Instead, European elites at the time explained their own social role in terms of peace, tradition, and stability. Nor was it viable for most nobles to claim that their rights were logically derived from their mastery of warfare, since only a small percentage of noblemen served in royal armies (and those that did were not necessarily very good officers!). That being noted, how did elites understand their own role in society? How did they justify the power of kings and nobles over the majority of the population? This was not just about wealth, after all, since there were many non-noble merchants who were as rich, or richer, than many nobles. They knew that there would have to beĬoncessions to a generation of people who had lived with equality under the law, but they worked to reinforce traditional political structures while only granting limited compromises. Only the most stubborn monarch or noble thought it possible to completely undo the Revolution and its effects, but there was a shared desire among the traditional elites to re-establish stability and order based on the political system that had worked in the past. Thus, after Napoleon’s defeat, there had to be a reckoning. The kings and nobles of Europe had good cause to fear that the way of life they presided over, a social order that had lasted for roughly 1,000 years, was disintegrating in the course of a generation. France may have been the greatest economic beneficiary, but Napoleon’s Italian, German, and Polish subjects (among others) also had their first taste of a society in which one’s status was not defined by birth. From the perspective of elites, Napoleon’s conquests were even worse because everywhere the French armies went the traditional order of society was overturned.
The French Revolution was seen by the European great powers as both threatening and, as it progressed and radicalized, morally repulsive, but at least it had largely stayed confined to France.
The French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars profoundly shook Europe. Chapter 3: Political Ideologies and Movements After the Revolution
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