A Velvet Empire

French Informal Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century

David Todd

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691205342
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia francesa

How France's elites used soft power to pursue their imperial ambitions in the nineteenth century After Napoleon's downfall in 1815, France embraced a mostly informal style of empire, one that emphasized economic and cultural influence rather than military conquest. A Velvet Empire is a global history of French imperialism in the nineteenth century, providing new insights into the mechanisms of imperial collaboration that extended France's power from the Middle East to Latin America and ushered in the modern age of globalization.David Todd shows how French elites pursued a cunning strategy of imperial expansion in which conspicuous commodities such as champagne and silk textiles, together with loans to client states, contributed to a global campaign of seduction. French imperialism was no less brutal than that of the British. But while Britain widened its imperial reach through settler colonialism and the acquisition of far-flung territories, France built a "velvet" empire backed by frequent military interventions and a broadening extraterritorial jurisdiction. Todd demonstrates how France drew vast benefits from these asymmetric, imperial-like relations until a succession of setbacks around the world brought about their unravelling in the 1870s. A Velvet Empire sheds light on France's neglected contribution to the conservative reinvention of modernity and offers a new interpretation of the resurgence of French colonialism on a global scale after 1880. This panoramic book also highlights the crucial role of collaboration among European empires during this period—including archrivals Britain and France—and cooperation with indigenous elites in facilitating imperial expansion and the globalization of capitalism.

1

Empire without Sovereignty

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF FRENCH INFORMAL IMPERIALISM

FEW WORKS have denounced territorial expansionism as eloquently as Benjamin Constant’s On the Spirit of Conquest, a pamphlet published just as Napoleon’s empire was crumbling, in early 1814. For Constant, the armies of conquering nations were “turning the progresses of civilization against civilization itself;” by “taking murder as a means, debauchery as a pastime, derision for gaiety, and pillage as their end,” they became “separated by a moral gulf from the rest of mankind, and united among themselves only like wild animals that hurl themselves in packs upon the flocks on which they prey.”¹ The pamphlet’s multiple editions captured a widely shared aspiration for an end to bellicose expansionism, in both France and Europe. Even an otherwise critical response applauded Constant’s lucid exposition of “the current inclination of minds.”² And it was because the pamphlet turned Constant into a public symbol of the repudiation of conquest that Napoleon, during his brief return to power in 1815 (the Hundred Days), entrusted his erstwhile adversary with the drafting of a new constitution, in a vain attempt to persuade European powers that he too no longer harboured dreams of territorial expansion.³

On the Spirit of Conquest has sometimes been cast as the culmination of a liberal rejection of empire, rooted in late Enlightenment criticisms of the inequity and violence of European colonization in the New World. Although the pamphlet predominantly discussed Napoleonic conquests in Europe, Constant’s use of expressions, such as a desire to “conquer the world,” “acquire remote countries” or reach “the far ends of the earth,” has been interpreted as denoting “the global scope of the phenomenon he warns against.”⁴ Yet words such as “world” and “earth,” especially in a nineteenth-century context, do not always refer to the entire globe. In fact, Constant’s preface to On the Spirit of Conquest described “England” and “Russia” as “the two extremities of the earth.” The casting of Constant as an adversary of imperial expansion everywhere pays insufficient attention to the work’s full title, which restricted his analysis of the spirit of conquest (and of usurpation) to “their relation to European civilization.”⁵ The very phrase “European civilization,” in contradistinction to other civilizations, was a neologism, if not invented then almost certainly popularized by Constant’s pamphlet.⁶ It departed from the traditional Enlightenment usage of “civilization,” becoming a word to denote a process that was common to all of humankind and that did not admit the plural, and heralding a radicalization of European ethnocentrism that informed most nineteenth-century ideologies of empire.⁷ On the Spirit of Conquest only referred to the world outside Europe, alongside pre-modern Europe, to make a contrast with modern European commercial norms of behaviour.⁸

Constant’s pamphlet did not explicitly call for the resumption of Europe’s expansion overseas, but it left the door open to the possibility. A cynical reader, unmoved by Constant’s moral lamentations, may still have concurred that “even a successful war always costs more than it brings in” and that, especially in Europe, international trade had cancelled out the economic benefits of territorial sovereignty: “The infinite and complex ramifications of commerce have placed the interests of societies beyond the frontiers of their own territories.”⁹ The same reader might conclude that new, more profitable ways to dominate foreign countries should be adopted and that territorial conquest should be restricted to commercially undeveloped societies. Demonstrating the ambivalence of his own condemnation of conquest, Constant himself later supported the creation of European colonial settlements in North Africa.¹⁰ This chapter’s aim is to show that a cynical interpretation such as this was common in post-Napoleonic France and that the popularity of De l’esprit de conquête should not be seen to demonstrate a widespread renunciation of empire.

Significant cynics included the Prince of Talleyrand-Périgord and several members of his circle, including the Abbé Dominique de Pradt, a former dignitary of the Napoleonic regime, who gained fame as a prolific commentator on international affairs after 1815.¹¹ Pradt has frequently been referred to as an early defender of the Americas’ emancipation from European rule. But as this chapter will show, he endorsed the American colonies’ independence as a means of maintaining the supremacy of White Europeans and increasing French influence in the New World. The American statesman John Quincy Adams was probably correct in his assessment that “the unprincipled looseness of [Pradt’s] morals” in politics exceeded even that of his mentor Talleyrand.¹² Another major source of informal imperial ideas was Saint-Simonianism, a politico-religious creed dedicated to the promotion of industrial capitalism from the late 1820s. The early romantic impulses of the Saint-Simonians soon gave way to a hard-headed promotion of French global interests by economic means, a turn to informal empire illustrated in this chapter by the career and ideas of Michel Chevalier. An enthusiastic leader of the sect in his youth, Chevalier soon became a major advocate of the economic subjugation of the Orient by Western industrial powers. As holder of the chair of political economy at the Collège de France from 1840 until 1879, and the self-proclaimed “architect” of the Second Napoleonic Empire’s economic and foreign policy, he also played a crucial part in the execution of projects of informal imperial domination.¹³

Scholarly debates about attitudes to empire in France after 1815 have tended to focus on canonical liberal figures such as Constant or Alexis de Tocqueville.¹⁴ Shifting the emphasis towards lesser known thinkers, who nonetheless enjoyed a vast audience at the time, not only improves our understanding of the discursive context in which these well-known figures expressed their views, but also helps recover what the prevailing attitudes of the informed liberal-leaning public towards empire actually were. Political scientists may question the liberal credentials of Talleyrand and Pradt, who served Napoleon’s dictatorship, and of Chevalier, a foremost supporter of the regime of Napoleon III. Yet sinners may still be believers. At least after 1815, once the word “liberal” entered the political lexicon, all three described themselves as liberals—with some justification, since they admired Britain’s balanced constitution and were stalwart advocates of free trade.¹⁵ Recovering their views on empire therefore helps to suggest that French liberals did not become imperialistic in the mid-nineteenth century, but instead consistently harboured imperial ambitions, even if, for pragmatic reasons, they tended to shun territorial expansion after 1815.

Focusing on these neglected but influential figures also helps correct the common perception of France as having withdrawn from the international stage after the fall of Napoleon. Pradt and Chevalier, in particular, demonstrated an extraordinarily precocious consciousness of the global scale of human affairs.¹⁶ Well before the global became a fashionable genre in historical scholarship, one study singled out Pradt as demonstrating an unusal awareness of “the intensification of world-political connections” at the turn of the nineteenth century.¹⁷ Similarly, more than a decade before globalization or mondialisation became common parlance in English and French, the author of Chevalier’s major biography felt the need to forge the neologism “planétarisation” to describe the importance that Chevalier accorded to the multiplication of connections across borders.¹⁸ Investigating the political economy of French informal imperialism therefore also reveals a little-known facet of the intellectual origins of globalization, and confirms that the pursuit of empire and the emergence of global consciousness were inextricably linked.

Talleyrand’s Imperial Vision

The move away from territorial imperialism in France after 1815 was first and foremost a response to a series of imperial catastrophes: the disintegration of Napoleon’s empire in Europe, of course, but also France’s loss of all its overseas colonies—to rebel slaves in Haiti; to British occupation in the rest of the West Indies and the Indian Ocean; and, more broadly, the waning of European sovereignty in the New World, from the independence of the United States in the 1780s until the transformation of most of Iberian America into self-governing polities in the 1810s.¹⁹ Previous imperial catastrophes, in particular France’s loss of its North American possessions and the drastic reduction of its political influence in India at the end of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), had already generated a virulent critique of traditional colonial methods.²⁰ The colonial anxieties expressed by Abbé Raynal and his collaborators in the Histoire des Deux Indes (first edition in 1772), a major bestseller of the late Old Régime, were not forgotten after 1815.²¹

Debates after the fall of Napoleon were also indebted to another intense controversy about the means and ends of empire, which took place around 1800, when war weariness led the main protago...