The important thing to remember about your question is that France was at war for almost the entirety of Napoleon's reign — a mass war, that affected all sectors of the country. Mass conscription into the army had begun in the 1790s and continued through Waterloo. The result was many young men were torn from their homes for years at a time; some never returned or returned with severe injuries. Meanwhile taxes remained high and commerce was choked off by British blockades. French trade in 1815 was half of what it was in 1789. There were some economic bright spots, including expanded domestic manufacturing and the rise of the sugar beet crop, and the rationalized legal system under Napoleon made improved many people's daily lives compared to the feudal ancien régime. In the absence of war, all this might have led to considerable prosperity for France. But of course, war was not absent, and its devastating impacts (made worse in 1814 and 1815 when enemy armies occupied France) pretty much override everything else.
My earlier answer about how the Revolution changed the French quality of life probably answers many of your questions. To that I'll add a brief digression focusing on money in the years around 1815 (though many of these examples concern the time immediately after Napoleon):
The majority of French people at this time were rural peasants. Some were tenant farmers, but many of them owned their own land — around 40 percent of French land was owned by peasants after the Revolution, up from about one-third beforehand. But many of these peasant-owned lands were quite small. In one village in the Perche region, there were 114 cultivable acres split between 63 farmers. Only 16 of these farmers owned at least two acres, and the largest plot was 3.4 acres. "Many people owned very small plots, a simple garden," writes historian Alain Corbin in his survey of the commune of Origny-le-Butin. "Eighty-nine individuals owned less than a tenth of an acre, and thirty-one owned between a tenth and two-tenths of an acre — not enough to feed a cow."
Even those who owned land, and most of those who did not, relied on labor or a trade to supplement their farming — hauling, chopping, plowing, making clogs or gloves. In this part of the country, a family of four needed an annual income of 500 francs to avoid begging. That's around 1.4 francs per day. Many people fell short of this: an unskilled laborer earned about 1.1 francs/day in 1820 (in some other parts of the country, as much as 2 francs/day); a clog-maker could earn up to 1.5. Obviously blacksmiths, gelders and other skilled laborers could do significantly better.
Women often worked too, spinning or making gloves. A glove-maker might earn half of what a (male) clog-maker did, while spinners earned significantly less. The schoolteacher in this town was paid 200 francs/year — less than a laborer, but more than a spinner. Rent on a rural cottage might be 50 francs/year. Further stressing these limited incomes was abundant alcoholism; peasants routinely drank in taverns every day, “even on Sundays and even at night, despite regulations to the contrary.”
The economic fragility of this commune is evident in a survey of the legal files in the early 19th Century, which show repeated lawsuits about people grazing their animals in other people's property, and poor laborers frequently facing criminal charges for illegally cutting trees in the government-run forest.
That's not to say everyone in the rural areas were poor. Notables could often do quite well for themselves; a typical provincial noble family after the Revolution might have earned around 5,200 per year. In Balzac's novel Père Goriot, we're told that the "tiny" estate owned by Eugène de Rastignac's family “was worth perhaps three thousand francs a year, not allowing for the instabilities inherent in the wine trade”; this is generally seen as insufficient for the expenses facing a prominent family. People without dependents could make do on less: the priest in a Franche-Comté town in Stendhal's The Red and the Black has a private income of 800 francs/year from inherited property, an income called "good solid money." A tutor to a local notable's family could earn 300 francs per year plus room and board and clothes; this is called an "undreamt-of salary" (though the notable proves willing to pay even more, both for the practical benefit of educating his children and the social benefit of being rich and important enough to hire a private tutor).
Let's contrast this with Paris. I don't have a detailed economic case study of Paris in this time as I do for the Perche, but we can draw some conclusions from contemporary novels, which were (as we've already seen) often quite specific about money. In Père Goriot, we're told that an arrangement to eat dinner every night at a boarding house would cost 30 francs per month, or 360 francs per year for one meal a day. The boarding house charged 540 francs/year for its shabbiest room and board, 864 francs/year for a nicer room, and 1,800 francs/year for the boarding house's nicest room. One lodger paid an extra 15 francs per month for after-dinner coffee and brandy. This can serve as a baseline — the truly destitute could find cheaper accommodations, while those capable of paying more could get far nicer accommodations than the best room in a run-down boarding house. This could change in response to economic conditions — after Napoleon's abdication in 1814, for example, Paris rents doubled in May because of the flood of foreign tourists and dignitaries taking advantage of the peace to visit Paris.
Where was the money coming from to pay these expenses? Middle-class Parisians generally had one of three sources of money: they practiced a trade or profession, they had a pension or they had investments in money or land.
Working could earn a decent income, especially for government bureaucrats, who had ballooned in number under Napoleon. A third-class clerk could earn 2,000 francs/year; a chief engineer could earn 5,000 — equivalent to those provincial noble families. Ex-military officers forcibly retired on half-pay could earn between 500 and 800 francs per year, depending on their rank — "just enough to buy bread." On active duty, they would of course earn twice that (and under Napoleon, at least, had the opportunity for plunder.) But as Rastignac discovers in Père Goriot, even working as an attorney in a time of high inequality could not hope to match the income possible from inheriting a fortune.
The rule of thumb in the 19th Century was that investments in land or capital would produce a return of around 4 or 5 percent. That means that to earn an annual income of 1,000 francs, one needed to have 20,000 francs invested in order to live in perpetuity off the interest. Someone who was desperate or foolhardy could dip into principal, but this was regarded with horror. ("She actually dipped into capital," Balzac notes of one character, emphasis in the original.)
The end of the Napoleonic Wars brought a return to trade, a sharp reduction in war-related economic and demographic dislocation, and generally set the stage for economic growth. But many people remained on the edge of poverty and starvation, while middle-income French families could find their greater incomes stressed by the greater expenses they faced.
My research has focused primarily on France, and I'm away from my library and relying on my (fortunately copious) notes for this, so I'll abstain from tackling your secondary question about how the standard-of-living compared to other European countries — though the same caveat that they were consumed by war while Napoleon was emperor applies, to an even greater degree for most continental countries whose territories were ravaged by criss-crossing armies over this time.
Sources