Napoleon_ A Biography_clone

seemed absurd that England was crammed with surplus products while France languished through shortage of the selfsame products, especially raw materials and colonial produce, and could not work out an efficient method of import substitution. Whereas corn, fruit, wool, wood and wine had been sold to England before r 8o6, the peasants could not now export the surplus; this hit them particularly badly after the bumper harvest of r 8o8. With industrialists, agriculturalists, shipowners, peasants and consum­ ers all suffering from the blockade, it was not surprising that human nature asserted itself. Speculation in coffee, sugar and cotton led to high prices, inflated profits, stock exchange gambling mania and hence generalized corruption and cynicism. The blockade was evaded even by Napoleon's most senior lieutenants. Junior aides took bribes and traded on the black market, while the Bonapartist grandees indulged in corruption at a flagrant level. Massena sold unofficial licences to trade with England to Italian merchants, thus swelling his already vast fortune. Bourrienne, French Minister at Hamburg in r 8o6-o7, was ordered to find so,ooo greatcoats and cloaks for the Grande Armee for the winter campaign against Russia. He secretly purchased cloth and leather from England, claiming that the Army would have died of cold if the Continental System had been observed. In fact the inflow of British manufactures continued at such a rate that in the r 8 r z campaign soldiers in the Grand Army wore boots made in Northampton and greatcoats made from Lancashire and Yorkshire cloth. But undoubtedly the great growth industry during the heyday of the Continental System was contraband, which was made easy by a combination of local demand, corrupt offici;1ls, lax surveillance and support from the British. Under Napoleon there were really only three ways to make a vast fortune if you were not a marshal: by supplying the Army, by speculation in national property, and by smuggling. With opportunities in the first two areas rapidly drying up, contraband beckoned as the future road to El Dorado. It is hard to overestimate the rich pickings that could be made from smuggling. The Rothschilds, now coming to prominence after the pioneering labours of the dynasty's founder Meyer Amschel, made vast sums by financing illegal trading and made even more after r 8 r o by manipulating the British and French licensing systems simultaneously. One lace merchant, a certain M . Gaudoit of Caen, imported illicit British goods worth 750,ooo francs between r 8o r-o8, using the roundabout route London-Amsterdam-Frankfurt-Paris-Bordeaux. On the Rhine it was reckoned that a smuggler could earn r 2-r4 francs a night, when the 485

daily wage for an agricultural labourer was I-I:i francs; in the Pyrenees the respective rates were ten francs and three francs. In Hamburg it was estimated that 6-I o,ooo people a day smuggled coffee, sugar and other comestibles, of which an absolute maximum of 5% was confiscated. Napoleon hit back with occasional exemplary punishments. In the Rothschilds' native city of Frankfurt, a sanctions-busting centre, French troops publicly burned £ I ,20o,ooo worth of contraband goods in November I 8 I o. But such scenes were rare: even when French viceroys and governors found out about contraband they could usually be bribed to remain silent or simply go through the motions. In the light of all this, the surprise is that the Continental Blockade worried the British as much as it did. The impact of the System on the British economy has been much disputed, and some indices seem to show an almost nil effect. Britain's merchant fleet rose from I 3,446 ships in I 8o2 to I 7,346; the rise in unemployment can be explained as a function of population growth in the U.K. from I 5,846,ooo in I 8o i to I 8,o44,000 in I 8 r r ; the modest profits of industry can be interpreted as systematic tax evasion. But there are other figures that tell a different story, particularly in the early period of the blockade until I 8o8. Exports, which reached a peak in I 809 (£50.3 million) were only £9 million up on the peacetime figure for I 8o2. Continental trade, worth £22 . 5 million in I 8o2 fell to half that in I 8o8. The value of Britain's re-export trade in colonial produce declined from £ I 4,4 I 9,ooo in I 8o2 to £7,862,000 in I 8o8 and was still only at £8,278,ooo in I 8 I I ; sugar, which sold for 73 shillings per hundredweight in I 798 fell to 32 shillings by I 807 and did not rise above 50 shillings until I 8 I 3 . The stagnation of colonial produce on the market was matched by the crisis of British manufacturers; industrialists in Manchester could not liquidate their stocks of cotton; the price of flax rose; there was a grave crisis in the wool industry. Matters were at an acute pass in early I 8o8. There was a serious drop in exports in the last six months of I 807 and the first six of I 8o8; exports to Europe sank to £ I 5 million as compared to £ r 9� million in the twelve months before. The combination of Jefferson's embargo and Napoleon's blockade began to bite, and there were serious riots in Lancashire and Yorkshire in May and June I 8o8. Ex-Prime Minister Grenville was one of those in England who began to panic. It was precisely at that moment that Napoleon made his disastrous and self-destructive intervention in Spain. Ostensibly, he moved in to shut a door still open to British produce, but at a stroke he ruined the prospect of Spain as a market for French manufacturers and opened the trade of Latin America to the British. With justifiable irony the economist d'Ivernois remarked that the 486

Emperor's blockade would have been more effective if, at the same time as he was taking violent steps to close European markets to the British, he was not also taking even more violent ones to open South America to them. The Spanish ulcer not only drained France of blood and treasure but saved the British economy. After 1 809 the ports of Spain and, more importantly, of Latin America were open to them. When the Grande Armee was progressively switched from Germany to Spain in r 8o9-1 r , making contraband in northern Europe easier, British recovery was rapid. In r 8o9, at £50.3 million, British exports reached their peak during the Napoleonic years. Even though they declined again during the years of 'general crisis' from r 8 r o-r2, they never again descended to r 8o7-o8 levels. When the North Sea became extremely difficult for the Royal Navy in r 8 r o-12, the British switched the main thrust of their contraband efforts to the Balkans, Adriatic and Illyria; the Danube replaced the Rhine as the conduit for colonial goods. If the Continental Blockade was a failure, the Continental System more widely considered was not an unalloyed disaster. From r 8o6 to r 8 r o French industry was bursting with confidence, with three industries particularly to the fore: cotton, chemicals and armaments. The great captains of industry enjoyed considerable prestige and were second only to the marshals and the Councillors of State in power and rank. Cotton - based in Paris, Normandy, Flanders, Picardy, Alsace, Belgium and the Rhineland - was the great success story and was the one area where France kept up with Britain technologically; in other spheres, where Britain had a commanding technical lead, the blockade made it difficult for her inventions to be copied and then remodelled in France. Silk was another success, especially in Lyons and St Etienne, as was wool in Verviers, Rheims, Aachen, Sedan, the Rhineland and Normandy. Agriculture did not fare so well, with sugar and tobacco on the decline, but viniculture did well. It has often been asserted that Napoleon set back European economic life for a decade, because his troops, living off the land, destroyed a multitude of subsistence economies. But a strong argument can be mounted for a contrary point of view, according to which the Emperor was a vital motor in the promotion of French capitalism, and not just in the picayune sense that he suppressed the old guilds. Some economic historians make the case that the Continental System saved Europe from being swamped by British enterprise and thus that it enabled a European industrial revolution to take place; some go so far as to say that by r 8oo Continental Europe was threatened by the fate meted out to India in the 487

nineteenth century: forced pastoralization. The workings of the cotton industry in Catalonia provide an almost textbook example of how the Continental System worked: booming until 1 808, it was then devastated by Napoleon's coup, six years of war and the British takeover in Latin America. Summing up, then, on the wider impact of Napoleon's Continental System, it can be said that, although Europe's industrial revolution did not start under the Emperor, it was his policies, and especially the elevation of the bourgeoisie, that laid the groundwork. Europe, in a word, was given a breathing space that secured its future as an industrial society, the predominance of the nobility was ended, feudal guilds broken up, and the centre of gravity switched from the ports and seaborne trade to the heavy industry of the north and east and the coal and iron in north­ east France and Belgium. It must be stressed that these were unintended effects. Nobody at the time really understood how international trade and the movement of capital worked, and Napoleon himself had old­ fashioned ideas on economics - deflationary policies, suspicion of paper money, restrictions on credit, a balanced budget - without understanding the knock-on effects of such policies. But it was always the Blockade, not the System, that obsessed him. Britain's chances of survival looked rosier than ever by the beginning of I 8I o, for the Royal Navy seized Cape Town and Java, Guadelupe and Mauritius from the Dutch and, by interposing the Royal Navy, detached Latin America from Joseph. Napoleon's only response to smuggling was to impose tighter political and military control on the allies, which meant annexation: Holland joined a long list that already included Ancona, Piacenza, Parma, Tuscany, the Papal States, Illyria (including Trieste) and was soon followed by most of Westphalia, the Tessin and the Valais in Switzerland and the Hanseatic towns of Hamburg, Lubeck and Bremen. Unfortunately for the Emperor, this remorseless policy of annexation simply increased the number of his enemies and critics, some of whom questioned his sanity and his judgement. All of Europe especially the Czar, was irritated by the annexations, and within France it reopened the debate about the desirability of resting content with the natural frontiers. To disarm his critics Napoleon thought of new economic devices, which merely exacerbated his problems. 1 8 1 0 was the year when things began to go badly wrong with the French economy. Realizing that he could not close the coast of Europe to British products, and that French industrial production was impaired by the high price of colonial raw materials, Napoleon decided on a new tack. The decrees of St-Cloud, Trianon and Fontainebleau (3 July, 1 August, 488