he wrote on the 2nd of August, “Germany, Poland, Italy.” Indeed, along with other serious checks in Spain, which involved the conquest of that land, it cut through the wide meshes of his policy both in Levantine, Central European and commercial affairs. The partition of Turkey had to be postponed; the financial collapse of England could not be expected now that she framed an alliance with the Spanish patriots and had their markets and those of their colonies opened to her; and the discussions with the tsar Alexander, which had not gone quite smoothly, now took a decidedly unfavourable turn. The tsar saw his chance of improving on the terms arranged at Tilsit; and obviously Napoleon could not begin the conquest of Spain until he felt sure of the conduct of his nominal ally. Still worse was the prospect when Sir Arthur Wellesley with a British force landed in Portugal, gained the battle of Vimiero (21st of August), and brought the French commander, Junot, by the so-called convention of Cintra, to agree to the evacuation of the country by all the French troops. The sea power thus gained what had all along been wanting, a sure basis for the exercise of its force against the land power, Napoleon. Still more important, perhaps, was the change in moral which the Spanish rising brought about. Napoleon’s perfidy at Bayonne was so flagrant as to strip from him the mask of a champion of popular liberty which had previously been of priceless worth. Now he stood forth to the world as an unscrupulous aggressor; moral force, previously marshalled on the side of France, now began to pass to the side of his opponents. The value of that unseen ally he well knew: “Once again, let me tell you,” he wrote to General Clarke on the 10th of October 1809, “in war moral and opinion are more than half of the reality.”
Such were the discouraging conditions which weighed him down at the time of the interview with the tsar at Erfurt (September 27th–October 12th, 1808). That event was so important as to require some preliminary explanation. For some five months past the two emperors had been exchanging their views as to the future of the world. Stated briefly they were these. Napoleon desired to press on the partition of Prussia, Alexander that of Turkey. The tsar, however, was determined to save Prussia if he could; and Napoleon after the first disasters in Spain saw it to be impossible to uproot the Hohenzollerns; while it was clearly to his interest to postpone the partition of Turkey until he had conquered Spain and Sicily. Austria meanwhile had begun to arm as a precautionary measure; and Napoleon, shortly after his return from Bayonne to Paris, publicly declared that, if her preparations went on, he would wage against her a war of extermination. The threat naturally did not tend to reassure statesmen at Vienna; and the tsar now resolved to prevent the total wreck of the European system by screening the House of Habsburg from the wrath of his ally. For the present Napoleon’s ire fell upon Prussia. A letter written by the Prussian statesman, Baron vom Stein, had fallen into the hands of the French and revealed to the emperor the ferment produced in Germany by news of the French reverses in Spain. In that letter Stein urged the need of a national rising of the Germans similar to that of the Spaniards, when the inevitable struggle ensued between Napoleon and Austria. The revenge of the autocrat was characteristic. Besides driving Stein from office, he compelled Prussia to sign a convention (8th of September) for the payment to France of a sum of 140,000,000 francs, and for the limitation of the Prussian army to 42,000 men.
Apart from this advantage, placed in his hands by the imprudence of Stein, Napoleon was heavily handicapped at the Erfurt interview. In vain did he seek to dazzle the tsar by assembling about him the vassal kings and princes of Germany; in vain did he exercise all the intellectual gifts which had captivated the tsar at Tilsit; in vain did he conjure up visions of the future conquest of the Orient; external display, diplomatic finesse, varied by one or two outbursts of calculated violence—all was useless. The situation now was utterly different from that which obtained at Tilsit. Alexander had succeeded in pacifying Finland, and his troops held the Danubian provinces of Turkey—a pledge, as it seemed, for the future conquest of Constantinople. Napoleon, on the other hand, had utterly failed in his Spanish enterprise; and the tsar felt sure that his rival must soon withdraw French garrisons from the fortresses of the Oder to the frontier of Spain. These facts, and not, as has often been assumed, the treachery of Talleyrand, decided Alexander to assume at Erfurt an attitude of jealous reserve. He refused to join Napoleon in any proposal for the coercion of Austria or the limitation of her armaments. Finally he agreed to join his ally if he (Napoleon) were attacked by the Habsburg power. Napoleon on his side succeeded in adjourning the question of the partition of Turkey; but he awarded the Danubian provinces and Finland to his ally and agreed to withdraw the French garrisons from the Prussian fortresses on the Oder. On the 12th of October both potentates addressed an appeal to George III. to accord peace to the world on the basis of uti possidetis. Canning assented, provided that envoys of all the states and peoples concerned took part in the negotiations. Whereupon a reply came from Paris (28th of November) that the French emperor refused to admit the envoys of “the king who reigns in Brazil, the king who reigns in Sicily or the king who reigns in Sweden.” The “Spanish insurgents” were equally placed out of court. Clearly, then, Napoleon’s desire for peace was conditional on his being allowed to dictate terms to the rulers and peoples concerned.
Already he had shown that the sword must decide affairs in Spain. After spending a short time in Paris in order to supervise the transfer of his forces from Germany to the Pyrenees, he journeyed swiftly southwards, burst upon the Spaniards, and on the 3rd of December received the surrender of Madrid. There, on the 16th of December, he issued a decree (omitted from the official Correspondence) declaring le nommé Stein an enemy of France and confiscating his property in the lands allied to France. The great statesman barely succeeded in escaping to Austria, a land in which the hopes of German patriots now centred. Encouraged by the sympathy of all patriotic Germans and the newly found energy of its own subjects, the House of Habsburg now began to prepare for war. Napoleon was then in the midst of operations against Sir John Moore, whose masterly march on Sahagun (near Valladolid) had thwarted the emperor’s plans for a general “drive” on to Lisbon. Hoping to punish Moore for his boldness, Napoleon struck quickly north at Astorga, but found that he was too late to catch his foe. At that town he also heard news on the 1st of January 1809, which portended trouble in Germany and perhaps also at Paris. Austria was continuing to arm; and the emperor perceived that the diplomatic failure at Erfurt was now about to entail on him another and more serious struggle. His anxiety was increased by news of sinister import respecting frequent interviews between those former rivals, Talleyrand and Fouché, in which Murat was said to be concerned. Handing over the command to Soult, he hurried back to Paris to trample on the seeds of sedition and to overwhelm Austria by the blows which he showered upon her in the valley of the Danube. Sir John Moore and the statesmen of Austria—the heroic Stadion at their head—failed in their enterprise; but at least they frustrated the determined effort of Napoleon to stamp out the national movement in the Iberian Peninsula. Thereafter he never entered Spain; and the French operations suffered incalculably from the want of one able commander-in-chief.
In the Danubian campaign of 1809 he succeeded; but the stubborn defence of Austria, the heroic efforts of the Tirolese and the spasmodic efforts which foreboded a national rising in Germany, showed that the whole aspect of affairs was changing, even in central Europe, where rulers and peoples had hitherto been as wax under the impress of his will. The peoples, formerly so apathetic, were now the centre of resistance, and their efforts failed owing to the timidity or sluggishness of governments and the incompetence of some of their military leaders. The failure of the archduke John to arrive in time at Wagram (5th of July), the lack of support accorded by the Spaniards to Wellesley before and after the battle of Talavera (28th of July), and the slowness with which the British government sent forth its great armada against Flushing and Antwerp, a fortnight after
