• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2645 0

was Frederick William that Napoleon was even offered an offensive and defensive alliance and a guarantee of up to 40,000 men if he would only offer better terms. But the emperor remained deaf to all argument, and the increasingly desperate Stein concluded that the only way out was a new war in conjunction with Austria. With this in mind, he therefore sent a special envoy to Vienna while looking into the possibility of stirring up some sort of popular insurrection in Germany. Unfortunately for him the French intercepted some of his correspondence, and promptly imposed new terms that made matters even worse: Prussia would be freed of all French troops other than garrisons in Magdeburg, Glogau, Küstrin and Stettin and need now pay only 140 million francs in terms of actual reparations, but in exchange for this she found herself stripped of much revenue, confined to an army of 42,000 men, committed to a military alliance against Austria, and deprived of Stein, whom Frederick William was obliged to banish and send into exile. Even by the standards of Napoleonic peace settlements, it was a massive blow. Deprived not just of much of her territory and population, but also unable even to levy tolls on the entire length of such frontiers as remained to her, Prussia was economically ruined. Still worse, she was seemingly forever in Napoleon’s pocket: with her main fortresses in the hands of the French, her army a mere shadow of its former self and Frederick William resolutely opposed to any move that might incur the emperor’s ire, there was no chance of the national uprising of which a few diehard officers dreamed, and, indeed, no guarantee of Prussia’s continued existence other than Napoleon’s will.

In adopting a hard line, Napoleon was acting against the advice of many of his advisers, not least his ambassador to Russia, Armand de Caulaincourt, who told the emperor to his face that his conduct was creating a climate of fear in Europe, and urged him to withdraw all his troops from Prussia other than a token garrison in one single fortress. This, he claimed, ‘would be of greater use to him than an army of 100,000 men and ten strongholds on the Oder, and . . . leave all his forces at his disposal to cover Spain and put an honourable end to the complications in that country’.27 But Napoleon would not hear of such a move. Fears of a universal monarchy he just laughed off: ‘France is large enough! What can I want? Have I not enough with my Spanish affairs, with the war against England?’28 And Caulaincourt’s plans for an evacuation of Germany, he scorned as ‘a system of weakness’. As the ambassador continued, ‘He objected that they would lose the fruit of all the sacrifices already made in order to make England bow, and that it was essential to close every port to the commerce of that power so as to compel her recognition of the independence of other flags . . . The emperor often listened to me with a genial air, but sometimes also with impatience. More than once he told me, though in a joking tone, that I understood nothing of affairs.’29

To return to Russia, it had been agreed that emperor and tsar should meet to settle the differences that had arisen over the Ottoman Empire. On 28 September 1808 the two rulers duly met at the small Saxon city of Erfurt, a spot chosen as it was roughly midway between the frontiers of France and Russia. Outwardly, all was well. The tsar was greeted not just by Napoleon but a large number of German princes, and the emperor conducted him in person to the sumptuous lodgings - furnished, incidentally, with fittings brought from Paris for the purpose - that had been selected for him to the sound of cannonades and church bells. To flattery, meanwhile, was added bedazzlement: as at Tilsit, the Imperial Guard put on an impressive display of military pomp; the German princes had been encouraged to attend so as to reinforce the notion of Napoleon as padishah; and Alexander was reminded of the superiority of French culture by the specially invited actors of the Comédie Française. As Napoleon told Talleyrand prior