What was the difference b/w Robespiere's reign of terror and that of napoleon's rule over France?

Question

What was the difference b/w Robespiere's reign of terror and that of napoleon's rule over France?

Answer 1

Napoleon imposed his own absolute rule on France.  He reversed many of the reforms carried out by the Revolutionary government.  He reintroduced imprisonment without trial, and imposed strict censorship, the freedom of the press was stifled.  There had been hundreds of newspapers during the revolutionary decade, but under Napoleon only a few were still in publication.

He had a particularly low opinion of women, and the rights that women had been granted during the revolutionary years, to divorce abusive husbands, to have widows pensions etc, were abolished.  Napoleon believed that women should always be under the authority of a man, he established the father as the supreme authority over all his family, like the ancient Roman pater familias.

Answer 2

Depends upon who is telling the tale.

Answer 3

Well, Napoleon may have been an absolute and rather tyrannical ruler, but he did a lot to establish our Republican legal traditions (our most basic lawcodes date back to his rule, even if there must be darn few articles left in them that read the way they did around 1810).

and he did not have all those he perceived as political opponents executed after a "trial" that makes Saddam's look fair.