Her army was, however, as has been well said, "only that of Frederick the Great grown twenty years older"; one of Frederick's generals, the aged duke of Brunswick, who had issued the famous manifesto in 1792,[425] was its leader. A single defeat, near Jena (October 14, 1806), put Prussia completely in the hands of her enemy. This one disaster produced complete demoralization throughout the country. Fortresses were surrendered without resistance, and the king fled to the uttermost parts of his realm on the Russian boundary.
The campaign in Poland.
Territorial changes of the treaties of Tilsit, July, 1807.
Creation of the grand duchy of Warsaw and the kingdom of Westphalia.
Napoleon now led his army into Poland, where he spent the winter in operations against Russia and her feeble Prussian ally. He closed an arduous campaign by a signal victory at Friedland (June 14, 1807), which was followed by the treaties of Tilsit with Russia and Prussia (July 7 and 9). Napoleon had no mercy on Prussia. Frederick William III lost all his possessions to the west of the Elbe and all that Prussia had gained in the second and third partitions of Poland. The Polish territory Napoleon made into a new subject kingdom called the grand duchy of Warsaw, and chose his friend, the king of Saxony, as its ruler. Out of the western lands of Prussia, which he later united with Hanover, he created the kingdom of Westphalia for his brother Jerome. Russia, on the other hand, was treated with marked consideration. The Tsar finally consented to recognize all the sweeping territorial changes that Napoleon had made, and secretly agreed to enforce the blockade against England should that country refuse to make peace.
The continental blockade.
250. Napoleon's most persevering enemy still remained unconquered and inaccessible. Just as Napoleon was undertaking his successful campaign against Austria in 1805, Nelson had annihilated the French fleet for the second time in the renowned naval engagement of Trafalgar, off the coast of Spain. It seemed more than ever necessary, therefore, to ruin England commercially and industrially, since there was obviously no likelihood of subduing it by arms.
The Berlin Decree and Napoleon's 'paper' blockade.
In May, 1806, England had declared the coast from the Elbe to Brest to be blockaded. Napoleon replied to this with the Berlin Decree (November 21, 1806), in which he proclaimed it a monstrous abuse of the right for England to declare great stretches of coast in a state of blockade which her whole fleet would be unable to enforce. He retaliated with a "paper"[426] blockade of the British Isles, which forbade all commerce with them. Letters or packages directed to England or to an Englishman or written in the English language were not to be permitted to pass through the mails in the countries he controlled. Every English subject in countries occupied by French troops or in the territory of Napoleon's allies was to be regarded as a prisoner of war and his property as a lawful prize. All trade in English goods was forbidden.