Browse Items (347 total)

Jacob–Nicolas Moreau wrote his "lessons of morality, politics and law" for the instruction of the Dauphin. Throughout the 200–page book, Moreau defends the power of the King to rule France without opposition. In this passage, he emphasized that the…

Vincent Ogé presented the views of his fellow mulatto property owners to a meeting of the white planter delegates who had come to Paris from Saint Domingue, the largest and wealthiest French colony. Ogé came to Paris to press mulatto claims for full…

In his memoirs, André François Miot de Melito, a special minister from the French government to Piedmont, tells of his first impressions of the young Napoleon Bonaparte, who was only twenty-seven but already an important general because of his…

Napoleon glosses over the conspiracy to overthrow the Constitution of 1795 and the duly elected legislature. This conspiracy was organized in part by his younger brother Lucien. He does, however, admit that some of the deputies opposed his endeavor…

Klemens von Metternich, head of the Austrian government and therefore a sharp critic of Napoleon, reported that Napoleon viewed Catholicism in largely utilitarian, even cynical terms.

When he made himself emperor, Napoleon clearly rejected the republican form of government. Here he tries to claim that hereditary government is necessary in a large state. The presence of the pope at his coronation seemed to confer legitimacy on the…

The "Champ de Mars Massacre" inaugurated a brief period of political repression directed at the popular movement and dramatized the growing tension between the claims of political activism and the desire of moderates to bring the Revolution to an…

Unlike the British, where the crown’s finance minister gave an annual report to Parliament, the French royal treasury’s accounts were a closely guarded secret. Yet Louis XVI’s second finance minister, Jacques Necker, a Swiss banker, who claimed to be…

The oath that Bonaparte took on becoming consul for life gives a good idea of the image that he tried to project: protector of the gains of the Revolution and insurer of order. In retrospect, his claims about not wishing to make war ring hollow.

A Revolutionary activist named Fournier, known as "the American" because he had been born in the French colony of Guadeloupe, here recalls his own role as a National Guardsman in the October Days as being more important than that of the market women.