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the argument of some of his advisers that French power was essential to keep British ambitions in check. To some extent this had been part of the rationale underlying Russian policy at Tilsit and in the following years. Rumiantsev had wished to use Napoleon against Britain just as Metternich hoped to use him to balance Russia. But the basic point was that France was too powerful and Napoleon far too ambitious for either the Austrians or Russians to use safely. Attempts to do so merely condemned Europe to more years of conflict and instability. Alexander’s insight that Napoleon would never honour any settlement acceptable to the allies, and that lasting peace could only be made in Paris, was correct. More than any other individual, he was responsible for Napoleon’s overthrow. If leadership of the coalition had rested with Metternich and Schwarzenberg, there is every likelihood that the 1814 campaign would have ended with Napoleon on his throne, the allies behind the Rhine, and Europe condemned to unending conflict and chaos. On the day that Paris finally capitulated, Castlereagh’s half-brother, Sir Charles Stewart, wrote that ‘it would be injustice’ not to recognize Alexander’s achievement as the man who had led the allies to victory and thereby ‘richly deserved the appellation of the liberator of mankind’.18

In early November 1813, however, when the allies reached Frankfurt and encamped on the Rhine, Paris still seemed far away. In Frankfurt, the allied leaders agreed on a combined political and military strategy. They would offer Napoleon peace on very moderate terms. As even Metternich admitted to one of his Austrian subordinates, there was every probability that the emperor would reject these terms. But the offer of peace would clarify allied aims and allow them to expose Napoleon’s intransigence to the French people. Throughout the 1814 campaign a key allied tactic was to stress that they were fighting Napoleon’s insatiable ambitions, not France and her legitimate interests and pride. They were terrified that Napoleon might succeed in mobilizing ‘the nation in arms’ against their invasion of France, just as his republican predecessors had done in 1792–4. On the contrary, if they could split Napoleon from the French nation, this might either increase the pressure on him to make peace or encourage the emergence of an alternative French regime with which the allies could negotiate.19

The biggest source of allied leverage would be military. Having seen how Napoleon had used the winter of 1812–13 to recover from disaster in Russia and create a new army, the allies were determined not to give him a second such opportunity. They therefore committed themselves to a full-scale winter invasion of France. If any of the allied leaders had doubts about this commitment, they were quickly dispelled by news from Paris that on 15 November Napoleon had summoned a further 300,000 men to the colours, on top of the 280,000 conscripts whose recruitment had already been announced in the autumn of 1813. The allied response to this was a ringing manifesto aimed at the French people. It stated that

the French government has just ordered a new levy of 300,000 conscripts. The justifications set out in the new law are a provocation against the allied powers…The allied powers are not making war against France…but against the domination which the Emperor Napoleon has for too long exercised beyond the borders of his empire, to the misfortune of both Europe and France…The allied sovereigns desire that France should be strong, great and happy because a strong and great France is one of the fundamental bases of the whole order of the world (édifice sociale)…But the allied powers themselves want to live in freedom, happiness and tranquillity. They want a state of peace which through a wise re-distribution of power and a just equilibrium will preserve their peoples henceforth from the calamities beyond number which have weighed on Europe for twenty years.20

The allied peace terms were conveyed to Napoleon by the Count de Saint-Aignan, a French diplomat