Philip G. Dwyer

The French Revolution and Napoleon : A Sourcebook

The upheavals, terror, and drama of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic period restructured politics and society on a grand scale, making this the defining moment for modern European history. This volume collects together a wide selection of primary texts to explain the process behind the enormous changes undergone by France and Europe between 1787 and 1815, from the Terror to the Counter-Revolution and from Marie-Antoinette to Robespierre and Bonaparte. While bringing the impact of historical events to life, Philip Dwyer and Peter McPhee provide a clear outline of the period through key documents and lucid introductory passages and commentary. They illustrate the meaning of the Revolution for peasants, sans-culottes, women, and slaves, as well as placing events within a wider European context. Students will find this an invaluable source of information on the Revolution as a whole as well as the international significance of the events.

‘It Still Makes Me Shudder’: Memories of Massacres and Atrocities during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars

This article looks at a number of French testimonies of massacres during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars committed by combatants, for the most part against civilians. Much of what we know about massacres is based on personal testimonies that are invariably from the perspective of the perpetrator, in this case, troops of the Grande Armee. Just as important as understanding why massacres occurred is to understand how they were represented, recalled and remembered by those who witnessed them. In this, memoirs become an indispensable tool for what they tell us about how the killings were justified, either from the individual or the state’s point of view, and for the insights one can glean into the minds of those that either committed or witnessed the atrocities taking place. Descriptions of massacres are commonly used to highlight the horror of war rather than the horror of the event itself. Massacre was also a means of underlining the difficulties encountered by the French in conquering, that is, in ‘c...

New Avenues for Research in Napoleonic Europe

The approaching bicentennial of the founding of the Napoleonic Empire is an appropriate occasion to review the state of research and to suggest possible avenues for further study. Despite two hundred years of historiography, it is safe to say that there is virtually no part of Napoleonic Europe, or any aspect of the Napoleonic Empire, that does not cry out for further research (or at least the dissemination of foreign scholarship by means of English-language synthesis). Generally speaking, the history of the Napoleonic period lags behind that of the French Revolution, but it has also suffered from short-term, relatively narrow approaches that focus on the somewhat artificial timeframe of 1799–1815. Some of the following suggestions, therefore, point to themes that take into account much broader time periods including the late eighteenth up to the mid-nineteenth centuries. They have been provided by a number of specialists in the field, who were asked to contribute ideas based on their extensive knowledge of both the archival and secondary material. It goes without saying that the avenues for future research into Napoleonic Europe are by no means limited to what one can find here.

NAPOLEON AND THE FOUNDATION OF THE EMPIRE

Historians generally discount the advent of the First French Empire as the result of Napoleons personal ambition. Napoleon, however, could not have brought about the transition from republic to empire without wide support, not only among the political and military elite, but also among the French people. This article re-examines the reasons why, a little more than ten years after the execution of Louis XVI, moderate-conservative elements in the political elite opted for a monarchical-style political system, and why it was so widely accepted by ordinary people across France. It does so by examining the arguments in favour of empire in three ‘sites of ideas’: the neo-monarchists in Napoleons entourage; the political elite, preoccupied with many of the same concerns that had plagued France since 1789; and the wider political nation, which expressed a manifest adhesion to Napoleon as emperor that was marked by an affective bond. The push to empire, it is argued, was an expression of a dominant set of political beliefs and values. Napoleon, on the other hand, only reluctantly came to accept the notion of heredity.

Violence and the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars: massacre, conquest and the imperial enterprise

Violence and the French Revolution has generated a considerable body of work, much of which focuses on the processes leading toward the Terror, or aspects of the Terror and Counter-Revolution. In contrast, the violence committed by French troops abroad during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars has largely been neglected, treated as something peripheral to the dynamics of conquest or as something peculiar to the nature of mass revolutionary armies. This article argues that far from being peripheral, massacre was on the contrary a method used by the French state in an effort to impose rule on conquered territories and to assimilate them into the empire. The territorial expansion of the French empire and the subjugation of neighbouring states should consequently be seen as part of a colonizing enterprise. To that extent, the methods used by the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies to subdue recalcitrant populations were no more violent than earlier periods. However, the purpose of the subjugation differed radically from previous eighteenth-century European wars. French troops, imbued with a sense of their own cultural and political superiority, were bringing enlightenment and civilization to the rest of Europe.

Massacre in the old and new worlds, c.1780–1820

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Two Definitions of Neutrality: Prussia, the European States-System, and the French Invasion of Hanover in 1803

the end of May 1803, twenty-five thousand French troops, under the command of General Edouard Mortier, marched virtually unopposed from northern Holland into the north German electorate of Hanover. When Hanover capitulated on 3 June by the convention of Suhlingen,1 for the second time in a little over two years the electorate was occupied by a foreign state. The first time had been in March 1801, when Prussia invaded Hanover with the backing of Russia, Denmark, and Sweden, its allies in the second league of Armed Neutrality.2 The sponsor of the league, which ostensibly aimed to combat British violations of neutral shipping in the Baltic, was the tsar of Russia, Paul I. As Prussia, lacking a navy, could not help the league at sea, it occupied Hanover in an attempt to threaten Britain, whose king, George III, was also elector of Hanover. At the same time, France, too, was threatening to invade Hanover as a means of striking at Britain. Thus, the Prussian army marched into Hanover in March 1801, partly to fulfil its treaty obligations to the league, partly to pre-empt a French invasion. The invasion of Hanover came back to haunt Prussia two years later when the king, Frederick William III, was again faced with having to decide whether to invade Hanover himself or to stand by and watch the French. This time, despite Hanovers obvious military and strategic value to Prussia, he stood by. To understand this turn of events, one must first examine the unit actors in the international system; that is, the great powers involved, especially Britain and Russia. Of particular importance at

Reflections on genocide and settler-colonial violence

Abstract The debate about whether genocide took place on the Australian colonial frontier began more than thirty years ago and appears to have reached an intellectual impasse. How then did the debate begin in Australia, how did it gain traction and why does it appear more vigorous in Australia than in other settler societies? To explore these questions, this paper places the debate within a larger context, firstly by comparing the Australian debate with those taking place in other similar British settler societies and then considering the ways European historians have invoked genocide discourse to explore nationalist histories. In taking this approach the paper reveals the different ways genocide discourse has been used to make sense of traumatic pasts in different regions of the world and how it has become part of the discussions about national identity. Finally in an attempt to overcome the intellectual impasse about the genocide debate in Australia, the paper offers a few suggestions that may give historians of the colonial frontier a way forward. This article has been peer reviewed.

‘Savage Wars of Peace’: Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World

Violence has always been central to the complex histories of empire that reach back over four centuries of the ‘modern era’. As an integral part of the social, legal, economic and gendered foundations on which colonial relations were built, violence was diffuse, multi-layered and enormously variable. Yet although the foundational role of violence in the process of empire-building is now widely accepted, we still need to pay closer attention to the structural relationship between colonialism, empire and violence beyond individual, spectacular moments in imperial history. This chapter considers colonial violence in a comparative context in order to identify some of its shared expressions, technologies and legacies.

‘Citizen Emperor’: Political Ritual, Popular Sovereignty and the Coronation of Napoleon I

The coronation of Napoleon in Notre Dame on 2 December 1804 was built upon a number of contradictory concepts. As heir to the French Revolution, Napoleon founded the legitimacy of his new regime on the notion of popular sovereignty. He incorporated the idea into a new coronation ceremony, a melange of different rites and customs, incorporating aspects of Carolingian tradition, the ancien regime and the Revolution, thereby helping to create a new political culture based on continuity with the past. And yet the people were precluded from the ceremony itself. Moreover, the coronation contained within it the seeds of the Empires later turn towards absolute-style monarchy, based on revived notions of divine right. The coronation thus highlights Napoleons, and the French political elites, ambivalent attitude towards the idea of monarchy and popular sovereignty. Although the coronation should be seen as part of the process of national reconciliation implemented by Napoleon, as ritual it failed to leave a deep impression.