During her assault on the British welfare state, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously declared: ‘There is no such thing as Society. There are only individual men and women, and families.’ No such pronouncement would likely have come from Napoleon Bonaparte. When the general seized power, he knew that his regime had to embed itself through new institutions and policies, and that it must field victorious armies, but also that his government must identify, co-opt and redefine in some fashion society’s local and national elites. For that matter, servitors of the Bourbon monarchy in its last few years tried unsuccessfully to do the same, and so too, in oblique ways, did the revolutionaries of 1789 and after. In Napoleon’s efforts to redefine and consolidate society’s new elites, rival values (such as the claims of wealth, military honour or state service) vied with the priority of maximising his own power.