A Turner thesis for Europe? the frontier in Napoleonic Europe

Résumé 0

This paper is a discussion of the frontiers of the Napoleonic empire. It maintains that these frontiers were more complex and more marked than the international boundaries which the French advance swept aside and that contemporary French imperial administrators saw them as such. It proposes that there was an ‘outer ’ and an ‘inner ’ empire, spheres defined less by the amount of time the French ruled them, than the degree to which they were pacified and, most importantly, than the degree to which their elites accepted French public institutions and acculturated to their public mores. This contention is then compared to the ‘frontier theses ’ as expressed in essays on the American frontier by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, namely, ‘Contributions of the West to American Democracy ’, first published in 1903, and ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History ’, which appeared in 1893 (the year the American government declared the frontier officially closed), in which Turner stressed most directly, the ability of events on the frontier to mould and drive the political culture of the heartland.