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Long-term influence outside France

Napoleon was responsible for spreading many of the values of the French Revolution to other countries, especially through the Napoleonic Code. After the fall of Napoleon, it continued to influence the law in western Europe and other parts of the world including Latin America, the Dominican Republic, Louisiana and Quebec.

Napoleon's regime abolished remnants of feudalism in the lands he conquered and in his satellite states. He liberalized property laws, ended manorialism, abolished the guild of merchants and craftsmen to facilitate entrepreneurship, legalized divorce, closed the Jewish ghettos and ended the Spanish Inquisition. The power of church courts and religious authority was sharply reduced and equality before the law was proclaimed for all men.

Napoleon reorganized what had been the Holy Roman Empire, made up of about three hundred Kleinstaaterei, into a more streamlined forty-state Confederation of the Rhine; this helped promote the German Confederation and the unification of Germany in 1871, as it sparked a new wave of German nationalism that opposed the French intervention.

The movement toward Italian unification was similarly sparked by Napoleonic rule. These changes contributed to the development of nationalism and the nation state.

The Napoleonic invasion of Spain and ousting of the Spanish Bourbon monarchy had a significant effect on Spanish America. Many local elites sought to rule in the name of Ferdinand VII of Spain, whom they considered the legitimate monarch. Napoleon indirectly began the process of Latin American independence when the power vacuum was filled by local political leaders such as Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín. Such leaders embraced nationalistic sentiments influenced by French nationalism and led successful independence movements in Latin America.

Napoleon's reputation is generally favourable in Poland, which is the only country in the world to evoke him in its national anthem, Poland Is Not Yet Lost.