Rousseau, Napoleon, and the Politics of Religion

Early in his life, Napoleon was influenced by Rousseau’s teaching that religion is dangerous since it exists in competition with the state—religion promises happiness in the other world when the state is responsible for providing the means of achieving happiness in this world. At the beginning of the French Revolution, Napoleon, then a young artillery lieutenant, wrote, “Dear Rousseau, why was it necessary that you have lived only for sixty years! For the interest of virtue, you had to be immortal.” Napoleon was as much influenced by the atheistic and anti-tradition political thought of the Enlightenment as the Jacobins were. After Napoleon acquired power, he had a change of heart. He realized that if he tried to suppress religion, he would lose support of the people and then his government might be overthrown like the government of the Jacobins was, so he allowed the traditional practice of religion. Jean Chaptal, Napoleon’s minister for Internal Affairs said: "The boldest operation that Bonaparte carried out during the first years of his reign was to re-establish worship upon its old foundations.”