Restoring Credit in Post-Napoleonic France: Settling French War Claims

‘The requisitions take everything from us’

To understand this massive effort at indemnification of the domestic victims of the Napoleonic Wars, one must remember that between late 1813 and mid-1815, France experienced two invasions and occupations – and no less than three regime changes – which left its inhabitants reeling. At the beginning of 1814, as three Allied armies entered France from the north-east, east, and south-west, France had been at war – with only a brief truce – for over 20 years. Following the coup of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799, it had conquered most of Europe. But in the wake of the Russian Debacle of 1812, the country was depleted, materially as well as morally.

Napoleon’s last campaigns intensified the burden of requisition along with conscription within France, especially along the frontiers, which had to defend themselves – especially in fortified towns – against invasion. By late 1813 and early 1814, as Allied forces crossed into France, communities were asked to supply massive quantities of food, drink, forage, horses, equipment, and transports. In the northern Alsatian town of Wissembourg, for example, the minutes of the municipal council for late 1813 and early 1814 are full of references to requisitions of horses and forage. To fund these expenses, the town sold a cut of wood from a nearby forest. ¹⁰ These requisitions were usually organized by civilian officials following orders from military commissaires ordonnateurs and commissaires extraordinaires. Increasingly, however, these military officials requisitioned materials directly from suppliers, who were issued bons, or warrants, for reimbursement by the state. (By definition, a requisition is a deferred purchase by the state, against a receipt.) In towns, the requisitions were often funded by extra taxes; in rural communes, however, where violence between invading troops and local inhabitants tended to be greater, they were usually supplied in kind. By early 1814, the country was suffering not just from military defeat but from economic devastation, with rising unemployment and increasing resistance to taxation. In rural areas, where subsistence farming still dominated, requisitions strained agricultural production to such an extent that some peasants were left without enough grain to plant for the next season. By the time of Napoleon’s exile to the island of Elba, France was on the verge of bankruptcy.

Despite the catastrophic state of the public treasury, the restored monarchy of Louis XVIII was committed to paying the arrears left by the Empire. Taking as his motto ‘A State must pay for everything, even its mistakes’, the new minister of finance, Baron Joseph-Dominique Louis, insisted upon reimbursing the debts accumulated by Napoleon:

They were contracted, no doubt, to undertake foolish wars. But whether the money thus collected was employed well or badly, it was borrowed in the name of France, and it would be scandalous as well as impolitic to disavow them. Without upholding the engagements of the Treasury, one has no credit, and without credit, it will be impossible to satisfy the most pressing engagements of the State. ¹¹

This pledge was endorsed by the Restoration’s founding Charter, whose article 70 stated, ‘The public debt is guaranteed. Every form of engagement made by the state with its creditors is inviolable.’ Following this logic, in its first finance law dated 23 September 1814, the new regime guaranteed the debts accrued by the Empire, including the costs of the invasion earlier that year. In late 1814, it began to consider claims for these damages.

Before it could compensate the victims of the invasion of 1814, however, Napoleon returned from exile to re-seize power in France, in March 1815. In fact, as Pierre Branda has argued in a seminal work on the role of money in the Napoleonic Empire, the financial policy of the First Restoration may actually have encouraged his return. ¹² To honour the debts of the Empire, the new regime had to raise taxes – including the unpopular excise taxes on alcohol and tobacco as well as the ‘extraordinary’ centimes imposed by Napoleon – and cut expenses, especially for the military. It also proposed to sell 300,000 hectares of forests and other communal properties. These measures generated considerable opposition to the restored monarchy, especially among the officers and soldiers who had served Napoleon and who supported his return in the spring of 1815.

The Hundred Days between Napoleon’s return to power in March and his second abdication following the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815 constituted the most expensive financial quarter in French history. Although the short military campaign of the Hundred Days did not exacerbate the deficit too much, the invasion that followed in the summer of 1815 was even more devastating than that of the spring of 1814. Following Waterloo, France was covered with over one million troops from almost all of the countries of Europe who, in addition to demanding endless requisitions and contributions, pillaged and destroyed private as well as public property (see Map 2). Following the Second Treaty of Paris in November 1815, most of the Allied troops evacuated, but a force of 150,000 men, plus 50,000 horses, was stationed at French expense in seven departments along the frontier as an ‘occupation of guarantee’ against revolution, until the French indemnified the Allies for the expenses they incurred as a result of the return of Napoleon, to the tune of 700 million francs. ¹³

OPEN IN VIEWER

Map 2.

Map of the Allied Occupation of France, Summer 1815.

The return of Napoleon seriously exacerbated the country’s financial situation. Already depleted of resources from the last years of the Napoleonic Wars, the inhabitants of France – especially in the north-east – were faced with another round of requisitioning to supply, first, the imperial army in its re-mobilization and, then, the occupying Allied troops. During the second half of 1815, in the Haut-Rhin alone the population rose by 300,000 troops, plus over 90,000 horses. These troops requisitioned – if not just pillaged – massive quantities of supplies and ‘contributions’, ranging from food and forage, to workers, wagons, and horses, to public funds. While the burdens of requisitions fell unequally – with communities on the plains struggling to supply money, while those in the mountains lacked food and wine; and with merchants and proprietors who had benefitted from the Empire often being forced to pay more than devoted royalists – they devastated the entire region, which had already been suffering from the events of the last few years. ¹⁴ Based on the claims submitted later by local inhabitants to departmental authorities for requisitioning, pillaging, and destruction of property, the expenses for this second invasion of the Haut-Rhin were estimated at 28 million francs; with those of the first invasion in 1814, they totalled some 41 million francs. ¹⁵ As a local noblewoman named Madame de Berckheim summarized the situation in Colmar, ‘The requisitions extract everything from us, down to the last penny: the troops change, but not our misfortunes.’ ¹⁶

The presence of these troops forced governments at all levels to take extraordinary measures. In late July, the requisitioning process was systematized by coordinated French and Allied commissions. To meet the demands of the Allies, the government of Louis XVIII, who was restored again, resorted to a forced ‘loan’ of 100 million francs on its wealthiest tax-payers in August. This exceptional tax was imposed mainly on those departments that were not occupied by the Allies – or at least not in great number or for an extended period. Nonetheless, the department of the Haut-Rhin still had to pay 135,000 francs, as did the Meuse. Other occupied departments were charged even more: the Moselle paid 1,480,000 francs and the Nord, 4,330,000. ¹⁷ In early 1816, the requisition process was centralized in the ministry of war, whose own quarter-masters and contractors were henceforth charged with procuring and distributing supplies to the occupying troops. In the meantime, however, it remained in the hands of departmental authorities. Through late 1815 and early 1816, these authorities issued countless bons, or receipts, to local citizens for expenses incurred for the occupying troops. As a result of the Hundred Days, the French confronted an unprecedented financial disaster, whose legacy would persist for over a decade, as interest payments replaced war costs as a main budget item. ¹⁸

The Second Restoration thus began amidst financial as well as political chaos. In addition to arrears of 695 million francs that remained unpaid from the First Empire, it faced the expenses of lodging, feeding, and paying the army of occupation, along with the reparations due to the Allied powers – and an as yet undetermined amount of indemnities to Allied nationals who had suffered from the Napoleonic Wars, which would eventually be negotiated by the commander-in-chief of the occupation, the Duke of Wellington, down to 240 million francs. The costs of the invasion, including the extraordinary contribution of August 1815, generated considerable resentment at every level of society, provoking divisions between departments, communes, and individual tax-payers and suppliers. In the Haut-Rhin, this resentment was directed at the capital of Colmar, whose ‘good treatment’ by the authorities was denounced by mayors of smaller towns such as Mersheim, who complained in September 1815 that, ‘considering that all the grain supplies are found in Colmar, it is unjust to make the other communes, even more exhausted than the inhabitants of Colmar, contribute to providing their warehouses’. Among Bonapartists in particular there was some resistance – even if it took a ‘passive’ form such as supplying bad-quality provisions or issuing erroneous tax-rolls – to furnishing requisitions and, especially, paying taxes to support the foreign armies who had restored Louis XVIII yet again. However, there were also some who profited from the presence of these foreign troops on French soil. For instance, hostel-keepers and carriage-owners as well as big military suppliers benefited from the extra business provided by their stay in the north-east. Among these, Jewish suppliers were often scapegoated – and sometimes punished with non-reimbursement – for the speculation and fraud inherent in the supply process. ¹⁹ With the population of 28 million already divided between royalists and Bonapartists in a virtual civil war, such burdens threatened to destabilize the monarchy, which had already been overthrown once, even more.

‘The best method, . . . for discrediting a government that no longer exists, is to do better’

In 1815, even more than in 1814, the restored monarchy needed to re-establish its political as well as financial credit. Understanding the tight relationship between the two, it sought to heal the wounds of both civil and foreign war by settling its many debts as quickly as possible. Recognizing, as one state creditor wrote in August 1815, that ‘the best method, the only honourable and useful one, for discrediting a government that no longer exists, is to do better than it’, the new regime made repaying its creditors, domestic and foreign, one of its main priorities. In its approach to these creditors, it followed a long tradition of ‘repairing’ the damages of war through patronage. But, in its effort to rally property-owners – many of whom had supported the Revolution and Empire – to its regime, the restored monarchy also developed a new approach to indemnities for war damages, based more on Enlightenment notions of individual property rights. This approach to indemnification necessitated the invention of new procedures and institutions, ad hoc. ²⁰

Since the Old Regime, the monarchy had routinely aided victims of disasters, including wars as well as famines and fires, on a case-by-case basis, through charitable grants. Connected to the theory of ‘just war’, such reparative justice was continued by the revolutionary and imperial regimes, but only sporadically and often ineffectively. But the last campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars increased the need for such reparations, at least within France. In both 1814 and 1815, Allied as well as French leaders – including Napoleon in a decree dated 6 April 1815 – were quick to offer indemnities and grants to French victims. In addition to supplying wood for rebuilding, the royal family donated 11 million francs (10 million from the civil list and 1 million from the funds allotted for the marriage of the Duc de Berri) in 1816 for the relief of the departments that had ‘suffered most from the calamities of war’. Intended to aid the poor, this relief was awarded, via commissions of notables in each arrondissement, to peasants and workers paying less than 200 francs in annual property taxes. ²¹

However, in the wake of the Revolution, the monarchy shifted from relying exclusively on such patronage to undertaking more systematic indemnification to repair the damages from war. Unlike patronage, this new approach to reparation was grounded in a notion of equality between all citizens-subjects. Such an idea had arisen in the late eighteenth century, most notably in The Law of Nations by Emer Vattel. In Part III on the law of war, this work included a section on the question of ‘Whether the state is bound to indemnify the subjects for damages sustained in war’, which concluded that, while it did need to remedy damages done by the state itself, deliberately and preventively, it was not responsible for those occurring accidentally, as a result of actions by the enemy. However, even if the state was not bound morally to compensate such damages, Vattel encouraged it to do so, noting,

But it is perfectly consonant to the duties of the state and the sovereign, and, of course, perfectly equitable, and even strictly just, to relieve, as far as possible, those unhappy sufferers who have been ruined by the ravages of war, as likewise to take care of a family whose head and support has lost his life in the service of the state. There are many debts which are considered as sacred by the man who knows his duty, although they do not afford any ground of action against him. ²²

In contrast to royal patronage, this notion of the debts owed by a sovereign to ‘unhappy sufferers’ was now grounded in the natural rights of all victims.

Following this logic, the French revolutionaries pledged to compensate the victims of war, in a preamble to the law of 31 July 1792:

The National Assembly, considering that if, in a war whose object is the conservation of liberty and the independence of the French constitution, every citizen owes to the State the sacrifice of his life and his fortune, the State must, in its turn, protect the citizens who devote themselves to its defence; wanting to give foreign nations the first example of fraternity that unites the citizens of a free people and that renders common to all individuals of the social body the damages inflicted upon one of its members, the Assembly decrees the urgency and poses the principle of national responsibility.

In Article 1 of this law, the Assembly promised to provide indemnities to citizens who had lost to external enemies all or part of their properties; in Article 10, however, it stipulated that these indemnities would be proportional to the financial need of the claimant and reserved mostly for those who had served the Republic in its administration or defence. These limits on the right of indemnification were reiterated by the Convention, which in a law dated 14–16 August 1793 excluded from the right to compensation for damages suffered as a result of invasion or defence those who had aided the enemy, a stipulation that was often interpreted very loosely by the government. Moreover, these and subsequent revolutionary laws on indemnification of war damages were not always implemented due to the financial travails of the various regimes that succeeded each other over the next two decades. ²³

Despite the financial difficulties it inherited, the Restoration monarchy went much farther in indemnifying its subjects – as well as its former enemies – for the damages they had suffered as a result of war. Out of a pragmatic need to satisfy the Allies and to reassure the property-owners who had profited from the Revolution and Empire, the new regime committed itself to fulfilling all of its debts. As the new finance minister, Louis-Emmanuel, Comte Corvetto, said in proposing a budget for 1816 to the Chamber of Deputies in December 1815, ‘Even if our troubles were greater, it would still be good, moral, honourable for the king and for France, to proclaim, amidst the ruins, the guarantee of the promise that was given.’ Invoking the ‘sacred right of property’, the finance minister insisted upon ‘an incontestable principle: that the State owes to its creditors full payment of their credits; and this principle is not only for the morality of the government, but in its interest; because faithfulness in engagements produces confidence, and confidence is the foundation of public credit’. ²⁴ In the interest of the public credit, Corvetto’s proposed budget included provisions for paying the arrears of the Empire as well as the sums owed to the Allies, via the extension of excise taxes and customs duties in addition to increased borrowing against government annuities.

The logic behind the government’s proposed finance bill was endorsed by a number of commentators in and outside the legislature. During the debate in the Chamber of Deputies in March 1816, economist and politician Charles Ganilh, for instance, emphasized that it would popularize the monarchy: ‘The repayment of the arrears, commanded by justice as well as politics, will make the name of Louis XVIII loved and blessed in the hut of the poor man, and these benedictions will be no less dear to the heart of a good King than those that he receives in the most rich and opulent salons.’ ²⁵ Employing similar language, the state creditor who had said the only way to discredit the previous regime was to best it wrote another pamphlet celebrating the benefits of credit: ‘Produced by the faithfulness of the government, it assures that of its agents; it sustains, it compensates probity, it excites zeal. Its influence is immense, its results incalculable; it honours Kings, augments their power, and makes prosper States.’ Or, as a former exchange agent named Guillaume and an ex-paymaster for the French army in Tuscany named Rey wrote in a pamphlet on finance the next year, ‘Credit, by tying together the fortune of all the citizens to that of the State, has the effect of ensuring, of multiplying the resources of the State, and of reinvigorating the national spirit.’ ²⁶

Against this logic, critics of the government’s proposal insisted that repayment of the creditors of the former regime, including the victims of the invasions of 1814 and 1815, would exacerbate the political divisions opened by the Revolution, encourage financial speculation, and deplete the resources of departments and communes as well as the Crown. In the Chamber of Deputies, there was considerable opposition to the proposed budget for 1816 among Ultra-royalists, who dominated the committee charged with examining the bill. Among these, one of the most vocal was Joseph, Comte de Villèle, who gave several speeches against the proposed finance measure. Arguing that financial disorder had been the cause of the original Revolution as well as the most recent invasion of France, Villèle complained that the new finance bill would favour some creditors – agents and partisans of the previous regime – over others, including the victims of the Terror who had not received any compensation. As he later asserted in his memoirs, with regard to the related reparations to the Allies, ‘The innocent pay for the guilty.’ Opposing the government’s reliance on communal properties (biens communaux) and foreign loans to meet its financial obligations, Villèle was concerned instead to protect the interests of ordinary tax-payers. In the interest of ‘terminating the revolution’, he advocated ‘erecting a brass wall between the past and the present, and escaping the shadow of the revolution, never to return there’. ²⁷

Under pressure from the Ultra-royalist legislative committee, the ministry revised its proposal to consolidate the arrears prior to 1 April 1814 with those accumulated up to 1 January 1816, the definitive settlement of which was postponed until 1820, after liberation from foreign occupation; in addition, it suspended the sale of state forests and restored communal properties. Nonetheless, the government insisted upon indemnification of damages from the invasions of 1814 and 1815. In a finance law passed by both chambers on 28 April 1816, it included a section (Title III) confirming the royal decrees that had pledged reimbursement of all additional taxes including the extraordinary contribution of 100 million francs in August 1815 as well as the requisitions levied by Allied troops during the invasion and occupation of that year. To back such financial guarantees, this law re-established a (better-funded) Caisse d’amortissement, or sinking fund, to retire state debt. The law of 28 April 1816 also stipulated that, in addition to the 11 million francs donated by the King, all back-taxes due on 1 January 1815 would be employed to aid the departments that had most suffered during this military occupation of 1815. The division of this money would be regulated by royal decree. The indemnification process was further clarified by subsequent finance laws, of 25 March 1817, which accorded creditors paper notes to be exchanged for rentes in five instalments as determined by a lottery beginning on 1 January 1821, and of 15 March 1818, which set a limit of 61.8 million francs for the debts of 1801 to 1810 and 297.6 million francs for the debts of 1810 to 1816, including the damages from the invasions of 1814 and 1815. ²⁸

Countering opposition from Ultra-royalist deputies, who argued that the monarchy should not have to pay for the sins of the previous regime, the government committed itself to reimbursing not just the extraordinary loan of 100 million francs from August 1815, but the other taxes and requisitions imposed on inhabitants during the invasions of both 1815 and 1814. In confronting its financial crisis, the Second Restoration sought above all to re-establish its own legitimacy. Acknowledging the link between public credit and public opinion in a representative government, it prioritized the indemnification of domestic war victims begun by the First Restoration. For the Second even more than the First Restoration, this process was critical for assuring the population – especially bourgeois property-owners, who had profited the most from the Revolution and now bore the cost of the defeat of the Empire – how much the new government differed from that of the ancien régime, in its commitment to honouring its debts. ²⁹ Despite the already substantial burdens on the public treasury, the newly restored government committed itself to compensating these victims, not just for the invasion of 1814 but now also for the invasion of 1815. In this process, it relied heavily on the local administrative hierarchy inherited from the Napoleonic regime, including mayors and sub-prefects who had been on the front lines during the invasions, but especially the prefects, some of whom had served the First Empire and/or First Restoration and some of whom were selected by the Second Restoration to replace Bonapartists. ³⁰

Claims Commissions

To manage the indemnification of the debtors of the invasions of 1814 and 1815, the finance law of 28 April 1816 developed a number of new institutions and procedures. First, to regularize the tax burden of the invasions, this law instituted a commission in all departments to verify and rectify local accounts, reimbursing those who had paid more than their share with the remainder collected from those who had not yet paid enough. In addition, to reimburse the other costs of war, the law mandated another commission, only in those departments that had been invaded, to verify and determine the amounts due to individuals for requisitions and contracts for the Allies during the invasions. According to the law, all claims for such indemnities needed to be submitted to the commission in the relevant department by 15 August 1816. After approval by the prefect of the department, each claim was forwarded to the ministry of finance, which in turn issued a credit to the supplier via the payeur of the department, against the account of that ministry, if the debt was owed by the department, or the ministry of war, if it was assumed by the state (following the systematization of requisitioning after November 1815; see Fig. 1). ³¹

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Organizational Chart of Process for Liquidation of War Claims. Département du Haut-Rhin, 1816.

Following this law, twin commissions – for verification of taxes and settlement of requisitions – were formed in the relevant departments. Each of these commissions was subdivided into two subcommissions, one for the costs of 1813–14 and one for those of 1815. The first commission regarding taxes – whether at the departmental, cantonal, or municipal level – was charged with validating tax-rolls that had been hastily established (and sometimes altered, for political reasons) during the invasions, collecting from those who had not paid their share and applying the revenue to reimburse those who had paid too much. The purpose of this commission was summarized by the minister of the interior in a circular letter to prefects on 13 May 1816: ‘It is obvious that these instructions have as their goal to erase all trace of any irregular operations into which the administration might have been led in the state of war in 1815.’ ³² The settlement commission, on the other hand, was supposed to verify all contracts and supplies furnished from the beginning of the invasion until the first of December 1815, the date at which all requisitions were supposed to have been taken over by the ministry of war. (Given that this administrative transition continued into the next year, there were actually a high number of claims from suppliers for requisitions between December 1815 and February 1816.) In most departments, including the Haut-Rhin, all claims had to be supported by receipts or contracts from the local ‘subsistence committee’ or departmental administration. This excluded the many requisitions furnished directly to the Allies. In the Haut-Rhin, verified claims were to be reimbursed via warrants on the departmental treasury, for requisitions in kind, or via tax deductions, in the case of contributions in money. ³³

Chosen by the conseil général of each department, the taxation and settlement commissions were generally composed of local notables, who were not paid for their service. In the Haut-Rhin, where there was significant overlap between the two commissions, at least two members were military quarter-masters; most were royalists with administrative experience, though many had also served the Empire. ³⁴ Both commissions relied heavily on assistance from local mayors, who were often asked to supply the commissions with registers of all the claims for damages in their communes. In the case of the Haut-Rhin, these registers contained bilingual lists of all claimants, dates of requisitions, supplies, quantities, prices, sums received, and sums still due. To handle all of the paperwork involved in the claims process, the commission responsible for reimbursing requisitions relied on a Settlement Bureau, which received claims and supporting documents from individuals, compiled their dossiers, and submitted them to the relevant subcommission; in the absence of adequate documentation, this bureau had to conduct an investigation to verify and quantify the claim, with the help of local experts, for instance in the food or construction business. In the Haut-Rhin, this Bureau employed six clerks (three for the subcommission for 1813–14 and three for that for 1815) and sometimes more employees, for whom expenses averaged about 600 to 700 francs per month. ³⁵

As the need for this bureau suggests, the indemnification process generated massive quantities of documents, which now fill hundreds of boxes in municipal and departmental archives. While much of this documentation is in the dry form of receipts or contracts, between the lines may be glimpsed intensely personal stories of the difficulties of the last years of the Napoleonic Wars in France. In the town of Valenciennes in the Nord, where 125 inhabitants filed claims totalling anywhere from 100 to 13,000 francs, including for numerous horses requisitioned by both French and Allied troops, one unfortunate merchant named Webber, with a wife and five children but ‘without property or pension’, demanded compensation for the following list of expenses incurred as a result of the siege of 1815: wages paid to diverse persons for transporting the goods of his shop, some household effects, and his children before the siege, 6 francs; for the same, after the siege, 4 francs; lost belongings, between 10 and 30 francs, at least, averaged to 15 francs; a little window he had to break, 6 francs; lodging for his wife and children for ten days in a cellar and other extra expenses for this ‘sad sojourn’, 15 francs; damage to a piece of cloth, caused by humidity (from the inundation of the city during the siege), 20 francs; deprivation of all means of subsistence not only during the time that the enemy shot at the town, but also during most of the time the town doors were closed, notably in the absolute stagnation of his ‘little trade’, 100 francs; expenses necessitated by the absence of two of his children that he evacuated from the town for 28 days, 42 francs. Together, these claims totalled 208 francs. ³⁶ A similar claim, from an inhabitant of Bar-le-Duc, totalled an estimated 127 francs for objects taken from his room in the prefecture by the Bavarian army on 3 July 1815, including six sheets of cloth, four muslin neckties, two pairs of white cotton stockings, two other coloured pairs of stockings, one straw hat, one pair of silver shoe buckles, another pair of silver garter buckles, and 4 francs 50 in pocket money. ³⁷ Given the subsequent loss of the records of the ministry of finance, it is difficult to quantify these claims for the nation as a whole. However, for 1815, damages in the Haut-Rhin were estimated at over 28 million francs; in Colmar alone, the expense of the Austrian occupation totalled some 256,585 francs, of which 162,212 were for lodging and 94,373 were for furniture and various maintenance expenses. ³⁸ In the Meuse, between 1 April and 1 December 1815, requisitions amounted to a similar sum of 23,144,000 francs, including 300,000 francs for losses of horses and wagons, 762,000 for diverse supplies demanded irregularly by the invaders, 160,000 francs for the maintenance of hospitals created for the Allies, 470,000 francs for the destruction suffered by the town of Longwy during a siege, 273,000 francs for the destruction of the village of Haute-Yutz ordered by the French general Joseph Hugo (father of the writer), and 111,000 francs for a fire set by the Prussians at Chénières. ³⁹ Based on a compilation of reports from prefects to the ministry of interior following the law of 28 April 1816, Roger André has estimated the cost of the invasion of 1815 at more than 495 million francs. ⁴⁰

Herculean as it was, the verification of these claims for requisitions was critical for the indemnification process. For the authorities, it was a question of re-establishing confidence in the state, by substantiating their decisions and reimbursing only honest suppliers. ⁴¹ This process was not without difficulties and contradictions. In practice, the national state’s imperative to act quickly was often impeded by the notables on the departmental commissions, whose reputation depended on fairness to all parties, as well by local mayors, whose slowness in compiling the necessary registers and justifications of all claims in turn frustrated the commissions. However, as the research of Thomas Gauchet on the Haut-Rhin suggests, most of the work of these commissions proceeded without bias: ‘The diverse procedures of reimbursement put in place aimed precisely to rationalize the process, to prove that the administration based its work on foundations that were healthy and worthy of confidence.’ ⁴² Especially in its reliance on (unpaid) expert artisans and professionals to vouch for the costs of the expenses of war, the departmental commissions contributed to the development of what Pierre Karila-Cohen has called, in contrast to the Leviathan State, the ‘Expert State.’ ⁴³

Settlement

Once the claims of tax-payers and suppliers had been verified by the departmental commissions, they were forwarded by the prefect to the ministry of finance, which reviewed them to determine the amount and method of payment. In cases where the debts to suppliers were owed by the department, they were referred back to the conseil général, which had to repay them, usually by reducing the taxes of these suppliers at the expense of other tax-payers. In most cases, though, where the expenses were covered by the state, the ministry of war issued a bill payable in Paris, to be claimed by the creditor via the payeur of the department. ⁴⁴

Following settlement, many claimants ‘abandoned’ their indemnities to their localities, which used them to rebuild churches, hospitals, city halls, and other infrastructure. In Dijon, one Bonapartist fédéré who as late as 1831 was still claiming 323 francs in damages for having to convert his auberge into a warehouse for wine and straw in 1815, plus another 378 francs for lodging 5,922 horses in 1814, promised to donate one-eighth of his credit to the communal subscription for a monument to the victims of the July Revolution of 1830. Illustrating the peer pressure to donate these funds to their communities, those who did not relinquish their indemnities were often cited on local registers. ⁴⁵ In many communes, as Jacques Hantraye has noted, such public works, particularly church bells, served in the absence of official commemorative monuments as reminders of the invasions of 1814 and 1815. ⁴⁶

The complexity of repayment prompted the appearance of a number of financial agents, to mediate between the ministries in Paris and suppliers as well as officials, especially mayors, in the departments. As Gauchet has noted of the Haut-Rhin, where the prefect Casteja received offers from at least two such agents, ‘Such financial transfers implied in effect a significant rate of commission for such intermediaries.’ While Casteja chose the agent Goubault because of his connections to local notables, numerous other, ‘less scrupulous’ individuals scoured the countryside to profit from the settlement of the damages of war. ⁴⁷ Spreading rumours that royal authorities would not be able to pay their debts, these agents offered to redeem the warrants of suppliers at a price below the actual value. By undermining the state’s effort at legitimization through indemnification, these speculators posed a threat to authorities at all levels. In addition, the difficulty of transferring money between Paris and provincial towns such as Colmar – let alone small villages in the countryside – made embezzlement relatively easy for functionaries. In the Haut-Rhin, there was a single, well-documented, case of embezzlement, by a clerk in the prefecture. While such corruption was infrequent – and punished by ‘military discipline’ or removal from office – it did mar the effectiveness of the process of indemnification for legitimizing the restored monarchy. ⁴⁸

So did the pace and division of reimbursements. Although it was supposed to be completed by August 1816, the process of indemnification dragged into the next year and beyond. In Dijon, for instance, one creditor, Laureau-Burgiard, who demanded 207 francs 75 centimes for 1,385 horseshoes furnished to Allied cavalry in 1814, was not repaid until September 1821; another, Carrelet, who was employed as chief of the subsistence office during the Allied occupation between 20 July and 30 December 1815, was not reimbursed for 15 years, until December 1830, despite numerous pleas to local authorities, including one in which he protested, ‘After all the pains I have given myself, one refuses to pay my salary, to a father of a family who has no other resource except his work as a clerk, as his sole fortune.’ ⁴⁹

Moreover, while the indemnification instituted by the law of 28 April 1816 was supposed to succour those who had suffered most from the invasions of 1814 and 1815, it tended to favour the richest tax-payers in each locality, whose support was critical for the new regime of limited suffrage. Numerous claims were rejected by local authorities, sometimes because of profiteering or falsification but mostly for lack of documentation, which disproportionally affected the poorest classes. In the Moselle, for instance, the commission of requisitions rejected 3,680 payments made at the residences of inhabitants and 1,740 demands without justifications, out of a total of 9,747 claims for requisitions and 2,602 for diverse losses. ⁵⁰ As late as July 1820, the department of the Nord, which alone supported a third of the army remaining for the occupation of guarantee between 1815 and 1818, still claimed it was owed some 1,400,000 francs for diverse war expenses. ⁵¹ Frustrated by the process, numerous subjects, usually the poorest, addressed petitions (often via public writers) to the administration.

In fact, the settlement process continued well after the liberation of France by the Allies in November 1818. In October 1820, the interior ministry compiled a report on the ‘State of the Settlement of the Expenses Charged to the Departments’ as a result of the military occupation of 1815 up to the date of the peace treaty. For each department, it noted the expenses recognized and settled by the departmental commissions; the extra contributions authorized from the departments and reparations made by the communes; the extra and local resources stemming from indemnification, aid, remaining property, and sales of supplies; funds provided by the treasury from a credit of 200 million francs in 1815; the remainder due from the treasury; and the remainder still at the expense of each department. At this date, the remainder still totalled some 15,670,238 francs. ⁵² To pay off this remaining debt, at least partially, the next month the minister of interior asked the minister of finance to dedicate four million left from a credit of 30 million francs opened for payment of the debt of 1814 by a law dated 25 March 1817, as a secours or aid to the departments that were still suffering from the invasion of 1815. In defence of this proposal, the minister of interior argued that it was a question of ‘erasing, if at all possible, down to the last traces the sufferings that it is so important to make forgotten’. ⁵³ According to the finance law of 21 July 1821, the remainder of this credit, in annuities, was to be applied to the outstanding claims from the occupation of 1815. In September of that year, a royal decree satisfied more of these claims, totalling 7,036,365 francs. In an effort to put an end to the indemnification process, the budget law of 22 August 1822 accorded to the ministry of finance a credit of over 13 million francs in bonds, to be distributed to creditors who filed claims for expenses from the invasions of 1814 and 1815 by 1 April 1823, at the latest. Following the Revolution of 1830, the interior minister Adolphe Thiers announced all demands for debts from the occupation of 1815 to be null. But hope for indemnification was kept alive by the last will and testament of Napoleon in 1821, promising significant sums to the regions of Alsace, Lorraine, Franche-Comté, Bourgogne, Île-de-France, Champagne, Forez, Dauphiné, which had suffered invasion. This promise was executed by his nephew, who awarded 50,000 francs to each of 26 departments in 1857. ⁵⁴ But this additional bequest still left many of the state’s creditors unsatisfied. Over four decades after the Restoration’s pledge to indemnify the debts of war, many claimants remained uncompensated.

Festering Wounds

In the end, the Restoration monarchy’s efforts at restoring public credit via indemnification of war damages were a mixed success. In the short term, such indemnification exacerbated the deficit in France. For a number of years, refunds of requisitions constituted one of the main expenses of the government of the Restoration. For example, the state budget for the year 1821 was about 877 million francs. The same year, the ministry of finance issued about 120 million francs, or more than 13 per cent of the annual budget, in annuities to the suppliers of 1814 and 1815. ⁵⁵ As Eugene White has shown, as a result of reparations to foreign as well as domestic creditors, government borrowing crowded out private investment, constituting a significant drag on the economy in France well into the next decade. ⁵⁶

Over the long term, however, the public borrowing used to finance these indemnities to French creditors, along with the reparations due to the Allied powers, did help to revive the financial credit of the government in France, closing the gap between the rate of French rentes and British consols, for example. With its commitment to repaying all of the state’s debts, the finance law of 28 April 1816 finally resolved the financial crises that had beset the state throughout the eighteenth century and provoked the French Revolution – and facilitated the public investments (for instance, in roads and canals) needed to compete internationally in the nineteenth century. Thanks to such legislation, according to the classic financial history by Marcel Marion, France’s ‘sufferings were repaired, and three years after Waterloo, 20 years after the bankruptcy of [the government: les deux-tiers], 22 years after the lamentable collapse of the revolutionary paper money, no State, except maybe England, had such solid finances’. ⁵⁷

For the Restoration, however, the revival of financial credit came at a significant cost to political credit. Rather than ‘reinvigorating the national spirit’, as proponents of the law of 28 April 1816 had hoped, the indemnification of damages from the invasions of 1814 and 1815 – like the repayment of the arrears from the Empire more generally – tended to exacerbate divisions between regions, classes, and political factions, particularly between royalists and Bonapartists. Such divisions were manipulated by Ultra-royalist opponents of indemnification, who, as the deputy Duvergier de Hauranne complained in the debate over the budget of 1817, ‘transformed tax-payers into factions, and provoked a war of those who pay against those who are paid; a war that will quickly degenerate into one between those who have nothing against those who have something, admirable means of healing our misfortunes and of ending the revolution!’ ⁵⁸

Long after the initial indemnification process, numerous claimants continued to complain to the state. As a member of the departmental commission in the Haut-Rhin, named Monsieur Blanchard, wrote to the prefect of that department earlier in 1821, ‘Two invasions cost the Haut-Rhin 40 million francs, of which only two have been reimbursed to it, the expenses that remain on its account are obviously so far beyond its means that a quarter of a century will not suffice to sew up [cicatrizer] the wounds that bleed everywhere.’ ⁵⁹ Indeed, as studies of the settlement process in the Meurthe and Moselle have concluded, the politics of reimbursement were often arbitrary and inadequate, generally favouring big suppliers. Despite having suffered some two million francs in damages, the Moselle received only 246,450 francs of the 11 million offered as a secours by the royal family in September of 1816, leading historian Henri Contamine to conclude, ‘If the general lines of the budgetary politics of the Monarchy lead to a praiseworthy conclusion, the detail of the liquidation of the expenses of war reveals numerous gaps, and the victims of the invasions were not always happy with the prudent economy of the State.’ ⁶⁰

Associated from the outset with the massive debts inherited from its predecessor, under foreign occupation, the Restoration monarchy thus faced an uphill battle to establish its political legitimacy. While its effort to settle these debts was by no means the sole cause of its eventual downfall, the political divisions exacerbated by the indemnification process certainly contributed to the Revolution of 1830.

Indeed, as suggested by the case of the rural policeman Elloy quoted at the beginning of this article, such dissatisfaction with the financial settlement after 1815 festered under the July Monarchy, fuelling Bonapartism as a political movement. Only after Napoleon’s nephew, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, was elected president in 1849 and then declared himself emperor in 1852 were the ‘wounds’ opened by the invasions of 1814 and 1815 definitively closed – or at least consigned to oblivion.

Forgotten in hundreds of boxes in local archives for almost two hundred years, the records of the verification and settlement commissions illustrate the lengths to which the Restoration monarchy went to indemnify its subjects for the costs of the wars initiated by the preceding regime. These commissions represented a relatively new and truly massive effort at repairing the damages of war, not just for the state’s former enemies but for its own citizens. Exemplifying a transition from grants based on royal patronage to reparations grounded in property rights, these indemnities preceded by over half a century the sorts of claims that became common following the wars of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and that were codified in international law circa 1900. Given its political and economic importance, the origin and implementation of such early indemnification of the costs of war deserve further investigation, not just in France but in other parts of the Atlantic world, where it presumably emerged from a new emphasis on individual property rights around the same time.