by Alan Palmer
Julie von Krüdener at her Prime
While the diplomats poured over maps and ministers intrigued for position and influence, the social life of Paris in that late summer and autumn of 1815 remained spectacularly brittle. People who, like Metternich and Nesselrode, had known the city in other times found it ‘curious to observe’, perhaps even slightly sinister. Strange episodes revealed uneasy tempers: Prussian Guardsmen impeded by a traffic block set about the coachmen with the butts of their muskets; an angry crowd brimmed over with resentment when British soldiers arrived at the Louvre to remove art treasures filched by Napoleon from the countries he had occupied; and everywhere there was uncertainty over the extent of the ‘White Terror’, seeking vengeance on Bonapartists of all classes in society. Yet, on the surface, life was as frivolous as ever: plenty of light entertainment in stifling and grubby theatres; a prospect of unlimited gambling; good singers at the Opéra; puppet shows in booths along the boulevards; and a hurriedly mounted ballet which claimed to represent the Waterloo campaign in such a way that neither Frenchman nor foreigner would take offence. Once more everyone of eminence in Europe seemed present in the city: not merely soldiers and statesmen and rulers, but great literary figures, doyens of salons, and women of beauty and distinction. Some diplomats, having negotiated in Paris during the previous summer and then in Vienna and now in Paris again, found it all rather tedious. Yet it is hard to believe in the dullness of a social scene enriched by four such contrasting luminaries as Madame Récamier, Princess Bagration, the Duchess of Sagan and Lady Caroline Lamb.15 And this year, too, there was at least one novelty. For Julie von Krüdener, having at first committed the disastrous error of moving into a hotel on the wrong bank of the Seine, established herself at the end of July in the Rue Saint-Honoré, whence religious exhortation fell upon a slightly astonished world of fashion each evening with the carefully modulated fluency of soirée conversation.
Some people were impressed by Julie’s talents, but not everyone. Castlereagh, himself a sound Matins worshipper each Sunday, thought her influence sufficiently important to merit explanation in a despatch to London; but he described her, a shade uncharitably, as ‘an old fanatic who has a considerable reputation amongst the few highflyers in religion that are to be found in Paris’.16 Others, though willing enough to listen to her message, were disturbed by her apparent trances and visions. Yet, as summer passed into an unusually early autumn, it became clear that Julie von Krüdener possessed one supreme advantage over less spiritual hostesses elsewhere in the city. For this year it was her extraordinary salon Alexander frequented and no other. Not that he was often seen there: it was enough for Society to know that he was expected at some time that night. The notion of conspiratorial confessions, with the suppliant slipping furtively through a hidden gateway in the wall of the Elysée garden, brought to religious observance the thrill of a romantic assignation. Soon these nocturnal visits were providing the tattlers with all the gossip they needed.17 At fifty-one Madame de Krüdener was pale and hollow-eyed, with grey hair parted severely down the middle: did she, they wondered, possess a hidden magnetism to which only the most complex of characters could respond? Her relationship with Alexander was a topic of fascinating but fruitless speculation.
The Tsar’s mind, observed Castlereagh with sage detachment, ‘has of late taken on a deeply religious tinge’.18 Socially he was almost a recluse that year. He was prepared to take the salute at parades of his own troops or to stand beside Wellington in the Place Louis XV as the Highlanders and Grenadiers and Lifeguards marched by in review. At the Elysée he received Walter Scott and other foreigners of distinction, asking them polite questions free from controversy as he would have done at home in St Petersburg.19 But he cut down public appearances to a minimum, limiting them in effect to obligations of duty. Not one light-hearted story of Alexander’s second visit to Paris ran the rounds of the capital, not even a single gallant remark. These people who had known or observed him a year before found now that he possessed an abstracted and preoccupied air, intensified by his increasing deafness and by myopia which he did his best to conceal. Now and again he surprised visitors to his receptions by the drift of his conversation. According to Lady Frances Shelley, who trailed at Wellington’s heels like a devoted spaniel, the Tsar now regretted his behaviour in London and was willing to attribute it to the bad advice of his sister.20 Unfortunately Lady Frances, as a reporter of conversations, could never quite distinguish between statements of fact and her own inspired guesswork and it is possible she completely misunderstood her host. On the other hand, there was a moment in August when it appeared even to Castlereagh as if the Tsar’s sense of remorse might brave him to face another Channel crossing rather than allow his quarrel with the Prince Regent to linger on into the new age of peace.21 But such an undertaking could well have strained anew Alexander’s Christian benevolence. It was wiser to be content with an outwardly cordial exchange of letters, and the offering of joint prayers with his pocket prophetess in the Rue Saint Honoré. Over the years there was an accumulation of trespasses for which he needed forgiveness, and of these his social sins in London seemed by no means the most grievous when thrust under the moral microscope of conscience.
The highest point in Julie von Krüdener’s ascendancy over the Tsar was reached on the Feast of St Alexander Nevsky, his patron and protector. On that day, 11 September, there was an impressive ceremony which took place, not in Paris, but on the Plain of Vertus, between Montmirail and Chalons in the natural amphitheatre separating the upper Marne from Champagne, some eighty miles east of the capital.22 For there Alexander reviewed more than one hundred and fifty squadrons of cavalry and well over a hundred battalions of infantry, together with some six hundred pieces of artillery. Francis of Austria, Frederick William of Prussia, Prince Schwarzenberg, Marshal Blücher and the Duke of Wellington were all present. With them was the Baroness von Krüdener, a plain figure in a blue serge dress and a straw hat. After the march-past the troops assembled around seven altars – the mystic number of the Apocalypse – while bishops and priests celebrated Mass according to the Russian Liturgy. Alexander, with the Baroness beside him, moved in procession at the end of the Mass from altar to altar. It was a curious addition to the traditional rites, not least because Julie was an evangelical Protestant and had never belonged to the Orthodox congregation.
Yet so powerful was the ecstasy of the occasion that such doctrinal niceties mattered little. Julie was deeply moved. ‘Here Jesus Christ was adored by the hero and by his beloved army’, she wrote soon afterwards. ‘Here the nations of the North prayed for the happiness of France … The Almighty had summoned Alexander and Alexander harkened to the voice of the Lord.’23 And that evening, after he had once more read through the litanies of the Mass, the Tsar tried to commit to paper his awareness of the exalted atmosphere in which his mind was moving. ‘This day has been the most beautiful in all my life’, he wrote to Julie. ‘My heart was filled with love for my enemies. In tears at the foot of the Cross, I prayed with fervour that France might be saved.’24 In Alexander’s agonies of belief the fire of faith seems to burn more spontaneously than in her exultant prose: within a fortnight it was to blaze forth so unexpectedly as to throw into shadow the carefully balanced protocols of conventional diplomacy.
The Treaty of the Holy Alliance, 26 September 1815
Shortly after returning to Paris from the Plain of Vertus Alexander presented his brother sovereigns, Frederick William and Francis, with a sacred treaty which he urged them to sign and publish in Europe. This strange document was designed to bind the rulers of the continent in a union of virtue, for it required them ‘to take as their sole guide the precepts of the Christian religion’.25 The King of Prussia, whose dreams at times soared similarly to the sublime, welcomed the project, though he barely disguised the fact he did not understand it. The Emperor of Austria, on the other hand, was frankly perplexed and embarrassed. There had long been a feeling among the peacemakers that the
ir settlement needed, for the inner security of Europe, to be based upon a general code of principles. But, as Pitt had sought to warn Alexander in 1804, there was a considerable difference between a pledge to uphold precisely defined aspects of the public law and an idealistic notice of intent to rest the behaviour of governments on ‘the sacred rights of humanity’.26 Francis, who had raised a doubting eyebrow at the holy gyrations on Alexander Nevsky’s Day, read through the text of the treaty and decided that the Tsar of Russia was, as he had long suspected, mad. Metternich privately agreed with his sovereign.27 Wellington, who was with Castlereagh when Alexander came to explain his brain-child to the British, confessed that he found it difficult to keep an appropriately solemn and serious expression on his face. Once the Tsar had returned to the Elysée both men treated the proposed Alliance with the irreverence they thought to be its due.28
Neither man was a cynic; but they had been trained to assume that in public affairs sentiment was invariably disciplined with common sense. By contrast, Alexander’s education was incomplete and throughout his reign he tended to reject systematic thought in favour of instinct and emotion. Yet, as Castlereagh explained to his colleagues in London, the ministers felt they could hardly thwart the Tsar: better to humour him, modify the more flamboyant flights of Apocalypse in the text, reconcile Alexander’s nebulous notions with their own aspirations, and extricate themselves from ‘what may be called a scrape’ with dignity.29 Discreetly Metternich set about changing the form of the ‘Holy Alliance’, ridding the draft of those phrases which implied penitence for past imperfections; contrition smacked too strongly of revolutionary presumption to satisfy those who identified the truths of religion with orderly and conservative government. Their only doubt was whether the Tsar would accept major modifications in a document which he seemed to treat as a new dispensation of Holy Writ.30
Much depended on the extent to which Alexander identified himself personally with the elevated sentiments of the Holy Alliance. Were they a written draft of his own meditations, or an echo of Julie von Krüdener’s fluent prophecies? If they were the product of long months of mental anguish, then it would be possible to change the text of the Alliance only if the Tsar could be convinced that, in seeking to express undoubted truths, he had selected phrases of ambiguous intent. If, on the other hand, the Alliance was written under the spell of the Prophet Julie, then it was high time she was exposed and sent to seek honour in her own country.
Most contemporary observers gave Julie von Krüdener credit for having inspired the Holy Alliance, a claim made by the Baroness herself in conversation with Roxane Stourdza a couple of years later.31 Yet those who knew Alexander well (including Roxane) indignantly refuted this suggestion, denying that the Alliance was in any sense a spiritual whim of the moment. Long before the Tsar heard of the Baroness he had shown an inclination to envelop statements of political convenience with high-sounding phrases: thus both the Potsdam Oath and the Bartenstein Convention hid their intrinsic poverty of objective under a sanctimonious wreath of mystic allusion. Moreover for the past three years he had been an eclectic in religious thought: from the Badenese fanatic, Jung-Stilling (whom he had met at Bruchsal), he acquired a notion of leading Europe back to ideals of Christian charity; from the German Catholic theologian, Franz von Baader, he received pamphlets maintaining the virtues of striving to establish a universalist theocratic community; from Golitsyn and Koshelev in Russia he gained a passing acquaintance with native mystic traditions and some of the patristic teachings of the mediaeval Schoolmen in the West; and from the Society of Friends in England he learnt virtues of pietistic Protestantism some months before Roxane Stourdza showed him the first letters from the Baroness.32 Add to all these influences the consequence of his own constant reading of the Scriptures – and in particular of his favourite Book of Daniel – and it becomes clear that Alexander’s brand of religious thought was a confused medley of ideas, all-embracing in its incomprehensibility. Although Julie von Krüdener conditioned the hothouse atmosphere in which the Holy Alliance burst upon the world, it was not she who had sown the seed.
Yet, when all reservations are made, it remains true that the timing was unquestionably Julie’s. She had used the phrase ‘Holy Alliance’ in one of her exhortations (though she may well have borrowed it from the Book of Daniel rather than coined it herself) and there is a direct echo of her sentiments in Alexander’s curious insistence on the virtues of proclaiming a treaty dedicated to ‘the Holy and Indivisible Trinity’ in Paris because it was the most irreligious of all Europe’s capital cities.33 Possibly, too, the Baroness amended the original draft, adding a flourish to the Tsar’s own handiwork. But, if so, it was almost the last occasion upon which she had any influence on his activities; for, at the very time when Metternich was modifying the character of the Holy Alliance, the close accord between Alexander and his spiritual counsellor was broken. By 26 September when the revised version of the Alliance was signed by the Tsar, the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria, Alexander had already emerged from the religious ecstasy in which the original declaration was drafted. Hence, no doubt, the willingness with which he accepted the verbal alterations in the text.* It is not clear precisely when or why Alexander ceased to find the revelations of the Baroness significant. As late as 23 September her influence was sufficiently strong to secure for the East Anglian Quaker, Thomas Clarkson, a private audience with the Tsar. In his account of his conversation with Alexander, Clarkson takes some pains to explain that Baroness Krüdener ‘is a Lady of the most exemplary Life’ on whom the Tsar called ‘every evening at seven in order to converse upon spiritual subjects’.34 Yet, in reality the path of spiritual love had not run smoothly ever since Julie’s arrival in Paris. There are fragments of her correspondence with the Tsar which show a shrewish impatience towards him for not visiting her at an agreed hour: ‘If you can go forward without me, I will absent myself from you’ she wrote. ‘But where else will you find anyone able to render for you the services I can? Where will you find a spirit created entirely to understand you?’ Even before the great day on the Plain of Vertus there had been an awkward scene when two of her closest followers attempted, by means of a spurious trance, to induce Alexander to make them a monetary grant in order to establish a religious cell in Baden.35 And one evening there was an episode which was strangely parallel to the incident of the hat at the Palais Palm; for Alexander, having apparently heard Julie von Krüdener in conversation, entered her drawing-room and found nobody else present. Her subsequent explanation that she had just been asking the great naturalist and writer, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (who had died in the previous year), how many Jews he had found in Paradise was not entirely reassuring.36 It had been easy enough to laugh off the tale of M. Moreau’s hat in Vienna; but it was another matter here in impious Paris, especially if the deception was practised by a person whose claims for attention rested solely on devotional affinity. Other visitors to the Baroness’s prayer-meetings thought her a fraud.37 Alexander never went so far as that: he accepted the sincerity of her piety, but his old lack of confidence in himself prevented him from trusting her as prophet or mentor. Once his faith in her messages declined, her influence on his thoughts and actions was at an end.
There was no dramatic finale to their relationship. She was ready, she told him in Paris, to follow her sovereign back to Russia when his business in the French capital was completed; firmly and kindly, with promises of future hours spent together in prayer and exegesis, Alexander declined her offer. He left Paris abruptly as soon as the Holy Alliance Treaty was signed. They met again on only two occasions, once near Pskov in the autumn of 1819 and a brief encounter a couple of years later in a small cottage outside St Petersburg.38
Disillusionment?
From Brussels on 1 October Alexander sent his sister Catherine a letter of relief: ‘Here I am, away from that accursed Paris’ he began, and added the information that he had arrived ‘the evening before last’.39 His sudden departur
e surprised the ministers still concerned in the task of peacemaking. It took another six weeks before they completed the Second Treaty of Paris, with its provisions for a French indemnity and its arrangements for an Allied army of occupation.† There was, strictly speaking, no need for Alexander to be at hand while his ministers thrashed out the terms of the settlement, for Nesselrode, Capodistrias and Pozzo di Borgo knew clearly enough what he wanted. More surprisingly, however, he was prepared to leave his ministers to discuss with Castlereagh the final form of the political alliance among the Great Powers, which Alexander had himself originally drafted. In consequence, on Castlereagh’s initiative, Bourbon France was excluded from the arrangement by which the foreign ministers of Austria, Britain, Prussia and Russia pledged themselves to meet in conference from time to time to discuss matters of general concern.40 Had Alexander insisted on his original project, not only would France have been a contracting member of what would then have been a Quintuple Alliance, but the resultant Congress System would have been based on a regular pattern of meetings held at fixed intervals and limited to matters arising from the nature of the Alliance itself. That the Tsar should suddenly have lost interest in a project which he had supported in various forms ever since his first exchanges with Pitt in 1804 suggests that once again, at the end of September 1815, he was racked by doubt and indecision. After the emotional excitement of Vertus, a cloud of depression enveloped his soul and challenged his reason. ‘I have found no easing of my troubles’, he confessed to Catherine, ‘save in the sublime consolation which flows from the grace of the Most High.’41