Correlli Barnett on Napoleon

“His views on politics and society, owing much to Rousseau's Du Contrat Social, display Buonaparte the egotist and Buonaparte the mathematician-engineer in uneasy collaboration. For society is conceived as of one great machine, constructed according to correct calculations which in turn are based on the right data. There is little sense of free association between individuals or groups, little sense of any natural community larger than the Corsican-style family or clan; no sense of organic social growth. Instead there are the competing egotisms of individuals, bridled or organized by the higher egotism of the State, whose will impels and directs the whole national apparatus. Buonaparte's ideal State enjoyed this untrammelled power because it was the organ of the people's will. Naïvely he believed that only hereditary monarchies could be tyrants. He scorned the ancien régime in France, with its agglomeration of different societies, partly regional, partly aristocratic, guild or religious; this is what constitutes the "privilege" which he and other progressives wished to sweep away. Buonaparte's chief complaint against the Catholic Church, for instance, lay in the very fact that it was independent of the State... Buonaparte's political ideas thus point straight towards the tyranny of the Consulate and the Empire; indeed towards every modern tyranny where the State bosses the entire life of the people in the people's name.”

“Bonaparte busied himself with extinguishing what yet remained of the freedom of expression won during the Revolution and with crushing what yet remained of organized opposition, whether royalist, Jacobin or merely intellectual. On 17 January 1800 he shut down sixty out of seventy-three existing newspapers; by the end of 1800 only nine remained, and those under strict censorship. The theatre was censored from April 1800. With his excessive sensitivity to personal criticism and ridicule, Bonaparte took a direct interest in this censorship... In July 1803 he ordered that bookshops be prohibited from placing new works on sale until seven days after a copy had been submitted to the censor "so that, as soon as there is an undesirable work, it can be stopped." The systematic opening of private correspondence, the ubiquitous police spy, and imprisonment without trial completed Bonaparte's practical interpretation of the "sacred right" of liberty guaranteed by the Constitution.”