What Was the Treaty of Tilsit?
On 25 June 1807, in the middle of the Neman River, Tsar Alexander I and Emperor Napoleon embraced on a raft anchored to the riverbank. The two men had not met before; the meeting had been arranged by Alexander’s diplomatic adviser, Prince Peter Dolgorukov, and it was the most photographed event of pre-telegraphic diplomacy. The raft was anchored just outside the Prussian town of Tilsit (now Sovetsk, in the Kaliningrad exclave), and over the next two weeks the two emperors negotiated the two Treaties of Tilsit — the Franco-Russian of 7 July 1807 and the Franco-Prussian of 9 July — that divided the continent between them. The treaties were an extraordinary personal triumph for Napoleon; they lasted less than five years (see Zamoyski, 1812, 2007).
The road to Tilsit
Russia had entered the Napoleonic Wars as a member of the Third Coalition in 1805 and had been smashed at Austerlitz on 2 December 1805. The campaign of 1806-1807 against Prussia and Russia was equally one-sided: the Battle of Friedland, on 14 June 1807, was a French victory so complete that it convinced Alexander to ask for an armistice the next day. The Russian army had lost about 20,000 men in a single afternoon, and the road to St Petersburg was open. The two emperors met on the raft to negotiate the surrender.
The personal chemistry on the raft is striking. Alexander, then 30, was charmed; Napoleon, 38, was in his element. They dined together, visited each other’s camps, and walked by the river. The historical consensus is that the meeting was the high point of Napoleon’s diplomacy — and the moment when Alexander began, in private, to plan his revenge (Tarle, Napoleon, 1943).
The terms
The Treaty of Tilsit of 7 July 1807 had two main parts. Publicly, Russia recognised the French annexation of Holland, the Kingdom of Westphalia, the Confederation of the Rhine, and the Italian kingdom; in return, France recognised the Russian annexation of Finland (from Sweden) and gave Russia a free hand in the Ottoman Empire. Russia joined the Continental System — Napoleon’s embargo of British trade — and agreed to close Russian ports to British ships. In a series of secret articles, the two powers agreed to divide the Ottoman Empire between them: Russia would take the Balkans and Constantinople, France would take Egypt, the Peloponnese, and the Adriatic coast.
The Franco-Prussian Treaty of 9 July was harder on Prussia. Prussia lost all its territory west of the Elbe (about half its population) and was reduced to a French client state under Frederick William III. The Prussian army was limited to 42,000 men. The treaty was, in effect, a re-ordering of central Europe around a French-Russian axis (Zamoyski, 2007).
The breakdown, 1808-1812
The Franco-Russian alliance rested on the personal relationship of the two emperors, and it began to fray almost immediately. The Continental System was deeply unpopular with the Russian nobility, whose English and Scottish ties were commercially and culturally important; the Russian treasury, dependent on the customs duties at St Petersburg, lost a substantial share of its revenue. The Polish question — Napoleon had reorganised the former Prussian-Polish territories as the Duchy of Warsaw under his ally the Saxon king Frederick Augustus — was a recurring irritant. The Ottoman question produced the Russo-Turkish War of 1806-1812, in which Russia was on the verge of taking Constantinople when Napoleon invaded.
By 1810 the two emperors were on cold terms. Alexander’s memorandum of November 1810, written in his own hand and never delivered, made the case against the alliance. In December 1810 Russia passed the Ukaz o svobode khlebnoi torgovli, opening the Russian grain trade to neutrals, including the British, in violation of Tilsit. Napoleon took it as a personal affront, and the Grande Armée crossed the Neman on 24 June 1812. The treaties of Tilsit had lasted just under five years (Lieven, Russia Against Napoleon, 2009).