Black J. From Louis XIV to Napoleon The Fate of a Great Power

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crumbled. A provisional French government deposed Napoleon and, with his marshals

unwilling to fight on, Napoleon abdicated on 6 April.

Louis XVIII returned to France on 24 April. Already, under the Treaty of Fontainebleau

of 11 April, Napoleon had been given the title of Emperor, the small Mediterranean island of

Elba as a principality, and a revenue from the French government. Under the armistice signed

on 23 April, the Allies agreed to evacuate France.

The Congress of Vienna

German hopes of regaining Alsace were not fulfilled in the Peace of Paris of 30 May 1814.

Instead, France got her frontiers of January 1792, with some important and favourable

border rectifications. She kept Avignon. She also received back all her colonies, bar Tobago,

St Lucia and the Seychelles, all of which went to Britain. These were generous terms designed

to help Louis XVIII. Under an armistice signed in Italy on 16 April, the French had already

evacuated the peninsula. However, both Louis and Talleyrand sought a more prominent role

for France in the subsequent peace negotiations at Vienna. As in 1667, 1678, 1713, 1735,

1748 and 1783, peace offered an opportunity for new alignments. Russia sought co-operation

with France against Britain, but Louis preferred an informal relationship with the British,

designed to ensure that France played a role in the German and Italian issues. As a consequence,

France had a part in the Vienna discussions.

The Congress established a barrière de l’ouest designed both to reward powers and to

limit France. The kingdom of Sardinia was strengthened with the acquisition of Genoa.

Opportunities for French expansion or influence in northern Italy were further lessened with

Lombardy–Venetia becoming part of Austria, and Parma and Tuscany a Habsburg

secondogeniture. The Austrian Netherlands and the United Provinces were joined as the

kingdom of the United Netherlands under the pro-British William V of Orange. Prussia

gained much of the lower Rhineland, including Cologne. Geneva and the Valais became Swiss

cantons, Baden and Württemberg were both strengthened, and in the Mediterranean Britain

was left in control of Malta and the Ionian Isles.

These territorial changes helped mark the end of an era. Unlike Louis XIV, Napoleon left

a smaller France, and one with fewer opportunities for further expansion. The Congress also

helped set a new agenda for the next century down to 1914. This agenda was initially built

partly around the Congress system of dispute settlement, but over the longer term owed

much in Western Europe to a slow realization of French decline and to the replacement of

Britain by Germany as the major French enemy. French relative decline owed much to

French politics, specifically the heavy loss of life in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic

Wars. Over a million Frenchmen died as a result. The Revolution itself was less bloody, but

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a combination of civil war and emigration both led to heavy losses and disrupted family life

and peacetime reproductive strategies. Partly as a consequence, France’s population grew

by less than 50 per cent in 1750– 1850 while that of England nearly tripled. This contrast can

in part be attributed to a fall in the French birth rate arising from the spread of birth control

in the late eighteenth century, but repeated choices for war were also important.

Talleyrand took a prominent role at Vienna in opposing Russo-Prussian pressure for the

Prussian annexation of Saxony. His co-operation with Austria and Britain on the issue was

designed to replace the alliance that had defeated Napoleon, and whose continuation would

have left France with only a limited role, by a new diplomatic order in which France could

have greater influence in Europe, as well as specific benefits on her frontiers. Count Blacas,

the personal representative of Louis XVIII, advocated a league against Russia that initially

would unite Britain, and her protégé the United Netherlands, with the Bourbon powers, and

then be widened to include Austria and Prussia. Good relations were sought with Sultan

Mahmud II. A politics of interest was linked to a sense that France was rightfully the arbiter

of Europe and an accompanying suspicion of aggrandizement by others. Louis and Talleyrand

disliked Russian predominance in Eastern Europe and tried to limit Austrian power and

influence in Italy. In addition, Louis sought to recreate a Bourbon Family Compact with

Spain and to restore the Bourbons to Naples.

From Elba to Waterloo, 1815

Louis, however, was overthrown when Napoleon returned from Elba. Landing in southern

France on 1 March 1815, he advanced on Paris, Louis fleeing before his arrival. Napoleon

was able to reimpose his authority relatively easily. The Vendée rose again but the rising was

crushed at the battle of Rocheservière. Napoleon promised to observe existing treaties and

affirmed peace with the rest of Europe, but his rhetoric within France was hostile and

bellicose. Caulaincourt, again foreign minister, was ordered to create a new league with the

lesser powers, including Spain, Portugal, Switzerland and the minor German and Italian

states, a testimony to Napoleon’s lack of realism.

Napoleon’s return united the powers. On 25 March 1815 they renewed their alliance to

overthrow the restored Emperor. Had he not been defeated by British, Dutch and German

forces at Waterloo on 18 June, other Allied armies would probably have rapidly defeated

him. At Waterloo, defensive firepower beat off successive French frontal attacks. Flank

attack or yet more frontal assaults might have succeeded, but the arrival of the Prussian

forces on the French right spelled the end.

France was then invaded and occupied. Napoleon surrendered to a British warship and

was exiled to distant St Helena, a British possession in the South Atlantic, to return to France

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only as a corpse. Louis XVIII returned to Paris on 8 July. The Second Treaty of Paris of 20

November stipulated an occupation of northern France for five years, a large indemnity of

700 million francs, and the cession of Beaumont, Bouillon, Saarlouis and Landau. The loss of

the Saar and Sambre coalfields has been seen as a serious blow to France’s industrial

development.

By the Quadruple Alliance of 20 November 1815, the four great powers –

Austria, Britain, Prussia and Russia – renewed their anti-French alliance for 20 years, a step

designed to limit the chances of France disrupting the alliance. Napoleon had failed, totally.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

France and the world

Napoleon and the loss of overseas empire

In European terms, Napoleon failed. He did not create a lasting dynasty, his empire collapsed,

and, under the terms of the Treaty of Vienna, France was constrained territorially, especially

with the establishment of Prussian power on her German frontier. The acquisition of Belgium

by the House of Orange and its restoration in the Netherlands was designed to create a

powerful pro-British state on France’s north-eastern border, and to provide a reliable axis

linking Britain with the continent. Napoleon III (President 1848–52, Emperor 1852– 70),

the reviver of Bonapartist monarchy, had to attempt to overthrow a European order that

provided no opportunities for French expansion.

There was also a failure of France as a global power. In the 1780s British politicians had

worried about France’s global ambitions, especially in the Indian Ocean and the Middle East.

There had been fears that the French would overthrow the British in India, as they had earlier

done in North America. France’s trans-oceanic empire, trade and possessions were, however,

hit with the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars as the British from 1793 captured

many of the imperial bases. Napoleon I got these possessions back under the Treaty of

Amiens of 1802, and the treaty was followed by a revival in France’s Atlantic trade, including

the slave trade, both of which had been badly hit by war and British naval mastery in the

1790s. However, this revival was cut short by the resumption of war with Britain in 1803.

This resumption also hit French diplomacy. Bernadotte had been appointed envoy to the

United States in January 1803, but was unable to assume that duty. Instead, he commanded

I Corps of the Grande Armée in the Ulm–Austerlitz campaign of 1805.

Like the Revolutionaries before him, Napoleon also failed to hold on to the French world.

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He could not, despite initial successes, recapture Haiti, losing large numbers of troops to

yellow fever; he had to accept the collapse of French hopes in the Middle East; and he was

unable to prevent the British defeat of the Marathas in India in 1803–5. Mysore, the state in

Southern India most ready to look to France, had already been conquered in 1799, and the

Nizam of Hyderabad’s French-trained force had been disarmed by the British the previous

year. Indeed, fears about Napoleon helped to drive a British forward-policy in India, and the

success of this policy made Britain the dominant power there and, therefore, in South Asia.

Furthermore, benefiting from their naval power and their skill in amphibious operations,

the British took the leading French bases – Martinique (1809), Réunion (1810), and Mauritius

(1810) – after war resumed in 1803, as well as the bases of France’s client states, such as

Cape Town (1806) and Batavia (1811) from the Dutch, although they were unsuccessful

when they attacked Buenos Aires. In addition, having gained Louisiana from Spain in 1800

by the Treaty of San Ildefonso, Napoleon sold what was then France’s most extensive

overseas possession to the Americans in 1803, thus ending France’s options in North America.

Having persuaded Charles IV of Spain to hand over his territories in 1808, Napoleon planned

to take over the Spanish Empire, not only in the New World, but also the Philippines. These

hopes were thwarted by Spanish resistance, and would, anyway, have been inhibited by

British naval power.

Napoleon’s global ambitions essentially arose from seeking to thwart Britain, a power

that opposed France in Europe, and these ambitions were blocked by Britain, albeit with the

important assistance of Napoleon’s inability to sustain co-operation with Russia and Spain.

Partly as a consequence, he pursued his colonial plans within (rather than outside) Europe,

although – like Hitler – his world view, anyway, was largely focused on Europe, especially

on territories to the east. After the Egyptian expedition of 1798, Napoleon’s interest in, let

alone commitment to, the world outside Europe was episodic. Furthermore, it essentially

arose from interest in harming European rivals, rather than from any sense of France’s role in

an expanding Western world.

British influence rested in large part on trade. This was true not only of Asia but also of

the New World, both the newly-independent United States and the Iberian colonies. Napoleon

did not greatly understand either how to further trade, or the dynamics of commercial

activity and its relation with public finances. This failing, serious enough in Europe, was of

even greater consequence beyond the bounds of French power. Napoleon’s replacement by

Louis XVIII was greeted with enthusiasm in the leading trading ports, such as Bordeaux and

Marseille, but far less so in Toulon, which relied on its role as a naval base.

The Napoleonic legacy was not only a weaker France in Europe, and a European

international system that left few options for France, but also a European overseas world

dominated by Britain. France’s colonies in 1815 were only those allowed them by Britain.

Britain dominated the Western world and France was in a weaker trans-oceanic position,

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both absolutely and relatively, than had been the case both before and after the peace treaties

signed in 1697, 1713, 1748, 1763 and 1783, and indeed than in the nadir of Revolutionary

weakness, division and defeat in 1793. Despite imperial expansion from 1830, especially in

North Africa (Algeria) and, later, West Africa and Indochina, France was never to reverse that

loss.

Empire and resources

A major reason for France’s failure was the lack of resources devoted to colonial development.

Such a remark may appear unreasonable given the range of French activity during the period.

It is easy to present the extent and pace of colonial development as impressive. For example,

in the new colony of Louisiana, Fort Maurepas (Biloxi) was founded in 1699 to guard the

access to the Mississippi. It had four bastions constructed of logs, three of them mounted

with cannon. The following year, more artillery was added and Fort Mississippi was

constructed, and in 1702 Fort Louis (Mobile) was laid out with bastions and batteries.

Yet, the commitment of resources was slight, not least in comparison with the deployment

of forces in Europe. Fort Mississippi had only a 15-man garrison with a small cannon on an

elevated bank, had no real fortifications, and was abandoned in 1706–7. Fort Maurepas had

12 cannon and 12 swivel guns by the end of 1700, but was also abandoned. The entire

garrison of disease-ridden Louisiana was no more than 45 in 1706, suffered from the absence

of a hospital and of fresh meat, and from insufficient swords, cartridge boxes, nails, guns and

powder, from demoralization and desertion, and its survival rested on acceptance by the

native population. In 1710 the woodwork at Fort Louis was so rotten with humidity and

decay that the cannon could not be supported.

Further north, the French in 1715 sent a garrison of only 20 to Michilimackinac, and

planned only ten for Detroit. Four years later, the French force that captured the Texan

mission of San Miguel de los Adaes from Spain was only seven-strong; the opposition a

single soldier unaware that the two powers were at war. Pierre Petit de Coulange established

the post on the Arkansas River in 1732 with only 12 soldiers.

More generally, after the

failure of Law’s bold plans for the Mississippi Company in 1720, there was a loss of interest

in Louisiana among both officials and the public. This led to the less regular dispatch of

supplies, with consequent shortages of food and manpower. There were 242 soldiers in the

colony in August 1730 and most were of low calibre. Instead of the 600 troops requested to

deal with the Natchez rising, only 150 men were sent.

Elsewhere, the numbers deployed by

France were also limited. The squadron sent to Siam (Thailand) in 1687 carried 1,361 people.

Of the 636 troops on board only 492 reached Siam and many died soon after arriving.

By the

time the 1,400 reinforcements en route for India reached Mauritius in July 1782, 1,032 were

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ill with scurvy. Many others had died on the voyage.

At Cuddalore in June 1783 Bussy had

2,200 French troops, rather than the 10,000 he was supposed to have, and 2,000 sepoys. He

still defeated the 12,000-strong British East India Company force.

Such modest resources help to explain the setbacks the French encountered in trans-

oceanic activity, although it would be misleading to suggest that greater numbers or more

persistence would necessarily have brought success. Furthermore, despite the small numbers

sent there, the French presence in Louisiana expanded.

Eighteenth-century successes and failure

Elsewhere, there were setbacks as well as successes. Plans in the late 1660s to develop a

colony on Madagascar had been thwarted by a hostile environment and local population,

and the French, instead, had concentrated on smaller islands in the Indian Ocean that were

easier to control: Réunion and Mauritius. They were driven from Fort Dauphin, their principal

base on Madagascar, in 1674. The French re-established a base at Fort Dauphin in 1748 and

laid claim to the island in 1768, but that had little impact. The island was not controlled from

the posts of Fort Dauphin and Ile Ste. Marie, although the French had staked a claim to a

possible base on the route to the Orient. Madagascar was not conquered until 1894–5.

Further east, the French were expelled from Burma in 1757, when Alaunagpaya occupied

Pegu. The French arms and advisers that played a role in Vietnam from the late 1780s did so

to the benefit of the expansionist schemes of Nguyen Anh – who had conquered all of

Vietnam by 1802 – rather than in order to advance French control. Nearer home, in 1741, the

Bey of Tunis seized the offshore island of Tabarca, which the French had purchased from the

Lomellino family, defeated a counter-attack by a small French force in 1742 and sacked the

French Africa Company’s base at Cape Negre. A French attempt to land at Larache in

Morocco in 1765 failed in the face of heavy fire.

Such failures were not unique to France, and are a reminder of the limitation of European

military systems in their confrontations with non-Europeans. The British, for example, also

failed in Burma. Indeed, as far as non-Europeans were concerned, the French did reasonably

well. If in 1706 the Governor of Pondicherry avoided Mughal attack by making a large

present, Pondicherry by then was a major base and the English at Bombay had fared worse

from the Mughals in 1686, as the Portuguese were to do, at the hands of the Marathas, in the

late 1730s. In the 1720s a threatened attack on Pondicherry by the Nawab of the Carnatic

was also bought off, but in 1740–41 the French gained great prestige when Pondicherry did

not yield to Maratha threats.

Initially, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, France was the European power

that geographically expanded most vigorously in North America. Whereas the British colonies

were bound more closely to the Atlantic seaboard and to the frontier of settlement, the

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French projected their power along the great rivers of the interior, especially the Mississippi,

following trade routes and seeking to link Québec and New Orleans in a bold undertaking.

Much of this expansion did not involve force. As the French sought trade, not land, it was

often possible to reach an accommodation with the native population. Any emphasis on

conflict is misleading, as it ignores the general ability of the French to maintain their position

without war, an ability that would have been enhanced had the British not stirred up

opposition, as with the Miami in the Ohio valley in 1747–51.

A lack of emigrants

The absence of large-scale settlement distinguished the French from the British in North

America; although not in India or West Africa, as neither power had much settlement there.

This was paradoxical, as France had the largest population in Western Europe and was the

most densely populated of the major European states. Neither Louisiana nor the St Lawrence

valley were as promising for settlement as many of the British colonies, particularly for the

cultivation of grain, but the element of opportunity was as much set by the more liberal

attitude of successive British governments to the composition of the emigrant population.

The British were especially tolerant of religious groups outside the established churches.

This was noted by anxious French envoys. Guerchy commented in 1763 and 1764 on

emigration to North America by French Protestants travelling via Britain.

Durand had urged

the government in 1750 to pay attention to the large number of emigrants going to British

North America.

New France, France’s principal settlement colony, contained some Protestant and Jewish

merchants, but it was overwhelmingly Catholic.

Huguenots were not allowed to settle

there, and, instead, went to British North America. Religious exclusion played a major role in

Louis XIV’s attitude to colonialism and colonial trade,

institutionalizing a strong Catholic

presence, and this attitude affected the subsequent history of New France. France lost many

talented people among the Huguenots who emigrated. Many of them, and their descendants,

joined the English and Dutch East India Companies. François Martin’s Mémoires mentions

the obstinate hatred for France of those he encountered. French colonial policy was to found

Catholic colonies in North America. The fur trade was envisaged only as a way of paying for

that colonizing purpose.

In the early 1660s there were only about 3,000 French inhabitants of French North

America. By the end of the seventeenth century the number had risen to about 10,000, but

there were about 210,000 Europeans in British North America. This was despite the fact

that Britain’s population was only about a quarter that of France and that much of the

French population migrated within France. In Britain there was a willingness to emigrate or

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act as an entrepreneur in distant areas which was much more limited in France. This contributed

to the dynamic of British expansion in North America and India.

The disparity with Britain became more marked during the eighteenth century. Canada

had about 56,000 inhabitants of French origin in 1740, British America nearly a million

people of European background. Religious refugees were particularly encouraged in Georgia,

enabling the fledging colony to anchor Britain’s presence between Carolina and Florida, and

to develop strong links with the Native Americans of the south-east of the modern USA. The

French proprietary companies that administered Louisiana from 1717 until it reverted to

Crown control in 1731 sought to encourage immigration. John Law saw this as crucial to the

prosperity of the colony and there was both voluntary and forced immigration. The former,

however, proved largely unsuccessful as far as French settlers were concerned, although

there was an important German immigration.

By 1763 there were about 4,000 whites and

5,000 blacks in the colony. Only about 11,370 French people settled in Canada between

1608 and 1759.

About six or seven people per million left France for Canada each year.

Most of the indentured labourers who were sent to work in Canada went back to France at

the close of their service.

The climate was discouraging as was the shortage of readily

cultivable land and neither Canada nor Louisiana had positive connotations in the minds of

the French people. The colonies were associated with indentured labour, hostile environments

and savage natives. The situation was different as far as North America and the British were

concerned. The overall disparity in numbers between British and French North America had

obvious implications for the size of forces that could be raised locally and for the extent of

the local market.

The alternative to European immigration was a demographic strategy based on assimilation,

whether by enculturation and intermarriage with Native Americans, as was in small part

attempted in Canada and Louisiana, or, more controversially, by seeking to incorporate free

Africans as subjects, as with Louis XIV’s Code Noir of 1685 and with the abolition of

slavery in 1793–4.

These strategies were controversial and their impact varied. They were

more successful in creating a situation open to loyalism and French cultural influences in

Canada and Louisiana than in St Domingue, where the French presence was so heavily

associated with slavery,

but, in all three cases, French control collapsed when the French

state was unable to sustain it.

Government control and empire

Limited immigration ensured that there was no expansionist demographic dynamic comparable

in scale to that which encouraged the spread of British settlement and activity in North

America. As a consequence, the French colonial presence was dependent on a metropolitan

government that was concerned about colonial costs and, at times, ambivalent about

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expansion.

A similar argument has been made about the French in India. Dupleix has been

presented as untypical of a French East India Company essentially motivated by trade and

commercial profit,

and attention has been drawn to the strength of anti-colonialism in

French public debate.

The French government has been seen as anxious after the Seven

Years’ War to replace British control and influence in India with a restoration of independence

by local rulers, not with French control.

This has been linked to French respect for Indian

culture,

although the strength of Indian rulers was clearly also important.

Lally’s instructions in 1757 were to destroy the English East India Company, not to

replace it. In the midst of protests and criticisms from vested interests and ‘colonial’ lobbies,

Bussy and Suffren similarly proclaimed in the early 1780s that the king’s instructions were

to liberate India, not to replace the British hegemony with a French one. Souillac – the

Governor of Île de France (Mauritius), who had sent Duchemin with his troops immediately

to India in 1780 – was, in contrast, a proponent of a strong, colonial policy. In the absence

of specific instructions from Versailles, he ordered Duchemin not to co-operate with Haidar

Ali unless a treaty had been signed between them allocating parts of India to France. Haidar

Ali was unimpressed, as these areas had not yet been conquered. Souillac was heavily

reprimanded for these instructions by Castries who told him that French policy was to

liberate Indian territories and return them to their legitimate sovereigns.

The regulation of migration to North America and elsewhere was but part of the general

regulatory framework within which the French colonists and merchants were expected to

operate. Church and State weighed heavily on passengers and shipping to the colonies, with

controls and restraints. The impact of this regulation is a matter of controversy. It has led to

claims that government heavyhandedness hindered entrepreneurialism, a charge focused on

the case of monopoly chartered companies, seen by successive governments as ways to

harness and control private enterprise. In the absence of reliable statistics and an effective

state machinery for regulation, French government created or turned to existing bodies,

rather than establishing a general supervisory regime and permitting free trade within it. The

most recent comparative study of European commercial enterprise in pre-colonial India

suggests of the French that ‘in so far as state support involved state management to a degree

not encountered in the case of any other East India Company, it constituted in the long run

more of a liability than an asset and may perhaps legitimately be held largely responsible for

the eventual failure of the French enterprise in Asia’.

It has also been argued, however, that

private merchants were more dynamic and less constrained by the regulations than is generally

appreciated.

Furthermore, it would be misleading to suggest that merchants were necessarily opposed

to regulation. Far from advocating free-trade policies, the deputies of the Council of Commerce

established in 1700, who were selected by the leading commercial towns, were protectionist

in outlook, and their pleas for liberty were based on the traditional support of rights and

privileges. Believing in the importance of the balance of trade and of maintaining large