The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (49 page)

the nearly continuous warfare placed enormous burdens on their

resources and manpower. State spending rose from seven hundred

million francs to one billion between 1806 and 1812, and 80 percent

of these funds went directly to the military.19 Similarly, although auxiliary troops from the wider empire rounded out the French forces,

Napoleon needed mass conscription to force Frenchmen to take part

in his imperial enterprise. The French people fi rst experienced full

military mobilization under the emergency
levée en masse
of 1793,

and the Directory enacted permanent draft laws fi ve years later. But

as with the other state institutions inherited from the republican era,

Napoleon expanded and centralized the military conscription system.

From 1799 to 1813, his recruiters demanded roughly 2.8 million men,

which amounted to approximately two-fi fths of all eligible males or

7 percent of the population of preimperial France.20

Napoleonic

Italy 251

Common Frenchmen may have reveled vicariously in France’s

new imperial glory, but only fi fty-two thousand of them volunteered

for Napoleon’s armies before 1812. To meet the emperor’s insatiable

demand for soldiers, subprefects drew up comprehensive manpower

lists for every locality. For a time, the wealthy could hire poorer men

to take their place, but in the fi nal years of the war the authorities

conscripted rich and poor alike. In 1809, Napoleon needed a rushed

levy of 174,000 men to repel an Austrian invasion during the War of

the Fifth Coalition. As he grew more desperate, military recruiters

turned French orphanages upside down in their dragnet for boys over

the age of twelve. Many conscripts did not go willingly, and approximately 10 percent of all men called dodged the draft. In some areas

the evasion rate was as high as 40 percent. In response, the
gendar-

merie
tracked down resisters in mass manhunts, and the provincial

authorities punished the parents of missing men with fi nes and billeted
gendarmes
in their homes. By 1811, the French authorities had

swept up more than one hundred thousand fl eeing conscripts.21

Thus, even more than taxation, conscription brought unprecedented levels of state intrusion into the daily lives of common people.

Napoleonic offi cials imposed special taxes on localities that missed

their quotas, and the brigades of
gendarmes
that hunted draft evaders

were widely despised for their lack of respect for individual rights and

privacy. It is not surprising that popular hostility toward conscription sparked another outbreak of resistance in the regions of western

and southern France that had rejected revolutionary centralization in

the 1790s. In the Vendée, columns of troops burned defi ant villages,

and special tribunes sentenced more than four hundred resisters to

death.

These brutal tactics exposed the harsh realities and limits of

Napoleonic rule. Faced with the distraction of a multifront war and

the need to maintain the appearance of control, Napoleon quietly and

pragmatically allowed communities in the Vendée to default on their

tax and conscription obligations in the later years of his reign. He

actually had greater authority in the settled areas of the inner empire

than he did in some parts of France itself. The ability of people living in the Vendée and other relatively remote regions to resist his

attempt to turn them into obedient French citizens demonstrated that

localism was still a potent force. This rendered Napoleon’s centralizing project incomplete.

252 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Nevertheless, the people of the Vendée’s nominal French citizenship

spared them from the full tribute demands that Napoleon imposed on

the common peoples of the wider empire. On paper, the Napoleonic

regime was relatively unique in the larger history of empire because

Napoleon and his offi cials pretended to make no distinction between

the populations of old France and conquered territories, which meant

that all of the peoples of the empire shared the same rights and obligations. This was in sharp contrast to Spanish and British imperial

policy in Peru and Bengal, where the boundaries of subjecthood were

pronounced and inherently discriminatory. In fact, however, only

the most useful notable and urban middle classes were eligible for

ralliement
and imperial citizenship. Even the patriots and wouldbe nationalists such as Ermolao Federigo who accepted Napoleon’s

modernizing rhetoric eventually learned that he always kept French

interests paramount.

From an administrative standpoint, the Napoleonic empire was

remarkably homogenous. Although Napoleon manipulated political

boundaries to create new departments and satellite states, he used

essentially the same institutions and laws to govern the French

metropole and his conquered territories. This was particularly true in

the imperial inner core, comprising the settled and economically integrated regions of eastern France, western Germany, northern Italy,

and the Low Countries. These territories contained the prosperous

and tribute-rich urban centers and fertile river valleys most easily

absorbed into the Napoleonic state system.

By contrast, the outer empire consisted of the mountainous and

densely forested regions of metropolitan France, central Europe, and

Italy, which stoutly resisted Napoleonic centralization. It took French

soldiers,
gendarmes
, and policemen to force communities in these

areas to acknowledge his authority, and the endemic banditry in the

outer empire demonstrated the real limits of French imperial power.

More signifi cant, the resumption of warfare after 1805 led Napoleon

to incorporate even more alien and inassimilable peoples in Spain,

southern Italy, the Balkans, and eastern Europe into the empire. This

included the unwise and ill-fated annexation of the former Austrian

territories of Trieste, Croatia, and Dalmatia as the Illyrian Provinces.

His hold on these regions was tenuous at best, and the expense of

ruling them strained French resources during the fi nal years of the

Napoleonic empire.

Napoleonic

Italy 253

In the inner empire, it usually took a period of transitional military

rule to soften up the
départements réunis
and prepare them for integration into France. One of the fi rst and most important steps was

to organize a
gendarmerie
to extend French authority as deeply as

possible into the countryside and the lower social orders. These forces

used a heavy hand to break up the guilds, corporate feudal bodies, and

local particularism that might hinder French attempts to tax and conscript. This is why Napoleon immediately imposed the Code Napoleon

in every annexed territory. Aiming to deal directly with the subject

population, his reforms established equality before the law but also

ended collective peasant rights, abolished monastic charitable institutions, and appropriated local sources of revenue. Napoleonic offi cials

similarly introduced the revolutionary practice of confi scating and

reselling Church lands to raise revenue. Collectively, these policies

were a radical shock to the society and culture of the
départements

réunis
.

The weight of French imperial rule was slightly lighter in the territories that Napoleon allowed to retain a measure of autonomy as

satellite republics and kingdoms. These were largely expedient artifi cial entities that reduced the strain of direct imperial administration

in regions that were less suited, at least in the short term, for incorporation into France. During the years when Napoleon maintained the

façade of the consulate he tended to call these puppet states republics,

but after he assumed the imperial throne in 1805 most became kingdoms. Some territories had the unique experience of falling into all

three categories. The Netherlands, for example, went from being the

Batavian Republic to the Kingdom of Holland in 1806 and then was

divided up and annexed as
départements réunis
four years later. In

the German-speaking lands, Napoleon reconfi gured the Holy Roman

Empire to create the Confederation of the Rhine and the Kingdom

of Westphalia. Further east, he undid the work of the Russians,

Prussians, and Austrians by reconstituting Poland as the Duchy of

Warsaw. In Iberia, Spain shifted from being a French ally to a puppet

state after Napoleon deposed the inept Bourbon monarchy in 1808.

In terms of governance, a well-developed road network and message system allowed the emperor to keep the satellite states on a short

leash. The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs handled their diplomatic relations, and Bonaparte family members became the kings

of Naples, Holland, Westphalia, and eventually Spain. Napoleon

254 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

kept the crown of the Kingdom of Italy for himself. Alternatively,

cooperative foreign rulers retained a measure of their authority if

they proved suffi ciently useful. King Max Joseph of Bavaria kept

his throne by enthusiastically adopting the Code Napoleon without

French pressure, and Frederick Augustus of Saxony spared the French

the costs of governing Poland by becoming the Duchy of Warsaw’s

nominal sovereign. Administratively, these satellite rulers still had

to follow Napoleon’s agenda. “Old Frenchmen” controlled their key

ministries, and most adopted Napoleonic constitutions that abolished

feudal privilege and instituted the primary elements of the French

legal reforms.

In both the annexed
départements réunis
and the satellite kingdoms

Napoleon sought to build a solid foundation for permanent imperial

rule by fashioning a new social order through
ralliement
and
amal-

game
. As in metropolitan France, he aimed to produce useful allies

who derived their status and privilege from their active participation

in the French imperial project. Napoleonic prefects may have aspired

to rule the annexed
départements réunis
directly, but most lacked the

linguistic and cultural expertise to communicate with their subjects.

Recognizing that they needed local assistance to govern effectively,

they courted ancien régime elites, urban notables, and professionals

by offering political stability, respect for private property, and lucrative employment in the civil service, courts, and military. Napoleonic

offi cials were also willing to work with cooperative local clergymen

even though many revolutionary Frenchmen still believed that the

Catholic Church promoted primitive superstition as a bastion of the

ancien régime.

Napoleon actually had little use for the foreign Jacobins and

republicans who had rallied to the French revolutionary cause in

the 1790s. These radicals lacked suffi cient infl uence with the general

population and still entertained potentially subversive aspirations for

national self-determination. When faced with reconciling their commitment to egalitarianism with their need for local allies the French

watered down their reformist agenda and dismissed the radicals who

embraced the ideals of the revolution in an effort to rally property

owners to their cause.

The appeal of
ralliement
varied from territory to territory. In

the Rhineland, the French regime won considerable support from

urban notables, wealthy landowners, and former radicals by reducing

Napoleonic

Italy 255

banditry. Ignoring political ideology, French offi cials won over men

of talent with jobs and social honors. It also helped that they gave

wealthy elites an opportunity to buy confi scated Church property

at reasonable prices. An even smaller handful of men, such as the

onetime Genoese revolutionary Gian Carlo Serra, who enlisted in

the Napoleonic imperial enterprise as a supporter of the Ligurian

Republic in the 1790s, advanced through the civil service ranks. Serra

even became the French resident in the Duchy of Warsaw in 1807.

Napoleon also found it easy to win allies among populations that had

suffered under the ancien régime. Poles served as loyal auxiliaries in

most of his wars because they needed French protection from Prussia

and Russia to realize their dream of an independent homeland. Jews,

southern German Protestants, and Freemasons also gained a measure of security under the Napoleonic regime’s emphasis on equality

before the law.

More often, however, the inherent risks of
ralliement
outweighed

its potential rewards. As in all empires, an alliance with an alien conquering power required imperial auxiliaries to cooperate in extracting wealth from their own communities. The men who rallied to the

Napoleonic regime had to help the French enforce conscription, collect taxes, and uphold a series of administrative directives that interfered directly with the daily lives of common people. In doing so

they earned popular disdain and risked violent retribution when the

French empire began to waver. Moreover, relatively few men could

match Serra’s rapid rise in the imperial civil service because most