Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

Netherlands. The French also took over much of modern-day Switzerland. In all three places, the French had strong control through the 1790s.
    Germany was initially hotly contested. But by 1795, the French had firm control over the Rhineland, the western part of Germany lying on the left bank of the Rhine River. The Prussians were forced to recognize this fact under the Treaty of Basel. Between 1795 and 1802, the French held the Rhineland, but not any other part of Germany. In 1802 the Rhineland was officially incorporated into France.
    Italy remained the main seat of war in the second half the 1790s, with the Austrians as the opponents. Savoy was annexed by France in 1792, and a stalemate was reached until Napoleon’s invasion in April 1796. In his first major continental campaign, by early 1797, Napoleon had conquered almost all Northern Italy, except for Venice, which was taken by the Austrians. The Treaty of Campo Formio, signed with the Austrians in October 1797, ended the War of the First Coalition and recognized a number of French-controlled republics in Northern Italy. However, the French continued to expand their control over Italy even after this treaty, invading the Papal States and establishingthe Roman Republic in March 1798. In January 1799, Naples was conquered and the Parthenopean Republic created. With the exception of Venice, which remained Austrian, the French now controlled the entire Italian peninsula either directly, as in the case of Savoy, or through satellite states, such as the Cisalpine, Ligurian, Roman, and Parthenopean republics.
    There was further back-and-forth in the War of the Second Coalition, between 1798 and 1801, but this ended with the French essentially remaining in control. The French revolutionary armies quickly started carrying out a radical process of reform in the lands they’d conquered, abolishing the remaining vestiges of serfdom and feudal land relations and imposing equality before the law. The clergy were stripped of their special status and power, and the guilds in urban areas were stamped out or at the very least much weakened. This happened in the Austrian Netherlands immediately after the French invasion in 1795 and in the United Provinces, where the French founded the Batavian Republic, with political institutions very similar to those in France. In Switzerland the situation was similar, and the guilds as well as feudal landlords and the Church were defeated, feudal privileges removed, and the guilds abolished and expropriated.
    What was started by the French Revolutionary Armies was continued, in one form or another, by Napoleon. Napoleon was first and foremost interested in establishing firm control over the territories he conquered. This sometimes involved cutting deals with local elites or putting his family and associates in charge, as during his brief control of Spain and Poland. But Napoleon also had a genuine desire to continue and deepen the reforms of the revolution. Most important, he codified the Roman law and the ideas of equality before the law into a legal system that became known as the Code Napoleon. Napoleon saw this code as his greatest legacy and wished to impose it in every territory he controlled.
    Of course, the reforms imposed by the French Revolution and Napoleon were not irreversible. In some places, such as in Hanover, Germany, the old elites were reinstated shortly after Napoleon’s fall and much of what the French achieved was lost for good. But inmany other places, feudalism, the guilds, and the nobility were permanently destroyed or weakened. For instance, even after the French left, in many cases the Code Napoleon remained in effect.
    All in all, French armies wrought much suffering in Europe, but they also radically changed the lay of the land. In much of Europe, gone were feudal relations; the power of the guilds; the absolutist control of monarchs and princes; the grip of the clergy on economic, social, and political power; and the foundation of
ancien régime
, which treated different people unequally based on their birth status. These changes created the type of inclusive economic institutions that would then allow industrialization to take root in these places. By the middle of the nineteenth century, industrialization was rapidly under way in almost all the places that the French controlled, whereas places such as Austria-Hungary and Russia, which the French did not conquer, or Poland and Spain, where French hold was