ABSTRACT
In an earlier and shorter published work, the author was less concerned with Napoleon, the man, than with the implementation and effects of his policies, and with the underlying structures of his regime. The author's binding theme is the nature of Napoleonic power: how it was pursued and won; how it was first elaborated in the extended frontiers of France and then expanded well beyond them; how its initial impact through military conquest was followed up by political subjugation and economic exploitation; how it was resisted. He draws his own research into the archival and printed primary sources for Napoleonic history; it is also primarily a synthesis of earlier secondary accounts, both old and more recent, of which many may not be familiar to general English readers. English readers will probably be most familiar with that historiographical debate through Pieter Geyl's long-serving study Napoleon: For and against, first published in 1949, which was deliberately confined to French writers.
