The Revolutionary-Napoleonic Empire

The Revolution of 1789 was partly a consequence of the Bourbons' imperial ambi­tions. Not only did the costs of naval warfare debilitate the monarchy's finances, forcing Louis XVI to convene the Estates General, but the liberal and egalitarian ideals of France's revolutionaries also owed a great deal to the emergence and rapid circulation of radical ideas throughout the Atlantic World, not least to the example set by the republican United States of America.

Revolutionary assemblies initially took only very modest steps toward the im­plementation of the rights of man in slave colonies. Effective lobbying by French planters thwarted attempts to grant equal civil and political rights to the libres de couleurs, the free population of slave descent, until 1792. But political agitation in the colonies, especially in Saint-Domingue, soon rendered the decrees from Paris irrelevant. While disputes between royalists and radicals and between whites and libres de couleurs undermined the unity of the free population, a slave revolt broke out in Saint-Domingue on August 16, 1791. After 1792, chaos in the colony was compounded by Spanish and British military interventions. The loss of the Pearl of the Antilles, to Britain or the black insurgents, seemed imminent.

Although imposed by circumstances rather than moral conviction, the emanci­pation of French slaves enabled revolutionary France to score significant successes against Britain overseas. In Saint-Domingue, Louverture’s army of black citizen­soldiers inflicted heavy losses on the British expeditionary force, while emancipated slaves helped the French regain control over Guadeloupe and turn the island into a major base for privateering directed at British trade. A parallel can be drawn with the course of revolutionary wars in Europe: as in the Caribbean, collaboration inspired by the promise of political and civil emancipation played an important part in the overturning of initial military setbacks and facilitated the expansion of French rule across Western Europe. Between 1794 and 1798, revolutionary France conquered the Austrian Low Countries (modern Belgium), the United Provinces, the Rhineland, Switzerland and the Italian Peninsula. Territories west of the Rhine and the Alps were annexed to France as departements reunis, while friendly republican regimes were established in the others: the Batavian, Helvetic, Cisalpine, Ligurian, Roman, and Parthenopean Republics.

Domestic divisions in the face of troublesome radical and royalist oppositions hampered the management of this fledging empire until Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in 1799. Bonaparte’s rise was closely linked to the Revolution’s empire­building efforts. His brilliant conquest of Italy in 1796 and, despite its ultimate failure, the 1798 expedition to Egypt established his reputation as a conqueror of genius. The Egyptian expedition aimed at dealing an indirect blow to Britain’s commercial and colonial interests in the eastern Mediterranean. But it remained grounded in the Revolution’s messianic elan, combined with a desire to bring the benefits of regenerated French civilization to a supposedly stagnant East. Having to repel several British and Turkish attacks and with only a loose grip over the country, the French did not implement any significant reform before the remnants of the expeditionary force surrendered in 1801. But the relatively easy toppling of the Mamluk regime of Ottoman Egypt and the work conducted by the nearly 200 scientists and Orientalists who accompanied the expedition, publicized in a monu­mental Description de I’Egypte (1809-1828), nurtured European dreams of political and moral conquests in the East.^[2233]

Napoleon’s military successes as first consul and emperor of the French after 1804 enabled him to extend French continental supremacy from Lisbon to Moscow. Napoleonic military might continued to rely on collaboration: until 1812, between 60 and 65 percent of the soldiers in the 500,000 to 600,000 strong Grande Armee were drawn from the departements reunis or satellite countries.

Trafalgar also spelled doom for Napoleon’s continental empire, although France’s powerful and experienced army staved off its eventual collapse by nearly 10 years. In response to Britain’s maritime supremacy, Napoleon imagined a “continental blockade” of the British Isles, in reality a continent-wide ban on imports from Britain designed to ruin British trade and industry. This ambitious project set France’s management of its empire on a disastrous course.^[2235] The decline of foreign trade, the sharp increase in the price of imported goods, and the growing fiscal tribute exacted from satellite and allied states annihilated the remnants of good will toward French rule. New annexations of coastal territories (Holland, Hamburg) to enforce the blockade proved extremely unpopular. An intervention to capture Spanish and Portuguese ports in 1808 resulted in the independence, under British tutelage, of Iberian colonies in the Americas, and the bogging down of a large army in an interminable war against British and irregular Spanish forces.

In one respect, however, the Napoleonic Empire remained true to its revo­lutionary origins: its determination, rooted in the Enlightenment, to refashion legislation and administration along rational lines. The Napoleonic Code confirmed the abolition of feudal distinctions between citizens and guaranteed individual property rights. The number of administrators in the capital rose from 600 in the 1780s to 2,500 in 1815. Fiscal extraction under Napoleon and successor regimes was not significantly higher than at the end of the Old Regime, hovering just under 10 percent of the national income between 1800 and 1870. But greater efficiency, thanks to the abolition of tax farms and venal offices and the creation of new institu­tional mechanisms that increased consent (land survey, representative assemblies), enabled the modern French state to borrow on a wider scale and at a lower cost than its early modern predecessor. From an imperial perspective, another impor­tant legacy of the Napoleonic era was the regime's sustained efforts to export legal, administrative, and fiscal rationalization to occupied Europe. The forceful transfor­mation of alien societies by omnipotent governors foreshadowed one of the main goals of European imperialism in the later nineteenth century. The arrogance of Napoleonic administrators, who described themselves in quasi-ethnic terms as the bearers of civilization to culturally inferior populations, also anticipated the institu­tional racism of later European colonial empires.^[2236]

France’s Informal Empire in the Nineteenth Century

In the aftermath of the Napoleonic experiment and despite the recovery of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyana, Bourbon, and its comptoirs of Senegambia and India at the Congress of Vienna, the French Empire shrunk to its smallest territorial extent since the early seventeenth century. As a result, historians of French imperialism have often treated the years 1815-1880 as a mere interregnum before the resurgence of large­scale territorial expansion at the end of the nineteenth century.

The Bourbon Restoration (1814-1830) witnessed an aggressive reassertion of mercantilist principles. In the 1820s, France became the second-largest slave-trading nation after Portugal, and its plantation islands partly recovered their former prosperity.^[2238] But the period also demonstrated the limits of a mercantilist stra­tegy after the revolutionary transformations of the Atlantic World since 1770. The plantation islands could only sustain Cuban and Brazilian competition thanks to costly protective tariffs. Attempts to reassert French sovereignty over Saint- Domingue floundered, and France eventually recognized Haiti's independence in 1825. These disappointments led the restored monarchy to envisage subtler methods of promoting French interests in the Americas, including the establish­ment of French “suzerainty” over Haiti, or the transformation of Spain's ex-colonies into new monarchies ruled by friendly Bourbon princes. These projects were un­successful, but the weakening of the Ottoman Empire offered new possibilities of imperial expansion in the Mediterranean. After joining Britain and Russia in a brief war to impose the recognition of Greek independence on the Sublime Porte in 1827-1828, France cultivated its alliance with Muhammad Ali, the ruler of the au­tonomous Ottoman province of Egypt, and, seizing as a pretext the alleged humil­iation of a French diplomat, launched an expedition to gain control of the Turkish Regency of Algiers in 1830.

France's new possessions in North Africa became the main focus of an intense de­bate about colonial expansion under the liberal July Monarchy (1830-1848). From Diderot until Benjamin Constant, French liberal thinkers had often condemned colonial undertakings on moral and economic grounds. While they remained crit­ical of slavery and mercantilist regulations, liberals after 1830 gradually reconciled themselves with empire-building. Francois Guizot, a leading intellectual and poli­tician, advocated a limited occupation of the Algerian coast and the acquisition of points d’appui (support stations) throughout the world to foster the spread of French trade and civilization. Once premier in the 1840s, Guizot even came around to the necessity of fully occupying Algeria, a policy which required seven years of brutal war against the insurrection fomented by the Arab leader Abd al-Qadir. A rival of Guizot in politics and critical of the violent colonial methods of Anglo-American settlers in his Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville nonetheless endorsed the conquest of Algeria as a means of maintaining French prestige abroad and civic consciousness at home.^[2239]

Nor was the revival of enthusiasm for overseas expansion confined to the gov­erning liberals. In domestic exile since the fall of the Bourbons, Catholic royalists mobilized unprecedented financial resources and energies for the development of a missionary effort spearheaded by the Oeuvre de la propagation de la foi: by the late nineteenth century, two-thirds of the 75,000 members of the Catholic clergy in missions overseas were French, with a particularly sustained effort in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa. The Saint-Simonians, defenders of Henri de Saint- Simon's industrialist creed and one-time supporters of a new religion premised on the reconciliation of the materialist West with the spiritual East, sent missions of their own, manned by engineers, in Turkey, Egypt, and Algeria. One of their leaders, Michel Chevalier, prophesized the regeneration of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa by Western railways, steamships, and exports in his Systeme de la Mediterranee (1832).^[2240] Even the republican and socialist oppositions propounded emigration to Algeria as a means of alleviating the misery of industrial workers.

All these strands of thought helped to justify the dismantling of mercantilist regulations between 1830 and 1860. The July Monarchy enforced, in collaboration with Britain, the abolition of the French slave trade. After the 1848 Revolution, rad­ical republicans proclaimed the immediate abolition of slavery throughout French colonies. At the instigation of Michel Chevalier, an influential councilor of state, the Second Napoleonic Empire (1852-1870) liberalized France's foreign and colo­nial trade. The conclusion of a commercial treaty with Britain in 1860 paved the way for similar treaties with most other European states and dozens of free trade agreements in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The remnants of the colonial Exclusif were repealed in 1861. But French commercial liberalism resembled the forceful as­sertion of Britain's economic interests by Viscount Palmerston, rather than the pac­ifist utopia of Richard Cobden. The same period witnessed a substantial increase in France's capacity to project its military power overseas, with a quadrupling of the navy's budget between 1840 and 1870 and the creation of special marine and colo­nial units such as the legion etrangere, spahis, zouaves, and African tirailleurs.

This military effort was intended neither for an invasion of Britain, nor for the acquisition of large territorial possessions. Instead, it served to promote France's economic and religious interests overseas, from the Pastry War of 1838-1839 to ob­tain the payment of damages due to French traders in Mexico, to the Second Opium War of 1856-1860 to ensure the safety of French missionaries in China. The Second Napoleonic Empire also waged war in Europe, but in alliance with Britain to de­fend the Ottoman Empire against Russian ambitions (1853-1856), or with British acquiescence to promote Italian independence from Austria (1859), rather than to extend French territory. France acquired a few more colonies overseas, such as New Caledonia or the southern tip of Indochina. But as the minister of the navy explained to the governor of the new colony of Cochinchina in 1862, such territo­ries remained conceived as points dappui to facilitate the spread of French influ­ence: “We do not wish to found a colony in the sense given to this word by our fathers... no, it is a veritable empire that we must create.”^{[2241] [2242] This empire was in­formal rather than territorial. It was economic, with a sixfold increase in French exports between 1830 and 1870 and a twentyfold increase in the stock of foreign investments between 1850 and 1870. It was also cultural, with the confirmation of French as the main medium of commercial and intellectual exchange in Latin America and throughout the Mediterranean, thanks not only to French intellec­tual prestige, but also to the high-quality secondary education provided by Catholic missions and the hundreds of Jewish schools sponsored in the Ottoman Empire by the Paris-based Alliance israelite universelle.2}

This policy of global informal expansion reached its apex under Napoleon III, whose constant efforts to maintain good relations with Britain gave a geograph­ical scope to French imperial activities unprecedented since Louis XIV. Several initiatives proved emblematic of the Second Empire's emphasis on informal rather than territorial imperialism. In Algeria, the so-called policy of the Arab Kingdom after 1861 reversed attempts at administrative assimilation: its main principles were the defense of the property rights of indigenous farmers, the confinement of settlers to commercial and industrial activities, and local self-government. In Egypt, the cutting of the Suez Canal in 1869, by an international company based in Paris and enjoying the protection of Napoleon III, reinforced French influence in the au­tonomous Ottoman province. Similarly, the 30,000-strong military expedition to Mexico in 1862-1867 did not aim at annexation. Instead, the establishment of a stable and friendly monarchical regime would provide safeguards for the supply of silver to bimetallic France and consolidate French influence in “Latin America,” an expression invented by Parisian intellectuals in the 1830s to justify French interventions in former Iberian colonies.^[2243]

This astute combination of cultural and economic influence with gunboat diplo­macy enabled France to remain or become, often alongside Britain, a preeminent power in the Middle East, Latin America, and East Asia after 1815. But even in­formal imperialism ultimately relies on hard power, and France's relative demo­graphic, economic, and military decline made this new empire look increasingly overstretched. In Mexico, American diplomatic pressure and a liberal insurgency led to a humiliating collapse of the French-backed monarchy in 1867. In Algeria, European settlers, with the support of the republican opposition at home, foiled attempts to implement a policy that took such a sharp turn away from direct ex­ploitation. Finally and decisively, France's swift defeat to a Prussian-led Germany in 1870 resulted in the downfall of Napoleon III and cast doubt on the future of this new informal empire.