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It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the French Revolution in Russian intellectual life. One could even make the claim that the French Revolution has had a more significant impact on modern Russian history than it has had upon modern French history! Indeed, since the end of the nineteenth century, the French Revolution has become passe in France in the sense that no Frenchman has looked at it as a blueprint for current political development. While there have been cases in which some of the old revolutionary images were invoked to bolster support for certain political activities (such as support for the war against Germany), it has never been wholeheartedly re‐embraced and there has been a sense of detachment about the revolution, a sense that modern conditions were somehow different.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of accounting in the enactment of the Napoleonic imperial project in Tuscany and the Kingdom of Naples in the early nineteenth century.

The study adopts the Foucauldian theoretical framework of governmentality and a comparative approach to highlight similarities and differences between the two regions.

The presence of different cultural understandings and structures of power meant that in Tuscany accounting mirrored and reinforced the existing power structure, whereas in the Kingdom of Naples accounting practices were constitutive of power relations and acted as a compensatory mechanism. In the Kingdom of Naples, where local elites had been traditionally involved in ruling municipalities, control of accounting information and the use of resources “re-adjusted” the balance of power in favour of the French whilst letting local population believe that Napoleon was respectful of local customs.

The ability of accounting technologies to act as compensatory mechanisms within governmentality systems paves the way to further investigations about the relationships between accounting and other governmentality technologies as well as the adjustment mechanisms leading to accounting resilience in different contexts.

By identifying accounting as an adaptive instrument supporting less obvious practices of domination the study helps unmask a hidden mechanism underlying attempts to know, govern and control populations which still characterises modern forms of imperialism.

The comparative perspective leads to a new specification of the multifaceted roles that accounting plays in different cultural and political contexts in the achievement of the same set of imperial goals and enhances understanding of the translation of politics, rhetoric and power into a set of administrative tasks and calculative practices.

Since the beginning of human existence, humankind has sought, organized and used information as it evolved patterns and practices of human information behaviors. However, the field of human information behavior (HIB) has not heretofore pursued an evolutionary understanding of information behavior. The goal of this exploratory study is to provide insight about the information behavior of various individuals from the past to begin the development of an evolutionary perspective for our understanding of HIB.

This paper presents findings from a qualitative analysis of the autobiographies and personal writings of several historical figures, including Napoleon Bonaparte, Charles Darwin, Giacomo Casanova and others.

Analysis of their writings shows that these persons of the past articulated aspects of their HIB's, including information seeking, information organization and information use, providing tangible insights into their information‐related thoughts and actions.

This paper has implications for expanding the nature of our evolutionary understanding of information behavior and provides a broader context for the HIB research field.

This the first paper in the information science field of HIB to study the information behavior of historical figures and begin to develop an evolutionary framework for HIB research.

About the year 1806 or 1807 consumers of cane sugar, and particularly those in central Europe, began to find out that there was very little of this kind of sugar to be obtained. Naval warfare and Napoleon's Continental System had resulted in something very like a sugar famine; and the only means of relief appeared to be either to extend and improve the existing methods of producing sugar from the beetroot or to discover new sources of saccharine matter from materials furnished by Europe itself, and so to make Europe independent of supplies of overseas sugar. Napoleon—the master of Europe at that time—made it his first care to provide, as far as possible, for the needs of the people of France; and French chemists were ordered and encouraged to undertake researches with the view to finding a more or less efficient substitute for cane sugar and molasses. The first step which was taken in the direction of relieving the situation was taken by Proust, who turned his attention to the possibilities inherent in grape juice. After a little time he had so well succeeded in his research that he was able to present the people of France with a sort of treacle, and with this it appears the masses had to be contented for about four years; refined cane sugar had become somewhat of a luxury. The use of molasses was the common practice in Germany—where the cost of moist sugar had been about fifteen pence a pound for some years before the time we are referring to. Proust's treacle must have proved an exceedingly poor article, and Napoleon, realising that human endurance of this would not survive for long, appointed a Committee, with the celebrated Chaptal as its head, to consider the best means of introducing the manufacture of beet sugar into France. Chaptal had succeeded Lucien Bonaparte as Minister of the Interior in 1801. He was the President of the Society for the Encouragement of National Industries, and in all respects he was well qualified to supervise a public enquiry of such importance. Marggraf's discovery in 1747 had already been taken advantage of to some extent in Prussia, and Achard of Berlin and others were already cultivating the beetroot and obtaining small quantities of beet sugar. After an interval of three or four years, during which careful examination had been made of the Prussian methods and results with beet sugar, Chaptal was able to send in a favourable report to Napoleon regarding their probable success in France. Events then moved rapidly. By Imperial decree 32 thousand hectares, say 80 thousand acres, of French soil were at once sown with beet. An absolute embargo was placed on all overseas sugar; and in the same year (1811) Chaptal was created Count de Chantaloupe. The start of the beet sugar industry in Europe may be said to date from this time.

Hegelian ideas are used to explain the success of Lenin. Hegel′s account of the World Historical Individual may be especially relevant at this time because the dialectic between decentralised grassroots politics and the need for strong central authority not only figured in the rise of Napoleon (an example Hegel had much in mind) but seems to be at work in the affairs of Mikhail Gorbachev as well. But one must beware the paradoxes associated with ideas of historical necessity. One can avoid them by talking of probabilities, and conceptualising the formation of leaders as a response to a market which has a tendency to match supply and demand. But this does not wholly explain the tendency of Marxist systems to produce leaders like Lenin, Stalin, Ceausescu, Hoxha, Tito and Castro. It is argued that such figures become surrogates for the free man of the future, and that the masses are also encouraged to live vicariously through them; but it is also argued that revolutions produce the kind of chaos which creates a demand for authority.

I. The Gendarmerie: Historical Background The Gendarmerie is the senior unit of the French Armed Forces. It is, however, difficult to give a precise date to its creation. What can be asserted is that as early as the Eleventh Century special units existed under the sénéchal (seneschal), an official of the King's household who was entrusted with the administration of military justice and the command of the army. The seneschal's assistants were armed men known as sergents d'armes (sergeants at arms). In time, the office of the seneschal was replaced by that of the connétable (constable) who was originally the head groom of the King's stables, but who became the principal officer of the early French kings before rising to become commander‐in‐chief of the army in 1218. The connétable's second in command was the maréchal (marshal). Eventually, the number of marshals grew and they were empowered to administer justice among the soldiery and the camp followers in wartime, a task which fully absorbed them throughout the Hundred Years War (1337–1453). The corps of marshals was then known as the maréchaussée (marshalcy) and its members as sergeants and provosts. One of the provosts, Le Gallois de Fougières, was killed at Agincourt in 1415; his ashes were transferred to the national memorial to the Gendarmerie, which was erected at Versailles in 1946.