies and vassal states. Paying for his wars was the motor of fiscal modernization. Once Napoleon was gone, France and liberated Europe happily retained the efficient fiscal bureaucracies he had created (p. 186).
What emerges from these essays is not only some needed gutting of the old Napoleonic edifice, but, like façadisme, a distinctly different, albeit recognizable, building. Napoleon’s empire, whether vassal states or new kingdoms for his brothers, is presented as more exploitative and self-serving than had previously been thought. The careful exploration of his tax and recruitment systems outside France, as well as his pacification and policing of his conquests, provide evidence to explain the instantaneous and complete collapse of his empire (and most of the reforms he imposed) after Waterloo. The non-ideological nature of the opposition to French occupation and government helps to explain the easy success of the restored European ancien regime and their cynical use of the new administrative efficiency bequeathed by the French. The many continuities between the Empire and the Revolution tie Napoleon more closely to his revolutionary inheritance than he would have wished while also questioning the familiar periodization of the Revolution as 'over' with Thermidor, or Brumaire, or even Napoleon’s coronation.
There remains, however, an important caveat. All the essays in this collection are from anglophone historians, and there are no essays that directly address cultural and intellectual questions. It would have been good to have Annie Jourdan[2] on Napoleon’s presentation of self in art, history, and patronage or Natalie Petiteau[3] on Napoleonic historiography since the mid 1940s, when Pieter Geyl’s famous essay was first published.[4] I suppose one cannot do everything in such a collection, but the absence of French voices and the voices of those working on the literature, the painting, the architecture, the museums, the archeology, the religion, the urbanism, the philosophy, the music, et al compromises an otherwise excellent collection of essays.
LIST OF ESSAYS
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Philip G. Dwyer, “Introduction.”
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Harold T. Parker, “Napoleon’s Youth and Rise to Power.”
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Alan Forrest, “The Military Culture of Napoleonic France.”
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Isser Woloch, “The Napoleonic Regime and French Society.”
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Michael Sibalis, “The Napoleonic Police State.”
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Geoffrey Ellis, “The nature of Napoleonic Imperialism.”
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Philip G. Dwyer, “Napoleon and the Drive for Glory: Reflections on the Making of French Foreign Policy.”
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Charles J. Esdaile, “Popular Resistance to the Napoleonic Empire.”
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Michael Broers, “Policing the Empire: Napoleon and the Pacification of Europe.”
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Alexander Grab, “State, Society and Tax Policy in Napoleonic Europe.”
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Brendan Simms, “Britain and Napoleon.”
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Michael Rowe, “Napoleon and State Formation in Central Europe.”
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John Lawrence Tone, “The Peninsular War.”
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Alexander M. Martin, “The Russian Empire and the Napoleonic Wars.”
NOTES
[1] See Pierre Pinon, Paris, biographie d’une capitale (Hazan: Paris, 1999), pp. 300-01, and Monumental, number 14 (1996), pp. 8-67.
[2] Annie Jourdan, Napoléon, héros, imperator, mécène (Aubier: Paris, 1998).
[3] Natalie Petiteau, Napoleon, de la mythologie à l’histoire (Seuil: Paris, 1999).
[4] Pieter Geyl, Napoleon for and Against, translated Olive Renier (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1949).
David P. Jordan
University of Illinois at Chicago
Dpj@uic.edu
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H-France Review Vol. 3 (November 2003), No. 126
ISSN 1553-9172
