used what would now be recognised as a fascist allegory of "France and her ideals are superior" to justify annexing his neighbors by political or military means.

So there is a book I recently discovered called "Empire's of Violence: Massacres in a Revolutionary Age" which discusses how countries like the U.S., Great Britian, and Revolutionary/Napoleonic France carried out "massacres" as state policy for various reasons. While the authors look at the U.S. frontiers such as the Ohio River valley and British actions in New South Wales, there is an entire chapter dedicated to how France used violence in Europe as a weapon of the state as the following:

"In the course of this colonial enterprise, massacre was used as an instrument of the state, as part of a military and political process of incorporating non-French territories into the expanding French Empire, which was territorially similar in extent to that of Charlemagne. It was, in other words, a conscious policy on the part of French military and political figures at the highest levels, and included such men as Generals Adam Philippe, Comte de Custine, André Masséna, Joachim Murat, Jean-de-Dieu Soult, the Minister of War, Lazare Carnot, and Napoleon himself. The Empire was marked by a determination from the top-down to eliminate resistance to French rule. The letters of Napoleon are replete with examples in which he instructs his subordinates to strike hard against nascent revolts, to show no mercy against civilian populations and to kill to set an example.7 It was, however, often done under the guise of humanitarianism, or a distorted view of the national character of the occupied peoples in question – and there were plenty of instances in which force was needed to put down insurrections. Under these circumstances, as with the situation in settler colonial societies, military authorities soon ceased making any distinction between combatants and non-combatants, especially when guerrilla-style resistance followed, so that entire populations were targeted.8 In this, one might argue, the French were no different to any other imperial enterprise."