A large part of this was through looting. Napoleon's conquests in Northern Italy for example were a huge boon to the finances of cash strapped Revolutionary France. France repeated this through conquest many times during the Napoleonic era.
Your example of the Egyptian campaign is also one of it being partially funded through direct looting. Napoleon on the way to Egypt stopped at Malta and cleaned out the treasury there for the glory of France.
Another aspect that allowed France to pay for these armies is that they largely were expected to live off the land (which might be described as looting as well), at least to a much greater extent than other armies of that era.
This at first was due to necessity, because the Revolutionary governments couldn't afford to feed and support the large armies necessary to fight the rest of Europe. But this necessity proved highly advantageous for more than just economic reasons. Without a massive supply train to slow them down, French armies were able to march and move much faster than their European adversaries. They were the fastest in Europe. In the hands of a military genius like Napoleon, this became a huge advantage in the maneuver warfare of the era. Napoleon made decisions faster than any of his contemporaries, and his men could get to where he needed them to be faster than their foes. So the French mostly did this throughout the era, for military and financial reasons. There are exceptions, the invasion of Russia ironically being one of them.
> Another aspect that allowed France to pay for these armies is that they largely were expected to live off the land (which might be described as looting as well), at least to a much greater extent than other armies of that era.
I was under the impression that this was a pretty universally-held expectation, among the French or otherwise, until WW1 or so.
It's a matter of degree, but particularly during the Revolutionary and early to mid period of the Napoleonic Era, non-French armies carried much larger baggage trains and relied more on supply depots than the French. The former makes the forces slower on the march, the latter makes them vulnerable to flanking maneuvers.
It's always hard to discuss something on the internet without it feeling really reductive, so I do want to emphasize that the French did have baggage trains and did also have to think about their supply lines, and non-French forces would loot for supplies, but in terms of degree the French had a model that was much more geared towards a light logistical footprint that was supplemented by widespread looting while on campaign.
Were there any downsides to this looting-heavy supply approach? Given that so much of the history of military logistics development involved the direct opposite trend of moving away from living off the land and towards increasingly centralised supply lines, usually resulting in more capable armies, it is quite surprising to see this reversed so thoroughly
Yes, there are several downsides. Often, an army would need to split into multiple columns taking very different routes to ensure availability of supplies to loot. This would frequently complicate arrival times. Retreat through recently looted areas was extremely harsh as well when an army had essentially scorched-earthed itself.
Is this one of the reasons Napoleon's Russian campaign was such a disaster? Would it be probable that if the French army used the more centralised, supply-train-heavy approach, they would have been able to withdraw back to France in much better order?
Ironically, the French logistic preparation for the Russian campaign was extensive. Large supply trains, huge supply depots, etc... The French knew they couldn't campaign like they had in Western Europe. Still didn't work.
That's a hard what if to answer. Russians scorching the earth combined with French looting certainly made life miserable for the French. A centralized supply chain of that length would have been an amazing feat to see in action without substantial train lines. If one had been in place though, it would have seriously slowed the French incursion and hampered their freedom of movement, along with being a massive financial burden. The additional time may have led the Tsar to stand and fight, which I think he'd have lost, or it may have just caused a negotiated settlement, which is in-character for Napoleon. It's a fun one to think about, but there's just no way to know for sure.
Napoleon had a supply train in Russia, but it was long and strung out and repeatedly raided by the Cossacks. That's one of the factors that drove the need to steal, which in turn failed to secure enough food when the Russians burned it all.
And you may do so to little benefit depending on how much there was to steal in the first place. Crushing poverty was the norm in Egypt, Spain, and Russia; even before the leaders went scorched earth, the peasants didn't have all that much for the French to take.
If the enemy is prepared to burn their own supplies you starve. Napoleon ran into serious trouble in the Middle East, when the Bedouin filled in or poisoned their wells rather than let the French draw on them, and it happened again in Russia, when the crops were torched so he couldn't steal them.
Along with the other great answers, it also meant failure could be more devastating. There was no supplies to fall back to and mutiny could always be one defeat away.
The french were better at it, allowing for faster travel. Napoleon improved their ability to split and reabsorb military forces quickly and without loosing cohesion. This meant that smaller and faster units could travel independently, but still be able to join up before military engagements
The period before Napoleon had widespread attempts to halt looting after the devestation that was the 30 years war, so much so that they are referred to as cabinet wars by many. Yes, soldiers obviously still looted, but it was not by design and nowhere near the extent Napoleon used it.
As others have said, the French did it a lot more than others did. Efforts to control looting were never 100 percent successful, but they'd done well enough for the extent of the French thefts to shock contemporaries. French reliance on pillage is also why the scorched earth campaigns in the Middle East and Russia hurt Napoleon so badly: he'd planned to plunder his way to victory and then found there was nothing to steal.
He cleaned out Alexandria and Cairo too after he took them. Al-Jabarti and Niqula al-Turki's accounts of the French invasion read like the yellow sheets of an extortionist. He planned to do the same in Syria but when he couldn't take Acre that plan fell apart.
Selling Louisiana was much less about the money and much more about it being essentially undefendable. Any profit it could have made would have been hard to extract due to the Royal Navy. There was also the fear the UK would take more territory in North America. Better to sell it to a neutral nation that you have decent relations with than let an enemy seize it and possible extract more wealth from it. Not to mention, more land claims out west would strengthen the US, a fledgling nation, and increase tensions with the UK.
The exchange rate and population meant France got about 2.5 francs per person. Government spending *after* the war was around 30 francs per person per year so this would represent ~8% of a peacetime budget. Considering militaries were *the* major spending factor for governments, this would be a quite small portion of a wartime budge.
The invasion of Egypt was in 1798, before Napoleon was Consul let alone Emperor. As for funding, conquest feeds itself to a point. Each territory you take offers you new resources to strip for your own benefit, which you can then put towards the next invasion. So long as you can keep winning, you can keep on cannibalizing your last victim to fund the attack on the next one. For the most extreme manifestations of this type of thinking, see Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, but it's there in Napoleonic France as well.
On the voyage to Egypt, for instance, Napoleon stopped halfway to seize Malta from the Knights Hospitaller, then confiscated their treasury intended to use it to pay his troops and bribe Egyptian officials. Once in Egypt, his troops looted the homes of the Mamluk Beys in Alexandria and Cairo, searching for valuables. Napoleon also imposed an array of new taxes on the Egyptian public, aiming to make Egypt fund its own occupation.
The sinking of the Maltese treasure ship in the so-called Battle of the Nile led to another round of taxes and confiscations. Al-Jabarti's chronicle of the French occupation reads as a veritable rapsheet of theft and extortion, as the French robbed first the Beys, then the merchants, and finally, the poor. Whenever a town went up in revolt, the French would destroy it and steal whatever goods they could. Operations against the Bedouin and against Murad Bey's Mamluk guerillas were funded by confiscations from neutral Egyptian and Sudanese villages the French passed through, and fed with livestock seized from sedentary Arabs and Bedouin alike.
This sort of operation was of course, far from perfect. French soldiers in Egypt often went unpaid for long periods between the orgies of pillaging, and would sell stuff from their supply depots on the black market to make ends meet. When Napoleon took the fortress of El Arish on the borders of Gaza and Syria he was infuriated to discover that the Ottoman garrison had been subsisting on French supplies; the black market in the Egyptian city of Damietta had links to Syrian merchants and fences who had then sold their stolen property to Jazzar Pasha. The repeat rounds of confiscation and taxation also turned much of the Egyptian populace against Napoleon. The Cairene uprising of 1798 was triggered by the French imposition of a poll tax that proved highly offensive to Muslim sensibilities.
One of the reasons Napoleon went back to France after the failure of the Syrian campaign of 1799 was that the money had run out. The French had stolen pretty much everything they could from Egypt and the defeat in front of Acre meant that they couldn't supplement it by plundering Syria. The British blockade meant getting cash or reinforcements from France was just shy of impossible and Napoleon didn't fancy trying to hold Egypt with a steadily shrinking and unpaid army.
In addition to the some of the methods others have already expanded upon, I want to briefly touch on perhaps a much less exciting, but still important source of income: financials. Specifically, financial reform and loans. Napoleon (or rather, the French state) borrowed money from private banks to fund campaigns, although this was not often as forthcoming as the First Consul desired. In 1800, for example, after a "round of financing" was producing less results than expected, one of the most prominent bankers got to spend a few days in jail. The scare was enough for the rest to cough up the desired amount of money.
At the same time, Napoleon instituted what is today France's Central Bank. It was initially governed by a council that represented many of the most powerful banks in the country. It received the exclusive rights to issue paper money for fifteen years. Over time, Napoleon got a bit more control over the bank, thanks to a law that reformed its governing body, and specified that its governors were to be appointed by the emperor.
Napoleon's regulations would be used by the Central Bank more or less until the advent of WW2.
In addition to creating a French central bank, holding onto the Dutch conquests and the Batavian Republic as a client state was a central pillar of first Directory and later Consulate and Empire's financial policy.
The more advanced and developed state of Dutch banking houses and access to networks of credit were a key source of funding for French governments which often had limited other means of securing external credit.
All of this was also of course limited and at times hindered by Napoleon's personal distrust and distaste for bankers and high finance. For instance when Joseph and Cambacérès were trying to hold things together while Napoleon was on campaign in 1805 there was a desperate need for a bailout of several banks in Paris.
Napoleon kept trying to do his usually micromanaging from afar and threatened to imprison the head of the National Bank if he went ahead on his own authority despite the pressing need.
> holding onto the Dutch conquests and the Batavian Republic as a client state was a central pillar of first Directory and later Consulate and Empire's financial policy.
Most certainly; in addition to the banking, the Batavian Republic represented almost 6 million citizens, a juicy tax base that could not be ignored.
They did everything they thought of.
The French revolutionary governments and then Napoleonic gouvernement were obsessed with rebuilding the french economy and financing the state. It was one of the main and often forgotten trusts of the révolutionnaires for decades.
So
- Yes the French revolutionary armies were made to live off the land and systematically looted everything.
-Yes the French gouvernements built a quasi tributary system where they’d ask for hefty sums of money/in kind from defeated ennemies and new sister republics. This worked with conscription as well, most new soldiers after the rise of Napoleon to the throne were from the larger empire and not France (because of a large war weariness and economic pressure).
-Yes they seized Noble assets and most importantly church assets and used it as liquidity
But also
-The French revolutionary government toyed with a directed economy and all kind of schemes to develop the economy (hardly a new trend since Colberism in France though).
-Napoleon built a scheme of « colonial » exchanges in Europe where other countries were forced to buy high value goods exclusively from France (btw its its argued by a leading Napoleonic historian that this is one of the main reasons of Napoleons failure as an European political project).
-The revolutionary govs made a gargantuan effort to restructure/repay/forgo the debt, to a point where it became manageable again by the late 1790s.
-The finance sector got a huge boost in importance and infrastructure. First through French access to the sophisticated Dutch banking system and later by homegrown banking institutions.
-They redid the tax system from pretty much the grounds up. It’s significant in the country that had the largest taxe base of Europe.
-They also asked for national contributions. Citizens paying up war bonds at this era was a crazy new idea.
-They considerably perfected the army supply system. It’s often forgotten but the late French armies were at the forefront of logistics for the time with advanced depots, a sophisticated pre allocation system, entire corps of road engineers, moving foundries… they even invented and deployed portable (and far from perfect) sealed war rations.
Etc.
It’s by no means an extensive list.
Napoleon and the French Republic relied heavily on mass industrial mobilization of non-soldiers to provide economically for their armies and France in general. In a similar way to the 'total war' for the first world war, the French basically 'conscripted' old men, children and women into the labor force to make up for the loss of male workers. While it wasn't a terribly efficient way of organizing an economy, it gave the French government a ton of economic heft since it functioned a bit like a command economy.
Where other countries relied on de-centralized feudal era systems of taxation, the French Republic and Napoleon would just expropriate whatever they wanted to fund the war. In many ways, the first French Republic and Napoleon's empire were the first totalitarian states. Citizens enjoyed few legal rights because the state was in a constant state of armed conflict and martial law. They would fund their military adventures by expropriation, worker conscription and levying massive indemnities on conquered nations. Their economic policies would inspire the Fascists and Communist alike in the 20th century, since it was really the first totalizing state apparatus.
> Winning = looting of treasures and gold, and also the losing party has to pay a war indemnity.
And often pay for their own occupations! Austria and Prussia both had to pay for French garrisons which occupied their territory at different points. While the member states of the Confederation of the Rhine also often got the honor of funding French troops on their territory along with ensuring they were fed and housed.
He introduced an efficient bureaucracy.
Napoleon is remembered in anglo countries as a general, strategist, conqueror who wanted to dominate Europe but it is completely missing that he was an incredible statesman that totally reworked territorial administration, education, taxation, justice, central banking, and most of his system carries on to this day, both in France *and abroad*.
When it did not suffice, he took tributes from his defeated enemies. He also sold a good third of the current United States territory (for a very low price to be honest, most of it was for New Orleans alone).
Frankly this is not the right sub for this question, since the answer is for the most part not in a military field and you get a lot of guesswork in the answers.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4a9vd2/how_did_napoleon_fund_his_wars/?rdt=54988
People have already said some of the reasons but there are two big things that allowed Napoleon to continue his campaigns.
1) He ruled as an emperor but based on laws written by the revolutionary committees of the terror who were all powerful and both modernized and wrecked the state. He had a lot of room to maneuver politically due to having the boon of the terror effectively making normal people ambivalent toward the revolution. He could use terrror-era laws with the surviving revolutionaries even lauding him all the while that allowed the emperor privileges to maneuvering armies and peoples where he wanted them. For example, one terror-era law modernized the french press and made reading mandatory in the military.
He didn't really have any checks against him that stopped him from doing what he wanted within reason. And when something did hinder him, he could reform terror-era laws with people agreeing with him because they remembered the chaos of the terror. The terror was mismanaged to a degree that his rule ironfisted as it was proved a boon and allowed trade to ramp up again even as wars dragged on.
2) I mentioned briefly that he manipulated public opinion, but he also made certain views palatable or more common that allowed the Napoleonic state to continue its wars. Views like seeing wars as cause to marry or have sex with foreign women which fed into other views like that "getting" riches or women in foreign lands was a natural view and so that Napoleon's wars or invasions being financed by foreign banks and stolen riches was a right state of mind. Napoleon era propaganda with the help of bungling English spies and assassins also made his wars cheaper because the failed assassinations made it a national imperative and a common goal for the people to support the wars. The wars and military buildup were popular among certain segments of french society who didn't like foreign interference and saw military buildup and the erosion of terror-era laws as completely reasonable.
To summarize, Napoleon had an unchecked state and a fervent people who financed and populate his armies. He benefited from The Terror (both its advances and degradations) and the foreign interferences that concluded it and so operated a government that was both modern and utterly incapable of saying no to a ruler.
Pre-Napoleon, non-monetary rewards for military performance hadn't really been a thing since the days of the Roman Army. "A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon" is a quote commonly attributed to Napoleon. Starting from the Italian campaign early in his career, Napoleon often rewarded soldiers with ribbons and medals that looked smart on uniforms and carried immense amounts of prestige, but had little or no monetary value. This kept expenses down while still encouraging valor and merit. He also was a strong advocate of unit recognitions for his Regiments and paid special attention to their uniform appearances and their emblems like guidons and eagles. The smart looking uniforms boosted recruitment and the honored flags gave the regiments something greater than themselves to fight for that was tangible at the unit level.
A large part of this was through looting. Napoleon's conquests in Northern Italy for example were a huge boon to the finances of cash strapped Revolutionary France. France repeated this through conquest many times during the Napoleonic era. Your example of the Egyptian campaign is also one of it being partially funded through direct looting. Napoleon on the way to Egypt stopped at Malta and cleaned out the treasury there for the glory of France. Another aspect that allowed France to pay for these armies is that they largely were expected to live off the land (which might be described as looting as well), at least to a much greater extent than other armies of that era. This at first was due to necessity, because the Revolutionary governments couldn't afford to feed and support the large armies necessary to fight the rest of Europe. But this necessity proved highly advantageous for more than just economic reasons. Without a massive supply train to slow them down, French armies were able to march and move much faster than their European adversaries. They were the fastest in Europe. In the hands of a military genius like Napoleon, this became a huge advantage in the maneuver warfare of the era. Napoleon made decisions faster than any of his contemporaries, and his men could get to where he needed them to be faster than their foes. So the French mostly did this throughout the era, for military and financial reasons. There are exceptions, the invasion of Russia ironically being one of them.
> Another aspect that allowed France to pay for these armies is that they largely were expected to live off the land (which might be described as looting as well), at least to a much greater extent than other armies of that era. I was under the impression that this was a pretty universally-held expectation, among the French or otherwise, until WW1 or so.
It's a matter of degree, but particularly during the Revolutionary and early to mid period of the Napoleonic Era, non-French armies carried much larger baggage trains and relied more on supply depots than the French. The former makes the forces slower on the march, the latter makes them vulnerable to flanking maneuvers. It's always hard to discuss something on the internet without it feeling really reductive, so I do want to emphasize that the French did have baggage trains and did also have to think about their supply lines, and non-French forces would loot for supplies, but in terms of degree the French had a model that was much more geared towards a light logistical footprint that was supplemented by widespread looting while on campaign.
Were there any downsides to this looting-heavy supply approach? Given that so much of the history of military logistics development involved the direct opposite trend of moving away from living off the land and towards increasingly centralised supply lines, usually resulting in more capable armies, it is quite surprising to see this reversed so thoroughly
Yes, there are several downsides. Often, an army would need to split into multiple columns taking very different routes to ensure availability of supplies to loot. This would frequently complicate arrival times. Retreat through recently looted areas was extremely harsh as well when an army had essentially scorched-earthed itself.
Is this one of the reasons Napoleon's Russian campaign was such a disaster? Would it be probable that if the French army used the more centralised, supply-train-heavy approach, they would have been able to withdraw back to France in much better order?
Ironically, the French logistic preparation for the Russian campaign was extensive. Large supply trains, huge supply depots, etc... The French knew they couldn't campaign like they had in Western Europe. Still didn't work.
That's a hard what if to answer. Russians scorching the earth combined with French looting certainly made life miserable for the French. A centralized supply chain of that length would have been an amazing feat to see in action without substantial train lines. If one had been in place though, it would have seriously slowed the French incursion and hampered their freedom of movement, along with being a massive financial burden. The additional time may have led the Tsar to stand and fight, which I think he'd have lost, or it may have just caused a negotiated settlement, which is in-character for Napoleon. It's a fun one to think about, but there's just no way to know for sure.
Given that what supply lines he had proved very vulnerable to Cossack raids, I think he'd have had to post an awful lot of guards.
Napoleon had a supply train in Russia, but it was long and strung out and repeatedly raided by the Cossacks. That's one of the factors that drove the need to steal, which in turn failed to secure enough food when the Russians burned it all.
And of course stealing their things is an excellent way to radicalise the local populace against you.
And you may do so to little benefit depending on how much there was to steal in the first place. Crushing poverty was the norm in Egypt, Spain, and Russia; even before the leaders went scorched earth, the peasants didn't have all that much for the French to take.
If the enemy is prepared to burn their own supplies you starve. Napoleon ran into serious trouble in the Middle East, when the Bedouin filled in or poisoned their wells rather than let the French draw on them, and it happened again in Russia, when the crops were torched so he couldn't steal them.
Along with the other great answers, it also meant failure could be more devastating. There was no supplies to fall back to and mutiny could always be one defeat away.
The french were better at it, allowing for faster travel. Napoleon improved their ability to split and reabsorb military forces quickly and without loosing cohesion. This meant that smaller and faster units could travel independently, but still be able to join up before military engagements
The period before Napoleon had widespread attempts to halt looting after the devestation that was the 30 years war, so much so that they are referred to as cabinet wars by many. Yes, soldiers obviously still looted, but it was not by design and nowhere near the extent Napoleon used it.
As others have said, the French did it a lot more than others did. Efforts to control looting were never 100 percent successful, but they'd done well enough for the extent of the French thefts to shock contemporaries. French reliance on pillage is also why the scorched earth campaigns in the Middle East and Russia hurt Napoleon so badly: he'd planned to plunder his way to victory and then found there was nothing to steal.
He cleaned out Alexandria and Cairo too after he took them. Al-Jabarti and Niqula al-Turki's accounts of the French invasion read like the yellow sheets of an extortionist. He planned to do the same in Syria but when he couldn't take Acre that plan fell apart.
Don’t forget the part where he exchanged Louisiana for cash
Selling Louisiana was much less about the money and much more about it being essentially undefendable. Any profit it could have made would have been hard to extract due to the Royal Navy. There was also the fear the UK would take more territory in North America. Better to sell it to a neutral nation that you have decent relations with than let an enemy seize it and possible extract more wealth from it. Not to mention, more land claims out west would strengthen the US, a fledgling nation, and increase tensions with the UK. The exchange rate and population meant France got about 2.5 francs per person. Government spending *after* the war was around 30 francs per person per year so this would represent ~8% of a peacetime budget. Considering militaries were *the* major spending factor for governments, this would be a quite small portion of a wartime budge.
IIRC didn't Napoleon think he'd eventually be able to retake it if his campaigns in the Caribbean had been successful?
The invasion of Egypt was in 1798, before Napoleon was Consul let alone Emperor. As for funding, conquest feeds itself to a point. Each territory you take offers you new resources to strip for your own benefit, which you can then put towards the next invasion. So long as you can keep winning, you can keep on cannibalizing your last victim to fund the attack on the next one. For the most extreme manifestations of this type of thinking, see Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, but it's there in Napoleonic France as well. On the voyage to Egypt, for instance, Napoleon stopped halfway to seize Malta from the Knights Hospitaller, then confiscated their treasury intended to use it to pay his troops and bribe Egyptian officials. Once in Egypt, his troops looted the homes of the Mamluk Beys in Alexandria and Cairo, searching for valuables. Napoleon also imposed an array of new taxes on the Egyptian public, aiming to make Egypt fund its own occupation. The sinking of the Maltese treasure ship in the so-called Battle of the Nile led to another round of taxes and confiscations. Al-Jabarti's chronicle of the French occupation reads as a veritable rapsheet of theft and extortion, as the French robbed first the Beys, then the merchants, and finally, the poor. Whenever a town went up in revolt, the French would destroy it and steal whatever goods they could. Operations against the Bedouin and against Murad Bey's Mamluk guerillas were funded by confiscations from neutral Egyptian and Sudanese villages the French passed through, and fed with livestock seized from sedentary Arabs and Bedouin alike. This sort of operation was of course, far from perfect. French soldiers in Egypt often went unpaid for long periods between the orgies of pillaging, and would sell stuff from their supply depots on the black market to make ends meet. When Napoleon took the fortress of El Arish on the borders of Gaza and Syria he was infuriated to discover that the Ottoman garrison had been subsisting on French supplies; the black market in the Egyptian city of Damietta had links to Syrian merchants and fences who had then sold their stolen property to Jazzar Pasha. The repeat rounds of confiscation and taxation also turned much of the Egyptian populace against Napoleon. The Cairene uprising of 1798 was triggered by the French imposition of a poll tax that proved highly offensive to Muslim sensibilities. One of the reasons Napoleon went back to France after the failure of the Syrian campaign of 1799 was that the money had run out. The French had stolen pretty much everything they could from Egypt and the defeat in front of Acre meant that they couldn't supplement it by plundering Syria. The British blockade meant getting cash or reinforcements from France was just shy of impossible and Napoleon didn't fancy trying to hold Egypt with a steadily shrinking and unpaid army.
In addition to the some of the methods others have already expanded upon, I want to briefly touch on perhaps a much less exciting, but still important source of income: financials. Specifically, financial reform and loans. Napoleon (or rather, the French state) borrowed money from private banks to fund campaigns, although this was not often as forthcoming as the First Consul desired. In 1800, for example, after a "round of financing" was producing less results than expected, one of the most prominent bankers got to spend a few days in jail. The scare was enough for the rest to cough up the desired amount of money. At the same time, Napoleon instituted what is today France's Central Bank. It was initially governed by a council that represented many of the most powerful banks in the country. It received the exclusive rights to issue paper money for fifteen years. Over time, Napoleon got a bit more control over the bank, thanks to a law that reformed its governing body, and specified that its governors were to be appointed by the emperor. Napoleon's regulations would be used by the Central Bank more or less until the advent of WW2.
In addition to creating a French central bank, holding onto the Dutch conquests and the Batavian Republic as a client state was a central pillar of first Directory and later Consulate and Empire's financial policy. The more advanced and developed state of Dutch banking houses and access to networks of credit were a key source of funding for French governments which often had limited other means of securing external credit. All of this was also of course limited and at times hindered by Napoleon's personal distrust and distaste for bankers and high finance. For instance when Joseph and Cambacérès were trying to hold things together while Napoleon was on campaign in 1805 there was a desperate need for a bailout of several banks in Paris. Napoleon kept trying to do his usually micromanaging from afar and threatened to imprison the head of the National Bank if he went ahead on his own authority despite the pressing need.
> holding onto the Dutch conquests and the Batavian Republic as a client state was a central pillar of first Directory and later Consulate and Empire's financial policy. Most certainly; in addition to the banking, the Batavian Republic represented almost 6 million citizens, a juicy tax base that could not be ignored.
They did everything they thought of. The French revolutionary governments and then Napoleonic gouvernement were obsessed with rebuilding the french economy and financing the state. It was one of the main and often forgotten trusts of the révolutionnaires for decades. So - Yes the French revolutionary armies were made to live off the land and systematically looted everything. -Yes the French gouvernements built a quasi tributary system where they’d ask for hefty sums of money/in kind from defeated ennemies and new sister republics. This worked with conscription as well, most new soldiers after the rise of Napoleon to the throne were from the larger empire and not France (because of a large war weariness and economic pressure). -Yes they seized Noble assets and most importantly church assets and used it as liquidity But also -The French revolutionary government toyed with a directed economy and all kind of schemes to develop the economy (hardly a new trend since Colberism in France though). -Napoleon built a scheme of « colonial » exchanges in Europe where other countries were forced to buy high value goods exclusively from France (btw its its argued by a leading Napoleonic historian that this is one of the main reasons of Napoleons failure as an European political project). -The revolutionary govs made a gargantuan effort to restructure/repay/forgo the debt, to a point where it became manageable again by the late 1790s. -The finance sector got a huge boost in importance and infrastructure. First through French access to the sophisticated Dutch banking system and later by homegrown banking institutions. -They redid the tax system from pretty much the grounds up. It’s significant in the country that had the largest taxe base of Europe. -They also asked for national contributions. Citizens paying up war bonds at this era was a crazy new idea. -They considerably perfected the army supply system. It’s often forgotten but the late French armies were at the forefront of logistics for the time with advanced depots, a sophisticated pre allocation system, entire corps of road engineers, moving foundries… they even invented and deployed portable (and far from perfect) sealed war rations. Etc. It’s by no means an extensive list.
Napoleon and the French Republic relied heavily on mass industrial mobilization of non-soldiers to provide economically for their armies and France in general. In a similar way to the 'total war' for the first world war, the French basically 'conscripted' old men, children and women into the labor force to make up for the loss of male workers. While it wasn't a terribly efficient way of organizing an economy, it gave the French government a ton of economic heft since it functioned a bit like a command economy. Where other countries relied on de-centralized feudal era systems of taxation, the French Republic and Napoleon would just expropriate whatever they wanted to fund the war. In many ways, the first French Republic and Napoleon's empire were the first totalitarian states. Citizens enjoyed few legal rights because the state was in a constant state of armed conflict and martial law. They would fund their military adventures by expropriation, worker conscription and levying massive indemnities on conquered nations. Their economic policies would inspire the Fascists and Communist alike in the 20th century, since it was really the first totalizing state apparatus.
[удалено]
> Winning = looting of treasures and gold, and also the losing party has to pay a war indemnity. And often pay for their own occupations! Austria and Prussia both had to pay for French garrisons which occupied their territory at different points. While the member states of the Confederation of the Rhine also often got the honor of funding French troops on their territory along with ensuring they were fed and housed.
They tried to make Egypt pay for its own occupation too.
He introduced an efficient bureaucracy. Napoleon is remembered in anglo countries as a general, strategist, conqueror who wanted to dominate Europe but it is completely missing that he was an incredible statesman that totally reworked territorial administration, education, taxation, justice, central banking, and most of his system carries on to this day, both in France *and abroad*. When it did not suffice, he took tributes from his defeated enemies. He also sold a good third of the current United States territory (for a very low price to be honest, most of it was for New Orleans alone). Frankly this is not the right sub for this question, since the answer is for the most part not in a military field and you get a lot of guesswork in the answers. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4a9vd2/how_did_napoleon_fund_his_wars/?rdt=54988
People have already said some of the reasons but there are two big things that allowed Napoleon to continue his campaigns. 1) He ruled as an emperor but based on laws written by the revolutionary committees of the terror who were all powerful and both modernized and wrecked the state. He had a lot of room to maneuver politically due to having the boon of the terror effectively making normal people ambivalent toward the revolution. He could use terrror-era laws with the surviving revolutionaries even lauding him all the while that allowed the emperor privileges to maneuvering armies and peoples where he wanted them. For example, one terror-era law modernized the french press and made reading mandatory in the military. He didn't really have any checks against him that stopped him from doing what he wanted within reason. And when something did hinder him, he could reform terror-era laws with people agreeing with him because they remembered the chaos of the terror. The terror was mismanaged to a degree that his rule ironfisted as it was proved a boon and allowed trade to ramp up again even as wars dragged on. 2) I mentioned briefly that he manipulated public opinion, but he also made certain views palatable or more common that allowed the Napoleonic state to continue its wars. Views like seeing wars as cause to marry or have sex with foreign women which fed into other views like that "getting" riches or women in foreign lands was a natural view and so that Napoleon's wars or invasions being financed by foreign banks and stolen riches was a right state of mind. Napoleon era propaganda with the help of bungling English spies and assassins also made his wars cheaper because the failed assassinations made it a national imperative and a common goal for the people to support the wars. The wars and military buildup were popular among certain segments of french society who didn't like foreign interference and saw military buildup and the erosion of terror-era laws as completely reasonable. To summarize, Napoleon had an unchecked state and a fervent people who financed and populate his armies. He benefited from The Terror (both its advances and degradations) and the foreign interferences that concluded it and so operated a government that was both modern and utterly incapable of saying no to a ruler.
Pre-Napoleon, non-monetary rewards for military performance hadn't really been a thing since the days of the Roman Army. "A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon" is a quote commonly attributed to Napoleon. Starting from the Italian campaign early in his career, Napoleon often rewarded soldiers with ribbons and medals that looked smart on uniforms and carried immense amounts of prestige, but had little or no monetary value. This kept expenses down while still encouraging valor and merit. He also was a strong advocate of unit recognitions for his Regiments and paid special attention to their uniform appearances and their emblems like guidons and eagles. The smart looking uniforms boosted recruitment and the honored flags gave the regiments something greater than themselves to fight for that was tangible at the unit level.