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Alexander believed that Europe had reached a crisis, moral as well as political, and wrote to the British Prime Minister William Pitt suggesting a reorganisation of the Continent into a league of liberal states founded on the sacred rights of humanity. Pitt was not interested in the scheme, but he pandered to Alexander, and, allowing him to dream of greater things, in 1805 managed to enrol him into the third coalition against Napoleon: Austria and Russia were to attack France, and Britain would pay for it.

Russia had no reason for going to war with France, as none of her interests were threatened, and France was Russia’s cultural beacon. Russian society was divided on the matter. While those who regarded Napoleon as an evil being who had to be crushed were probably in the majority, there were plenty who thought otherwise. The former Chancellor Count Rostopchin was vociferous in his criticism, propounding the view that Russia was being used by Britain; his future successor, Count Nikolai Rumiantsev, regarded France as Russia’s natural ally. Napoleon had many admirers in Russia, particularly among the young – some of whom would be drinking his health even after the war had begun.
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But Alexander had come to see the whole question as part of a wider moral issue. He had assumed the role of knightly defender of a Christian monarchical tradition against the onslaught of the new barbarism as represented by Napoleon. An element of emulation also came into it, for he longed to distinguish himself on the battlefield. He had inherited his father’s love of parades and the minutiae of military life – he was always checking details of uniforms and drill –
and believed that a Tsar’s place was at the head of his troops. He therefore insisted on setting off to war in person, although he gave overall command of his armies to the only experienced general to hand, the fifty-eight-year-old Mikhail Ilarionovich Kutuzov.

Kutuzov had first seen action against Polish insurgents, and subsequently distinguished himself in several campaigns against Turkey. In 1773 in the Crimea he had received a bullet in the head which severed the muscles behind his right eye, causing it to sag in a grotesque way; eventually he lost sight in it. Kutuzov had been military governor of St Petersburg at the time of the murder of Tsar Paul, so he knew a thing or two about that. This was not the least of the reasons for which Alexander feared and resented him, and as a result he dismissed him and exiled him to his country estate. There, Kutuzov relieved his boredom and his rheumatic pains with drink and whatever sexual solace the rural retreat could provide his notorious appetite. And it was there, in the summer of 1805, that he suddenly received the order to take command of the army and join forces with the Austrians.

The army was not ready, so Kutuzov set off with an advance guard to reinforce the Austrian General Mack. Napoleon acted with speed and surrounded Mack, forcing him to surrender at Ulm while Kutuzov was still on the march. Massively outnumbered, Kutuzov was obliged to fall back and join up with the Russian main army, led by Alexander, and the remainder of the Austrian forces under the Emperor Francis.

Napoleon had never seen any good reason for France and Russia to fight, and was convinced that Alexander had been manipulated by Britain into joining the coalition. He therefore sent General Savary to the Tsar with the suggestion that they get together and sort out any differences amicably. But Alexander haughtily declined, famously addressing his reply to ‘the Head of the French Government’, as he could not stomach acknowledging Napoleon’s imperial title.

Kutuzov wanted to retreat further, but Alexander was determined to fight, and obliged him to give battle at Austerlitz on 2 December.
Like a subaltern playing at being commander, Alexander overruled Kutuzov’s suggestions and made him adopt a plan devised by one of the Austrian generals. On the day, he bossed and chivvied Kutuzov for the slowness of his deployment, and then watched in horror as the allied army was routed. Forced to flee from the battlefield, Alexander was mortified. ‘He was himself even more thoroughly defeated at Austerlitz than his army,’ according to the French diplomat Joseph de Maistre.
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The Tsar now resented Kutuzov all the more, and dismissed him from his command, giving him the minor post of Governor of Kiev.

Austria sued for peace, but the war went on, as Prussia joined the coalition. The thirty-five-year-old King Frederick William III had sat on the fence, until his beautiful and spirited wife Louise had finally induced him to come out against Napoleon. But in a whirlwind campaign in October 1806 his renowned army was routed at Jena and Auerstädt, and he had to flee his capital of Berlin. Napoleon entered the city and pursued Frederick William, who took refuge in East Prussia at the side of the Russian army, now under the command of General Lev Bennigsen.

Alexander showed remarkable determination in adversity. He raised more troops, and in 1807 called up a peasant militia. But he had to take precautions to ensure that these serfs would remain loyal to a system that kept them enslaved. News of the revolutionary happenings in France over the past fifteen years was slow to spread among the uneducated peasants of central and eastern Europe. But that very slowness meant that it often mingled with local legend and even religious millenarian longings as it went, with the result that the figure of Napoleon was sometimes confused with a number of mythic folk heroes, lending him the attributes not only of a liberator, but of a messiah as well. The Russian authorities were well aware of this, and prepared accordingly as the French armies drew close to the boundaries of the empire.

While calling on a high official in 1806 the writer Sergei Glinka had been intrigued to see a civil servant clutching a copy of the
Apocalypse. There was a long tradition in Russia of associating the enemy with the Antichrist in order to raise the fighting spirit of the soldiers, and now the authorities had hit on the idea of substituting Napoleon for the rulers of the abyss, Abaddon and Apollyon. In November 1806 the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church issued a thundering denunciation of Napoleon, accusing him of taking on the role and the name of Messiah and conspiring with Jews and other evil people against the Christian faith. The clergy also made much of the fact that when in Egypt Napoleon had declared his regard for Islam – it must be remembered that the Russians had been in a semi-permanent state of war with Muslim Tatars and Turks, which they saw as a kind of crusade. Thus the average soldier and peasant was given the impression that Napoleon was in league with all the devils of hell.
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But the crusade against him was cut short. In January 1807 Bennigsen lost 25,000 men in a fierce engagement at Eylau, and he was routed by Napoleon at Friedland in June. Alexander faced a stark choice. He could either fall back and try to regroup, which would involve letting the enemy into his own empire, or he could come to terms with Napoleon. His army was unpaid, unfed and badly officered, and the territory he would be falling back through, which had only been taken from Poland ten years before, was full of potential partisans.

On 24 June 1807 Alexander sent General Lobanov-Rostovsky to Napoleon’s headquarters at Tilsit on the river Niemen with a personal message saying that he would be delighted to make not just peace but an alliance with him. ‘An entirely new system must replace the one which has existed up to now, and I flatter myself that we will easily reach an understanding with the Emperor Napoleon, provided that we meet without intermediaries,’ he wrote.
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Negotiations began the next day. A tented pavilion was constructed for the purpose on a raft moored in the middle of the Niemen. Alexander turned up in his most fetching uniform, determined to charm Napoleon and get himself out of the desperate straits he was in. For his part, Napoleon wanted to seduce Alexander in order to break
up the coalition once and for all, and in the process gain a useful pawn in his struggle against Britain.

Alexander may have had great charm, but Napoleon was the better manipulator of men. He flattered Alexander shamelessly, treating him as an equal. He also spared no occasion of driving a wedge between him and his Prussian ally. Frederick William III had not been allowed on to the raft, and on the day negotiations opened he could be seen watching from the Russian bank, even at one stage edging his horse forward until it had water up to its chest, as though trying to eavesdrop. On the next day Napoleon relented and allowed Alexander to present Frederick William to him, but he was curt and did not invite him to the dinner he was giving for the Tsar that evening. He repeatedly told Alexander that he was only leaving the wretched King on his throne in deference to his, Alexander’s, wishes. However much he might have been pained or shocked by such insults to a brother monarch, Alexander could not fail to be flattered at the difference in the status accorded to the two by Napoleon.

While the foreign ministers of both states negotiated the actual treaties, Napoleon and Alexander assisted at parades, went out for walks, drives and rides; they sat up together after dinner, talking far into the night. Napoleon would let drop the odd phrase about how Russia’s frontier really ought to be on the Vistula, about a possible mutual carve-up of Turkey, about the two of them resolving all the problems of Europe together. He pandered to Alexander’s dreams of reforming the world. He would unfold maps of Europe and Asia, and together they would speculate on ideal solutions to the world’s ills through some monumental territorial rearrangement. Napoleon told of how he had modernised France, giving Alexander the impression that he too could achieve great things, that all the self-flagellation he had been obliged to perform before his tutor would finally be vindicated by some magnificent act.
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Alexander had grown up hating Napoleon and all he stood for, as did his family and court. On the day of the first meeting on the raft, his sister Catherine wrote to him vehemently denouncing Napoleon
as a liar and a monster, urging him to have no truck whatever with him. But there is no doubt that the flattery of the conqueror of Europe, however monstrous he might be, had worked its magic. For Alexander, unsure of himself, aware of his inadequacies, brought up to think of himself as a failure, to be treated as an equal by a man who had achieved so much, whose very name made Europe tremble, was strong liquor. The subaltern sat at the table of the most successful general in history. ‘Just imagine my spending days with Bonaparte, talking for hours quite alone with him!’ he wrote back to Catherine. ‘I ask you, does not all this seem like a dream?’
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And while Napoleon had set out with the most cynical attitude, he too seems to have fallen for Alexander’s boyish charm and enjoyed being with him in an elder-brotherly way. They were also to some extent carried away by the epic nature of the proceedings. Their meeting on the raft, in full view of two great armies drawn up in parade uniforms on either bank; the banquets at which the two most powerful men in Europe drank each other’s health and embraced, pledging to build a better world; the grenadiers of both armies mingling to drink the health of the emperors of the Orient and the Occident; the touching scenes as Napoleon, having asked the Russians to name their bravest ranker, pinned the order of the Légion d’Honneur on his breast, a gesture reciprocated by Alexander with the Cross of St George – were all so much playacting. But it was grand spectacle, and actors are notorious for being taken in by their own histrionics.
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In the treaties signed on 7 July at the conclusion of these three weeks of posturing, Russia ceded the Ionian Islands to France, but received a small part of Poland in return. She agreed to pull her troops out of the Danubian Principalities, while France negotiated a settlement with Turkey on her behalf. Most importantly, she allied herself with France in the war with Britain, promising to close her ports to all British trade unless Britain made a speedy peace with France by the end of the year.

The obvious loser at Tilsit was Prussia. Frederick William was only
just allowed to keep his throne, in deference to the wishes of Alexander. He had to give up most of the territory Prussia had taken from Poland in the past decades, to pay France a huge indemnity for having made war on her, to reduce his army to a symbolic force, and to accommodate French garrisons all over his kingdom. With the Polish lands taken from Prussia, Napoleon formed the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, a new French satellite.

Considering he had been obliged to sue for peace, Tilsit was a triumph for Alexander: he had managed to avoid being treated as a defeated party. But a closer look at the treaty revealed it to be not a peace settlement, but the initiation of a new war and the foundation of a partnership, one which bound Russia more than it bound France. All the exciting nocturnal talk remained vapour hanging in the air, while Russia had committed herself to make economic war on Britain. And while the stationing of French troops on her territory was a humiliation and an expense for Prussia, it was clear to all but the most naïve that they were there to keep Russia in check and to shore up the newly-founded Grand Duchy of Warsaw. This in itself was an open challenge to Russia. It was tiny, but it was a potential kernel for the resurrection of the Polish state which had been wiped off the map only a decade before, and a chunk of which currently formed the whole western belt of the Russian empire.

Whatever else he had managed to save, Alexander did not have to wait long to find out that he had not, as far as his subjects were concerned, saved his face or Russia’s honour. His sister Catherine called the treaty a humiliating climbdown, and his mother refused his embrace when he returned to St Petersburg. The court, already disapproving of his desertion of the popular Empress Elizabeth for his mistress Maria Antonovna Naryshkina, sensed a betrayal. The traditionalist aristocracy opposed any negotiation with the despised ‘upstart’ and saw the treaty as a sell-out. Many felt Alexander had been made a fool of by Napoleon. The playwright Vladislav Aleksandrovich Ozerov wrote
Dmitry Donskoi
, a play whose historical heroics, applauded frantically by full houses, made Alexander look ineffectual.