No single scheme of Napoleon's contributed in the end so much to his discredit as the Berlin Decree. Colonial wares had become a necessity of life to the populations of Europe, and to be deprived of them brought irritation into every household, even the poorest; it was an attempt to coerce Russia into adhesion to this ruinous policy which directly initiated his fall. Reviving the commercial policy of the old régime, the republic outran the zeal of the monarchy. Such, according to our best authority, Mollien, was the condition of public opinion when Bonaparte took charge in 1800. It is needless to say that a man like the First Consul, who was a suitor for public favor, made the universal jealousy of England's commercial supremacy in a special and peculiar sense his foremost care. But that Bonaparte did not originate the high-protection temper of France is proved by the remarkable enactment known as the Loi de 10 Brumaire, An V (October thirty-first, 1796). This drastic measure forbade the importation of all manufactured articles, either made in England or passing through the channels of English trade by land or sea, except under certain stringent and exceptional regulations as to transshipment; and ordered the confiscation of such articles, if found in a French port on any vessel whatsoever. The carefully prepared list of the articles of English manufacture thus to be shut out included absolutely everything in the production of which the splendid expansion of English manufactures at the close of the eighteenth century made Great Britain supereminent—products of the loom, the forge, the tannery, the glass house, the sugar refinery, and the potter's kiln. Fourteen concluding articles of the law enacted a system of trade control whereby, to all appearance, the evasion of either the letter or the spirit of the statute was made impossible. Yet for a time the disintegration of the public powers under the Directory was such that, in spite of the exasperation of the national hatred against the English government, the law was simply ignored. On December fourth, 1798, however, there was a sudden change; without warning, strong military detachments were placed at all the gates of Paris and every vehicle was carefully searched; domiciliary visits were commenced by the customs authorities and were continued until all English wares were removed from commerce; and French public opinion supported these proceedings, which the English stigmatized as "legal robbery."
The fact was that Napoleon Bonaparte had temporarily taken up the task of administration, and, having correctly read the public temper, was beginning the policy of "thorough." The treaty of Campo Formio had been concluded; and, though he was only commander-in-chief of the French army—and that by construction rather than in form—he was really the arbiter of the government. Whatever the masses thought, the Directory knew that the fate of France was in his hands; and nothing confirmed that opinion more strongly than the ease with which the law enacted two years before was now enforced. Having made what he considered easy terms with Austria, he had determined to destroy the credit of Pitt's government by attacking English industries and commerce, and to defy, if necessary, the neutral carriers of the world. It appears to have been at this time that his mind formed the "Chimera," as a French historian calls it, which in the end proved his ruin—the conception that, if only the conservative administration of Great Britain could be discredited, the Whigs would adhere to "the republican peace."
The time was not ripe for any attack on England more direct than this; and to occupy the interval until it might become so, the well-worn scheme of harassing her at her extremities was revived. The uneasy Bonaparte was temporarily removed from the scene of administration by the Egyptian expedition, intended at least to menace English commerce in those distant parts of the earth, if not to work the complete ruin of her Oriental empire. But if the time was not ripe to engage in active hostilities for the enforcement of an economic doctrine, this fact was not due to the absence of such a doctrine, formulated and avowed. The theory of a closed jural state, which had been evolved in defense of the final stage in the formation of European nationality, was itself undergoing an expansion in the direction of expounding the international relations of states in commercial affairs. In 1801 Fichte published his famous treatise entitled "The Closed Commercial State," his contribution to the literature of Utopias. Defining the jural state as a limited body of men subject to the same laws and to the same coactive sovereignty, he declared that the same body of men ought to be stringently limited to like reciprocity of commerce and industry, and that any one not under the same legislative power and the same coactive force should be excluded from participation in this relation; thus would be formed a closed commercial state parallel to the closed jural state. His treatise was divided into three books, entitled respectively, "Philosophy," "Contemporary History," and "Politics," preceded by an introduction discussing the relation of the rational state to the real, and of pure public law to politics. The first book was merely an elaboration of his idea as to what is just and right within the rational state, in view of trade relations as they are; in the second book he proceeded to discuss the actual condition of commercial intercourse in existing states; and in the third book he considered how the theory of a closed commercial state was to be realized. The vital portion of his argument lay in the statement[40] that if all Christian Europe, with its colonies and factories in other quarters of the globe, was to be considered as a whole, trade must remain free as it once was; if, however, it was to be divided into several wholes, each under its own government, it must likewise be divided into several entirely closed commercial states. Said he: "Those systems which demand free trade, those claims to the right to buy and sell freely in the whole known world, have been handed down to us from among the ideas of our ancestors, for whom they were suited; we took them without examination and adopted them, and it is with trouble that we substitute others for them."
Seven years later the same philosopher declared, in his better-known Address to the German Nation, that the much-vaunted liberty of the seas was a matter entirely indifferent to the Germans. For the preservation of their peculiar genius, he argued, they should be saved from all participation, direct or indirect, in the wealth of other peoples; otherwise the curse of commercialism would overtake them. Thus the "ideologues" of Europe, German and French, held identical opinions. They appear to have had multitudes of supporters in all lands. At any rate, it is idle to charge Bonaparte with being the inventor of the rigid protectionist doctrines that he endeavored to apply to the dominions which, when acquired by conquest, he intended to incorporate in a European empire having its capital and administrative seat at Paris. They were held by the men of the Terror in 1793, by the Directory in 1796, by the overwhelming majority of the French people in 1798, and by a respectable number of Germans and of Americans in the years immediately succeeding; while they are still held by immense numbers of those in whom the idea of nationality is dominant and preponderates over all other political concepts.
The Berlin Decree, which is generally considered to have inaugurated the Continental System in form, is, in fact, antedated by the Orders in Council of Great Britain. During 1801 English commerce was considerably greater than it was during 1802, the year of nominal peace; and this was due, of course, to the fact that the commercial welfare was not even nominally discontinued. The real trouble felt by Lord Whitworth, the British ambassador at Paris, was that the existing commercial situation of his country was intolerable, and that he must find some casus belli in order to end it. We have explained how he fixed on a very trivial pretext, the conduct of Bonaparte at a public reception in the Tuileries, and that Great Britain had much difficulty in making the flimsy excuse appear important. The fact was that the First Consul was using the peace to extend the protective system of France over all the lands which he had conquered in northern and central Italy and to force Holland and Switzerland into his customs union. In consequence English commerce was suffering, and the mission of Sebastiani into the Orient made it seem highly probable to English merchants that the process of further diminishing their trade was already under way in those distant parts. The publication of Sebastiani's report was the last straw in the burden of the British merchants, and they refused to carry the load any longer. Bonaparte said that the independence of a nation carried with it the absolute control of its trade, and that if Great Britain intended to keep both Gibraltar and Malta, she virtually announced by that fact her determination to unite the commerce of the Indies, the Mediterranean, and the Baltic in a single system controlled by herself, which would create a situation intolerable and impossible.
The Peace of Amiens was merely a truce, and the only question as to its duration was one of reciprocal forbearance and endurance. As soon as it became clear that neither England nor France would abandon the idea of commercial supremacy, the vital matter of policy on both sides was how to reopen the war. To do this was to assume a fearful burden of responsibility. History is still striving to determine who gave the immediate impulse; for whoever did give it is held responsible for the appalling bloodshed of the Napoleonic as distinguished from the republican wars. To-day even the English historians of the most enlightened sort admit that France was tricked into the declaration of war. The coalition was in process of formation within a few days after the ink was dry on the treaty of Campo Formio; it was in readiness when hostilities broke out; and the fuel necessary to make the intermittent flickering flames burst forth anew was supplied by the successive Orders in Council.
In 1805 there was printed in London and published anonymously a book which is now believed to have been officially inspired. It was actually written by James Stephen, and the title was "War in Disguise, or the Frauds of the Neutral Flag." Its argument was the need of the destruction of France to prevent the ruin of England. The immediate dilemma considered was the sacrifice of Great Britain's maritime rights or a quarrel with the neutral powers. The author thought that the system of licenses—"salt-water indulgences," he called them—was shaking England's supremacy exactly as the papal indulgences of the fifteenth century had shaken the Roman supremacy. In attacking neutral trade, he thought, there was little danger of provoking hostilities or evoking reprisals. As to America, particularly, a non-importation policy on her part would injure herself alone. She was far too honorable to confiscate the property of English merchants within her borders and far too shrewd to expose to retributive seizure the enormous commerce which she herself had afloat. Suppose, however, he continued, that neither the sacrifice of maritime rights nor the quarrel with neutral powers be accepted, there remains still a third possibility—to admit the pretension that "free ships make free goods," to suspend the navigation laws and then to seize all the benefits of neutral carriers. "Let brooms be put at the mastheads of all our merchantmen, and their seamen be sent to the fleets." This, he argued, would be a less evil than that under which English commerce was suffering, unless, indeed, all parties, including the enemy, would abjure the right of capturing merchant ships or private effects of an enemy—a visionary means of reconciling naval war with commercial peace. Such general abjuration was impossible, and there remained no remedy for England's ills save peace with Bonaparte. But the mere suggestion of this action was preposterous. The insuperable barrier was the British constitution. Austria and Russia might make peace with a military despot; but with a man who employed the leisure of peace for no other purpose than to enslave the smaller powers of the Continent no peace was possible for a free country like England, except such a one as would be equivalent to absolute surrender. As might have been expected, the Englishman who wrote "War in Disguise" concluded his argument with a pious appeal to the Almighty, obedience to whose righteous laws is the soundest political wisdom, and who wills not only the end, but the means—in this case "volunteers, navy and maritime rights." This temper for war to the bitter end was quite as strong in France as in England; and while the English appealed to God and righteousness, it was equally characteristic that the French were at the same time exploiting a parallel drawn from classical history—that of Rome and Carthage.
We must always recollect that the Grand Army of England was a two-edged weapon. Napoleon told Metternich that he always intended to use it against Austria, as he actually did use it; but he told the captain of the Northumberland, on August fifteenth, 1815, that he had intended the invasion seriously, expecting to land as near London as possible. Although these antipodal statements were clearly intended to flatter the national pride of the respective dignitaries to whom they were addressed, yet, paradoxical as the assertion seems, when taken together they express the exact truth: successful invasion would have involved the immediate overthrow of British power; while protective exclusion and the destruction of the coalition was the slower, perhaps, but the more certain of the two ways. The latter was probably the intention toward which Napoleon leaned most seriously. By compelling the British to maintain a costly war establishment, the great schemer would exhaust their by no means bottomless purse; and thus would be able to cripple the equipment of the coalition, to expand by victory the territorial empire of France, and to open the way for her enterprise to the eastward. Finally, Napoleon made no serious effort toward the "Descent," using the notion to extort war funds from the French exactly as the Jacobins and the Directory had done; and the actual fact of the magnificent countermarch toward Vienna and the results of Austerlitz ought to convince us that, while at times he did contemplate invading England, his mind was on the whole directed toward the course he actually pursued—that of striking at the coalition through Austria.
The extension of the protective system beyond France and the countries immediately under her control began in 1803, when Spain was admonished to observe it or to take the consequences; immediately after Austerlitz, Istria and Dalmatia were included in the system. When, thereupon, Prussia was requested to include the North Sea coasts in its operation, as the price for the occupation of Hanover, Great Britain retorted by her Orders in Council, declaring the shore line from the mouth of the Elbe all the way around as far as Brest to be in a state of blockade. Prussia chose to accept neither the terms of Great Britain nor those of France, and struggled to remain neutral—a sheer impossibility; the Czar of Russia then repudiated the treaty into which his ambassador, Oubril, had been drawn by the wiles of Talleyrand; in due course of time followed Jena and Friedland; and at last the way was clear for turning a protective system hitherto more or less local into one which could be more or less continental. The Berlin Decree was the longest step possible after Jena; while the Milan Decree was the natural sequence of the enlarged opportunity which the Peace of Tilsit gave for pursuing the same old economic policy.
In justification of his course, Napoleon pleaded the moderation he had shown in dealing with the enemy after the first three coalitions, and declared in his message to the senate that he desired such a general European peace as would guarantee the prosperity, not of England alone, but of all the continental powers; but as the attitude of the enemy rendered this impossible, nothing remained but to adopt measures "which were repugnant to his heart." The Berlin Decree set forth in its preamble that England paid no respect to international law; that she considered as enemies, not alone the organized war power of hostile states, but the persons and vessels of their citizens engaged in commerce, taking the persons prisoners of war and the ships as prizes; that she extended the principle of blockade to unfortified towns, harbors, and river mouths, declaring places to be blockaded before which there were no forces sufficient to enforce the blockade, and extending this absurdity to the coast lines of entire empires; that, finally, since this conduct had no other intention than the ruin of all Europe to the advantage of English trade, "We have resolved to apply to England the usages which she has sanctioned in her maritime legislation." The principles of the decree were asserted to be valid just as long as England should not admit the validity in maritime war of the principles which control war by land: the laws of war "cannot be applied either to private property, whatever it may be, or to the persons of those who are not belligerents, and the right of blockade must be confined in its application to strong places really invested by sufficient forces." The British Isles were then declared in a state of blockade and all the rigors of the English system were ordered to be carried out in detail. Finally, notification in due form was given to the Kings of Spain, Naples, Holland, and Etruria, and to all Napoleon's allies whose citizens were suffering from the "barbarities of English maritime legislation."