Napoleon

My early view of Napoleon was as a cartoon figure: A megalomaniac who tried to take over the world. I recall looking down at Napoleon's tomb in Paris in the company of my brother Craig, the two of us mocking his immense sarcophagus and elaborate surroundings, wondering aloud why the French would semi-deify such a bloody tyrant. The typical American republican conceits aside, we were woefully uninformed about much of the life of Napoleon. Napoleon, perhaps more than any other European leader, built the foundations of modern Europe.

Among the many biographies of Napoleon, this one ably provides a thorough albeit reasonably compact account of Napoleon’s impact on the modern Western world.

"The Code Napoléon guaranteed the equality of all Frenchmen in the eyes of the law, freedom of person from arbitrary arrest, the sanctity of legal contracts freely entered into, and allowed no recognition of privileges of birth. Reflecting the Organic Articles, it established total religious toleration (including for atheists), separating Church and state."

-p. 340

Napoleon indeed became a man who over-reached, fatefully so in his attempt to conquer Russia. Yet Napoleon, perhaps more than any other European leader, built the foundations of modern Europe. As a child of the Revolution, he focused the violent, chaotic and beset-upon Revolutionary France, and organized it both to protect France from the equally violent European royal reaction, and to extend the individual freedoms sought by the Revolution. One of the results of this was the Code Napoléon, officially Code civil des Français, which survives as the basis for modern French republican law. Another was massive armies of conscripted soldiers, which Napoleon, with his superior generalship, led to victory throughout Europe.

David’s painting of the self-coronation of the Emperor Napoleon, right, whispers of megalomania and immense self-confidence. Girded with such self-belief, Napoleon occupied Europe, spreading the radical ideas of the Revolution and the Code Napoléon throughout the Continent.

Napoleon’s France was ultimately defeated in the 26 year European battle to subdue France in the name of the old order; Napoleon’s worst traits produced colossal defeats and much loss of life. Yet the final peace at the Congress of Vienna following Napoleon’s ultimate defeat at Waterloo wrought a future Europe with diminished monarchies and enhanced individual liberties. During the short period Europe was administered by Napoleonic France, the new Revolutionary ideas took root, pushing Europe inexorably towards representative democracies.