seemed absurd that England was crammed with surplus products while
France languished through shortage of the selfsame products, especially
raw materials and colonial produce, and could not work out an efficient
method of import substitution. Whereas corn, fr uit, wool, wood and wine
had been sold to England before r8o6, the peasants could not now export
the surplus; this hit them particularly badly after the bumper harvest of
r8o8.
With industrialists, agriculturalists, shipowners, peasants and consum
ers all suffering from the blockade, it was not surprising that human
nature asserted itself. Speculation in coffee, sugar and cotton led to high
prices, inflated profits, stock exchange gambling mania and hence
generalized corruption and cynicism. The blockade was evaded even by
Napoleon's most senior lieutenants. Junior aides took bribes and traded
on the black market, while the Bonapartist grandees indulged in
corruption at a flagrant level. Massena sold unofficial licences to trade
with England to Italian merchants, thus swelling his already vast fortune.
Bourrienne, French Minister at Hamburg in r 8o6-o7, was ordered to
find so,ooo greatcoats and cloaks for the Grande Armee for the winter
campaign against Russia. He secretly purchased cloth and leather from
England, claiming that the Army would have died of cold if the
Continental System had been observed. In fact the inflow of British
manufactures continued at such a rate that in the r8rz campaign soldiers
in the Grand Army wore boots made in Northampton and greatcoats
made fr om Lancashire and Yorkshire cloth.
But undoubtedly the great growth industry during the heyday of the
Continental System was contraband, which was made easy by a
combination of local demand, corrupt offici;1ls, lax surveillance and
support from the British. Under Napoleon there were really only three
ways to make a vast fortune if you were not a marshal: by supplying the
Army, by speculation in national property, and by smuggling. With
opportunities in the first two areas rapidly drying up, contraband
beckoned as the future road to El Dorado.
It is hard to overestimate the rich pickings that could be made fr om
smuggling. The Rothschilds, now coming to prominence after the
pioneering labours of the dynasty's founder Meyer Amschel, made vast
sums by financing illegal trading and made even more after r8ro by
manipulating the British and French licensing systems simultaneously.
One lace merchant, a certain M. Gaudoit of Caen, imported illicit British
goods worth 750,ooo francs between r8or-o8, using the roundabout
route London-Amsterdam-Frankfurt-Paris-Bordeaux. On the Rhine it
was reckoned that a smuggler could earn r2-r4 francs a night, when the
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