Until very recently, the perspective taken by studies of the Napoleonic Empire was a France-centred view, heavily tinged by biography (usually of the founder) and by wars and diplomacy.Footnote ³ The notion of empire meant a continental, landlocked affair of largely contiguous annexations, while the term colonies was reserved for the acquisition and extended governance of maritime holdings (of which the Napoleonic French ended up with few indeed). The two terms, empire and colonial empire, were thus separate topics – albeit more so by custom than by argument and demonstration.Footnote ⁴ The mould that Napoleonic Empire specialists had in mind was clearly ancient Rome or the renovatio imperii of Charlemagne, not nineteenth-century Britain or France. In choosing a title for this review, I at first wrote, ‘The question of cultural imperialism and the First Empire’, but then thought better of it, realizing it might be confusing to readers who might assume I meant the first French colonial empire (i.e., of the eighteenth century), which has come into vogue lately, in academic study (see below).

The innovative research being produced by a large group of international historians working on the extended First Empire – i.e., on those lands that Napoleonic France occupied, annexed, and ran roughshod over (variously the pays conquis, pays réunis, pays alliés) – has placed in centre ring the claim that imperial and colonial are closely related, if not indeed the same thing, in the Napoleonic orb. Their collective work qualifies as nothing less than a scholarly renaissance in terms of quantity, quality, and novelty of approach. Indeed the word naissance applies even better, seeing that in most cases the scholars discussed here not only got to the archival salt mine and the publishing sun first with the most, but, in addition, defined a field heretofore unmarked as such.

The historians include, in the United Kingdom or Australia, where the whole affair got started in the late 1980s: Stuart Woolf, John Davis, Michael Broers, Charles Esdaile, Michael Rowe, David Gates, Brendan Simms, and Philip Dwyer; in America, where it moved next, John Lawrence Tone, Frank Bundy, Alexander Grab, Rafe Blaufarb, Christopher Blackburn, and Katherine Aalstead; and in France, where these studies curiously took the longest to get under way, Richard Hocquellet, Alain Pillepich, Annie Jourdan, and Silvia Marzagalli.Footnote ⁵ The point of departure for one and all is not Napoleon but the vast French imperial administration. Less consensually, their collective findings have led these men and women – some of them, anyway – intentionally to blur the old distinction between empire and colonial empire, between imperialism and colonialism.

Congratulations tinged with amazement being herewith offered, let us now proceed to do this group of remarkable historians the honour of giving them more than a satisfied stock-taking. A closer and critical look is in order.

Of this group it may be said that all amount to so many Romuluses and Remuses to the Woolf who is never far from the door. Stuart Woolf's utterly path-breaking Napoleon's integration of Europe Footnote ⁶ suckled an entire generation. Woolf's work has been amply commented upon,Footnote ⁷ so I shall limit myself here to noting that we owe to him the plausible portrait of the Empire without its founder and charismatic chief. What keeps such a view from being Hamlet sans le prince, however, is Woolf's convincing demonstration that the Empire was not only a viable, but also an interesting, set of institutions, beyond the presence of the spell-binding imperator. Let one confident Woolfian speak for them all. ‘Napoleon did not run the Empire alone, nor was it run capriciously: quite the reverse. The imperial bureaucracy was rigid, chauvinistic and often ruthless, but it was determinedly civilian in character and dedicated to high, well-defined professional standards. The Empire was certainly not meant to be a “family enterprise”, nor did it really become so.’ Or, to put it a different way, ‘Napoleon need not have divorced Josephine to produce an heir; he already had one in the Council of State.’ He goes so far as to assert that the well-known Malet attempted coup d'état of 1812 proves that the Empire simply did not need Napoleon or even his family in order to function quite nicely, thank you.Footnote ⁸

Now Woolf did even more than this, as we shall presently see, but for now let us consider just this part of his contribution, and the use made of it by scholars. As a general statement we may say that if the Corsican asserted that ‘administrer est le fait d'un seul’,Footnote ⁹ then the Woolf pack have shown it not to be so. At the same time, they have so decisively redirected the river of Napoleonic scholarship that it no longer bypasses places named society, culture, administration, economy, education, all of which are now, thanks to them, known to be as important as the older, more familiar ports of call (constitution, civil code, conscription, high politics, etc.).

This review will unfold in five parts. The first will present the current view of the Empire as containing three zones. In the second, I present the findings of recent work dealing with Switzerland, the three parts of Germany (the Rhineland, the so-called Third Germany, Prussia), Spain, and the so-called national question(s). Third, I present recent work on the three parts of Italy (the Kingdom of Italy, the départements réunis, and the Kingdom of Naples). Fourth, I present the work of Michael Broers along with his offer of a new and highly controversial conceptualization of the Empire. Fifth, I critically analyse Broers's principal thesis.

Perhaps the single most important new distinction now being utilized by virtually all historians of the Napoleonic Empire is one that differentiates among an inner empire, an outer empire, and an intermediate zone. This is the brainchild of the Oxford historian, Michael Broers, whose famous map of ‘the real Napoleonic Europe’ is a sight to behold.Footnote ¹⁰ Depending on a concatenation of varied factors – a region's distance from Paris; its structural precondition; its date of entry into the imperial sway (its time on the cross, so to speak); the forms that imperial governance took; the degree of its resistance to the French – it may be placed in one of the three zones noted above. Thus, the inner empire consisted of most of France, Switzerland, the Low Countries, the Republic/Kingdom of Italy, and western Germany. The outer empire included Spain, the Illyrian provinces, Venice and the Veneto, the Papal States, and parts of northern Germany. The intermediate zones were western France (the Vendée, etc.), the Kingdom of Naples, and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Broers writes, ‘[the inner empire] became the breeding ground of the professional administrators, just as the lands of the outer empire [and intermediate zone] became their proving ground’.Footnote ¹¹

The brilliance and utility of such a map reside in two features: first, its readiness to break down larger regions into components; and second, the emergent clarification that the inner empire in fact turns out to coincide (fortuitously? surely not) with the six founding countries of the European Economic Community.Footnote ¹² State borders are wonderfully unsacrosanct to Broers. Thus, he has the interesting idea of leaving out of the inner empire those notoriously rebellious regions of old France, the Vendée, and Brittany. Germany, for its part, gets divided up four ways by Broers, since Prussia is put in a different category altogether: that of unreliable ally. That enfant chéri of all mavens of complexity, Italy, sees herself distributed in a very original fashion among Broers's zones. Lombardy, parts of the Veneto, the Papal Legations, and Modena – i.e., the Republic, then (after 1805) the Kingdom, of Italy – go to the inner empire. This is not so unusual; much of this land had been under French hegemony since 1796. The outer empire, on the other hand, surprisingly receives the resistant, more imperfectly assimilated province of Tuscany as well as Rome and its attached states (annexed to France as départements between 1809 and 1810). And in the most surprising move of all, the Kingdom of Naples, the most geographically distant part of the boot from France, so often considered the most alien or estranged, is put in the intermediate zone, for French-imposed reforms and the imperial legacy were greater here than one might imagine in a regime where the Napoleonic king (Murat) was executed.Footnote ¹³

Virtually all the recent overviews of the First Empire utilize these distinctions. The best of them is Alexander Grab's Napoleon and the transformation of Europe.Footnote ¹⁴ The author has read widely in sources and secondary work in four languages, and has innovatively organized his book on a country by country basis, rather than taking the traditional chronological approach. Grab cleverly interlaces French reforms (and their accompanying Enlightenment/Revolutionary ideology) with the echt-Napoleonic aim of close administration and high material extraction. While both he and Broers are Woolfians, Grab yet falls closer to a traditional French historiographical line when he gives a relatively generous estimate of the overall French impact and legacy in the lands he surveys. ‘The uniqueness of the Napoleonic Empire lies more in his reform programs than in his exploitation and harsh domination.’Footnote ¹⁵

Although the main purpose of this review will be to discuss Michael Broers's work, with its offer of a new conceptualization of the burgeoning field of First Empire studies, we cannot do so adequately without first putting him into context by seeing what is being said by his colleagues. To sum it up in advance, the cornucopia of current work – on Switzerland, the various parts of Germany, Spain, Italy, and on the much-discussed national question(s) – all share general conclusions about the complexity and ambivalence of the French impact and legacy. Not until Broers's last two books have sharp departures or disagreements arisen on issues of grandes lignes d'approche and interpretation.

Slightly atypical of recent work is a collection of essays published after a colloquium at the Sorbonne, on Napoleonic Switzerland.Footnote ¹⁶ In presenting a positive balance-sheet of the French occupation, the essays fly in the face of a traditional Swiss historiography which ignored the French ‘moment’ when it did not lambaste it.

The German experience of Napoleonic France has been recently studied by Fahrmeir in an article on the Third Germany (i.e., the south and south-western Germany of middle-sized states like Bavaria); and in books by Hagemann on Prussia, and by Rowe on the Rhineland. John Breuilly, for his part, offers a suggestive and fascinating article on the larger question of future German state-formation and its relationship to the Napoleonic experience.Footnote ¹⁷ Overall, the conclusion seems to be that notwithstanding a distinct reluctance to invest their sons in French imperial traineeships, as well as their increasing dislike of conscription and extraction, the German populations in French-occupied lands responded, in Rowe's words, with a series of ‘gradations of “ralliement”, ranging from full ideological commitment to pragmatic considerations’. He adds, ‘it makes no sense therefore to speak of the Rhinelanders as “collaborators” or “resisters”’.Footnote ¹⁸ These scholars take as their mutual point of departure the shock, magnitude, and lasting significance of what Fahrmeir calls Napoleon's great ‘reshuffle in 1803’.Footnote ¹⁹ For the first time in the history of Mitteleuropa, ‘consolidation did not primarily result in the further expansion of larger states, but plucked some smaller ones out of relative obscurity and increased them to something like “great small power status”’.Footnote ²⁰ He is wise to underline that this radically new state of affairs was not reversed – they did not dare – by Napoleon's adversaries after 1815, for all their desire to set back the clock.

For the rest, the influence of the French lay ‘in inverse proportion to the size of the state in question – it was minute in Prussia and Austria, not negligible in the medium-sized states, but it was considerable only in the smaller principalities and imperial cities’.Footnote ²¹ In the Rhineland, as Rowe shows, ‘the most important characteristic of Napoleonic government was less its centralisation and more its dependence upon local elites’. French rule may have marched in, in uniform, but ‘it quickly gained a measure of local support. Rhinelanders, like their fellow Frenchmen, were weary of ideological conflict and welcomed Napoleon's “depoliticization” of public life.’Footnote ²² The post-Jacobin French

Only subsequently did public opinion turn sour at the high cost of doing business with, and under, the French – by way of extraction, conscription, censorship, etc. But apart from Prussia – and there, under special circumstances, as we shall see in a moment – there was never a general rising in ‘Germany’ against Napoleon; ‘relatively few crossed borders in order to fight Napoleon. The pattern of volunteer origins mirrored the policies of their governments.’Footnote ²⁴

Rowe's careful study of the French rule and legacy is a model of even-handed cultural-political history. One quickly becomes familiar with the one–two Rowe punch: ‘Certainly, the [Continental] System could draw upon a modicum of support from some Rhinelanders, who believed Britain had grown fat on the stolen wealth of the Continent. However, sectors dependent upon international commerce suffered from both the Continental System, the British blockade and the various wars in Germany.’Footnote ²⁵ Rowe notes, en passant, that French rule brought greater freedom for Protestants and Jews, and that the area became economically stronger by the end of the Napoleonic period than it had been when the French first arrived. On the other hand, it is true, French rule collapsed in 1813 without strong objection or defensive effort from the populace. (‘There was no hint of enthusiasm or urgency in defence of the Napoleonic regime.’Footnote ²⁶) Yet subsequently, the Napoleonic legacy endured in countless institutional and ideological-political ways down to the end of the nineteenth century, though its influence in any given contest was not necessarily liberal.

The one startling example in Germany of deep-seated Francophobia breaking out into something like a large-scale patriotic uprising was of course Prussia, though it required catastrophic military defeat and political-economic destitution to launch it. Karen Hagemann's 600-page book about the anti-Napoleonic struggle in Frederick the Great's former realm is truly an opus magnum, which I cannot summarize nor adequately comment upon in the confines of this review. Amidst all that the author has to say that is profound and novel on the intertwined discourses of politics, nation, gender, and the military in the Prussian revival after Jena, she yet does not depart from the recent mixed balance-sheet of most of her colleagues when they sum up the French impact and legacy in Germany.Footnote ²⁷ At the end of the day, Prussian reform-minded good will toward the French Revolution and the Empire (and its legacy) was not easily swept away nor forever lost after 1806. For his part, Matthew Levinger shows that the most authoritarian tendencies in Prussia's political culture were strengthened by the reaction to defeat by the French and the Napoleonic amputation of territory, prestige, money. Prussia embraced a distinctive programme of political modernization mainly in response to the country's defeat and occupation in 1806–7, and its catastrophic loss of prestige and capital thereafter.Footnote ²⁸

Prussia certainly reacted to the Diktat and brutal occupation of post-Jena, and in doing so, she was increasingly pushed by the well-known handful of Patriot-activists such as Arndt, Goerres, etc., but neither they nor she achieved anything close to a national rising throughout Germany. In the Prussian monarchy itself – or what was left of it after 1806 – any popular rising that did occur, Hagemann relentlessly shows, was manipulated and contained by state power. This being said, for a time in 1813, it appears to have got out of control.Footnote ²⁹ Crucially, Hagemann establishes beyond peradventure that the profound differences traditionally alleged to exist between the Prussian and French meaning, and even their mutual experience, of ‘nation-talk’, in the era down to 1815, are indeed quite true, contrary to doubts raised by recent French reconsiderations.Footnote ³⁰ With its relentless accent on ethnicity (Volkstum, Deutschtum, Heimat, Vaterland) and religion, and its comparative ambivalence to, when not connivance with, absolute monarchy, even the ‘liberal’ variant of Prussian nation-talk diverged significantly from the secular and civic French one.

Ultimately, in this era, Prussian ‘national’ feeling – along with whatever there was of a larger ‘German’ one (not much, we gather) – arose inextricably out of the bitter experience of defeat and occupation at the hands of the French, and depended ideologically upon the notion of the Kultur-Nation (i.e., on language and religion) more than on Etat-Nation and the civic arena. ‘Nationalism [in Prussia] was integral from the outset’, writes Michael Jeismann,Footnote ³¹ while the historian John Breuilly extrapolates brilliantly: Prussia, he asserts, certainly ‘modernized’ herself, but not in a willed progressive response to the French Revolution; rather, in agonized reaching for revanche following the defeats and shame inflicted by Napoleon. (Breuilly usefully refutes the ‘tendency to conflate modernisation as a deliberate policy and modernisation as an objective process of change’.Footnote ³²)

Corroboration for the foregoing is given by Katherine Aalestad in Place and politics: local identity, civic culture, and German nationalism in North Germany during the revolutionary era (Boston, 2005). She shows that even in a German-speaking bonne ville de l'Empire français, occupation and annexation did not give rise to francophobia-based German nationalism. That had to wait until much later in the nineteenth century.

Moving to other states' experiences, Charles Esdaile rides down even harder on any supposed Spanish national rising between 1809 and 1814 – notwithstanding that it had a full five years to occur. He denies that the requisite socio-economic-political preconditions (urbanization, a level of acculturation and literacy, etc.) existed in Spain. ‘Patriotism in the modern sense’, he writes, ‘did not exist in Spain, and, what is more, could not exist, for the country had not gone through the processes that were the sine qua non of such feelings.’Footnote ³³ Massive resistance – here he cites Broers to good effect – is emphatically not the same thing as nationalism, or even patriotism. Esdaile concludes that amidst all that is unknown or unknowable about Napoleonic Spain

Esdaile's downright pronunciations about patriotism defined only as ‘ideology’ are over-hasty, however. Had he taken a deeper, more nuanced view of it as mentalité as well as ideology, he might have found more to say. Thus, for example, the French historian, Richard Hocquellet, who writes in the Annaliste tradition of the great French historian of Spain, Pierre Vilar, notes that both the terms ‘people’ and ‘nation’ took real life in Napoleonic Spain, the former taking precedence over the latter, and even eventually subsuming it: ‘nation’ in Spain, he says, meant the masses.Footnote ³⁵ But where Esdaile and Hocquellet agree is on the overall balance-sheet of the French in Spain: amidst the inveterate conflict and horrendous violence, an undeniable quantity and quality of ‘progress’ was also made, not least in establishing future benchmarks against which, and ‘national’ discourse in which, Spanish liberals would criticize and attack the restored Bourbon monarchy.

Not even the Russian uprising against Napoleon's invading – or more especially, his retreating – army, in 1812, is these days readily assigned the label ‘national’ (or even ‘patriotic’, as was the case in Czarist and Soviet historiography). Janet Hartley refers to ‘the so-called “people's war”’, or the ‘national' reaction’, using quotations.Footnote ³⁶ The evidence, what there is of it, is ‘ambivalent and it is more difficult to argue that at a collective level there was a concerted “patriotic” or “national” reaction in 1812’.Footnote ³⁷ Great Russian nationalism, on Hartley's telling, did not develop until the middle of the nineteenth century, at which point the French invasion of 1812 furnished it with myths and traditions cut to order. More particularly, the 1812 disaster laid some of the political foundations for future army cabals against the state.Footnote ³⁸

Finally, briefly, one notes in passing that even on France, the best recent scholarship – that by Alan Forrest – adduces no evidence of widespread or long-lasting patriotism in the letters of revolutionary and Napoleonic soldiers, whom Forrest sympathetically considers. True, the levée en masse would become a future ‘symbol of national unity and patriotic endeavour, a symbol which would be respected by future generations of Frenchmen and would inspire them in hours of need or of national emergency’,Footnote ³⁹ but in the moment – whether writing from encampments at Austerlitz, Eylau, Wagram, or Waterloo – ‘the political tone of soldiers' writings’ evolved against, not for, patriotism. Their letters betray, rather, ‘a greater degree of professional pride, of commitment to the army and to their future within it’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Professional pride included – Forrest seems reluctant to say so – a very definite and discrete pride in l'Empereur.Footnote ⁴¹

And so we arrive at the boot of the peninsula, and as slowly as we have had to proceed till now – other countries and regions being rife with distinctions and nuance, as we have seen – our pace slows to a crawl through the unforgiving complexity of the Italian peninsula. The number of states here – each with its discrete traditions, patois, regimes, and hence (and not least) sets of archives – evolved from ten to three, between 1780 and 1815 (it went down to two after the Franco-Austrian War of 1858–9, and was then a single united state, after the seizure of Rome in 1870). Nothing reflects this diversity better than the Broers's map, discussed above, which distributes Italy among three of the four different classifications on the map of Napoleonic Europe. That portion of Italy where the French stayed the longest and had the most impact comprised Piedmont and those parts of the Kingdom of Italy acquired before 1806: Lombardy, Modena, the Papal Legations (the modern Emilia-Romagna) but not the territories of the old Republic of Venice; where they had considerably less – because they stayed fewer years and encountered (even) more opposition – was the outer empire: Tuscany, the core of the Papal States, and Venetia. The works before us are all at great pains to inform, virtually admonish, the reader about the daunting complexities and contrasts among the states of the peninsula. Fine. What is confusing, not to say annoying, however, is that all (not just some) of these experts are presently flinging about the term ‘Italy’ – including even in their titles (which admittedly publishers may have had a hand in).Footnote ⁴²

Let me start by giving an idea of the sort of thing scholarship has moved beyond. ‘I praise this hero [General Bonaparte], child of Italy, who, having become French, has saved his patrie.’ This anonymous acclamation, by an Italian in 1796, Dwyer shows is far more typical of Napoleonic self-advertisement than a valid generalization of ‘Italian reaction to the French.’Footnote ⁴³ It was, nevertheless, the sort of thing that used to be adduced in times past – especially by French authors.Footnote ⁴⁴

Widely respected for his dissertation, Milan, capitale napoléonienne, 1800–1814 (Paris, 2002), Alain Pillepich has recently produced an overview that focuses on the Republic/Kingdom of Italy, where he has done extensive archival labours. He dedicates the work to his mentor, Jean Tulard (commonly known in France as the ‘pope’ of Napoleonic studies),Footnote ⁴⁵ whom he praises for his ‘regard froid sur le passé’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Although Napoléon et les Italiens features some fresh evidence (e.g., a partial facsimile of a Napoleonic memorandum about Italy, c. 1805, drawn up in the emperor's own handwriting),Footnote ⁴⁷ it is mainly an overview drawn from the latest scholarship in several languages. Overall, Pillepich argues that ‘the work of constructing a modern state’ was realized by the Kingdom of Italy under ‘the aegis of France’.Footnote ⁴⁸ This ‘work’ certainly had its downsides; the author leaves out little by way of French fiscality, bellicosity, and all-around authoritarianism. Such critiques are, in the French scholarly literature on Italy under the Empire, fairly strong stuff.

Yet Pillepich's ‘cold regard’ has limits; he definitely pulls his pichenette in balance-sheet statements that lean strongly to the positive. All of the downsides are contingent, not doctrinal, on his telling. Italy wound up a purely instrumental consideration in Napoleon's larger policies of war with Austria and England, but this, on Pillepich's telling, ‘in no wise diminishes the glory of the Emperor’.Footnote ⁴⁹ The French, he notes, had the good sense to adapt an Italian version of the Concordat that allowed certain compromises in a different cultural setting.Footnote ⁵⁰ ‘Italian opinion’, in general, he writes, appears to have substantially evolved: ‘Whether by resignation, habit, or other reasons, hostility to France was manifest less at the level of principles than at the practical level, in a host of particulars’ (conscription, the Continental System, anticlericalism, etc.).Footnote ⁵¹

Napoleon I, as he appears in this familiarly French telling – Pillepich is wont to cite the Napoleonic Stendhal and Rossetti more often than the negative Leopardi – becomes the dominant figure of the coming Risorgimento. The France of the Code, the Concordat, and conscription, not to mention administrative modernity, was able, ‘in 1860 as in 1800’,Footnote ⁵² to impose common institutions throughout Italy because the Italian states could not get along nor decide among themselves. If the author is finally sceptical about Viceroy Eugène de Beauharnais's claim that something quite like a ‘nation italienne’ was emergent amidst the sundry populations of Lombardy and Bologna, etc., he is willing to give a positive answer at the end of the day to the question: ‘does anything of 1802–1814 remain today in Italy?’. In his coda, Pillepich refers to ‘the benefits received by Italy from the passage of a conqueror who was in no way foreign to them and who was also a builder’.Footnote ⁵³

Moving to English-language work on Napoleonic Italy, one crosses the familiar continental divide separating attitudes in the two leading historiographies of the First Empire. As is well known, Anglo-Americans (Anglo-Saxons, as the French call us) generally take a much harder, even harsher, view.Footnote ⁵⁴ Thus David Laven, in Venice and Venetia under the Habsburgs, 1815–1835, looks at Venice in the subsequent period, but this time the ‘cold regard’ is freezing: uniformly anti-French in both disposition and conclusion. While granting that ‘Napoleon established a remarkably effective administrative machine’ (‘the key characteristics of Napoleonic modernization were retained [after 1815]’), Laven maintains that French rule was profoundly resented by the Venetians.Footnote ⁵⁵ Indeed – and herein lies the novelty of his thesis – the latter acquiesced in Austrian rule in part simply because Francis I was not his son-in-law, but rather an ‘honest, fair, efficient’ ruler whose government was ‘a blessing’ for Venetians; it was not the ‘neo-colonial’ domination that French governance had been.Footnote ⁵⁶

In one important regard, however, Laven concurs with Pillepich: ‘nationalism’ did not flourish here (‘Mazzini … was driven to despair by the want of nationalism among Venetians’).Footnote ⁵⁷ That being said, Laven charts new archival and intellectual ground when he concludes that the Austrian secret police have been unfairly villainized by scholars as well as contemporaries. ‘[I]n reality they probably care more for the welfare of the local population than any other branch of the administration.’Footnote ⁵⁸

John Davis's remarkable study of the largest of the Italian states – Naples and Napoleon, southern Italy and the European revolutions, 1780–1860 – goes a long way toward demonstrating the highly suggestive and revisionist thesis that in broad outline the Kingdom of Naples was in most respects similar to the other imperial satellite Kingdoms. The restored Bourbon dynasty of 1815 ‘retained a regime premised on a bureaucratic model of the state’.Footnote ⁵⁹ The French impact exposed ‘[the south's] vulnerability to political and economic subordination, even though against every intention of empire the Neapolitans in those years had acquired important autonomies’.Footnote ⁶⁰ But in the changed political and economic conditions after unification (i.e., post-1860) the south would become the prisoner of its insecurities, such that when the oldest and largest of Italy's pre-unification states ceased to be a kingdom it became a problem: the Southern Problem. In sum, ‘the most fundamental problems facing southern society were the consequence of change and not its absence’. Naples, on this fascinating reading, eventually parted company with its fratelli to the north, albeit only late in the nineteenth century, and not because it had abandoned ‘the laissez-faire principles that had guided the enlightened reformers of the eighteenth century [nor even] the confident belief of the French rulers that rational governance was all that was needed to unlock the natural wealth of the South’. Rather, its problems ‘had little to do with immobility, but everything to do with the extreme fragility of the Kingdom's economic foundations when exposed to new forces of change’.Footnote ⁶¹

Davis is less unrelenting in his Napoleonophobia than Laven. His highly revisionist conclusion argues that the Napoleonic years had a more profound effect on Naples than they did on the Kingdom of Italy: ‘the institutional and political reforms made during the period of French rule were retained more fully in the South in 1815 than in any of the other Italian states, consolidating a form of government described by contemporaries as an “administrative monarchy”’.Footnote ⁶² French rule in Naples took place against a background of ‘prolonged commercial economic recession, intermittent warfare, constant political uncertainty, and almost permanent internal unrest. Yet the changes that took place within southern Italy in this brief span of time [notably the abolition of feudalism] were remarkable.’ Davis quotes an Italian administrator of Murat's: ‘“Never has a society witnessed greater upheaval or greater transformation in so short a space of time than the Kingdom of Naples at the beginning of the nineteenth century.” … [This] claim was an exaggeration, but not a wild one … [S]outhern Italy in these years had few comparisons.’Footnote ⁶³ Mind you, Davis hardly has it all beer and skittles here. Naples after 1809, on this author's telling, writhed on permanent political tenterhooks due to King Joachim (Murat)'s constantly shifting position in the tableau vivant that was the Empire's politics. Davis quotes an Italian administrator who believed ‘that the new political order had little popular support’ (although Murat was personally popular ‘because of his swashbuckling style’), but he quotes another, a well-known supporter of Napoleon's (Zurlo), who believed the French, had they stayed, would have succeeded in transforming ‘the kingdom into a Nation’.Footnote ⁶⁴

To move from Rowe, Grab, Laven, Davis, et al., to deep immersion in the works of Michael Broers is to go from a pleasant garden party to an intense debate in a hot greenhouse. The ornate orchids you come upon in his four books take the form, first, of elenchus – an argumentative style, fierce judgements and statements, second-person apostrophizing, and the frequent delivery of the quietus. Second, they take the form, as one book leads to another, of recondite references to classical sources such as Cierco, and, above all, to extensive citation from and reliance upon contemporary social science, mainly anthropology. Broers's degree of learning – very rare among Italianists, he does research on more than one Italian polity – the quality of his thinking – even, one may say, of his courage – are on par with the controversial originality of his theses. Taken together, they put him in a class by himself among current-day historians in this field. This said, as I shall argue later, there are very serious conceptual and historical problems with his work.

A few years before the appearance of the landmark Napoleon's integration of Europe, Stuart Woolf wrote an article that posed a potent new issue (which curiously he would not examine further in his book): the question of cultural imperialism; specifically, the duty felt by the French to foster and impose their ideas, methods, and institutions on the foreign lands under their sway.Footnote ⁶⁵ He noted that if ‘the problems of introducing the new French system … were of the same nature as those already experienced in the more “refractory” departments of France, [they] were on a different scale’ beyond France, and complicated ‘by introducing the reality of ethnicity’. Ethnicity, he argued, ‘became a mirror image of French cultural imperialism, a means of explaining why the French nation embodied the highest level of civilization and hence the right, even the duty, to impose it on “lower” ethnic groups’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Three years later, in another article, he invoked the modern heritage of colonialism, cited Edward Said's work, and proceeded to consider ‘the construction of a European world-view’ vis-à-vis the non-Occidental, seen as ‘inferior’. He conceded this was a view that eighteenth-century Europeans had picked up from their classical (Greek) heritage. Taking care ‘not to read back into the ancien régime the commonplaces of nineteenth-century European imperialism’, Woolf examined Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt (1798–9) as an instance of cultural imperialism.Footnote ⁶⁷

Woolf's views in this area did not go ignored; we have already noted that scholars as varied as Pillepich, Laven, and Davis all consider the Italian states (as well as other countries) ‘colonial’ in their subordination to France. Still, it is one thing to see the lands of the Empire as ‘colonial’ in their standing vis-à-vis Paris, it is quite another to consider that what the French were mainly about may be understood and expressed in the modern theory and practice of cultural imperialism.

Yet this is what Broers, as time goes by, is doing for the case of Italy (with heavy hints that it applies to other lands, as well),Footnote ⁶⁸ crystallizing recent tendencies into a highly original, not to say idiosyncratic, system and understanding of the whole of modern Italian history – an understanding anchored, at bottom, in his empathy for the underdog. An Ulster Protestant and a former infantryman in the British army, Broers sees himself ‘instinctively drawn to a struggle between sides who abandoned relativism in the face of deeper realities: that to defend cultural values, to preserve a social cement, you had to be “fierce”, in local parlance’.Footnote ⁶⁹ His subjects were indeed ‘fierce’; and he admires them for it. His compliment to the priests of early nineteenth-century Rome, imprisoned by the hundreds by the French overlords for their unbending refusal to play ball with ecclesiastical reform, could be that of one soldier speaking of another: ‘the Tridentine clergy showed a coolness under fire worthy of Wellington's troops at Torres Verdes; their response to French harassment was a vindication of the Borromean ideal in times of crisis, however compromised it might be in normal circumstances’.Footnote ⁷⁰

In short, in Broers we have the wail, the snarl, and often enough the bite of the werewolf, and no longer just Woolfians in sheep's clothing.

A final prefatory word – on epistemology. Befitting an ex-rugby player become Oxford don, Broers is a resolute positivist in his practice of our craft: he sees history as being about truths that are objective, and he is convinced he is on to many. Pillepich, though probably as knowledgeable about primary documentary sources, reluctantly declares that ‘the state of current archival research offers up only clues’ as to the ‘deep sentiments’ of Italian Catholics vis-à-vis French secularizations.Footnote ⁷¹ Broers, however, believes that ‘archival empiricism’ yields ‘as much objectivity as can be expected in a post-modern world.’ (‘[I]t is probably an intellectual failing – nay, one of sheer lack of intelligence – that I am rooted in archival empiricism.’) And he is quite certain that cultural imperialism ‘is present in the archival sources avant la lettre’.Footnote ⁷² Aside from false modesty, however, if there is any ‘failure’ in his brilliant sortie across disciplines, it arises not from Broers's archivalism – he reveals himself a true scion of Richard Cobb, for his ability to make a given judicial, prefectural, or military report ‘sing’ (and in many keys) – but from his reflection.

Broers's views did not spring Athena-like from his brow, but were painstakingly produced across twenty years of research and reflection, and a decade of publication. In his early brace of books, Napoleonic imperialism and the Savoyard monarchy, 1773–1821 and Europe under Napoleon, 1799–1815,Footnote ⁷³ his critical remarks on the French presence in Europe belie his Oxonian's intellectual descendance from a nonetheless Cantabridgian clutch of scholars, Derek Beales, Simon Schama, and Timothy Blanning. Their work in the 1970s and 1980s pioneered archival scholarship in the field of Enlightenment/Revolutionary/Napoleonic impact on Europe; in proper English fashion, it was unyielding in its tone of harshness toward the imperial French power. By and large, these men see the French as barbarian invaders who knocked highly evolved societies in the Rhineland and the Low Countries back a decade or two.Footnote ⁷⁴ Broers to some degree follows suite: ‘the restoration of order had not produced universal admiration for the French’; ‘promising signs of ralliement and acceptance of imperial rule were compromised by [policies of taxation, conscription, the Blockade]; conscription was nothing short of traumatic’; the Romans' experience of the modern state ‘was wholly negative, … there were signs between 1809 and 1812 that they [the French] were making more progress in parts of Spain than in central Italy’; ‘If Napoleon was not at war with the Church, his state was at war with the culture that sustained it.’Footnote ⁷⁵

However – and this is no minor point – Broers also displays a fair-mindedness toward the French that contrasts sharply, not only with the Cambridge group's unrelieved hostility, but also with the work of the younger, more recent British scholars whom we have considered. Broers makes a great deal, for example, of the French ability to restore peace and order in the Piedmontese countryside: ‘The French were able to reduce assassination of people to assassination of character; while the parish pump may have spat venom, it no longer ran with blood.’ Or he notes, ‘Genuine and persistent attempts were made by the central and departmental authorities … to protect the citizen from the potential excesses of the state, although this is something the Napoleonic state seldom receives credit for.’Footnote ⁷⁶

In sum, in a long and dense book about north-western Italy that closely examines the extent and durability of the French legacy down to the 1820s, Broers – parting company, as well, with Schroeder, Dwyer, and even Davis – does not judge that Napoleon's designs and methods amount to less than the rule of law in a Ciceronian (i.e., a firm, authoritative) sense, and not in a Caesarian or despotic one. However, he also says, plainly – as none of his more self-consciously ‘liberal’ colleagues do – ‘if Napoleon's regime was indeed “the first modern dictatorship”, it was a dictatorship of the modern left’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Woolf states it less polemically

If the dictatorship itself was transient, its effects were lasting. Putting things with echt-Broersian insight combined with irony, he notes, ‘Few parts of the French Midi, central or southern Italy, or Iberia, could claim so profound a change [as took place in Piedmont].’Footnote ⁷⁹ This is quite a concession, perhaps one Broers no longer stands by, seeing as how in his next book, he placed the states in the outer, not the inner, Empire. But what the Broers' right hand gives, the left hand takes away, for even in his dissertation, he could not restrain himself from generalizing about later Italian history, viewed from the Napoleonic stans. The Italy of the (pro-French) Patriots, he writes,

We now arrive at the heart of the Broersian matter; he is ready to deliver his quietus. Although acknowledging the long-term viability of the Napoleonic edifice and foundation, they are things he wants no part of – unlike virtually all of his French, Anglo-American, or German colleagues, who in varying degrees are cautiously favourable or ambivalent toward the progressive and modernizing aspects of the First Empire, and in any case are unwilling to see in Napoleon ‘a left-wing dictator’. Broers writes, ‘The nation-state had become inseparable from the centralized state and, as such, a living nightmare [for the masses].’ Or again

So much for early Broers. What of the two most recent works? The politics of religion in Napoleonic Italy has a clearer agenda than the previous books, and it is not the colonial subordination of the départements réunis – a familiar matter quickly dispatched. Already by page 2, we learn that ‘the French exploited their Italian territories from beginning to end’, and, further, that ‘the Continental System … was an ill-concealed policy of economic imperialism that made of Italy a mere supplier of raw materials to France’.

What compels the author is not French exploitation, per se, but rather French cultural-missionary zeal: i.e., spreading the benefits of French ‘civilization’. Broers unleashes heavy artillery; he cites Allan Bloom citing Nietzsche, in the kinds of fell judgements his reader soon becomes accustomed to: ‘Cultures have different perceptions, which determine what the world is. They cannot come to terms. There is no communication about the highest things.’Footnote ⁸² And so we find we are in the land of the ‘concepts of “the other” and of cultural imperialism’, which, ‘although fraught with complexities, have a place in a purely European context and are not the preserve of relations between European and the extra-European world’.Footnote ⁸³

Simply put – and one risks doing harm to the density of Broers's thought and prose by putting things simply – the French view of the Italian cities and countryside came to resemble Said's concept of Orientalism; that is, Napoleonic administrators in Italy viewed urban and elite culture as old centres of civilization in decline. The France of the Revolution and Empire had all but abandoned Christianity, even as she remained deeply imbued with the missionary impulse to disseminate her Enlightened concept of ‘civilization’ – i.e., her own civilization polie et policée (as Broers puts it, drawing on Michelle Duchet).Footnote ⁸⁴ In both senses – of high culture and of order – Italians were seen to come a cropper; they ‘stood in need of the moral regeneration propounded by the Revolution’.Footnote ⁸⁵ This civilizing mission lent a unity of purpose to otherwise potentially divided French officials and generals, from ex-nobles like Tournon to ex-Terrorists like Nardon. Broers's portrayals of them are wrought in pastels, not hard colours; he is impressed by their intellectual ability and their high professionalism, even as he scores them for insensitivity – and worse.

In no field were the imperial French and their Italian collaborators (the self-styled Patriots) more remorseless than in their pursuit of religious reform, which is the main concern of the book. The French ‘disliked the very sight of a numerous clergy’, and they particularly loathed the regular orders, male or female.Footnote ⁸⁶ Though generally sincere in their motives, no few among the overlords perversely mistook Italian piety – at the end of the day, not so alien from their own (French) backgrounds – for blind superstition, which it was not (or not mainly). Broers limns these men most effectively by once again citing Allan Bloom, ‘“a cultural relativist [who] must care for culture more than truth, and fight for culture more than truth while knowing it is not the truth”’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Thus, if at first the French seemed to be fighting the self-same battles with ‘blind’ popular religion that previous regimes (Trent, the Jansenists, and the Enlightened absolutists) had taken on, their real mission, as they warmed to it, became, in Broers's tendentious sub-title, ‘the war against God’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Nothing in the reforms of any previous regime nor of the Tridentine Church itself had prepared locals for what Broers sees as the spiritual assault that the French implacably applied in their Concordat (revised in 1810).Footnote ⁸⁹

In short, the battle was ‘more than a clash between Church and state’, it was guerre à outrance ‘between the concept of society that emerged from the French Revolution … and the Catholic religion … Eventually every facet of [the Italian] spiritual culture felt the ire of the new regime, and every component of that culture fought back as best it could.’ The bishop of Assisi, for example, went into exile, followed soon by his vicar-general, then by his archpriest, the latter instructing the faithful that he would prefer to see a layman administer the diocese than one of the pro-French juring priests.Footnote ⁹⁰ Pope Pius VII, having begun his pontificate ‘soft’ on Napoleon, rediscovered his Benedictine mettle; the French, the pontiff stated,

He also – Broers lets this pass sans commentaire – denounced the doctrine of religious toleration promulgated in the Concordat as being ‘nothing but a pretext for lay power to insinuate self into spiritual affairs’.Footnote ⁹¹

The nub of Broers's thesis about Roman Catholicism is that the Church, in extremis, swiftly learned to embrace elements and aspects of popular religion that would have been unthinkable to eighteenth-century ecclesiastical reformers (such as the young monk, Chiaramonte, before he became pope). There was

Broers perfectly portrays the supreme pontiff's evolution after 1805; ‘[Pius VII] had to move further from [his] roots than did Napoleon, from his original role as ‘the saviour of the Church’ to the gaoler of the pope. The ex-Jansenist theology professor came to embrace the [popular] Marian devotion at its most populist.’Footnote ⁹³

The incredibly wide and unified resistance raised in the Papal States (‘there were no “deserters” … whatever the hardships or dangers of their forced marches’Footnote ⁹⁴) eventually produced an irony on which the Ausländer impaled themselves

And so, in the kind of dramatic phrasing Broers reserves for such occasions, ‘the last Emperor of the West failed to win this battle’ – a fact which ‘deserves to be recorded’.Footnote ⁹⁶

But if Broers the recorder has wound down, Broers the reflector is just winding up. He now proceeds to project his story of the départements réunis in the decade before Waterloo on to the whole of the Boot in the nineteenth century, in order to draw out conclusions about Church–State conflict in general. For on his reading ‘the Napoleonic experience in Italy is a harbinger of the future, and important in that it is the first incidence of how liberals would react to Catholic resistance to reform when in control of a strong, effective state, especially when that state proved less powerful than they had assumed. They became bullies, but frustrated ones.’Footnote ⁹⁷ Having asserted that the Italian Church's famous ‘lurch to the right’ was a product of the turn of the century, not of the 1848 counterrevolution, Broers now moves to different countries and later eras; he offers up comparisons of Napoleon in his ‘war against God’ to Bismarck and Combes, in theirs. He quotes a historian of the German Kulturkampf to the effect that ‘the image of an embattled Church – wounded, bleeding – constituted a powerful symbol, one that placed a claim on the devout, demanding sacrifice and self-abnegation’.Footnote ⁹⁸ He considers the Iron Chancellor to be ‘the lineal connection between the 1902 Combes government of the Third Republic and the First Empire’, albeit granting that such a notion would certainly ‘horrify the anti-Bonapartists’ in the camp following le petit père Combes. He adds, ‘in this sphere, at least, the Third Republic might be said to be a truer heir of the First Empire than was the Second Empire. Indeed, when Napoleonic policies in Italy are set beside those of Combes, the latter emerge as the more moderate.’Footnote ⁹⁹

We shall return to these reflections, but for now let us plunge ahead to the last volume in the ongoing Broers opera.

The Napoleonic Empire in Italy, 1796–1814 opens with as powerful an assault on the traditional historiography of Napoleonic imperialism as I have read. It is classic Broers: learned, sweeping, unyielding. It is a prelude to an expansion of his larger thesis, which he has embraced more strongly as he has read more widely in it and reflected more deeply about it. After being momentarily dislodged by the Second Coalition, the French, he writes, re-entered Italy in 1799 ‘with a sense that regeneration was their unique achievement, and its diffusion would be their work alone. Their new ‘raison d'être … was essentially ideological, and fits a wider pattern of imperialism’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ More explicitly than in the last book, the reader is apprised that the author's research is limited to the fourteen départements réunis, and the author more resolutely expands his conclusions to embrace, first, the neighbouring Kingdom of Italy, and then the entire boot.

The three years between 1796 and 1799 are known in Italian history as the triennio; it is a period traditionally associated with revolutionary reform and Franco-Patriot co-operation – the Patriots, including the giacobini, being Italian sympathizers and collaborators with the French. Broers, however, has a very different understanding. First of all, he disputes that the Patriots were patriots in the usual sense; they were, rather, pre-existing political factions who ‘turned to the French, in the name of reform, as well as in the context of local power struggles’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ That is of course indisputable; the same observation could be, and has been, said about all capital ‘p’ Patriots of any era and place – i.e., they love their country.Footnote ¹⁰² What is less indisputable is Broers's somewhat captious portraits of many of the Italians who followed the ‘French model’; and still less, his low opinion of the ‘enlightened’ state construction that they and their allies carried out in the so-called ‘sister’ republics (the Cisalpine, Parthenopean, Ligurian, etc.).Footnote ¹⁰³ Broers argues that contemporaries, as opposed to posterity (including academic historians), saw in Franco-Patriot rule during the triennio a time of internecine conflict and collaborationism, ending with widespread and successful anti-French revolt. Indeed, what most impresses him is the swift, total, thundering collapse of the ‘sisters’ when the Austro-Russians invaded Italy in 1799 (while the victorious General Bonaparte was off in Egypt). The crux indeed turns on one's interpretation of the various republics' collapses: were they primarily caused by foreign invasion or by anti-French feeling – usually among nobles and peasants – merely occasioned by that invasion? Broers's answer – the latter – would be contested by mainline Italian historiography.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

The French, on Broers's telling, learned something crucial in the vast and bloody uprisings of 1799; they learned that their earlier methods had not taken, and their ‘lessons’ must therefore be driven home differently. When they returned after the First Consul's near-miss of a victory at Marengo (1800), they thus came loaded for a different kind of bear. They now abandoned the complex and fragile policy of alliance with the Patriots,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ and instead construed Piedmont, Lombardy, and Liguria – with their hoary tradition of government by campanilismo and clientelismo – as a ‘“dependency culture” of the most fawning, craven variety’. France and Italy were no longer seen as similar Occidental cultures, but as ‘a confrontation between “others”’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ ‘[F]amiliarity bred not just contempt but resigned bewilderment’ before the scope of the project at hand; to undo ‘it all’ and re-make ‘the political education of Italy’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ And so Napoleon's empire-makers (Broers has a good time describing the more efficient of them as having ‘a taste for frontier justice’ characteristic of the ‘wild west’Footnote ¹⁰⁸) became civilizing missionaries, with contempt for the Patriots. Broers gets off a line that ought to be required learning for adepts of the causal power of discourse. ‘Whatever the importance of classical republicanism to the revolutionaries in their formulation of French national identity, they did not like the vestiges found in its Italian homeland.’Footnote ¹⁰⁹ They now demanded of their emperor that he ‘transform himself from a ruler in the mould of Louis XIV, a “natural prince” drawing on a civilised cultural heritage, into a “new prince”, in the manner of Peter the Great, obliged to force a degenerate society into civilised modernity’.Footnote ¹¹⁰

In this, the fourth, Broersian tome on things Napoleonic, the author cavorts in the fields of social science, particularly anthropology. Among his recurring partners: George Lichtheim, Frank Ninkovich, Nathan Wachtel, Jonathan Friedman, Owen Lattimore, Ussama Makdisi, James Axtell, Ranajit Guha, H. S. Alatas, and Geoffrey Gorer. From Friedman, he borrows his overall theme. ‘European practitioners of empire-building believed themselves increasingly able to understand, and so to rule “the other” without recourse to the savage coercion of an earlier imperialism, born of greed and religious zealotry. In many cases, they may well have been correct.’Footnote ¹¹¹

On the ground, interpreting evidence, however, Broers relies most heavily on Nathan Wachtel, with his concepts of ‘integration’ and ‘assimilation’, which Broers relates to the French distinctions between ralliement and amalgame. Indeed, Wachtel gets to join him in the final thumbs-down judgement. What one is facing here, finally, ‘is a study in the failure of “acculturation” in a quasi-colonial context, to employ this concept as formulated by Nathan Wachtel’.Footnote ¹¹² (If I confine Wachtel's nomenclature to a footnote, it is because I think his concepts do not do much explanatory work in Napoleonic Italy – I think that historians' longstanding concepts of amalgame and ralliement carry the load; the rest have the effect of vaguely terrorizing the reader due to his own reflexive receptivity to concepts taken from the social sciences, particularly anthropology, and even more particularly concepts that accuse the West of racism, colonialism, sexism, and general injustice.)

What undoes it all is not French contempt for those peculiarly Italian styles and modes (e.g., the quaint habits of denunciation, nepotism, corruption, etc.) but rather the ideological question of religion. This long and dense study – 300 pages of fresh and welcome archival research – leads the reader irresistibly to the conclusion that Broers shares with his host of post-colonial scholarly friends. ‘[G]lobalisation as a predatory annihilator of cultures’Footnote ¹¹³ – where, by culture, he means literally cult, religion. In this connection, he gets off this pithy sentence, ‘the fundamental objection to French rule was neither that it was foreign nor French, but lay in its basic nature’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ One does not know if he intended, or not, the brilliant pun (lay might be an adjective, as in laic), but the point is made: the Italians balked at the Concordat, even if they might have swallowed the rest, including the contingent policies of extraction and conscription.

And, as before, our author wastes little time in lifting off from his immediate historical turf (Broers can be both Antaeus and Icarus). He informs us that the coming nineteenth-century Italian nationalism is so much ‘smashing of square regional pegs into round, centralising holes’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ He employs the censorious tone he occasionally reserves for the Napoleonists (whom he nevertheless can admire in other moments): ‘Yet, in a manner worthy of Burkean rebuke, they failed to see beyond [their civilizing project]. The French missed a very great deal. Their own version of political culture – the arena of the public sphere – was all that mattered. They saw only superstition – religion – and decadence among the Italian elites’, and they failed to see the vibrant civic humanism and classical republicanism in many Italian urban sites. Footnote ¹¹⁶

He concludes with slashing irony. ‘There is much truth in the judgement of an older, nationalist historiography, that Napoleonic rule really did bring the modern state to Italy.’Footnote ¹¹⁷ For the reader knows by now what this authors thinks of the ‘state’, just as he knows of his preference for ‘the defiant durability of a host of private and localised loyalties, [which] is central to modern Italian history’.Footnote ¹¹⁸

In his exhaustive archival research and incredibly wide theoretical reading, Broers is a historian's historian. Moreover, he does not make many of the usual kinds of petty mistakes that most of us do. In four books I, for one, found precisely two; Junot was not a maréchal d'Empire (to his bitter regret),Footnote ¹¹⁹ and, technically, in terms of canonical formalities, Napoleon did not ‘die excommunicate’, as Broers (along with some English-language historians) purports.Footnote ¹²⁰

Trivialities aside, let us get down to business. First, let us consider Broers' historical projections to Wilhelmine Germany, and later to Third Republican France. What of the initially fetching comparison of Napoleonic ecclesiastical reform in Italy with Bismarck's Kulturkampf (1871–87)? Its most accommodating aspect is the high degree of spontaneous, widespread popular reaction (nearly revolt) evoked in both climes, although German Catholics had a lower level of co-ordination than in Italy. In both instances, Catholic morale refused to collapse; in both, the attack on the Church was met by a closer forging of ties among previously disparate and conflicting groups in the Church, or allied to it. Both the tall, moustachioed chancellor and the tiny dictator in the bicorne pursued a relentlessly political agenda. The Iron Chancellor launched an ‘“internal preventive war”’ against what he took to be the threat of the powerful Centre Party and its able leader, Windthorst. Catholics, along with Poles and Socialists (the latter growing politically powerful) both individually and collectively threatened Bismarck's consolidation of his newly minted Reich.Footnote ¹²¹

But then the comparison starts to run low on gas. Bismarck's was a domestic policy within a polity in the process of being brought to cohere as a nation-state. Broers would have found more sincere (i.e., not so political) anti-Catholic antipathy if he had considered, not Bismarck and his conservative regime, but German Liberalism, although the comparison would not be symmetrical, for it would be a case of official policy vs political theory. But at least the idea of a culture war, not a government power manoeuvre, would be present.Footnote ¹²² In the measures that he took against Catholics, Bismarck in no way sought to reform the Church,Footnote ¹²³ as did the French. He meant to strike at Catholic political leadership in the Reichstag, the press, and society, but Catholic beliefs, catechism, structure, internal governance, etc., went largely unassailed. In the Franco-Italian case, on the other hand, though the fundament of the battle was also political (Broers is not clear about this; we recall he granted that French policy, at least in the Roman departments, was a straight-forward attack on counterrevolution as much as it was an illustration of cultural imperialism) it was also the case that force majeure intended to, and for a time did, alter Italian ecclesiastical structures and (therefore cultural) practices for millions of Catholics, including the vast majority of its regular and diocesan clergy.

In terms of outcome, both projects failed, that is true – but not in the same way, nor for the same reasons. Bismarck's failed because he was forced to abandon and to withdraw by domestic opposition: i.e., by virtually all of Germany's Catholics, as well as by the German courts, bureaucracy, and the government's own political allies, all of whom notoriously failed to give their chancellor the support he demanded (in part because they understood that these measures ‘called into question the entire network of existing political and institutional arrangements upon which [Bismarck's own] power ultimately rested and required alterations that threatened to undermine and to diminish his influence and control).Footnote ¹²⁴ The French administration, on the other hand, worked towards its goals as one man, backed entirely by The Man, in Paris, and largely able to count on a not unimportant minority of Italians within the départements réunis (as well as other Italian states). Finally, it is anything but clear that French ecclesiastical reform in Italy – even in the Roman departments – would have failed if it had been applied over the long haul. This, as Broers is the first to point out, the French fully intended to do. The French left Italy manu militari due to external force, not because they lost the political internal battle.

We now come to Broers's invocation of the French Third Republic, which is, in certain regards, a more apt comparison to the First Empire, in terms of cultural imperialism, than is Bismarckian Germany.Footnote ¹²⁵ However, ‘mass demonstrations and the emergence of Catholic political parties – the Centre in Germany, the Action Française in France’Footnote ¹²⁶ – will not wash. The Action Française was not really a mass political party but a small self-styled intellectual-ideological elite organized around a newspaper. Still less was it a Catholic organization; indeed it was condemned by the Vatican in 1926. Broers writes, ‘the lineal connection between the 1902 Combes government and the First Empire is clear’, and the specialist on pre-1914 France will grant him this in a broad sense. On the other hand, what he will not grant him is the crucial phrase, in Broers's thesis, of the ‘war against God’. This is exactly the sort of explosive slogan that no historian, even French conservative ones, would get near in an attempt to limn fairly the Third Republic's politique laique.Footnote ¹²⁷ And the reason they would not is that it is not true – certainly not for the Third Republic, and probably also not even for the emperor who was crowned by the pope in 1804. From Jules Ferry, et al., in the 1880s, to Waldeck-Rousseau and le petit père (Combes) himself, at the turn of the century, historians in no way envisioned taking on the Christian, or even the Catholic, god.Footnote ¹²⁸ They saw themselves opposing clerical-royalist political subversion and forming citizens with ideals and morals. Broers cites the great French social historian, Maurice Agulhon, to the effect that ‘French society and culture in general remain impregnated with religion. Neither Jules Ferry nor even Emile Combes had changed anything in that respect.’Footnote ¹²⁹ This is quite true in a general cultural sense, but it does not alter the fact that Catholic religious adherence and practice have steadily fallen off for two centuries, to the current 48 per cent and 6 per cent, respectively.Footnote ¹³⁰

This being said, it is also true – and now we see the inaptness of the comparison with the Kulturkampf or with Napoleon's ecclesiastical reform in Italy – that Agulhon would be the first to say that laicité has worked out pretty well in the creation of republican citizens in France, certainly far better than Bismarck's Kulturkampf or German Liberalism's anticlerical attitudes brought unity to Germans. And this is so because laicité, and even the Separation, originated, and were widely received, including by many Catholics, not as a war against God, but a battle with a far-from-impotent Church, and as means of forming moral, patriotic, and ‘spiritual’ (even god-fearing) citizens. This aspect of things is not appreciated if the term constantly employed to describe policies is ‘anticlericalism’, as Broers does. First of all, many French Catholics could themselves be anticlerical in their resistance to churchly authoritarianism and its refusal to allow a role for the laity in church ritual and governance. Second, more important, the term anticlericalism suits certain aspects and moments in laicité and its history, but is not synonymous with it. Laicité, as we know, not only contained much of a spiritual, virtually religious, impulse of its own,Footnote ¹³¹ but it also attracted a number – a minority, true, but an educated and important one – of liberal Catholics who were ‘blues’, i.e., republicans who did not construe civic and citizen as inherently contrary to Catholic. Indeed, formal Vatican policy toward France during the Ralliement (after 1891) could be said, in some senses, to be blue. Such a policy would have been unthinkable to Rome vis-à-vis the Kulturkampf or to the First Empire French in Italy.Footnote ¹³²

The foregoing reality is lost sight of in the systematic deployment of phrases like ‘war against God’, ‘anti-Christian’, and ‘anticlerical’ used as a synonym for laicité. These are war cries of one side in the conflict (often embattled reactionaries or counterrevolutionaries), not objective categories. In Broers's hands, they strike one as the expressions (here I venture into speculation) of someone who has freshly discovered ‘the power of faith’ but has not yet seized upon the subtlety of faith, nor its potential for assimilating. In any event, to deploy such terms is to lose sight of other social forms of Catholicism that historically played crucial roles as well. As it happens, the three regimes – the two Napoleonic Empires and Bismarck's Reich – fought mainly political duels with the Church. Whether Napoleon was harsher than Combes or Bismarck, as Broers opines,Footnote ¹³³ is not at all clear. Perhaps he was; his men threw hundreds of Roman clergy into prison, after all. On the other hand, l'empereur did not separate the Church and the State and this, from the pontifical point of view, was the harsher measure.

It is perhaps true to say, with Broers, that Napoleon ‘the Great’ (albeit not le Petit nor the French republican laics) was seeking a cultural sea-change that might be usefully seen in terms of cultural imperialism. Napoleon failed in Italy for the same reason he failed in France: his attempt was radically foreshortened due to external force. It is another question entirely, however, whether Napoleonic cultural changes might not have taken over the long haul in Italy. But even if they had, would cultural imperialism be the term that would capture what the Napoleonists were mainly about?

Is it wrong, then, to make historical projections, as Broers often does? Of course not. The deeper legacies of the Napoleonic model outside of France have not till recently attracted the attention they should – Woolf is right to complain about this,Footnote ¹³⁴ so Broers's desire to see broadly both synchronically and diachronically is auspicious.

But caveat emptor! Doing so may cut both ways. Consider Gilles Havard and Cécile Vidal, Histoire de l'Amérique française, a study of the French eighteenth-century empire in North America.Footnote ¹³⁵ The authors argue that the French partnership with the Indians was one of equality, not subjection. The chapters on cultural exchanges inform us that the ‘conquerors’ married Indian women, adopted many Indian forms, granted Indians immunity from personal retribution, and when the Indians refused to learn French, the French authorities placed French children in Indian villages, to serve eventually as translators. The reviewer in French History asks ‘from a cultural perspective, one wonders who was being colonized’.Footnote ¹³⁶

Or consider a recent study of the British Empire which critiques post-colonial historians who rely too readily or greatly on Edward Said's work, and who therefore run the risk of construing colonial history as mainly the story of the colonizers overpowering the colonized.Footnote ¹³⁷ The author's evidence repudiates the notion that peoples do not cross borders, or that there is an easy separation of oppressors from victims. A reviewer notes, ‘It is easy to speak of a “clash of civilizations” when cultures are distilled to the point of abstraction. But real people in the real world do not necessarily experience other cultures in a confrontational or monolithic way.’Footnote ¹³⁸

An author more inclined to see things Broers's way is Herman Lebovics whose latest book explores ‘postcolonial regionalism’ in metropolitan France.Footnote ¹³⁹ Lebovics accepts the notion that the ‘subjugation’ of peasants in the Languedoc equates with the French colonization of Senegal or Madagascar, but he also notes that the Gaullist governments of the 1960s and 1970s inveighed against the ‘guerrilla ethnology’ propounded by peasant spokesmen or leftist critics in Les temps modernes.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Which is to say, Lebovics seems to be conceding that his own, and Broers's, position is a political one, and will therefore spark political, as well as intellectual and scholarly, reaction. In any case, Lebovics's larger point, which explains his book's title, is that French governments since the 1970s have made it their business to seek to bypass the identity wars of earlier eras, and to establish a sort of ‘universal’ (read: official, ergo blander) French culture that incorporates many different kinds of people and ethnicities, all of whom are of course deemed to have made France and the Republic what they are.

In the context of Broers's affection for projecting his material into the future, this brief discussion of books on eighteenth-, as twentieth-, century colonialism argues to a different point from Broers's. What French imperialism/colonialism was, where it came from, where it was going, how it was executed, and how open it was to changing and learning are not quite such decided matters as Broers's evidence – and above all his speculations and conclusions – give us the impression of being.

In any event, having projected backwards and forwards, let us return to France and Italy in the early nineteenth century.

Can you have Orientalism in your own country? (And if that country is France, Britain, or Italy, does it become Occidentalism?) Broers says ‘yes’, and supports his conclusions by citing the classic works of Eugen Weber and Linda Colley.Footnote ¹⁴¹ He weds Tom Nairn's and Michael Hechter's notion of ‘internal colonialism’ with Said's cultural imperialism. True, Colley does not actually use any of these terms, and neither historian deploys anthropological applications, metaphors, and terms, as Broers does. Nonetheless, one gets the point: the British crown, in subduing Ireland or annexing Scotland, or the French monarchies and republics, doing the same to Brittany and Normandy, etc., subjugated these regions in a despotic sense, sending there armies and officers who did not hold the locals in moral, cultural, or intellectual esteem – au contraire.

But does this mean that we may say that Generals Wolfe, Burgoyne, and the duke of Cumberland, or Generals Radet and Menou felt themselves venturing into ‘the heart of darkness’ in North America, Scotland, or Italy, as Broers claims?Footnote ¹⁴² Were the French seeking to make early nineteenth-century Italians into Frenchmen the same way that they would try, fifty years later, to turn peasants into Frenchmen? Or were they mainly just trying to administer well and extract efficiently while maximizing the French empire's strength in its war-to-the-knife with Great Britain?

Let us grant that such an expression as ‘heart of darkness’ (properly translated for the French) might have suited the generals just named – as might even the term totalitarian, depending on how it was explained to them. If, further, you told them that the Jesuit missionaries regarded the vendetta culture of the Italian periphery as a spiritual challenge requiring methods which their Order had invented for the New World or the Far East, is it not likely our hardened band of empire-builders might just have nodded knowingly? Nuestras Indias Footnote ¹⁴³ might well have struck them as the perfect summing up of their view of the primitive, unwashed, stubborn, and unassimilable Canadians, Americans, Scots, chouans, or Italians.

Are metaphors thrown off in medias res by hard-pressed Jesuits and serving generals the same thing as analytic terms? We know that an Austrian emperor was capable of speaking of ‘his’ Italians as ‘a people that is still half barbarous, ignorant, superstitious without limit, ardent and passionate like Africans’,Footnote ¹⁴⁴ just as the popes could refer to certain nearby districts as their ‘Tartary’, deploring ‘the barbarity of the inhabitants’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Similarly, Broers is constantly citing French administrators sounding off about the ‘fierce nature’ of Italian highlanders who ‘behaved like Africans’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Colonial encounters from early in the eighteenth century became a standard metaphor for elite European views of their own ‘backyard’, with words like ‘savage’ and ‘barbarian’ getting thrown around as useful insults.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ But are we to assume that they meant the same thing by this as Cromer and Curzon or Faidherbe and Lyautey would mean when, decades later, they used similar terms for the peoples they ruled? Or what Joseph Conrad would mean with his unforgettable title, or Arendt with her famous word? These latter all lived in a different era, in different places, had different experiences with very different peoples from those with whom the ‘enlightened’ French bureaucrats worked, and were often frustrated by, in their eighteenth-century Italian peasants, bourgeois, and nobles. Broers readily grants that the Napoleonic Empire was not the Third Reich (thereby disagreeing with Schroeder), but what makes him so sure it is so comparable to the Raj or French West Africa, or that we are justified in speaking of the French gendarmerie approaching ‘the heart of darkness’ in the lowlands of Lombardy?Footnote ¹⁴⁸

Consider the dispatches of Félicien Challaye, a young Normalien, who was accompanying Savorgnan de Brazza to the Congo in 1905, and writing about it for Le Temps.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Challaye is socialist-leaning, and very sympathetic to the Congolese he encounters; he is not vexed in the way that Broers's bureaucrats abroad were. Yet after a page of reading, one has no doubt, not the slightest, that when Challaye marvels at the Africans' ability to speak and write French correctly, or compliments them for being able to ‘dress like us, without appearing too ridiculous’, he is experiencing and expressing something autrement ‘other’ than Norvins or Tournon did in Italy – notwithstanding that Challeye says the Congelese countryside ‘looks just like Normandy’.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ What works as a bright idea, as an excited exclamation, as a mental fillip, or a good metaphorFootnote ¹⁵¹ may not prove workable as concept raisonné or as a Problemestellung. It terribly flattens historical experience if we seek to assimilate eighteenth-century Italy to nineteenth-century sub-Saharan Africa via an intellectual framework intended to study the latter (or immediately cognate situations).

The domestic application of cultural imperialism that Broers refers to occurs in the west of France: the nine departments of the Vendée militaire, which, as we know, he situates in the outer Empire.Footnote ¹⁵² He is supported, or so it would appear, by Alan Forrest, who writes of the French soldiers' perceptions of ‘the Vendean’: ‘[he] was not as other men; he was more ignorant and more primitive, was incapable of understanding patriotism, and, it was implied, must be treated accordingly … Here compromise was impossible, and the dominant discourse was that of rooting out counterrevolution and destroying the cancer of fanaticism.’Footnote ¹⁵³

However, two things might be noted: first, a careful look at Forrest's sources shows that the great preponderance of his evidence for these statements dates from soldiers' letters written in the era of the Revolution, not the Empire. This is not so minor a point, for it indicates not simply a gradually increasing pacification of the region in question but its (comparative) de-politicization, under the Empire – which is precisely what the Empire was aiming to do. That leads to my second point: the issue that fostered such hatred and violence here was politics and ideology, not mainly culture and ethnicity.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

Let us probe this question with a distant example, asking whether what is sauce for the French goose may not be sauce for the British gander. On Broers's own telling, Portugal suffered the most lasting effects of any country in Europe from the Napoleonic era – and they occurred at British, not French, hands, and had nothing to do with cultural imperialism.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Now consider the Italian gander, and his sauce. Speaking of anti-French resistance in the Papal States post-1809, Broers avers in Politics of religion that ‘to refuse to recognize the politicized nature of religious resistance is to miss the point in the same way as the French did’.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Three years later, in Napoleonic empire in Italy, he is even more certain: ‘The most singular manifestation of counterrevolution in Napoleonic Italy was, arguably, the passive resistance organised on a mass scale in the Papal States.’Footnote ¹⁵⁷ On the other hand, it is also true that ‘the experience of counterrevolution in the Papal States was unique’,Footnote ¹⁵⁸ so perhaps this sterling instance of pure political–ideological confrontation gives way to broader and more diffuse cultural imperialism in the rest of the Italian départements reunis.

Broers warns us in the preface to Politics of religion that we shall be dealing with ‘a peasantry perhaps more politicized than might be comfortable to admit because it was not “progressive” in character’.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ So we are comforted by his stated refusal to dispute the ‘intrinsic worth’ of the Enlightenment ‘a beacon of reform in a sea of reaction’.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Alas, long before the end of the book, we are left in little doubt on where the author's sympathies finally lie: with the peasants, not with ‘the Enlightenment on horseback’, which on the whole, was not much good for Italy, Broers believes.Footnote ¹⁶¹

But is it so simple? What if Michael Broers had decided to study American, instead of Italian history? Say, he chose to work under J. R. Pole, not Richard Cobb, in the early 1980s. Might not the talented young scholar have arrived in, say, Mobile, Alabama, ready to comb the archives for a revisionist thesis on how the unprogressive southern lower middle and middle classes, working with and through their municipal and state governments, especially their police forces and sheriff departments, strove to defend their culture and their way of life against uppity northern students and sundry liberals, come to impose totalitarian ideas about voter registration, educational equality, and racial integration on the mores of the old Confederacy? Citing Wachtel, Broers would insist the northerners were doing cultural imperialism.Footnote ¹⁶²

So one further wonders: would those liberal students, some of whom paid with their lives, have considered ethnocentrism to be the term for what they hoped to accomplish in the south? They would have granted they were caught up in a culture war; and they would have readily concurred that they were hoping to alter the mores and habits of millions of southern American whites, living in an economically challenged environment. But the northern activists would not have seen themselves as promulgating ethnicity, rather as fostering universal human rights and a higher degree of civilization. The more religious among them might have protested against the accusation that they were trying to impose foreign or alien ethnic values. One can almost hear their indignation.

Would a Jew or Protestant or free-thinker living in the Rome of Prefect Tournon, c. 1810, have deemed reforms ‘ethnic’ or oppressive that gave him freedom from the threat of personal violence as well as civil rights and freedom of religious practice? Is it not doubtful that either they or even some of their more dubious concitoyens would have opted for the terms of cultural relativism? They lived (and believed) in a world that still believed in the objective and the universal. John Davis notes that far more works were censored in the Restoration than under Napoleon. On the whole, the French era saw greater freedom of the press and expression. Recall, too, that Liguria petitioned the Congress of Vienna to be allowed to return to the French orbit.Footnote ¹⁶³

Any book is inevitably shaped by its sources as well as by the gut instincts of its author. The vast majority of Broers's archival evidence consists of French perceptions of Italians – their doings, their sayings, their attitudes and thoughts, as limned by their observant overlords. Broers's case for the ‘other’ is thus largely assembled out of French data, made to speak by Broers; we do not get much of a symmetrical sense of what the ‘other’ thought of all this, in their own words. Moreover, even from the evidence Broers supplies, or from what we know from scholarship about the Italians (e.g., the Patriots) in this period, it is not at all clear that many of them – including some of the most educated, successful, and powerful – construed the French in the ways that Broers shows the French perceived them. Why this silence from the colonized in his book?

Then, too, Broers is not beyond heavy massaging of his evidence now and then. When the wife of a high-level French civil servant in Italy describes herself as ‘a good little French peasant girl, healthy and of good heart’, are we really to see in her ‘a female prototype of Jean Chauvin’?Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Norvins, Roederer, Tournon, et al., occasionally feel superior or homesick,Footnote ¹⁶⁵ but their words, except formally, do not remind us of the lament of a Briton or a Foreign Legionnaire in Rangoon or Timbuktu. When Prefect Tournon remarks to his director of conscription for Rome, ‘The kind of men found in this department is much smaller than elsewhere in the empire’, we concur with Broers that these words are certainly not ‘blatant racist contempt’, but are they even comparable to the words he cites of a nineteenth-century British anthropologist, living among the Javanese: ‘I do not like being among people who appear smaller and weaker than I am … I dislike the company of those I feel to be my inferiors’?Footnote ¹⁶⁶ The latter speak from true racism, a very different order of alterity. Not to forget, Broers concludes Napoleonic empire in Italy informing us that twenty-two French gendarmes in Tuscany elected to remain with their local Italian wives, whom they had married illegally (i.e., without permission or a civil ceremony), as did, presumably, D'Auzers, the French director-general of police in Turin, who married a member of the Cavour family.Footnote ¹⁶⁷

The Italians, for their part, loudly and constantly complained about every manner of French administrator and issue, but their cries make still less of a case for the kind of alterity Broers is trying to get at via Wachtel, et al., not to mention Joseph Conrad. We are not surprised to learn that Tournon, Roederer, Norvins, et al. barely heeded the suggestions, methods, and complaints of their Italian administrés, whom they strove hard to civilize. Broers has the Italians being refused meaningful participation in governance, but, as he well knows, that was true – and only in part – in the annexed departments, not at all in the Kingdom of Italy or the Kingdom of Naples, where Italians largely ran their own show in implementing French reform. He quotes Degerando,Footnote ¹⁶⁸ a Frenchman who worked in Tuscany; Broers calls him ‘the regime's leading intellectual and a proto-ethnographer’. Degerando talked about ‘effacing’ Roman custom in order to ‘unite’ them ‘entirely to the French’.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ But are we to believe he intended ‘efface’ as some of the late nineteenth-century colonial governors meant it? Broers readily purveys phrases like ‘utter incompatibility’ and ‘irreconcilable conflict’Footnote ¹⁷⁰ – but the reader begins to wonder if more nuance is not called for.

Were the Frenchmen unaware of the myriad Italian contributions to the highest notion of civilization? Were they not constantly aware of the enormous, enduring force of the (ancient) Roman model – and more particularly of the Roman emperorship? How other could Italians have been to French administrators who served, and were enamoured of, a Corsican emperor who spoke a variant of Tuscan as his native language? Did Napoleon see his Italians as the heart of darkness? He certainly found them, as he often found everybody, stubborn, resistant, and obtuse, but I doubt he saw Laetitia Buonaparte or Uncle Fesch as other.

No doubt the Continental System, not to mention French financial extraction and military conscription, reduced all of these lands to colonial status, but that is not an argument to alterity. True, the annexed Italian departments did not work out as swimmingly as the Rhineland and Belgium in receiving French reform, but in Italy, Holland, Hansa, or Berg, just how other was the ‘other’ which the French had to face and efface? Is the sort of amateurism and gross cupidity (bribes to judges) in the functioning of the court system, which so disgusted the French in Holland, akin to the British horror at suti? Or is it the ironic disgust of men raised in an agricultural Catholic culture when confronted by the celebrated ways of capitalism and the Protestant ethic?

In a distinguished book published in 1971, the late Edward Whiting Fox dubbed the maritime littoral the other France. In this essay, which Braudel called ‘one of the finest books I have ever read’,Footnote ¹⁷¹ the Cornell professor unforgettably portrayed the myriad of senses in which this other France – the France of a commercial economy and thriving bourgeoisie, of representative assemblies, of liberal economic doctrine, of (comparatively) democratic social interaction, and of discrete cultural expressions – differed profoundly from the royal France of the interior: feudal, hierarchical (based on a peasant/lord/bishop/king social structure), authoritarian-administrative in its political methods. Yet Fox's other France, for all that it had its own identity, never amounted to anything like an alterity that required First/Third World contrasts and concepts to explicate it.

To find alterity in the way it rears its head in Broers, we would have to look to French experience in Illyria, Russia, or perhaps in parts of Iberia, more than in Italy. True racism toward other Europeans would have entailed the latter's availability, at least formally, for slavery or serfdom, but this was never remotely suggested. Woolf sees cultural imperialism in the larger European project vis-à-vis non-Europeans in this period, and he makes a solid point accusing the French (and others) of racist anti-Semitism. But these are other matters from those that Broers considers.

Schumpeter remarked about imperialism that it ‘cannot be explained by any of the pretexts that bring it into action, by any of the aims for which it seems to be struggling at the time … Such expansion is in a sense its own “object”.’Footnote ¹⁷² The question arises, thus: are civilizing missionaries – is cultural imperialism – finally what the Napoleonic Empire was about? For let us be clear: when John Davis writes that the Napoleonic Empire in Italy ‘was not a simple exercise in “rational” modern governance … Ideology provided the models but contingent necessities dictated the priorities’,Footnote ¹⁷³ he is mainly wrong, on Broers's telling. The Oxford don sees ideology as providing more than just models, it also dictated most of the priorities and the actions. The Napoleonists in Italy were seeking to be so many Paul Berts in Cochin-Chine, avant la lettre, not to be the ancient Romans in Gaul. Even Stuart Woolf, whose brace of articles fifteen years ago got us to thinking about cultural imperialism, has thought these issues through, and clarified that he will not go where Broers has gone.

The issue Broers takes with Alexander Grab is even greater, for the latter, in a host of densely researched articles on conscription, the maintenance of order, and finance,Footnote ¹⁷⁵ argues to very different points from Broers. Grab believes that in all these areas (as well as others), Napoleon was ‘a pragmatic imperialist driven primarily by Realpolitik materialist consideration, namely economic/financial, political, and military factors, rather than by ideological motivations such as civilizing mission’.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ If reform or civilization functioned importantly for Napoleon, on Grab's view, it was only because those terms aided his quest to augment extraction and control.

In any case, did French lessons take in Italy? No small amount of the evidence and arguments Broers adduces in the course of his three books on Italian reticence and resistance vis-à-vis the French is ambiguous and ambivalent in character, detracting from the verbal emphasis with which Broers constantly seeks to hammer them home. Thus, we learn that the great rebellions of the Piedmontese valleys, 1799–1802, were one-off things, that the wide-scale revolts of 1809 in the central Apennines were squashed, and that many climes did not rise en masse, though it was thought they might (the Aretini, Liguria). He writes, ‘There were signs, it must be said, that the routine of ruthless pacification followed by impartial centralization, was winning the French a limited degree of support in the most unprepossessing of soils of Calabria and even in parts of Spain, notably Valencia and Asturias.’Footnote ¹⁷⁷ The number of Italian applicants for jobs in the French ‘colonial’ bureaucracy was always oversubscribed. (‘Many Italians … who should have known better still applied’, is Broers's acerbic comment.Footnote ¹⁷⁸) The ranking Italians, e.g., the Piedmontese togati (judges), who came to Paris and were overawed and seduced (as the emperor intended)Footnote ¹⁷⁹ see their visits portrayed – caricatured – by Broers as ‘no different, in essence, from that [strategy] employed by the American government, when it took the captured Sioux leader, Red Cloud, on a tour of the great eastern cities in the 1870s, an experience that shattered his renowned determination to resist their expansion’.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Do most readers follow Broers in such an analogy between a captured aboriginal chieftain being paraded before crowds and elected visits to Paris by Italian justices?

A central Broersian view holds that many Italians, whether in Paris or Italy, ‘amalgamated, using the imperial institutions for their own ends, and to protect what they could of the old order, but they had not rallied. They used the imperial system, but never desired its wider vision.’Footnote ¹⁸¹ But what does Broers imagine this proves? The French were not mainly thinking in terms of these resistant togati but of their sons, and their sons's sons; and many of Broers remarks and observations give them reason to have done so.

There is much in the support the French won from the communities of the Italian periphery to justify these assertions [by a French prefect justifying the French presence], in exactly the way the Ministry of Justice preferred and predicted. On one level, this reveals a strong identity of interest between rulers and ruled, but there were important qualifications which, taken together, would turn this source of ralliement into a quagmire for the French.Footnote ¹⁸²

The Portuguese and Spanish were in South America (and elsewhere) for over four centuries; the British were in India for nearly two centuries; the French in Canada and Algeria for a century, in West Africa for seventy-five years; the Italians and the Germans were in their Third World colonies for decades. And the Napoleonists? Well, they were around for ten years in Italy, often less. During this time, Broers asserts that they were ‘probably … the most intransigent, unbending conquerors – or liberators – of Italy since Constantine’.Footnote ¹⁸³ Now if that is true – and it is quite a mouthful, and would need to be compared to, say, the hundred-plus years that the Lombards or the Carolingian Franks were sur place; it would need to be compared to the decades upon decades of the Spanish presence in Italy, and the role of Antispagnolismo in Italian identityFootnote ¹⁸⁴ – then might not we be right in imagining that all of this near-term resistance and alterity that Broers makes so much of would have come to niente, and presently evaporated? Broers himself speculates that perhaps unification ‘might have been more easily absorbed into Italian society had the French pursued a different set of policies’.Footnote ¹⁸⁵

In any case, Napoleon's ‘unbending and intransigent’ dose of cultural imperialism was, as we know, a failure – and a swift one. And if it was a kind of a success in the long term, it was so in the same sense that the Indian Administrative Service borrowed a great deal from the (British) Indian Civil Service. That is to say, it was a success only in quotations, on Broers's telling; at bottom, for him, it was a kind of deeper moral failure. For let us be clear once again: when Grab sums up the dominant current scholarly viewpoint. ‘Nonetheless, the two decades of French rule left significant legacies in the Italian peninsula. The Napoleonic period laid the political, institutional, and ideological foundations for Italy's unification and independence’, etc.Footnote ¹⁸⁶– he has, for Broers, missed the larger (the largest) point of them all: the coming Italian nationalism was ‘the bastard child of Napoleonic cultural imperialism’.Footnote ¹⁸⁷

The bastard child? Is this a scholarly opinion carefully deduced from evidence, or is it a moral judgement and a political statement sandwiched into brilliant scholarship? Paul Ginsborg speaks of the ‘estrangement between the state and the citizen’ in modern Italy, but Broers knows what to call it: ‘the mirror image of the great “borrowing” of the French model of the state’.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ What, in the author's notion, should Italian unification have been like in order to be natural and legitimate? Broers has an answer. ‘[T]he atomised, but vibrant world of municipal politics and factionalism [which] was the political geography Italians had drawn for themselves, below the tides of war and diplomacy.’Footnote ¹⁸⁹ The ancien régime in various Italian states had ‘for all its flaws’ allowed that ‘creative tension’ among and within regions, as among cities and countryside, and State and Church, to go on and on. But this was not by choice or design. The old regimes were straining for all they were worth to bring the kind of order and efficiency (and extraction) the French brought. What Napoleon finally wrought was what the enlightened absolutists of the houses of Savoy, Bourbon, and Habsburg longed and strove for.

One may abhor that Germany was unified by Bismarck, not the Frankfurt Assembly; a historian has (or takes) the right to pronounce such judgements. But the larger point seems to me to be this: the obstetricians who birthed the baby of Italian Unification were Italians, including some of the most important who had worked for the French, and had celebrated French ideas, if not always French methods.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Were they cultural imperialists? To Broers, yes. They were men who had imbibed the psychology of colonial subordination. The survival of Napoleonic institutions established the existence of the social-psychology of a collective interiority complex, a sense of subordination: ‘a subaltern Italy’, which is how Broers entitles his last chapter. In his succinct phrase, ‘a neo-colonialist past bred a neo-colonial response’.Footnote ¹⁹¹ When the Italian political classes ‘fell back on imported French norms’, they introjected French ‘contempt’ and ‘loathing’, just what Ranajit Guha claims about the post-Raj Indian regime, or Fred Cooper, about extra-European political identities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.Footnote ¹⁹²

Collective identity statements at high levels of abstraction are difficult to disprove. What would Italian norms have been if the French occupation had not preceded the Risorgimento? Were the Cavours, the Balbos, and the Crispis supposed to have envisioned a state that did not tolerate Jews, Protestants, and free thought because Pius VII did not want it? Were the thirteen colonies subaltern because they imbibed many English ideas and British methods?

As time passes, Broers becomes ever more thesis-driven. It irks him that his peers do not feel as strongly. Reviewing John Davis's latest book, Napoleon and Naples, Broers notes the author's citation of Paul Schroeder's rhadamanthine view: ‘The very notion of Napoleon's empire as a conceivable, potentially durable form of European international politics, or as a leading one, is a contradiction in terms.’ Broers then scores Davis for ‘shying away’ from proving this assertion, for not being able to ‘bring himself to sustain this’, for his ‘persistent refusal to decide to what extent the reforms of Murat's regime were inspired by indigenous reforming traditions or driven by the newly arrived French’, for ‘repeatedly [insisting] on the wholly pragmatic character of Napoleonic rule’.Footnote ¹⁹³ John Davis is a senior scholar of Napoleonic Italy; he has earned the right to his conclusion, even if it is an evenhandedness that frustrates Broers's. There may well be something frustrating in evenhandedness, but there may also be a truth to complicated historical circumstance, in which lineages are not clear. But Davis's research and mastery in Napoleon and Naples are acknowledged by Broers. What his sharp criticism comes down to is basically that the University of Connecticut professor does not follow him into the fast lane of his increasingly radical views about cultural imperialism.

Surely, there is an irony lurking in the fact that someone who defends empiricism and his descendance from Richard Cobb – than who, more empirical and less theory-driven, they do not come – as much as Michael Broers does, should nonetheless find himself increasingly in the vice-like grip of post-colonial high theory, leading him to judge his colleagues harshly while himself making claims for periods far beyond the range of his empirical evidence. It would seem to be a grievous disregard for the rules of his own method, a disregard motivated principally by moral emotion and political opinion.

This being said, it is equally true to say that Michael Broers remains the most interesting, learned, and one of the most productive scholars in this field. It has become increasingly apparent to toilers in the Napoleonic imperial vineyard that the time has come where we must have a comprehensive portrait of the whole damned dappled, divided, endlessly shifting tableau vivant that was Napoleonic Europe. But who on earth has the skills (or the languages), the energy, and the will to do such a thing? Who has the intelligence to make sense of the absurd Napoleonic conception that wished to impose a system on Europe, a system that would subordinate it to an imperial centre, with closed frontiers, yet at the same time be open, rationalized, modernized, and in many ways progressive?

Well, perhaps Michael Broers. But only a Broers who is considerably more self-aware and freer from his demons – especially the demon of political opinion dressed out as sweeping historical generalizations and platitudes, as well as the demon of ‘grand theory’, who puts him in thrall to a group of social scientists (who would do well to toil in the archives half as much as the Oxford historian regularly does).Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Broers recently won the Napoleon Foundation's prize for best foreign book on the First Empire (one congratulates the French for conferring a prize on a viewpoint that runs against the grain of their own studies of the Napoleonic Empire). One sees why. Politics of religion (also Napoleonic empire in Italy) is (are) the most original thing(s) in this field since Woolf. After reading Broers, it will be less possible for any scholar to take refuge in purely pragmatic and contingent explanations of the First Empire. There was more going on here than extraction and efficient government-for-more-extraction, even if that is what the mainstream of scholarship decides at the end of the day is mainly what was going on here. Extraction and efficiency are likely what the emperor himself most thought about, but then again if we have learned anything as Woolfians, it is not to pay too much attention to the emperor.Footnote ¹⁹⁵