Two hundred years after his death, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) remains a fascinating, ambivalent, and polarizing figure. From the onset of the French Revolution in 1789, responses of authors, artists, and thinkers ranged from celebrations of a dawning age of liberation to prophesies of anarchic violence. Initial reactions to Napoleon’s early rise to power were, to a large extent, conditioned by German views of the French Revolution. Like many of his contemporaries, Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813) had already expressed his enthusiasm for the ideals underpinning the Revolution, as for example in his essay of 1788, “Das Geheimniß des Kosmopoliten-Ordens” (The Secret of the Cosmopolitan Order). Indeed, the very title of the first essay Wieland published in his literary journal Der Teutsche Merkur after the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789—“Eine Unterredung über die Rechtmäßigkeit des Gebrauchs, den die französische Nation dermahlen von ihrer Aufklärung und Stärke macht” (Debate about the Legitimacy of the French Nation’s Current Use of Its Enlightenment and Power)—left contemporary readers in little doubt as to where his sympathies lay. But Wieland was by no means a lone figure in his enthusiasm for what he hoped would be the prelude to the replacement of the feudal structures of the ancien régime with a modern constitutional monarchy. Other notable writers and intellectuals who, by and large, remained supportive of the French Revolution included Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), Jean Paul (1763–1825), Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), Georg Forster (1754–94), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). By contrast, Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), profoundly committed to the republican ideals he saw enshrined in the American War of Independence (1774–83), appears to have taken a much more skeptical view of the French Revolution’s capacity to bring about progressive political change following the rise of the Jacobin faction and the Terror. For those Germans tempted to imagine Bonaparte as the leader who would “complete” the Revolution, his coronation as Emperor on December 2, 1804, and the defeat of Prussia two years later at the battle of Jena and Auerstedt on October 14, 1806, proved to be decisive moments in both hardening attitudes against Napoleonic France and encouraging aspirations of German nationhood through wars of liberation, and (in some cases highly chauvinistic) fantasies of German nationalism.
