In the period from the French Revolution (1789) until the Congress of Vienna (1814-15) Europe underwent an extensive reorganisation. The patchwork of early modern states made way for a more modern system of nation states. At the time, it was not the European Union itself, but one of the major European powers – France, to be more precise – that was the driving force behind European integration. Between approximately 1799 and 1815, France was ruled by Napoleon Bonaparte. Later in his life, as an exile on the island of St Helena, he declared that he had striven to found ‘a grand federative European system (…) conformable to the spirit of the age, and favourable to the progress of civilisation.’ From the perspective of Paris at the time, integration was inextricably bound up with ‘modernisation’, i.e. the transition from a traditional to a modern form of society.

The goal was the unification of Europe along the lines of the French model. The Napoleonic regime attempted to impose its own state institutions top-down on the subjected populations of Europe, in part because it saw itself as the driving force behind the modernisation of the continent. And the Napoleonic model of modernisation, directly or indirectly, did indeed leave its mark beyond the French borders. Among other things, modernisation took the shape of a modern governance system involving a hierarchical structure very much inspired by the French one.

Of course, these developments had major consequences for the capital of the Netherlands, Amsterdam. The years around 1800 were not exactly the city's heyday. It was a period in which the city lost many of its residents. Where during the Golden Age it had had a population of 220,000, by the end of the Napoleonic era this number had dwindled to around 180,000. Compared with other cities, this was a tremendous decline in population. At the same time, Amsterdam's place on the global stage was changing. The city was increasingly embedded in larger structures. Amsterdam had always been fairly autonomous: as the most powerful city in the province of Holland, it had enjoyed a lot of influence both within the Dutch Republic and beyond. Even after the Batavian Revolution of 1795, Amsterdam was still able to play a central role. Although The Hague became the seat of the new central government, Amsterdam remained influential.