Napoleon's Europe and the question of commercial union

One question we can ask is what idea of Europe we have coming out of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815.

Christopher Brooke

Senior Lecturer in Political Theory

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Christopher Brooke

Senior Lecturer in Political Theory

11 May 2025

Key Points

Napoleon’s systems of bureaucracy and uniform administration lay the foundations for European union.
German economist Friedrich List thought that European countries would create a commercial union to protect themselves against British economic hegemony, but also that the union’s success could later attract Britain to join.
The 18th century idea of free trade was to eliminate treaties; in the 19th century, many European countries signed commercial treaties to promote freer forms of trade.

Europe in the Napoleonic era

Photo by Oleg Golovnev

One question we can ask is what idea of Europe we have coming out of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. Napoleon is a complicated and a controversial figure. From one point of view, he represents French militarism. This is a familiar story in histories of European nationalism: the nations of Europe come together to resist French military domination, there’s a German national uprising in 1813, and this is the staple of the old historiography. Napoleon is figured as a universal monarch. The powers that resist Napoleon have a vision of a Europe in which they cooperate with one another to keep the peace and respect the independence of the different countries.

From another point of view, Napoleon represents bureaucracy, uniform administration and modernisation. Napoleon was a French ruler, but wherever he went, he imposed law codes; he reformed the law. He worked to break down the structures of the old European aristocracies, the remnants of European feudalism. So, from this point of view, Napoleon’s activity lays the foundations for a form of European union.

The Continental System

At the height of his power, Napoleon created the Continental System, which was an attempt to exclude Britain from European trade. It’s not radically implausible to see the Continental System as the nucleus of something that might have turned into a European common market. In the end, this didn’t happen because the Continental System had all kinds of problems. Ultimately, the French were more interested in keeping the French war machine going than promoting prosperity across the entire continent.

To the extent that European union in the 19th and 20th century becomes synonymous with projects of creating a single market, a customs union or a unified economic space, Napoleon is part of that. From one point of view, Napoleon is the enemy of Europe, but from another point of view, the systems he brings into focus are precisely what European modernisation and administrative unity might look like.

Spiritual power

Another theme that is really discernible towards the end of the Napoleonic period is an interest in what is often called pouvoir spirituel, or spiritual power. If the Napoleonic vision is one of a European bureaucratic or administrative unity, other thinkers are interested in whether there’s a spirit of Europe – something not tangible, not material – that can be made to do political work.

The German Romantic poet Novalis has a fragment called “Christianity or Europe” in which he speculates about a European spiritual identity. This becomes important at the close of the Napoleonic period. Catholic apologists like Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald in France think that the key to peace in the 19th century is restoring the authority of the pope – reconstructing something like the organisation of medieval Catholicism with the pope as a linchpin of spiritual power in Europe.

Science replacing religion

Photo by Neveshkin Nikolay

But French writer Henri de Saint-Simon, later famous as a utopian socialist, tries to grab the attention of the diplomats at the Congress of Vienna with a pamphlet on the reorganisation of Europe. He’s interested in this idea of spiritual power. The idea is that, in the past, religion provided the spiritual power that animated life in Europe. But in the future, this was going to be science. Science was replacing religion.

As Europe modernised, and as scientific rationality increased its grip on life in Europe, Saint-Simon thought there would also be the development of an international federation. It would begin with the fusion of Britain and France; the British would teach the French how to run parliamentary government, and the unity of Britain and France would make the otherwise crushing problem of public debt much more manageable.

That Anglo-French union then might include Germany, and a European union would build from there. This was Saint-Simon’s vision of a European union, which was deeply interested in these ideas of spiritual power that had become so significant in the last years of the Napoleonic regime.

The British perspective

Saint-Simon’s scheme emerges in France, with France at its centre. Was there any interest in Britain in schemes of European cooperation? Basically, the answer is no. If we look back to that moment in 1805 immortalised at the start of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the Russians get interested in proposing a European confederation by building an alliance against Napoleon, and William Pitt’s government isn’t interested. There isn’t the interest in confederation or federalism in Britain that you find elsewhere.

There is a distinctive British involvement, however, in these arguments. It’s connected to the Quakers, and it’s a vision of pacifism that imagines how international arbitration will come to prevent war fighting. Instead of the establishment of powerful political organisations, as we might think of a federal Europe, there’s a tradition of imagining schemes of international arbitration.

Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, is interested in that idea. But going back to the start of the 18th century and into the late 17th century, there are Quaker authors, including William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, who are interested in these arguments. This tradition continues through the 19th century with people who are arguing for demilitarisation, disarmament, international arbitration and the creation of international tribunals. Richard Cobden is a key figure.

Free markets and protectionism

In the 18th century, people like Adam Smith in Scotland or the physiocrats in France are invested in the idea that free markets – especially free trade in grain, for the French physiocrats – will anchor a pacific international order. The amount of prosperity that can be generated will persuade political elites that they’re much better off not fighting than fighting.

In the 19th century, there are economic liberals who remain committed to this view, but we also see the development of other arguments. One example is connected with the German economist Friedrich List. He’s known as the advocate of protectionist economics.

Of course, in the 19th century when there is British commercial supremacy, free trade in practice often means opening your markets to be flooded with cheap machine-made British goods, and that’s not going to be good for the prosperity of European countries. List develops the argument that countries should set up an environment for economic development behind a tariff wall to protect their economies against the ravages of international competition.

A vision of European federation

For List, the long-term goal is to move to a system of international free markets. Protectionism is a medium-term strategy to help economies develop when they are not yet fully competitive. It’s also linked to a vision of European federation. List thinks that if a German customs union is built, and that becomes a European customs union, then a commercial life will come into being across the entire continent. This will be facilitated by improved transport networks, such as canals and railways, so more goods can travel over longer distances.

List thinks that European countries will be incentivised to create a commercial union as a way of protecting themselves against British economic hegemony, but he also thinks that if the Europeans go down this route, it will be successful enough that the British will want to be a part of it, too.

That’s not a bad prophecy of how European economic integration turned out. The British didn’t want to be a part of it at all in the 1950s and 1960s. But as the 1960s wore on, culminating with the entry of Britain into the European Economic Community in 1973, the British decided that they did want to be a part of it. Much more recently, with Brexit, the British have left the European Union, and we don’t know what the future holds, but much of the story does share the logic that List foretold.

Commercial treaties in the 19th century

The House of Commons, 1860, during the Debate on the French Treaty. Photo by National Portrait Gallery, London. Given by the daughters of the artist, Miss L. J. Barlow and her sister, 1910. Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

The old argument about free trade was to get rid of laws, get rid of treaties and just let people buy and sell without any national or international regulation. In the second half of the 19th century, there are these commercial treaties where countries commit themselves to lowering tariff barriers or to freer forms of trade with one another. The treaty that’s negotiated by Richard Cobden in Britain and Michel Chevalier in France at the turn of the 1860s is the best example. France and many other European countries in this period are signing commercial treaties with one another.

These treaties often contain “most favoured nation” clauses; if a country strikes a favourable deal with another country, it has to extend those same terms of trade to all the other countries who have “most favoured nation” status. In a piecemeal way, with governments signing treaties with one another, this becomes the nucleus of the post-war approach of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and, later, the World Trade Organization. This generalises that approach into one organisation rather than having a series of treaties.

That’s part of how the argument about commerce changes in the 19th century. It’s still driven by economic liberals who think that if you can promote international trade, you can create international bonds and defuse the potential for international relations to become explosive. In general, liberals believe that if people are free to buy and sell with one another, the future will be more pacific. Yet, the particular means used in the 19th century, the commercial treaty, is very different from the way in which writers like the physiocrats imagined a free-trade future for a pacific Europe in the 18th century.