The Final Collapse

By the apostasy of Russia, however, the Continental System had lost one of its retaining walls; and in the course of 1811 the breach was more and more widened by Alexander's constantly more open favourable treatment of British shipping. Napoleon had to try to raise a new barrier along the western frontier of Russia toward Prussia, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, and Austria, and to have recourse to still more active measures to bar the south coast of the Baltic, now that British ships had points d'appui on its east coast in addition to those they had had all the time among the Swedish skerries. The last step in this direction was taken by the occupation of Swedish Pomerania in January 1812; but the immediate effect of this was to cause Sweden openly to fall away. Meanwhile, the preparations for the great trial of strength with Russia afterwards made heavier and heavier demands on Napoleon's attention; and with the beginning of the Russian campaign the cordon was relaxed everywhere. After the retreat from Moscow, in the beginning of the year 1813, insurrections took place both on the North Sea coast and in the Ruhr district (the Grand Duchy of Berg), which, like the Hanse Towns, had been very badly treated. It is true that they were ruthlessly suppressed, and Napoleon, sometimes at least, adhered to his old idea that the Continental System had shaken the power of England. But in the rush of more pressing claims that now came upon him, it exceeded even Napoleon's ability to devote to the enforcement of the system the superhuman energy which, even under more favourable auspices, would have been necessary to prevent it from falling asunder. Moreover, the falling away of his compulsory allies cost the system its continental extension, so that even his sincere collaborator, Frederick VI of Denmark, took a cautious step backward; and with the advance of the allied armies into France there also followed whole swarms of forbidden goods. Finally, the Continental decrees were formally rescinded, immediately after Napoleon's abdication in April 1814. With that the system passed into the realms of history, not without dragging with it in its fall large parts of the new branches of production which were indebted to it for their existence.

But before that disintegration of the system which was visible from without and which was conditioned by external causes had had time to take effect, forces from within had appeared which made it a thing quite different from what had been originally intended. What has now been described, over and above the contents and significance of the foundational decrees, is merely the external political façade behind which the real machinery worked. It is the latter that is to be the subject of part III.