By the end of the eighteenth century, the revolution appeared to have lost its way, consumed by poverty, corruption and mutual blood-letting. It was saved by a young soldier, Napoleon Bonaparte, who was as sincerely faithful to the spirit of the French revolution as Cromwell had been to the English.
The Mason Christopher Hodapp writes: "It was rumoured for many years that Napoleon Bonaparte was a Freemason, but there is no historic proof of it. Still, many of his military officers, members of his Grand Council for the Empire, and 22 of the 30 Marshals of France were. So were his four brothers, three of whom were made kings by Napoleon. The Emperor's wife, Empress Josephine, was even admitted into a French female lodge in 1804. Regardless of whether Napoleon was ever made a Mason, he did adopt the title Protector of Freemasonry, along with the lengthy list of other titles he assumed when he became emperor in 1804."[38] …
Madame de Staël called him Robespierre on horseback. After all, he came from Corsica, which in 1755 had successfully rebelled from Genoa, and for which Rousseau wrote one of his most seminal works, Project de constitution pour la Corse, in 1765. But, like Cromwell (and Caesar), he found that in order to save the republic he had to take control of it and rule it like a king.
He was, like many a tyrant, utopian in his ambitions. 'We must have a European legal system, a European appeal court, a common currency, the same weights and measures the same laws,' Napoleon once said to Joseph Fouché: 'I must make of all the peoples of Europe one people, and of Paris, the capital of the world.'"
The truth is, therefore, that it was neither the State nor the Nation that Bonaparte exalted above all, - although he greatly increased the worship of both in later European history, - but himself. So the spirit that truly reigned in the Napoleonic era can most accurately be described as the spirit of the man-god, of the Antichrist, of whom Bonaparte himself, as the Russian Holy Synod quite rightly said, was a forerunner.
This antichristian quality is most clearly captured in Madame De Staël's characterization: "I had the disturbing feeling that no emotion of the heart could ever reach him. He regards a human being like a fact or a thing, never as an equal person like himself. He neither hates nor loves… The force of his will resides in the imperturbable calculations of his egotism. He is a chess-master whose opponents happen to be the rest of humanity… Neither pity nor attraction, nor religion nor attachment would ever divert him from his ends… I felt in his soul cold steel, I felt in his mind a deep irony against which nothing great or good, even his own destiny, was proof; for he despised the nation which he intended to govern, and no spark of enthusiasm was mingled with his desire to astound the human race…"
op bought into the "enlightenment" meme