Second Milan Decree (Dec. 17, 1807)

It was during his stay in the kingdom of Italy that Napoleon was informed of the British Orders in Council of November 11; and he seems to have been seized by a violent fit of anger, which found expression in the second of the fundamental laws of the Continental System, namely, the second Milan decree, issued on December 17, 1807. The part of the Orders in Council to which he especially devoted his attention was the in itself not very remarkable examination (the warning) by British war-ships; but of course he also took notice of the obligatory call in England and the duty on re-exports. He hurled out his decree as a measure of reprisal against the English government, 'which,' he said, 'assimilates its legislation to that of Algiers,' and applied it only against such nations as failed to compel England to respect their flags, and also, as usual, made it valid only so long as England continued to disregard international law (Article 4). Every vessel which submitted to any of the three regulations—examination, call in England, or paying duty there—was declared to be denationalized; it had forfeited the protection of its own flag and, from the view-point of French legislation, had become English property (Article 1), and had thus become lawful prize both in port and at sea (Article 2). The doubt which had hitherto prevailed concerning the application of the Continental System by sea was thereby removed. The real content of the Milan decree is simply the express and unrestricted extension of the system from the Continent to the sea, in so far as French privateers could make it effective there. This fact finds expression in the curious formula that the British Isles are now declared in blockade both by land and by sea; and every vessel on its way to or from an English port, or an English colonial port, or even a port occupied by England, are declared to be fair prize (Article 3). Moreover, by attaching these regulations in the first place to the examination, which the neutrals almost entirely lacked the power of preventing, and not only to the call in a British port, where a certain amount of independent will might perchance remain for the masters of neutral vessels, the Continental System had approached the Nivôse law of 1798 more closely than in its previous workings; that is to say, it had come to apply against neutral shipping as such. This was quite deliberate on the part of Napoleon; and from this point of time dates his view that there were no longer any neutrals, inasmuch as they were either, and as a rule, Englishmen in disguise, or, at all events, had made themselves the accomplices of the English by accommodating themselves to the Orders in Council. This construction put upon non-French shipping applied almost as a matter of course to vessels, not only from allied, but also from purely vassal powers. On the very same day that the Milan decree was issued, for instance, Napoleon gave orders to Decrès, his minister of the marine, to detain a Russian vessel—that is to say, a vessel belonging to an allied nation—which had arrived in the port of Morlaix in Brittany; and for this order he gave the truly Napoleonic justification that it was either really English—in which case it was condemned as a matter of course—or that it was really Russian, and in that case should be detained to prevent it from being taken by the English. Decrès was also charged to give orders to the same effect to all French ports concerning Danish, Dutch, Spanish, and all other vessels, and to investigate whether the regulations were similarly applied in the vassal states. On this basis Napoleon afterwards systematically built up his treatment of non-French vessels in the ports of France and its subsidiary states, with gradually more and more developed protectionist tendencies as against shipping which was not purely French.

On the same day that the Milan decree was issued, Champagny, the foreign minister at the time, received orders to transmit it by a special courier to Holland, Spain, and Denmark, with the request that these nominally sovereign states should comply with (obtempérer à) it; and the continental powers immediately set to work to bring their legislation into accordance with the new decree of the master. Of greater interest than the details of this development, which becomes important only in connexion with the inquiry into the actual workings of the system, is the attitude assumed by the United States—at that time almost the only remaining neutral power—toward this blow directed by both the belligerents mainly against neutral trade. The highly instructive development of the American attitude toward the Continental System went on alongside the development of European affairs down to the practical collapse of the system in 1812. It will form the subject of the next chapter.