In the spring of 1812, on the eve of commanding more than 600,000 soldiers to invade Russia, Napoleon Bonaparte laid out his plans for the future of Europe. “We need,” he told his former police minister, Joseph Fouché, “a European law code, a European high court, a single currency, the same weights and measures, the same laws. I must make all the peoples of Europe into a single people, and Paris, the capital of the world.” The French emperor had not previously expressed such vaulting ambitions, but as his empire swelled, he came to believe he could bring the continent a degree of unity that it had not known since the fall of Rome. After falling from power himself in 1815, he frequently referred back to these ambitions, and lamented his failure to create an enduring European superstate.
