Napoleonic France was in an almost permanent state of war, a war which repeatedly affected large parts of the continent. As Luigi Mascilli Migliorini remarks, the legitimacy of a state born out of a coup d’état, led by a general, relied on potentially endless victorious campaigns, which made peace and stability in Europe virtually impossible.1 Victory enabled France to externalise – and therefore prolong – a large part of the war effort, the cost of which had proved fatal to the Bourbon monarchy in eighteenth-century France. Victory, moreover, gave the French economy privileged access to new markets, either through the integration of new territories and consumers directly into the French Empire, or by the imposition of commercial treaties and industrial restrictions favourable to French interests on allied or defeated states.