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what was going on.’41 This angry outburst was followed by a series of specious attempts to paint the emperor as the injured innocent. His conduct towards Russia had been fair and moderate; he did not want war with Alexander; he wanted only for Russia to fulfil her treaty obligations and to behave as a friend and ally; he could not pull his garrison out of Prussia without enduring public humiliation. Yet still Caulaincourt would not give up. Going to war with Russia, he contended, would be difficult and dangerous: what would happen, for example, if the Russians evaded battle and retired into the interior? Napoleon, however, was no less stubborn. The Russians would be thrashed - ‘one good battle’, he said, ‘would knock the bottom out of . . . Alexander’s fine resolutions’42 - and, with that subject dealt with, he returned to insisting that Russia wanted war, denouncing any attempt to make him compromise, and alleging that the Lithuanians were deluging him with appeals for their liberation. After five hours’ argument, the interview concluded, leaving a weary Caulaincourt with no other hope of maintaining the peace than that the war in Spain would keep Napoleon from turning east.

Before leaving Russia, Caulaincourt had repeatedly been told by Alexander that he did not want war. But this was disingenuous. In the first half of 1811 the tsar was certainly considering a very different policy. Following the peace treaty signed with Sweden in 1809 , Finland, it will be recalled, had been annexed by Russia. However, she was not simply absorbed into the Russian empire, but rather given the status of a Grand Duchy, even though its Grand Duke would forever be the tsar of Russia. Not only this, but Finland was also granted a constitution, albeit one that reflected the patterns of an earlier age: the Finnish assembly, for example, sat not as a single chamber but as four different estates. In this way, a figment of self-government was maintained without threatening Russian control: always virtually powerless, the assembly met for a single session in 1809 and thereafter did not come together again until 1863 . The importance of these events here is that they offered a solution to the Polish problem, and, in particular, restoring the control of Poland which Russia had enjoyed in the eighteenth century. Much favoured by Czartoryski, this was hardly a new idea, but the new Grand Duchy of Finland gave it a credibility it might previously have lacked. And, convinced that Russian domination was the best means of protecting their privileges, many Polish nobles were very interested in such a scheme. In the course of the campaign of 1809, indeed, a deputation of Polish nobles had visited Golitsyn’s headquarters and promised him the support of all Poles if only Alexander would reconstitute the old Polish state with himself as its ruler. Why not, then, turn the situation around by offering the Poles a Finnish-style settlement of their own that would bring together both the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and the vast swathes of Polish territory already possessed by the Russians?

Further encouraged by the way such a policy would enable him to live out his dream of playing the liberator, in January 1811 Alexander therefore committed himself to restoring the Kingdom of Poland on the basis of the frontiers she had enjoyed prior to the first partition 1772 in (included in these, of course, were not just the territories taken by Russia and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, but Austrian Galicia and Prussian Pomerania). As for the political basis of the new state, this would be the radical constitution of 1791 which had greatly reduced the power of the nobility and created a strong central government. In all probability Alexander would have preferred the much weaker constitution that had governed Poland earlier in the eighteenth century, but in the end he was persuaded by Czartoryski - still his chief agent in respect of Poland - that there was no other option if the new state was to be a credible entity. In proof of Alexander’s good intentions, meanwhile, there was also