The Fall of the Napoleonic Empire

Abstract

The historian of the fall of the Napoleonic empire is always in the interesting position of working backwards from the military-diplomatic events of the ‘the fall’, to a series of enquiries into the possibilities of deeper, more structural contributing factors to these events. They are of two essential kinds: Firstly, those which gave rise to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812; that is, those immediate factors which led to the definitive start of the process of collapse, factors which, arguably, can stretch far back into the history of Napoleonic expansion. Second, are aspects of the Napoleonic regime which may, or may not, have made it prone to self-destruction, whether imbedded in its fundamental character, or which it developed over the short course of its existence. This reverses utterly the Braulelian logic of history, while still paying tribute to it, and makes of the undertaking something of a justification of Nietzsche’s cutting insight, that ‘Historians are like crabs—they walk backwards until they think backwards.’ The French grip on Europe only a few years before the major defeat of 1812—and it was a French, not merely ‘Napoleonic’ grip—was firm. The quest to find weaknesses in this structure are rooted in the counter-factual, not the reverse, a Schroeder believes when he argues that Napoleon’s ‘strengths’ reside only in the counter-factual. More realistic is to assess the obvious weaknesses: How long could the European economies support the privations of the blockade? How long could exhausted populations bear the burden of mass conscription? The regime’s goal was to end its dependence on both, but the disasters of 1812–1813 introduced a different logic into the fate of Napoleonic Europe.