to do everything they could to circumvent the German prohibition via Altona, the volume of trade between Hamburg and France declined drastically. Sieveking in Paris Already in March 1795, the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce had therefore raised the idea of a special envoy to Paris, in order to reverse the embargo. Due to his high standing in Paris, Sieveking was the obvious choice, and he arrived in Paris as special envoy on the night of 31 March 1796 with his delegation, which included the President of the Hamburg Cathedral chapter Friedrich Johann Lorenz Meyer. There, a period of relative political stability had returned, after the crushing of the anti-revolutionary uprising of 13 Vendémaire (5 October 1795) by Napoleon and Paul de Barras. On 12 April 1796 Sieveking was granted an audience with the French Directory, where a solution to the conflict could not be reached, however. His plan to support France's finances by raising the exchange rate for the mostly devalued assignats was rejected by the French as insufficient, and by the Hamburg Senate as impossible. On 27 April, Sieveking received 300,000 Marks from the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce to be used at his own discretion, and he did not hesitate in using it to bribe Barras and other powerful figures of the Republic. In May 1796, after a meeting with the French finance minister Dominique-Vincent Ramel-Nogaret, a fortunate turn of events occurred. The Directory ratified a treaty on 14 June 1796 which provided for the payment of 13 million livres, which Sieveking guaranteed personally. That same evening, Barras met with Sieveking, and told him: "Votre affaire est finie" ("Your business here is finished"). The official signing took place ten days later, and a worried Sieveking wrote to Hamburg the same day: "ob ich das Opfer meines Patriotismus sein werde, das werden meine Mitbürger entscheiden" ("whether I shall be the victim of my own patriotism, that will be for my fellow citizens to decide"). But his fears proved unfounded. On his return in July 1796, Sieveking was received with honours. In his report before the assembled members of the chamber of commerce he said that this moment was one of the finest and most important of his life and claimed: "Ich schwöre es bei Ihrer Achtung, bei meiner Ehre, ich habe Hamburg gerettet" (I swear by your esteem, by my honour, I have saved Hamburg"). Death On 25 January 1799,