The phrase "a nation of shopkeepers" is an expression commonly used to refer to England or the United Kingdom. It is often attributed to Napoleon, though this claim is disputed and earlier occurrences exist.
The phrase "a nation of shopkeepers" is an expression commonly used to refer to England or the United Kingdom. It is often attributed to Napoleon, though this claim is disputed and earlier occurrences exist.
There is reason to doubt that Napoleon ever used the phrase. No contemporaneous French newspaper mentions that he did. The phrase was first used in a derogatory sense by French revolutionary Bertrand Barère on 11 June 1794 in a speech to the National Convention: "Let Pitt then boast of his victory to his nation of shopkeepers". Barère was referring to the British victory over the French at the Glorious First of June. [1] Later, during the Napoleonic wars, the British press mentioned the phrase, attributing it either to "the French" or to Napoleon himself. [2]
A later, explicit source is Barry O'Meara, who was surgeon to Napoleon during his exile in St. Helena. [3] If O'Meara is to be believed, Napoleon said:
Your meddling in continental affairs, and trying to make yourselves a great military power, instead of attending to the sea and commerce, will yet be your ruin as a nation. You were greatly offended with me for having called you a nation of shopkeepers. Had I meant by this, that you were a nation of cowards, you would have had reason to be displeased; even though it were ridiculous and contrary to historical facts; but no such thing was ever intended. I meant that you were a nation of merchants, and that all your great riches, and your grand resources arose from commerce, which is true. What else constitutes the riches of England. It is not extent of territory, or a numerous population. It is not mines of gold, silver, or diamonds. Moreover, no man of sense ought to be ashamed of being called a shopkeeper. But your prince and your ministers appear to wish to change altogether l'esprit of the English, and to render you another nation; to make you ashamed of your shops and your trade, which have made you what you are, and to sigh after nobility, titles and crosses; in fact to assimilate you with the French... You are all nobility now, instead of the plain old Englishmen.
There may be grounds to doubt the veracity of this account. [4]
The supposed French original as uttered by Napoleon (une nation de boutiquiers) is frequently cited, but it has no attestation. O'Meara routinely conversed with Napoleon in Italian, not French. [5] There is no other source.
After the war English newspapers sometimes tried to correct the impression. For example the following article appeared in the Morning Post of 28 May 1832: [6]
ENGLAND A NATION OF SHOPKEEPERS This complimentary term, for so we must consider it, as applied to a Nation which has derived its principal prosperity from its commercial greatness, has been erroneously attributed, from time to time, to all the leading Revolutionists of France. To our astonishment we now find it applied exclusively to BONAPARTE. Than this nothing can be further from the fact. NAPOLEON was scarcely known at the time, he being merely an Officer of inferior rank, totally unconnected with politics. The occasion on which that splenetic, but at the same time, complimentary observation was made was that of the ever-memorable battle of the 1st of June. The oration delivered on that occasion was by M. BARRERE [sic], in which, after describing our beautiful country as one "on which the sun scarce designs to shed its light", he described England as a nation of shopkeepers.
Napoleon would have been correct in seeing the United Kingdom as essentially a commercial and naval rather than a land-based power, but during his lifetime it was fast being transformed from a mercantile to an industrial nation, a process which laid the basis for a century of British hegemony after the Battle of Waterloo. Although the UK had half the population of France during the Napoleonic Wars, there was a higher per capita income and, consequently, a greater tax base,[ citation needed ] necessary to conduct a prolonged war of attrition. The United Kingdom's economy and its ability to finance the war against Napoleon also benefitted from the Bank of England's issuance of inconvertible banknotes, a "temporary" measure which remained from the 1790s until 1821. [7]
The phrase may have been part of standard 18th-century economic dialogue. It has been suggested that Napoleon may have heard it during a meeting of the French Convention on 11 June 1794, when Barère quoted Adam Smith. [8] But this presupposes that Napoleon himself, as opposed to Barère alone, used the phrase.
In any case the phrase did not originate with Napoleon, or even Barère. It first appears in a non-pejorative sense in The Wealth of Nations (1776) by Smith, who wrote:
To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.
— Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations [9]
Smith is also quoted as saying that Britain was "a nation that is governed by shopkeepers", which is how he put it in the first (1776) edition. It is unlikely that either Adam Smith or Napoleon used the phrase to describe that class of small retailers who would not even have had the franchise.
The phrase has also been attributed to Samuel Adams, but this is disputed; Josiah Tucker, Dean of Gloucester, produced a slightly different phrase in 1766:
And what is true of a shopkeeper is true of a shopkeeping nation.
Benjamin Franklin used a similar idea about Holland in a letter to Charles W. F. Dumas on 6 August 1781:
Some writer, I forget who, says that Holland is no longer a nation but a great shop and I begin to think it has no other principles or sentiments but those of a shopkeeper.
Though the original supposed usage by Napoleon was meant to be disparaging, [10] the term has since been used positively in the British press. Margaret Thatcher used the phrase in an interview to the press on 18 February 1975: [11]
We used to be famous for two things—as a nation of shopkeepers and as the workshop of the world. One is trade, the other is industry. We must get back our reputation.
William Makepeace Thackeray turned the phrase back onto the continent in his classic Vanity Fair (1847–1848), albeit satirizing the Belgians rather than the French. In chapter XXVIII, in which the Duke of Wellington's army lands in Ostend in the lead up to the Battle of Waterloo, Thackeray states:
It may be said as a rule, that every Englishman in the Duke of Wellington's army paid his way. The remembrance of such a fact surely becomes a nation of shopkeepers.
Angleterre…a people which he [Napoleon] so disdainfully used to call a nation of shop-keepers
Adam Smith was a Scottish economist and philosopher who was a pioneer in the thinking of political economy and key figure during the Scottish Enlightenment. Seen by some as "The Father of Economics" or "The Father of Capitalism", he wrote two classic works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). The latter, often abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations, is considered his magnum opus and the first modern work that treats economics as a comprehensive system and as an academic discipline. Smith refuses to explain the distribution of wealth and power in terms of God's will and instead appeals to natural, political, social, economic, legal, environmental and technological factors and the interactions among them. Among other economic theories, the work introduced Smith's idea of absolute advantage.
A commonwealth is a traditional English term for a political community founded for the common good. The noun "commonwealth", meaning "public welfare, general good or advantage", dates from the 15th century. Originally a phrase, it comes from the old meaning of "wealth", which is "well-being", and is itself a loose translation of the Latin res publica. The term literally meant "common well-being". In the 17th century, the definition of "commonwealth" expanded from its original sense of "public welfare" or "commonweal" to mean "a state in which the supreme power is vested in the people; a republic or democratic state".
Small beer is a lager or ale that contains a lower amount of alcohol by volume than most others, usually between 0.5% and 2.8%. Sometimes unfiltered and porridge-like, it was a favoured drink in Medieval Europe and colonial North America compared with more expensive beer containing higher levels of alcohol. Small beer was also produced in households for consumption by children and by servants.
Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, 1st Prince of Benevento, then Prince of Talleyrand, was a French secularized clergyman, statesman, and leading diplomat. After studying theology, he became Agent-General of the Clergy in 1780. In 1789, just before the French Revolution, he became Bishop of Autun. He worked at the highest levels of successive French governments, most commonly as foreign minister or in some other diplomatic capacity. His career spanned the regimes of Louis XVI, the years of the French Revolution, Napoleon, Louis XVIII, and Louis Philippe I. Those Talleyrand served often distrusted him but, like Napoleon, found him extremely useful. The name "Talleyrand" has become a byword for crafty and cynical diplomacy.
Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac was a French politician, freemason, journalist, and one of the most prominent members of the National Convention, representing the Plain during the French Revolution. The Plain was dominated by the radical Montagnards and Barère as one of their leaders supported the foundation of the Committee of Public Safety in April and of a sans-culottes army in September 1793. According to Francois Buzot, Barère was responsible for the Reign of Terror, like Robespierre and Louis de Saint-Just. In spring 1794 and after the Festival of the Supreme Being, he became an opponent of Maximilien Robespierre and joined the coup, leading to his downfall.
The Hundred Days, also known as the War of the Seventh Coalition, marked the period between Napoleon's return from eleven months of exile on the island of Elba to Paris on 20 March 1815 and the second restoration of King Louis XVIII on 8 July 1815. This period saw the War of the Seventh Coalition, and includes the Waterloo Campaign and the Neapolitan War as well as several other minor campaigns. The phrase les Cent Jours was first used by the prefect of Paris, Gaspard, comte de Chabrol, in his speech welcoming the king back to Paris on 8 July.
The invisible hand is a metaphor inspired by the Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith that describes the incentives which free markets sometimes create for self-interested people to act unintentionally in the public interest. Smith originally mentioned the term in two specific, but different, economic examples. It is used once in his Theory of Moral Sentiments when discussing a hypothetical example of wealth being concentrated in the hands of one person, who wastes his wealth, but thereby employs others. More famously, it is also used once in his Wealth of Nations, when arguing that governments do not normally need to force international traders to invest in their own home country. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and in The Wealth of Nations (1776) Adam Smith speaks of an invisible hand, never of the invisible hand.
Window tax was a property tax based on the number of windows in a house. It was a significant social, cultural, and architectural force in England, France, and Ireland during the 18th and 19th centuries. To avoid the tax, some houses from the period can be seen to have bricked-up window-spaces. In England and Wales it was introduced in 1696 and in Scotland from 1748. It was repealed in both cases in 1851. In France it was established in 1798 and was repealed in 1926.
"Perfidious Albion" is a pejorative phrase used within the context of international relations diplomacy to refer to acts of diplomatic slights, duplicity, treachery and hence infidelity by monarchs or governments of the United Kingdom in their pursuit of self-interest.
Gaspard, Baron Gourgaud, also known simply as Gaspard Gourgaud, was a French soldier, prominent in the Napoleonic wars.
Sir Hudson Lowe was an Anglo-Irish General during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars who is best known for his time as Governor of St Helena, where he was the jailor of Emperor Napoleon.
Louis Henri Joseph de Bourbon was the Prince of Condé from 1818 to his death. He was the brother-in-law of Philippe Égalité and nephew of Victoire de Rohan.
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, generally referred to by its shortened title The Wealth of Nations, is the magnum opus of the Scottish economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith (1723–1790). First published in 1776, the book offers one of the world's first connected accounts of what builds nations' wealth, and has become a fundamental work in classical economics. Reflecting upon economics at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, Smith addresses topics such as the division of labour, productivity, and free markets.
The first laws to emancipate Jews in France were enacted during the French Revolution, establishing them as citizens equal to other Frenchmen. In countries that Napoleon Bonaparte's ensuing Consulate and French Empire conquered during the Napoleonic Wars, he emancipated the Jews and introduced other ideas of liberty. He overrode old laws restricting Jews to reside in ghettos, removed the forced identification of Jews by their wearing the Star of David. In Malta, he ended the enslavement of Jews and permitted the construction of a synagogue there. He also lifted laws that limited Jews' rights to property, worship, and certain occupations. In anticipation of a victory in the Holy Land that failed to come about, he wrote a proclamation published in April 1799 for a Jewish homeland there.
Barry Edward O'Meara was an Irish surgeon and founding member of the Reform Club who accompanied Napoleon to Saint Helena and became his physician, having been surgeon on board the HMS Bellerophon when the emperor surrendered himself. He was a medical graduate of Trinity College Dublin.
James Roche Verling was a British Army surgeon who became personal surgeon to Napoleon Bonaparte on St Helena.
François Louis Michel Chemin des Forgues was a French politician, and Foreign Minister.
John Wesley Wright, was a Royal Navy commander and captain.
Kathleen O'Meara, also known under her pen name Grace Ramsay, was an Irish-French Catholic writer and biographer during the late Victorian era. She was the Paris correspondent of The Tablet, a leading British Catholic magazine. Irish Monthly also published many of her serialized and biographical works. O'Meara also wrote works of fiction where she explored a variety of topics from women's suffrage to eastern European revolutions. The majority of her novels contained Catholic themes and social reform issues.
"China is a sleeping giant, when she wakes she will shake the world", or "China is a sleeping dragon" or China is a sleeping lion, is a phrase widely attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte.