The Age of Napoleon
From Robespierre to Bonaparte
The Napoleonic Settlement in France
Napoleonic Hegemony in Europe
Resistance to Napoleon
Learning Objectives:
Students will understand that the new ideas of liberty associated with the French Revolution and how they were carried by the French armies into central, southern and eastern Europe, causing political and social upheavals and ultimately inspiring a nationalist reaction.
The National Convention moved for the first time since ancient Athens to institute a democratic
republic
The Convention responded to foreign
military threats, internal rebellion, and intense
factionalism by establishing a
revolutionary dictatorship
Individual liberties disappeared, and terror against “enemies of the people” became the purpose of the
movement
General Napoleon Bonaparte replaced the Republic with a
personal dictatorship
A strong centralized state ruled from the top down in France and
in imperial reorganization of Europe totally dominated by
France
From Robespierre to Bonaparte
Most revolutionaries now attempted to
establish a moderate or centrist position, but
they proved unequal to the task
An ambitious general and hero of the Republic
to seize power
The Thermidorian Reaction (1794-95)
Robespierre prepared to denounce yet another group of unspecified
intriguers
His enemies made a preemptive strike and
denounced Robespierre to the Convention as a
tyrant
Anti-Jacobinism The sans-culottes pushed an anti-jacobin agenda leading
to arrests, assassinations, and massacres
The Jacobins insisted on public virtue which gave way
to toleration of luxury and self-indulgence among the
wealthy
Many consumers suffered worse privations than those
during earlier shortages
The Last Revolutionary Uprising
Thermidorians viewed the Jacobin Constitution of 1793 as far too democratic and looked for an
excuse to scrap it altogether
Government forces overwhelmed the insurgents
This event proved to be the last mobilization of the parisian
revolutionary crowd and egalitarian movement
The Directory (1795-1799)
By the end of 1795, the remaining members of the
Convention considered the Revolution over
The revolutionary government, which had
replaced the fallen constitutional monarchy in 1793 and gave way to
the constitutional republic —known as the
*Directory
The Republic should “be governed by the best citizens, who are among the property-
owning class”
Five-man executive was meant to prevent the rise of a
dictator
Government troops led by an officer named Bonaparte easily crushed a royalist revolt against this power
grab
The Political SpectrumThey repeatedly purged
elected officials and periodically suppressed
political clubs and newspapers
The Neo-Jacobins adhered to the moderate Republic of 1795
They promoted grassroots activism through local political clubs, drives,
newspapers, and electoral campaigns
The Babeuvists viewed the revolutionary
government of the year II as promising stage that had to be follows by a final revolution in the name of the masses
The Republic sought a new form of oppression
by the elites
The Elusive Center
The Directory grew fearful of the revived
left
The elections (1798)
Elections of the year VI (1798), Neo-Jacobins
and moderates vied for political power
The Rise of BonaparteBonaparte, a popular general,
rose steadily through the military ranks
He advocated a new strategy: opening a front in Italy to
strike at Austrian forces from the south, while French armies on the Rhine pushed as usual
from the west
Bonaparte sought the defeat of the various members of the
coalition
The Brumaire Coup
Further French expansion into Italy and the gathering of allies precipitated a
new coalition against France —
Britain, Russia, and Austria
“Revisionists” wanted to redesign the Republic along
more oligarchic lines
A General Comes to Power
The revisionists wanted to establish a more centralized, oligarchic republic, and they needed a general’s support
Bonaparte’s return to France from Egypt thus seemed most
timely
Once the coup began, he proved to be far more ambitious and
energetic than the other conspirators and thrust himself
into the most prominent position
He demanded emergency powers for a
new provisional government
Bonaparte, along with others, was empowered
to draft a new constitution
The Brumaire coup had not been intended to install a dictatorship,
but that was its eventual result
The Napoleonic Settlement in France
Most French people were so weary politically that they
saw in Bonaparte what they wished to see
He soothed a divided France
The Napoleonic Style
Authority, not ideology, was his great concern, and he justified his actions by
their results
Napoleon valued the Revolution’s commitment to equality of opportunity and continued to espouse
that liberal premise
Napoleon slowly drifted away from his own
rational ideals
He began to force domestic and foreign policies on
France
He concentrated his government on raising men and money for his
armies and turned his back on revolutionary liberties
Political and Religious SettlementsCentralization
Bonaparte gave France a constitution, approved in a
plebiscite, that placed almost unchecked authority in the
“First Consul” (himself)
Two revisions: (1802) lifetime post; (1804) Napoleon proclaimed hereditary
emperor
Bonaparte eliminated the local elections
each department was administered by a *prefect
France was depoliticized—no organized opposition,
reduced number of newspapers, prohibited
political clubs, and silenced liberal intellectuals and former political activists
The Concordat
1801, Napoleon negotiated a *Concordat, or agreement,
with Pope Pius VII
Catholicism was the “preferred” religion of France
by protected religious freedom for non-Catholics
“The clergy would be his moral prefects”
The Era of the Notables
Napoleon intended to reassert the authority of the
state and the elites
He conferred status on prominent local individuals,
or *notables
“It is with trinkets that mankind is governed”
The Civil Code
It swept away feudal property relations and gave legal
sanction to modern contractual notions of property
e.g. the right to choose one’s occupation, to receive equal
treatment under the law, and to enjoy religious freedom
What impact did the civil code have on family and women?
Napoleonic Hegemony in Europe
After helping to give France a new government, Bonaparte
turned to do battle against the second anti-French coalition in
northern Italy
Unable to invade Britain, he resorted to economic warfare
and blockades
Through these, Bonaparte will have emerged as a “glorious”
imperial conqueror
Military Supremacy and the Reorganization of Europe
French victories in Lombardy and in Germany
Austria wanted peace: Treaty of Luneville (1801)—restored
France to the positions
Britain now stood alone
The Treaty of Amiens (1802) ended hostilities and
reshuffled territorial holdings outside Europe
The Third Coalition
A third anti-French coalition sought to limit French influence and restore the independence of
the Netherlands and Italy
The British, largely a sea power, won a significant victory at the
Battle of Trafalgar (1805)
The Battle of Austerlintz was Napoleon’s greatest tactical achievement and forced the
Habsburgs to the peace table
Through a series of battles, Napoleon conquered Southern and
Northern Germany
The end of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806
He liquidated numerous small German states and merged them
into two new regions: Kingdom of Westphalia and Grand Dutchy of
Berg
The “restoration” of Poland (divided by Prussia, Russia, and Austria)
Battle of Eylau
The Battle of Friedland in June was a French victory that demoralized Russia and led to Treat of Tilsit
(1807)
They partitioned Europe in East and West
The creation of new satellite kingdoms became the vehicle for Napoleon’s domination of Europe
Naval War with Britain
Britain alone stood between Napoleon and his dream of
hegemony over Europe
invulnerable to invasion, they waged an economic
battle
Blockade on British ports
The plan was to create social unrest and bankruptcy
The Continental System Napoleon launched the
*Continental System to prohibit British trade with all French
allies
The British responded with the *Orders in Council—a reversal
on the blockade required all neutral ships to stop at British
ports
Total naval war between France and Britain enveloped all neutral
nations
The Continental System did hurt British trade
but the French satellite states, as economic vassals of France, suffered the most
The Napoleonic Conscription Machine
The National Convention’s mass levy of 1793 drafted all able-bodied unmarried men
between 18 and 25
Directory passed a conscription law that made
successive “classes” of young men (those born in a particular year) subject to a military draft
should the need arise
Resistance to Napoleon
Napoleon felt that nothing stood in his way
His calculations proved utterly mistaken, and in
both places he ultimately suffered disastrous
defeats
French expansion sparked new forms of nationalism in some
quarters, but also liberalism and reaction
The “Spanish Ulcer” Spain and France shared a common interest in
weakening British power in Europe and the colonial world
Napoleon concluded that he must reorganize Spain himself
to bring it solidly into the Continental System
Once the French army was well inside Spain, Napoleon intended to impose his own political solution to Spain’s
instability
Popular ResistanceFaced with military occupation, the disappearance of their royal
family, and the crowning of a Frenchman, the Spanish people
rose in rebellion
May 2, 1808
Goya’s famous painting, The Third May, 1808
The Battle of Bailen, 1808: The French defeat broke the aura of
Napoleonic invincibility
After five years of fighting and many reversals, the
Spanish pushed the French back across the Pyrenees in November
1813
About 30,00 Spanish guerrilla fighters helped wear down the French
Europeans were inspired by their example of armed
resistance to France
The Russian Debacle Russia, resented the restrictions on its trade under
the Continental System
Prussia and other nations pressured the tsar to resist
Napoleon
His objective was to annihilate Russia’s army or, at the least, to conquer Moscow and chase the
army to the point of disarray
“Grand Army”—600,000 soldiers
Napoleon forced marches across central Europe into
Russia
Russian nobles abandoned their estates
and burned their crops to the ground
Hunger, thirst, fatigue, and disease as they
marched into an abandoned Moscow
The Destruction of the Grand Army
Moscow was mysteriously set ablaze; the extensive
damage as to make it unfit to be the Grand Army’s
winter quarters
Napoleon’s army was picked apart, starved, and slowly destroyed the long
march back to France
The Fall of Napoleon
British troops reinforced the coalition
The French had lost confidence in him,
conscription had reached its limits, and no popular spirit
of resistance to invasion developed
Napoleon was captured and imprisoned on the isle of Elba