Between 1808 and 1814 Spain and Portugal were devastated by the single most destructive episode of the Napoleonic Wars, namely the so-called Peninsular War. Originating in a foolhardy attempt on the part of Napoleon to render the former country a more reliable ally in the wake of his bloodless occupation of the latter in October 1807, this soon turned sour. French armies sustained one embarrassing reverse after another; assailed by multiple problems, the puppet regime of Joseph Bonaparte was unable to impose its authority; the Spanish armies proved easy to beat but hard to eliminate; the British ejected the French from Portugal and turned her into an unassailable stronghold; the French suffered heavy casualties; and political revolution in Spain made it very hard to claim the ideological high ground. Had Napoleon been willing to concentrate all his efforts on the struggle, he might yet have prevailed, but his decision to attack Russia badly destabilised the position of his armies, the result being that within two years the whole of the Peninsula had been liberated. All this makes for a dramatic story, but in practice the impact of the Peninsular War on the fate of Napoleon was very limited, its real importance lying rather in its influence on the history of Spain and Portugal.

The concluding chapter examines the impact of the Napoleonic Wars on Europe. Between 1803 and 1815, Europe plunged into an abyss of destruction as thousands died in the blood-soaked fields of Germany and Russia and savage street fighting in ruined Spanish cities. While many in the ruling classes would continue to consider war as a glorious undertaking – even as one that could rejuvenate tired and corrupt societies – no longer did they see it as a normal, ordinary part of human existence that could be engaged in on a regular basis without enormous cost. The Congress of Vienna signaled this change by establishing mechanisms of cooperation (the ‘Concert of Europe’) to maintain the peace among the major powers, rather than assuming that the powers would themselves instinctively act to limit the extent and destructiveness of military conflict.

In France, throughout the post-revolutionary period, sovereignty was invoked to justify unlimited, absolute and arbitrary exercises of power by the king, parliament and the people. These uses of sovereignty, I maintain, were perceived as politically dangerous by French jurists Jean Denis Lanjuinais, Firmin Laferrière, Felix Berriat Saint Prix and Edouard Laboulaye. On three different occasions, they resorted to constituent power to tame the implications of contemporary appeals to sovereignty. First, during the Restoration it was used to claim that the king could not exercise power unlimitedly, as the constituent power belonged to the people. Second, during the July Monarchy constituent power was used to oppose the Parliament’s claim to be the sovereign and the only legitimate author of the constitution. Last, during the Second Republic, constituent power was used to claim that the power of the republican sovereign amounted to and did not extend beyond authorising the creation of the legal system. Constituent power was thus used to negotiate an understanding of popular power different from that implicit in ideas of sovereignty. While sovereignty allowed for uncontrolled and unlimited exercise of power, pouvoir constituant was used to argue that the supreme authority consisted in the popular institution of the constitutional order.