The impact of the Continental Blockade on Napoleon's Empire varied
enormously, not just over space but through time. Subject to later
provisos, a risky generalization might be that in France itself the northern
and eastern areas benefited while the southern and western suffer ed. This
was part of a general process whereby the economy shifted structurally
away from the Atlantic seaboard and towards the land markets of the
Continent. All trade with a maritime or colonial component was hit hard:
the manufacture of linen and hemp declined disastrously as a result both
of the closure of colonial markets and the reduced demand from a
mothballed and dry-docked Navy for ropes and canvas.
The mood in the northern departments from I 8o6-I I was notably
pro-Bonaparte: brigandage declined; civic morale was high and there was
a very low level of absenteeism and military desertion; cities like Lille,
Amiens and Valenciennes did well. In the east, Alsace recovered under
Napoleon and the blockade benefited the areas of the Haut-Rhin. It was
noted that the four departments on the left bank of the Rhine particularly
prospered, both because the abolition of tithes and seigneurial rights
stimulated agriculture, and because the elimination of British competition
benefited local textiles and metallurgy. In general, the growth of industry
and trade in the Rhine area led to a strongly pro-Bonaparte commercial
bourgeoisie. Almost overnight traffic on the river changed its character,
as the upstream flow of raw materials from the Rhine basin exceeded the
downstream dispatch of colonial produce from Holland, now choked off
because of the blockade.
It was a very different picture in the west of France, where the ports
were blockaded by the Royal Navy and the level of economic discontent
accordingly very high. The west, where the tradition of the Vendee and
the Chouans lived on, was always the weak point in the Napoleonic
Empire. Royalist factions and English spies still had their networks here
and banditry was rampant. Brigandage in the west under Napoleon has
been much discussed and seems to have had many roots: the influence of
the petite eglise -that part of the Church which opposed the Concordat;
an indulgent magistracy; a chronic shortage of gendarmes; and an anti
Bonaparte tradition. The brigands themselves were a melange of former
Chouans, deserters and rebellious conscripts and ordinary criminals who
spread a spurious political patina over their crimes. Napoleon thought it
best to let semi-somnolent dogs lie, and softpedalled on the old Vendee
areas, granting them low levels of conscription and a fifteen-year tax
exemption (given in I8o8) to all whose buildings were destroyed by civil
war, provided they rebuilt them by I8Iz. These softly-softly measures
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