French Policy of Interests

THE strain of egoism in Napoleon's policy is a well-known and abundantly proved side of the Continental System, which naturally weakens the sympathy usually shown by German writers for the fundamental idea of the plan to exclude England from the Continent. The pretended object of combining the Continent of Europe into an economic unit against Great Britain did not, it is true, altogether lack champions. The fairly obvious and undeniably important idea of developing the Confederation of the Rhine (which embraced the whole of Germany, with the exception of the possessions of Austria, Prussia, Sweden, and Denmark, and whose creator and powerful protector Napoleon was) into a customs union, which, incidentally, would have been an antecedent of the German Zollverein of 1833, was put forward by Beugnot, the 'imperial commissary' or supreme head of the local administration in the Grand-Duchy of Berg, on two or three different occasions; it also had a spokesman in Bacher, Napoleon's minister to the Confederation of the Rhine at Frankfurt; but it was not in the least degree this spirit that prevailed in Paris. In the late summer of 1807 Napoleon charged Champagny, who was just then passing from the Home Office to the Foreign Office, with the task of determining what the princes of the Confederation of the Rhine wished for their trade, and what measures should be taken to secure a market for French industrial products in their territories. It was assuredly in accordance with the Emperor's intention that the second question was the one that Champagny in reality answered, and in doing so he followed the significant line that it was necessary to prevent the now consolidated German states from throwing obstacles in the way of French sales and particularly the transport of French goods across Germany, obstacles which had been impossible at the time when the states were small and divided. In accordance with this idea, Napoleon maintained a whole swarm of commercial spies all over Germany, and these made reports on the smuggling of English and continental goods and on the capacity of French manufacturers to beat foreign competitors; and to a large extent it was on the strength of such information that Napoleon later directed his measures against sales in other countries.

A celebrated illustration of the way in which Napoleon in reality regarded his political mission in this department is contained in a letter which he dispatched from Schönbrunn to Fouché (acting home secretary at the time) after his victory over Austria in 1809 (September 27). In that letter the master empties the vials of his wrath over the commercial department of the French Home Office:

If the department had done its duty, it would have taken advantage of my march into Vienna to encourage merchants and manufacturers to export their cloth, pottery, and other goods which pay considerable duties in Austria, cloth alone paying 60 per cent. I should, as a matter of course, have released them from these dues and filled the warehouses of Vienna chock-full of French goods. But that department thinks of nothing and does nothing.

Accordingly, it was not to exclude England, but to make a breach in the customs wall against French goods, that he here wished to make use of his victories; and in full accordance with this the French manufacturers just a week later tried to bring about an export of fine French cloth to Vienna on payment of a very insignificant duty, without any reciprocity for Austrian goods in France.

But Napoleon's egoistic policy was most clearly framed with regard to the Kingdom of Italy (North Italy), which he was anxious to transform entirely into an economic dependency of France. Hermetically sealed to the sales of the industrial products of all other countries, it was open to receive French goods and to provide France with needed raw materials (chiefly silk), but without any corresponding right to derive advantages from the French market; finally, it was designed as a barrier to prevent goods from the competitors of France from penetrating into Naples, Sardinia, and South Europe in general. Owing to the fact that Italy for hundreds and even thousands of years had been economically connected with Switzerland and Germany by close commercial ties, this policy involved a severe dislocation of the industrial life of these last two countries and compelled them to have recourse to other markets or to other branches of activity. Napoleon has never given his general principles relating to the treatment of allies and subordinate non-French territories a more intensive expression than in another famous letter which he addressed on August 23, 1810, to his faithful and reliable step-son, Eugene Beauharnais, who governed Italy in his name as Viceroy. The fundamental idea of this letter appears in the following extract, with Napoleon's own highly significant italics:

My fundamental principle is, France first and foremost (la France avant tout). You must never lose sight of the fact that if English trade triumphs on the seas it is because the English are the strongest there. It is reasonable, therefore, that as France is the strongest on land, French trade should also triumph there. Otherwise all is lost.... Italy has France to thank for so much that she really should not mind if France acquired some commercial advantages there. Therefore, take as your motto: La France avant tout.

The beginning of this policy in Italy has already been described, and the continuation followed along the same lines. The decree of the year 1806 was directed against Bohemian, Saxon, Swiss, Bavarian, and Berg textile goods, and seems to have hit hardest the Grand-Duchy of Berg. That country, which was at that time nominally ruled by Napoleon's brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, but in reality by the Emperor's own organs, managed to obtain an exemption for itself in January 1807; but as early as December of the same year this exemption was cancelled. Beginning with the following year its goods were definitely excluded from the Italian market, while the exports of Switzerland were hit particularly hard by an intensification, introduced about the same time, of the decree of 1806, which forbade all imports of cotton goods except from France. The position of French goods in the Italian market was further strengthened in 1808 by a curious Franco-Italian 'commercial treaty' which Napoleon, in his capacity as autocratic ruler of both countries, concluded with himself. Finally, this policy culminated in 1810 in a triple regulation which in the first place extended the prohibition of imports from cotton goods to woollen goods, when they came from other countries than France, in the second place supplemented the prohibition on imports by a prohibition of transit, and in the third place forbade the export of Italian raw silk except to Lyons, the export of silk from Piedmont, which was incorporated with France, having been forbidden as early as 1805. The explanation given for this (in the letter to Eugene just cited) was that it would otherwise go to England, because Germany did not manufacture silk; but this explanation ignored the fact, well known to Napoleon, that Switzerland both carried on a trade in Italian raw silk and also had a flourishing silk manufacture. In the Kingdom of Naples, which was ruled first by Joseph Bonaparte and afterwards by Murat, there was applied, under the hard pressure of Napoleon, a similar policy, first with preferential duties on French goods and afterwards with a prohibition on the import of foreign goods.

As regards the states of the Confederation of the Rhine, Napoleon observed considerably greater restraint; and comparatively little is known as to violations of their right of self-determination, despite Champagny's proposals just mentioned. On the other hand, it is highly significant that not even the territories incorporated with the empire in Napoleon's own time were thereby automatically placed on the same footing as 'the old departments'. This was a weakness which had, as a rule, characterized the loosely combined states of the old regime, not least France herself; but in Napoleon's strictly centralized realm it did not mean any such looseness of structure, but something quite different. There, indeed, it is an expression of the fact that the territories were worked into the empire in order to be shut out from British supplies, and at the same time were not to be more than proselytes of the gate; that is to say, they were to be left without participation in the advantages of the French market. This policy, which has not yet been made the subject of special investigation, was applied, for instance, as against Holland and 'the Hanseatic departments,' in such a way that French goods could be conveyed to the incorporated territories without let or hindrance in the same way as to the other parts of the empire; but goods from there, on the other hand, were regarded as foreign when they were conveyed to France. For Holland, it is true, it was laid down in the decree of incorporation that the customs frontier with France should disappear as early as the beginning of 1811, but this disappearance was repeatedly put off and seems never to have been realized. It makes a peculiar impression, for instance, to hear of people from Leyden, in 1811, and from Osnabrück, in 1812, praying for free intercourse with the empire, although both places belonged to the territories incorporated in 1810; and the same was the case with the Hanse Towns.

The whole of this egoistical system probably had an even more irritating than economically injurious effect on the other countries because it ran counter to the most cherished economic sentiments of the natural man as to the advantages of exports and the disadvantages of imports. Moreover, it did not even have the redeeming feature of providing the export goods of France with the dominant position that was its sole object and raison d'être. To a considerable extent this was due to the fundamental character of the Continental System, with its tendency to make the supply of raw materials enormously dear and difficult; for, as the figures already given show very clearly, this hit France the hardest, because smuggling by sea was checked more effectually there than farther to the north, while goods smuggled by land had to be filtered through many customs frontiers before they reached France. But it was further aided by the fact that French industry was marked by the production of luxuries, which rendered sales extremely difficult, especially toward the close of the period, when the burden of the endless wars, both bloody and bloodless, on the whole of Europe was pressing with increasing weight. Finally, there was the fact that France could not by any violent measures overcome the circumstance that her industries had not made so much progress as those of certain other countries. In Italy, it is true, these factors made themselves felt to a less extent, for the industries of that country did not really appear as competitors; and the blockade towards the north would seem to have had a certain degree of efficacy. At any rate, the available figures for the Kingdom of Italy show that Franco-Italian commerce increased many times over, so that about half the foreign trade, including both imports and exports, fell to the exchange of commodities with France; and from Naples also there could be ascertained a rise in imports from France. On the other hand, this implies no increase in the exports of France on the whole. Only one year during the period of the empire (1806), according to the official returns, could show figures as high as those of the last years of the ancien régime, despite the huge annexations of important industrial regions that had taken place since then; and, as has already been mentioned, the export of woollens had declined. It is particularly striking how poor a showing France made in competition with her continental rivals in the German market. It is fairly obvious, and also confirmed by the sources, that the obstacles which Napoleon placed in the way of the exports of those countries to the south of Europe must have helped to further their penetration into other markets, where they entered into competition with France. Thus the Swiss showed themselves at a Leipzig fair for the first time at Easter, 1808, after the closing of the frontier toward Italy had been made more strict at the end of 1807; and their sales of muslins were forced anew on that market after the still stricter embargo of 1810. In that case it is evident that little had been gained from a French point of view, even though injury was inflicted on the trade of the other countries as a result of its being diverted from its natural course.

The reports of the French commercial spies completely agree with the statements found in German and Swiss sources as to the difficulty for France to compete with the other countries. Thus from Switzerland we learn that French competition was unimportant in Germany, except for silk; from Bohemia, that French goods could not compete; and from Frankfurt, that French goods were the least important of all. The French reports usually sought an explanation of the fact that German and Swiss goods had the upper hand in various accidental circumstances, such as greater proximity to the place of production, simpler qualities, greater ease in obtaining raw materials, &c. But some, on the other hand, are more frank. Thus the report from Darmstadt runs: 'The cashmere and cotton factories of Saxony and Switzerland injure our trade in Germany, where they find great sales and are much in request under the name of English wares, the appearance of which they imitate.' And in the autumn of 1810 one of the French commercial spies made a statement which, from the standpoint of Napoleon's egoistic policy, must be regarded as a condemnation of the entire Continental System: Their competition' is perhaps at the present moment more dangerous for France and Italy than that of the English manufacturers, because they dispute the Continent with us'. Thus, despite the best will in the world and despite unlimited powers to reserve for France what had become free through the blockade against England, Napoleon had scarcely succeeded in obtaining any increased sales for French export industries. As a measure to promote exports in the interest of France, therefore, the Continental System cannot be regarded as having achieved any great results.

We must now examine somewhat more closely how the economic life of certain other continental countries, and particularly their manufactures, was affected by the Continental System; and in this matter, especially with regard to the general effect, it seems proper to limit ourselves to a few typical examples.