Napoleon and the Transformation of Europe European History in Perspective General Editor: Jeremy Black

Benjamin Arnold Medieval Ronald Asch The Thirty Years’ War Christopher Bartlett Peace, War and the European Powers, 1814–1914 Robert Bireley The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700 Donna Bohanan Crown and Nobility in Early Modern France Arden Bucholz Moltke and the German Wars, 1864–1871 Patricia Clavin The Great Depression, 1929–1939 Paula Sutter Fichtner The Habsburg , 1490–1848 Mark Galeotti Gorbachev and his Revolution David Gates Warfare in the Nineteenth Century Alexander Grab and the Transformation of Europe Martin P. Johnson The Dreyfus Affair Peter Musgrave The Early Modern European Economy J. L. Price The Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century A. W. Purdue The Second World War Christopher Read The Making and Breaking of the Soviet System Francisco J. Romero-Salvado Twentieth-Century Matthew S. Seligmann and Roderick R. McLean Germany from Reich to Republic, 1871–1918 Brendan Simms The Struggle for Mastery in Germany, 1779–1850 David Sturdy Louis XIV Hunt Tooley The Western Front Peter Waldron The End of Imperial Russia, 1855–1917 Peter G. Wallace The Long European Reformation James D. White Lenin Patrick Williams Philip II

European History in Perspective Series Standing Order ISBN 978-0-333-71694-6 hardcover ISBN 978-0-333-69336-0 paperback (outside North America only)

You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in the case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above.

Customer Services Department, Palgrave Ltd Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England Napoleon and the Transformation of Europe

Alexander Grab © Alexander Grab 2003 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-0-333-68274-6 hardback ISBN 978-0-333-68275-3 ISBN 978-1-4039-3757-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-4039-3757-5 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Grab, Alexander I., 1946– Napoleon and the transformation of Europe / Alexander Grab. p. cm.—(European history in perspective) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-333-68274-6—ISBN 978-0-333-68275-3 (pbk.) 1. Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1769–1821—Influence. 2. France—History—Consulate and First Empire, 1799–1815. 3. France— Foreign relations—1789–1815. 4. Europe—History—1789–1815. 5. , 1800–1815—Influence. I. Title. II. European history in perspective (Macmillan Press) DC202.5.G74 2003 940.2Ј7—dc21 2003042907 10987654321 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 Contents

List of Maps vii Acknowledgments viii Introduction ix

1 The Formation of the Napoleonic Empire 1

2 The Janus Face of Napoleon’s Rule: Reform and Exploitation 19

3 France 34

4 The 60

5 Belgium 75

6 Germany 85

7Switzerland 112

8 Spain 123

9 Portugal 144

10 The Italian Peninsula 152

11 The of 176

12 The 188

v vi Contents

13 The Collapse of the Napoleonic Empire 197

Conclusion: The Legacy of Napoleon 204

Notes 212

Selected Bibliography 228

Index 234 List of Maps

1 Europe, 1812 17 2 Germany, 1812 91 3 , 1812 158

vii Acknowledgments

This work has benefited from the generous help of several colleagues and friends. A number of colleagues deserve my gratitude for reading parts of the manuscript and providing me with useful comments: Don Horward, Carlo Capra, Geoffrey Symcox, Bill Baker and Massimiliano Ferri. Special thanks go to Richard Blanke, who very kindly agreed to read the entire manuscript and made many invaluable suggestions that helped me produce a better book. I owe a special debt to Suzanne Moulton, the Assistant Administrator of the Department of History at the University of Maine, who, very patiently and meticulously, read through several drafts of my manuscript and made numerous corrections and stylistic improvements. I am indebted to my wife Julie, who has always been ready with advice and encouragement, without which completing the work would have been much more difficult. I dedicate the work to her and my daughter Sonali. Lastly, I would like to mention my father, Walter Grab, a scholar of German history, who taught for many years at Tel Aviv University. He read the early versions of some of the chapters but, regrettably, will not be able to read the final product as he died in December 2000. We did not always agree about everything, but his encouragement, assistance, and stimula- tion over many years have been highly instrumental in making me the historian that I am today.

viii Introduction

Ever since his fall from power in 1815, Napoleon has aroused enormous interest among historians. More has been written about him than any other French – possibly even European – historical figure (by the latest reckoning more than 220,000 volumes). A major reason for this huge interest is Napoleon’s meteoric rise to prominence from relatively obscure origins in peripheral Corsica. Bonaparte was only 26 years old when he was appointed commander of the Italian front, 30 when he became First Consul, and 35 when he crowned himself Emperor. Napoleon’s numerous military victories and the important legacies that he left to France, includ- ing Code Napoleon and the lycées, also explain the considerable interest in him. Although the literature on Napoleon in the English language is exten- sive, it is rather uneven.1 There is a vast bibliography on Napoleon’s mil- itary campaigns and his diplomacy, as well as on his private life, but much less attention has been devoted to the economic, social, administrative, and cultural aspects of the Napoleonic years. Although nobody doubts the importance of Napoleon’s battles and military policy for understand- ing the Napoleonic period, it is equally important to investigate the tax system that paid for these campaigns and the policy that conscripted the soldiers for his army. The biographies of Napoleon’s generals are important, yet so are the less-explored biographies of his ministers and prominent officials in France and his satellite states. A second shortcoming of the Napoleonic bibliography is its Franco- centric nature.2 Until recently, most English-language books on Napoleon have focused on France, devoting relatively limited space – a chapter or two – to developments in his annexed and satellite states.3 Yet one must insist that Napoleon was as much a part of European history as he was of French history. Indeed, to fully understand Napoleonic policies, we need to study them in a European context. Clearly, a critical component of Napoleon’s

ix x Introduction historical role was his effort to consolidate French hegemony throughout Europe and establish himself as its dominant ruler. To achieve these goals, Napoleon incessantly intervened in other countries and reshaped the map of Europe. He annexed foreign territories, created new satellite states, altered borders, toppled dynasties, and imposed new govern- ments. He also exploited the human and financial resources of occupied Europe, conscripted young men into his Grande Armée, and imposed taxes and war contributions. Since French resources were inadequate for his military campaigns, his ability to tap European resources was indispensa- ble in sustaining and expanding his Empire. To put it bluntly, without drafting European conscripts and extracting financial support from other countries, Napoleon would have been unable to create his Grande Armée and wage his many campaigns. Likewise, Napoleonic economic policies must also be studied within a European setting. The Continental Blockade, his most significant policy after 1806, required the collabora- tion of the rest of Europe, and French economic domination in Europe meant that his satellite states had to grant French industry and com- merce favorable conditions without reciprocity. But a discussion of Napoleon’s European policies cannot be limited to military operations, conquests, and exploitation. Reform programs that transformed and modernized the internal structures of various countries constituted a highly significant component of Napoleon’s continental impact. Indeed, the Napoleonic regime possessed a Janus face: reform and innovation combined with subordination and exploitation. In fact, the two aspects were linked. To maximize revenues and recruit men more efficiently, Napoleon and his officials initiated broad reforms in the subject states, designed to create a central state apparatus consist- ing of a centralized bureaucracy, a uniform tax system, a conscripted army, a uniform court system, and an effective police force. They also launched the transformations of European societies by subjecting the Church to the State, reducing the power of the nobility, and advancing the interests of non-nobles by opening government and military positions to them and selling them national property. Other major changes included the introduction of Code Napoleon, which stressed legal equal- ity and property rights; abolition of the seigneurial system; elimination of internal tolls and the formation of national markets; secularization of Church property; and the introduction of secondary education. To be sure, the depth and impact of these reforms varied from country to coun- try, depending primarily upon how well prepared each society was to adopt the changes. But in many of the countries that comprised his Introduction xi

Grand Empire, Napoleon’s policies undermined a great deal of the traditional structure and paved the road toward a more modern society. Napoleon modeled his reforms throughout Europe on French laws and institutions. Revolutionary France had initiated many of these changes, and Napoleon exported them throughout Europe. Aside from increasing his ability to exploit his satellite states, his reform policies aimed at inte- grating the Continent, thereby enhancing French domination in Europe. In addition to these pragmatic considerations, Napoleon and his officials were convinced that the French system was simply the best and that Europeans would be grateful once they experienced the benefits of French laws and institutions.4 In sum, the policies that Napoleon launched as a French and a European ruler, reformer, and military commander were closely linked. In his view, France’s role was to provide a model for the improvement of the rest of Europe, while Europe’s func- tion was to acknowledge the supremacy of the French structure and supply the resources to aggrandize France’s position in Europe. The last decade has witnessed some efforts by historians to rectify the Franco-centrism that has characterized much of the previous Napoleonic bibliography, and to explore Napoleon within a European context. An unprecedented number of English-language works on Napoleon’s rule outside France appeared in the 1990s. Important works such as Stuart Woolf’s Napoleon’s Integration of Europe (1991) and Michael Broers’ Europe under Napoleon, 1799–1815 (1996) provide a wealth of information and analysis on the entire Continent, the former topically and the latter chronologically. Other volumes on Napoleonic Europe, recently pub- lished, include: a small but useful volume by Geoffrey Ellis, The Napoleonic Empire (1991); a helpful guide by Clive Emsley, The Longman Companion to Napoleonic Europe (1993); Charles Esdaile, The Wars of Napoleon (1995); and more recently, a volume of valuable articles edited by Philip Dwyer, Napoleon and Europe (2001). A number of excellent studies on the internal developments in single countries have also appeared during this same period: Christopher Blackburn, Napoleon and the Szlachta (1998); Michael Broers, Napoleonic Imperialism and the Savoyard Monarchy, 1773–1821: State Building in Piedmont (1997); Frank Bundy, The Administration of the Illyrian Provinces of the French Empire, 1809–1813 (1987); Milton Finley, The Most Monstrous of Wars: The Napoleonic Guerrilla War in Southern Italy, 1806–1811 (1994); Brendan Simms, The Impact of Napoleon: Prussian High Politics, Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Executive, 1797–1806 (1997), and John Lawrence Tone, The Fatal Knot: The Guerrilla War in Navarre and the Defeat of Napoleon xii Introduction in Spain (1994). John Davis, Michael Rowe, and Alexander Grab have added important articles on the Kingdom of Naples, the left bank of the Rhine, and the Republic and Kingdom of Italy, respectively. Finally, the many valuable articles on various states published in The Proceedings of the Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, 1750–1850 (hereafter abbrevi- ated to CRE) also demonstrate the growing interest in Europe under Napoleon. The present volume is an addition to this growing bibliography on Napoleonic Europe. It does not pretend to be exhaustive, by any means; it is a work of synthesis, based primarily on secondary literature, whose principal innovation is its structure, namely its comparative discussion of Napoleonic changes in a wide variety of countries. It focuses on the principal events and developments in the ten countries that comprised the Napoleonic Empire at one time or another: France itself, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, the Illyrian Provinces, Italy, Portugal, (the Grand Duchy of Warsaw), Spain, and . The Napoleonic period in each country is the subject of a separate chapter, presented in the form of a chronological narrative covering the period from the Revolutionary years to the fall of Napoleon. Each chapter discusses the pre-Revolutionary period, the context of the French invasion, the incor- poration into the Napoleonic Empire, the various territorial changes, the types of governments Napoleon imposed, the principal officials he appointed, significant military operations, the Napoleonic exploitation of resources, the effects of the Continental Blockade, and the collapse of Napoleonic rule. The primary objectives of this volume, however, are to describe and analyze the Napoleonic reform programs in each country and to assess their success or failure, their impact on the local popu- lations, how the latter responded to the changes, and the legacy of the Napoleonic period. As this book attempts to demonstrate, aside from being a brilliant military commander, diplomat, and harbinger of change in France, Napoleon was also a major reformer and a catalyst of modernity on a European scale. In other words, the Napoleonic years marked a period of transition from the Old Regime to the modern era. By building the cen- tral state, abolishing the privileges of the Church and nobility and weak- ening their grip on power, advancing the interests of the bourgeoisie, proclaiming legal equality, and promoting economic unity, Napoleonic rule paved the way for the modernization of Europe. Yet as this volume also demonstrates, Napoleonic reform programs and their effects were uneven throughout Europe.5 For example, their impact Introduction xiii on the Kingdom of Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium was greater than on Spain, the Kingdom of Naples, or the Duchy of Warsaw. This is not surprising, of course, given the wide diversity of conditions in the various countries and the different durations of French rule. The former group of countries was economically developed and had already experienced a period of reform, while the Kingdom of Naples and the Duchy of Warsaw, where noble privileges and the seigneurial system were deeply entrenched, had experienced little or no change at all. Belgium and northern Italy, which were occupied by the French in the 1790s, had more time to adopt the reforms than states that became subject to Napoleon after 1806. In Spain and the Kingdom of Naples, popular revolts posed obstacles to the implementation of the reforms, but in northern Italy and Belgium violent popular protest was rare and short-lived. In sum, an analysis of these and other differences allows us better to understand the uneven pace and depth of Napoleonic reforms in the various parts of the Grand Empire. There is still much to be learnt, of course, about the Napoleonic sub- ject states and their societies, including the peasantry, the urban middle and lower classes, the new tax systems, the administrative and judicial structures and their personnel, public disorder and police response, and the implementation of educational reforms. It is hoped that this work will help to stimulate continued interest in Napoleonic Europe and encour- age further research into these and other aspects of this important period.