Economic Warfare, Organized Crime and the Collapse of Napoleon’s Empire

Abstract

The French Tariff Barrier on the Rhine,, 1798–1806 Born three years after Waterloo, Karl Marx never experienced Napoleon’s Continental System. For his parents it would have been a fact of every- day life in his native Trier, a city that before 1814 belonged to the French Empire, ft lay about 90 km west of the Rhine which from 1798 marked the tariff barrier separating France from the world beyond. Trier bounds the Moselle, which joins the Rhine at Koblenz, home of Joseph Görres. This writer counted among the republicans in the 1790s. Under Napoleon he grew disillusioned with French rule and emerged as a prominent German nationalist whose strongly Francophobie message reached a wide audience in 1814 and 1815 via his newspaper, the Rheinischer Merkur. The Continental System, however, hardly figures in its pages, which condemn French rule for reasons other than the scarcity of coffee: military conscription, high taxation, requisitioning and the arrogance of native French officials. The Rheinischer Merkur repeatedly warned against bureaucratic government, and not only in France, and readers would most likely have identified the Direction générale des douanes as an obvious manifestation of this phenom- enon. They were reasonable to do so: in 1812 the total number of customs agents in the French Empire peaked at approximately 35,000, including four thousand agents de bureaux, and 30,750 organized into ‘’brigades’ that patrolled the frontiers.

… take the case of sugar and coffee which have proved their world-historical importance in the nineteenth century by the fact that the lack of these products, occasioned by the Napoleonic Continental System, caused the Germans to rise against Napoleon, and thus became the real basis of the glorious Wars of Liberation of 1813.

— Karl Marx, The German Ideology¹