Napoleon A Biography

seemed absurd that England was crammed with surplus products while
France languished through shortage of the selfsame products, especially
raw materials and colonial produce, and could not work out an efficient
method of import substitution. Whereas corn, fruit, wool, wood and wine
had been sold to England before r 8o6, the peasants could not now export
the surplus; this hit them particularly badly after the bumper harvest of
r 8o8.

With industrialists, agriculturalists, shipowners, peasants and consum­
ers all suffering from the blockade, it was not surprising that human
nature asserted itself. Speculation in coffee, sugar and cotton led to high
prices, inflated profits, stock exchange gambling mania and hence
generalized corruption and cynicism. The blockade was evaded even by
Napoleon's most senior lieutenants. Junior aides took bribes and traded
on the black market, while the Bonapartist grandees indulged in
corruption at a flagrant level. Massena sold unofficial licences to trade
with England to Italian merchants, thus swelling his already vast fortune.
Bourrienne, French Minister at Hamburg in r 8o6-o7, was ordered to
find so,ooo greatcoats and cloaks for the Grande Armee for the winter
campaign against Russia. He secretly purchased cloth and leather from
England, claiming that the Army would have died of cold if the
Continental System had been observed. In fact the inflow of British
manufactures continued at such a rate that in the r 8 r z campaign soldiers
in the Grand Army wore boots made in Northampton and greatcoats
made from Lancashire and Yorkshire cloth.

But undoubtedly the great growth industry during the heyday of the
Continental System was contraband, which was made easy by a
combination of local demand, corrupt offici;1ls, lax surveillance and
support from the British. Under Napoleon there were really only three
ways to make a vast fortune if you were not a marshal: by supplying the
Army, by speculation in national property, and by smuggling. With
opportunities in the first two areas rapidly drying up, contraband
beckoned as the future road to El Dorado.

It is hard to overestimate the rich pickings that could be made from
smuggling. The Rothschilds, now coming to prominence after the
pioneering labours of the dynasty's founder Meyer Amschel, made vast
sums by financing illegal trading and made even more after r 8 r o by
manipulating the British and French licensing systems simultaneously.
One lace merchant, a certain M . Gaudoit of Caen, imported illicit British
goods worth 750,ooo francs between r 8o r-o8, using the roundabout
route London-Amsterdam-Frankfurt-Paris-Bordeaux. On the Rhine it
was reckoned that a smuggler could earn r 2-r4 francs a night, when the

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daily wage for an agricultural labourer was I-I:i francs; in the Pyrenees
the respective rates were ten francs and three francs. In Hamburg it was
estimated that 6-I o,ooo people a day smuggled coffee, sugar and other
comestibles, of which an absolute maximum of 5% was confiscated.
Napoleon hit back with occasional exemplary punishments. In the
Rothschilds' native city of Frankfurt, a sanctions-busting centre, French
troops publicly burned £ I ,20o,ooo worth of contraband goods in
November I 8 I o. But such scenes were rare: even when French viceroys
and governors found out about contraband they could usually be bribed
to remain silent or simply go through the motions.

In the light of all this, the surprise is that the Continental Blockade
worried the British as much as it did. The impact of the System on the
British economy has been much disputed, and some indices seem to show
an almost nil effect. Britain's merchant fleet rose from I 3,446 ships in
I 8o2 to I 7,346; the rise in unemployment can be explained as a function
of population growth in the U.K. from I 5,846,ooo in I 8o i to I 8,o44,000
in I 8 r r ; the modest profits of industry can be interpreted as systematic
tax evasion. But there are other figures that tell a different story,
particularly in the early period of the blockade until I 8o8. Exports, which
reached a peak in I 809 (£50.3 million) were only £9 million up on the
peacetime figure for I 8o2. Continental trade, worth £22 . 5 million in I 8o2
fell to half that in I 8o8. The value of Britain's re-export trade in colonial
produce declined from £ I 4,4 I 9,ooo in I 8o2 to £7,862,000 in I 8o8 and
was still only at £8,278,ooo in I 8 I I ; sugar, which sold for 73 shillings per
hundredweight in I 798 fell to 32 shillings by I 807 and did not rise above
50 shillings until I 8 I 3 . The stagnation of colonial produce on the market
was matched by the crisis of British manufacturers; industrialists in
Manchester could not liquidate their stocks of cotton; the price of flax
rose; there was a grave crisis in the wool industry.

Matters were at an acute pass in early I 8o8. There was a serious drop
in exports in the last six months of I 807 and the first six of I 8o8; exports
to Europe sank to £ I 5 million as compared to £ r 9� million in the twelve
months before. The combination of Jefferson's embargo and Napoleon's
blockade began to bite, and there were serious riots in Lancashire and
Yorkshire in May and June I 8o8. Ex-Prime Minister Grenville was one
of those in England who began to panic. It was precisely at that moment
that Napoleon made his disastrous and self-destructive intervention in
Spain. Ostensibly, he moved in to shut a door still open to British
produce, but at a stroke he ruined the prospect of Spain as a market for
French manufacturers and opened the trade of Latin America to the
British. With justifiable irony the economist d'Ivernois remarked that the

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Emperor's blockade would have been more effective if, at the same time
as he was taking violent steps to close European markets to the British, he
was not also taking even more violent ones to open South America to
them.

The Spanish ulcer not only drained France of blood and treasure but
saved the British economy. After 1 809 the ports of Spain and, more
importantly, of Latin America were open to them. When the Grande
Armee was progressively switched from Germany to Spain in r 8o9-1 r ,
making contraband in northern Europe easier, British recovery was rapid.
In r 8o9, at £50.3 million, British exports reached their peak during the
Napoleonic years. Even though they declined again during the years of
'general crisis' from r 8 r o-r2, they never again descended to r 8o7-o8
levels. When the North Sea became extremely difficult for the Royal
Navy in r 8 r o-12, the British switched the main thrust of their
contraband efforts to the Balkans, Adriatic and Illyria; the Danube
replaced the Rhine as the conduit for colonial goods.

If the Continental Blockade was a failure, the Continental System more
widely considered was not an unalloyed disaster. From r 8o6 to r 8 r o
French industry was bursting with confidence, with three industries
particularly to the fore: cotton, chemicals and armaments. The great
captains of industry enjoyed considerable prestige and were second only
to the marshals and the Councillors of State in power and rank. Cotton -
based in Paris, Normandy, Flanders, Picardy, Alsace, Belgium and the
Rhineland - was the great success story and was the one area where
France kept up with Britain technologically; in other spheres, where
Britain had a commanding technical lead, the blockade made it difficult
for her inventions to be copied and then remodelled in France. Silk was
another success, especially in Lyons and St Etienne, as was wool in
Verviers, Rheims, Aachen, Sedan, the Rhineland and Normandy.
Agriculture did not fare so well, with sugar and tobacco on the decline,
but viniculture did well.

It has often been asserted that Napoleon set back European economic
life for a decade, because his troops, living off the land, destroyed a
multitude of subsistence economies. But a strong argument can be
mounted for a contrary point of view, according to which the Emperor
was a vital motor in the promotion of French capitalism, and not just in
the picayune sense that he suppressed the old guilds. Some economic
historians make the case that the Continental System saved Europe from
being swamped by British enterprise and thus that it enabled a European
industrial revolution to take place; some go so far as to say that by r 8oo
Continental Europe was threatened by the fate meted out to India in the

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