Napoleon’s rise owed everything to the French Revolution, to its ideals of liberty and equality, the meritocracy that lay at its roots, and the huge institutional changes that it wrought. Without the events of 1789, France would have retained the restrictive legal order of the Old Regime, with its emphasis on privilege and inheritance, its passion for nobility and hierarchy, and a social order that – while cherishing ideas of honour – excluded commoners from positions in the officer corps of the army or in the royal administration. In pre-revolutionary France, Napoleon’s horizons would have been limited and the bounds of his ambition severely curtailed. 1789 therefore was a year of hope, a year when social walls and barriers seemed to fall with a devastating ease that echoed the dramatic surrender of the Bastille before the onslaught of the Paris crowd.
For Napoleon and thousands like him the changes that were being made in the name of the French people opened the door to brilliant careers and rapid social advancement – as Napoleon himself began to realise. He had spent his schooldays in the company of the sons of French aristocrats, who were destined for officer rank in the military, and he encountered the same sorts of men in the army – men whose social values he could not share and whose disdain and snobbery he bitterly resented. There was much about ancien régime France for which he had little affection and with which he could not identify. The ideals of the early Revolution were far from being anathema to the young officer.
Napoleon’s letters during the summer months of 1789 may talk deprecatingly of looting and pillage by the populace since, as a soldier, he emphasised the importance of keeping order, and thus the need to side with the authorities against popular violence. In the town of Auxonne where his regiment was stationed, rioters had sounded the tocsin from the parish church, attacked public officials and burned the tax registers; moreover, many of the troops sympathised with the rioters, and in August soldiers in Napoleon’s regiment mutinied and indulged in an orgy of drunken violence. His main duty, he wrote to his brother Joseph, had been to contain the violence after the rioters had broken down one of the gates of the town, and his general had given him responsibility for haranguing the mutineers, subduing the rebels and safeguarding property in the city. No army officer could condone such indiscipline, and Napoleon did not seek to do so; but he could not entirely conceal his excitement at the implications of what was happening around him. Writing to Joseph from Auxonne in early August, reporting rumours that were circulating amongst the garrison, he announced that ‘all over France blood had been spilt’. But, he added, ‘almost without exception it was the impure blood of the enemies of Liberty and the Nation, those who had long been getting fat at their expense. We hear that in Brittany five people have been killed and their heads sent to Paris’. The tone of his letter is more one of wonderment than of condemnation, a realisation that the meeting of the Estates-General heralded a new political era and that the events unfolding around him were more than just another banal manifestation of the rebelliousness of the French.
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