9 - Saul Ascher’s Napoleon

Summary

The writings of Saul Ascher (1767–1822) about the politics of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) are based on his presumption that the Emperor’s interest in political reform overlapped significantly with his own political concerns. As I shall argue, however, their respective positions were in fact more divergent than Ascher himself may have realized. To put this initial assumption of commonality into context it may help to recall some historical background of French/Prussian intellectual exchange about the emancipation of Jews in the last decades of the eighteenth century. One of the texts that influenced the French National Assembly’s vote to bestow citizenship rights to Jewish men living in France (September 27, 1791), was Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (On Civic Improvement of the Jews, 1781–83), by Christian Wilhelm Dohm (1751–1820). Dohm’s treatise had been instigated by Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86), partly as a response to a request for aid by the Alsace Jewish community. Among others, Dohm’s reform proposals helped to shape the thoughts of Honoré Gabriel Riqueti comte de Mirabeau (1749–91) about the civic integration of Jews. Mirabeau traveled to Berlin in early 1786 and was officially dispatched to the royal court of Prussia in July. Upon his return to Paris, he published De la monarchie prussienne, sous Frédéric le Grand (On the Prussian Monarchy under Frederick the Great) in 1788, and his Histoire secrète de la cour de Berlin (Secret History of the Court of Berlin) caused a scandal in 1789 because of its harsh criticism of the Prussian court. He had met Dohm and discussed his reform ideas extensively in a 1787 pamphlet on the Jewish question: Sur Moses Mendelssohn, Sur la Réforme Politique des Juifs (On Moses Mendelssohn and the Political Reform of Jews). In part, the pamphlet was an attempt to offer a more enthusiastic reading than the one Jacques-Pierre Brissot (1754–93) had provided in a 1784 review of Dohm’s work. The disagreement was less about the question of granting citizenship rights to men aged twenty-five and older, independent of their religious affiliation, but rather about Dohm’s concrete proposals for engineering social and political integration.