The brilliant French victory at Jena in October, 1806, seemed to fill the British as well as the Prussian cup to overflowing. The very next month Napoleon followed up his successes by inaugurating a thoroughgoing campaign against his arch-enemy, Great Britain herself; but the campaign was to be conducted in the field of economics rather than in the purview of military science. England, it must be remembered, had become, thanks to the long series of dynastic and colonial wars that filled the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the chief commercial nation of the world: she had a larger number of citizens who made their living as ship-owners, sailors, and traders than any other country in the world. Then, too, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter, it was in the England of the eighteenth century that the Industrial Revolution began,—a marvelous improvement in manufacturing, which fostered the growth of a powerful industrial class and enabled the English to make goods more cheaply and in greater profusion and to sell them more readily, at lower prices, both at home and abroad, than any other people in the world. Industry was fast becoming the basis of Great Britain's wealth, and the commercial classes were acquiring new strength and influence. It was, therefore, against "a nation of shopkeepers," as Napoleon contemptuously dubbed the English, that he must direct his new campaign.
To Napoleon's clear and logical mind, the nature of the problem was plain. Deprived of a navy and unable to utilize his splendid army, he must attack Great Britain in what appeared to be her one vulnerable spot—in her commerce and industry. If he could prevent the importation of British goods into the Continent, he would deprive his rivals of the chief markets for their products, ruin British manufacturers, throw thousands of British workingmen out of employment, create such hard times in the British Islands that the mass of the people would rise against their government and compel it to make peace with him on his own terms: in a word, he would ruin British commerce and industry and then secure an advantageous peace. It was a gigantic gamble, for Napoleon must have perceived that the Continental peoples might themselves oppose the closure of their ports to the cheaper and better manufactured articles of Great Britain and might respond to a common economic impulse and rise in force to compel him to make peace on British terms, but the stakes were high and the emperor of the French was a good gambler. From 1806 to 1812 the struggle between Napoleon and Great Britain was an economic endurance-test. On the one hand, the question was whether the British government could retain the support of the British people. On the other hand, the question was whether Napoleon could rely upon the cooperation of the whole Continent.
[Sidenote: The Berlin and Milan Decrees]
The Continental System had been foreshadowed under the Directory and in the early years of the Consulate, but it was not until the Berlin Decree (November, 1806) that the first great attempt was made to define and enforce it. In this decree, Napoleon proclaimed a state of blockade against the British Isles and closed French and allied ports to ships coming from Great Britain or her colonies. The Berlin Decree was subsequently strengthened and extended by decrees at Warsaw (January, 1807), Milan (December, 1807), and Fontainebleau (October, 1810). The Milan Decree provided that even neutral vessels sailing from any British port or from countries occupied by British troops might be seized by French warships or privateers. The Fontainebleau Decree went so far as to order the confiscation and public burning of all British manufactured goods found in the Napoleonic States.
[Sidenote: The Orders in Council]
To these imperial decrees the British government, now largely dominated by such statesmen as Lord Castlereagh and George Canning, replied with celebrated Orders in Council (January-November, 1807), which declared all vessels trading with France or her allies liable to capture and provided further that in certain instances neutral vessels must touch at a British port. Thus the issue was squarely joined. Napoleon would suffer no importation of British goods whether by combatants or by neutrals. The British would allow none but themselves to trade with France and her allies. In both cases the neutrals would be the worst sufferers. The effects of the conflict were destined to be far- reaching.
[Sidenote: Difficulties in Maintaining the Continental System]
The British by virtue of their sea-power could come nearer to enforcing their Orders in Council than could Napoleon to giving full effect to his imperial decrees. Of course they had their troubles with neutrals. The stubborn effort of Denmark to preserve its independence of action in politics and trade was frustrated in 1807 when a British expedition bombarded Copenhagen and seized the remnant of the Danish navy. From that time until 1814 Denmark was naturally a stanch ally of Napoleon. Against the Americans, too, who took advantage of the Continental System to draw into their own hands a liberal portion of the carrying trade, the British vigorously applied the Orders in Council, and the consequent ill-feeling culminated in the War of 1812 between Great Britain and the United States. But on the whole, the British had less trouble with neutrals than did Napoleon. And compared with the prodigious hardships which the System imposed upon the Continental peoples and the consequent storms of popular opposition to its author, the contemporaneous distress in England was never acute; and the British nation at large never seriously wavered in affording moral and material support to their hard-pressed government.
Here was the failure of Napoleon. It proved physically impossible for him to extend the Continental System widely and thoroughly enough to gain his point. In many cases, to stave off opposition, he authorized exceptions to his own decrees. If he could have prevailed upon every Continental state to close its ports to British goods simultaneously and for several successive years, he would still have been confronted with a difficult task to prevent smuggling and the bribery of customs officials, which reached large proportions even in France and in the surrounding states that he had under fairly effective control. But to bring all Continental states into line with his economic campaign against Great Britain was a colossal task, to the performance of which he subordinated all his subsequent policies.
[Sidenote: Subordination of Napoleon's Foreign Policies to the
Enforcement of the Continental System]