Napoleonic Governance in the Netherlands and Northwest Germany: Conquest, Incorporation, and Integration

At its height, the continental European possessions of Napoleonic France consisted of 130 departments. Among the last additions to the collection were the thirteen carved out of the Netherlands and north-west Germany and integrated, at least on paper, in 1810/11. Rule from Paris was short-lived: most of these departments were overrun by coalition troops in the course of 1813, though French forces clung on to Hamburg into the spring of 1814, when they finally surrendered after a devastating siege. Martijn van der Burg’s new book examines these departments, and thereby adds to a growing corpus of regional studies of Napoleon’s empire in recent decades. The territorial frame adopted by this book is its greatest strength. It allows for a comparison of integration policies in areas of vastly diverse histories and traditions. A similar methodology of cutting across multiple borders is adopted by Pierre Horn, in his book Le défi de l’enracinement napoléonien entre Rhin et Meuse, 1810–1814: L’opinion publique dans les départements de la Roër, de l’Ourthe, des Forêts et de la Moselle (published by Oldenbourg in 2016). With the Dutch departments examined by Van der Burg, the French confronted inhabitants already used to living together under a substantial territorial administration. The preceding phases under the Batavian Republic (1795–1806) and Kingdom of Holland (1806–1810) provided introductions to French-style governance. In contrast, the jumble of polities from which the north-west German departments were cobbled together were denied passage through any intervening decompression chamber. What made the whole area, Dutch and German, worth annexing from Napoleon’s perspective was his conflict with Britain. This was fought out economically, and the strategy of blockade and counter-blockade demanded direct control of the North Sea coast. The issue was how to best manage the annexation process.