Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONhad taken place at the expense of the French or (more often) of theanti-French.Equally important were the institutional changes introduced directlyor indirectly by French conquest. At the peak of their power (1810),the French directly governed, as part of France, all Germany left of theRhine, Belgium, the Netherlands and North Germany eastwards toLuebeck, Savoy, Piedmont, Liguria and Italy west of the Appeninesdown to the borders of Naples, and the Illyrian provinces from Carinthiadown to and including Dalmatia. French family or satellite kingdomsand duchies covered Spain, the rest of Italy, the rest of Rhineland-Westphalia, and a large part of Poland. In all these territories (exceptperhaps the Grand Duchy of Warsaw) the institutions of the FrenchRevolution and the Napoleonic Empire were automatically applied, orwere the obvious models for local administration: feudalism was formallyabolished, French legal codes applied and so on. These changesproved far less reversible than the shifting of frontiers. Thus the CivilCode of Napoleon remained, or became once again, the foundation oflocal law in Belgium, in the Rhineland (even after its return to Prussia)and in Italy. Feudalism, once officially abolished, was nowherere-established.Since it was evident to the intelligent adversaries of France that theyhad been defeated by the superiority of a new political system, or atany rate by their own failure to adopt equivalent reforms, the warsproduced changes not only through French conquest but in reactionagainst it; in some instances—as in Spain—through both agencies.Napoleon's collaborators, the afrancesados on one side, the liberalleaders of the anti-French Junta of Cadiz on the other, envisaged substantiallythe same type of Spain, modernized along the lines of theFrench Revolutionary reforms; and what the ones failed to achieve,the others attempted. A much clearer case of reform by reaction—forthe Spanish liberals were reformers first and anti-French only as it wereby historical accident—was Prussia. There a form of peasant liberationwas instituted, an army with elements of the levie en masse organized,legal, economic and educational reforms carried through entirelyunder the impact of the collapse of the Frederician army and state atJena and Auerstaedt, and with overwhelmingly predominant purposeof reversing that defeat.In fact, it can be said with little exaggeration that no importantcontinental state west of Russia and Turkey and south of Scandinaviaemerged from these two decades of war with its domestic institutionswholly unaffected by the expansion or imitation of the French Revolution.Even the ultra-reactionary Kingdom of Naples did not actually90