The French Revolution by William Doyle

Author:William Doyle [Doyle, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192576354
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2019-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

Napoleon

He was more than willing to cooperate with Sieyès in dissolving the legislative councils in brumaire Year VIII (November 1799), but he, rather than his would-be patron, had the decisive voice in framing the new authoritarian constitution which was promulgated after a hasty referendum in December. It invested Napoleon with practically limitless powers as First Consul of the Republic. ‘Citizens,’ he proclaimed, ‘the Revolution is established on the principles with which it began. It is over.’

None of this was true, but over the next two years Napoleon ensured that the second sentence at least began to seem credible. By defeating the Austrians (himself at Marengo in June 1800, and through General Moreau at Hohenlinden in December) he ended the war on the Continent. The war-weary British gave up the struggle too in 1802 at the peace of Amiens. The revolutionary war was won, in a complete victory for France. That in turn gave Napoleon the strength to dash all Louis XVIII’s hopes that he might prove the instrument of a Bourbon restoration. If France was to have a monarch, Napoleon himself was now a more credible candidate, as he was to demonstrate by crowning himself in 1804. By then, too, he had deprived the Bourbons of their main source of support by settling the quarrel between France and Rome. Under the concordat negotiated with a new pope, Pius VII, in 1801, open Catholic worship was restored in France and paid for by the state. But to secure this deal, the pope was forced to recognize Napoleon’s one precondition: that the lands of the Church confiscated and sold since 1789 were gone for ever. Their new owners could at last feel secure in their gains, and became natural supporters of the new regime, rather than of the only parties hitherto to promise them such guarantees—the discredited Directory, and the bloodstained Jacobins. The brumaire coup itself had been glorified as saving the country from these two tainted prescriptions, and shortly afterwards the last Jacobin activists were rounded up and blamed when desperate Royalists tried to assassinate the First Consul. The nationwide sigh of relief was practically audible. Napoleonic rule would bring its own problems and contradictions, but it endured because it began by resolving others that had torn the country apart for more than a decade.

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