‘You have nothing but special laws,’ he told an Italian delegation at Lyons in 1805, ‘henceforth you must have general laws. Your people have only local habits; it is necessary that they should take on national habits.’3 For many German and Italian public officials, Napoleon’s Empire, in the words of the British historian H. A. L. Fisher, ‘shattered the obdurate crust of habit and substituted wide ideals of efficient combination for narrow, slovenly, lethargic provincialism’.4 By 1810 he was moving towards a progressive unitary Empire with uniform laws based on the Napoleonic Code, enlightened
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