Both the Jacobins and the Bourbons accused Napoleon of copying the old regime. Most of these complaints centered around his declaring himself emperor and using the senate to rubber-stamp his agenda. However, there are some key differences between the two regimes that were clearly inspired by the French Revolution.
First, Napoleon’s rise to emperor was not as un-democratic as it might seem. A number of French generals were considered to lead the coup. Napoleon simply played the political game better and made himself seem not only the obvious choice but the only choice.
Second, Napoleon used the trappings of the old regime to help justify his new one, without following the traditions closely. The title of emperor carried specific connotations, and the pageantry he borrowed from the old regime helped him win popular support. However, he always made very clear that his rule was sanctioned by law, not divine right or historical tradition (a huge break from the old regime).
Further, Napoleon’s system of nobility was vastly different from the old regime. Titles and status could be earned. Even commoners could earn titles through service to France, which was all but unheard of in the old regime. Due to these changes, the vast majority of the titled were now drawn from the military, and many were from modest backgrounds. This meant the noble class was far smaller than in the old regime, and it tended to be very supportive of Napoleon and his military endeavors.
As you can see from the above examples, although Napoleon borrowed heavily from the old regime, he attempted to center his own on merit and law, rather than religion and tradition. He integrated important elements of the French Revolutionary mindset and put them into action for the first time. In these ways, his regime was vastly different from the old regime.
After Napoleon was crowned emperor in 1804, he became almost as powerful as any French king before him. On the face of it, it seemed that there was little material difference between Emperor Napoleon and his predecessors of the ancien regime. In its great splendor and opulence, Napoleon's court certainly appeared to display a degree of continuity with the great kings of old.
Nonetheless, there were some differences. For one thing, French kings had traditionally believed in the Divine Right of Kings, in other words that they'd been chosen by God to rule. Napoleon, on the other hand, quite literally crowned himself as Emperor. As far as he was concerned, he and he alone was responsible for his occupying the French throne. His was an earthly crown without any suggestion of divine sanction.
The administrative system under Napoleon represented another radical departure from what had existed under the ancien regime. Political power was more effectively centralized, building on the inheritance of the Revolution which had streamlined and modernized the state. Napoleon took the process a stage further by carrying out a wholesale reform of the French legal system. The Napoleonic Code, as it was called, established a single French law for the entire country, in sharp contrast to the confusing mishmash of ancient laws, regional privileges, and royal edicts that had prevailed prior to the Revolution.
Napoleonic France was very much a hierarchical system, but with a much greater degree of social mobility than during the days of the ancien regime. Napoleon effectively created a new service aristocracy, one where loyalty to the emperor was considered much more important than noble blood. Many of the old aristocratic families looked down on Napoleon's new nobility as a vulgar parody of the Second Estate. To them, the new people flocking to Emperor Napoleon's court were nothing more than social-climbing parvenus, richly undeserving of their exalted titles.
To a large extent, the system of government in Napoleonic France was a synthesis of both the aristocratic ancien regime and the more democratic, egalitarian French Revolution. That is to say it took different elements from each respective system and fused them together to create something completely unique.
No comments:
Post a Comment