19

Tilsit

‘A father who loses his children finds no charm in victory. When the heart speaks, even glory has no illusions.’

Napoleon on Eylau

‘I can do other things than just conduct wars, but duty comes first.’

Napoleon to Josephine, March 1807

‘My love, we had a great battle yesterday,’ Napoleon reported to Josephine from Eylau at 3 a.m. on the night of the battle, February 10. ‘Victory rested with me, but I have lost many men; the enemy’s loss, which is still more considerable, does not console me.’¹That evening he wrote again, ‘in order that you may not be uneasy’, now claiming that he had taken 12,000 prisoners at the loss of 1,600 killed and between three and four thousand wounded. One of the dead, his aide-de-camp General Claude Corbineau, had been Josephine’s master of horse. ‘I was singularly attached to that officer, who had so much merit,’ he wrote, ‘his death caused me pain.’

The Grande Armée had been battered so badly that it could not follow up the victory, as it had after Jena. Soult’s aide-de-camp Colonel Alfred de Saint-Chamans recalled after the battle, ‘The Emperor was passing in front of the troops; in the middle of cries of “Vive l’Empereur!” I heard many soldiers cry “Vive la paix!”, others “Vive la paix et la France!”, others even shouted “Pain et paix!” [Bread and peace!]’² It was the first time he had seen the morale of the army ‘a bit shaken’, which he put down to ‘the butchery of Eylau’. The day after the battle, Napoleon announced in a bulletin that an eagle had been lost, and said, ‘The Emperor will give that battalion another standard after it has taken one from the enemy.’³ The reason the unit wasn’t named was that in fact five eagles had been lost.*

Napoleon was still at Eylau on February 14, writing to Josephine: ‘This country is strewn with dead and wounded. It is not the prettiest side of war; one suffers, and the soul is crushed to see so many victims.’⁴ He soon became concerned that officers’ letters back to Paris were dwelling too much on the losses. ‘They know as much about what happens in an army as people walking in the gardens of the Tuileries know about what happens in a cabinet,’ he told Fouché. Then he heartlessly added: ‘And what are two thousand men killed in a great battle? Every single battle of Louis XIV and Louis XV claimed many more lives.’ This was demonstrably untrue; Blenheim, Malplaquet, Fontenoy and Rossbach claimed more, but by no means every battle of the Wars of Spanish and Austrian Successions or the Seven Years War. Napoleon as usual was dissembling about the number killed at Eylau, which was closer to 6,000, with around 15,000 more wounded.⁵

After Eylau there was one significant clash at Ostrolenka on February 16, and another between Bernadotte and Lestocq in late February, but otherwise both armies went into their winter cantonments – the French along the Passarge river, the Russians along the Alle – until the campaigning season could start again in mid-May. This didn’t mean that Napoleon rested, of course. Pierre Daru was intendant-general of the imperial household on campaign and in his correspondence from March 1807 are scores of letters concerning the army’s shortages of cash, horses, ovens, mutton, beef, uniforms, shirt fabric, caps, sheets, flour, biscuit, bread and, especially, shoes and eau-de-vie.⁶ Daru did his best, boasting to Napoleon on March 26 that the army had 231,293 pairs of shoes, for example, but the soldiers were suffering. Daru requisitioned 5,000 horses from eight German cities in December, of which 3,647 were delivered by the end of the month.⁷ Napoleon was kept informed of how much rye, wheat, hay, meat, straw, oats and bread had been requisitioned from which provinces by which date, figures presented to him in neat lists; similarly he was told how many men were in his 105 hospitals in Germany and Poland. (On July 1, for example, there were 30,863 French, 747 French allies, 260 Prussians and 2,590 Russians.⁸) The army needed its time of rest and recuperation after the desperate rigours of the campaign.

When Joseph tried to equate the travails of the Army of Naples fighting the Calabrian rebels to those of the Grande Armée, Napoleon would have none of it:

Staff officers, colonels and officers did not undress for two months and some not for four (I myself went fifteen days without removing my boots). We were surrounded by snow and mud, without bread, wine, brandy, potatoes and meat. We went on long marches and counter-marches without anything to relieve the harshness, fighting with bayonets, often under fire, having to evacuate the wounded on open sledges over distances of fifty leagues [130 miles]. It is therefore in bad taste to compare us to the Army of Naples, doing battle in the beautiful Neapolitan countryside, where there is wine, bread, oil, cloth, bed-linen, a social life and even women. Having destroyed the Prussian monarchy, we are fighting against the rest of the Prussians, against the Russians, the Cossacks, the [Volgan] Kalmyks and those people of the North that once invaded the Roman Empire.⁹

With Russia and Prussia still at war with him, Napoleon also used the time to call up a Bavarian division of 10,000 men, raise a levy of 6,000 Poles, bring in reinforcements from France, Italy and Holland, and conscript the 1808 recruits more than a year early. Eylau had struck at his myth of invincibility, a blot that needed to be expunged if the Austrians were to remain neutral – especially when in late February Frederick William rejected much more lenient peace terms than Duroc had offered the Marquis di Lucchesini, the Prussian ambassador to Paris, after Jena.

An aggressive campaign could not be fought in the spring until the rich and well-fortified port of Danzig (present-day Gdansk) had fallen, as otherwise the Russians could launch an attack in Napoleon’s rear with the help of the Royal Navy. After Victor had been kidnapped in Stettin on January 20, 1807 by twenty-five Prussian soldiers disguised as peasants, the grizzled fifty-two-year-old Marshal Lefebvre was given the task of besieging Danzig. When he succeeded in taking it on May 24, so securing the French left flank, Napoleon sent him a box of chocolates. The marshal was unimpressed until he opened it, when he found it stuffed with 300,000 francs in banknotes. A year later the proud republican Lefebvre, who had been Napoleon’s deputy on 18 Brumaire, became the Duke of Danzig.

As he rebuilt his army and prepared for the campaign, Napoleon’s imperial micro-management continued. On the same day that he heard that Danzig had fallen – upon which news he ordered Clarke to have salutes fired and Te Deums sung in Paris – he asked Lacépède, the chancellor of the Légion d’Honneur, to ‘write a letter to Corporal Bernaudat of the 13th Line enjoining him not to drink more than is good for him. The decoration has been given to him because he is brave; it must not be withdrawn from him just because he likes a bit of wine. Tell him not to get into situations that could debase the decoration he wears.’¹⁰ In April 1807, perhaps the quietest month of his entire reign, Napoleon still wrote 443 letters. Staying at Finkenstein Castle with its many fireplaces – ‘as I often get up at night, I love to see an open fire’ – he involved himself in a dispute between the head stage-hand of the Paris Opéra, Boutron, and his deputy, Gromaire, over who had been responsible for dropping the singer Mlle Aubry from a mechanical cloud above the stage, breaking her arm. ‘I always support the underdog,’ Napoleon told Fouché, taking Gromaire’s side from over a thousand miles away.¹¹

On April 26 the Convention of Bartenstein confirmed that Russia and Prussia would continue the war, that of the Fourth Coalition, and invited Britain, Sweden, Austria and Denmark to join. The first two responded positively, Britain joining in June and sending money as its contribution, while maintaining the naval stranglehold on French trade. Sweden – which had not made peace with Napoleon after the end of the Third Coalition at Austerlitz – sent a small body of troops. Napoleon never forgave King Gustav IV, whom he called ‘a lunatic who should be king of the Petites-Maison [a Paris lunatic asylum] rather than of a brave Scandinavian country’.¹²

 • • •

By late May, Napoleon was ready: Danzig was his, the sick had been sent away from the front, there were enough provisions for eight months. He had 123,000 infantry, 30,000 cavalry and 5,000 artillerymen in the field. He set the date of June 10 for his major offensive, but, as in January, Bennigsen moved first, attacking Ney at Guttstadt on June 5. ‘I am very happy to see the enemy wished to avoid our coming to him,’ Napoleon quipped as he left Finkenstein the next day in an open carriage due to the extreme heat.¹³That day he put all his corps in motion, as keen as ever for a decisive battle that might end the campaign. Davout, who had already moved two divisions up from Allenstein to threaten the Russian left, deliberately allowed a messenger to be captured carrying the false news that he had 40,000 men in place to fall on the Russian rear, when his whole corps really numbered 28,891. Bennigsen ordered a withdrawal the next day. Meanwhile Soult crossed the River Passarge in strength and pressed back the Russian right.

On June 8 Napoleon interviewed prisoners-of-war from Bagration’s rearguard, who told him that Bennigsen was marching on Guttstadt. It seemed that he might offer battle there, but instead he retreated to the well-fortified camp of Heilsberg. Napoleon advanced with Murat and Ney in the lead, followed by Lannes and the Imperial Guard, with Mortier a day’s march behind them. Davout was off to the right and Soult on the left; the corps system was working well. Bagration covered Bennigsen’s retreat, destroying bridges and villages behind him as his men marched along the long, dusty roads in the searing heat. Believing that Bennigsen might be heading to Königsberg, on June 9 Napoleon decided to attack what he thought was only the enemy rearguard. In fact it was the entire Russian army of 53,000 men and 150 guns.

The town of Heilsberg, in a hollow on the left bank of the Alle, was an entrenched operational base used by the Russian army. Several bridges led to a suburb on the right bank. The Russians had built four great redoubts to protect against river crossings, interspersed with flêches (arrowhead-shaped earthworks) where they fought from the early morning of June 10. Napoleon arrived at 3 p.m., furious at the costly way Murat and Soult had conducted the battle, with three more eagles lost. At one stage the fighting swirled so close to Napoleon that Oudinot asked him to leave the area, saying his grenadiers would take him away if he refused. ‘At 10 o’clock the Emperor passed through us,’ recalled the young aide-de-camp Lieutenant Aymar-Olivier de Gonneville, ‘and was saluted by acclamations to which he seemed to pay no attention, appearing gloomy and out of spirits. We learnt later that he had no intention of attacking the Russians so seriously as had been done, and especially had desired not to engage his cavalry. [Murat] had been reprimanded for this, and followed the Emperor with a tolerably sheepish air.’¹⁴ The fighting didn’t end until 11 p.m., after which there were disgusting scenes of camp-followers of both sides despoiling the dead and wounded. Dawn rose over a truly desolate battlefield – over 10,000 Frenchmen and as many as 6,000 Russians had been wounded – and as the sun reached its height both armies recoiled from the stench of death.

Although large amounts of stores and provisions were captured in Heilsberg, Napoleon had set his sights on the far larger provisions of Königsberg. For the Russians to reach Königsberg they needed to re-cross the Alle. Napoleon knew there was a bridge at the small market town of Friedland (present-day Pravdinsk), so he sent Lannes to reconnoitre there, while he split the rest of his army between Murat with 60,000 men – his own cavalry, plus Soult’s and Davout’s corps – who were sent off to capture Königsberg, while he himself took 80,000 men back to Eylau.

On June 13 Lannes’ advance guard reported a large Russian concentration at Friedland, a mid-sized town nestling in the U-bend of the river, which in accordance with corps doctrine he engaged and then managed to hold in place for a full nine hours as reinforcements arrived. At 3.30 p.m., 3,000 cavalry of the Russian advance guard crossed the Alle and threw the French out of the town. Bennigsen seems to have assumed he could cross the Alle the next day, crush Lannes and then re-cross before Napoleon could arrive from Eylau, which was 15 miles west of Friedland. It was never wise to underestimate Napoleon’s speed, especially when he was marching over ground baked hard by the summer sun.

The Alle river curves around Friedland, enveloping the town to the south and the east while a lake called the Millstream flanks it to the north. The Alle is deep and fast flowing, its banks over 30 feet high. In front of the town was a broad fertile plain nearly 2 miles wide waist-deep in wheat and rye, abutted by a dense forest, known as Sortlack Wood. The Millstream, which also has steep banks, divides the plain. The belfry of Friedland’s church offers a superb panoramic view of the entire battlefield, and Bennigsen, his staff and his British liaison officer Colonel John Hely-Hutchinson wisely climbed it. But they failed to spot that the three pontoon bridges Bennigsen had put across the river to augment the stone one in the town were too far behind his left flank, and that if the bridges were destroyed or congested, Friedland, in the bend of what is almost an ox-bow lake, would become a gigantic death-trap.

Between two and three o’clock on the morning of Sunday, June 14 – the anniversary of the battle of Marengo – Oudinot arrived on the plain before the village of Posthenen. A soldier’s soldier, impetuous and formidable, beloved by his men, he survived a total of thirty-four wounds in his career, losing several teeth in the 1805 campaign and about to lose part of an ear.¹⁵ The only child of nine to survive into adulthood, he had ten children himself, collected clay pipes, was an amateur painter and spent evenings with Davout on this campaign snuffing out candles with pistol-shots. Oudinot now sent his men into the Sortlack Wood, and heavy skirmishing fire and cannonades developed along the front. When the talented aristocratic cavalry leader General Emmanuel de Grouchy arrived with a division of French dragoons, Lannes, who had by then been joined by the Saxon Light Horse, had enough men to face down some 46,000 Russians until Napoleon arrived.

Bennigsen sent large bodies of men across the Alle into Friedland, and ordered them to begin fanning out towards Heinrichsdorf, where they could threaten the French rear. Nansouty’s cuirassiers were directed by Lannes towards Heinrichsdorf and drove the leading Russians back. Grouchy then moved up quickly from Posthenen, charged in from the flank and got in among the Russian guns, sabring the unprotected gunners. The by-then-disordered French cavalry were themselves counter-charged, but by 7 a.m. Grouchy had stabilized the French line to the east of Heinrichsdorf.

In the desultory fighting that followed, the wily, agile Gascon Marshal Lannes was in his element. Covered by an unusually thick line of skirmishers in the tall crops, he continually moved small units of infantry and cavalry up and down and inside and outside the woods, exaggerating the size of his force, for he still only had 9,000 infantry and 8,000 cavalry to hold off the six Russian divisions that had crossed the Alle. Fortunately, just as Bennigsen deployed his forces and attacked, Mortier’s corps arrived on the field and drove into Heinrichsdorf just in time to deny it to the Russian infantry. Leaving three battalions of Oudinot’s grenadiers in the village, Dupas deployed to its right. Mortier’s Polish division then came onto the field and General Henri Dombrowski’s three Polish regiments moved into position, supporting the artillery at Posthenen. In terrific fighting in Sortlack Wood, Oudinot’s division effectively sacrificed itself to hold off the Russian infantry. By 10 a.m. Lannes had been joined by General Jean-Antoine Verdier’s division, bringing his total up to 40,000 men.

Bennigsen realized that the absent Napoleon – who was galloping to Friedland as fast as he could – was feeding more and more men onto the battlefield against him, and he changed his expectations for the outcome. He now merely hoped to hold his line until the end of the day so that he could effect another escape. Yet nightfall in midsummer falls very late at that latitude and at noon, having galloped on his Arab horse from Eylau with his bodyguard straining to keep up, Napoleon appeared on the battlefield. Oudinot, riding a wounded horse, his uniform torn by bullet holes, made his way over and begged the Emperor: ‘Give me reinforcements and I shall throw the Russians into the river!’ From the hill behind Posthenen, Napoleon immediately spotted Bennigsen’s gross tactical error. The split of the plain caused by the Millstream lake meant that Bennigsen’s left was vulnerable to being pushed up against the river.

While Napoleon and Oudinot awaited reinforcement, Napoleon allowed a lull in the battle, certain that Bennigsen couldn’t repair the damage even if he had seen it. The men on both sides welcomed the chance to find shade and water. Many were delirious with thirst as they had spent hours ripping saltpetre cartridges off with their teeth on a stifling, cloudless midsummer day that reached 30ºC in the shade. Napoleon sat on a simple wooden chair and ate a lunch of black bread within range of the Russian guns. When his attendants begged him to withdraw, he said: ‘They will dine less comfortably than I will lunch.’¹⁶ To those who worried that it was getting late to attack, and that the assault should be postponed to the next day he replied: ‘We won’t catch the enemy making a mistake like this twice.’¹⁷ The soldier-diplomat Jacques de Norvins watched Napoleon walking up and down hitting tall weeds with his riding crop and saying to Berthier: ‘Marengo day, victory day!’¹⁸ Napoleon was always highly attuned to the propaganda possibilities of anniversaries, as well as being superstitious.

At 2 p.m. he issued orders for the resumption of hostilities at 5 p.m. Ney was to attack towards Sortlack; Lannes would continue holding the centre, and Oudinot’s grenadiers would lean to the left to draw attention to themselves and away from Ney; Mortier would take and hold Heinrichsdorf, with Victor and the Imperial Guard staying in reserve behind the centre. Over on the church belfry, Bennigsen and his staff watched, as Hely-Hutchinson recorded, as ‘the horizon seemed to be bound by a deep girdle of glittering steel’.¹⁹ Too late, Bennigsen began issuing orders for a retreat, which he had to cancel immediately as withdrawal was by now too dangerous to attempt in the face of an oncoming enemy.

At 5 p.m. three salvoes of twenty guns signalled the start of the Grande Armée’s attack. Ney’s 10,000 infantry surged through Sortlack Wood and completely cleared it by 6 p.m. His columns then marched against the Russian left. General Jean-Gabriel Marchand’s division drove into Sortlack village and pushed many of its defenders bodily into the river. He then moved westwards along the river, sealing off the Friedland peninsula, bottling the Russians up inside. The French artillery could hardly miss them. Napoleon then sent Victor’s corps up the Eylau road towards Friedland itself from the south-west.

When Ney’s exhausted corps began to fall back, Sénarmont divided his thirty guns into two batteries of fifteen each, with 300 rounds per cannon and 220 per howitzer. Sounding ‘Action Front’ on his bugles, his teams galloped forward, unlimbered and fired first at 600 yards, then at 300, then at 150, and finally, with nothing but canister-shot, at 60. The Russian Ismailovsky Guards and the Pavlovsky Grenadiers tried to attack the batteries, but some 4,000 men fell to their fire in about twenty-five minutes. An entire cavalry charge was destroyed with two volleys of canister. The Russian left was utterly destroyed, and trapped against the Alle river. Sénarmont’s action became famous in military textbooks as an ‘artillery charge’, although his gunners suffered 50 per cent casualties. Ney’s regenerated corps, led by the 59th Line, battled through the streets of Friedland from the west, securing the town by 8 p.m. The Russians were pressed back towards the bridges, which caught fire, and many soldiers were drowned trying to cross the Alle.

At that point, Lannes’ and Mortier’s divisions poured out onto the plains and the Russian units to the right of Friedland were simply pushed into the river. Many Russians fought to the end with bayonets, although twenty-two cavalry squadrons escaped along the left bank of the Alle. Heat, exhaustion, nightfall and the pillaging of the town for food have all been advanced as explanations for why there was no Jena-style pursuit of the Russians after Friedland. It is also possible that Napoleon felt a wholesale massacre might have made it harder for Alexander to come to terms, and by then he very much wanted peace. ‘Their soldiers in general are good,’ he told Cambacérès, something he had hitherto not recognized, and which he would have done well to remember five years later.²⁰

For sheer concentration of effort, Friedland was Napoleon’s most impressive victory after Austerlitz and Ulm. At the cost of 11,500 killed, wounded and missing, he had utterly routed the Russians, whose losses have been estimated at around 20,000 – or 43 per cent of their total – though only around twenty guns.²¹* Percy’s hundred surgeons had to work through the night, and a general later recalled ‘meadows covered with limbs severed from their bodies, those frightful places of mutilation and dissection which the army called ambulances’.²²

The day after the battle Lestocq evacuated Königsberg and Napoleon issued a classic bulletin:

Soldiers! on 5 June we were attacked in our cantonments by the Russian army, which misconstrued the causes of our inactivity. It perceived, too late, that our repose was that of the lion; now it does penance for its mistake . . . From the shores of the Vistula, we have reached those of the Niemen with the rapidity of the eagle. At Austerlitz you celebrated the anniversary of the coronation; you have this year worthily celebrated that of the battle of Marengo, which put an end to the War of the Second Coalition. Frenchmen, you have been worthy of yourselves, and of me; you will return to France covered with laurels, after having acquired a peace which guarantees its own durability. It is time for our country to live in repose, sheltered from the malign influence of England. My rewards will prove to you my gratitude and the greatness of the love I bear you.²³

On June 19 Tsar Alexander sent Prince Dmitry Lobanov-Rostovsky to seek an armistice, as the Russians re-crossed the Niemen and burned the bridge of the last Prussian town at Tilsit (present-day Sovetsk), where Napoleon arrived at 2 p.m. The Prussians, unable to continue the war without Russian help, would now simply have to follow in the Tsar’s diplomatic wake. A month’s armistice was agreed in two days’ negotiation, and on the third evening Napoleon invited Lobanov-Rostovsky to dinner, drank a toast to the Tsar’s health and suggested that the Vistula was the natural boundary between the two empires, thus implying that he would not demand any Russian territory if an all-embracing peace could be reached. On that basis, arrangements were swiftly made for Napoleon and Alexander to meet. In order to provide neutral ground a pavilion was erected by General Jean-Ambroise Baston de Lariboisière, commander of the Guard artillery, on a raft in the middle of the Niemen river securely tethered to both banks at Piktupönen, the official ceasefire line near Tilsit.²⁴ ‘Few sights will be more interesting,’ wrote Napoleon in his 85th campaign bulletin. Large crowds of soldiers did indeed turn up on both banks to watch the meeting.²⁵ Its purpose, Napoleon repeated, was nothing less than to ‘give repose to the existing generation’. After eight months on campaign, he was keen to make peace, return to Paris and continue to oversee his far reaching reforms of so many aspects of French life.

 • • •

The interview between the emperors on Thursday, June 25, 1807 was remarkable for much more than its bizarre location; it was one of the great summit meetings of history. Though genuine friendship is impossible at the apex of power, Napoleon made every effort to charm the twenty-nine-year-old absolute ruler of Russia, and establish a warm personal relationship with him as well as an effective working one. The peace treaties that the negotiations produced – signed with Russia on July 7 and Prussia two days later – effectively divided Europe into zones of French and Russian influence.

Napoleon arrived on the raft first, and when Alexander came aboard, dressed in the dark-green uniform of the Preobrazhensky Guards, the two men embraced. The Tsar’s first words were ‘I will be your second against England.’²⁶ (A less regal version has it, ‘I hate the English as much as you do.’) Alexander had not shown the same antipathy to the English gold he had been readily accepting for years, but, whatever the phrase he used, Napoleon immediately appreciated that a wide-ranging agreement would be possible – indeed, as he put it later, ‘Those words changed everything.’²⁷ They then entered the pavilion’s sumptuous salon and spoke alone for two hours. ‘I’ve just met the Emperor Alexander,’ Napoleon reported to Josephine. ‘I’m very well satisfied with him; he is a very handsome and good young emperor; he has more intelligence than one thinks.’²⁸

Although the door of the raft’s pavilion (which Napoleon pronounced ‘beautiful’) was surmounted by representations of the eagles of Russia and France and large painted monograms of ‘N’ for Napoleon and ‘A’ for Alexander, there was no ‘FW’ for Frederick William of Prussia, who was present at Tilsit but made to feel very much the junior monarch. On the first day he wasn’t invited onto the raft at all but had to wait on the riverbank wrapped in a Russian greatcoat while the fate of his kingdom was decided by two men who had no instinctive affection for it.²⁹ He was allowed onto the raft on the second day, June 26, so that Alexander could introduce him to Napoleon, whereupon it became clear to him that the coming Franco-Russian alliance was going to be bought at the grievous expense of Prussia. When, at the end of the second meeting on the raft, Alexander entered the town of Tilsit at 5 p.m. he received a 100-gun salute, was welcomed by Napoleon in person and was put up in the best mansion in the town. When Frederick William arrived there was no salute, no welcome, and he was billeted at the house of the local miller.³⁰ His position was not helped by the fact that both Napoleon and Alexander found him a pedantic, narrow-minded bore of limited conversation.³¹ ‘He kept me half an hour talking to me of my uniform and buttons,’ Napoleon reminisced, ‘so that at last I said: “You must ask my tailor.”’³² Night after night thereafter, the three men would dine early, say goodnight, and then Alexander would return to Napoleon’s apartments to talk long into the small hours without Frederick William knowing.

Although there was a good deal of reviewing of each other’s guards and exchanging of orders and decorations – Napoleon gave a Russian grenadier the Légion d’Honneur at Alexander’s request – and mutually flattering toasts at grand banquets, it was the late-night conversations about philosophy, politics and strategy that shaped Napoleon’s relationship with the Tsar. In letters to his sister, Alexander wrote of these talks sometimes lasting four hours at a stretch. They discussed the Continental System, the European economy, the future of the Ottoman Empire and how to bring Britain to the negotiating table. ‘When I was at Tilsit I used to chat [je bavardai],’ Napoleon recalled, ‘call the Turks barbarians, and say that they ought to be turned out of Europe, but I never intended to do so, for . . . it was not in the interest of France that Constantinople should be in the hands of either Austria or Russia.’³³ In one of their more surreal discussions, on the best form of government, the autocrat Alexander argued for an elective monarchy, whereas Napoleon – whose crown was at least confirmed by a plebiscite – argued for autocracy. ‘For who is fit to be elected?’ Napoleon asked. ‘A Caesar, an Alexander only comes along once a century, so that the election must be a matter of chance, and the succession is surely worth more than a throw of dice.’³⁴

Alexander was under pressure to make peace from his mother, the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, who felt that enough Russian blood had been shed for the Hohenzollerns, and from his brother Constantine, who frankly admired Napoleon. The deal he struck at Tilsit hardly reflected the scale of his defeat; Prussia paid almost the entire price and Russia lost no territory except the Ionian Isles (including Corfu, which Napoleon called ‘the key to the Adriatic’).³⁵ Napoleon guaranteed that those German states such as Oldenburg which were ruled by the Tsar’s close family would not be forced into the Confederation of the Rhine. Alexander agreed to evacuate Moldavia and Wallachia, recently taken from the Turks (they had never been Russian), and he was given a free hand to invade Finland, which belonged to Sweden. The only significant concession that Alexander had to make at Tilsit was to promise to join the Continental System, which Napoleon hoped would greatly increase the pressure on Britain to make peace. Meanwhile, Alexander invited Napoleon to St Petersburg. ‘I’m aware he’s terrified of cold,’ he told the French ambassador, ‘but despite this I won’t spare him the journey. I’ll order his quarters warmed to Egyptian heat.’³⁶ He also ordered that anti-Napoleonic literature be burned in Russia, where his new ally was now to be referred to in print only as ‘Napoleon’ and never as ‘Bonaparte’.³⁷

By complete contrast with the extreme leniency shown to Russia, Prussia was subjected to drastic penalties. ‘Where I erred most fatally was at Tilsit,’ Napoleon said later. ‘I ought to have dethroned the King of Prussia. I hesitated for a moment. I was sure that Alexander would not have opposed it, provided I had not taken the King’s dominions for myself.’³⁸ Alexander took the eastern Białystok region of Poland from Prussia – hardly the action of an ally – but the other heavy lashes were all dealt by Napoleon. Out of Prussian provinces acquired during the Second and Third Partitions of Poland he carved the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, which Poles hoped would be the first stage on the path to the re-creation of their own kingdom, though it had no diplomatic representation abroad and its Grand Duke was a German, Frederick Augustus of Saxony, with a toothless parliament. Prussian lands west of the Elbe formed a new kingdom of Westphalia, Cottbus went to Saxony, and a huge war indemnity of 120 million francs was imposed. To pay it off, Frederick William had to sell land and raise the overall tax burden from 10 per cent of national wealth to 30 per cent. Prussia was forced to join the Continental System and was not permitted to impose tolls on various waterways such as the Netze river and the Bromberg Canal.³⁹ Joseph was to be recognized as king of Naples, Louis as king of Holland and Napoleon as Protector of the Confederation of the Rhine, and French garrisons remained in the Vistula, Elbe and Oder fortresses. Prussia was reduced to a population of 4.5 million (half its pre-war number) and two-thirds of its territory, and was allowed an army of only 42,000 men; in almost all territories between the Rhine and the Elbe ‘all actual or eventual rights’ of the Kingdom of Prussia ‘shall be obliterated for perpetuity’. The King of Saxony would even have the right to use Prussian roads to send troops to the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. By imposing these humiliations on the great-nephew of Frederick the Great, Napoleon guaranteed that Prussia would feel perpetual resentment, but he calculated that Austrian revanchism over Pressburg and Prussian over Tilsit could be held in check by his new friendship with Russia.

As he began to approach the zenith of his power, Napoleon’s strategy was to ensure that, although he could always count on British hostility, there would be no moment when all three continental powers of Russia, Austria and Prussia would be ranged against him at the same time. He thus needed to play each off against the others, and as much as possible against Britain too. He used Prussia’s desire for Hanover, Russia’s inability to fight on after Friedland, a marriage alliance with Austria, the differences between Russia and Austria over the Ottoman Empire and the fear of Polish resurgence that all three powers felt to avoid having to fight the four powers simultaneously.⁴⁰ That he achieved this for a decade after the collapse of the Peace of Amiens, despite clearly being the European hegemon that each power most feared, was a tribute to his statesmanship. The effective dividing of Europe into French and Russian spheres of influence was the defining moment of this strategy.

One evening towards the end of his life, while he was in exile on St Helena, the conversation turned to when Napoleon had been most happy in his life. Members of his entourage suggested different moments. ‘Yes, I was happy when I became First Consul, happy at the time of my marriage, and happy at the birth of the King of Rome,’ he agreed, referring to the future birth of his son. ‘But then I did not feel perfectly confident of the security of my position. Perhaps I was happiest at Tilsit. I had just surmounted many vicissitudes, many anxieties, at Eylau for instance; and I found myself victorious, dictating laws, having emperors and kings pay me court.’⁴¹ It was a wise moment to have chosen.

 • • •

When Queen Louise of Prussia arrived at Tilsit on July 6, only three days before the Franco-Prussian treaty was signed, she had a two-hour meeting with Napoleon in which she begged for the return of Magdeburg on the west bank of the Elbe. She was an extremely attractive woman, so much so that in 1795 Johann Gottfried Schadow’s statue of her and her sister Frederike was determined to be too erotic for public display.⁴² (Napoleon merely remarked that she was ‘as handsome as could be expected at thirty-five’.⁴³) Reporting their meeting to Berthier, he wrote, ‘The beautiful queen of Prussia really cries,’ after which he added, ‘She believes I came all the way here for her nice eyes.’⁴⁴ He was fully aware of the strategic importance of Magdeburg from his studies of Gustavus Adolphus’s campaigns, and it was never likely that he would do anything so frivolous as concede a vital military stronghold because he succumbed to a lachrymose queen.* He later likened Louise’s entreaties over Magdeburg to Chimène begging ‘in the tragic style’ for Count Rodrigue’s head in Corneille’s play Le Cid, ‘“Sire! Justice! Justice! Magdeburg!” At last to make her stop I begged her to sit down, knowing that nothing is so likely to cut short a tragic scene, for when one is seated its continuance turns into comedy.’⁴⁵ He claimed that during the whole of dinner one night all she talked of was Magdeburg, and that after her husband and Alexander had withdrawn, she kept on pressing. Napoleon offered her a rose. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but with Magdeburg!’ ‘Eh! Madam,’ he replied, ‘it is I who is offering the rose to you, not you to me.’⁴⁶

Magdeburg instead went to Westphalia, a new 1,100-square-mile kingdom carved out of the territories of Brunswick and Hesse-Cassel, as well as Prussian territory west of the Elbe, to which were later added parts of Hanover. To this strategically important new entity, however, Napoleon sent as monarch a boy who had achieved nothing in his twenty-two years beyond taking unauthorized leave in America, making an ill-advised marriage which had been only semi-legally annulled, and then serving perfectly competently (but no more) in charge of Bavarians and Württembergers in the recent campaign.⁴⁷ Jérôme didn’t have a good enough curriculum vitae for a crown, but Napoleon continued to feel that he could depend upon his family more than anyone else – despite the clear indications to the contrary from Lucien’s exile, Jérôme’s marriage, Joseph’s weakness in Naples, Pauline’s insubordinate infidelities and Louis’ blind eye to British smuggling in Holland.

Napoleon wanted Westphalia to be a model for the rest of Germany, encouraging other German states to join the Confederation, or at least to stay out of the Prussian and Austrian orbit. ‘It is essential that your people enjoy a liberty, an equality, a well-being unknown to the people of Germany,’ he wrote to Jérôme on November 15, sending him a constitution for the new kingdom and predicting that no-one would want to return to Prussian rule once they had ‘tasted the benefits of a wise and liberal administration’. He ordered Jérôme to ‘follow it faithfully . . . The benefits of the Code Napoléon, public trials, the establishment of juries, will be, above all, the defining characteristic of your rule . . . I count more on their effects . . . than the greatest military victories.’ Then, ironically given to whom he was writing, he extolled the virtues of meritocracy: ‘The population of Germany anxiously awaits the moment when those who are not of noble birth but who are talented, have an equal right to be considered for jobs; for the abolition of all serfdom as well as intermediaries between the people and their sovereign.’ This letter wasn’t written for publication, but it nevertheless represents Napoleon’s finest ideals. ‘The people of Germany, as those of France, Italy and Spain, want equality and liberal values,’ he wrote. ‘I have become convinced that the burden of privileges was contrary to general opinion. Be a constitutional king.’⁴⁸

As he did with Joseph, Louis and Eugène, Napoleon constantly criticized Jérôme, even admonishing him on one occasion for having too good a sense of humour: ‘Your letter was too witty. You don’t need wit during times of war. You need to be precise, display backbone and simplicity.’⁴⁹ Although none of his brothers made competent rulers, Napoleon’s endless carping didn’t help. ‘He has it in him to become a man of quality,’ he told Joseph of Jérôme. ‘However, he would be surprised to hear this, as all my letters to him are full of reproach . . . I purposefully put him in a position of isolated leadership.’⁵⁰ Napoleon knew how demanding he was being of his family, but his approach failed every time.

 • • •

‘By the time you read this letter,’ Napoleon wrote to Josephine on July 7, ‘peace with Prussia and Russia will have been concluded, and Jérôme recognized as King of Westphalia, with three million in population. This piece of news is for you alone.’⁵¹ The last sentence indicates how much Napoleon usually regarded his letters to Josephine and others as a sophisticated propaganda tool. The day before he had written ‘the little Baron de Kepen has some hope of receiving a visit’, which implies that he was telling the truth when he wrote: ‘I very much wish to see you, when destiny decides the time is right. It’s possible that could be soon.’⁵² Marie would be left behind in Poland.

He returned to Saint-Cloud at 7 a.m. on July 27 after a 100-hour night-and-day carriage ride, moving so fast that his escort had no time to remove the barrier in front of a triumphal arch that had been specially built for him (he simply ordered his coachman to swerve round it).⁵³ He had been away from France for 306 days, the longest absence of his career. ‘We saw Napoleon return from the depths of Poland without stopping,’ recalled Chaptal, ‘convene the Conseil when he arrived and show the same presence of mind, the same continuity and the same strength of ideas as if he had spent the night in his bedroom.’⁵⁴ Sending Marie Walewska his portrait and some books, he wrote from Saint-Cloud: ‘My gentle and dear Marie, you who love your country so much, will understand the joy I feel at being back in France, after nearly a year away. This joy would be complete had you been here too, but I carry you in my heart.’⁵⁵ He didn’t contact her again for eighteen months.