Europe and the French Imperium, 1799-1814

Geoffrey Bruun

An insightful and (I think) a quietly revisionary look at the Napoleonic era both inside France and out. At the beginning, Bruun asserts, "If Europe in the revolutionary age may be thought of as dominated by one nearly universal mood, that mood was an intense aspiration for order.” He believes that to see the Philosophes as aspiring to republicanism is to misread them for enlightened despotism was more what they looked for. Was the Revolution a success or a failure? That depends, of course, on what you think were its goals: “If the primary motivation for the Revolution was the will to establish democracy and republicanism, that will scored but a questionable triumph…But if the major objective of the revolutionary effort is taken to have been (as manifested in France so strikingly between 1799 and 1814) the creation of an efficient centralized nation-state, the coordination of national energies for the enhancement of national prestige, and the development of the secular spirit in government and society, then the influence of the Revolution has continued to work with increasing effect up to the present time, and has seldom been more active than in the fourth decade of the twentieth century. It was this practical mandate of the revolutionary program that Napoleon chose to execute, at the expense of the more idealistic and humanitarian elements, and posterity, while sighing for the still-born Utopia, has generally endorsed his interpretation of the revolutionary testament in preference to the codicils of the Saint-Simons and the Mazzinis.”