Napoleon's Orders in December 1806

The best idea of the apparatus which was set going can be obtained from the letters which Napoleon wrote on December 2 and 3 to Marshal Mortier in Hamburg, to the police and navy ministers, and to his brother, King Louis of Holland, and from the simultaneously issued proclamation (December 2) as to the blockade in the northeast. In the first of the letters Mortier received orders to occupy Vegesack on the Weser, north of Bremen, in order to complete the blockade of that river. King Louis was to place batteries on the left bank of the river, in order to have a cross fire from corresponding batteries at Bremerlehe on the eastern shore. In the mouth of the Elbe a redoubt and a battery were to be erected on an island in the river immediately opposite Stade, so that no vessel could pass without being examined, and no English goods could come in through Altona, Hamburg, or any other place; and in all three Hanse Towns French troops were to be stationed to stop English letters. A brigadier general was to be stationed in Stade, and another in the outport, Cuxhaven; and in addition to this, two cordons—one from Hamburg to Travemünde along the frontier of Holstein, and another along the left bank of the Elbe as far as a point just opposite Hamburg—were to be placed under the command of yet a third brigadier general. As regards troops, the greater part of General Dumonceau's division, two Italian regiments and a third of the Dutch cavalry, were to be used for these purposes; and at the same time the minister of the marine received orders to send a post captain with two ensigns and forty sailors to equip some sloops in Stade. The customs authorities received orders to send five hundred (according to the proclamation, three hundred) customs officials under a director of customs and two inspectors of customs. These were the 'green coats', and in point of fact they arrived before the close of the year and soon drew upon themselves the bitter enmity of the population. Finally, Marshal Moncey was to have at his disposal one hundred gendarmes for distribution along the barrier. On that very same day (December 2) Napoleon wrote a second letter to Mortier with a renewed exhortation to set up a good battery at Stade; and above all things he was to prevent all communication between Hamburg and Altona, to confiscate on the Elbe all vessels with potash, coal, and all other goods coming from England, and to detain all letters from England. In these very first orders, however, the difficulty emerged of obtaining honest executors of the measures. The naval minister received a special reminder to send 'unbribable' officers; and from the very beginning an effort was made to interest the soldiers themselves in the effectivity of the blockade by the regulation that they should have the benefit of all confiscations of goods which should try to pass. But in several of the letters, especially that to Fouché, the minister of police, Napoleon says that he has received complaints—in reality only too well founded—about his consul in Hamburg, Lachevardière, who 'seems to steal with impunity'.

In Hamburg there still survived the continental establishment of the Merchant Adventurers' Company, the most notable English trading company of an older type (the 'Regulated Company'), though it no longer played any considerable part. In order to save this for the English, the Senate of Hamburg purchased the whole establishment, called 'The Merchant Adventurers' Court', and presented it to the members, who became citizens of Hamburg besides and in this way escaped imprisonment, so far as they did not escape by flight. The main thing, however, was the seizure of the English stocks of goods, which Napoleon, after various negotiations, fixed at the somewhat high figure of 17,000,000 francs for Hamburg and 2,000,000 francs for Lübeck; meanwhile Bremen, by delaying the operation for a whole year, managed to smuggle away the greater part of the goods there and had to account for only 377,000 francs. In Leipzig, whose Fair still constituted by far the most important market in Central Europe, especially for manufactured goods to and from all points of the compass, the stocktaking gave a value of 9,150,000 francs, which was redeemed for 6,000,000 francs. Things went in the same way elsewhere.

In Great Britain the publication of the Berlin decree caused, according to evidence given before a parliamentary committee, a cessation of exports to the Continent during the months of December 1806, and of January and February 1807, with a rise in the marine insurance premiums. But the absence of captures on the basis of the decree, which, as we have seen before, was at first regarded as not applying to the sea, after that put new life into commercial intercourse; and an Order in Council of February 18, with instructions for the commanders of vessels, granted unrestricted traffic for the vessels and goods of the Hanse Towns and the rest of that part of North Germany which was occupied by the French; and this safeguarded intercourse with them.

During the whole of the first six months of 1807, indeed, the Continental self-blockade may be said to have been practically ineffective, at least in North Germany. The systematic dishonesty of Napoleon's tools gave rise to regular orgies during this time, especially with the help of the new commander-in-chief in Hamburg, Marshal Brune, whom Napoleon, with unusually good reason, branded as an 'undaunted robber'. According to the report of de Tournon, who was sent there especially to investigate, Brune's instructions themselves to the customs staff were calculated to encourage smuggling; but that was the case to a very much greater extent with the application of the instructions. When vessels came up the Elbe, they were allowed, in absolute defiance of the instructions quoted above, to continue their journey past Stade, with only one single person from the barrier control on board, usually an ignorant seaman, while the customs officials themselves were consistently kept at a distance. The bill of lading was examined by a sub-officer of the navy; and the inspection which it was the duty of Consul Lachevardière to carry out, was handed over by him to a Hamburg broker, who had the greatest possible interest in letting everything pass. On the basis of the entirely uncontrolled investigation of this person, the consul afterwards issued a certificate as to the non-English origin of the goods; and fabricated Holstein certificates of origin were always available to bolster up the certificate. At the close of May 1807, Brune went a step farther and removed the always relatively zealous customs officials from the Hamburg-Travemünde frontier line and the Elbe line from Harburg (immediately opposite Hamburg) to Stade, replacing them by gendarmes. Consequently, during the five and a half months down to the beginning of August there arrived in Hamburg, without impediment, 1,475 vessels with cargoes estimated at 590,000 tons, including the most notoriously English goods, such as coal. According to the investigator just mentioned, Hamburg was chock full of English and colonial goods, which were sold as openly as in London, and not a single seizure had occurred. This would also seem to have been the time at which Bourrienne, Napoleon's envoy in Hamburg—according to his own story, which is in this case confirmed from English sources—obtained cloth and leather from England in order to be in a position to supply Napoleon's own army with the uniform coats, vests, caps, and shoes which he had to procure.

The farce of Brune's conduct in Hamburg, however, was too much for Napoleon, who removed him in the latter half of July and appointed Bernadotte as his successor. This appointment manifestly brought with it a stricter enforcement of the law, although the new and well-meaning despot that the Hamburgers thereby got proved rather costly to the town; nor did he entirely escape more or less unproven accusations of corruptibility, both from Napoleon and also, later on, from the Senate of Hamburg. Above all, however, after the removal of Brune, Napoleon regulated the blockade by means of two new decrees of August 6 and November 13, 1807. These placed the right of seizing English goods into the hands of the customs staff, which was strengthened at the same time, while the troops were placed at the disposal of the customs officials and increased guaranties were provided in various ways that unlawful goods should not be permitted to escape examination. In doing this Napoleon fell back on the old and very clumsy expedient of declaring large main groups of goods to be eo ipso British when they did not come from France, that is to say, the majority of textile goods, (except certain ones imported by the Danish East Asiatic Company), cutlery and hardware, glass, pottery, and lump sugar; and for the colonial goods detailed certificates of origin were required from the French commercial agents in the exporting port. As regards the question as to whether a vessel had put in at an English port, a searching examination was prescribed of the captain and the sailors separately, and the arrest of such of them as should give false information, after which they should be set free only after the payment of a heavy fine (6,000 francs for the captain and 500 francs for each sailor). All such vessels were to be confiscated, while the Berlin decree merely prescribed their expulsion. The latter of these two decrees, that concerning certificates of origin, the examination of the crews, and the confiscation of the vessels, was given practically unaltered validity for the whole Empire through what is called the first Milan decree, issued ten days later (November 23). Within barely a month, as we have seen, there followed the answer to the Orders in Council, the great second Milan decree, which marks the end of Napoleon's measures bearing on the Continental System in 1807. On the heels of all this, immediately after the beginning of the new year (January 11, 1808) there came the so-called Tuileries decree, which sought to induce the crews and passengers of vessels to reveal any call in an English port by promising one-third of the value of the vessel and cargo as a reward. In September 1807, Napoleon, with his customary ruthlessness, had intervened in Holland and, to the despair of his brother Louis, had calmly caused his gendarmes to convey to France from that nominally independent kingdom a citizen of Breda and a citizen of Bergen-op-Zoom on the suspicion of smuggling.

At the same time, thanks to Canning's almost Napoleonic contempt for the independence of neutrals, Napoleon received valuable assistance in the blockade of the North Sea coast in consequence of the bombardment of Copenhagen in the beginning of September and the breach between Denmark and Great Britain. As a matter of fact, Schleswig-Holstein, during the whole of the preceding period, had been a serious obstacle in the way of Napoleon's measures south of the Elbe. When the Elbe and the Weser were barred, Tönning in particular, but also Husum on the west coast of Schleswig, had largely replaced the Hanse Towns during the years 1803-6 as importers of English and colonial goods; and their trade had flourished like plants in a forcing-house. All attempts to prevent the passing of goods to the south from Holstein territory through the town of Altona, which was practically continuous with Hamburg (all zu nah), met with almost insuperable difficulties, all the more as the local Holstein authorities never failed to certify the neutral origin of the goods. It was, therefore, of very great importance that the ruler of Denmark, the Crown Prince Frederick, embittered through the conduct of Great Britain, placed himself at the service of the Continental System, with almost unique loyalty, and as early as September 1807 ordered the seizure of all forbidden goods in Holstein. Almost alone among the allies of Napoleon, he repudiated the idea of feigning adherence to the system while the real intention was to allow intercourse with Great Britain. His was not the principle suaviter in re, fortiter in modo, to quote a modern historian. It is true that the British, on their side, made a counter-move which was to have far-reaching consequences in the opposite direction, in that, simultaneously with the attack on Copenhagen, they occupied the Danish possession of Heligoland; but the effects of this did not immediately show themselves.