What role did Napolean play in the French Revolution?
Erm… when the Revolution didn’t magically solve all of France’s domestic problems, and in fact worsened a bunch of them because they more or less collapsed the existing bureaucratic infrastructure, France launched foreign wars to distract everyone. So in these wars, Napoleon came to prominence as a brilliant military leader. And eventually he was so popular that he took over the government, because the governing efforts out of Paris were totally incompetent. Notwithstanding that he made himself an Emperor, he actually extended a lot of the goals of the Revolution. He was rather an enlightened despot. The Napoleonic code improved the standards for women’s rights somewhat, and vastly modernized and normalized the legal code. Anyway, according to a particular model of history that we studied in high school, I don’t recall whose it is, revolutions have 6 stages, the last of which is “return to normalcy”. And for the French Revolution, Napoleon represented the return to normalcy, because
