An Imperial Bureaucracy under Stress: The first Napoleonic Empire, 1799–1814, as an Exercise in Stress under Crisis

Abstract The Napoleonic episode in European history was a perpetual crisis of war and dislocation, a prolonged exercise in stress across European society which engulfed the conquered populations of the empire and the bureaucracy set to rule over them. The Napoleonic bureaucracy is increasingly evaluated in terms of an imperial bureaucracy. Bureaucracy stood at the heart of the Napoleonic state. Historians’ attention has inevitably been drawn to the inter-action of French and non-French administrators, and to the impact of specific Napoleonic policies and practices on the non-French subjects of the empire, in which stress was intrinsic, and so an essential conceptual tool.