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.
