Napoleon Was NOT a Son of the Revolution Essay -- European History

At the end of the French Revolution, the hopes of the early stages of the Revolution had been mangled, leading into the Reign of Terror. France had dissolved into anarchy, with internal and internationalistic turmoil. It was out of the foreign wars that Napoleon came to power. Napoleon Bonaparte rose to power, victory by victory, eventu eithery making himself Emperor of France, creating a strong central establishment while continuing the foreign wars, creating a mass French Empire. Although Napoleon was a product of the French Revolution and maintained the visualise as a son of the Revolution, idealism always fell to pragmatism as Napoleons main purpose was creating a strong unified France.Napoleons policies reflected some of the ideals of Enlightenment thought and he sought to spread them across Europe as he conquered. One of the core beliefs of the Enlightenment is that the universe is dandy and that there are natural laws that apply to everyone. Although what these right s were was up to debate, the central idea was that everyone should have them. As Napoleon conquered Europe he applied the same laws to everybody, everywhere. This cast of laws is known as the Code Napoleon. Some of the laws enforced by the Code Napoleon can be seen in Napoleons Imperial reign at Madrid, where Napoleon abolished feudal rights, such as banalities, as well as seizing church lands to be distributed among the people. Other actions he took were creating constitutions that created laws that applied to all people equally and could non be altered on a whim. These are the same actions taken during the French revolution applied to all some other areas. In fact, the promises of these reforms gave Napoleons forces supporters in the countries he sei... ...gery he used. Napoleons rule was greatly influenced by the Enlightenment ideas, but he was not a son of the Revolution. Louis Bergeron considered Napoleon an enlightened despot, saying, the dynamism of Bonaparte and his rigorous administration revived the experiment of enlightened despotism, somewhat belatedly, since in the setting of Hesperian Europe it was already a bit out of date. Napoleon did resemble an enlightened despot as he upheld absolute power while back up legal and social equality for all classes of people (that werent him). What makes Napoleon unique among enlightenment despots is that he formatted his image to appear to be something else. The discrepancies between the image he presented and the person he was creates room for interpretation as to whether Napoleon was a dictator, an enlightened despot, or a champion of the revolution.