“The Declaration of Paris is one of the greatest triumphs won by commercial interests over the strict rules of maritime warfare. Its importance resides in its first three articles. Article 4 did no more than formulate a principle acknowledged for more than a century. Construed strictly it requires an impossibility; for no blockade, however strict, can always ‘prevent access to the coast of the enemy.’ But it is clear that the words were meant to be understood in a reasonable sense as merely prohibitory of ineffective or ‘paper’ blockades …. Article 1 struck at a most objectionable practice. The current of opinion had long been running strongly against the use of privateers…. Article 2 … has provoked an enormous amount of controversy. Together with Article 3 it amounted to a new departure in the law of maritime capture. Up to 1856 the great naval powers had been divided between the old principle that the liability of goods to capture should be determined by the character of their owner, and the more modern principle … that the character of the ship in which the goods were laden should settle their fate.” 1 R.H. Inglis Palgrave, Palgrave’s Dictionary of Political Economy 520–21 (Henry Higgs ed., 2d ed. 1925).
declaration of paris
Declaration of Paris. An international agreement, signed by Great Britain, France, Turkey, Sardinia, Austria, Prussia, and Russia in 1856 (at the end of the Crimean War), providing that (1) privateering is illegal, (2) with the exception of contraband, a neutral flag covers an enemy’s goods, (3) with the exception of contraband, neutral goods cannot be confiscated under a hostile flag, and (4) a blockade must work to be binding. • The agreement was later adopted by most other maritime powers, except the United States and a few others.
