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French armies brought both bayonets and law codes into the conquered territories. Moreover, this reformist agenda was not simply about improving the efficiency and capacity of the Napoleonic state to extract financial, economic and military resources from subject territories and states. As Stuart Woolf has cogently argued, there was a genuine commitment on the part of the Napoleonic state to
posits it against his concept of divine violence. Mythical violence, for Benjamin, is that violence which is both law-preserving and law-making. In Benjamin's analysis, mythical violence thus inevitably relates to existing state structures that prescribe, though laws, codes and norms, either a reaffirmation (preservation) of existing political structures or indeed the making of new laws and codes, thus also prescribing or reaffirming the normativity of
– perhaps by offering shelter or food – were subject to the same punishment. The Icelandic law code, Grágás , provided for similar consequences, equating the status of the newly outlawed to that of a wolf: ‘hann skal sva vida vargr heita, sem vidast er verold byggd, ok vera hvarvetna raekr ok rekinn um allan heim’ [‘he shall be known as a wolf, as widely as the world is inhabited, and be rejected everywhere and be driven away throughout all the world’] (Barraclough 2010 ). The use of animalistic metaphors to communicate the status of the outlaw is significant and