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.Napoleon accepted the bonds and promptly sold them to raise cash; ironically the largest purchaser was the Russian tsar.The wealth of the Romanovs ultimately made possible not only Napoleon’s assault on their empire but also the massive expansion of the empire that in the next century would surpass theirs to dominate the world.When Napoleon staged his coup d’état in November 1798, Alexander’s father Paul was still tsar.It would be difficult to think of two societies further apart than tsarist Russia and revolutionary France, but Tsar Paul believed he sensed a kindred spirit in Napoleon.France was disintegrating into chaos as the terror of the guillotine was followed by virtual civil war.Tsar Paul was not alone in seeing the need for a voice of authority to lift France out of chaos; as so often, a military strongman seemed to be the answer.Tsar Paul’s admiration for Napoleon was one of the factors that divided the Russian emperor from his people, and eventually led to his assassination.Alexander came to the throne determined to reverse his father’s pro-French policy.The stage was set for conflict on a massive scale.As so many times before and after, Poland was central to Russia’s priorities.The overwhelming characteristic of Russia’s attitude to the outside world was fear of invasion – dating right back to the first Slav tribes, through the Mongol period and more recently invasion from Poland.Catherine had determined to remove the Polish threat by dismembering the Polish commonwealth and dividing it between Prussia, Austria and herself.Alexander had a different agenda.He wanted to build on Catherine’s imperial legacy by reuniting Poland as part of an expanded Russian empire.Napoleon also had his sights set on Poland, and his war chest was swollen by selling France’s North American possessions.The clash between the two men produced the catastrophic French invasion, which confirmed all the worst fears Russia had about the rest of the world.The two opponents could not have been more different physically: Napoleon short and stout, Alexander tall and handsome.Compared with the sixty-five-year-old Catherine the Great and the near-insane Paul, the new tsar, just twenty-eight, was the Princess Diana of his day – and he knew it.Ignoring more experienced and cautious voices he decided to personally lead his armies into battle at Austerlitz in Bohemia.Napoleon won a stunning victory.(The battle is usually described as being between French and ‘Austro-Russian’ forces; the reality is that most of the Austrian army had already been smashed at Ulm and Russian losses outnumbered Austrian by three to one.) Napoleon’s armies went on to occupy Berlin and Warsaw.After the disaster at Austerlitz Alexander decided to let his generals take command, but they did no better; following a winter campaign in Poland, Russia suffered an even greater defeat at Friedland and Alexander was forced to make peace.Napoleon and Alexander met on a raft in the middle of the river Niemen to sign the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807.In an uncanny prefiguring of the Hitler-Stalin pact 132 years later the treaty contained a secret annexe allowing Alexander to occupy Finland, which he invaded the next year.Finland became a grand duchy within the Russian empire, with Alexander himself the grand duke.Alexander was also expanding on other fronts, taking territory from Persia and annexing Bessarabia after a six year war with Turkey.Important as these gains were for Alexander, it was the competition with Napoleon that presented both the greatest threat and the greatest opportunity, and the place where both threat and opportunity were most apparent was once again Poland.Under the Treaty of Tilsit Russia had agreed to the creation of a French puppet state, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, which included those parts of Poland not controlled by Russia.Napoleon immediately started recruiting a Polish army that could have only one objective: moving east.Napoleon turned to the hero of the American Revolution and Poland’s battles with Russia, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, who was now living in exile in France, and offered him command of the Polish Legion [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]