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Conclusion When Louis XVIII took possession of the vacant throne in  he was content to leave most of the existing personnel in place. He resisted pressure from the small, hard core of émigrés who, having remained in exile with him until the bitter end, were demanding a greater reward for their loyalty. It is often said that Louis succeeded to the throne of Napoleon, maintaining structures as well as individuals from his predecessor. Indeed, the prefects, like the Napoleonic Code, are still with us  years later.

When Sieyès began plotting a coup d’état Bonaparte was marooned in Egypt and thus excluded from the political conspiracy being hatched in Paris. Of course, military support would be required to accomplish the constitutional revisions that were envisaged, as had been the case with preceding coups. But Sieyès was actually canvassing other generals when Bonaparte unexpectedly returned from the eastern Mediterranean and imposed his involvement despite misgivings on the part of the former clergyman.

The increasingly frantic efforts to underpin a ‘fourth dynasty’ bore testimony to Napoleon’s realization that, unlike other monarchs, he could not retain authority once he had been defeated. 34 | malcolm crook However, for a long time defeat on the continent seemed a distant prospect. In  the Empire reached its maximum extent, with the borders stretching from Rome in the south to Hamburg in the north, not to mention those parts of the Spanish and Italian peninsulas, Germany and Poland, which were satellite states under French control, or ruled by members of Napoleon’s own family.