Witnessing the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in German Central Europe

Recent German historiography of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods has tended to focus upon particular regions, conceding the different conditions and experiences of people from north to south and east to west. It has also generally focused upon limited conceptions of the period under French influence (Franzosenzeit), such as its impact upon jurisprudence or constitutionalism or religious emancipation or language and so on. And historians have often drawn distinctions between the different periods of the Franzosenzeit, noting that the experiences of initial conquest or occupation differed from subsequent years under French administration, which differed again from the period of liberation and Restoration in 1813–14. Leighton James’s book is therefore ambitious in every way. It attempts to summarize, in less than 200 pages, the entire span of the years...