Servants of Power.(Review)

Napoleon and His Collaborators: The Making of a Dictatorship, by Isser Woloch (Norton, 281 pp., $29.95)

Corsica, that fractious little island annexed by France in 1768, has traditionally supplied its unloved stepmother with two sorts of citizens: gangsters and gendarmes. Opinion remains divided over whether her most famous son, born one year after France took over, was more cop or robber. As master of the largest, most acquisitive police state of early modern times, perhaps Napoleon Bonaparte combined both functions.

Most biographers have portrayed Napoleon as coming to power by his own unaided merit and daring. But every modern dictator has been aided by a cadre of bureaucratic opportunists who put his orders into practice. In Napoleon and His Collaborators, Columbia professor Isser Woloch depicts some of the key functionaries who helped bring Napoleon to power and administered his authoritarian empire.

Although as a self-proclaimed Marxist Woloch eschews the "great man" approach to history, he does recognize Napoleon as a "remarkable individual." His major emphasis, however, is on the interaction between Napoleon and his "collaborators." The use of this loaded term suggests that Woloch will pass some kind of moral judgment on these bureaucratic henchmen, similar to that rendered by history on the Nazi collaborators of Vichy France. But like so many historians with a leftward bias, Woloch seems to have trouble differentiating between good and evil on an individual human basis, or even caring much about it.

Who were these "collaborators"? They ran the gamut from ex-Jacobins to ex-royalists, making up an interesting gallery of characters. Jean- Jacques-Regis Cambaceres was an effete gourmand of porcine dimensions, with a brilliant legal mind, an inexhaustible appetite for perks, and few, if any, serious convictions. Cambaceres was the second-highest- ranking official in the Empire, and Woloch performs a useful service by introducing this important but neglected figure to a wider audience. The same applies to Boulay de la Muerthe, Theophile Berlier, Antoine Thibaudeau, Etienne-Denis Pasquier, and the rest.

The convergence of their careers with Napoleon's began not as a meeting of the minds, but as the result of a brazen act of force. Woloch coyly terms the military coup that brought Napoleon to power on November 9, 1799, "The Joint Venture of Brumaire," characterizing the participants as "a group of insecure republican politicians who had lost their faith in their own . . . regime." True as far as it goes, this misses the main point. Yes, Napoleon signed on some civilian politicians before launching his coup; but the coup itself was not so much a collective venture as one more case of a ruthless strongman's using whatever human material was at hand to grab for power. Ultimately, it was the bayonets of Napoleon's grenadiers-not the speeches of his political supporters- that installed the dictatorship.

Napoleon presented himself not as Cincinnatus-a citizen soldier defending the fatherland and its republican virtues-but as Caesar. The Brumaire coup was his Rubicon; hence the rapid forced march from coup to Consulate to Empire. But if Napoleon delighted in comparing himself to Caesar and Charlemagne, in reality he was not so much Europe's last Caesar as its Founding Fascist. The egomaniacal swagger; the overdone uniforms; the vulgar excess in all things related to taste, rhetoric, and manners; the lip service to progress and populism screening police- state thuggery; the merciless plundering of neighbor states: What did all these characteristics of Napoleonic France define if not the first fascist regime?