Napoleon Between War and Revolution
"So, was Napoleon a revolutionary or not? He was for the revolution in the sense that he was against the royalist counterrevolution, and since two negatives cancel each other, a counter-counterrevolutionary is automatically a revolutionary, n’est-ce pas? But one can also say that Napoleon was simultaneously against the revolution: he favoured the moderate, bourgeois revolution of 1789, associated with the Feuillants, Girondins, and Thermidorians, but was against the radical revolution of 1793, handiwork of the Jacobins and sans-culottes. In her book La Révolution, une exception française?, the French historian Annie Jourdan quotes a contemporary German commentator who realized that Bonaparte “was never anything other than the personification of one of the different stages of the revolution”, as he wrote in 1815. That stage was the bourgeois, moderate revolution, “1789”, the revolution Napoleon was not only to consolidate within France but also to export to the rest of Europe."
A self-crowned monarch and imperialist who established a nobility and placed his relatives on the thrones of Europe. A supporter of revolution? An opportunist rather than a revolutionary I suspect. It is true that Napoleon wasn’t an ideologue. He would therefore have claimed anything that strengthened or secured his position. So for us to judge his true beliefs by his pronouncements alone would be very difficult. Not just a General but a politician. Like all politician’s writings, nothing was without purpose and motive.
And it should be noted that Napoleon was not an ideologue and usually had no time for anyone who was.
Napoleon's political beliefs were liberal, and he supported the Revolution. He was disgusted by the atrocities committed in the name of the Revolution and took no part in them.