Dictatorship in the Nineteenth Century

Conceptualisations, Experiences, Transfers

Moisés Prieto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000437089
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Historical research on modern dictatorship has often neglected the relevance of the nineteenth century, instead focusing on twentieth-century dictatorial rules. Dictatorship in the Nineteenth Century brings together scholars of political thought, the history of ideas and gender studies in order to address this oversight.

Political dictatorship is often assumed to be a twentieth-century phenomenon, but the notion gained currency during the French Revolution. The Napoleonic experience underscored this trend, which was later maintained during the wars of independence in Latin America. Starting from the assumption that dictatorship has its own history within the nineteenth century, separate from the ancient Roman paradigm and twentieth-century totalitarianism, this volume aims at establishing a dialogue between the concepts of dictatorship and the experiences and transfer of knowledge between Latin America and Europe during this period.

This book is essential reading for scholars and students of modern history, as well as those interested in political history and the history of dictatorship.

Part I

Conceptualisations

DOI: 10.4324/9781003024927-2

1 The Napoleonic regime

A paradigm or an anachronism for the new century?

Michael Broers

DOI: 10.4324/9781003024927-3

Napoleon cast a long shadow over the political landscape of the nineteenth century, and his influence was, in many ways, more direct in the turbulence of Latin America than in the Old World. Whereas the emerging states of the dying Spanish empire looked forward, in search of relevant contemporary political solutions to the havoc of war and revolution, Europeans, even revolutionaries, had become cautious of following too closely the political examples set by Napoleon, the dictator, as opposed to Napoleon the institutional reformer. Contemporaries knew from direct experience how Napoleon rose to power and kept it; succeeding generations grasped first at the image of power he projected, only later sensing what the reality embodied.

An army de-fanged

The coup of 18 Brumaire, year VIII (9 November 1799) that brought Napoleon to power was very different from the pronunciamientos which became almost ubiquitous in heralding military bids for power, first in Spain in 1820, and then throughout the Hispanic world well into the twentieth century. The ‘18 Brumaire’ was far from a military coup on either the Hispanic or the Roman model. It did not hinge on a powerful general declaring himself dictator, still less emperor, at the head of a powerful army, marching on the capital. Nor was it followed by ruthless purges, bloody or otherwise. Napoleon was very much the ‘junior partner’ in the plot. He was brought into it by civilian politicians, led by Sieyès and Talleyrand – veteran politicians of the revolutionary years with no penchant for military authoritarianism – who were bent on reforming the existing regime and retaining its civilian ethos, if also reducing its parliamentary character in favour of a more powerful executive. The inclusion of a prominent, successful soldier in that three-man executive, the Consulate, was to provide a more coherent approach to the direction of a potentially disastrous war, and to appease the more radical Jacobin elements seeking a return to the war government of the Terror period, 1792–1794. Napoleon was included as part of a team; he was not even the plotters’ first choice, who was General Moreau, by far a more successful commander, who demurred, sensing his lack of political acumen. Far from commanding a fanatically loyal army at his back, Napoleon was almost bereft of troops, having abandoned his army in Egypt. He possessed only his small, if loyal, personal guard; he had to persuade the commander of the Paris garrison, then needed to win over the guards of the parliamentary assemblies, and almost failed to do so. His clumsy attempts at a pronunciamiento of sorts almost backfired, and he was rescued by the very parliamentary, unmilitary skills of his brother, Lucien, the president of the lower house of the assembly, the Council of 500.¹ It bore scant resemblance to the scenes in Cádiz in January, 1820, where the oratory of the young officers, Quiroga and Riego, to the enraged ‘Army of America’ set the pattern for the emergence of a new Latin political culture.² Napoleon was not proclaimed emperor by his legions on 18 Brumaire, nor did he ‘rouse the rabble’ of an unruly army, even if he had shown he was capable of it three years earlier in his famous address to the Army of the Alps on the eve of the first Italian campaign. Nothing of the pronunciamiento was foreshadowed at Brumaire. Indeed, when a pamphlet began to circulate almost a year later, “A Parallel among Caesar, Cromwell, Monck and Napoleon”, which was actually meant to dispel rumours that Napoleon intended to become an outright military dictator, he still considered it dangerous even to broach the subject or invoke ‘the Roman paradigm’, even if to refute it. Association with it cost Lucien his post as Minister of the Interior.³

Rather, Napoleon moved gradually, and by wholly civilian means, to achieve something close to absolute power in his first years in government. He cultivated a very unmilitaristic public image before and after the coup, frequenting the liberal intellectual elite and projecting the image of a French Washington. More importantly, he kept the military firmly out of high office, and out of Paris, two policies that he clung to from beginning to end. The Directory, the regime the Brumaire plotters had overthrown, had become deeply reliant on the army; the war made its generals – and Napoleon was but one among several – famous and influential. Their armies, once fighting outside France, became increasingly loyal to and dependent on, their commanders, rather than the government. Each came close to turning them on Paris and seizing power, ‘on the Roman model’, save Napoleon and Moreau, who had actually backed the internal purge of the executive as well as the assemblies, to protect the government from extremists as recently as 1797. Their unanimous agreement that the government had to be purged and the executive restructured had been essential to the success of the coup. The military presence in Paris had kept the regime in power from the outset. All the elements for a true military pronunciamiento existed by 1799, save in the case of Napoleon, who had no army at his back.

The threat of a military coup hung over the Directory like a dark cloud almost from the outset. The army had intervened to support the politicians, but only their own, internal divisions prevented the army seizing power. The culture of pronunciamiento could have been born in France; all the elements were there in the late 1790s: a disgruntled rank-and-file, ‘political’ generals, a discredited political class. None of this disappeared at Brumaire, which led Napoleon to keep the army out of the capital from the moment he took power. Until his fall, the only troops allowed in Paris were his own Guard (first ‘Consular’ and then after 1804, ‘Imperial’) which was always under his own command, together with the Parisian cohorts of the National Guard. When several National Guard units wavered in a short-lived coup against him led by a disaffected general, Malet, in 1812 when rumours spread of his death in Russia, Napoleon dissolved even them. Nor were his marshals ever given political office, save for the ministry of war. Honours and wealth were lavished upon the marshals – as they were on the Guard – but none of them was ever allowed into the real corridors of power. In terms of its personnel, the Napoleonic regime remained resolutely civilian, however authoritarian in character. If Napoleon had not read Edmund Burke’s famous prediction in his 1791 Reflections on the Revolution in France, that the French Revolution would end like the English, with a military dictatorship, he acted as if he knew it by heart.

Napoleon gained something close to sole power by very civilian strategies. Within weeks after the coup, Napoleon sidelined Sieyès by carefully reshaping the cumbersome, complex draft constitution Sieyès had devised, then manoeuvring his own men into the positions of second and third consuls, with him as first consul, leaving the chief plotter in the cold. Napoleon’s civilian team emerged early: the constitutional and legal expert, Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès, and the financial expert, Charles-François Lebrun, were the real driving force in government, alongside Talleyrand, as foreign minister, and Joseph Fouché, another dangerous revolutionary survivor, who continued undisturbed as minister of police. So it remained. Napoleon ensured the army always held an exalted place in French public life. Soldiers took precedence over the clergy and civil servants at public ceremonies, in stark contrast to the values and symbolism of the old regime and revolution alike. The great holidays of the empire centred on the army, notably ‘St. Napoleon’s Day’, when brides married veterans in large, public ceremonies, their dowries provided by Napoleon. Parades took place in Paris every Sunday, in almost open competition with Mass. Napoleon sought “to militarise the imagination of the nation”,⁴ but not its government. The army was cherished, but it was not empowered. That Napoleon achieved this balance was not a ‘given’ in 1799, however.

The years between 1800 and 1805 saw Napoleon’s grip on power tighten inexorably. In no small measure, this was achieved by that most unmilitary of achievements, peace. By 1801, his own reconquest of Italy, and Moreau’s victories in Switzerland and Germany, had brought the continental powers to the conference table; Britain joined them because French diplomacy had orchestrated a continental-wide blockade against their commerce. The final result, the Treaty of Amiens, led to over four years of peace in Europe, although war began again with Britain, largely at sea, soon enough. This was what allowed Napoleon to take the first clear step to dictatorial power, when he was named First Consul for Life, with the right to name his own successor. With each change of constitution came a strengthening of the executive branch at the expense of the legislature. This had an important impact on Napoleon’s position, quite distinct from the obvious increase in his constitutional powers. The influence of all the generals under the Directory had been helped by their ability to cultivate followings among the politicians in the legislature. Napoleon was no exception to this; his brothers Joseph and Lucien worked assiduously to this end.⁵ However, both Moreau and Bernadotte often seemed to be better placed with the politicians, the former because the Jacobin opposition trusted his republicanism, the latter because he was, simply, a good networker, which led to his appointment to the important ambassadorship to Vienna at one point. As parliamentary politics waned, so did this source of rivalry, helped by Moreau’s implication in a plot against Napoleon and his self-imposed exile to America, and Bernadotte’s marriage to Désirée Clary. When Napoleon created the corps system of military organisation in the first years of his rule, it proved effective not only militarily, but politically. Each senior general – marshals after the creation of the empire in 1804 – commanded a corps of nominally 20,000 men. This meant that no single commander led an army the size or power of those that emerged under the Directory, except when on campaign and Napoleon was in direct overall command. In was a policy of ‘divide and rule’, all the more effective because it was conceived and welcomed by the marshals as sound military organisation, and it gave them full, independent command in the field, from all save Napoleon.

The plots against Napoleon, from left and right, kept him in constant danger. He had near-death experiences on several occasions, which enabled him to play on the growing unease about what would befall the regime if he died without a designated, viable successor. This combination of circumstances, none of them linked to military success, paved the way for the creation of the empire in 1804. The army now became a pote...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: “The dictator is coming …”
• PART I: Conceptualisations
• PART II: Experiences
• PART III: Transfers
• Index