Tyrant, liberator, warmonger, bureaucrat: the meaning of Napoleon
It’s Napoleon’s continent, and Europeans are just living in it
Ever watched a film about how important bureaucratic reforms are devised?
Ever wanted to?
Hopes were high among a certain type of nerd that a Hollywood blockbuster out this week would provide just those thrills.
Alas, “Napoleon”, a big-budget biopic, serves up rather more predictable fare: the manner in which a Corsican upstart seized absolute power as French emperor, fought endless battles and bonked a slew of mistresses.
Thrilling as blood, sweat and courtship can be, it misses the point of Napoleon.
For whereas many tyrants over the course of European history have fought wars and ruled impetuously, not to mention imperiously, few have marked modern Europe—and the world beyond—so enduringly.
Forget Bonaparte the general, the Napoleon that really matters was the fellow who held dozens of administrative gatherings from which emanated the laws and institutions that hundreds of millions of people still live by today.
Europeans are unsure about where to place Napoleon, who ruled France from 1799 to 1814 (a bit less long than Angela Merkel ran Germany two centuries later) before a brief return in 1815.
To many he is one of those figures from distant history, a latter-day Julius Caesar or Charlemagne, who came to rule vast swathes of the continent.
Detractors paint him as a tyrant whose personal ambition led to ruin and death, a prelude to the madmen who came to wield totalitarian power in the 20th century.
Indeed, Napoleon and his Grande Armée killed millions.
Adjusted for population, that is perhaps no less murderous than an Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin.
But, unlike them, his reign also bequeathed institutions, laws and reforms that left Europe more free and better run.
The continued import of Napoleon to France is visible across daily life there: teenagers study for the baccalauréat he devised in lycées he introduced, tourists stream to his imposing mausoleum, lawyers study the thick Code Civil of rules he brought in.
Unsurprisingly, Napoleon is less often feted in the places he came to control by dint of his cavalry and artillery.
And yet it is those areas, stretching from Amsterdam to Naples, Warsaw and Madrid, where he perhaps counts most of all.
For by the time Napoleon rose to power, France had already had its revolution, in 1789: the ancien régime, the political order controlled by nobility, guilds and the clergy, had been overthrown.
The importance of Napoleon is as an export agent for this enlightened approach.
The French revolutionary model—blended with others, and infused with democracy among other changes—is arguably the dominant political system of the day in Europe, even in the bits he did not conquer.
Napoleon fell far short of being qualified to be a liberal hero.
Critics note that he diluted the rights that the revolution had granted women, and reimposed slavery in the West Indies.
What “plebiscites” were held were rigged in a manner that would make today’s North Koreans blush.
There was at least one political assassination, and men were sacrificed on the battlefield willy-nilly.
But the introduction of the civil code that Bonaparte championed—he chaired many drafting sessions personally, and in time called it the Code Napoléon—was a turning point for Europe.
Opaque customary laws that were imposed by local grandees on some citizens but not others were replaced by transparent statutes written so as to be understood by the (educated) public.
Superstition and tradition were replaced by “sublimated common sense”, perhaps the most French thing ever.
Forget the privileges accorded to nobility or the church: the only source of authority was to be the state.
The landed gentry lost their privileges (plenty had already lost their heads), as did the clergy and the urban oligarchy of guildmasters who throttled innovation and kept the little people in their place.
In the administration meritocracy flourished.
Napoleon did not invent the European state, but he showed how it could be cast forward to the modern era.
Even a brief invasion by France often resulted in rapid reforms that were never entirely undone after its troops were booted out.
In many bits of Germany controlled by France, the old elites only partly regained their grip.
Clearing the cobwebs of feudalism and imposing predictable laws allowed those places that had been visited by French troops to grow faster, economists have found: the parts of Europe that fell under Napoleon’s spell went on to industrialise more rapidly, come 1850.
And Napoleonism’s reach extends beyond his home continent: the legal systems in much of Latin America and the Middle East are variations of the code he created.
Just don’t mention Russia
Can Napoleon be termed one of Europe’s founding fathers, a stepping stone between Charlemagne and Jean Monnet?
History buffs remember him as the destroyer of the Holy Roman Empire, that 1,000-year-old continental endeavour.
But what replaced it was one step closer to today’s quasi-federalism.
The pan-European military coalitions devised to counter Napoleon later morphed into recurring diplomatic gatherings, held to maintain a balance of power in Europe.
In a precursor to today’s eu summits, national leaders and their emissaries started meeting regularly from 1814 to 1825 (with varying degrees of British interest, another constant).
The end result, after a few more wars, was a variant of the United States of Europe that Napoleon himself had in mind, with its unified laws and currency.
(Detractors will instead point to the way nationalism in Germany and Italy emerged, the cause of quite a few nasty problems down the line.)
Hollywood producers are not the only ones to remember Napoleon as a warmonger rather than a reformist.
Paris is full of streets named for his generals, while the authors of his civil reforms are all but forgotten.
The man himself said: “My true glory is not the 40 battles I won…what will live for ever is my civil code.”
People turn out to have remembered the wrong lessons from the Napoleonic era.
An enlightened film mogul might try to fix that with a sequel, “Napoleon 2: Bureaucrat extraordinaire”.
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