I wrote this exact essay title last year for my degree. Swansea University?
edit: This is word for word a copy/paste of an essay I submitted last year that received a first. If we are in fact at the same university, copying chunks of it will undoubtedly be recognised by the TurnItIn system.
As Louis Bergeron writes;
“Bonaparte belongs to the Revolution, surely, in matters that seemed irreversible at the time— civil equality, the destruction of feudalism, the ruin of the privileged position of the Catholic Church. As for the rest … so much instability, so many contradictions between grand principles and the practice of governments, so much persistent uncertainty on the outcome of the war and the unity of the nation, that the field lay open for a strong man.”
Here, Bergeron introduces two of the staple themes of this essay. The first theme is being the notion of great man theory and the second being Napoleon’s relationship with revolutionary ideals. This essay uses great man theory to show Napoleon’s rise to power, using the Revolution as his platform. Sociology is used to analyse Napoleon’s policies to determine whether he was in fact a ‘son of the Revolution’; Herbert Spencer in his criticism of great man theory stated, “the genesis of a great man depends on the long series of complex influences … Before he can remake his society, his society must make him”. This use of sociology will show that Napoleon knew the limitations of his power. Napoleon’s regime had been incubated by and founded upon the unstable political failings of the seventeen-nineties and, ‘in matters that seemed irreversible’. As such this placed limitations on Napoleon, he felt he had to adhere to revolutionary sentiment in order to remain in power. Furthermore, if Napoleon didn’t recognise these limitations, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord his foreign minister certainly did. This essay outlines Napoleon’s early career to show how he gained power at the Coup of Brumaire before analysing his imperial and internal policy to determine whether Napoleon and his empire can be held up as products of the Revolution. Moreover, this essay argues that Napoleon, in essence, created himself. Whilst revolutionary sentiment became his platform and his limiter, Napoleon himself created the ‘Napoleonic Myth’ that saw his rise to power.
I
Napoleon ‘the Great’ is almost a complete fabrication created and perpetuated by Napoleon himself throughout the seventeen-nineties. Thomas Carlyle integrated this into his great man theory in his lecture The Hero as King. Cromwell, Napoleon: Modern Revolutionism, in 1840:
“’False as a bulletin’ became a proverb in Napoleon’s time. He makes what excuse he could for it: that it was necessary to mislead the enemy, to keep up his own men’s courage, and so forth. On the whole, there are no excuses. A man in no case has liberty to tell lies ... Yet Napoleon had a sincerity: we are to distinguish what is superficial and what is fundamental in insincerity … let us discern withal that the man had a certain instinctive ineradicable feeling for reality; and did base himself upon fact, so long as he had any basis.”
However, let us not forget the words of Carlyle’s great contemporary critic, Spencer. As much as the Napoleonic Myth was invented, the societal consensus of the seventeen-nineties, the so-called ‘series of complex influences’ not only harboured the myth but perpetuated it. Therefore, this section of the essay shows how Napoleon engineered his rise to power alongside the failings of Montagnard, Thermidorian and Fructidorian France, described by Howard G. Brown as, “chronic violence, ambivalent forms of justice, and repeated recourse to heavy-handed repression”. In essence, Napoleon’s rise and France’s republican fall are two parallel streets on the road to Brumaire.
Napoleon’s military bulletins were an important source of the Napoleonic Myth. In particular, Napoleon’s Italian campaigns of 1796-97 and 1800-01 were the platform for the Corsican’s rise to fame. Via his two newspapers, Le courier de l’Armée d’Italie and La France vue de l’Armée d’Italie, Napoleon was able to write and distribute military bulletins. While the facts were spurious, and the content sometimes too Napoleon-centric, in the earlier campaign particularly following the battles of Lodi (June 1795) and Arcole (November 1796), the bulletins were able to provide an enormous confidence boost to both the general and soldiers, propelling the former to great fame in France and Europe. By 1800, Napoleon’s bulletins were an extension of his meritocratic principles, using the bulletins to reward commanders with fame and prestige. As emperor, Napoleon’s manipulation of the press would continue in the form of censorship. The use of the press in this manner was a cultural and political side effect of the seventeen-nineties. J. Holland Rose writes that Napoleon inherited a censor-heavy climate from the Jacobins, and Dwyer outlines an increasing culture of hero worship in France; “This type of self-promotion was only possible because of a revolution that had taken place in the use of the press, coupled with a change in attitudes towards the individual in society”. Contemporary heroes like Rousseau and generals such as Condé were the ones to be glorified by republican France, Napoleon did everything he could to put himself alongside them.
The political failings of the seventeen-nineties made it almost impossible to govern France without authoritarianism. The coups of 18 Fructidor and 22 Floréal are clear examples that the directors did not want a return to Jacobin or royalist France, despite the legality and legitimacy of elections. With the Coup of Brumaire, the Directory traded uncertainty of elections for middle-class economic stability and authoritarianism. Hunt, Lansky and Hanson in The Failures of the Liberal Republic, 1795-1799: The Road to Brumaire state that, “the republicans of 1795 wanted to establish a liberal republic without accepting the imperatives of liberal politics. The notables of 1795 wanted to preserve what they had won”. These new notables were the effective new aristocracy of France who desired a new authoritarian regime: a neo-acien regime masked as a meritocracy. Having created the Myth, Napoleon was the hero and meritocrat the middle classes and France wanted.