Sanctimonious twaddle is what we can expect for the bicentenary of Napoleon’s death, but the man was a thug with pretensions and his empire a system of expropriation run on the back of what French critics of conscription called the “blood tax.” This contrast in perception, between those who adore the Corsican and those who deplore him, was there from the outset. Napoleon proclaimed his virtues while opponents were shot down, starting in Italy with mass executions in 1796 to suppress popular opposition to French exploitation. Napoleon’s nephew Louis Napoleon, later Napoleon III, was to claim in Des Idées Napoléoniennes (1839): “In Italy he formed a great kingdom which had its separate administration and its Italian army. . . . The name Italy, so beautiful, defunct, for so many ages, was restored to provinces which until then had been severed. That name implies in itself a future of independence.”

The reality was very different. Aside from the brutal suppression of opposition, which was achieved in part by limiting food supplies in Calabria, there was the mass conscription that led to 70,000 deaths fighting for Napoleon, as well as heavy financial burdens. Indeed, there and elsewhere, the unpopularity of the Napoleonic System helped create and accentuate divisions between state and society that remain a feature to the present day.

And, as Cynthia Saltzman, the author of Plunder, shows in this well-written, carefully constructed, artistic gem of a book, there was also a mass looting of