The Napoleonic Debt

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 21, 1868

The Napoleonic Debt.

Such statements as the following, which is reliable, we believe, somewhat shake our confidence in the extravagant laudations of the wonderful genius and ability of the present French Emperor. The quotation is from The Chicago Tribune:

“The French Emperor has had seventeen years of rule, and during the whole time he has borrowed, in one way or another, the enormous sum of four thousand three hundred and twenty-two millions of francs. He has expended an infinite amount of ingenuity upon devising indirect means of making loans. Thus he gave the Algerian Company a contract, under which it was to furnish one hundred millions of francs in six years for public works in Algeria. At the end of the six years the whole sum had become, of course, a debt of the State. The bank of France secured twenty years of monopoly in return for adding one hundred millions to its capital and loaning this sum to the Empire. By all these means the interest of the debt of France has risen from 291 millions in 1852 to 549 millions in 1868. The increase on interest is almost exactly the average annual amount borrowed by the Emperor during the seventeen years of his rule. That is to say, Napoleon’s debt is now so big, in addition to what the debt of France was when he came to the throne, that when he has met the expenses of the Empire as far as he can, he has nothing to pay the interest on the loans of his reign, but has instead a deficit of just the sum required to pay that interest.

Not a franc to pay the interest on his debts—that is the financial situation of Napoleon at this moment. How long can he carry on his immensely-expensive system of public works and his military expenditure, when he cannot manage to pay anything on the interest of his debts except by borrowing?”