Napoleon at Peace: How to End a Revolution

(Hardback)

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The French Revolution facilitated the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, but after gaining power he knew that his first task was to end it. In this book William Doyle describes how he did so, beginning with the three large issues that had destabilized revolutionary France: war, religion and monarchy. Doyle shows how, as First Consul of the Republic, Napoleon resolved these issues: first by winning the war, then by forging peace with the Church and finally by making himself a monarch. Napoleon at Peace ends by discussing Napoleon's one great failure - his attempt to restore the colonial empire destroyed by war and slave rebellion. By the time this was abandoned, the fragile peace with Britain had broken down, and the Napoleonic wars had begun.

Reviews

"Americans have long had a love-hate relationship with Napoleon Bonaparte. . . . There is Napoleon the genius general, whose swift and daring actions enabled him to conquer an entire continent. But there is also the Napoleon who spilled the blood of his men en masse and recklessly challenged all the nations of Europe, only to meet his final defeat at Waterloo. In his recent work, Napoleon at Peace, Bristol University historian William Doyle, a scholar well known for his revisionist histories of France, presents a unique and revolutionary version of Napoleon Bonaparte: that of Napoleon as peacemaker."-- "VoegelinView"
"To be sure, the French Revolution made Napoleon: officer commissions were no longer limited to nobility; the Corsican cultivated his celebrity with new forms of battle-focused propaganda; and, with great foresight, he appealed to le peuple, the emergent and dominating authority in politics. Many posit Napoleon's coup d'tat of 18 Brumaire (November 9, 1799) to be the end of the French Revolution, but, as Doyle argues in Napoleon at Peace, the 'popular genera'--to borrow a term from Burke--spent
three more years ending the Revolution's wars on European kingdoms, on religion, and on monarchic authority, ultimately gaining one year of true peace before war broke out again in 1803."-- "New Criterion"
"Napoleon at Peace has interesting and important things to say. . . . Written with the sort of lan that would inspire envy in a squadron of cavalry, Doyle's book provides a scholarly and succinct account of General Bonaparte's unmaking of the French Revolution and his own remaking as an absolute prince."-- "Literary Review"

Author Bio

William Doyle is Emeritus Professor of History and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His many books include The Oxford History of the French Revolution (1989, third edition 2018).