Official Corruption

But the unevenness of the struggle with the great organization at the disposition of the smugglers was enormously increased by the thorough-going corruption which was also distinctive of all branches of administration at the time, especially those branches which had to deal with the blockade.

In part the system of bribery in earlier times undeniably formed simply a kind of pay for the servants of the state, although of the most objectionable kind possible; and the line between perquisites and bribes was often as fine as a hair. With regard to Bremen, for instance, we are told how the constant exactions of money for commandants, war commissaries and consuls—for non-dutiable goods, certificates of origin, and all kinds of lawful intercourse—took the form of fixed fees with definite names; thus the fees for certificates of origin, for instance, increased tenfold during the first six quarters after the issue of the Berlin decree. There was scarcely a place in the territories occupied by France or under French control where similar tactics were not employed. In the autumn of 1810 Napoleon wrote to Marshal Davout instructing him not to let the commander at Danzig, General Rapp, tolerate any corruption, although 'everybody takes bribes'. Hamburg seems to have been especially exposed to people of this type. Marshal Brune, Consul Lachevardière, and almost more than anybody else, Bourrienne, were perfect virtuosi in this respect. As regards Bourrienne, Napoleon is alleged to have said that he (Bourrienne) would have been able to find a silver mine in the garden of the Tuileries if he had been left alone there; and at the beginning of 1811 the Emperor calculated that his former secretary had made seven or eight million francs at Hamburg. The Emperor's letters are full of embittered outbursts against his corruption, which seems to have been carried on quite systematically with the connivance of sub-agents of different sorts, and which finally led, first to his being prohibited to sign certificates of origin, and then to his being removed from office. But these are only isolated examples of things that occurred everywhere.

Rist, who, like the purely Hamburgian writers, fully confirms the French statements as to the corruptibility of Bourrienne and his associates, does not represent the conduct of his Holstein compatriots in any better light. Moreover, passing to another country, we are informed that in Geneva eighty customs officials had to be dismissed in seven months for complicity in malversation; and from the Rhine frontier we have further information that the director of customs and his relations directly helped the illicit trade in the smuggling centre of Strassburg, and that the customs lieutenants on the Rhine lived on bribes when they had no British pension.

However oppressive a corrupt administration may be to the population, yet the bribery system would scarcely have led Napoleon to change his policy, if the whole thing had been limited to exactions above those allowed by laws and ordinances. From the standpoint of the Continental System, however, the unfortunate thing was that at least as much, and probably more, could be gained by facilitating or actually encouraging—always for a consideration—precisely the traffic which the Continental System aimed to annihilate by every possible means. For such illegalities on the part of the officials the people were willing to pay munificently, and they were, if anything, somewhat more amiably disposed than before toward their foreign rulers. One of the very few persons who from the beginning to the end really made the resolute execution of the Continental System the lodestar of all his conduct, namely, Marshal Davout, Prince of Eckmühl, the last French Governor-General of Hamburg—an ever reliable sword in the Emperor's hand, and, as far as one can see, a man of the same type as the German generals who during the recent war governed occupied territories—for that very reason brought upon himself perhaps a stronger hate than any of Napoleon's other tools; and among the inhabitants of Hamburg he passed under the name of Marshal 'Wuth' (Fury).