The Economy of Glory: From Ancien Régime France to the Fall of Napoleon

From the outset of Napoleon’s career, the charismatic Corsican was compared to mythic heroes of antiquity like Achilles, and even today he remains the apotheosis of French glory, a value deeply embedded in the country’s history. From this angle, the Napoleonic era can be viewed as the final chapter in the battle of the Ancients and Moderns. In this book, Robert Morrissey presents a literary and cultural history of glory and its development in France and explores the “economy of glory” Napoleon sought to implement in an attempt to heal the divide between the Old Regime and the Revolution. Examining how Napoleon saw glory as a means of escaping the impasse of Revolutionary ideas of radical egalitarianism, Morrissey illustrates the challenge the leader faced in reconciling the antagonistic values of virtue and self-interest, heroism and equality. He reveals that the economy of glory was both egalitarian, creating the possibility of an aristocracy based on merit rather than wealth, and traditional, being deeply embedded in the history of aristocratic chivalry and the monarchy—making it the heart of Napoleon’s politics of fusion. Going beyond Napoleon, Morrissey considers how figures of French romanticism such as Chateaubriand, Balzac, and Hugo constantly reevaluated this legacy of glory and its consequences for modernity. Available for the first time in English, __The Economy of Glory__ is a sophisticated and beautifully written addition to French history.

From the outset of Napoleon's career, the charismatic Corsican was compared to mythic heroes of antiquity like Achilles, and even today he remains the apotheosis of French glory, a value deeply embedded in the country's history. From this angle, the Napoleonic era can be viewed as the final chapter in the battle of the Ancients and Moderns. In this book, Robert Morrissey presents a literary and cultural history of glory and its development in France and explores the "economy of glory" Napoleon sought to implement in an attempt to heal the divide between the Old Regime and the Revolution. Examining how Napoleon saw glory as a means of escaping the impasse of Revolutionary ideas of radical egalitarianism, Morrissey illustrates the challenge the leader faced in reconciling the antagonistic values of virtue and self-interest, heroism and equality. He reveals that the economy of glory was both egalitarian, creating the possibility of an aristocracy based on merit rather than wealth, and traditional, being deeply embedded in the history of aristocratic chivalry and the monarchy—making it the heart of Napoleon's politics of fusion. Going beyond Napoleon, Morrissey considers how figures of French romanticism such as Chateaubriand, Balzac, and Hugo constantly reevaluated this legacy of glory and its consequences for modernity. Available for the first time in English, The Economy of Glory is a sophisticated and beautifully written addition to French history.

This work traces the roots of the “economy of glory”- where glory and recognition function as recompense, as a kind of “moral money”- back to Antiquity and follows its ideological development in Old Regime France, its implementation under Napoleon, and its resonances in nineteenth-century French literature. Enlightenment thinkers come to see the political economy of glory as a powerful alternative to the liberal vision of a commercial economy based on the profit motive. Offering the promise of reconciling a whole series of contradictory values- virtue and interest, collective welfare and individual ambitions, equality and distinction, republican and aristocratic ideals- the economy of glory becomes a cornerstone of Napoleon’s attempts to overcome the divide separating the Old Regime from post-Revolutionary France. It also provides a new reading of Las Cases’s Memorial of Saint Helena depicting Napoleon’s daily struggle against his “jailer” Hudson Lowe on this tiny, god-forsaken island, and explores how the deposed emperor refashioned glory to fit the dimensions of ordinary life and to make of himself an everyman figure. After the Napoleonic episode, glory became a master-theme of nineteenth-century French literature. Balzac, Stendhal, Chateaubriand, and Hugo all explore its attractions and pitfalls. Understanding the underpinnings, history, and workings of the economy of glory provides fundamental insights into French culture and identity