| This dissertation examines the relationships between state-building, policy implementation, and the consolidation of state power. By examining what has generally been seen as a paradigmatic example of state-building--the implementation and enforcement of conscription in Napoleonic France--it seeks to address a number of theoretical questions related to the processes and outcomes of state formation. Specifically, the dissertation focuses on three main issues: (1) the process by which central state policies were implemented and enforced; (2) the relations of central and peripheral state organizations, and (3) the consequences of those relations for state-building and the consolidation of state power.; In fact, conscription proved to be a very difficult policy to enforce. In spite of the central authorities' vigorous efforts to control conscription, officials at the middle and local levels of the state retained enough autonomy to hinder the draft when they chose to. Where conscripts were able to pressure local or middle-level officials into supporting draft resistance and draft evasion, conscription was likely to fail. To enforce the draft, the state ultimately was forced to treat much of the periphery as enemy territory and to abandon the conscription apparatus it had carefully constructed in favor of brute military force.; Far from being a streamlined set of centrally coordinated organizations, the Napoleonic state was a complex and socially permeated set of agencies tied to conflicting interests, interests which not only determined policy outcomes but fundamentally altered the shape and character of the state itself. Such findings are of theoretical interest, in that they contradict both the usual view of France and most current understandings of state-building and state power. Because most studies of the state have assumed that only the central state and the dominant classes are politically important, discussions of state-building usually have focused on the relationship between the central state and those classes. However, if this work's reading of Napoleonic France is correct, state-building, the implementation of state policies, and the consolidation of state power may depend above all on state structures and social interests located in the resistant periphery. |
