Isser Woloch

Isser Woloch calms down both the image and mythology surrounding Napoleon by focusing on the less glorious aftermath of his victories, political and military, to the individual French politicians and bureaucrats with their laws and actions who made his government run. What we lose in the high romantic melodrama we gain in probing on the day to day operations reflecting on France after its still influencing Revolution and its gaining a dictator. Woloch's light humor, brevity, far ranging show more scholarship, and sharp revealing insights enliven what could be a deadly subject. He has given us a good remedy to those who only think of Napoleon in mostly his military aspect. My guess is that this a good edifying read for only a limited number of readers.

Quotes: (page 52) “The prefect melded into one individual the attributes of the elected departmental administrations of the Directory plus the Directory's appointed commissioner to each department. The division of power between the two positions had always been murky and subject to abuse, but was justified by a current need for local self-government and a measure of supervision from Paris. Now that the Consulate had eliminated elections, it made sense to have one man with power and responsibility for each department, who would in turn oversee a pyramid of subalterns...”

(page 55-56) “While Bonaparte clearly succeeded in depoliticizing and stabilizing the government in Paris, the prefect became the point men in the more daunting effort to pacify the provinces. The official line that past conflicts should be forgotten, and the new government did its part by suppressing the elections that ostensibly rekindled them. The tranquil image that the Consulate promoted was evoked by Beugnot, one of the more successful prefects; 'The Seine Inferieure has an excellent public spirit,' he reported, 'because there reigns here a great political immobility and a great movement towards domestic concerns. When a people has made a wise and serious delegation of public powers (ie. , to Bonaparte), it has nothing better to do than to occupy itself with other matters.' But politicization was of course an ideal rather than an accomplished fact. In many, perhaps most, departments, a kind of low intensity warfare smoldered. Certain prefects helped damp down the recriminations and rivalries of the past decade, but others turned out to be partisan themselves or at least insensitive to one camp or another.
Delve into the local sources for the Napoleonic era, and the embers of revolutionary conflicts are not hard to detect.”

(page 206) “As one historian has put it, republican moderates 'did not feel that newspapers deserved the protection given to serious discourse.'
To Napoleon, such views were second nature. The first consul had long considered freedom of the press a dangerous shibboleth, and after the experience of the Directory years he encountered scant resistance to muzzling political newspapers decisively. Without any serious constitutional guarantees standing in its way, the Consulate from its inception ordered the closing of most surviving newspapers, coerced the sale of several others to reliable individuals, and eventually instituted formal censorship over those that remained.
Not that the press was entirely comatose during the Consulate. While the regime indeed suppressed overt political journals, broader intellectual currents could still find expression.”

(page 240) “Yet his departure was understood abroad as a sign of encouragement to Napoleons adversaries (with whom Talleyrand remained in secret contact) that they should resist the emperor's grandiose ambitions. Being notorious for his cynicism and opportunism, Talleyrand is hard to hold up as an example on integrity or courage, and in France his behavior had understandably been viewed as equivocal if not traitorous. But his machinations in the interest of France (as he saw it) and as a good European stand in better repute today than in the past.
Observations about lack of courage or the absence of 'exit' among Napoleon's servitors are in any case easy enough to make. But the history of Napoleon and his collaborators has a more positive if problematic side as well. The ex-revolutionary in particular kept aloft the banner of liberal revolutionary principles, however selective, symbolic, or observed in the breach they have become. They repeatedly managed to inscribe certain ' gains of the Revolution' in the regime's acts of self-representation---in the proclamation surrounding Brumaire, the necrologies of senators, the pivotal orchestration for the transition to Empire, even in the launching of the imperial nobility, notwithstanding the contortions this last development required.” show less