The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (50 page)

French offi cials only trusted “old Frenchmen.” This discrimination

invariably alienated and disillusioned potential allies. Consequently,

the preeminent notables in the conquered territories withdrew from

civic life to avoid being drawn into the imperial administration on

unfavorably subordinate terms.

Napoleon’s problems recruiting and retaining local allies would

have been quite familiar in earlier empires. The Romans, Umayyads,

conquistadors, and nabobs all tried to implement their own versions

of
ralliement
. Napoleon, however, broke new ground in the scope of

his ambitiously systematized amalgamist agenda. While he sought

to rally the most useful and prominent European social classes to

his cause, in the long term his goal was to create a cohort of “new

Frenchmen” to bridge the gap with his subjects. Theoretically, they

would be loyal to the Napoleonic regime because they shared its goals

256 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

and core values while retaining suffi cient ties to their home cultures

to be useful imperial intermediaries. The vast majority of conquered

Europeans would remain subordinate subjects, but these assimilated

elites would enjoy a measure of privilege and equality on par with

that of romanized Britons under the later Roman Empire. Where it

took centuries for romanization to run its course in Britain, Napoleon

gambled that he could create a viable European continental empire in

a single generation by reviving and updating Roman assimilationist

policies.

The legacy of Bourbon absolutism and revolutionary centralization gave Napoleon the means and inspiration to attempt such an

audacious feat of imperial social engineering. Banking on the malleability of youth, French administrators established special schools

to draw the children of the aristocratic and notable classes into the

new order. Always on the lookout out for promising recruits, they

kept careful track of prominent families and maintained extensive

fi les on their wealth, talents, loyalties, and reputations. No amount of

gossip was too trivial, and police offi cials recorded the religion, dowries, physical appearance, and morals of unmarried young women

of means. For those who passed muster, receptions, balls, salons, and

tours of Paris highlighted the aesthetic rewards of imperial service,

while the army and the
auditoriat
offered the prospect of status, rapid

advancement, and, in the case of the military, glory. Napoleon even

turned Freemasonry, which the Convention and Directory distrusted

and condemned, into an amalgamist instrument. Bringing the various

French rites under central state authority, Napoleon used Masonic

lodges, particularly those tied to French army regiments, to co-opt

the young Germans and Italians who joined the Napoleonic forces.

These amalgamist strategies achieved a small measure of success.

Napoleon had roughly 150 foreign generals, and a little more than

10 percent of all prefects were “new Frenchmen.”22
Amalgame
was

most appealing to the small strata of urban and professional classes

best equipped to take advantage of the stability and opportunities in

the new continental empire. Young Italian, German, and Belgian notables could fi t themselves into Napoleonic society because they shared

the values of the French Enlightenment and revolution and had not

yet committed themselves to an exclusive national identity. Napoleon

claimed to be above the ancien régime’s anti-Semitic prejudices, but he

did not accord Jews equality before the law. Instead, French Jews had to

Napoleonic

Italy 257

serve a ten-year probationary term to demonstrate that they had given

up their “superstitious” ways before qualifying as real Frenchmen.

Eastern Europeans were even harder to assimilate. Coming from

more agrarian feudal societies, they were largely a mystery to French

administrators. Napoleon therefore overreached himself in trying

to impose
amalgame
on the Illyrian Provinces. When Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and other Balkan communities refused to accept the

Code Napoleon or attend French
lycées
, French offi cials concluded

that they were too primitive and superstitious to ever become new

Frenchmen.

Despite these French rationalizations,
ralliement
and
amalgame

failed because they offered no signifi cant protection from the real

burdens of imperial subjecthood. Austrian and Prussian elites and

commoners alike had to pay tens of millions of francs into French

coffers as penalties for their rulers’ defi ance of Napoleon’s imperial

agenda. In 1807, the
départements réunis
and satellite kingdoms surrendered a total of 359 million francs in tribute, which constituted half

of France’s annual national income. The weight of this unprecedented

extractive regime took an equally heavy toll on both Napoleon’s enemies and allies. The Kingdom of Holland had to take out a loan of forty

million fl orins to meet its obligations to the emperor, and roughly

two-thirds of the Kingdom of Naples’ budget went to pay for the cost

of its French garrison. Similarly, the Kingdom of Westphalia’s yearly

tribute obligations and mandatory military spending outstripped its

annual revenues by more than six million francs.23 The resulting fi scal insolvency ensured that the satellite kingdoms would never be

even remotely autonomous.

The continental system, which embargoed British goods in the

aftermath of the French navy’s demise at Trafalgar, had an equally

extractive dimension. Hoping to strangle Britain’s emerging industrial economy, Napoleon turned the empire into a common but protected market for French industry and commerce. Under a blatant

“France fi rst” policy, discriminatory internal tariffs privileged French

manufactures over those of rivals in the satellite kingdoms. As a

result, Swiss, German, and Austrian producers lost access to key markets in northern Italy, Belgium, and the Rhineland that had become

part of metropolitan France as annexed
départements réunis
. Even

worse, the Royal Navy’s retaliatory blockade closed off overseas

markets, thereby swamping the continent with unsold excess goods.

258 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

This overproduction drove down prices and forced bankers to tighten

credit and raise interest rates. Unemployment rose as small fi rms and

large manufacturers alike went out of business. French merchants

also openly violated the blockade when it suited them. They resold

captured goods at a premium and even saved the British from a bad

harvest in 1810 by selling them wheat.

While the continental system encouraged some import substitution to replace British and overseas products, it ultimately forced the

rest of Europe to subsidize metropolitan France’s standard of living.

The development of more sophisticated fi nancial instruments allowed

Napoleon to dispense with some of the cruder extractive tactics of his

imperial predecessors, but there was no mistaking the reality that

his fi scal policies were simply an updated form of imperial plunder.

Special agents drew up statistical assessments of the wealth of newly

conquered territories, and prefects toured their departments annually to gather demographic and economic data for the purposes of

conscription and tax collection.

Administrators, generals, speculators, and concessionaires also

leveraged their privileged position to reap the personal benefi ts of

empire. Just as military victories in India gave the nabobs the means

to exploit Bengali rulers and
ryots
alike, the French scrambled to

make their fortunes in the
départements réunis
and satellite kingdoms. They bought up the Catholic Church’s nationalized lands at

reduced prices and made off with its moveable treasures and works

of art. Typically, the imperial administration also became a lucrative

source of jobs, contracts, and patronage. Profi t-seeking Frenchmen

exposed the inherent corruption of empire by selling conscription

exemptions, taking bribes to ignore smuggling, speculating in currency, and extorting gifts from local notables. This sort of graft was

hardly unusual in early nineteenth-century Europe, but the power of

empire gave venial Frenchmen the means to seek fortunes without

fear of sanction or retribution from the local authorities.

Napoleon personally disapproved of this kind of corruption, but

he also had no qualms about exploiting the opportunities of empire.

Ignoring the protests of his German and Polish allies, he seized great

swaths of Church and feudal land in the Kingdom of Westphalia and

the Duchy of Warsaw to create estates for his new imperial nobility,

who consisted primarily of Bonaparte family members and French

generals. The common Poles and Germans who actually lived on these

Napoleonic

Italy 259

donations
essentially acquired new feudal masters. These new French

estates generated tens of millions of francs a year, most of which

their absentee holders remitted to metropolitan France. Napoleon

personally claimed a share of these spoils for his own use through a

special fund known as the
domaine extraordinaire
. Although Polish

and German peasants bore the heaviest burden of this exploitation,

French revenue demands effectively hamstrung Napoleon’s eastern puppet rulers. In addition to losing a signifi cant portion of their

annual budgets, the necessity of using authoritarian measures to generate the surplus required to meet French tribute demands cost them

what little legitimacy they had with their subjects.

While this constituted a fairly conventional form of imperial

extraction, the French also placed new burdens on their subjects

by demanding military service as well as labor and tribute. Protonationalism justifi ed mass conscription in metropolitan France, but

Napoleon’s insistence that the “modernizing” reforms of his empire

placed a similar obligation on conquered populations rang hollow. Yet

the Confederation of the Rhine, Switzerland, and the kingdoms of

Italy and Westphalia actually supplied more conscripts than metropolitan France. To a degree this refl ected the limited successes of
ral-

liement
and
amalgame
in convincing local notables to serve in and

recruit for the French army. Napoleon’s willingness to promote his

offi cers on the basis of merit rather than birth helps to explain how

more than one hundred Westphalians won the Legion d’Honneur.24

However, the rulers of the satellite kingdoms also put their weight

into conscription in the hope of gaining a greater degree of autonomy

from their French overseers.

Roughly one million Italians, Germans, Belgians, Dutchmen,

Poles, and other nationalities served Napoleon as conscripted soldiers. Estimates vary, but anywhere from one quarter to one half

of the men in the Grande Armée that invaded Russia in 1812 were

not French. French conscription policies thus constituted a new and

highly oppressive form of imperial exploitation. The eighty thousand

soldiers Napoleon took from the Rhineland amounted to 60 percent

of all eligible men in 1813. Less than half of these troops returned

home.25

These worsening conditions in the imperial forces eventually

inspired the same kind of local resistance to conscription that broke

out in the French Vendée. As in France, Napoleon’s unending appetite

260 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

for soldiers drove imperial offi cials and their allies to intervene ever

more deeply into local affairs. The result was widespread draft evasion

and anticonscription riots. Banditry also became more common as

draft dodgers and deserters joined the outlaw gangs that had long

resisted the ancien régime’s attempts to extend their reach into the

remote hinterlands. Resistance to conscription also often blended into

local opposition to economic liberalization, land privatization, and the

abolition of collective rights.

Napoleon was barely aware of these realities and treated this

and every other form of dissent as unacceptable threats. The police

imposed summary punishment without trial, and special criminal

courts suspended regular legal codes to deal with captured rebels and

bandits. The French success in improving law and order won over

some notables, but these brutal tactics gave the great majority of

Napoleon’s rural subjects little opportunity to embrace
ralliement
.

Seeing through the hypocrisy of Napoleonic propaganda, common

peoples boycotted French sponsored festivals and ignored orders to

celebrate the emperor’s military victories. Others wore ribbons in the

colors of deposed ancien régime rulers or refused to attend imperial

Church services.

Napoleon’s secular agenda and attempts to impose state control

on the clergy were particularly divisive, and the Catholic Church

emerged as one of his most entrenched and determined opponents

after his accord with the Pope collapsed. The failure of the concordat was costly. The clergy were far more infl uential at the local level