The Age of Napoleon

Summary

The Age of Napoleon, published in 1975, is the eleventh and last volume of The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant. Subtitled A History of European Civilization from 1789 to 1815, it covers the French Revolution, the career of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the culture of Europe during the quarter century of war that ended at Waterloo. In their preface the authors explain that age and time would not allow them to carry the series into the nineteenth century, so the volume stands as the conclusion of a project begun with Our Oriental Heritage in 1935. The first part narrates the Revolution: the summoning of the Estates-General, the Tennis Court Oath and the fall of the Bastille, the night of August 4 and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the king's flight to Varennes, war with Austria and Prussia, the September Massacres, the trial and execution of Louis XVI, the rising in the Vendée, the Terror under the Committee of Public Safety, Robespierre's fall in Thermidor 1794, and the unstable Directory. The authors write with sympathy for the Revolution's early hopes and with horror at the Terror, and they give the persecution and dechristianization of the clergy a clear place in the story. The central part is a biography of Napoleon: his Corsican youth, Toulon, the Italian campaign, Egypt, the coup of Brumaire in 1799, the Consulate's Concordat with Pius VII and the Civil Code, the coronation of 1804, Austerlitz, Jena and Tilsit, the Continental System, the war in Spain, the marriage to Marie-Louise, the Russian campaign of 1812, Leipzig, abdication, Elba, the Hundred Days, Waterloo and exile on St. Helena, where he died in 1821. The Durants admire his intelligence, administrative genius and gifts as a lawgiver while holding him responsible for the wars that cost Europe millions of lives. The remaining parts survey civilization under and against Napoleon. In France they treat Madame de Staël, Chateaubriand's defense of Christianity, painting from David to Gros, and science and medicine. In England they cover Pitt, the industrial transformation, Burke and Paine, Wollstonecraft and Godwin, and the Romantic poets from Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge to Byron and Shelley, with Jane Austen and Walter Scott. In Germany they treat Goethe's maturity, Schiller's last years, Kant's old age, Fichte, Hegel and Beethoven; in Russia, Alexander I. The book closes with a reflection on Napoleon's legacy and, briefly, on the series as a whole. As with every volume, this is a work of synthesis for general readers rather than original research, and its judgments reflect the liberal humanism the authors held throughout. Students can use it as a map to the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars before reading Burke, the Declaration, Napoleon's letters, Tolstoy and the English Romantics directly.

Plot or Argument

• From the Estates-General to the Republic

  The calling of the Estates-General in 1789, the National Assembly, the Bastille, the August decrees and the Declaration, the reorganization of the Church, the flight to Varennes, the outbreak of war in 1792, and the overthrow and execution of Louis XVI.

• Terror, Thermidor and the Directory

  The Committee of Public Safety, the Vendée, mass executions in Paris and the provinces, the dechristianization campaign and Robespierre's cult of the Supreme Being, his fall in July 1794, and the corrupt but more moderate Directory.

• The making of a general

  Bonaparte's Corsican origins, his artillery work at Toulon, the suppression of the Paris rising of Vendémiaire, the Italian campaign of 1796-1797, and the expedition to Egypt and Syria.

• Consul and lawgiver

  The coup of Brumaire, the Constitution of the Year VIII, the Concordat of 1801 restoring public Catholic worship, the administrative and educational reforms of the Consulate, and the Civil Code of 1804.

• Emperor of the French

  The coronation, the execution of the duc d'Enghien, the campaigns from Austerlitz to Wagram, the Continental System, the Spanish ulcer, the quarrel with Pius VII, and the Austrian marriage.

• Europe's culture in a time of war

  Regional surveys of French letters, art and science; English politics, economy and Romantic poetry; German philosophy, poetry and music; and Russia under Alexander I.

• Moscow, Waterloo and St. Helena

  The invasion of Russia and the winter retreat, the German rising of 1813 and Leipzig, abdication and Elba, the Hundred Days and Waterloo, and the last exile, followed by the authors' estimate of Napoleon and their farewell to the series.

Characters

• Will and Ariel Durant, authors and narrators

  Historians closing their eleven-volume series, admiring of genius and order and grieved by revolutionary and imperial bloodshed.

• Louis XVI, king of France (1774-1792)

  Conscientious, indecisive monarch tried by the Convention and guillotined in January 1793.

• Maximilien Robespierre, Jacobin leader

  Incorruptible disciple of Rousseau and dominant voice of the Committee of Public Safety during the Terror.

• Georges Danton, revolutionary orator

  Leader of 1792 who later urged moderation and was executed in 1794.

• Napoleon Bonaparte, general, First Consul and emperor

  Corsican soldier of genius whose rise, rule and fall form the center of the volume.

• Josephine, empress

  Napoleon's first wife, divorced in 1809 for want of an heir.

• Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, diplomat

  Bishop turned revolutionary turned foreign minister, who served and then betrayed Napoleon.

• Pius VII, pope

  Signer of the Concordat who attended the coronation and later endured years of captivity under Napoleon.

• Madame de Staël, writer and salon hostess

  Necker's daughter, critic of Napoleon, and interpreter of German culture to France.

• François-René de Chateaubriand, writer

  Author of The Genius of Christianity (1802), which helped restore religion's prestige in France.

• Ludwig van Beethoven, composer

  Musician whose Eroica Symphony and growing deafness the authors set against the Napoleonic years.

• Alexander I, tsar of Russia

  Napoleon's ally at Tilsit and enemy in 1812, later the mystical author of the Holy Alliance.

Lessons

• When liberty licenses the scaffold

  The Durants trace how a revolution that proclaimed natural rights in 1789 executed thousands as enemies of the people by 1794. They point to war, fear of conspiracy and the claim to speak for a single popular will. Students can examine how good words were bent to justify killing, and why the authors find the Terror a warning rather than an accident.

  • What events between 1789 and 1793 do the authors present as steps toward the Terror?
  • How did the Law of Suspects change the meaning of justice?
  • What restraints, legal or moral, might have stopped the slide, and why did they fail?

• Genius without a governor

  Napoleon appears in the book as a man of extraordinary intellect and work, a reformer of law and administration, and a ruler who could not stop making war. The authors invite comparison with the great conquerors of earlier volumes. Students can ask what virtue would have had to accompany his gifts, and whether any institution in France could have checked him.

  • Which of Napoleon's achievements do the Durants think will last, and which perished with him?
  • Why did he invade Russia, according to the book?
  • How should one weigh the Civil Code against the dead of his campaigns?

• Concordat and coronation: Church and new state

  After a decade of persecution, oaths and dechristianization, the Concordat of 1801 restored public Catholic worship under state supervision, and Pius VII attended Napoleon's coronation. Later the emperor annexed the Papal States and held the pope captive. The sequence shows how a ruler may value religion as an instrument of order, and what faithful resistance cost the pope and the clergy.

  • Why did Napoleon want a settlement with Rome, and what did each side gain?
  • How did French Catholics who had refused the revolutionary oath fare under the Concordat?
  • What does Pius VII's captivity show about the limits of a political alliance with the Church?

• Poets and philosophers answer the age

  The cultural chapters show writers responding to revolution and war in opposite ways: Wordsworth's early enthusiasm and later recoil, Burke's defense of inherited order, Chateaubriand's return to Christianity, Hegel's view of Napoleon as world-spirit on horseback, and Beethoven's withdrawn dedication of the Eroica. Students can compare how art judges events that politics only records.

  • Why did so many writers who welcomed 1789 turn against the Revolution or against Napoleon?
  • Which response to the age do the Durants seem to admire most?
  • Can a poem or symphony make a sound moral judgment on a political event?

Context

Published in 1975, when Will Durant was nearly ninety and Ariel in her late seventies, the volume concluded a forty-year project. Its subject, 1789-1815, had been the focus of intense historical debate in the decades before publication, between the Marxist social interpretation of the Revolution (Lefebvre, Soboul) and revisionists such as Alfred Cobban; the Durants largely stand outside that debate, writing a narrative of persons, ideas and culture.

Composition

The authors began the volume after Rousseau and Revolution (1967) and The Lessons of History (1968), and the preface explains why the series ends at 1815 rather than continuing into the nineteenth century. Like the earlier volumes it draws on memoirs, correspondence (including Napoleon's), standard biographies and French, English and German histories. Will and Ariel Durant died within two weeks of each other in 1981.

Reception

The book was a best seller and was reviewed as a fitting close to the series, though academic readers noted its reliance on older secondary works and its preference for biography over social and economic analysis. It remains a common entry point to the period for general readers.

Comparisons

• Reflections on the Revolution in France

  Burke's 1790 warning that abstract rights would end in tyranny reads, after the Durants' chapters on the Terror and on Napoleon, as prophecy; students can test how much of Burke's argument the historians implicitly accept.

• Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen

  The Declaration of August 1789 is the text the book presents as the Revolution's charter; reading its articles beside the Law of Suspects shows how quickly its guarantees were suspended.

• The French Revolution: A History

  Carlyle's 1837 history, prophetic and dramatic, covers the same years from the Bastille to Vendémiaire; comparing its style with the Durants' measured narrative shows how temperament shapes history.

• Letters of Napoleon

  The authors draw on Napoleon's correspondence for his voice and judgments; his letters let students meet the emperor's energy, calculation and self-presentation directly.

• War and Peace

  Tolstoy's novel narrates Austerlitz, Borodino and the retreat from Moscow while denying that great men direct history, a direct challenge to the biographical method the Durants use for Napoleon.

• A Tale of Two Cities

  Dickens dramatizes the fall of the Bastille, the September prisons and the guillotine; his novel and the Durants' history together show how the Terror passed into English imagination.

• Lyrical Ballads

  Wordsworth and Coleridge's 1798 collection, which the book places in the English Romantic chapters, came from poets who had welcomed the Revolution and were rethinking their hopes.

• Rousseau and Revolution

  The previous volume ends at 1789 with the Estates-General; this one begins there, and its account of Robespierre tests the earlier book's claims about Rousseau's influence.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The first months of 1789. Notice how quickly the Estates-General became a National Assembly, and which decisions the authors present as irreversible.
• The Church in the Revolution. Track the confiscation of Church lands, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the oath, and the fate of priests who refused it.
• Robespierre. Watch how the Durants connect his speeches to Rousseau and how they describe his personal austerity beside the executions he defended.
• The Concordat and the Civil Code. Ask what each kept from the Revolution and what each restored from the Old Regime.
• The cultural chapters. For each writer or composer, note whether he or she first welcomed the Revolution or Napoleon, and whether that changed.

Key terms and names

Third Estate

The commons of France, everyone outside the clergy and nobility, whose deputies declared themselves the National Assembly in June 1789.

Civil Constitution of the Clergy

The 1790 law reorganizing the French Church under the state, with elected bishops and priests and a required oath that divided the clergy.

Committee of Public Safety

The executive committee of the National Convention that directed war and the Terror in 1793-1794.

Thermidor

The revolutionary month in which Robespierre was overthrown and executed, July 1794, ending the Terror's height.

Brumaire

The month of Bonaparte's coup in November 1799, which replaced the Directory with the Consulate.

Concordat of 1801

The agreement between Napoleon and Pius VII recognizing Catholicism as the religion of most French people and reorganizing the French Church under state appointment and papal institution.

Continental System

Napoleon's attempt from 1806 to close European ports to British trade, which drove him into conflicts with Portugal, Spain and Russia.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What years does this final volume cover, and why did the authors stop there?
2. Comprehension What were the main provisions of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, and why did it split the French Church?
3. Comprehension Which campaigns do the Durants treat as the summit of Napoleon's power, and which as the beginning of his fall?
4. Interpretation How do the authors explain the movement from the hopes of 1789 to the Terror of 1793-1794?
5. Interpretation Why did Napoleon make peace with the Catholic Church, and how do the Durants evaluate his motives?
6. Interpretation Which writers and artists of the period do the authors present as resisting Napoleon, and on what grounds?
7. Big Question Can great gifts excuse great ambition? Using Napoleon, ask what a person of rare talent owes to God and to neighbor.

Faith Connections

• Mark 8:34-37 (Scripture)

  Jesus asks what it profits a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul, a question that sharpens any reading of Napoleon's conquests and his reported reflections on St. Helena.

• Romans 13:1-7 and Acts 5:29 (Scripture)

  Paul's teaching on governing authorities and the apostles' refusal to obey men against God both bear on the priests who had to choose whether to take the revolutionary oath.

• Chateaubriand, The Genius of Christianity (Great Conversation)

  Published in 1802 as the Concordat took effect, Chateaubriand's defense of Christianity by its beauty and its works of charity is the French counterpart to the religious recovery the Durants describe.

• Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Great Conversation)

  Burke's argument for inherited institutions, religion and gradual reform gives students a conservative Christian-informed standard for judging the revolutionary experiment the volume narrates.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: The Revolution began with real grievances and noble declarations, but war, fear and the claim to embody a single popular will led to the Terror; exhaustion with disorder opened the way to a soldier of genius who preserved much of the Revolution's civil achievement in law and administration while restoring religion and authority; his unlimited ambition then drew Europe into wars that destroyed his own power; meanwhile poets, philosophers and musicians across Europe answered the age with Romanticism, idealism and renewed faith, so that the period's lasting legacy lies as much in its culture and law as in its battles.

Rhetorical device: rise-and-fall biography. The authors shape the Napoleon chapters as a dramatic arc from Toulon to Austerlitz and from Moscow to St. Helena, so that the structure of the narrative itself carries a moral judgment about ambition.

Debate: Resolved: Napoleon preserved more of the French Revolution than he betrayed.

Writing Prompts

Essay: The Durants close their whole series with Napoleon. Argue whether his life, as they tell it, confirms or challenges the view that individual persons shape history more than social forces do.

Comparison with War and Peace: Tolstoy insists that Napoleon was carried along by events he did not control. Compare his account of 1812 with the Durants' and argue which better explains the Russian campaign.

Medical Lens

The quarter century of revolution and war was also a period of change in medicine, and the book's chapters on French science and on the campaigns offer points of entry. Military surgery under Dominique-Jean Larrey, with his flying ambulances and rapid amputations, transformed battlefield care. Plague struck the French army at Jaffa in 1799, and the scene of Bonaparte among the plague-stricken became a famous painting by Gros. Typhus, dysentery, cold and hunger destroyed the Grande Armée in Russia in 1812 more than battle did. In Paris, Philippe Pinel's reforms at Bicêtre and the Salpêtrière are traditionally credited with beginning humane treatment of the insane, though the story of his striking off the chains has been revised by later historians. Beethoven's deafness, recorded in his Heiligenstadt Testament of 1802, belongs to the German chapters. Napoleon's own final illness on St. Helena, usually attributed to stomach cancer, has been the subject of many later theories; any such identification is interpretive. Which of these episodes the Durants treat, and in how much detail, must be checked against the printed volume.

• Napoleon biography, the Egyptian and Syrian campaign (1798-1799)

  Plague in the army at Jaffa and Acre and Bonaparte's visit to the sick.

  Plague Epidemic Death Dying
• Napoleon biography, the Russian campaign (1812)

  Losses of the Grande Armée to disease, cold and starvation on the advance and the retreat from Moscow.

  Fever Infection Starvation Nutrition WAR Wounds
• French chapters on science and medicine under the Revolution and Empire

  Military surgery, Pinel's reforms of asylum care, and the Paris hospitals as centers of clinical teaching.

  Surgery Asylum Institution Psychiatry History Physicians Doctors
• German chapters on Beethoven

  The composer's progressive deafness and his despairing letter of 1802.

  Disability Deformity

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation in 1801 between a priest who refused the revolutionary oath and has just returned from exile, and a former Jacobin now serving as a prefect, about the Concordat.

• Essay

  The Durants judge Napoleon both a builder and a destroyer. Argue which judgment their own evidence better supports, using his Civil Code and one campaign as test cases.

• Classroom

  Build a timeline from 1789 to 1815 with three rows, French politics, war, and culture, and mark where a book, painting or piece of music the Durants discuss answers a political event.

• Fiction

  Narrate the retreat from Moscow in late 1812 through the eyes of a regimental surgeon, drawing on the book's account of the campaign.

Further Reading

• Napoleon: A Life, Andrew Roberts

• Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, Simon Schama

• The Coming of the French Revolution, Georges Lefebvre

• The Genius of Christianity, François-René de Chateaubriand

• Memoirs of Baron Larrey, Dominique-Jean Larrey

  The surgeon's own record of the campaigns; check edition before citing.

• Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault

  Influential, much-debated account of the asylum and Pinel's reforms.