Napoleon Bonaparte: An Enlightened Despot - Research Paper Example

World History Western Civilization NAPOLEON BONAPARTE: AN ENLIGHTENED DESPOT ______________ Semester ______________ ______________ Date of Submission : ______________ Full Name : ______________ E-Mail : ______________ Napoleon Bonaparte: An Enlightened Despot The question whether the actions or beliefs of an individual have the potential to change the course of history does not have two answers. Nor can there be debate on whether the life of Napoleon is worth studying. Napoleon Bonaparte, The Little Corporal, interests us as a historic figure for several reasons. Firstly, it was no ordinary feat for a man with humble beginnings (and without a royal descent to claim) to be able to make a breathless climb to the heights of power in one of the most powerful nations in Europe as well as the world. It is all the more remarkable when such a thing happens in a society that that determined a person’s place by birth and pedigree. Secondly, he was not just an ambitious conqueror but a brilliant visionary. Thirdly, the political and administrative he created marked the transition in Europe and have had a lasting effect on the whole world. Fourthly, there are as many timeless lessons, to every one of us in general and to the leaders in particular, in his dramatic rise as in his pathetic fall. This paper shall endeavour to dig for gold while making his portrait sketch. Born on August 15, 1769 in Corsica, Napoleon was not French. But it did not matter, as history tells us. (Nor was Hitler German for that matter!) The original Italian last name Buonaparte changed to Bonaparte when spelt in French (Landau 12). Lying, however, was not a political and diplomatic compulsion that he adopted in later life. It was a childhood habit that he could not quit despite having been thrashed often by his disciplinarian mother (Landau 15). No wonder he was short-tempered right from his teens. The frustration resulting from having to improve upon his Italian dialect to speak French and the perennial problem of not having enough money obviously took its toll (Landau 17). But these traits did not come in the way of winning the privilege of studying at the Ecole Militaire, a prestigious military school in Paris where he distinguished himself as a top-notch artillery expertise. It was important because he could thus demonstrate the dominance of his skill and valour over the lineage and status of his peers (Landau 19). Having experienced alienation and ridicule in the then French society that was notorious for its rigid social hierarchy in which a person’s place was determined by birth, Napoleon was greatly impressed by the French Revolution and its ideals. The persecution that his family suffered under the royalist administration of Corsica added to the hostility towards the institution of absolutism (Landau 27). It is an irony that this very man rolled back the spirit of the French Revolution to make France a monarch once again and that he could not resist the temptation to have absolute power in the period after 1804 (Landau 114). Napoleon had his break in his military career when the promising young officer, at the age of twenty-four, was elevated to the rank of Brigadier General from the position of a captain that he had been. This was in recognition of the martial acumen he had displayed during the siege of Toulon in the post-Revolution French Republic in the fall of 1793 (Landau 9). But this was just the beginning of a saga of triumph. Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition in 1798 was actually a disaster. But to the French, who relied on the bulletins they received, he was a formidable hero. 1799 was the year that gave him the break in his political career when he was invited to head the executive in France, following the overthrow of the Directory by a coup d’état. He fired the imagination of the demoralized public who saw in him a ray of hope, a saviour. For the bourgeois, he meant a promise of security. Three years later, he became the First Consul for life and in the next two years he consolidated his position so much so that he could crown himself ‘the Emperor of the French’ (Perry et al. 483). Thus ended France’s eventful cyclic journey from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy to republic to military dictatorship to absolute monarchy. The first images that Napoleon’s name conjures up are those of his victories on the battlefield. His strength was his sword. As Hitler’s key word was blitzkrieg, Napoleon’s strategy was ‘offensive war’. The first decade of the 19th century witnessed Napoleon conquer most of Europe, with the exception of Britain, and become its virtual ruler. The in-thing of Napoleonic Wars was not the expansion of French territory but the spread of the ideals of the French Revolution all over Europe and the introduction of the liberal traditions of the Napoleonic Code (Testa et al. 131). The attempt of the revolutionaries towards a unified law code with a view to revamping the Old Regime’s irrational and ambiguous legal principles culminated in what came to be known as the Napoleonic Code or the Code Napoleon. That several of the liberal ideas found in the Constitutions of the world we live in (like equality before the law, religious freedom, the right to freedom of profession, protection of property rights, separation of state and religion and the abolition of serfdom to name a few) could be found in the Code reflects much on Napoleon’s futuristic personality and attitude. He was, to a large extent, justified in his claim: “My true glory is not to have won forty battles … Waterloo will erase the memory of so many victories … But what nothing will destroy, what will live forever, is my Civil Code.” It was not vanity, it was conviction. Not that the conservative side of the Code (which is evident from the way employer-worker equations and men-women relations were laid down) can be overlooked. But it has to be borne in mind that the Code was drafted more than two hundred years ago and was inevitably influenced by the social and familial structures of the time (Perry et al 488). The merit of the Code lay in its success in overriding the power of feudal institutions and the clergy. It is worth mentioning here that the Code was, by and large, received well in the conquered territories as well and earned Napoleon the image of a liberator. Napoleon’s policy on public education gives us a pretty good idea of what his priorities were and also of his obsession with centralization. On the one hand, it sought to groom military and administrative competence in the older children who would later be the resource for the state service. On the other, to ensure uniformity, it sought to create a highly centralized and rigidly organized lycées wherein every process, including teaching, curriculum and textbooks, followed the pattern precisely defined by the central Ministry of Education. Leaving girls and younger children to the care of the Church reveals where his focus lay and why. The lycées are among Napoleon’s permanent legacies. It is a different thing that their increasing rigidity began to border on a kind of cultural imperialism and sparked off a student revolt in the latter half of the 20th century (Lyons 105). Regarding the education of girls, his view that ‘marriage is their whole destination’ is by all means very demeaning and is bound to hurt feminists but it tells us again that he had a clear sense of direction and was quite clear about what he needed. History bears out the fact that Napoleon’s Grand Army was beaten by the Allied forces. But more than the Spanish Ulcer or the Russian Disaster or the hostility of subject nationals, it was own boundless ambition that paved the way to his fall. It is again an irony that the same ambition that was responsible for the breathless climb to the heights of power later cause the rapid slide downhill. Moreover, as the exploitative and repressive character of Napoleonic conquest, which was motivated and dominated by the self-interest of France, eventually stood exposed, even his own countrymen began to view him as an enemy of the Revolution. However, his ouster was the result of the combined military power of the Allied forces and he was never completely rejected by his countrymen as such, as it was in the case of Louis XVI. His Hundred Days bear testimony to this. But he chose to let the old mistakes be repeated and chose to be defeated once and for all. There are people who admire Napoleon for his spectacular accomplishments. Then there are those who condemn him in the strongest terms for the Corsican adventurer’s lies, mistakes, flaws, his relentless drive for territorial expansion and above all his insufferable ego. What would be the best approach to work out a consummate judgement about this self-made emperor? It does not matter whether one likes or dislikes him. What matters is that Napoleon Bonaparte was a complex man who cannot be ignored by anyone. That explains why he undeniably deserves to be rated among the most celebrated leaders in the history of the West and among those that changed the course of the history of the world. Whether the change was for the better or for the worse depends on which side of Napoleon we lay the focus. As he himself admitted, he lived only for posterity (Perry et al. 484). And he did. Works Cited Landau, Elaine. Biography: Napoleon Bonaparte. Minneapolis: Twenty-First Century Books, 2006. Lyons, Martyn. Napoleon Bonaparte and the Legacy of the French Revolution. New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 1994. Perry, Marvin B, Myrna Chase, Margaret C Jacob, James R Jacob & Von Laue. Western Civilization: Ideas, Politics and Society (Ninth Edition). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2009. Testa, David W Del. Lives and Legacies: Government Leaders, Military Rulers and Political Activists – An Encyclopedia of People Who Changed the World. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001. 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