H-FRANCE NAPOLEON FORUM


Response Essay
Howard Brown, University of Binghamton (State University of New York)


The short essays in this forum are so diverse in themes and content as to
beggar efforts at synthesis.  Nonetheless, a single issue--the political
importance of the army--appears in a number of guises.  Annie Jourdan
argues that in order to compensate for Napoleon's glaring lack of
legitimacy, images of him were designed to provide a historical legitimacy

by using classical tropes and especially by casting his story as the
adventures of a hero.  At the heart of this heroic narrative was "le
 grande
capitaine," first in Italy and Egypt, then Austria, Germany, and
Spain.  His image made the transition from republican hero to republican
emperor through changing depictions of him on the field of battle where he

could be shown as both commander-in-chief and father of his people.  Thus
pictorially, his ascendance did not come through the seedy machinations of

domestic politics.  For this reason, Jourdan has nothing to say about
images of Brumaire.  In her analysis, the representational construction of

the heroic adventures of "le grande capitaine" effectively elided the
 coup
d'etat.  This was certainly true for the "feuilleton militaire en
peinture", but Brumaire itself turned out to be essentially a military
adventure.

Although contemporary propaganda ensured that the seizure of power became
known as the coup d'etat of 18 Brumaire VIII, Malcolm Crook emphasizes
 the
recourse to military force to overcome politicians' protests on 19
Brumaire.  Bonaparte's ability to enter the revolving door behind the
politicians and yet emerge ahead of them (to use Isser Woloch's image) was

obviously due largely to the essential part the army played in executing
the coup.  No wonder, then, that in "world historical" terms, Brumaire
 has
always epitomized the sudden intervention into politics of a man on
horseback.  This general view fits well with Crook's belief that
participation in democratic politics was not necessarily in "terminal
decline" before Bonaparte ended the experiment.  On the other hand, Woloch

thinks it best to avoid extrapolating from the Directory and projecting its

development into a more mature democracy.  I go even further, suggesting
that Brumaire was merely another step, and not the most decisive one at
that, on the road to liberal authoritarianism and a security state.  In my

view, politicians had already stripped the governance structures of most of

their democratic features and had come to rely on many men on horseback to

maintain the republic both at home and abroad.   19 Brumaire was not,
therefore, the start of a military dictatorship, nor was it even the
beginning of a militarized republic.  In fact, by the time Bonaparte seized

power, most Frenchmen experienced the republic as a polity that privileged

war over democracy.  Coercive mobilization and the glorification of arms
had a greater impact than holding elections or living under a so-called
rule of law.  In this respect, Brumaire made little difference.

The republic was founded on a war emergency and only military expansion
enabled it to survive as long as it did.  Bonaparte acknowledged this fact

in exile on St. Helena, stating that "the Directory was overpowered by its

own weakness; to exist it needed a state of war as other governments need a

state of peace."[1]  He knew what he was talking about because his regime

lived by the same rules. Even when the Empire was at its zenith he
remarked, "My power is dependent on my glory, and my glory on my
victories.  My power would fall if I did not base it on still more glory
and still more victories."[2]  The revolutionary and Napoleonic periods
have usually been treated separately, thereby obscuring important
evolutionary continuities.  In my first essay I suggested that Brumaire was

not the decisive turning point for democracy in France; here I suggest that

treating it as a major break with the revolution has diminished the
importance of continuous warfare in determining the shape of the
post-revolutionary settlement.

The "municipal revolution" of 1789 created bourgeois militias across the

country.  Although they soon became units of the National Guard, they were

really expressions of the new power structure at the communal level.  The
revolutionaries' rupture with the church displaced Sunday mass and
religious processions as the traditional expressions of communal
solidarity. This made service in the National Guard one of the few approved

ways to embody the local community.  Fear of war made the National Guards
into a critical nexus between hundreds of urban communities and the
revolutionary state.  The 200,000 volunteers drawn from the National Guard

in 1791 and 1792 were recruited, organized and equipped by local
authorities.  Much vaunted as citizen-soldiers by contemporaries and
historians alike, nonetheless, these volunteers remained tangible
expressions of localism.  Their collective identity, more than their
individual one, made national guardsmen recruited into the line army a
critical factor in the transition to the modern French state-nation.

It was only after France became a republic that mobilization for war began

rapidly to erode communal solidarity.  When the fledgling republic resorted

to the levy of 300,000 in early 1793, community leaders were forced to
choose between collective resistance and conscripting unpopular or marginal

members of the community.  The "levƒe en masse" completed this rupture

between the revolution and communities.  Henceforth, the revolutionary
state, experienced directly as coercive military force, took precedence
over the democratic institutions of local government.  The "levƒe en
 masse"
of 1793 was the first universal conscription in European history, and yet
it was a one-time event.  The Jourdan law of 1798 provided the basis for
routinized conscription, but this is not generally considered one of the
Directory's major achievements.  Woloch considers it a cruel irony that
military conscription became the Napoleonic regime's "foremost civic
obligation." In fact, this was true from the early days of the
Republic.  Elsewhere, Woloch has convincingly argued that the Napoleonic
regime's greatest domestic achievement was to inculcate conscription into

the French nation.[3]  It should be emphasized, however, that this was but

one aspect of the militarization of society during the revolutionary and
Napoleonic years.

Woloch's call for more research on the process of militarizing society is

amplified by Annie Jourdan's emphasis on images of military glory as a
surrogate political legitimacy, Malcolm Crook's insistence on the military

intervention of 19 Brumaire, and my own work on the consequences of
escalating military repression during the late republic.  In this respect
as well, Brumaire appears less a rupture than an intensification of a
process already well underway.


NOTES:

[1] Quoted in Denis Woronoff, _The Thermidorian Reaction and the Directory,

1794-1799_, trans. Julian Jackson (Cambridge, 1984), 167.

[2] Quoted in Geoffrey Ellis, _Napoleon_ (London, 1997), 192.

[3] _The New Regime_ (New York, 1994, 380-433.

Copyright 1999 H-France and Howard G. Brown