The most important satellite state was the Confederation of the Rhine,
a league of states set up by Napoleon to replace the old Holy Roman
Empire; in essence it comprised all of Germany except Austria and
Prussia - not just Westphalia but Baden, Wiirttemberg and Bavaria.
Except for Westphalia and Berg, these satellite states in the Confedera
tion were ruled by old-style legitimist princes who had opportunistically
thrown in their lot with Napoleon. Other important satellite states were
Switzerland and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Switzerland was
technically neutral but in 1803 Napoleon had intervened there with his
Act of Mediation, which renamed the country the Helvetic Confederation
and provided a new constitution. Even more complicated were the
arrangements governing the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, a buffer state
created in 1807 from the Polish territories Prussia ceded at Tilsit.
Theoretically ruled by the King of Saxony as Grand Duke - but
Frederick Augustus never even bothered to visit his duchy - Warsaw
experienced a 'dyarchy' of a so-called independent government and a
powerful French Governor-General.
The Napoleonic Empire was thus bewilderingly heterogeneous, but
uniformity was supposed to be provided by the Code Napoleon and the
centripetal tug of Paris, the very symbol of European integration under
Bonaparte. Napoleon's way with mystification and the way he liked to
conceal autocracy under a show of pluralism was evident in the notional
tripartite separation of powers, with the executive based at the Tuileries,
the Legislative Assembly at the Bourbon Palace and the Senate at the
Luxembourg Palace. Napoleon claimed in 1804 that he wanted to site his
capital at Lyons, but this was obviously a sop to extra-Parisian feeling, for
he made no serious attempt at relocation.
The Emperor wanted his capital to be a political, administrative,
cultural and even religious megalopolis - a grandiose city full of palaces
and public monuments. Napoleon had ambitions to make Paris both a
fabulous, and a futuristic city. On St Helena he told Las Cases: 'I wanted
Paris to become a town of two, three, four million inhabitants, something
fabulous, colossal, unknown until our time.' Circumstances prevented
this. Although the population of France's capital city rose from soo,ooo
to 700,000 under the Empire, a sober estimate must conclude that
Napoleon pulled down more of the old city than he created of the new.
His particular target seemed to be the architectural reminders of the
Revolution: among the 'monuments' of 1789--- 94 he ordered destroyed
were the Salle de Manege, where the National Assembly had met and the
Marais Temple where Louis XVI and family had been imprisoned;
marcin
(Marcin)
#1