The Napoleonic Empire

Abstract

Few periods of modern European history entail so much paradox or, perhaps more correctly, evoke such perplexed reactions from historians, as the rise and fall of Napoleon. A challenging overview by the Franco-Dutch scholar, Annie Jourdan, typifies this in her opening sentences. Her L’Empire de Napoléon begins with a series of questions, in a tone that recalls the introduction of Alexis de Tocqueville’s canonical work, L’ancien régime et la Révolution: Napoleon: assassin or saviour of the Revolution? Hero or charlatan? Manager or despot? Warmonger or pacifist? These are the questions French and foreign historians have tried to answer over the last two centuries.1 With great candour, she declares that these questions are her own ‘red thread’, too. In his seminal work of 1990, Napoleon’s Integration of Europe, Stuart Woolf challenged this whole approach to the period. Woolf sought, in many ways justifiably, to relocate the emphasis from ‘the man and the career’ to the machine he shaped, drove and, perhaps most significantly for the future of Europe, left behind him in working order. Woolf has had his stern critics, Geoffrey Ellis among the most eloquent and well-informed, who continue to insist on the omnipresence of the man and the decisive influence of his direct interventions in shaping the character of the regime.2