Exports of Gold

Such trains of thought were certainly not foreign to Napoleon, as will appear from his observations at a later period, to be treated in their proper place; but in the main it may be said that he was dominated by simpler economic notions. Judging from his own utterances, as well as from the evidence of his assistants, indeed, we cannot easily doubt that, thanks to his contempt for the ideologues, he was still in the pre-mercantilist or bullionist stage, which saw something unfortunate for a country in the exportation of the precious metals and good fortune in the importation of gold as such. Thus, for instance, in a highly characteristic letter of May 29, 1810, to Gaudin, his Minister of Finance, Napoleon writes how smuggling with England is to be arranged. 'My object', he says, 'is to favour the exportation of foodstuffs from France and the importation of foreign money.' In another letter, of April 3, 1808, to his brother Louis of Holland, he gives instructions as to how to export gin to England by means of smugglers, ending in the bullying apostrophe: 'They must pay with money, never with goods, never, do you understand?' In accordance with this idea licences were issued which authorized voyages to England against exports from there of gold and silver in specie and bullion, but nothing else; and in a report to the Emperor dated November 25, 1811, Gaudin gives as the object of the licensing system 'the extraction of metallic money from England, the exportation of French goods, and activity in our ports.' His colleague, Mollien, also mentions as an explanation of an extremely curious business with enormous advances from the French treasury to the financiers, whose business, on the contrary, would have been to advance the taxes (les faiseurs de service), that a thing of that kind could never have taken place unless those gentlemen had undertaken to obtain precious metals from the Spanish colonies, which were regarded as being of incalculable value. With such a conception, the war against British exports justified itself as soon as it caused Great Britain to export gold.

One might be inclined, beforehand, to doubt Napoleon's interest in these questions, but such a view would be an immense mistake. What was at once the strength and the weakness of Napoleon was that he wished himself to understand every detail of his government better than any of his assistants, and this is particularly true as regards finances. I do not know whether this is a characteristic trait of the French revolutionaries in general, but the same feature, as a matter of fact, is to be found in Bernadotte, concerning whom Trolle-Wachtmeister, an acute Swedish observer, tells us in his diary (1816) that the then Crown Prince did not at all dispute the possibility that Sweden had three hundred more efficient soldiers than he, but declared that with regard to high finance he would yield to nobody, as he had long made it a subject of special study. Possibly this was simply an imitation of Napoleon, with whose remarkable financial measures the later efforts of his old rival had many points in common. It is certain that Napoleon's fantastic but immensely laborious summaries, often made in the field and always by his own hand, of the tables given him by his ministers of finance, reveal an almost inconceivable attention to precisely these questions, although the results bear no proportion to his toil or his ingenuity. A study of his letters easily reveals this, especially when it is observed from where the writings date. Mollien's memoirs are a running commentary on the same tendency. He says that 'two months of discussions in council and private conferences, which were almost daily repeated at Paris or Saint-Cloud after the return of the Emperor from the banks of the Niemen (in 1807), had not exhausted that curiosity, that passion for details, which he felt especially in questions of finance. His imagination created at every moment new combinations of figures, which he took for the creation of new resources. His errors of this kind were the more difficult to confute because the figures in which he expressed them gave to the mistakes the appearance of mathematical verities.' Consequently, it is not at all unlikely that Napoleon ascribed to his notions on the credit system and the precious metals a decisive influence on his great policy against England.