Treaties of Tilsit (1807)
틸지트 조약 (1807)
The two peace treaties Napoleon signed at Tilsit (today Sovetsk, Russia) in July 1807 at the end of the War of the Fourth Coalition: with the Russian emperor Alexander I on 7 July and with Prussia on 9 July. Prussia lost about half its pre-war territory, had to cut its army to 43,000 men and pay a heavy indemnity, while Russia allied with France and joined the Continental System against Britain.
In depth
After Napoleon's victory at Friedland, with the Grande Armée in Berlin and pursuing him to the easternmost frontier of his realm, King Frederick William III of Prussia had already agreed to a truce on 25 June. Napoleon and Alexander I met on a raft in the middle of the Neman. Both treaties were made at Prussia's expense.
The Franco-Russian treaty of 7 July ended the war between the two empires and made them allies. They secretly agreed to aid each other in disputes: France pledged to aid Russia against the Ottoman Empire, and Russia agreed to join the Continental System against Britain. Napoleon also persuaded Alexander to enter the Anglo-Russian War and to start the Finnish War against Sweden to force it into the Continental System. Russia was to evacuate Wallachia and Moldavia and hand the Ionian Islands and Cattaro over to France.
The Franco-Prussian treaty of 9 July stripped Prussia of about half its territory. Cottbus went to Saxony, the left bank of the Elbe to the newly created Kingdom of Westphalia and Białystok to Russia, most of the Polish lands taken in the Second and Third Partitions became the Duchy of Warsaw, and Danzig became a free city. Prussia had to reduce its army to 43,000, and on 9 March 1808 France fixed the indemnity at 154.5 million francs, lowered to 120 million by November 1808; until 1812 the occupiers requisitioned a further 146 to 309 million francs. Prussia's population fell from 9.75 million to no more than 4.5 million, and many in Prussia and Russia saw the treaty as unequal and a national humiliation.
Franco-Russian co-operation broke down in 1810 when the tsar began to admit neutral ships to Russian ports, and in June 1812 Napoleon crossed the Neman and invaded Russia. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 restored many Prussian territories. In the General Council's second address on the Franco-Prussian War (September 1870) Marx wrote that if any conqueror ever took "material guarantees" for breaking the sinews of a nation, it was the first Napoleon by the Tilsit Treaty and the way he executed it against Prussia and the rest of Germany; yet a few years later his gigantic power split like a rotten reed upon the German people, a warning he turned against Prussia's demand for Alsace and Lorraine.