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13. “Treasures in the New World”
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 13. “Treasures in the NewWorld” The greatest commercial and political undertaking . . . using the treasures in the new world for the benefit of commerce in general, and in particular for that of Spain and France. Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard Unfortunately, the subsidy was Spanish silver, and that was in America. Maurice Payard [Contrast] the despotism of irrationality and disorder with the tyranny of reason and order. Jacques Arna Behind the intervention of French forces in Spain in early 1808 was a legacy of structures and attitudes persisting during the Revolution, the Directoire, the Consulat, and the Empire: pressure for access to Spanish and Spanish colonial staples and consumers and to inflows of American (now mainly Mexican) silver, along with the hope of tying, even subordinating, the Spanish metropolitan and colonial economies to French interest groups. More specifically, persistent pressures behind France’s occupation of the Iberian Peninsula are identifiable. American silver was important to the French economy in the eighteenth century, a prominence heightened in the 1780s. The revolutionary years in France and their aftermath only accentuated the need for silver from New Spain, as assignats depreciated rapidly and budgetary deficits resulting from military operations and infrastructural outlays demanded greater revenues. There is a clear nexus between the Franco-Spanish treaty of mutual defense of 1796, the agreement on a financial subsidy by Spain to France in 1804, and silver from Mexico City in the Paris banking crisis of 1805. Inexorably the Banque de France, the speculations of the war contractors (munitionnaires) Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard and Jacques-Ignace Vanlerberghe, and Mexican pesos became linked issues mag- 376 • Toward the Second War of Succession nifying for Napoleon and French policymakers the economic potential of Spain’s overseas possessions. Contributing to this emphasis on New Spain in the western Atlantic was the revolution in Saint-Domingue, resulting in the loss of its sugar, molasses, and coVee and the decision to sell Louisiana to the United States. Now France might import from Spain’s Caribbean islands and circum-Caribbean colonies sugar, coVee, and, for France’s textile industries, cotton, indigo, and cochineal. Thus, France’s public and private sectors saw in Spain and its colonies a source for those commodities previously imported from Saint-Domingue whose re-export to continental Europe had been a major element contributing to the growth of France’s foreign trade and its favorable trade balances in the eighteenth century, as well as to the expansion of its Atlantic ports at Bordeaux and Nantes. In short, behind France’s Spanish policy not only before but also after 1789 lay the long-term perception of France’s civil servants, diplomats, financiers, manufacturers, and merchants, that Spain’s colonial world might function more eYciently under French direction. In these specifics one locates both long-term and contingent factors shaping the diplomacy of the Directoire, the Consulat, and the Empire vis- à-vis metropolitan and colonial Spain. Industrial, financial, and strategic interests of France, fused in the crucible of competing English and French imperialisms, flowed into Napoleon’s grand design to incorporate Spain and its Atlantic possessions under French hegemony and—an unintended consequence—the crisis of the Spanish imperial system. Like the first French intervention, in the War of the Spanish Succession, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, in which access to Spain’s colonial possessions through trade in goods and African slaves had figured prominently, France’s second intervention in the peninsula, under the Grand Empire, was motivated in no small measure by industrial and financial interests as well as by the more apparent military and strategic ones. Even before 1789 the flow of silver from Spain’s colonies into France had slackened as Spanish authorities tightened surveillance at the border. Spain’s war against France in 1793–95 reduced the flow to a trickle. Then came the loss of access to Saint-Domingue’s tropical staples—sugar, coVee and indigo—which curbed French re-exports to western Europe and brought trade deficits and a decline in revenues; over the decade after 1789, exports fell by 50 percent.… These factors were compounded by military outlays, disorganized tax collection, budgetary deficits, and inflation. In the inflationary episode, specie in circulation fell by about 85 percent, from 2 billion livres tournois to about 300 million. Thus, internal and international conflict left a legacy of public debt that the Directoire could not readily manage. By [54.81.33.119] Project MUSE (2024-03-28...