Napoleon and the Abolition of Feudalism

Abstract

The latest research on Napoleon’s European empire paints a bleak picture of the French legacy: cultural imperialism, taxation, conscription, misery, war and death. Even Napoleon’s vaunted administrative and legal reforms turn out to have been nothing more than a means of facilitating imperial exploitation. In the face of this mounting evidence, it has become difficult to sustain the image of Napoleon as liberator of Old Regime Europe.¹ One of his major European initiatives, however, has so far resisted critique: the abolition of feudalism. Napoleon extended French legislation dismantling feudal property relations to annexed territories. Similar policies were pursued in satellite kingdoms like Naples and Westphalia. And even after Napoleon’s Empire fell, restored monarchs made no attempt to undo these changes. Instead, they confirmed the transformation Napoleon had wrought because they believed it had modernized their states and increased their power. While Napoleonic domination of European lands was bitterly contested and soon proved ephemeral, his programme of feudal abolition was neither. Indeed, it was one of the most significant long-term legacies of the Napoleonic episode. From this perspective, Napoleon can still be seen as the faithful heir of 1789, as the vector by which the abolition of feudalism was spread to Europe.