A Nation of Shopkeepers

According to Wikipedia, "There is reason to doubt that Napoleon ever used [this phrase]." And if he did, he wasn't the first to do so (unless he said it when he was a very small child).

The earliest documented use of this exact phrase was by the Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith, who wrote in The Wealth of Nations (1776): "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."

In the first edition of The Wealth of Nations, Smith described Britain as "a nation that is governed by shopkeepers" (as opposed to either "a nation of shopkeepers" or "a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers"; Wikipedia is not clear).

The first person to attribute the phrase to Napoleon appears (according to Wikipedia) to have been the Irish surgeon and radical Barry Edward O'Meara. Having been the surgeon on board HMS Bellerophon when Napoleon surrendered, he accompanied the Emperor to St. Helena, and became his physician. According to O'Meara, Napoleon took pains to explain that although he had described the British as a nation of shopkeepers, he hadn't meant it as an insult, and specifically he hadn't meant that they were a nation of cowards. He meant that they were a nation of merchants, whose wealth and resources arose from commerce.

Wikipedia doubts the veracity of O'Meara's account, quoting sources that describe him as "duplicitous". It also points out that there is no contemporaneous French source, and that the sentiments ascribed to Napoleon are typical of a British radical in the 1820s (such as O'Meara), but not of an Emperor of the French.

During the Napoleonic Wars, the British press commonly attributed the phrase to "the French" or to Napoleon himself. Wikipedia quotes the Morning Post from 1832, however, taking the epithet as a compliment "as applied to a Nation which has derived its principal prosperity from its commercial greatness", but dismissing the idea that it originated with Napoleon. The Morning Post attributes the words to Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac [a prominent member of the National Convention – the Parliament of the French Revolution]; and Wikipedia suggests that this may have been where Napoleon first heard it.

Wikipedia says that the phrase has been attributed to Samuel Adams, one of the founding fathers of the United States, but that this is disputed. It also notes that Josiah Tucker, Dean of Gloucester, wrote in 1766 that "what is true of a shopkeeper is true of a shopkeeping nation"; and that Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1781: "Some writer ... 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."

Which all goes to show that the idea of "a nation of shopkeepers" (even if not that exact phrase) was current in the late 18th century – even before Adam Smith wrote about such a nation in The Wealth of Nations (and certainly before Barry O'Meara became Napoleon's confidante on the island of St. Helena.)

In fact, going by the full quotation (above), I'm not even sure that Adam Smith himself actually described England, or the English (or Great Britain) as "a nation of shopkeepers".