6min chapter

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EI Weekly Listen — Michael Broers on how Napoleon built a continent

Engelsberg Ideas Podcasts

CHAPTER

France's Colonial Ambitions in the 18th Century

Exploring France's economic interests in its Atlantic territories, including sugar production in Sanderman, Guadalupe, and Martinique, and the challenges faced by the French due to conflicts with the British in North America and the Caribbean.

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While its proximity to Central Europe also gave France a more pressing, permanent interest in the affairs of the continent than its colonial competitors, particularly as Spain's powers declined. The wars with Britain in the mid-18th century greatly reduced the French Empire in North America, and all but ended its nascent ambitions to establish a presence in the Indian subcontinent. French territories in the New World had been reduced to Sanderman, Guadalupe and Martinique, although these islands, Sanderman, especially, were of enormous economic value, particularly as the major producers of that most lucrative commodities in this era, sugar. Looked at on the map, and in the light of the resounding defeats at British hands, which had shrunk that colonial map, the French Atlantic was a dead letter by the time Napoleon seized power in 1799. Indeed, the abolition of slavery by the French revolutionaries in 1793 and their failure to implement it properly led to successful slavery revolts on Sanderman, which brought a rebel government to power under an ex-slave, Toussaint Louverture. It was exactly this crushing loss of revenue and the loss of the rump of territory that spurred the new Napoleonic regime into action in a last attempt to revive a commercial Atlantic Empire. The last of the pre-Napoleonic revolutionary regimes, the Directory, had already displayed colonial ambitions when it sent Napoleon on an ill-fated expedition to seize Egypt in 1798, which only succeeded in seeing its massive fleet destroyed by Nelson and leaving Napoleon's cracked troops stranded in the Middle East for several years. Almost at once, however, the new Napoleonic regime turned westwards. Napoleon's North American ambitions had two separate components, which is foreign minister, Taléron, and through his efforts, Napoleon, believed could become complementary parts of a new French colonial empire. One of Taléron's first diplomatic successes was to persuade Spain to cede the Louisiana Territory to France by the secret treaty of San Ildefonso in October 1800. Napoleon had only come to power in December 1799. Louisiana, now to be settled by French pioneers, was meant to become the bread basket for Saint-Dermain, whose monocultural economy, based on sugar and inhospitable topography, left little scope for food production. The economic vision was wholly a mercantilist. This was to be self-sufficient autarky, enabling the French colonies to free themselves from American imports of basic necessities. French ambitions in the Caribbean had to run in tandem for the project to succeed. These ambitions were only made possible by peace with Britain in 1802, which at last opened the seaways to French shipping and the French navy. That peace had come about through a series of military victories on land, one by Napoleon over the Austro-Russian coalition in 1800, and by a successful anti-British blockade supported by almost every major European state, between 1801 and 1802. Britain came to the conference table at the northern French town of Amiens, and the result was a brief period of peace, 1802 to 1803, which allowed a French army to cross the Atlantic unhindered to try to retake Saint-Dermain. First, however, Napoleon had to confront the prospect of American ambitions in Louisiana. For a brief moment, the wilderness of the Louisiana Territory became one of the most dangerous flashpoints in the Western world. The American President Thomas Jefferson considered it his country's manifest destiny to expand across the continent, and prepared to seize the Upper Mississippi before the French could occupy it, for Napoleon had assembled an expeditionary force to do exactly this, but it was literally frozen, locked in harbor in Dutch ports during the severe winter of 1802 to 1803. Meanwhile, the invasion of Saint-Dermain had ended in disaster, Napoleon's army was destroyed as much by disease as by guerrillas, and he had to admit total defeat. The raison d'etre for the colonization of Louisiana was now gone, and so Jefferson and Napoleon withdrew from the brink of war. Louisiana was sold to the United States on April the 30th, 1803. When war broke out again between Britain and France the following month, the Royal Navy closed the Atlantic to Napoleon forever more. The last French troops were withdrawn from Saint-Dermain the following year. Jefferson was now able to turn his country firmly inwards towards continental expansion. Napoleon saw that France had to abandon its Atlantic ambitions. Colonial imperialism did not come naturally to him, for he saw it as the product of two things he distrusted, royalist nobles and capitalist financiers, often one and the same. The former represented an old order intrinsically hostile to him, the latter, a French replica of rampant, unstable British capitalism. The great earthquake had been avoided. Nevertheless, two tectonic plates had come close to colliding in 1803. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 proved a turning point in the geopolitics of the western world, which has often been underestimated. Its importance rests not just on what Jefferson did next, opening the west to settlement, but on the course of action Napoleon set upon, as the Atlantic was lost to him, Europe beckoned.

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