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MONSTRE SACRÉ: THE QUESTION OF CULTURAL IMPERIALISM AND THE NAPOLEONIC EMPIRE*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2008

STEVEN ENGLUND
STEVEN ENGLUND*
Affiliation:
The American University of Paris
*
9 rue Tholozé, 75018 Paris, France[email protected]
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Abstract

This review considers, first, current work on the Napoleonic Empire dealing with Switzerland, the three parts of ‘Germany’ (the Rhineland, the ‘Third Germany’, Prussia), Spain, and the so-called ‘national’ question(s) in these countries and regions. It next focuses on recent work on the three parts of ‘Italy’ (the Kingdom of Italy, the départements réunis, and the Kingdom of Naples). But the main body of the review concentrates on the work of Michael Broers: not only his new and remarkable conceptualization of the Empire as containing ‘inner’, ‘outer’, and ‘intermediate’ zones, but also his creative if controversial application of post-modern colonial theory to an analysis of the French in Italy. The review suggests that Broers, for all his brilliance and mastery, has perhaps pressed his arguments and conclusion beyond his evidence base. The latter, while extensive, is too limited to just French perceptions of Italians before 1815, and does not extensively consider Italian reactions to the French presence; nor does it provide significant evidence to buttress Broers's far-reaching conclusions about nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italy.

Type
Historiographical Reviews
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , March 2008 , pp. 215 - 250
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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Footnotes

For their suggestions, the author would like to thank Michael Drolet, Sudhir Hazareesingh, David A. Bell, Alexander Grab, Edward Berenson, William Smith, and Vincent J. Curcio.

References

1 Michael Broers, The politics of religion in Napoleonic Italy: the war against God, 1801–1814 (London, 2002), p. x.

2 David Gilmour, The ruling caste: imperial lives in the Victorian Raj (New York, 2006), p. 377.

3 This was as true of works violently critical of l'Empereur as of those that are measured in their treatment of him. See Felix M. Markham, Napoleon and the awakening of Europe (New York, 1954); Geoffrey Bruun, Europe and the French imperium (New York, 1957); Owen Connelly, Napoleon's satellite kingdoms (New York, 1965); Jean Tulard, Le Grand Empire, 1804–1815 (Paris, 1982); and Geoffrey Ellis, The Napoleonic Empire (London, 1991).

4 See the collective reflections on Les Grands Empires (Brussels, 1973), Société Jean Bodin pour l'Histoire Comparative des Institutions, t. xxxi. The authors make clear that their perspective is ‘imperial’, not colonial, empires – as if the nuance were self-evident, decisive, and did not need to be argued. (The two essays on France considered the First and Second Napoleonic Empires, and say nothing about the colonies. They also heavily privilege the roles of the two Bonaparte founders, Napoleon and Louis-Napoleon.)

5 Jourdan teaches at the University of Amsterdam but writes in French on French topics, though she is currently working on a study of the Netherlands under Napoleon. Marzagalli wrote her doctoral dissertation under Stuart Woolf's supervision at the European University in Florence, then became maître de conference at the University of Bordeaux, and is now a professor at the University of Nice. She writes in both Italian and French on international topics (including the Continental System). A new generation of freshly minted doctorates in France working in this area include Nicola Todorov (working on Westphalia), Xavier Abeberry (on Spain), and Matthieu de Oliveira et José Olcina (on Belgium). Scholars working in German and on Germany include Elisabeth Fehrenbach, Helmut Berding, Thomas Nipperdey, H.-J. Luesebrink, Rolf Reichardt, Michael Jeismann, K. Deinete, and Karen Hagemann (the last-named teaches in the US). See Schoenpflug, Daniel, ‘So far, and yet so near: comparison, transfer and memory in recent German books on the age of the French Revolution and Napoleon’, French History, 18 (Dec. 2004), pp. 446–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In Spanish, and on Spain: J. Aymes, Moreno Alonso, Morales Moya, and Jose-Maria Portillo. See the recent volume of the Annales historiques de la Révolution française (336 Apr./June 2004)) given over to ‘L'Espagne et Napoléon’. In Italian, and on Italy: Carlo Capra, Paolo Villani, Anna-Maria Rao, Livio Antonielli, Emanuele Pagano, Stefano Levati, and Ivana Pederzani. Work on the effects on Britain of the Napoleonic Empire and wars include Linda Colley, Britons: forging the nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven and London, 1992); and Stuart Semmel, Napoleon and the British (New Haven and London, 2004). For general syntheses that are sensitive to the new approach, see Philip Dwyer, ed., Napoleon and Europe (London, 2001); the published papers from the colloquium held in 2001 in la Roche-sur-Yon, Napoléon et l'Europe (Rennes, 2002), sous la direction de Jean-Clément Martin; Voies nouvelles pour l'histoire du Premier Empire: territoires, pouvoirs, identités, textes réunis et présentés par Natalie Petiteau (Paris, 2003).

6 Stuart Woolf, Napoleon's integration of Europe (London and New York, 1991).

7 For a recent critical commentary, see Geoffrey Ellis, ‘The nature of Napoleonic imperialism’, in Dwyer, ed., Napoleon and Europe. For Woolf's summary of criticism and response, see Woolf, S., ‘Napoleon and Europe revisited’, Modern and Contemporary France, 8 (2000), pp. 469–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Malet was a Jacobin general in Paris who spread the rumour that Napoleon was dead in Russia. He then moved to seize power for himself and a few confederates. His coup failed not because the government did not believe Malet about the emperor's being dead, but because both it and the vast bureaucracy it ran were quite accustomed to functioning without Napoleon. Michael Broers, Europe under Napoleon, 1799–1815 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 272, 271, 273.

9 Cited in Le dictionnaire Napoléon, sous la direction de Jean Tulard (Paris, 1987), p. 295.

10 Broers, Europe under Napoleon, p. 181.

11 Ibid., p. 267. The map does not show the Veneto as part of the outer empire, but the mistake was the publisher's. The Veneto is part of the outer empire, less for reasons of the failure of law and order (although the Fiume was always bandit-infested) than because the administration and court system never took root and had to be run by outsiders. Moreover, the Venetian elites never adapted to Napoleonic mores, and had to be frozen out of any but very local jobs.

12 Looking innovatively backward, not only forward in time, Broers sees the inner empire as ‘a version of a “middle kingdom”’, at the crossroads of Europe, more than a pure extension of France itself. His realm resembled the original inheritance of Charles V, more than of Louis XI, of Lothar, more than Charlemagne”, Europe under Napoleon, p. 268.

13 ‘To use Michael Mann's distinction, French domination in the “inner empire” was “infra-structural”, taking the form of routine administration, rule of law and a close articulation of the central state with patterns of local power. By contrast, rule in the “outer empire” was “despotic”, requiring military force and the ceding of everyday control to independent forces.’ John Breuilly, ‘Napoleonic Germany and state-formation’, in Michael Rowe, ed., Collaboration and resistance in Napoleonic Europe: state-formation in an age of upheaval, c. 1800–1815 (Cambridge, 2003), p. 124. The latter collective work contains essays by many of the individuals we are considering in this review, each summarizing his views on the country on which he works.

14 Alexander Grab, Napoleon and the transformation of Europe (London and New York, 2003).

15 Grab, Napoleon and the transformation, p. 211. Broers, by contrast, writes: ‘The imperial bureaucracy was rigid, chauvinistic and often ruthless.’ Broers, Europe under Napoleon, p. 272.

16 Alain-Jacques Czouz-Tornare, ed., Quand Napoléon Bonaparte recréa la Suisse (Paris, 2006). The author is a professor at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland.

17 Andreas Fahrmeir, ‘Centralisation versus particularism in the “Third Germany”’, in Rowe, ed., Collaboration and resistance, pp. 107–20; Breuilly, ‘Napoleonic Germany’, pp. 121–52; Karen Hagemann, Mannlicher Muth und Teutsche Ehre, Nation, Militär und Geschlecht zur Zeit der Antinapoleonischen Kriege Preussens (Paderborn, 2002); idem, ‘Francophobia and patriotism: anti-French images and sentiments in Prussia and northern Germany during the anti-Napoleonic wars’, French History, 18, pp. 404–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘Occupation, mobilization, and politics: the anti-Napoleonic wars in Prussian experience, memory, and historiography’, Central European History, 39 (2006), pp. 580–610Google Scholar; Michael Rowe From Reich to state: the Rhineland in the revolutionary age, 1780–1830 (Cambridge, 2003).

18 Rowe, From Reich to state, p. 98.

19 Fahrmeir, ‘Centralisation versus particularism’, p. 108.

20 Rowe, From Reich to state, p. 113.

21 Fahrmeir, ‘Centralisation versus particularism’, p. 113.

22 Ibid., 114. John Breuilly writes, ‘A French-based reform programme worked because it encountered a society not very different from France itself.’ Breuilly, ‘Napoleonic Germany’, p. 134.

23 Rowe, From Reich to state, p. 156.

24 Ibid., p. 117.

25 Ibid., p. 198.

26 Ibid., p. 214

27 Paul Nolte, Staatsbildung als Gesellschaftsreform: Politische Reformen in Preussen und den süddeutsch en Staaten, 1800–1820 (Frankfurt a. M., 1990).

28 Matthew Levinger, Enlightened nationalism: transformation of Prussian political culture between 1806 and 1848 (Oxford, 2000). Brendan Simms, for his part, proves the absolute Primat des Aussenpolitiks in Prussian political history from 1797 onwards. Brendan Simms, The impact of Napoleon: Prussian high politics, foreign policy, and the crisis of the executive, 1797–1806 (Cambridge, 1997).

29 The best summary in English of Hagemann's book is her article ‘Occupation, mobilization, and politics’. Rowe writes of the Rhenish experience of fighting for Napoleon in the Grande Armée that it amounted to a ‘dilution of nationalism’, which ‘reversed the revolutionary concept of a “Nation in Arms”. Rhinelanders in French service were more likely to be “praetorianised” than nationalised.’ Idem, From Reich to state, pp. 190–1.

30 See, for example, Alain Dieckhoff, ‘Nationalisme politique contre nationalisme culturel?’, in A. Dieckhoff and C. Jaffrelot, eds., Repenser le nationalism: theories et pratiques (Paris, 2006), pp. 105–30.

31 Michael Jeismann, La patrie de l'ennemi: la notion d'ennemi national et la representation de la nation en Allemagne et en France de 1792 à 1918, trans. Dominique Lassaigne (Paris, 1997; originally published in 1992), p. 37.

32 Breuilly, ‘Napoleonic Germany’, pp. 135–6, 138.

33 Charles Esdaile, Fighting Napoleon: guerrillas, bandits and adventurers in Spain, 1808–1814 (New Haven, 2004), p. 89.

34 Ibid., pp. 201, 77, 129.

35 Hocquellet asserts his ‘désaccord avec [Esdaile] sur ce point capital [that the guerrillas did more harm than good to the Allied cause]’. He concludes that without guerrilla action, Spain would have been subdued rapidly by the French. ‘Les élites et le peuple face à l'invasion napoléonienne: pratiques sociales traditionnelles et politique moderne (1808–1812)’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 336 (‘L'Espagne et Napoléon’) (Apr./June 2004), pp. 84, 95.

36 Janet Hartley, ‘Russia and Napoleon: state, society and nation’, in Rowe, ed., Collaboration and resistance, pp. 184–202; see pp. 190–1. In a less archivally based piece, Alexander Martin, however, takes the traditional view of what he sees as the Russian national rising, led by the nobility. Alexander Martin, ‘The Russian empire and the Napoleonic wars’, in Dwyer, ed., Napoleon and Europe, pp. 243–63. See also Franco Venturi, The roots of revolution (London, 1960), on the Decembrists. For further evidence of the absence of ‘national’ revolts, see Yves Bercé's La fin de l'Europe napoléonienne: 1814, la vacance du pouvoir (Reims, 1989).

37 Hartley, ‘Russia and Napoleon’, p. 193. On the other hand, she also writes, ‘it cannot be claimed that, generally, serfs viewed Napoleon as their saviour in an ideological attack on feudalism or on the institution of serfdom’, though if Napoleon had worked at that, it might have been different. Ibid., p. 194.

38 Ibid., pp. 196–7.

39 Alan Forrest, Napoleon's men: the soldiers of the revolution and empire (London, 2005), pp. 6–7.

40 Ibid., p. 93.

41 ‘That pride was particularly strong when they served under Napoleon himself. Few of his troops seemed to question the cause in which they were fighting; few expressed any reservations about the proclamation of the Empire in 1804; and there is no sense that they were tempted to betray or even criticise their Emperor [toward whom they felt] awe.’ Ibid., p. 100.

42 Alain Pillepich, Napoléon et les Italiens (Paris, 2003), concerns the Kingdom in the north-east, while Broers, Politics of religion, concerns mainly the neighbouring départements réunis.

43 Cited in Dwyer, P., ‘Napoleon Bonaparte as hero and saviour: image, rhetoric, and behaviour in the construction of a legend’, French History, 18, 4 (2004), p. 393CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 E.g., André Fugier, Napoléon en Italie (Paris, 1947); François Gachot, La première campagne de l'Italie (Paris, 1902).

45 See the paean by J.-O. Boudon, La dernière classe du professeur Tulard (Paris, 2004), p. 12.

46 Pillepich, Napoléon et les Italiens, unnumbered dedication page.

47 Ibid., pp. 61–3.

48 Ibid., p. 197.

49 Ibid., p. 85.

50 For example, anything not spelled out in the articles of the Italian version of the Concordat would remain under the sway of the Church, not the State (article 20). Ibid., p. 136.

51 Ibid., p. 77.

52 Ibid., p. 196.

53 Ibid., p. 198.

54 For a critique of this harshness, see Englund, Steven, ‘Napoleon and Hitler’, Journal of the Historical Society, 6, 1 (Mar. 2006), pp. 166–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Philip Dwyer, however, is unrelenting on his French colleagues: ‘Historians, especially French historians, have had a tendency to gloss over the social reality of occupation and to mirror the idealist element in Napoleonic propaganda justifying the French conquests – namely, that the French were bringing the principles of the Revolution (“liberty and equality”) and enlightened principles of government to essentially backward and superstitious peoples. Instead, one is tempted to draw a parallel between the French soldier in southern Europe during the Napoleonic wars and the German soldier in eastern Europe during the Second World War.’ Dwyer, ed., Napoleon and Europe, pp. 12–13.

55 David Laven, Venice and Venetia under the Habsburgs, 1815–1835 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 62, 214.

56 Ibid., pp. 213, 105. ‘For Italians … to be a Habsburg was a blessing. Such “foreign” domination was vastly preferable to the reaction, obscurantism, and muddle, not to mention intermittent rebellions, that characterized the regimes of the Neapolitan Bourbons, the House of Savoy, and the Papacy.’ Between 1806 and 1813, the French spent 28.5 million lire on infrastructure, while the Austrians, between 1814 and 1821, spent nearly 55 million (p. 107). The Austrians also conscripted many fewer men (albeit for longer tours), and slashed taxation (p. 106). Laven's reader may have a bit of a time grasping why the Revolution of 1848 could have hit Venice as hard as it did – except that Francis had long been dead, and his successor was a dolt. For a slightly different take, see Stuart Woolf, ‘L'Italia nell'età napoleonica’, in Giuseppe Gullino e Gherardo Ortalli (a cura di), Venezia e le terre venete nel Regno Italico (Venice, 2005), pp. 3–17.

57 Laven, Venice and Venetia, p. 204. Lombardy was more sympathetic to ‘a nationalist program’, because of the presence of more Napoleonists than was the case in Venice. Ibid., p. 26.

58 John Davis, Naples and Napoleon, southern Italy and the European revolutions, 1780–1860 (Oxford, 2006), p. 212.

59 Ibid., p. 277. ‘The Minister of Police acknowledged with gratitude that the reforms of the French rulers had made it possible for the government to enforce censorship more effectively.’ Ibid., p. 315.

60 Ibid., p. 320.

61 Ibid., pp. 329–30.

62 The Bourbons extended this to Sicily, making it ‘a posthumous conquest of Napoleon’. Ibid., p. 277.

63 Ibid., pp. 161–2.

64 Ibid., pp. 248, 307, 254.

65 Woolf, Stuart, ‘French civilization and ethnicity in the Napoleonic Empire’, Past and Present, 124 (Aug. 1989), pp. 96–120CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 Ibid., p. 110.

67 Woolf, Stuart, ‘The construction of a European world-view in the revolutionary-Napoleonic Years’, Past and Present, 137 (Nov. 1992), pp. 72–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 See Broers, Europe under Napoleon, passim.

69 Broers, Politics of religion, p. xii.

70 Ibid., p. 171.

71 Pillepich, Napoléon et les Italiens, p. 140.

72 2002., p. x.

73 This first named (Napoleonic imperialism and the Savoyard monarchy, 1773–1821) is Broers's dissertation which, though it did not appear in print until 1997 (Edwin Mellen Press, Lampeter, UK, 1997), the year after the second named (Europe under Napoleon), was in fact his first completed work. Its subtitle is State Building in Piedmont.

74 D. E. D. Beales sees Joseph II as something of a Napoleon avant la lettre, in ‘Social forces and enlightened policies’, in H. M. Scott, ed., Enlightened absolutism, reform and reformers in later eighteenth century Europe (London and New York, 1990). T. C. W. Blanning, Germany and the French Revolution: occupation and resistance in the Rhineland, 1792–1802 (Cambridge, 1983); and Simon Schama, Patriots and Liberators: revolution in the Netherlands, 1780–1813 (New York, 1977).

75 Napoleonic imperialism, p. 414; Europe under Napoleon, pp. 205, 207, 208, 222.

76 In another place he writes of ‘“the determined yet scrupulous way in which” the French learned about local politics’. Or again, ‘Napoleonic objectivity stands in sharp contrast to the Monarchy's conduct’. Napoleonic imperialism, pp. 464, 370, 403.

77 Europe under Napoleon, p. 187.

78 Woolf, ‘The construction of a European world-view’, pp. 94, 97.

79 Napoleonic Imperialism, p. 53.

80 Ibid., p. 529.

81 Europe under Napoleon, pp. 270, 269, 270.

82 Politics of religion, p. xi.

83 Ibid., p. 3.

84 Michelle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières (Paris, 1995).

85 Politics of religion, pp. 25, 23. ‘The French regarded … both centre and periphery as “rotten at the core”.’ Ibid., 19.

86 Ibid., p. 123.

87 Ibid., p. 64.

88 Broers had originally designated this as the title, changing it only at the request of the publisher.

89 Prefects arbitrarily disaffected certain churches for administrative or historical uses. By 1812, the French were treating the clergy of Rome as common criminals, as hundreds of non-juring priests were thrown in prison and/or deprived of their incomes. Politics of religion, pp. 165, 167.

90 Ibid., pp. 188, 189, 158, 164.

91 Ibid., pp. 148, 147.

92 Ibid., p. 178. An example of Broers at his Cobbian best in the discovery and interpretation of new evidence is his detailed presentation of the remarkable story of Cardinal Spina and his reluctant, opportunistic adoption of a potent symbol of popular religion: the statue of Our Lady of Charity. Ibid., pp. 63–5.

93 Ibid., p. 168.

94 Ibid., p. 164.

95 Ibid., p. 85.

96 Ibid., p. 189.

97 Ibid., p. 183.

98 Ibid., p. 153.

99 Ibid., p. 183.

100 Michael Broers, The Napoleonic empire in Italy, 1796–1814 (Basingstoke, 2005), p. 15.

101 Ibid., p. 35.

102 For example, see David Bell, The cult of the nation in France: inventing nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 2001).

103 For a sustained argument of the opposite view – i.e., that ‘Italians’ responded to and benefited from the French in the triennio – see Michel Vovelle, Les Républiques-soeurs sous le regard de la Grande Nation, 1795–1803: de l'Italie aux portes de l'Empire ottoman, l'impact du modèle républicain français (Paris, 2000).

104 See Harry Hearder, Italy in the Age of the Risorgimento, 1790–1870 (London, 1983).

105 ‘They [had] left behind, not the foundations of a new political culture, but groups of exposed collaborators who had to pay the traditional price of clients whose patrons failed them.’ Napoleonic empire in Italy, p. 26.

106 Ibid., p. 5.

107 Ibid., pp. 26–27.

108 Ibid., p. 108.

109 Ibid., pp. 26–7.

110 Ibid., p. 7.

111 Ibid., p. 3.

112 Ibid., p. 23: ‘integration means the incorporation of foreign elements into the indigenous society; even where they effect change, they take place within indigenous models and in the context of unaltered native values. In Axtell's discourse, these represent “borrowing” by Italians; the relevance of the concept of cultural imperialism to that of integration, is that the French borrowed nothing from Italian culture in return. The other pole of the process of acculturation, for Wachtel, is assimilation: the adoption of alien, foreign elements by the subject society, accompanied by elimination of indigenous traditions, and total submission to the values of the dominant culture, leading to the disintegration of ethnic identity. These were the goals of French policy, reflected in its workings. The French hoped that integration would go hand in hand with assimilation, as reflected in their own avowed policies of ralliement and amalgame … Ralliement – by far the most successful policy – meant the regrouping of both pro- and anti-revolutionary elements of the French, and later imperial, elite under the umbrella of Napoleonic rule; it indicated an acceptance of the regime. Amalgame proved more problematic, entailing active participation in the regime and, thus, submission to its mores … The French originally hoped for integration, as did many Italians. In reality, assimilation was ultimately the social and political implementation of ralliement and amalgame.’ Ibid., p. 23.

113 Ibid., p. 3.

114 Ibid., p. 26.

115 Ibid., p. 3.

116 Ibid., p. 16.

117 Ibid., pp. 26–7.

118 Ibid., p. 27.

119 Ibid., p. 91. Well, perhaps three: the French politician of the early Third Republic, Victor duc de Broglie was anything but a ‘true Catholic reactionary’ (ibid., p. 295), a phrase that better suits Louis Veuillot. De Broglie was an Orleanist liberal – a very different animal.

120 Politics of religion, p. 179. This turns on fine distinctions: Napoleon was not directly named in a bull of excommunication in 1809, as, for example, Frederick II (Hohenstaufen) was deposed (and named Antichrist) by Gregory IX, then excommunicated by Innocent IV in the 1240s.

121 Ronald J. Ross, The failure of Bismarck's Kulturkampf: Catholicism and state power in imperial Germany, 1871–1887 (Washington, DC, 1998), p. 5. ‘The cause of our policy’, wrote Bismarck, ‘was determined not by religious considerations but purely by the desire to establish as firmly as possible the unity won on the battlefield’, p. 11.

122 See Michael B. Gross, The war against Catholicism: liberalism and the anti-Catholic imagination in nineteenth-century Germany (Ann Arbor, 2004).

123 Though he did try to reduce the ties of communication between German Catholics and Rome. That said, however, he eventually had to turn to the pope to get the Centre Party to cease its troublesome opposition. I am grateful to Professor Paul Misner of Marquette University and Mr James Graff of Time magazine for some of the above considerations.

124 Ross, The failure of Bismarck's Kulturkampf, p. 189.

125 Politics of religion, p. 182. Broers refers to both regimes, Napoleonic and Wilhelmine, as ‘liberal’ (ibid., p. 185), which will shock some readers, but I assume he merely means by this both were Rechstaaten, not despotisms.

126 Ibid., p. 185.

127 The classic studies by Catholic historians include: Louis Capéran, Histoire contemporaine de la laïcité (3 vols., Paris, 1957–61); Adrien Dansette, Histoire religieuse de la France contemporaine (2 vols., Paris, 1978–51; rééd. 1965); Antonin Debidour, L'église catholique et l'état sous la Troisième République (2 vols., Paris, 1906–9); Père Lecanuet, L'église de France sous la Troisième République (4 vols., Paris, 1910–31).

128 The few true ‘dechristianizers’ in Republican ranks (e.g., Allard, Vaillant) in no sense held the tiller.

129 Politics of religion, pp. 184–5.

130 ‘La France est-elle encore catholique?’, Le monde des religions, 21 (Jan.–Feb. 2007), pp. 23–8.

131 There is a huge literature to this effect, the most recent exponents being Blandine Kriegel, Philosophie de la République (Paris, 1998); Jean-Fabien Spitz, Le moment républicain en France (Paris, 2005).

132 See the remarkable article by Portier, P., ‘L'église catholique face au modèle français de laicité: histoire d'un ralliement’, Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 50 (2005), pp. 117–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in which the author shows how the French episcopacy has gradually come to accept the Republican model of laicity. See also Jean-Marie Mayeur, Catholicisme social et démocratie chrétienne: principes romains, experiences françaises (Paris, 1985). Also, by the same author, La question laique au XIXe et XXe siècles (Paris, 1997); La séparation des églises et de l’état (Paris, 2005). For a ‘Jacobin’ view that would comfort Broers, see Claude Nicolet, L'idée républicaine en France (1789–1924) (Paris, 1982), chs. vii and xi.

133 Politics of religion, p. 183.

134 Woolf, ‘Napoleon and Europe revisited’, p. 1.

135 Gilles Havard and Cécile Vidal, Histoire de l'Amérique française (Paris, 2003).

136 Girard, Philippe R., ‘Empire by collaboration: the first French colonial empire's rise and demise’, French History, 2003 (Sept. 2005), pp. 486–7Google Scholar. Girard, who is considering four recent academic studies of this topic, continues, ‘only a forceful governmental policy could have brought any unity to this disparate French empire, but … no such thing ever appeared … the first French empire was an odd combination of peoples and lands that France kept together by virtue of a military alliance with its non-white inhabitants, then lost when she abandoned that policy. Why France embraced this multicultural approach remains open to question … Whatever the reason, this portrayal conflicts with many commonly held notions, including the centrality of racism in colonial societies, the hierarchical structure of the French empire, and eighteenth-century kings' claim to absolute monarchy.’ Ibid., p. 490.

137 Maya Jasanoff, Edge of empire: lives, culture, and conquest in the east, 1750–1850 (New York, 2006).

138 David Gilmour, ‘Surprises of the Empire’, New York Review of Books, 2 Nov. 2006, p. 48.

139 Herman Lebovics, Bringing the empire back home: France in the global age (Durham, NC, 2004).

140 Ibid., p. 191.

141 Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: the modernization of rural France, 1870–1914 (London, 1977); and Colley, Britons.

142 Napoleonic empire in Italy, p. 145.

143 Ibid., p. 12.

144 Cited in Laven, Venice and Venetia, p. 296.

145 Napoleonic empire in Italy, p. 229

146 Ibid., p. 229.

147 See, for example, Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, and Jacques Revel, Une politique de la langue: la Révolution française et les patois (Paris, 1975), p. 168.

148 At one point, we seem to encounter the real thing. Broers cites a virtually induplicable description by Director General of Police Norvins, which the reader at first believes describes the man's ‘physical revulsion’ at the inhabitants of the Apennines: ‘children of both sexes and I don't know how many colours … their nostrils were monstrous, their knees deformed … their arms curved in such a way as to make us take them for something between a man and a donkey … It was [a] vision that had something of hell about it.’ However, on studying the paragraph to which it is appended, we realize that these are words penned by Norvins describing his time in Saint Domingue; they have been cited now by Broers, who argues that they ‘foreshadow his reaction to the Apennines’. Nothing in the rest of the book sees Norvins express himself this strongly. Napoleonic empire in Italy, p. 229.

149 Cited and discussed in Edward G. Berenson, forthcoming book on the French domestic reception to colonial empire, chapter on De Brazza.

150 Félicien Challaye, Le Congo français: la question internationale (Paris, 1909), p. 44.

151 For example, Alexander Stille, the distinguished journalist, writes thus about his interviews with Berlusconi: ‘It began to dawn on me that what I was encountering was a deep anthropological difference. My obsession with factual accuracy, documentation, objective truth was all part of my baggage as a print journalist … while Berlusconi is a man of a different age, …of the post-modern world where it doesn't whatter what actually happened, but what people think happened.’ Alexander Stille, The sack of Rome: how a beautiful European country with a fabled history and a storied culture was taken over by a man named Silvio Berlusconi (New York, 2006), p. 15, my italics. Similarly, it is a commonplace among Germanists to consider that the late nineteenth-century German middle class was ‘colonized’ by the imperial military aristocracy. See Silvia Cresti, ‘Images récriproques des juifs allemands et italiens (1871–1914)’, in Marie-Anne Matard Bonucci, ed., Antisémythes, l'image des juifs entre culture et politique (1848–1939) (Paris, 2005), p. 269.

152 Howard Brown's remarkable work, Ending the French Revolution, violence, justice, and repression from the Terror to Napoleon (Charlottesville, VA, 2006) effectively makes a case for slotting parts of the Midi of France into the outer Empire.

153 Forrest, Napoleon's men, pp. 128–9.

154 ‘In the west, republican soldiers talked with more than average ideological passion, for here the war was far more demonstrably political than elsewhere.’ Ibid., 127.

155 The British used Portugal as their military base in Iberia, transforming the whole country for that end (the royal family had gone to Brazil). Lord Beresford became virtual dictator, turning Portugal into a ‘barracks state … that far outdid anything seen in Napoleonic France.’ It left a hitherto peaceful country with a swollen, martial officer corps which dominated political life until the 1970s. Portugal probably suffered more, proportionately, than any European society. Its population fell by over a quarter of a million, between 1808 and 1814, along with irremediable losses in production and infrastructure. The Portuguese experience in this period most approximates to that of ‘total war’, and it was the work of the British, who, by the way, rapidly dismantled their own massive war machine in 1814–15. Portugal did not bear many of the characteristics of the Napoleonic state. See Broers, Europe under Napoleon, pp. 155–9, 210–18; Grab, Napoleon and the transformation, ch. 9.

156 Politics of religion, p. 188. Confusingly, however, he writes on the previous page, ‘The French police may often have attributed too high a degree of politicization to some of these events in linking them directly to Papal intrigue.’

157 Napoleonic empire in Italy, p. 53. ‘Radet exploded that Pius “governs more powerfully with his little finger than we do with our bayonets”’, p. 58 Broers adds, ‘the counterrevolutionary origins of the struggle were not lost quickly [in favour of the broader phenomenon of anti-revolution, as in France], if at all’, p. 59.

158 Ibid., p. 70.

159 Politics of religion, p. x.

160 Ibid., p. x.

161 Ibid., p. xi.

162 ‘Wachtel defines assimilation as the forcing of a colonial people into the ways of the European intruder, “alongside the elimination of indigenous traditions, by submitting it to the models and values of the dominant society”’. Broers, Napoleonic empire in Italy, p. 221.

163 Davis, in Laven and Riall, p. 247.

164 Napoleonic empire in Italy, p. 254.

165 ‘I feel like a traveller in an inn here’, writes Roederer. Ibid., p. 219.

166 Napoleonic empire in Italy, p. 220. Indeed, is it not simply likely that Tournon's comment about the ‘smallness’ of Italians relates merely to military conscription, nothing more?

167 ‘Beneath it all, there had been French acculturation after all.’ Napoleonic empire in Italy, p. 299. Earlier Broers writes of ‘the [French] dislike of Italian sexual mores and, fundamentally, of Italian women, [which] borders on the fears of contamination by “the other” noted by Axtell in native–colonial relations in North America’ (p. 255). In light of the intermarrying that could go on, it strikes the reader as an unfounded comparison.

168 The more common spelling in French biographical dictionaries is ‘De Gérando’.

169 Napoleonic empire in Italy, p. 213.

170 Ibid., p. 226.

171 Edward Whiting Fox, History in a geographic perspective: the other France (New York, 1971), published in France in 1972 as L'autre France. See Braudel's review in Le Monde, 12 Oct. 1972.

172 Joseph Schumpeter, Imperialism and social classes, trans. Heinz Norden (A. M. Kelly, 1951), pp. 5–6.

173 Davis, Naples and Napoleon, p. 163.

174 Stuart Woolf, ‘Napoleon: politics of integration?’, in Deutsche Historische Instituten in Rom und Paris: la politica di espansione della Francia napoleonica (Rome, 2007), pp. 12–13.

175 Grab, Alexander, ‘Army, state, and society: conscription and desertion in Napoleonic Italy (1802–1814)’, Journal of Modern History, 67 (March 1995), pp. 25–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘State, power, brigandage, and rural resistance in Napoleonic Italy’, European History Quarterly, 25 (1995), pp. 39–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘The politics of finance in Napoleonic Italy (1802–1814)’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 3 (1998), pp. 1227–43Google Scholar.

176 Alexander Grab, ‘Napoleon: a civilizing missionary or a pragmatic imperialist?’, paper delivered at the Consortium for Revolutionary Europe, 2007 (Washington, DC), panel on ‘The Napoleonic transformation of Europe’.

177 Napoleonic empire in Italy, p. 225.

178 Ibid., p. 201.

179 Those who did not receive a Broers kudos: ‘[it was] a tribute to the resilience of their faith in their own cultural roots’, ibid., p. 202.

180 Ibid., p. 209.

181 Ibid., p. 210.

182 Ibid., p. 146.

183 Ibid., p. 296. My emphasis.

184 See Aurelio Musi, ed., Alle origini di una nazione: antispagnolismo e identià italiana (Milan, 2003). Anti-Spanish sentiment was a founding myth of Italian unification, but the contributors to this volume do not speak in terms of Orientalism or cultural ‘other’.

185 Napoleonic empire in Italy, p. 296.

186 Grab, Napoleon and the transformation, pp. 174–5.

187 Napoleonic empire in Italy, p. 122.

188 Ibid., p. 275.

189 Ibid., p. 294.

190 Like Cavour, for whom Broers displays more than a touch of contempt. See the last chapter of Napoleonic imperialism.

191 Napoleonic empire in Italy, p. 293. ‘The essential truth of Crispi's debt to Napoleon seems unshakeable, all the more so for being unacknowledged.’ Ibid., p. 292, my emphasis.

192 Ibid., pp. 292–3.

193 Davis, Naples and Napoleon, p. 160. Broers's review forthcoming in English Historical Review. Schroeder quotation from Schroeder, The transformation of European politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1996), p. 394.

194 Broers would do well to stop limiting himself to mainly police and military series, and instead to look at a whole range of civil administration sources, including in Italy, not just Paris.

195 But this man's ideas are not so easily reduced to just extraction either. See the subtlety, complication, and contradiction in Napoleon's own thought, well dissected and analysed in Antoine Casanova, Napoléon et la pensée de son temps: une histoire intellectuelle singulière (Paris, 2000).