Napoleon

French Empire

In 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte, a brilliant military general who had participated in the French Revolutionary Wars of 1796, 1797 and 1798, seized power as First Consul (see French Consulate), and in 1802 he was made First Consul for life. Bonaparte attracted more power and gravitated towards imperial status, gathering support on the way for his internal rebuilding of France and its institutions. He gradually dampened opposition and -- using exile, systematic bureacratic oppression, and constitutional means -- in 1804, the Senate granted him the title of emperor. The French Empire (or the Napoleonic Empire) (1804-1814) was marked by the French domination and reorganization of continental Europe (the Napoleonic Wars) and by the final codification of the republican legal system (the Napoleonic Code).

By 1804, Britain alone stood outside French control and was an important force in encouraging and financing resistance to France. Napoleon lacked the resources to attempt an invasion of Britain or to defeat the Royal Navy at sea, and his one attempt to do so ended with defeat at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Napoleon resorted instead to economic warfare and instituted an embargo (the Continental System), forbidding his allies and conquests from trading with the British.

Portugal was the only European country that openly refused to join the Continental system. After the Treaties of Tilsit of July 1807, Napoleon attempted to capture the Portuguese Fleet and the House of Braganza, to occupy the Portuguese ports and to expel the British from Portuguese soil, and failed. King John VI of Portugal took his fleet and fled to Brazil with a Royal Navy escort. The Portuguese population rose in revolt against the French invaders, the Duke of Wellington's British Army intervened and the Peninsular War began in 1808.

Ultimately the embargo failed. Its effect on Great Britain and on British trade is uncertain, but the embargo is thought to have been more harmful on the continental European states. Russia in particular chafed under the embargo, and in 1812, that country reopened trade with Britain, provoking Napoleon's invasion of Russia. The disaster of the march on Moscow would lead to Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Nations in 1813 and his abdication in 1814.

After an initial forced exile on the island of Elba, Napoleon briefly returned to power (the Hundred Days of 1815), but the imperial dream was finally crushed by the defeat of Waterloo and Napoleon was definitively exiled to the island of Saint Helena in the south Atlantic.

The Restoration

Following the ouster of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1814, the Allies restored the Bourbon Dynasty to the French throne. The ensuing period is called in French "The Restoration" and is characterized by a sharp conservative reaction and the re-establishment of the Roman Catholic Church as a power in French politics. Louis XVIII, brother of the deposed Louis XVI, ruled from 1814-1824 and was succeeded by his brother Charles X in 1824.

Despite the return of the House of Bourbon to power, France was much changed from the era of the Ancien Regime. The egalitarianism and liberalism of the revolutionaries remained an important force and the autocracy and hierarchy of the earlier era could not be fully restored. The economic changes, which had been underway long before the revolution, had been further enhanced during the years of turmoil and were firmly entrenched by 1815. These changes had seen power shift from the noble landowners to the urban merchants. The administrative reforms of Napoleon, such as the Napoleonic Code and efficient bureaucracy, also remained in place. These changes produced a unified central government that was fiscally sound and had much control over all areas of French life, a sharp difference from the situation the Bourbons had faced before the Revolution.

Louis XVIII, for the most part, accepted that much had changed and pursued a moderate course while in power. Charles X of France, however, took a far more conservative line. He attempted to compensate the aristocrats for what they had lost in the revolution, curbed the freedom of the press, and reasserted the power of the church. In 1830 the discontent caused by these changes culminated in an uprising in the streets of Paris, known as the July Revolution. Charles was forced to flee and a member of the Orl?ns branch of the family, Louis-Philippe d'Orl?ns, ascended the throne, and ruled, not as "King of France" but as "King of the French" (an evocative difference for contemporaries).