Napoleon: from the shadow of the Caesars to the creation of modern Caesarism?

The influence of antiquity on the French revolutionaries was ubiquitous and all-powerful. It made the invocation of the Caesars and the history of the late Roman Republic inevitable as their revolution unfolded, for they were the revolutionaries’ only guide when trying to grasp the nature of their times. This article explores two main questions. The first examines the influence of the historical examples of the first two Caesars, Julius and Octavian, both on the political culture of the French Republic that Napoleon seized control of in 1799, and on the development of Napoleon’s career. It thus assesses the nature and the degree of influence that these historical tropes had on the man and his times, it explores the perception of this aspect of the Roman past among the generation of the French political elites of the revolutionary period, and it examines how this perception of the Roman past translated into practical politics in Napoleon’s approach.Footnote ¹ To this end, the article is divided into two sections: the first on the influence of Julius Caesar, the second on that of Octavian. It should be emphasized that this is an analysis of the perceptions of the Caesars by men of the times, and is in no way an attempt to assess the actual historical accuracy of these perceptions, which would be beyond the author’s competence.

The second, if less extensive, question concerns the contribution to the development of modern Caesarism of Napoleon’s engagement with the historical example of the first two Caesars. In this respect, the following pages ask how this aspect of the classical heritage contributed to Caesarism as the nineteenth century came to know it, and assess its place in this context.

The underlying premise of this study is that Caesarism was still very much an embryonic concept in revolutionary and Napoleonic France, in terms of what Caesarism subsequently became in the century after 1815.Footnote ² Markus J. Prutsch sees postrevolutionary Caesarism as encapsulated by “the possibility of ‘democratic dictatorship’” deriving from the tension between the two, but held together by Max Weber’s concept of charismatic leadership, manifested through a “dynamic bond” between a mass electorate and the leader.Footnote ³ However, this article also contends that in the course of the revolutionary decade of the 1790s and the Napoleonic regimes, from 1799 to 1815, the French political elites evolved their own clearly perceived concept of Caesarism, derived wholly from their own experience of revolution, a phenomenon they often interpreted through the history of the late Roman Republic.

In her seminal study of the ideology of the French Revolution, L’homme régénéré, the great French scholar Mona Ozouf argued that the revolutionaries “resigned themselves very quickly … [to the fact] that their Antiquity of reference was less that of history, than that of a Utopia,” so great was the gap in time between themselves and the classical past. Therefore they saw their lived political experience as wholly unique.Footnote ⁴ This article does not in the least seek to undermine or contradict the essence of Ozouf’s insight. Ozouf’s concept of the revolution as a complete break with the past (at least in the eyes of its creators) offers an important nuance to the present argument, and a vital reminder that not only the trope of the Caesars, but the whole historical example of ancient Rome, is but one strand among many in the ideological heritage of the revolution. Revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries alike shared the view that their generation’s experience was unique in history, to the point that it was almost impossible to communicate it either to their fathers or to their sons. Napoleon himself expressed this view, and he spoke for his generation,Footnote ⁵ as did his intellectual nemesis, Réné de Chateaubriand, for whom, as Peter Fritzsche has said, even the recent past had been permanently lost through the violence of the revolution.Footnote ⁶ However, this article contends that the late Roman Republic, as the revolutionaries perceived it, had a powerful influence on their practical, political behavior, which increased as the revolutionary decade progressed. It became an agent that those in power took incessant account of, if only to avoid its repetition. “By the end of the decade of revolution, French people … had learned a new political repertoire: ideology appeared as a concept,” in the words of the American scholar Lynn Hunt.Footnote ⁷ Caesarism was one such ideology. It emerged from a generation’s sense of the classical past made relevant by their own traumas, but it was transformed by the events of the revolution. In the process, the Roman Republic became a source of political agency in their hands. The fall of that republic became a morality tale for the French revolutionaries.

Napoleon and the legacy of the revolutionary decade: in the shadow of Julius?

Like all educated men of his times, Napoleon was haunted not just by the historical example of Caesar, but also by the life and death of the Roman Republic. However, Napoleon felt not just the weight of historical precedent around him, as did all the French revolutionaries, but something far more personal and perilous, as his rise to prominence and power accelerated. As his career increasingly risked comparison with that of Julius Caesar, so his fate—assassination—quite literally came to lurk around every corner, real and symbolic, that Napoleon had to turn in the early years of his public life. His every step from young general, to de facto provincial proconsul in the Cisalpine Republic, to first consul, to emperor of the French, was less inspired by Julius Caesar than dogged by his legacy. The revolutionaries had already killed a king; it seemed most unlikely they would hesitate to kill a would-be usurper. Napoleon was imbued with a fear of Caesarism, even as he became its precursor in the eyes of many.

For the makers of the French Revolution, by whom Napoleon was enthralled and to whom he was indebted, Julius Caesar was nothing short of a nightmare. He had long had a “bad press.” The British classical scholar Maria Wyke has traced a line from “the violent debates about republicanism” in Renaissance Italy, where Caesar was cast as a tyrannical usurper, to the revolutionary era of the late eighteenth century in the Atlantic world, where “Caesar [became] ever more villainous.”Footnote ⁸ Voltaire wrote two rabidly anti- Caesarian plays, Brutus and Mort de César. “The shrill cry of ‘justice’ rather than grace could be heard well before the Revolution,” in the words of Emmet Kennedy, the American scholar of the cultural history of the Revolution, who went on to add, “the Revolution made those (shrill) voices its own: at the height of the Terror, the Committee of Public Safety ordered the weekly performance of both Voltaire’s plays.”Footnote ⁹

With the outbreak of war against most of the crowned heads of Europe in 1792, and the injection of militarism into the revolution, Caesar became the model for the ambitious general prophesized by Edmund Burke as early as 1790, whose apocalyptic coming they all dreaded: he who would turn his legions on Paris, and bring down the Republic. The war brought Julius Caesar back to life. After the start of the War of the First Coalition in 1792, the list of potential candidates for the role of Julius Caesar grew apace: Lafayette, Custine, Dumouriez, and, under the Directory, a galaxy of “Caesars-in-the-making,” made all the more lethal by their successes on the battlefield, which earlier commanders had never matched, and the power and independence given them by their control of the foreign conquests they made between 1795 and 1798. Napoleon was but one of this cohort, which included Moreau, Joubert, Hoche, Bernadotte, and Masséna. As the civilian politicians who plotted Brumaire pondered who would be their “sword,” as Sieyès put it, they deliberately sought he who was most unlike Caesar, he who seemed to have the least pro-royalist inclination. It was no coincidence that their first choices fell on Hoche, Joubert, and Moreau—ultimately because they were not likely Caesars. Hoche and Joubert were removed by death; Moreau declined the invitation, and recommended Bonaparte, as a good republican. The coup of Fructidor year V—September 1797—had already established Napoleon’s republican credentials and helped pave the way for his inclusion in the coup of Brumaire, two years later, which ultimately led him to power. The left-leaning directors and deputies had turned to him to purge the assemblies and the executive of the royalists who had won the recent elections, and he duly obliged. Essentially, Napoleon was called upon to save the Republic and help reform it in 1799 precisely because he was not Caesar.

Fructidor was the first instance to date in which the army had intervened directly in politics; it had done so in the name of the Republic, but its potential to effect regime change was now clear for all to see. In the political climate of the post-Fructidor Directory, Caesarism changed from a readily discernible political category into a mechanism in revolutionary political culture; there was nothing theoretical about it now. In the autumn of 1800, almost a year into the new Consular regime, a pamphlet appeared in Paris—purporting to be a translation of a larger work published in England—entitled Parallèle entre César, Cromwell, Monck et Bonaparte. In the course of detailing what made Napoleon so utterly different from Julius Caesar, the anonymous author, inadvertently or not, drew a clear definition of Caesarism in the context of the times:

Napoleon was, of course, the antithesis of all this in the eyes of the pamphleteer. Yet what really emerges here is the essence of the revolutionary Caesar: his ability to rally the forces of urban populism to himself through rabble-rousing oratory, to emerge as a new Robespierre and rally the sans-culottes, but equally—and this is the new element introduced by the war, now in its eighth year—his capacity to command the loyalty of his troops and use them in conjunction with the Parisian popular movement. The populist demagogue had been feared as a threat to the revolution almost from the outset; that of the military usurper was present from the beginning of the war. By the dying days of the Directory, the fusion of the two had emerged as the Republic’s most dread spectre, and Julius Caesar was the obvious historical precedent to invoke. From Fructidor onwards, although the menace of the sans-culottes may have receded, the army emerged as a potent threat, if it had at its head a commander who was both ambitious and able in equal measure. That moment seemed to have passed for Napoleon after his failure in Egypt in 1798, and had not improved by the time the coup of Brumaire overthrew the Directory in late 1799. But after his victories in the second Italian campaign, it appeared to many that he had repositioned himself as a potential Caesar, both politically and militarily. Napoleon’s recent French biographer, Patrice Gueniffey, notes that Napoleon took a real risk soon after Brumaire, when he moved the seat of the Consulate from the Luxembourg Palace, because it lacked the grandeur required for the residence of a head of state, to the former royal residence of the Tuileries. Gueniffey cites Adolphe Thiers, the French statesman of the mid-nineteenth century, to telling effect: “opinion was disposed to see in him a Caesar or a Cromwell … this relocation to the royal palace was a hazardous and delicate step to take, not because of the resistance it might provoke, but for the moral effect it was capable of producing.”Footnote ¹¹

To be identified with Julius Caesar was, in every sense, “the kiss of death.” That close identification was something Napoleon could not shake off as first consul. Even the author of the Parallèle did not attempt to deny the real similarities in their military careers. In so doing, he unwittingly revealed that the potential threat Napoleon posed to the revolution could not be dispelled: he could use his legions to overthrow the Republic with or without the masses, according to this vision, whether to crush the left or the right, or both. The specter of Caesar was anathema to all shades of opinion. During the Directory, the right-wing press, centered on the monarchist and antiwar Clichy Club, drew constant comparisons between “Buonaparte” and Julius Caesar, “but in a sarcastic manner” according to the Franco-Dutch historian Annie Jourdan, depicting him as a myth maker, whose accounts of his exploits in Italy were exaggerated, as were Caesar’s in Gaul in his memoirs. Newspapers like the royalist La Quotidienne portrayed him not as a Jacobin, but as two-faced, cynical, and out only for himself—but with an army at his back, a tone that grew stronger after Fructidor.Footnote ¹²

The Julian trope was something all too real for Napoleon on his path to power; it was not confined to the corridors of power. It was brutal. There were scores (possibly well over a hundred) of potential “Ides of March” in the early years of Napoleon’s rule. The parallel lives of Napoleon and Caesar did not go unremarked, even among his supporters. Most were risible; some—most infamously that of the “infernal machine” that almost killed him on his way to the Opéra on 24 December 1800—were all too deadly. The work of royalists, it was blamed on the Jacobins. François-Denis Tronchet, a “Bonapartist of the first hour,” said at this time, “he has begun like Caesar, and he will end like him.”Footnote ¹³ In this climate, Napoleon ruthlessly sacked his brother, Lucien, from his post of minister of the interior (October 1800) over his approval of the Parallèle, a pamphlet he may have written. Although its whole purpose was to refute any analogy between Napoleon and Caesar as politicians—a point insisted on by Lucien in a stormy interview with his brother—Napoleon’s rage was provoked by the fear that even the mention of the subject could undo him. The incident saw Lucien dispatched to Madrid as ambassador to Spain. Julius Caesar was a dread specter for Napoleon in his early years in power, even to the point of depriving himself of the services of Lucien, who had recently proved himself so useful, both by his timely actions during the coup of Brumaire, and in his selection of Napoleon’s first cohort of prefects, excellent choices made possible by his numerous political contacts and astute networking.

Whatever Caesarean ambitions Napoleon may have harbored either before or after his seizure of power, he had precious little hope of realizing them and staying alive, irrespective of fears the political classes themselves might have had about him. Indeed, the historical parallel between the political circumstances of Napoleon and those of Julius Caesar at this stage is almost eerie. Napoleon, however, had the example of Julius Caesar before him, and took careful note of it in all he did. He had to, for his standing with the army in these years did not match that of the myth of the great commander loved by his troops that he cultivated so assiduously and that was so readily believed by acolytes and opponents alike, then and now. For many of those who had served with him in Egypt, but not previously in Italy, Napoleon was regarded as an incompetent commander and a duplicitous comrade, having, in their eyes, deserted the army and returned to France, after the disastrous Syrian campaign. Napoleon needed the successes of the second Italian campaign of 1800 and his subsequent reconstitution of the army in the Channel camps between 1802 and 1805 to rebuild his reputation with many of his own commanders. Even as his reputation as a statesman grew in the civic sphere, with the Peace of Amiens in 1802 and the realization of a raft of domestic reforms that remolded the French state, Napoleon had to tread carefully with many sectors of the army. The distrust of some in the high command was matched by the untested, potentially volatile, composition of the largely new army he assembled in the Channel camps. Worn out by almost a decade of constant war, much of the army of the French Revolution—an amalgamation of new, pro-revolutionary volunteers and former professionals of the pre-1789 royal army—was now filled in by recruits, most forcibly conscripted from peasant communities often hostile to the revolution. It was a tribute to Napoleon’s qualities of leadership that he molded them into a loyal, highly trained, and motivated fighting force that he went on to lead in the conquest of Western Europe: this was his Grande Armée, a creation he always regarded as one of his greatest achievements. His ability to shape and command the Grande Armée came to form the major, most enduring component of the “Napoleonic myth,” just as the capacity to win the army’s loyalty through a blend of effective command and charismatic leadership became one of the pillars of Caesarism in the nineteenth century and beyond. However, at the time, this could not be taken for granted. Napoleon’s own caution over the reliability of his own troops is seen in his handling of his plans to become emperor in 1804.

Whereas his use of plebiscites in the civilian sphere during his early years in power was cavalier, to say the least, often blatantly rigged and held “after the event,” his balloting of the Grande Armée over the question—directly posed to it—whether Napoleon should be awarded the title of hereditary emperor was assiduously fair and scrupulously accurate. The basic units of the army, the ordinaries, were consulted by their NCOs for their responses to the question; their answers were forwarded to the middle-ranking officers, who then drew up petitions, the overwhelming majority of which favored the proposition. The petitions of the camps of St Omer and Montreuil—only two of the six camps of the future Grande Armée—numbered more than 21,000 signatures.Footnote ¹⁴ Only then did Napoleon feel secure. Napoleon had, indeed, become Julius Caesar to his men, but he did not feel confident until he knew their collective opinion. The final petition looked forward to a more secure future, but one clause took a backward glance: “Henceforth the French armies will march to victory only under the banners of Buonaparte.”Footnote ¹⁵ The American scholar Isser Woloch is right that the petition represented an unprecedented military intervention in the affairs of state.Footnote ¹⁶ As such, it can be seen as a harbinger of Caesarism and might be claimed as the first pronunciamiento of the nineteenth century. However, by harnessing the loyalty of the army to one commander alone—the current head of state—it represents a concerted attempt to put paid to the nascent Caesarism of the 1790s, so deeply reflected in the annals of both late republican and imperial Rome, a political culture of independent generals scrambling for the dictatorship or the imperial crown.

Henceforth, Napoleon had no need to fear his own troops, but this is not to say that he had ceased to fear Caesarism, or that he believed that his successes in government or on the battlefield had made it disappear from the political landscape. Far from it. He continued to dread the specter of a military coup against him, as much, if not more, than had the politicians of the revolutionary decade. Put plainly, he knew it could happen to him if he was not careful. He had, however, learnt the lessons of the revolution well, and neutralized the two main founts of Caesarism as perceived by his generation. A major component of his rebuilding of the army in the Channel camps was the creation of his personal elite “army-within-the-army,” the Consular, then Imperial, Guard, drawn from the best individual soldiers from across the Grande Armée. Napoleon never entrusted its overall command to anyone other than himself, and it was the only unit of the army ever allowed into Paris. Any would-be usurper would have to confront it with inferior troops to take the capital.

The other prong of revolutionary Caesarism had been the Parisian popular movement. It had been disarmed and effectively emasculated as an armed threat shortly after the fall of Robespierre in August 1794. Nevertheless, its potential for disorder remained a constant fear during the Directory, and for Napoleon. The popular classes of Paris were always appeased by Napoleon, and seldom coerced, in stark contrast to the tactics of the Directory. Napoleon viewed Paris, the “new Rome,” with a mixture of affection, fear, and loathing. He always ensured that its markets were well provisioned and that their produce was affordable; and he was usually reluctant to be ruthless with public servants (early in his rule he had unceremoniously sacked Lucien’s successor as minister of the interior, Jean-Antoine Chaptal, for failing to ensure the city’s food supply during a shortage in 1803). During the economic crisis of 1810–11, he provided public works specifically for the struggling artisans of the eastern quarters of the city—the heartland of revolutionary disorder and the recruiting ground for the rank and file of rebellion. Idle hands were kept occupied and well paid for restoring the derelict palace of Versailles, surely among the greatest ironies in history. Contracts for saddles, gun carriages, boots, and uniforms for the army came their way in abundance, as Napoleon readied for war against Russia. While the rest of his empire was crushed under the weight of pitiless conscription for the mammoth task of invading Russia, Paris—as had always been the case under Napoleon—enjoyed deliberately light conscription quotas. Instead, the Imperial Guard scoured the surrounding countryside for food to ensure that the capital was well provisioned in his absence. Napoleon almost always entered Paris from the east, knowing he would find a warm welcome in the old sans-culotte heartlands, yet even in the darkest hours of 1814 and 1815, with the Allied armies swarming around him, Napoleon refused to arm the people of Paris, fearing a return to mob rule that he could not control, but that someone else might.

Deeply fearful of Caesarism, Napoleon still became an active proponent of it, lavishly rewarding his soldiers, especially his commanders, and dealing with the popular classes of his capital more as a populist than an authoritarian ruler. Caesarism in its Julian form was something he succumbed to out of fear, rather than being something he embraced as a vehicle to power. He had to deploy the Guard and populist economics because the very nature of his regime, its origins and the roots of its power, denied him recourse to traditional paternalism and revolutionary democracy as sources of legitimacy. Conventional legitimacy, whether from left or right, eluded the Napoleonic regime. In the political climate created by the combination of revolution and war, Caesarism—defined as military usurpation with the backing of anarchic popular support—remained a real threat. As long as Napoleon had no indisputable heir, as was the case until 1811, there was always the prospect that a coterie of marshals might attempt to seize power should he die, given their disdain for his brothers. The Julian model of Caesarism was a real danger to Napoleon, particularly in the early years of his rule, and even later it lurked in the shadows.

Napoleon in power: in the footsteps of Octavian?

The trope of Julius Caesar had been an obstacle Napoleon had been forced to navigate around for fear, quite literally, of his own life during his rise to power and his first, dangerous years as first consul. When still a general of the Republic, his reputation as a commander had shone brighter when set beside Julius Caesar’s military exploits. This circumstance did him much good with a Parisian bourgeois public and even with a wary political class, desperate for military success against a powerful European coalition. However, the closer he came to the seat of power, roughly from the coup of Fructidor in 1797 until his coronation as emperor in 1804, the example of Julius Caesar stirred in many within the elites the specter of a new Custine or Dumouriez, this time not outside Paris, but firmly in their midst. Lucien Bonaparte made this point in his memoir of the coup of Brumaire, written in the 1840s, long after the fall of the regime, when he recalled that the French asked themselves whether, at the dawn of their new history, of the new world they had carved out of the revolution, a Cromwell, a Washington, a Monck, or a Caesar had appeared among them in the person of Napoleon.Footnote ¹⁷ Some asked it quite aggressively, notably that group of veteran politicians of the revolutionary center, known collectively as the Idéologues, many of whom were inside the regime, as members of the Tribunate—one of the three houses of the French parliament created in 1799—whose impotent opposition to the Concordat revealed to them “their weak grip on public affairs,” but who were still in a position to influence public opinion.Footnote ¹⁸ This was an attack from the establishment, not from either political extreme. It was not violent, but it was all the more menacing because it came—like the final blow against Julius Caesar—from the heart of the state, and in the course of their diatribes the Idéologues made all too frequent reference to Caesar, “too charged with military connotations to be useful to the new politics the Consulate wanted to initiate.”Footnote ¹⁹

The first step in Napoleon’s mediated campaign to take power was to divest himself of that most demonstrative sign of modern Caesarism: militarism. Following his return from Egypt, Napoleon sought to “demilitarize” his personal image before the Parisian public and the political classes. Napoleon presented himself to the educated public not as a conquering hero—for he was not, at the moment—but as an intellectual, a man of the Enlightenment. He cultivated the French intelligentsia and academe, dwelling on his scientific interests in Egypt, rather than on his military and political actions. He dressed in civilian clothes, avoided the cheers of the crowd, and went out only to the theatre, or to look at the elephants in the Jardin des plantes. He cultivated the image of “the most civilian of the generals,” and told all who would listen that he sought only obscurity and to serve quietly, while Josephine told all who passed not to believe a word of it. Napoleon also drew a sharp contrast between himself and his late rival, Hoche, “a man who would have marched from Strasbourg at the head of 25,000 men to seize the government by force, whereas me, I have only ever wanted patient politics, always conducted according to the spirit of the time and the circumstances of the moment.”Footnote ²⁰ As so often with Napoleon, this was something that was true and untrue at once. However, it had clear echoes of Suetonius’ portrait of Octavian, who in his consulship “commonly went through the streets on foot,” became annoyed when people addressed him with obsequious titles, and “met the requests of those who approached him with great affability.”Footnote ²¹ Both men were ostentatious in their modesty. A different classical trope was emerging.

As Napoleon moved closer to the apex of power, particularly after his success as a peacemaker—the first in the history of the Revolution—with the Peace of Amiens in 1802, and as he sought to establish the regime on more stable foundations than the army or urban populism, he needed to divest himself of Julius Caesar, more than ever. Napoleon’s own commentaries on Caesar’s wars, written about this time, but unpublished until 1836, were careful to be critical of Caesar’s failings as a politician.Footnote ²² His close collaborator, Louis Roederer, recalled “the doubts that still haunted Bonaparte,” in the years between Brumaire in 1799 and the creation of the empire in 1804: he was “still haunted by the ghosts of Brutus and Caesar, by the heroes of his youth who spoke to him of the liberty of Rome, stifled by the ambitions of a military genius.”Footnote ²³ Immediately before and after his coronation as emperor, Napoleon and his collaborators turned to Charlemagne as a historical reference to sidestep this. It was deployed to scotch the Tribunate’s “bad-humoured, grumbling, baseless” opposition to the Concordat in 1801. Charlemagne was deployed to portray Napoleon as a defender of traditional French rights against the papacy.Footnote ²⁴ In 1804, in the final petition of the army, composed by Napoleon’s chief of staff, Étienne-Alexandre Berthier asked, “The title of Emperor that Charlemagne carried, does it not belong by right to the man who recalls it in our eyes as a legislator and warrior?”Footnote ²⁵ In the words of Luigi Mascilli Migliorini, “it is not by chance that the figure most often invoked in the literature of the Consulate is that of Charlemagne, symbol of an extraordinary transition from the old to the new,” which relegated Julius Caesar to the shadows.Footnote ²⁶ Roederer said it was the reason he advised Napoleon to take the title of emperor in 1804: it was European, not merely French; it placed him above kings, past and present; and “it assimilates you to Charlemagne” and, by implication, not to Caesar.Footnote ²⁷ As Roederer pointed out to Napoleon, Charlemagne was a “European title” for a polity that by 1804 embraced far more than France itself. Over the next ten years, this was how the legacy of Charlemagne tended to be used by the regime: to assert itself as a European empire and to underpin the web of vassal states under Napoleon’s siblings and allies constructed after the great expansion that followed the war of the Third Coalition, in 1805, as an emperor set over kings, and on the same level as his major rivals, the Habsburgs and Romanovs. The international circumstances often called for a concept of “emperor” more feudal than Roman. Yet was this truly the whole reason why Napoleon made himself “emperor of the French”? Something quite different from the model of Charlemagne was needed in 1799–1800, when the task in hand was not European war, but the internal reordering and pacification of France.

There was another prototype of Caesarism that Napoleon now drew upon that proved highly effective for him. Less colorful than the Julian archetype, it was the example of Octavian that did most to bring him to the pinnacle of power, and keep him there, and Napoleon’s use of it was so cautious that it was left almost unspoken. Rather, the model of Octavian was ubiquitous, known by its deeds, not by blatant references to history. It was a method of government, a set of policies, rather than the direct emulation of an iconic figure. If such a figure was invoked in the first years of the Consulate, it tended to be Washington;Footnote ²⁸ Octavian was the real, if mute, influence nonetheless. For the classical historian Maria Wyke, Napoleon’s greatest Roman precedent was Octavian, not Julius: “Augustus offered durability and the lesson to proceed discretely and in small stages to absolute power.”Footnote ²⁹ That is just what Napoleon did. What came after his consolidation of power was marked still more by Octavian’s own actions. Whereas Julius was a cliff edge to be skirted, Octavian proved the bedrock of his political strategy.

The analogy is clearer still in the period between Brumaire and the proclamation of the empire at the end of 1804, in the gradualist policy of accruing power quietly to himself through acceptance of requests rather than through brutal seizure. The French classical scholar Valérie Huet has encapsulated Octavian’s strategy and his genius as “first in prolonging his consulship, then in becoming imperator for life.” She adds emphatically, “The genius of Bonaparte was to redeploy this model but not in every particular.”Footnote ³⁰ Napoleon quietly, and almost by sleight of hand, reoriented Sieyès’s original constitution of 1799 for the Consulate, to give more power first to the three-man executive, and then to the first consul—himself—a position he gathered to himself on his first day in office simply by applying alphabetical order over his two co-consuls to act as chair, and then consolidating this. The inequality of the consuls was only subsequently inserted into the new constitution after it was in force; the consuls were to be elected in future by the Senate from its members, but this provision disappeared from the text voted on in the plebiscite that followed the coup.Footnote ³¹ Originally appointed for ten years, Napoleon was proclaimed consul for life, with the right to nominate his successor in August 1802, after the successful conclusion of peace with Britain at the Peace of Amiens. By then, so monarchical had his powers effectively become, that the new constitution by which he became emperor in December 1804 needed very little readjustment from that of 1802. Like Octavian, Napoleon was determined that no dramatic Rubicon would be seen to be crossed. Valérie Huet has put it best: that, like Octavian, Napoleon knew it was better to appropriate the Republic than to reimpose the monarchy, and wisest to reassure his original supporters that the legitimacy of the revolution, together with the operation of the Republic, were secure.Footnote ³² As Suetonius remarked of Octavian as he chronicled his rise to supreme power, “he realized his hope by making every effort to prevent any dissatisfaction with the new régime.”Footnote ³³ The peril of deviating from this approach is evident in the many petitions from the army that saw the establishment of hereditary rule under the Bonapartes as the surest way to “destroy the hopes of the counter-revolutionaries” in the words of one, and as the “greater guarantee for the maintenance of public liberty and equality” in those of another.Footnote ³⁴ This process culminated in the coronation oath. It stipulated that the Republic was not abolished, but rather entrusted to a hereditary dynasty; furthermore, the Senate remained the ultimate repository of the Republic, retaining the right to depose the emperor should he become a threat to it, words that came back to haunt Napoleon in 1814, when the Senate deposed him on exactly these grounds and constituted itself as a provisional government.

The search for stability through authority, not for popularity through martial glory, dominated Napoleon’s agenda until at least 1805. He set himself to reform and “normalize” the French state after ten years of upheaval, and to end what he and many in France had come to regard as a state of affairs more akin to a civil war than a revolution. Now, however, the Peace of Amiens gave Napoleon an unheralded “peace dividend,” and he put it to dynamic use. Napoleon’s strategy of pacification was two-pronged: on the one hand, he used the peace dividend to unleash a ruthless campaign against rural disorder, deploying his newly reinvigorated paramilitary police, the Gendarmerie, to crush banditry, royalist counterrevolution, and resistance to conscription. This was harnessed to a determined, but incremental, tightening of censorship, to the point that the free press was suppressed in France within a few years of Brumaire. Octavian had achieved this in a very different age by simply choking off the possibilities for intellectual opposition, through patronage. Yet his avowed policy of restoring order drew the greatest writers of his era to him: Livy, Horace, and Virgil. Napoleon did not quite match his success, for he made lasting opponents of Chateaubriand and Germaine de Staël, but a large section of the French intelligentsia came to support the regime. In all this, the new regime was generally perceived as defending the Republic from its inveterate enemies—the royalist peasantry and the urban radicals—and protecting persons and property, regardless of their politics. The net result, however, was the creation of a powerful, centralized, authoritarian state quite different from that envisaged in 1789 or at the overthrow of Robespierre in 1794.

This had ceased to matter for many by Brumaire. The priorities of the revolutionary generation had changed. The repression of the royalist, bandit-ridden countryside meant stability; the strangulation of political ferment through the press meant a calming of public discourse to the point that political debate withered and died voluntarily. Two distinct policies now went hand in hand: the state was directed by Napoleon but driven by a new body of professionalized administrators and magistrates chosen on merit, and increasingly composed of young men devoid of the prejudices of the 1790s. That state presented itself as “above faction,” as an instrument to “referee” society fairly, but with a firmly authoritarian ethos. Appointment of professionals by professionals to public office rapidly replaced elections, which had so often been flash points for collective violence and personal vendetta in the 1790s. This process was matched by the twin policies of ralliement and amalgame, not quite rendered into English by the terms “rallying” and “amalgamation.” The former offered all who were prepared to obey the rules as laid down by Napoleon the chance to take active state service; the latter sought to end the civil war by allowing all subjects—citizens no longer after 1804—the protection of the law and the state, whatever their political views, on condition that they did not antagonize their former opponents.Footnote ³⁵ Most followed suit. The great historian of the late Roman Republic, Ronald Syme, wrote in 1939, “With the Principate, it was not merely Augustus and his party that prevailed—it was the victory of the non-political classes. They could be safe and happy at last.”Footnote ³⁶

It was the same for the army. Its commanders were increasingly showered with honors and riches, its rank and file were awarded a status at public functions even higher than the Church, the brides of soldiers were given dowries, and its widows and orphans were cared for. However, the marshals were never allowed into the corridors of power, none ever held any ministry save that of war, and the bulk of the army was usually quartered outside France, where it could do no harm to a state which served the army, but was never in its clutches. The Marshalate preened and strutted in public, its troops behind it, but real control in the Napoleonic state rested with a mandarinate, composed of increasingly young professionals guiding the rule of law. Things were seldom as they seemed.

Ultimately the greatest impact of the Octavian trope is found in the way Napoleon ruled. If he was a “true Roman,” it was in his strong sense of the practical and the prosaic.Footnote ³⁷ The regimes of the 1790s were precarious, and survived only long enough to proffer initiatives; Napoleon’s Consulate enacted concrete policies. In 1804, the regime finally completed a process begun in 1789, but soon neglected in the revolutionary maelstrom: the codification of French civil law in clear and easily comprehensible terms, and rooted in the egalitarian ethos of the Republic. The regime also undertook the compilation of a national land register, the Cadastre, which set out publicly the taxable value of all property in France, thus making taxation itself transparent and accountable. Moreover, the currency, a disastrous area for the revolutionary governments, was set on sound foundations, and secondary education was refunded by the creation of the lycées, soon followed by the creation of the Université impériale, together with the grandes écoles. It was all foreshadowed in the Parallèle: “Napoleon protects all classes in the state, but he takes care to honor property, education. In a word … Bonaparte is the legitimate Consul.”Footnote ³⁸

With a critical, sardonic eye, Tacitus summed up Octavian’s modus operandi, and eerily foretold that of Napoleon on the first page of his history of the early empire, The Annals: “by seducing the military with donatives, the masses with grain allowances, and everybody with the pleasures of peace, he gradually increased his powers … He met no resistance … Having benefitted from the revolution, [the noble class] preferred the security of the current regime to the dangers of the old.”Footnote ³⁹ The Napoleonic Consulate, when compared with contemporary Roman judgments, has more than echoes of the Principate. However, the analogy became stretched to the point of irrelevance after 1805, as the impact of war and further conquest changed the regime and its relationship to its subjects, but in the context of its inception, in the politics that drove its actions, and in the manner it wielded and accrued power, the imprint of Octavian Caesarism is everywhere to be seen.

Yet there is little here to anticipate the salient features of Caesarism as the coming century came to know it, save for Napoleon’s acute awareness of his need to stamp out the wellsprings of Caesarism that emerged during the revolution. Indeed, on Saint Helena, Napoleon refashioned Julius Caesar as the forerunner of Octavian, as a ruler who sought to bring order and stability. He tried to amalgamate them into a continuum, portraying Julius as the leader of the “party of order,” and Brutus as the rabble-rousing would-be dictator.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Republic had been saved, but the Republic had been changed, and Octavian built on Julius’ foundations, according to Napoleon’s rewriting of Roman history in his final years.

The Napoleonic regime was rooted in Octavianic Caesarism. It was authoritarian, competent, professional, and stable. In its workings, its real self was civil service grey, not glittering military braid. There is little in it, however, that would seem to make it the prototype for the self-styled Caesarism of the following century, save its growing reliance on military glory after 1805. Yet this is not the image that lingered in the mind of the next generations.

The legacy in the legend?

In conclusion, it is useful to return to Prutsch’s lucid definition of modern Caesarism as that tension between democracy and power, held together by charisma, in order to better ascertain the elements of Napoleonic rule that were, and were not, influential for the future of the concept of Caesarism. Again, all is not what it seems.

The plebiscite had been used three times by the different revolutionary regimes to ratify their new constitutions,Footnote ⁴¹ but when deployed by Napoleon it became a political mechanism almost intrinsic to later Caesarism, and a hallmark of the regime for later generations. It was the method which expressed clearly that legitimacy came from below, but power, legitimized by the people, came from above. However, although the plebiscite was used repeatedly in the first years of the regime to consolidate its power at each moment of constitutional change, plebiscites were not resorted to again until the idiosyncratic period of the 100 Days. The years in between may easily be defined as Octavianic Caesarism, but not readily as modern Caesarism. The clearest indications of the Caesarism to come are found in the desperation of the 100 Days. The plebiscite had its uses, but the deliberate harnessing of “plebs” and dictators in the quest for legitimacy was still too dangerously close to the Julian model for Napoleon to make it a permanent political fixture. That he turned to it so quickly on his return from Elba shows how precarious he knew his position was with French public opinion in 1815. The plebiscite on his amendments to the constitution had been preceeded by blood-curdling appeals to revolutionary resentments of nobility and monarchy as he marched on Paris, their rhetoric redolent of Jacobinism. For the first time, he actively sought to rouse popular disorder in the provinces in a desperate quest for allies, inciting pro-revolutionary Protestant factions against Catholic royalists across southern France. It was all a reversal of his own policies, an undoing of the work of pacification and of ralliement and amalgame, but very much in the mold in which Julius Caesar had been cast by the revolutionaries, the author of the Parallèle the last among them. Napoleon entered Paris on 20 March 1815, through the sans-culotte neighborhoods of the east, acclaimed by “the mob.” In the spring of 1815, out of desperation, Napoleon had become exactly the Hoche he had denounced all those years before. Having replaced Julius with Octavian, Napoleon then cast the latter aside, and returned to the roots of revolutionary Caesarism. This was his last stand as a leader, and it became the image he honed shamelessly on Saint Helena.

It is from this point that so much of Napoleon’s contribution to later Caesarism springs—from the successful, according to him, application of the “dynamic bond” between leader and people. It was, in his mind, renewed less by plebiscites than by the quest for military glory. After 1805, safely in power, Napoleon felt no need to tread carefully about his military prowess; the image of the conqueror was vaunted, and continued to be propagated from Saint Helena. It was at this stage that military success became intrinsic to Napoleon’s image, more than in the years of his rise to power. That is, he stressed it only when he had put the contested politics of the revolution behind him. Only then did he embrace that aspect of revolutionary Caesarism from which the “dynamic bond” descends. In this guise, he became the hero of the disenfranchised radical revolutionaries of the early nineteenth century. In 1815, if only fleetingly, Napoleon had saved the revolution and liberated the people, or so he said afterwards. He wrapped himself in the colors of the Jacobin. He gave new life to the Julian Caesarism he had initially stifled, for, through populism, he escaped “from the shackles of party” and the influence of the Senators, as did Julius when he took the dictatorship.Footnote ⁴² Yet the Octavianic model proved more serviceable to those in power, himself included. It mapped out a Caesarism that was authoritarian, professionalized, prosaic, and almost apolitical; above all, a Caesarism that understood that the end of politics was the security of life and property, not liberty, and that all politics were but means to this end.Footnote ⁴³ Yoked together, these two strands of Caesarism created what Jean Tulard has called “the myth of the savior.”Footnote ⁴⁴