The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (45 page)

metropolitan Britain. The reformers therefore performed the useful

service of obscuring the reality that the reconstituted Company still

primarily benefi ted stockholders, civil servants, missionaries, planters, and private opium traders.

In South Asia, however, the continuing exploitive realities of

empire exposed the hypocrisy of the reformist lobby’s agenda. Its civilizing rhetoric implicitly depicted Indians as inherently primitive and

condemned even aristocratic elites and Company allies to perpetual

Company

India 229

subjecthood. This inherent racism turned western-educated Indians

into baboos and left common people at the mercy of the imperial

special interests. Moreover, the charter revisions gave the reformers

a lever to force the Company to intervene more directly in the daily

lives of its subjects. The resulting social instability compounded local

resentment over the Company’s growing demands for tribute. As

in Europe, social disruption and rural unrest were inevitable consequences of commercialization, industrialization, and integration into

the global economy, but in Company India British rulers exacerbated

the traumatic effects of these changes with their unchecked quest for

privilege and profi t.

It took several centuries for the Bengali
ryots
to rid themselves

of these imperial parasites, but in Europe the surprisingly short

lifespan of Napoleon’s continental conquest state suggested that

empires were losing their viability in the nationalist era. Although

the French emperor portrayed himself as a modern Caesar, it was

no longer possible to replicate the Roman achievements in Europe.

The Roman Empire was the product of an era where identities were

insular and narrow. Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo drove him from

power, but simple peasants and townsmen were the most responsible

for thwarting his imperial ambitions. Quite unexpectedly, the common peoples of the Italian peninsula and the rest of French-occupied

Europe demonstrated that it was possible to stand up to conquistadors and nabobs.

REPUBLIC

A U S T R I A

C

N

ISA

Milan LP

INE

Venice

PARMA

LIC

Genoa

Bologna

Florence

R

O

TUSCANY

MAN

R

EPU

P

B

A

L

R

Rome I

T

C

Naples

UBLIC

Palermo

SICILY

0

50

100 mi

0

50

100 150 km

Italy, 1799

5

Empire Aborted

History appeared poised to repeat itself in 1804 when the French fi rst

consul (soon to be emperor) Napoleon Bonaparte assembled a massive

army of more than 150,000 men at the channel city of Boulogne, the

same port from which Claudius most likely launched his conquest of

the British Isles centuries earlier. The Grande Armée that threatened

Britain with invasion roughly eighteen centuries later was a powerful instrument of French empire building, but it was actually a heterogeneous force recruited throughout Napoleonic Europe. Many of

the soldiers were impressed conscripts, but others served their French

conquerors voluntarily.

Ermolao Federigo, an Italian offi cer from Vicenza, was among the

latter group of imperial auxiliaries. Although Napoleon had overrun

his northern Italian homeland, Federigo was a willing retainer. In a letter home, the young Vicenzan assured his mother that service in the

French military would teach his countrymen to be Italian. “I serve my

patria
when I learn to be a soldier, and even if I served the Turk it would

be the same. Our Republic will certainly gain more reputation and glory

from its few soldiers still too young to think of liberty. Let us think of

being soldiers, and when we have a hundred thousand bayonets, then we

can talk.”1 Federigo’s
patria
was the Italian Republic, a recent invention

that Napoleon had cobbled together from the various duchies, republics, and papal fi efdoms of northwestern Italy. The French emperor convinced young patriots like Federigo to fi ght and die for him by skillfully

exploiting the nationalist sentiments that were breaking down local and

communal identities in early nineteenth-century Europe.

231

232 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

While Phillip II’s great sixteenth-century Habsburg Empire was

on the decline, its hold on Italy remained largely intact. Some Italian

ancien régime rulers were his vassals and others were independent,

but most all tried to keep pace with the political and economic changes

remaking western Europe by dabbling in state-directed absolutist

reform. Nevertheless, the peninsula was largely a stagnant backwater.

Only crumbling ruins testifi ed to its grandeur as the heartland of the

Roman Empire, and its infl uence as a center of arts and learning during the Renaissance had similarly declined. Mindful of their imperial

and cultural heritage, Federigo and other ambitious young reformers

took heart in Napoleon’s destruction of the petty ancien régime states

that stood in the way of reform. They were willing to overlook the

brutal realities of the French Empire in return for Napoleon’s promise that progressive imperial rule would restore Italy to its former

greatness.

Napoleon willfully nurtured these ambitions as the titular president of the Italian Republic. Invoking self-determination as a new

kind of legitimizing imperial ideology, he cast himself as the great

patron of the Italian “nation” even after transforming the republic

into a kingdom and crowning himself its king. His viceroy and stepson Eugène de Beauharnais reassured his subjects that their emperor

had not betrayed them and promised that service in the French imperial forces was their best chance of becoming “a nation again, to make

the power of Italy respected both now and in the future.”2

Writing during his imprisonment on Elba, Napoleon insisted that

one of his greatest accomplishments was to have raised “the Italian nation from its ruins” by creating a single “independent nation

bounded by the Alps and the Adriatic, Ionian, and Mediterranean

Seas.” By his reasoning, it took an enlightened French empire to

remove the roadblocks that the papacy, the Austrian Empire, and

petty ancien régime princes placed in the way of Italian unifi cation.

Appealing to the judgment of history, Napoleon excused the excesses

of his imperial regime by asserting: “There were now no Venetians,

Piedmontese, or Tuscans: the inhabitants of the whole peninsula were

no longer anything but Italians: all was ready to form the great Italian nation.”3

At fi rst glance, the French emperor seemed to have offered his

subjects a new, more humane and inclusive brand of empire. His

rule held out the offer of equality before the law, respect for private

Napoleonic

Italy 233

property, and national self-determination within the framework of a

continental European empire that promised equality to his subjects.

While Napoleon treated large swaths of rural France as conquered

territory, his strategy of
ralliement
(rallying) represented a concerted

effort to enlist propertied and infl uential Europeans in his imperial

enterprise. Even more ambitiously, in adopting a policy of
amalgame

(amalgamation) he sought to create a new imperial elite that would

assist France as loyally and usefully as romanized Britons and Gauls

had served the Roman Empire.

In fact, there was actually very little that was new or revolutionary

in Napoleon’s amalgamist project. To varying degrees, the Umayyads, Spanish, and British nabobs had made similar compromises with

Visigothic barons, Andean nobles, and Bengali aristocrats. The willingness of a signifi cant cohort of elites to align their interests with

foreign conquerors explains the longevity of ancient, medieval, and

early modern empires. It is possible that Napoleon did not see a contradiction in
amalgame
and national self-determination, but in reality amalgamation was an impossibility in early nineteenth-century

Europe. Napoleon conquered most of the continent by harnessing the

emerging power of French nationalism, and the generals and administrators who followed him expected the new empire to bring material rewards for themselves and France.

The legitimizing ideologies of empire may have shifted at the

dawn of the nationalist era, but the underlying nature of imperial

rule had not. Extraction and exploitation were still the defi ning realities of imperial subjecthood, and no amount of inclusivist
amalgame

or benevolently nationalistic rhetoric could disguise this fact. Indeed,

Napoleon may have portrayed himself as a humane empire builder,

but he was actually part aspiring conquistador and part Caesar. He

seized northern Italy in 1796 as a rising revolutionary general largely

on his own initiative and used the resulting fame to claim fi rst the

consulship and then the imperial purple. Napoleon’s reconquest of

Italy in 1800 as fi rst consul marked one of the rare occasions when a

head of state led an imperial conquest and harked back to the Claudian invasion of Britain. His aspirations would have been familiar to

most ancient Romans, for his fi rst and primary goal was to empower

himself by building a continental empire.

Napoleon courted Ermolao Federigo and other young would-be

patriots as part of his amalgamist agenda, but he fully understood

234 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

that French nationalism was the key to his dynastic and imperial ambitions. At its core, his empire was an expression of French

greatness. Depicting himself as the personal embodiment of France,

he had as his primary goal to extract tribute, collect taxes, and conscript military manpower to advance his plans for continental dominance. This explains his candor in a 1805 order to his viceroy Eugène:

“Italy must not make calculations separate from the prosperity of

France . . . it must blend its interests with those of France. . . . So take

as your motto: France before all.”4 Federigo would also have been disturbed to hear his patron describe Italians as “a people who are soft,

superstitious, deceitful and cowardly.”5

Napoleon’s Elba pronouncements about his benign imperial intentions were revisionist fi ction. The non-French troops who assembled

in Boulogne for the stillborn invasion of Britain and fought for the

French throughout Europe were mostly unwilling conscripts. They

were subjects, not imperial partners. Napoleon nurtured the nationalist aspirations of the Italians, Germans, and Poles to enlist them in

his imperial enterprise; he had no intention of granting them social

or political autonomy, much less nation-states. Federigo represented

the small reformist and protonationalistic segment of Italian society

willing to embrace
amalgame
. Most Italians, however, viewed the

French Empire as alien, authoritarian, brutal, and invasively extractive. While
zamindars
stood between the full weight of nabobist rule

and Bengali
ryots
, Napoleon used the tools of the bureaucratic state

to create a far more effi cient system of imperial administration that

reached down to the lowest, most basic levels of rural Italian society.

He did not need
zamindari
-type intermediaries to collect tribute, and

his demands for revenue and conscripts imposed a new, more oppressive form of subjecthood on conquered peoples throughout Europe.

Ironically, the very factors that made the early nineteenth-century

French Empire so powerful also led to its quick demise. Napoleon’s

attempt to rule local communities directly sparked a powerful and popular anti-French backlash throughout the continent. This resistance

was not yet national, for most Europeans at this time still identifi ed

themselves on the basis of local or communal loyalties. Nevertheless, the common experience of resisting the invasive French empire

helped build larger identities that were the raw material of European

nationalism. These expansive and coherent identities made it much

harder for would-be empire builders to recruit allies among subject

Napoleonic

Italy 235

populations by exploiting their divisions. Federigo and his comrades

eventually would realize that Napoleon had betrayed them, but at

least the emperor’s downfall appeared to signal the demise of the era

of formal empire in Europe.

The quick rise and fall of the Napoleonic empire marked the end

of a coherent mode of imperial conquest and rule that stretched back

to the ancient world. Where the Roman, Umayyad, Spanish American, and British Indian empires lasted for centuries, the empire that

began with the French Revolution and ended with Napoleon’s defeat

at Waterloo spanned only twenty-fi ve years. Michael Broers attributes the French Empire’s short life span to the violence that brought

it into being. In his view, the brutality of the Napoleonic wars stunted