Chapter 21-The Age of Napoleon

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