millions for the catastrophic mistake of Jena, and Hanover, Prussia's
appanage, had to pay fifty millions. The extraction of fu nds from Spain
after r8o8 was big business, with western Castile 'contributing' eight
million fr ancs in just six months in r8ro. Additionally, the conquered
territories were stripped of other significant material resources: in 1 8o6
the Prussians lost 40,000 horses while the Saxons had to abandon all
cannon, munitions and military stores.
The twin evils of conscription and taxes to pay for the draftees did not
end there. French soldiers in fo reign territories lived off the land - a
euphemism fo r large-scale looting. The costs of having French troops
quartered on them were so great that many citizens preferred to abandon
their homes instead. The brutal French soldiers, many of them rapists
and murderers who had chosen the army instead of a prison sentence,
took their pick of the local women. Feelings ran high over sex, which was
a threefold source of anger and resentment. There was rape pure and
simple; there was a high level of prostitution; and there was the
phenomenon of peasant girls and others choosing to go off with officers
and becoming camp fo llowers. As one French soldier wrote of his
experience among the Germans: 'They cannot fo rgive us fo r having fo r
twenty years caressed their wives and daughters before their very faces.'
Conscription, taxes, forced levies, debts run up by the Bonaparte
fa mily as kings, looting by ordinary soldiers, economic disruption and
dislocation, the Catholic backlash triggered by anticlerical and freemason
soldiery, the affront to local cultures, traditions and folkways which
engendered primitive nationalism - not even this long list of sources of
discontent exhausts the alienating impact of Napoleon's Empire. Over
and above all this was the crucial consideration that Napoleon ran his so
called integrated Europe as a gigantic spoils system. The exiguous
revenue base in the hard-pressed satellites was shrunk still further by the
estates set aside fo r the Emperor's donataires.
The titles and benefices Napoleon assigned to his marshals were always
located in the satellite or annexed states, never in France itself, partly for
prudential reasons so as not to alienate French taxpayers, partly to give
his generals a strong motive for fighting campaigns beyond the 'natural
frontiers', partly because all worthwhile national property had already
been alienated. Never was there a more blatant example of the Emperor's
boast that 'I have only conquered kingdoms ... to serve the interest of
France and help me in all I am doing fo r her.' His barefaced exploitation
of the satellite states emerges clearly from one salient fact: first charge on
all state revenues went to the entailed incomes of his marshals and other
donataires.
marcin
(Marcin)
#1