In vain does he, after Tilsit, make a bargain of this kind with Russia.

This bargain cannot hold, because in this arrangement Napoleon, as usual with him, always encroaching, threatening, and attacking, wants to reduce Alexander to the role of a subordinate and a dupe.[12115] No clear-sighted witness can doubt this.

In 1809, a diplomat writes: "The French system, which is now triumphant, is directed against the whole body of great states,"[12116] not alone against England, Prussia, and Austria, but against Russia, against every power capable of maintaining its independence; for, if she remains independent, she may become hostile, and as a precautionary step Napoleon crushes in her a probable enemy.
All the more so because this course once entered upon he cannot stop; at the same time his character and the situation in which he has placed himself impels him on while his past hurries him along to his future.[12117] At the moment of the rupture of the treaty of Amiens he is already so strong and so aggressive that his neighbors are obliged, for their own security, to form an alliance with England; this leads him to break down all the old monarchies that are still intact, to conquer Naples, to mutilate Austria the first time, to dismember and cut up Prussia, to mutilate Austria the second time, to manufacture kingdoms for his brothers at Naples, in Holland and in Westphalia .-- At this same date, all the ports of his empire are closed against the English, which leads him to close against them all the ports of the Continent, to organize against them the continental blockade, to proclaim against them an European crusade, to prevent the neutrality of sovereigns like the Pope, of lukewarm subalterns like his brother Louis, of doubtful collaborators or inadequate, like the Braganzas of Portugal and the Bourbons of Spain, and therefore to get hold of Portugal, Spain, the Pontifical States, and Holland, and next of the Hanseatic towns and the duchy of Oldenburg, to extending along the entire coast, from the mouths of the Cattaro and Trieste to Hamburg and Dantzic, his cordon of military chiefs, prefects, and custom-houses, a sort of net of which he draws the meshes tighter and tighter every day, even stifling not alone his home consumer, but the producer and the merchant.[12118]--And all this sometimes by a simple decree, with no other alleged motive than his interest, his convenience, or his pleasure,[12119] brusquely and arbitrarily, in violation of international law, humanity, and hospitality.

It would take volumes to describe his abuses of power, the tissue of brutalities and knaveries,[12120] the oppression of the ally and despoiling of the vanquished, the military brigandage exercised over populations in time of war, and by the systematic exactions practiced on them in times of peace.[12121] Accordingly, after 1808, these populations rise against him.

He has so deeply injured them in their interests, and hurt their feelings to such an extent,[12122] he has so trodden them down, ransomed, and forced them into his service.