Popular Resistance in Napoleonic Europe

Outside metropolitan France and, in part, even within it, the Napoleonic empire was in no sense a popular institution. Consciously administered by and for elite groups, for the populace it constituted a burden that was both wearisome and excessive. Already vividly demonstrated in the Revolutionary period, the tensions that these characteristics produced led to a generalised mood of unrest, whose most dramatic manifestation was a series of major revolts, the most important of these phenomena being the ones which broke out in Calabria in 1806, Spain and Portugal in 1808, and the Tyrol in 1809.