Treaties of Tilsit

• 1. Introduction

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  The Treaties of Tilsit were sealed on a raft in the middle of a river. On the 7th of July 1807, Napoleon met Russian Emperor Alexander I on that raft, moored in the Neman. No territory belonged to either empire there; that symmetry was the point. Frederick William III of Prussia, whose realm hung in the balance, stood on the far bank and waited. He was not invited. What emerged from those negotiations reshaped half a continent. Prussia lost more than half its land and more than half its people. Russia and France swore to help each other against all remaining enemies. A string of new wars began almost immediately. How the meeting came together, and what the two emperors promised each other in secret, are questions worth sitting with. So is the reason the alliance collapsed so completely within five years.

• 2. Theater on the Neman

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  The city of Tilsit was declared neutral for the occasion. Russian officers who wanted to see Napoleon were required to disguise themselves as civilians just to enter. Only select individuals were permitted anywhere near the military ceremony. The two armies held separate halves of the city: a Russian Guardsmen battalion in one, the French Guard in the other. Napoleon issued a notable order for his troops. The daily password and countersign for the French Guard would be "Alexander, Russia, Greatness." The Russian Guard was given "Napoleon, France, Prowess."

  Alexander arrived on a richly caparisoned Arabian horse and rode along the ranks of French Guardsmen frozen at attention. A superb horseman, he sat impeccably and responded to military salutes with a gracious smile, drawing his sword to salute each battalion. On a plain near the city, the French Guards hosted a grand banquet for soldiers of the Russian Guard. The Preobrazhensky, Semyonovsky, and Izmailovsky regiments attended. A huge square of tables had been set up there, with a band playing marches at the center. The tables were laden with delicacies, and soldiers of both armies sat intermingled. Napoleon visited the feast and told his guardsmen: "Grenadiers, what you have done is wonderful!" After the emperors left, the celebration grew more riotous. The soldiers exchanged uniforms and marched through the streets of Tilsit shouting "Long live the emperors!" in Russian and French alike.

  The festivities were open to view, but the two emperors had also reached a private agreement. It pledged each empire to aid the other in any dispute.

• 3. Remaking the Map

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  Russia's agreement to join the Continental System against the British Empire was one of the pivotal terms Napoleon secured at Tilsit. Alexander I also agreed to enter the Anglo-Russian War directly and to press Sweden into the same embargo by instigating the Finnish War. The tsar promised to withdraw Russian forces from Wallachia and Moldavia. Those provinces had been occupied during the ongoing Russo-Turkish War of 1806-1812. The Ionian Islands and the port of Cattaro had been seized by Russian admirals Fyodor Ushakov and Dmitry Senyavin. Under the Tilsit terms, both were transferred to France. As a counterbalance, Napoleon guaranteed the sovereignty of the Duchy of Oldenburg and several small states ruled by the tsar's German relatives.

  Tilsit formally recognised three French client states carved from Prussian territory. The Kingdom of Westphalia, the Duchy of Warsaw, and the Free City of Danzig each received that status at the negotiations. Other confiscated Prussian lands went to existing French allies or to Russia directly. France had previously held treaties promising support to Persia and the Ottoman Empire against Russian expansion, including one known as the Finckenstein agreement. Tilsit abandoned those commitments. The territories of what are now Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia would be lost from Persian control in the years that followed.

  Frederick William III had already agreed to a truce with Napoleon on the 25th of June. He would soon discover exactly what the treaty meant for his kingdom.

• 4. The Prussian Settlement

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  Frederick William III emerged from Tilsit with a kingdom reduced from 5,700 square miles to 2,800 square miles. The population fell from 9.75 million to roughly 4.5 million people. Annual state revenue, formerly forty million dollars, declined in an even greater proportion than the territory itself. Cottbus went to Saxony, a state that had been a Prussian ally before the war. The left bank of the Elbe was awarded to the Kingdom of Westphalia. Białystok was given to Russia, which converted it into the Belostok Oblast. Nearly everything Prussia had gained through the partitions of Poland between 1772 and 1795 was taken and assigned to the Duchy of Warsaw. The Prussian army was restricted to 43,000 men.

  On the 9th of March 1808, France set the tribute owed by Prussia at 154,500,000 francs. From that figure, 53,500,000 already collected during the French occupation was deducted. The sum was reduced in two steps to 120 million francs by the 1st of November 1808. French forces also requisitioned money and goods from cities, corporations, and private citizens throughout the occupation. Estimates of those additional contributions range from 146 to 309 million francs, depending on the method of calculation. Prussian government indebtedness grew by thaler 200 million between 1806 and 1815. By 1817, the state's bonds were trading at a discount of 27 to 29 percent. In 1818, that discount widened to 35 percent. Prussia restructured part of its debt through a five-million-pound loan on the London financial market. Lenders required a discount of 28 and a third percent, bringing the effective annual interest rate to 6.98 percent.

  One observer recorded that Frederick William III had been pacing the bank of the Neman while the terms were drawn up. Napoleon, that observer noted, needed only to raise his hand for Prussia to cease to exist. Many in both Prussia and Russia viewed the settlement as a national humiliation, a judgment that Napoleon's own foreign minister had quietly shared.

• 5. When the Alliance Broke

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  Talleyrand had advised Napoleon to accept milder terms at Tilsit. His counsel was ignored, and historians mark that refusal as an important stage in Talleyrand's growing estrangement from the emperor. What followed in the alliance itself showed that the diplomat's reservations were well founded. Russian soldiers refused to follow Napoleon's commands, as the Lisbon Incident demonstrated to all of Europe. Napoleon's plans to marry the tsar's sister were blocked by the Russian royal family. By 1810, Alexander I was allowing neutral ships to dock in Russian ports, a direct breach of his Continental System commitment. The alliance negotiated on the Neman had run its course.

  The Tilsit agreements had released French forces for new fronts. The Peninsular War began on the 19th of November 1807. Austria entered the conflict in 1809, opening the War of the Fifth Coalition. Napoleon crossed the Neman into Russia in June 1812. That act retraced in reverse the very line where two emperors had once declared their friendship.

  The Congress of Vienna, concluding the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, restored many Prussian territories that Tilsit had stripped away. Yet the debts that Berlin and other occupied cities had accumulated through billeting French soldiers were never assumed by the royal government. Those municipal burdens outlasted the armies that had created them.