The politics of time during the Napoleonic Consulate, 1799–1804

Abstract

ABSTRACT The French Revolution generated an acceleration of political time that disrupted old assumptions about the legitimacy and durability of political authority. Following the coup of 18 Brumaire, Napoleon and his counsellors had to confront the challenge of erecting a legitimate regime that would endure in a political environment where regimes that endured very often appeared illegitimate. This article examines how the French Consulate (1799–1804) sought to manage revolutionary time by practising a politics of temporal dilation. The embryonic institutions of the Consulate – from the Légion d’honneur to the lycées – were designed to decompress popular perceptions of time, at least as they related to political life, by charting a verifiable pathway for the nascent regime to develop steadily and incrementally through history. The collective perception of the present was made to expand, re-validating the notion of historical experience and slowing the unruly onset of the political future. Time would cease to be the medium of rupture. This article examines how the temporal assumptions embedded within the regime discourses and political practices of the Napoleonic Consulate were central to the construction of its own legitimacy.