Napoleon: a life

30 Master of Europe

THE PEACE NEGOTIATIONS in the spring and summer of 1806 with Britain and Russia were bedevilled by mistrust on all sides. While professing its peaceful intent, the British cabinet not only issued Orders in Council putting France and much of Germany under blockade, it continued to support the Bourbon King of Naples against Napoleon’s brother Joseph, landing troops in southern Italy and in July scoring its first mainland victory for a century at Maida. Napoleon was also stalling. He had negotiated a treaty with the tsar’s envoy Peter von Oubril which had been sent to St Petersburg for ratification; he was probably hoping that this would put him in a stronger negotiating position vis-à-vis Britain.

It unsettled the King of Prussia, who feared that Napoleon would make a deal at his expense. He had acquired Hanover by a treaty with France in December 1805, and it seemed probable that an agreement between Britain and France would entail its loss. He also suspected that the price of peace between Napoleon and Tsar Alexander might be the cession of some of his eastern lands to Russia. Having marginalised Prussia, Napoleon had no wish to reduce it further, and tried to reassure the king, going so far as to order at the beginning of August the withdrawal of French troops still in Germany. Frederick William wanted nothing more than a preservation of the status quo, but he was being influenced by his belligerent queen and his minister Karl August von Hardenberg, who played to a body of public opinion which felt that Prussia had been humiliated, and an officer corps which believed its army was the best in Europe and longed to prove it. On 9 August, in response to a false report by General Blücher of French troop concentrations threatening Hanover, Prussia began to mobilise.^[1]

Although Napoleon responded with assurances of his desire for peace, he was outraged. When he learned of the publication in Bavaria of a violently anti-French pamphlet bemoaning the humiliation of Germany, he had its publisher, Johann Philipp Palm, tried by a military court and shot on 26 August. This provoked reactions among German nationalists and a surge of anti-French feeling in Prussia, where officers demonstratively sharpened their sabres on the stone steps of the French embassy in Berlin. Quick to take offence himself, Napoleon was seemingly incapable of appreciating that he could give it.

He also suspected there was more to Prussia’s belligerence. ‘The idea that Prussia can single-handedly engage against me seems to me so ridiculous that it is not worth discussing,’ he wrote to Talleyrand. When on 3 September he learned that Tsar Alexander had rejected the treaty negotiated by Oubril he realised that Britain, Russia, and Prussia had reached an understanding. Failing to grasp that he had pushed them into each other’s arms, he could see only perfidy. ‘These kings will not leave me alone,’ he said to Caulaincourt. ‘They seem determined to convince me that I will have no peace and quiet until I have destroyed them.’^[2]

He instructed Talleyrand and his ambassador in Berlin to assure Frederick William that he had no wish to make war, pointing out that it was not in his interests to disturb a peace he had just concluded. He may have been sincere in this, as it would have been difficult to see what advantages such a war could bring him. But he had taken umbrage at what he called ‘a little kingdom like Prussia’ defying him in front of the whole of Europe. It was, as he put it to Caulaincourt, ‘like some little runt impudently raising its leg to piss over a Great Dane’. By this stage, peace could only have been maintained if the runt lowered its leg, but that was not going to happen.^[3]

Buoyed by the prospect of 100,000 Russians marching to his aid, and anticipating that Austria, Bavaria, and Sweden would seize the opportunity to join in the fight against France, the usually undecided Frederick William set his troops in motion. On 12 September they invaded Saxony in order to prompt its ruler into an alliance against the French. Two weeks later he issued an ultimatum to Napoleon to pull all his forces back behind the Rhine. ‘They want to change the face of Europe,’ Napoleon said to Caulaincourt. He went on to speculate that perhaps his ‘Star’ meant him to fight this senseless war which would, as he put it, ‘open up a vast field for great questions’. He also intimated that since mere treaties could not guarantee peace, some new system would have to be put in place.^[4]

He wrote a last letter to Frederick William on 12 September professing his peaceful intentions and warning him not to start a pointless war. But he had ordered his maison militaire to take the road two weeks earlier, and on 25 September he left Saint-Cloud for Mainz, accompanied by Josephine. On 2 October he was at Würzburg with his ally the King of Württemberg, aiming to confront the Prussians in Saxony.^[5]

On 10 October Lannes, commanding the advance guard, attacked and defeated a Prussian corps at Saalfeld. Its commander, the Prussian king’s cousin Prince Ludvig, was cut down and killed by a French hussar. Napoleon sent one of his aides with a letter for Frederick William proposing peace talks, but on reaching the Prussian lines the aide was held back, and the letter never reached its destination.

The Prussian corps manoeuvred erratically, and Napoleon had some difficulty in guessing their intentions, but he reacted with extraordinary speed and attacked what he believed to be their main force at Jena on 14 October. In fact it was a body of about 40,000 men under Prince Hohenlohe. Not realising in the thick morning mist (he was shot at by his own pickets as he reconnoitred) that he outnumbered them heavily, possibly by as much as two to one, Naopoleon operated cautiously and defeated them, putting them to flight by the early afternoon. Some fifteen kilometres to the north, Davout, with 30,000 men, who had been ordered to outflank what Napoleon took to be the left wing of the Prussian force, had run into the main Prussian army numbering some 70,000 men under the Duke of Brunswick and King Frederick William at Auerstadt. Bernadotte, who was marching alongside Davout with his corps, failed to come to his aid. But although he suffered heavy losses, in a brilliant action Davout routed Brunswick, who was mortally wounded, and as the retreating remnants collided with those fleeing from the battlefield of Jena, the Prussian army disintegrated. Entire corps and fortresses surrendered to advancing platoons of French cavalry, bringing Prussian losses in killed, wounded, and captured to 140,000 in the space of a few days.^[6]

On 24 October Napoleon was at Potsdam, where like Tsar Alexander before him he visited the tomb of Frederick the Great, stealing his hat and sword to take back to the Invalides as trophies. He reported to Josephine that he was well and that he found Frederick the Great’s renowned retreat of Sans-Souci ‘very pleasant’. Davout made a triumphal entry into Berlin, where Napoleon joined him three days later, riding down Unter den Linden to take up residence at the royal palace, escorted by his Guard in parade-ground order.^[7]

Frederick William had written him a pathetic plea for a suspension of hostilities, but Napoleon was not in generous mood. He had been so incensed by Bernadotte’s behaviour that he would have had him court-martialled and shot had he not been the husband of Désirée. He did order the execution of the governor of Berlin, Prince Hatzefeld, as a spy. After an amiable meeting with Napoleon, the prince had written to Frederick William’s headquarters giving details of French dispositions, and the letter had been intercepted. The prince’s wife came to beg for mercy, and Napoleon pardoned him. But his mood did not improve. Riding along with his Mameluke Roustam at his side, he drew a pistol from his saddle-holster and aimed at some crows. The gun did not go off, so he angrily threw it to the ground and berated Roustam in the foulest language. He was obliged to apologise after the Mameluke reminded him he had ordered a new safety-catch fitted to the pistol.^[8]

Napoleon was not impressed by Prussia. Its army had been little better than an eighteenth-century military machine, with the soldiers showing scant devotion to their officers or their country. ‘The Prussians are not a nation,’ he kept saying to Caulaincourt. He likened the desk of Frederick the Great at Sans-Souci to that of a French provincial notary, and having meant to take the four-horse chariot from the triumphal arch at Charlottenburg to adorn one in Paris, he was disgusted to discover that it was made of sheets of iron. He described Prussia and its monarchy as a tinsel stage-set hardly worth preserving and began turning over in his mind various options regarding the reorganisation of its territory.^[9]

Count Metternich, the Austrian ambassador in Paris, believed that if Napoleon had made peace with Frederick William on the basis of a reduced Prussia incorporated into the Confederation of the Rhine, France would have been unassailable and Russian influence would have been entirely excluded from Germany. But Napoleon was slow to respond to Prussian overtures, and his conditions — that Prussia give up her possessions west of the Elbe, pay heavy war reparations, and join France in alliance against Russia and Britain — were too harsh. Negotiations never got going before Frederick William took refuge in Königsberg to await salvation by Russia.^[10]

Meanwhile Napoleon decided to strike at the paymaster of all the coalitions against France. Like most Europeans at the time, he believed that the British economy, which was heavily reliant on credit, would implode if the trade supporting that credit were destroyed. Responding to the British Orders in Council of 16 May 1806, which decreed a blockade of French ports and seizure of French shipping, on 21 November he signed decrees which closed all European ports under his control to British ships, British goods, and British trade. The aim was to deny British industry its markets and cut off vital supplies of grain, timber and raw materials, particularly from the Baltic. Napoleon would increase the pressure the following year, when he ordered that any ship which had docked at a British port could be confiscated, and then broadened this to include any vessel which had been searched by the Royal Navy, and to allow French corsairs to confiscate British goods on neutral ships. The British responded in kind.

The Berlin Decrees had far-reaching implications, since they made it essential that France control, directly or indirectly, every port in Europe. Allies would have to be forced and neutrals coerced into what Napoleon would call his Continental System. As a first step he ordered General Mortier to occupy the Hanseatic towns of Hamburg and Lübeck, and Swedish Pomerania. But enforcing the decrees was going to take a great deal more than a few regiments. Napoleon had entered into an open-ended commitment which he was never going to be able to fulfil. As if that were not enough, he now opened a Pandora’s box.

On 19 November he had received a delegation of Polish patriots from Posen (Poznań), the capital of a Polish province annexed by Prussia a decade earlier. The collapse of Prussian might had raised hopes throughout Poland of the re-creation of that country, which had been divided up by Russia, Prussia, and Austria in 1795. The Prussian part of it was now effectively free, and the patriots had come to find out his plans for the area. He had none.

Like most western Europeans, Napoleon felt residual sympathy for the Poles following the loss of their country. During his first Italian campaign he had come to value several Polish officers, and particularly his aide Sułkowski. When he realised that among the Austrian prisoners there were Poles who had been drafted by the Austrians and were keen to fight against them, he formed them up into a legion which fought alongside the French. But when they were no longer of any use he felt no compunction in sending them off to Saint-Domingue, where most of them perished. Back in March 1806 he had instructed Fouché to insert articles in the press describing Russian repression and violence against the Poles, probably only to embarrass Russia, with which he was then negotiating a treaty.^[11]

Many Poles drafted into Prussian ranks had also deserted to the French, and Napoleon had them formed up into a legion under General Józef Zajączek, who had served under him in Italy and Egypt (1,500 were incorporated into a legion made up of Irish insurgents of 1798 who had been sold by the British government to the King of Prussia to work in mines, but had subsequently been pressed into the Prussian army). On 24 September Napoleon had instructed Eugène to despatch all Polish staff officers in the Italian army to join the legion under Zajączek. Less than a week after reaching Berlin, on 3 November, he wrote to Fouché in Paris instructing him to send the Polish general Tadeusz Kościuszko, the universally respected leader of a Polish national insurrection in 1794, along with any other Poles he could find in Paris, to join him in the Prussian capital. On 17 November, two days before his meeting with the delegates from Posen, he had given instructions for it to be said that he was intending to re-create a Polish state. Talleyrand was keen on the idea and had been sounding out Austria on the possibility of her giving up her Polish province of Galicia in exchange for the richer Prussian one of Silesia.^[12]

By then the Grande Armée was marching through Poland to meet the oncoming Russians, and on 25 November Napoleon left Berlin to join it. Late on 27 November he drove into Posen, which was illuminated in his honour. He was greeted like a saviour, and young men rode in from the surrounding countryside hoping to fight for their country under his command. Murat, who rode into Warsaw on the following day, wrote that he ‘had never seen such a strong national spirit’. The inhabitants were inviting officers and men into their houses, offering them food and drink. ‘The Poles are all asking for arms, leaders and officers,’ he went on. The following day, after talking to some of the locals, he wrote that he was convinced they were ready to rise and fight and would be prepared to accept any ruler he chose to give them. He asked for instructions on how to proceed.^[13]

Napoleon wrote back from Posen that the Poles were superficial and unreliable, telling him to offer nothing. ‘Make them understand that I have not come to beg a throne for one of my people, as I do not lack thrones to give my family,’ he warned Murat, who was already being lined up by Paris gossip as the next King of Poland. He had always been a dashing dresser, never conforming to regulation uniforms, preferring to swagger in skin-tight buckskin breeches adorned with ribbons, embroidered dolmans, and turned-down buccaneer boots, but when he first saw traditional Polish noble dress, he stepped into another sartorial world. He had a new wardrobe run up in his version of the Polish model, with fur-trimmed velvet tunics, slashed hanging sleeves, and fur cap, in a variety of colours. ‘He had all the majesty of an actor trying to play a king,’ commented one Polish lady, but she admitted that the Polish people would have accepted him as such if it had meant independence.^[14]

Napoleon meant to keep his options open as to how he would settle the ‘great questions’ raised by his victory over Prussia. While he encouraged Poles to join the ranks, in talks with local notables he did little more than demand supplies for his army. On 2 December he attended a ball given by the local nobility to mark the anniversary of his coronation, only to tell them they should be booted and spurred, not wearing stockings and pumps. After the ball he wrote to Josephine saying he loved and missed her, he found the nights long without her, and he would soon be sending for her to join him. He was frustrated, as he had devised a sweeping manoeuvre designed to destroy the Russian army now in Poland under General Bennigsen. He had sent detailed instructions to his corps commanders, but while his plan looked straightforward on the map, it was proving difficult to implement, and he realised he needed to be closer to the theatre of operations.

On 16 December he left for Warsaw, which he reached on horseback, having had to abandon his carriage because of the state of the roads. He entered the city at night in order to avoid having to face a reception committee, spent four days there making arrangements for what he hoped would be a decisive battle, then left to take charge of operations, crossing the Vistula and the Bug to join his army at Nasielsk on Christmas Day. Intelligence on the whereabouts of the main Russian forces was confused, and while Lannes with 25,000 men attacked what proved to be Bennigsen’s main force of 40,000 near Pułtusk, Napoleon marched toward Gołymin, where Davout, Augereau, Ney, and Murat were engaged against other Russian units. By the time he realised what was going on and struggled back to join Lannes, it was all over. Lannes had beaten Bennigsen, who retired, but pursuit was out of the question due to atrocious conditions.

A sudden thaw had melted the snow and ice, turning the roads, mere tracks, into rivers of mud. The conditions were so bad that gun carriages sank into the sludge, dragging down their horse teams; even doubling the teams could not pull them free. Sunk to their bellies in mud overnight, the animals died, their crews helpless. Soldiers took off their boots and carried them, but it was not just boots that were swallowed up by the mud. According to the artillery officer Louis Brun de Villeret, ‘in one single regiment, eighteen men drowned in this mud during a night march, their comrades being unable to help them without running the same risk’. Caulaincourt complained of ‘mud up to one’s ears’, and Napoleon himself had to spend the night with only a few wisps of straw between him and the mud in an old barn. ‘Regiments melted away by the day,’ remembered Lieutenant Théodore de Rumigny.

Matters were not improved by a dire lack of supplies. ‘No commander ever gave as many orders to provide victuals for his army as Napoleon,’ remarked one infantryman, ‘and none were more poorly executed.’ What little supplies there were had got bogged down as well, and the underpopulated, poor countryside provided scant resources. Men died of hunger and exposure, and some took their own lives out of despair. The mud of Poland entered French military lore alongside the burning sands of Egypt.^[15]

Napoleon’s usual method of moving fast and seizing opportunities as they offered themselves proved useless in these conditions, but he had also fallen behind the army and could not coordinate operations. It is allegedly from this moment that he began to refer to his Guard as ‘grognards’ on account of their grumbles over the conditions and lack of food. They had learned the Polish for bread, ‘chleb’, and for ‘There is none,’ ‘Nie ma.’ Whenever he passed marching troops they would shout ‘Chleba, Chleba!’ to which he would shout back, ‘Nie ma!’ They were not just grumbling over the lack of food; it was the first campaign on which he was not constantly in their midst. There was also criticism of his conduct of the campaign, and his prestige in the ranks was dented.^[16]

Back in Pułtusk on 29 December, given the impossibility of fighting on, he ordered his army to take winter quarters. On his return to Warsaw on 1 January 1807 he declared that since they could not fight, everyone should enjoy themselves. He was certainly meaning to do so himself. On 31 December news had reached him that Éléonore de la Plaigne had given birth to his son — proof that it was not, as Josephine had always maintained, he who was infertile. In his letters there was no further mention of her coming out to join him.

He spent the whole of January in Warsaw. There were parades, balls, and concerts. Polish society fêted their French guests, and many women gave themselves to their putative liberators with patriotic fervour. ‘The time we spent in Warsaw was magical,’ recalled Savary. Major Boulart of the Guard Artillery remembered to the end of his days a pair of ‘beautiful eyes’ and the joy of flying around the sparkling, snowbound city in a sleigh.^[17]

Napoleon was viewed with respect, and in some cases with genuine awe. ‘He seemed to have a halo,’ noted the thirty-year-old Countess Potocka, who was ‘bedazzled’ by the sense of power he exuded. But if he was expecting to enjoy the privileges of a conqueror, he was to meet with disappointment. At a ball he spotted the beautiful Princess Lubomirska and in the morning sent an aide to inform her he would call that evening. Fearing for her virtue, the princess ordered her carriages and left for the country, and when he called Napoleon found himself, as the Polish saying went, kissing the door handle. ‘Silly woman,’ he snapped.^[18]

Josephine, still in Mainz, was eager to join him in Warsaw, but he put her off, using the distance and the bad roads as a pretext. He urged her to return to Paris and enjoy herself, promising to let her know when she could join him. His letter of 18 January was a little more impatient: ‘I am very well and love you very much, but if you keep crying I will begin to think you have no courage and no character.’ He did add a saucy phrase about kissing her breasts, but it was not hers he was thinking of.^[19]

The evening before, at a ball given by Talleyrand in one of the Warsaw palaces, he had danced with a young woman he had spotted at a reception ten days earlier and was smitten. Her name was Maria Walewska. She was twenty and married to a seventy-one-year-old, and though she did not love her husband, she had strong principles and believed in the sanctity of marriage. Her two brothers, both officers in the French army, and various other Polish patriots who had noticed Napoleon’s interest, urged her to at least humour the man on whom the future of their country depended. She appears to have given him some hope, and the following day he sent her a note through Duroc. ‘I saw only you, I admired only you, I desire only you,’ he wrote, demanding a prompt response ‘to calm the impatient ardour of N’. She refused to go with Duroc to the ardent Napoleon. He wrote again. ‘Have I offended you, Madame? I had the right to expect the contrary. Your emotions have cooled, while mine have grown. Thoughts of you do not let me sleep! Oh! Give a little joy, of happiness to a poor heart which is ready to adore you. Must it be so difficult to obtain a reply? You owe me two.’ She did come to him at the royal castle that evening, but left at four in the morning without having given herself to him. That morning he wrote Josephine a testy note ordering her to be ‘merry, charming and happy’, and stop nagging him.^[20]

Walewska’s reticence was a novel experience for one who had grown used to submission. In his short, eager letters he cast himself as the lonely man at the top whose cares only she could dispel by allowing him to throw himself at her feet. ‘Oh! Come to me, come to me! All your wishes will be granted. Your motherland will be dear to me if you take pity on my poor heart,’ he cajoled, counting on her patriotism. The more she resisted him, the more loving the tone of his letters, the more he followed her around at receptions, watching her every move like a lovelorn teenager. At the same time his tone forbidding Josephine to even think of coming to join him grew imperious. Walewska did agree to call on him again, and after expending every argument he could, and faced only with her tears, he appears to have as good as raped her.^[21]

He had set up a council of prominent Poles as a provisional administration, but it was firmly supervised by Talleyrand and Maret, and its brief was limited to raising a Polish army and providing victuals and horses for his troops. At the same time, he ordered the setting up of a French-style administrative structure and even the introduction of his Civil Code. He would not make further commitments until the military situation had clarified.^[22]

He left Warsaw on 30 January, travelling north through Pułtusk, where he visited the sick Lannes, who told him the place was not worth fighting for and they should go home, a view echoed by many in his entourage. Three days later he watched a skirmish between Soult’s corps and Bennigsen, who fell back, and on 4 February himself attacked Bennigsen at Allenstein, forcing him to retreat in a northerly direction and, on 7 February, to abandon the little town of Eylau. The weather had changed again, and it was snowing. The troops had not had any bread since leaving Warsaw a week earlier, and that evening Napoleon sat by a bivouac fire baking potatoes along with his grenadiers. Bennigsen counter-attacked in the morning, and there followed a chaotic battle fought in a blizzard, in which Napoleon himself was nearly captured. Both sides fought with determination, and although Bennigsen retired and his losses were greater, it could hardly be termed a French victory, and there was little doubt that Napoleon had not been fully in control.^[23]

‘The victory was mine, but I lost many men,’ he wrote to Josephine at three o’clock in the morning after the battle. ‘The enemy’s losses, which are even greater, are no consolation to me.’ Many of his best troops had been killed, and the sub-zero temperatures meant that most of the wounded who could not move froze to death in the night. The sight of the battlefield the next day had a demoralising effect on the survivors: the dead lay so close that it was difficult not to walk over them. Napoleon himself was horrified by the carnage. ‘This is not the pretty aspect of war,’ he wrote to Josephine a couple of days later. ‘One suffers and one’s soul is oppressed by the sight of so many victims.’ The army shared his feelings, and the men were anxious, knowing the losses could not be easily made good so far from home. The weather and the mournful landscape made them homesick, and morale plummeted as they once more went into winter quarters at Osterode. According to some accounts, over 20,000 men were suffering from dysentery.^[24]

As usual, the bulletins proclaimed a decisive victory and minimised French losses, but letters from husbands, brothers, and sons spread anxiety in Paris. Josephine expressed it and wished he would come home, not least because rumours of his romance were beginning to circulate. He wrote telling her she had no grounds for sorrow. ‘I do know how to do other things than making war, but duty comes first,’ he chided her. ‘Throughout my life, I have sacrificed everything — tranquillity, interest, happiness — to my destiny.’^[25]

On 1 April Napoleon moved into the nearby castle of Finckenstein, where he was joined by Maria Walewska. She was delivered at night in an unmarked carriage by one of her brothers and having been shown to her quarters would not leave them for the next six weeks. Her presence was supposed to have been a secret, and only Napoleon’s valet Constant and his secretary Méneval were allowed to see her, but there was talk in the surrounding camps of ‘la belle polonaise’, and Warsaw society knew she was there.^[26]

She later admitted to a friend that her scruples had vanished, for Napoleon made her feel as though she were his wife. Innocent and uncomplicated, she was unlikely to have been critical of or dissatisfied with his sexual prowess, and seems to have fallen in love with him. They behaved as a married couple, even taking their breakfast together in her red-damask upholstered bed. He found the castle ‘very fine’, and its numerous fireplaces suited him, as he liked to see a fire burning when he got up in the night. He was in good health, he assured Josephine, noting that the weather was cold but fine. He inspected troops almost every day and took exercise on horseback, and in the evenings played cards.^[27]

His strategic position was not good. He had some 70,000 men at Osterode, but many were sick, the rest hungry and dispirited, and rates of desertion were alarming. He was facing a constantly growing Russian force. The last fortress in Prussian hands, Danzig, had fallen to Marshal Lefèbvre (who became duc de Danzig), but although the Prussian army had all but disintegrated, many of its officers were making their way to take service with Russia. On 26 April Frederick William signed the Convention of Bartenstein with Russia, by which both powers vowed not to make a separate peace. At his back, Napoleon had Austria, which was only being held in check by the presence of an Italian army under Eugène on its southern border. He had recently got wind of contacts between the Spanish minister Godoy and the British concerning the possibility of Spain joining the anti-French coalition. In May Napoleon concluded the Treaty of Finckenstein with Persia, which he hoped would result in military action on Russia’s southern border. He was also encouraging the Turks to make a move that might divert Russian forces; he had received a Turkish envoy at Finckenstein in this spirit. But a British fleet had sailed into the Dardanelles, accompanied by a British invasion of Egypt, to pressure the Porte to make peace with Russia and expel the French ambassador.

At the beginning of June Bennigsen attacked Ney’s corps, and with a couple of deft manoeuvres managed to sow confusion among the other French corps. Napoleon rallied them and followed Bennigsen, who fell back on the little town of Friedland in a curve of the river Alle, where on 14 June he was forced to accept battle. With no room to manoeuvre and no possibility of falling back when two of the three bridges over the river were destroyed by French artillery, his army was cut to pieces, losing by some estimates as much as 50 percent of its effectives. It was the anniversary of Marengo, and Napoleon made much of this, saying the battle had been as decisive as Marengo, Austerlitz, and Jena.^[28]

The tsar, who was close by, had no option but to request an armistice, and Napoleon, who was keen to make peace and take his homesick army home, agreed to one on 21 June. Three days later, at his headquarters in the small town of Tilsit, he received a note from Alexander stating that for the past two years he had longed for an alliance with France, as only that could guarantee the peace and well-being of Europe, and requesting a meeting.^[29]

Alexander had been humiliated and lost an army at Austerlitz, and now another at Eylau and Friedland. He could raise more men, but his officer corps was not up to doing much with them. If he retreated he would be drawing the French into an area taken from Poland only ten years before, in which they would be welcome and he not. He was single-handedly supporting the crushed and ineffectual Frederick William and felt abandoned by his British ally; British gold had bought nothing but Russian blood and embarrassment. Something of a fantasist, he fancied he would be able to seduce Napoleon.

Napoleon for his part had begun to reflect on a possible alliance with Russia, against the advice of Talleyrand, who consistently pressed for a strategic alliance with Austria. On the day he received Alexander’s note he had received a report from his ambassador in Vienna, General Andréossy, that Austria was hostile and only waiting for a chance to take revenge. The other news Napoleon had that day was that there had been a palace revolt in Constantinople, and the sultan Selim III, with whom he had been negotiating, had been deposed, so he could expect no support against Russia from that quarter. He agreed to Alexander’s offer and invited him to a meeting on the following day.

He ordered his sappers to construct a raft with a tented structure on it, decorated with the arms and ciphers of the two monarchs, and to moor it midstream on the river Niemen (Neman). When Alexander arrived with his suite on the opposite bank, he was rowed out to the raft, where Napoleon greeted him with an embrace as his troops, drawn up on the western bank, cheered. Frederick William, who had come with Alexander, was left sitting on his horse on the east bank, pointedly left out. Symbolism was the order of the day, and the showman in Napoleon had taken over.

‘My Dear, I have just met the emperor Alexander,’ he wrote to Josephine that evening. ‘I am very pleased with him; he is a very handsome and good young emperor, he is more intelligent than is commonly thought. He is coming to stay at Tilsit tomorrow.’ Over the next two weeks he entertained Alexander to dinner, had his troops parade before him, and held private conversations with him, sometimes lasting long into the night. As they strolled arm in arm he played the part of the great conqueror who appreciated the hidden qualities of the younger man and graciously treated him as an equal, taking him into his confidence as he discoursed on weighty matters of state. This was balm to the young tsar, a man of complexes, weak, unsure of himself, desperate to cut a figure as a military leader. He was intelligent enough to appreciate what Napoleon had achieved in rebuilding the French political edifice and society, something he dreamed of doing himself in Russia. Although a part of him resisted (strongly supported by his mother and his sister Catherine), he could not help falling under the spell of Napoleon, who tempted him with prospects of being able to play a part in the affairs of the Continent and even to fulfil the Russian monarchy’s dream of conquering Constantinople, and of a combined march on India to expel the British and extend their own empires. This was accompanied by typically Napoleonic gestures, such as his asking the Russian guards parading before him to name their bravest, and presenting him with the Legion of Honour.

The troops of both sides fraternised, the French guards inviting their Russian counterparts to banquets in the open air. At a higher level, Murat teamed up with Alexander’s younger brother Constantine in orgies of drunkenness and debauchery. When Murat appeared in his ‘Polish’ dress, Napoleon told him to go home and change, saying he looked like a comedian. More decorously, parades were held and uniforms inspected and compared — on one occasion two battalions of French infantry displayed the new white uniforms with which Napoleon was thinking of replacing the blue, on account of the shortage of indigo dye following the loss of France’s West Indian colonies.^[30]

Although Alexander did persuade him to meet the King of Prussia and to admit him to the festivities, Napoleon continued to treat him as an irrelevance. He even failed to show much interest in the beautiful Queen Luise when she came to plead the Prussian cause. He adopted a tone both flirtatious and mocking, promised to do something for Prussia, and then broke his word, reducing her to tears. He had already prepared the text of a proclamation dethroning Frederick William and only relented at the request of the tsar.^[31]

The upshot was a treaty, signed on 7 July 1807, by which Russia lost nothing except its protectorate over the Ionian islands and gained in return a small piece of territory from Prussia, seemingly a miraculous outcome after having been roundly defeated. She also bound herself to withdraw from the Danubian principalities over which she was in conflict with the Turks, but was given licence to capture Finland from Sweden instead. Furthermore, Russia bound herself to bring Britain to the negotiating table by 1 November 1807, and if this proved impossible, to join France in alliance against her. In return, Russia endorsed all of Napoleon’s arrangements in Europe, which included the dramatic reduction of Prussia, whose Polish possessions were turned into a grand duchy of Warsaw, ruled over by the King of Saxony, and the creation of a kingdom of Westphalia, mostly out of former Prussian provinces, with Napoleon’s brother Jérôme as king.

The treaty effectively negated Russia’s designs on Constantinople, excluded her from influence in Germany, and left in the shape of the grand duchy of Warsaw a French outpost on her border and an embryonic Polish state that might one day recover, or at least subvert, many of Russia’s recent western conquests. The treaty humiliated Prussia, whose population was reduced from nearly ten million to less than five by the removal of its Polish conquests and provinces absorbed into the kingdom of Westphalia. It was obliged to join the war against Britain and pay a crippling indemnity to France — and to remain under French military occupation until that was settled. Furthermore, Denmark, Sweden, and Portugal would be asked to close their ports to the British and recall their diplomats from London. If they refused, they were to be considered enemies of France and Russia.

Napoleon had got his way in everything, and there was now no state independent enough to act as proxy for Britain on the Continent. But by committing his allies to the trade war, he forced an unpopular and in some cases suicidal policy on them — and on himself the obligation to ensure that no port in any part of Europe remained beyond his control.