The Napoleonic Free City of Gdańsk, 1807–1814: War, Trade and the Vistula

Between 1807 and 1814, Gdańsk occupied one of the most curious positions in Napoleonic Europe. Known internationally at the time as Danzig, the great Baltic port was removed from Prussian rule by Napoleon, declared a Free City by the Treaties of Tilsit, surrounded by its own territory and formally restored to political independence. It stood immediately beside the newly created Duchy of Warsaw, controlled the maritime end of the Vistula trade and became one of the principal French fortresses in northern Europe.
Its independence was more complicated than the title suggests. The treaties placed the city under the protection of the kings of Prussia and Saxony, while French troops occupied its fortifications and General Jean Rapp exercised power as Napoleon's governor. The city repeatedly attempted to recover the substantial autonomy it had enjoyed before its annexation by Prussia in 1793, but Napoleon never allowed the constitutional settlement to be completed. At the same time, the Continental System attacked the maritime commerce on which Gdańsk's prosperity depended, while enormous contributions and military expenditure pushed its finances towards exhaustion.[1][2][3]

The result was a political experiment full of contradictions. Gdańsk was independent but occupied, commercially important but economically constrained, formally protected by Prussia while serving the military system that had defeated Prussia, and closely connected with the Duchy of Warsaw without actually belonging to it. Its history can be reconstructed with unusual precision through treaties, maps, siege plans, printed proclamations and manuscript negotiations that show how Napoleon's new political geography was created on paper and then imposed upon the landscape.

Strictly speaking, the legal history of the first Free City of Gdańsk continued until the Congress of Vienna formally returned it to Prussia in 1815. The years 1807–1814 nevertheless define its Napoleonic existence: French rule began after the conquest of 1807 and ended when Rapp and the surviving garrison left the city in January 1814.[3] Read further on Congress Poland and what followed after 1815 here.

Gdańsk before Napoleon

For centuries Gdańsk had occupied a distinctive position within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The city belonged politically to the Polish Crown while possessing extensive municipal privileges, its own governing institutions and considerable control over its commercial affairs. Its position at the mouth of the Vistula made it the principal maritime outlet for the enormous grain-producing territories of the Commonwealth, connecting the Polish interior with Amsterdam, London and other western European markets.

Prussia annexed Gdańsk during the Second Partition of Poland in 1793. The annexation ended the city's old political relationship with the Commonwealth and incorporated it into a centralising Prussian monarchy. When Napoleon defeated Prussia in 1806, therefore, Gdańsk had been under Prussian rule for only fourteen years. The older civic order remained within living memory, and the possibility of recovering it became politically significant once Prussian military power collapsed.

Gdańsk also mattered for reasons far beyond local autonomy. Whoever controlled the city possessed a major fortified port at the mouth of the Vistula, access to grain and military supplies from the Polish interior and an important position on the southern Baltic coast. During Napoleon's campaign against Russia and Prussia in 1807, a hostile garrison at Danzig threatened French communications while its magazines and harbour offered considerable strategic value to whoever possessed them.[4][5]

This combination of commercial geography and military strength explains why the history of Napoleonic Gdańsk cannot be separated from the creation of the Duchy of Warsaw. Both emerged from the same campaign and the same diplomatic reconstruction at Tilsit, but Napoleon deliberately gave them different political forms.

The Siege of Gdańsk in 1807

French and allied forces began investing Gdańsk in March 1807. The defending Prussian and Russian troops were commanded by Friedrich Adolf von Kalckreuth, while the besieging X Corps was placed under Marshal François Joseph Lefebvre. Polish troops took an active part in the operations, giving the campaign around Gdańsk an important place in the military history of the Polish forces being organised during Napoleon's campaign in the former Prussian partition.[4][5]

The city's fortifications and surrounding terrain made a rapid assault difficult. Siege works had to approach powerful defensive positions while control of waterways and the possibility of relief from the Baltic complicated French operations. Contemporary printed plans of the siege record the progressive lines of trenches, batteries and redoubts advancing towards the fortified city, turning the landscape around Gdańsk into one of the most extensively documented military spaces of the 1807 campaign.

An attempt to reinforce the defenders failed, and by late May Kalckreuth's position had become untenable. He negotiated terms with Lefebvre that allowed the garrison to march out with the honours of war. Gdańsk capitulated on 24 May 1807. Napoleon rewarded Lefebvre shortly afterwards with the title Duke of Danzig.[4]

The capture occurred before the decisive French victory over Russia at Friedland on 14 June. When Napoleon and Alexander I subsequently met at Tilsit, Gdańsk was therefore already in French hands. What remained unresolved was whether the conquered city would be attached to Prussia, incorporated into the emerging Polish state, annexed more directly into Napoleon's system or restored as an independent political entity.

The answer came in July.

Tilsit and the creation of the Free City

The Franco-Russian Treaty of Tilsit of 7 July 1807 dealt with Gdańsk immediately after the provision creating the Duchy of Warsaw. Article V established the Duchy from former Polish territories taken from Prussia. Article VI declared that the city of Danzig, together with a surrounding territory, was to be restored to its former independence under the protection of the kings of Prussia and Saxony and governed according to the laws that had existed when the city ceased to govern itself.[1]

That wording deliberately referred backwards to 1793. Napoleon was not inventing Gdańsk's independence from nothing. The settlement presented itself as restoring the city's earlier political condition, or at least an approximation of it, after fourteen years of Prussian rule.

Two further clauses made the relationship with Poland and the Vistula explicit. Article VIII prohibited Prussia, Saxony and Gdańsk from obstructing navigation on the Vistula through tolls or other duties. The new Free City was therefore conceived as the maritime terminus of a river whose commercial hinterland now included the Duchy of Warsaw.[1]

The separate Franco-Prussian Treaty of 9 July was even more revealing. Frederick William III formally renounced possession of Danzig in Article XIV. Article XIX restored the city to independence, Article XX again guaranteed freedom of navigation on the Vistula, but Article XXI ordered the city and its port to be closed to British trade for the duration of the maritime war.[2]

The contradiction that would dominate the next six years was therefore written into Gdańsk's founding settlement. Napoleon recreated a commercial city whose prosperity depended upon international maritime trade, then immediately subordinated that trade to his economic war against Britain.

Was Gdańsk really independent?

The phrase “Free City” can give a misleading impression if it is read as describing complete sovereignty. Gdańsk recovered municipal institutions and was legally separated from Prussia, but Napoleon retained decisive power over the city through the French military presence and the governorship entrusted to General Jean Rapp.

Rapp became military governor immediately after the conquest. His office was not straightforwardly provided for in the Tilsit settlement, yet in practice he stood above the restored civic institutions and represented Napoleon's authority inside the city. The provisional nature of the arrangement became one of the defining characteristics of the Free City.[3][7]

There was even a brief attempt to produce a different political settlement. On 13 July 1807, only days after Tilsit, Rapp concluded an agreement with representatives of Gdańsk that diverged from the treaty settlement and contemplated the city as free and independent under Polish protection. Napoleon did not accept this alternative arrangement, and it never replaced the system established at Tilsit.[3][7]

The episode is significant because it shows that Gdańsk was not simply a passive object transferred between great powers. The city's representatives attempted to exploit the political uncertainty of 1807 to obtain the most advantageous settlement they could. A connection with the Polish state was one conceivable outcome, but Napoleon ultimately preferred a formally separate city whose military and commercial position he could control directly.

The arrangement that survived was therefore neither restoration to Poland nor ordinary incorporation into Napoleon's French Empire. Gdańsk became a small state positioned between Prussia and the Duchy of Warsaw, with nominal international guarantees and substantial local institutions, but subject to French military supremacy.

The territory of the Free City

Tilsit described a territory extending two leagues around Gdańsk, but such wording was insufficient to create a workable frontier. The landscape surrounding the city was extraordinarily complicated. Rivers divided into branches, islands appeared within the Vistula delta, drainage systems and embankments crossed potential boundaries, and control of the coast raised questions concerning harbours, fisheries and navigation.

The eventual territory was considerably more elaborate than a simple circle around the city. It included Gdańsk itself together with places such as Nowy Port, Wrzeszcz, Oliwa, Siedlce, Chełm and Stare Szkoty, as well as lands in the Vistula delta and the Hel Peninsula. Its area was approximately 478 square kilometres and its population a little over 64,000.[3]

The difference between the simplicity of the treaty language and the complexity of the finished border is one of the most revealing aspects of the creation of Napoleonic Gdańsk. Tilsit could declare that a Free City existed in a few lines. Making that declaration function required months of surveying, argument and negotiation.

Drawing the frontier: the Convention of Elbing

The final territorial settlement was negotiated between Prussia and representatives of the Free City under French mediation. The resulting Convention of Elbing, signed on 6 December 1807, transformed the general provisions of Tilsit into an extraordinary piece of geographical precision.[6]

The Prussian plenipotentiary was Friedrich Ferdinand Alexander zu Dohna-Schlobitten. Gdańsk was represented by Johann Labes, Carl Friedrich Jeschke and Johann Carl Gnuschke, while Marshal Nicolas Soult acted as mediator on behalf of Napoleon. Their agreement followed waterways, villages, embankments and stretches of coast to define what was now the sovereign territory of the Free City.

The boundary began near the mouth of the Oliwa stream and passed through the country around Oliwa before turning through a succession of settlements and watercourses towards the Radunia, Motława and Vistula. From there it followed the complex river system of the delta before reaching the Vistula Lagoon and the Baltic coast. The convention also addressed matters that a modern reader might not immediately associate with international diplomacy: the maintenance of hydraulic works at the division of the Vistula and Nogat, fishing rights, reed cutting, the ownership of islands created by river deposits and the erection of boundary posts.[6]

The Hel Peninsula received separate treatment. The Free City was given sovereign possession of the peninsula to the Bay of Puck and was required to maintain navigational infrastructure, including lighthouse provision. The convention also protected the ability of ships bound for Gdańsk to anchor in the Bay of Puck.[6]

This is diplomacy at the point where it becomes physical geography. The sovereignty proclaimed at Tilsit had to be translated into individual channels, fields, islands and villages. Even the future creation of new islands by the Vistula had to be anticipated.

A surviving contemporary negotiation file relating to this settlement provides a particularly direct documentary record of the process. Dated between October and 6 December 1807 at Memel and Elbing, it includes two signed memoranda by Dohna, a copy of Frederick William III's full powers and a contemporary copy of the final convention. The memoranda show that the finished boundary was preceded by active Prussian negotiation over the right bank of the Vistula, the Nogat and neighbouring territory. The final convention then records the compromise in the formal language of sovereignty, navigation and demarcation.

For a history constructed through manuscripts, this file occupies an unusually revealing position. Tilsit tells us that the Free City was created; the Elbing papers show the work required to decide where it actually began and ended.

Government without a settled constitution

The Treaties of Tilsit envisaged a return to the laws under which Gdańsk had governed itself before 1793. In practice, the political system established after the conquest combined revived municipal institutions with increasingly direct French control.

The former City Council was reorganised as a Senate. Its eighteen members included four mayors, learned members of the urban elite and wealthy citizens, while the Bench continued to exercise judicial responsibilities and the Third Estate represented another surviving component of Gdańsk's traditional civic order. These institutions gave the Free City a visibly local government rather than reducing it to an ordinary French military administration.[3]

The unresolved question was constitutional authority. Several projects for a permanent constitution were prepared. The Senate produced one proposal, the jurist Gottlieb Hufeland another, and the French resident Nicolas Massias sent a further project to Paris in 1810. None received final implementation.[3][7]

The failure was politically useful for Napoleon. So long as the constitutional settlement remained provisional, Rapp could exercise extensive authority while the city retained enough of its traditional institutions to preserve the appearance and some of the reality of self-government. In September 1808 the governor reorganised the administration in a manner that strengthened his control over the Senate and reduced the influence of the Third Estate.[3]

Napoleonic Gdańsk therefore differed strikingly from the Duchy of Warsaw. The Duchy received a written constitution from Napoleon within weeks of its creation. The Free City spent its entire Napoleonic existence waiting for a definitive constitutional order that never arrived.

Gdańsk and the Continental System

Nothing exposed the contradiction at the centre of the Free City more clearly than the Continental System. Gdańsk had become wealthy because it connected the Vistula basin with maritime Europe. Napoleon now expected that same city to participate in his attempt to exclude British commerce from continental ports.

The restriction was not simply an administrative decision imposed after 1807. It had been written into the Franco-Prussian Treaty of Tilsit itself. Article XXI required the city, port and territory of Danzig to remain closed to British trade and navigation during the maritime war.[2]

For Gdańsk's merchants and shipowners the consequences were severe. The number of merchant ships entering the port had been 1,194 in 1805. It fell to 377 in 1806, only 58 in 1807 and 32 in 1808. There was some recovery in 1810, when 291 ships entered, but traffic again collapsed to 50 in 1811 and 34 in 1812.[3]

Smuggling and evasions were inevitable. Rapp initially tolerated some illicit commerce, but French pressure for stricter enforcement increased. The city's traditional commercial relationship with Britain was now treated as part of a continental military struggle rather than simply a matter of local economic policy.[3][7]

The Vistula offered an alternative artery of commerce, which explains why free navigation appeared so prominently in the treaties creating both Gdańsk and the Duchy of Warsaw. Yet river trade could not compensate fully for the contraction of maritime exchange, and disputes continued when Prussian customs officials imposed charges that Gdańsk considered contrary to the Tilsit settlement.[3]

The economic history of the Free City therefore cannot be described simply as a revival of Gdańsk's earlier commercial independence. Napoleon restored political separation from Prussia while simultaneously subjecting the port to a wartime economic system that damaged the commercial foundations on which that independence had historically rested.

The cost of French protection

The Continental System was only one part of the city's financial burden. Napoleon imposed an enormous contribution on Gdańsk, calculated at more than 30 million francs. Even after subsequent financial arrangements reduced and reorganised the outstanding liability, the obligation remained far beyond what the city's weakened economy could comfortably support.[3]

The inhabitants also had to support the French garrison, provide military supplies, maintain barracks, magazines, hospitals and arms workshops, improve the fortifications and prepare the city for renewed war. Gedanopedia calculates that these military obligations alone, excluding the principal French contribution, amounted to more than 19 million francs between 1807 and the end of May 1812.[3]

The apparent paradox becomes increasingly clear. Gdańsk had been declared independent, but a large part of its economic resources was being redirected towards the military requirements of the power that guaranteed its new political existence. France had liberated the city from Prussia in one sense while making it a strategic asset of the Napoleonic Empire in another.

This also explains the enormous emphasis placed upon fortifications and supplies. To Napoleon, Gdańsk was not simply a Baltic trading city. It was a military position guarding the mouth of the Vistula, watching Prussia and Russia, supporting French operations in the east and offering a fortified logistical base in the rear of any army advancing towards the Russian frontier.[4][7]

Gdańsk and the Duchy of Warsaw

The Free City and the Duchy of Warsaw were legally separate, but geographically and economically they belonged to the same Napoleonic reconstruction of Polish and Prussian territory. Tilsit created them in consecutive treaty articles, protected navigation between the Polish interior and the Baltic and placed the King of Saxony in a formal relationship with both arrangements.[1]

Gdańsk's relationship with Poland was therefore substantial without amounting to political incorporation. Polish grain, timber and other products had historically travelled down the Vistula to the port. Polish troops participated in the campaign that captured the city in 1807, and the military geography of the Duchy and Gdańsk remained closely connected throughout the Napoleonic period.[5]

The brief 13 July proposal placing the city under Polish protection shows that an even closer relationship was actively contemplated during the confused weeks after the conquest. Napoleon's rejection of that arrangement should not obscure its significance. In the summer of 1807, the political future of Gdańsk was sufficiently open that incorporation into a Polish sphere formed part of the negotiations surrounding the city.[3][7]

This makes Napoleonic Gdańsk particularly important within the history of the Duchy of Warsaw. It demonstrates that the reconstruction of Poland after Tilsit was not limited to drawing the Duchy's border. Napoleon was simultaneously restructuring the entire lower Vistula and Baltic environment through which the Polish state communicated with northern Europe.

From commercial city to military depot

As relations between France and Russia deteriorated, Gdańsk's strategic role became increasingly important. Preparations for the 1812 campaign transformed the city and surrounding territory into a major supply centre. Food, equipment and military materials accumulated there, while fortifications were strengthened in anticipation of the possibility that the war might eventually return to the Baltic coast.[3][4]

Local production increasingly served military requirements. Workshops, slaughterhouses, bakeries and other businesses supplied the army. Barrel making expanded markedly as enormous quantities of flour, biscuit and other provisions had to be stored and transported. The economy that the Continental System had damaged was partially redirected towards the needs of Napoleon's military machine.[3]

The Russian campaign exposed both the strength and weakness of this strategy. Gdańsk's position made it an obvious refuge and logistical centre when the Grande Armée retreated westward in catastrophic condition at the end of 1812. It also made the city an obvious objective for the advancing Russians.

Jean Rapp returned to assume command of the defence. The Free City, created in the aftermath of Napoleon's eastern victories in 1807, was about to face its destruction as those victories were reversed.

The Siege of Gdańsk in 1813

Russian troops reached Gdańsk in January 1813. What followed was not a short investment but one of the longest sieges of the final phase of the Napoleonic Wars. The struggle lasted through most of the year while Napoleon attempted to rebuild his armies in Germany and Rapp held a fortress increasingly isolated from the rest of the French system.[3][8]

The defenders were multinational, reflecting the composition of Napoleon's armies and the political geography surrounding the city. French troops formed the core of the garrison, but thousands of Polish soldiers also participated in the defence. Fighting extended across the approaches to the city, including Wrzeszcz, Nowy Port, Westerplatte and the fortified heights around Biskupia Górka.[3]

Conditions inside Gdańsk deteriorated severely. Food supply became increasingly difficult and disease proved vastly more destructive than bombardment. Rapp ordered approximately 6,000 of the poorest inhabitants to leave the city as the pressure on provisions intensified. Those who remained lived within a fortress filled with soldiers, hospitals and military stores while epidemic disease spread through both the garrison and civilian population.[3]

The material destruction was substantial. Contemporary estimates recorded more than a thousand buildings destroyed in the suburbs, while houses, warehouses and religious buildings within the urban area were damaged or lost. Nearly 200 granaries were destroyed or burned, a particularly fitting symbol of the collapse of a city whose historic wealth had rested upon the grain trade.[3]

By November continued resistance could no longer alter the strategic outcome. Napoleon had been defeated at Leipzig in October, and there was no realistic prospect of relieving Gdańsk.

Rapp signed a capitulation on 29 November 1813 that offered comparatively honourable terms to the garrison. Alexander I refused to ratify it, and a second agreement concluded on 29 December imposed harsher conditions. The surviving Napoleonic forces finally left the fortress at the beginning of January 1814. Among them were thousands of Polish soldiers who had defended the city alongside the French.[3][8]

Why 1814, and why some histories say 1815

The departure of Rapp and the Napoleonic garrison in January 1814 marks the practical end of the Napoleonic Free City. French authority disappeared, and Gdańsk ceased to function as part of Napoleon's European system.

Its formal international status, however, remained unresolved. For a short period Russian and Prussian authorities competed over the administration of the city. Alexander I considered retaining Gdańsk and the mouth of the Vistula within the Russian sphere, while Prussia sought the restoration of the territory it had lost in 1807.[3]

Prussian administration was effectively restored during 1814, but the diplomatic question was settled only in the wider reconstruction of Europe following Napoleon's defeat. Agreements made in 1815 and incorporated into the settlement of the Congress of Vienna formally returned Gdańsk to the Prussian monarchy.[3]

Both date ranges therefore have a defensible meaning. “1807–1815” describes the juridical lifespan of the first Free City from Tilsit to the Vienna settlement. “1807–1814” describes the actual Napoleonic regime, beginning with the conquest and ending when the French garrison finally departed. For the history of Gdańsk under Napoleon, 1807–1814 is the more meaningful political period.

The Free City through books and manuscripts

Napoleonic Gdańsk is unusually well suited to a history constructed through surviving objects. Maps document both sieges and show how fortification shaped the surrounding landscape. Printed treaties reveal the distinction Napoleon deliberately created between the Duchy of Warsaw and the Free City. Municipal publications and decrees record the attempt to govern under an unsettled constitutional system, while commercial and military documents reveal the pressures imposed by the Continental System.

The surviving papers relating to the Convention of Elbing bring the process even closer. Their importance lies precisely in the fact that they record neither the spectacular capture of Gdańsk nor the ceremonial diplomacy of Tilsit. Instead they preserve the difficult stage in between: the moment when an international settlement had to become an actual frontier.

A clause concerning the Nogat could determine water flow and economic interests. A provision regarding Hel could decide sovereign control of an entire peninsula. Language about islands created by alluvion anticipated future geographical change, while fishing and reed-cutting rights forced diplomats to reconcile sovereignty with the everyday lives of communities divided by the new boundary. Even the proposed boundary posts were to display the arms of Napoleon, the King of Prussia and the King of Saxony beside the words identifying the territory of the Free City.[6]

Documents of this kind show why the Napoleonic transformation of Europe cannot be understood entirely from campaign maps. States were made through paperwork as well as battles.

Why the Napoleonic Free City of Gdańsk matters

The first Free City occupies a comparatively small place in general histories of the Napoleonic Wars, yet it brings several of the period's largest themes together in a single city. Gdańsk stood at the intersection of the destruction of Prussian power, the partial restoration of Polish statehood, Napoleon's economic war against Britain, the strategic importance of the Baltic and Vistula, and the eventual collapse of French power following the invasion of Russia.

Its history also complicates any simple description of Napoleonic “liberation.” Napoleon removed Gdańsk from Prussian rule and restored institutions associated with its earlier independence, but he also installed a French governor, delayed the city's constitutional settlement, restricted its maritime trade and extracted enormous financial and military resources from it. Local autonomy and imperial control existed simultaneously.

For Polish history the city is equally significant. Gdańsk was not incorporated into the Duchy of Warsaw, but its status was negotiated as part of exactly the same settlement. Freedom of the Vistula connected the port directly with the Polish state created at Tilsit, Polish forces fought both for the capture of the city in 1807 and in its defence in 1813, and a short-lived alternative arrangement even envisaged the Free City under Polish protection.

The history that began with French siege trenches in the spring of 1807 therefore extends far beyond the walls of Gdańsk. Tilsit created a new political geography stretching from Warsaw to the Baltic. The Convention of Elbing converted that geography into borders. Napoleon's Continental System then tested whether a commercial republic could survive inside an imperial economic war, while the siege of 1813 demonstrated what happened when the military system supporting the entire arrangement collapsed.

In January 1814, the French left. The Free City created by Napoleon had lasted less than seven years as a functioning Napoleonic state, but its surviving treaties, maps and manuscripts preserve one of the clearest documentary records of how Napoleon attempted to remake the political landscape of Poland, Prussia and the Baltic.

To learn more about the history of the Duchy of Warsaw, visit here.

Bibliography

[1] Treaty of Peace between France and Russia, Tilsit, 7 July 1807, especially Articles V–VIII, establishing the Duchy of Warsaw, restoring Danzig to independence and regulating navigation on the Vistula. Fondation Napoléon, Napoleon.org.

[2] Treaty between France and Prussia, Tilsit, 9 July 1807, especially Articles XIV–XXI, concerning Prussian renunciation of Danzig, the creation of the Free City, freedom of Vistula navigation and the exclusion of British trade. Fondation Napoléon, Napoleon.org.

[3] Bolesław Hajduk, “Wolne Miasto Gdańsk, 1807–1815,” Encyklopedia Gdańska / Gedanopedia. Particularly valuable for the territory, institutions, constitutional projects, finances, port traffic and 1813 siege.

[4] Andrzej Nieuważny, Klucz do wszystkiego. Dzieje napoleońskiej twierdzy Gdańsk 1807–1814, Monografie Muzeum Gdańska, vol. 4 (Gdańsk-Sopot, 2022). The principal modern monograph on the military role of Napoleonic Gdańsk, making extensive use of French and Russian archival material.

[5] Janusz Staszewski, Wojsko polskie na Pomorzu w roku 1807, Biblioteka Gdańska, Seria Monografii (Gdańsk: Gdańskie Towarzystwo Naukowe, 1958), especially the chapters concerning the operations around Tczew and the siege of Gdańsk.

[6] Convention establishing the boundaries of the Free City of Danzig, Elbing, 6 December 1807, concluded by Friedrich zu Dohna on behalf of Prussia, Labes, Jeschke and Gnuschke for Gdańsk, with Marshal Soult as French mediator. A contemporary printed edition is recorded by the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin; the text has also been transcribed in Polish by Napoleon.org.pl and the original French has been fully transcribed by Julia Woodward Antykwariat from Marshal Soult's contemporary manuscript copy.

[7] Władysław Zajewski, Wolne miasto Gdańsk pod znakiem Napoleona (Olsztyn: Littera, 2005), including studies of the city's diplomatic initiatives, French residents and Jean Rapp's government.

[8] Adam Paczuski, Gdańsk Napoleoński: oblężenia 1807, 1813, exhibition catalogue (Gdańsk: Muzeum Historyczne Miasta Gdańska, 2000).