The Economic Legacy of Napoleon Bonaparte

Ridley Scott’s Napoleon earned $78.8 million internationally in its first weekend in movie theaters. The film focuses on the titular 19th-century leader who swept across the continent with French armies, creating an empire and then experiencing his own downfall. But Napoleon was more than a military innovator; he was an economic and legal reformer as well, setting the foundation for the modern societies we live in today.

LISTEN HERE: For the entire conversation, and episodes in the weeks ahead on this subject and others, follow Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts.

What was Napoleon’s economic legacy? How did he finance his wars? And should he be remembered as a progressive or a conservative?

Those are a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.

Cameron Abadi: I know you saw the movie. What did you make of it?

Adam Tooze: I’m struggling because, it seems silly to say, but I believe this is the worst film I’ve ever seen. I believe it was the most offensively bad film I’ve ever seen. So much so that me and a friend who were there, also a historian admittedly, just couldn’t bring ourselves to sit through the whole thing, and we left halfway through. And I’ve never, ever done that before. It was so unbelievably bad at every level, maybe, except visually. They spent quite a lot of money on recreating late 18th-, early 19th-century France. But unless you know any Napoleonic history, I can’t see how you could possibly follow the film. And if you do have any Napoleonic history, I don’t really know how you can stand to stay in the film.

Effectively, what we’re being asked to believe is that Napoleon, a deeply cultured, wildly, obsessively reading man of his period, was essentially a kind of mafia underboss. He doesn’t have the menace of a Tony Soprano. He doesn’t have the menace of the Godfather. He really behaves like a thug, like a street thug. The sex scenes are kind of risible and kind of grotesque. It’s not very erotic.

And the military history is just flat-out staggering in its failure to convey the essential elements of warfare in the period. They have 18th-, early 19th-century troops of the line in trenches. Austerlitz, which is this epic battle fought against the Austrian and Russian armies, is reduced to a skirmish between relatively small groups of units. The thing about Napoleonic warfare that makes it historically significant is that Napoleon maneuvered entire armies on a giant scale. So if you wanted to convey, say, the way that Saving Private Ryan conveys the drama of D-Day, very effectively conveys both the small-group action and the scale, the epic sweep of the entire landing, you would need to convey what Napoleon is doing, which is maneuvering army corps, the entire Grande Armée, in military maneuvers on a huge scale. And with computer graphics, we have the resources to do that now. And historically speaking, say, when the Soviets made War and Peace, they literally used large contingents of the Red Army to recreate that. There was also a very famous adaptation of Waterloo, a film made in Waterloo in the 1970s and ’80s.

And to do this properly, you really need to actually register the scale of wars that were fought then. And this film just doesn’t care. It’s basically just various types of CGI that you’ve seen in all sorts of other war movies. There’s no effort to actually capture 18th-, early 19th-century warfare and its essential elements of line and column and square. It’s as though a bunch of people who really have no interest in military history whatsoever made a thuggish mafia-style adaptation of somebody who actually transformed the way in which modern warfare operated.

CA: Well then, let’s try to engage in some of the actual history. Napoleon is obviously remembered as a military genius. But was he also a significant economic reformer? I know the Napoleonic reforms transformed France into a more modern society. Did it do the same for its economy? And what to make of the fact that this kind of modernizing economic reforms came from someone with no apparent interest in democracy at all?

AT: I think Napoleon really does stand as one of the original early authoritarian modernizers. I think that’s maybe the best way to think of him in that context, faced with the chaos of financial conditions and inflation left by the revolutionary period, which had relied on the issuance of paper currency, so-called assignats, to fund the projects and the wars of the early revolutionary period. In 1800, Napoleon issued orders for the foundation of the bank, the French Central Bank. And then in 1803, in April, he orders the issuance of a silver- and gold-backed currency, which then becomes known as the franc germinal. And this is the anchor of France’s currency system, really, for the rest of the 19th century and into the 20th century. So France becomes a hard-money, metallic-backed currency system from that moment on.

In the same period, the early 1800s, the directory period, Napoleon also sets up a series of legal commissions which then draft the famous Code Napoléon, which also has a commercial element, which is issued and enters into force in 1804 and really forms the basis for one of the most enduring legal frameworks in European history. It’s a so-called Roman law code, so it’s not based on precedent and the court ruling of judges but on the issuance of fundamental principles of law, which are enshrined in the code. And this, too, is one of the legacies, really, of the Napoleonic era which has a profoundly enduring impact on not just France but on many of the European territories which France conquered under Napoleon and went on to adopt the code. Notably, for instance, western parts of Germany. Rather than thinking of short-run economic policy in the way that we do today, these sorts of institutional systems are really the anchor of Napoleon’s economic legacy and its enduring legacy. He also built a certain amount of infrastructure. He was obviously very interested in roads for the marching of armies. These fell more easily into disrepair. But a monetary system and a legal system are really very important.

In terms of economic policy and the way we understand it today, notably with regard to trade policy, Napoleon’s legacy is much more ambiguous. Or his impact was much more ambiguous, because we’re in Berlin today, and in November 1806, shortly after defeating and destroying the Prussian Army in battle in October 1806 at the famous climactic Battle of Jena–Auerstedt, Napoleon marched in triumph into Prussia. And having effectively conquered at that point all of Germany and brought it under French control, he uses Berlin as the location to issue the Berlin decrees, which are the foundation of what is called the Continental System, which is Napoleon’s effort to blockade the British economy into submission. So in 1805, the French navy had suffered a catastrophic defeat at the hands of the British at the Battle of Trafalgar. So the possibility of a naval blockade of Britain was impossible. So instead, what Napoleon decides to do, having conquered all of Germany, France, the Netherlands, having all of this under his control, he decides to declare an economic blockade of Britain. And that really becomes the cornerstone and the most impactful policy pursued by the French Empire toward Europe from that moment onward. It basically means that Europeans are no longer able to buy British textiles, because the British Industrial Revolution has already been rolling by that point for several decades. Cheap cloth from Britain is the principal import, and bales of cheap British cloth are burned ceremonially across Germany in the wake of the Berlin decrees declaring this first ever system of modern economic warfare.

And it’s ultimately over the Continental System and Russia’s refusal to comply with its requirements that leads to Napoleon’s fateful decision to invade Russia in the summer of 1812. So this continental system is a key element, and it has a very ambiguous impact as any kind of constraint of trade will have. It’s bad for the standard of living in Europe. It drives up the cost of living. It does, however, lead to some promotion of manufacturing within Europe. It gives manufacturing in France and Germany a leg up. It’s widely, of course, regarded as a mistake by any liberal economist.

CA: So obviously Napoleon is remembered for these vast continental wars, millions of people being moved across the continent of Europe. How did Napoleon go about financing these vast continental wars?

AT: The promise by Napoleon to the French people is that the wars will pay for themselves. And Napoleon and the French revolutionary regime all the way back to the 1790s had a well-established practice essentially of forcing defeated states to pay war damages, reparations, occupation costs to France. And this was done on a huge scale. Napoleon took it very seriously, and he actually created a war fund, an army fund into which all of these reparations were paid. And so they never really touched the conventional budget of the French state. They remained in a fund which was a sort of slush fund for military purposes. And we’re talking about 20 percent to 30 percent of French GDP, really very large shares of the available output of the time, because Napoleon’s war-fighting was on a scale never seen in Europe before, probably never seen anywhere in the world before. The biggest battles by the end of the Napoleonic Wars involve hundreds of thousands of troops on both sides. The Grande Armée, the French Army, at its height numbered 600,000 men, hundreds of thousands of horses. So they’re gigantic mobilizations. Some of this plunder took the form of cultural artifacts as well. The reason why Paris is such a mecca for anyone interested in art history, among other things, is the systematic plunder of artifacts from Italy, notably in the 1790s, but then the rest of Europe as well.

Did it pay for Napoleon’s wars? It didn’t. This plundering took the form of money, it took the form of artistic artifacts, it took the form of soldiers. So when we say France invaded Russia in 1812, only about a third of the army of 600,000 men that marched into Russia were French. About a third were German. The rest were Polish and various other types of auxiliaries. But if we ask in the end whether this really did pay for itself, the answer is emphatically no. Sixty percent, probably, of the costs of Napoleon’s wars were actually borne by French taxpayers and through French debt, which was made easier by the fact that they had a stable currency with the metallic-backed currency. And it was also made easier by the fact that Napoleon inherited an inflationary clean slate in the fact that the inflation of the 1790s had burned away all of the existing debts of the French state and rendered them worthless. And so he could borrow from a fresh start. At the end of the Napoleonic wars, as was observed by contemporaries, the British state is actually carrying a larger debt burden than the French. But in terms of the impact on the French society, it was very, very severe. And the extractions from the occupied territories probably covered less than half of the overall cost.

CA: Finally, should we be thinking of Napoleon ultimately as progressive or reactionary? You’ve described his legal and economic reforms that set the foundation for the modern society that we all live in today. But clearly, Napoleon was no democrat and had this extractive imperialistic policy and was cruel and vicious in other ways. The German philosopher Hegel described him as this representative figure pushing history forward. Is that then by definition progressive?

AT: Yeah. I mean, Hegel famously wrote to a friend to say that he felt like he’d seen the world spirit on horseback. Right? I think the important thing, which is why I’m also so indignant about this terrible film, is that Napoleon was a figure that was understood at the time to be a transformative figure in world history, to be a truly shocking phenomenon and not a grubby mafia underboss. Whatever he was, he was towering in his impact. He was gigantic in his consequences. I mean, defeating the Prussians was really the third in a series of devastating defeats that he’d inflicted on the enemies that rallied against him in 1805. Not partial defeats, not some thousands of men drowning in a frozen lake, but the total disintegration of their armies and the humiliating surrender of emperors to Napoleon. The most dramatic consequence of which was the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, which was the supervening organizing political entity not just of Germany, but of Central Europe.

And this makes this question of progressive, reactionary—world-changing, I think, is the attribute that people would settle on. Whether or not that’s progressive or alarming or terrifying—world-changing, a force that you have to struggle with.

So I guess the point to make is, as one German historian famously remarked in his effort to write a 19th-century German history, “Am Anfang war Napoleon,” or, “In the beginning there was Napoleon.” Almost all of the subsequent political theorizing, whether it’s reactionary in restoring the Bourbons to the throne in France after 1850, bringing the Bourbon dynasty back, or liberalism in the form of positivism and so on is all after Napoleon, right? It’s all thinking through the consequences of this regime and its impact on not just European society but on world society.

And Bonapartism becomes, for thinkers in the Marxist canon, the prelude to the authoritarianisms of the 20th century, whether they be, you know, the shah in Iran or [Mustafa Kemal] Ataturk in Turkey or fascism. Bonapartism is, for Marxism in the 20th century, the sign of a novel kind of politics which refuses straightforward class alignments and the balances in between and asserts a kind of autonomy for the political that’s rarely found in well-established capitalist regimes but has a historic significance as a vector of reform and change and transformation.