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How Napoleon (almost) destroyed the French Revolution
When the Corsican general seized power in a coup in 1799, he proclaimed himself a defender of the republican ideals that had come from the revolution. But, as Marisa Linton explains, the would-be emperor did all he could to dismantle them
On 10 November 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte stormed into the chambers at the Château de Saint-Cloud in the suburbs of Paris and set in train a military coup. “The republic no longer has a government,” he declared to the assembled members of one of France’s two ruling councils. “Together let us save the cause of liberty and equality.” The coup represented an enormous gamble for Bonaparte but it paid off spectacularly: within a matter of days, he had been declared First Consul of his nation. He was now the most powerful figure in France – and hardly anybody had seen it coming. But one man had, and his name was Maximilien Robespierre. When revolutionary France had embarked on a war with its royalist neighbours in April 1792, Robespierre warned of the dangers that would follow. A military leader could, the leading Jacobin revolutionary counselled, take the opportunity to seize political power in Paris, becoming another Julius Caesar, another Oliver Cromwell. Robespierre’s warnings were disregarded, but they proved prescient. The ensuing war would last a generation. It brought to prominence several talented young generals with the potential to become a second Caesar. In the end the man who came out ahead was the young Corsican general who burst into the Château de Saint Cloud in November 1799: Bonaparte. Read more | Napoleonic Wars timeline: the key dates you need to know For many historians, the coup of 1799 signalled the end of one of the great step-changes in European history: the French Revolution. Erupting in 1789, the revolution had shaken the old order based on the authority of king, nobles and clergy to its core. It also brought into being a raft of new political ideals, such as individual liberty, equality before the law, freedom of speech and religious toleration. The revolution was the first of its kind anywhere in the world, and would have an unfathomable impact on modern history. But what would be the fate of these revolutionary ideals under the Napoleonic regime that took shape after his rise to power? Would the man himself go on to champion them or dismantle them? Was he their greatest ally, or an implacable foe? If Bonaparte himself is to believed, the answer is clear: the revolution was safe in his hands. “The French Revolution need fear nothing,” he declared, “since the throne of the Bourbons is occupied by a soldier!” Bonaparte later presented himself as having been the mediator between the old world of the kings and the new world of the revolution: “The [great battle] of the century had been won,” he intoned, “and the revolution accomplished.” However, a close examination of what Bonaparte did, as opposed to what he said, during his extraordinary time in power tells an entirely different story. A man of “transcendental merit” As a young man, Bonaparte’s revolutionary credentials were impressive. Robespierre’s younger brother, Augustin, had encountered Bonaparte, then a young artillery officer, at the siege to retake Toulon from the British in 1793. Augustin was impressed by his expertise and his radicalism – laid out in Bonaparte’s pamphlet, Le Souper de Beaucaire, written in support of the Jacobins, among revolutionary France’s most powerful political forces. The Corsican was, Augustin confided to Maximilien, a man of “transcendental merit”. Neither brother would live to see that potential realised. On 28 July 1794, both lost their lives to the guillotine, the latest victims of waves of revolutionary bloodletting that we now know as the Terror. Many more Jacobin sympathisers would be executed, and more still arrested. Among the latter was Bonaparte himself, who spent a short time imprisoned at the fort of Antibes in France’s south-eastern corner. He was in prison for less than two weeks, and was released after writing a statement that emphasised his republican allegiances, while distancing himself from the Robespierre brothers and Jacobinism. Such radical politics could no longer serve Bonaparte’s ambition: ever the pragmatist, he promptly ditched them. As Maximilien Robespierre had predicted, the revolution offered young soldiers of talent the opportunity to rise through the ranks. Some of these men had the potential to make the transition to the political sphere had they so wished. They included Lazare Hoche, whose father had been a servant tending the king’s horses in the stables of Versailles. Yet Hoche, seen by many as a more talented man, died young of consumption in 1797. Another rising star was Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, son of an enslaved black woman and a French nobleman, her legal owner. More than 6ft, strikingly handsome, a staunch Republican (and father of the author of The Three Musketeers), Dumas cut a much more impressive figure than the diminutive Bonaparte. During the French invasion of Egypt (1798–1801), locals who saw Dumas on horseback “all believed that he was the leader of the expedition” rather than Bonaparte. When he heard that Dumas had conferred with other generals about his ineptitude in Egypt, Bonaparte threatened to shoot him. En route back to France, Dumas was captured by royalist forces in the Kingdom of Naples, imprisoned in grim conditions, and left to languish by Bonaparte, who refused to intervene. Though Dumas was eventually released, his health was irretrievably damaged. The fates of both Hoche and Dumas prove that, while Bonaparte was one of the most able of the new generals, he was also lucky that his main rivals had been eliminated. Bonaparte was the leading proponent of the French invasion of Egypt, so when the campaign descended into a bloody debacle, it was he who had most to lose. Yet he showed exceptional skill in presenting it as a success, and himself as a hero. He left his soldiers bogged down in the desert sands and returned before news of the extent of the disaster had reached France. In doing so, he was able to turn a potentially career-ending fiasco into a bid for power After arranging for the despatch of looted treasures from Egypt’s ancient past, which would eventually find their way into the Louvre, Bonaparte cut a deal with the leading political theorist of the revolution, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès. Lured by the prospect of a regime based on militarism – and the big money to be made from lucrative contracts to supply the armies – Bonaparte and Sieyès conspired to overthrow the republic that they claimed to cherish. The result was the coup of November 1799. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/02/GettyImages-520717823sml-4af44bc.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Napoleon Bonaparte leads a military coup in November 1799, claiming he acted in the interests of the revolution (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" title="Napoleon Bonaparte leads a military coup in November 1799, claiming he acted in the interests of the revolution (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" /> The Coup of 18 Brumaire Though this revolt – widely known as the Coup of 18 Brumaire, the name of its date in the short-lived French revolutionary calendar – ultimately catapulted Bonaparte into power, it very nearly went wrong. In short, Bonaparte met with more opposition than he had expected. “What about the constitution?” declared a defiant deputy in response to the Corsican’s dramatic entrance to the Château de Saint-Cloud. According to the political commentator Madame de Staël, conciliatory and judicious speech did not come naturally to Bonaparte. He was “eloquent only in abuse” and what he really wanted to say, she speculated, was: “You are a miserable bunch and I will have you shot if you do not do as I say.” Bonaparte also met with fury and cries of “Down with the dictator!” Half-fainting, he was rescued by two grenadiers. His position was saved by his younger brother, Lucien, who put on a theatrical display for the grenadiers waiting outside the palace, swearing to stab his brother if he proved a traitor to the republic. The soldiers marched into the council’s assembly hall and with fixed bayonets drove out the unarmed deputies. Within hours, Bonaparte issued a proclamation presenting himself as having acted as “a citizen devoted to the Republic”, motivated by his sense of public duty to take office. “I believed it my duty to my fellow citizens, to the soldiers perishing in our armies, to the national glory bought with their blood to accept the command,” he later declared. Read more | Napoleon: the rise and fall of a dictator A few days later, a new constitution was devised, inaugurating a regime that, for all Bonaparte’s words, was only nominally republican. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the statement of the founding principles of the revolution, which had served as the preface to the three previous constitutions, was omitted. Sieyès had envisioned buying off Bonaparte by making him “Great Elector”, a title full of pomp, but with little power. Bonaparte would have none of it, enquiring if Sieyès imagined a man such as himself “would consent to be no more than a pig manured with millions, luxuriating in the royal palace at Versailles”. Bonaparte had out-manoeuvred the man who had installed him and planned to control him. He would serve as First Consul, on a salary of 500,000 francs a year (Robespierre had lived on the equivalent of 6,570). There were two additional consuls, and the appearance of consultation, with three legislative bodies and a series of referendums, but the legislatures were talking shops, referendum results falsified. Clamp down on press “free reign” One of the first casualties of Bonaparte’s rise to power was freedom of the press. In 1789 the revolutionaries had legalised freedom of speech, stating that “the free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man”. While this principle came under considerable stress after the execution of King Louis XVI in 1793, Bonaparte’s regime was far more systematic in destroying press freedom. “If I give it free reign,” he said, “I shall not remain in power for three months.” In 1800 a decree suppressed 60 of the 73 newspapers in Paris. In 1811 the number of permitted newspapers was reduced to four. The theatres of Paris had long been a place where opposition to the government was voiced: in 1807, 25 theatres were ordered to be closed, leaving just eight open. A secret police enforced censorship and arrested vocal opponents. It operated under the sinister Joseph Fouché, another Jacobin who had long since renounced his radical beliefs. For his services he was awarded the title of Duke of Otranto. Much of the population, exhausted by years of revolution and instability, was prepared to accept Bonaparte. His principal opponents were people with strong political convictions: Jacobins and others who retained their republican beliefs; and royalists, who wanted a return to the old regime. Bonaparte was ruthless in exterminating opposition. When, in 1804, royalists launched the Cadou dal Plot, an attempt to assassinate Bonaparte and restore the Bourbon monarchy, Napoleon used it as an opportunity to decimate Jacobins who had no involvement, along with the actual conspirators. What many ordinary people did want was a reconciliation with the Catholic church, which throughout the revolutionary years had been divided from France. In a tactical manoeuvre, Bonaparte obliged. On Easter Sunday 1802, a Concordat signed the previous year in Rome was published. It recognised that Catholicism, if not the state church of France, at least was “the religion of the great majority of Frenchmen”. Bonaparte himself gave little sign of caring about religious belief. He was quick, however, to acknowledge its utility in reinforcing his position. In 1806, a new Catholic catechism was devised, article 7 of which involved pledging to, “Napoleon I, our emperor, love, respect, obedience, loyalty, military service… because God… whether for peace or for war, has made him the minister of His power and His image upon Earth.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/02/AKG167122smlwebready-957790f.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Napoleon commissioned the artist Anne-Louis Girodet to paint this glorification of those who had died fighting for republican liberty (Photo by akg-images / Erich Lessing)" title="Napoleon commissioned the artist Anne-Louis Girodet to paint this glorification of those who had died fighting for republican liberty (Photo by akg-images / Erich Lessing)" /> Napoleon as emperor of France Two years earlier, in 1804, Bonaparte had crowned him self Emperor Napoleon. From that moment the republic had not even a notional existence. “The government of the republic is confided to an emperor,” he said, but the words were hollow. When Beethoven heard that Bonaparte had betrayed the ideals of the revolution by making himself emperor, he slashed out the dedication to the French leader on the title page of his Third Symphony, the Eroica. Bonaparte was not an absolute dictator, in that he gave people things they wanted: stability, after years of uncertainty; reconciliation with the Catholic church; and military successes for France. His popular support depended on victories on the battlefield, and an economic system that fed France with tributes and recruits. Yet Bonaparte’s military successes came at a cost – above all, in human lives. Around 50,000 people lost their lives in the Terror, 2,639 of whom were guillotined in Paris. Many thousands more died both in a civil war that erupted across the Vendée, and the revolutionary wars. These figures are dwarfed by the number of casualties – French and non-French, soldiers and civilians – in the so-called Napoleonic Wars. No one has ever clearly established the death toll, especially for civilians, but it numbers several million. In 1790, the revolutionaries had abolished nobility, along with all privileges founded on heredity. Bonaparte made it clear that he did not care about a person’s political past – Jacobin, royalist, moderate – provided that they were now loyal to him and were prepared to drop their principles in his service. To encourage obedience, he awarded those who served him well with honours and titles; he encouraged emigrés to return to France, provided they would give him their allegiance; and in 1808 he set up a new imperial nobility. It was honorific, without the fiscal and legal privileges that had made the old regime nobles such a powerful force. With the new nobility, the emphasis lay more explicitly on the creation of wealth. And like many rich and powerful men, Bonaparte used his status to cultivate a well-deserved reputation as a womaniser. But the truth was that he feared the kind of women he could not control – strong, intelligent women, such as Madame de Staël. The novelist and liberal theorist was no Jacobin, yet her intellectual salon and political criticisms infuriated him, and he reacted by banishing her from Paris, and banning her writings. His mother, who had singlehandedly brought up eight children, remained for Napoleon the ideal of womanhood. “In France,” he said, “women are considered too highly. They should not be regarded as on equality with men… they are nothing more than machines for producing children.” Established in 1804, the Napoleonic Code built on the legal achievements of the revolutionaries in some ways, while undermining them in others. Legal and civil rights for women, including equality of children’s inheritance rights regardless of gender, were partially or entirely rescinded. The revolutionary right to divorce, to which men and women had equal access on grounds of incompatibility, was limited under Napoleon’s code. While “the husband may demand divorce on cause of adultery on the part of his wife”, a woman could only obtain a divorce if, in addition to adultery, her husband “shall have kept his concubine in their common house”. “War of extermination” In February 1794, the revolutionaries had decreed an end to all slavery in France’s territories. The decree aligned with the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, though the revolutionaries’ immediate reasons were rather more pragmatic, and were passed in the wake of Toussaint Louverture’s successful slave revolt in Saint-Domingue. Bonaparte changed course completely, setting out to reimpose slavery throughout France’s colonies, forcing formerly enslaved people back onto the plantations, and restoring the slave trade. He sent 20,000 soldiers to the Caribbean under the command of his brother-in-law Charles Leclerc to wage what Leclerc called a “war of extermination”. Despite fierce resistance, slavery was reinstalled in Guadeloupe. Saint-Domingue was another matter. Napoleon’s forces failed to retake the colony from the formerly enslaved who fought ferociously for their freedom. “Damn sugar, damn coffee, damn colonies!” was Bonaparte’s response. Saint-Domingue declared itself the Republic of Haiti. But Louverture was captured and imprisoned in a fortress in the Jura mountains. Within a year he was dead, seen by many as a martyr for the cause of black liberty. Foreign territories that came under Bonaparte’s rule saw some of the benefits of the revolution – among them equality before the law and the abolition of feudal practices. But other peoples saw the imposition of French nationalism as a foreign invasion. In Spain, French soldiers met with fierce resistance, fanned by Bonaparte’s decision to install his brother Joseph as Spanish king. As emperor, he placed relatives on thrones across Europe, and married the Hapsburg archduchess Marie-Louise. Their son was made King of Rome. When Bonaparte was forced to abdicate in 1814 he attempted to make his son his successor. For many commentators, Bonaparte remains the heir of the revolution. Yet his determination to secure a family dynasty was just one example of the myriad ways in which he left the political radicalism of the 1780s and 90s far behind. He was a populist and militarist dictator, who used the revolution to climb to the pinnacle of power. When the coalition forces defeated him for the second time, at the battle of Waterloo in 1815, they put a Bourbon monarch, Louis XVIII, on the throne, a man who acted as though the revolution had never taken place. For a while, the ideals of the French Revolution appeared to be all but extinguished. But it would fight back through the long and tumultuous 19th century. In fact, such was the strength of its resurgence that today its principles are seen as a foundation of modern democracy. For more than a decade, Napoleon Bonaparte had, it seems, strained every sinew to consign the revolution to the dustbin of history. He almost succeeded, but not quite. This article was first published in the April 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine
Robespierre is often cast as one of the bloodiest figures of the French Revolution. But has he been made a scapegoat for the sins of equally guilty men? Marisa Linton investigates
On 10 Thermidor, Year II in the new revolutionary calendar – 28 July 1794 to us today – Maximilien Robespierre climbed the steps to the guillotine stationed in Paris’s Place de la Révolution. The watching crowd roared its approval as he staggered across the plinth, was strapped to the plank, and waited for the blade to fall. Within seconds, he was dead. But that wasn’t the end of the bloodletting. Over the following three days, more than 100 of Robespierre’s friends, colleagues and supporters were dispatched – damned as traitors – in the biggest mass-guillotining of the French Revolution. What happened on 28 July 1794 constituted a stunning reversal of fortune. Only 36 hours previously, Robespierre had been one of the most powerful men in France, a dominant figure in the revolution that, from 1789, had swept away the old order. All that changed when Robespierre took his seat at the National Convention – the French Revolutionary Assembly – on 9 Thermidor (27 July). Soon after his arrival, members of his own radical group, the Jacobins, were shouting him down, preventing him from speaking. Moments later, they ordered his arrest. Spectacular as it was, Robespierre’s fall from grace came as no great surprise. In fact, Robespierre saw his death coming. The night before his arrest he spoke at the Jacobin Club, the nerve centre of his support, telling the emotional audience that the speech was his “last will and testament”. He would become a martyr for the revolutionary cause to which he had dedicated his life. His parting words were: “I leave you my memory, and you will defend it.” Yet that memory has been hugely contested. In the 220 years since his death, commentators, especially those on the left, have hailed Robespierre as a heroic, if tragic, figure. To others – probably the great majority – he was the man of terror, a demon whose death was a blessing for the French people. Robespierre’s reputation is bound up indelibly with the ‘Reign of Terror’ that bedevilled France in the wake of the revolution. Revolutionary terror took a number of forms. By far the biggest loss of life occurred during the civil war of 1793 in the Vendée in western France where counter-revolutionary forces led peasant armies against the revolutionaries. As many as 250,000 insurgents and 200,000 republicans are estimated to have perished in the ensuing carnage. Terror also took the form of spontaneous violence unleashed by crowds on the streets. The worst outbreak of street violence was that of the September Massacres of 1792, which took place shortly after the fall of the monarchy, against an atmosphere of rising panic at the prospect of invading foreign armies taking Paris. Over several grim days, impromptu gangs invaded the Paris prisons, dragged out prisoners they suspected of being ‘counter-revolutionaries’, and used knives and pikes to butcher them in the streets. About 1,200 died, including priests, women and nobles, as well as some hapless ordinary criminals caught up in the frenzy. Eyewitnesses described piles of bodies by the prisons, and gutters that ran with blood. However, the ‘Reign of Terror’, the infamous period of bloodletting with which Robespierre is associated, wasn’t unleashed until Year II (beginning September 1793) when the Convention passed a series of coercive laws that enabled the revolutionaries to “rule by iron those who cannot be ruled by justice”. Thousands perished in the following 12 months – 2,639 alone under the guillotine in Paris. Victims ranged from obscure cooks, servants and peasants – luckless victims of a spiteful denunciation – to courtiers who had once danced at Versailles. One of the latter was the elderly Comtesse du Barry, in former times the beautiful mistress of Louis XV. She went to the guillotine screaming and begging the indifferent crowd to save her. Some of the most dramatic scenes at the guillotine took place when the victims were former revolutionary leaders. When Madame Roland, a fervent revolutionary and wife of the former minister of the interior, arrived at the guillotine, she saw the plaster statue of Liberty in its prominent position close by and, in a voice that carried to the watching crowd, she cried out: “Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name!” As a leading member of the notorious and hugely powerful Committee of Public Safety – which orchestrated the Terror – Robespierre bears his share of responsibility for its acts. Yet the picture of him as a tyrant gripping France is a caricature. To use terror was a collective choice. Robespierre was one of 12 revolutionaries on the Committee, all of whom were strong-minded radicals, committed to the same policy. One way of understanding what Robespierre was really like is to look at the kind of man he was before the revolution began. He was a provincial lawyer in his native town of Arras in the north of France. The community in which Robespierre lived was a world away from Versailles, and the cynical, amoral, duplicitous Parisian nobles described in Laclos’s notorious novel Dangerous Liaisons. Guillotined in the French Revolution: the bloody story through 7 severed heads Poor man’s lawyer A hard-working, gentle and studious man, Robespierre took his responsibilities seriously, and shouldered the burden of caring for his younger brother and sister after the early loss of their parents. He was not particularly political before the revolution – few people were – but he had marked sympathies for the poor and downtrodden. He was known as a poor man’s lawyer, rather than one who chose his clientele on the basis of their ability to pay. He was sympathetic to women’s civic equality and was well integrated in Arras society. Robespierre was just 31 when the revolution began; not yet married, though he engaged in some tentative courting of one or two young women in his circle. In short, he led an unremarkable life. Yet, it was one characterised by a sense of justice and injustice, and sympathy for the underdog, long before the possibility of a career in revolutionary politics made this kind of belief expedient. Robespierre embraced the revolution from the outset. Like so many others, he was exhilarated by the possibility that the world he knew might be transformed for the better. Not content to observe from a distance, he was elected to what became the first National Assembly. Here it was no easy matter to gain a political voice. He was an unknown deputy among 1,200 others. He had no connections, no wealth, no influence – only his skill with words. He set out to make his reputation as a speaker. It was a long process, which he undertook with persistence and self-belief. Robespierre was a radical democrat. In contrast to the moderates who dominated the early years of the revolution, he argued that all men should have a vote – even the poor – and opposed slavery in the French colonies. He deplored the death penalty as a barbaric and cruel punishment, but – and here was the crucial point – he made an exception for traitors who committed crimes against their country. In such cases, the public good could justify their deaths. Robespierre gradually won the people’s support by convincing them that he was on their side. He could not be co-opted into the ruling elite, or bought by promises of wealth and powerful jobs. He became known as ‘the Incorruptible’, a tribute to his integrity. Though he certainly had flaws – he could be self-righteous, thin-skinned, and obdurate – for most of his revolutionary career he showed sound political judgment, and cautioned against violent extremism that could make the revolution hated. Unlike some of the reckless radicals, he believed until relatively late that the monarchy should be retained. He was almost a lone voice in opposing the declaration of war with Austria in April 1792, a conflict that brought about the overthrow of the monarchy, destabilised the country, and sent the revolution hurtling towards terror. The key to Robespierre’s transformation does not lie in some flaw in his personality, but in the politics of the revolution itself. When the Jacobins came to power they wrote the most democratic, egalitarian and libertarian constitution that the world had yet seen. Then they shelved it “until the peace”. Robespierre did not cease to be a democrat. But he thought that other things were more important – chief of which was the survival of the republic. Everything must be subordinated to that. The summer of 1793 saw a major crisis in the revolution. France was now at war with a number of European powers. There was civil war in the Vendée and uprisings against the Jacobin government. France’s leading general, Charles-François du Périer Dumouriez, had attempted to lead his army on Paris to overthrow the Convention. The revolutionaries were beset on all sides. In this context, the Convention itself voted for stringent measures that permitted terror in time of extreme danger for the country. While some Committee members were more practical organisers, Robespierre was the man whose speeches provided the legal and moral justification of terror, a role for which he would pay dearly. He became its public apologist. What makes idealistic men choose terror? It is a problem as relevant today as it was in the late 18th century. As Robespierre’s most recent biographer, Peter McPhee, argues, rather than thinking of Robespierre as the man who ruined the revolution, we should see him as a man that the revolution ruined. To understand why Robespierre and other revolutionary leaders supported such extreme measures we must unravel the tangled, toxic world of revolutionary politics in the Year II. Like his colleagues, Robespierre was motivated by conviction – but also by fear. The revolutionary leaders were under intense pressure. Any political activist who was seen to fall short of complete dedication to the revolutionary cause, who was denounced for having personal ambitions, for being open to corruption, for putting his own friends before the public good, for being in the pay of France’s enemies, risked the guillotine. The integrity of their words and actions was judged by suspicious observers. This could be a spectator in the public galleries, a member of the crowds on the streets, a revolutionary journalist, or, indeed, one of his readers. Above all, revolutionary politicians were in danger of being denounced by one another. The guillotine cast a long shadow and, of all the cases that came before the Revolutionary Tribunal during Year II, none were pursued more ruthlessly than those involving France’s new leaders. Once they appeared before it, they were doomed, and a succession of political factions passed under the guillotine. Of all Robespierre’s actions, his role in the deaths of fellow leading revolutionaries Georges Danton and Camille Desmoulins, both of whom had been his personal friends, did most to stain his reputation. Robespierre had tried to save them, but when it came to a choice between his friends and what he believed to be the security of the revolution, he chose the latter. Once he had made up his mind to agree to their arrest, there would be no turning back, no mercy. He used his knowledge of their private lives to add weight to the denunciation made against them; and he supported the decision to arrest them without warning, giving them scant chance to defend themselves. One possible interpretation of Robespierre’s actions in his final weeks is that he was having some kind of breakdown. Certainly he had lost his political judgment. Yet had he really been the ‘tyrant’ he is so often damned as being, he would have taken the precaution of having his enemies arrested before making his final address to the Convention. Instead he arrived with only his speech in his hand to defend himself. Much of this address consisted of an anguished protest at how his integrity had been undermined by his enemies. He also brandished a list of Jacobins whom he wanted to denounce in a further purge. Yet he refused to give their names and, in doing so, gave much of his audience the impression that they were next in line for the guillotine. It was a fatal miscalculation on his part. When the deputies called Robespierre a tyrant it was not because of his part in the laws instigating the Terror, it was because they feared that he would denounce them, as he had denounced the Dantonists. They were afraid for their own lives. As one of the deputies said later: “Thermidor… was not a question of principles, but of killing.” The survivors pinned the blame on Robespierre. Robespierre was the fall guy whose death enabled other men with blood on their hands to wind down the Terror and to rehabilitate their own reputations. Had Robespierre died in 1792, even early 1793, we would have remembered him as a principled man, inspired by the ideals of liberty and equality. But he did not die then. He lived on to take his place in a government that made use of terror, he defended the use of terror and, ultimately, he too was destroyed by it. Marisa Linton is reader in history at Kingston University. She is author of Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship and Authenticity in the French Revolution (Oxford University Press, June 2013) This article was first published in the September 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine
How the architects of the 'Terror' after the French Revolution ended up among its victims
Marisa Linton reveals how the architects of the bloodletting that swept Paris after the French Revolution ended up among its victims...
In his prison cell, during the long hours before dawn, Camille Desmoulins, radical revolutionary and deputy to the National Convention, wrote a last letter to his wife, Lucile, in which he struggled to comprehend the sudden turn of events that had brought him to that terrible place. It was the spring of 1794, the height of the revolutionary terror, and the prisons were crowded with thousands of people who had fallen foul of the sinister Law of Suspects. But Desmoulins was in a different category to most prisoners – for he personally knew his accusers, the men who had signed his arrest. Several of them had been his friends, among them Maximilien Robespierre, known to Desmoulins since their schooldays. For five years Desmoulins himself had been at the forefront of the revolution, and now the revolution itself had turned on him. “My dear Lolotte,” he wrote, his tears staining the paper, “I, whom men who called themselves my friend, who call themselves republicans, have thrown into a cell, in solitary confinement, as though I were a conspirator!” The revolutionary government had its reasons for his arrest – complicated, unedifying, tortuously political reasons. The previous winter, Desmoulins, a talented but reckless journalist, had begun to write a new newspaper, Le Vieux Cordelier, in which he put pressure on the already jittery government. Desmoulins not only called for a policy of clemency to wind down the Terror, but challenged the authority of the two committees that led the revolutionary government – the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security. The committees had already organised the arrest, trial and execution of a group of extreme radicals, the Cordeliers, self-appointed spokesmen for the militant working people of Paris, the sans-culottes. In context: The French Revolution turns sour By the spring of 1794, the French Revolution had been raging for nearly five years. The revolutionaries of 1789 had set up a constitutional monarchy with a National Assembly, and the king’s absolute powers were curbed by law. But many royalists refused to accept it; they fled France to become émigrés, and urged the foreign powers to make war on revolutionary France. In June 1791 French king Louis XVI attempted to become an émigré, fleeing with his family, but was intercepted at Varennes and returned to Paris. In 1792 war broke out with Austria and Prussia; it went badly from the start. On 10 August the Parisian street radicals, the sans-culottes, led a pitched battle to overthrow the monarchy. A new Assembly was set up, the National Convention, which declared France a republic. Britain, Spain and the Dutch Republic joined the conflict, and a civil war ignited in the Vendée, leaving the Republic beset on all sides. The Convention set up a Committee of Public Safety, along with a Committee of General Security, to take on executive responsibilities of government. Under pressure from the sans-culottes and their leaders, the Cordeliers, the Convention’s deputies voted for the Law of Suspects which formed the basis of a legalised terror. This law saw almost 3,000 so-called enemies of the revolution die under the guillotine in Paris in just 12 months. In October 1793 terror was used against revolutionary leaders themselves, when the Girondin faction was sent to the guillotine. Now the revolutionary leaders were faced with the dilemma of whether to maintain the Terror to ensure the Republic’s survival. Increase in terror Desmoulins, in Le Vieux Cordelier, had repeatedly attacked Hébert, leader of the Cordeliers, who had called for an increase in terror and the violent suppression of the Catholic church. Now, the committees, in part as a trade off to show their evenhandedness and intolerance of any opposition, decided to crack down against Desmoulins’ moderate group too. It was at a midnight meeting of these two committees that the arrest of Desmoulins and several of his fellow deputies – including Georges Danton – had been agreed. Danton, like Desmoulins, was a member of the radical group, the Jacobins. He was also the former minister of justice and a one-time member of the Committee of Public Safety. If he could be arrested then no deputy was safe. When news broke in the Convention that Desmoulins, Danton and the rest had been arrested in the night, there were murmurings of anger and dismay, but in the end the deputies accepted the arrests – partly out of fear for themselves. The deputies listened as Robespierre’s colleague on the Committee of Public Safety, the young, handsome and alarmingly intense Saint-Just made the formal denunciation. He stood very still, only occasionally moving his right arm in a sweeping down gesture that reminded one eyewitness of the falling blade of a guillotine, as he disclosed a long list of vague allegations. Danton, Desmoulins and their friends, Saint-Just said, were part of a conspiracy, secretly in league with their apparent enemies, the extremist Cordeliers, together with the foreign powers at war with France, plotting to bring down the revolution from within. Three days later the accused faced their trial. Danton, a bull of a man and a prodigious orator, argued till his voice gave out, but to no avail. A further decree was obtained from the Convention to silence their protests and exclude them from their own trial. On 5 April they were condemned to death as traitors and conspirators against the Republic. As the tumbrels carried them towards the waiting guillotine, past the shuttered windows of the house where Robespierre lived, Danton cried out: “Within three months, you will follow me!” Stalinist show trial This tragic episode, sometimes known as the Danton Affair, has long been seen as an iconic moment in the revolution. Playwrights, film makers and novelists, ranging from Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death to Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety, have portrayed its enigmatic protagonists and the dark and claustrophobic world of revolutionary politics in which they lived. More than one commentator has compared it to a Stalinist show trial, as in Andrzej Wajda’s film Danton, with Robespierre playing a cold-blooded Stalinist figure, while Danton is portrayed as the humane and likeable – if venal – hero. But what is less understood is that the Danton Affair was part of a pattern. A surprising number of revolutionaries fell victim to the revolutionary terror, both before and after the affair. Of the 749 deputies in the National Convention, 86 died violent deaths during the life of the Convention (between September 1792 and October 1795). Most died under the guillotine, some by their own hand, and almost a third in total were arrested – both before, during and after the fall of Robespierre in July 1794. It was a phenomenon that I refer to as the ‘politicians’ terror’. The second thing that is not well understood is that the trial of Danton and Desmoulins was not typical of how most trials were conducted. The revolutionaries used rough justice, and decisions were swift and not subject to appeal, but in most cases heard before the Revolutionary Tribunal there was some attempt to establish guilt or innocence. Overall nearly half the accused were found not guilty, and even after prosecutions in Paris intensified in June and July, nearly a quarter escaped death. The trials of revolutionary leaders, however, were particularly ruthless in the way they were conducted, precisely because the men who initiated them were afraid for themselves if they failed – fearful either that their intended victims would turn the tables and seek revenge, or that they themselves might be denounced by the sans-culotte militants if they were seen to show weakness and favouritism to men who had been their friends. As one deputy later put it: “You had to be the first to attack, because whoever stayed on the defensive was lost.” It had not always been thus. Back in the early months of the revolution in 1789 when the Bastille fell, when the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen was written, when the deputies of the National Assembly gave up their privileges and declared the French people to be equal under the law, people like Camille Desmoulins reacted with wonder, hope and boundless enthusiasm. Many wept tears of joy – though some of the nobles, ominously, seeing their privileged world collapse around them, wept tears of rage. Until the revolution, politics had been the exclusive business of the king and his ministers. Now a new kind of man came into being – the professional politician. The deputies were plunged into a new political world, one in which they tried to establish their credibility with the crowd as men of integrity, untainted by old-regime corruption. Radical democrats Robespierre, Desmoulins and their friends were part of a radical democratic and egalitarian group. None of these men entered revolutionary politics intending to become killers. In 1791 Robespierre tried to get the death penalty abolished altogether as a barbaric, inhumane punishment. Shared ideals and the common cause brought them together. They became successful, men who counted in the new world of revolutionary politics. Profits from his political journalism had finally given Desmoulins the means to ask the girl he had long loved, Lucile Duplessis, to marry him. She was a small, graceful and elegant blonde from a wealthy family, and before the revolution she would have been out of his social league. As he waited anxiously for her answer she astounded him by crying and laughing at the same time out of sheer happiness. Their wedding in December 1790 was attended by many of the brightest young revolutionaries, men whom Desmoulins was proud to call his friends. His witnesses included Robespierre, and another mutual friend, Jacques-Pierre Brissot. The future seemed assured under a constitutional monarchy, but over the next two years the situation deteriorated. Successive events – the attempted flight of the king; the declaration of war on the foreign powers harbouring French royalists; a succession of unexpected military disasters and betrayals by high-profile leaders; the overthrow of the monarchy in a pitched battle in Paris – all spiralled into a dangerous destabilisation of politics. When, in September 1792, the Convention met and established a republic, the atmosphere was tense. The Republic was said to be ‘one and indivisible’, but behind this proclamation of unity, new factional divisions formed among the deputies, and in many cases former friends became bitter enemies. Most damaging of all was the general conviction – born largely of political inexperience – that opponents could not be legitimate in their views, but must have bad intentions. Mutual suspicion, calumny and fear intensified. Secret enemies A new faction, the Girondins, dominated the Convention’s early months. Their leader was Brissot, who had become the enemy of Desmoulins, Robespierre and the Jacobin faction. Desmoulins wrote a pamphlet Brissot Unmasked, which claimed that Brissot was a secret enemy of the revolution. It was one of the Girondins who first proposed that the immunity preserving deputies from arrest for their opinions be removed but, ironically, it was the Girondins themselves who were the first faction to suffer from the ending of immunity. In October 1793, 21 of them, including Brissot, were condemned to death amid dramatic scenes. One of the condemned stabbed himself. Seven of the guests at Desmoulins’ wedding were among those convicted. In the public gallery Desmoulins himself, stricken with remorse for his clever denunciations of his former friends, broke down and wept. The Girondins went to the guillotine defiantly singing the Marseillaise and crying “Long live the Republic!” The executioners worked so rapidly that the actual killings took only 36 minutes, and so vigorously that several of the heads flew through the air to land at the base of the scaffold. After the first few executions people in the crowd began to move away, horrified at what they were seeing – the reality of the guillotine in action. The next political faction to perish en masse was that of the Cordeliers. Their leader, Hébert, had used his newspaper Le Père Duchesne, in which he adopted the brutal persona of a sans-culotte to mock his enemies for their cowardice when their turn had come to face ‘the national razor’. Now the executioners entertained actual sans-culottes by stopping the descent of the blade inches above Hébert’s neck, a game they played four times, before the blade was allowed to slam home, and his screams at last were silenced. Just a few days later came the turn of Desmoulins, Danton and their friends. In his defence Desmoulins had made the painful admission: “I was always the first to denounce my own friends.” But the most extensive wholesale slaughter of a political faction took place with the fall of Robespierre, Saint-Just and their supporters. Over the three days of 28, 29 and 30 July 1794, more than 100 people met their deaths under the guillotine in the Thermidor coup. Since these people had all been declared “outlaws” by the Convention for defying its decrees ordering their arrest, they were not given even the semblance of a trial, but appeared before the Revolutionary Tribunal only to have their identities officially confirmed. Among them was René-François Dumas, who until the previous night had been president of the tribunal that now condemned him. Heroes and villains In the 220 years since their deaths, there has been much mythologisation of the revolutionary leaders, a tendency either to whitewash or to blacken their reputations. This is particularly the case for Danton and Desmoulins – so often seen as heroes – and for Robespierre and Saint-Just – just as regularly stigmatised as villains. The truth is rather more complicated – as it often is. Many of the revolutionary leaders were perpetrators as well as ultimately victims of terror. The fact that many acted out of fear, or the conviction that they were defending the Republic, may help to explain their choices, but does not lessen the horror of what they did. For their womenfolk, however, the moral case is more straightforward. They did not perpetrate terror themselves, but nevertheless suffered bereavement, public shame, and often the confiscation of their families’ goods and property, while a few of them literally became victims of the politicians’ terror. Camille Desmoulins’ last tear-stained letter to his wife still rests in the National Archives, but Lucile herself never saw it. By the time he wrote it she was already under arrest. It was claimed that she had tried to use bribery to stir up a prison revolt in a pitiful attempt to save her husband’s life. She was condemned only days after Camille. In the tumbrel taking her to her death she rode with the widow of Hébert. Their husbands had done so much to destroy one another, yet at the foot of the guillotine the two women embraced, in defiance of revolutionary politics, in defiance of death. Men of terror Leading revolutionaries whose methods were turned on them Camille Desmoulins (1760–94) Desmoulins’ attempts to make a career as a lawyer suffered due to his stammer. In July 1789 he was in a cafe at the Palais Royal, where he urged people to storm the Bastille. He became a talented, volatile journalist and wrote Le Vieux Cordelier, the chief vehicle for the ‘Indulgent’ faction to attack the revolutionary committees and the Terror. He was arrested in March 1794, tried and executed. Georges Danton (1759–94) At the outbreak of revolution, Danton (below) was a lawyer. After the monarchy fell, he became minister of justice. He had undisclosed sources of wealth, and was probably corrupt. He called for a Revolutionary Tribunal, saying: “Let us be terrible to spare the people from being so.” He sat with the Jacobins in the Convention, and supported the use of terror. Yet there were rumours about his commitment. He was executed along with Desmoulins. Maximilien Robespierre (1758–94) Robespierre was a lawyer who became a radical revolutionary, a deputy in the first National Assembly, and a leader of the Jacobin Club. Popularly known as ‘the Incorruptible’, he only held power in the last year of his life, after joining the Committee of Public Safety. He is seen as an apologist for the Terror, though the extent to which he controlled it was exaggerated by the men who overthrew and killed him in the 1794 Thermidor coup. Louis-Antoine Saint-Just (1767–94) The youngest member of the Convention, Saint-Just had a meteoric career as a revolutionary leader. In Paris he gained a chilling reputation for taking on the role of spokesman for the Committee of Public Safety in denouncing successive political factions: the Girondins, the Cordeliers, and the Indulgents. He tried to defend Robespierre in Thermidor, but ended by dying alongside him. Marisa Linton is reader in history at Kingston University. Her most recent book is Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship and Authenticity in the French Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2013) This article was first published in the September 2015 issue of BBC History Magazine
Napoleon’s chance: why the French Revolution was Bonaparte's big break
The ending of privilege in France gave the young Napoleon the opportunity to shine in his military career, says Marisa Linton, but what really allowed him to rise to the top was his astute exploitation of the political instability and years of war that followed the French Revolution
The French Revolution of 1789 brought down the centuries-old regime of absolute monarchy and privileged nobility. In its place the revolutionaries founded a new regime based on principles of individual liberty, equal rights, and popular sovereignty. Yet the ensuing 10 years of political instability would be exploited by Bonaparte to seize power in a militarist regime which was, in some ways, more autocratic than that of Louis XVI and, in terms of the millions of casualties of the Napoleonic Wars, much more lethal. The Revolution smashed the stranglehold of hereditary privilege and venality, hitherto endemic in all parts of old regime society. Many young men profited from the ending of privilege to forge careers in the higher ranks of the army. Napoleon Bonaparte was one of them. Although his family were minor nobility, they were also Corsican, and of Italian origin (France had conquered Corsica in 1769), the kind of people who, before the Revolution, were looked down upon as foreigners and outsiders. The disastrous decision of the revolutionary leaders to go to war against the European powers opposed to the Revolution set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the revolutionary government becoming ever more dependent on the armies and their generals. Tensions were inflamed by the émigrés – French opponents of the Revolution who had fled abroad and agitated for the foreign powers to invade France and overturn the Revolution. The move to war was spearheaded by Jacques-Pierre Brissot, leader of the ‘Girondin’ revolutionaries, who declared that France must wage “a crusade for universal liberty”, exporting the Revolution abroad. Brissot assumed that the people of western Europe would welcome French soldiers bringing ‘liberty’. Brissot was opposed by a very different revolutionary, Maximilien Robespierre. The Revolution, Robespierre warned, could not and should not be spread by invading armies at the point of bayonets. He gave the prescient warning: “No one welcomes armed liberators”. Brissot’s strategy, said Robespierre, would put France – and the Revolution – at the mercy of the military elite whose loyalty to the Revolution was far from certain. But Brissot’s belligerent rhetoric caught the popular mood. Robespierre’s opposition to war was denounced as ‘unpatriotic’. In April 1792 France declared war on Austria, setting in motion a conflict that would last (with two short-lived breaks in 1802 and 1814) for a generation, ending only with the final overthrow of Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo in June 1815. Contrary to the warmongers’ optimistic expectations, the initial war went badly for France. Paris was for a time in danger of falling to invading armies. The resultant crisis polarised tensions and brought about a second revolution, in August 1792, that overthrew the constitutional monarchy and installed a republic. War intensified, and by the spring of 1793 France was confronted by enemies on all sides, with Britain joining the conflict after the execution of the French king in January 1793. It was against the backdrop of war that the revolutionaries formed a government led by Jacobins – radical revolutionaries – who resorted to the use of terror, including that new invention, the guillotine. In the crisis of 1793–94, Robespierre, once an opponent of the death penalty, became, like many other revolutionaries, an advocate of terror. Yet he remained deeply uneasy at the militarisation of the Revolution. He warned that military expansion put unprecedented power into the hands of generals, pointing at historical figures, such as Julius Caesar and Oliver Cromwell, who had used their ascendancy over their armies to seize personal power, toppling republican or revolutionary regimes. Already two revolutionary generals, Lafayette and Dumouriez, had tried to lead their armies against the revolutionary government. Fearful of further betrayals, revolutionary leaders used terror to control and eliminate generals whose ambitions, loyalty and competence were suspect. They took no chances. During 1793 to 1794 many generals were arrested, and several executed. In June 1794 the French armies won a major victory at Fleurus against a coalition army led by the Habsburg field marshal Prince Josias of Coburg, which ended the danger of invasion and thus the need for terror, paving the way for the fall of Robespierre and the Jacobins. Robespierre was retrospectively stigmatised as having been the mastermind behind a regime of terror in which, in reality, many revolutionaries had been deeply involved. After the fall of the Jacobin government, the Revolutionary Wars changed track from defensive to expansionist. Military success became about exploiting the resources of other countries, and shoring up the survival of the new political regime, the Directory. Napoleon breaks from the Jacobins Napoleon, always deeply ambitious, was alive to the new opportunities on offer. He abandoned his brief flirtation with Jacobinism (he had been imprisoned for a time after the fall of Robespierre, being suspected of Jacobin sympathies), and a chance to rescue his military career soon arrived in October 1795 when he was entrusted with the suppression of the Vendémiaire uprising, a royalist revolt in Paris. 7 things you (probably) didn’t know about the Napoleonic Wars But his big break came in 1796 when he was nominated by Paul Barras, one of the Directors, to lead the French army in an invasion of northern Italy. His troops won some spectacular victories against the Austrians, and he established a Cisalpine Republic, with equality under the law. But he also sent back looted art treasures and plenty of cash – 15 million francs worth in 1796, and a further 35 million the following spring. Bonaparte returned to Paris full of a new, still more ambitious plan, to mount a French invasion of Egypt. It would be France’s first foray into establishing itself as a colonial power in North Africa. Bonaparte hoped to use Egypt as a route to India to challenge British colonial power there. Bonaparte wrote to the leaders of the Directory: “The time is not far when we will think that in order to truly destroy England, we have to take Egypt”. Bonaparte’s strategy was supported by the foreign minister, Talleyrand, former old regime bishop and blue-blooded noble, who had turned revolutionary before taking fright at the radical Jacobin regime. Now a key player in the Directory, Talleyrand was a political survivor and cunning strategist. Bonaparte would make full use of Talleyrand’s diplomatic skills, even while dubbing him a “shit in a silk stocking”. Bonaparte also had secret personal motives for fixing on Egypt, stemming from his belief in his own ‘great man’ destiny. He was consciously walking in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, hoping to replicate Alexander’s conquest of Egypt. The French armies arrived in Egypt in July 1798. Bonaparte presented himself to the Egyptians as the bringer of liberty. He declared his aim was to help them throw off their Mamluk oppressors, while respecting their religious beliefs and cultural customs. In a proclamation to the Egyptians he stated: “I am come to restore your rights, punish your usurpers, and raise the true worship of Mohammed… I venerate, more than do the Mamluks, God, His prophet, and the Koran”. He also presented his invasion of Egypt as a force for scientific progress and European Enlightenment; along with the armies he brought scientists and artists. From one crisis to another After victory at the battle of the Pyramids near Cairo, events soon took a dire turn for the French. They were heavily defeated in Aboukir Bay by the British naval fleet, led by Horatio Nelson, in what became known as the battle of the Nile. British ships then blockaded the French, trapping them in a hostile environment among an increasingly hostile population. The French soldiers were ill-equipped for a campaign in the heat of the desert: lack of water, lack of food, and spreading sickness decimated their ranks. Bonaparte ordered an extension of the invasion into the western edges of what is now the Middle East. His soldiers took the city of Jaffa, massacring thousands of its civilian inhabitants, before many of the French in their turn fell victim to the plague. How tall was Napoleon Bonaparte? Seeing the scale of the debacle and hearing that a renewed political crisis in France was offering the opportunity he had been seeking, Bonaparte slipped away in secret, abandoning the soldiers and evading the British blockade. He arrived back in France in October 1799, before news could spread of the extent of his military disasters. Always an astute propagandist, and never more so than at this critical moment, Bonaparte presented himself as a victor, with large crowds turning out to welcome him as France’s potential saviour. Meanwhile, the Directory was lurching from one crisis to another, its leaders determined to avoid any return to the political radicalism and violence of 1793–94, and becoming ever more reliant on the military to stave off the threat posed by royalists on the right and Jacobins on the left. Corruption was rife, and individuals made vast sums from the political and social crisis, particularly out of the lucrative contracts to supply the armies. A group of leaders, including Talleyrand, and the Director, Sieyès, another former revolutionary, determined to initiate a coup to bring down the Directory and install a strong military leader in its place. One of the Directors, Barras, was notoriously corrupt and it was a simple, if expensive, matter to buy his silence and acquiescence. Even so, it was nearly not Bonaparte who was the beneficiary of the last crisis of the Republic. Sieyès personally disliked Bonaparte, and turned to him only when Sieyès’s first choice for a military leader, general Barthélemy Joubert, died fighting in Italy in August. Napoleon comes to power The coup of 18 Brumaire (the date according to the revolutionary calendar), 9 November 1799, that brought Bonaparte to power became an object lesson in how to destroy an elected government. With the executive power of the Directory nullified, it remained only to bring down the legislative parliamentary body. Bonaparte’s brother, Lucien, succeeded in getting himself elected as president of the Council of Five-Hundred, the main parliamentary body, thus giving himself a deciding voice. A lie was concocted that the Jacobins were planning a conspiracy to attack the deputies. The Council of Five-Hundred was moved out of Paris to Saint-Cloud, supposedly for its own safety, but in fact making the deputies more vulnerable to a military takeover. The plan was that Bonaparte would enter the debating chamber to address the deputies directly, and explain the rationale leading him to assume power. When Bonaparte later recalled his part in the coup he presented himself as the master of events, the heroic saviour, rising above party faction, to bring order and security out of chaos. The reality was far different: he was no public speaker, and when he met with furious opposition from some of the deputies who shouted, “Down with the dictator!” he stammered and was barely coherent. Eventually he fainted, then fled from the chamber. It was his brother, Lucien, who saved the day for the Bonapartes by going outside to the soldiers guarding the Council and telling them that his brother was being threatened by ‘assassins’. Lucien assured the troops that his brother’s sole desire was to defend sacred liberty, and produced a sword which, in a theatrical gesture, he held to his brother’s breast, vowing to kill his brother should he prove to be a liar. The ploy worked. Soldiers entered the Council’s chamber and used fixed bayonets to disperse the deputies, who fled for their lives through the windows out into the park of Saint-Cloud, where twilight had fallen and darkness was gathering. Bonaparte made many promises and assurances – that he would protect and maintain the Republic; that he would defend the principles of the Revolution; that he would stay in power just so long as it took to resolve the political crisis and ensure the security of the state. He kept none of them. What killed Napoleon Bonaparte? One of Bonaparte’s greatest tactical assets as a leader would be his ability to cement his popularity through plausible lies skilfully delivered to a public that was ready to believe him. For those who remained unconvinced, he would be equally ready to employ coercion and ruthless repression. Bonaparte’s regime was not a naked military dictatorship. He was careful to maintain the appearance, at least, of a consultative regime, with elected assemblies and plebiscites (referendums). Real power would rest firmly in Napoleon’s hands, but he knew that his popularity and his acceptance by the French people would depend on the continuance of his military successes as his armies marched through Europe. Marisa Linton is professor emerita of history at Kingston University and the author of Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship and Authenticity in the French Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2013) This content first appeared in BBC History Magazine's The Story of the Napoleonic Wars special edition
The French Revolution: Everything you need to know
Everything you wanted to know about history (podcast series)
Marisa Linton responds to listener queries and popular search enquiries about the dramatic events that engulfed France in the late 18th century
In the latest of our series tackling the big questions on major historical topics, historian Marisa Linton responds to listener queries and popular search enquiries about the dramatic events that engulfed France in the late 18th century. Topics discussed include the causes of the revolution, the role of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and the bloodshed of the Terror. Listen to more episodes in our ‘Everything you wanted to know’ podcast series Find more articles about the French Revolution