[1] At Tilsit, Napoleon had made an admirer of Alexander, but by the time of the meeting at Erfurt anti-French sentiment at the Russian court was beginning to threaten the newly forged alliance.

Napoleon and his foreign minister Jean-Baptiste Nompère de Champagny sought to strengthen the alliance once more in order to settle affairs in Spain and prepare for the expected war with Austria.

The meeting became a great conference involving an array of kings, princes, dukes, barons and notables from all over Europe.

By 1812 Russia no longer complied with Napoleon's Continental System of economic warfare against the United Kingdom and anti-French sentiment in the Russian court had reached a new height.

[citation needed] The congress is an event referred to by Leo Tolstoy in his War and Peace (Book Two Part Three Chapter 1).