British Uses for Napoleon

Abstract

British Uses for Napoleon Stuart Semmel (bio) In 1806, Napoleon Bonaparte's armies defeated Prussian forces at Jena. William Wordsworth, a staunch British loyalist, expressed what at first sight might have seemed unseemly relief at Prussia's loss. Britain now stood "alone," the poet explained: The last that dare to struggle with the Foe. 'Tis well! from this day forward we shall know That in ourselves our safety must be sought.1 It was good, in other words, that Britain would now have to rely upon its own devices. Locked in single combat with Napoleon, Britain faced a test of its national character, a trial of its weaknesses—and this was to be welcomed. Wordsworth's friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge had said much the same thing three years earlier, when Napoleon seemed on the verge of invading Britain: "As to me, I think, the Invasion must be a Blessing. For if we do not repel it, & cut them to pieces, we are a vile sunken race & it is good, that our Betters should crack us—And if we do act as Men, Christians, Englishmen—down goes the Corsican Miscreant, & Europe may have peace."2 In 1811, Wordsworth again took strange comfort from the strength of Britain's enemy. Britain's moral compass, the poet suggested, was maintained only by the magnetic repulsion of its Gallic enemy. "If the time should ever come when this Island shall have no more formidable enemies by land than it has at this moment by sea"—Britain's [End Page 733] naval predominance had been established at Trafalgar in 1805—"the extinction of all that it previously contained of good and great would soon follow." Domestic virtue, national character, depended on having an enemy "capable of resisting us, and keeping us at arm's length," according to Wordsworth. "If a nation have nothing to oppose or to fear without, it cannot escape decay and concussion within."3 Wordsworth's notion of Napoleonic France's usefulness for Britain—a usefulness directly proportional to the threat it posed—may seem to prefigure the notion of some recent historians (notably Linda Colley and Gerald Newman) that British national identity in the Hanoverian period was constructed by means of a contrast with a French "Other."4 But in fact once Napoleon came to power in 1799, the usefulness of France as an Other became an extremely murky matter. Before the revolution a highly effective opposition between Britain and ancien régime France had operated in British culture and thought. Political writers contrasted French effeminacy, frivolity, and Catholicism with British manliness, sincerity, and Protestantism—and suggested that political liberty arose as naturally from the latter trio as a slavish readiness to truckle before authority did from the former. This habitual contrast had to be modified considerably with the coming of the revolution: the supposed French characteristic of aristocratic frivolity had turned into democratic savagery; servility to power had become anarchic repudiation of hierarchy and tradition; the Catholic antagonist had turned atheist (and Protestant students of Scripture had followed accordingly, modifying their identification of Antichrist so that the figure in Revelations stood no longer for the papacy but rather for the godless Republic).5 In short, the revolution had required the British stereotype of the French to be modified radically in its details. Still, a binary categorical opposition between the two nations remained. [End Page 734] That changed after Napoleon's accession. Napoleon was a hybrid figure, and was regularly figured as such—as a "monster," or a "proteus"—in British accounts.6 Was he a Jacobin or a king (British observers wondered); Italian or Frenchman; Catholic, atheist, or Muslim? Was he some unnatural combination of these elements? Napoleon unsettled the traditional contrasts, and even the revised revolutionary ones. He seemed to defy categorization, or to inspire contradictory classifications. One result was confusion and anxiety for British "loyalists" (as those who trumpeted their devotion to king and country were known). But British radicals sensed a rhetorical opportunity: to a surprising degree, they would use the figure of the French emperor as a lens through which to scrutinize the failings of the British government—and a cudgel with which to beat it...