Alexander I: Tsar of War and Peace

by Alan Palmer

  St Peterburg in the Early Nineteenth Century

  Twenty years later, in August 1782, their successors saw her salute the most illustrious of past Tsars as an equal. She had shown an ability to play off one ambitious favourite against another and to bend rather than break those who would have schemed against her. The most frightful peasant revolt for many centuries, the rising of Emelian Pugachev in 1773–4, had sent a shudder of revulsion through her Court but had failed to shake her authority. Russia’s frontiers were extended to west and to south, and more lands were soon to follow. Now Catherine was credited with political genius by all the statesmen of Europe and acclaimed ‘Catherine the Great’ by Voltaire. Yet it was not merely the statecraft of the Empress which excited admiration. She drew up a scheme of reform so radical in its liberalism that the government of Louis XV sought to prohibit its circulation in France for fear that it would create a demand for recognition of the rule of law within the monarchy. Capital punishment was restricted throughout the Empire, formal torture forbidden. The Empress had written of the virtues of toleration, of the responsibilities of the nobles towards the peasants who were their serfs, of the need to rest government policy on the ‘dictates of Nature and Reason’. No one could deny the imaginative magnitude of her enterprise. Peter I had turned Muscovite Tsardom away from Asia so as to face the West; Catherine II watched over the growth of that empire, while, at the same time, safeguarding Peter’s conception of monarchy by vaccinating it with French ideas against the more dangerous political ills of Europe. Much in her policy was ultimately self-defeating, but in that summer of 1782 success still crowned her endeavours. The young Grand Duke Alexander thus stood by his grandmother’s side at the very zenith of her reign. No other sovereign outside Asia enjoyed such absolute power; and already Catherine was preparing Alexander for the heritage she would bequeath. By contrast Paul, her own son, had always counted for little in her eyes. He had an estate at Pavlovsk, only a short distance from her palace at Tsarskoe Selo, but it could well have been several hundred miles away for all the contact between them.

  Grand Duke Paul was not present when the Bronze Horseman was unveiled. With his mother’s encouragement, he had set out in the previous autumn on a tour of the European Courts. He had visited Vienna, Florence, Naples and Paris, and by the beginning of August 1782 he was journeying at a leisurely pace through Picardy and into the French-speaking provinces of the Austrian Netherlands. With Paul travelled his second wife, a Württemberg Princess whom he had met in Berlin and married in the autumn of 1776. She took the names Marie Feodorovna on being received into the Orthodox Church. The Grand Duchess was tall and well-built, distinguished in appearance rather than pretty and noted, during those early years in Russia, for her patience and modest bearing. ‘Sweetness of disposition is her chief characteristic’ wrote Frederic Masson, one of the many French tutors employed at St Petersburg by aristocratic families in these years.3 There is no doubt that Grand Duchess Marie loved her husband dearly; she always described him in affectionate terms in her letters. It cannot have been easy for her to comfort and honour a man of such temperament, soured by years of neglect, distrusting every move which his mother made, and convinced he was haunted by Peter the Great, the apparition accompanying him through the streets of the capital and murmuring sadly, ‘Paul, poor Paul.’

  Nor were Marie’s relations with her formidable mother-in-law always happy. Marie was only eighteen when, on 24 December 1777, she gave birth to her first child and named him after St Alexander Nevsky, the warrior prince of the thirteenth century. Catherine, delighted at the event but inclined to criticize the choice of name for its hint of grandeur, declared that Marie was too young to look after the boy.4 From earliest days she determined the details of Alexander’s life. He was not to be coddled: his mattress should be filled with hay; his room should always have a window open, even in the Russian winter; he was to sleep in the wing of the Winter Palace beside the Admiralty so that he should grow accustomed to cannon fire from the ceremonial salutes. No one can be sure of the psychological effects of these experiences in infancy. It is not surprising that he began to suffer from deafness of the left ear.

  The Empress was no less possessive towards Marie’s second son, born in May 1779. She insisted not only on how he was to be reared but on the name he should carry. He was baptized Constantine; for Catherine, whose armies were sweeping the Turks into the Black Sea, had convinced herself that this second grandson would one day reign on the Bosphorus as Emperor of a new Byzantium. No thought was given to the mother’s wishes. Any ordinary girl would have been swiftly crushed by the mere shadow of Catherine’s presence in her children’s nursery; but Marie Feodorovna was far from ordinary. Her character gained in strength from the battles she lost at Court; so, in other times, had Catherine’s.

  As yet, however, it was solely the will of the Empress that counted. Hers was a strange personality, as full of paradox as the Russian Empire itself. There was Catherine the proud, surfeited with flattery and seeking more, a person ‘to be approached with all the reverence due to a divinity’, as an English diplomat commented soon after arriving in Russia.5 But there was also Catherine the modestly diffident, gently suggesting to Frederick II of Prussia that her vaunted intellectual powers were exaggerated, that she was no more than ‘a crow in peacock feathers’.6 Then there was Catherine the passionate lover, soul aflame for the sensuous and dramatic, half afraid of her paramours but playing out such a fantasy of conjugality with the greatest of them, Prince Potemkin, that many believed they were secretly married. And again there was Catherine the lost literary idol, fingers made restless – so she said – by the sight of a newly cut quill, the woman who dashed off nine plays in four years and then launched a periodical to satirize society in her own capital. Nor were these Catherine’s only roles. Others emerge from the memoirs of the time: a business woman bound to a routine of daily administration; a devout high priestess, on pilgrimage to the Troitska monastery or the relics of St Dmitri in Rostov; a rationalist exchanging ideas with Voltaire and Diderot; an imperialist partitioning Poland and looking out greedily from the hills above Sebastopol towards the Turkish shores of the Black Sea. Sadly, in the end, there was another Catherine: the disillusioned tyrant who sent Alexander Radischev in chains to Siberia for publishing an honestly bitter indictment of serfdom which once she would have praised for its compassion. Each of these several Catherines was respected or feared by her contemporaries; and each, indeed, has become part of her legend. One side of her character was less readily revealed because it ran counter to so much that was known of her; and yet, in the last nineteen years of her reign, she emerged as an adoring grandmother. She bestowed on all eight of her grandchildren the affection she had denied their father in his childhood. But none possessed her heart as much as Alexander.7

  Alexander’s Childhood

  Catherine confided her hopes for her two eldest Grand Dukes in an unlikely adviser, Melchior Grimm, a German-born critic of the French literary scene. Grimm, who was long a friend of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, had visited St Petersburg in 1773 and the Empress found his conversation so stimulating that, for the rest of her life, she continued to send him letters, mingling political comment with social gossip and flippant humour. In return, he acted as her agent for obtaining books in Paris and other centres of western culture. Inevitably Catherine’s correspondence contained anecdotes of her grandchildren, especially Alexander; and Grimm was shrewd enough to ask the type of questions to which a doting grandmother was pleased to reply.

  If Catherine’s account may be believed, Grand Duke Alexander was remarkably precocious. At the age of two years and three months he was sending her notes from his bedroom, and she wrote proudly to Grimm, ‘Now, at this very moment, he knows more than a child of four or five.’8 And when he was indeed four years old she reported that he could find on his globe any town which she mentioned to him. On the eve of his fifth birthday she recorded a touching scene when he said that he wished to meet
someone of whom he had heard, one ‘Alexander the Great’, and he was most unhappy when informed that an introduction could not be arranged.9 Grimm was told of Alexander’s good looks, of his interest in tilling the soil, and of the cleanliness and simple good sense of his nurse (who was an Englishwoman, Pauline Hessler, married to a footman in the household of the Empress). With the slightly coy playfulness which she affected in her domestic correspondence, Catherine wrote, ‘I feel certain that should Monsieur Alexander have a son of his own brought up by this same Englishwoman, the throne would rest secure for over a century to come.’10 At times Catherine’s matriarchal enthusiasm carried her into trivialities which Baron Grimm must surely have found a trifle perplexing. Thus, in the early summer of 1781, Catherine sent him a letter from Tsarskoe Selo commenting on two German poems she had particularly enjoyed and giving him instructions for purchasing books for her in Paris; but between these items she included details of a special one-piece costume which she had herself designed for her grandson so that it could easily be put on and taken off. Alexander, she explained, had worn this type of dress ever since he was six months old: ‘The King of Sweden and the Prince of Prussia have asked for and obtained the pattern’, she added; and she was so pleased with ‘my stroke of genius’ that she sketched the child’s dress in order that Grimm might admire it from afar.11 There is no doubt that Alexander’s grandmother was, on every count, a remarkable woman.

  She had theories of her own on education, some of which she certainly owed to Emile although, typically, she tempered Rousseau’s zeal with natural common sense. Her grandsons, she insisted, were to be observed at play as well as during times of formal tuition and their teaching was to follow, so far as possible, the interests revealed by their active imagination. They should learn to maintain their self-respect in the presence of their elders without an excess of abject docility. On the other hand, towards those of less fortunate birth, the boys must be taught to show compassion and sympathy rather than the arrogance of pride.12 Her precepts were admirable; and so long as Catherine herself could spare time to attend to her grandchildren, they benefited from her tolerant counsels. But when Grand Duke Paul returned to Russia from his visit to the Western capitals, the Empress gave him the estate of Gatchina, a grim square-towered fortress twenty-eight miles from St Petersburg; and the mood of Paul’s circle of intimates at Gatchina was totally at variance with the enlightened education which Catherine had decreed for his sons. The disturbing contrast between life at the Winter Palace or at Tsarskoe Selo and life at Gatchina broke the even tone of Alexander’s mental training far more than his grandmother suspected. He learnt, as an early lesson, the art of dissimulation: it had not figured on Catherine’s programme of instruction.

  There was another grave weakness in her method. Who in Russia was sufficiently skilled to tutor Alexander in the way the Empress wished? The boy must be taught, she wrote to Grimm, by someone of ‘the highest integrity, with liberal views and with known excellence in history, geography, mathematics and philosophy’.13 She was forced to admit that there was no such educational paragon within the borders of her own Empire. Grimm came to her rescue. There was, he said, in Switzerland a brilliant scholar of unquestioned ability as a teacher: he was convinced that it would be right for the Empress to entrust Alexander’s education to the discretion of Frederick Caesar La Harpe. In the spring of 1783, when he was twenty-nine years old, La Harpe came to Russia, originally as a tutor to the brother of one of Catherine’s favourites. Although aware that La Harpe was living in St Petersburg, the Empress at first kept him ‘in reserve’, as she wrote to Grimm.14 Either she was reluctant to introduce a man of advanced views into the entourage of the Grand Duke or – more probably – she sensed that Alexander, despite the praise she had lavished on him, was not yet sufficiently mature for regular tuition. Ever since their parents had first gone abroad, Alexander and Constantine had been placed under the supervision of one of her ladies-in-waiting, Countess Sophia Benckendorff, who was in effect their governess. Catherine was reluctant to end an arrangement which still permitted her to see much of the boys’ progress. The Empress, as she grew older, became increasingly irresolute and this characteristic extended from matters of state to her own family circle.

  But on 19 September 1783 Sophia Benckendorff collapsed and died while in attendance on the Empress at Tsarskoe Selo; and Catherine, however much she might wish to temporize, could do so no longer. She would not accept Grimm’s advice outright and send for La Harpe. The Grand Dukes, she decided, should have not a mere tutor, but a Governor; and for this post she chose General Nicholas Ivanovitch Saltykov, younger brother of the man who she maintained was Paul’s real father. She sent the General an able directive on the principles of education, and selected a team of tutors who were to work together under Saltykov’s direction.15

  La Harpe was one of the tutors, but it was not until the autumn of 1784 that Catherine referred to him in a letter as ‘being at Alexander’s side’. He was to share responsibilities with Frederic Masson (the French writer of memoirs of the Court) and with three Russians, Muraviev, Protassov and Samborsky. Apart from Muraviev, to whom everyone willingly left instruction in Russian grammar, there was no clear distinction of teaching functions. Protassov, an officer in one of the fashionable regiments, kept a diary of his years in attendance on the Grand Duke: he complained that Alexander was inadequately trained in specifically Russian traditions and was made to look towards Europe too much. Samborsky, by contrast, was an unconventional priest, sent by the Empress to England as a young man in order to study English farming methods. He married an English girl and acted as chaplain to the Russian diplomatic envoys in London before returning to St Petersburg. To the horror of the Church hierarchy, the Empress permitted him to wear ordinary clothes and remain beardless. He taught Alexander the basic Church catechism and the English language, in which he rapidly became proficient. Like the eldest sons of George III, the two Grand Dukes were expected to cultivate a strip of land and it was Samborsky who showed them how to use a harrow and a plough in the fields around Tsarskoe Selo. Inevitably Samborsky and La Harpe formed a progressive faction among the Grand Dukes’ tutors and were opposed by Masson (who was particularly envious of La Harpe’s European reputation) and by Protassov. Alexander tended to attach himself to the progressives. On the other hand, Constantine, who did not take easily to any form of tuition, was invariably rude to La Harpe, was never able to master the English language – he had been assigned a Greek and not an English nurse in infancy – and was criticized by Protassov for his temper rather than his methods of study.16

  All the tutors seem to have despised poor General Saltykov; and this was unjust. The General had an unenviable task, which he discharged well. Clearly he was a man of limited sympathies and no scholar; but neither was he a militaristic bigot. His family had moved forward with the fashion and he personally always kept up with them. When Society looked for enlightenment to France, the Saltykovs duly imported a French tutor into their home circle: his name was Marat, and a few years later his brother achieved some notoriety in revolutionary Paris; but no whisper of libertarian sentiment overtaxed Saltykov minds. The General had at least absorbed the idea that Frenchmen are natural pedagogues; and, though he did not understand all that the Empress had to say about education, his wife explained what she thought he needed to know, leaving him to see that the Grand Dukes remained smartly turned out and in good health. He possessed an instinctive tact for retaining favour: glowing reports went regularly from him both to the Winter Palace and to Paul at Gatchina; and he succeeded in making himself acceptable to the Empress and equally to Paul and Marie Feodorovna. Whatever others might think of his abilities, Alexander himself always continued to treat the General with respect. It is significant that during the crisis years from 1812 to 1815 it was to Saltykov that Alexander looked when he needed a Chairman for his Committee of Ministers; for he knew, from what he had seen as a child, that Saltykov of all men would stand above qua
rrels and disputes, discreetly magisterial and impressively remote.17

  Yet, in later years, people barely remembered Saltykov as one of the formative influences on Alexander’s mind. It was La Harpe whom they commended, or condemned, for the Tsar’s generous principles; and, in his moments of enlightened liberalism, Alexander himself was ever ready to acknowledge the debt. From La Harpe he learnt of ancient Greece and Rome, the culture of the Renaissance, the contractual theories of Locke (and how the Americans were interpreting them) and what it was that his grandmother had found fit to admire in Voltaire. When, in June 1792, an envoy from Paris was surprised to find Alexander discussing the Rights of Man and the French constitution, the voice may have been the Grand Duke’s but the thoughts were La Harpe’s.18 Yet such a breadth of understanding did not come easily to Alexander. He was remarkably slow in picking up the French language. It was not until April 1785, when he had experienced a year’s teaching from both Masson and La Harpe, that Alexander risked a note in French to his ‘chère Grand Maman’ and it was hardly a message of elaborate construction: ‘Comme Maman vous écrit,’ he wrote, ‘je veux vous écrire aussi et dire que je vous aime de tous mon coeur.’19 Eighteen months later he managed some seventy words in French to the Empress, letting her know how much he had enjoyed a performance of Beaumarchais’s Barbier de Seville – in Russian. Catherine, at any rate, was impressed and, at the end of 1787, she told Grimm that La Harpe had the highest hopes of her grandson’s intelligence. Characteristically the Empress added the comment that since La Harpe was a Swiss republican, there was no reason why he should make flattering remarks about Alexander’s progress; and she therefore assumed his judgement was sound.20