Meantime Napoleon had placed his brother Joseph on the throne of Naples, Louis on the throne of Holland, and had formed a Confederation of the Rhine out of several states in the valley of the Rhine, which had fourteen million people. Napoleon was elected Protector of the Confederation.
Russia now became an ally of Prussia, and war was declared against France Oct. 14, 1806. The double battle of Jena and Auerstädt was fought, and the Prussians were completely defeated. Alison says, "The loss of the Prussians was prodigious; on the two fields there fell nearly twenty thousand killed and wounded, besides nearly as many prisoners.... Ten thousand of the killed and wounded fell at Auerstädt."
Napoleon entered Berlin in triumph Oct. 27, 1806, and established himself in the king's palace. He did not like the beautiful Queen Louise, because he felt that she had inspired the soldiers by her presence, and urged her husband to make war. He was unjust to her in his bulletins, and Josephine reproached him for "speaking ill of women."
Napoleon visited the palace of Sans Souci to see the room where Frederick the Great died, still preserved as he left it, and then went to the church where he is buried. At the tomb, says General de Ségur, "Napoleon paused at the entrance in a grave and respectful attitude. He gazed into the shadow enclosing the hero's ashes, and stood thus for nearly ten minutes, motionless, silent, as if buried in deep thought." The sword of Frederick he took with him, and gave it to the Hotel des Invalides in Paris, with the flags carried by his guard in the Seven Years' War.
Early in November, Prince Hohenlohe surrendered twenty thousand Prussians to the French; and Blücher, whom Napoleon was to meet again at Waterloo, surrendered twenty thousand men and over five hundred officers.
With all this victory, Josephine was not happy. Napoleon wrote her Nov. 1: "Talleyrand has come, and tells me you do nothing but cry." She wrote to Hortense, more miserable than herself, that she could not be happy so far from the Emperor.
Napoleon, while at Berlin, issued, Nov. 21, 1806, his famous "Berlin Decree," wherein he declared the British Islands blockaded. All commerce with England and her colonies was prohibited; all property belonging to an English subject confiscated; every native of England found in a country occupied by French troops to be made prisoner of war.
Napoleon declared that this was a retaliatory measure against England. Every French port was, in fact, blockaded by English vessels from the Elbe to Brest, by a decree of the British Government, passed in May, 1806, according to Alison. Some months after the Berlin Decree, England issued further prohibitory acts, called Orders in Council. The consequence of all this was that hate between the two nations was increased.
After the humiliation of Prussia, the war went on with Russia. After some minor battles, both armies met on the bloody field of Eylau, Feb. 7, 1807. Jomini thinks the forces about equal, though some historians place the number at eighty thousand Russians, and sixty thousand French. Part of Feb. 7 and all of Feb. 8, the armies were in deadly conflict. A blinding snowstorm part of the time prevented the armies from seeing each other. The snow and ice were so thick that men fought on ponds and did not know it.
Fifty thousand dead and wounded lay on the snow. Marshal Augereau's corps was almost destroyed; three thousand only remained out of fifteen thousand. Napoleon wrote in his bulletins: "Imagine, on a space a league square, nine or ten thousand corpses; four or five thousand dead horses; lines of Russian knapsacks; fragments of guns and sabres; the earth covered with bullets, shells, supplies; twenty-four cannon surrounded by their artillerymen, slain just as they were trying to take their guns away; and all that in plainest relief on the stretch of snow."