Introduction

Arguably no figure in the modern world better personifies the agonies and ecstasies of empire than Napoleon Bonaparte. With his stunning military victories over the various coalitions of European powers; his liberalizing reforms of the Continental legal system; and his advocacy of religious toleration for Jews, Catholics, and Protestants, Bonaparte can plausibly be construed as the architect of a uniquely modern vision of empire that promised legal emancipation and civilization to all those falling under its power. Nonetheless, the emperor's insatiable lust for conquest and the devastation his military campaigns wrought on the peoples of Europe, Russia, and the Middle East cast him in a much less flattering light. His personal legacy is every bit as multivalent as the peculiar brand of imperialism he ushered onto the political stage in the nineteenth century.

What is even more confounding are the wildly disparate responses Bonaparte elicited from contemporaries – republicans, liberals, and monarchists alike. Among the emperor's many observers, Alexis de Tocqueville captures this ambivalence as well as any commentator in the first half of the nineteenth century. Tocqueville is usually cast alongside early nineteenth-century French liberals such as Benjamin Constant and Germaine de Staël as a trenchant critic of Bonaparte's despotic rule. There is undeniable truth to this characterization, as we will see, but in this chapter I want to complicate the standard view of Tocqueville as a whole-hearted critic of Bonapartism.