What were the actual political views of Napoleon and the First French Empire?

(My answer on Quora)

There is a strong tendency to mythologize Napoleon Bonaparte and shroud him in tropes that all too often downplay what the man and indeed the First Empire really were. Much of this is a function of pro-French propaganda and a reading of the history that views his legacy through a lavender soaked screen rub (the rose colored glasses are on vacation this week)..

There is no doubt that Napoleon had a pivotal role in France’s development as a nation state, and was in all respect a man of military brilliance, but he was also the forerunner of another legacy: the modern secular dictator.

Portrait of the Emperor source: Napoleon.org

While it is largely correct that Napoleon restructured France along lines that were refreshingly meritocratic and egalitarian - the army and the legal system being the obvious respective examples - it is also true that he was an Authoritarian who often fooled outsiders with his larger than life image.

Ludwig von Beethoven was one such figure who was later transformed by reality. (Check out the story behind his Third Symphony).

Beethoven's Eroica

Beethoven's Eroica Beethoven called his Third Symphony Eroica (“Heroic”). The Eroica is two hundred years old yet still seems modern. In this symphony Beethoven began to use broad strokes of sound to tell us how he felt, and what being alive meant to him. The piece caused a sensation and changed the idea of what a symphony could be. When Beethoven called this piece “heroic,” he wasn’t kidding. It’s bigger, longer than a symphony had ever been. It’s confessional, even confrontational. Just the scale of it was huge, unprecedented—and daunting for its first listeners. It foreshadowed the world that Wagner and, ultimately, Sigmund Freud would explore—the realm of the unconscious. That’s what was so revolutionary. The First Movement When Beethoven first presented himself to Viennese society, he had to make a name for himself. He did this by playing some of his own compositions and, most importantly, by improvising on themes of his own or of his rivals. Nothing like it had been heard before. These improvisations—often lasting an hour—were entire landscapes of emotional extremes. They were tragic, stormy, lyrical, wildly exhilarating. Such exhibitions of power first drew people to Beethoven’s art. And the improvisations that dazzled Vienna were, in a way, rehearsals of the daring musical ideas Beethoven would explore in his symphonies. The first movement of the Eroica was unprecedented in scale, in part because he had so much to say. Beethoven uses a huge spectrum of keys to express different worlds of emotion. Each new experience of the themes gets darker and deeper. He develops the movement as a way of expressing what really happens in life—the wrong turns, the confusion, the sense of helplessness and entrapment. In the first movement of the Eroica , Beethoven takes his listeners on a wild journey through the emotional extremes that can be wrought from a few simple themes. The Second Movement Perhaps the best reflection of these emotional extremes is the Second Movement, which he titled “Funeral March,” a powerful musical evocation of the massive state funerals then taking place in Paris. The music suggests the thunder of drums and the roar of the crowd. In this movement, Beethoven explores grief, its public face and its intimate expression. The oboe solo at the beginning is a personalized and interior expression of grief within a public ceremony. It’s a modern solo in that it has tremendous psychological dimension. The music is evocative—we can almost see the funeral procession pass before us and ask, What really has died here? Perhaps it is part of Beethoven that is being mourned. In the years before he wrote Eroica , Beethoven realized he was going deaf, and his initial reaction was terror and shame. He tried to keep it a secret. He couldn’t bear for anyone to know that he—a musician—was not able to hear. But he came to realize that, as a musician, he could function perfectly well. What really scared him was being cut off from other people, losi

https://www.pbs.org/keepingscore/beethoven-eroica.html

It was Napoleon who established the prototype of the modern police state that has been replicated with various degrees and greater severity in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Communist China, the USSR and the numerous dictatorships that have dominated most countries outside the geographic framework of the West.

At the head of the Napoleonic police state for the greater part of the Empire was Joseph Fouché, who earned his stature suppressing the Lyon Insurrection in 1793 Revolutionary France.

Joseph Fouché source: Geneanet.org

Fouché held the post of chief of police throughout the Directory, Consulate and the early Empire. After falling from grace in 1810, he was replaced by Anne Jean Marie René Savary who was even more devoted to Napoleon than his predecessor.

What Savary and Fouché had in common was an obsession in snuffing out conspiracies everywhere. Careless words did indeed cost lives and when called on to act each made careful use of a terror apparatus that was far more subtle and focused than that employed during the mass insanity of the dark days of the revolution.

However from the perspective of the transgressor it was equally as deadly. Two enemies were constantly in sight of the Empire’s angers - Royalist sympathizers and left wing radicals.

The Little Corsican was not a Liberal certainly not in the sense conceived during the Scottish Enlightenment. His regime in fact was one that was the antithesis of what the Founding Fathers of the United States wanted. It was Executive driven to the highest order with virtually no checks and balances countering Napoleon and his elite core.

So why then was Napoleon so popular with the French? In short he delivered order from chaos.

Historian Michael Broers had this to say

Napoleon did not make his political reputation as a warmonger, at least not among the French….. He posed, first and foremost, as the man who would restore order to a society plagued by crime, violence and uncertainty…… When this goal was achieved by the Peace of Amiens with Britain in 1801, he set about winning over French society – or at least the propertied sections of it – by a concerted effort to restore civil order ruthlessly, but more effectively, than the unstable regimes of the Revolutionary decade of 1789-99.

Napoleon was a self styled dictator and a strong man but he was also politically savvy and understood both the language of the elites and the masses. He wore French Enlightenment values on his sleeve and so earned the good graces of historians to follow but he was no champion of democracy when it truly countered nor did he aspire to replicate the individualism so valued by thinkers across the English channel.

He did however bring together Nationalism and the Romanticism of Rousseau within a rubric of Cartesian efficiency. At his heart he displayed Jacobin tendencies (he after all a friend of Robespierre) but was also driven by an immense ego that saw himself as the material embodiment of the Will of the People. He was in a sense his own ideology.

Sources:

The Napoleonic Police and their Legacy

Napoleon did not make his political reputation as a warmonger, at least not among the French. Indeed, the reverse was the case, as he smoothed his way to despotism in the first years of his rule after seizing power in 1799. He posed, first and foremost, as the man who would restore order to a society plagued by crime, violence and uncertainty. The first war he fought as First Consul in 1800-01 was intended to bring a quick peace which would enable him to consolidate his grip on France. When this goal was achieved by the Peace of Amiens with Britain in 1801, he set about winning over French society – or at least the propertied sections of it – by a concerted effort to restore civil order ruthlessly, but more effectively, than the unstable regimes of the Revolutionary decade of 1789-99.

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/napoleonic-police-and-their-legacy