Napoleon vs the Bankers: The Banque de France Story
Chapter III is Napoleon as a money guy, not just a general. Goodson wants you to see a ruler who refused to borrow for day-to-day war, built one note-issuing bank, paved half of Europe, and then lost to people who could fund every army at once.
Book: A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind by Stephen Mitford Goodson (ISBN-13: 978-1-910881-49-1). Black House Publishing Ltd. First edition 2014; second and third 2017. Goodson was a former non-executive director of the South African Reserve Bank.
The Sun King Could Not Print
The chapter opens with Napoleon staring at an interest table. The “deadly facts,” he says, make him wonder that “this monster, interest, has not devoured the whole human race.”
Then Goodson rewinds to Louis XIV. In this telling the Bank of England, founded in 1694, exists to finance war against France, then the top maritime and territorial power. Four years earlier the French navy had smashed an Anglo-Dutch fleet at Beachy Head.
Louis knew bankers could be trouble. When he decided Nicolas Fouquet, his Superintendent of Finances, was a front for the money power and had looted the state, he locked him away for life at Pignerol.
But suspicion is not a credit line. In the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1714), Louis tried to put his grandson Philip on the Spanish throne. Goodson says a Franco-Spanish giant would have threatened the Bank of England. England, able to create money out of nothing, built a fleet and paid France’s enemies. Louis lasted nine years. Then his heirs started dying.
The Heirs, Then John Law
This is where the chapter goes dark. On 13 April 1711 the Grand Dauphin dies, officially of smallpox, even though he had already had it as a child. In February 1712 the Duchess of Burgundy dies of a fever. Days later her husband is covered in spots and dies. Their sons catch scarlet fever. The five-year-old Duke of Brittany dies. The three-year-old Duke of Anjou lives after isolation and an antidote.
Goodson does not name a killer. He does not have to. The timing is the insinuation: bankers, or anyone who needed France to stop fighting. After the deaths, Louis is pushed into the Treaty of Utrecht (1713). Then, he notes, the heirs stop dying. Except the Duke of Berry later dies in a riding “accident.”
France noticed England’s credit machine. On 1 May 1716 the Scot John Law gets a patent for the Banque Générale, a private note issuer modeled on the Bank of England. In 1718 the regent, Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, turns it into the Banque Royale, France’s first central bank.
For a while it works. In January 1720 the government takes a record loan of 100 million livres. In February a rumor hits: the bank cannot redeem notes for gold. Panic. Goodson names no source, but his “most likely suspect” is the Bank of England, killing a rival.
Decrees follow. Coins are banned from 1 May. On 22 May 1720 notes are cut 50 percent. In October they are swapped for state bonds at another 50 percent haircut. In November the Banque Royale goes bankrupt. Law flees in December. Goodson calls this an “unmitigated triumph” for the Bank of England “and its Jewish stockholders.” That last bit is his ethnic frame, not a documented shareholder roll.
One Bank, No Day-to-Day Loans
Napoleon, emperor from 1804 to 1815, talks about money like it is a foreign power. “The hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency: their sole object is gain.”
He would not use loans for current civil or military spending. People said that was because nobody would lend to him. He said that was nonsense. They did not understand the stock exchange. Loans were not part of his system.
His first move as First Consul (9 November 1799) is the Banque de France, set up 18 January 1800 and open 20 February. Capital: 30 million francs, 30,000 shares at 1,000 francs each. Napoleon, his family, and his circle take a portion.
Goodson says this bank replaced “15, mainly Jewish, private banking houses” tied to what he calls “the Jewish revolution against the French people,” meaning 1789-1799. Report the claim. Then drop it as history. The French Revolution had many causes: fiscal collapse, bread prices, a broken tax system, Enlightenment politics, a weak king. It was not a Jewish coup.
On 14 April 1803 Napoleon shuts two rival note issuers, the Caisse d’Escompte de Commerce and the Comptoir Commercial. He wants one source of “artificial money,” easier for government and the public to watch. On 22 April 1806 a new act replaces a three-man committee with a governor and two deputies.
Blockade, Russia, Waterloo
England, “under the direction of her international bankers,” spends the next nine years funding wars against this setup. Napoleon answers with the Continental Blockade, meant to kill English exports.
At Tilsit, 7 July 1807, on a raft in the Neman, he and Tsar Alexander I split the continent. Alexander joins the blockade. Goodson says France and Russia were then the only two European states not on the “usury system” and not in debt to the Rothschilds. Then Russia breaks the blockade. Russia sold raw materials and needed English industrial goods. France could not replace them.
So on 24 June 1812 Napoleon invades with more than 500,000 men. He reaches an empty Moscow on 14 September. The winter retreat is a disaster. About 110,000 make it out. Leipzig, 19 October 1813. Abdication at Fontainebleau, 11 April 1814.
Then Elba, then Waterloo, 18 June 1815. Goodson’s kicker: Nathan Rothschild financed all the belligerents, England, Prussia, and France, and France got a £10 million loan. The Rothschilds did become huge wartime and postwar lenders. Nathan paying every side at Waterloo, including a tidy £10 million to France on the day, is the conspiracy layer. Treat it as his.
Surnames, Roads, St Helena
In 1808, as part of a plan to assimilate Jews into French society, Napoleon orders them to take surnames. Goodson quotes an 1808 letter to Jerome: Napoleon wants to “reform the Jews,” not import more of them, and to push Jewish youth into the army so their interests become French. That is the emperor as social engineer.
Then the trophy list, all supposedly paid with “interest free” money from the Banque de France. A new commercial code (21 March 1804). Lower taxes. Cotton and beet sugar behind tariffs. 20,000 miles of imperial roads, 12,000 of regional roads, almost 1,000 miles of canals. Cherbourg and Dunkerque expanded. The Louvre gallery. Lycées. An Industrial Board. Midwifery and veterinary schools.
On St Helena he tells his Irish doctor, Barry O’Meara, that the public works are his real monument. The allies can take his throne. They cannot take the Alpine roads, the seas he joined, or the code of laws. To Las Cases he boasts that French finances are the best in the world, and that if he had more time every artisan would have become an artist.
What Holds
Napoleon really did care about debt and a single note issuer. That part is not fanfic. He was obsessive about not floating loans for ordinary spending, and the 1803 monopoly speech is a clean central-bank argument: one tap is easier to watch than many.
The road and canal list is impressive. Roads, beets, harbours, schools. That is a government doing something with the printing privilege besides rolling over interest.
But here’s the thing. The Banque de France was not a pure public piggy bank. It was a privileged joint-stock company. Napoleon and his people owned shares. It had a governor after 1806. That is state-backed private capital with a monopoly, not a municipal credit union.
The weak joints are the motive stories. Bankers quietly killing Bourbon heirs in 1711-12. The Bank of England whispering the Banque Royale to death for “Jewish stockholders.” Nathan Rothschild funding Waterloo from every chair at the table. Those are how Goodson turns a real fight over who issues money into a single ethnic plot. The money argument can stand without that. The plot cannot stand on the evidence he gives.