Alexander I: Tsar of War and Peace

by Alan Palmer

  Throughout the summer of 1818 Alexander stood out as the champion of German state rights and of restoring France as a Great Power. Yet as soon as he reached Aix his political strategy seemed to change. He allowed Capodistrias to put forward proposals on France and on Europe in general, matters already agreed between the Russian delegates,72 but he made little effort to press them. There was a project for linking all governments together in a protective union against revolution, a proposal for a European army, with Wellington as commander and Brussels as his headquarters, and once again the Russians entered a pious plea for disarmament. Yet when the Allies rejected Alexander’s ambitious schemes, he meekly gave way. After a few days Metternich noticed he was not in the least interested in any suggestions from Pozzo di Borgo and he showed a greater willingness to listen to Wellington than to Capodistrias.73 It is true that the Duke and the Tsar were agreed on the early need for the armies of occupation to be withdrawn from France and that there was a precision in Wellington’s advice lacking in the Corfiote’s subtle phrases. But it remained a matter of comment that Alexander was so unusually amenable. He was even charming to Metternich. ‘It struck me as wholly amusing to see Papa one evening arm in arm with the Tsar’, wrote Metternich’s twenty-one-year-old daughter, Marie Esterhazy, back to her mother in Vienna;74 and there were many others who shared her gratified surprise at Alexander’s obvious desire for reconciliation.

  Yet there is no reason for supposing that Alexander had suddenly experienced one of those disconcerting ‘periodic evolutions of the mind’ which Metternich later maintained were a feature of his psychology.75 The truth is far simpler. At Aix, as in Paris and London in 1814, he was once again the centre of public attention, dominating the diplomatic stage as he had rarely been able to do in Vienna and only at Vertus during his second visit to France. In his own Empire Alexander seldom responded to public acclaim: he expected it, as of right. But abroad he enjoyed the sensation of having all eyes focused upon him, of knowing that the Prime Minister of France and the Foreign Ministers of Britain and Austria were watching anxiously the changing expressions of his face. Nor were the statesmen the only observers at Aix waiting on his nod of approval: there were petitioners to end the slave trade, spokesmen for other humanitarian projects, and special correspondents from newspapers in the German cities, France and England.76 Friedrich Gentz, Metternich’s principal public relations man, recorded his impressions of Alexander at Aix:

  The Emperor of Russia is the only sovereign who is in a position to achieve a great enterprise … Obstacles, such as constitutional forms or concern for public opinion, may shackle other rulers, but they do not exist for him. Anything he decides today can be carried out tomorrow. Though said to be impenetrable, all the world amuses itself discussing his designs. He attaches extraordinary importance to what others think of him and it is probable that he is more eager to acquire a reputation for goodness than merely to win glory. He values terms such as peacemaker, protector of the weak, saviour of his empire rather than the title of conqueror. A natural religious sentiment almost fills his heart and dominates his emotions.77

  If so astute and caustic an observer as Gentz could write in such terms, it is small wonder Alexander found the Congress such an enjoyable experience. Moreover, though his most detailed proposals came to nothing, he was gratified to find Castlereagh and Metternich still talking of the ‘moral solidarity’ of the alliance, while the final declaration of the Congress, with its insistence on the virtues of ‘justice, moderation and concord’ in the politics of nations, was happily reminiscent of the Holy Alliance.78¶ Everyone was pleased with Aix, except perhaps Capodistrias.

  Still delighted at finding himself once more the cynosure of the European galaxy, Alexander lingered in western and central Europe. He crossed over into France, reviewed the last units of the Russian army of occupation at Sedan and Valenciennes and even made a hurried trip to Paris, where Louis XVIII thanked him profusely for supporting France’s admission to the Great Power league. And then there were his sisters to visit, Anna at Brussels, Marie at Weimar, and the dearest of them all at Stuttgart; and he managed a few nights at Karlsruhe, where Elizabeth was once again spending part of the winter with her mother and brother. Finally, in the last week of the old year, Alexander surprised the Austrians by going to Vienna, where he was entertained to lunch by Metternich in the house he had shunned during the tension of the great Congress. The spirit of peace and goodwill was, indeed, mightily active that Christmas. At last he set out for his own Empire, determined to reach St Petersburg before the Russians celebrated the Epiphany. Slowly, escort and carriage headed north-eastwards from Vienna towards southern Poland.79 At some moment, as he was travelling between Brno and Olmütz, the familiar contours of the Pratzen Plateau lay to the right of his carriage window, silent and empty in the winter snow; but there is no record of what he said or thought as he journeyed back this second time from Austerlitz. His star had not always shone so brightly in the ascendant as at Aix.

  * See above, Chapter 12, p. 194.

  † The colonies were changed out of all recognition in 1831 after being weakened by the cholera epidemic of that year and subsequent rioting. Nicholas I and the orthodox generals who formed his chief advisers had always disliked them, fearing that they constituted an armed state within an army state, as it were. Legally the colonies were not abolished until after the Crimean War, in the reforming era of Alexander II, when preparations were being made for the final emancipation of the serfs.

  ‡ Anna and the Prince of Orange settled at first in Brussels, then second city in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. There, early in 1817, she gave birth to a son, the future William III of the Netherlands (reigned 1849–90), grandfather of Queen Juliana (who is thus today the reigning sovereign closest in descent from Catherine the Great, Paul and Marie Feodorovna).

  § Alexander spoke in French and it is a matter of doubt precisely what he meant by this particular phrase. It is unlikely that he intended it to signify ‘liberal’ in the classical political sense. A recent translation of the Russian text (Vernadsky’s Source Book of Russian History, Vol. 2, p. 503) renders the phrase as ‘these legally free institutions’ and this may well have been what Alexander had in mind. One wonders if this phrase, with its remarkable ambiguity, was suggested by Capodistrias.

  ¶ The Congress at Aix-la-Chapelle ended the military occupation of France and settled all questions of reparations. The validity of the Quadruple Alliance of 1815 was re-affirmed by a secret protocol of the original signatories while, at the same time, Louis XVIII was invited to associate France with all efforts to maintain peace and the status quo in Europe. The Congress agreed on measures to strengthen security on St Helena, in case Napoleon sought to escape to America, and confirmed a decision already taken at the Vienna Congress ensuring that German Jews enjoyed their civil rights.

  20

  The Absentee Tsar

  Sad News from Stuttgart (January 1819)

  Alexander was back in St Petersburg in time to celebrate the Russian New Year. People noticed he was still in good spirits and apparently tireless. So, for that matter, was his mother. At fifty-nine Marie Feodorovna had just completed a winter journey in which she visited her three married daughters in Germany and the Netherlands, and yet a week later she was fresh enough to walk immediately behind the Tsar in procession to the Jordan Steps where the annual ceremony of blessing the waters of the frozen Neva took place in a crisp frost and bright sunshine. With the Empress Elizabeth not expected to return from Karlsruhe until the end of the month, Marie Feodorovna was once again at the centre of affairs, planning a lively winter season of entertainments before the coming of Lent. Since the Court had wintered the year before in Moscow, the young Grand Duchess Alexandra had not as yet been in St Petersburg during the carnival weeks. Once the Dowager Empress felt inclined to enjoy herself she always wished to celebrate in grand style, and if her eldest son had shaken off his despondency there was good reason for a round of
dinners and theatricals and dancing. ‘I was delighted’, wrote Alexandra looking back on these months in a brief memoir. ‘It was all new to me and I was only twenty.’1

  This nursery freshness of the year was suddenly dissolved by news which threw the family into grief and mourning. Soon after Alexander returned from the ceremony at the Jordan Steps a courier arrived from Stuttgart and the Tsar learnt that Catherine Pavlovna was dead. Marie Feodorovna refused at first to believe it: had she not herself been Catherine’s guest in the previous month? She seemed well enough then and no word of any illness reached St Petersburg. So unexpected was Catherine’s death that Elizabeth was actually on the way from Karlsruhe to Stuttgart to pay her respects to her sister-in-law when she was intercepted by a messenger who told her what had happened and advised her not to proceed with her journey but to return to Russia.2 Inevitably there remained some mystery over Catherine’s death. Everyone knew that she, of all Alexander’s brothers and sisters, was the one most capable of provoking a personal enemy to murder and, as the young Grand Duchess wrote, ‘the name of Prince Paul of Württemberg was whispered’. But, though there had indeed been tension between Catherine and her husband’s younger brother, it appears certain she died from natural causes. Officially Catherine succumbed to ‘an attack of erysipelas in the head’ but it seems more likely that her constitution, weakened by the birth of two daughters within twenty months, was unable to throw off a bout of influenza.3 She was only thirty years old.

  Catherine had been Marie Feodorovna’s favourite child and the sad news from Stuttgart almost unhinged her. Alexander was so concerned over his mother’s health that the full sense of loss only came upon him gradually, reaching a climax when Elizabeth arrived home from Germany on 7 February. He could not mention the sister for whom he had felt so deep an affection without tears in his eyes. It was, for all the Imperial family, a ‘slow and heavy winter’. Alexander was often deep in melancholy reverie. Religion alone raised in him the spark of hope, though all too frequently his reading of the Old Testament intensified the fire of agony in his conscience. Later that year it seemed to some of his suite as if he were being deliberately careless of his own welfare, riding recklessly on horseback or in his smaller and lighter carriages. To those sufficiently intimate with their sovereign to suggest he should not run such risks he replied, ‘Why should I be cautious? I have two saints praying for me, Queen Louise of Prussia and my dear sister Catherine.’4 It is hardly surprising that he began to discuss with Golitsyn the possibility of a private meeting with Julie von Krüdener.5 But not yet.

  Government by Post Chaise

  That spring another sudden death, though less personal, also disturbed him. On 23 March, August Kotzebue, the German dramatist who had for some years served as a Russian intelligence agent, was assassinated in Mannheim by a fanatical theological student from the University of Jena. Alexander had admired Kotzebue’s work ever since his youth and had known Kotzebue during Paul’s reign when he was director of the German Theatre in St Petersburg. But what troubled Alexander now was not so much the loss to the dramatic arts nor even to the Russian spy service, but the evidence that the German students were turning against the established order and that they were identifying the Russian State with counter-revolution. Metternich had argued in Aix that the autocracies should stand together against radical Jacobinism but did not succeed in converting Alexander, and at the time of Kotzebue’s assassination each of the dynasties in Germany which had marriage links with the Tsar was committed, in varying degree, to some project of constitutionalism. The crime at Mannheim played directly into Metternich’s hands, making it possible for him later that summer to induce the German States to adopt a series of repressive measures: the so-called ‘Carlsbad Decrees’ restricted rights of political assembly, established general surveillance of the German universities, and tightened up censorship of the Press.6 Inevitably the knowledge that Germany was being subjected to such a rigorous system of repression raised doubts in Russia over the Tsar’s intentions for his own lands. Would he now follow Metternich’s lead, abandoning the last vestiges of liberalism, as Frederick William was doing in Prussia? What then would happen to the promised Russian constitution? On his visit to Warsaw in March 1818 he had told the Polish Diet he wished to introduce ‘free institutions’ in ‘all the regions entrusted by Providence’ to his care:* would he stand by this declaration? There were many in St Petersburg and Moscow who hoped they would hear nothing more of such nonsense.

  Alexander was not ready to answer these questions. Outwardly he made no response to Kotzebue’s murder. He continued to approve a more relaxed policy of censorship than during the five years following the Napoleonic invasion. It seemed as if he was still looking to some of his old friends for enlightened reform. Kochubey, as Minister of the Interior, complained that, ‘Police agents have not been confining themselves to gathering information, they have been seeking to incite crimes and suspicions’;7 and Alexander agreed that the Ministry of Police should accordingly be abolished, its responsibilities passing to the Interior, with Kochubey to keep watch on its activities. Nor was he the only veteran of the Secret Committee to be employed on measures of liberalization. Throughout the months when Germany was groaning in resentment at the Carlsbad Decrees, Novosiltsov was working on a draft constitution for Russia, which would have endowed the Empire with a federal structure and bicameral assemblies (though consultative rather than legislative in scope).8 The preparatory draft at least proved that Alexander’s ambiguous pledge to the Polish Diet still had some substance. As late as midsummer 1819 the Tsar confirmed, in private conversation, that he had every intention of giving Russia a constitution once he had seen that the Polish experiment was working effectively. But he had not made up his mind on the project: Russia was short of the funds necessary to establish genuinely decentralized institutions, he told Prince Viazemsky; and he complained of the marked anti-liberal prejudice of the governing class in the two capitals.9

  His enthusiasm for administrative reform was easily muted. He was prepared, for example, to reinstate Speransky and appointed him as Governor-General of Siberia. The most primitive province of the Empire certainly needed a person of Speransky’s gifts to organize its administration and he was able to draft a remarkable statute which reconciled the rights of nomadic natives with the traditional forms of government; but although Alexander appreciated Speransky’s services in Siberia, he was uneasy in case he might seek once more to change policy at the centre of affairs. ‘I advise you to become as friendly as you can with Count Alexei Andreevich’, Alexander told Speransky at their first meeting after his return to St Petersburg.10 It was a pointed message; for Alexei Andreevich Arakcheev could be relied on to check any excessive sympathy with constitutional liberalism.

  Arakcheev’s own position remained unchanged and unchallenged. For those outside the Court, access to the Tsar was possible only through Arakcheev’s private chancery in Liteiny Prospect. His powers as overlord of the military colonies were not affected by the reorganization of Kochubey’s department. When Alexander was in St Petersburg, Arakcheev ‘was indispensable to him and worked with him every day’, as the Grand Duchess Alexandra wrote. ‘He was liked by no one’, she added. ‘I have never been able to understand how he remained in favour.’11 She was not the only person to be puzzled.

  In June 1819 soldiers and peasants on a military colony at Chuguev, near Kharkov in the eastern Ukraine, rose in protest at the harsh discipline of the local commanders and at the requisition by military authorities of cereals they had cultivated. There had been serf risings earlier in Alexander’s reign, notably during his absence abroad in 1813–14,12 but the Chuguev troubles were more serious, because they involved a military mutiny. Arakcheev at once travelled down to the Ukraine and punished the rebels by brutal floggings which caused many deaths. There is some evidence he was worried in case he had over-reached himself, for he wrote to Alexander confessing that he had been forced to think ‘about this business d
ay and night’ lest ‘my human imperfections might make me harsh or vindictive’. But the Tsar expressed sympathy for his loyal servant’s ‘sensitive soul’ and gave him ‘sincere and warm approval’ for his ‘good and Christian feelings’.13 However generous Alexander might feel when talking to his Quaker visitors, he could not tolerate the threat of mutiny. Yet he refused to see the terrible incident at Chuguev as a warning of impending revolution. Though Arakcheev’s reign of terror coincided with the implementation of the Carlsbad Decrees in Germany there was no parallel between the two systems of repression, nor between the events which had given rise to them. In Alexander’s eyes what happened at Chuguev was endemic to Russia, not part of the Jacobin contagion which Metternich insisted was already spreading across the continent.

  In this instance Alexander was perfectly correct. But the generation which had attained manhood in this second decade of the century saw things differently. They were eager and willing to receive ideas from abroad and to identify specifically Russian problems with the general discontent. Hence to young officers and to students in the new universities there was confirmation in the reports from Chuguev of the need for organized resistance to the old order. Secret societies, many of them masonic in organization and symbolism, proliferated; and at least one group of young aristocratic intellectuals began to prepare a more radical constitution than anything which Novosiltsov had in mind.14 To the surprise of foreign observers, the authorities did little to hamper them. There was a time-lag of more than a year between the restrictions imposed on the German universities by the Carlsbad Decrees and the tightening of academic discipline within the Russian Empire. It was, in fact, during these very months of uncertainty that the Pedagogical Institute in St Petersburg was raised to the status of a university. New and stricter regulations on censorship were not enforced until June 1820, coinciding with the first systematic purge of academic teachers.15 Much of this delay was a direct consequence of Alexander’s own reluctance to proscribe liberal beliefs. Whatever might happen beyond the frontiers of his Empire, he could never entirely forget he was himself a child of Catherine II’s ‘enlightenment’ and a pupil of La Harpe. When in the early summer of 1821 the Governor-General of St Petersburg urged the Tsar to strike at the secret societies in the capital, Alexander replied sadly, ‘You know that I have shared and encouraged these illusions and errors. It is not for me to deal severely with them.’16 Harassed officials, far more aware than their sovereign of the mounting intellectual discontent, found Alexander’s moderation perplexing and exasperating, and not without reason.