How Napoleon’s legacy infused American debates over empire in the nineteenth century

No individual dominated the early nineteenth century like Napoleon Bonaparte, the titanic figure who came to embody the French Revolution and nearly brought all of Europe to heel. He exerted a cultural influence in his time that few figures in world history have ever attained. As a result, when Americans debated the merits, limits, and administration of their own burgeoning republican empire, they continually invoked Napoleon to make their point. From the presidency of Thomas Jefferson and for decades afterward, the legacy of Napoleon loomed over discussions about the course their country’s expansion would take.

As Mark Ehlers shows, Americans of all persuasions rhetorically enlisted Napoleon to advocate for their competing visions of US imperialism. Whether they admired his method of imperial rule or saw in him a warning against the hubris of imperial overreach, Napoleon’s image served as an essential cultural touchpoint in the early republic’s rhetoric of empire—until finally, by the Mexican War, most Americans had come to imagine their republican empire as a worthy successor to Napoleon’s own.