RE THESE PRIOR POSTS CAN BE LOOKED AT MORE OR LESS TOGETHER THE PROBLEM OF CHANGE

See prior posts, Tony Blair's recent remark, and what I will call The Problem of Change.

See Schroeder's 1763 to 1848, especially 1812.

By then, concepts of war and of peace along with other concepts connected with one another in The Old European Order, such as authority and hierarchy, had been transformed.

Napoleon had started out as a product of The French Revolution, itself an unintended  product of the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment, in turn, had been a movement which originally began within the aristocracy in the Old European Order, not outside it.

 He rose from the ranks, after the Revolution, from below, up, to direct an enlightened but democratic and Jacobin crusade of liberation from despotism, or so it seemed at first to many Europeans themselves, and to many Americans like Jefferson.

It was thought for a long time, say 10 years, to be a democratic war of liberation from the despotism of the Old European Order. 

Schroeder says the enlightenment side of Napoleon's new brand of  enlightened democratic despotism didn't last, that he lapsed back into imperialism and colonialism within Europe itself of a kind which the enlightened French Revolution had been intended, ultimately, but certainly not at first, to have terminated.

One question to ask is: Isn't even Schroeder's assertion here somewhat problematic?

After all, one can think, and many in fact did so think, back then, in the mid 18th Century, of both imperialism and colonialism as being quite consistent with quite enlightened and  very civilized ideas.

Regarding the end of the Old European Order, for example, even Kennan, writing very long after, remarked somewhere that the Austro Hungarian Empire finally ending with WWI, had been better than anything subsequently put in its place.