Chapter 6 details the shift that occurred in Grouchy’s thought following Napoleon’s coup of 18 brumaire. Initially supportive of the new regime, she quickly became disillusioned with what she perceived as Napoleon’s authoritarian suppression of political dissent. She feared that humans, in the face of a menacing state, would seek to mask their intentions, rendering sympathy – on which her political vision was founded – ineffectual. She thus developed a newly suspicious view of governmental intrusion into the sentiments of the populace, and discarded her ideal, developed during the early days of the revolution, of the state playing a central role in fostering the political emotions of the people. These ideas were developed over the course of anonymous articles in the journal, Le Citoyen français, that she launched in 1799 with her lover, Maillia Garat, and a proposed new edition of seventeenth-century moralist La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes, conceived together with her next romantic partner, Claude Fauriel. This Chapter draws on Fauriel’s unpublished manuscript, The Last Days of the Consulate, as further evidence of their joint ideas, especially their increasing suspicion of Napoleon and their distaste over his use of his secret police to spread fear and encourage duplicity.

The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) was a key turning point in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. The most successful rebellion by enslaved people in world history, it prompted the first direct colonial representation in a European legislature and created the second independent state in the Americas. Broad-based liberation from slavery won on the battlefield, ratified with the emancipation decrees of 1793-1794, and secured with the 1802-1803 war of independence, served as a continuing reminder of the possibility of emancipation while pressing key questions about the proper structure of post-slavery reconstruction. Haiti was also the first independent state in the Caribbean and Latin America, and the first in the Western Hemisphere to be led by people of African descent. Haitian approaches to governance also paralleled French, Latin American, and U.S. debates about monarchy and authority, liberty and empire, and popular sovereignty and social order. Meanwhile, white U.S. and French responses to Haiti’s successes prompted many revolutionaries in those countries to curtail their ideas about the universalism of revolution.

This essay concentrates on the practice and significance of parodying Shakespearean speeches during wartime, which reached a height during the French Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars. At a particularly pivotal moment – the renewal of war in 1803 – a spate of parodies of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy appeared in print, most of which adapted the speech for Napoleon, who debates the merits of invading Britain. This essay examines these overlooked parodies, paying particular attention to George Woodward’s ‘Buonaparte’s Soliloquy at Calais’ published by Rudolph Ackermann and circulated widely, including in the Weimer-based journal London und Paris. While these confident parodies express unambiguous support for Britain’s war effort and condemn Napoleon, they do not testify to united public opinion about the necessity of war or to untrammelled optimism about its outcome. This essay establishes their wider significance: they draw attention to a politically and culturally astute readership that was not limited by national or conflict lines, and they reveal the fractures beneath confident wartime propaganda. Hamlet’s famous soliloquy becomes a malleable rhetorical template for carrying out topical wartime debate, facilitating political discourse that could draw attention to the divisive debates underlining this period of conflict.

Mass democracy went into abeyance with the demise of the Roman Republic. With the revolutions in America and France in the late eighteenth century, the masses asserted their political presence with a vengeance. Although both revolutions began moderately enough, they quickly diverged. In America, patronage became the predominant means of winning and keeping power. In France, in contrast, politics was soon dominated by a series of demagogues, from Danton to Robespierre. Rather than looking to ideology, this chapter proposes that the difference was due to the lower cost of patronage as a means of political incorporation in America compared to France. American elites had more than a century of working in the limited franchise democracy of British America prior to its "democratization." In France, in contrast, French elites had no such legacy on which to build. French institutions instead precluded the building of political parties, rendering direct appeals to the masses, especially those in the capital, cost-effective. The recurrent cycle of populism in France was interrupted only with Napoleon’s combination of popular appeal with the reimposition of centralized, executive power: a popular dictatorship.

Between 1808 and 1814 Spain and Portugal were devastated by the single most destructive episode of the Napoleonic Wars, namely the so-called Peninsular War. Originating in a foolhardy attempt on the part of Napoleon to render the former country a more reliable ally in the wake of his bloodless occupation of the latter in October 1807, this soon turned sour. French armies sustained one embarrassing reverse after another; assailed by multiple problems, the puppet regime of Joseph Bonaparte was unable to impose its authority; the Spanish armies proved easy to beat but hard to eliminate; the British ejected the French from Portugal and turned her into an unassailable stronghold; the French suffered heavy casualties; and political revolution in Spain made it very hard to claim the ideological high ground. Had Napoleon been willing to concentrate all his efforts on the struggle, he might yet have prevailed, but his decision to attack Russia badly destabilised the position of his armies, the result being that within two years the whole of the Peninsula had been liberated. All this makes for a dramatic story, but in practice the impact of the Peninsular War on the fate of Napoleon was very limited, its real importance lying rather in its influence on the history of Spain and Portugal.

Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1798 invasion of Egypt represented the first modern attempt to incorporate an Islamic society into the European fold. Although the expedition was a military fiasco, it left a lasting legacy in the region. The invasion constituted the formative moment for the discourse of Orientalism, when all of its ideological components converged and a full arsenal of instruments of Western domination was employed to protect it. The occupation itself did little to modernize Egyptian society, because the revolutionary principles that the French tried to introduce were too radical and foreign, and met determined local resistance. But Napoleon created a political vacuum in Egypt that was soon filled by Kavalali Mehmet Ali Pasha, who, within a decade of the French departure, began laying the foundation for the reformed and modernized Egypt that later would play such an important role in the Middle East.

The concluding chapter examines the impact of the Napoleonic Wars on Europe. Between 1803 and 1815, Europe plunged into an abyss of destruction as thousands died in the blood-soaked fields of Germany and Russia and savage street fighting in ruined Spanish cities. While many in the ruling classes would continue to consider war as a glorious undertaking – even as one that could rejuvenate tired and corrupt societies – no longer did they see it as a normal, ordinary part of human existence that could be engaged in on a regular basis without enormous cost. The Congress of Vienna signaled this change by establishing mechanisms of cooperation (the ‘Concert of Europe’) to maintain the peace among the major powers, rather than assuming that the powers would themselves instinctively act to limit the extent and destructiveness of military conflict.

This chapter examines siege surrender rituals and the obstinate defence of practicable breaches during the Napoleonic Wars, with a particular focus on French obstinacy in the Peninsular War, which triggered the British general storms of Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz and San Sebastian. Whereas a century earlier Louis XIV’s fortress governors had surrendered at the point of a practicable breach or beforehand, Napoleon’s now fought on. This chapter explores how this had come to pass, the extent to which eighteenth-century siege surrender conventions were disrupted during the Peninsular War and Napoleonic Wars more generally, and British attitudes and practices towards siege defences taken to the last extremity. On the one hand, French garrison commanders were adhering to Napoleon’s orders to defend practicable breaches, which became the subject of an instructional treatise by Lazare Carnot. On the other hand, this was the culmination of a much broader and long-term evolution in cultures of war and honour codes – that encouraged a cult of obstinacy. The chapter concludes by comparing siege surrender in Spain with siege defences and capitulation throughout other regional theatres of war and campaigns during the Napoleonic Wars.

Chapter 6 discusses how France, hesitant about smallpox inoculation, embraced cowpox inoculation and the Napoleonic regime provided strong support and direction. After the first successful vaccination in Paris in August 1800, vaccine was rapidly distributed through France. In 1803, the Minister of Interior instituted a central vaccination committee in the capital and instructed prefects to form subordinate committees to support the practice in the provinces. Napoleon himself was committed to the practice and the practice prospered under a regime that had no doubts as to its merits and potential contribution to the nation’s welfare and prosperity. In the context of large-scale military mobilisation, several million citizens were vaccinated before 1815. The French system, ill-funded but quite effective, was extended to the client states and annexed territories of the Napoleonic empire, providing further scope for Dr Sacco’s enterprise in Italy and laying firm foundations for the practice in the Netherlands.

Chapter 2 explores how two rogue diplomats, Robert Livingston and James Monroe, obtained half a continent for the United States without shedding a drop of blood. Despite President Thomas Jefferson's instructions that Livingston and Monroe negotiate only for the city of New Orleans and as much territory east of that city as Napoleon Bonaparte's government could be persuaded to part with, they broke ranks and pledged $15 million for the transfer of the immense Louisiana territory from France to America. This act violated two of Jefferson's most cherished principles: economy in government and strict construction of the Constitution. Fifteen million dollars was a huge sum of money in 1803 - it vastly expanded the national debt - and there was no clause in the Constitution empowering the president to buy land. Livingston and Monroe risked their reputations, and possibly their lives, on the gamble that Jefferson would cast his scruples aside and submit the Louisiana treaty to the Senate. They were right, and, as a result of their disobedience, the United States doubled in size, acquiring 827,000 square miles of territory west of the Mississippi at a cost of three cents an acre. It was a mind-boggling bargain, and, like the treaty that ended the American Revolution, it grew out of American diplomatic indiscipline.