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By Root 2504 0

the young sprang to arms, and that before anyone had asked them to do so. Neither the menaces of Russia, nor the prudence . . . of their parents, could check their patriotic spirit . . . Children listened with feverish curiosity to the stories of their elders, and burned with ardour . . . Anyone without a uniform did not dare to show themselves in the streets for fear of being mocked by urchins.’11 But Napoleon, less enamoured of the Poles than his public position suggests, realized that pushing the Polish question too far was folly, for his attack on Russia needed the active cooperation of Prussia and Austria. To act upon his rhetoric of liberation was therefore impossible. As his aide-de-camp, Lejeune, wrote:

Deputations of Polish noblemen arrived in rapid succession, eager to persuade him to decree the restoration of the Kingdom of Poland, and promising him . . . the loyal cooperation of the whole Polish nation . . . There is little doubt that Napoleon would gladly have met their wishes immediately, for an independent Poland would have been a steadfast ally to France, and have protected us from an invasion from the north . . . It must, however, be remembered that the emperor was terribly hampered in any decision as to Poland by the fact that he would not only have to dispose of that portion of the dismembered kingdom still in the grasp of Russia, but also of the provinces . . . assigned by treaty to Prussia and Austria respectively. Now Prussian and Austrian battalions were marching in line with ours . . . but there was no doubt that at the slightest hint of the emperor’s intentions to take from their princes their [remaining] portion of the spoils of the old Kingdom of Poland, every Austrian and Prussian would have left our ranks to join those of the Russians. Napoleon . . . therefore . . . needed all his diplomatic skill . . . to evade destroying the hopes of the Poles or making any definite promise to them.12

To deal with the problem, a special diet of the Polish nobility was assembled at Warsaw under the presidency of no less a person than the father of Prince Adam Czartoryski, and allowed to proclaim itself to be a ‘general confederation of the Polish nation’. Opening the deliberations of this body, meanwhile, Napoleon’s ‘ambassador-extraordinary’, Dufour de Pradt, made vague promises of freedom, only to discover that the deputies voiced demands beyond anything his master was prepared to contemplate. After just three days, then, the Diet was dissolved and replaced by a small council of administration. Yet this was not the most politic of moves. At Tilsit the Poles had seen the emperor surrender the interests of Poland to his need for an alliance with Russia, and now, with 75,000 men under arms in the grande armée and her economy ruined by the Continental Blockade, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw was in a state of complete bankruptcy. On top of this, Poland, like East Prussia, had now been devastated by the concentration of the grande armée. ‘The depredations of the army, and its agents,’ wrote Pradt, ‘had not ceased for an instant. I remember a little Jew whom I passed on the road to Warsaw and asked for news. “News?” he wryly replied. “There is not a thing to eat.” ’13 But, it now transpired, all this was for nothing, all that had changed being that the emperor was sacrificing Poland’s interests in favour of Austria and Prussia rather than Russia. The result, needless to say, was disillusionment in the army - so far as Napoleon was concerned, one cavalry officer concluded, ‘the Poles have never been anything but an instrument of convenience’14 - and apathy on the home front. ‘The grandees, some elements of the lesser nobility and the so-called liberal professions remained in a state of excitement . . . but the mass of the nation turned their backs on the movement . . . The Poles may have wanted the restoration of their fatherland, but they did not want to achieve this at the cost of devastation and absolute ruin.’15 And if Poland was apathetic, Prussia was downright hostile. Reduced to penury by the passage