Alexander I- the Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon

by Marie-Pierre Rey

  Paul’s activism was not limited to the manners or reading matter of his subjects. In a sort of frenzy, the man who had become emperor at the age of 43 manifested an obsession to make up for lost time, and he lashed out on all fronts. This desire to quickly conduct the changes he wanted to impose on the country led Paul into a veritable legislative and regulatory fever, as witnessed by the flurry of manifestos, ukases, and regulations that were adopted: 2,179 over 1,586 days of a reign lasting from November 1796 to March 1801—or only half as many as during the three full decades of Catherine’s reign!7

  Lacking symbols of his own and in quest of legitimacy, the person who had been the adulterous child rejected by his mother and who felt a need to publicly assert his lineage would erase the “ignominy”8 of 1762. Doing so in a rather macabre way, he had Peter III’s body exhumed from the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, the pantheon of the imperial crown, and had the coffin exhibited at the Winter Palace alongside that of Catherine II, before ordering both bodies to be reburied in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Later, in the spring of 1797, a few weeks after his coronation, he promulgated a text on the modes of succession to the throne: the rule of masculine primogeniture would now prevail. No more grand duchesses could accede, except in cases where the masculine branch was extinct.

  During the first weeks of his reign, Paul undertook to liberate almost all those prisoners whom his mother had locked up for political or religious reasons. On the first day he had the writer and publisher Nikolay Novikov removed from the Schlusselburg Fortress; then he signed a ukase freeing Radishchev from the Ilimsk penal colony but putting him into domestic exile, and soon he released all the imprisoned followers of Saint Martin. Faithful to the Polish-loving convictions that he had several times expressed in front of Catherine II, he visited General Kosciuszko in November, liberated him, and granted him a pension that counted as political and moral compensation for the suffering endured by the Polish patriot. But Paul did not commit himself to find a political remedy for the Polish tragedy.

  Paul’s pacifism, already apparent in his 1774 memorandum, which broke with Catherine’s bellicose activism, was concretely manifested in his foreign policy. The emperor recalled the army sent by Catherine on a campaign against the Persians in the Caucasus, and he refused to send an expeditionary force she had promised to assist the British and Austrians in their war against Revolutionary France—not out of sympathy for the latter, which he execrated, but out of hatred for war.

  His distrust of the nobility and his desire to possess absolute power over all his subjects—as he told the Swedish ambassador, “Nobody is great in Russia except the person I am talking to, and then only for the time I do so”9—pushed him to force nobles to serve the state and to restrict the privileges conceded by Catherine II. Without abrogating the Charter of Nobility she had promulgated in 1785, he suppressed some of its guarantees. Nobles were now subject to occasional taxes and could be banished to Siberia or subjected to corporal punishment.

  Finally, Paul tried to fight the corruption and laxity that riddled both government administration and the army. He reasserted central authority by requiring sharper submission from regional governors who had been too free for his taste, and he laid out a drastic reform of the military.

  Prepared by Lieutenant-General Rostopchin, the strict new regulations (which got lost in details of alignment and spacing between men on parade and on the march) were published for the cavalry and infantry in 1796 and in 1797 for the navy. Strongly inspired by the Prussian model elaborated by Frederick the Great, the regulations quickly aroused disapproval from most of the high-ranking officers. Suvorov bravely informed Paul: “Russians have always beat the Prussians, so why do we want to copy them?”—which in February 1797 earned the brilliant general a sacking from the army for “insolence.”10 In exchange for a substantial increase in the number of soldiers and officers, Paul required all regiments, including those of the Guard (until then having the lightest obligations) to perform full-time service under iron discipline, and he acquired the means to verify that his orders were respected by creating an inspection corps.

  These measures designed to restore order to the army might seem justified: upon his arrival on the throne, Paul realized that some regiments existed only on paper and that desertion was a common phenomenon. But the brutal methods to which the tsar resorted (in three years, 7 field marshals, 300 generals, and more than 2,000 officers were dismissed),11 on top of the extreme centralization of decision making (the emperor alone could grant leave longer than 24 days, military power was concentrated in his hands, seconded by a chancellery and all staff officers suppressed),12 aroused malaise and even anger within the army. Moreover, by imposing new uniforms that closely resembled those of the Prussians and were not comfortable,13 by exposing officers to disciplinary punishment14 and by granting more rapid promotion to soldiers from the Ukraine or Germano-Baltic regions who had emerged from the Gatchina army, Paul clumsily offended the patriotic feelings of Russian officers,15 particularly the Guards regiments, who were already livid at losing many of their service privileges.

  His deep and sincere religious sentiments led him to want to improve the condition of the peasants, but he tackled this, as the Russian historian Alexander Sakharov has correctly underlined, with a patrimonial (even paternalist) approach,16 rather than an economic one. In the manifesto issued for his coronation on Orthodox Easter Day, he pronounced that it would henceforth be forbidden for peasants to work on Sundays and religious holidays and that the compulsory work owed to landowners would be limited to three days a week.17 Later, a ukase banned the selling of peasants without also selling the lands on which they worked. But at the same time—and this is another example of his contradictions—Paul sadly adopted a practice of Catherine II by distributing almost 100,000 serfs to his favorites upon his accession.18

  To help his reforming task, he promoted some of Peter III’s old advisors and leaned especially on his “Gatchina men,” to whom he gave increased powers. From the end of 1796, Alexey Arakcheev, newly promoted general, was made military commander of St. Petersburg.

  This frenzy of action was combined with a flurry of trips whose purpose was to enable him to know the country better and to remedy the evils that undermined it. In the spring of 1797, the emperor and his two elder sons, accompanied by Arakcheev (just made a baron and decorated with the Great Cross of the Saint Alexander Nevsky Order, he was more than ever the tsar’s prime advisor) visited Moscow, Smolensk, Mogilev, Minsk, Vilno, Grodno, Riga, and Narva. Alexander gave a very concrete account of this voyage to his mother back in Gatchina in almost daily letters, which are precious documents for the historian. He gives his impressions of the trip, the regions traversed, the cities visited, and the landscapes; he sketches amused commentaries on the sometimes rudimentary comforts that awaited them at many stops or else praises the high quality of the welcome and food that were offered.19 For the first time in his life, the young man took the true measure of the geographical and human diversity of the Russian Empire.

  A year later, the emperor was again on the road, still accompanied by Alexander and Constantine, but this time going to Novgorod, Tver, Moscow, Vladimir, and Nizhni-Novgorod. In the course of these two trips, Paul met representatives from all levels of society and criticized and punished those whom he found guilty of abuses; but by doing so harshly and pitilessly, he sowed terror among subjects accustomed until then to living far from the scrutiny of power.20 And he began to worry Alexander by his fits of anger and violence.

  Indeed, impulsive and impatient in his concern to reform, Paul resorted to force and arbitrary power as he tried to establish a more militarized style of government. Distrusting the old noble families who had been in favor under Catherine II, he did not hesitate to send them away, even to condemn them to exile and to confiscate their goods, often on futile or imaginary pretexts.

  He began by exiling not the guiltiest, for nobody dreamed they were that, but the coldest, the most assiduous and
prostrate [nobles]. Exile put a damper on the others; there were more banishments and new apprehensions and soon general consternation on all sides, and permanent suspicions, such that at the end of three years, there was no longer in St. Petersburg a man or a family left in the posts that Empress Catherine had put them before she died.21

  The historian Nathan Eidelman has provided very interesting figures on the scope and nature of the court cases dealt with during Paul’s reign.22 In four and a half years, 721 civil cases were judged (during Catherine’s long reign the total was 863), and of these 721 cases almost half (44%) incriminated nobles, of whom most were imprisoned or exiled.23 This shows to what extent under Paul the impunity of the nobility was just a memory.

  Thus, although the first measures Paul adopted might have augured a reign able to fix some of the crying abuses and dysfunctions inherited from Catherine, very quickly arbitrary rule raised to a style of governing made the sovereign unpopular. Of course, he remained appreciated by humbler people, in particular by peasants and rank-and-file soldiers, to whom he brought greater welfare, but he was hated by the elites, particularly by those at court. Forced to submit, they regarded him as a despot and all the more dangerous in that he was unpredictable. Alexander did not escape this feeling of fear and insecurity any more than did other courtiers.

  Alexander at Paul’s Court

  From the beginning of Paul’s reign, Alexander’s situation was ambivalent. On the material and financial plane, his position had gotten perceptibly worse:

  Grand Duke Alexander saw from the first year how his fate was different from that of the Emperor under the same conditions. He was paid an income of 500,000 rubles and Madame the Grand Duchess a pension of 150,000 rubles, but apart from lodging, nothing was provided for him. He had his own court, his table, his stables—but it was up to him to pay for them.24

  But things were better on the political level: unlike Catherine, who had so long held him away from power, Paul, as soon as he was proclaimed emperor, confided important posts to his two older sons, and in particular to Alexander. These provisions flattered the grand dukes and strengthened their filial love and seemed to attest to Paul’s desire to make a clean slate of the suspicion and rancor inherited from Catherine’s reign. From this point of view, the reign began in a climate of peace, even tacit reconciliation. Alexander was named colonel of the Semenovsky Regiment, then raised to the post of First Military Governor of St. Petersburg, leader of the Semenovsky Regimental Guards, member of the Senate, Inspector of Cavalry and Infantry in the divisions of St. Petersburg and Finland, before becoming at the start of 1798 president of the Senate’s military department. Still, the young man did not take long to realize that these titles, as brilliant as they might be, in reality conferred on him neither autonomy nor power. Placed by his father under the constant surveillance of Arakcheev, Alexander was reduced to the status of a child deprived of any freedom. From the start of the reign, each morning he had to scrupulously account for his activities to the emperor, from whose arbitrary rule he suffered like any other subject. And he was afraid of his father, who treated him often as incapable and an imbecile and showered him with humiliating reprimands and reproaches.

  He was leader of the second Guard regiment, Inspector-General of the Army, leader of the War and Navy Offices, director of the empire’s police, he presided over the Senate—all that would constitute a complete prime minister, but nobody took note of his apparent authority nor his good favor. He could not hire or dismiss anybody, or even sign his name without an express order that he was not even free to go and request. Pupil and victim of the Gatchina men, he was treated by them not as a leader, not as the son of an emperor, but as a student who is by turns taken up and then neglected.25

  Often, he managed to escape his father’s anger only by the intercession of Arakcheev, who played the role of buffer and helped him without Paul’s knowledge. Instead of Alexander, it was the favorite who occupied himself on a daily basis with the training of the men of the Semenovsky and it was often he who wrote the reports that Alexander was supposed to address twice a day to his father on the general state of the garrison, population movements, and the arrival or departure of any foreign or provincial traveler.26 This devotion was obviously of capital importance. Forged in this trying period when Alexander felt particularly vulnerable, the relationship of complete confidence that slowly was established between the tsarevich and the young general gave rise to a lasting and mutual feeling of gratitude.

  More and more exhausted by repeated military exercises,27 subject to a father who obliged him as president of the Senate’s military department to sign acts (particularly condemnations) of which he personally disapproved, Alexander was permanently subject to Paul’s caprices, in an atmosphere that became burdensome after only a few months. In one of her letters to her mother, dated 1797, Elizabeth wrote:

  It is always something to have the honor of not seeing the Emperor. In truth, mama, this man is widerwärtig [repugnant] to me, to hear him alone spoken of, and his society is even more so; anyone who says in front of him something that has the misfortune to displease His Majesty may expect to receive a coarse rebuke. I assure you that except for a few affiliates, most of the public detests him. People even say that the peasants start to talk about him. What were the abuses I detailed last year? Now they are double, and there are cruelties under the very eyes of the Emperor. Imagine, mama, once he had an officer beaten who was in charge of provisioning his kitchen because the boiled meat was bad; he had him beaten in front of him and even chose a very strong cane. He was put under arrest; my husband told [the Tsar] he was innocent and another was at fault, and he answered: “It’s all the same, they will sort it out together.” Oh, mama, it is painful and frightful to see daily injustices and brutalities, to see people made miserable (how many does he have on his conscience?) and to have to make a semblance of respecting and esteeming such a man. Tell me, mama, if that is not being a martyr, to have to court such a man! I am the most respectful daughter-in-law, but really not fond of him at all; moreover, it is all the same to him if he is loved, provided he is feared—he said so himself. And his will is generally fulfilled; he is feared and hated—at least by everyone in Petersburg. He is sometimes likeable and affectionate when he wants to be, but his humor is more changeable than a weathervane.28

  This dolorous atmosphere and the abuses that Alexander witnessed, as well as the repeated vexations of which he was victim, all tended to reinforce his conviction that the style of government chosen by his father was not in the interests of the country. And while in 1796 Alexander in his letters to Kochubey had not projected himself into the role of sovereign, after the spring of 1797, his increasingly virulent criticism of the tyranny exercised by Paul was now accompanied by reflections on his own conception of power and the means by which he intended to exercise it “when his turn came.” Henceforth, he could no longer remain a critical spectator of the increasingly dysfunctional court; now he would become the main actor in the changes to be conducted.

  •••

  In the letter he wrote to Laharpe in October 1797—it was given by Nikolay Novosiltsev29 (traveling to Paris) straight into the hands of his former tutor—Alexander asserted:

  My father in ascending the throne wanted to reform everything. His beginning was rather brilliant, it is true, but the rest has not lived up to it. Everything is turned upside down at once, and this has merely increased the already great confusion that reigned. The military takes up almost all his time, and in parades. For the rest, there is no plan being followed. Today something is ordered that will be countermanded in a month: representations from others are never tolerated except when the evil is already done. Finally, to put it in a nutshell, the welfare of the state counts for nothing in the regulation of affairs; there is only absolute power, which does everything wrong in all directions. It is impossible for me to enumerate all the madness that has been committed. […] My poor fatherland is in an unspeakable state: the
farmers are vexed, commerce injured, personal freedom and well being annihilated. This is the picture of Russia, and you may judge what my heart suffers. Myself employed in military minutia, wasting all my time in the duties of a junior officer, not having a moment to give to my studies, which were my favorite occupation before the change—I have become the unhappiest being.

  You know about my ideas leaning to expatriation. At this moment, I no longer see how to execute them; the unfortunate situation of my fatherland has turned my ideas to another side. I thought that if ever my turn came to reign, instead of leaving the country, I would do much better to work to make my country free and thereby preserve it, than in future serve as a plaything for the insane.30

  This major change was largely motivated by Alexander’s personal evolution; it is also explained by the support brought to his political thinking by his circle of close friends. In April 1797, even as the ceremonies of Paul’s coronation were unfolding, Alexander gathered in Moscow his friends Adam Czartoryski, Paul Stroganov, and Nikolay Novosiltsev31 in order to confide his desire to promote fundamental political reforms once he was emperor himself. From this date the four men adopted the habit of meeting daily, discreetly, at the home of Count Alexander Stroganov, who held a reputedly liberal salon. In the margins of the salon discussions, and in secret meetings, the foursome freely tackled many key subjects, as illustrated by the remainder of the letter Alexander sent to Laharpe:

  This has given me a thousand thoughts that have showed me that this would be the best kind of revolution, taking effect through legal powers, which would cease to exist as soon as the constitution was achieved and the nation had representatives.