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The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Era CONTEXTS The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Era CONTEXTS ebate about the French Revolution, which was to open English eyes to the possibility of political Dchange in their own country, began shortly after the 14 July 1789 storming of the Bastille (during which a Parisian crowd swarmed the prison in search of ammunition, freeing seven prisoners and killing the governor in the process). The revolution forced English men and women to re-examine their most basic societal tenets: their system of government and their handling of issues such as individual civil rights and liberties, rights of inheritance, and sufferance. Discussion of the Revolution triggered a massive increase in the production of written materials. On the pages of novels, periodicals, sermons, chapbooks, handbills, song sheets and poetry, English writers debated their new relationship with France and its implications for issues of social and political reform at home. On 4 November 1789, moral philosopher, mathematician, and dissenting preacher Richard Price delivered a sermon venerating the French Revolution and equating it with England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, the bloodless revolution in which James II was replaced by William III and Mary II (a key moment in the evolution of constitutional monarchy in Britain). “Struggle no longer against increasing light and liberality,” he warned. “Restore to mankind their rights; and consent to the correction of abuses, before they and you are destroyed together.” Such views became more and more widespread over the course of the next few months. On 14 July 1790, Parisians gathered near the ruins of the Bastille to celebrate the revolution’s first anniversary, and there was celebrating in Britain too; according to the London Times, the anniversary gathering represented “a magnificent association of FREE MEN, emancipated from the shackles of despotism within so short a space of time.” The newspaper declared the revolution “a Phenomenon on which surrounding empires look with admiration.” Such feelings ran counter to age-old habit; since 1688, the English had tended to think of themselves as progressive guardians of liberty, and had thought of the French as intolerant and slavish in their Catholicism. To many in Britain, however, English attitudes did not seem to have changed. Rather, the French revolution merely represented their long-overdue and much-needed Glorious Revolution. To be sure, English support for the ideals of the French Revolution was far from being universal. The most important expression of early opposition to those ideals was that of politician and writer Edmund Burke, whose Reflections on the Revolution in France was published on 1 November 1790. Burke had strongly supported the American revolution fifteen years earlier as representing an ordered and constitutionally-based response to tyranny, and he surprised many with his vigorous condemna- tion of the French revolution as undermining the foundations of constitutional monarchy. In Burke’s view, the suggestion of Price and others that a monarch owes his lawful authority solely “to the choice of the people” was either “nonsense, and therefore neither true nor false, or it affirms a most unfounded, dangerous, illegal and unconstitutional position.” Burke’s long essay came to be regarded as a classic statement of conservative principles, and one of the works written in answer to it, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, as a classic expression of 2 Contexts Enlightenment principles of human liberty. The voice of Paine, an expatriate Englishman who had moved to America in 1774, was joined in Britain by voices such as those of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and other prominent reformers who were later labeled “Jacobins.” Condemning Burke’s allegiance to “canonized forefathers,” Wollstonecraft accused him of clinging to an ideology of inherited rights: “any personal present convenience should prevent a struggle for the most estimable advantages. This is sound reasoning,” she quipped, “in the mouth of the rich and short-sighted.” In 1792, a Republic was declared in France, and the Revolution’s violence escalated. In May, the English government, fearing rebellion on its own soil, vowed to eradicate “wicked and seditious writings”; shortly thereafter, it banned Paine’s Rights of Man (Part II). In August, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were marched out of the Palace of the Tuileries and placed under house arrest—and an increasing number of English began to feel alienated from their French neighbors. Within the conservative English imagination, the French were becoming savages, choosing anarchy over liberty. Even some reformers began to reconsider their view of the Revolution, although they continued to lobby in England for universal suffrage, electoral reform, and the natural rights of citizens. In late 1792, Maximilien Robespierre and his Committee for Public Safety took control of Paris and brutally demonstrated their intolerance for any enemy of the republic. The Committee put Louis XVI on trial, and the King and Queen soon joined the list of beheaded aristocrats, clergy, and counter-revolutionary suspects. The English anti-Jacobin movement gathered momentum as citizens expressed horror at these “un-English” acts. By this time other European nations had been considering intervention in France for more than two years. In April 1792, France declared war on Austria; after the execution of the King in early 1793, other countries (Britain included) joined to form the “First Coalition” against France. Over the next several years, the French government remained in a state of turmoil, but French forces held their own against their various enemies, with a young general named Napoleon Bonaparte playing an increasingly important military role. In 1799, Bonaparte seized power, and, for the next fifteen years, the powerfully enigmatic Corsican dominated the European stage. For some in England, the French by that time had lost their way. In William Wordsworth’s view, the oppressed had, in a few short years, “become Oppressors in their turn,” and had “changed a war of self-defence / For one of conquest, losing sight of all / which they had struggled for.” Yet, as Godwin noted, all “the great points embraced by the revolution remain entire: hereditary government is gone; hereditary nobility is extinguished; the hierarchy of the Gallican church is no more; the feudal rights, the oppressive immunities of a mighty aristocracy, are banished never to return.” The English parliament spent much time in debate over the new French leader, unable to determine whether he was Jacobin or despot, republican or monarchist. Napoleon patronized the arts and supported industry. He centralized education, modernized France’s infrastructure, and banished the feudal system. His Napoleonic Code advocated trial by jury and other much-needed reforms of the legal system. Yet he ruled like a monarch—a monarch of no legitimate lineage—and was often accused of military atrocities. “Bonaparte has made me anti-Gallican,” the poet Robert Southey declared, despairing of the future of the Jacobin movement. In a later letter, however, Southey called Bonaparte “the greatest man that events have called into action since Alexander of Macedon.” Such ambivalence toward Napoleon was common. Had Napoleon destroyed the revolution, or saved the revolution from itself? What of its republican ideals? Some thought them entirely lost, but others were more sanguine—and the debate continued for years. Radical journalist William Cobbett, for example, argued in an 1812 article in his Weekly Political Register that the revolution had “created, totally created, a middle-class in society; and, though one man has the executive government in his hands, the society is essentially republican.” In 1802, Bonaparte was made First Consul, and two years later he crowned himself Emperor of France, in effect reinstating monarchical rule. For most of the following decade, France remained at The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Era 3 war with England and the rest of Europe, with Napoleon’s forces largely successful on land (most notably in their great defeat of Russia and Austria at Austerlitz in 1805) and the British retaining the supremacy at sea that Horatio Nelson established with his decisive victory at Trafalgar (also in 1805). In hopes of ensuring an heir to the throne, Bonaparte divorced his wife of fourteen years, Joséphine de Beauharnais, and in 1810 he married Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria, Marie Antoinette’s grand niece. (William Wordsworth, recognizing the irony in Napoleon’s new bond to enemies of the revolution, likened the coronation to a dog returning to its vomit.) Within two years of his second marriage, military reversals began to threaten Napoleon’s rule. His catastrophic Russian campaign in 1813 cost hundreds of thousands of French soldiers their lives. Later that year, his forces severely depleted, Bonaparte refused the peace terms of a coalition force that included England, Russia, Prussia, Sweden, Austria and a number of the German states. A coalition army marched into Paris shortly thereafter, and Bonaparte was forced into exile. Napoleon was detained less than a year on the island of Elba. By March of 1815, he had returned to France. Capitalizing on growing resentment against the restored Louis XVIII, he rebuilt his army, thus beginning what has become known as the Hundred Days (the period of time between Napoleon’s return and Louis XVIII’s restoration as king, following Napoleon’s failed Waterloo campaign).
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