Lefebvre Georges. Napoleon
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the world in 1812
484
nationalism is a hint that the Continental System would not have survived
once the emperor who founded it had gone.
As for the social grievances, they were in part contradictory, with the
result that in the countries where the economy had already been modern-
ised, there were obstacles in the way of a united social front. This explains
why the coalition between the monarchy and the aristocracy held back
from the national movements and turned against them after they had won
their own triumph. In the spring of 1812 Alexander was already posing as
the protector of downtrodden nations, and from 1813 to 1815 he and his
allies were lavish in making vague promises. But they certainly did not
intend their own convenient territorial arrangements to be in any way upset.
They took it as a matter of course that there should be no reduction in their
own power, and that the peasants and middle classes to whom they appealed
would have to submit, as they had before, to the superior position of the
aristocracy. Austria, obstinately loyal to the ancien régime , felt very closely
threatened by the subjection of so many nations, and was eager to regain
her ascendancy over Italy and Germany. Never for one moment did she
consent to giving any kind of revolutionary character to the struggle against
France. There is thus already revealed in this duplicity of purpose the history
of the fi rst half of the nineteenth century, in which the oppressors wreaked
a cruel revenge against their subjects who had allowed themselves to be
deceived.
THE PROGRESS OF CAPITALISM, AND THE EXPANSION
OF EUROPE THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
During the whole of the Napoleonic period, money was abundant. As this
book has already several times explained, this was one of the central features
of the British economy. From 1809 onwards there was increasing infl ation
in Great Britain. The Bank of England dealt with an increasing number of
exchequer bills, and in 1811 its commercial discount rate stood at a fi gure
fi ve times as high as in 1795, and there were £28 ½ million in circulation in
the form of banknotes. There was not much increase in the number of private
banks in London, with their own issue of notes; but in the provinces there
were something like eight hundred of them in 1809. As the Bank of England
issued £1 and £2 notes, coins gradually disappeared and prices continued to
rise. In 1814 the index was 198 as compared with 100 in 1790. The Bank of
England’s gold and silver reserve fell to two million in 1815, and the
exchange rate dropped from fi fteen per cent to twenty per cent, though this
did not damage the export trade. In France, infl ation was less pronounced.
485
the independent forces
There was a continuance of hoarding, and complaints about the scarcity of
coin remained frequent; but there can be no doubt that the note issue
increased. The Bank of France’s issue rose from sixty-three million in 1806
to 111 million in 1812. The rate of circulation increased too. From 1809 to
1812 bills rose from four hundred to fi ve hundred million and reached 747
million in 1810. If it had had the emperor’s support it would have been
more lively still, and would have extended greatly in the provinces, where
the local banks cannot have done much – though nothing is known about
their transactions. Paper credit was as yet only used by a small number of
business people, and the increase in metallic coin was of greater importance.
This was achieved partly by new minting, partly by the positive funding of
the trade balance, chiefl y through war indemnities and the income from the
foreign territories. The gold and silver brought into France from 1799 to
1814 have been calculated at 755 million. In the Empire, although manufac-
tured products grew dearer, the price of agricultural products sometimes
fell; but the general indications are that prices remained perceptibly higher
than in 1789. Many of the continental countries went over to paper-money
systems. But as their coin was hidden, or had passed to France or England,
these were the two chief countries where the monetary infl ation made for
economic advance.
Moreover, the extension of the revolutionary reforms to a large part of
Europe – freedom for the worker, the abolition of serfdom and feudal dues,
the opening up of the land, the abolition of internal customs and tolls, a
uniform system of weights and measures – all these were in favour of the
growth of capitalism. They were in accordance with Adam Smith’s doctrine
as popularised by Garnier and especially by J.-B. Say, who clarifi ed and
supplemented it in his Traité d’économie politique , which came out in 1803.
Warfare, too, was a constant stimulant. In England, it forced traders to
look for new markets, and on the Continent it ensured effective protection
for industry. The continental blockade only underlined the consequences of
incessant hostilities, which makes it impossible to determine its exact effect
on the conditions of production. Nevertheless, the havoc wrought by war
certainly outweighed the advantages. Political uncertainty and the inter-
ference with commercial relationships were a widespread brake upon enter-
prise; and as industrial progress on the Continent depended particularly on
the popular spread of British machinery, it would have been speedier still if
Englishmen had continued to come over and install it.
In the economic sphere, the inventive spirit, stirred up by scientifi c
research, did not lose its impetus as much as elsewhere; but as compared
with the inventions of the eighteenth century, the results were slender. The
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expansive power of steam when condensed, which had been thought out by
Hornblower in 1792, was taken up again in 1804 by Woolf, who made use
of medium steam pressures to produce a double effect; and this was the
origin of the compound steam-engine. In Philadelphia, a workman and
mechanic called Evans introduced some remarkable improvements in the
construction of boilers. Murdock, who had succeeded in lighting Boulton’s
workshops in Birmingham by gas in 1798, installed the fi rst lamps in the
streets of London – in Pall Mall – in the year 1807. In France, Philippe Lebon
had made the same discovery, but died in 1804 without having been able to
get it adopted. Towards the end of the Empire, Philippe de Girard also
succeeded in producing a machine for spinning fl ax. Moreover, the prob-
lems of transport were claiming increasing attention. In 1811 Mcadam laid
before the House of Commons the process which bears his name for
providing roads with a hard stone surface – although it was already in use
in France. The English coal industry was making increased use of transport
by rail, with improvement in the gradients. Finally, efforts were made to
construct a steam-engine to run on an ‘iron road’, and in 1804 Trevithick
achieved a primitive locomotive, and Hedley one in 1814, while Stephenson
began his researches in the same year. The revolution in water transport was
also in its early stages, though only in America. In 1807 Fulton organised a
regular steamship service on the River Hudson, but no one dared as yet to
venture on the ocean.
The evidence suggests that the war inclined the manufacturers to rely on
military success and on contraband for maintaining their markets, rather
than on technical improvements or a reduction in the rate of profi t, which
would help to explain why there was this slowing down in the progress of
inventions. Although in England the use of machinery continued to spread,
this took place fairly slowly, even in the cotton industry, where the ‘mule’
had not yet entirely replaced the ‘jenny’, and where in 1812 there were not
more than two thousand mechanical looms at work. In the woollen industry,
mechanisation was in its early stages, and was confi ned to spinning, though
it was more used in lace-making. The metal industries were more advanced.
Wood-burning furnaces were dying out, and for smelting cast iron, the
puddling furnace and the rolling mill had won the day. Hydraulic power
and steam power were still rarely used, except in cotton-spinning and in the
mines. Moreover, although there was an undoubted tendency to concentrate
industry, it was not so far very marked. Cotton factories only numbered
fourteen in 1812, and the fi rst factory in Manchester using steam power
only opened in 1806. In the lace industry, the oldest dates only from 1810.
The production of metals was still widely dispersed, and other industries
487
the independent forces
even more so, except for distilleries. In London, the working classes
undoubtedly held the most prominent position. Taken as a whole, capitalist
enterprise was still markedly commercial in character. Merchants had piece-
workers engaged in making goods in their own homes out of raw materials
supplied them, often on hired looms.
In the Empire, there was still greater weight behind the urge to increase
production along traditional lines, in spite of the interest shown in new
methods, such as the mule, the Jacquard loom, the revolving cylinder for
printing calicoes taken over by Mulhouse from Oberkampf in 1805, and
Douglas’s and Cockerill’s machines for wool-spinning. The fi rst reverbatory
smelting furnace appeared at Le Creusot in 1810. Progress was sporadic,
and chiefl y to be seen in Alsace and the North, at Lyon and Saint-Étienne, in
Normandy, and in the state-owned mines of the Saar: it was most marked in
Belgium and the Aachen region. It was then that the Belgian mines began to
be equipped with machinery; and at Liège, Périer – with Napoleon’s help
– set up a gun foundry. In 1810 Dony established the factory where he used
his special process for treating zinc, the origin of the ‘Vieille Montagne’.
Ghent underwent a revival through the establishment of cotton manufac-
ture: and at Verviers the beginning of the industrial revolution as far as
woollens were concerned was the introduction of English machinery. The
town became a very important centre, with eighty-six manufacturers and
twenty-fi ve thousand operatives in 1810. Italy, on the other hand, had few
improvements to show; and several regions, deprived – like the West of
France – of their traditional markets, devoted themselves more and more to
agriculture. Taken as a whole, there was only a very limited installation of
new machinery. For cotton-spinning, the spinning wheel had not disap-
peared, and the jenny reached its peak in about 1806. The metal industry
remained faithful to charcoal smelting, there were few steam-engines, and
Belgian mines did not use them until 1807. In spinning, they were not
brought in until the end of the Empire, for instance in Alsace, in 1812. There
was only a concentration of industry in cotton-spinning and in wool. On
the other hand, there was striking progress in commercial concentration.
One of the notable features of the period is the increase in the number of
big businessmen. There were Bauwens and Richard-Lenoir, the great cotton
magnates, at Oberkampf; then Ternaux, who specialised in wool and was a
pioneer in the making of cashmere shawls. Dolffus-Mieg at Mulhouse, Japy
at Montbéliard, Peugeot at Audincourt, Cockerill at Liège were all great
names. They made no attempt to divide their activities, being at once traders
and manufacturers. Though they were the creators of factory products, they
still went on employing a whole host of piece-workers in their homes.
the world in 1812
488
In comparison with England, the capitalist economy was as behindhand in
development as the banking system.
Outside the Empire, the same characteristics recur in Saxony and in
Switzerland, the only countries where there were any signs of mechanisa-
tion and a beginning of the concentration of industry, which was in cotton-
spinning and the printing of calicoes. In the United States, there had likewise
been great progress in the former, with a rise from four factories in 1804 to
fi ve hundred in 1815. But weaving was well behind: the fi rst mechanised
factory was not set up by Lowell till 1813. The outstanding features in the
American economy were the progress in cotton-growing, in which produc-
tion doubled between 1801 and 1811, and the growth in external trade and
in navigation, for it was still the period of magnates like Astor and Girard.
Agriculture remained much more wedded to tradition than industry,
except in England, where her superiority over the Continent was even more
marked. Only the Low Countries had adopted modern methods, and parts
of Northern France. In the Baltic countries and in Prussia, the lords much
preferred to evict the peasants and multiply forced labour rather than make
any change in their customary methods.
On the Continent, capitalism was making too gradual a progress towards
concentration for its social consequences to be for the time being very
extensive. Agricultural day labourers and operatives at the looms went on
living much as they had always done, paying more attention to looking for
work and keeping an eye on the price of food than on the conditions of
work and the rates of wages. They only came into occasional collision with
the employers, in certain localities, and only in matters of strictly profes-
sional concern. The only attempts at organising themselves concerned the
revival of the trade guilds and the formation of a certain number of mutual-
help societies. As in the eighteenth century, their history was chiefl y marked
by periods of severe unemployment, and high prices caused by bad harvests.
But the case was quite different in England. There, the working classes
were growing in numbers and becoming increasingly massed in the Black
Country of the West Midlands. The exodus from the countryside brought
about by the enclosures, the employment of women and children, endemic
unemployment due to the introduction of machinery, and the periodical
economic crises all prevented wages from keeping pace with prices. There
was a sinister deterioration in the living conditions of these masses, uprooted
from the country, crowded together in insanitary slums, undernourished,
uneducated and altogether lacking in any amusements. In spite of the Act of
1799, unions continued to be formed. Since they went on appealing to
ancient statutory rights, Parliament repealed those which authorised a levy
489
the independent forces
on wages in the year 1813, and in 1814 those which concerned apprentice-
ship. As in France, all that was left of the ancient laws were the clauses that
bore so hardly upon the workers. In 1802, at the instance of Peel’s father,
Parliament had introduced the fi rst Factory Bill to protect children, but it
remained a dead letter. Deprived as they were of all legal redress, it is not
surprising that there were periodical outbreaks of violence among them,
usually directed against the new machines. The most famous of these Luddite
riots in 1811 and 1812 were the result of the economic crisis, although
attempts were made to ascribe them to conspiracies and to the infl uence of
French ideas. Maitland, who was entrusted with their suppression, assured
the public that ‘there was a pernicious spirit abroad’, tending ‘to subvert the
government of the country and destroy all property’. To judge by the
speeches made by some men, such as John Baynes of Halifax, there were
memories of the democratic agitation that had occurred at the time of the
Revolution. He was condemned at the age of sixty-six to transportation for
having greeted the recent disturbances as a prelude to revolution:
Too long have these vampires fed upon our blood . . . They have stirred up
wars; they feed on them, nay, they grow fat on them. They have sent us all
over the world to fi ght in order to stamp out freedom in France and main-
tain despotism over the whole of Europe . . . I have waited a long while for
the dawn to break; but old as I am, may I still live to see the glorious
triumph of democracy.
But if the masses in Great Britain had been fi lled with revolutionary fi re,
they would at least have demanded universal suffrage: as it was, these events
can only be seen as the writhings of a tortured people who had lost all
political spirit. It is possible – as some have maintained – that there were
certain infl uences at work holding the populace in check, such as the
Dissenters, Hannah More’s Sunday School movement, and the schools for
self-help instruction recommended by a young Quaker called Lancaster in
1798, and fostered by an organisation from 1810 onwards. Nevertheless, the
absence of any general uprising was essentially due to the fact that as yet the
working classes were not very closely massed together; and since 1795 wages
had been made up to a certain fi gure in proportion to the price of bread. For
the property-owning classes, the Poor Law was an insurance premium.
Some thinkers, however, were beginning to have new ideas in the face of
these social developments. Although the British economists found no fault
with the existing system on the score of justice, it fi lled them with a
profound pessimism, as already exemplifi ed by Malthus. The banker Ricardo,
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490
who began to write in 1810, founded all value upon work; but he noted
that in England the cultivation of the less and less profi table land, made
necessary by the increasing population, ensured a differential income to the
owners of the better land, while he also confi rmed the iron law of supply
and demand which controlled wages. Man’s attempts to ward off famine
would become more and more desperate, labour would absorb an increasing
proportion of the cost of production, and the capitalist’s profi ts would
continually decrease. The fi nal result would be that no new land would be
taken into cultivation, and Malthus’s law would exercise its inexorable sway
over the whole situation. On the Continent, Sismondi, adopting a moral
standpoint altogether absent from Ricardo’s thought, was working out his
Principes d’économie politique , which appeared in 1819. It contained a sharp crit-
icism of the new organisation of labour in which the wage earner became a
mere chattel whose value was constantly being lowered by the competition
of the machine. As early as Year XII, Fourier had denounced the state of
social chaos that had arisen from the individualism of the Revolution. Saint-
Simon, taking an opposite line, retained the eighteenth-century enthusiasm
for the productive capacity of modern industry; but he proposed to organise
it in such a way as to increase production still further.
These men were no champions of democracy, and Fourier and Saint-
Simon’s violent attacks on the effects of the Revolution were quite in keeping
with the reaction of contemporary thought. Saint-Simon, for example,
claimed that society should be run by ‘the really capable people’, that is to
say, by the experts and the technicians, so that the ‘ruling class’ should be
‘always more enlightened than those whom they ruled’. It was thus his
intention to reconstitute an aristocracy invested with absolute power. But he
realised that this new aristocracy would, in order to continue to deserve its
privileged position, have to be constantly renewed by fresh blood; and he
was therefore against the principle of inheritance. Like Saint-Simon,
Sismondi and Fourier attacked economic liberty and competition. Their
ideal was that all men, regardless of politics, should be concerned solely
with creating wealth for the benefi t of all mankind. Socialism could afford
to disregard the noise and tumult of war, for it was the inevitable outcome
of capitalism; and it was about to infuse new life into the democratic move-
ment. By this time, Robert Owen was already planning his experiments in
community.
Outside Europe, capitalism pursued its conquering career by the English
spirit of commercial progress shown in America; but it continued to be a
brake upon white expansion. In the Far East, the agents of the East India
Company continued their efforts to establish trading centres. As early as
491
the independent forces
1802 the Portuguese were asked to admit a British garrison at Macao, and
in 1808 a squadron put in an appearance there, though still without success;
while in Canton a series of incidents produced continual friction between
the Chinese and the English. Gia Long also had to repel attacks on Cochin
China in 1804 and against Hanoi in 1808. In Japan, a ship appeared at
Nagasaki in 1808 in an attempt to capture the Dutch ships; and later on
Raffl es, who had established himself in Java, tried to get his authority recog-
nised by the Batavian trade settlement of Deshima. In China, Chia Ch’ing
was increasingly threatened by secret societies, and in 1813 a great insur-
rection broke out in Shantung. Japan could not have put up any serious
resistance, and the appearance of Captain Pellew in 1808 had struck terror
into the leading spirits. It was only the internal struggles of Europe that gave
the Far East more than a quarter of a century of respite.
As far as colonisation was concerned, it did not make more than very
modest progress in the British Empire. Emigrants were few, and preferred to
go to the United States. None came to the Cape till 1808, and Canada hardly
received any. In Australia about the year 1815 there were only some six to
seven hundred colonists, four hundred of whom were convicts, cultivating
about eighty thousand hectares. Canada showed the most favourable advance.
At the end of the period, Lower Canada had about 250,000 inhabitants,
twenty to thirty thousand of them English, and Upper Canada seventy thou-
sand. American contraband was very profi table to Halifax, and the needs of
the Admiralty gave an advantage to timber export, thus laying the founda-
tion of a prosperous industry. In Java, Stamford Raffl es went in for new
methods, transforming the native chiefs into offi cials, renting land to the
inhabitants and allowing them freedom to work it and to engage in trade;
but he did not have the necessary time or money.
White expansion continued to prosper, particularly in the United States.
This was due less to immigration than to the excessive birth rate, which led
to a continuous trek from the Atlantic coast to the north-western territories.
Ohio had become a state in 1802, and Indiana and Illinois were to be
admitted soon after 1815. In the south, on the other hand, the Negroes
were increasing in numbers with the growth of the cotton plantations, and
were now reckoned at more than 1½ million. Louisiana was admitted to the
federation in 1812, and Florida was having greedy eyes cast upon it. Madison
occupied the western part of it along with Pensacola, which was disputed
territory; and Jackson, at the head of the Tennessee militia, was conducting
operations against the Creeks.
The only serious rivals to the Anglo-Saxons were the Russians. They had
entered Transcaucasia, defeated the Persians and by the Treaty of Gulistan in
the world in 1812
492
1813 been recognised as the possessors of Daghestan and Baku, with the
sole right of having a fl eet on the Caspian. They tried unsuccessfully to
establish relationships with China; and in 1805 an embassy from Alexander
was arrested in Mongolia. The Bering Company, established in 1799, was
expanding in Alaska, and in 1803 they sent the cruisers Razanov and Kruzenstern
round Cape Horn. The fi rst appeared at Nagasaki in 1804, but was not
admitted to harbour, and in 1806 proceeded from Alaska as far as San
Francisco. From Okhotsk, the Russians attempted to seize Sakhalin and
attacked the Kurile Islands and Ezo, to the great consternation of the Japanese.
A little later on, they were planning to establish a colony in California as a
supply base for Alaska, and in 1811 set up a fort north of San Francisco,
coming into contact at this point with the Canadian company that was
beginning to work in Columbia and Oregon.
The part played by the missions remained a very subordinate one. In
China, the apostolic vicar Dufresne had called the fi rst synod together in
1803; but it was not attended by any priest from Europe. In 1805 persecu-
tion broke out again, and Dufresne himself was beheaded in 1815. In 1807
a Protestant missionary called Morrison landed at Canton, and Baptists had
also begun to work in Burma. The Bible Society was founded in 1804, but
conditions did not so far allow it to engage in much activity.
In the minds of Europeans, the colonies were still playing the part assigned
to them by the Mercantile Theory; but the old colonial system was already
threatened. France had at a particular juncture abolished slavery, thus giving
up one of her chief advantages, and she lost San Domingo in an attempt to
reintroduce it. In 1807 England abolished the slave trade, which was bound
to cut off the supply of Negroes. On the other hand, the United States took
a distinctive line, for the colonists and the half-castes had made up their
minds to have done with exclusiveness, and to separate from Europe to get
rid of it. Spain was in a fair way to lose her colonial possessions. After recog-
nising Ferdinand VII, the colonies had not been slow to remember that they
were only his personal possessions, and that during his captivity they were
their own masters. In 1810, when the news came through that Andalusia
had fallen and that the junta were shut up in Cadiz, they took a further step.
Caracas deposed its viceroy on 19 April, Buenos Aires on 20 May. New
Granada rose in July, Quito in August, Chile and Mexico in September. The
colonies offered to sign a commercial treaty with England, and Bolivar went
to London. Wellesley intervened, but the Cortes refused to abolish the trade
monopoly, and declared their American subjects to be rebels. Bolivar
returned home again, followed by Miranda. They called together a congress
which declared Venezuela independent on 7 July 1811, and voted a consti-
493
the independent forces
tution. New Granada did the same. In the Argentine, the leaders were already
at odds, and one of them, Moreno by name, had been expelled. The
Constituent Assembly did not meet till 1813. Everywhere the rights of man
were proclaimed, while keeping for Catholicism its privileged position as
the religion of the state; but slavery, the mita and the comiendas were suppressed.
Discord promptly broke out in the new states. The half-castes cold-
shouldered the Spaniards. The moderates took alarm at the appeal to the
Negroes and the half-breeds, while the leaders quarrelled, and the towns, in
their jealousy of one another, changed sides in order to defend their inde-
pendence. The mountain-dwellers, led by the clergy, supported the Spaniards;
and in Venezuela, the llaneros were prepared to fi ght for anyone who would
pay them. But Spain succeeded in retaining some solid advantages. In
Mexico, they shot the parish priest Hidalgo in 1811; and his confederate,
Morales, who made a new attempt in 1813, suffered the same fate in 1815.
The Spaniards retained possession of Lima, from which point they could
successfully contest Quito with the Granadinos; and after varying fortunes,
they recaptured High Peru from the Argentinians. Paraguay fi nally slipped
from their grasp, but Elio put up a long resistance at Montevideo and called
in the Portuguese to his assistance. The town was not fi nally freed until
1814, under Alvear. In Chile, Rosas, Carrera and O’Higgins were rivals for
power; and in 1813 the Spaniards, concentrating their forces in the south,
regained the offensive and reconquered the whole country. But the struggle
took its most dramatic turn in Venezuela and New Granada. The Spaniards
had been able to hold out in the region of Maracaïbo and in the Orinoco
valley; and in 1812 they fairly easily got the better of Miranda, who capitu-
lated on 25 July. He was sent to Cadiz, where he died in 1816. Bolivar
managed to escape and reached Cartagena. The following year, the Granadinos
authorised him to invade Venezuela, and he entered Caracas on 6 August. His
enemies once more retreated eastwards, whence in 1814 they renewed their
attack and defeated him, forcing him to retire to New Granada. Just at this
moment, Ferdinand VII, restored to power, despatched reinforcements, and
in the spring of 1815 his fl eet appeared and Bolivar embarked for Jamaica.
The Argentine alone remained free; but it was weakened by dissensions, and
Alvear, who was elected governor in 1814, and had asked for English protec-
tion, was overthrown in April 1815. There was thus still some uncertainty
about the eventual destiny of Spanish America; but it was certain that the
mother country could never fully re-establish the old colonial regime.
Since the objective of capitalist production was profi t, it represented a
power that was quite foreign to Napoleon’s political and military ideals. It is
true that in its most developed forms it is inimical to national barriers,