Great Britain, France, and the neutrals, 1800–02
- Date:
- c. 1801 - 1815
- Location:
- Europe
- Participants:
- Austria
- France
- Ottoman Empire
- Portugal
- Prussia
- Russia
- Spain
- United Kingdom
- Context:
- British Empire
The British, in pursuit of their primarily maritime, colonial, and commercial interests in the wars, claimed to have been serving the common cause and had moreover applied their profits to subsidizing the Continental armies, but they had adopted means that offended neutral states and former allies alike. Through their blockade, the British could virtually dictate the terms of European sea trade. When granting licenses for merchant shipping to enter the ports of France and France’s associates, they admitted neutrals only when there were not enough British ships to carry all the colonial produce of which they now controlled the sources. Moreover, the British maintained that a neutral flag did not cover an enemy’s goods and that these might be seized when destined for a port only blockaded on paper. Iron, hemp, timber, pitch, and corn (maize) were at all times to be regarded as contraband of war, and neutral ships were liable to search even when under convoy.
The League of Armed Neutrality
Offended by the British capture of Malta after Bonaparte had presented the island to him, the Russian emperor Paul, in November 1800 placed an embargo on British ships in Russian ports. On December 16 Russia, Sweden, and Denmark renewed that League of Armed Neutrality which they had first made in 1780, during the American Revolution. The Danes occupied Hamburg, which had become the main entrepôt for Anglo-German trade after the French invasion of Holland, while the Prussians, who joined the League on December 18, invaded Hanover.
Germany and the Baltic States had witnessed much of the expansion of British trade during the previous decade of war, British exports to Bremen and Hamburg having risen 600 percent between 1792 and 1800. The closing of the Baltic Sea and of the German ports and rivers thus struck the most damaging blow at Great Britain’s commerce and war economy. Furthermore, the Baltic States and Germany also supplied most of the materials for British shipbuilding and were the main source of the imports of grain, supplying 5–16 percent of British consumption. As the harvests of 1799 and 1800 were poor, the interruption in shipments was soon felt in a bread shortage.
The assassination of the emperor Paul (March 1801) removed the chief author of the League at a moment when its members had to reckon with British reprisals. A fleet including 18 ships of the line under Sir Hyde Parker had left Great Yarmouth for the Baltic on March 12. On April 2 Horatio Nelson led a vanguard of 12 ships of the line and frigates into Copenhagen harbour. Shore batteries opened fire but, despite orders to retire and the grounding of three of his ships, Nelson continued the Battle of Copenhagen until he had overcome the stubborn resistance of the vessels and hulks anchored there. The Danes agreed to an armistice and made peace on May 28. Sweden had already done so on May 18, and an Anglo-Russian convention followed on June 17. The League was thus dissolved and its forces withdrawn from Hanover, Hamburg, and Lübeck; in return the British modified their maritime claims. The new Russian emperor, Alexander I, moreover gave up the demand for Malta.
The Anglo-Turkish conquest of Egypt
British sea power made possible a further success in the course of the year 1801: the defeat of the army that Bonaparte had left in Egypt in 1799. An expeditionary force of 18,000 under Sir Ralph Abercromby was landed at Aboukir (Abū Qīr) in March, the Turks sent 25,000 to the theatre, and 6,000 sepoys from India arrived via the Red Sea. The 13,000 French in Cairo surrendered on June 28 and the 5,000 in Alexandria on August 30. Nelson’s attack on the flotilla at Boulogne (August 15–16), however, met with failure.
The interval of peace, 1802–03
Meanwhile the British economy was suffering from severe strain. Gold payments rose steeply in 1800 and 1801, for in addition to disbursing £5,600,000 in subsidies and £2,800,000 in their own military expenses in Europe during these two years, the British spent an estimated £19,000,000 on grain imports. The price of wheat had risen to 156 shillings per quarter by March 1, 1801. It fell to 129 shillings in June and to 75 shillings in December.
The Treaty of Amiens
The British government had opened negotiations with France on February 21, 1801. William Pitt, whose place as prime minister had been taken by Henry Addington, approved of this overture not so much because of the collapse of Austria as because of the danger presented by the League of Armed Neutrality. The preliminaries having been concluded on October 1, 1801, the Treaty of Amiens was signed on March 27, 1802. Notwithstanding their reverses overseas, the French recovered all their colonies. The British kept Ceylon (now Sri Lanka, taken from the Dutch) and Trinidad (taken from the Spaniards) but restored Minorca to Spain and Cochin (now Kochi), the Cape of Good Hope, and the Spice Islands (Moluccas) to Holland. France agreed to the evacuation of Naples and the Papal States and to the return of Egypt to Turkey. The British undertook to leave Malta within three months. The island was to be handed back to the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, with its neutrality guaranteed by the powers. It was agreed that “an adequate compensation” should be found in Germany for the prince of Orange, William V, who had lost his position in the Netherlands. Though Bonaparte had already ignored his undertaking in the Treaty of Lunéville to observe the independence of the neighbouring republics, the Treaty of Amiens made no reference to nonintervention in their affairs. When later the British government complained that French troops remained in Holland and northern Italy in violation of the Treaty of Lunéville, Bonaparte replied that this was the business of the signatories to that treaty and that he desired “the Treaty of Amiens and nothing but that.” France had asked for British recognition of the Italian republics, but in the absence of compensation for the king of Sardinia this was withheld.
Redispositions in Europe
Representatives of the Cisalpine Republic, summoned to Lyons at the end of 1801 to remodel their constitution, invited Bonaparte in January 1802 to accept the presidency of the republic. It was henceforth to be known as the Italian Republic. Similar arrangements were subsequently made in the Ligurian Republic and in Lucca. Piedmont was brought under direct French rule in September 1802.
In Germany the compensation of the rulers dispossessed by the French was settled by the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss (Principal Decree of the Imperial Deputation) of February 1803. French and, to a lesser extent, Russian influence marked the negotiations by which the ecclesiastical principalities and all but six of the imperial cities were distributed among the displaced princes and the larger German states. The church in Germany lost nearly 2,500,000 subjects, while Prussia gained nearly 400,000. Bavaria’s losses on the left bank of the Rhine were more than compensated by the acquisition of bishoprics and imperial cities to the east; Württemberg, Baden, Hesse-Kassel, and Salzburg became electorates. Austria gained some territory but was in effect weakened, since the new settlement not only left the Reich feebler but also lessened the emperor’s voice in its affairs. The coming of peace accelerated Bonaparte’s reorganization of French institutions and overhaul of governmental machinery. His achievement in this field provided the model for countries under French occupation during the following decade.
Economic aspects of the wars
France had a population of 27,350,000 in 1801 as opposed to Great Britain’s 10,942,146 and had gained much territory in the warfare since 1792. However, a significant advance in economic strength was to enable Great Britain to wage war against this formidable adversary and to achieve the “miracles of credit” whereby foreign military assistance could be subsidized. The French, whose manufactures progressed less dramatically than the British and whose seaborne trade had been strangled, found it impossible to raise funds commensurate with their aggressive policy in Europe, so that Napoleon had to rely on the spoils of conquest to supplement the deficiencies of French finance.
Many of the figures for British overseas trade during the period represent official values based on a scale of prices current in the 1690s, regardless of market value. Useful only for comparison, the official scale shows that exports rose from £20,000,000 in 1790 to £53,500,000 in 1814, increasing by 75 percent between 1790 and 1801 and by 51 percent between 1801 and 1814. The total expenditure of the British government in 1793 was £30,590,000, of which war services amounted to £10,340,000 (nearly twice the figure for peacetime); in 1814 these sums had increased to £163,790,000 and £69,070,000 respectively. The steep rise in national income made this possible both by providing immediate revenue and by supplying the funds from which investors lent to the state, whose debts rose from £230,000,000 at the beginning of 1793 to £507,000,000 in 1802 and to £900,000,000 in 1815. For the period as a whole, 35 percent of the addition to the country’s expenditure caused by the war was met from current revenue, and between 1802 and 1813 the proportion of total net governmental income derived from borrowing was never more than 54.7 percent.
Great Britain had superior banking services, could suspend payments in gold at home, and was preponderant in the European money market. France by contrast was financially hampered by a national economy and financial machinery ill-constituted to produce government credit, by the virtual impossibility of inflating the metallic currency, and by potential investors’ lack of confidence in the regime. The deliberate obscurity of Napoleon’s budgetary system makes it difficult to ascertain the exact state of government finances. Among the privy funds that he amassed were (1) the trésor de l’armée (treasury of the army), formed by Austrian and Prussian war contributions and estimated to have furnished 743,000,000 francs between 1805 and 1810; and (2) the domaine extraordinaire of January 1810, largely composed of the territories which Napoleon had retained in the satellite states. These hidden sources of income met some part of French expenditure, and foreign states made further contributions of money as well as troops and supplies, but the disparity between French and British financial resources remains clear. In 1813, when French expenditure was in the region of £40,000,000, the British government was able to borrow £105,000,000 of the £174,000,000 that it spent.
Napoleon’s economic ideas owed much to the outmoded mercantilist school. He hoped to destroy Great Britain’s capacity to make war by closing the European markets to British trade. Yet, when at last he was in a position to do so, the military strength whereby he had enforced his will on Europe was so strained that the Continental powers could break the boycott prematurely and resume hostilities against his widely dispersed armies. Imported grain provided no more than 5 percent of Great Britain’s consumption in normal years and is estimated never to have exceeded 16 percent, though in such periods as 1800–01 and 1811–12 home production of grain fell short of normal demand by 40 percent. There is no evidence that Napoleon ever considered withholding grain from Great Britain in an attempt to force withdrawal from the war: when he did suspend shipments, as in 1811–12, it was because grain was scarce in Europe. At other times his mercantilist views led him to export French grain to Great Britain, provided that France received cash, not goods, in return. For the mercantile marine France had had more than 2,000 ships employed in European and colonial trade by 1792 but possessed only 200 ships of 200 tons or more by 1800, while British strength rose by one-third in ten years to number 19,772 vessels (2,037,000 tons) in 1802 and was to reach 21,869 ships (2,447,831 tons) in 1815. Maritime supremacy enabled the British to dominate the colonial reexport trade (coffee, tea, sugar, spices, cotton and dyes) to the great advantage of their national economy.
