ok so some background to the question. being Irish living in England I notice that history taught here majorly glosses over bad bits and focuses on the good bits. that's pretty standard in countries but it got me thinking. how bad was Napoleon really and was the French revolution a good thing for French people in terms of quality of life?
so I know things were rough for normal people in countries like England France and Spain despite them being colonial superpowers. the ragged trouser philanthropists paints a grim tale of life then and capital in the 21st century paints a massively unequal society so we know common people had it tough. this was the basis for the revolution and deposition for king Louis.
then eventually along comes Napoleon. admittedly we weren't taught too much in school about motives etc. AFAIK the war was about reinstating the monarchy. for what I remember of von klaushvitz in his book "on war" he respected Napoleon a lot and said his greatest ability was to mobilise the French people and get them on side in a way not seen before. but in Britain he's painted as a bad guy we defeated.
so yeah. was he a bad guy or is it that the empires at the time didn't like the idea of an equal society that was powerful and could inspire others? and did he and the revolution before him improve life for the average Frenchman?
sorry if the formatting is bad and rambly. I'm on my mobile.
I'll tackle the first part of your question, on the change in the quality of life for French people after the Revolution.
This is really two different questions:
The second one is simpler to answer: very badly. I discussed the human cost in an earlier post but it's worth restating some of it:
A million Frenchmen died during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, out of a population of around 29 million. Historian Robert Tombs estimates that “more than one in three of all boys born between 1790 and 1795 were killed or wounded.” Many of these soldiers were forcibly conscripted, “dragged to barracks roped together" and sent abroad to fight and die. Even families whose conscripted sons weren't killed still suffered the economic dislocation of their being taken away from working the fields (and most French families at that time were rural farmers). (Tombs, 330)
Meanwhile, being at war had meant France's ports, once home to a thriving overseas trade, had been subject to blockades for years. In his An Economic History of Modern France, François Caron writes that the "economic consequences of the Revolution and the Empire were 'a natural disaster'" (citing the economic historian Maurice Lévy-Leboyer):
The Revolution drove capital out of the country; inflation ruined those with savings, and favored speculative forms of investment at the expense of productive ones. The Revolution and the Empire ruined France's great sea trade. The revival under the Consulate was short-lived. The war and the blockade brought a new wave of bankruptcies. The policy followed under the Empire prevented French trade from adapting itself to the new conditions of international commerce, an adaptation which in any case was bound to be difficult. France's ports, whose prosperity was based on the 'sugar islands,' the West Indies, found it difficult to retain their position amid new trends orientated toward the American mainland. The decline of the great ports caused the collapse of regional economies which had lived off their activity. (36)
There were some silver linings. Napoleon's protectionist economic policies had encouraged some domestic manufacturing, and new agricultural industries such as growing sugar beets (to replace the lost West Indies sugar). These successes were relatively minor, hurt by a "technological gap between France and England" which grew wider because "contacts with the outside world were few and difficult, dynamism was lacking, and the market was uncertain" (Caron, 37).
So overall, huge demographic and economic dislocation caused by decades of war, especially in France's port cities and their dependent areas.
But what about the Revolution itself? Here the answer is more complicated. I'll tackle it in a reply, due to hitting the character max.