Now came an opportunity far greater than that which occurred after Austerlitz. The Peace of Presburg was merely continental. That of Tilsit was of world-wide importance. But before referring to its terms we must note an event which indicated the lines on which Napoleon’s policy would advance. After occupying the Prussian capital he launched against England the famous Berlin Decree (21st of November 1806), declaring her coasts to be in a state of blockade, and prohibiting all commerce with them. No ship coming thence was to be admitted into French or allied harbours; ships transgressing the decree were to be good prize of war; and British subjects were liable to imprisonment if found in French or allied territories. This decree is often called the basis of the Continental System, whereby Napoleon proposed to ruin England by ruining her commerce. But even before Trafalgar he had begun to strike at that most vulnerable form of wealth, as the Jacobins had done before him. Nelson’s crowning triumph rendered impossible for the present all other means of attack on those elusive foes; and Napoleon’s sense of the importance of that battle may be gauged, not by his public utterances on the subject, but by his persistence in forcing Prussia to close Hanover and the whole coastline of north-west Germany against British goods. That proceeding, in February 1806, constitutes the basis of the Continental System. The Berlin Decree gave it a wide extension. By the mighty blow of Friedland and the astonishing diplomatic triumph of Tilsit, the conqueror hoped speedily to overwhelm the islanders beneath the mass of the world’s opposition. Napoleon at Tilsit resembles Polyphemus seeking to destroy Ulysses. The crags which he flung at Britannia did indeed graze the Stern and graze the prow of her craft.
The triumph won at Friedland marks in several respects the climax of Napoleon’s career. The opportunity was unique; and he now put forth his utmost endeavours to win over to his side the conquered but still formidable tsar. In their first interview, held on a raft in the middle of the river Niemen at Tilsit on the 25th of June, the French emperor, by his mingled strength and suppleness of intellect, gained an easy mastery over the impressionable young potentate. Partly from fear of a national Polish rising which Napoleon held in reserve as a last means of coercion, and partly from a subtle resolve to use the French alliance as a means of securing rich domains at the expense of Turkey, Prussia, Sweden and England, Alexander decided to throw over his allies, Prussia and England, and to seize the spoils to which the conqueror pointed as the natural sequel of a Franco-Russian alliance. Napoleon, therefore, had Prussia completely at his mercy; and his conditions to that power bore witness to the fact. The prayers of Queen Louisa of Prussia failed to bend him from his resolve. He refused even to grant her tearful request for Magdeburg. At a later time he reproached himself for not having dethroned the Hohenzollerns outright; but it is now known that Alexander would have forbidden this step, and that he dissuaded Napoleon from withdrawing Silesia from the control of the House of Hohenzollern. Even so, Prussia was bereft of half of her territories; those west of the river Elbe went to swell the domains of Napoleon’s vassals or to form the new kingdom of Westphalia for Jerome Bonaparte; while the spoils which the House of Hohenzollern had won from Poland in the second and third partitions were now to form the duchy of Warsaw, ruled over by Napoleon’s ally, the elector (now king) of Saxony. Danzig became nominally a free city, but was to be occupied by a French garrison until the peace. The tsar acquired a frontier district from Prussia, recognized the changes brought about by Napoleon in Germany and Italy, and agreed by a secret article that the Cattaro district on the east coast of the Adriatic should go to France. Equally important was the secret treaty of alliance between France and Russia signed on that same day. By it Napoleon brought the tsar to agree to make war on England in case that power did not accept the tsar’s mediation for the conclusion of a general peace. Failing the arrival of a favourable reply from London by the 1st of December 1807, the tsar would help Napoleon to compel Denmark, Sweden and Portugal to close their ports against, and make war on, Great Britain. Napoleon also promised to mediate between Russia and Turkey in the interests of the former, and (in case the Porte refused to accept the proffered terms) to help Russia to drive the Turks from Europe, “the city of Constantinople and the province of Rumelia alone excepted.” This enterprise and the acquisition of Finland from Sweden, which Napoleon also dangled before the eyes of the tsar, formed the bait which brought that potentate into Napoleon’s Continental System. Both Russia and Prussia now agreed rigorously to exclude British ships and goods from their dominions.
The terms last named indicate the nature of the aims which Napoleon had in view at Tilsit. That compact was not, as has often been assumed, merely the means of assuring to Napoleon the mastery of the continent and the control of a cohort of kings. That eminence he enjoyed before the collision with Prussia in the autumn of 1806; and he frequently, and no doubt sincerely, expressed contempt of conquests dans cette vieille Europe. The three coalitions against France had not produced a single warrior worthy of his steel. The treaty of Tilsit may more reasonably be looked on as an expedient for piling up enormous political resources with a view to the coercion of Great Britain. If that end could not be achieved by massing the continental states against her in a solid phalanx of commercial war, then Napoleon intended to ensure her ruin by that other enterprise which he had in view early in 1798 (see his letter of the 23rd of February 1798), namely the conquest of the Orient. An expedition against India had recently occupied his thoughts, as may be seen by the instructions which he issued on the 10th of May 1807 to General Gardane for his mission to Persia. The Orient was, indeed, ever the magnet which attracted him most; and his hostility to England may be attributed to his perception that she alone stood in the way of his most cherished schemes. The treaty of Tilsit, then, far from being merely a European event, was an event of the first importance in what may be termed the Welt-politik of Napoleon. His confidence that his vastly enhanced powers would enable him first to coerce, and thereafter to overthrow, the British empire may be illustrated by his allowing the appearance in 1807 of an official atlas of Australia in which about one-third of that continent figures as “Terre Napoléon.”
As usually happened in this strife of the land power and the sea power, Napoleon’s continental policy attained an almost complete success, while the naval and oriental schemes which he had more nearly at heart utterly miscarried. The continent accepted the new development of his System. After some diplomatic fencing Russia and Prussia broke with England and entered upon what was, officially at least, a state of war with her. Further, owing to the carelessness of the Prussian negotiator, Napoleon was able to require the exaction of impossibly large sums from that exhausted land, and therefore to keep his troops in her chief fortresses. The duchy of Warsaw and the fortress of Danzig formed new outworks of his power and enabled him to overawe Russia. In home affairs as in foreign affairs his actions bespoke the master. On returning from Tilsit to Paris he relieved Talleyrand of the ministry of foreign affairs, softening the fall by creating him a grand dignitary of the empire. The more subservient Champagny now became what was virtually the chief clerk in the French foreign office; and other changes placed in high station men who were remarkable for docility rather than originality and power. Napoleon also suppressed the Tribunate; and in the year 1808 instituted an order of nobility. During the course of a tour in Italy in December 1807 he gave a sharp turn to that world-compelling screw, the Continental System. By the Milan Decree of the 17th of December 1807, he ordained that every ship which submitted to the right of search now claimed by Great Britain would be considered a lawful prize. The imperious terms in which this decree was couched and its misleading reference to the British maritime code showed that Napoleon believed in the imminent collapse of his sole remaining enemy. This was natural. Britain, it was true, acting on the initiative of George Canning, had seized the Danish fleet, thus forestalling
