Napoleon and the destruction of the French revolution as well as France - Personal Opinion

 Napoleon and the destruction of the French revolution as well as France.

He not only had ruined the French revolution, making it everything it was against, a kind of absolutist government, when Napoleon conquered France and became emperor, but more than that, Napoleon stifled the spirits of emancipation excited by the French and the American revolutions throughout Europe and permitted the revival and recovery of absolutist governments. Even the legacies to which Napoleon is credited, such as the Civil Code, the system of law, which was an amalgamation of feudal laws, was suggested in the French revolution, and he merely borrowed it, later to neglect it when it suited his time-honored dictatorial purpose and ambitions. But what Napoleon bequeathed us in reality that was best characterized by death, destruction, terror and defeat to the people of France, the French revolution and France itself. One of the ironies in history is the fact that the very man who was commissioned by the revolutionary leaders to protect and defend the French revolution and its ideals is the one that was going to destroy it, and later France itself.

Emperor Napoleon.

Due to the megalomania and uncontrollable desire to power and conquer Napoleon, over a million French people lost their lives and millions of others suffered in France. It is a fact that not every war that was fought in the Napoleon age could be attributed to Napoleon. At the time he became a dictator and later became an emperor of France, it was already at war with half of Europe, who viewed revolutionary France as an enemy and were determined to annihilate it, and all he did was to attempt to stop these wars with a decisive triumph of France. The issue begins with all the unneeded battles he had dragged France and the rest of Europe into, battles that would ultimately destroy him and France. Such catastrophes as the disastrous occupation of Spain, his imbeciliating and utterly futile campaign in Egypt, or the way in Tahiti Napoleon killed over 100,000 Caribbean slaves who had risen against France, were noteworthy. But most of all there is the really boggling megalomaniac and meaningless invasion of Russia in 1812 that led to the French surrender to Russia and its allies and exile of Napoleon.

In 1812, Napoleon fleeing a burning Moscow.

In 1812, Napoleon invaded Russia with a military of nearly 700,000 men, most of them not French but comprising soldiers all over Europe, killed and ravaged Russians and his own army, all to literally nothing. The majority of his forces did not even make it back, and only an insignificant fraction of the Grande Armee ended up surviving the retreat of Russia having not that Napoleon cared as he was riding in the front and in a luxurious carriage with no idea of the suffering he caused to the rest of his troops. As Napoleon met his final and decisive defeat in the battle of Waterloo in 1815, and was sent into exile in a second and definitive exile out of France, France was more isolated, beaten, occupied, dominated, despised and smaller in size and influence than it had never been before, and the monarchy of France had been restored. As has been mentioned above, Napoleon with his tyrannical and absolutist way acted not only to suffocate the spirit of emancipation, republicanism and secularism awakening because of the French and American revolutions in France, but also everywhere in Europe, and allowed the continuity and recovery of the absolutist monarchies.

After all, Napoleon was not superior to those absolutist autocrats that he was fighting, on the contrary, he was worse. Why? Since he deceived millions that he was going to make a difference, and continues to do so, that he was holding the torch of the French revolution and unleashing freedom onto Europe. He was misleading millions, not only in France, but in all of Europe, and deceived and followed by his followers only to find themselves somewhere in the battlefields, somewhere deep in some desert or other in the world, or buried dead in Russia. But he never in any way intended to execute any of his so-called enlightened promises and all he ever really intended to do, as history showed, was to reign as a despot absolutist monarch all the time cynically playing upon the French revolution and all the people who had ever backed it and its motto of Liberty, egalite, fraternite.

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