Starting in the sixteenth century, French intellectuals such as Antoine de Montchrétien (1575–1621) offered alternatives to the increasing capitalist integration of world trade by crafting policies of economic nationalism, political economy, and geo-economics that focused on the creation of an autarkic French empire, completely self-sufficient and closed to international trade. This was offered as a solution to France’s economic backwardness relative to world-embracing Dutch capitalism and increasing English integration of world trade. In addition, the French grappled with the fact that nature had seemingly denied France the precious metals to fulfill its “providential mission” of continental hegemony by transitioning from subsistence to market production. This chapter will argue that Napoleon’s efforts to create a closed commercial state through his Continental System represented the culmination of French attempts to achieve economic self-sufficiency.