France (3)

With regard to source publications, of course, we have here to take into consideration the Correspondance de Napoléon Ier, the Bulletin des lois, &c., and Le Moniteur, all of them very helpful. A contemporary, secondary, though very abundant source is Chaptal, De l'industrie françoise, vols. I-II (Paris, 1819). It suffers from the very obvious vanity and prejudices of its author, who, however, probably had a better acquaintance than most of his contemporaries with the economic life of France under Napoleon. Of the almost innumerable memoirs of the Napoleonic age scarcely more than two bear on the question in hand, both by ministers of Napoleon, namely, Mollien, Mémoires d'un ministre du trésor public, vols. I-III (1845—here used, Gomel ed., Paris, 1898); and Chaptal, Mes souvenirs sur Napoléon (Paris, 1893), of which the former is beyond comparison both the more useful and the more trustworthy. Chaptal's reminiscences have the same weaknesses as his book, and also exhibit a rancour toward Napoleon that is difficult to explain. Of Mollien, on the other hand, the words of Macaulay in reference to George Savile, Marquess of Halifax, hold good to an unusual extent, namely, that he saw the events of his own day 'from the point of view from which, after the lapse of many years, they appear to the philosophic historian'.

Of secondary works we must first refer once more to Tarle's book, which in the volume so far published chiefly falls under this section. A detailed survey of the economic history of France throughout this period is given in Levasseur, Histoire des classes ouvrières et de l'industrie en France de 1789 à 1870, 2d ed., vol. I (Paris, 1903). Darmstädter, who would seem to be the foremost living German authority of the administrative history of the Napoleonic age, has treated the economic life of France under the Continental System and during the crisis of 1810-11 in the first of his two treatises, Studien zur napoleonischen Wirtschaftspolitik in Vierteljahrschrift für Social- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, vol. II (Leipzig, 1904). The only thing lacking there is a thorough grasp of the deeper economic character of the question in hand. An excellent monograph on one particular problem is Roloff's Die Kolonialpolitik Napole[???]ns I. (Historische Bibliothek, vol. X; Munich and Leipzig, 1899). Moreover, the periodical Revue des études napoléoniennes (Paris) contains several minor contributions to the history of the Continental System in France. The periodical Revue Napoléonienne, edited from Rome by Baron Lumbroso, also contains some studies which bear on the subject, as does even more the Revue d'histoire des doctrines économiques et sociales (later called Revue d'histoire économique et sociale).

The literature concerning the various incorporated territories is treated below under the countries to which they belonged just before the World War of 1914.