Napoleon, Charlemagne, and Lotharingia: Acculturation and the boundaries of Napoleonic Europe

This article attempts to redefine the parameters of Napoleonic hegemony by applying two models to the territories of the Napoleonic empire: one developed by Nathan Wachtel, predicated on levels of acculturation and assimilation to the imperial core; the second, derived from the work of Braudel and Brunet, which detects a European core, based along the Rhine-Rhone axis, a macro-region with a long, if submerged, history. This study concludes that the acceptance of Napoleonic reforms was achieved only in a core region, already predisposed to them.