Digby,
Since even the British didn't fully understand the massive changes their economy was undergoing (i.e., the Industrial Revolution), I think we can cut Napoleon some slack for not doing so either. In the end, he simply shared the mercantilist attitudes of most Frenchmen of his age, which posited that only agriculture generated "real" money. People understood debt financing no better than we know C.D.O.s or Derivatives these days, and if the British had lost (as seemed likely in say, 1807) the Bank of England probably would have been issues over the payment of the accumulated debt of the government.

-Alex