Impact of Political and Industrial Revolutions 203
no way in which satisfactory substitutes for tea, coffee, sugar, raw
cotton, and similar goods from overseas could be found within the
limits of continental Europe—at least not in the short run.^38
A fundamental French weakness was their dependence on costly
overland transport, both for distribution of goods to civilian markets
and, more decisively, for military supply as well. The catastrophes to
Napoleon’s power, in Spain and in Russia, arose from the fact that in
both these theaters of war his enemies were able to avail themselves of
water transport for supplying their armies, whereas the French had to
rely mainly on overland haulage for whatever they could not find by
plundering the countryside along the way. In rich enough rural land
scapes, such as those of Italy and Germany, and for a period of a few
weeks in summer time, the French reliance on overland haulage for
whatever could not be seized along the line of march worked well
enough, as Napoleon’s earlier victorious campaigns attested. But
when a single year’s operations proved indecisive—as in Spain—and
when the poverty of the landscape made living off the country diffi
cult, then the formula for military success which French armies had
followed since 1793 lost its potency. Plundering to make good de-
grew from 900 to 13,000 a year, and seventeen new foundries turned out no fewer than
14,000 bronze guns per annum, according to Clough, France, p. 49. One near
contemporary calculation held that between 1803 and 1815 the French produced 3.9
million muskets, rifles, carbines, and pistols, whereas Great Britain turned out only 3.1
million in the same period. F. R. C. Dupin, Military Force of Great Britain (London,
1822), quoted in Richard Glover, Peninsular Preparation in 1795–1809 (Cambridge,
1963), p. 47. This may understate British production: Birmingham alone turned over
1,743,383 handguns and 3,037,644 gun barrels to the Board of Ordnance between
1804 and 1815, according to William Page, ed., The Victoria History of the County of
Warwick II (London, 1908), “The Gun Trade of Birmingham,” pp. 226–32.
France and French-controlled regions of Europe also saw spurts of entrepreneurship
into new branches like cotton-spinning. Cf. Fernand Lelux, A l'aube du capitalisme et de la
révolution industrielle: Lieven Bauwens. industriel Gaulois (Paris, 1969). Irregularities in
access to raw cotton hurt the latter venture, however; and, in general, industries de
pendent on goods imported from overseas languished. Indeed the main effect of the
war years was to choke off the Atlantic face of France and build up industry in the
Rhine-Rhone valleys. Cf. François Crouzet, “Wars, Blockade and Economic Change in
Europe, 1792–1815,” Journal of Economic History 24 (1964): 567–88; Bertrand Gille, Les
origines de la grande industrie métallurgique en France (Paris, 1947), pp. 206 ff.
- Experiments, later to be important, were made with sugar beets; likewise cotton-
growing in the Po valley was initiated; but these never came near filling the gap created
by the cutoff of colonial goods. Realizing this weakness of his position, Napoleon kept
hoping to be able to challenge Britain on the seas once again. After Trafalgar (1805)
reduced the French army to a mere 30 ships of the line, he set about rebuilding. By
181.4 103 ships of the line and 65 frigates were ready for sea. But the new vessels
huddled uselessly in port, and in 1812 Napoleon took many of their crew members into
the army for the invasion of Russia, thus tacitly admitting his inability, for the time
being, to challenge his rival effectively. Cf. Joannes Tramond, Manuel d'histoire
maritime de la France: Des origines à 1815 (Paris, 1947), pp. 772 ff.
