Customs Courts and the Military Cordon

It was on the North Sea coast that the new customs courts were of the most importance, and it was there that they proceeded with all the cruelty and contempt for private rights that invariably characterize an unscrupulous police. The new customs staff, which is represented as a rabble scraped together from different countries, penetrated by day and night into dwelling houses, and espionage flourished more than ever. With grim irony Eudel, the former head of the customs system in Hamburg who was tolerably well hated by everybody, was able, according to Bourrienne, to prophesy that he and his greencoats would be positively missed: 'Hitherto,' he said, 'they have seen only roses.' Rist, on whose evidence what has been just said is partly based, furnishes the following information of greater value:

A tribunal of blood, the prevostal court, the most frightful tool of fiscal despotism, was soon domiciled in Hamburg. In defiance of common law, the unfortunate accused here became a victim to the unlimited caprice of his merciless tyrants. Le Grand Prévôt, half customs official and half judge, here settled matters of life and death; and as a kind of mockery against every notion of honour, this bastard offspring of civil and military authority had received the same rank as the prefect and the president of the supreme court of justice. Everybody shunned his presence; and, for my own part, I have never been able to meet without a sense of loathing this, as far as one can judge, quite worthy holder of such an office.

During one fortnight in 1812 Le Grand Prévôt in Hamburg pronounced one hundred and twenty sentences of six months' imprisonment, all for offences against the blockade decree. The result was that in Hamburg the prison became so crowded that a hundred prisoners had to be conveyed to the galleys of Antwerp, while at Bremen the prison conditions were so bad that 22½ per cent. of the prisoners died. Death sentences were also passed and executed, as Rist correctly states in the passage just cited, although no justification for this was to be found in the Fontainebleau decree. The whole system became still more detestable for the reason that the licensing system was its background. Bourrienne states that the father of a family came near being shot in 1811 for having imported a small sugar-loaf in the Elbe Department, possibly at the very moment when Napoleon was signing licences for the importation of a million sugar-loaves. Moreover, in Hamburg the system gave rise to perfectly meaningless intrigues in conjunction with the usual lawless robbery on the part of the functionaries; all of which was especially troublesome owing to the fact that Holstein was indissolubly united with Hamburg, and after the annexation of the Hanse Towns people suddenly found the border of the Empire running between Altona and Hamburg. Consequently, the most elementary economic functions had to come to a standstill owing to the prohibitive legislation. This was carried to such an extent that the Holstein peasants were at first not permitted to take back over the frontier the money they had received in payment for the foodstuffs that they had sold, because it was against the law to take money out of the country.

Alongside this new system of justice on the basis of the Fontainebleau decree, Napoleon now fell back on his military resources to a greater extent than ever before. Masséna's army corps, now under the command of Oudinot, was stationed on a line from Boulogne along the coasts of Brabant and Holland, with its strongest division at Emden to maintain the connexion with the Hanse Towns. Next came Davout's corps, which, according to Thiers, was 'the finest, most reliable, and best organized' in the army, 'the invincible third corps,' the only corps in the whole of Napoleon's army which now, during the short interval of peace upon the mainland, was kept upon a war footing. It consisted of three divisions, each composed of five regiments of infantry divided into four battalions (sixty battalions of infantry in all), with eighty cannons; and in addition to these there was one division of cuirassiers and one division of light cavalry, a great siege train, and finally a flotilla of gunboats stationed in the mouths of the rivers. The extreme outpost of this line was General Rapp's force at Danzig. In a letter of September 28, 1810, to Davout, the mainstay of this organization, Napoleon gave detailed instructions as to how the different generals with their forces were to be distributed, and he expressly declared that the two divisions stationed along the German North Sea coast had as their sole task the prevention of smuggling. Moreover, considerable fortifications were made along the coast with the same purpose in the last months of 1810, after a plan to capture Heligoland without maritime forces had had to be abandoned.