The organisation of judicial system and the Napoleonic Wars evolved hand in hand.1 Indeed, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars unfolded while massive and rapid reforms were transforming France’s legal and judicial system from that of the ancien régime. These reforms upended earlier legal norms and thoroughly remodelled human and institutional judicial structures, as well as practices of conflict regulation, law and order, and repression. This unprecedented revolution in judicial, penal and policing frameworks was later extended to territories conquered by the armies of the Republic and the Empire, particularly territories in Italy, Belgium and the Rhineland, and up to fifty departments of the ‘Grand Empire’ at the height of its expansion in 1811–12, including parts of the Netherlands, northern Germany, Switzerland and Dalmatia. Satellite states also came under the influence of this revolution, and its imprint on Western Europe lasted well into the mid-nineteenth century.