Napoleon French Revolution Dbq Analysis

Initially, Napoleon's ideals of the French Revolution revolved around three main ideas: liberty, equality, and fraternity. At first, he was successful in completing this by establishing the Napoleonic Code. The code, which is still extant today, established privileges based on birth, allowed freedom of religion, and specified that government jobs should go to the most qualified. This had a postitive impact on French society because it granted citizenship to everyone. However, through his ambition and need for power, Napoleon became a dictatorship and negatively affected France. Although Napoleon is viewed as the child of the French Revolution, he ultimately betrayed the ideals of the revolution through his dictatorship in France and his attempts …show more content…
This is observed through his abuse of power to force the people of France to obey and worship him. Napoleon claimed to have absolute power and that those who resisted his rule “would render themselves worthy of eternal damnation” (Document 10). This conveys how Napoleon would persuade the French to follow him by instilling fear, which is injustice to the freedom that he initially wanted the French to have. This contradicts what he had wrote in the Napoleonic Code, which stated that “every Frenchman shall enjoy civil rights” (Document 8). Since the French were unable to form their own beliefs and act as individuals, Napoleon contradicted his original goal of wanting the French to have political and social justice. Another one of Napoleon's goals for the French Revolution was to establish alliances and peace with surrounding countries. As illustrated in Document 4, which shows Napoleon crossing the Alps to fight Russia, Napoleon did quite the opposite of making peace with Europe; he raged wars and attempted to conquer all of Europe. His strong leadership in the military led France into a countless number of wars, which goes against the peace that he initially wanted to establish. This was