Browse Items (1079 total)

Even when they resisted Napoleon’s efforts to control their destinies, contemporaries of all European nations were fascinated by the Napoleonic legend unfolding before their eyes.

John Stuart Mill (1806–73), an English civil servant and philosopher, was a firm believer in the liberal, democratic, and anti–absolutist elements of the legacy of the Revolution and hoped to extend these concepts as widely as possible. Most famous…

On the occasion of Napoleon’s death, the leading English paper expressed the view of the English establishment: hatred of his despotic rule, yet a kind of sneaking admiration of his “extraordinary life.”

Some in the popular classes saw in Napoleon an opponent of monarchs.

From an English periodical of 1819, this antirevolutionary print portrays the sans–culottes as drunkards anxious to destroy by fire, gallows, and guillotine rather than to work for their own good. The image satirizes the idea of sans–culotte…