France by Jeremy Black

Author:Jeremy Black
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

9. From Napoleon I to Napoleon III, 1799–1870

In 1800, war dominated national attention, but vaccination against smallpox, introduced into France that year, may have been more significant. Within a decade, half of all babies were being vaccinated. New standards also modified other key aspects of everyday life, producing changes that have lasted until the present. In 1790, the National Assembly adopted a report proposing uniform weights and measures based on an invariable model taken from nature, and, in 1791, adopted as its criterion for the universal measure the metre: one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator. The kilogramme and the litre were part of this process. Such changes contributed to the idea that France experienced its period of ‘Enlightened Despotism’ during the 1790s and, more clearly, under Napoleon, who moved from being first consul in 1799 to becoming emperor in 1804, using each time a title with a Roman echo. Ruling until forced by defeat to abdicate in 1814, Napoleon had time to try to implement reform and shape France into modernity. He returned to power in 1815, full of new projects but, again, was forced out by defeat, and this time rapidly so.

Napoleon was born Napoleone Buonaparte, in Corsica, 1769, to a low-ranking noble family that would have been regarded as more Italian than French. For all his egocentric ambition and posturing, Napoleon was genuinely interested in a kind of rational modern administration, and found it appropriate to present himself accordingly. He introduced some worthwhile features of government, notably issuing a new civil law code, the Code Napoléon (1804). Napoleon also reorganized financial, local and judicial administration. More generally, the cult and practice of self-conscious modernization was advanced as explaining the logic and value of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic systems. Both cult and practice drew on the rejection of the past seen with the radicals of the Revolution, but also reflected a deliberate engagement with an ideology of efficiency under Napoleon. A greater use of modernization was an aspect of the latter, and, for example, Jean-Antoine Chaptal, minister of the interior from 1800 to 1804, sought to utilize useful information in order to encourage industrial innovation. A chemist, Chaptal was a key figure in the development of industrial policy, publishing his France industrielle in 1819. Indeed, much of the modernizing project was realized after Napoleon, as was the case for the crucial development in the mathematical analysis of medical treatments, which did not occur until the 1830s, with Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis’s statistical assessment of rival therapies.

Napoleon’s ideas of rational modernity, however, were often crude, for example his views on economic and financial matters, while he repeatedly undermined his own efforts by his rapacity, militarism and neo-feudalism, the last very much seen with the new imperial nobility. Napoleon was also an opportunist who operated by jettisoning the unpopular aspects of the Revolution, such as the abolition of slavery and the breach with Catholicism. Slavery was restored in 1802, and the entry to France of West Indian

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