202 Chapter SixRussian state interests. But this, in effect, was the choice that the
sudden upthrust of French and British power presented to the tsars
and the Russian ruling elite. It was a dilemma less acute than those
faced by rulers further west inasmuch as the Russian peasantry and
lower classes of the towns were almost unaware of the winds of change
blowing so powerfully in western Europe. The tsars therefore re
mained free to shift back and forth between a British and a French
alliance, finding no real satisfaction in either. The Hapsburg rulers of
Austria did the same, though when, in 1810, Klemens von Metternich
arranged the marriage of Napoleon to a daughter of the emperor,
Francis II, it looked as though a permanent reconciliation according to
the ancient pattern of dynastic alliance had been achieved. The upstart
emperor of the French valued the legitimation imparted by his mar
riage into the ancient house that claimed the headship of Christen
dom, and the Hapsburg emperor valued the immunity from further
defeats that having Napoleon for a son-in-law seemed to guarantee.
From a military and diplomatic point of view, therefore, it surely
seemed by 1810 that the French hegemony over western and central
Europe was secure. Far-reaching legal changes followed in the wake of
French conquests. Vested interests in the new regime, within France
and beyond its borders, came swiftly into existence and grew stronger
year by year.
Nevertheless, Britain’s antagonism remained formidable, and the
French effort to bring Great Britain to bay by cutting off all British
trade with the Continent—a policy Napoleon announced in 1806—
ended by putting his authority on a collision course with the interests
of a considerable proportion of the European population, for whom
cheap cotton cloth and other British manufactures as well as colonial
goods available only through British entrepots had become important.
Had France been able to deliver equivalent goods from factories
within her own borders, the continental blockade would surely have
worked; but that was not the case. French manufactures had suffered
severe dislocation between 1789 and 1800, and even though there
was a recovery under Napoleon so that by 1811 the value of produc
tion surpassed that of the prerevolutionary period by as much as 40
percent^36 this rate of growth lagged far enough behind the British to
make it difficult for articles of French manufacture to compete in
quantity and price with British products.^37 More important, there was
- L. Bergeron, “Problèmes économiques de la France Napoléonienne,” Annales
historiques de la révolution française 42 (1970): 89– - The gap was easy to exaggerate. Napoleon had no difficulty in supplying his
armies with all the military hardware they could carry. Annual production of iron cannon