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Updated: May 9, 2025
She was beyond imagination piquante and delicious." The Consul, as my readers may have partly inferred, was not a Roman Consul, nor yet a French one. He had had the honor of representing this great republic at one of the Hanse Towns, I forget which, in President Monroe's time.
In policy he was right, but the report of foreign cannon was already loud enough to drown the best of arguments. After the ill-timed and useless union of the Hanse Towns to France I returned to Hamburg in the spring of 1811 to convey my family to France. I then had some conversation with Davoust.
Their strength lay in their sturdy and enterprising sea-faring population. The Hollanders had for many years been the rivals of the Hanse Towns for the Baltic trade.
There was the Mediterranean seaboard, and there were the Baltic towns and the Hanse towns; the Portuguese mariners and traders; the Venetian merchant princes. There was the Spanish colonial trade; the Dutch trade of the East Indies; the trade of Amsterdam and London. There were the Elizabethan sea-rovers.
But in order to fulfil the purposes and realize the possibilities which were indicated in the treaties of Tilsit, no time was to be lost. The fate of Sweden and the Hanse towns having been virtually settled, there remained three small maritime states in Europe which still maintained a nominal neutrality Denmark, Portugal, and Etruria. One and all, they must choose between England and France.
This offer was tentatively made. It was all one. Denmark would not hear of the cession of Norway or any part of it; and in the course of the negotiations with England she even put in a claim to the Hanse Towns, which was at once rejected. As Denmark was obdurate, Bernadotte insisted that Sweden should gain the whole of Norway as the price of her help to the allies.
I declared that it was urgent to put an end to this state of things. The Hanse towns had been reduced from opulence to misery by taxation and exactions, and were no longer able to provide the funds. During this year Napoleon, in a fit of madness, issued a decree which I cannot characterise by any other epithet than infernal.
Napoleon, on the contrary, wished to make his empire encroach upon other states, and to realise the impossible Utopia of ten different nations, all having different customs and languages, united into a single State. Could justice, that safeguard of human rights, be duly administered in the Hanse Towns when those towns were converted into French departments?
In 1796 he was appointed a Minister to the Hanse Towns, and, without knowing why, he was hailed as the point of rally to all the philosophers, philanthropists, Illuminati and other revolutionary amateurs, with which the North of Germany, Poland, Denmark, and Sweden then abounded.
"I have heard of the Hanse Towns," added Paul; "but I never knew what the term meant before." "The docks and basins here are mainly the work of Napoleon. The great conqueror intended to make Antwerp the first seaport of the north.
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