Lefebvre Georges. Napoleon

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departmental council and a court of appeal and district courts, not to

mention a Conseil d’État. He adopted the Code Napoléon , abolished privilege

and seigneurial justice, and did not fail to introduce conscription. Without

displaying this amount of zeal, certain other princes made use of their

advantages and showed good will. The most important of these was Louis I,

grand duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, who hastened to abolish the Landtag and

do away with ﬁ scal privilege, except for the mediatised lands. He also

adopted the Civil Code in 1808, though making some alterations in it, ﬁ xed

the limits of forced labour and put an end to serfdom, with due compensa-

tion. The duke of Nassau likewise did away with exemption from taxation,

serfdom and a number of strictly feudal rights. In 1810 the prince of Salm

also made all his subjects liable to the land tax. The other princes of Anhalt

in Thuringia and Mecklenburg were satisﬁ ed with a few changes in the ﬁ scal

system and the recruitment of ofﬁ cials, but the Landtag and the social system

continued as of old. Saxony too belongs to this category. Senft would have

liked to take the initiative, but he did not have enough character to carry the

day with the minister of the interior, Hopfgarten, who was ﬁ rmly opposed

to all innovation, as indeed was the Landtag. The nobility continued to enjoy

exemption from taxation, and Calvinists were still excluded from toleration,

which was only granted to the Catholics. The main attention was given to

reorganising the army, to which was added a gendarmerie . The case of King

Frederick was somewhat similar to that of the grand duke of Würzburg. He

too was a faithful ally of Napoleon; but he was limited and apathetic in

outlook, and showed no interest in reform, though he would perhaps have

yielded to imperial persuasion. Napoleon did not press matters here any

more than in Bavaria or Württemberg, because he was afraid of losing his

good will. Yet in the grand duchy of Warsaw which he had presented to the

emperor, Napoleon saw no need for the same delicate handling, but

proceeded to organise it with the freedom he had shown in the kingdoms

of Italy and Westphalia.

THE GRAND DUCHY OF WARSAW

On 22 July 1807, at Dresden, Napoleon had given the country constitu-

tional status. The central power, the administration and the judiciary were all

based upon the French model. The prince was to nominate six ministers and

a secretary of state, to be joined later on by superintendents of public educa-

tion, waterways and forests, food supplies, war and state lotteries. At ﬁ rst the

Conseil d’État was no more than a council of ministers; but in 1808 it was

enlarged by councillors and then by referendaries, and became considerably

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more important than in France, for it combined administrative justice with

the powers of a supreme court of appeal. Besides, it came to play an increas-

ingly important part in politics, for its members were the ofﬁ cial repre-

sentatives in the Diet and in the Chamber of Nuncios, and in 1809 it began

to take part in governing the country. Nonetheless, it remained true that in

Warsaw the executive continued to be in fact of the collegiate type, and

lacked effective guidance. The grand duke lived in Dresden, and did not

exercise his right to appoint a viceroy. True, there was a president of the

Council of Ministers, Stanislas Potocki by name; but he did not wield the

inﬂ uence of a chief of state.

The territory was divided into départements, districts and communes.

The collegiate principle was abolished, and administration put in the hands

of a préfet assisted by a secretary-general and a préfet ’s council, a sous-préfet and

a mayor and municipal magistrates. The grand duke chose the préfet and sous-

préfet , while the senior préfet chose the municipal members. In each area a

council was set up, also nominated by the grand duke from among the

candidates put forward by the diétines , or assemblies of the nobles in a dépar-

tement or district, or by the communal assemblies. The districts were given

a justice of the peace, chosen from those put forward by the diétine ; and the

départements a court of permanent judges. There was a criminal court for

each two départements, and a single court of appeal. Commissioners of

police were also appointed. The French tax system was brought in forthwith

and a court of accounts set up. Education beneﬁ ted from the serious atten-

tion given to it, and it was put into the hands of local committees. The

Catholic Church was placed under the authority of the state, for the consti-

tution gave the grand duke the right to nominate the bishops. The command

of the army fell to Poniatowski, and in 1808 conscription was brought in.

Thus for the ﬁ rst time in history, the Polish state had a centralised adminis-

tration and a body of professional ofﬁ cials. The latter were destined to

provide the material from which the middle classes of the Western states

had been formed.

This was an authoritarian government, as in the other Napoleonic states.

Individual freedom was guaranteed by the constitution, but the police

enjoyed just as extensive discretionary powers as in France. Not a word had

been said about the liberty of the press. Nevertheless, the duchy was given

a Diet, though without the power of initiating measures, and only meeting

for a fortnight at the most every other year; besides, its marshal or president

was appointed by the king. At all events it met regularly in 1809 and 1811.

There was also a Senate of bishops and nobles appointed for life by the

grand duke, whose sole duty was to see that laws were in conformity with

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the constitution, and a Chamber of Nuncios or deputies comprising, for

each district, a noble resident – a landowner or son of a landowner – elected

by his peers assembled in Diet, and the representatives of the communal

electoral assemblies, in which the peasant proprietors, the parish priests and

the curates took part, as well as merchants worth ten thousand ﬂ orins,

ofﬁ cers, and soldiers who had received decorations. This Diet differed in its

constitution from the Italian or Westphalian assemblies, and was more like

the one in Naples, though it was still more aristocratic in character. Although

some part was played by professional and property qualiﬁ cations, the

distinction between the two curias still rested mainly on the preservation of

the social orders. True, the deputies each had a vote; but the nobles held

three-ﬁ fths of the votes, not to mention the fact that the communal assem-

blies could also elect noblemen. On the other hand the electoral system was

more enlightened than in Naples or Westphalia, where the members of the

electoral colleges were nominated by the king, and merely elected candi-

dates. In Poland, the electors’ rights were guaranteed by the constitution,

and their elections were genuine elections.

Thus Napoleon was accustomed to take local conditions into account.

Since the middle classes in Lombardy and Westphalia enjoyed a certain

stability, he did not give the aristocracy special representation. In Southern

Italy, where the aristocracy were much stronger than in the north, the case

was very different; but as the Bourbons had stripped them of all political

authority, they were only given an upper chamber nominated by the king.

In Poland, the power of the nobility as compared with the insigniﬁ cance of

the middle classes was too great to give them anything but a dominant posi-

tion; moreover, it was not so long since they had been the real masters of the

state, and it was advisable, while putting them under the law, to give them a

genuine liberty to shape policy, and liberty from which the commoners

reaped some incidental advantage. Napoleon’s efforts to get the aristocracy

on his side were therefore more marked in this country than anywhere else.

The result was that the nobility kept its speciﬁ c identity and became the real

controllers of the state.

This was by no means an advantage for the peasants. While maintaining

the privileged position of the nobility as a political institution, the constitu-

tion had proclaimed civil liberty and abolished serfdom. The Civil Code was

promulgated on 15 August 1810, freeing the peasants from the glebe and

giving them the right to go to law; but the land nevertheless continued to

belong to the nobles, and the decree of 12 December 1807 pronounced all

tenure to be precarious in default of a contract, which put the tiller of the

soil in a worse position, for when his right of possession was for the most

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part hereditary or for life, he could not usually call anything except custom

to his assistance. Feudal rights, land dues, forced labour and tithe all

continued to exist; and so did even arbitrary forced labour. Notaries were

appointed and model contracts published in order to encourage ﬁ xed

tenure, dues and labour; but very few written agreements saw the light of

day. The lord could use his right of eviction to maintain the existing burdens,

or even increase them; and there is reason to believe that a good number of

peasants cultivating only small plots took advantage of their new freedom

and left the land. But as the country had no industries, this could only lead

to economic and social unrest. The property of the clergy, however, was left

untouched, and what had been secularised by Prussia was kept as part of the

royal lands. In 1812 Bignon, who represented France in Warsaw, recorded:

‘The condition of the peasants has hardly altered at all.’

In spite of this, the aristocracy were a prey to anxiety lest Napoleon

should not call a halt at this point. The great families were even more

annoyed because the level of equality for all landowning nobles established

by the political constitution, and the opening of the Diet to commoners,

seemed to strike a mortal blow at the authority that had hitherto been theirs.

They nevertheless continued to hold the major ofﬁ ces of state or to ﬁ ll them

with their own protégés. The Czartoryskis in particular, although remaining

in the background, kept well informed about the various ministries, for

Stanislas Potocki had married a Lubomirska, a niece of Adam Czartoryski’s

father, and Matuszewicz, minister of ﬁ nances, was regarded as a supporter

of the latter; and Niemcewicz, the secretary of the Senate, and very hostile

to France, continued to be his devoted servant. Nor was the opposition of

the Roman Catholic Church by any means to be ignored, for it was para-

mount over the peasants. It had been deeply offended by the proclamation

of freedom of conscience and worship, although it had been allowed to

keep its privileged position as the religion of the state and had been given

the management of all civil registration, divorced persons being handed

over to the secular arm. Though there was little protest from the secular

clergy, the reaction of the monks was very different, especially after the

break with the pope. The Benonists – most of whom were German – were

supported in their agitation by the nuncio from Vienna, and had to be

expelled. The establishment of masonic lodges – there were a dozen of them

by 1810 in the Grand Orient – was a further source of grievance. The Jewish

question (which was at the same time a social question) gave the clergy an

excellent weapon. There were no exceptions in the constitution, and Jews

were therefore given the same rights as Christians. But this caused such

feeling that in 1809 their political rights were withdrawn from them for ten

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years, with certain individual exceptions granted by the prince to those who

paid a licence fee. In 1808 they were forbidden to acquire land without

authorisation, and in 1812 to lease imperial domain lands or to sell bever-

ages; and in order to keep down their numbers, a system of authorisation

for marriage was imposed upon them. It must be admitted that they seemed

in no hurry to become assimilated; and in 1812 they were at their own

request – we are told – given exemption from military service upon payment

of a contribution.

EUROPEAN CIVILISATION

It is clear then that in the Grand Empire the Napoleonic system showed a

signiﬁ cant division. On the one hand, the state reforms went steadily ahead:

on the other, social reform dwindled or proved abortive. The increasingly

marked favour shown by the emperor towards the aristocracy makes it difﬁ -

cult to say what would have been the future course of his liberating efforts.

All the same, he was so bent upon the Civil Code that once peace had been

established on the Continent, we can well believe he would have taken the

necessary measures to apply it to the full in every place. Thus it may be said

that everywhere he strove to add administrative and social unity to political

unity, and this was to form the framework for a new European civilisation.

This did in fact develop after his time, in the course of the nineteenth

century, in spite of the counter-revolutionary reaction; but with a slowness,

and with disturbances and distortions, that Napoleon might well have

avoided. For the most part, the principles were in alignment with those of

1789, and that was what stamped this civilisation as essentially French.

Outside the French Empire, Napoleon did not take any steps to add an

intellectual culture for which the French language would have served as the

vehicle. In the kingdoms of Italy, Naples and Westphalia, by far the majority

of the staff were locally recruited, and Italian or German remained the

languages used for administration and education. But the case was different

in the French Empire. Thus in Holland, the decree of 22 October 1811 made

it compulsory for the heads of private schools to provide, within a period

of three months, instruction in French. As the annexations increased, so

would the sphere of the French language have extended. Even at this period,

it had come into use at the courts of the vassal kings and in the great

Napoleonic administrators’ ofﬁ ces. Knowledge of French was becoming

indispensable for all who aspired to the highest levels of employment, and

teaching was obliged to take this into account. It would not be right to

suspect Napoleon of deliberately wishing to uproot the other dialects, any

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more than he had done in old-world France. But French would have come

in alongside them as the language of continental unity. It would have served

as a medium for consolidating classical culture all the more so as no other

existed in the emperor’s eyes. There is no doubt at all that he intended Paris

to become the intellectual, artistic and secular capital of the European

Empire, as it already was the political capital. He was intent on making it the

world’s museum by bringing to it the works of art taken from the countries

he had conquered. In stark opposition to this conception of a universal civi-

lisation, surviving from the eighteenth-century ideal, looking back to the

traditions of Rome, and inspired by the Catholic Church, stood the Romantic

idea of national cultures of spontaneous diversity, and irreducible in nature,

which were a fundamental denial of the oneness of the human race.

THE CONTINENTAL ECONOMY

Locked in combat with England, the European federation had as its symbol

and its weapon the continental blockade; but the blockade reacted on its

economy, because it was reduced to living on its own resources. This way

would, if successful, increase its strength by creating interests which would

have been damaged by an English victory; and by the same token it might

well undermine the economy if there was any failure to organise the

continental market so as to provide a livelihood for each of its members.

Wherever it was applied with some rigour, the blockade’s effects were

similar to those in France. The maritime cities and their industries were

ruined. In the Mediterranean, there was ﬁ rst Genoa, then Venice and Leghorn,

and ﬁ nally Trieste. In this last port, the ﬁ gures dropped from more than

ﬁ ve thousand ships and 208,000 barrels in 1807 to 2,600 boats and sixty

thousand barrels in 1812. In the north, the Hanseatic ports were the ﬁ rst to

feel the pinch, followed by the Baltic ports, and lastly by those of Holland.

The trade of the great German fairs, fed as they were by contraband goods,

became a precarious business, which meant that the blockade provoked the

hostility of the shipowners, the big business interests and the banks. But in

industry it was different: although the cotton industry found it difﬁ cult to

get raw materials and other branches suffered from the ban on exports, local

production was rather fortunate in being delivered from English competi-

tion; and the veto on exports acted as a stimulus. As in France, cotton spin-

ning and weaving showed the most marked progress, although this was

lessened by the importance of contraband. In Saxony, although results were

on the whole less good than in 1805, they showed a twenty-ﬁ ve per cent

improvement in 1810, and the production of printed materials rose sharply,

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increasing more than ﬁ fty per cent during this period. Switzerland, the

southern part of Baden and even Northern Italy likewise took advantage

of these favourable circumstances. Wool prospered too, for instance in

Switzerland and Denmark. In Germany, the Silesian and Westphalian mines

extended their markets; so did ironmongery, weapons produced in Thuringia,

straw hats and brushes in Baden, and chemical products. The processing of

sugar-beet also developed, especially in the duchy of Frankfurt and at

Magdeburg, and struck root in Holland and Russia. At a time when the spirit

of enterprise was everywhere being stimulated by England’s example, the

blockade taught (more effectively than the theory or fragmentary practice of

the Mercantile Theory in the ancien régime ) how much it could be helped in its

early stages by protective customs duties. And after 1815 this lesson was to

be well remembered. In this sense, it was in the interest of all the members

of the Continental System to maintain a common front against British

industry. All the same, not every member reaped the same advantage, for as

one went east and south, agriculture assumed a growing preponderance, so

that the blockade was especially favourable to France, and in the second place

to Germany, Switzerland and Northern Italy. Needless to say, the consumer

did not share the industrialists’ satisfaction; and the states themselves, seeing

their customs revenue diminish with the cutting off of English imports,

shared the anxieties felt by the emperor.

Hence it was not enough simply to produce at all costs: it was also a ques-

tion of adapting the wheels of commerce to new conditions and redistrib-

uting markets so as to provide for the consumer and ﬁ nd new customers for

the manufacturers who had hitherto exported overseas, such as the cloth-

makers of Hanover and Silesia. And this was an extremely difﬁ cult task. The

English market, with its control of the seas, underwent a natural growth, by

virtue of the living impetus of productive activity. On the other hand each

of the continental regions naturally turned towards its particular coast, and

the European market, though in theory uniﬁ ed by the blockade, tended in

practice to be split up as it were by a centrifugal force. The proof of this was

the persistence of the cross-country trade routes which had come into being

across Central Europe since France had been cut off by war. The Frankfurt,

and more particularly the Leipzig, fairs continued to be well patronised, and

as late as 1809 Trieste was still getting the produce of the Levant through to

Bavaria and Saxony. From then onwards, the cross-country trafﬁ c tended to

stretch still further east, along caravan routes from the Baltic to Leipzig, and

from Salonica to Vienna.

On the other hand the really new feature was the advance of essentially

continental routes running from west to east. It may be said that the success

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of the blockade and the consolation of the Continental System depended on

the routes running north and south, thus bearing witness to the vitality of

the maritime trafﬁ c and the dealers in contraband. Strasbourg and Lyon

were the chief centres where these trade routes crossed. The former became

the French depot for goods destined for Germany, Austria and Russia, which

were subsequently sorted at Leipzig. In return, the town also received goods

from Frankfurt via the Rhine, and from Vienna, which up to 1810 sent it

cotton from the Levant. But the transformation of Lyon’s commerce was an

even greater novelty, because Napoleon was completely master of Italy and

had opened the Alpine routes. His ﬁ rst object was political and military. To

begin with he concentrated on the Simplon in order to link up with Milan,

and the road was ﬁ nished in 1805. But as Piedmont had just been annexed,

the main effort was switched to the Mont Cenis, which was completed as

early as 1806. Work also went ahead on the Genèvre, which was of purely

strategic importance.

As French rule spread to central Italy, the Corniche road came into the

picture; and in 1810 Napoleon decided to build it and extend it via La

Spezia and Florence towards Ancona and Trieste, but he never had time to

complete it. Up till 1810 the Simplon, which had difﬁ cult approaches and

was not easily controlled by the customs, was chieﬂ y used by troops and

travellers. On the other hand the Mont Cenis at once assumed great economic

importance, and the pre-eminence of Lyon was largely due to it, for nearly

all the Italian trafﬁ c went that way, amounting in 1810 to almost three thou-

sand travellers’ vehicles, fourteen thousand heavy wagons and thirty-seven

thousand pack-mules. As Piedmont and the kingdom of Italy had become to

some extent colonies of France, buying her manufactures and sending her

agricultural and textile goods, the industries of Lyon reaped the advantage,

for the Mont Cenis route was used by the silk trade. Illyria became impor-

tant in another way, for in 1810 the emperor made it the centre for the

cotton caravans arriving from the Levant. Lyon then became the gateway for

cotton, since Strasbourg had been closed against goods coming from Vienna.

The Mont Cenis route proved inadequate for the cotton trade, and when the

Valais was annexed, the Simplon grew in commercial importance.

It remained to be seen whether these supply routes would be able to

carry enough to replace the coastal trafﬁ c, which was becoming more and

more difﬁ cult. There is no doubt that it proved insufﬁ cient. France’s system

of waterways was still very incomplete, while elsewhere there were hardly

any canals, and the rivers were barely usable. Even on the Rhine, the local

tolls set up by the ordinance of 1803 had lessened the burden of the tolls

payable for navigation, though they had not altogether removed it. Nor had

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the privileges controlling certain stretches been abolished, where tranship-

ment had to be carried out for the beneﬁ t of certain porters’ unions. Wheeled

transport enjoyed great prosperity at this time, for instance at Chalon-sur-

Saône, for goods being sent to the interior of France, and at Lyon, where the

House of Bonnafour became one of the largest concerns of the time. But it

was no substitute for water transport where heavy goods were involved; and

even if enough vehicles had been built, there would not have been enough

horses, and the roads would not have stood up to the trafﬁ c, for except in

France and a few parts of Southern Germany and Italy they had no hard

stone surface.

As there were already a good many centres of industrial production

outside the Empire, the best plan would have been to give each of them a

sphere of activity and divide the continental market into customs zones. The

creation of large economic units would even have been an inducement to

accept this concentration of territory. The grand duchy of Berg, for example,

continued to ask for union with the Empire in order to draw on its custom;

and Holland would have taken a kinder view of annexation if the customs

barrier had been done away with. Napoleon was in a master position for

bringing about commercial unity in Italy; and Beugnot and Bacher repeat-

edly urged the setting up of a German customs union.

But there were various considerations working against, or at any rate

delaying, this solution of the problem. In the ﬁ rst place, the vassal and allied

states had to be humoured, for they were inclined to be jealous of their

sovereignty, and would not have agreed to give up their autonomy in

customs. As Napoleon’s institutional reforms and military needs were

expensive, it was difﬁ cult to cut down their resources, and they even put up

their customs tariffs. Territorial arrangements were in a state of constant

ﬂ ux, so that conditions for doing business and exchanging products became

worse rather than better. A number of regions naturally belonging together

or linked by their histories found themselves cut off from each other: for

instance, the kingdom of Italy from Dalmatia and Istria, from Novara and

from Piedmont, from Genoa and Leghorn. Switzerland was cut off from

Italy, from Genoa and from the Black Forest; the Tyrol from Italy and from

Austria, and Illyria from Hungary and Vienna, although Fiume would have

seen to the matter of transport, and so would Trieste in 1812. The grand

duchy of Berg, strangled between the French Empire on one side and her

German neighbours on the other, was in a pitiful plight. Her sales fell from

ﬁ fty-ﬁ ve million in 1807 to thirty-nine million in 1810. Trade agreements

would have provided some relief, but Napoleon did not encourage these, for

he wanted to keep all the proﬁ ts for France.

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The reef on which his European policies were wrecked was, to be sure,

his failure to see the European market as a thing in itself, and not simply

with reference to the French Empire. ‘France comes before everything else,’

he wrote to Eugène in 1810. Having conceived and planned the Continental

System, he would not deviate in his own territory from the mercantilism he

had espoused in the days of the Consulate. His frontiers remained strictly

closed against allies and vassals, no less than against the English, even for the

Swiss or the inhabitants of the duchy of Berg. In order to avoid all rivalry

with his own producers, he even refused to annex the duchy and kept

Holland and North Germany out of the Empire as far as customs were

concerned, although he had joined them to France politically. On the other

hand he did his utmost to impose against all nations preferential tariffs that

beneﬁ ted his own subjects, and succeeded as far as the kingdom of Italy and

Naples were concerned. This attitude of his can be explained by the position

of France. Being the most industrialised of all the continental peoples, she

suffered most of all from the blockade and the war. She had lost both the

colonial and the English markets, and then Spain in 1808 – Spain, her best

remaining customer; and it was from this time onwards that Napoleon

made every effort to keep his hold on Italy. France was the heart of the

system, and at all costs he felt he must preserve her from economic collapse.

Yet political considerations once again saved him from pushing this policy

to extremes. He took no steps to prevent the people of Saxony and the Swiss

from getting possession of the German market; and at the Leipzig fair,

France only sold the highest-quality goods. On the other hand, he kept a

close hold on Italy, where he reigned supreme. In this way he contrived to

get a share of the chief three industrial regions. Moreover, pressure from the

inhabitants of Lyon made him determined to hold on to this private preserve,

and he proceeded to erect progressively a series of impassable customs busi-

nesses around the kingdom of Italy, except on the French side. In 1808 he

forced her to accept a commercial treaty, and in 1810 arrogated to himself

the sole right to import cotton goods and cloth; he put a tax on the export

of raw silk to Austria and Switzerland so as to give Lyon a monopoly; and he

insisted on it giving free passage to cotton from Naples and from the Levant,

as well as allowing transit between France and Illyria. The kingdom of Italy

bought forty-three million’s worth of goods from France in 1810, and

eighty-two million in 1812, mostly cereals, ﬂ ax, hemp and silk – seventy-

three million in 1810 and ninety-two million in 1812. But she does not

seem to have fared as badly as has sometimes been suggested, for her balance

of trade remained favourable. France did not ruin her industries; she simply

took the place that had previously been held by England. As she was only in