Not available to order
Publication date:
05 September 2017Length of book:
375 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersISBN-13: 9781538108314
Placing the creation of Westphalia within the context of the larger German story of the Napoleonic Wars, this groundbreaking book offers the only complete history of Napoleon’s grand experiment to construct a model state in Germany. In 1807, in the wake of two years of victories over the Austrians, Prussians, and Russians, Napoleon redrew the map of central Europe by fashioning a new German state. Dubbing it the Kingdom of Westphalia, he appointed his 23-year-old brother Jerome as its king. Sam A. Mustafa shows how Westphalia became a proving ground for the allegedly liberating and modern concepts of the French Revolution, brought by foreign conquest and enforced by a powerful new centralized state. Over the next six years, the inhabitants of this region experienced fundamental and often jarring changes in almost every aspect of their lives. They witnessed a profound clash of French and German culture, as well as new ideas about law, nationality, and politics. And yet, for all of its promise on paper, Westphalia ended up despised by most of its people, who cheered at its collapse and in many cases helped to bring it down. What went wrong with this early example of what we would today call “nation building” and how did Germans react to the changes? Napoleon’s Paper Kingdom is the first book in the English language to provide a comprehensive investigation of this fascinating chapter of the Napoleonic Wars.
Sam Mustafa is to be heartily congratulated on his outstanding new work chronicling the history of the ephemeral Kingdom of Westphalia in Napoleonic Germany. Despite its importance in both the story of the Napoleonic era and the broader sweep of Germany’s national development, Westphalia has not been the subject of a comprehensive, professional historical analysis for more than a century. Mustafa has filled this astonishing gap in sterling fashion, meeting the highest expectations of scholarship while being eminently readable. His book is a series of firsts: the first serious study since the late 1800s, the first ever in English, and the first to provide an assessment outside the strictures of either Prussian historical biases or post-Napoleonic romanticism. Combining careful consideration of the historiography with unprecedented primary research and a mastery of the secondary literature, he presents a thoughtfully nuanced view of a kingdom that sat at the center of Germany for six tumultuous years and whose brief existence continues to proffer powerful interpretive insights for the Napoleonic epoch and the evolution of Germany as a state and society.