Fontainebleau Decree (October 18, 1810)

But as a new road was now in reality opened for the legitimate importation of colonial goods, it was important for Napoleon not only to strike still harder at the illicit importation of those goods, but also to make the sale of British industrial products impossible. It is this idea which lies at the bottom of the immense increase in the rigour of the customs laws which is marked by the Fontainebleau decree of October 18, 1810, the last of the great laws in this department. Both the penalties now introduced and the treatment of the goods themselves involved a reversion to the most violent methods of the prohibitive system. First as regards the prohibited goods, that is to say, manufactured products, the smuggling leaders of different grades were punished with ten years' penal servitude and branding, while the lower-grade tools might under extenuating circumstances get off with a milder kind of punishment (peines correctionnelles) and 5 to 10 years' police supervision. The smuggling of the goods specified on the tariff, that is to say, colonial goods, involved as much as four years' penal servitude, while 'simple smuggling,' that is, smuggling 'without any agreement or obligation of a kind to form an undertaking or insurance,' did not lead to penal servitude.

The regulations as regards the treatment of the goods were carried to still greater lengths than the punishment for smugglers. As regards colonial goods the penalty was limited, as before, to confiscation, the goods to be sold by auction every six months; but with regard to prohibited goods Napoleon now went to the extreme and ordered that they should be publicly burned or otherwise destroyed after a list had been made of them with prices attached. Here Napoleon was following precedents which were to be found in English legislation of the seventeenth century, and which was repeated as late as the beginning of the reign of George III. For the whole of this draconic legislation there were erected special customs courts (cours prévôtales des douanes), the operations of which have stood out to later generations as the culmination of the oppression involved in the Continental System.