“Otto Wolff (1881-1940) was a rarity among biographers, a businessman who found the time, while presiding over the fortunes of a vast industrial and commercial empire which he had built up, to write the life of an earlier man of affairs”
“This bio¬ graphy of a Frenchman, who was the leading army contractor and financier of many of the campaigns that took place at that time,”
“Ouvrard’s enterprises and operations were on such a grand
scale, so abundantly was he endowed with imagination, resource¬ fulness and sheer animal spirits, so impressively did he combine the lack of scruples of a financial soldier of fortune with out¬ standing powers of improvisation and innovation, that the con¬ temporary comparisons between him and Napoleon no longer appear as entirely without substance. “I was born with a passion for big business, which I find essential to the full activity of my mind”, wrote Ouvrard in his Memoirs.”
““It gives me a kind of gambler’s excitement which neither experience nor reason can overcome.””
“The star of this great drama was of course Napoleon, who at
once hated Ouvrard and found him indispensable in times of necessity. Not unexpectedly, there were close similarities in the circumstances of the two men’s rise to fame”
“They were contem¬ poraries: Napoleon was born in 1769 and Ouvrard in 1770. Both men courted official suspicion by their activities after 1789 and, having come to Paris at the age of twenty-two in order to plead their respective cases with the authorities, they became rapidly drawn into the centre of affairs, partly through their remarkable gifts and partly through getting to know the right people: the Director Barras, Josephine de Beauharnais and Madame Tallien.”
“While Ouvrard did not endear himself to the Directory or to Napoleon by the sixty million francs he amassed between 1795 and 1799 as army contractor and naval victualler-in-chief, he did nevertheless tender very sound advice to the Directors about the folly of feeding inflation by continuing to print unbacked paper money—the notorious assignats—and about the need to fund the”
“After the coup d’etat of the 18th Brumaire, Napoleon had to call on him to supply the Marengo campaign of 1800 and to relieve the severe famine of 1802. Yet Ouvrard could not expect any favour of the First Consul, whom he later criticized in his memoirs as “knowing no other sources of revenue but taxation and conquest””
“Napoleon, indeed, was constantly trying to squeeze Ouvrard’s war profits out of him. Ouvrard chose not to resist openly, but to bide his time and meanwhile to apply himself to building up financial empires behind “men of straw” and to salting away his wealth beyond the reach of the authorities.”
“Wolff has rightly described his agreement of December 1804
with the King of Spain as “unparalleled in economic or political history”. Its main object was to bring Spanish treasure worth more than 260 million francs—nearly twice the combined reserves of the Bank of France and the Bank of England at that time—through the British blockade”
“The bold conception and the incisive analysis of a given situation was, once more, sustained by his personal powers of persuasion and charm of manner, which later captivated even the crusty Duke of Wellington. Thus he managed to win over all the men whose services were essential to his scheme, from Napoleon and his ministers to the two foremost bankers in Europe, Hope of Amsterdam and Baring of London.”
“What almost surpasses belief is that Baring, at Ouvrard’s behest, should have persuaded Pitt to despatch four frigates of the Royal Navy in order to bring back the first sixty millions. The Bank of England, however, badly needed the bullion in order to fortify its reserves, as British subsidies to Allied governments and other war expen¬ diture overseas totalled for 1805 and 1806 alone the equivalent of seventy-five million francs. Once more Ouvrard’s grasp of circumstances and opportunities shows the touch of a master.”
“X Introduction
Continental ports in neutral ships”
“Wolff suggests that the whole gigantic operation collapsed as
a result of the Emperor’s high-handed interference. However, later research has revealed that it continued until its completion in the summer of 1808, interrupted only temporarily by Jefferson’s Embargo Act of 1807 which forbade American ships to sail to foreign ports. Yet it was regarded as important enough for the United States Secretary of the Treasury specifically to exempt it. The total proceeds did not come up to Ouvrard’s original expec¬ tations, but world trade benefited by the millions of francs’ worth of bullion that had been drawn into international circulation, and a number of the main parties did well enough out of the trans¬ action. Barings, Hopes and their American agents pocketed twenty-two million francs, while Ouvrard’s own share was allegedly a further twenty-four million”
“Throughout the years of Napoleon’s ascendancy, Ouvrard’s foremost allies were characteristically Talleyrand and Fouche, These three great pragmatists and opportunists knew better than anyone how to anticipate subtle shifts in social and political power. Thus they formed a harmonious trio, as each member could only profit from co-operation with the others—the wily diplomatist, the astute and ever-alert police chief and the in¬ dispensable financier. That the two former were in the latter’s pay most of the time was of equal benefit to all three: but that was not the whole story, for irrespective of such simple monetary considerations, their affinity of outlook, method of operation and interest would surely have brought them together. In consequence the three of them, by deliberate choice, or impelled by circum¬ stances beyond their control, were bound to part company with”
“As soon as it became clear that no manoeuvre and no persuasion could have stopped Napoleon and healed the fundamental rift in European power, all three—though each in his different way—were waiting for the day of reckoning, biding their time in readiness for a new regime to take over after the collapse of the Empire, which now seemed to them un¬ avoidable.”
“As Ouvrard said in his Memoirs, “Napoleon, when he came to power, knew no other means of replenishing his Treasury than those he had employed as general to fill his military chest: war indemnities, the spoliation of sovereigns and peoples, subsidies imposed on his allies—who were often as ill-treated as his enemies—blockades, ports closed to free commerce and opened by licences.... Credit was to him an abstract idea, in which he saw merely the dreams of ideologists and the empty notions of economists.””
“Napoleon was enlightened enough to establish the
Bank of France and lay the foundations of an equitable taxation system, to the end he adhered to his outdated weapons of econo¬ mic warfare, namely indemnities and blockades.”
“The Emperor even smugly pointed to the Rothschilds’ shipments of bullion across the Channel from 1811 onwards as evidence that his blockade was driving Britain to her knees. He never grasped that the network of international finance was, by means of bills and smuggled letters of credit, simply transferring the money to Wellington’s Peninsular Army, which would otherwise have starved for lack of supplies. Ouvrard could have explained all this, and on the eve of the Russian campaign of 1812 he did try to impress on the Emperor, by letter, that in the end it is cheaper to pay for supplies than to requisition them”
“Even if the grand project of paying off the Allied reparations by borrow¬ ing the funds from the Allies themselves was not solely Ouvrard’s intellectual property, he certainly played an important and characteristically audacious part in its conception and execution.”
“Ouvrard figured prominently and with un¬ diminished powers in the highly bizarre episode of the French invasion of Spain in 1823. France had a quarrel with her neigh¬ bour; the army was massed on the Pyrenees. The Duke of Angouleme arrived at Bayonne to take command, and found an army virtually without provisions for man or beast. He therefore did what all sensible men in those straits had done for the past thirty years: he sent for Ouvrard. Ouvrard, having foreseen this situation, had already cornered the market in those commodities that the army most needed.”
“He had convinced himself that the Bourbons were on the way out and that the Rothschilds, by then the established government bankers, were still backing the regime and thus the wrong horse. But these were considerable though temporary successes, brilliant coups which had no lasting impact on affairs, on an historical scale. The Rothschilds and their competitors, imitators and successors were by then “in” for keeps, and Ouvrard was “out”. At the end Ouvrard, the one-time grand seigneur of Rainey, died in 1846 in a small apartment in London, off Oxford Street, of no account now, and entirely oblivious of the fever of railway speculation that then raged in the country.”
“The watchword of the Pereire brothers, founders of the Credit Mobilier, was almost identical with his own phrase that “the present can be safeguarded only by mort¬ gaging the future”; like him, they eventually overreached them¬ selves and vanished into obscurity.”
“XIV Introduction
prisoner, who happened also to be Bonaparte’s nephew and heir, wrote a pamphlet on the same topic. Louis Napoleon grasped the boundless economic possibilities of Mexico and, when he had become Emperor, launched his disastrous expedition against that country.”
“Ouvrard had another link with the Second Empire. As Wolff
tells us, he had hoped to found a financial dynasty similar to that of the Barings, but his legitimate son rose no higher than county councillor and deputy, serving without distinction on the Chamber’s finance committee. It was left to the offspring of his union with Madame Tallien to re-create in the society of the Second Empire some of the elegance and dash that Ouvrard had displayed in the First.”
“2 Ouvrard.
of modern warfare, and Law credit, so Ouvrard discovered con¬ fidence and speculation, immeasurable and mysterious forces con¬ cealed in the depths of commercial life.”
“For more than half a century, from his arrival in Paris in 1793 to his death in 1846, there was not a single government in France which did not benefit by his advice, his help or his loans. Yet he spent several years in prison for debt. At the age of twenty-one he had already made 300,000 francs and at twenty-nine he possessed twenty-nine million francs”
“He met merchants who thought nothing of placing an order for fifty tons of tobacco. He learned that men like the Thoinet brothers were in a position to advance the city a round million francs to purchase grain supplies. In these circles, into which Ouvrard as the son of a Clisson manufacturer gained immediate entry, he soon acquired a self-confidence which re¬ mained one of his most striking characteristics and which stemmed from the conviction that his profession was of vital importance.”
“The leading men of Nantes had felt closer than ever to America since the Peace Treaty of 1783. They were ship owners, merchants and bankers. Trade which satisfies the most elementary human needs seemed to them to be the cornerstone of the State. A new era was beginning, a new “Kingdom of Commerce” was being established. Those citizens who were engaged in commerce regarded themselves as better informed than any other section of society about public affairs; they alone could offer a guarantee of permanent prosperity.”
“For young Ouvrard all this was an unforgettable spectacle. At
first he was filled with wonder, but he very soon realized what it meant, that there were undreamt-of possibilities for anyone not merely engaged in European trade but also conducting inter¬ national operations from bases overseas. At this early stage Ouvrard acquired the limitless vision which was to shape his subsequent career. His early experiences in Nantes ultimately bore fruit in the most grandiose venture he ever embarked upon, the scheme he devised some fifteen years later to recover the silver treasure of Mexico.”
“Everything the citizens of Nantes undertook was the result of careful and sometimes even timid planning; in Ouvrard’s bold imagination their schemes assumed gigantic proportions and soon the pupil was to leave his teachers far behind. Once he was installed in Paris his guests marvelled at such princely luxury”
“Ouvrard came to know and understand the power of credit; he
realized “how it increases one’s financial resources and how, by adding to one’s private fortune, one also increases the prosperity of the nation””
“8 Ouvrard
construction. These were known as “Boris Graslin” or “building papers”. Inevitably they went into circulation, because the workers received no other form of wages. And, lo and behold, the new currency was accepted everywhere without question, although it was without cover.”
“Anxious shopkeepers, into whose tills this private currency had found its way, quoted the printed assurance on the Ions that they could be converted into cash at any time. But Graslin thought of a way out. The people, who rushed into his office, gesticulating angrily, were assured that they would get their money. But in copper coins! They must surely realize that there was just not enough silver, which was already in short supply, to cover sackfuls of paper! They would have to make do with small change! But repayment in pennies and halfpennies was naturally a slow business, and when it became known that Graslin was, in fact, paying, day in, day out, slowly but surely, confidence in him was gradually restored, the bons were no longer presented and building was resumed.”
“Ouvrard saw how successful Graslin had been and how he had
achieved it. He found it hard to believe that public confidence could have such magical powers. He had learned a lesson which he never forgot. “This incident showed me”, he wrote in his memoirs, “how credit adds to one’s resources.” In these few sober words the budding capitalist drew his own moral. Yet there can be no doubt that this was the most important single ex¬ perience in Ouvrard’s life. Many years later he embodied the same moral in a much more pretentious axiom: “Treasures of gold and silver do not last for ever; the only treasure which is never exhausted, which grows and multiplies, is credit.””
“He joined the firm of Guertin, Loret & Co., wholesale grocers, but he did not stay there long. Not sur¬ prisingly, for what others took years to learn he picked up in a flash. He could tell almost by the smell of a place if he was wasting his time there. So Ouvrard left. It all happened very quickly, because he derived no pleasure from watching others making money. For the time being, however, he remained in the trade. “Guertin et Ouvrard”, also dealing in wholesale groceries, was his first business. But it was not his first venture in big business. Ouvrard himself sensed that this was not the right line for him.”
“At this early stage the Revolution had produced few tangible
results. But one thing was clearly apparent: the freedom to speak, the freedom to write, the freedom to print. The freedom of the Press had been won. There was a positive deluge of placards: speeches, manifestos and official declarations. Periodicals would follow. Newspapers would soon appear: the Paris Revolution, the Picardy Correspondent, the Free Press, the People’s Tribune and many others. Ouvrard saw from the beginning the way things were moving and he had enough expert knowledge of the trade to realize that the French paper industry was too small to meet such an increase in demand. Supply must inevitably lag behind demand, which meant that the price of paper would rise steadily”
“But throughout his career one of his out¬ standing qualities was courage, the intellectual courage which is much subtler and rarer than its physical counterpart. He himself had very little capital to invest, but he had learned from Graslin that, for a time at least, one can pay with trust. The trust he needed could be borrowed from his father, who was known and respected in the trade.”
“At the beginning of the Revolution Ouvrard travelled round
the paper-mills of Poitou and Angoumois. From the unsuspecting manufacturers he bought up their entire production for the next two years; at normal prices, of course; and on his own account. The demand for paper began to increase, the prices rose and printers were compelled to seek out Ouvrard. This, his first major business deal, was also his first masterpiece
and bore all the hall-marks of subsequent ventures. It was charac¬ teristic of him that he refused to become involved in questions of detail. They no longer interested him. What excited and satisfied him was the overall conception; it was enough for him to realize an overall profit. The entire paper supply for two years, produced and unproduced, was sold en bloc to a few firms in Tours and Nantes. Ouvrard had made 300,000 francs. He was nineteen years old.”
“Anyone who acquired a sugar plantation in the French colonies could be sure of in¬ creasing his capital by io per cent each year. Cotton plantations brought in between 12 and 15 per cent. Coffee plantations yielded at least 20 per cent. These were sound investments, for people have always remained loyal to their pleasures, especially those of a more noxious variety. Ouvrard could see only one drawback—and no one else seems to have realized this—that there was no guarantee how long the slaves in the colonies would remain slaves working for starvation wages. There was always the danger that the growing unrest inside France would lead to a breakdown of authority in overseas territories, that the natives would rebel and that property and investments would disappear.”
