Note 72 — PART II. THE EASTERN QUESTION.
Reading edition
“Napoleon’s object was clear: in the first place, to wrest from the Emperor Nicholas the moral hegemony which he wielded on the Continent, and then, after conquering Russia, to get his hands free to tear up the treaties of 1815, restore to France her so-called natural frontiers, and reconstruct the map of Europe in accordance with Napoleonic ideas” (Count Vitzthum’s “St. Petersburg and London,” vol. i. p. 73).