Map 5: The Napoleonic State System by 1811–12
The final years of Napoleon’s rule have often been portrayed as a period of stagnation and increasing conservatism, as a time when the Empire began to slip back into the patterns of the ancien régime, but nothing could be further from the truth.
The outward tone for the standard view of the late Empire as hardening into conservatism is set by Napoleon’s marriage to Marie-Louise, daughter of Francis II of Austria, in April 1810. It caused consternation in France, was seen as a betrayal of the Revolution, and not just among avowed republicans. Yet the Austrian marriage was not what it seemed. It came at the height of Napoleon’s quarrel with the Pope, when Napoleon was an excommunicate. This allowed Pius VII to refuse to recognize the marriage and then the legitimacy of the son it produced. Pius urged the clergy not to celebrate the marriage or the birth of the little prince, to whom Napoleon gave the deliberately provocative title, King of Rome. Even if the marriage was meant to lead the regime along more traditionalist paths, its practical consequences were to embitter the quarrel with Rome still further, thus reviving anticlericalism and much of the radical tradition that went with it. To the very end, the hereditary Empire was fighting the battles of the Revolution.
In turn, this threw the regime back on many of its radical, almost Jacobin roots at the very moment when it had sought to free itself from the past. Within the Kingdom of Italy, for example, the prefectoral corps became more heavily dominated by the Jacobins of the 1796–99 period as time progressed: the Jacobin element was less than 20 per cent of the corps when Melzi left power in 1806, but under Eugène they numbered 45.8 per cent by 1810 and almost 60 per cent by 1813, a clear majority.1 These changes took place in the inner empire; they were even more marked in the new territories. At the centre of power, this return to revolutionary militancy is clear in the replacement of Fouché by Savary, at the powerful Ministry of Police-Générale, in 1810. Savary masterminded the brutal destruction of royalist resistance in the Vendée and Normandy in 1803, engineered the execution of the Duc d’Enghein in 1804, and lured the Spanish Bourbons to Bayonne in 1808. He continued Fouché’s policy of recruiting the police from veterans of the revolutionary armies, and was the right choice to conduct the mass arrests of clergy that the break with the Pope entailed. His replacement of Fouché represents a hardening of the latent Jacobinism of the regime, the Terrorist past of his predecessor notwithstanding.
The lands of the outer empire were almost all ripe for counter-revolution, often on a scale the French had not met before; its acquisition breathed new life into many old problems. Inevitably, the regime became more revolutionary in its policies, in inverse proportion to the number and ferocity of the old demons it met. Many old radicals were retained in local office in the territories of the inner empire – or their re-emergence, as in Italy – and an increasing reliance on that most Jacobin of institutions, the army, side-by-side with the new generation of auditeurs. The young auditeurs and the die-hard Jacobins came to the fore in the last years of Napoleonic rule. The quarrel with the Pope, coupled with the challenges of the outer empire, meant Napoleon needed men of their outlook more than ever. In its last years, the Napoleonic Empire became more demanding, authoritarian and, all too often, tyrannical but, from an imperial rather than a Francocentric perspective, that tyranny had more to do with the Terror than the ancien régime. The Napoleonic order collapsed suddenly, after a brief but fiercely contested struggle fought by ever younger administrators as well as ever younger conscripts. It did not live long enough to ossify; if anything it grew more youthful with every challenge, as well as more revolutionary.
Nevertheless, if the outer empire (the frontier) became the preserve of the newer and more radical elements in the Napoleonic state, the inner empire witnessed the consolidation of those other, very different groups – the provincial notables at local level, the ‘immortals’ of the Directory at the centre of the state – who had been Napoleon’s original bedrock of support. They remained what Napoleon had first christened them, les masses de granit – immoveable, ever more secure in wealth and influence – even as he began to distrust them after the disllusionments of 1809, and they began to distrust him as the costs of the blockade and the risks of war increased.
France was the core of the Napoleonic Empire; with a population of approximately 30 million, it represented two-thirds of the population of the imperial departments. Until 1812, Frenchmen provided the bulk of the Grande Armée; it was always the source of most of its ruling elite. French official culture was the culture of the Empire, French its written – although not spoken – lingua franca. From about 1808 onwards, the effects could be felt of the initial reforms carried out by Napoleon in the first years of his rule. Before 1807, the regime had developed and then imposed its agenda. By 1808, as the Empire entered its first crisis, the relative success and failure of the ‘Napoleonic Revolution’ begins to emerge.
The ethos of these reforms was uniformity and centralization but, even after the efforts of the revolutionaries between 1789 and 1799, France remained a country of vast regional differences. To grasp the true nature of Napoleonic rule in its heartland, the reforms of the regime must be assessed in the context of the French regions, and then in terms of its attempts to mould a governing elite to hold France together from the centre. The history of France in these years is that of the emergence of an important form of the modern state in Europe.
The map of imperial France is a study in support or opposition for the regime. Broadly, this was conditioned by three factors: physical geography, which made opposition more or less possible; the influence of the Continental System on the economies of the various regions; and the recent political history of the main regions of France during the 1790s. An examination of the French regions during the later years of the regime reveals that the imperial heartland was far from a Bonapartist monolith, and also that the inner empire, as a whole, was drawing together across pre-Napoleonic boundaries to form a core that did not embrace all of France itself.
The complexity of French political geography emerges in the contrasting responses to imperial rule of the Flemish departments of the north-east and the Norman departments, further west. The hub of the north-east was the department of the Nord, centred on Lille. Throughout the second phase of Napoleonic rule, the economy of the Nord continued to grow, despite short-lived economic slumps. Its varied textile industries survived the general crisis of 1810–11 relatively lightly, and benefited from imperial preference and protection from British competition. This is borne out by the demographic expansion of its cities in these years, which gave the Nord the highest population density of any department in the Empire and, usually, the highest conscription quota, which was met without difficulty until 1813. Its commerce and industry increasingly integrated with those of the equally successful Belgian departments, an example of French expansion enabling a natural economic unit to emerge, within the tariff walls of the Continental System. Even the fall of the Empire did not interrupt the growth of textiles, although the more traditional wool and linen industries gave way to cotton. The picture was not quite as dynamic in the neighbouring departments of the Pas-de-Calais and the Somme, but it was still one of prosperity. In the Pas-de-Calais, the deprivations of the blockade in the coastal ports of Calais and Boulogne were partly offset by the intense interest taken by the government in developing agriculture there. The Somme became an important producer of gunpowder for the army, and a centre of flour and paper mills. Until 1813, the north-east remained politically stable. Its urban notables, often drawn from commerce and industry, and large sections of the urban workforce, became increasingly secular in outlook, and benefited greatly from the creation of an extensive network of schools, both primary and secondary, especially after 1806. The countryside, in contrast, tended to remain deeply Catholic and it was here, rather than the towns, that the ‘Flemish Vendée’ of 1813 exploded.
The Norman departments present a more complex range of experience, for although they shared much in common with the departments of the north-east, their western borders touched the heartland of Chouannerie, and they were not part of the economic renaissance of Flanders – French and Belgian – in these years. Although deep inside France, they benefited little from the Continental System. The economic life of the Norman ports – Le Havre, Dieppe, Honfleur, and Cherbourg – was virtually extinguished by the blockade, and local industries, particularly forges, declined in number, partly through shortages of manpower as a result of conscription.2 Similar problems faced the agricultural sector, sometimes endangering grain production, but the period also saw the progressive consolidation of farms into larger, more profitable units. However, in these circumstances, official efforts to extend agricultural land made little impact. Larger industrial enterprises tended to collapse, especially during the recession of 1810–11, and Normandy survived as a ‘pilot region’ of French industry only because it was based mainly on small-scale firms producing for localized markets and so immune to the ‘grand strategy’ of Napoleonic market design.
Neither the Normans nor the government felt secure, as the economic troubles of the later years were compounded by bad harvests and an increasingly fragile political climate: Normans loyal to the regime had to fear British incursions along the coast and the embers of Chouannerie further west and inland, circumstances that made Normandy almost a frontier of the inner empire, although only three days’ march from Paris. In March 1812, the regime responded aggressively to a series of grain riots in Caen and the surrounding countryside, in the department of the Calvados, which appeared to have the potential to link popular, essentially economic discontent to Chouannerie: strong detachments of the Imperial Guard fought a ruthless campaign in western Normandy, prior to its departure for the Russian campaign.3 Clearly Napoleon regarded it as a sensitive area.
The west of France was the theatre of the Vendéan and Chouan risings during the Revolution and, despite determined efforts to pacify them involving both the carrot and the stick, the western departments always remained one of the weak points of the whole Empire. Napoleon’s brutal response to the relatively minor disturbances in the Calvados was conditioned by a lingering lack of confidence in his grip over the countryside of the nine departments comprising the Vendée militaire, the rugged, isolated bocage. Here, significant numbers of peasants and clergy continued to defy the Concordat, supporting the Petite Église, in an act of defiance against both the Pope and the Emperor. Conscription quotas remained artificially low as much from fear and resignation as from hope of appeasement. Finally, in 1808, Napoleon initiated a further series of singular concessions to the three departments most tainted by royalism, the Vendée, itself, the Deux-Sèvres and the Loire-Inférieure: they were exempted from taxation for 15 years and an extensive programme of rebuilding was to be subsidized by the state. None of this bore fruit, and only the fall of the Empire in 1814 pre-empted another rising, fuelled by the need to impose more realistic conscription quotas and the breach with the Pope.
Beyond the Vendée militaire lay the five Breton departments. Although a remote region, Brittany had almost 2,500,000 inhabitants; it was also a source of bitter resistance to the regime, until at least 1805, when the martial law imposed during the Revolution was finally lifted. The first years of the Consulat saw determined, often brutal campaigns against the Chouans and, even as late as 1809, small bands of ex-Chouans operating on the borders of the departments of the Côtes-du-Nord and the Morbihan terrorized tax collectors and families who had bought biens nationaux during the Revolution. In 1806, Chouans kidnapped the pro-government Bishop of Vannes.4 The regime and its supporters were always an embattled minority in Brittany: few regions had known more autonomy under the ancien régime, and none resented its loss more. Even the Concordat did not really appease these intensely Catholic populations. The loyalty of the Bishop of Vannes was exceptional in the region. In the Côtes-du-Nord, the Bishop of St-Brieuc used the Concordat to re-establish refractory, openly royalist priests throughout the diocese; the bishop of Rennes, in the Ille-et-Vilaine, was in league with the schismatic Petite Église, which refused to recognize the Concordat. The bishops were in almost constant conflict with the prefects throughout the period,5 and the attitude of the Breton clergy to the Concordat may be likened more to that of newly annexed regions in Italy or Germany, than to other parts of France. The regime had few supporters outside the towns or the owners of biens nationaux; although conscription was eventually enforced and outward calm prevailed, the local administration was never at ease. The prefect of the Côtes-du-Nord remained to the end more a ‘commissaire de police supérieur’ than a mere civil servant. Like many future prefects in the departments of the outer empire, after 1808, he had ambitious plans to improve the economic and cultural life of his administrés, but his tangible achievements did not stretch far beyond the restoration of order.6 The besieged character of Napoleonic rule in the western countryside was encarnated in the ‘new towns’ of Napoléonville, created in the troubled backcountry of southern Brittany, and Napoléon-Vendée, in 1804, made the new capital of the department of the Vendée. Both were built on the sites of villages destroyed in the repression of the rebellion, and stood as symbols of the intention of the regime to master the West. In fact, they were isolated strong-points surrounded by a hostile bocage.
The bocage was not the whole of the West, but the last years of the Empire are notable for turning former strongholds of loyalty to the revolutionary regimes into centres of surly, sometimes pro-royalist opposition. The great port of Bordeaux suffered a fate comparable to all the maritime centres of the Empire, as the effects of the blockade and the loss of the colonies choked its trade; its population fell from over 120,000 in 1790 to 88 398 in 1809, and it continued to fall into the 1820s. There was a brief revival of commerce between 1802 and 1806, but thereafter trade stagnated, even if the steep decline of the 1790s was slowed. Only smuggling and a series of concessions over neutral shipping after 1811 prevented the total collapse which seemed so imminent in 1808, when the American consul wrote ‘The grass is pushing through the pavements of this city. Its splendid port is a desert …’7 Previously a republican bastion, the economic crisis allowed covert royalist groups, masquerading as the Institut Philanthropique, to grow in influence to the point that in 1814 Wellington chose Bordeaux as his target, assured of a sympathetic welcome. Conditions in Nantes, further north, were little better; the blockade reduced the port to local traffic, although its importance as a naval base prevented a complete eclipse. The proximity of the bocage – Nantes was the chef-lieu of the Loire-Inférieure – restrained political disaffection among its notables, but there was little positive support for the regime after 1808, in a city made famous by its determined resistance to the Vendéan army in 1793. The smaller port of La Rochelle was equally disaffected; even the transfer of the chef-lieu of the department – Charente-Inférieure – to the port from Saintes did not win the regime clear support.
Thus, an ‘outer layer’ of economic – and in Bordeaux, political – disaffection increasingly wrapped a volatile, determinedly royalist countryside. Secure support for the regime had shrunk to the market towns of the interior, the famous ‘blue islands in a sea of white’, such as Niort, Chinon and Saumur: a narrow base, akin to circumstances in the Kingdom of Naples or Andalusia in the same years.
By 1807, considerable progress had been made in restoring normal life to most of the south, although the eastern Pyrenees always remained recalcitrant. The small-scale peasant agriculture of much of the Midi, like that of the west, spared these areas from involvement in the imperial market design, but their periodic inability to achieve self-sufficiency in grain provided an increasingly unstable background to Napoleonic rule, after the relative successes of the early years. This only became dangerous after the failure of the harvest of 1811, however, and the inland areas of the southern countryside enjoyed a period of relative prosperity, as well as security, in the middle years of the Napoleonic period.
This economic prosperity appears all the more real when contrasted with the collapse of the great port of Marseille which, like Bordeaux, saw a steep decline in population from 111,000 in 1799 to 80,000 in 1813, as people sought work in its agrarian hinterland.8 Its popular classes, never sympathetic to the regime, moved ever closer to overt royalism. Only Toulon, of the Mediterranean ports, enjoyed a degree of prosperity during the blockade, as a naval base and arsenal; thus, it was a bastion of loyalty to the regime.9 A combination of prosperity and the goodwill of the propertied classes created by the restoration of order enabled the regime to surmount the economic crisis of 1811–12 better in the Provençal countryside than in the cities.
Economic conditions, and even the prevalence of law and order, are not the most influential elements on the political geography of the south, however. Broadly, the grip of the regime loosened, moving from east to west. Provence, although never an area noted for loyalty, was essentially secure. In the central Midi, the Cévennes region, the regime could count on the Protestant minority to maintain the order established under the Consulat; its grip was effective, but based on local fears of a renewed civil war, rather than on any positive reasons. The textile industries of the Gard collapsed between 1809 and 1812, causing considerable hardship in the countryside and sizeable towns like Nîmes and Beaucaire, but the Protestant elite of the area – themselves the victims of the slump – were unswervingly loyal to the regime in the face the latent threat of popular, Catholic royalism, which did, indeed, burst upon them in 1814–15.10 The regime had a hard core of support, but hardly a secure base.
Further west, the Pyrenean departments might be properly classified as part of the outer, rather than the inner empire, the fact that they were part of pre-revolutionary France notwithstanding. In contrast to the departments of the Massif Central or Provence, they showed few improvements in the enforcement of conscription. While the year 1811 might be described in Provence as the point when the regime was at the apogee of its power,11 the prefect of the Pyrénées-Orientales, in Perpignan, admitted that conscription was no more effective in 1811 than in 1799.12 The war with Spain only increased disorder; the creation of a weak satellite state, followed by the civil war, brought havoc to the isolated border areas, and sorely overstretched the local forces of order. The Gendarmerie remained too busy trying to enforce conscription to act as a proper police force, and so became an irrelevance, at best, even to the propertied classes.13 As in the Gard, the Napoleonic regime could not extend its basis of local support beyond those who had served the previous revolutionary regimes.
A poignant indication of the true nature of French control in this area is that from 1806 onwards the authorities turned to exactly those repressive police tactics that were being abandoned in Provence, the Piedmontese and Rhenish departments, and in the Kingdom of Italy: the occupation of whole villages and the imposition of fines on the extended families of missing conscripts or known bandits.14 The numbers of réfractaires were reduced in the central Pyrenean department of Hautes-Pyrénées between 1805 and 1810 to levels lower than those of the Pyrénées-Orientales, but only because the same, ruthless methods were applied more effectively, rather than through any real amelioration of public order.15 In 1808, the government virtually resurrected the ancien régime privileges of this region in matters of conscription: companies of semi-regular troops were to be raised, largely from the réfractaires, and were promised they would not be called upon to serve outside the Pyrenees. This amounted to far more than an amnesty; it was an admission by the state that this region would co-operate in the defence of France only on its own, traditional terms. The initial response was excellent: 600 out of the 1,200 chasseurs de la montagne raised in the Hautes-Pyrénées were réfractaires, but when these terms were violated in 1809, and they were ordered to Spain, all but 275 deserted.16 The corps raised in the Pyrénées-Orientales eventually came to consist of bands of smugglers, under their own chiefs, who had virtually made private treaties with the authorities. In every case, their military value proved miniscule.17 Even the restitution of ancien régime provincial privilege failed. More significantly for the place of these departments in the Napoleonic Empire, as a whole, these tactics were replicated in the newly annexed departments of central Italy and in the Illyrian departments, both hardly secure sectors of the Empire. The case of the Pyrenees underlines the real, effective borders of the inner empire. To the east, secure frontiers had been forged by 1807, making not only Piedmont and Lombardy part of the inner empire, but Provence as well. To the west, the relationship between Spain and the Pyrenean departments reversed the process.
It was not only the Spanish border and the proximity of the war that pulled the Pyrenees out of Napoleon’s orbit, however, but the failure of the regime to establish itself there before 1808. The Napoleonic regime proved no more able to curb the deep-rooted independence of the region than had those of the 1790s. This went much deeper than opposition to conscription, high taxation or even the Concordat. The regime was singularly unsuccessful in its attempt to disarm the region in 1806.18 However, a deeper sign of estrangement from the state can be detected in the way local people simply ignored the judicial system for regulating their disputes. Even the propertied classes simply ignored the state; they saw that its justice was not respected by the lower classes, who they had to control, and thus justice remained largely in the private sphere, making a mockery of French rule at the most basic level.19 The government was increasingly resented throughout southern France, not only for the general imposition of conscription or the economic crisis after 1811, but at a cultural level, particularly as regarded the religious reforms of the Concordat. However, only in the Pyrenees did the regime fail to lessen these sources of antagonism from overt resistance to mere discontent by 1807. In most other regions, it is difficult to make a direct link between the popular unrest caused by the economic crisis of 1810–12 and the politically inspired movements of 1814, during the fall of the Empire. Roussillon, however, is an example of continuous rejection of authority, unmatched even by the Vendée.
The departments of the Massif Central, the mountainous core of central France, saw little material change during the Napoleonic period, but against this immobile material background, the Napoleonic regime made determined political and administrative advances, a true example of internal conquest. Poverty remained the hallmark of this region; large sections of its population either migrated for much of the year, to augment local resources, or were dependent on such income. Agricultural self-sufficiency remained the goal of its peasantry, but local methods of cultivation often remained backward, and the region would have endured severe famine without harvests of chestnuts to supplement its fragile levels of grain production. A succession of prefects failed to modernize agriculture or expand industry; the region stood further outside the ambitions of the imperial market design than any other in the Empire. Despite its poverty, the Massif Central was among the few parts of France where the population rose in these years; the first years of the Consulate mark the start of an upward trend that would last into the mid-nineteenth century.20 During the Napoleonic period, the total population of its nine core departments probably exceeded 2,500,000; that of the Puy de Dôme alone numbered well over half a million.
Thus, the region made up in human resources what it lacked in natural wealth. However, the 1790s had revealed the violent nature of this large population, and the first years of Napoleonic rule witnessed ferocious, widespread resistance to conscription and the Concordat. The regime overcame the powerful combination of cultural antagonism to strong government and forbidding geography, to the extent that the political feuds of the 1790s were squashed, if not completely extinguished. By 1811, these departments had been changed from among the worst suppliers of men for conscription, to among the most reliable: Napoleon had tapped this important source of manpower by a sheer effort of bureaucratic will, persistent policing and ever more ruthless prefects, epitomized by Camille Périer, an auditeur under 30 when he became prefect of the Corrèze in 1810. A new generation of professional administrators reduced this isolated region to obedience. This process took longer in the Massif than elsewhere, but its results were complete: even in 1814, much of the Massif was notable for its political passivity. A bastion of resistance had been surrounded, and worn down. The replacement of rebellion with surly resignation was not the ideal outcome of state-building, but it represents a stunning triumph of the relative and the possible, from the vantage point of the regime.
Eastern France – the northern Rhone valley, dominated by Lyon; Burgundy; the Champagne; and Alsace-Lorraine – was the most solidly pro-Napoleonic region in France. The east enjoyed a rising level of economic prosperity which was often directly attributable to the market design of the Continental System: of all the various regions of under Napoleonic hegemony, eastern France benefited most clearly from policies that so often brought ruin in their wake elsewhere. Whereas the north-eastern departments benefited from imperial expansion because it created a natural economic unit with Belgium, these areas derived their prosperity specifically from the privileged position granted them by the imperial tariff boundaries and the wider policy of turning away from Atlantic markets, towards continental trade. Lyon thrived as the manufacturing centre of silk, produced in Italy specifically for its needs, at the direct expense of indigenous Italian industry; Alsatian commerce and industry thrived in great part due to the market design, even absorbing capital and manpower from less privileged parts of the Rhineland, such as Berg; Burgundian wines spread throughout the vast German markets opened for them, as a direct result of French military conquest.21 When Napoleon spoke of an economic policy of ‘France first’, these regions were the first among equals.
By and large, they knew when they were well off, and it is reflected in their political outlook. This loyalty, although based on sound economic foundations, had to be worked for by the regime, for its political inheritance from the Revolution was far from uniform. Lyon had been a centre of ferocious resistance to the Jacobin regime in Paris, and had suffered physical devastation as intense as any in the Vendée; the result was that the second largest city in France had a marked penchant for royalism, by the first years of the Consulate. In Burgundy, although the Napoleonic regime enjoyed great support from the outset – for the region contained a large number of purchasers of biens nationaux – the administration of its largest city, Dijon, remained in the hands of Jacobins. Returned émigrés and militant clergy were reduced to silence, but Napoleon did not dare purge the Dijonnais Jacobins, many of whom were elected to the electoral college of the department as late as 1810.22 Both cities became centres of Bonapartism, and remained so after the fall of the Empire. The two Alsatian departments of Haut- and Bas-Rhin, like Burgundy, had large numbers of purchasers of biens nationaux during the Revolution, to the extent that the peasantry came to own two-thirds of rural property by 1800. However this was balanced by the return of many émigrés, ranging from influential nobles to the 1800 peasants of the countryside near Wissembourg who fled across the border during the wars of the 1790s and returned to find their small farms confiscated.23
Lyon stands at the crossroads of north-eastern and south-eastern France, where the valleys of the Rhône and the Saône meet, and its true identity – as a northern or southern entity – remains a lively source of discussion. In the Napoleonic period, its politics and economy link it emphatically to the north-east, whereas in the 1790s it was an epicentre of the factional violence and counter-revolutionary resistance so typical of the Midi.24 This transformation is no less dramatic for being predictable, in the light of Napoleonic economic policies. Napoleon took a personal interest in the reconstruction of Lyon from the outset, declaring as early as June 1800 that within two years, ‘the commerce of this city, once the envy of Europe, will regain its original prosperity’. The silk industry grew apace, literally fuelled by cut-rate Italian raw materials: the number of silk workers rose from 6500 in 1801, to 9500 in 1807, and peaked at 13 146 in 1811; the crisis of that year lowered them by only 150. The urban population also grew apace, from 94,000 in 1810, to over 120,000 by 1812, a rise of over 20 per cent. This prosperity permitted a degree of urban renewal, and some of the major damage of the Federalist revolt of 1793–94 was repaired. The city came as close to flourishing in these years as could be expected at a time of major European war. The regime won back the greatest urban stronghold of counter-revolution in France.
Elsewhere, the regime had firmer foundations to build upon, and it did not fail to capitalize on the loyalty to the Revolution it found in Burgundy and Alsace. Strasbourg, in particular, and the left bank of the Rhine, in general, prospered in these years. The blockade, as opposed to the wider strategy of the Continental System, did hinder some sectors of the economy, particularly the cotton industry, and, as inhabitants of a border region, Alsatians were tempted into the lucrative business of smuggling, possibly as much by greed as necessity. However, in contrast to similar activities in other frontier areas – notably the Dutch, Hanseatic and Pyrenean departments – Alsace offers an example of a region that defied this aspect of imperial policy, without political implications. The Haut- and Bas-Rhin were among the most reliable sources of recruits, despite the proximity of the rugged Vosges mountains. Burgundy, the Ain, and the Jura – the eastern hinterland of Lyon – were equally obedient. Resistance to conscription was small scale, and above all it was never overt or collective, even in mountain communes.
Indifference was probably more typical of the political complexion of the eastern departments than true enthusiasm, but this region proved exceptionally loyal to Napoleon, not only in the last campaigns of 1814, but during the 100 Days. It was no coincidence that he chose to ‘emerge’ from hiding at Lyon on his march to Paris, in 1815, where he re-proclaimed the Empire. In Dijon, there was genuinely popular support for Napoleon in 1815, as there was throughout Alsace and Lorraine.25 In no other area of France was support for the regime as solid or as general as here.
Paris was the centre of the Empire, and its history encapsulates many of the contradictions of the Napoleonic regime. There was a dispute within its administration over the character of the city itself, which magnifies the paradoxes surrounding the First Empire. Frochot, one of its two prefects, sought to create a Paris fit to be the capital of an empire of the professionals, devoid of an industrial workforce prone to political agitation. Frochot strove to build a city of monuments and vast offices, peopled by bureaucrats, diplomats and service industries – a dream that would embody a particular vision of the Empire and its purpose. Yet, Frochot’s vision was propelled less by confidence than by fear. He looked back with unease on the events of the 1790s, and was determined that any risk of mob rule at the centre of power should be averted by the most definitive means conceivable: by making the mob – the artisan classes – redundant to the life of Paris.
Frochot’s dream foundered on all counts. There was never enough money to realize his monumental building plans on a large scale. Above all, he could not stop the growth of industry and commerce at the heart of the Empire. Frochot always argued that this growth was fragile and artificial; it was too dependent on political circumstances – the imperial market design, in particular – to withstand economic realities. There were signs that he had good cause for caution, first in 1801 when a bad harvest threatened disorder, and then in 1805–06 when over-production and saturated markets led to a banking crisis which threatened industrial recession. For most of the period 1801–12, however, Paris witnessed an unheralded industrial boom, as it was sheltered from British competition by the blockade, fed cheap raw materials by the Continental System and provided with a monied clientele by the Imperial Court. Four industrial sectors benefited especially in these circumstances: luxury trades, cotton, chemicals, and mechanical engineering. Most enterprises were on a small scale, few factories employed more than 20 or so workers, but the workforce swelled, especially after 1806. By 1811, over 30,000 people worked in 57 cotton mills, of which there had been only five in 1804.26
It proved impossible to limit the natural expansion of Paris in these years. The population rose from 546,856 in 1801 to 714,000 by the end of the Empire. During the good times, seasonal migrants – usually from Normandy, the Alps and the Auvergne – became permanent, and increasingly they were joined by migrants from neighbouring departments, drawn to Paris by the ever higher level of wages. Paris acted as a magnet for the educated and working classes alike in these years. This was an emphatic sign of confidence in the Parisian economy, which reached its zenith in tandem with the political fortunes of the regime, between 1806 and 1809, but it always worried the police. Regulations bent on controlling the activities of the Parisian workforce flooded from the Prefecture de Police, prohibiting clandestine trade unions, monitoring their movements through the imposition of livrets (compulsory records of employment that every worker had to carry), breaking the handful of strikes that occurred, and spying on their leisure activities.
Yet Paris was also a favoured, almost pampered city: Napoleon spoiled his capital, just as he did the imperial Guard, for they both stood close to the levers of power. During the subsistence crisis of 1810–12, he plundered the grain resources of northern France to satisfy the Parisian working classes as thoroughly and ruthlessly as he plundered the regiments of the line for recruits for the Guard. Paris did not starve at the height of the economic crisis, as Napoleon swept the policy of free trade aside, reverting in 1812 to the Jacobin policy of a maximum price fixed on grains. As a result, there were no popular disturbances of a political nature, even when the boom collapsed after 1811. Like the Guards, Parisians grumbled, but the old centres of revolutionary agitation – the artisan quarters, the eastern faubourgs – remained the most dependable parts of the city. It was no coincidence that Napoleon always preferred to enter Paris through them, rather than the more royalist western suburbs. Here, the myth of the ‘Jacobin emperor’ was not just the invention of Napoleon’s memoirs, but a reality forged by deliberate policy from 1800 onwards.27 The capital, like the Empire itself, had a Jacobin core.
Beyond this core, the goodwill of Paris rested on a combination of prosperity and good order, and Napoleonic policy centred on providing them. Frochot saw clearly that both were brittle, dependent on the success of the Continental System and continued military victory. Neither survived long after 1814; the fate of Paris was bound up even more with that of Napoleon than it had been with the Revolution.
It is almost a commonplace to think of France as divided into two parts – almost two countries – by an imaginary line running from north-west to south-east, from St Malo to Lake Geneva. Its academic origins date from the statistical essay of Adolphe d’Angeville in 1836, but it received its seminal form in the work on levels of literacy by Louis Maggiolo in 1879. The more general, impressionistic work of Angeville and the specific enquiries of Maggiolo are deeply imbedded in French self-perceptions, and the ‘Maggiolo line’ has reappeared frequently in analyses of electoral, social and cultural behaviour in the last century, its applications reaching far beyond their academic origins.28 The assumption behind the Maggiolo line is of a France of the north and east that is advanced, liberal and urban, more secular, better educated and fed, generally more pro-Revolutionary than the France of the south and west, where the last bastions of royalism and fanatical Catholicism mix with a lower material level of life, based on a more agrarian economy. The Maggiolo line, as it has evolved in the analysis of French culture, has come to symbolize ‘enlightened’ France from ‘traditionalist’ France – ‘lightness’ from ‘dark’.29
The ‘line’ has been rejected in favour of geographic analyses that place a dual emphasis on a still more varied sense of regionalism – that of microregions too localized to fit a general line – alongside the view that these regions do fit a wider pattern of France as a coherent, meaningful geographic unit.30 Yet the Maggiolo line has always exercised a powerful influence on the study of French identity. Within its original sphere (the assessment of literacy – and with it, levels of formal education) the line has been modified, as shifting from north-east/south-west, to a division that is more emphatically east/west by the mid-nineteenth century.31 The basic premise of a gradual, but continuous trend of ‘improvement’, on both sides of the line, has also been questioned.32 The power of the Maggiolo line persists, however, as a method of analysis, as well as a myth.33
Many Napoleonic prefects, usually those sent from the north or east to the south, had a vision of France that anticipated that derived from Maggiolo. Napoleon certainly shared it. This is evident in his expressed belief that the prefects of the southern departments should be northerners, exactly because they would be ‘men nourished on the Enlightenment’, and therefore uninclined to tolerate the backwardness of their administrés. The classic case of this was the attitude of Thibaudeau to the people of the Bouches du Rhône, the department of which he was prefect.34 He described the Provençal as being ‘as variable as his climate, he is primitive, brutal, hasty, excitable, indolent or taciturn’. This was as nothing compared to the contempt of the prefect of the Loire-Inférieure, in Brittany, who declared ‘we think it superfluous to [give in] detail the diversity of mores, language, beliefs, or customs to be found here; ignorance and superstition shape their general character’.35 Thus, the concept of the Maggiolo line was a determining element in the policy of the Napoleonic regime, 80 years before it was articulated. Napoleon’s own prejudices in this regard are all the more striking because he was a Corsican.
The assumptions on which ‘the line’ rested were more prejudicial than scientific in the Napoleonic period, underlined by the incomplete and impressionistic nature of most official statistics gathered by the regime.36 Indeed, the experience of the prefects tended to a belief in a thoroughly atomized France, as they dissected and sub-divided the people and geography of their respective departments.37 The closer they drew to their administrés, the more conscious the prefects became of the complexity of France, and the deeper their determination became to obliterate these differences. Their ideal remained that of a united and uniform society, where differences would not be assimilated but extinguished, to be replaced by modernity, as they understood it: a secularized, French-speaking society, dominated by urban and northern values. What emerges is the sense of cultural estrangement between rulers and ruled, whatever the preferred geographic configuration of France. The concept of a cultural Maggiolo line dominated their thinking, and their policy was always to advance it further south and west, although even in the north and east the prefects of Flemish and Alsatian departments could be as crushing in their attitudes to local culture as their colleagues in the Midi.38 As the Empire expanded, so their ambition became to push the line back, into the Mediterranean, off the coasts of Calabria and Cadiz, and into the bay of Lisbon, in the west.
The model of a Maggiolo line would seem to have a practical, historical relevance, quite different from the prejudicial judgements of contemporary administrators, however. If the concept is applied to Napoleonic France in political terms, and especially in terms of conscription and brigandage, it acquires a remarkable relevance. The overriding image is of a west and south deeply at odds with the regime, where open rebellion – or the persistent fear of it – prevented the introduction of trial by jury, the continued use of colonnes mobiles to police the countryside in place of fixed gendarmerie brigades, and a general tendency among the clergy and laity to regard the Concordat less as a welcome restoration than as a continuation of Jacobinal de-christianization by other means. The line runs through the Norman bocage, probably to the mouth of the Rhône. The political heartland of the Napoleonic regime conforms broadly to a north-west/south-east divide, but the pacification of Provence and the Cévennes – however fragile – together with that of the northern Massif Central, probably advance the line further east, along its southern front. The creation and simultaneous pacification of the inner empire in Piedmont and the Rhineland were essential to this shift. It was consolidated by the development of the Continental System, which oriented French commerce and regional prosperity eastwards. Napoleon did not begin with a realm centred on the Saône-Rhône-Rhine arteries, but by 1807, it was increasingly pulled this way.
Regionalism remained the essence of French society under the Napoleonic regime, and for decades to come, but this was far from the intentions of those at its helm. The essence of state policy was centralization and uniformity, and if the life of the people demands a regional approach, the relationship between the regime and the people of its heartland, France, must also be seen in terms of the general policies laid down at the centre of power.
By the middle years of the Empire, it was clear that the broad objective of those at the apex of the Napoleonic state was to create an immobile society, governed by a highly mobile, almost rootless elite of professionals. This was not an abstract concept, but a policy with very real ramifications for fonctionnaires and administrés alike. The regime sought to curtail and regulate the movements of its citizens and, incongruously for a state so bent on unity, to circumvent the lives of ordinary people within prescribed administrative limits. The department was the limit of free, unregulated travel; beyond its borders, passports were required of the propertied classes, and livrets du travail for workers – cards which had to stamped by the police when a workman changed job – that enabled the state not only to monitor the movements of ordinary people, but to keep them in one place, if desired.39 The department became the basis of all statistical enquiries and the central government came to assume that it was, invariably, a self-contained economic and social unit, despite massive evidence to the contrary.
The determination to anchor French society is equally apparent in the marked preference of the regime to base its own conscious definition of its local elite – notability – mainly on the ownership of landed property. Wealth, as such, was less important than stability,40 and stability was interpreted in a physical, very literal sense. It was also reflected in the desired organization of religious life, under the terms of the Concordat. Bishoprics were, in so far as possible, synonymous with departments. Everywhere, the parish was the only recognized sub-division of the diocese, and so the centre of religious life; the parish priest, the curé, was the sole source of authority here, and the long-established practice of inviting preachers from elsewhere was discouraged. In these ways, it was hoped that the citizen might be more easily taxed, conscripted, ministered to and also protected. Movement was not something the authorities liked among the labouring classes, and Napoleonic legislation on begging and vagabondage is remarkable for its severity.
It proved an impossible task to circumvent French life in such narrow limits, however. Internal, seasonal migrations were traditional and essential parts of working life in many parts of France. They took place on a massive scale in the Massif Central, the Alps and the Pyrenees, where most of the adult male population spent a large part of the year working either in the cities or in other regions, practising itinerant trades. Equally, the labouring populations of wealthy areas, such as Normandy, would migrate at harvest time to the neighbouring regions of the Ile de France or Picardy, or to adjacent departments within their own region, while at the same time receiving itinerant craftsmen from the Massif Central and the Limousin. The regime did not break these patterns, which would only disappear with industrialization later in the century.
Where elements in French society did seek a restoration of more regulated social and economic practices, they met with at least partial disappointment. Many craftsmen hoped that the tighter controls on movement by the livrets heralded the restoration of the trade guilds, which had been abolished in 1789. This was generally favoured by the police as a useful means of control; the Parisian police actually created syndics for mastercraftsmen in most trades, a step which was technically illegal, but that aroused considerable enthusiasm among skilled workers.41
At the other end of the social scale, the regime set great priority on reestablishing the legal profession, and regulating its membership to those trained in the new law schools. This raised hopes within its ranks of the restoration of the ancien régime Order of Barristers, with its rights of self-regulation. These hopes were disappointed, in similar fashion to those of the mastercraftsmen who desired the return of the guilds, and for identical reasons. Napoleon was deeply suspicious of the barristers, personally, and this reinforced the wider outlook of the regime: that the purpose of the organization and regulation of any aspect of working life – whether that of an itinerant tinker or a barrister – was to ensure state control in that sphere. The barristers were never accorded any authority over their own profession; the curriculum of the law schools was laid down by the Ministry of Justice and recruitment was decided by the state,42 just as an Auvergnat stone mason required the permission of his prefect to work outside his department. After 1811, these controls tightened at every level. As has been seen, they even extended to those the regime called its nobility.
At the heart of these policies lay a fundamental dispute between the regime and large portions of French society. The thwarted hopes of mastercraftsmen and barristers ought not to be equated with political opposition; it was a question of disappointment, not resistance, wholly different from the liberal and reactionary defiance that marked the early years. Nevertheless, the restorative character of many of the initial Napoleonic reforms raised hopes in some quarters of a partial return to the ancien régime. Yet, just as the transformation of the Consulate into the Empire did not mean a monarchial restoration, so the reordering of the workplace did not open the way to the return of corporatism. Nor did the introduction of the Concordat allow the restoration of many aspects of popular religion – or of any religious life outside the parish. The popular lay confraternities remained outlawed, alongside the guilds and professional bodies who had once supported them. The intention of the Napoleonic ‘restoration’ was to strengthen the state and standardize life, not to revive particularism.
These tensions were reflected within the state itself, for the disappointment of these conservative hopes was by no means a foregone conclusion. It was only after about 1806 that the regime decided to blend its authoritarianism with the liberal individualism of the Revolution, rather than the corporatism of the old order. The possibility of restoring the guilds and the Order of Barristers was debated by the Council of State several times, but ultimately the liberal view prevailed: that the freedom of profession established in 1789 should remain, if now subject to certain strictures in the case of medicine, the law and public service. This remained a haven of deregulation – almost an anomaly – in so tightly controlled a society.
Above and outside the immobile, regulated France of the administrés, the regime sought to create the basis to perpetuate that ‘empire of the professionals’ upon which it relied. The Université Impériale and its lycées were producing their first generation of pupils by about 1806–07. Drawn from the immobile ranks of the notables, the more promising among them were destined, at least in the eyes of the government, to become the next generation of imperial officers and administrators. The lycées were created to give them the appropriate education for this role, but as the sons of the notables confronted this system of education, other signs of reticence emerged between the state and society.
The issue of elite education reveals a clear distinction between the culture of the notables and that of the state. Even within the ranks of those most solicited by Napoleon, a gulf began to emerge between the aspirations of notable families for their sons, and those of the state culture, the ‘official France’ whose values were taught in the lycées. A united, professional, centralized state could not hope to survive without an educated bureaucracy and army, staffed by men who shared a national culture and a distinct set of values, but it was by no means clear that Napoleon was going to get this from the notables. The curriculum was meant to reassure the conservative instincts of the landed classes, by the reintroduction of classics and a degree of religious study, yet this served only to emphasize how unlike the Church-run schools of the ancien régime the lycées actually were. The general goal of the curriculum was clearly to create professional administrators; great stress was placed on science, mathematics and modern languages. The ethos of school life was military, both in the daily routine and the uniforms themselves. Classes changed to military drum beats; ranks and punishments were replications of military norms.
An educational system of this kind did not appeal to those same notables who spent considerable sums on buying replacements to help their sons avoid conscription. The limited appeal of the lycées indicates that the notables resented the militarization of their lives. Imperial victories were crucial to their well-being, but they did not want to be directly involved in creating the Empire, any more than the peasantry. The imperial ethos was alien to them. It is even more striking that this reluctance did not come in the final, beleaguered years of the Empire, but at its zenith, in 1805–07. They detested the creation of the Gardes d’Honneur, the thoroughly elitist corps of national guards, selected from the wealthiest taxpayers of each department, representing as it did an attempt by the government to recoup for service those who had bought replacements.
The cultural divide between the Napoleonic state and its most prized citizens, the French notables, was deep, for when the notables rejected the lycées – and the state culture they stood for – they turned, instead, to the more traditional Catholic schools. Fontanes, who became Rector of the Imperial University in 1808, brought the differences between the state and Catholic schools to light, in his unsuccessful attempts to get Napoleon to soften the curriculum of the lycées by introducing more formal religion and more traditional humanist studies at the expense of science. He also tried to introduce more clergy to the teaching staff, but with no real success. Fontanes saw the serious nature, and the wider implications, of the rift exposed by the unpopularity of the lycées, but was unable to ameliorate it. His sense of unease is reflected in the opening words of the memoirs of Alfred de Musset, who was a schoolboy in these years. They reveal the unease which underlay Napoleonic rule, even at its peak:
During the wars of the Empire … worried mothers brought a pale, passionate, nervous generation into the world, conceived between two battles, brought up in colleges to the roll of drums, thousands of children looked around at each other with sombre eyes, flexing their puny muscles … Every year, France made a present to this man (Napoleon) of 300,000 youths … Never were there so many sleepless nights as in the time of this man; never were there to be seen, leaning on the ramparts of town walls, such a nation of sorrowing mothers; never did such silence envelop those who spoke of death. And yet, never was there so much joy, so much life, so many warlike fanfares, in every heart. Never was there so much pure sunshine, to dry out the stains of so much blood. It was said that God made it for this man, and it was called the sun of Austerlitz. But he made them, himself, with his never-silent cannons, which left only clouds of smoke the day after his battles.43
A glaring contradiction lay at the heart of the state’s plan to extract future empire-builders from the ranks of the notables: the Napoleonic regime sought to glorify empire, commitment to service in far-flung wars and departments, while at the same time it deliberately enshrined the ideal of a landed, localized, stable network of family-based elites at the heart of French society. The incongruity of this became clear as the notables shunned the lycées. Few outside Paris ever filled the number of places available: that of Bordeaux had only 180 pupils for 350 places in 1809 and only 255 by 1813; most of them were the sons of ex-revolutionaries. Even the politically loyal city of Lyon had only 150 pupils at its lycée, in 1810. The vast majority of pupils were drawn from sons of civil servants and officers, for whom Napoleon provided generous scholarships. The revolutionary-Napoleonic state was in danger of becoming hereditary well below the level of the Bonaparte dynasty.
Had the regime lasted longer, there were clear indications that two elites would have emerged: a social and economic elite based on the 600 wealthiest taxpayers in each department, rooted, for the most part, in their localities, inward-looking, politically powerless, with only the departmental electoral colleges as a collective means of expression; beside them, in an almost parallel universe, stood the professional elite of the army and the imperial civil service, composed of men whose lives revolved around their careers, and whose horizons were European, rather than local, ready to serve in the Italian, German or Dutch departments, as required, and who sent their sons, in turn, to the lycées. The French elite was united by a common language and the long experience of living under a relatively centralized state long before 1789. There was a true national, literary culture to bind them, but as Napoleonic rule acquired its own identity through the creation of a state culture, that official culture diverged from – and threatened to outweigh – the older sources of cultural unity in France. Some reconciled the two, some did not: the regime increasingly wrapped itself in the trappings of the old monarchy, not only in its iconography, but in new history textbooks describing the Bonapartes as ‘the fourth dynasty’ in a continuous history of France.44 Seen in the context of the reticence of the notables to embrace state culture, such efforts become less the expression of unbounded egotism, than another aspect of ralliement, a desperate attempt to preserve cultural unity. It did not fail, altogether.
There was another side to the picture of fear and anxiety painted by de Musset, for a generational divide was emerging within the French elite at the height of the Empire. De Musset portrayed the fears of his parents, not of his peers: his classmates rallied to Napoleon in the 100 Days – ‘It was the unsullied air of heaven, gleaming with glory and resplendent with so much steel, that children breathed then.’45 Even within the ranks of the Savoyard nobles, loyal to the House of Savoy, who had refused to serve France since the annexation of their province to France – now the department of Mont Blanc – in 1792, the new generation of nobles increasingly took service in the Grande Armée.46 For those caught up in the heady creation of the Empire, the prospects seemed endless, but they were only attainable in the service of the state.
The regime was renewing itself from within from 1808 onwards, particularly by purging its ranks of many older men. They were replaced mainly by a new generation aged between 21 and 30 who had known only the Napoleonic order since childhood. These younger administrators brought with them not only the necessary vigour for ruling the new unruly territories acquired after 1808, but also a fresh perspective on the role of the state in society. Above all, they possessed a strong sense of confidence – of superiority – in the whole edifice of contemporary French culture and its single greatest achievement, the Napoleonic state. In bringing these younger men into power and responsibility, Napoleon sought to break with the quarrels of the past but equally to find men he felt he could trust, who, although inevitably from wealthy backgrounds, would conform to Eugène de Beauharnais’s vision of the professional bureaucrat, whose interests were wholly at one with those of the state. By the last years of the Empire, Napoleon’s initial reforms provided him with the human material to achieve this. The main instrument Napoleon chose for his policy of renewal was the office of auditeur to the Council of State, his central policy-making body. There were only 16 auditeurs in 1805, but the office grew along with the Empire. By 1808, they had risen to 34, and many of them had seen service as military administrators with the Grande Armée or as intendants of areas temporarily under French control. Following the upheavals of 1809, Napoleon reshaped their role and increased their number considerably. By January 1810, there were 350 of them, by 1813, 452. The auditeurs played a role in the life of the Empire out of all proportion even to these numbers. Most were French, usually the sons of the political elite of the Revolution, together with some scions of the old nobility, but from 1809 onwards they were also drawn from the Dutch, Belgian and Italian departments: the office was an instrument of ralliement, as well as of renewal. Although many Dutch and Italian recruits were reluctant to serve the French and were not really loyal to the regime, most acquired a profound respect for the Napoleonic system of government; it was a certainty they never abandoned. The auditeurs made their most obvious impact in the departments of the outer empire; all the Illyrian intendancies, the two Roman departments and the civil administration of Spain north of the River Ebro all fell to their lot. These young bureaucrats were very conscious of their elite status, and their confidence – often sheer arrogance – lent a real ferocity to the almost traditional rivalries between the civil and military authorities.
The heartland of the French Empire was stable and secure, on the eve of its last phase of expansion in 1808. There was little overt political opposition to the regime and, as a new generation began to take its place within the elite, the signs were that opposition would continue to dwindle. However, on several different levels, divisions of a less obvious, but more fundamental kind were emerging. Geographically, if the ‘imaginary line’ between a loyal, ordered, prosperous country and a more backward, rebellious France was shifting from north/south to east/west, it continued to exist. Within the ranks of the elite, at the heart of the social groups the regime had chosen as its foundation, two different cultures were taking shape. When the Empire struck out into new territories, it carried with it the official culture of the professional elite and the image of the ‘enlightened France’ of the north and east.
Napoleonic rule was brief in the territories of the outer empire, but although at the level of institutions its influence on the societies of these areas was ephemeral, the impact of annexation was no less profound for being almost wholly negative. They would get their first taste of rule by a modern state when that state was at its most demanding; conscription, the blockade and cultural imperialism would hit them all at once. Bad memories are often more enduring than good ones, and this was largely the case for the peoples of central Italy, Spain, the Illyrian provinces, and the North Sea coast. The experience of the outer empire was, truly, a short, sharp shock.
In June 1810, the former Kingdom of Holland became nine French departments. Lebrun was appointed Governor-General, responsible for their integration into the Empire, the same role he had played earlier in Genoa and Parma. A largely decorative council was appointed to advise him from among Louis’ leading advisors, but the real power lay with a new bureau for the Dutch departments, in Paris. The Dutch departments were in a unique position: having been under pro-French regimes since 1795, they did not find the administrative reforms difficult to absorb. Indeed, the full introduction of the Civil Code proved remarkably easy and popular, as Dutch magistrates were by now well versed in French law; after the fall of the Empire, it was maintained virtually unaltered by the restored monarchy until 1838. The French made annexation more difficult for themselves by creating new departments instead of working through those already established under Louis, and also by bringing in French and Belgian prefects, who were then moved deliberately from one department to another to prevent them developing that sympathy for the Dutch which had undone Louis. As a result, they were heavily reliant on the local officials of the former kingdom.
All this was nothing compared to the resentment engendered by the full introduction of conscription and a more effective enforcement of the blockade. Louis had protected his subjects from conscription, as had Murat in Naples, by raising forces of his own, but now Napoleon was determined to plunder Dutch reserves of manpower unhindered, especially for the navy. His new prefects sensed Dutch resentment, and moved with circumspection; it was estimated that only 17,300 troops were raised between 1811 and 1812, from a target of 40,000. Nevertheless, riots were frequent at the departure of conscripts. They posed no serious threat to public order and were usually composed of desperate women and children, but in 1813, as the collapse of French rule became more likely, resistance to conscription grew in violence and intensity. At Oud Beierland, in southern Holland, the crowds numbered in thousands and several people were killed in confrontations with the French.47 The urban middle classes were often able to buy replacements, usually with the connivance of local officials, but lower-class resentment was intense.
The hatred and economic hardship provoked by the enforcement of the blockade was far more serious than the conscription riots; it also showed how slack Louis’s regime had actually been about smuggling. While the civil administration, heavily influenced by Dutch politicians, was content to change as little as possible, the police and customs’ officials behaved ruthlessly. Under Devilliers Duterrage, the gendarmes, coastguards and excisemen carried out arbitrary nocturnal arrests and house searches often notable for a gratuitous brutality which appalled even the French officials. Widespread corruption and extortion only compounded popular hatred of the French. The losses incurred by the blockade were not offset by annexation, thus disappointing the slender hopes of those Dutch businessmen who had seen some advantages in annexation. The Dutch departments were not allowed to trade on equal terms with France; legitimate markets were not opened up on a scale capable of replacing British or colonial trade. The burning customs’ house became the symbol of Dutch resistance. Napoleon’s financial policy was equally ruthless, above all his reduction by a third of the Dutch public debt. Large sections of the urban middle classes had invested in the public debt and this entailed a real financial loss to them.
Thus, Napoleon’s three key policies intensified Dutch resentment at the loss of independence. Even long-standing supporters of the French were alienated after annexation. Donker Curtius – a leading magistrate – saw his son arrested arbitrarily for refusing to join the Garde d’Honneur, a national guard for the propertied classes. The French officials who presided over this had little confidence in the imperial edifice and their words echo those of their colleagues in Italy and Germany after the revolts of 1809. Lebrun told Napoleon early in 1811:
I told Your Majesty that tranquillity reigns here. I did not say that there is general contentment … I hope that the enemy will not appear, but should that happen I doubt very much that we could count on the help of the Dutch.48
He was right.
The Dutch, at least, had a long acquaintance with the revolutionary-Napoleonic state and its workings. In contrast, the three Hanseatic departments, created in December 1810 from the coastal area between Lübeck and Osnabruck, have been justly described as one of the last and least durable creations of the Napoleonic state system.49 With the exception of a few areas subtracted from the Kingdom of Westphalia – which deprived the ‘model kingdom’ of its outlet to the sea – these departments had been under French military occupation and had witnessed attempts to introduce both conscription and the blockade, but they had proved ineffective. Now, their imposition came as a severe blow, compounded by the wholesale introduction of the Napoleonic administrative system.
The Hansa ports had no tradition of centralized government; their political and legal traditions were alien to those of the French. Many local magistrates were horrified by the comparative severity of the French criminal code and had no idea how the new system worked. To overcome this, the French simply imported their own officials into the area en masse, thus excluding the indigenous elite from power and influence. The shock was compounded by French corruption. There was no concerted attempt to implement the policies of ralliement and amalgame among the wealthy merchant oligarchies of these great ports, a clear sign of the makeshift, expedient nature of the annexation. Far from the centres of power, they slipped back into the arbitrary practices of the ancien régime and the Revolution. The gendarmerie, 400 strong, was brought straight from France to implement conscription as quickly as possible, which actually led to the breakdown of law and order in an area where disorder had been largely unknown. Between 1811 and 1813, the marshlands along the coast were filled with men fleeing conscription, many of whom soon turned to banditry. Real power soon passed from the civilians to Marshal Davout, who proved an uncompromising military ruler.
Mass unemployment was the major consequence of annexation. The end of legitimate colonial trade led straight to the collapse of sugar refining, and there were over 300 refineries in the Hamburg area alone. The enforcement of the blockade ended large-scale smuggling with Britain, which had flourished under the pre-annexation collaboration between French commandants and the senates. This created so much hardship that even French officials pitied the plight of these coastal communities, among them the prefect of the neighbouring Dutch department of Ems-Oriental, who wrote in 1811: ‘The islands … that live from smuggling will be, and are already, deeply impoverished. A way should be found to employ these unfortunates in some sort of work on the mainland.’50 There was no such possibility, and not only because of the blockade. As in the Dutch departments, the French denied the Hanseatic ports the right to trade freely with France, which led to the collapse of the textile industry; the numerous artisan classes of the ports were devastated. The ship-building programmes begun by the French did not provide enough work to compensate for dislocation on so vast a scale.
These annexations began in an atmosphere of resignation, but rapidly this was transformed into widespread hostility. Almost every sector of society felt its most vital interests damaged by annexation. The flourishing urban civilization of the North Sea coast had been ruined economically, and its sophisticated culture brutalized. Its economic fate was shared by almost all the coastal areas of the Empire, France not excepted. Bordeaux and Nantes, for example, never recovered from the blockade, unlike the North Sea ports. However, the cultural and political disruption of French rule were their own, and unique.
The French had high hopes for Tuscany, despite the violence of the counter-revolution there in 1799 and the bitterness surrounding the deposition of the Bourbons in 1808. Yet these hopes were based on the false assumption that the reforms of Peter-Leopold in the 1780s had been popular and that they had fostered a peaceful, well-ordered state which could be easily revived under French rule. They were wrong on both counts: the enlightened reforms had been rejected violently in the 1790s and their originators were too unpopular and too small in number to provide a solid basis of support for the French. Nor did Tuscany have the basis of an orderly society; banditry was endemic over much of the countryside, especially in the inaccessible southern marshlands, the Maremma, and the mountain valleys to the north. There was also Arezzo, the centre of counter-revolution in 1799, which was still restive after annexation. The urban centres of the three Tuscan departments sheltered a mass of paupers, long perceived as dangerous by the authorities and the propertied classes, even if they posed no political threat.
Although these conditions predated the political upheavals of the decade prior to annexation, the succession of weak governments that ruled Tuscany had intensified them. Fear of disorder, rather than any tradition of enlightened reform, provided the French with a source of support rare in the outer empire. The new regime could deploy its most effective tactic, the restoration of order, and, by and large, the Tuscan propertied classes responded favourably, especially in the smaller towns and rural areas. The Tuscan notables respected French effectiveness, at least as far as repressing social disorder was concerned. In turn, this made the enforcement of conscription easier than it might otherwise have been, as the local authorities used it as a way to dispose of a wide spectrum of ‘social nuisances’, from dangerous bandit chiefs to unfortunate vagabonds, supported by French gendarmes. The willingness of the French to protect their collaborators in local government from the intimidation that went with social disorder brought forward many notables who were not really pro-French. Their way with the landed classes was also smoothed by the almost total absence of seigneurialism in Tuscany, thus sparing the French so many of the tensions that bedevilled them in Naples, Berg and Westphalia.
This pattern corresponds very closely to the successes of 1800–07 in the inner empire, but it should not be exaggerated. Tuscany is an example of how promising signs of ralliement and acceptance of imperial rule were compromised by the economic demands of the blockade, the strains of war and the intransigence of French religious policies. Livorno, the major port of the region, suffered greatly from the blockade, as did Prato, the only Tuscan centre with a highly developed textile industry. Tuscan agriculture had a significant commercial sector, centred on the export of olive oil, which was affected very badly by the loss of export markets brought about by the blockade. This, in turn, increased resentment of taxation among the landed classes and led them to oppose costly French improvement projects such as road-building, purely on financial grounds. The burdens of taxation and conscription embittered the popular classes, as they did all over Napoleonic Europe, while the patrician families of Florence resented the loss of their former prestige.
All this was compounded by a general lack of faith in the solidity of French rule. This crucial ingredient, which had been so important in consolidating the inner empire, was not present in the newly annexed territories, but it was not always due to military or diplomatic developments. Tuscany is a clear example of how the Empire was now simply overstretched, within its own borders. Between 1809 and 1812, considerable progress was made in the restoration of order, but although the following years did not see widespread disorder, the drain on military resources led to signs of weakness in the fight against the bandits. Now, instead of defeating them, as they had in the inner empire, the French were often reduced to making truces with the bands, whereby the bandits usually agreed to serve in Spain as irregular troops. It was a difference local officials took note of. They approved of what the French sought to do, but came to doubt their ability to achieve it.
The French had few straws to cling to in the two departments of the ex-Papal States. The intransigent passive resistance initiated by Pius VII did not abate after annexation. Added to this was the total incompatibility of the Papal government with the Napoleonic system. Probably nowhere else in western Europe did rulers and ruled find themselves thrust into such different dimensions as here. The French did not understand what they were dismantling because they were confronted by an administrative structure where not only was there no division between Church and state, but where the Church was the state. The Papal Curia, the highest administrative organ of the Roman Catholic Church, doubled as the civil service of the Papal States. The College of Cardinals was, effectively, the Council of State. Many Cardinals were deported by the French for their loyalty to the Pope, and only a handful of laymen held high posts in the Papal government; neither the nobility nor the middle classes were part of public life. In short, the French had nothing – and almost no one – to work through.
As in Tuscany, the highest posts went to Frenchmen. General Miollis became Governor-General after heading the transitional administration, the Consultà, until 1811. The prefects of the two new departments, Tiber (later Rome) and Trasimeno, were also both French. Among the ranks of the imported administrators in Tuscany and Rome were many magistrates, gendarmes and officials from the Piedmontese departments; many young French-trained Piedmontese magistrates gained quick promotion in the tribunals of the new departments. As with the use of prefects from Lombardy in the new Venetian departments a few years earlier, the inner empire was now colonizing the outer. This was far from a purely French expansion.
Like the Tuscan Giunta under Menou, the Consultà was remarkably successful in creating the institutional framework for French rule, but in much more difficult circumstances. Several noble families accepted office in the Roman departments, but usually only at local level. However, the non-noble professional classes tended to remain hostile to the regime, largely due to their close personal and economic ties to the clergy. Most successful families had clergy in their ranks, the equivalent of political connections in other states. Although reluctance to serve the French was less marked in provincial centres like Perugia and Spoleto than in Rome itself, there were few indications that a new class of secular, largely middle-class administrators would emerge here, in contrast to northern Italy, excluding the Veneto, or as was showing signs of happening in Tuscany. Much of this came from hatred of the new regime, but often it was due to the absence of laymen with adequate administrative backgrounds among those willing to serve.
The introduction of conscription was nothing short of traumatic for the Roman people; banditry increased and the population of Rome fell from 136 268 in 1809 to 112 648 in 1814, largely as a direct result of men fleeing the call-up.51 Nevertheless, the ruthless determination of the prefects ensured that the two departments usually filled their quotas, while brigandage – although endemic in the mountains and along the border with Naples – was contained by the local police forces and the handful of troops Miollis had at his disposal. Thus, the Roman people were introduced to the modern, secular state, experiencing more wholesale change in the period 1809–14 than any other country in Europe.
Beyond the level of institutions, this experience was wholly negative. In both the Roman and Tuscan departments no pretence was ever made that French rule was popular with the masses. Their resentment found its most coherent expression in passive, widespread resistance to the introduction of the Concordat, the trauma of which was as deeply – and more widely – felt than the introduction of conscription. The dissolution of the regular orders, the abolition of many dioceses and of the lay confraternities had been disruptive enough elsewhere in western Europe. In the Roman departments, at the very heart of the Catholic world, it was interpreted as a savage blow to the whole fabric of society. Throughout the Papal States, the orders given by Pius VII to ignore the French regime were obeyed, especially in religious matters, as far as possible, thus threatening the daily functioning of the Church. Lay support for their clergy amounted to a non-violent movement of national resistance, orchestrated first by the College of Cardinals and then, when they were arrested and deported, by vicars-general of the dioceses and parish priests. Thousands of clergy at all levels were arrested by the French, ostensibly for their refusal to take the oath of allegiance to Napoleon, but really in an attempt to deprive the masses of the leadership they provided. In spite of their original intentions, the French found themselves returning to the anticlericalism of the revolutionary years. Over most of central Italy, the French came to depend heavily on the radicals of the 1790s, especially in the police; in Rome, they were virtually the only loyal support the regime had. If the symbol of popular resistance along the North Sea coast was a burning customs’ house, or a guerrilla raid that of Spain, the anger of the Roman and Tuscan masses was expressed in the celebration of banned saints’ days, the empty stalls in St Peter’s Basilica for official celebrations and, most poignantly of all, the refusal of the entire population of four Roman dioceses to have their children baptized by the few collaborationist bishops of the area between 1809 and 1813. Despite its impressive administrative reforms, as well as the ambitious attempts to restore Rome’s architectural and artistic heritage, the French regime remained virtually friendless, still haunted by Fesch’s dread prophecy made before annexation: ‘what would they not do to them, if they had the power’.
The course of French rule in Tuscany represents the practical problems imposed by over-expansion; in the Roman departments, it exemplifies those created by the radical ideology of reform at the heart of Napoleonic imperialism. It was not just the demands of war these populations rejected, or even the edifice of the modern state, but the world of the Enlightenment itself. French ambitions ran far beyond the imposition of conscription, taxation and the Napoleonic administrative system. Here, they overreached themselves more than territorially. Indeed, there were signs between 1809 and 1812 that they were making more progress in parts of Spain than in central Italy.
In the satellite kingdom of Spain, a very clear distinction must be made between basic military control of the country – occupation – and true pacification. The difference between the two had been clear in the minds of the French from the outset. After the end of the Wagram campaign in 1809, it did not take long for the French to drive the Junta Central out of Seville and pen its successor, the Cortes, behind the walls of Cadiz, in the far south-west. In the course of 1810 and 1811, with no major wars elsewhere to distract them, the French were able to secure their grip on Andalusia in the south, Asturias in the north, and, after a series of determined sieges, to take Valencia and the southern part of the Catalan coast. Thus, these years represent the apex of French military control in Spain; Joseph’s kingdom had been extended from its core around Madrid and in the north-east, to include most of the south and east.
This was also the lowest ebb of large-scale resistance. The juntas and the Cortes now held on only to a few coastal areas: Cadiz itself, most of Galicia in the far north-west, and a few ports in Asturias and Murcia. With the vital exception of Portugal, real control had passed away from most of the juntas. Those of Navarre, Aragon and Catalonia had virtually merged with the guerrilla bands; those of Leon and Old Castille took refuge in Galicia. That of Asturias had been reduced to between two and five men, fleeing from one mountain hamlet to another during the winter and spring of 1811; its members often slept fully clothed, so great was their fear of capture. Their plight applied to most of the Spanish juntas between 1809 and 1812:
What must be imagined most often, is the image of a small group of men, trudging for hours under the Asturian rain and the rugged peaks of the Cantabrian mountains, while below them, in the valley, the hamlet where they had found shelter the night before, burns.52
Even during these years, military occupation could fluctuate. When French troops were temporarily withdrawn from Asturias, for example, its ragged junta briefly found itself restored to the regional capital, Oviedo. Almost simultaneously. Soult and Suchet consolidated the French grip on Andalusia and Valencia, respectively. The sheer size of Spain still thwarted French efforts to establish a consistent grip on the country. When coupled to the determination of the Spanish to resist, the size of Spain made it very difficult to transform military occupation into pacification.
Nevertheless, where a degree of control was established, there were clear signs that the policy of restoring order and normal government was gaining ground. Suchet, in Aragon, Catalonia and then in Valencia, Bouchet in Asturias and, up to a point, Soult in Andalusia, were adept at counter-insurgency tactics and developed policies to secure the support of local populations, often weary of war and unconvinced of the effectiveness of the guerrilla fighters they sustained. In these areas, especially in Andalusia, the French convinced a significant segment of the propertied classes of the usefulness and effectiveness of their rule. It has even been suggested that between 1810 and 1812 a major part of the Spanish propertied classes were ‘passive collaborators’ in Joseph’s regime, if far from sympathetic to it.53
This progress was the work of military commanders, not the civilian administration. All Spain north of the River Ebro, which included Suchet’s commands of Aragon and Catalonia, had been placed under the full, direct control of the French army. South of this line, when Suchet took Valencia and Soult took Andalusia, they treated these areas as their own responsibilities, ceding little power to Joseph’s Spanish officials. Even where both pacification and a degree of collaboration were achieved, it was often in flagrant contradiction to the policies Joseph sought desperately to promote. In Valencia, the co-operation between Suchet and the upper classes was achieved at the price of condoning the perpetuation of feudalism. Valencia was one of the most heavily seigneurial regions in Spain. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, its countryside had been rocked by several serious peasant revolts against the handful of powerful noble landlords of the province. Valencia was also an important rice-producing area and, as such, an unparalleled source of supplies for Suchet’s troops. Thus, he aided and abetted the perpetuation of the feudal rights of the great landlords in return for provisions: French troops kept order in the Valencian countryside and even helped to collect feudal dues.54 Nothing could have been further from the spirit of the anti-seigneurial legislation Joseph and his afrancesado ministers were drawing up in Madrid.
Valencia was not unique. Whether in the 31 departments into which the kingdom was notionally divided in April 1810, or even the administrative units set up by Paris north of the Ebro, real power lay with the soldiers. If a sign distinguishing the outer from the inner empire is the prevalence of the military over the conventional civil administration centred on prefects and departments, then Spain is an important example of it. The viability of Joseph’s kingdom was compromised by the fact that the most successful instances of pacification were not really the work of his government.
The extent of pacification must not be exaggerated, even though it was bearing more fruits than in southern Italy or the Illyrian provinces in these years. The guerrilla war qualifies any temptation to speak of a pacified ‘Josephist’ Spain. This aspect of the resistance has become part of historical myth, and so attracted many emotional, perhaps overrated assessments of its effectiveness. Great stress is often placed on the contribution made by the guerrillas in tying down large numbers of French troops, both for the process of pacification and simply to keep open their lines of communication. There is much truth in this, although ultimately it was probably less important than the more coherent resistance of Portugal, which provided the springboard for eventual liberation. The guerrillas were most effective where they behaved more like regular soldiers on ‘irregular duty’ than free-spirited partisans. In Asturias, the only successful guerrilla resistance in 1810–11 came from small detachments of regular troops still acting under orders, rather than the true irregulars, whose indiscipline and ineffectiveness engendered support for Bouchet. Guerrilla resistance improved over time, but usually only when the bands, the partidas, became strong enough to act as regular troops, as in Navarre and Aragon in the last stages of the war in 1813. All this points to the essential wisdom of the determination of the provincial juntas, if not the Cortes, to impose a degree of discipline on the partidas. It also lends credence to the view that they were a drain on efforts to rebuild an effective Spanish army.55
The guerrilla war epitomizes the strengths and weaknesses of counter-revolutionary resistance in revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe. Unable and often unwilling to fight outside their own areas, or to take orders from a higher command, the partidas could not advance the liberation of the country without help from outside. Nor could they remain undefeated within. Throughout the period 1809–12, if any tide can be detected, it was probably turning against the partidas. The real value of the guerrillas to the anti-French struggle was more subtle. Their continued existence, although not a military threat, was a powerful barrier to the process of ralliement and any return to normal life for ordinary people. Even when the partidas were too weak to ambush French patrols, they could still visit horrors on isolated local officials who collaborated, just as their presence in an area could provide a focal point – a refuge – for those who were determined to resist. These conditions aggravated the divisions within Spain and made the rhetoric of the politicians in Cadiz a fearsome reality in the remotest corners of the peninsula. The ultimate result was the destabilization of Spanish society at a very basic level. When French rule had looked at its most secure in Andalusia, in 1810–12, the guerrillas met their match. A younger generation of liberals and Freemasons flocked to Joseph. Their will probably stiffened by the dire threats coming from the proximity of Cadiz, these afrancesados formed irregular units of their own which committed many atrocities. The parallels with southern Italy are very powerful.
This was the background against which Joseph had to work and he tried vigorously to present his regime as the only hope of surmounting these bitter divisions. It was a classic – almost caricatured – statement of Bonapartist policy as it had first emerged in post-revolutionary France in 1799, but Joseph lacked the power and the wide consensus necessary to put it into practice. That it was given any life at all was because soldiers like Suchet happened to agree with him. Suchet’s commitment to Joseph’s policy of appeasement is very clear in his treatment of the members of the Valencian junta, all of whom he pardoned on taking the city. Where the French generals took a different view, these policies became a mockery, as in Barcelona. For most of the period 1808–10, the city was controlled by Casanova, an afrancesado who the French military made Director-General of Police. Casanova ran Barcelona through a network of corrupt spies and his vast powers were only curbed after 1810, when Paris took direct control of Catalonia in preparation for annexation to France. Casanova was a hated figure; he went in constant fear of assassination but obviously made a niche for himself within the imperial service.56 When his position in Barcelona became untenable, by 1812, he was appointed Chief of Police in Genoa, another city where the ravages of the blockade bred discontent.
Joseph had a small but active core of ideological supporters, such as the young liberals of Seville or Llorente, the ex-secretary of the Inquisition, who became responsible for reforming the Church along the lines of the French Concordat. Beside them were older, enlightened administrators such as Azanza and O’Farril, whose main purpose in collaborating was to curb the French. Their fear of patriot vengeance and of popular disorder outweighed the severe doubts they harboured about Joseph’s ability to act independently of Napoleon. These men were probably typical of the many ‘passive collaborators’ in the war-torn provinces, and of those civil servants who had stayed at their posts in 1808, in a simple effort to maintain a semblance of order. Casanova was typical of another kind of afrancesado, the pure opportunists who joined the French for expedient, often mercenary reasons. If the largest ‘ideological’ base of collaboration was among the bourgeois youth of Andalusia, the equivalent for the opportunists was probably along the border with France, in the Pyrenees. Ironically, because the French commandants allowed the blockade to be flouted in this area, a huge network of powerful bandit-merchants developed along the border. Most had a vested interest in the perpetuation of French rule, but they also supplied the patriot partidas. While the blockade ruined Barcelona, inland centres such as the Cerdanya and Tarragona flourished. Chaos in these border areas, partly fostered by French corruption, spawned a loose but not insignificant bond between occupiers and occupied.
In truth, there was no real national government in Spain between 1808 and 1814. Effective administration existed only in those places where a responsible French general (whether honest like Suchet or corrupt like Soult), guerrilla leaders with pretensions to statesmanship such as Esposa y Mina in Navarre and Palafox in Aragon, or a provincial junta, could achieve some degree of control. Joseph’s government in Madrid and the Cortes in Cadiz fought an ideological war of words for the soul of a Spain from which they were both cut off, the afrancesados by their treason, the Cortes by its adoption of liberal ideas and physical isolation. Both were swept away when the war reached its conclusion. In the meantime, provincial Spain drifted into lawlessness on a huge scale, its economy exhausted by the raids of the British from Portugal and the usual rigours of French military occupation. Almost everywhere, the French and the guerrillas engaged in an unseemly race for the harvest to deny the other supplies and revenue, as much as to provision themselves.
As long as the military deadlock continued, so would the anarchy Spain had sunk into. An Anglo-Portuguese attempt to invade Spain in 1809 had ended in retreat and only the narrowest of defensive victories for Wellington. Then, Massena failed to break it for the French, when his invasion of Portugal was repulsed in the winter of 1810–11. The final campaigns of 1812–13 would unleash still further destruction, but well before they began, Spain presented a terrifying spectacle of suffering, graphically recorded by the artistic genius of Goya. His paintings are a remarkable window on a collective psyche scarred by violence and deprivation but marked, equally, by a will to resist the French.
There are many qualifications to the idealized view of the Spanish resistance. The junta of Catalonia had great trouble raising taxes; guerrilla indiscipline could drive peasants into the waiting arms of the French, as in parts of Asturias; the patriot leaders could turn on each other with great ferocity, as they did at local level in Asturias and Galicia, or in the Cortes itself. Yet in spite of all this, few ever turned away from the cause. Cold and cowering in the mountains, the provincial juntas and the partidas never contemplated surrender, even to a regime which had shown itself fair and friendly to those who accepted it. Large armies and small partidas dissolved when defeated, only to regroup. The clergy there had no alternative but resistance, and their influence on the masses was incontrovertible. Whereas in Rome and Tuscany they could only submit to exile, in Spain they could join the guerrillas. Above all, the struggle remained a popular one. The first afrancesados had hoped the traditional collective instincts of resignation and Catholic obedience would pave the way for Joseph; instead, they sustained the dangers and privations of the resistance. Ironically, they also helped to undermine authority – all authority save that of the Church – by perpetuating chaos.
The crushing defeats inflicted on the Spanish by Napoleon late in 1808 all but destroyed the tenuous authority of the Junta Central. The Junta Central and the provincial juntas supremas reacted in a curious way to these disasters. They turned in on themselves, began to debate the deeper causes of their plight and turned to the question of fundamental, long-term reform. The ensuing debates produced some of the most profound political thought of the period, but the times were not propitious for detached reflection. By concentrating on the fundamental issues, at a time of crisis, the Spanish resistance exposed the deep ideological divisions in its ranks, and finally tore itself apart. Chased to Seville, the Junta Central resolved to call the Cortes, but its members were divided over its character and purpose. Jovellanos and the moderates wanted the Cortes for legalistic reasons: only the Cortes could establish a legitimate regency with the authority to run the war.57 The radicals, led by Quintana, Blanco-White and Calvo de Rozas, saw the Cortes as a chance to give Spain a new constitution. Calvo, in particular, argued that reforms were needed desperately if support were not to be lost to Joseph. They found a supporter in the British representative, Lord Holland. He became a close friend of Quintana and his circle, and was instrumental in winning them away from French models of reform.
The Junta held together long enough to issue the decree convoking the Cortes on 22 May 1809. Their unity was a lingering fear of despotism, and is reflected in the language of the decree, which spoke of the need ‘to reconstruct the august edifice of our ancient laws, in order to place an everlasting barrier between deathly arbitrary rule and our imperceptible rights …’.58 This reflected both a compromise within the Junta and the views emanating from the provincial juntas, which showed reservations about traditional absolutism and audible calls for constitutional government.
The radicals in the Junta won the struggle over the form of the Cortes and the manner of its election: the Cortes was a single chamber assembly, elected without provision for the traditional, separate estates of the realm. It met in Cadiz in September 1810, after the Junta Central had been driven there from Seville, and dissolved itself. Before this, the Junta managed to implement elections for the Cortes that were a true landmark in the development of European politics. The nobles and clergy were invited on an individual basis; they were not elected, but did not have the right to sit as a separate house. Most of the other 302 deputies were elected by a chain of assemblies stretching from parish to provincial level. Their distribution was fixed according to population, based on the 1797 census. At parish level, every male householder over 25 could stand for election to the district assembly. The popular element was gradually filtered out, but it was predominant at the base. The French occupation prevented many northern provinces from holding elections in 1810. Deputies for these areas were chosen by a committee of the Cortes, controlled by Quintana’s faction, who packed these seats with radicals. Arguelles, the leading orator of the ‘liberals’, as they were soon called, was among them. Where elections were held, however, conservative elements proved strong: one-third of the deputies were clergy,59 and their numbers rose still further, as proper elections were held in the liberated areas.
The clergy and other conservative deputies soon clashed with the liberals, who did well in the large coastal cities. Both proved themselves masters of political propaganda and organization, even if their rivalry was played out within the narrow confines of the besieged port of Cadiz. The city became a cauldron and a political laboratory; the debates of the Cortes increasingly appeared as a dress rehearsal for civil war, rather than the centre of national resistance.
The alliance between liberals and conservatives (los serviles) had been fragile from the start. They had been able to work together in the familiar environment of the provincial juntas, when faced with the crisis of the war. However, in the different, very rarified atmosphere of Cadiz, ideological divisions over the reforms proposed by the liberals snapped the alliance forged in 1808. The deep-rooted fear of arbitrary rule, shared by most deputies, poisoned the relations of the Cortes with the series of Regency Councils created to act as an executive to run the war, but even this source of unity was not enough to stem the growing bitterness between liberals and serviles. Fear of arbitrary rule created an initial consensus for the drafting of a new constitution. At this stage – but not by 1812 – conservative deputies favoured constitutional checks on royal power. The liberals got their way over administrative and judicial reforms, which sketched out a centralized, standardized state. However, the debates over ecclesiastical reform and the abolition of seigneurialism were ferocious and produced irreconcilable enmities. The serviles salvaged a great deal from, the assault on seigneurialism. Most property tights of this kind were left intact, to the deep disappointment of liberal deputies from Valencia,60 where feudal property was extensive, as was collaboration with the French.
The clerical deputies were a powerful force when they stood together. As early as November 1810 they had done so in the debates on censorship, when even enlightened clerics, such as Aguiriano y Gomez, the Bishop of Calahorra, in Rioja, joined the serviles.61 The debate on censorship was important for bringing together conservative opinion. It was hardened further by liberal attempts to legislate the abolition of the regular orders in 1810–11, and finally by their proposal to abolish the Inquisition, tabled in January 1813. These debates brought the ideological divisions to a head. The liberals forced a vote, which they won by 90 votes to 60, but by so doing they shattered any remaining unity within the Cortes. Many serviles now recanted their support for earlier reforms and displayed a new, hitherto unexpected support for royal absolutism, once the king was restored. They rejected the constitution they had helped to frame in 1812. As a result, none of the legislation debated or voted in Cadiz became law after the defeat of the French.
The reaction in the provinces to the abolition of the Inquisition should have shown the liberals how little support they had in the country at large. Most bishops simply refused to comply with the decree. The Bishop of Santander, in the French-held north, threatened to excommunicate any of his priests who dared read it to their flocks. Many provincial juntas refused to implement not only the decree on the Inquisition, but almost all the reforms voted at Cadiz, including the constitution of 1812 itself. Those ‘on the ground’ saw that to do so risked creating a civil war within the civil war.
The Cortes had fallen prey to delusions, in its isolation. Liberals like Quintana and Arguelles imagined they could refashion Spanish society according to the purest liberal ideology. In the constitution of 1812, they produced a political framework imbued with a powerful insistence on the rights of the individual in every sphere of life that excited future generations of Spanish reformers. It raised the hopes of reformers in Italy and Germany that liberalism could flourish without Napoleon and, indeed, in opposition to him. It had no relevance to the Spanish resistance, however.
A romantic, conservative vision of ‘the true Spaniard’ evolved in opposition to abstract liberal concepts of the citizen and the individual. The historian Capmany expressed it lyrically, when he declared true patriotism as the sole preserve of ‘those who hold their land dearest …[who] are the roughest and most ignorant; the ploughman, the dairyman, the shepherd, the rustic labourer [who] do not lose sight of the spire of the parish church’.62 This ideal, too, was buffeted in the last years of the war. Only in their hatred for each other did the deputies truly catch the mood of the times.
When Wellington drove Junot from Portugal in September 1808, the royal administration proved incapable of controlling the popular fury which swept Lisbon in the wake of the French defeat, to say nothing of the violence in the provinces where the Junta of Porto was still the only real power. The ostensible targets of this orgy of popular vengeance were the collaborators – the ‘Jacobins’ – and social groups who were traditional targets of hatred. This meant Jews, Freemasons and foreign merchants, even though few of them had actually collaborated. Within the political violence and ethnic pogroms, a mass of private vendettas were also being settled amid the anarchy. These circumstances continued over most of Portugal into the spring of 1809, and they always resurfaced when the French threatened to regain the military initiative, as in September 1810 when the Intendant of Police in Lisbon reported on the popular reaction to the fall of Almeida to Soult:
The populace is still stunned … General optimism sees it very much as the result of treason, so much so that a terrible explosion could result: the cry is for the punishment of many traitors.63
The authorities feared this disorder almost as much as those it was directed against. Indeed, the first decrees issued by the Regency, after Junot’s withdrawal, asserted categorically the judicial monopoly of the state and the illegality of private vengeance.64 As late as January 1809, the Intendant of Police pleaded with the Regency that ‘It is essential that [the Regency] establish some form of procedure that, without compromising [the views of] public opinion, will establish and preserve good order.’65 So impotent were the authorities in the autumn of 1808, that they gave in to the popular fury. The magistrates of the Inconfidencia – the highest police tribunal – actually encouraged anonymous denunciations as the easiest way of appeasing public opinion and the only way of finding the guilty. As a flood of denunciations poured in, the Prince Regent – now in Brazil – stood aghast that people had been condemned without due process of law, and that the death penalty had been applied without royal sanction.66
Gradually, the Regency reasserted its authority. It was not an easy task, and was done in ways and for ends that had more to do with internal politics than the war with France. Activism at street level was mastered by the Regency in the course of 1809–10, as private vendettas were channelled towards government aims, after seeing the futility of trying to forbid them. They did this by evolving a policy of ‘selective repression’, aimed at prominent individuals. However, those targeted were not singled out merely for their ‘collaboration’, but for their liberal, reformist views. ‘Selective repression’ emerged first in a series of decrees in December 1808. Then came two infamous mass arrests in Lisbon. The first was in March 1809 – ‘the Holy Week Arrests’ – followed by the more ruthless, definitive Setembrizada, at the height of the invasion scare of 1810, when 64 prominent liberals were seized and held until 1814.67
From a state of impotence, the Regency skilfully transformed itself into a political and psychological manipulator. It acknowledged popular fears, and so mastered them. Their policy of ‘selective repression’ allowed the Regents to manipulate a mass national movement while, at the same time, creating a climate of intimidation that extended far beyond the relatively few people it actually touched. ‘The actions and policies of the Regency translate not only into an efficient policy of repression, they legitimized and normalized it.’68 Liberal opposition was stifled until 1814, allowing the Regents to restore the old order. The British often baulked at these policies. The Regents had to appease Wellington – hardly a liberal figure in his own country – more than once. Only abroad, in London and Brazil, did liberal opposition make itself heard.
Everything depended on British protection. Although Wellington and other field commanders expressed disquiet about how the Regency dealt with its critics, Beresford, the viceroy, had no such qualms. He worked closely with the Regents to enforce strict censorship, especially to stifle news of the debates of the Cortes of Cadiz. An ‘ideological claustrophobia’ was maintained in Portugal in these years.69 Beresford continued as viceroy after 1814, and his policy of repression did not abate.
Under Beresford, Portugal underwent one of the most rapid and truly profound transformations of any society in revolutionary Europe. Between 1807 and 1809, Portuguese society slipped into anarchy, ‘an unleashing of desperate hopes and energies’.70 However, in the years between his arrival in 1808 and the final rout of the French in 1813, Beresford turned Portugal into a virtual ‘barrack-state’. He mobilized Portuguese resources for the war effort successfully and his ‘Orders of the Day’ reveal the progressive militarization of a populace that had, almost literally, ‘run amok’ a few years earlier.71 This remarkable metamorphosis far exceeded the much trumpeted mobilization of France during the Terror in its intensity and universality, if not, inevitably, in the numbers of people involved. The dictatorship of Beresford produced the only army of the period to achieve sustained, consistent victories over the French. This was all done by and for the cause of a counter-revolution rooted in dynastic loyalty and intense popular Catholicism, but its internal dynamics are still little understood.
This awesome effort left Portugal prostrate by 1814; it remained so for many years afterwards. Its population fell by over a quarter of a million, from a total of approximately 3,200,000 in 1807 to 2,960,000 by 1814, reaching its lowest level of 2,875,000 in 1811.72 Dislocation was less due to the fighting than to the destruction of the economic infrastructure necessitated by Wellington’s ‘scorched earth’ policy against the French. The laying waste of productive land and communications networks on such a scale proved almost impossible to rebuild after 1814. The domestic market for Portuguese industry all but vanished, and the costs of war engendered a financial crisis that took decades to surmount. London imposed disadvantageous trade treaties on Portugal, opening the colony of Brazil to British trade and eventually turning Portugal itself into a British economic colony. The Portuguese economy had boomed between 1800 and 1806; henceforth, she was increasingly dependent on British imports.
Political instability followed the end of the war. The militarization of society and the formation of a more meritocratic army deprived the nobility of a degree of its traditional prestige, and created a large, restive officer corps of middle-class origins. They gave the liberal opposition powerful support after 1814. Until then, Portugal remained a formidable, heroic and remarkable bastion of resistance to Napoleon.
French intervention in Spain had devastated a previously peaceful, if troubled, country. In the Illyrian provinces, the French were drawn into one of the most volatile areas of Europe, the Balkans. Their rule only intensified existing problems; French rule was disastrous, destabilizing and thoroughly hated by almost every section of the population. It was also unsuccessful from a French point of view. These provinces were occupied for purely strategic and diplomatic reasons: to cut the Austrians off from the sea, so strengthening the blockade, and for use as a bargaining counter in future negotiations with the eastern powers. Thus, in stark contrast to the lands of the inner empire, there was never any guarantee of the permanence of French rule on the part of the regime itself. French priorities make their subsequent conduct appear incongruous. The Illyrian provinces were not intended as permanent acquisitions, yet from 1809 to 1813 they were imperial departments in all but name, ruled directly from Paris. All senior officials, under a military governor-general and a civilian intendant-general were French, as were the provincial intendants (prefects) under them, who were chosen exclusively among the young auditeurs, which reproduced the tensions between military and civilian officials so characteristic of the initial phase of imperial rule elsewhere. However, in the Illyrian provinces, as in Spain, French rule never progressed beyond this stage.
While the French expended considerable effort in futile attempts to introduce their system of government, legal code and the Concordat, by 1811 the enforcement of the blockade had failed. Two years after annexation, the Illyrian provinces were removed from the imperial customs’ system, which meant that British goods were the only merchandise prohibited in the area. This amounted to an admission that the customs’ service was capable of controlling neither the Adriatic coastline, dotted with many inlets and tiny islands, nor the isolated, rugged inland frontiers with Austria and the Ottoman Empire. Smuggling assumed massive proportions in the following years. Instead of concentrating on their limited strategic objectives, the French imposed their ideology on a part of Europe where it could not have been more out of place. They met unprecedented problems over the introduction of their administrative system. The French Revolution has often been described as primarily an urban revolution, and the Napoleonic Empire as ‘the empire of the towns’, principally because the French administrative system was based in urban centres, radiating from the towns into the countryside; government corresponded to a nationwide urban network.73 The basic truth of this was discovered in the interior of the Illyrian provinces, especially in what is now Croatia, where virtually no towns existed. The office of maire was not sought after in any rural part of the Empire, nor were the numerous refusals the French received in Illyria anything new. Predictably, the coastal cities of Ragusa, Trieste and Fiume resented their loss of privileges and independence greatly. What they were faced with, away from the coast, was a society without urban centres, for whom their system was not just unpopular, but incongruous. In the provinces of the Military Croatia, the imperial system could not take root; cantons and communes, the basic units of the administrative chain, could not be set up. In its Balkan enclave, the Napoleonic state reached the ultimate limit of its applicability to European society. The experience of Illyria reveals the Napoleonic state as a wholly western European phenomenon, and how limited was its relevance outside it.
The French inherited a very diverse population composed of Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Italians, and Germans, whose cultural, linguistic and religious divisions had survived under Venetian and Habsburg rule. Literally dozens of legal systems were in use in ‘Illyria’, some based on Austrian or Venetian law, some on Roman or canon law, and almost all of them heavily qualified by local customs and practices. French legal reforms succeeded only in creating more chaos. As in many parts of Germany and southern Italy, attempts to abolish feudalism served only to disappoint the peasants and unsettle their landlords. This was not helped by French ignorance of the local languages but, even here, the clash of Balkan society with the Napoleonic bureaucracy produced a peculiar twist. French officials had always shown great reluctance to learn foreign languages, but at least in western Europe they knew what the local languages were. In the Illyrian provinces it took them some time to grasp that Slovenian, Croatian and Serbian were distinct languages. Their ambitious plans for a system of lycées was partially realized against great odds, but it was fatally compromised, because instruction was offered only in French, Italian and German.
Added to ignorance and incongruity were the introduction of heavy taxation, the blockade, the Concordat, and conscription. The fierce resistance to these policies follows a widespread, truly European pattern. Yet, only in these negative aspects were the western Balkans drawn into the mainstream of the history of western Europe in this period. It is hard to establish if French taxation was actually heavier than that imposed by the Austrians, but it was certainly considered more vexatious. To this day, Slovenian dialect has preserved the word fronki as a term for taxes, a revealing folk legacy of this period.74 Resistance could reach spectacular levels, as in June 1812 when a military expedition had to be sent into the coastal islands of Dalmatia to collect overdue taxes, a costly, impractical method.75
The introduction of the Concordat was an act of ideological rigidity by the French. Previous attempts to do so by Italian administrators between 1805 and 1809 had been resented in Dalmatia, the coastal area around Ragusa. Nevertheless, these early signs did not convince Marshal Marmont, the French Governor-General appointed in 1809, to leave such matters alone. He ignored the advice of Italian officials such as Dandolo, who had experience of the area. With the wholesale introduction of the Concordat, the numerous, influential Catholic clergy of Dalmatia, Croatia and Slovenia soon became the leaders of resistance to French rule. The suppression of the regular orders produced a guerrilla leader as redoubtable as any in Spain, the Franciscan friar Dorotich, ‘a picturesque, if far from edifying character’. He fled into Austrian territory when his order, devoted to the peaceful ideals of St Francis of Assisi, was abolished. Henceforth Dorotich waged a tenacious partisan war from across the border in Bosnia and Albania until 1813, when he returned to Ragusa in triumph.76 To convert a Franciscan into a warlord was quite an achievement for French policy, but even more lamentable was the reaction of the people of Lagosta, an island off the Dalmatian coast, when the French closed their confraternity. The women savaged the French officials who came to seize the silver altarpieces, while the men, who had served as coastguards since 1810, withdrew their co-operation and became raiders for the Royal Navy, close by in Corfu.77 The French could not even play the Orthodox minority off against the Catholics. Despite many improvements in their status, including full toleration and the creation of a bishopric, the Orthodox population remained adamantly anti-French. The secularization of the state, the introduction of compulsory civil marriage in particular, was anathema to so conservative a culture.
The impact of the blockade joined the people of these provinces to the fate of the other coastal regions of the Empire. The maritime trade of the Adriatic coast and the fishing industries of the islands collapsed more as a result of raids by the Royal Navy and the protection it afforded pirates than of French policy, simply because the French did not have the power to enforce it. Many coastal communities were devastated, albeit only for the duration of the war, after which the economy made a quick recovery. The French intendants were acutely aware of this, but their plans to develop the ports of Trieste and Fiume came to nothing in the face of war and shortages of money. Just as in parts of the North Sea coast, even the French came to see smuggling as the only means of survival left to many maritime communities. As one intendant remarked, at least its proceeds helped them pay their taxes.78 The blockade alienated the commercial classes of the coastal cities as well.
The impact of conscription best reveals the extent to which French rule destabilized the region. On the coasts, many fishermen joined the British, who liked them to operate in their own areas as privateers, far more preferable than risking incorporation into the French Navy and service further afield. In the hinterland of Croatia, the proximity of the Austrian and Ottoman borders, coupled with an economic structure which left most peasants landless, made mass emigration easy. The French feared it had actually reached levels large enough to ruin the local economy. The flight from conscription intensified banditry in a region where it had long existed as a way of life. Most rural areas were in a state of almost permanent revolt, which worsened after 1812 when there were fewer French troops in the area. The border area became easy prey to raids from the Ottoman provinces of Bosnia and Serbia.
Despite their expressed desire to ‘civilize’ the Illyrian provinces, the general pattern was one of increasing, rather than diminishing disorder. Only in Slovenia were the French able to eradicate the brigandage they found and thereby create a reasonable basis of support for themselves. This was the only positive ‘folk memory’ they left in the region.79 Elsewhere, the French had very few supporters – ‘a handful of intellectuals, Freemasons and Jews who had suffered discrimination under Austrian rule’.80 Only in such circles were the French able to recruit for the lower grades of the administration, which came to be dominated by Freemasons, a tiny minority of the urban middle classes, and it was only in their narrow ranks that French rule left a lasting, positive impression. Yet even this was partly false. Later generations of intellectuals saw in Napoleonic rule the genesis of a new national consciousness, but in fact, one of the few aspects of Balkan politics Napoleon understood was the ferocious divisions among the Slavic peoples and that any attempt to evoke nationalist feelings would eventually mean favouring one ethnic group over another.81 This, at least, both he and his officials steadfastly refused to do; it was anathema to the whole concept of imperial government.82 Of the mass of mistakes made, perhaps the worst was avoided. However, for the young, idealistic auditeurs, who dreamed of ‘civilizing’ the Balkans, and for their more hard-bitten military colleagues in search of conscripts, the result was resounding failure. The masses remembered only oppression, probably the sole thing uniting so diverse a region.
The arrest of Pius VII was much more than a personal quarrel between the Pope and the Emperor about state control over the Church, or a diplomatic row about the seizure of the Papal States. After 1809, the Concordat – and the compromise it embodied – collapsed. The Pope excommunicated Napoleon, and refused to confirm new bishops in their sees because Napoleon had appointed them. As a result, many dioceses stood vacant, including Paris itself. In reply, Napoleon openly revived the ‘Gallican principles’ that Louis XIV had used against Rome in the seventeenth century, by which the head of the French state claimed the right not only to propose bishops, but that they did not need to be installed by the Pope. This policy broke with the Concordat, which had required the Pope’s agreement to Napoleon’s choice of candidates. Napoleon sought to extend the four ‘Gallican articles’ to Italy and, possibly, Germany. He then set about removing the centre of the Church from Rome to Paris, often by nefarious means, as when the cardinals who were brought to Paris in April 1810 for the marriage of Napoleon and Marie-Louise were then detained and subsequently arrested.
In 1811, Napoleon sought to break the deadlock between Church and state by calling a Council of Bishops to reshape the government of the Church. Most of the higher clergy in France and Italy attended, but they refused to support him against the Pope. Faced with this, Napoleon turned his back on the Concordat, telling Pius VII early in 1812 that he considered it void. In its place, the Ministry of Religion – Cultes – produced a new Concordat by 1813. Although the military collapse of the Empire prevented its implementation, the new Concordat makes interesting reading. It embodies the radical, almost anticlerical spirit at work within the imperial civil service. The Concordat of Fontainebleau, as it came to be known, was more than a neat means of solving a technical, high-level dispute over Church–state relations. It was an assault on the traditional character of Catholic belief and the role of the Church in society of at least the same magnitude as the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of 1791. In its language, as much as in its terms, the new Concordat expressed an unswerving belief in the cultural superiority of the French Enlightenment, the strongly felt need to impose that culture on the common people of western Europe, and, paradoxically, the fear and frustration of those local officials – old Jacobins and young auditeurs alike – who were busy carrying ‘the torch of French civilization’ to the outer empire. If Napoleon was at war with the Church, his state was at war with the culture that sustained it. This struggle had never abated, but in the heightening tension of the final years of the Empire it acquired its old intensity.
The outer empire had been created because of the policy of blockade, but its most obvious consequence was to swell the extent of Napoleonic hegemony. Alongside political, military and cultural domination, the French also sought to create an economic system commensurate with the position of mastery they held from 1806 onwards.
The blockade was central to the war against Britain, but it was only one component of the regime’s economic policies; it was only a means to a greater end. This is clear when the blockade is set in a wider political and economic context. The blockade made its major impact on the coastal areas of western Europe, yet the vast majority of people in Napoleonic Europe neither lived in the great maritime cities, nor earned their livings from large-scale commerce. No major port within Napoleon’s orbit escaped the catastrophic consequences of the blockade, yet these areas are an exceptional case, if a very important one.
Napoleonic Europe was predominantly agricultural. Its economic structures were still more early modern than urban or industrial in character, based on very localized markets for limited agricultural surpluses and the products of small industries, usually linked closely to agriculture. Vast sectors of the European economy were still not advanced enough for government policies to alter them in a lasting way, or to take rapid effect, no matter how powerful the regime behind them. This is the essential background to Napoleon’s plans for the European economy. The most significant economic development in these years, at least in terms of the number of people affected, were the bad harvests of 1810–11. The harvests did not fail everywhere, however. Northern Italy was able to sustain itself, even if most of France and Germany saw food shortages. In central Italy, the threat of famine to the Roman and Tuscan departments was averted only by large-scale, state-purchased imports of grain but they came from the Kingdom of Naples, which had enjoyed a good harvest. This was ‘the end of the luck factor’ for Napoleon, in that the poor harvests broke a long sequence of good ones in most of the Empire stretching back to 1803. The end of this run may have done more to unsettle Napoleon’s hegemony than any of his deliberate policies.
Nevertheless, his policies made a considerable impact on some parts of the Empire. Their long-term importance is far from clear, but in the last years of the Empire, the emergence of a Napoleonic ‘market design’ for Europe did much to shape contemporary attitudes to the regime, and even more to push the Empire towards its final military crisis. Just as the rise of the Napoleonic state system redrew the political map of western and central Europe, so the Napoleonic market design meant reshaping the customs’ barriers of the Grand Empire. Two massive reorganizations – the Berlin and Milan Decrees of 1806–07 and then the decrees of St Cloud and the Trianon in 1810 – created the commercial borders of Napoleonic Europe. Their terms reveal the aggressively Francocentric nature of this market design. While the blockade was meant to keep British goods out of Europe, the market design – the commercial policy of the Continental System – was intended to let French commerce and industry fill the resultant gap. This is the essence of the ‘one-way common market’, and it was the core of Napoleon’s economic strategy.
The commercial borders of the Grand Empire were devastatingly simple: the territories of the Empire of 1799 – France itself, plus the Rhenish and Belgian departments – could circulate their goods freely throughout the rest of the Grand Empire. However, the states and imperial departments outside this zone were forced to pay high, increasingly prohibitive tariffs on their own exports to France and to each other. The aim was clear: with British and overseas markets closed to them, the non-French manufacturing centres of continental Europe were to be squeezed out, while those within the French tariff zone were protected from all foreign competition. In those few areas where commerce and manufacturing were important parts of the local economy, the results were catastrophic in the short term, although Napoleonic control probably did not last long enough for its tariff policies to do permanent damage to even the worst affected areas.
The selfishness of the market design emerges with stark clarity when the fates are compared of manufacturing regions on either side of the preferential zone. Well-developed manufacturing industries existed within both the Rhenish departments, an area inside the preferential zone, and the Grand Duchy of Berg, outside it. The former German states which composed the Grand Duchy of Berg were among the most industrialized in Europe; mining was the main economic activity of the uplands of the Wupper valley, together with textiles, while the lowlands were important commercial routes, centred on Düsseldorf. The chief market for the manufactured goods of the region, before the Napoleonic occupation, was France, but the market design of the Continental System sealed this off after 1806. In 1807, Berg’s outlet to Italian markets was also withdrawn; its products were banned from parts of Italy that were targeted as ‘captive markets’ for French goods.
This is a major example of another aspect of the Napoleonic market design: that Paris controlled not just its own trade relations with the other states of the Grand Empire, but trading among those states. In Italy, olive oil from the French-ruled Tuscan departments was blocked from entering the Kingdom of Italy, which had been a well-established market before French rule. A series of trade treaties between Bavaria and the Kingdom of Italy imposed by Napoleon gravely disrupted their flourishing well-established trade over the Alps.
In Berg, by 1808, this policy had made redundant almost all of the 10,000 textile workers who supplied the Italian market. By that year, only the biggest firms were still operating, and further French efforts to isolate the Dutch departments from the rest of Europe, because of continued smuggling, worsened the plight of Berg still further. In 1810, the Trianon Tariff put prohibitive duties on all colonial goods entering Berg. Henceforth, local industries could only obtain the raw materials they needed, chiefly cotton, by contraband. Berg was not without influential friends; both Beugnot and especially Roederer fought its case tenaciously in Paris, but French industry was also in deep recession after 1810, and their arguments faltered upon the strength of vested French interests. The general malaise was summed up by Roederer late in 1813:
in general, manufacturing industry is stagnating; the cotton factories have been wiped out; but the cotton works of Rouen [in northern France] are flourishing … The metallurgical works also suffer from a great lack of orders … I am assured that in Elberfeld and Barmen, one man in seven survives on charity.83
Predictably, a serious revolt broke out in January 1813, the first such in the Confederation of the Rhine. It was driven by misery, rather than politics. As Beugnot put it, Berg was now ‘a violent country, and this stems from the fact that it is the only manufacturing country for which the hardships demanded by the Continental System have produced no compensation whatsoever’.84 French economic strategy reduced one of the most skilled workforces in Europe to a horde of beggars and bandits, if only temporarily.
The prosperity of those parts of the Rhineland under direct French rule exposes the artificially induced nature of Berg’s demise. Strasbourg became one of the busiest trading centres in Europe, while Aachen, Cologne and Neuss also prospered. The same industries which collapsed in Berg expanded in the French-ruled left bank of the Rhine. They reached levels of production hitherto unknown, a process hastened, at least in part, by the mass emigration of capital and skilled labour from Berg.
Other pockets of commercial or industrial activity outside the preferential zone went the way of Berg. In Neuchâtel, the specialized textile industry, based on a system of cottage production, was decimated by high French tariffs and effective expulsion from the Italian markets. The Prince of Neuchâtel was Berthier, the most loyal of Napoleon’s marshals and, as his Chief of Staff, probably the closest to him. As early as 1807, he wrote to the Emperor:
It is enough to say that [Neuchâtel’s] inhabitants are one of your peoples … Their industries have been destroyed and many industrious men have been forced to go abroad. I beseech Your Majesty …85
The failure of even Berthier to get any response shows how determined Paris was to persist with so Francocentric a policy. Ad hoc concessions, in the form of special ‘import licences’, were granted increasingly as the economic crisis deepened, but they provided no real relief to those areas worst hit by the policy of ‘France first’.
Belgian manufacturing industry shows the advantages – and limits – of operating inside the preferential zone. Belgian industry was dynamic. All its major sectors continued to expand, if often fitfully, in the two decades before 1814. Coal-mining became almost a mania once French legislation lifted previous restrictions on this activity, causing one Napoleonic official in Liège to comment that:
[the law] which allows each proprietor to mine his land [down to a level] of thirty metres … was interpreted in its widest sense by the local administration, the courts and the landowners; there was not a soul with a corner of land who didn’t want to dig a hole.86
Out of this lunacy emerged a high number of stable, substantial mining companies, well able to withstand the crisis of 1811. Indeed, there were 140 mines in one Belgian department alone, the Ourthe, in 1812. For the first time these firms were assured a large, stable market, safe from British competition and firmly within the preferential zone. The same was true of the metallurgical industry – the Belgian departments produced 25 per cent of the Empire’s iron by 1813 – as well as steel, which got important help from the government, turning Liège into a centre of the war industry.
Textiles was the largest sector of Belgian industry and, although its road was a rockier one than steel or coal, the general trend was of growth, most of which came in the last years of the Empire, the crisis of 1810–11 notwithstanding. By 1814, the city of Ghent had been transformed from a market centre into an industrial town based on textiles, as small or medium-sized factories replaced cottage industry. This process had its victims, especially among the traditional trades and crafts formerly protected by powerful guilds which the French had abolished. These men reasserted themselves, briefly, when French rule collapsed in 1814, but neither the present nor the future were with them. The ban on British cotton after 1806 produced a boom in textiles as Belgian manufacturers saw their chance and seized it with both arms, only to face a crisis of over-production in 1808–09. A major factor in the industry’s quick recovery after 1809 was the tightening of the blockade, which choked off those British goods still illegally in circulation. By the spring of 1810, Belgian textiles in general, and Ghent cottons especially, were again in full expansion, until by 1812 the industry was larger than in 1808. Growth continued after 1814, and the brief slump of 1813 was solely the result of the war.
Belgian dynamism had its limits. Isolation from Britain led to technological stagnation; most mines and textile mills still used old-fashioned production methods and new machinery was relatively scarce, because the best then being made was British. Over-production was always a latent threat, if not always a problem. Above all, the new circumstances favoured those who could adapt and adjust quickly. It was less important, for example, to use modern machinery than to switch from declining textiles like linen to profitable ones such as cotton, or to get out of cottage industry and into factory production. Napoleonic Belgium produced a generation of resourceful and progressive entrepreneurs, more than capable of meeting the challenges – and opportunities – of the imperial market design. In textiles, they were led by the Lievin family in Ghent, in mining, by the Orban brothers in Liège. Their opportunism, tenacity and willingness to modernize their businesses make them worthy equivalents in business of Lannes or Murat on the battlefield, and their loyalty to the regime was probably more assured. Bauwens Lievin opted to serve Napoleon during the 100 Days, and afterwards moved his operations to France.
The textile industries of Switzerland and the lower Rhine followed a pattern similar to that of Belgium, as did mining throughout the Rhineland. An important development in the Confederation of the Rhine was an increasing integration of the economies of the various states, as entrepreneurs and investors shifted their capital from one centre to another, in the search for markets and to work within the preferential zone. In this way, for example, capital originally accumulated in Berg found its way into Aachen and Cologne, while the Rothschilds invested heavily, if discreetly, in Bavarian textiles. Western Germany emerged from Napoleonic rule as a more coherent economic unit than before, although not necessarily a more advanced one. Initially, the renewed political divisions of the restoration period did more to hamper the industrialization of this area than to help it. Only the unified Prussian Rhineland continued its progress uninterrupted.
By 1810–11, the problems created by both the blockade and the tariff system were affecting France as well as the rest of the Empire. French industry probably had the productive capacity to fill the gap created by the expulsion of Britain and the destruction of rivals like Berg. However, neither the French nor the remnants of the manufacturing sector in Italy or Germany could find adequate markets. The main cause of the slump of 1810–11 within France is attributed to over-production, which in turn led to a collapse of prices. The impoverished urban centres of Italy and Germany could no longer afford French goods. This reflected the same problems facing the industrialists of Berg, who desperately sought new markets in central Europe in 1807–08, only to be frustrated by a lack of demand. The textile firms of the Tuscan city of Prato profited at first from the absence of British competition, only to face disappointment and contraction when their ambitious search for new markets also failed. All of this points towards a basic flaw in the market design itself: the exclusion of overseas trade from the whole system exposed the fact that the European markets could not absorb even French manufacturing output, let alone that of other regions.
It is indicative of the essentially protectionist outlook of most continental manufacturers that they did not seek free trade as a replacement for the French market design, but admission to the preferential zone. The petitions of the commercial representatives of Berg, Neuchâtel and Italy sought inclusion in the protective network, never open competition. As the example of Prato illustrates, many within the Continental System welcomed protection from British competition. The French disregarded a genuine source of collaboration by persevering with the policy of ‘France first’, although even a more benign system would still have confronted the lack of markets. As the Belgian experience shows, even the best protected industries were exposed to the ‘boom-bust’ economy inevitable where demand is made fragile by the absence of a stable consumer base.
The position of Saxony was probably what most contemporaries aspired to, revealing the commercial possibilities for a friendly state outside the scope of the Napoleonic market design. Here, although the indigenous linen industry almost collapsed after 1806, the Saxon cotton industry grew apace, and even the crisis of 1810–11 checked its expansion only briefly. This was due to the potent combination of the removal of British competition and the well-established fair at Leipzig, the Saxon capital, which handled two-thirds of Lyon’s silk exports. Above all, Saxony was not tied formally to the Napoleonic state system, and so escaped its customs’ regulations. Its manufacturers could import cotton from the Middle East at affordable prices, and export their textiles more freely than the states of the Confederation of the Rhine or the Kingdom of Italy. Polish mining and distilling followed a pattern similar to Saxony for identical, essentially diplomatic reasons. Saxony is an important reminder that many industrialized inland areas derived positive benefits from both the blockade and the wider-ranging policies of the Continental System. Saxon dependence on this combination of circumstances is borne out by the collapse of its textiles boom under the pressure of Prussian competition after 1814.
All these areas, successful and unsuccessful alike under the Continental System, were exceptional in their high levels of industrialization. What mattered to most of the people of the Empire was the impact of the blockade and the imperial market design on agriculture. This vast sector of economic life is still relatively little studied, but it seems that Napoleonic policies were marginally more beneficial than harmful. They did not have the devastating consequences so evident in coastal regions. Within the Empire, the official policy that probably did most to disrupt the world of small, localized economies was the reintroduction of municipal tolls for local markets, the octrois, which became increasingly onerous on wine producers, butchers and the grain trade in the last years of the Empire. In agriculture, as with industry, what really mattered in the final analysis was the relationship of a given region or sector of the economy to France. The parts of Napoleonic Europe where this is clearest are northern and central Italy and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw.
The French always saw Italy as a potential economic colony. Its role in the imperial market design was to provide raw materials for French manufacturing and to be the larder of the Empire. This was as true of the nominally independent Kingdom as of the imperial departments. To this end, indigenous industries were crippled. The major casualty of this policy was the silk industry, centred on the Lombard parts of the Kingdom of Italy and the Piedmontese departments. Silk manufacturing all but collapsed in these areas as the raw silk they produced was directed to Lyon, its designated centre, to be turned into finished goods. Silk manufacturing and, indeed, most manufacturing, was on a relatively minor scale in Italy, however. On the whole, the role of an imperial granary suited Italian economic realities. Rice production grew apace in these years in the malarial lowlands of the Po valley, greatly aided by the abolition of ancien régime legislation which had restricted its cultivation. Almost the whole of the Italian rice crop was exported to France, while maize sustained the domestic market. In general, the Napoleonic market design profited those parts of Italy where commercial agriculture had developed, as opposed to industries based on agriculture which were important parts of the economy in the Po valley, Tuscany and the Legations. Outside these zones, in most of the peninsula, subsistence agriculture continued much as before, based on the peasant small-holding. In these circumstances, imperial economic policies made little impact on the structures they found. In the same manner as Napoleonic policies only tended to favour industries already in advanced stages of development, such as Belgian or Rhenish textiles, so in Italy it was only areas of well-established commercial agriculture that expanded in this period. Previous trends intensified, but did not spread.
The Grand Duchy of Warsaw, although within the Napoleonic state system, was of no direct importance to the market design. The French did not see Poland as a source of raw materials, but of unearned income from peasant labour and rents. Polish grain production and exports had been healthy in the late eighteenth century, but were noticeably disrupted by the expansion of the Continental System. Indeed, it has been calculated that grain prices fell directly in line with the Polish provinces coming under Napoleonic control. In direct contrast, those parts of Galicia which remained under Austrian rule and never entered the Continental System saw no falls in grain prices before 1815.87 From 1810 onwards, the blockade began to paralyse agricultural growth, as cereal prices fell to a third below their 1805 levels. The great Polish landowners regarded the economic changes after 1806 as a catastrophe.88 However, Napoleonic rule did not last long enough to achieve this alleged ‘pauperization of the aristocracy’, which was undoubtably the last thing the French wanted to happen in Poland, the blockade notwithstanding.
There is often a fairly clear relationship between economic prosperity and loyalty to the regime evident within the industrial sectors of the economy and also in some areas of commercial agriculture. The example of Poland is a clear exception to this, as it is in so many other respects, but it should still serve as a warning not to interpret the economic crisis of 1810–11, or a wider detestation of French economic policies, as signs of a feeling that the end of Napoleonic hegemony was at hand. The territories of the inner empire continued to plead for more integration, not less, as late as 1812, seeing the potential advantages of the absence of British competition. They were still unconvinced that there was any likely alternative to French hegemony.
This confidence, however reluctant, was not shared by the French themselves by 1811. The economic crisis only intensified the regime’s belief that success on all fronts depended on the effectiveness of the blockade, in the face of the stark truth that it was not working. In official eyes, this meant that the outer empire had been created for nothing, at least as yet. The North Sea and the Baltic coasts were now perceived as the weakest links in the blockade, and the Russian alliance which supposedly sealed them to the British was seen as worse than useless.
Napoleon did not embark on his last, most ambitious offensive in a spirit of confidence or enthusiasm, but from a feeling of frustration which the economic crisis of 1810–11 was rapidly turning into desperation.