some sections of the economy burgeoning and others plummeting. Those
whose livelihood depended on ports or who were engaged in colonial
trade had a thin time. Bankruptcy and ruin was the norm for all who
based their fortunes in the great ports - Barcelona, Cadiz, Hamburg,
Lisbon, Bordeaux, Nantes, Antwerp, Amsterdam - not just from the
direct blockade but from the decline in colonial trade, affecting adversely
ropemaking, linen, shipbuilding, sugar refining, distilling, provisioning
and even some industries which throve elsewhere, such as cotton and
tobacco. The Napoleonic years brought about a permanent transfer of
social power away from the old elites in these ports, for even after 1815
most of these cities became thriving regional centres rather than the
international entrepots they had once been.
It will be clear that the economic blockade, originally designed to
throttle England, took on a life of its own and produced a European
economic bloc based on the Napoleonic Empire. This is why some
historians prefer to distinguish the Continental Blockade proper, directed
at British exports, from the more general notion of a Continental System
which played a positive, if haphazard role, in European economic
integration. In this system French production and, to a lesser extent, that
of the satellites, was protected from British competition. The differing
effects of the Continental System proper explain why the economic
winners and losers under Napoleon were not merely regionally based but
cut through the social strata.
The general picture of the peasantry until 1812 is one of reasonable
contentment. In the early years of Empire the demands of conscription
were more than offset by the abolition of tithes, feudal rights, the
abolition of the ancient rights of the nobility and reassurances about the
future of emigre property. But the Continental System drove a wedge
between the upper peasants and their middle and lower cousins. Where
big farmers benefited from price rises and increase in outlets, the small
farmers suffered fr om rents that outstripped the price rise of staples like
corn. Nine-tenths of the peasantry were share croppers and their
marketable surplus was not large enough to enable them to benefit from
the economies of scale in the Continental System.
It is generally agreed that living standards, as measured by diet,
improved both in the countryside and in the towns in the Napoleonic
period. One sociological curiosity of the era is the great popularity
enjoyed by the Emperor among the urban proletariat, for this was not a
vital element in his power structure, and the lot of city workers does not
seem to have been particularly happy. Life expectancy was still only fifty
and suicides were common; and the average Parisian worker earned 900
marcin
(Marcin)
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