Part 243

See FRANCE: A. D. 1806-1810.

GERMANY: A. D. 1807 (February-June). Closer alliance of Prussia and Russia. Treaty of Bartenstein. Napoleon's victory at Friedland. End of the campaign.

The effect produced in Europe by the doubtful battle of Eylau "was unlucky for France; in Paris the Funds fell. Bennigsen boldly ordered the Te Deum to be sung. In order to confirm his victory, re-organise his army, reassure France, re-establish the opinion of Europe, encourage the Polish insurrection, and to curb the ill-will of Germany and Austria, Napoleon remained a week at Eylau. He negotiated: on one side he caused Talleyrand to write to Zastrow, the Prussian foreign minister, to propose peace and his alliance; he sent Bertrand to Memel to offer to re-establish the King of Prussia, on the condition of no foreign intervention. He also tried to negotiate with Bennigsen; to which the latter made answer, 'that his master had charged him to fight, and not negotiate.' After some hesitation, Prussia ended by joining her fortunes to those of Russia. By the convention of Bartenstein (25th April, 1807) the two sovereigns came to terms on the following points: 1. The re-establishment of Prussia within the limits of 1805. 2. The dissolution of the Confederation of the Rhine. 3. The restitution to Austria of the Tyrol and Venice. 4. The accession of England to the coalition, and the aggrandisement of Hanover. 5. The co-operation of Sweden. 6. The restoration of the house of Orange, and indemnities to the kings of Naples and Sardinia.

This document is important; it nearly reproduces the conditions offered to Napoleon at the Congress of Prague, in 1813. Russia and Prussia proposed then to make a more pressing appeal to Austria, Sweden, and England; but the Emperor Francis was naturally undecided, and the Archduke Charles, alleging the state of the finances and the army, strongly advised him against any new intervention. Sweden was too weak; and notwithstanding his fury against Napoleon, Gustavus III. had just been forced to treat with Mortier. The English minister showed a remarkable inability to conceive the situation; he refused to guarantee the new Russian loan of a hundred and fifty millions, and would lend himself to no maritime diversion. Napoleon showed the greatest diplomatic activity. The Sultan Selim III. declared war against Russia; General Sebastiani, the envoy at Constantinople, put the Bosphorus in a state of defence, and repulsed the English fleet [see TURKS: A. D. 1806-1807]; General Gardane left for Ispahan, with a mission to cause a Persian outbreak in the Caucasus. Dantzig had capitulated [May 24, after a long siege], and Lefèbvre's 40,000 men were therefore ready for service. Masséna took 36,000 of them into Italy, In the spring, Bennigsen, who had been reinforced by 10,000 regular troops, 6,000 Cossacks, and the Imperial Guard, being now at the head of 100,000 men, took the offensive; Gortchakof commanding the right and Bagration the left. He tried, as in the preceding year, to seize Ney's division; but the latter fought, as he retired, two bloody fights, at Gutstadt and Ankendorff. Bennigsen, again in danger of being surrounded, retired on Heilsberg. He defended himself bravely (June 10); but the French, extending their line on his right, marched on Eylau, so as to cut him off from Konigsberg. The Russian generalissimo retreated; but being pressed, he had to draw up at Friedland, on the Alle. The position he had taken up was most dangerous. All his army was enclosed in an angle of the Alle, with the steep bed of the river at their backs, which in case of misfortune left them only one means of retreat, over the three bridges of Friedland. ... 'Where are the Russians concealed?' asked Napoleon when he came up. When he had noted their situation, he exclaimed, 'It is not every day that one surprises the enemy in such a fault.' He put Lannes and Victor in reserve, ordered Mortier to oppose Gortchakof on the left and to remain still, as the movement which 'would be made by the right would pivot on the left.' As to Ney, he was to cope on the right with Bagration, who was shut in by the angle of the river; he was to meet them 'with his head down,' without taking any care of his own safety. Ney led the charge with irresistible fury; the Russians were riddled by his artillery at 150 paces: he successively crushed the chasseurs of the Russian Guard, the Ismaïlovski, and the Horse Guards, burnt Friedland by shells, and cannonaded the bridges which were the only means of retreat. ... The Russian left wing was almost thrown into the river; Bagration, with the Semenovski and other troops, was hardly able to cover the defeat. {1513} On the Russian right, Gortchakof, who had advanced to attack the immovable Mortier, had only time to ford the Alle. Count Lambert retired with 29 guns by the left bank; the rest fled by the right bank, closely pursued by the cavalry. Meanwhile Murat, Davoust, and Soult, who had taken no part in the battle, arrived before Konigsberg. Lestocq, with 25,000 men, tried to defend it, but on learning the disaster of Friedland he hastily evacuated it. Only one fortress now remained to Frederick William--the little town of Memel. The Russians had lost at Friedland from 15,000 to 20,000 men, besides 80 guns (June 14, 1807). ... Alexander had no longer an army. Only one man, Barclay de Tolly, proposed to continue the war; but in order to do this it would be necessary to re-enter Russia, to penetrate into the very heart of the empire, to burn everything on the way, and only present a desert to the enemy. Alexander hoped to get off more cheaply. He wrote a severe letter to Bennigsen, and gave him powers to treat."

_A. Rambaud, History of Russia, volume 2, chapter 12._

ALSO IN: _Duke de Rovigo, Memoirs, volume 2, part 1, chapters 4-6._

GERMANY: A. D. 1807 (June-July). The Treaty of Tilsit. Its known and its unknown agreements.

"Alexander I. now determined to negotiate in person with the rival emperor, and on the 25th of June the two sovereigns met at Tilsit, on a raft which was moored in the middle of the Niemen. The details of the conference are a secret, as Napoleon's subsequent account of it is untrustworthy, and no witnesses were present. All that is certain is that Alexander I., whose character was a curious mixture of nobility and weakness, was completely won over by his conqueror. ... Napoleon, ... instead of attempting to impose extreme terms upon a country which it was impossible to conquer, ... offered to share with Russia the supremacy in Europe which had been won by French arms. The only conditions were the abandonment of the cause of the old monarchies, which seemed hopeless, and an alliance with France against England. Alexander had several grievances against the English government, especially the lukewarm support that had been given in recent operations, and made no objection to resume the policy of his predecessors in this respect. Two interviews sufficed to arrange the basis of an agreement. Both sovereigns abandoned their allies without scruple. Alexander gave up Prussia and Sweden, while Napoleon deserted the cause of the Poles, who had trusted to his zeal for their independence, and of the Turks, whom his envoy had recently induced to make war upon Russia. The Treaty of Tilsit was speedily drawn up; on the 7th of July peace was signed between France and Russia, on the 9th between France and Prussia. Frederick William III. had to resign the whole of his kingdom west of the Elbe, together with all the acquisitions which Prussia had made in the second and third partitions of Poland. The provinces that were left, amounting to barely half of what he had inherited, were burthened with the payment of an enormous sum as compensation to France. The district west of the Elbe was united with Hesse-Cassel, Brunswick, and ultimately with Hanover, to form the kingdom of Westphalia, which was given to Napoleon's youngest brother, Jerome. Of Polish Prussia, one province, Bialystock, was added to Russia, and the rest was made into the grand duchy of Warsaw, and transferred to Saxony. Danzig, with the surrounding territory, was declared a free state under Prussian and Saxon protection, but it was really subject to France, and remained a centre of French power on the Baltic. All trade between Prussia and England was cut off. Alexander I., on his side, recognised all Napoleon's new creations in Europe--the Confederation of the Rhine, the kingdoms of Italy, Naples, Holland, and Westphalia, and undertook to mediate between France and England. But the really important agreement between France and Russia was to be found, not in the formal treaties, but in the secret conventions which were arranged by the two emperors. The exact text of these has never been made public, and it is probable that some of the terms rested upon verbal rather than on written understandings, but the general drift of them is unquestionable. The bribe offered to Alexander was the aggrandisement of Russia in the East. To make him an accomplice in the acts of Napoleon, he was to be allowed to annex Finland from Sweden, and Moldavia and Wallachia from Turkey. With regard to England, Russia undertook to adopt Napoleon's blockade-system, and to obtain the adhesion of those states which still remained open to English trade--Sweden, Denmark, and Portugal."

_H. Lodge, History of Modern Europe, chapter 24, section 25._

"'I thought,' said Napoleon at St. Helena, 'it would benefit the world to drive these brutes, the Turks, out of Europe. But when I reflected what power it would give to Russia, from the number of Greeks in the Turkish dominions who may be considered Russians, I refused to consent to it, especially as Alexander wanted Constantinople, which would have destroyed the equilibrium of power in Europe. France would gain Egypt, Syria, and the islands; but those were nothing to what Russia would have obtained.' This coincides with Savary's [Duke de Rovigo's] statement, that Alexander told him Napoleon said he was under no engagements to the new Sultan, and that changes in the world inevitably changed the relations of states to one another; and again, Alexander said that, in their conversations at Tilsit, Napoleon often told him he did not require the evacuation of Moldavia and Wallachia; he would place things in a train to dispense with it, and it was not possible to suffer longer the presence of the Turks in Europe. 'He even left me,' said Alexander, 'to entertain the project of driving them back into Asia. It is only since that he has returned to the idea of leaving Constantinople to them, and some surrounding provinces.' Due day, when Napoleon was talking to Alexander, he asked his secretary, M. Meneval, for the map of Turkey, opened it, then renewed the conversation; and placing his finger on Constantinople said several times to the secretary, though not loud enough to be heard by Alexander, 'Constantinople, Constantinople, never. It is the capital of the world.' ... It is very evident in their conversations that Napoleon agreed to his [Alexander's] possessing himself of the Turkish Empire up to the Balkan, if not beyond; though Bignon denies that any plan for the actual partition of Turkey was embodied in the treaty of Tilsit. Hardenberg, not always well informed, asserts that it was. {1514} Savary says he could not believe that Napoleon would have abandoned the Turks without a compensation in some other quarter; and he felt certain Alexander had agreed in return to Napoleon's project for the conquest of Spain, 'which the Emperor had very much at heart'"

_C. Joyneville, Life and Times of Alexander I., volume 1, chapter 8._

ALSO IN: _Sir A. Alison, History of Europe, 1789-1815, chapter 46 (volume 10)._

_Count Miot de Melito, Memoirs, chapter 24._

_P. Lanfrey, History of Napoleon, chapters 3-4._

_Prince de Talleyrand, Memoirs, part 3 (volume 1)._

_A. Thiers, History of the Consulate and the Empire, book 27 (volume 2)._

GERMANY: A. D. 1807 (July). The collapse of Prussia and its Causes.

"For the five years that followed, Prussia is to be conceived, in addition to all her other humiliations, as in the hands of a remorseless creditor whose claims are decided by himself without appeal, and who wants more than all he can get. She is to be thought of as supporting for more than a year after the conclusion of the Treaty a French army of more than 150,000 men, then as supporting a French garrison in three principal fortresses, and finally, just before the period ends, as having to support the huge Russian expedition in its passage through the country. ... It was not in fact from the Treaty of Tilsit, but from the systematic breach of it, that the sufferings of Prussia between 1807 and 1813 arose. It is indeed hardly too much to say that the advantage of the Treaty was received only by France, and that the only object Napoleon can have had in signing it was to inflict more harm on Prussia than he could inflict by simply continuing the war. Such was the downfall of Prussia. The tremendousness of the catastrophe strikes us less because we know that it was soon retrieved, and that Prussia rose again and became greater than ever. But could this recovery be anticipated? A great nation, we say, cannot be dissolved by a few disasters; patriotism and energy will retrieve everything. But precisely these seemed wanting. The State seemed to have fallen in pieces because it had no principle of cohesion, and was only held together by an artificial bureaucracy. It had been created by the energy of its government and the efficiency of its soldiers, and now it appeared to come to an end because its government had ceased to be energetic and its soldiers to be efficient. The catastrophe could not but seem as irremediable as it was sudden and complete." There may be discerned "three distinct causes for it. First, the undecided and pusillanimous policy pursued by the Prussian government since 1803 had an evident influence upon the result by making the great Powers, particularly England and Austria, slow to render it assistance, and also by making the commanders, especially Brunswick, irresolute in action because they could not, even at the last moment, believe the war to be serious. This indecision we have observed to have been connected with a mal-organisation of the Foreign Department. Secondly, the corruption of the military system, which led to the surrender of the fortresses. Thirdly, a misfortune for which Prussia was not responsible, its desertion by Russia at a critical moment, and the formation of a close alliance between Russia and France."

_J. R. Seeley, Life and Times of Stein, part 2, chapter 5 (volume 1)._

GERMANY: A. D. 1807-1808. The great Revolutionary Reforms of Hardenberg, Stein and Scharnhorst. Edict of Emancipation. Military reorganization. Beginning of local self-government. Seeds of a new national life.

"The work of those who resisted Napoleon--even if no one of them should ever be placed in the highest class of the benefactors of mankind--has in some cases proved enduring, and nowhere so much as in Germany. They began two great works--the reorganisation of Prussia and the revival of the German nationality, and time has deliberately ratified their views. Without retrogression, without mistake, except the mistake which in such matters is the most venial that can be committed, that, namely, of over-caution, of excessive hesitation, the edifice which was then founded has been raised higher and higher till it is near completion. ... Because Frederick-William III. remains quietly seated on the throne through the whole period, we remain totally unaware that a Prussian revolution took place then--a revolution so comprehensive that the old reign and glories of Frederick may fairly be said to belong to another world--to an 'ancien regime' that has utterly passed away. It was a revolution which, though it did not touch the actual framework of government in such a way as to substitute one of Aristotle's forms of government for another, yet went so far beyond government, and made such a transformation both in industry and culture, that it deserves the name of revolution far more, for instance, than our English Revolution of the 17th century. ... In Prussia few of the most distinguished statesmen, few even of those who took the lead in her liberation from Napoleon, were Prussians. Blücher himself began life in the service of Sweden, Scharnhorst was a Hanoverian, so was Hardenberg, and Stein came from Nassau. Niebuhr was enticed to Berlin from the Bank of Copenhagen. Hardenberg served George III. and afterwards the Duke of Brunswick before he entered the service of Frederick-William II.; and when Stein was dismissed by Frederick-William III. in the midst of the war of 1806, though he was a man of property and rank, he took measures to ascertain whether they were in want of a Finance Minister at St. Petersburg. ... We misapprehend the nature of what took place when we say, as we usually do, that some important and useful reforms were introduced by Stein, Hardenberg, and Scharnhorst. In the first place, such a word as reform is not properly applied to changes so vast, and in the second place. the changes then made or at least commenced, went far beyond legislation. We want some word stronger than reform which shall convey that one of the greatest events of modern history now took place in Prussia. Revolution would convey this, but unfortunately we appropriate that word to changes in the form of government, or even mere changes of dynasty, provided they are violent, though such changes are commonly quite insignificant compared to what now took place in Prussia. ... The form of government indeed was not changed. Not merely did the king continue to reign, but no Parliament was created even with powers ever so restricted. Another generation had to pass away before this innovation, which to us seems the beginning of political life, took place. But a nation must be made before it can be made free, and, as we have said, in Prussia there was an administration (in great disorder) and an army, but no nation. {1515} When Stein was placed at the head of affairs in the autumn of 1807, he seems, at first, hardly to have been aware that anything was called for beyond the reform of the administration, and the removal of some abuses in the army. Accordingly he did reform the administration from the top to the bottom, remodelling the whole machinery both of central and local government which had come down from the father of Frederick the Great. But the other work also was forced upon him, and he began to create the nation by emancipating the peasantry, while Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were brooding over the ideas which, five years later, took shape in the Landwehr of East Prussia. Besides emancipating the peasant he emancipated industry,--everywhere abolishing that strange caste system which divided the population rigidly into nobles, citizens, and peasants, and even stamped every acre of land in the country with its own unalterable rank as noble, or citizen, or peasant land. Emancipation, so to speak, had to be given before enfranchisement. The peasant must have something to live for; freewill must be awakened in the citizen; and he must be taught to fight for something before he could receive political liberty. Of such liberty Stein only provided one modest germ. By his Städteordnung he introduced popular election into the towns. Thus Prussia and France set out towards political liberty by different roads. Prussia began modestly with local liberties, but did not for a long time attempt a Parliament. France with her charte, and in imitation of France many of the small German States, had grand popular Parliaments, but no local liberties. And so for a long time Prussia was regarded as a backward State. ... It was only by accident that Stein stopped short at municipal liberties and created no Parliament. He would have gone further, and in the last years of the wartime Hardenberg did summon deliberative assemblies, which, however, fell into disuse again after the peace. ... In spite however of all reaction, the change irrevocably made by the legislation of that time was similar to that made in France by the Revolution, and caused the age before Jena to be regarded as an 'ancien regime.' But in addition to this, a change had been made in men's minds and thoughts by the shocks of the time, which prepared the way for legislative changes which have taken place since. How unprecedented in Prussia, for instance, was the dictatorial authority wielded by Hardenberg early in 1807, by Stein in the latter part of that year and in 1808, and by Hardenberg again from 1810 onwards! Before that time in the history of Prussia we find no subject eclipsing or even approaching the King in importance. Prussia had been made what she was almost entirely by her electors and kings. In war and organisation alike all had been done by the Great Elector or Frederick-William I., or Frederick the Great. But now this is suddenly changed. Everything now turns on the minister. Weak ministers are expelled by pressure put upon the king, strong ones are forced upon him. He is compelled to create a new ministerial power much greater than that of an English Prime Minister, and more like that of a Grand Vizier, and by these dictators the most comprehensive innovations are made. The loyalty of the people was not impaired by this; on the contrary, Stein and Hardenberg saved the Monarchy; but it evidently transferred the Monarchy, though safely, to a lower pedestal."

_J. R. Seeley, Prussian History (Macmillan's Magazine, volume 36, pages 342-351)._

ALSO IN: _J. R. Seeley, Life and Times of Stein, parts 3-5 (volumes 1-2)._

_R. B. D. Morier, Agrarian Legislation of Prussia (Systems of Land Tenure: Cobden Club Essays, chapter 5)._

GERMANY: A. D. 1808. The Awakening of the national spirit. Effects of the Spanish rising, and of Fichte's Addresses.