The French Revolution was the greatest challenge to political authority and social order that the European world had experienced since the Reformation. So confident were the revolutionaries of their vision of the future that they not only wished to refashion politics but sought the regeneration of mankind. They coined the, far from innocent, label of ancien régime to consign the past to oblivion. The history of the medieval and early modern world was dismissed as a catalogue of errors, crimes and bigotry.1 The world was now liberated from the tyrannical forces of tradition and superstition. It did not take long for opposition against this totalising vision of political and social order to coalesce. As Darrin McMahon has stated: ‘the revolution did not need to invent its enemies. They were there from the outset, and their presence exerted a powerful influence on the dynamics of the revolutionary process.’2 The counter-revolutionaries of the 1790s were the direct heirs of the counter-enlightenment of the eighteenth century.

Napoleon Bonaparte was not the initiator of the eighteenth-century European revolutions, nor the inventor of the ‘sister republics’.1 Long before he became general-in-chief of the Army of Italy, and some years before the French Revolution, the European continent went through a series of spontaneous uprisings, which had more to do with the American War of Independence and the propaganda of American diplomats who sought allies on the continent and, to this end, circulated the New World’s credo and principles. In the 1780s, the Republic of Geneva and the United Provinces led the way to this revolutionary wave; Switzerland soon followed and faced several internal rebellions, which were repressed severely. All these revolts or revolutions failed. The traditional powers were still strong enough to suppress political upheavals and maintain their authority. Before Robert R. Palmer and Jacques Godechot, historians did not pay much attention to these aborted revolutions, still disqualified by some as being simply ‘a storm in a teacup’.

Napoleonic France was in an almost permanent state of war, a war which repeatedly affected large parts of the continent. As Luigi Mascilli Migliorini remarks, the legitimacy of a state born out of a coup d’état, led by a general, relied on potentially endless victorious campaigns, which made peace and stability in Europe virtually impossible.1 Victory enabled France to externalise – and therefore prolong – a large part of the war effort, the cost of which had proved fatal to the Bourbon monarchy in eighteenth-century France. Victory, moreover, gave the French economy privileged access to new markets, either through the integration of new territories and consumers directly into the French Empire, or by the imposition of commercial treaties and industrial restrictions favourable to French interests on allied or defeated states.

In the century after the Napoleonic Wars ended, memories of these conflicts were regarded as an important part of the national heritage, especially in the countries that had fought in the coalition against Napoleon. In his bibliography of the Napoleonic era, published 100 years later, the German historian Friedrich M. Kircheisen estimated that 200,000 essays and books, including translations, appeared in Europe and beyond in the previous century. For his bibliography he selected 8,000 titles he considered ‘necessary for an understanding of the Napoleonic era’. He included only those texts that met his standards of scholarly historiography and biography, whose value as sources he acknowledged or which he deemed part of the literary canon. For that reason, he did not include thousands of popular memory texts – including commemorative broadsheets, autobiographies, war memoirs, biographies and novels, as well as pictorial volumes.1

In his youth, Tsar Alexander I had dreamt of being a peaceful and reforming monarch; however, he would see most of his reign unfold under the sign of war. He ‘converted’ to the anti-Napoleon coalition after many doubts and hesitations, only to be confronted in 1812 with a cataclysmic invasion that would cost the Russian Empire 300,000 lives. From the start of the twentieth century until now, many historians have reproached him for having sacrificed the national interest and exhausted the country over useless dreams of grandeur and military glory.1 However, this accusation is baseless. While the military rivalry between France and Russia would in fact prove costly in both lives and resources, it was by no means futile: far from being reduced to the selfish caprice of a sovereign concerned about his image, rivalry with France had a major impact on the destiny and stature of the Russian Empire.

The fate of the Bonaparte family encapsulates the revolutionary maelstrom, first buffeted by it, then riding it to power, and finally crashing into oblivion. They are at once extraordinary in, and emblematic of, their era.

The Empire’s wars left their mark on the entire nineteenth century. In a very practical way, however, the shadow cast by the First Empire over the following century began with the demobilisation of its armies. In France, hundreds of thousands of men returned to their homes in 1814 and 1815, to say nothing of the wounded or those too old to serve any longer who had preceded them during the years of the Consulate and the Empire. The same applied in all the countries that had been at war. The veteran was a familiar sight everywhere, a figure of legend, even though the men themselves enjoyed little if any official recognition. Everywhere, their experience of warfare set them apart from their fellow citizens. They had seen fighting of unparalleled savagery and had experienced in the flesh, often all too painfully, what it meant to serve one’s country; and while some of them may have been curious to discover distant lands, they had also learned the rigours of military discipline. In France, though, the new government regarded them with particular mistrust and accorded them no status. The difficulties of reconversion were experienced more acutely there than in other countries.

During her assault on the British welfare state, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously declared: ‘There is no such thing as Society. There are only individual men and women, and families.’ No such pronouncement would likely have come from Napoleon Bonaparte. When the general seized power, he knew that his regime had to embed itself through new institutions and policies, and that it must field victorious armies, but also that his government must identify, co-opt and redefine in some fashion society’s local and national elites. For that matter, servitors of the Bourbon monarchy in its last few years tried unsuccessfully to do the same, and so too, in oblique ways, did the revolutionaries of 1789 and after. In Napoleon’s efforts to redefine and consolidate society’s new elites, rival values (such as the claims of wealth, military honour or state service) vied with the priority of maximising his own power.

If the designation the ‘Age of Enlightenment’ to describe the second half of the eighteenth century is rooted in historical thinking, as cipher it nevertheless points to the broader characteristics of the historical period. Whatever one might think of the aptness of attributing the ‘Enlightenment’ to complex developments in intellectual history and mindsets, contemporaries themselves, or at least their leading thinkers, situated themselves in an era of enlightenment. They propagated a style of thinking that was guided by criteria of rationality in order to deduce a course of action that aimed at order and transparency, or in other words clarity. If this resulted in epoch-making intellectual developments such as increasing scientification, this was not an end in itself. Rather, it served to make one’s own and others’ actions more predictable when other guarantors of predictability such as religious authorities, could no longer be counted on. It was intended to ensure a minimum level of security in a constantly changing world.

‘Having learned of the energetic measures adopted by the Sovereigns of Europe to exterminate the Misántropo (mankind hater) of Corsica, and thus wipe away the tears of Humanity, I shall take care to prevent the dissemination in these domains of the harmful and false news with which his vile henchmen attempt to unhinge the Universe.’1 Melodramatic and overblown as it sounds at first, this statement by the viceroy of Perú, José Fernando de Abascal, in reaction to news received from the authorities in Madrid about Napoleon’s departure from Elba in 1815 may ring familiar to readers living in a ‘post-truth’ society. Napoleon’s agency, let alone the effectiveness of his followers’ deeds in this regard could be doubted, but there is no denying that the Hispanic world never experienced such disruption and mayhem as in the period that rightly bears his name. Dealing extensively in misinformation became part and parcel of the activities of all parties involved in the worldwide conflict that ensued from the French Revolutionary Wars.

In order to glorify his reign through propaganda, Napoleon utilised, among other sources, iconography. In particular, the images which he conceived or whose diffusion he favoured concentrated on his grandeur; the republican general turned emperor encouraged works that showcased his military acumen, his courage, or his scientific approach to combat or, by contrast, images that highlighted his magnanimous and peaceful nature. He thus became, ‘the father of his people’, like the monarchs of the Old Order, alternately the attentive and benevolent father of the family or its military leader. These images constantly edified, constructed, and reinvented his authority; they made explicit his ‘brilliant’ persona, but, as well, the state he led.

In 1819, the disgruntled French archbishop Dominique de Pradt, who went into early retirement to continue a prolific career as expert and commentator on the affairs of the world, summarised the post-Napoleonic state of affairs in international relations as follows: ‘Two colossal powers have risen upon Europe, England and Russia … There existed, it is true, previously to the new order, preponderant powers, but not powers exclusively preponderant; whose force was so disproportional to that of others, as to reduce them to a state of absolute vassalage; unable to sustain them without a continual league’. The system of states of Europe could therefore no longer be considered a system propelled by the principle of the balance of power, since there was no longer any balance of multiple forces, only a hegemony of two ‘colossi’.1 This contemporary analysis precedes Paul Schroeder’s, one of the most incisive historians on the Congress System, by almost two centuries in interpreting the Vienna Settlement of 1815 as the hegemonic triumph of tsarist Russia and the British Empire.2 In recent years, most historians have followed Schroeder’s (and unwittingly also De Pradt’s) lead in subscribing to an analysis of the not-so-balanced treaty system after 1815.

In Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1868) Napoleon’s invasion of Moscow in 1812 is the occasion for the redemption and domestication of the heroine, the lively and impulsive Natasha Rostov. As the invading forces approach Moscow, Natasha briskly superintends the family’s preparations to evacuate the city. Moved by patriotic compassion, she offers the Rostovs’ residence to the army. Eventually she is reconciled with the lover she betrayed, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, when, after he is fatally wounded at the Battle of Borodino, she nurses him until his death. The novel concludes with Natasha’s marriage to Pierre Bezukhov; her ‘old fire’ is dampened as she devotes her life entirely to her husband and children and settles into a ‘vigorous maternity’.1 Natasha’s ‘fall’ and ‘redemption’ have been read as an allegory for Russia’s near ‘rape’ and ‘deliverance’ from the French invaders. Her spirited performance of a traditional folk dance earlier in the novel and her espousal of a contented domesticity at its end emblematise the rejection of the Francophile cosmopolitanism of pre-war St Petersburg salons and the embrace of an authentic Russian femininity.