H-FRANCE NAPOLEON FORUM

The final panelist in our Napoleon Forum is Howard G. Brown, Associate

Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies in History at

Binghamton University, State University of New York. Among Dr. Brown's

publications are _War, Revolution, and the Bureaucratic State: The Politics

 

of Army Administration in France, 1791-1799_ (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1995). He currently is completing a book entitled "Ending the French

Revolution: Violence, Justice and Repression, 1795-1802." Dr. Brown

has

organized, with Dr. Judith Miller of Emory University, an international

symposium entitled "The Impossible Settlement: Problems of a New Order

in

Post-Revolutionary France," A Symposium to Mark the Bicentennial of

Napoleon's Seizure of Power, Atlanta, November 12-13, 1999.

 

 

BRUMAIRE IN NAPOLEONIC LEGEND AND LEGACY

Howard G. Brown, University of Binghamton (State University of New

York)

It is imprudent to claim that historians have reached a consensus on

something. Nonetheless, Napoleon Bonaparte's historical significance

has

several aspects that are generally accepted. Oddly, these accord with

Napoleon's own image of himself cultivated during his years in exile.

Most

importantly, Napoleon shaped his own image into a legend by focusing

on

military genius and charismatic leadership. Although historians work

hard

to prevent geniuses from proliferating, they agree that Napoleon was

one of

the greatest military commanders of all time (even though his innovations

were limited). The importance of his powerful presence, whether in

private

or public, has never been questioned, making him an archetype of Max

Weber's "charismatic authority." Napoleon also presented himself

as a

latter-day Justinian and self-conscious modernizer. Here too, historians

find little to quarrel about. Louis Bergeron called him "the last

of the

enlightened despots or the prophet of the modern state";[1] FranÇois

Furet

dubbed him "the Louis XIV of the democratic state."[2] All of this

agreement between Napoleon and historians confirms a final point of

consensus: Napoleon was a master propagandist.

However, there are other areas where Napoleon's image of himself and

historical scholarship are profoundly at odds and have been for a long

time. One of these is his relationship to the French Revolution; another

is his legacy in French politics. Both aspects are old chestnuts of

Napoleonic historiography. However, they take on freshness when the

coup

d'État of 18 Brumaire Year VIII is removed from the pantheon of

Napoleonic

events and demythologized as a point of rupture.

Simply marking the bicentennial of Napoleon Bonaparte's seizure of

power

raises suspicions about one's political values. The coup d'État

of 18

Brumaire has become synonymous with an authoritarian reaction against

republican democracy. This is due in large part to later struggles

over

republicanism in France, especially Napoleon III's massive repression

of

1851 and Marx's analysis of it. However, the events of 18-19 Brumaire

Year

VIII do not merit the historical significance bestowed upon them. True,

this sordid affair brought a general to power and, true, Bonaparte

soon

became Napoleon, a thoroughly machiavellian prince running a new model

empire. But Brumaire should not be used as historical shorthand for

the

transition from democracy to dictatorship. Both the demise of democracy

and Bonaparte's role in it cannot be confined to the coup and the

Consulate.

Napoleon Bonaparte was able to become Emperor because his personal ambition

before and after Brumaire served as a catalyst in the emergence and

consolidation of "liberal authoritarianism," the political praxis

that

dominated nineteenth-century France. This concept of "liberal

authoritarianism" is a "triple entendre" intended to express 1) the

limits

the liberal (i.e. rights based and constitutionally defined) legal

system

placed on the powerful police apparatus created after 1794, 2) the

French

state's repeated recourse to a liberal (i.e. heavy) use of armed

force to

resolve socio-political crises, 3) the support supposed liberals (i.e.

the

representatives of the social and political "juste milieu") generally

accorded to these contradictory aspects of governance throughout the

nineteenth century.[3]

The tortuous journey from a bloody reign of virtue to an even bloodier

reign of military prowess should be divided into three phases: 1794-1797;

1797-1802; 1802-1814. This is an unconventional periodization which

relegates both the start and end of the Directory to secondary

significance. It has the virtue, however, of better marking the stages

in

the collapse of the revolutionary imaginary and the rise of "liberal

authoritarianism," the Napoleonic era's most important historical

legacy.

The first phase could be called the Thermidorian years. They ran roughly

from the overthrow of Robespierre in the summer of 1794 to the defeat

of

domestic royalism in the autumn of 1797. These years were dominated

by

continuous warfare, vigilante violence, and economic chaos. They also

witnessed a desperate struggle to define the nature of republican democracy

and the political elite it would generate. Populist democracy disappeared

quickly, the sans-culottes and Babeuf notwithstanding. On the other

hand,

only a good deal of royalist bungling and some timely interventions

by the

army prevented a ground swell of anti-jacobin reaction from bringing

down

the fledgling republic. Bonaparte's ruthless "whiff of grapeshot"

preserved the Thermidorians in power and ironically made him midwife

to the

Directorial regime. Later his army's published threats to intervene

in

domestic politics encouraged a triumvirate of hardliners in the new

government to use military force to end the royalist threat of 1797.

The

coup d'État of 18 Fructidor V (September 1797) ostensibly saved

the

Republic but crippled its political legitimacy.

Bonaparte's victories in Italy in 1796-97 had a similar duality. They

gave

the republic some much needed prestige, but their detrimental effects

were

more significant and longer lasting. The money he sent back to France

was

a tiny fraction of the annual budget and his victories did nothing

to

lessen the anti-republican landslide in the elections of spring

1797. Furthermore, in order to turn the preliminaries of Leoben (April

1797) into the Peace of Campoformio (October 1797), he had to threaten

Austria with renewed attack, which could only be done by stripping

southern

France of regular army units. This once again plunged the Midi into

factional violence, proving that the Thermidorians and the Constitution

of

Year III were incapable of ending the Revolution. Such manifest domestic

weakness prevented the Directory from rejecting Campoformio--essentially

a

replacement of the Republic's priorities (natural frontiers) by those

of

Bonaparte (a satrapy in Italy)--and so forced it to live with an inherently

unstable settlement. Thus Bonaparte was deeply implicated in compromising

the regime both at home and abroad.

The second phase extended from Fructidor V to the Constitution of year

X.

It was characterized by renewed warfare, a continual erosion of democracy,

the elimination of Jacobinism, and a steady increase in

authoritarianism. Bonaparte contributed more than anyone else to the

reckless extension of French power that provoked the war of the second

coalition. His army's absence in Egypt ensured that a renewal of

warfare

soon became a national emergency and led directly to the "Jacobin

hundred

days"[4] of 1799. In the meantime, he had helped to create a dangerous

national thirst for military glory.

Contrasting the Directory and the Consulate is a clichÉ of Bonapartist

and

republican historiography alike. However, it was Fructidor, and not

Brumaire, which turned the page on representative democracy and the

rule of

law, and it was the Consulate for Life, not the Imperial coronation,

which

closed the book. After Fructidor the Directory made frequent use of

its

arbitrary powers. Selectively nullifying elections and disfranchising

former nobles belied the regime's democratic claims. The Second Directory

sacked and replaced so many elected officials that the Consulate's

transition to appointed prefects, judges and mayors appeared to be

little

more than streamlining an already undemocratic system of local

administration. How much did it matter when rigged plebiscites replaced

election tampering and electoral lists took the place of exclusionary

laws? How much freedom of the press was really left when Bonaparte

stifled

it in 1800?

Just as republican historians failed to describe the comatose state

of

democracy before the Consulate nailed the coffin shut, Bonapartist

historians emphasized the Consulate's return to law and order without

acknowledging the Directory's preparatory work. The endemic lawlessness

of

rural France was not ended by an ecumenical choice of officials or

the

reopening of churches, alone; it was quashed by ruthless repression.

The

Fructidor coup began this process. Military commissions tried at least

a

thousand people as ÉmigrÉs and summarily executed 275 of them.

By

Brumaire

over 200 cities, towns and villages had been put under a form of martial

law known as a "state of siege." Starting in January 1798, military

courts

tried hundreds of civilians accused of highway robbery or

housebreaking. Mobile military commissions attached to flying columns

followed in early 1801 in order to break the back of brigandage in

the west

and south. Once the balance of fear had tipped in the state's favor,

Special Tribunals were created to ensure that the regular criminal

courts

would not be "corrupted" by sympathy or intimidation. Between 1797

and

1802 the gendarmerie doubled in size and public prosecutors gained

considerable investigative powers. In the process, France became a

"security state." Eliminating representative democracy and fortifying

criminal justice went hand in hand with a vast administrative analysis

of

society that gave the state an unprecedented ability to chart social

change, and thereby respond more effectively to it. Thus local communities

became enmeshed in the security state, at first through repression

and then

through supervision.[5] The revolution turned subjects into citizens;

the

security state turned citizens into "administrÉs."

The Thermidorian years convinced the republican elite that genuine

democracy was not yet viable in France. The turn to liberal

authoritarianism occurred in 1797 and by 1802 the security state was

in

place. Only after the power of the post-revolutionary notability had

been

solidified was the Revolution truly over. The Constitution of Year

X

completed this process by restricting political participation to "les

plus

imposÉs." The state's basis of legitimacy had shifted from providing

access to politics to providing security and social stability.

During the third phase from 1802 to 1814 France experienced the truly

Napoleonic years. The transition from first Consul for Life to Emperor

was

more a matter of style than substance. This was the age of personal

grandeur, an essentially ephemeral period dominated by egomania. The

Civil

Code had already been written, if not enacted, and creating the Imperial

nobility was a gratuitous indulgence after the "LÉgion

d'honneur." Conscription had been thoroughly ensconced before perpetual

warfare began in 1803. Napoleon's legend rests on his European

conquests. However, once he consolidated his power in France, and turned

the Bonapartes into a "gangster dynasty"[6] ruling Europe, his

personality

made defeat by a coalition of powers utterly inevitable. The Napoleonic

legend was not the Napoleonic legacy, and the central part of that

legacy--liberal authoritarianism--was not really his, but that of the

post-revolutionary notability.

 

NOTES:

[1] _L'Épisode napolÉonienne: aspects intÉrieurs, 1799-1815_

(Paris,

1972), 8.

[2] _Dictionnaire critique de la RÉvolution franÇaise_ (Paris, 1988),

224.

[3] For a fuller explanation of "liberal authoritarianism" and its

place

in

the "longue durÉe," see Howard G. Brown, "Domestic State Violence:

Repression from the Croquants to the Commune," _The Historical Journal_

42

(Sept. 1999).

[4] J-P Bertaud, _Bonaparte prend le pouvoir_ (Paris, 1987), 120.

[5] This concept is more fully developed in Howard G. Brown, "From

Organic

Society to Security State: the War on Brigandage in France, 1797-1802,"

_Journal of Modern History_, 69 (1997): 692-4.

[6] Richard C. Cobb, _The Police and the People: French Popular Protest,

1789-1820_ (Oxford, 1970), 197.

Copyright 1999 H-France and Howard G. Brown