Sam A. Mustafa, Napoleon's Paper Kingdom: The Life and Death of the Kingdom of Westphalia, 1807-1813. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2017. xxi+341 pp. Maps, figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $99.00 U.S. (hb). ISBN 978-1-5381-0829-1; $94.00 U.S. (eb). ISBN 978-1-5381-0831-4.
Review by Nicola P. Todorov, University of French Guiana.

'In his historiographical preface, Mustafa argues that scholars writing under the German Empire at the end of the nineteenth century had agreed that the Westphalian regime’s supposed collapse matched the expectations of Prussian “liberators” (p. 286). The presumed revision of this old nationalist view from the 1970s onwards, initiated in Western Germany, was due to the desire to strengthen the Franco-German friendship, downplaying the oppression Napoleonic rule had represented for the people. Suspecting postwar historians to have “overcorrected,” Mustafa attempts to challenge this view, stating that “Old stories … are not necessarily wrong only because they are old”...Sam A. Mustafa has divided his book into thirteen chapters that cleverly alternate between chronological and thematic sequences....The ... thematic chapters are devoted to economic life and taxation, the army and military conscription, and, finally, the new legislation and the police. The author repeats several commonplaces created by the older literature. Heavy taxes rested upon the people, economic life was gloomy because of the continental blockade and this was, he claims, a continent-wide problem. Only a few people understood the new laws, and there were not enough judges who could read French and hence be able to understand the Civil Code. Of course, families hated conscription and compulsory military service, as they did elsewhere. Westphalia’s army was thus weakened by significant rates of desertion....Neither the predicted “broadly-based rebellion” in the case of a war against Russia nor the collapse of Westphalia expected by Prussian strategists happened (p. 238). Westphalia was simply occupied by the regular forces of the Sixth Coalition victorious at Leipzig. Even before, deprived of the main part of its troops and engaged at the Saxon theater of operation alongside Napoleon’s Grande Armée, the kingdom was unable to prevent the enemy’s systematic incursions aimed at disorganizing its administrations. After these short incursions, Westphalian authority was immediately restored, and the alleged collapse of Westphalia expresses nothing more than the wishful and teleological thinking of nationalist historians....The numerous factual errors, the shallow reading of sources, the miscalculations obviously aimed at supporting his negative view of Westphalia, the very partial selection of facts, and the many unreliable references to the sources and the secondary literature disqualify Mustafa’s book as scholarly work. Unfortunately, the English-speaking reader will still be advised to refer to the old works of Herbert Fisher and Owen Connelly, that certainly do not take account of recent research, but provide a much more well-balanced judgement on Napoleonic Westphalia and certainly contain fewer factual errors than Sam Mustafa’s polemical writing.'

https://lists.uakron.edu/sympa/arc/h-france/2019-03/msg00116.html

Author's response:

'Dr. Todorov and I have a very different reading of the period of Westphalia’s collapse in 1813. He goes so far as to put the word “collapse” in quotes, and argues instead that a functional Westphalia was simply occupied by the Coalition armies after their victory at Leipzig. Even if we assume that many memoirs from this period amplified the grievances or inflected them with subsequent nationalist rhetoric, how would we explain the responses of the Napoleonic authorities themselves? When a departmental police commissioner, for example, writes that he expects the kingdom to collapse within a few weeks, or when the head of the gendarmes sends a circular criticizing disloyalty and desertion and demanding a renewed commitment to duty from those who remain, or when an infantry regiment takes yet another loyalty oath to the king with the assertion that they are “still” loyal and faithful, or when the king writes that he is concerned that his troops will switch sides at the least provocation, we see in these observations, I believe, confirmation of the sentiments expressed in the memoirs of the inhabitants. Marshal Louis Nicolas Davout, whom nobody accused of being overly dramatic, informed Napoleon on 9 May 1813 that, “Everywhere I have found that our enemies are being received with enthusiasm and the inhabitants, indeed even the local officials, have torn off the Westphalian colors and replaced them with the Prussian” (p. 271). One does not have to rely upon nineteenth-century German memoirs to conclude that Westphalia collapsed in 1813...'

https://lists.uakron.edu/sympa/arc/h-france/2019-03/msg00117.html