Abstract
The remarks quoted below, admittedly composed on Saint Helena, are nonetheless at least partly true, as is confirmed by the expedition to the Orient of 1798 and by the secret missions of 1810 to Egypt, Syria and Jerusalem.1
Egypt, he said, should have been our Saint-Domingue and our American colonies, reconciling freedom for the blacks with prosperity for our trade, etc. This new colony would have ruined the English in America, in the Mediterranean, and all the way to the banks of the Ganges.
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Notes
Stuart Woolf, ‘Napoleon and Europe revisited’, Modern & Contemporary France, 4 (2000): 469–478.
The best study of the French-language historiography is Natalie Petit eau, De la mythologie à l’histoire (Paris, 1999). In English, Pieter Geyl, Napoleon: For and Against (New Haven, 1949); Stuart Semmel, ‘British Radicals and “Legitimacy”: Napoleon in the Mirror of History’, Past and Present 167 (2000): 140–175
Woolf, ‘Napoleon and Europe revisited’: 470–472; Michael Rowe, ‘France, Prussia, or Germany? The Napoleonic Wars and Shifting Alliances in the Rhineland’, Central European History 4 (2006): 610–640.
Marx bemoaned Germany’s failure to understand the benefits to be derived from Napoleon’s policy, notably the abolition of feudalism. ‘In Germany, Napoleon was the representative of the Revolution, the prophet of its principles, the destroyer of the old feudal society’, quoted by Georges Cogniot, ‘Napoléon vu par Marx et Engels’, Europe 47 (1969): 42–51.
For more precise details, Gabriel Paquette, ‘The Dissolution of the Spanish Atlantic Monarchy’, The Historical Journal, 1 (2009): 175–212
Napoleon’s armies were barely present outside Europe, and the expedition to Saint Domingue in 1802 had ended in total failure. If there was war, it was rather a civil war between native conservatives and reformers, long before the struggle for independence. For the Caribbean, Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, Revolution and Slave Emancipation (Chapel Hill and London, 2004). For the Imperial revolutions, Jeremy Adelman, ‘An Age of Imperial Revolutions’, AHR 2 (2008): 319–340.
On this subject, Philip Mansel, ‘Monarchy, Uniform and the Rise of the Frac, 1760–1830’, Past and Present, 96 (1982): 103–132.
Moreau de St-Méry deputy to the Constituent Assembly for Saint Domingue, took refuge in Pennsylvania after the Saint Domingue revolt.. The Alien Act of 1798 forced him to return to France. For a time Bonaparte put him in charge of the States of Parma. For these networks, see Annie Jourdan, ‘Théophyle de Cazenove, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, and Joel Barlow: A Tale of Three Patriots’, Early American Studies 2 (2012): 360–381.
Christopher Bayly lists the great changes of the revolutionary period that reverberated around the world: birth of the nation state, rights of man, written constitutions, freedom to trade. The question remains of whether that world was thrown into turmoil as a result. What applied in South America did not necessarily apply in Asia, in the Arab world or in Africa. Conversely, what did we receive from these distant countries? This we are not told. Christopher Bayly, ‘An Afterword’, in Armitage and Subrahmanyam, Age of Revolutions, 209–217. See also Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford, 2004). For a welcome critique of global history, see D. A. Bell, ‘Questioning the Global Turn: The Case of the French Revolution’, French Historical Studies, vol. 37, 1 (2014): 1–24.
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Jourdan, A. (2016). France, Western Europe and the Atlantic World. Napoleon’s Empire: European Politics in a Global Perspective. In: Planert, U. (eds) Napoleon’s Empire. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137455475_2
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