ABSTRACT
The 'classic' accounts of Napoleonic imperialism were constructed mainly by French writers during the period from 1815 to the Second World War, and have been well outlined in Pieter Geyl's survey, Napoleon: For and Against, first published in 1949. 1 Although there were many variants of the genre, most of those early accounts had one thing in common: they sought to explain Napoleon's imperial ambition in terms of a major binding theme, or 'grand idea'. The most colourful of these reconstructions celebrated him in some way as the embodiment of the Roman imperial past, a motif which had already been lavishly embellished in the visual arts of the Napoleonic Empire, 2 and which was then transformed into a powerful legend after the publication of the Memorial de Sainte-H́el̀ene by Count Emmanuel de Las Cases in 1823. Some variants of that particular genre made analogies with the empires of Constantine and Theodosius, in which the caesaro-papist theme was predominant, or with Justinian's empire, where the emphasis lay more on Napoleon's achievements as a great lawgiver; while others preferred to stress his own grandiloquent and flamboyant espousal of the Carolingian past. Whatever the image so portrayed, Napoleonic imperialism was construed in retrospective terms, essentially as the consummation of an ancient and glorious heritage. Its historical significance thus looked backwards, to a past dimly remembered and easily distorted, and always closely associated with a personalised heroic cult. 3 It is of course necessary to add here that earlier perceptions of Napoleonic imperialism were not always heroic. The 'black legend' of Napoleon was recounted in a long line of writers stretching from Mme de Staël, Benjamin Constant and Chateaubriand during or shortly after the First Empire to Edgar Quinet, Pierre Lanfrey, the comte d'Haussonville, Jules Michelet and Hippolyte Taine later in the nineteenth century. The image of Napoleon which emerges in their works is associated much more with his brutal repression and incessant war-mongering, with his tyrannical destruction of civil liberties in France and systematic despoliation of conquered peoples beyond her frontiers, with his monstrous ambition and pitiless methods. In short, they saw him as a demoniacal creature who had presided over a new age of barbarism in European history.
