(15) NAPOLEONIC EMPIRE

 

The empire ruled by Napoleon Bonaparte, “who established French hegemony over much of continental Europe” for a decade or so – formally from 18 May 1804 (although I would argue it effectively preceded that) to 6 April 1814, and for an encore from 20 March 1815 to 7 July 1815.

It’s referred to by historians as the First French Empire – to distinguish it from the second one ruled by his nephew Napoleon III, the perfect representation of the Marxist quip that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. Historians also distinguish both from the French colonial empire, that overlapped with and persisted through them.

18 May 1804 was when Napoleon was granted the title Emperor of the French, crowning himself on 2 December 1804 – signifying the end of the French Consulate and French First Republic, although the stated continued to be called the French Republic until October 1808. However, the reality of French military predominance in Europe and Napoleon’s predominance within the Republic preceded the formal imperial title.  French military predominance was cemented as military supremacy and hegemony in continental Europe by Napoleon’s victories in the so-called War of the Third Coalition and the War of the Fourth Coalition, with the latter representing the high point of the empire.

Napoleon distinguished himself as one of the most brilliant military commanders of history. Under his leadership, the French armies repeatedly defeated numerically superior Austrian, Prussian and Russian armies – outfighting coalition after coalition led and financed by Britain.

But in the end Napoleon lost his Napoleonic wars and with them, his empire – defeat saw his empire dismantled, France completely defeated (once and for all in a battle subsequently commemorated by Abba) and Napoleon himself exiled to progressively more pathetic islands.

Despite his strategic and tactical brilliance, Napoleon was undermined by his own flaws. One basic flaw was his nepotism in handing out kingdoms or nations as prizes to his relatives – most critically in giving the kingdom of Spain to his brother Joseph, which prompted Spain to rise up against France in the Peninsular War, the running sore or “Spanish Ulcer” of Napoleon’s empire

Of course, it didn’t help that Napoleon was relentlessly opposed by the British, who were unparalleled in magnificent bastardry – with their most cunning aspect to pose as being nice, as if they were just going about playing cricket rather than taking out almost every country on earth in the name of empire.

In fighting the world’s greatest maritime power, Napoleon was handicapped by his lack of understanding of naval strategy (or his navy’s lack of ability) as well as geopolitics. It was trying to fight outside Europe (and on the seas) that Napoleon met with his earliest (and most consistent) defeats.

For all his romping around Europe, he effectively was bottled up in Europe by the British navy, unable to project his power into the world. All his victories in Europe did not change the basic fact that true world power had moved from the center of Europe to its edges – to the maritime empire of Britain and the continent-spanning empire of Russia, which ultimately crushed him between them. And in the end, all Napoleon’s wars achieved was handing world empire over not to his own empire, but to two successive Anglo-Saxon powers, Britain and the United States (the latter not least through the Louisiana Purchase) – the real winners of the Napoleonic Wars.

The defeat of his empire also initiated the rise of Germany under Prussia – with Prussia reforming itself militarily, and then, as part of the Congress of Vienna seeking to beef it up for a better balance of power, acquiring industrial regions in Germany that transformed agrarian Prussia into an industrial leader in the nineteenth century.

Of course, Germany was to have the same fatal flaw as that of Napoleon before them, bottled up between Britain and Russia as well as misjudging the extent to which world power had moved beyond Europe. Actually, their situation was worse, as world power to their west had moved across the Atlantic to the United States, even more beyond their reach than the maritime empire and power of Britain. Indeed, only twenty years after Waterloo, another Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville predicted Russia and the United States as the two global powers – a process that visibly took shape during the Napoleonic Wars.

However, Napoleon’s empire saw the transformation of Europe and the world into their modern form– spreading French revolutionary principles over much of Europe (then identified as liberal with the same distaste as a subsequent era was to identify socialist or communist).

It “had profound consequences on global history, including the spread of nationalism and liberalism, the rise of Britain as the world’s foremost naval and economic power, the appearance of independence movements in Latin America and subsequent decline of the Spanish Empire and Portuguese Empire, the fundamental reorganization of German and Italian territories into larger states, and the introduction of radically new methods of conducting warfare.”

To which might have been added other things, such as the relative peace in continental Europe during the nineteenth century, and the territorial expansion of the United States with the Louisiana Purchase. And my own pet theory that the destruction of indigenous nations or peoples in the Americas and Australasia can be traced to Napoleon. Not directly, of course, but indirectly through the Louisiana Purchase, consolidation of British “settlement” in Australia and Latin American revolution or independence, which accelerated the impending destruction of indigenous peoples or nations.