6 - An Ingenious Tyrant: The Representation of Napoleon Bonaparte by German Women Writers

Summary

In a letter to Carl Friedrich Zelter (1758–1832) written on November 4, 1800, Dorothea Veit-Schlegel (1764–1839) asks, “Können Sie sich wohl ein herrlicheres Loos denken, als Buonapartes Mutter zu sein?” (Can you imagine a more magnificent destiny than to be Buonaparte’s mother). With this sentence, Veit-Schlegel not only expresses admiration for the French Emperor but also introduces a female element into an otherwise highly masculine narrative. This interest in the importance of women’s voices and contributions in the political realm provides the inspiration for the following analyses of female-authored narratives about Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821). As is demonstrated in the following, the women writers discussed here differ vastly in their evaluation of the French Emperor. Indeed, the perception of Bonaparte by German writers and thinkers of the nineteenth century is characterized by stark polarization: some celebrate him as an embodiment of egalitarianism, while others consider him a tyrant who enslaved Germany and who must be destroyed at all cost. These conflicting responses are rooted not only in Bonaparte’s personality, or in what Lord Byron (1788–1824) called his “antithetically mixed” spirit, but rather in the nature and impact of Napoleonic rule and policies in Germany. Bonaparte was a brilliant military leader as well as an unusually talented administrator. He instituted equality before the law, reformed the legal codes, rationalized state and local administrations; secured property rights, including intellectual property; abolished feudalism, championed a meritocracy that contributed to the leveling of class differences, encouraged science and the arts; and instituted secular education and religious toleration, including civil liberties for Jews. These positive features of Napoleonic rule, however, were, as Jeffrey Sammons points out, “submerged in the miseries of conscription, taxation, censorship, arrests and forced labor, the violent destruction of economic life at every level.”

Clearly, Napoleonic rule was both a curse and a blessing, and for women, such contradictions were complicated not only by the sexual violence inflicted by the French army but also by Bonaparte’s blatant sexism, which was manifested in the Code Napoleon. Napoleon biographer Andrew Roberts notes that “Napoleon generally saw women as lesser beings,” citing his proclamation that “women should not be looked upon as equals of men … they are, in fact, only machines for making babies” (Roberts, 56 and 278).