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Revolutionary France and the Transformation of the Rhine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2011

Robert Mark Spaulding
Robert Mark Spaulding
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Wilmington
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Extract

As one of the world's busiest rivers the Rhine carries about 300 million tons of freight annually, upriver and down, between Switzerland and the Dutch ports on the North Sea. Heavy shipping traffic on the Rhine, including ocean vessels reaching Mannheim and barges reaching Basel, has been an integral part of the Rhine valley landscape for the past 150 years. But a bounty of commercial shipping on the Rhine has not always been part of the river's history. Despite the Rhineland's growing population and increasingly productive economy at the end of the early modern period, long-distance shipping activity along the river gradually declined during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. River commerce revived and expanded only in the early nineteenth century, stimulated in part by new developments in transportation technology, business organization, industrial development, and an unprecedented civil engineering assault on the river's natural contours. These material components of the nineteenth century transportation revolution as it unfolded along the Rhine are generally well known.

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Articles
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Central European History , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , June 2011 , pp. 203 - 226
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Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 2011

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References

1 The two monumental and still indispensable descriptive histories of these events are Eckert, Christian, Rheinschiffahrt im XIX. Jahrhundert (Leipzig: Dunker & Humblot, 1900)Google Scholar; and Gothein, Eberhard, Geschichtliche Entwicklung der Rheinschiffahrt im XIX. Jahrhundert (Leipzig: Dunker & Humblot, 1903)Google Scholar.

2 See, for example, Chamberlain, J. P., The Regime of the International Rivers: Danube and Rhine, Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law, vol. CV, no. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1923)Google Scholar; Hoederath, Roland, Grossbritanien und das internationale Rheinregime, Schriften zum Völkerrecht, Bd. 69 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1981)Google Scholar.

3 The only work of which I am aware explicitly dedicated to French reforms on the Rhine is Hans Mosler's fifty-page local study limited to the German portion of the lower Rhine and covering only a five-year period, Die Einführung der Rheinschiffahrtsoktroi-Konvention am deutschen Niederrhein, 1803–1807 (Düsseldorf: Lintz,1908)Google Scholar.

4 Schwann's, MathieuGeschichte der Kölner Handelskammer (Cologne: P. Neuber, 1906)Google Scholar has served as an indispensible base for much of this work. Diefendorf's, JeffryBusinessmen and Politics in the Rhineland, 1789–1834 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980)Google Scholar, which focuses almost exclusively on Cologne and the surrounding territory that comprised the Department of the Roer during French occupation, is a good, more recent example.

5 Klaus Müller's recent essay closely re-narrates French reforms along the lower Rhine, but lacks connections to larger issues in German history; as in Mosler's essay a century earlier, the administrative regulation of the river's shipping remains a lower Rhine curiosity. Klaus Müller, “Politische und Rechtliche Veränderungen der Rheinschifffahrt zwischen der Französischen Revolution und dem ersten Pariser Frieden,” in Der Rhein als Verkehrsweg. Schriftenreihe der Niederrhein-Akademie, vol. 7, ed. Looz-Corswarem, Clemens von and Mölich, Georg (Bottrop: Peter Pomp, 2007), 37–59Google Scholar.

6 Kellenbenz, Hermann, “Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte der nordlichen Rheinlände seit 1815,” in Rheinische Geschichte in drei Bänden. Band 3, Wirtschaft und Kultur im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Petri, Franz and Droege, Georg (Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1979), 12Google Scholar.

7 Jaeger, Hans, Geschichte der Wirtschaftsordnung in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 52Google Scholar.

8 Giraud, Louis, “Transport,” in Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. VI, The Industrial Revolution and After: Incomes, Population, and Technical Change, ed. Habbakuk, H. J. and Postan, M. M. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 224Google Scholar.

9 Findlay, Ronald and O'Rourke, Kevin, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 379Google Scholar; Loriaux, Michael, European Union and the Deconstruction of the Rhineland Frontier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 215CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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11 Andreas Fahrmeir, “Centralization versus Particularism in the ‘Third Germany,’” in Collaboration and Resistance in Napoleonic Europe, ed. Rowe, 116.

12 Rowe, Michael, “Napoleon and State Formation in Central Europe,” in Napoleon and Europe, ed. Dwyer, Philip (London: Longman, 2001), 204Google Scholar.

13 See, for example, Timothy Blanning's characterization of 1792–1801 as a “terrible decade” of “economic collapse,” in Blanning, Timothy, The French Revolution in Germany: Occupation and Resistance in the Rhineland 1792–1802 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 165Google Scholar; Marieluise Schultheis-Freibe's similar conclusions in Die französische Wirtschaftspolitik im Roer-Departement 1792–1814 (Ph.D. diss., University of Bonn, 1969), 278.

14 On the larger issues of integrating the Napoleonic period into modern German history, begin with Dwyer, Philip, “New Avenues for Research in Napoleonic Europe,” European History Quarterly 33 (2003): 1, 101–124CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Aaslestaad, Katherine and Hagemann, Karen, “1806 and Its Aftermath: Revisiting the Period of the Napoleonic Wars in German Central European Historiography,” Central European History 39, no. 4 (2006): 547–579CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 In a recent discussion of the state of transportation history, Hans-Liudger Dienel suggests that assessing the relative importance of “government influence” in transportation developments compared to “other factors” such as “consumer preferences, entrepreneurial decisions, and technological progress” remains the central concern of the field. Dienel, Hans-Liudger, “Vekehrsgeschichte auf neuen Wegen,” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte 1 (2007): 19–37Google Scholar.

16 See the historiographic review in Pierenkemper, Toni and Tilly, Richard, The German Economy during the Nineteenth Century (New York: Berghahn, 2004), 135–144Google Scholar.

17 Findlay and O'Rourke, Power and Plenty, 502.

18 Hence Hermann Kellenbenz's somewhat curiously formulated statement that eighteenth-century Germans “underestimated” the potential of Rhine commerce. Kellenbenz, Hermann, “Der deutsche Aussenhandel gegen Ausgang des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Die wirtschaftliche Situation in Deutschland und Österreich um die Wende vom 18. zum 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Lütge, Friedrich (Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer Verlag, 1964), 16Google Scholar.

19 Kellenbenz has described how land routes ran from the Netherlands through Aachen to Cologne and from there headed south “parallel to the river” [!] to “avoid” trafficking the Rhine, in Kellenbenz, “Der deutsche Aussenhandel,” 16.

20 Jeffry Diefendorf has also pointed out that “rising river tolls in the eighteenth century forced traders to seek other north-south routes” in Diefendorf, Businessmen and Politics, 29.

21 A subsequent Prussian report stated that when the Peace of Lunéville was signed on February 9, 1801, twenty-nine stations were collecting river tolls on the Rhine above the Dutch border; sixteen on the right bank and thirteen on the left. Graf Solms-Laubach to Staatsminister Baron Karl von Stein, February 28, 1814, Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin (hereafter GStAP) III.HA I Nr. 1367. Gothein cites the generally reported figure of thirty-two toll stations between Strasbourg and the Dutch border, but without giving a specific date: Gothein, Geschichtliche Entwicklung der Rheinschiffahrt, 3. Wolfgang Zorn mentions thirty tolls for that same stretch of the river, in “Binnenwirtschaftliche Verflechtungen um 1800,” in Die wirtschaftliche Situation in Deutschland, ed. Lütge, 101. These discrepancies highlight the uncertain and changing nature of toll collection along the river.

22 Clapp, Edwin J., The Navigable Rhine (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 6Google Scholar.

23 Even Timothy Blanning, generally eager to describe the “general upturn in the Rhenish economy in the course of the eighteenth century,” admits that Rhine tolls “may have reduced traffic by up to fifty percent,” in Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany, 30.

24 Gothein, Geschichtliche Entwicklung der Rheinschiffahrt, 7.

25 My conclusion drawn from data on volumes and values that are presented in Martin Kutz, Deutschlands Aussenhandel von der Französischen Revolution bis zur Gründung des Zollvereins. Eine statistische Strukturuntersuchung zur vorindustrieller Zeit (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1974), 158–160 and table 67 on 340.

26 Kellenbenz, “Der deutsche Aussenhandel,” 9, 13; and Zorn, “Binnenwirtschaftliche Verflechtungen,” 104.

27 Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany, 24; Kutz, Deutschlands Aussenhandel, 155.

28 Clapp, The Navigable Rhine, 10.

29 Jeffry Diefendorf's statement on Cologne that “the city treasury was supported by fees charged for the use of port facilities” indicates that the sums extracted by Cologne from passing merchandise must have been considerable. Diefendorf, Businessmen and Politics, 29. Similarly, Blanning describes Bonn, Koblenz, and Mainz as centers of conspicuous consumption supported by “the easy money which flowed in from river tolls and rural taxes.” Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany, 32.

30 Kutz, Deutschlands Aussenhandel, 167, 168.

31 Historisches Archiv der Stadt Köln, Bestand 90 (Alter Bestand), files 707–713 (hereafter HASK 90/707–713). The incident is documented with other sources in Joseph Hansen's essential collection, Quellen zur Geschichte des Rheinlandes im Zeitalter der Französischen Revolution, 1780–1801, vol. 1 (Bonn: P. Hahnstein, 1930), 866–871Google Scholar.

32 The German-Dutch commercial relationship and its treatment by German historians are important parts of the river's history and historiography, but are not themes that require extensive elaboration in this article. On Dutch obstructionism after 1815, see footnote 63 below.

33 For example, article 89 of the Treaty of Münster: “Above all, the Navigation of the Rhine shall be free, and none of the partys shall be permitted to hinder Boats going up or coming down, detain, stop, or molest them under any pretence whatsoever, except the Inspection and Search which is usually done to Merchandizes: And it shall not be permitted to impose upon the Rhine new and unwonted Tolls, Customs, Taxes, Imposts, and other like Exactions; but the one and the other Party shall be contented with the Tributes, Dutys and Tolls that were paid before these Wars, under the Government of the Princes of Austria.” Similarly explicit language in article 6 of the Rastatt treaty: “Navigation and other uses of the River shall remain free and open to the subjects of the two parties [France and the Empire] and to all those wishing to pass by, sail, or transport merchandise … Nor, especially, can they demand new tolls or taxes or increase old ones, or oblige vessels to land on one bank rather than the other, to lay open their cargo or to receive any, but all shall be at the choice of each individual.” Both in Israel, Fred L., ed., Major Peace Treaties of Modern History, 1648–1967, vol. 1 (New York: Chelsea House, 1967–80)Google Scholar, 35 (Treaty of Münster), 244 (Rastatt treaty).

34 That case certainly makes one wonder why “in recent years the reputation of the imperial courts has improved considerably.” Fahrmeir, “Centralization versus Particularism in the ‘Third Germany,’” 113.

35 HASK, Bestand 350 (Französische Verwaltung), 5265, part 1.

36 For example, Johann Windscheid's collection of legal and historical arguments against the privileges of Cologne, Commentatio de Stapula (Düsseldorf: Stahl, 1775), written in reply to a 1774 tract published in Cologne, defending the city's traditional river privileges, Stapula Urbio-Aggripiensis. These and other contributions to the debate are in GStAP III.HA I Nr. 1368; a collection of such works is in HASK 350/5721 “Drückschriften über das Cölner Stapelrecht 1776–1795.”

37 Biro, Sydney, The German Policy of Revolutionary France, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 695Google Scholar.

38 Israel, ed., Major Peace Treaties of Modern History, vol. 1, 441. Biro notes that free navigation on the river had been part of the French-Austrian armistice in the winter of 1795–96. Biro, German Policy, 694.

39 French note of May 3, 1798, summarized in Solms-Laubach's report to Stein, February 28, 1814, GStAP III.HA I Nr. 1367.

40 “Les droits d'Étape soient abolis, ansi que les corporations de bateliers,” ibid., GStAP III.HA I Nr. 1367.

41 Original documentation in Heinrich Freiherr Munch von Bellinghausen, ed., Protocoll der Reichs-Friedens-Deputation zu Rastatt, 3 vols. (Rastatt: Sprinzing, 1800).

42 This transitional phase between Campo-Formio and the new Octroi agreement in 1804 is well described in Gothein, Geschichtliche Entwicklung der Rheinschiffahrt, 18–29.

43 Article 39 reprinted in für die Rheinschiffahrt, Zentral-Kommission, Rheinurkunden. Sammlung zwischenstaatlicher Vereinbarungen, landesrechtlichter Ausführungsverordnungen und sonstiger wichtiger Urkunden über die Rheinschiffahrt seit 1803, vol. 1 (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1918)Google Scholar, 1.

44 Ibid., 6–25.

45 Revenues collected on the right bank in excess of these costs could be used to support Arch-Chancellor Dalberg and other disposed German princes as stipulated in several articles of the RDHS, but it is not correct to say, as Peter Wilson and many others have, that “France promised [Dalberg] half the revenue” from future Rhine tolls. Peter Wilson, “Bolstering the Prestige of the Habsburgs: The End of the Holy Roman Empire,” The International History Revue 28 (Dec. 4, 2006): 718. Dalberg was never in favor of this arrangement and resigned his claims in 1810.

46 As early as July 1797, Talleyrand told the Margrave of Baden that one important French motive for reforming Rhine commerce was to relieve French shippers of appearing before foreign (German) courts that were notoriously slow and expensive. Biro, German Policy, 965.

47 Substantial original documentation on Couquebert-Montbret's activities are in HASK350/5265/1 and 2, “Organization des Rheinschiffahrtsoctrois und die Rheinzölle,” 1804–1809.

48 Ockhart, Johann, Der Rhein nach der Länge seines Laufs und der Beschaffenheit seines Stromes (Mainz: Kupferberg, 1816)Google Scholar. A summary of these major developments is in Gothein, Geschichtliche Entwicklung der Rheinschiffahrt, 43 ff.

49 Gothein's data in Geschichtliche Entwicklung der Rheinschiffahrt, 25–26; data for 1807 in GStAP, IHA, Rep.113, Nr. 242.

50 Eichhoff, J. J., Topographische-Statistische Darstellung des Rheins (Cologne: M. Dumont-Schauberg, 1814), 18Google Scholar.

51 Ellis, Geoffrey, The Napoleonic Empire (Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1991), 102CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 Report by Sebastian Nau, Bavarian member of the Rhine Commission, November 15, 1831, Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv (hereafter BayHStA), Munich, MA 63447.

53 Nau's reports of December 21, 1827, and February 18, 1828, both in BayHStA, MA 63447.

54 Report on Rhine revenues for 1824, dated September 13, 1825, GStAP, IHA, Rep.113, Nr. 163.

55 GStAP, IIIHA I, Nr. 1367.

56 “Art.V—La navigation sur la Rhin, du point où il devient navigable jusqu'à la mer et réciproquement, sera libre, de telle sorte qu'elle ne puisse être interdite a personne.” Zentral-Kommission für die Rheinschiffahrt, Rheinurkunden, vol. 1, 36.

57 Ibid., 42.

58 Nassau issued a new constitution on September 2, 1814; Bavaria on May 26, 1818; Baden on August 22, 1818; and Hessen-Darmstadt on December 17, 1820.

59 Set in a larger pattern of Prussian economic liberalization that begins with the Allgemeines Landrecht of 1794 and runs through the tariff reform of 1818, Prussian policy on the Rhine is more understandable, perhaps even predictable.

60 Documentation of the commission's work at Vienna is in Zentral-Kommission für die Rheinschiffahrt, Rheinurkunden, vol. 1, 50–162; unpublished material on Prussian efforts in this body is in GStAP III.HA I Nr. 1371.

61 From 1816 to 1820, for example, annual gross revenues collected on the conventional Rhine between Strassbourg and Emmerich averaged 2.2 million francs, calculated from the report of Bavarian commissioner Nau to Munich, November 15, 1831, BayHStA, MA63447. At that time, 2.2 million francs equaled 1.01 million gulden, or about half the annual budget of the Duchy of Nassau.

62 Zentral-Kommission für die Rheinschiffahrt, Rheinurkunden, vol. 1, 42–50. In accordance with the documents themselves, this essay uses Roman numerals when referring to the Vienna Rhine articles of 1815 and Arabic numerals when referring to articles of the 1831 Rhine Treaty.

63 On Dutch obstructionism, begin with Bouman, P. J., Rotterdam en het Duitsche achterland, 1831–1851 (Amsterdam: H. J. Paris, 1931)Google Scholar, which surpasses any German-language account of which I am aware. For the 1831 treaty, see Zentral-Kommission für die Rheinschiffahrt, Rheinurkunden, vol. 1, 212–273.

64 As early as 1832, Hanover cited the “beneficial effects” of the Rhine regulations under the Central Commission in its arguments to the German Confederation for a liberalization of the transit trade in Germany; see the 29th Bundestagsitzung, August 9, 1832, in Oncken, H. and Saemich, F. E. M., eds., Vorgeschichte und Begründung des Deutschen Zollvereins 1815–1834, vol. 1 (Berlin: Hobbing, 1934), 272–73Google Scholar.

65 Kunz, Andreas, “The Performance of Inland Navigation in Germany, 1835–1935: A Reassessment of Traffic Flows,” in Inland Navigation and Economic Development in Nineteenth Century Europe, ed. Kunz, Andreas and Armstrong, John (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1995)Google Scholar, 49, table I.

66 Wilson, Peter, “Still a Monstrosity? Some Reflections on Early Modern German Statehood,” The Historical Journal 49 (2006): 2, 573–575CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the literature cited there.

67 Volckart, Oliver, “Politische Zersplitterung und Wirtschaftswachstum im Alten Reich, ca. 1650–1800,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftgeschichte 86, no. 1 (1999): 1–38Google Scholar.

68 Ibid., 3–6.

69 Volcarkt admits that during the Empire, problems “in interterritorial trade remained.” Ibid., 37.

70 In his many essays on economic and commercial developments during the Napoleonic period, Dufraisse occasionally referred to extensive changes underway on the Rhine and sometimes identified the Octroi administration by name, but he never addressed the river's governance as a subject in its own right. See, for example, Dufraisse, Roger, “Industrie et commerce dans le palatinat à l'époque française (1797–1813),” in Vom alten Reich zu neuer Staatlichkeit. Kontinuität und Wandel im Gefolge der französichen Revolution am Mittelrhein, ed. Gerlich, Alois (Wisebaden: Franz Steiner, 1982), 108Google Scholar.

71 Exceptions notable for brief mentions of the Octroi administration are Diefendorf, Businessmen and Politics, 178–179; Graumann, Sabine, Französische Verwaltung am Niederrhein. Das Roerdepartement 1798–1814 (Essen: Klartext, 1990), 125Google Scholar; Rowe, Michael, From Reich to State: The Rhineland in the Revolutionary Age, 1780–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 199CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Geoffrey Ellis's brief summary of the Octroi agreement contains numerous inaccuracies, beginning with a misidentification of the “droit de relâche or Stapelrecht” as one and the same the same privilege, when in fact they were two distinctly different rights and were treated as such by the Octroi; Ellis, Geoffrey, Napoleon's Continental Blockade: The Case of Alsace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 52Google Scholar, footnote 64.

72 To cite just one recent example from the voluminous literature on the Continental System, Katherine Aalestad attributes “additional river traffic” on the Rhine after 1806 and the improved economic fortunes of Strasbourg to the “elimination of British competition” and “the shift in commerce from the Atlantic seaboard to the Rhine” as results of Napoleon's Continental Blockade, without recognizing the more immediate impact of the Octroi's reforms on these Rhine developments. See Aalestad, Katherine, “Revisiting the Continental System: Exploitation to Self-Destruction in the Napoleonic Empire,” in Napoleon and his Empire: Europe 1804–1814, ed. Dwyer, Philip and Forrest, Alan (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 116Google Scholar.

73 In recently discussing nineteenth-century developments on the river, Dieter Strauch consigned the Octoi to the “prehistory” of the period; French achievements find no reference in his discussion after 1815. Dieter Strauch, “Die Entwicklung des Rheinschifffahrtsrechts zwischen 1815 und 1868,” in Der Rhein als Verkehrsweg, ed. von Looz-Corswarem and Mölich, 61–92. Hans Jaeger makes no reference to earlier French activities in his brief discussion of the 1831 treaty; Jaeger, Wirtschaftsordnung, 52.

74 Frank Tipton, “The Regional Dimension in the Historical Analysis of Transport Flows,” in Inland Navigation and Economic Development, ed. Kunz and Armstrong, 179.