These words were written by Napoleon to his brother Jerome, King of Westphalia, on the same day. They express what many historians perceive as the fundamental contradiction of Napoleon’s rule in almost all of his client states: his oppressive nature, embodied by the burdens of war, particularly conscription, the ‘blood tax’, together with the negative effects of economic warfare, which contrasts with his desire to modernise law and administration, through the abolition of privileges and the introduction of individual freedom and religious toleration. In the wake of his victories, polities which had previously enjoyed some diplomatic room for manoeuvre were transformed into subordinate states, called satellites of the French Republic and later of the Empire, which formed part of the informal ‘Grand Empire’.