The Austrian attack on Napoleon left Alexander no alternative but to declare war. Had he failed to meet his clear treaty obligations the Russo-French alliance would have collapsed and Russia and France would probably have been at war within a matter of weeks. While in theory Austria’s enemy, Russia’s overriding war aim was that the Austrian Empire should be weakened as little as possible. The last thing Russia wanted to do was damage the Austrian army, since its survival was the main guarantee against Napoleon imposing crushing peace terms on the Habsburgs. In addition, the Russians were strongly opposed to any addition of territory to the Duchy of Warsaw. The Russian army which invaded Austrian Galicia therefore devoted much of its efforts to avoiding the Habsburg forces and impeding the advance of the Duchy’s Polish army, which was supposedly its ally. Of course it was impossible to hide such tactics, especially when Russian correspondence intercepted by the Poles made their intentions clear. Napoleon was furious and never really believed again in the usefulness of the Russian alliance. Predictably, the war ended in Austria’s defeat. In the peace treaty of Schoönbrunn, signed in October 1809, Napoleon revenged himself on Alexander by handing a large slice of Galicia to the Poles.
The war between Austria and France was the beginning of the end of the Russo-French alliance but two developments over the winter of 1809–10 disguised this for a time. Napoleon agreed that his ambassador in Russia, Armand de Caulaincourt, should draft a Franco-Russian convention which would lay to rest Russian fears about Poland’s possible restoration. More or less simultaneously he divorced his wife, the Empress Josephine, and sought the hand of Alexander’s sister. Rumours that Napoleon was in pursuit of a Russian grand duchess had been floating around for some time. In March 1808 a very worried Empress Marie had asked the ambassador in Paris to find out whether this was a real danger. At that time the obvious target would have been the Grand Duchess Catherine. The marriage of this extremely feisty and strong-willed young woman with Napoleon would have been interesting and combustible. For all her ambition, however, Catherine could not stomach the idea of marrying the Corsican bandit. Perhaps to avoid any possibility of this, in 1809 she married her distant cousin, Prince George of Oldenburg, instead. This left the only possible Russian bride as the Grand Duchess Anna, just turned 16 when Napoleon’s proposal arrived.25
Napoleon’s request for Anna’s hand was very unwelcome to Alexander. He neither wanted to marry his sister to a Bonaparte nor to insult the French emperor by refusing to do so. Paul I had decreed in his will that his daughters’ marriages should be in their mother’s hands and in a sense this was a glorious excuse for Alexander to dodge the issue, though by pleading inability to impose his will on a mere woman he confirmed all Napoleon’s suspicions about his weakness. Alexander rather dreaded a tantrum from the empress on this issue but in fact mother and son saw eye to eye on the matter and this was just one sign of their growing agreement on political questions. Of course Marie was horrified by the idea of the marriage but she fully understood the dangers of annoying Napoleon. She wrote to her daughter Catherine that Alexander had told her that Russia’s western frontier was very vulnerable, with no fortresses to cover the likely invasion routes: ‘The Emperor told me that if God granted him five years’ peace, he would have ten fortresses, and his finances in order.’ The Empress accepted the fact that it was the duty of the imperial family to sacrifice themselves for the good of the state but she could not bear the thought of losing her daughter, who was still a child, to Napoleon. The fact that two of her older daughters had been married young and that both had died in childbirth strengthened this revulsion. In the end the Grand Duchess Catherine came up with a compromise: Napoleon would not be refused outright but merely told that, having lost two daughters, the Empress was determined that her last one should not marry before the age of 18.26
By the time the Russian semi-rejection reached Napoleon in February 1810 he had long since opted for his second-best option, namely marriage with the daughter of the Austrian emperor, the Archduchess Marie-Louise. Alexander stifled both his resentment that Napoleon had been simultaneously negotiating with both courts and his deep fear that an Austrian marriage would contribute to the breakdown of the Franco-Russian alliance and Russia’s isolation. Almost simultaneously he was shocked to learn that Napoleon had refused to ratify the convention barring the restoration of Poland. Napoleon assured the Russians that he had no intention of restoring a Polish kingdom but could not sign a convention which bound France to stop anyone else, including the Poles themselves, from doing so. In a sense the dispute over the convention’s wording was nonsensicaclass="underline" no one could hold Napoleon to any agreement he signed and his record of fidelity to treaties was not impressive. In a way, however, that made his refusal even to pretend to meet Russian wishes as regards Poland even more suspicious in Russian eyes. From this moment on Franco-Russian relations went into a steep decline, which continued until the outbreak of war in June 1812. It was no coincidence that in early March 1810 the new minister of war, Mikhail Barclay de Tolly, drafted his first memorandum on measures for the defence of Russia’s western border from French attack.27
Meanwhile the Continental System was beginning to cause Russia major difficulties. Alexander recognized always that Russian adherence to Napoleon’s economic blockade of Britain was ‘the basis of our alliance’ with France. To restore relations with Britain would be to breach the core of the Treaty of Tilsit and make war with Napoleon inevitable. For that reason he refrained from doing this until French troops actually crossed his border in June 1812. By 1810, however, it was clear that something had to be done to reduce the damage being caused to Russia by the Continental System.28
The biggest single problem was the collapsing value of the paper ruble, which by 1811 was almost the only currency in use in the empire’s Russian heartlands. In June 1804 the paper ruble had been worth more than three-quarters of its silver equivalent: by June 1811 it was valued at less than one-quarter. This had two key causes. In the first place, the only way the state could pay for its enormous military expenditures in 1805–10 was by printing more and more paper money. Secondly, the Continental System, added to general economic and political uncertainties, had resulted in a collapse in business confidence. Even the silver ruble lost one-fifth of its value against the pound sterling in 1807–12. The value of the paper ruble on the foreign exchanges plummeted. This had a dramatic effect on the cost of sustaining Russian armies fighting in Finland, Moldavia, the Caucasus and Poland: Caulaincourt reckoned that the campaign against the Swedes was costing Alexander the equivalent of fifteen French silver francs per man per day, commenting that ‘the Swedish war is ruining Russia’. By 1809 state income was less than half of expenditure and crisis was looming. The real value of the government’s tax income that year was 73 per cent of what it had been five years before. At a time when Russia needed to prepare for war against Napoleon’s empire this was nothing short of a potential catastrophe.29