ABSTRACT
Napoleon’s imperial authority took the European system of states further towards the empire end of our spectrum than ever before. It was successfully opposed both by other states and by anti-French nationalism outside and inside the area of his hegemony. These external and internal constraints worked to push the whole system back towards the independences end of the scale; but they were not able to bring it all the way back to the eighteenth-century pattern. Napoleon’s empire changed the social structures of west and much of central Europe, and permanently altered men’s ideas about what was desirable and attainable. The system which emerged from the Vienna settlement of 1814-15, at the end of a quarter of a century of upheaval and warfare, stands about halfway between the Napoleonic and the eighteenth-century systems on our spectrum. In some ways it was a synthesis between two opposing ways of organizing Europe.
