"Napoleonic economic disunity"
I dont see this, I am sorry. The imperial system was trans-national. Rules really the same everywhere. Harming and benefitting the same kinds of people everywhere it was applied.
"French troops had to occupy the coastal regions and eventually France annexed the whole of the north sea coast - these countries did not willingly adhere to French economic policies because it was detrimental to their own interests"
Right, sure - they were commercial trading/banking centres - very Briitish aligned economically. How about Bavarian farmers and Swabian metal workers ? Was a system based on the French imperial economic model better for them, or was British economic hegemony a better choice (not that anyone was running referenda on the matter) ? Amsterdam merchants vs. Flemish pastoralists ? And so on. (Think of Spain or Russia, had the imperial system ever been somehow applied in these places -- would that be "good" or "bad" ?)
If we must (and I would rather not), at 200 years distance, try to decide which policies were more in the interest of the people, then we should think of all the people -- not just the ones who were urban, literate and prone to complain in English. And so again the question becomes murkier. For myself, I just cannot see the venality so often attributed to the Napoléonic régime. I would not mind seeing this venality .... cognitive dissonance is really annoying, ya know ?
-- We look at legitimacy (as we would measure it today) and one bunch of autocrats looks like another (save a few failed attempts at revolutionary governments that pre-date the Empire - and even these of at least slightly debatable legitimacy).
-- We try to find excessive taxes, thefts and "milkings dry" - and the actual financial numbers give us really none at all.
-- We look for tax burdens - we find them typically equal or lower and more fairly administered.
-- We look at the economic policy goals and we see a consistent attempt to develop local agrriculture, infrastructure and military manufacturing - at the expense of banking, insurance, trading and the exploitation of colonial assets (and thus in summary quite contrary to British economic hegemony). Is this so clearly "wrong" that we can trumpet "N. is bad" like happily braying donkeys ?
-- We look at social and civil conditions and see an expansion of religious tolerance, an improvement in government administration and efficieny, the creation of a nobility based on merit, and a codification of common laws, weights/measures and standards that (oh my God) are still in use today. And some of this all might be thought to the benefit of the people, right ?
-- We look at the demand for men to man an army to protect this system and permit implementation of these policy goals. Aside from the basic question of legitimacy, what else exactly does one expect a state to do ? Is there some other definition of "national defense"?
We cannot analyze the history that did not happen. Napoléon did not sit quietly with the Empire of 1810, withdraw from Iberia and consolidate. He bet the Empire on Russia and lost. And the victors wrote up the tale.
But look at the world of 1810, as non-Iberian citizens of the Empire would have seen it then at the time of the imperial wedding. Is it so clear that "N is bad" in the eyes of those citizens?
"While patriotic sentiment might counterbalance the hardships for some/many/most Frenchmen, what was in it for the foreigners? "
Were they really "foreigners" then in 1810, Robert, or were they, perhaps for the first time in their history, "citizens", citizens of the Empire - an Empire that would be destroyed within 24 months, lost in vasts of Russia, pillaged by Cossack and Bashkiri horsemen, and finally frozen in the snow.