The Political Culture of the Napoleonic Empire

Abstract

Twenty years ago, in Chicago, there began a great series of conferences which sooner or later brought together most of the leading historians working on the French Revolution around the time of its bicentenary. The theme of these conferences, whose published proceedings eventually stretched to four handsome and weighty volumes, was The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture.1 This series was consciously intended by the editors who planned it as a manifesto for a new era in French Revolutionary studies; an era when the Revolution would be studied no longer in terms of class conflict and social movements, but in terms of culture. In order to set the scene, to explain the distinction he was drawing, one of the editors, Keith Baker, felt obliged to offer an explanation of what political culture was, defining it as a set of discourses and practices which were characteristic of the community in question.2 Political culture, therefore, is our way of conducting public affairs, how we order our governance. And in this context, the great drama of the French Revolution was its attempt to reformulate French ways of governance from scratch, and comprehensively. Sooner or later, every facet of the old political order and the habits by which it worked was renounced. Entirely new rationales for authority, structures to give them working substance, and behavioural expectations to make them work, were all introduced.