Napoleon's Wars_ An International History, 1803-1815 - Charles Esdaile [174]
This desire for peace was not unknown to Napoleon, for it was hinted at by a delegation of the senate that travelled to Berlin to congratulate him upon his victories. Then, too, there was the Foreign Minister. As an acute German observer who had frequent dealings with French headquarters noted:
Talleyrand . . . desired some political rapprochement. He regarded it as a possibility for the first time after the collapse of Prussia. The new English ministry still seemed undecided in its policy; the nation wanted peace . . . It was only with reluctance, therefore, that Talleyrand had drafted the decree . . . that was designed to bar every coast to the English [see below] . . . Talleyrand continued to buoy himself up with . . . hopes of convincing the English Cabinet, or of inducing it to recognize by pressure of public opinion, that many of the advantages arising out of the war might, on conclusion of peace, be shared by England. But it was essential that Napoleon should cease going on giving the English Cabinet a pretext, by his speeches no less than his measures, for reconciling the nation to their policy by the bugbear of his name. The objective on which Talleyrand staked all his efforts and all his influence was to persuade the emperor, even against his own inclination, to adopt an attitude of moderation.27
This, to put it mildly, was the vainest of hopes. Ensconced in Berlin amid the adulation of his generals, he had, after all, vanquished the ghost of Frederick the Great, whose great victory at Rossbach was now avenged. With the grande armée at the very peak of its performance, all this was reflected in his disposition: ‘Having arrived in Berlin, Napoleon did not just speak and act as a victor moved by self-righteous anger, but affected the language and attitude of a sovereign who commands his subjects. Loyalty to the prince who had fled before him was treated as rebellion, and, angered by the defiance of certain nobles who had stayed in communication with that unfortunate monarch, in the palace of Frederick the Great himself he cried out, “I will bring these petty courtiers so low that they will be reduced to begging for their bread.” His proclamations and bulletins constantly mixed insult with menace, whilst misfortune . . . was not even respected when it came to the person of the Queen of Prussia.’28 Even before the fall of the Prussian capital, Napoleon had taken a hard line: a personal appeal for an armistice on the part of Frederick William was rejected out of hand, while the dispatch of a special envoy to the emperor’s headquarters in the person of the erstwhile ambassador to Paris, Lucchesini, succeeded only in eliciting peace terms that were grim in the extreme. These terms were more or less those that the Prussians were forced to accept the following year but with the added demand that they should go to war with Russia if the latter should attack the Ottoman Empire, something that was by now almost certain. After much agonizing, Frederick William and his advisers screwed themselves up to accept these terms, only to discover immediately that no terms at all were on offer any more. Once again the Prussians were just too late.
In the wake of Jena and Auerstädt, the emperor seems to have envisaged Prussia in the role of a satellite state that could seal his eastern frontier against Russia, whose attitude to a continuation of the war could not yet be predicted with any certainty. On November, however, a large Russian army crossed the frontier into Prussian Poland. Moved by the plight of Frederick William and Louise, for both of