Napoleon: A Life

by Andrew Roberts

troops would leave Holland when the general peace was signed, and the Peace of Lunéville guaranteed Swiss independence, so the British didn’t feel the need to address either in the treaty itself. The lack of a commercial treaty attached to the political one meant that the powerful British merchant class soon came to oppose a peace that gave them no privileged access to the markets of France, Holland, Spain, Switzerland, Genoa and (later) Etruria. This has been regarded as a deliberately hostile act by Napoleon, and contrary to the ‘spirit’ of Amiens, but no state is required to enter into a commercial treaty she knows would work to her disadvantage.12 Napoleon wanted to levy tariffs on British imports, and the fact that he didn’t intend to return to the conditions of the badly skewed 1786 Anglo-French trade treaty delighted French merchants in places like Rouen, who could continue to operate behind the French protective tariff – which made British goods more expensive – but also with newly opened seas free of the Royal Navy. France now saw a flourishing of her maritime economy, with raw cotton supplies flooding in from abroad. The prisoner-of-war exchanges were popular in France, since by then there were nearly 70,000 French prisoners-of-war in Britain, almost all sailors captured in the dozens of minor naval engagements Britain had won since 1793, many of whom had been kept for years in extremely bad conditions on crowded and insanitary prison hulks moored off the south c...