Napoleon A Tyrant Or Traitor

Revolution is definitely more than a word for people of a nation who have experienced it once. The revolution has such impact on a nation that if centuries later you ask about a brief history of a nation from any person whether educated or not, citizen of that country or not, you would hear the phrases such as “before revolution” and “after revolution” as a part of their description. In the case of French revolution, surprisingly, Napoleon, who came after the occurrence of revolution, became more important than the revolution itself to the extent that the history of modern France can be divided in to “before Napoleon” and “after Napoleon. French revolutionaries from 1789, who were both the heart and the true symbols of revolution, would have never expected this fact. Indeed, French revolutionaries expected that law would become everything, not a single person. Thus, French revolutionaries from 1789 would have thought of Napoleon as more of a traitor of their ideas than an embodiment of those.

As one of his very first attempts, “in 1802, Napoleon was declared Consul for Life” (Lecture 2, Week 1). By doing that, he became a king and the most important person of the nation alone. French revolutionaries did whatever they could by constituting law, holding many riots, and breaking their cultural codes in order to make their nation to be ruled by people’s representatives not an emperor or a monarch. However, Napoleon simply denied that. In addition, Napoleon did whatever he thought was beneficial for him instead of his people. For example, “he annexed the Papal States in central Italy, prompting Pope Pius VII to excommunicate him”; this action was in a direct contrast with the tenth and second article of “Declaration of the Rights of Man” stating that opinions and religious views should be