Napoleon: rights, liberty and consensus between the legacy of the Enlightenment and the culture of Romanticism

Scholars have long focused their attention on the theme of rights and freedoms in the crucial transition from the Ancien Régime to the contemporary world. These topics have been explored thoroughly in particular by American and Italian scholars, driven amongst other things by the need to reflect in new ways on the concepts of the modern and modernity. The investigation of rights, which are the most important legacy of the Enlightenment but at the same time also its less acknowledged part, allows us to reinterpret the social and political dynamics that since the eighteenth century have accompanied the clash between individual and collective identities with the subsequent spread of racisms and nationalisms.