Napoleon was a hired gun

Paul François Jean Nicolas, vicomte de Barras, was a nonentity who had a major role in the French Revolution. In 1794, he came out of nowhere, took charge of the Convention and sent all the mad dogs including Robespierre to the guillotine. The Terror ended just as suddenly as it had started, and again the people had no say.

 

With the Convention wiped out, the Directoire took over. Barras, an aristocrat who had suddenly become extremely wealthy and powerful, had obviously been paid to get a hired gun to get rid of the Royalists. After Barras handed over his mistress Josephine to the love-struck Napoleon, it was obvious that Bonaparte was the chosen one. When the latter proceeded to gun down a number of Royalists in front of St. Roch Church, the deal was sealed.

 

Bonaparte grew in stature, and Barras simply stepped aside. The first thing Emperor Napoleon did was hammer through the Civil Code and put Prefects in charge of the newly-created Departments with the help of the dreaded Fouché police. France had become the police state that it is today.

 

All told, Napoleon did a great job. Under his watch, the Holy Roman Empire was defeated at Austerlitz, France was transformed into a centralist state, the French Navy was destroyed at Aboukir and Trafalgar, while the Imperial Army was annihilated during the Russian campaign and at Waterloo. As a political and financial power, the Church of Rome no longer existed.

 

In France, the Royalists fought back hard—there were three more revolutions—but they ran out of steam and finally capitulated with the passing of the Constitutional Laws in 1875. The Rothschilds had taken control of the Bank of England and the world of finance as early as 1810, but it had taken them almost seventy years to get the Ancien Regime to cry uncle.