The decision in 1804 by First Consul Bonaparte to have himself crowned Emperor of the French brought France’s revolution very clearly to an end and ushered in a new period in which the French sought to establish themselves as an imperial people, both within Europe and further afield. But were the French inventing a new form of imperial rule or was Napoleon’s empire simply the latest incarnation of an all-too-familiar story of oppression and subservience stretching back to the days of Nero and beyond?
Napoleon always claimed that his empire was not about war or soldiering, and he presented himself as a great legislator, providing the legal framework within which the French people could enjoy the rights they had so confidently declared when they rose in revolution. But his empire of liberty was kept up by the operations of his secret police and by the exercise of strict censorship. Abroad, the ‘liberated’ peoples of Europe were to find that while they might enjoy equality under Napoleon’s rule, French Europeans were definitely more equal than others.
By 1814 the Bourbons had returned to a restored, if battered, French throne. Could the concept of empire be appropriated by the restored monarchy and would it work the same magic? King Louis Philippe I consciously sought to emulate Napoleon’s success, carrying through the conquest of Algeria and fostering French influence in Napoleon’s exotic former campaigning ground, Egypt. He deliberately cultivated a nostalgic Napoleonic Legend. After Louis Philippe was toppled by revolution, Napoleon’s nephew, Prince Louis Napoleon, emerged as a leader and in December 1852 he declared a Second Empire, with himself as Emperor Napoleon III. But what sort of Empire was it to be? Napoleon III made Paris an imperial city, but his Empire soon overreached itself, first in an attempt to conquer revolutionary Mexico and then in disastrous diplomatic manoeuvres against Bismarck in an attempt to expand into western Germany and the low countries. Napoleon III’s miscalculations led to military defeat at the hands of the Germans and to the collapse of his Empire, but the Third republic that replaced it proved just as imperially-minded as he had been. The Republic expanded its territory into Indochina, North Africa and even embarked on an attempt to establish a belt of French territory across Africa, west to east, which nearly caused war with Britain when the French expedition encountered a British army at the Sudanese town of Fashoda. French imperial concerns in North Africa led to friction with the Germans when they tried to extend their influence in the region and contributed to the outbreak of war in 1914, a war in which French colonial troops played a full part. It was French Algerian Zouaves who, in 1915, had the unfortunate distinction of being the first to encounter the use in combat of poison gas.
France’s dreams of imperial glory came crashing down with its defeat at the hands of the Germans in 1940, but in the crisis that followed the war continued, extended now to France’s colonies, which split between the competing claims of Marshal Petain’s ‘legitimate’ government at Vichy and the call of General De Gaulle and the Free French in London. It was in the Empire that De Gaulle was able to establish his claim to be a legitimate Head of State, which in turn formed the legal basis of his bid for power at the Liberation in 1944. But De Gaulle soon retreated from the scene and France descended into a nightmarish imperial endgame, first in Indochina, where the Viet Minh inflicted a humiliating defeat on French forces at Dien Bien Phu, and then in the long drawn-out agony of Algeria. In the end, De Gaulle emerged from his self-imposed exile, brought France’s huge African Empire to a close, and established a Napoleonic-style Presidency with which to replace it.
