Revisiting Napoleon's Continental System

Local, Regional and European Experiences

K. Aaslestad, J. Joor, K. Aaslestad, J. Joor

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137345561
• eBook ISBN: 9781137345578
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Wirtschaftsgeschichte

Economic warfare during the Napoleonic era transformed international commerce; redirecting trade and generating illicit commerce. This volume re-evaluates the Continental System through urban and regional case studies that analyze the power triangle of the French, British and neutral powers and their strategies to adapt to trade restrictions.

Part I
Looking Forward and Backward: The Historiography and Origins of the Continental System

1

The Continental System Revisited

Geoffrey Ellis

The year 2011 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of my doctoral thesis, Napoleon’s Continental Blockade: The Case of Alsace, by Oxford University Press. When I first embarked on my doctoral research at Oxford in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was struck by a marked lopsidedness in Blockade studies published up to that time. It seemed to me then that most, particularly those in English and French, had dealt in some way with what I called the ‘sea aspects’ of the subject, in which the Blockade is seen as essentially a ‘coast system’. Such a view tended to accentuate its harmful commercial and industrial effects in the maritime ports of continental Europe and their hinterlands, to the neglect of its ‘land aspects’, which often reflected more positive economic results. My aim was to redress the balance by concentrating more on the inland regions of the Napoleonic Empire. That was why I chose Alsace, the two departments of the Bas-Rhin and Haut-Rhin, as an area for detailed focus, using the extensive archival material in Strasbourg, Colmar and Mulhouse. In due course, my wider research revealed that some of the economic fortunes of Alsace during the Continental Blockade from 1806 to 1813 were matched in other inland parts of the Empire, notably the annexed departments of the German left bank of the Rhine and mainland Belgium. Although industrial and commercial expansion varied considerably across those regions under Napoleonic rule, they were spared the prolonged decline, which overtook the major European seaports during the maritime wars of that time.

This conflicting evidence suggested that those very different economic experiences largely depended on whether the manufacturers and merchants concerned had access to, or lacked access to, markets and sources of supply. A familiar pattern of economic activity became clear to me: as the maritime ports entered their time of troubles from the mid- to later 1790s, and especially later during the Blockade, there was a reorientation of trade and industry in France and its earliest annexed departments towards the mainland markets. In a seminal article published some 50 years ago, the much-lamented François Crouzet, for long the recognized doyen of Blockade studies, argued that a major long-term effect of the maritime wars of 1793 to 1815 was a ‘shift of industry from the seaboard to the heartland of western Europe’. This ‘shift’ was so marked by the end of the period that, as he forcefully put it, ‘the axis of the Continental economy had now moved from the Atlantic toward the Rhine’.¹

Following those leads, I was soon convinced that markets were a crucial element of Napoleon’s Blockade project. This belief was sharpened by major differences of economic policy current among the states of western Europe during that formative period of my doctoral research, which prompted some tempting historical analogies. At the time my original thesis was conceived and completed, Great Britain had not yet joined the European Economic Community. For a young and no doubt rather impressionable researcher then projecting himself from an English university into the archives and libraries of Gaullist France, the analogy, however broad, between French opposition to British membership of the EEC and Napoleon’s Continental Blockade against British trade more than a century and a half earlier seemed intriguing. But whereas de Gaulle was pursuing French interests within a genuine European Common Market of six initial member states subject to the same rules, Napoleon had no such restraints. He was not bound by the terms of any multilateral Treaty of Rome or of any other subsequent treaties that have redefined the identity of what is now the much enlarged European Union. He was in a position to impose his economic policies on conquered Europe in a much more unilateral and partisan way, if necessary by military force.

That, indeed, was the sense of my central theme that Napoleon’s Blockade objectives included a continental market design, a project to create what I called an ‘Uncommon Market’ on the continental mainland – or what Louis Bergeron once likened to ‘a kind of “one-way common market” (une sorte de “marché commun à sens unique”), in which imposed commercial treaties and unilateral decisions produced an exchange system in the interests of France alone’.² To achieve this, Napoleon had to find within his essentially land-based empire the economic resources, both markets for French exports and re-exports and sources of supply of vital primary materials, which the French had lost in their overseas colonies during the maritime wars since 1793. It was thus on the continental mainland, within his expanding sphere of power, that he sought preferential or even exclusive rights favourable to French industry and trade. Such rights were not reciprocal, however, as soon became painfully clear to many manufacturers and merchants in countries that lay beyond the official imperial customs frontiers for all or much of the period of the Blockade.

How well my analogy of Napoleon’s ‘Uncommon Market’ has weathered the last 33 years others may judge for themselves. Inevitably, something of its earlier topicality disappeared as the EEC was steadily enlarged, with Britain becoming a member in 1973. It would seem that just as historical circumstances change, so historiographical trends change with them. If in retrospect I engage in some critical self-appraisal, I would have to make certain concessions in the light of more recent research. I can see now that, constrained as I then was by the strict word limit for doctoral theses at Oxford, I may have focused too narrowly on urban industrial and commercial markets. Although these were significant in themselves, and of growing future importance, they did not of course match the aggregative scale and overall primacy of local agricultural markets and the small-scale industries serving them within the European economies of Napoleon’s time. I must equally admit that in my original research I only skimmed the surface of the large but neglected issue of military markets, that is to say markets for the supply of vital food and equipment to Napoleon’s armies, which we now know were a major spur to local production and trade in many areas, including some in the subject states. These, too, reduced the relative importance of private industrial and commercial markets within the imperial economy.

‘Continental Blockade’ and ‘Continental System’

Those were necessary self-limitations in my original work, and I should now also revisit another initial problem: was there any important distinction to be made between the ‘Continental Blockade’ (Blocus continental) and the ‘Continental System’ (Système continental)? Both terms were in common use from 1806, and it would be fair to say that contemporaries often thought of them as synonymous and interchangeable. Later nineteenth-century writers also tended to do so, and that same loose usage persisted even in some modern scholarly works in this field of research. Of these, one of the most influential was by Eli Heckscher, the political economist and economic historian. It appeared in English translation in 1922, three years after his original Swedish edition.³ Entitled The Continental System: An Economic Interpretation, it was primarily a study of the questionable theory behind and the erratic implementation of the Blockade as a failed venture in commercial and industrial warfare, to which the author as a celebrated free trader was opposed in principle. Heckscher’s volume was to remain the standard text on the subject in Anglophone countries for almost the next half-century. His treatment of its British dimension was rather sketchy, however, and readers conversant with French had to wait until the publication of François Crouzet’s magisterial account in 1958 provided the definitive statement.⁴ He preferred to use the term blocus continental, and I readily followed suit in my own published thesis.

Yet, even by then it was becoming clear that the term ‘Continental Blockade’ did not adequately cover the gamut of Napoleon’s economic policies in conquered Europe, let alone his much wider imperial ambitions, and one could ask whether it had ever done so. The first use of the phrase blocus continental is usually attributed to the comte de Montgaillard (1761–1841), formerly a shady counter-revolutionary polemicist who had ingratiated himself into Napoleon’s circle of publicists through a series of reports. The thinking behind the Berlin Decree of 21 November 1806 had been anticipated in Montgaillard’s mémoire of 25 July 1805, three months before the French naval defeat at Trafalgar, and its supplement of 24 March 1806.⁵ He saw British trade as a vast organized system of piracy, but at the same time as phantom wealth which he likened to ‘dropsy’ (hydropisie). Other polemicists around that time were also propagating an image of British commercial power as ‘a colossus with feet of clay’.

Formulated in such terms, the rationale behind the Continental Blockade was crude and lacking in any real intellectual pedigree, except perhaps for a superficial foothold in outmoded mercantilist theories, which Napoleon himself shared. In short, his Blockade was not a carefully reasoned and well-organized economic ‘system’ in any meaningful sense, but rather an ad hoc extension of his military power to the commercial conflict with his most elusive enemy, and its enforcement was wholly dependent on that power.

Its official proclamation in the immediate aftermath of Prussia’s twin defeats at Jena and Auerstädt on 14 October 1806 was not coincidental. Conversely, it also testified to the increasing naval weakness of France after the battle of Trafalgar on 21 October 1805. It was not a blockade properly so called but in effect a self-blockade, or boycott, as Heckscher pointed out long ago. Military conquests on land, Napoleon presumed, would lead to French conquests of continental markets as well.

In those broad terms, 33 years ago, I argued that the French continental market design was the obverse and more constructive side of the Blockade’s destructive function as an economic war machine set in motion against British trade. Since then, as we know, Napoleonic studies have moved on to new areas and new debates, and the whole subject of the Blockade now needs to be approached in a somewhat different context.

New Directions in Napoleonic Studies: The Question of European ‘Integration’

One of the more recent historiographical interpretations is the notion that Napoleon’s overarching ambition was the ‘integration of Europe’ under French tutelage. Within this genre of writings, the Continental Blockade is seen as only one element of his wider imperial project to assimilate the annexed departments to French models and also to extend that process as far as possible to the subject states beyond the official frontiers of the French Empire, in other words, to all...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations, Maps and Tables
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• General Maps
• Introduction: Revisiting Napoleon’s Continental System: Consequences of Economic Warfare: Katherine B. Aaslestad
• Part I Looking Forward and Backward: The Historiography and Origins of the Continental System
• Part II Regional Approaches to the Practice and Consequences of the Continental System
• Part III Adapting to Economic Warfare: New Networks and Illicit Trade
• Part IV Urban Experiences and the Napoleonic Continental System
• Select Bibliography
• Index