Ponte-Corvo, to the position of Crown Prince and de facto ruler of Sweden.
With its colony in Pomerania, Sweden still ruled over more than half of the entire coastline of the Baltic Sea. She had lost Finland to Russia in 1809 and a constitutional crisis resulted in the half-mad Gustav IV being toppled in favour of Charles XIII. The new King was senile and childless, and in their search for a successor the Swedes turned to Napoleon for advice. He declined to involve himself in their internal affairs, and in the end they chose a man they believed he might have nominated, and whom they considered to be agreeable to him. Their mistake was to have momentous consequences.
Bernadotte was an old colleague of Napoleon. When the two were no more than aspiring officers he had succeeded, and possibly supplanted, the future Emperor in the affections of the lovely Désirée Clary, whom he had subsequently married. Désirée’s sister Julie had married Napoleon’s brother Joseph, which might have made for a happy family. But it did not. Bernadotte was jealous of his colleague’s meteoric rise. While he happily accepted the rank of Marshal of France and the princely title Napoleon had bestowed on him, he cloaked his resentment in righteous disapproval of Napoleon’s assumption of the imperial purple and his pursuit of conquest. Napoleon for his part had a low opinion of Bernadotte and once said that he would have had him shot on at least three occasions had it not been for the bond of kinship.11
When Bernadotte became Crown Prince of Sweden, Napoleon realised that he might prove less than cooperative, but assumed he would behave as a Frenchman and as a Swede. Sweden had traditionally been a close ally of France, and her natural enemies had always been Russia and Prussia. Only the previous year Russia had invaded and forced her to give up Finland after a protracted war. The Swedes’ friendly feelings towards France were put under a certain amount of strain by the Continental System, but their long coastline permitted them to breach it and trade with Britain, while their Pomeranian colony on the northern coast of Germany meant that they could sell on to the German market with profit.
The Russians could only view the combination of the creation of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, Napoleon’s marriage to the daughter of the Emperor of Austria and the recent developments in Sweden as aggressive encirclement, and Bernadotte’s election was greeted with uproar.
All these feelings were given added poignancy by the economic hardships caused by the Continental System, which had turned into a regular tariff auction. Britain had responded to Napoleon’s Berlin decree of 1806 banning her ships from all ports under his control by declaring that any ship trading with a port from which her ships were excluded was fair game for confiscation by the Royal Navy. French, Spanish, Dutch and German traders tried to get around this by using neutral American vessels to carry goods, but Britain decreed that no vessel could be considered neutral if it were carrying goods between hostile ports. In order to get around this, American ships would pick up their cargoes, take them to an American port, unload them, reload them and take them to a European port. Britain refused to accept this as legal. Napoleon retaliated in December 1807 by decreeing that any ship which had put in at a British port or paid British duty was automatically liable to seizure. On 1 March 1809 the United States closed its ports to all British and French shipping, but Napoleon managed to reach an agreement with the Americans to the detriment of Britain, which would ultimately lead to the outbreak of hostilities between Britain and the United States in 1812.
Russia had little industry, and was dependent on imports for a huge variety of everyday items. These now had to be smuggled in via Sweden or through smaller ports on Russia’s Baltic coastline. Her exports – timber, grain, hemp and so on – were bulky and difficult to smuggle. The Russian rouble fell in value against most European currencies by some 25 per cent, which made foreign goods exorbitantly expensive. Between 1807 and 1811, the price of coffee more than doubled, sugar became more than three times as expensive, and a bottle of champagne went from 3.75 to twelve roubles. Russian noblemen had to pay through the nose not only for champagne, but for everything they did not produce at home, and they could not find a market for the produce of their own estates.12
This cocktail of hurt pride and financial hardship produced ever more violent criticism of Alexander’s policy and of his State Secretary, Mikhail Mikhailovich Speransky, who was virtual prime minister. Speransky was the son of a priest, a very able man of lowly social background, ascetic and devoid of any social or financial ambition. A radical at heart, he believed autocracy to be incompatible with the rule of law, and would have liked to carry out far-reaching reform of the structure of the state. But he accepted the limitations imposed by his position and concentrated on modernising the administration. Soon after his appointment in 1807 he had promulgated reform of the legal system, which was never implemented, of government finances and of the administration.
The nobility, who sensed an enemy in him, did everything to undermine his position. There were soon rumours circulating to the effect that Speransky was a Freemason and revolutionary secretly in league with Napoleon, and that he meant to bring the whole social system crashing down.
The Tsar of Russia was theoretically an all-powerful autocrat, but his relationship with his people was a complex and ambivalent one. There was a mystical, sacred foundation to his power, since he was both his subjects’ religious hierarch and the representative of God on earth. This imposed strong bonds of obedience to him on them. But if a Tsar was felt to have betrayed his divinely ordained purpose, he became something worse than just a wicked Tsar – he became a devil who must be destroyed. At the secular level, his position was just as ambiguous. The very fact that all power was concentrated in him meant that he had no instruments with which to impose his will. He was thus in a curious way dependent on the goodwill of the nobility, which staffed the army and all the organs of state, and therefore on public opinion. And public opinion was by now strongly against Alexander and his policies on virtually every point. He was seen by many as the author of Russia’s shame, and he realised that the only way he could wipe away that shame was through war. The conquest of Finland had helped slightly, but it was not enough.
On 26 December 1809, while he was assuring Napoleon that he would do everything to make the marriage to his sister Anna possible and begging him to bury the Polish question forever, Alexander summoned Prince Adam Czartoryski, a close friend and a prominent Polish patriot who had ten years before elaborated a plan for the restoration of the Kingdom of Poland under Russia’s protection. The Tsar told him that he would now like to put this plan into action, by ‘liberating’ the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and uniting it with the Polish provinces currently under Russian rule, and asked Czartoryski to sound out the Poles on the subject. The Prince did not need to do much research. He knew that the plan could only have worked in 1805 or in 1809, during Napoleon’s war with Austria. He nevertheless went to Warsaw and saw the man who would be the key figure in such a plan – Prince Józef Poniatowski, commander-in-chief of the Grand Duchy’s army and nephew of the last King of Poland. Predictably, Poniatowski rejected the Russian proposal.13
Czartoryski reported back to Alexander personally in April 1810. He pointed out that many Poles had got wind of Alexander’s negotiations with Napoleon to prevent the restoration of Poland, and that this hardly inspired confidence. But the Tsar clung to his view that the Poles could be won over. ‘We are now in April, so we could begin in nine months’ time,’ he concluded.14
Caulaincourt noticed during the winter of 1809–1810 that Alexander was less and less amenable to French policies, and by the spring of 1810 he was finding the friendship he had built up with the Tsar increasingly at odds with his ambassadorial role. He began to hint to Napoleon that he would like to be recalled. But Napoleon paid no heed to his warnings or his wishes.
He had persuaded himself that Britain was suffering economically, and that a few more months would probably bring her to the negotiating table. He therefore adopted a more aggressive attitude to the application of the Continental System. His correspondence bristles with detailed instructions to the rulers and administrators of the coastal areas under his control on which ships and goods to impound and which to allow through. He suggests alternative sources of the supplies