ABSTRACT
The Napoleonic land settlement guaranteed them continued possession of the land they had obtained during the Revolution. To replace cane sugar, normally imported from the West Indies, the Napoleonic regime encouraged the planting of sugar beets in northern France and the Belgian departments. The Napoleonic regime’s fate was sealed by Napoleon’s own top officials, led by his foreign minister, Talleyrand. The promulgation of the Civil Code, often known as the Code Napoleon, in 1804, completed Napoleon’s program of domestic reforms. Since 1792, France’s revolutionary legislators had labored to replace the hundreds of prerevolutionary local law codes with a single national system of civil law. Napoleon stage-managed the creation of carefully controlled sister republics, enriched both himself and the Directory from the levies he raised, and successfully courted the Catholic Church, avoiding the religious conflicts that had dogged the Revolution at home.
