He[Napoleon] had destroyed ...

He[Napoleon] had destroyed only one thing: the Jacobin Revolution, the dream of equality, liberty and fraternity, and of the people rising in its majesty to shake off oppression. It was a more powerful myth than his, for after his fall it was this, and not his memory, which inspired the revolutions of the nineteenth century, even in his own country.
 Eric Hobsbawm

Quotes from the same author

Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle.
 Eric Hobsbawm
The most lasting and universal consequence of the French revolution is the metric system
 Eric Hobsbawm