Alexander I: Tsar of War and Peace
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Alexander was himself tempted to leave Vienna. He considered joining his brother Constantine in Poland and travelling westwards with the army once it was fully mobilized. On reflection, he decided it would be a mistake to cut himself off from the centre of political affairs until it was certain the Final Act of the Congress would be successfully drafted. He therefore stayed on in the Hofburg throughout April and most of May. Elizabeth, however, left Vienna and travelled to Munich in order to spend the spring months with her sister, the Queen of Bavaria. For companionship the Tsar still had his sisters Marie (who had come to Vienna with the representatives of Weimar) and Catherine, who was impatiently waiting for an invitation to Württemberg and planning a short visit to Buda from mild pique and genuine curiosity.67 In general, however, Vienna was emptying fast as the soldiers prepared for war and the social adventurers realized the festivities were at an end.
Life in the Austrian capital became almost normal during April. Nobody tried to mount preposterous entertainments any more. Alexander attended military conferences, rode in the Prater or on the hills, discussed the slow deliberations of a committee with his ministers, and dined in almost celibate austerity. The police spies noted that he made occasional flirtatious remarks to one of the Bohemian aristocrats and once his carriage took him to the Palais Palm and he spent a short time with Katharina Bagration.68 But on many evenings he was left on his own to resume that spiritual quest for understanding of the Scriptures which was absorbing his mind more and more. Since Roxane Stourdza had accompanied Elizabeth to Bavaria, he was no longer in a position to receive reports of prophecies by Julie von Krüdener but, as he admitted later that summer, her revelations were much in his thoughts during those weeks of military and political uncertainty. The Baroness herself did not hesitate to claim she had foreseen Napoleon’s return and had warned Roxane cryptically from Strasbourg in October, and she was now predicting that the Tsar’s soul was about to achieve ‘a glorious destiny which will astonish the World’.69 There is no evidence that any of these feverish outpourings reached the Tsar’s ears while he was still in Vienna; but they corresponded remarkably closely with his own growing certainty he had a divine mission to fulfil. All that was needed to convince Alexander was a miraculous encounter with his prophet. Since a sound instinct had induced Julie von Krüdener to settle in the village of Schluctern, full in the path of the Allied armies as they moved westwards to mass in Baden, there was a reasonable likelihood that the miracle would indeed take place.
Alexander remained in Vienna until the last week of May. It then became clear that, though there would still be tedious disputes in committee on the German Confederation, the basic work of the Congress was over and there would be no serious obstacles to delay signing of the Final Act sometime in June. Emperor Francis announced his intention of leaving Vienna for Schwarzenberg’s headquarters on 27 May, and the Tsar and Frederick William accordingly determined from courtesy to set out, independently, a day ahead of him. Once again Alexander set his horses a cracking pace, reaching Lambach for dinner on that first evening and continuing through the night to Munich.70 He spent a few days with Elizabeth and his sister-in-law in Bavaria and then journeyed on into Württemberg and Baden. Late in the afternoon of 4 June he arrived in the town of Heilbronn and established headquarters in one of its finest buildings, the Rauch’sche Palais. It was a Sunday and, having spent most of the day in his carriage, Alexander retired to his room and began to read his Bible.71 From a village eight miles to the west of Heilbronn a woman in her early fifties, clad in simple clothes and unlikely to attract anyone’s notice, was travelling into town: the Baroness von Krüdener was on her way to meet the Emperor to whom she had known for a long time that the Lord would at last summon her.
* Not least among the ironies of this complicated situation was the fact that Alexander himself had, in 1808, been largely responsible for arranging the marriage between Dorothea and Talleyrand’s nephew, Edmond de Périgord (who subsequently appreciated his wife’s gifts less than did his uncle). See Philip Ziegler’s delightful biography, The Duchess of Dino.
† One naturally wonders who was Hager’s informant. Since all the reports on Princess Bagration are written in French and show some style, it is probable that they originated with someone highly placed in her suite and enjoying her confidence to the full.
‡ The Stourdzas came from Moravia (part of modern Roumania). They were Phanariot Greeks, that is to say, members of a Greek family which had served as agents or officials of the Turkish authorities within the Ottoman Empire. By St Petersburg society the Stourdzas were recognized as virtual leaders of the Greek colony in the capital.
Julie von Krüdener was born at Riga in 1764. She was the daughter of a Baltic German landowner, Baron Otto von Vietinghof, and on her mother’s side a great-granddaughter of the redoubtable Marshal Munnich who had distinguished himself in Russian service against the Turks in the 1730s. Julie married a Russian diplomat, Alexis von Krüdener, in 1782 and accompanied him on embassies in Venice and Copenhagen. They had two children, Paul (born in January 1784) and Juliette (born July 1787). Alexis and Julie separated in 1792 and he died ten years later.
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Holy Alliance
The Heilbronn Prophetess
The first meeting of Alexander and Julie von Krüdener, though attested in essentials by both participants, was sufficiently improbable and dramatic to please any hagiographer looking for signs of the workings of a special providence. It was already late at night when the Baroness, accompanied by her twenty-seven-year-old daughter Juliette, reached Heilbronn. The guards outside the Rauch’sche Palais at first paid little attention to the poorly dressed woman who was asking, at this unconventional hour, for an immediate audience with the Tsar. Understandably they did their best to send her about her business. She insisted, however, that this was her business: only let someone inform His Imperial Majesty of her name and he would command her to be brought to his presence. Eventually her obstinate persistence attracted the attention of Prince Volkonsky, the Tsar’s aide-de-camp. He agreed reluctantly to go to Alexander’s room and find if he was still awake. According to the account which Alexander himself gave to Roxane Stourdza, he had been studying the Scriptures and thinking of the prophetess on that same evening. ‘Where is she now, I wondered, and how will I be able to meet her?’ he told Roxane. ‘At that moment I heard a knock on the door and Prince Volkonsky came in, looking rather embarrassed. He apologized for disturbing me but he did not know how to get rid of a woman who was insisting on seeing me. To my amazement he gave her name as Madame de Krüdener. I received her at once. She spoke to me with words of hope and consolation, as though able to read my very soul.’ Only in humility and contrition ‘at the foot of the cross of Christ’ could he free himself from the burden of accumulated sin, she told him, speaking as ‘one who has been a great sinner, but who has found pardon’. This was not a new message but its simplicity was enough to calm the conflict of spiritual emotions surging within him.1 She stayed that night for several hours and he invited her to visit him again and again, attaching herself to headquarters as they moved westwards, the holiest of camp-followers, protected for several hundred miles by a single Cossack horseman with a broken lance.2
Julie von Krüdener’s behaviour at Heilbronn scandalized and dismayed some of Alexander’s suite. Others, one suspects, were amused by her presumption and self-confidence. It seemed extraordinary for a woman to burst into the apartments of the most powerful ruler in Europe and unctuously seduce him into baring his soul. She had, of course, certain advantages, among them familiarity with the Russian social and political background; for, not only was she born in Riga, but once as young wife to an ambitious diplomat she had even entertained Tsar Paul when he was still a Grand Duke and uncertain if he would ever inherit the throne. Moreover Julie’s spiritual talents had subsequently brought her into the company of people whom Alexander deeply respected, including poor Louise of Prussia. Nevertheless Julie’s powers of
self-advancement and her unabashed confidence were remarkable; they were enough in themselves to provoke comment. Was she a handmaid of the Lord, a latter-day Joan of Arc vouchsafed a vision of a new and holier Europe? Or was she a bogus seeker after notoriety, a would-be literary lioness of the salons, frustrated in her ambitions by the seemingly perpetual eminence of Germaine de Staël? Many who listened to Julie von Krüdener in 1815 were contemptuously critical of what she said and did; some even maintained privately that Alexander’s mind could not be ‘completely sound’ if he accepted his prophetess at her face value. To others, however, it was as though she dissipated the mists which shrouded his spirit and gave to him tranquillity in place of gloom.3
The passage of time has not made it easier to assess the sincerity of their spiritual experience. No task taxes the historical imagination so deeply as an understanding of past religiosity: Faith and Worship are subjective and may never be verified, and the borderline between a mystical happening and mere charlatanry is as tenuous as that which separates the man of grace from the hypocrite. Nor is this the only problem. The unfamiliar emotional ecstasy of early-nineteenth-century pietism necessarily raises in modern minds a doubt over the honesty of its impulse and form of witness. Yet given all these grounds for scepticism, there remains in Julie’s exultations and Alexander’s agonies of the soul a passionately compulsive power of conviction, so that one feels even in their most incongruously absurd modes of expression a genuine attempt to rend the veil of mortality and achieve a state of mind whence would emerge the new heaven and new earth of Revelation. ‘Be filled with divine creation! Let the life of Christ permeate morally your spiritual body’! she told Alexander as he made ready once more to impose his will on the Allied peacemakers.4 To Generals and ministers concerned with the day-to-day task of defeating Napoleon and making certain there would be no future resurgence of Bonapartism it seemed that she spoke a strange language, visionary and tiresomely imprecise; but after those first disillusioning months in Vienna, these were the very words of comfort and inspiration for which Alexander was seeking. As far as he was concerned that summer, had Julie not existed it would have been necessary to invent her.
Peacemaking in Paris Once More
Alexander stayed only a few days at Heilbronn after his meeting with the Baroness. He then moved on to new headquarters at Heidelberg, some sixty miles down the river Neckar, where Francis and Frederick William were already established with Prince Schwarzenberg and the Rhine army. It was there, on 21 June, that the Tsar heard the news which changed his own status in the Allied counsels almost overnight.5 For on that Wednesday arrived the first reports of the battle which had taken place the previous Sunday at Waterloo. From the confused picture of the fighting two matters stood out beyond dispute: Napoleon was decisively defeated; and honours for the victory were shared by the Anglo-Dutch forces of Wellington and the Prussians under Blücher and Bülow. There was now no possibility that Alexander would be able to enter Paris at the head of a liberating army, as in the spring of 1814, for he had with him at Heidelberg only one army corps already exhausted from a march across Poland and Germany in full kit at midsummer. The laurels of liberation, together with the political influence which went with them, would this time rest on Wellington’s brow. That, as Alexander saw it, was hardly surprising though he had not expected a decision so soon. What mattered far more to the Russians was the improved position of Prussia, so long the poor relation among the Great Powers. The Tsar was determined to reach the French capital as rapidly as possible rather than permit Blücher to rule the roost in Paris. On 25 June, escorted by a mere hundred Cossacks, Alexander left Heidelberg for Mannheim and the long march across Lorraine and Champagne to the Seine.6
There followed a fortnight of frustration. Because of the risk of attack by French irregulars the small Russian force moved slowly. Alexander did not arrive in Paris until the evening of 10 July. Louis XVIII was some forty-eight hours ahead of him. The King of France returned to the Tuileries confident of protection from Wellington and knowing full well that neither the British nor the Prussians would accept any alternative to a Bourbon restoration, as Alexander might well have done: the King’s only immediate problem was the alarming manner in which the Prussians were exploiting their victory at the expense of his subjects’ security of person and property. Alexander was therefore too late to challenge the assumption of his allies that a second Bourbon restoration was the most appropriate form of government for the French nation; but at least he had the comfort of arriving in Paris before the latest of peace conferences opened.7 Theoretically there was nothing to prevent him from lifting its discussions to a nobler level, away from the shifts and expediencies of frontier drafting to that apocalyptic vision of which he was the Messiah and Julie von Krüdener the Prophet.
Alexander did not wish to humiliate or punish the French for their rejection of the government which he and Talleyrand had set up a year before. But he was determined that this time he would stand above the feuds of French politics, no longer courting favour as friend and protector of the city of Paris. He would reside in state at the Elysée Palace rather than in apartments assigned by grace and favour of Talleyrand. The Elysée, recently the town residence of the Empress Josephine, had to much recommend it, above all elegance and isolation, with pleasant gardens where he might meditate in peace and solitude. But this was a different Alexander from the man who had walked with Josephine between the rhododendrons of Malmaison fourteen months ago. Then he had looked with benign gallantry on the unfortunate Hortense: now he shunned her, for she had secretly sought to enlist his support for her stepfather soon after Napoleon’s return in March. When, at the end of the Tsar’s first week in Paris, the Prussian military command resolved to expel Hortense from France as a dangerous Bonapartist firebrand, he made no effort on her behalf. Those who had presumed on Alexander’s magnanimity should learn respect for the majesty of God’s elect.8
There was another change, too, in his outlook which surprised his own ministers as much as it did his allies. Half an hour after his arrival at the Elysée the Tsar received a courtesy call from Louis XVIII. Alexander had never forgiven the King of France for the arrogant bad manners he displayed at Compiègne on the eve of his first return to Paris. But now Louis was graciously charming, praising Alexander for his depth of understanding and for the moderation he was showing towards the French, in contrast to the greed of the Prussians. The Tsar was sufficiently experienced in such matters to suspect Louis’s honesty of purpose, and he responded at first with polite evasion.9 But, on reflection, it seemed there was something to be said for friendship with the rulers of France, if not with the French people. Alexander’s old cordiality towards Frederick William was strained by the latest military successes of Blücher: Prussia no longer needed Russian patronage. On the other hand, there were still too many potential causes of friction with Austria in central Europe and the Balkans for the Tsar to share Nesselrode’s willingness to work with Metternich. It was clear that politically Louis XVIII did not wish to appear indebted to Wellington and the British; nor, for that matter, did Alexander even if he presented the Duke with a diamond-hiked sword as ‘Conqueror of Waterloo’.10 All in all there was enough mutual interest between Russia and France to justify an effort at reconciliation; and within a few days of the King’s visit to the Tsar foreign diplomats in Paris were commenting on the rare regard in which Alexander now held the Bourbons whom he had for so long despised. ‘New needs always create new forms’, commented Metternich dryly a few weeks later.11
Alexander’s diplomatic advisers were quick to respond to their sovereign’s latest shift of policy. Two men in particular favoured Franco-Russian collaboration, Capodistrias and Pozzo di Borgo, and they tended to replace Nesselrode in the Tsar’s confidence during the Paris negotiations. They argued that French interests in the Mediterranean coincided more closely with those of Russia than any other Power, and they were able to convince Alexander that his dynastic links with Bavaria and
Baden – to say nothing of his forthcoming marriage connection with Württemberg – necessarily required Russia to seek a balance of interests along the Rhine, instead of permitting Prussia to achieve mastery in the German lands as custodian of the frontier with France.12 Capodistrias, wrote the French diplomat Barante later, ‘contributed more than any man to render the [peace] treaties less burdensome for France and to inspire comparative moderation among the Allies’.13 It was the Russians who took the lead in countering Prussian efforts to rob France of Alsace and Lorraine and much of Burgundy and Franche-Comté, too, although it is true that neither the British nor the Austrians wished to see a vindictive peace imposed upon the restored Bourbons. Louis’s tenure of the throne was not so secure that it could survive national humiliation.
From the Russian point of view the strangest feature of this peacemaking in 1815 was Alexander’s willingness to leave all details of negotiation to his ministers and ambassadors. This sublime and self-imposed isolation was in striking contrast to his attitude in the previous year, both in Vienna and in Paris itself. Never before had he seemed to possess such confidence in a team of negotiators. They talked and argued round the conference table while he meditated at the Elysée or attended the Krüdener prayer meetings, remembering from time to time to exchange courtesies with his restored Majesty in the Tuileries.
In the autumn this manifest sympathy for the Bourbon cause brought the Tsar an unexpected success. Louis XVIII, to his regret, had been forced in July to accept a ministry headed by Talleyrand and supported by Fouché. Elections in August returned a Chamber royalist in sympathy and the King felt inclined to dismiss the ministry and purge his kingdom of names so stained with liberal disrepute. Both men, however, were working in harness with Wellington, and Talleyrand still retained his old skill as a negotiator; if they went, who would take their place? It was the newly appointed Russian ambassador, Pozzo di Borgo, who provided Louis with an answer, and incidentally afforded Alexander revenge for the secret treaty of January 1815. Let the King force Talleyrand to resign, suggested Pozzo, and appoint as his successor the Duke of Richelieu; here was a man who bore one of the most illustrious titles in French history but who, like Pozzo himself, had emigrated to Russia and entered the Tsar’s service. Richelieu was largely responsible for the rapid commercial development of the port of Odessa and for other enterprises in southern Russia. Alexander respected him and was grateful for his services. In the last week of September Richelieu became prime minister. ‘An excellent choice, indeed’, commented the fallen Talleyrand wryly, ‘M de Richelieu certainly knows the Crimea better than any man in France.’14 This was, no doubt, the truth; but he also knew Alexander better than any Frenchman save Caulaincourt (whose loyalty to Napoleon ruled out offers of service from the Bourbons). From September 1815 until December 1818 the French government was headed by a returned émigré who could look back on nearly a quarter of a century in the Russian administration, a fact of some significance in the international relations of the period.