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The state secretariat papers, including a huge variety of maps and sketches, reveal the complexity of governing a territory as vast as that ruled by Napoleon I. In terms of state administration, state secretariat reports show attempts to rationalise the territorial and administrative units making up the Empire. These papers reveal not only a distillation of the disagreements which occupied public administrators at the local level, both in France and beyond the pre-imperial frontiers, such as in Italy, but also how central government took note of these inter-communal conflicts and tried to resolve them.