ABSTRACT
This chapter starts with Napoleon the conqueror. While his military and diplomatic initiatives outside of Europe were conspicuously unsuccessful, his great military victories of 1805-07 gave him a continent-wide hegemonic position that the republican regime of the previous decade had never been able to achieve. From Napoleon the conqueror, the chapter talks about Napoleon the administrator, outlining the new legal and administrative system he devised and showing how crucial decisions he took resolved issues that had remained bitterly divisive after a decade of revolution. The chapter concludes with the downfall of the Napoleonic regime. Beginning with a consideration of the different forms of resistance to Napoleon's rule and their spread to different areas of the continent, it moves on to the economic crisis in the years after 1809 and the fateful decision to invade Russia in 1812, resulting in the creation of a European-wide military coalition that would decisively defeat the emperor's armies and destroy the state-system he had created.
