Napoleon Bonaparte: A Life

by Alan Schom

  At long last a letter from Richard, Lord Wellesley, dated October 15, reached Malta. “His Majesty has commanded me to express to you that in the circumstances in which you find yourselves placed, he cannot permit you to go to America or to remain on the island of Malta. His Majesty is disposed, however, to permit you and your family to install yourselves in England.” Transferring to a British frigate, Lucien and his family set sail from Valletta on November 20, 1810, reaching Plymouth on December 12.

  Much to Lucien’s astonishment, given his brother’s fulminating anti-British propaganda, they were kindly received by “the perfidious English.” Not only was he not seized and murdered by the crowds, but instead was received by “applause and cheers,” as he and his family made their way to Ludlow. Several months later he acquired the rambling estate of Thorngrove and its rolling acres, where his famous house parties, not to mention his fabulous art collection (mostly looted), became the talk of Worcestershire. And as another surprise, althought he was kept under “house arrest” and not permitted to leave the estate without government permission, none of his hundreds of crates and trunks had been seized, not a single Spanish diamond or Austrian gold ducat impounded by the British. After years of harassment by Napoleon and the French military authorities, Lucien, Alexandrine, and their family at last found peace.

  “Betrayal! Betrayal! It’s sheer betrayal!” Napoleon had thundered at Josephine on learning of Lucien’s flight from France back in 1804. Now the curses were multiplied, resulting in Napoleon striking Lucien’s name from the rosters of the French Senate and the Legion of Honor (and ending the handsome lifetime salaries attached to both). As far as Napoleon was concerned, brother Lucien had betrayed him by seeking freedom and shelter from his own continuous persecution, with his greatest foes, the dastardly English, thereby rendering Napoleon Bonaparte the laughing stock of the whole of Europe...and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. “My family,” Napoleon was to write years later, “did much more harm to me than the good I did for them.” But as he had once commented: “A prince who is considered...a kind man is a king who is doomed!” Napoleon would never have to worry about that particular accusation. Nor was this year, 1810, to spare him further ill tidings. Napoleon’s great Empire, even on attaining its zenith with the Habsburg marriage, was already well on the wane.

  Chapter Thirty-Two – Chimes and Alarm Bells

  ‘Now begins the finest period of my reign.’

  Napoleon was determined to break England. If he could not do so on the battlefield, for England never fielded large armies on the Continent, relying instead on a strong navy, then he would follow up the trade war begun during the Revolution.

  In 1798 the Directory had ordered the seizure of all neutral vessels that had called on British ports. The British retaliated by taking French colonies and trade through them. Great Britain, as a traditional exporter, depended heavily on colonial products, textiles, and iron products destined for the Continent, while also reliant on corn and timber imports. By 1800 English exports had more than doubled, while imports had risen by 64 percent. In 1803 Napoleon had forbidden trade in British products. After the French navy and merchant marine were irreparably crippled by the decisive naval defeat at Trafalgar in October 1805, Napoleon decided to strike another blow, and in November 1806 issued his Berlin Decree, placing Great Britain under a French blockade. This unique blockade, however, would be enforced by land, not by sea. No ship thereafter was allowed to come directly from British ports or colonies to France or French-controlled ports. England had countered French restrictions by shipping more of its goods under neutral flags, and by 1807, 44 percent of British commerce was thus conveyed. Trade was carefully controlled in London by the selling of export-import licenses. Napoleon tightened the noose on British commerce in November 1807 with his Milan Decree, which required the automatic confiscation of all shipping and goods that had touched English ports. The United States, as a neutral, trading with both France and England, was caught in the middle, attempting to solve the conundrum in 1807 by placing an embargo on trade with both countries.

  Despite evasive action by Britain, Napoleon’s measures were daily taking a stronger bite. The surest way was through conquest, seizing or controlling one continental power after another and hence those additional ports and markets. He tightened his control of France, the Low Countries, Italy, and central Europe. By 1808 British exports, which two years earlier had reached £40.8 million, dropped to £35.1 million. Violent industrial strikes and shortages of products hurt England, and thus for instance the raw cotton imports reaching Liverpool dropped from 143,000 sacks in 1807 to a mere 23,000 in 1818. Corn imports fell, as did timber, and although British exports to South America rose sharply between 1805 and 1808, from £8 million to £20 million, this often involved onetime sales and irregular payment. On the other hand, British exports to the Mediterranean increased fourfold between 1805 and 1811, particularly in Turkey and Persia. But 1808 had been a very bad year, things only gradually recuperating thereafter. Meanwhile the United Kingdom continued to use neutral shipping when possible, thereby providing sugar, coffee, cotton, and soda for Holland, Frankfurt, and Leipzig. A struggling France tried to compensate for its own loss by introducing grape sugar and linen in place of real sugar and cotton, and by the mandatory planting of one hundred thousand hectares of sugar beets, but Paris failed to close Frankfurt and Leipzig to English products and goods.

  Nonetheless 1808 had indeed frightened the British and the French both, as major commercial and banking houses lapsed into bankruptcy. The trade war was double-edged, almost equally destructive to both nations. If Russia was a major partner of Napoleon’s Continental System, it also served as an important sieve in Napoleon’s system, as Riga and other Baltic ports continued to accept British goods. For all that, France’s great commercial war continued greatly to harm the Russian economy.

  The year 1811 marked another new low for the British, their exports to the Continent dropping by 80 percent from the previous year, exports to the United States and South America falling by a similar figure. British exports, which had finally risen to £60 million in 1810, had plummeted yet again. Great was the anxiety of the City, and unchecked inflation and poor harvests in 1809 and 1810, aggravated by the flow of English gold to pay its continental allies, only compounded the matter. The coalition against France depended on just such flows of English gold. Bankruptcies swept England again in 1810 and in 1811, resulting in large-scale unemployment or at best reduced three-day workweeks. Many desperate firms and traders blamed not Napoleon but the British government, and on May 11, 1812, a bankrupt businessman by the name of Bellingham walked into the lobby of the House of Commons and shot Prime Minister Spencer Percival. Napoleon rejoiced when he heard the news.

  Meanwhile a bull-headed Bonaparte, the genius behind this massive economic chaos afflicting Europe, continued to tighten the screws whenever and wherever possible, even when it meant alienating his own allies. In 1810 he officially annexed Holland; the Valais Republic of Switzerland; the Hanseatic cities of Hamburg, Lübeck, Bremen; and by January 1811 the Duchy of Oldenburg. That this gravely aggravated Napoleon’s relations with the various Germanic states, including those within the Confederation of the Rhine, and Russia in particular, seemed to him quite irrelevant: Napoleon never learned from past mistakes. If his “allies” misbehaved, he could send in Davout’s troops to buily and even occupy them, as indeed he had already done in the case of Hamburg. No one envied that city’s fate and the subsequent “war contributions.” But that Napoleon chose to do this at a time when events — although stabilizing briefly in 1810 — grew more alarming than ever, proved as illogical as it did counterproductive.

  England’s trade by 1812 was finally improving again, reaching an export figure of £50 million pounds, while France’s much-vaunted Continental System could not even begin to equal that. The French economy was sinking desperately, irretrievably. But Napoleon remained intent on destroying the impuden
t British, regardless of the cost, regardless of the harm to the French and continental economies, and regardless of the destructive cost to his tenuous relations with his political allies and even to his own position.[756]

  From the moment that he seized power at gunpoint in November 1799, apart from one year, 1802-3, Napoleon had been in a state of perpetual war, and at one time or other with just about every country and principality in western and central Europe. Waging war being an expensive proposition, it required money, and lots of it. Austro-Italian war booty helped bridge the financial gap during the Consulate, but on February 25, 1804, a desperate Napoleon, then in the throes of his invasion preparations for England, introduced what he called “the combined duties.” These began with a tax on drinks, then another on salt (which had been abolished during the Revolution), and an increase on tobacco (which finally became a government monopoly). Local taxes also increased now, to help pay for the prefects, and local administration and maintenance, as well as the growing network of local canals, exclusive of normal annual contributions to the national budget. In addition local toll roads, abolished during the Revolution, were reintroduced, and in some cases even pressed-labor gangs (also abolished during the Revolution). Napoleon showed very little interest either in the small taxpayer or the plight of the provinces, and as of 1807 only 37 million francs were set aside by the national treasury for the totality of French public works and the maintainenance or building of churches, schools, and roads. Where did the money go? War. More than half of French annual revenue went to the vast war machine, despite Napoleon’s huge “war contributions” from conquered “allied states.” Everyone paid, or else.

  If the French people had revolted in 1789 in large part because of heavy taxes, King Louis XVI’s last budget of a mere 298 million francs looked positively pale in comparison with Napoleon’s, which by 1804 had leaped to 588,066,203 francs and finally to 876,266,180 francs by 1812. Napoleon had trebled the French national budget and taxes.

  He could argue that perhaps a quarter of the French national budget was paid by such foreign “contributions,” but that still left three-quarters of the budget, and it was the small French taxpayer who carried this growing deficit.

  Part of the burden paid by the countries of occupied Europe went into the Army Fund, set up on October 28, 1805, milching 743 million francs just from Austria and Prussia between 1805 and 1810. Spain was in theory to contribute another 350 million francs, but in reality it was many times that, as will shortly be seen. But the gap grew. France continued to maintain various state monopolies, including all armaments, the manufacture of gunpowder, the minting of currency, and of course the sales of salt and tobacco, and the control of the nation’s mines and forests. Napoleon did a little to encourage commerce and industry, offering national competitions to increase production, for example the development of a small steam engine and a flax-spinning loom, while creating new schools for mining and dyeing, but all with one aim, increasing taxable income. He encouraged silk production, cotton spinning, metallurgy, tools, cutlery, sheet iron, tin, brass, pins and needles — all to replace products cut off by the blockade of British products. But generally, if France could not produce it, then the country went without.

  That was just one ramification of Napoleon’s creation, the Continental System. Because the English retaliated by permitting only ships friendly to London to sail the high seas, all French ports were soon effectively closed and moribund, apart from local fishing vessels. The once bustling harbor of Marseilles, with thousands of merchantmen in 1789, was reduced to nine by 1811, while Bordeaux’s population fell from 120,000 to 70,000. Other cities and industries suffered similarly. French manufacturers worth 50 million francs in 1789 fell to 12 million by 1811 (while that same year England’s exports rose to 1,250,000,000 francs). This resulted in massive unemployment, hundreds of thousands of peasants being forced to eke out an existence on wild herbs and chestnuts, tens of thousands dying annually of malnutrition. Inflation soared even when harvests were relatively good, placing everyday staples well beyond the reach of the masses. The wealthy, too, were affected and could only purchase colonial products at outrageous black-market prices, although Napoleon himself always had a plentiful supply of tobacco and sugar on hand at the Tuileries (largely stolen for him by his customs agents). The bankruptcy of hundreds of major and minor firms occurred throughout continental Europe, and no worse than in Paris, Lyons, and the once prosperous Nantes, Bordeaux, and Marseilles. Two famous companies, Richard-Lenoir and Gros-Davilliers, were only narrowly saved at the last moment by government loans. Nor were the larger, more powerful and prestigious banks of the day spared, as one after another folded, including Laffittes, Foulds, Tourton’s and Rodde’s, not to mention the collapse of France’s wealthiest financier and entrepreneur, Ouvrard, along with his various associates, including Desprès and Vanderberghe.

  In an attempt to protect the French people, and to prevent riots, Napoleon did try to maintain state granaries and to peg prices on certain products, including cheap bread, though inflation and high demand made prices increase drastically. It was not surprising that commercial life and the stock exchange and the treasury reflected the worsening situation, as Napoleon desperately ordered Treasury Minister Mollien to come up with millions in “extraordinary revenue” by selling, or privatizing, state and communal properties, including state forests. Then the most desperate of all measures was introduced, the “centimes de guerre,” special war taxes bringing in another 60 million francs.

  But the fact is that when Junot, Masséna, Fouchét, Talleyrand, Berthier, and others were each paid more than nine hundred thousand francs a year, 60 million from “centimes de guerre” did not go very far. The French peasant, when fortunate enough to escape or survive conscription, was in a more miserable plight than ever he was under Louis XVI.

  As for the large commercial and manufacturing houses that supplied the government, Napoleon arranged for their gradual payment, or repayment, through reserved national sinking funds. But in most cases these businessmen were rarely repaid in full. Thus when Napoleon sought larger government loans, reaching out in all directions, few would oblige him, for a promise by Bonaparte was worthless, and sometimes even dangerous, several prominent businessmen being thrown into prison “for non-compliance” when Napoleon later failed to repay them.

  Even with massive extorted funds from occupied territories, the French could not meet the financial and commercial crisis resulting from a permanent wartime economy foisted upon them and the rest of Europe by the unrelenting soldier, Bonaparte. But after his marriage to Marie-Louise, Napoleon’s warlike attitude altered significantly. For the moment at least, no doubt with the guns of Wagram still reverberating in his memory, for the first time in his career Napoleon sidestepped open campaigning. On three occasions in 1810 alone he stated his intention of going to Spain to save the situation there, and each time found excuses for not doing so. Had Napoleon finally matured a little and grown tired of warfare and of taking those enormous personal risks? Everyone around him was struck by the changes in him. Clearly Marie-Louise had achieved something.

  Following his return to St.-Cloud from his honeymoon in the Netherlands, Napoleon sharply changed his tactics, concentrating most of his efforts on a dramatic new economic attack on England, as he signed four hare-brained decrees in July, August, and October 1810, tightening his crackdown on all commerce. No ship from any European nation was permitted to sail without an export-import license personally signed by Napoleon. Heavy new import duties were placed on all colonial produce, including sugar, tobacco, tea, cocoa, and coffee. All colonial products discovered in any country in Europe were to be destroyed. The results: on four days in early November alone, French customs officers seized whole shiploads of such illicit products, burning them dramatically before public rallies. “As a result of not having made peace sooner, England has lost her markets in Naples, Spain, Portugal, and Trieste. If she delays much longer, she will lose those of Ho
lland, the Hanse towns, and Sicily,” Napoleon boasted to Foreign Minister Champagny in 1810, still refusing to acknowledge the full extent of his suicidal Continental System, and the reality of the declining French exports compared with those of England. Thus Napoleon’s campaign was waged more and more on the economic front, even in the face of the economic catastrophes it was wreaking on France and her allies.

  But until such time as England was finally destroyed, France had to find new indirect taxes from dwindling sources to pay for the continuing war. “Our taxes must be varied,” Napoleon insisted, “that they might appear less onerous to the public...France must pay greater taxes,” he insisted before the State Council in 1810, “and even higher ones today since we have become the première nation of Europe. We must maintain ourselves at the level of importance we have achieved. And when I have clobbered England, I will be able to cut our taxes by 200,000,000 francs per year.”[757]

  “You are still complaining [about the Continental System], aren’t you?” Napoleon addressed the governing body of the Council of Commerce and Manufacturers in the spring of 1810:

  When I issued my Berlin and Milan Decrees, England laughed. And you, too, gentlemen, you laughed as well. I was, however, doing something very effective. I had given much serious thought to England...And you can now see for yourselves that the situation of England is today a result of my policy...In ten years’ time I will have crushed England...And in any event I have no pressing wish for peace with England at the present time. Moreover [thanks to my conquests], I have brought more than one billion francs in war reparations into France since 1807. I am the only one in Europe with money today. Austria is bankrupt, Russia will be shortly, as will be England.