Customer Reviews

Europe Under Napoleon 1799-1815

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This relatively concise (about 250 pages) book is an unusually well written and insightful analysis of the Napoleonic Empire. Broers covers the period from Napoleon's ascension to power in 1799 to the fall of the Empire in a series of chronologically arranged but primarily analytical chapters. Each chapter provides the essential basic narrative but Broers' primary emphasis is on the nature of the Napoleonic Empire and the differing responses of the different regions incorporated into the Empire.

Broers' Napoleon is not the irrational force of romantic legend, or a brilliant general improvising as he went along. Napoleon here is presented primarily as the architect of a powerful French state, the inheritor of both the Terror and the type of enlightened despotism practiced by Frederick the Great and Joseph II. Napoleon's great achievement, in Broers' view, was to consolidate the centralizing reforms of the Revolution, producing a uniquely powerful French state whose most obvious manifestation was its army. In the conflicts that characterized the early years of the Empire, Napoleon was able to extend this state successfully with the creation of what Broers terms the inner Empire, the Low Countries, the Rhineland, and much of Northern Italy. These regions were administered very much as France was administered, with Napoleon extending the French administrative, legal, and religious reforms developed in France.

Broers is particularly on the differing responses of different regions conquered by the French, including parts of France where the Empire's rule was surprisingly less secure. Many parts of the inner Empire adapted well to French rule. Napoleon's Empire got into particular trouble with its extension into the so-called outer Empire, regions like Spain that the French conquered as part of Napoleon's efforts to eliminate the British threat and where a combination of popular revolt and Church resistance made imposition of the reform package particularly difficult. Broers is very good on the often destructive effects of Napoleonic conquest. The reactions of local elites to Napoleonic reforms and the differing consequences of French economic policies, including the blockade of British commerce and the essentially colonial policy pursued by the French are delineated quite well.

Broers' narrative shows the evolution of the Empire very well and he stresses that its greatest achievement was to leave behind a legacy of modern state machinery, either in areas where it was imposed by the French or by the need to emulate French reforms to compete in the international arena. These institutions include much of what we regard today as crucial to a liberal society, though the Napoleonic state, which Broers terms a "well ordered police state," was hardly a liberal state. The state system that followed Napoleon's Empire was very much his creation.