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Despite apparent difficulties, achieving Napoleon’s goals proved almost ridiculously simple. In the first instance, as France was a guarantor of the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire by virtue of the treaty of Westphalia of 1648, the First Consul had a legitimate right to intervene in German affairs. At the same time, the French ruler had long since correctly identified gaining the support of Alexander I as the key to the situation, and all the more so as the tsar was for a variety of reasons closely involved in the fate of Germany. Thus, by virtue of the treaty of Teschen of 1779, which had seen Catherine II mediate an Austro-Prussian peace settlement in the wake of the War of the Bavarian Succession, he could claim to be the guarantor of the Holy Roman Empire’s constitution, while he also had numerous connections among the rulers of the states of Germany: his mother was a princess of Hesse, his wife was a princess of Baden, his brother-in-law was Duke of Oldenburg and a cousin the ruler of Württemberg. No sooner had Alexander come to the throne, indeed, than a new envoy had been sent to St Petersburg in the person of General Duroc. Alexander had received him warmly enough. ‘Tell the First Consul that I am attached to his glory,’ he had said. ‘I do not want anything for myself; I only wish to contribute to the tranquillity of Europe.’34 In saying this, he was probably sincere enough. As Sophie Tisenhaus, a Polish countess who later published her memoirs as the Comtesse de Choiseul-Gouffier, remembered:

The philanthropic character of the emperor seemed to promise uninterrupted peace to his happy subjects. No idea of conquest or ambition had thus far entered the head of this young sovereign . . . That which was not less remarkable was the admiration which he involuntarily felt for the man whose character could in no way be in sympathy with his own. But it must be admitted that that prestige of glory and power which then surrounded Napoleon was well calculated to seduce the imagination with all the fascination of the marvellous. Alexander could not consider as a usurper the extraordinary man who, having rescued France from the abyss of revolution, continued still to direct her destiny under the modest title of consul.35

Friendly relations having been established, the wooing of Russia continued: it is, for example, significant that the troops sent to reconquer St Domingue (see below) included all the Polish volunteer forces that had been raised from Austrian prisoners of war in Italy. Yet, naïve and idealistic though Alexander was, he did not immediately rush into the arms of Napoleon. His first Foreign Minister, Nikita Panin, was violently opposed to the French Revolution and Napoleon alike, and was in consequence inclined to seek an alliance with Britain. Indeed, a peace settlement was signed with her in June 1801. Yet Alexander always had reservations. Deeply resentful of Britain’s commercial pretensions, the tsar had insisted on Britain agreeing to respect the maritime rights not just of Russia but also of the Baltic states as the price of peace, while he also strongly suspected Britain of complicity in the murder of his father and greatly disliked Panin who was notoriously arrogant and overbearing. By the autumn of 1801, then, Russia was engaged in serious negotiations with France, and in early October the way was cleared for an agreement by the replacement of Panin by the more malleable Victor Kochubei. Within days there followed the treaty with France that formally put an end to Russia’s participation in the Second Coalition. This agreement being accompanied by a secret codicil that effectively promised Napoleon Russian support for his German plans, the way was open for the First Consul to remake Germany, so long, that is, as he respected the interests of Alexander I.

In the circumstances, this was little hardship. Many of the states with which the tsar had family ties were ones which he would have wished to strengthen anyway, and, if Alexander had rather ostentatiously taken Prussia under his wing in