Building on the Directory’s conscription law of September 1798, the Napoleonic regime, after considerable trial and error, had created the mechanisms for imposing on the citizens of France and the annexed territories the distasteful obligation of military service. Each year the Ministry of War Administration assigned a quota of conscripts for every département. Using communal birth registers, the mayor of each commune compiled a list of men reaching the age of 19 that year. After a preliminary examination to screen out the manifestly unfit and those below the minimum height of 5 feet 1 inch (1.5 metres), the young men drew numbers in a lottery at the cantonal seat. Doctors in the departmental capitals later ruled on other claims for medical exemptions, and in all about a third of the youths avoided military service legally as physically unfit. Though married men were not exempt from the draft, two other means of avoiding induction remained, apart from drawing a high number: the wealthy could purchase a replacement, and the poor could flee.
For Napoleon’s prefects, the annual conscription levy was the top priority and draft evasion the number-one problem in most départements. Persistence, routine stepped-up policing, and coercion gradually overcame the chronic resistance. Napoleon had begun by drafting 60,000 Frenchmen annually, but by 1810 the quota hit 120,000, and the first of many “supplementary levies” was decreed to call up men from earlier classes who had drawn high numbers. In January 1813, after the Russian disaster, Napoleon replenished his armies by calling up the class of 1814 a year early and by repeated supplementary levies. Because he could still rely on his conscription machine, Napoleon consistently rebuffed offers by the allies to negotiate peace. Only after he lost the decisive Battle of Leipzig in October 1813 and was driven back across the Rhine did the machine break down. His call of November 1813 for 300,000 more men went largely unfilled. With the troops at his disposal, the emperor fought the Battle of France skillfully, but he could not stop the allies. Shortly after Paris fell, he abdicated, on April 6, 1814, and departed for the island of Elba. France was reduced to its 1792 borders, and the Bourbons returned to the throne. Altogether—along with large levies of Italians, Germans, and other foreigners from the annexed territories and satellite states—nearly 2,500,000 Frenchmen had been drafted by Napoleon, and at least 1,000,000 of these conscripts never returned, roughly half that number being casualties and the other half imprisoned or missing.
The most sympathetic explanation for Napoleon’s relentless aggression holds that he was responding to the irreducible antagonism of Britain: French power and glory were the only antidotes to John Bull’s arrogance. Others have argued that Napoleon’s vendetta against Britain was merely a rationalization for a mad 10-year chase across Europe to establish a new version of Charlemagne’s empire. This “imperial design” thesis, however, makes sense only in 1810, as a way Napoleon might have organized his conquests and not as the motivation for them. (Only retrospectively did Napoleon write, “There will be no repose for Europe until she is under only one Head…an Emperor who should distribute kingdoms among his lieutenants.”) In the end, one is thrown back on the explanation of temperament. In his combination of pragmatism and insatiable ambition, this world-historic figure remains an enigma. Increasingly “aristocratic” at home and “imperial” abroad, Napoleon was obviously something more than the “general of the Revolution.” And yet, with civil code in one hand and sabre in the other, Napoleon could still be seen by Europeans as a personification on both counts of the French Revolution’s explosive force. Napoleon and the Revolution
The Revolutionary legacy for Napoleon consisted above all in the abolition of the ancien régime’s most archaic features—“feudalism,” seigneurialism, legal privileges, and provincial liberties. No matter how aristocratic his style became, he had no use for the ineffective institutions and abuses of the ancien régime. Napoleon was “modern” in temperament as well as destructively aggressive. But in either guise he was an authoritarian, with little patience for argument, who profited from the Revolution’s clearing operations to construct and mobilize in his own fashion. His concept of reform exaggerated the Revolution’s emphasis on uniformity and centralization. Napoleon also accepted the Revolutionary principles of civil equality and equality of opportunity, meaning the recognition of merit. Other rights and liberties did not seem essential. Unlike others before him who had tried and failed, Napoleon terminated the Revolution, but at the price of suppressing the electoral process and partisan politics altogether. Toward the end of the empire, his centralizing vision took over completely, reinforcing his personal will to power. France was merely a launching pad for Napoleon’s boundless military and imperial ambition, its prime function being to raise men and money for war. In utter contrast to the Revolution, then, militarism became the defining quality of the Napoleonic regime.
Napoleon’s ambiguous legacy helps explain the dizzying events that shook France in 1814 and 1815. Even before Napoleon’s abdication, the Imperial Senate, led by the former foreign minister Talleyrand, had begun negotiations with the allies to ensure a transition to a regime that would protect the positions of those who had gained from the Revolution and the Napoleonic period. Louis XVI’s long-exiled brother was allowed to return as King Louis XVIII, but he had to agree to rule under a constitution (called the Charter) that provided for legislative control over budgets and taxes and guaranteed basic liberties. However, the Bourbons alienated the officer corps by retiring many at half pay and frightened many citizens by not making clear how much of their property and power the church and émigrés would regain. As the anti-Napoleonic allies argued among themselves about the spoils of war, Napoleon slipped back to France for a last adventure, believing that he could reach Paris without firing a shot. At various points along the way, troops disobeyed royalist officers and rallied to the emperor, while Louis fled the country. Between March and June 1815—a period known as the Hundred Days—Napoleon again ruled France. Contrary to his expectation, however, the allies patched up their differences and were determined to rout “the usurper.” At the Battle of Waterloo (June 18, 1815) British and Prussian forces defeated Napoleon’s army decisively, and he abdicated again a few days later. Placed on the remote island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic, he died in 1821. The “Napoleonic legend”—the retrospective version of events created by Napoleon during his exile—burnished his image in France for decades to come. But in the final analysis Napoleon’s impact on future generations was not nearly as powerful as the legacy of the French Revolution itself. Isser Woloch Jeremy David Popkin France, 1815–1940 The restoration and constitutional monarchy Constitutionalism and reaction, 1815–30 Louis XVIII, 1815–24
King Louis XVIII’s second return from exile was far from glorious. Neither the victorious powers nor Louis’s French subjects viewed his restoration with much enthusiasm, yet there seemed to be no ready alternative to Bourbon rule. The allies avenged themselves for the Hundred Days by writing a new and more severe Paris" class="md-crosslink">Treaty of Paris. France lost several frontier territories, notably the Saar basin and Savoy (Savoie), that had been annexed in 1789–92; a war indemnity of 700 million francs was imposed; and, pending full payment, eastern France was to be occupied by allied troops at French expense.