"Napoleon was not a revolutionary but he solidified many of the revolutionary changes of 1789 - 1791 and he himself supported most of the ideas and proposals of Enlightenment philosophers." Substantiate.

Answer:

Napoleon Bonaparte was no revolutionary in spirit, for he ended the Revolution and established a personal and autocratic empire. Yet he consolidated and made permanent many of the key gains of 1789 to 1791, and gave institutional form to several ideas of the Enlightenment, thus becoming at once the heir and the destroyer of the Revolution.

Not a revolutionary

• He seized power by the coup of Brumaire in 1799 and brought revolutionary government to an end.
• He crowned himself Emperor in 1804, restoring a hereditary monarchy and creating a new nobility.
• He curbed liberty, suppressed opposition, censored the press and built a powerful police state.
• His endless wars and dynastic ambition served personal, not revolutionary, ends.

Consolidating revolutionary changes

• The Code Napoleon entrenched equality before the law, the abolition of feudalism and secular civil rights.
• He upheld the revolutionary land settlement, confirming the peasants in their gains.
• He preserved careers open to talent, replacing birth with merit in the service of the state.
• The Concordat of 1801 settled the Church question on revolutionary, state-controlled lines.

Supporting Enlightenment ideas

• He promoted rational administration, a centralised bureaucracy and a uniform system of law.
• He founded lycees, reformed education and supported science and the new Bank of France.
• His reforms embodied the Enlightenment ideals of order, reason and efficiency, if not of liberty.

Administrative and financial reform

• He created the prefectural system, giving France a uniform and efficient administration.
• The Bank of France and a stable currency restored financial order after revolutionary chaos.
• The Legion of Honour rewarded merit and service rather than birth.
• Tax collection was regularised, ending the arbitrary exactions of the old regime.

A mixed legacy

• He spread the principles of the Revolution across Europe through conquest and the Code.
• Feudalism and serfdom were abolished in many territories he conquered.
• Yet he also provoked the very nationalism that would ultimately destroy his empire.
• His rule thus fixed the Revolution's achievements while betraying its ideal of liberty.

The verdict of historians

• Contemporaries were divided: Beethoven famously erased his dedication of the Eroica in disgust.
• Georges Lefebvre saw him as completing the bourgeois revolution in institutional form.
• Others, following Madame de Stael, judged him a despot who strangled liberty.
• The Code Napoleon still underlies the civil law of much of continental Europe.
• His plebiscites and appeal to the nation prefigured modern authoritarian populism.
• He is best seen as the executor, not the author, of the Revolution's legacy.

The statement is thus well substantiated: Napoleon was not a revolutionary but the consolidator of the Revolution's durable achievements and a practical exponent of Enlightenment rationalism in administration and law. As historians observe, by fixing the gains of 1789 in codes and institutions he ensured their survival long after his own fall, so that the Europe of the nineteenth century was shaped as much by his settlements as by the Revolution itself.