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From Berlin the French advanced into Poland. Behind the Vistula were Lestocq’s Prussians and 55,000 Russians under Leonty Leontyevich, count von Bennigsen, who had occupied Warsaw and the right bank. There, Bennigsen awaited a further Russian army of 35,000 men under Friedrich Wilhelm von Buxhöwden. On November 28, 1806, Bennigsen abandoned Warsaw without resistance to Murat, whom Napoleon had sent ahead with Davout, Jean Lannes, and Pierre-François-Charles Augereau. As the three remaining French corps became available, Napoleon directed Ney’s and Bernadotte’s toward Thorn (Torún) and Nicolas-Jean de Dieu Soult’s between Thorn and Warsaw. At Berlin, on November 19, Napoleon had informed a Polish deputation that he sympathized with their desire for the restoration of Poland. Although he was ready to recruit Polish assistance, he did not contemplate a thoroughgoing revival of the Polish state, which would have aroused further Russian enmity and Austrian opposition.

Bennigsen withdrew his forces to the Narew, principally around Pultusk, and was reinforced by Buxhöwden. On December 18, 1806, Napoleon himself reached Warsaw. After some indecisive engagements between December 22 and December 29 he gave up all hope of an effective pursuit of the retreating Russians and ordered his army into winter quarters. The combined Russian and Prussian forces had numbered about 115,000, of whom about 20,000 had been killed, wounded, and captured. The French had suffered approximately 5,000 casualties. Weather, terrain, and poor communications robbed the French of their mobility, and Napoleon was handicapped by the unfamiliar difficulty of feeding an army in an unfertile area whose resources the Russians had already exhausted.

Most of the French army was grouped in front of Warsaw. On the extreme left one corps was placed before Elbing (Elbląg), while another at Neidenburg (Nidzica) linked that force with the mass of the army. Outposts were established along the Passarge (Pasłeka), the Omulew, and as far south as the Bug. Ney, who had been ordered to push the Prussians northward late in December 1806, so exceeded his instructions that his troops had not reached winter quarters when Bennigsen advanced against the French left wing in the last days of January 1807. On January 25 Bernadotte concentrated his corps at Mohrungen (Morag), 8 miles (13 km) west of the Passarge, where he repulsed the numerically superior Russian advance guard before withdrawing southward toward Osterode (Ostroda). Anxious to appear in the rear of his enemy, Napoleon marched northward along the right bank of the Alle (Lyna) with three corps. He reached the Russians, who had retreated to the north between the Passarge and the Alle, at Göttkendorf (Gutkowo) on February 3, but night fell before a battle could be fought. By morning the Russians had decamped, abandoning their magazines on the Alle. The French continued their pursuit, and on February 7 their forward troops attacked the Russian rear guard outside Eylau, occupying the town that night. The Battle of Eylau was fought on the following day, February 8, 1807. The Russians suffered 25,000 casualties and were able to retreat in good order. The French, having had 28,000 casualties and being unable to pursue the Russians, fell back into winter quarters along the Passarge.

Great Britain and the Fourth Coalition

Though he had more than 600,000 men under arms in Europe altogether, Napoleon had barely 150,000 available for the war in East Prussia, and of those only 100,000 could be used for the decisive operations of summer 1807. Some 50,000 remained in Poland, protecting lines of communications and covering the 30,000 Russians disposed along the Narew. To the north, in East Prussia, there were 24,000 Prussians and 85,000 Russians by June 1807, and more Russian troops were expected. The allies, however, were not well placed to profit from the dispersal of Napoleon’s forces. While Russia was handicapped by having undertaken war against Persia (1804) and Turkey (1806), Great Britain’s practice of piecemeal warfare overseas precluded the dispatch of a strong expedition to help the eastern allies.

The progress of the campaign in East Prussia was obscured for the British by developments in South America. On June 27, 1806, a squadron under Sir Home Popham, with 1,600 troops, had captured Buenos Aires. Although the Spaniards had recovered the city in August the prospect of opening up new markets was so attractive to the British that a second expedition of 7,800 men under Sir John Whitelocke was sent out. Landing near Buenos Aires on June 28, 1807, it suffered such heavy losses in the assault on the city’s defenses that the project had to be abandoned. Failure had also overtaken the 6,000 troops sent from Sicily to Alexandria in March and the naval squadron dispatched in February to assist the Russians by attacking Constantinople.

It was not until April 26, 1807, that Russia and Prussia concluded the convention of Bartenstein (Bartoszyce), by which they undertook to make no separate peace treaties and to free Germany and Italy. The British proposed to grant Prussia a subsidy of £1,000,000 and to send an expeditionary force to Stralsund to join 16,000 Swedes in opposing the French, who had occupied Swedish Pomerania. Sweden, however, had signed an armistice with the French on April 18, and this truce lasted until July 3. When 8,000 British troops under William Cathcart disembarked at Rügen in mid-July, the Russians and Prussians, farther to the east, had already been defeated. The Fourth Coalition had come into being too late.

Friedland

Soon after the suspension of the winter campaign, Napoleon issued orders for the siege of Danzig (Gdańsk). The investment began on March 12, 1807, and the town was surrendered on May 26, offering a valuable base for operations. The French army had left winter quarters early in May to assemble behind the Passarge. On June 5 the Russians appeared before the French left wing. As Bennigsen’s opening moves traversed the French front, Napoleon grouped his forces.

On June 8, 1807, an encounter with 10,000 Russians suggested that the mass of the Russian army was around Guttstadt (Dobre Miasto), on which Napoleon proceeded to march and where on June 9 he dislodged the Russian rear guard. The Russians retreated to Heilsberg (Lidzbark Warmiński) on the Alle, where they had prepared an entrenched camp, 35 miles (56 km) south of Königsberg (Kaliningrad) and 27 miles (43 km) southwest of Friedland. Heavy fighting took place before Heilsberg on June 10, in which the French had the advantage. The next day Napoleon brought up the rest of his forces, trusting that the threat to their lines of retreat would make the Russians withdraw—as they did late in the evening. Bennigsen crossed to the right bank of the Alle, while Napoleon, anticipating that he would soon reappear on the left bank, headed north toward Eylau to place himself between the Russians on the Alle and the Prussians in front of Königsberg. On June 13 the French were massed close to Eylau, with strong detachments pushed forward in the direction of both Königsberg and Friedland. That evening it was learned that the Russians had crossed the Alle at Friedland, which Lannes had already been instructed to occupy next day. The Battle of Friedland, on June 14, ended with the crushing defeat of the Russians, who suffered 25,000 casualties. Meanwhile the corps detached to keep the Prussians away from the battlefield had driven Lestocq into Königsberg, which he abandoned on June 16, withdrawing his forces to join Bennigsen at Tilsit. Napoleon reached the Neman on June 19 and found the Russians ready for an armistice.

The Treaties of Tilsit

A variety of political motives, as well as his reverses in the field, prompted Alexander to make peace. Chief among them were his dissatisfaction with Great Britain and his belief that a French invasion of Russia would stimulate opposition to his regime. Yet Napoleon had not the means to contemplate an early invasion of Russia and had resolved, should Alexander remain in the war, to maintain his forces on the Neman and to await the eventual reappearance of the enemy army.

Alexander was ready to accept not only peace, but an alliance with France. He hoped to acquire the greater part of Turkey’s Balkan possessions, though Constantinople itself was not to fall to his share. Furthermore, an understanding with France and hostility toward Great Britain would give him the opportunity to pose as an arbiter of European affairs in common with Napoleon and to preserve Russia’s Polish lands. Though Napoleon would not agree to restore Prussia’s western territories in exchange for the cession of Polish provinces to Saxony and excluded Frederick William from the Franco-Russian negotiations and from the secret alliance signed at Tilsit on July 7, 1807, Russia lost nothing in the peace treaty of the same day.

The settlement between France and Prussia (July 9, 1807) furnished the spoils of the recent campaigns. Prussia was reduced to half its former population, losing all possessions west of the Elbe and almost all the territory gained in the three partitions of Poland. Danzig was to be a free city, garrisoned by the French, and Prussia was to be occupied by French forces until a heavy war indemnity had been paid. Further, Prussia agreed to close its ports to British trade and, if necessary, to join Russia and France in war against Great Britain.

The ceded territory west of the Elbe was distributed mostly between Murat’s grand duchy of Berg and the new kingdom of Westphalia (created for Jérôme Bonaparte in August 1807 and including also Brunswick and Hesse-Kassel). East Frisia went to Holland, and some other lands were left at Napoleon’s disposal. The bulk of the Polish provinces, with a population of 2,000,000, were made into the duchy of Warsaw for the king of Saxony, with a French garrison. Westphalia entered the Confederation of the Rhine, into which Mecklenburg and Oldenburg followed in 1808.

The Continental System and the blockade, 1807–11

Napoleon’s Berlin decree of November 21, 1806, had already declared that the British Isles were under blockade and that “no ship which comes directly from England or the English colonies…shall…enter any of our harbours.” The secret Franco-Russian alliance of Tilsit furthered his scheme for economic warfare against Great Britain, since the cooperation of Russia should permit the complete closure of the Baltic to British shipping and hasten Austrian participation in the Continental System. Alexander undertook to support France against the British if they did not consent by November 1, 1807, to acknowledge the complete freedom of the seas and to return the conquests made since 1805. If Britain refused, France and Russia would “summon the three courts of Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Lisbon to close their ports to the British and declare war.”

The coercion of Europe

Soon informed of the Franco-Russian agreement, the British government tried to prevent Denmark from joining Napoleon’s Continental System. On July 26, 1807, Adm. James Gambier sailed for Copenhagen with a massive fleet, and his junction with Cathcart’s troops, evacuated from Swedish Pomerania, enabled him to land 27,000 men near Copenhagen on August 16. The Danes were offered an alliance and told that in any case they must surrender their fleet for the duration of the war. Rejection of this ultimatum led to the bombardment of Copenhagen (September 2–5), and the Danes capitulated on September 7. The British withdrew with 18 Danish ships of the line and many smaller vessels. Denmark signed an alliance with France on October 30, 1807.

On July 19, 1807, Napoleon informed the Portuguese that they must join the Continental System, and ten days later he ordered the concentration around Bayonne of 20,000 troops under Andoche Junot. The Portuguese tried to placate both belligerents by proposing to refuse to confiscate British goods but to close their ports and to go through the motions of making war on Great Britain. Neither side would accept such a policy. In mid-October the French troops set out for Portugal, marching through Spain. The Franco-Spanish convention of Fontainebleau (October 27) regulated a partition of Portugal: the northwest, with Porto, should go to the house of Bourbon-Parma in return for the cession of Etruria to France; Algarve and Alentejo were to go to Manuel de Godoy, the Spanish court’s favourite; the rest was to be at Napoleon’s disposition. On November 30, Junot’s vanguard reached Lisbon, whence the Portuguese royal family had embarked for Brazil with a British escort. On the pretext of supporting Junot in Portugal, Napoleon was organizing three more army corps for Spain.

In Italy, Tuscany (Etruria) was annexed to the French empire in pursuance of the convention of Fontainebleau. Parma was also formally incorporated into the empire and the papal Marches were added to the kingdom of Italy in April 1808, extending French surveillance of the Adriatic coast. Russia declared war on Great Britain on October 31, 1807, and Prussia followed suit on December 1, apologizing secretly to the British government for its action. Austria, which had joined the Continental System in October, was forced to announce a state of hostilities with Great Britain early in 1808.

Russia, having begun to mass forces on the Finnish frontier in November 1807, invaded Swedish Finland, with Danish support, on February 21, 1808. The British granted Sweden a subsidy of £1,200,000, but the nature of King Gustav IV Adolf’s plans made it impossible to find a basis for common military action, and the 12,000 troops under Sir John Moore, sent to Göteborg in May 1808, returned without having landed. British shipping, however, continued to supply Swedish markets and to engage in contraband trade with the other Baltic countries.

The orders in council and Napoleon’s decrees of 1807

The British further retaliated to the Berlin decree and the Tilsit agreement by the orders in council of November 11, 18, and 25, and of December 18, 1807. These prescribed that any port closed to the British was to be regarded as under blockade and that, under pain of confiscation, any neutral vessel sailing to or from such ports was to put in at a British port to obtain a license to trade with the enemy and to pay customs duties (now increased to 20–30 percent) on its cargo. By taxing neutral, principally American, trade with enemy colonies, the orders favoured the interests of British merchants and planters, who had been complaining of foreign competition. As far as was practicable, the continent of Europe was to receive its commerce through Great Britain, and, up to the point where British shipping capacity proved insufficient, the license system ensured that this trade was carried in British vessels.

Since in practice the Berlin decree did not prevent neutral vessels from bringing British cargoes into French-held ports, Napoleon intensified his measures by the decree of Fontainebleau (October 13, 1807) and the two decrees of Milan (November 23 and December 17). The decrees of October 13 and November 23 classed all colonial produce as British unless carrying a certificate of origin, while that of December 17 declared that “all ships which had submitted to the British [orders in council] were denationalized, and good and lawful prize; and every ship sailing from or to Great Britain or any of its colonies…was good and lawful prize.”

The effect of the French and British regulations was to leave the neutrals with the prospect of being taken as prizes at sea by the British or in port by the French. On December 22, 1807, the United States imposed the Embargo Act on belligerents adopting measures against neutral shipping. The decision favoured France and damaged British interests, since the French conducted their trade in neutral ships. The U.S. embargo was unpopular with many sections of U.S. opinion and was not completely effective, despite further legislation in 1808 and the Enforcement Act of January 9, 1809. It did, however, contribute to the crisis which overtook Great Britain in 1808.