They both desired peace, so that their empires might expand and consolidate.

Above all, France was weary of war; and by peace the average Frenchman meant, not respite from Continental strifes that yielded a surfeit of barren glories, but peace with England.

The words of Lucchesini, the former Prussian ambassador in Paris, on this subject are worth quoting: "The war with England was at bottom the only one in which the French public took much interest, since the evils it inflicted on France were felt every moment: nothing was spoken of so decidedly among all classes of the people as the wish to have done with that war; and when one spoke of peace at Paris, one always meant peace with England: peace with the others was as indifferent to the public as the victories or the conquests of Bonaparte."[158] If the French middle classes longed for a maritime peace so that coffee and sugar might become reasonably cheap, how much more would their ruler, whose heart was set on colonies and a realm in the Orient?
In Poland he had cheered his troops with the thought that they were winning back the French colonial empire; and, as we have seen, he was even then preparing the ground in Persia for a future invasion of India.

These plans could only be carried out after a time of peace that should rehabilitate the French navy.

Humanitarian sentiment, patriotism, and even the promptings of a wider ambition, therefore bade him strive for a general pacification, such as he seemed to have assured at Tilsit.
But the means which he adopted were just those that were destined to defeat this aim.