Treaties of Tilsit (1807): Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I

The Treaties of Tilsit were two peace agreements signed in July 1807 at the town of Tilsit in East Prussia, after Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I met on a raft in the middle of the River Niemen. The treaty with Russia, signed on 7 July, turned an enemy into an ally, and the treaty with Prussia, signed on 9 July, cut that kingdom roughly in half. Tilsit marked the height of Napoleon’s power in Europe.

Background: the war of 1806-1807

After crushing Prussia at the Battles of Jena and Auerstedt in October 1806, Napoleon advanced into Poland and East Prussia to fight the Russian army that had come to Prussia’s aid. The winter campaign was costly. At the Battle of Eylau in February 1807 the French fought the Russians to a bloody draw in a snowstorm.

Through the spring both sides rebuilt their forces. The French besieged and took the Baltic port of Danzig, which surrendered in late May 1807, while Russia struggled to supply its army and faced a separate war with the Ottoman Empire on its southern frontier. Britain, Russia’s ally, sent little direct help, which Alexander and his advisers resented.

The decisive blow came on 14 June 1807, when Napoleon defeated the Russian army of General Levin August von Bennigsen at Friedland. The Russians retreated behind the Niemen, the border of the Russian Empire, and Alexander asked for an armistice, which was agreed a few days later.

The meeting on the Niemen

On 25 June 1807 the two emperors met on a large raft moored in the middle of the river, fitted with a decorated pavilion. They talked privately for well over an hour. Over the following days they continued their discussions in Tilsit itself, which was declared neutral, riding, dining and reviewing troops together.

The personal relationship mattered. Napoleon set out to charm the young tsar, and Alexander, disappointed with his British and Prussian allies, was willing to listen. A widely repeated story says that Alexander opened the talks by declaring that he hated the British as much as Napoleon did, but it rests on later accounts and its wording is uncertain.

King Frederick William III of Prussia was largely shut out of the talks. His wife, Queen Louise, met Napoleon on 6 July to plead for milder terms for Prussia, but she won no real concessions.

The Franco-Russian treaty

The public treaty of 7 July and its secret articles and alliance made Russia a partner of France:

• Russia recognised the new order Napoleon had created, including his brothers Joseph, Louis and Jerome as kings of Naples, Holland and Westphalia, and the Confederation of the Rhine.
• Russia accepted the creation of the Duchy of Warsaw from Prussia’s Polish lands, and gained the district of Bialystok.
• Russia handed over the Ionian Islands and the Bay of Kotor (Cattaro) on the Adriatic to France.
• Russia offered to mediate peace between France and Britain. If Britain refused, Russia would join the war against it and close its ports to British trade under the Continental System.
• France offered to mediate between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, with whom Russia was at war, and the secret alliance foresaw joint action against the Ottomans if they refused.

The Franco-Prussian treaty

The treaty of 9 July was harsh. Prussia lost about half of its territory and population.

A later convention in 1808 fixed a large war indemnity and limited the Prussian army to 42,000 men. Prussia survived as a state largely because Alexander insisted on it. The occupation and the indemnity weighed heavily on the reduced kingdom, whose population had fallen to under five million, and French troops remained in Prussian fortresses on the Oder for years afterwards.

Key people

• Napoleon, who dictated most of the terms.
• Alexander I, Tsar of Russia, who exchanged a failing alliance with Britain for one with France.
• Frederick William III, King of Prussia, whose kingdom paid the price of the peace.
• Queen Louise of Prussia, whose personal appeal to Napoleon made her a heroine in Prussian memory.
• Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, the French foreign minister, who negotiated and signed the treaties.

Consequences

In the short term Tilsit left Napoleon free to turn west. He pressed Portugal to join the blockade of Britain, a step that led to the Peninsular War, while Russia went to war with Sweden in 1808-1809 and took Finland. Britain, fearing that the Danish fleet would fall into French hands, bombarded Copenhagen and seized the fleet in September 1807.

The alliance was fragile from the start. Many Russian nobles disliked it, and the ban on trade with Britain hurt Russian exports. The two emperors met again at the Congress of Erfurt in September and October 1808, but relations cooled. Disputes over Poland, the Ottoman Empire, the annexation of the Duchy of Oldenburg, ruled by a relative of the tsar, and Russia’s new tariff of December 1810 led to the breakdown of the alliance and to the French invasion of Russia in June 1812, which was launched across the same River Niemen.

Myths and facts

• “Napoleon and Alexander divided the world on a raft.” The raft meeting was largely ceremonial. The actual terms were negotiated over the following two weeks in Tilsit by the emperors and their ministers, above all Talleyrand for France and Prince Alexander Kurakin and Prince Dmitry Lobanov-Rostovsky for Russia.
• “Russia became a French satellite.” Russia remained a great power with its own interests. Alexander treated the alliance as a breathing space, refused to support Napoleon wholeheartedly against Austria in 1809 and protected Russian trade when the blockade became too costly.
• “Queen Louise nearly changed the terms.” Her meeting with Napoleon became a celebrated episode in Prussian memory, but the main terms had already been settled before she arrived.

Legacy

For Prussia, Tilsit was a national humiliation that inspired the reforms of Stein, Hardenberg and Scharnhorst and a new German patriotism. For Poles, the Duchy of Warsaw revived hopes of a restored Polish state. For historians, the meeting on the raft has become a classic image of two emperors dividing a continent between them, an arrangement that lasted barely five years.

Timeline

• 1807, 7-8 February: Battle of Eylau.
• 1807, 14 June: French victory at Friedland.
• 1807, 25 June: Napoleon and Alexander meet on a raft on the Niemen.
• 1807, 6 July: Queen Louise meets Napoleon.
• 1807, 7 July: Franco-Russian treaty signed.
• 1807, 9 July: Franco-Prussian treaty signed.
• 1808, September - October: Congress of Erfurt.
• 1810, 31 December: Russia’s new tariff breaks with the Continental System.
• 1812, 24 June: French troops cross the Niemen to invade Russia.

Why it matters

The Treaties of Tilsit redrew the map of central Europe, reduced Prussia to a second-rank power and made Napoleon and Alexander the arbiters of the Continent. Their failure to last showed the limits of a peace built on one man’s victories, and their unravelling led directly to the campaign of 1812 that began Napoleon’s downfall.