In any event, the awkward alliance - a compromise version of it - was made, and the Austrians adhered to it. War aims stipulated the French evacuation of north Germany (including Hanover), the Netherlands, Switzerland and Piedmont-Sardinia, as well as the augmentation of these territories such as to constitute in future a barrier to French expansion.
Of course, all of these grand plans went terribly awry. The Austro-Russian armies were crushed at the battle of Austerlitz in December 1805, whereupon Austria, deserted briefly by a panicked Alexander, made peace (Pressburg). Prussia, having persisted in the most undignified neutrality since 1795, rallied to the cause too late, and with equal lack of dignity, only to be routed utterly at Jena and Auerstadt in October 1806. Whereupon Russia, after extensive tergiversations, returned to the fray in the most inauspicious circumstances imaginable, carrying on the fight virtually alone until the lost battle of Fried- land in June 1807, whereupon it, too, made peace.
By this time, Alexander was thoroughly disgusted with his former allies. As the Baron deJomini remarked after the costly but indecisive battle of Eylau - February 1807, on the wintry plains of Poland, nearly a thousand miles from Paris - 'Ah, if only I were the Archduke Charles!' In Alexander's opinion, the British were worse than the Austrians. The great wartime prime minister, William Pitt, had died in January 1806, and the Ministry of All the Talents that followed him - Lord Grenville and Charles James Fox - was a vain misnomer. Until the coming of Viscount Castlereagh to the Foreign Office in March 1812, British foreign policy was simply adrift in demoralising, defeatist incompetence, and Alexander's grievances against London were multiple: Russia was bearing a disproportionate burden of the war; the British were niggardly with loans and subsidies; they might have but did not open in Western Europe something like a second front; their navy's enforcement of the British code of maritime commerce was an offence both to Russia and the neutrals. Finally, the Russians had stumbled imprudently into a war with Turkey for fear of Napoleon's designs on the Balkans, and London, always suspicious of the Russians' own designs in the East Mediterranean, stubbornly refused to assist them.
The war had ceased to be popular in Russia, and Alexander's frustration disposed him to a change of front. Here was the celebrated peace of Tilsit and the Franco-Russian alliance attached to it. It recognised the whole of the Napoleonic order of Europe, the Bonaparte dynasty in Naples, the Netherlands and Westphalia; the Grand Duchy of Warsaw; the Confederation of the Rhine; French possession of Cattaro and the Ionian Islands. Russia would mediate peace between France and Britain; France would mediate between Russia and Turkey; and, failing peace, each power would join the other at war. The ancient idea of the partition of the Ottoman Europe was stipulated. Russia would join the Continental System to bar British trade from the continent, and Portugal, Denmark and Sweden would be forced to join it as well.
Of course, this new system, so contrary to Czartoryski's, naturally had to be embodied in a new Russian foreign minister, Count N. P. Rumiantsev. Rumiantsev identified with it naturally, as he was the son of Field Marshal Petr A. Rumiantsev, who had led Catherine's successful campaigns against the Turks. Rumiantsev stood for a division of Europe into eastern/Russian and western/French spheres. Hence he represented one of two traditional variants of Russian foreign policy, the isolationist impulse that we formerly saw in V P. Kochubei. If the peace was popular in Petersburg, however, the alliance was not. Alexander hoped in vain that the promised partition of the Ottoman Empire and the conquest of Swedish Finland would compensate for the substantial obligations and burdens of the alliance.
And now Alexander turned fondly again to his pet projects of liberal reform at home. This time, his whole 'secret committee' was concentrated in a single person, arguably the most able civil servant in the history of Russia, a priest's son who had married an English woman, Mikhail Speranskii. Alexander asked for the project of a constitution, and Speranskii drafted a prudently progressive document. The French alliance and the Speranskii constitution alike provoked the problem of public opinion again. Napoleon's emissaries carefully monitored the massive Russian discontent with the French alliance. General Savary reported that France had only two friends in Russia, the emperor and his foreign minister. One of Alexander's courtiers allegedly warned him bluntly, 'Take care, Sire, you will finish as your father did!'[117] Speranskii's constitution was naturally never implemented, but the mere drafting of it provoked consternation, and when the war of 1812 approached, Alexander, in deference to the good Russian sentiments that the nation at war would require, dismissed the unpopular Francophile Speranskii and the constitution with him. When another of his intimates questioned the dismissal of so devoted a public servant as Speranskii, Alexander responded, 'You are right, . . . only current circumstances could force me to make this sacrifice to public opinion.'[118]
In fact, the arrangements of Tilsit almost predictably contained irreconcilable elements of conflict. The most conspicuous factor here was the unlimited ambition of Napoleon. As Napoleon later remarked after his meeting with Alexander at Erfurt, Alexander expected to be treated as an equal, and it was not Napoleon's habit to deal with others as equals. Particular issues abounded. There was the persistent suspicion of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Moreover, Napoleon stubbornly refused to evacuate his troops from the
Prussian territory of Alexander's friend, King Frederick William of Prussia. Here were two offensive encroachments on Russian sensitivities in Eastern Europe. In addition, the Continental System was a burden: Britain was a natural commercial ally of Russia; France was not. Finally, Napoleon clearly had no intention of sharing what might have been the most ostentatious Russian benefit of the alliance, the Ottoman possessions of the Balkans. In December 1810, Alexander, thoroughly disillusioned now of the raptures of Tilsit, repudiated the Continental System, and the coming of war was only a matter of time.
The defeat of Napoleon in Russia faced Alexander with a dramatic foreign- policy choice. His commander of the armies, Field Marshal M. I. Kutuzov, stood shoulder to shoulder with Foreign Minister Rumiantsev: Russia was rid of Napoleon, and there was no need to send the armies into Europe. Alexander, however, perhaps predictably, followed the system formerly laid out by Czartoryski.
The Russo-Prussian Treaty of Kalisch (27 February 1813) stipulated an alliance to deliver the nations of the continent from the French yoke and the restoration of Prussia to its possessions of 1806. The Russo-Austro-Prussian Treaty of Toeplitz (9 September 1813) stipulated the restoration of the Austrian Empire, dissolution of Napoleon's Confederation of the Rhine, and an arrangement of the future fate of the Duchy of Warsaw agreeable to the three courts of Russia, Prussia and Austria. This last point, of course, was soon to become a subject of contention. The British joined the coalition in the treaty of Reichenbach (27 June 1813), which stipulated the restoration of Hanover to the British monarchy and, of course, subsidies for the continental powers.
By this time, the outline of the treaties of Vienna was emerging. The treaty of Chaumont (1 March 1814) committed the allies to a German confederation robust enough to sustain its independence; the restoration of an independent Switzerland; independent Italian states between Austria and France; the restoration of Ferdinand VI of Spain; an augmentation of the Netherlands under the sovereignty of the Prince of Orange; the accession of Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands to the treaty; and a concert among the powers to maintain these peace terms for twenty years.
118
N. K. Shil'der,