Europe Under Napoleon by Michael Broers

Author:Michael Broers [Broers, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: azw
Tags: Battles and campaigns, International Relations, Military history, History 1700&#x2013, European History, Political leaders &#x0026, leadership, Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon Bonaparte, 1900
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Published: 2014-11-17T16:00:00+00:00

4

Crisis, 1808–11

The Continental Blockade and the Reordering of Europe, 1807–09

Expansion in Germany and Italy: Coastal Security

Napoleon’s first priority in 1807 was to make Britain sue for peace by means of the economic Continental Blockade. Henceforth, its enforcement dominated the development of the Empire. Napoleon had to control the entire coastline of Europe, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. This was a momentous and ultimately impossible ambition, but it remained central to French policy from 1807 onwards. Napoleon himself had few illusions about the privations in store. As early as December 1807, he told his brother Louis, the King of Holland, ‘The blockade will ruin many commercial towns: Lyon, Amsterdam, Rotterdam …’. He could have extended the list to every port where his writ ran.

The long French tradition of economic protectionism received a new lease of life when the outbreak of the revolutionary wars in 1792 allowed successive governments to enact trade and tariff legislation aimed at strangling British commerce in the name of the war effort. Napoleon was building on this legislation even before the Berlin Decrees of 1806, just as he drew heavily on a mercantilist tradition of economic thought that stretched back to Colbert and Louis XIV. However, from the Peace of Tilsit onwards, the economic blockade of Britain became the pivot of all French policy, domestic and foreign, military and economic. It stemmed from a widely shared belief that the victories of 1806–07 seemed to make the blockade feasible.

Initially, the blockade was meant to work through co-operation, not coercion. Napoleon stood by the policy of maintaining as limited and indirect a French presence as was possible, in the states bordering the inner empire, confined to the military occupation of key installations crucial to the blockade. There was a great deal of bullying, directed at the small states of northern Germany, Tuscany, the Papacy, Spain and Portugal – and eventually of Louis in Holland, as well – to make them enforce the blockade, but there was no serious territorial expansion until December 1807, when Tuscany was occupied and March 1808, when Napoleon deposed the Spanish. Bourbons in favour of his brother Joseph. The annexations of the Papal States and the north German coast did not take place until after the outbreak of war with Austria in 1809. The outer empire was created with as much hesitancy as the inner one had been.

Almost simultaneously with the issuing of the Berlin Decrees in mid-November 1806, French and Dutch troops occupied the three Hansa ports of Hamburg, Lübeck and Bremen, on the North Sea coast of Germany, together with some of the smaller ports and coastal fortresses. Beyond this, the senates of the Hansa towns continued to rule much as before. The occupation was accepted with resignation rather than enthusiasm, but the general view of the three senates was that a strong military presence would at least keep the area out of any further fighting. The enforcement of the blockade was merely irksome, at this stage; fiercer resentment was triggered by the conscription of 3000 sailors from the Hansa ports by the French in February 1808.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.