9

A Vision of Civil Society

The history of Napoleonic Europe is too often presented as little more than the history of military conquest: the submission of a continent to one man’s all-consuming dream. Of course it is true that the needs of war were paramount in Napoleon’s France. The war effort indubitably distorted the economy and imposed a huge burden on the population in the form of conscription and requisition, while the French army enjoyed greater prestige and prominence than at any time since the reign of Louis XIV. Generals were rewarded with the baton of marshals; marshals with titles, wealth and lands; and the majority of those awarded the Legion of Honour during the First Empire were serving soldiers, especially officers. The pomp and elegance of military uniforms, the use of military bands and martial music, and the increased military presence in state ceremonial were all symptomatic of the growing power of the army. If Napoleon was to achieve his goals, he depended on his army to deliver them, and he would never forget his debt to the generals and marshals who supported him. They would be richly rewarded, and military values attained a new prominence in French society: the glory of war was seen as the supreme good.¹

Some have suggested that Napoleon’s debt to the army was still greater, that the very legitimacy of the Empire derived from the military victories which sustained it and which had the effect of concentrating authority so unambiguously in the person of the Emperor. On Saint Helena, replying to a question from Las Cases about the personal character of the regime, Napoleon virtually conceded this point. ‘That situation was not of my choice,’ he replied. ‘It was not my fault.’ He maintained that it was the consequence of the circumstances of the time, and that the legitimacy of his rule depended on his continuing to win battles, and with them glory: ‘I was the key to a completely new building,’ he said, ‘and one with such shallow foundations! If it was to endure it was reliant on each and every one of my battles.’²

Though Napoleon’s Empire was the product of war, and the Emperor himself was often absent on campaign, spending months at a time on horseback, his vision of Empire remained stubbornly that of a civil society. He did not appoint army officers to ministries of state, though some, Duroc and Sébastiani among them, were entrusted with diplomatic missions; and it was observed, not always approvingly, that Napoleon appointed several of his generals to embassies around Europe (Brune to Constantinople, Lannes to Lisbon, Andréossy to London).³ But there the army’s political influence stopped; officers were not given political control, and the army as an institution was kept firmly answerable to the civil authorities. Despite its overarching military ambitions, therefore, it is misleading to indict Napoleon’s regime for militarism, since the army was never allowed to exercise power autonomously. Indeed, it is more accurate to see the Empire as an exercise in state-building, in institutional reform and modernisation – a process that wouldleave behind monuments to administrative efficiency which many in the nineteenth century would seek to emulate. Napoleon saw himself as a moderniser, and his impatience with old structures and privileges – shown most notably, perhaps, in his willingness to challenge the Papacy and tear down what remained of the Holy Roman Empire – is a symptom of his modernising zeal. Like many of his ideas, it had its roots in the revolutionary period, when first the Jacobins then the Directory had pursued a policy of conquest, imposing administrative and judicial reforms on the countries they invaded, and recreating them as new departments of France or sister republics allied to Paris. The French, they preached, brought liberty – new freedoms – to the peoples of Europe.

Few at the time, with the notable exception of Maximilien Robespierre,⁴ had expressed any doubts about the wisdom of this policy, and they had shown little understanding to those who preferred to resist the imposition of liberty at the point of a French soldier’s bayonet. It was only too easy to equate opposition with counter-revolution, banditry, or religious obscurantism, and to seek to quell such opposition with military force. In this respect the Empire merely carried on the policy of its predecessors, though with greater efficiency and ruthlessness. The Imperial regime swept aside such rebellions as it encountered and imposed French-style institutions on the peoples it conquered. It was not, of course, perfect, certainly not everywhere, and it left pockets of resistance that would never be broken. And the institutions that were put in place had ceased, as John Davis has noted in the case of Italy, to offer any true reflection of the ‘egalitarian aspirations of the Revolution’. Instead they were ‘instruments of administration’ that served to strengthen the powers of the state, with the consequence that ‘what had remained only aspiration in even the most powerful of the eighteenth-century monarchies’ was finally given substance in the service of Napoleon.⁵ Serving the state had been transformed into the highest of political ideals.

State service implied loyalty above any deep ideological commitment. Napoleon went out of his way to declare himself a pragmatic leader who took advantage of such circumstance as presented itself, and who acted opportunistically in matters of diplomacy just as he did on the battlefield. He did not, he boasted to Dalberg, the newly appointed ruler of the Confederation of the Rhine, in 1806, work in accordance with pre-conceived systems or inflexible plans: ‘I seize events and push them as far as they will go.’⁶ Like many of Napoleon’s flash judgments, this is perhaps too facile, but it is clear that in foreign policy matters he did act instinctively, at times impetuously, to press home his advantage or to avenge a perceived slight. There was no single blueprint of Empire in his mind, no staged plan that he stuck to coherently from the moment he came to power. The early years, however, can most plausibly be presented as part of a consistent strategy that built on the expansion of French power under the Directory and Consulate. Italy was already an established sphere of influence into which it seemed logical to expand further; then he turned to Germany, establishing a bridgehead through his alliances with Bavaria, Baden and Württemberg. The defeat of Prussia and the peace signed with the Russians at Tilsit allowed him to harbour much grander ambitions, and from this moment Napoleon could dream of a new Carolingian empire with Paris at its heart. A new Europe ‘of federated states, or a true French empire’ was to be created, he declared.⁷With the destruction of Prussia’s military power at Jena, all the pieces seemed to be in place for the realisation of his dream; yet within months he was being diverted by other short-term goals or passing irritations.

The later years of the Empire came to be dominated by attempts to implement the Continental System against Britain and by long and costly invasions, first of the Iberian Peninsula, then of Alexander I’s Russia. Imperial policy had become prey to over-arching ambition and to Napoleon’s own rash and opportunistic decision-making.

The Empire evolved over time. Part of it, the so-called ‘French Empire’, was organised as departments of France, lands annexed by conquest that were sucked into a greater France which, by 1812, extended to one hundred and thirty departments and forty-four million inhabitants. The French departments were largely concentrated in the territories adjoining France herself – the Low Countries, Germany and northern Italy – and they were administered exactly like other parts of France. Much more inchoate and far flung was the ‘Grand Empire’, a series of independent kingdoms and electorates more loosely tied to France, which incorporated a further forty million people. These territories were generally ruled by a local prince who had agreed to cooperate with Napoleon, often in return for honours and titles, or, increasingly, by a member of the Bonaparte family. There was little sign of consistency, even within a single region. In 1802, for instance, Napoleon had set up the Republic of Italy in Milan with himself as president and the Milanese patrician Melzi d’Eril, a moderniser like himself, as his vice-president. But after he became Emperor, he abruptly transformed the Republic into the Kingdom of Italy, to which he progressively added various conquered territories – the Veneto and Istria in 1806, the Marche in 1808, South Tyrol in 1810. In one sense it made little difference, in so far as whatever their titular status, they were still client states, supplying soldiers for the French army and providing for the upkeep of troops stationed on their territory.⁸

Across Germany there was no common template, though the loyalty of local rulers was often richly rewarded. Napoleon presented himself as the Protector of the various Rhineland territories thrown together into the Confederation of the Rhine; elsewhere he elevated Bavaria and Württemberg to the status of kingdoms, soon followed by Saxony and Westphalia; and Karl Friedrich of Baden saw his lands quadruple in size and was raised to the status of Grand Duke.⁹ Other states found themselves favoured in a different way, receiving as king a member of the Bonaparte family: Napoleon’s brother Louis was crowned King of Holland, Jerome was made King of Westphalia, and Joseph became the King of Naples. Even these arrangements could be of short duration. In 1808 Joseph was moved to the even more troublesome throne of Spain. In 1810 Louis, distrusted by his elder brother for being too sympathetic to his subjects and seeking to harmonise his rule with the wishes of the Dutch people, was simply removed. Only four years after it was established, the Kingdom of Holland abruptly ceased to exist and the Netherlands were annexed to France.¹⁰ All pretence of independence was abandoned.

To administer the Empire Napoleon needed trusted collaborators, men who would serve him unswervingly. What mattered was their loyalty, both to his person and to the Empire, and he gave his trust as easily to men of the Right as of the Left, as much to aristocrats and returned émigrés as to former Jacobins and terrorists of the Year II. He was concerned that men of all political colours could find something with which to identify in the imperial order, qualities which they could embrace. Thus the Right would findsomething of the stability of monarchy, and perceived in its strong executive powers and its lack of concern for elected bodies and popular opinion the kind of authority which they craved. The former second and third consuls, Cambacérès and Lebrun, both recognised in the political culture of the Empire something redolent of the old monarchy, something that Catholics and conservatives might find deeply reassuring. Lebrun believed that he was witnessing the dawn of an ‘imperial monarchy’; Cambacérès noted succinctly that ‘everything is taking us back to the former order of things’.¹¹ The fact that the Empire had made peace with the Vatican and allowed, even welcomed, the return of aristocrats who had fled France during the Revolution helped to consolidate the sense that the revolutionary years were finally over and that men were no longer judged by their political pasts.

Republicans, too, had little difficulty in serving an Emperor whom they identified with at least some of the ideals of the defunct Republic, a man with a republican past who was committed to a culture of service and meritocracy. That was the beguiling ambiguity of Napoleon’s regime, the nature of its relationship to the Revolution that had made way for it. Théophile Berlier was among the republicans of all hues who allowed themselves to be persuaded that they could find a new political home in the First Empire, since ‘in the heart of an old and monarchical Europe, the best France could reasonably hope for definitively was a representative government under a new dynasty, whose power would be limited by liberal institutions’.¹² And Regnaud de St-Jean d’Angély, who would be among Napoleon’s more loyal supporters, agreed, though he had not always sided with the Jacobins in the 1790s and was identified with the more liberal wing of republican thought. He insisted that civil liberties were best served by the imposition of a hereditary empire, which could help to guarantee the gains his generation had made from 1789, gains which he defined as ‘individual liberty, religious freedom, the inviolability of property, the irrevocability of the sale of the biens nationaux, the political equality that opens all positions to all citizens, the civic equality which assures that all citizens are judged according to the same laws, and the approval of these laws and of the annual levels of taxation by a national representation’.¹³ These, he argued, had not been diluted by the demise of the Republic.

Not all agreed; even some who had served Bonaparte while he was First Consul found the abandonment of republican institutions too much to bear and, like Carnot, preferred to step back into the political wilderness.¹⁴ But they were a minority. Most republicans did agree to serve the Empire, some arguing, with Fouché, that it would be ‘absurd on the part of the men of the Revolution to compromise everything in order to defend our principles, while we had nothing further to do but enjoy the reality’.¹⁵ Napoleon in their eyes remained a standard bearer for the Revolution and its ideals. Their past support for egalitarian principles was not held against them, any more than was their involvement in voting for the execution of Louis XVI (which the Bourbons would never forgive, even after the Restoration of Louis XVIII). Regicides, indeed, played a significant role in the Empire: Sieyès as a senator, Fouché a government minister and chief of police, David in the role of court painter, Lakanal given the task he had always relished of reorganising the education system, and Cambacérès himself as archichancelier and the second most powerful man in the Empire.¹⁶ Many of them were first-class officials and loyal administrators, and they were assured Napoleon’s support provided that they were single-minded in serving the new order. Their collaboration ensured that the new regime had an abundance of talent at its disposal and experience of government on which to draw, which the Emperor did not hesitate to use.

The ministers and dignitaries of the Empire were the outward symbols of the new meritocracy – men drawn from widely differing backgrounds but each with the relevant experience to occupy the great offices of state. A few examples will suffice.¹⁷ Talleyrand, in charge of foreign affairs until 1807, had already been Foreign Minister under the Directory; before 1789 he was the Bishop of Autun and had served as Agent-General of the Clergy of France. Maret, who held the foreign ministry between 1811 and 1813, was a lawyer, attorney at the Parlement of Dijon before the Revolution, then a deputy to the Estates-General in 1789. Portalis, entrusted with the delicate portfolio for Ecclesiastical Affairs, also came from a legal and political background, an attorney at the Parlement of Aix-en-Provence in the Old Regime who had helped to draft the Civil Code. The Ministry of War, unsurprisingly, went to men with army experience. Among them were Alexandre Berthier, who had served in America under Rochambeau, remained in the army during the Revolution, and became chief of staff to Bonaparte in Italy and Egypt; and Henri Clarke, who had been an officer in the old line army during the 1780s and was Private Secretary to Napoleon after 1802.

Such links were seen as signs of a deep, personal loyalty to the Emperor, and some went a long way back. René Savary, Fouché’s successor as Minister of Police in 1810, had been aide-de-camp to the future Emperor in Italy after Marengo. Navy and the Colonies, again unsurprisingly, was given to an experienced naval officer, Denis Decrès, who had first joined the navy at the age of eighteen, risen to the rank of captain under the Revolution, and then been cashiered in 1793 because of his noble origins. It was Decrès’ subsequent action in Malta and the Nile that won Napoleon’s favour.¹⁸ Napoleon’s appreciation of a man’s past record did not, however, depend on his social origins, and if Decrès belonged to the Old Regime nobility, other ministers came from the humblest of origins. Of his Ministers of the Interior, for instance, Jean-Antoine Chaptal was the son of a peasant family in the Lozère, while Emmanuel Cretet’s family were shopkeepers in a small town near Grenoble. This did nothing to hinder Cretet’s career under the Empire. He served in turn as Governor of the Bank of France and, from 1807 to 1809, as Minister of the Interior. He would end his life ennobled, as the Comte de Champmol.

By appealing to all men of good will, regardless of their social origins or their political pasts, Napoleon hoped to establish the Empire on a solid foundation, providing it with efficient leadership and appealing to a broad swathe of the French public. He also sought to secure the support of the landed interest and to help develop a new capitalist class in France.¹⁹ Here, Napoleon was continuing the policy he had initiated during the Consulate, offering the promise of internal order and stability and, with it, an end to the bitter faction fighting that political ideology generated. He preferred, like De Gaulle in the twentieth century, to play down specific ideological commitments, and sought to rally the population to his person. After the bitter schisms of the revolutionary years there were attractions in this seemingly open approach, with its promise to bring an end to internal divisions and the kind of revenge killing that had fractured the South during the previous decade. But there were also dangers in this approach, most notably that the Empirewould be judged an unsatisfactory, unsustainable compromise between the warring parties. Cambacérès expressed this succinctly in his memoirs. On the one side were the many Frenchmen who had not entirely lost their affection for their former kings, and to whom Bonaparte would always be an impostor. ‘A number of them adhered with alacrity to the re-establishment of the throne, but they will not understand that it could be occupied by anyone other than the present head of the House of Bourbon.’ For committed republicans, Cambacérès believed, the Empire offered an equally unsatisfactory outcome, since ‘the project to restore heredity in government and to start a new dynasty’ would not suit any of them. And, he warned Napoleon presciently, ‘I fear that it will deprive you of friends, and especially of support in the general public.’²⁰

Cambacérès’ pessimism about the Empire’s durability proved ill-founded, and most former republicans dutifully fell into line, accepting that the Consulate had run its course and that Napoleon would take care to safeguard the gains they had made from the Revolution. Indeed, it can plausibly be argued that the Empire retained enough of the policy that it inherited from the Republic to satisfy all but the most fiercely ideological, and even that Napoleon, for all his craving after respectability and dynastic legitimacy, had remained loyal to the most crucial of the beliefs of his youth. Napoleon had a marked authoritarian streak, of course. His preference for control and efficiency left little place for local accountability and was translated into a marked distrust of elections. But these traits were not born with the Empire; they had been evident since the beginning of the Consulate and the constitutional reforms of 1800. The institution of the prefect and the vast authority given to the Ministry of the Interior were proof, if proof was needed, that this was a regime where authority emanated from the centre, and not from local electors. The prefect was an agent of central power, inviting comparison with the intendant under the Bourbon monarchy.²¹ Under the Empire France moved further away from the liberal individualism of the early Revolution, imposing controls and censorship, extending the outreach of the police, and restoring constraints on the operation of the free market. By 1810, for instance, only four newspapers had licences to publish in Paris;²² while the city’s book trade was subjected to new controls and regular surveillance. Indeed, the newly established General Direction of the Book Trade set out to monitor ‘not only every printer, publisher and bookseller in the entire Empire, but also every piece of printed matter’.²³

This was not a liberal regime – but it was not anti-revolutionary, either: Napoleon’s most significant programmes of reform, to education, the Church and the justice system, had a solid foundation in the achievements of the previous decade. He saw little reason to change the institutional structures – the departments and districts, communes and cantons, courts and tribunals he had inherited from the Revolution, and where he innovated it was generally to increase their authority and their professional expertise. There was little here that former republicans could reasonably object to. The France they had so carefully forged in 1790 and 1791 was scrupulously retained, and there was no suggestion of a return to the Old Regime. Napoleon was an authoritarian, but he was no reactionary, and many beyond the frontiers of France identified his regime with progressive and enlightened values.

Two areas of policy in particular were suggestive of the continuing influence of revolutionary values. One was education, where Napoleon expanded on the ideas which the Revolution had preached but never found the resource to implement. He envisaged an imperial education system, monitored by the new University of France, in which state-run lycées provided secondary education to the gifted while a level of public instruction was made available to all. But the costs of war took priority and, like the revolutionaries, the Empire soon found that it did not have the money to provide a school in every parish. As a consequence, free primary education would not be offered to all for another half-century. Greater attention was given to the lycées, which the government saw as vital in training an educated elite; though even here, budget cuts meant that fees had to be imposed which made them the preserve of families with money. As for the University – founded in 1806 and implemented in 1808 – it was given a monopoly in the award of degrees throughout the Empire; a single secular institution, it would, through intensive instruction, contribute to the process of nation-building. The University was divided into twenty-six academies, with the lofty mission of spreading enlightenment throughout Europe but also the duty to train new generations in the skills needed to run government. Education policy should not be seen uniquely in terms of spreading liberal values. It was also devised in the service of the state.²⁴

The other policy, and in Napoleon’s eyes the more important, was the codification of the law, a huge task in which he took a personal interest over four years until the Civil Code was finally decreed in 1807. Again he had inherited unfinished business from the revolutionaries, who had ripped away the old codes based on Roman or custom law, abolished feudal law, removed clerical jurisdiction in moral matters, consecrated certain principles in constitutional law, and passed an impressive number of decrees and statutes. The result, though, was considerable confusion, especially over land ownership and the laws of inheritance, and Napoleon, with his customary concern for order, determined to resolve it in a single legal code. At the heart of the code was the idea of property as an individual right, to be enjoyed free of any feudal obligations. Noble privilege was everywhere abolished, but he also swept away some of the more egalitarian legal reforms of the revolutionary years, upholding the authority of husbands over wives, parents over children.

Marriage law, too, was revised to guarantee the man’s right to administer property in marriage, and though divorce was maintained as a secular institution – as the revolutionaries had decreed in 1792 – the law now demanded a clear demonstration of mutual consent, or evidence of ill-treatment, adultery or a criminal conviction. This led to plummeting divorce rates, depriving women of the escape route that had been opened up to them by the Revolution. Illegitimate children were stripped of any property rights. The Empire was an ordered society where the rights of property-owners and of the heads of families had priority. In this sense the Code had educational significance, too, presenting a template for the kind of ordered, strictly hierarchical society that Napoleon favoured.²⁵It defined the individual’s relationship with the state, and would be a central feature of imperial administration in all the countries France annexed during the Napoleonic Wars. Wherever the French went, the Code necessarily followed.

In his administrative appointments in the territories France invaded, Napoleon looked for professionalism and good judgment above all else – the key attributes, as he saw it, of modern civil administration. At the very top, of course, he might have little choice:princes and electors had to be won over to work for the imperial project, and the reward of a title or a kingdom seemed a small price to pay if it bought their loyalty and maintained administrative continuity. Where no such solution presented itself, as in Naples, Holland or Spain, a member of the Bonaparte clan would be sent in to rule over a conquered people. Though in these instances family interest was clearly in play, even Napoleon’s brothers had to prove their efficiency and defer to the Emperor’s will if they were to avoid his contempt and risk having their authority overruled. He had no hesitation, as we have seen, in undermining his brother Louis in Holland in 1810, when his failure to enact the Continental System led the Emperor to annex his kingdom and, quite arbitrarily, to abolish Louis’ position as monarch.²⁶ More generally he looked to men of some standing in their local society: men of a certain wealth who would be capable of distinguishing public service from family interest and self-aggrandisement – a distinction that was sometimes difficult to maintain in the corrupt political culture of southern Europe and the Mediterranean.

In other words, Napoleon sought men of substance, akin to the British or American notion of independence, with a degree of wealth and ease that could make for a disinterested servant of the state. This, as much as any innate social conservatism, was what led him to search out the notables in each department, to compose lists of the six hundred households that paid most tax, or to bestow titles and honours on his most trusted collaborators. It also led to a greater rigour in the choice of administrative personnel; he replaced early empiricism with a targeted training programme for future prefects and sub-prefects, magistrates and judges, a programme that was made available to the sons of the new elite. With the aim of channelling the brightest among them into key administrative roles, he created auditors to the Council of State in 1803, and within ten years a quarter of the prefects had started in this role. The scheme proved attractive as a channel of advancement for the new social elite, the ‘masses of granite’ who would rally to the Empire across France and beyond, for those ‘sons, sons-in-law and nephews of ministers, senators, state councillors, generals, prefects’ who would attach their star to the fate of the Empire.²⁷ It would contribute significantly to building the imperial administrative elite.

Only such men, Napoleon believed, could see things with an objective eye; and they alone – civilised Europeans working for a secular state in a post-Enlightenment culture, men who, like himself, had lived through and assimilated the values of the French Revolution – could hope to govern with objectivity, submerging personal interest in the greater good that was the interest of the Empire. They did not have to be French as long as they understood the values that made the French the great imperial nation they had become; and in those parts of Europe (generally those in the north and the west, closest to France) where men of standing could be found, willing and able to assume the key administrative roles, the government of the country would be entrusted to them. Elsewhere, in places where these qualities were deemed deficient, French administrators were drafted in. Criminal justice, tax collection and army recruitment were much too important to be consigned to men whose loyalties or probity were suspect. Yet these were exactly the issues most likely to cause popular anger and even to incite rebellion.

In many parts of Europe the French taxed relentlessly, extracting the wealth and grain which the inhabitants produced in order to raise soldiers and feed their armies. The demand for conscripts was even more divisive, turning family against family, rich against poor, and uniting whole communities in their opposition to the state. Across Napoleonic Europe, deserters and draft-dodgers defied the authorities, seeking protection from local people, joining armed gangs, and attacking the gendarmes and agents of the state who were sent to act against them.²⁸ Law enforcement and policing fuelled popular resentments, especially in mountainous regions of southern Europe like the Alps, the Apennines and the Dolomites, where feelings of autonomy were strong and traditions of banditry ingrained. Nowhere was this resentment more damaging than in the furthest outposts of Empire – the Illyrian provinces and Dalmatia.²⁹

Part of the problem from the French point of view was that in such regions, which had traditionally been poorly policed and loosely administered, imperial agents were often resented as intruders, impinging on local customs and imposing unwelcome regulation. In southern Europe in particular, many parts had lain outside the control of any form of state police, while tax collectors and customs officers were rarely seen in rural areas. The greater efficiency and longer outreach of the Napoleonic state meant that gendarmes and troops were used to do jobs that had previously been left undone; taxes were now collected, smuggling rings broken, requisitions imposed, draft-evaders and their protectors rounded up. To local people these innovations smacked less of good government than of foreign interference in local matters where the state had no business to meddle. Similarly, having armies billeted on local villagers was seen not as a source of welcome protection from bandits and robbers, but rather as a harsh imposition that was widely resented. Soldiers stole and looted, since the imperial armies customarily travelled light and depended on requisitioning and foraging if they were to feed their men and horses. Their presence was often actively detested to the point that, in many areas, peasants hid their grain and their animals and refused to sell them food. The fact that the soldiers were foreign could fan the embers of nationalism; but it was their presence that gave offence and drove many villagers to take to smuggling or side with bandits, brigands and partisans from their own community.

It did not help the Empire’s civilising mission when its demands were perceived as unethical or its agents condemned as bullies. It merely united the people, especially those in rural areas, against the demands of outsiders, against what was presented to them as modernisation. This was true even where there were no ideological differences on which the opposition could play. Where there was, as in deeply Catholic regions where the French tried to impose secular civic values, the Empire could easily be seen as the Antichrist. In much of Italy, for instance, traditional piety was not extinguished, and religion gave those who opposed Napoleon a sense of occupying the moral high ground which they exploited to the full. Here, the conflict was seen in broader terms as one ‘between the concept of society that emerged from the French Revolution, as nurtured by the Napoleonic regime, and the Catholic religion’, or, as Michael Broers aptly terms it, a ‘war against God’.³⁰ That was one conflict Napoleon could not hope to win.

Napoleon was not overly concerned that his policies left many Europeans feeling as though they had been colonised by the Empire. Once a country was annexed or occupied, the French suddenly had a very different mission. It was no longer a conquered foreign state, but part of an organic whole, subject to the same laws and administrative dictates as France. The French were no longer mere occupiers; they had to establish a sustainable imperial rule.³¹ This involved more than force: it involved persuasion, an inculcation of French values, and a change in the relationship between the centre and the local powerbrokers. It exaggerated the contrast between those countries like Holland, northern Italy and large parts of Germany that had little trouble embracing imperial institutions, and those, further east and south, where the elites proved unreceptive and popular resistance was widespread. Europe divided into an inner and an outer empire, as the French were very well aware. In the former, local lawyers and landowners – some with radical ideas, many deeply conservative – collaborated readily with them to provide strong justice and administration; the latter offered little cooperation, and was always prey to rebellion and counterrevolution.³²

The exception in eastern Central Europe was the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, established between 1807 and 1813, where, after the miseries of the Partition between Austria, Prussia and Russia, Napoleon could hope to be seen as a liberator and appeal to Polish national aspirations. The Grand Duchy enjoyed little freedom; it was a satellite state, incorporated in the Continental System and allowed diplomatic relations only with France. But there were compensations. The administration was run by Poles, the Duchy raised its own regiments, and the official language was Polish. Besides, the Polish nobility had a long-standing sympathy for French ideas and French culture. This was one corner of Europe where Napoleon’s arrival was guaranteed to be greeted with a degree of sympathy.³³ But it must be seen as an exception, and further French expansion after 1807, in Spain and Portugal at one end of Europe and into Russia at the other, only served to underline how fragile their hold over the outer empire really was. Popular resistance could so easily spill over into guerrilla fighting, and peasant anger into a full-blown people’s war.

More sobering was the reception given to the French in Naples, where they had sought to exploit the weakness of the Bourbon monarchy. Napoleon had reason for some optimism because the French invasions under the Revolution had been widely welcomed by the country’s liberal elite, even though the undisguised anti-clericalism of the French soldiers had antagonised large swathes of this intensely Catholic society. Napoleon himself was scornful of the Neapolitan Bourbons. He proclaimed after Austerlitz that the dynasty had simply ‘ceased to reign’ and sent an army of forty thousand men to dethrone them in response to what he saw as their ‘treacherous’ support for his opponents. The territories around them he treated as political pawns, turning the Grand Duchy of Tuscany into an independent kingdom, then summarily annexing it; and in 1808 he occupied Rome and took the Pope prisoner, the second pope to be seized by Napoleon in a decade. Meanwhile, in 1806, he had given the Neapolitan throne to his brother Joseph Bonaparte; then, when Joseph was moved to Spain, Naples passed to Napoleon’s brother-in-law, Joachim Murat. The Emperor clearly saw strategic importance in Naples, and was prepared to impose his rule whatever the cost in public hostility. It mattered to him in terms of his control of the northern Mediterranean, and also played an important part in enforcing the Continental System. Murat was given a heavy legislative programme to implement, including a new land tax and a new organic law that would spread the burden of taxation more equally and bring justice to all, part of what Napoleon tried to sell to the Neapolitans as his modernising mission.

But the Emperor well knew that these reforms ran counter to much of Neapolitan tradition as well as to the interests of powerful families in the city. His administrators, many themselves Neapolitans, were thwarted or forced to resign by the force of public outrage, and magistrates refused to enforce the new laws. Government proved impossible to enact: taxes went uncollected and conscripts faded into the landscape, while proposed reforms to the Church and public education had to be abandoned. By the end of the war, the state’s finances were in ruins and public anger against the French boiled over, with the central bureaucratic model of government which they had introduced widely held to blame for the country’s failures. There was little sympathy for the French, and little that they had legislated on survived the regime’s collapse. It is surely indicative of their anger that Joachim Murat, alone of the rulers installed by Napoleon across his Empire, should have been executed by the people over whom he ruled.³⁴