Napoleon: what he founded, what he restored

He was born in Ajaccio on 15 August 1769. Brienne at nine, then the École militaire in Paris, which he left ranked forty-second out of fifty-eight. At twenty-four, after the siege of Toulon, he was made a brigadier general. At thirty he took power: on 9 and 10 November 1799, the coup of 18-19 Brumaire, Year VIII, made him provisional consul.

The rest fits into fifteen years. Emperor of the French on 18 May 1804, crowned on 2 December, Austerlitz a year to the day after the coronation. Then Russia in 1812, Leipzig in 1813, the abdication of 6 April 1814, Elba, the return in March 1815, Waterloo on 18 June. He died on Saint Helena on 5 May 1821.

Before the battles, the offices. The Banque de France was created on 13 February 1800, the prefects instituted four days later. The Concordat was signed with Rome on 15 July 1801, the lycées created on 1 May 1802, the Légion d’honneur on 19 May. Almost all of it is still there.

The Civil Code was promulgated on 21 March 1804, after work opened on 12 August 1800: 2,281 articles replacing custom. He is credited, on Saint Helena, with a line in which his true glory is not his forty battles but his Code. It circulates everywhere, and no document of his reign carries it: it is a sentence of captivity, reported by others. The fact underneath holds, though: most of the Code is still in force.

On 16 Pluviôse, Year II (4 February 1794), the Convention had abolished slavery in every colony. Eight years later the law of 30 Floréal, Year X, that is 20 May 1802, did the opposite. Article 1: in the colonies returned to France by the Treaty of Amiens, slavery “shall be maintained in conformity with the laws and regulations in force before 1789” (our translation of the French text). Article 3 reopened the slave trade.

An order of 16 July 1802 extended it to Guadeloupe. Then came the ban on Black people and people of colour entering mainland France, on 25 June 1802, and a circular of 8 January 1803 against mixed marriages. In Saint-Domingue the insurrection broke out: the French army was beaten at Vertières on 18 November 1803, and the colony became Haiti on 1 January 1804.

He was not short. The measurement taken after his death by his doctor Antommarchi, assisted by his valet Marchand, gives “5 pieds, 2 pouces, 4 lignes”, which in French units is 1.686 m. The English upholsterer Andrew Darling, who measured the body himself, noted 1.70 m. “Little Boney” is an invention of the British caricaturists: in 1803 Gillray put him, sabre drawn, in the hand of a giant George III.

He did not write the Civil Code. The men who did have names: Portalis, Tronchet, Bigot de Préameneu, Maleville, Cambacérès. The Revolution had tried several times without finishing; Bonaparte attended working sessions, arbitrated, and promulgated. The text became the Code Napoléon only in 1807.

He did not speak broken French. At home in Ajaccio, Corsican was spoken. When he reached the college of Autun at nine and a half, he needed four months of catching up, from January to April 1778. By ten he was bilingual, with a certain accent and the odd Italianism. What never left him was the spelling: it stayed erratic all his life, and he wrote otorizé for autorisé.

No man has ever left this much paper. From 2004 to 2018 the Fondation Napoléon published his Correspondance générale: fifteen volumes, 40,497 letters from 223 archive collections, 58 per cent of them absent from the Second Empire edition. It is the base of what gets written today.

Against it stands the account he composed himself. On Saint Helena, the comte de Las Cases took down his conversations; expelled from the island on 31 December 1816, he had his papers seized, and Colonial Office clerks copied them whole before returning them. That copy lay in the British Library until Peter Hicks found it there in 2005. Set beside the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène published in 1823, it shows a reworked text. The book that made the legend is not the notebook.

On 1802, historians do not say the same thing. Yves Bénot, in La Démence coloniale sous Napoléon (1992), insists on how little creative imagination that colonial policy had: remaking the Ancien Régime, no more and no less. Pierre Branda and Thierry Lentz, in Napoléon, l’esclavage et les colonies (2006), see a decision as pragmatic as it was inhuman, and a vast blunder; they count the embarrassment of historians among the reasons this side of the reign stayed in the shade. Same texts, same dates: what they argue over is the intention.