French Measures (1793-1799)

At first the measures of France had been considerably milder than those of Great Britain; and this was natural enough in view of the fact that France stood in great need of the help of neutrals. By a law passed on May 9, 1793—that is to say, before the British instructions of June 8, but after the declaration of April 4—the Convention ordered that all neutral vessels conveying foodstuffs to an enemy port or carrying goods belonging to the enemy should be captured and conducted into a French port. Such vessels were to be fair prizes, and their cargoes were to be purchased on behalf of France. But the French purchase regulations themselves were more favourable to the neutrals than the corresponding British ones; and at the same time it was declared, in the same way as afterwards under Napoleon, that the orders would be abolished as soon as the enemy on his part granted the unrestricted importation of foodstuffs into France.

At first the practice, too, was milder on the French side. Gradually, however, French policy turned completely around; and it was not long before the new tendency acquired official form. On July 2, 1796 (Messidor 14, year IV), the Directory categorically declared in an ordinance of only a few lines that British methods were to be applied against the neutrals in every respect. The culmination, however, was reached in the notorious law of January 18, 1798 (Nivôse 29, year VI), which laid down that the nationality of a vessel should be determined by its cargo, so that if any vessel was carrying goods of any kind coming from England or its possessions, no matter who was the owner, this fact alone should justify the confiscation, not only of these goods, but also of the vessel itself and its entire cargo. Moreover, any vessel that had touched at a British port was forbidden to put in at any French port; and earlier it had already been made a practice to seize vessels bound for a British port.

It would have been difficult to go farther; and this time actions were not milder, but still more violent, than words. From the two years or so during which the law of Nivôse was in force come all the wildest examples of high-handed procedure on the part of belligerents on the seas. It was especially Scandinavian vessels that were exposed to this reign of terror, while the only important neutral power besides Sweden and Denmark and Norway, namely, the United States, began what was practically a privateering war against France without any formal declaration of war. The French law came into force without any preliminary warning, so that vessels which had sailed without knowledge of its provisions fell helplessly into the hands of captors; and once seized, their chances of escape were very small indeed. With the importance that British industry had now acquired, in fact, it was almost impossible for a vessel to sail without having on board some article of British origin; and it was not at all necessary that these articles should constitute its cargo, in the strict sense of the term, to seal its fate. A woollen blanket on the skipper's berth, a few sacks of British coal for the ship's stove, British earthenware used by the crew, the British metal buttons of the skipper's coat, etc., were sufficient to lead to confiscation. Indeed, the old Hamburg economist Büsch gives us in one of his last works, that bearing the exquisite title of Ueber das Bestreben der Völker neuerer Zeit, einander in ihrem Seehandel recht wehe zu thun (1800), such an example as this: Once when a French captor, quite exceptionally, did not succeed in finding anything British on board a captured vessel, two of the sailors were bribed to disclose the alleged fact that the skipper had had a pair of English boots which he had thrown overboard on the approach, of the captor; and that, says Büsch, was enough to bring about the confiscation of the cargo. In a suit against five Danish East Indian vessels bearing rich products obviously of Danish origin, the captors succeeded in having the cargoes condemned on the ground that Lascars included in the crews were British subjects; and in other cases vessels and cargoes were condemned on the ground that the former had been built in a British shipyard and had been bought after the outbreak of the war—in spite of the fact that the vessel was a French prize and had been sold to its then Danish owner by the French captor.

Justice was indeed a parody. Those who acted as judges were ordinarily the consuls in the most important haunts of the privateers, with whom they often acted in collusion; nay, some of them were themselves ex-privateers or even still commercially interested in the captures—an example which one of Napoleon's governors was destined to follow in the fullness of time. The abuses increased to such an extent that they completely outgrew the control of the weak government of the Directory. On one occasion, for example, Reubell, one of the members of the Directory, informed the Danish minister in Paris that a French prize court had condemned and caused to be sold for the benefit of the captor, a Swedish vessel with a cargo destined for the French government itself. Moreover, the privateers worked into each other's hands in various ways. Thus one of them might rob a neutral vessel of its ship's papers in order that another might seize it with impunity; for without papers its condemnation was certain.

What is peculiar in the policy of the Directory, and at the same time significant for the ensuing developments, is the fact that it had the effect of a French self-blockade. It is indeed manifest, as Admiral Mahan points out, that the power which was excluded from the sea was the one which really had need of the neutrals for the procurement of its supplies, and which, therefore, from a purely material point of view at least, had the most to lose by a course of violent action against them. 'Every blow against a neutral,' he says, 'was really, even though not seemingly, a blow for Great Britain.' During the period of scarcely two years in which the law of Nivôse was in force, it practically did away with that neutral trade and navigation with France which was to some extent independent of Great Britain. Neutral vessels, in fact, did not venture there, so that even during the year 1798 their coasting trade in France declined by two-thirds and their foreign trade with the same country by one-fourth. Moreover, the obstacles that French captures placed in the way of free navigation brought it about that neutrals in general were pushed back; and this, of course, was an advantage to Great Britain, which was enabled by her command of the sea to protect her trading vessels by means of convoys. The latter obstacle in the way of neutral shipping was of less importance than the former, however, because the two neutral Scandinavian states also fitted out convoys in common on the basis of the League of Armed Neutrality of 1794. This had excellent commercial results, at least for Denmark, but the French policy caused it to be of very little benefit to France. Nor did the latter country receive any compensations whatever for its own shipping, for according to the Directory's own declaration, in 1799, the British blockade had been maintained so strictly that not a single vessel was sailing the seas under a French flag.

It was therefore quite natural that Napoleon, as early as December, 1799, that is, shortly after his accession to power, should repeal, or cause to be repealed, the law of Nivôse and revive the more moderate regulations of 1778 (law of Frimaire 23 and ordinance of Frimaire 29, year VIII); and at the beginning of the following year he did away with some of the worst abuses in the administration of prize-court justice by instituting a Supreme Prize Court in Paris. In principle, however, his later policy was to be a faithful reflection of that of the Directory, as will be shown in due course.