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value on increasing Russia’s trading links with the outside world. At the same time he was also beginning to doubt the Blockade’s chances of success. ‘It was . . . impossible for Alexander to close his eyes any longer to the sad condition to which the absolute cessation of commerce had reduced the empire,’ wrote the Lithuanian countess, Sophie Tisenhaus. ‘What limit, moreover, could anyone assign to this system, even more oppressive for those who had undertaken it than for those against whom it was directed. Had not England her colonies, her ships, all her seas at her disposition?’38 As Alexander’s problems mounted up, so opposition to his rule became ever more open, those involved including such members of his own family as the dowager empress and the Grand Duchess Catherine; prominent members of the armed forces like Admiral Alexei Shishkov and Paul I’s sometime Foreign Minister, Nicolai Rostopchin; the leading writer Basil Karamzin; and the Minister of Justice, Georgi Derzhavin. In December 1810, then, Alexander decided to act. As a first step, the ban on neutral vessels had already been relaxed, but by imperial decree it was announced that tariffs on imports that arrived in Russia by land would be massively increased in relation to those payable on goods that came in by sea. Neither Britain nor France were mentioned directly, but in the circumstances nothing could be clearer: the former’s colonial goods were to be allowed in while the latter’s wines and manufactures were to be kept out. As such, Russia did not withdraw from the Continental Blockade - British ships continued to be seized in considerable numbers up until 1812- but it was all too obvious that Alexander could no longer be counted upon to enforce it, and still more so that Napoleon’s attempt to transform the whole of continental Europe into a captive market was not to be allowed to extend any further east than Warsaw.

As a shot across Napoleon’s bows, the ukase of December 1810 was very pointed, and he would therefore have been well advised to take it very seriously. Yet the emperor’s attitude towards the growing crisis is revealed only too well by the interview he accorded his ambassador Caulaincourt when the latter was recalled to France in the early summer of 1810. Arriving in Paris on June, Caulaincourt immediately presented himself at court:

His Majesty received me coldly, and at once began heatedly to enumerate his . . . grievances against the Tsar Alexander . . . He spoke of the ukase prohibiting foreign imports, and of the admission of neutral . . . ships into Russian ports, which, he said, was an infringement of the Continental System. He went on to say that the tsar was treacherous, that he was arming to make war on France, that troops from Moldavia were on their way to the Dvina.39

Faced by this tirade, Caulaincourt stood his ground. The Russians, he said, had legitimate economic grievances, and Napoleon could not be surprised if they in effect followed the precedent established by the decrees of Trianon and Fontainebleau: that Alexander had never acted in anything other than good faith; that the reported troop movements were defensive measures that were entirely understandable in the circumstances; and that almost every action taken by Napoleon since the summer of 1809 had in some respect been detrimental to Russia’s interests. Alexander, Caulaincourt insisted, did not want war, and all would be resolved if only Napoleon would give him the assurances he sought over the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and pull all his troops out of Prussia. ‘Finally, I told the emperor frankly that, if he wanted a war, his government was doing everything it could to bring one about; it was even crying its purpose from the house-tops, and if he regarded the Russian alliance as worth maintaining, I was unable to understand what purpose all these pin-pricks could possibly serve.’40

As might have been expected, Napoleon’s response was frosty. ‘The emperor was extremely annoyed with me, and told me that I had been duped by . . . the Russians, that I did not understand