At the river mouth, the Seine River, still fairly clear upstream, carried vast amounts of silt and deposited mud at Le Havre. While it blocked ships from putting out to sea, it also prevented overseas ships from entering.
Once the sand-flushing lock chamber was completed, that obstruction would be gone, and Le Havre did not have a "Little Gibraltar" like Toulon.
Georgiana sighed as she looked at the commemorative coin on the table. Henry Petty's scheme was not entirely aimed at Napoleon; it was a theory left behind by his ancestor William Petty, and it was indeed somewhat workable.
But exchange rates were also an adjustment tool that affected imports and exports. Georgiana had originally only considered tariffs. Even if tariffs were lowered, a change in the exchange rate would make cheap British goods expensive to import into France. The key was that the domestic currency, the pound sterling, had not changed; it was the franc that had changed.
This exploited a loophole in policy, and also a loophole in human nature. If the newly minted francs were of poor quality, people would still continue using Louis d'or.
Soldiers did not care whose portrait was stamped on a coin. They could melt the gold coins down and recast them into whatever shape they wanted. Before the Battle of Waterloo, Rothschild had withdrawn coins from the Bank of France to pay the troops.
But soldiers also had things they cared about. Napoleon had originally planned to erect a statue of either Desaix or Kléber in Victory Square, but Georgiana had turned it into a bronze column, with the names of other fallen men engraved upon it.
She had noticed those equestrian statues back in Venice. The men commemorated by them were mercenaries, not kings.
Even mercenaries wanted to leave behind their