nineteenth century: forced pastoralization. The workings of the cotton
industry in Catalonia provide an almost textbook example of how the
Continental System worked: booming until 1808, it was then devastated
by Napoleon's coup, six years of war and the British takeover in Latin
America.
Summing up, then, on the wider impact of Napoleon's Continental
System, it can be said that, although Europe's industrial revolution did
not start under the Emperor, it was his policies, and especially the
elevation of the bourgeoisie, that laid the groundwork. Europe, in a word,
was given a breathing space that secured its future as an industrial
society, the predominance of the nobility was ended, feudal guilds broken
up, and the centre of gravity switched from the ports and seaborne trade
to the heavy industry of the north and east and the coal and iron in north
east France and Belgium. It must be stressed that these were unintended
effects. Nobody at the time really understood how international trade and
the movement of capital worked, and Napoleon himself had old
fashioned ideas on economics - deflationary policies, suspicion of paper
money, restrictions on credit, a balanced budget - without understanding
the knock-on effects of such policies.
But it was always the Blockade, not the System, that obsessed him.
Britain's chances of survival looked rosier than ever by the beginning of
I8Io, for the Royal Navy seized Cape Town and Java, Guadelupe and
Mauritius from the Dutch and, by interposing the Royal Navy, detached
Latin America from Joseph. Napoleon's only response to smuggling was
to impose tighter political and military control on the allies, which meant
annexation: Holland joined a long list that already included Ancona,
Piacenza, Parma, Tuscany, the Papal States, Illyria (including Trieste)
and was soon followed by most of Westphalia, the Tessin and the Valais
in Switzerland and the Hanseatic towns of Hamburg, Lubeck and
Bremen. Unfortunately fo r the Emperor, this remorseless policy of
annexation simply increased the number of his enemies and critics, some
of whom questioned his sanity and his judgement. All of Europe
especially the Czar, was irritated by the annexations, and within France it
reopened the debate about the desirability of resting content with the
natural frontiers. To disarm his critics Napoleon thought of new
economic devices, which merely exacerbated his problems.
1810 was the year when things began to go badly wrong with the
French economy. Realizing that he could not close the coast of Europe to
British products, and that French industrial production was impaired by
the high price of colonial raw materials, Napoleon decided on a new tack.
The decrees of St-Cloud, Trianon and Fontainebleau (3 July, 1 August,
marcin
(Marcin)
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