The question in the title of this chapter highlights its reexamination of the national, and nationalizing, narratives of science and war in the Napoleonic period as exemplified in propaganda of the time and in subsequent historiography. For example, French military historians pin the genius of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) as a war strategist on his Corsican heritage and second language acquisition of French, because these credentials enhance the evidence of his indisputable “French-ness.” Similarly, the distinctiveness of France’s engineering, physical, and natural sciences of the period, including the unrivalled preeminence of the reinstituted Jardin du Roi in Paris as the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in 1793, is also largely unchallenged in terms of the politics that determined who had access to its fields, and who became its key “French” Directors and Chairs. By contrast in this chapter, I look beyond essentialist assumptions and constructions of national identity, political allegiance, and scientific contribution by the criteria of birth, mother tongue, and citizenship that take on particular fixity at times of international conflict, to approach Napoleon’s nation-building priorities for First Empire France as a Premier Empire scientifique that also expanded its distinctive “Frenchness.” Especially during the early campaigns in Egypt, the Low Countries, and the Austrian-Germanic States, Napoleon’s expansion of France “abroad” necessarily reconfigures, and transforms, its “home.” By locating Napoleon’s strategic values for French nationhood outside oppositional binary constructs for national identity as defined by victors and vanquished, insiders and outsiders, home and abroad, the chapter also remaps the under-researched inspirations and impacts of Germanic scientific culture and understanding as pivotal to Napoleon’s models for “French” science in the First Empire as expansionist.

Irrespective of their specific geography, the Napoleonic campaigns share key defining features. In this chapter I examine three: Napoleon’s strategic mapping, navigating, and translocating of scientific knowledge and its artifacts. These features configure his global positioning and ambitions for post-Revolutionary France by means of French institutionalization of sciences, and French as their international vernacular for further dissemination. This national story of “advances” and “first discoveries” of the period is selectively incomplete, however, without fuller acknowledgment of “outsider” inspirations, and explanation of their marginalization in official histories of war and science.