[2] Antwerp remained a major base for the French Imperial Navy: from 1804 to 1814, its shipyards launched 19 ships of the line and frigates, and 14 were under construction at the start of the siege.

In November, a French flotilla of five gunboats, commanded by Captain Halgan, was tasked with reinforcing the defences of Walcheren: the inhabitants of Hellevoetsluis had sabotaged the guns and made them unusable by spiking them.

In December, 2,555 sailors had landed to reinforce the garrisons of Antwerp, Bergen op Zoom and Vlissingen, with only 945 remaining with the squadron, which was practically immobilised until the end of the siege.

[4] On 21 December 1813, General Nicolas Joseph Maison was appointed commander of the I Corps of the Grande armée with the mission of defending the Rhine and Meuse crossings and the approaches to Antwerp.

In January 1814, the governor of Antwerp was General Anne-Charles Lebrun [fr]; he was replaced at the end of the month by Lazare Carnot, an old republican who had long distanced himself from the imperial regime but who returned to service to defend his country from invasion.

On the British side, the Duke of Clarence, Admiral of the Fleet (future King William IV) insisted that the Coalition army attack Antwerp in order to burn the port and the squadron.

The Duke of Saxe-Weimar had his forces regrouped for fear of a French attack on Brussels; he asked General Wallmoden to send one of the two brigades of the Russo-German Legion to reinforce the encirclement of Antwerp.

[6][7] Due to a lack of small currency in the city, Carnot decided to have 10 and 5 centime siege coins struck in bronze, first at the private workshop of Antwerp resident Joseph Frans Wolschot on 10 March, then to speed things up, at the naval arsenal on 3 April.