Trianon and Fontainebleau decrees — 5 août et 19 octobre 1810

The Trianon tariff struck colonial goods with prohibitive duties — up to fifty per cent of their value — taxing smuggling rather than banning it. The Fontainebleau decree ordered the seizure and public burning of English merchandise throughout the Empire. The blockade became a fiscal machine, hated by ports and consumers alike, without making London yield.

A blockade leaking everywhere

Four years after the Berlin decree, the verdict was plain: English goods were still coming in, by Heligoland, by the Baltic, through the Balkans and through the Dutch ports. The licence system, opened in 1809, even officially allowed certain merchants to trade with the enemy on payment of a fee.

Napoleon therefore changed his logic. Since smuggling could not be suppressed, he decided to tax it: this was the Trianon tariff of 5 August 1810.

Tax on one side, burn on the other

The tariff struck colonial produce — sugar, coffee, cotton, indigo, cocoa — with prohibitive duties that could reach half their value. What had entered by fraud now entered legally, and brought revenue to the Treasury. It was an admission as much as a resource.

The Fontainebleau decree of 19 October 1810 completed the arrangement in the other direction: it ordered the seizure of all English manufactures found within the Empire and their public destruction. Bonfires of cloth and cottons were lit in the squares of Frankfurt, Hamburg and Amsterdam, before the population.

A system that turns on itself

The effect on London was nil: England found other outlets in Latin America and the Baltic. The effect on the continent was considerable. Ports were ruined, the prices of sugar and coffee soared, and the blockade became unpopular even among allies.

It was Trianon that tipped Russia over: on 31 December 1810 Alexander published a ukase reopening his ports to neutrals and surtaxing French products. The commercial rupture preceded the military one by eighteen months — the blockade, designed to bring England down, had led to the Russian campaign.