Chapter III.: Smuggling and Corruption; Fiscalism and Licensing, Smuggling (2)

THE tendencies described in the last chapter made it increasingly clear to Napoleon during the year 1810 that he must find new expedients if he was ever to succeed in making the Continental self-blockade effective; and he also had another reason for reshaping his policy, in the great inconveniences which had revealed themselves both in his finances and in French economic life. In order to form a clear idea of this second phase of the history of the Continental System, however, we must consider in a little more detail the smuggling and the system of bribery.

Concerning the prevalence of smuggling under the Continental System lengthy books might be written, for it flourished throughout Europe to an extent of which the world since then, and perhaps even before then, has rarely seen the like. Coercive measures in the sphere of commercial policy have at all times found a palliative in smuggling. But that palliative was used to an infinitely larger extent now that coercion acquired a range previously undreamt of; and at the same time it was felt to be unendurable in a quite different way than formerly, owing both to the increased importance of international intercourse and to the fact that outside the limits of France proper it represented a foreign dominion and lacked moral support in all classes of the community. The purely external forms of the smuggling are of relatively subordinate importance in this connexion. The examples that have been mentioned in the preceding pages, and that will be mentioned in the following pages, may here be supplemented by a couple of contemporary descriptions. One of these by Bourrienne refers to the year 1809 and has a more or less anecdotal character.