Erfurt Prince Congress

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Napoleon receives with Alexander (3rd from right) the Austrian ambassador in Erfurt
Programmatic history painting
by Nicolas Gosse .

The meeting of Napoleon I with the Russian Tsar Alexander I from September 27 to October 14, 1808 in Erfurt is called the Erfurt Prince Congress (also Erfurt Congress or Erfurt Prince's Day ) . The highlight of the meeting was the signing of an alliance treaty between Napoleon and Alexander, which was later not kept.

prehistory

In July 1808 the French army suffered a heavy defeat at Bailén in Spain . At the same time, the Emperor watched Austria's increasing preparations for war with concern. To secure the support of Russia in order to keep Vienna in check, therefore appeared to him politically necessary. The relationship with Alexander I had not remained untroubled since the Peace of Tilsit in 1807. The Tsar's expectation of France's support in the fight against the Ottoman Empire had been disappointed, and Russia's participation in the continental blockade against Great Britain was very unfavorable for Russia. Against this background, the emperor invited to a princely congress in Erfurt, at that time a French exclave in Thuringia as the Principality of Erfurt . Since the German vassal princes of the Rhine Confederation appeared in large numbers, it was suitable as a show of power against the Tsar. Napoleon also wanted to impress the participants with a glamorous supporting program. In nominal terms, the congress was designed as a continental European summit. In essence, it was a meeting between Napoleon and the princes of the Rhine Confederation to coordinate foreign and military policy just in case, and above all an attempt at long-term coordination with the Russian Empire.

Congress and its aftermath

On October 16, 1808, Napoleon I and Alexander I said goodbye at this point on what is now Bundesstrasse 7 near Mönchenholzhausen .

The two emperors met frequently and never missed an opportunity to demonstrate the warmth of their relationship in public. The magnificent theater performances of the Comédie-Française in the Kaisersaal also served for this purpose . In terms of content, they did not get a step closer to each other, even though an alliance agreement was signed on October 12th, which of course remained a formality without consequences.

The congress was characterized by glamorous receptions, excursions, hunts, the evening theater performances in the Kaisersaal and similar representative events that were deliberately aimed at political and public impact.

Napoleon took the opportunity to get to know three great German intellectuals - the political journalist and poet Christoph Martin Wieland (who had already predicted his rise when Napoleon was still a simple general), the famous historian Johannes von Müller (with whom he discussed a dilemma that currently his was too: whether Caesar at the peak of his power, if he had not been murdered, would have chosen the great campaign against the East - against the Parthian Empire - or the consolidation of the Roman Empire as a priority), and Germany's greatest poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe (whom to take for oneself could be valuable for propaganda purposes).

Popular vernacular and novel-like literature of the 19th century reported that the popular freedom heroes Eugen von Hirschfeld and Heinrich von Wedel tried to murder Napoleon by gunfire in the Rautal valley when he explained the battlefield near Jena to Napoleon during the Prince's Congress , but in the last For a moment, because he would have sat too closely with the Tsar in the car. The attempted assassination, which was also attributed to others, has not been proven and probably belongs to the realm of legend.

The Goethe encounter became the most popular: According to Goethe's account, Napoleon received him on October 2nd in the Stadthalterpalais and, after carefully examining him, told him Vous êtes un homme (in German you are a man ) or, according to the more widespread tradition, Müller's Voilà un homme (in German, this is a man ). He later discussed Werther's suffering with him and presented him with the Knight's Cross of the Legion of Honor . ( Milan Kundera ironically describes this meeting in the book Immortality .) Napoleon then attended a theater performance in Weimar.

literature

Representations

swell

  • Theodor Ferdinand Kajetan Arnold: Erfurt in its greatest splendor during the months of September and October 1808 . (Annotated facsimile print of the 1808 edition). Erfurt 2008. ISBN 978-3-932655-33-3
  • Karl Bertuch : Weimar and Erfurt in September and October 1808 , in: Journal des Luxus und der Moden 23 (1808), passim (coverage of the congress in seven consecutive letters published from October 1808)
  • Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord : Mémoires du prince de Talleyrand , publiés avec une préface et des notes par le Duc de Broglie, Vol. 1, Paris 1891, pp. 319–321, and the chapter "Entrevue d'Erfurt", Pp. 393–457 (pp. 453–457 reproduce the text of the Convention d'Erfurt ).
  • From Metternich's papers , published by Prince Richard Metternich-Winneburg, arranged and compiled by Alfons v. Klinkowström, Part One: From the Birth of Metternich to the Vienna Congress. 1773–1815 , Vienna 1880 (“The Monarchs Meeting in Erfurt”, pp. 221–233, reproduction of four letters by Metternich to the Austrian Foreign Minister Johann Philipp von Stadion ).

Web links

Commons : Erfurt Prince Congress  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ As is well known, Napoleon then led his armies against Russia.
  2. ↑ Successful; Goethe was then also conspicuously skeptical of the "Wars of Freedom" (cf. Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher # Monuments ).
  3. ↑ To this Kurt von Priesdorff: Soldatisches Führertum . Volume 5, Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt Hamburg, undated [Hamburg], undated [1938], DNB 367632802 , p. 356, no. 1593.
  4. ^ Theo Buck : Goethe and France. Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2019, ISBN 978-3-412-50078-8 , p. 143.
  5. ↑ Barbara Beßlich : "at the piano as behind the cannons". Goethe and Napoleon and what the 19th century made of them. In: Goethe yearbook. Vol. 126, 2009, ISSN  0323-4207 , p. 104.