The ground made the battle. Bennigsen had taken his army across the Alle to attack an isolated French corps and found himself backed into a loop of the river, with the town of Friedland and a few bridges as his only way out. Napoleon, arriving during the day of 14 June 1807, saw the mistake on the map and waited for the Russians to finish shutting themselves in.
Ney broke the left wing, Senarmont's artillery pushed its batteries to a hundred and fifty metres and fired canister into the massed columns. The bridges burned, the Russian army lost twenty thousand men. The date was not indifferent: it was the anniversary of Marengo, and the Emperor had pointed it out before the action.
Friedland is now Pravdinsk, in the Russian oblast of Kaliningrad. The town has kept its fourteenth-century brick Gothic church, which served as a hospital during the battle, and a few old buildings; a monument recalls the fighting. The landscape of the Alle loop, farmland again, can still be read fairly well from the heights.
The consequence was immediate and considerable. Five days later Alexander asked for an armistice; eleven days later the two emperors met on a raft at Tilsit, sixty kilometres away. It is the only battle of the Empire that led directly to a reversal of alliances. In Paris, the neighbouring quay was named quai de Friedland in 1808 — becoming an avenue in 1864.
