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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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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.

• Napoleon biography, the Russian campaign (1812)

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

• 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.

• German chapters on Beethoven

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