Alexander I- the Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon

by Marie-Pierre Rey

  This is my idea. I communicated it to enlightened persons who, for their part, had long thought the same thing. We are only four: Monsieur Novosiltsev, Count Paul Stroganov, Prince Adam Czartoryski, my aide-de-camp and a rare young man, and myself. […] On the other hand, once my turn comes, it will be necessary to work, little by little, to achieve a national representation that will be directed to make a free constitution, after which my power will cease absolutely, and if Providence seconds our work, I will retire to some spot and I will live content and happy in seeing and enjoying the happiness of my country. This is my idea, my dear friend.

  Ah, I would be happy if I could have had you by my side in these times! What services you could render us! But this is an idea I dare not indulge. […] May heaven enable us to reach the goal of making Russia free, and guarantee it against the attacks of despotism and tyranny! This is my sole wish, and I willingly sacrifice all my effort, and my life, to this goal that is so dear to me.32

  This letter is of crucial importance, not only because, for the first time since 1796, Alexander seems to be reconciled to the prospect of one day mounting the throne but also because the scope of the reforms to which he aspires, with the adoption of a constitution in the foreground, attests that he has decided to make his reign the instrument of a political revolution.

  In this letter Alexander does not mention Victor Kochubey. The young ambassador to Constantinople33 knew nothing yet of these early discussions, but when recalled to Petersburg in 1798 to be named vice-chancellor, he immediately joined the group and contributed to the general thinking. However, while the circle’s activity was intense—Novosiltsev made a synthesis of their thoughts in many notes and drafts—it did not last. Paul became increasingly suspicious of them and the young men had to disperse. In September 1797 Novosiltsev, suspected by Paul of liberal tendencies, left Russia for England; in August 1799 Kochubey resigned from his post as vice-chancellor, and after his marriage in November, he undertook a long journey with his bride to Europe and settled in Dresden, Germany at the start of 1801. Adam Czartoryski, already dismissed by Paul for his liberal ideas, was abruptly forced to leave Russia as ambassador to the court of Sardinia on May 30, 1799, after having been threatened with deportation to Siberia. In fact, that day Elizabeth gave birth to a little girl, Maria, whose resemblance to the Polish prince caused chatter at court and triggered Paul’s anger. Of fragile health, the infant died on August 8, 1800, plunging Elizabeth into great grief.34

  These successive departures—only Paul Stroganov still managed to remain in Alexander’s entourage—isolated the heir to the throne. But he pursued thinking about his reform plans. An extract from his personal diary, titled “Thoughts at various times on all sorts of subjects touching the public good,” written sometime between June 1798 and November 1800, clearly testifies to this intense intellectual activity and his desire to abolish serfdom:

  Nothing could be more humiliating and inhuman than the sale of human beings and so it is absolutely necessary to start by promulgating an edict that will forbid it forever. To the shame of Russia, slavery still exists here. It would be superfluous, I think, to explain why it is desirable that it be ended. However, it has to be recognized that this is very difficult and dangerous to achieve, especially if it is undertaken abruptly. I often reflect on the means of obtaining this and I have not found anything but this:

  First, publication of the above-mentioned edict.

  Second, publication of an edict that will allow all sorts of people to buy land, even with villages, but on condition that the peasants of these villages are not obliged to pay rent except on the land they inhabit, and that in the event they are not satisfied, they are free to go wherever they want. […]

  Third, after a while […] it will already be possible to publish a third edict that will oblige all nobles to purchase lands and villages only under these conditions. […] The Government should set an example by conferring on peasants of the Crown the status of free peasants. […]

  Shame, that powerful weapon residing everywhere that honor exists, will largely help to incline many to follow this example. Thus Russia will gradually free itself from these rags of servitude that have clothed it until now. […]

  All this will be doubly useful: first, the slaves that we once were will become free beings, and second, social conditions will gradually become more equal, and then classes will disappear.35

  Although deprived of his close circle and harassed by the military activities in which he was forced to participate, Alexander nevertheless managed in 1798–1799 to formulate critical judgments about the current state of the Russian Empire, but now he did so as a future political decision maker.

  At the same time his personal situation became more critical as the state of his father’s mental health deteriorated. Of course, the emperor was not falling into madness properly speaking,36 but he was overcome with obsessions, and even growing paranoia; he became more and more suspicious of his sons and even of Maria Feodorovna, accusing them repeatedly of fomenting plots. In his Secret Memoirs on Russia during the Reigns of Catherine II and Paul I, Masson reports that “one day, seeing his wife talking softly near a chimney with Prince Kurakin, he entered in a fury: ‘Madame, you want to make friends and are preparing to play the role of Catherine, but know that you will not find in me a Peter III.’”37 It was also in 1799 that Eugen of Württemberg, nephew of Maria Feodorovna, then aged thirteen, was called to the Russian court by Paul to be observed and perhaps raised by the emperor to the rank of future heir.38 And so, while Alexander was ripening in politics but feeling increasingly under threat, Paul’s political decisions began to crystallize as a serious opposition to him.

  Growing Opposition

  Two key factors, the emperor’s religious policy and his foreign policy, seem to have played determining roles in this crystallization. Starting in 1799–1800, Paul was exasperating the dignitaries of the Orthodox Church.

  The Society of Jesus had been present in the Russian Empire since 1772, date of the first division of Poland and the territorial annexation that followed; it had been briefly suppressed by Pope Clement XIV in 1773 but had maintained itself in the Russian Empire, benefiting from the protection of Catherine II, who saw the order as an instrument for promoting quality secondary education in Russia, as well as an advantage for her Polish policy.39 In this context the Jesuits had developed and sowed missions along the Volga River, on the banks of the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, the Caucasus, and Siberia. But what had been an act of tolerance inspired by Catherine’s well-understood interests turned under Paul into a demonstration of assertive sympathy. In 1800 the Society of Jesus was given authorization to found a college in St. Petersburg, as well as a seminary in Vilno (Vilnius) on Catholic land. Then in March 1801, in response to a request by the vicar of the Jesuits in Russia, the Pole François-Xavier Kareu, and with the personal support of the tsar, Pope Pius VII published the brief Catholicae Fidei, which legitimized the existence of the society in the Russian Empire.40 Perceived by the hierarchy of the Orthodox Church and by nationalist elites as an unbearable attack on both the prestige of the official church and “Russianness,” these measures provoked irritation from a court that was already disgusted by the immense reputation enjoyed by an Austrian called Gabriel Gruber with Paul. An engineer, chemist, specialist in naval architecture, the vice-vicar of the Jesuits in Russia was the only person in the emperor’s entourage to be able to present himself without being announced in advance. His frequent spiritual discussions with Paul upset Russians who held strictly Orthodox convictions. The emperor would even go so far as to ask Gruber to prepare a text aiming to unite the Churches of East and West. Completed and handed to the tsar on March 22, 1801—the day of his death—this text, which could have been extremely important for the history of Christianity by helping redefine relations between the Catholic and Orthodox churches, remained on the imperial desk, never brought to Paul’s knowledge.

  Benevolent toward the Jesuits, Paul
also favored the Knights of Malta. Here again, he seemed to be following Catherine II, who had established links with this order shortly after the French Revolution expelled it from France. But what had resulted from interested tolerance under Catherine—bringing support to a persecuted Catholic order—under Paul appeared as the result of personal preference, in which the tsar’s fascination for knightly orders was in conflict with his hatred of impious France and the “Republican plague.”41 This commitment to the Knights soon led him to spectacular gestures that seemed incomprehensible—if not insulting—in the eyes of the Orthodox Church and its dignitaries. In August 1798, anxious to amplify his support of the order—when the French had just captured the island of Malta and forced out all the religious orders—the emperor welcomed them to Russia, declaring himself Grand Master of the order and protector of the island, regardless of the fact that the Knights of Malta recognized the pope as head of the church. For Paul, the struggle against revolutionary France required a rapprochement between the Christian churches, and even a form of ecumenism. His position was a sacrilege to the Orthodox, and it accentuated Paul’s unpopularity among the traditional elites.

  To the discontent aroused by his religious policy were soon added tensions over the diplomatic strategy Paul adopted in 1799. After an initial period of withdrawal from international affairs at the end of 1796 to 1798, Paul took an increasingly activist position on the foreign scene, which again recalled the political choices made by Catherine II.

  In December 1800, after negotiations started the previous year with the ruler of Georgia, Georgi XII, he signed a manifesto of “union” between Russia and the Christian kingdom of Kartl-Kakhetia that placed this part of eastern Georgia, under threat from the Persians, under Russian protection, with a design to quickly annex it. Similarly, the emperor was anxious to enlarge the empire’s borders toward the north Pacific. Until 1799 Russian expansion into Alaska had remained spontaneous, arising almost exclusively from private initiatives by trappers and adventurous merchants. But after 1799 Paul decided to give his official and active support to the private Russo-American Company, to which he gave a charter guaranteeing for 20 years its monopoly on the exploitation of territories situated beyond the fifty-fifth parallel, with an exclusive right to hunting and mining in that region.

  Finally, although he had at first sought to preserve Russia’s neutrality, the emperor felt constrained to intervene in European affairs in 1797–1798. Here again he was following imperatives defended by Catherine. On the political and ideological levels Paul saw the successes of Revolutionary (and then Napoleonic) France as a threatening adventure, likely to put in danger the social order on which autocratic Russia rested. On the geopolitical level Bonaparte’s expansionism that aimed at the Mediterranean Sea if a potential alliance with the Ottoman Empire could be achieved appeared to Paul as a challenge to the prerogatives that Russia had seized since the Kutchuk-Kainardji treaty in 1774. In this worrying context he opted for measures that were both symbolic and military.

  First he asserted in a public and official way his support for the French monarchists. As part of his “anti-republican crusade,” in 1797 he invited the Prince de Condé and his army to place themselves under his protection: no fewer than 5,000 men, 200 generals, and several thousand exiled families gathered on imperial soil. Condé took an oath of allegiance to the emperor of Russia and was made grand commander of the Order of Malta; his army, equipped and reconstituted into five regiments, was established in Volhynia.42 Similarly, Paul invited the future Louis XVIII to take refuge in Russia, offering him as residence the Mitava Castle, where the heir to the French throne settled with his court in exile.43 But Paul was not content with symbolic gestures to manifest his repudiation of how Europe was evolving.

  Advised by his minister Bezborodko, he soon undertook a political offensive, partly by entering into the Second Coalition against France that united England, Austria, Naples, Portugal, and the Ottoman Empire, and partly by offering the sultan Russian protection against France. In December 1798 this Russian proposal led to a treaty by which the two empires mutually guaranteed their territorial possessions. Paul soon made a military demonstration of his anti-French commitment: in the winter of 1798–1799, a Russo-Turkish flotilla under the command of Admiral Ushakov began to operate with success in the eastern Mediterranean and managed to chase the French armies out of the Ionian islands. A few months later, in 1800, these islands were organized into a republic placed under Ottoman tutelage but in fact occupied by Russian troops. Their unprecedented military presence in this geographic region was very satisfying for the Russians, which caused Bezborodko to comment ironically:

  We had to wait for the arrival of monsters like the French to witness a spectacle that I would never have believed I would see in my lifetime: an alliance with the Porte and the passage of our navy through the Straits.44

  At the same time Russian armies led by Suvorov (recalled by the emperor from his forced exile at the request of the Austrian Archduke Franz) conducted in Italy ferocious and victorious battles against the French; the particularly hard battle of Novi took place in August 1799. For the first time in its history, Russia appeared on the international scene as a Mediterranean power.

  However, Paul’s foreign policy ceased being rational and became confused, due to the evolution of the international situation and the growing influence on the emperor of the Anglophobe party. It was this abrupt switch, which baffled the pro-British party at court, that precipitated the conspiracy.

  In April 1799 Bezborodko’s death resulted in the nomination of two vice-chancellors at the head of the College of Foreign Affairs: the chamberlain Count Rostopchin, and Nikita Panin, nephew of Catherine II’s old advisor. However, these two men did not share the same views on foreign policy. Like the Russian ambassador to London, Simon Vorontsov, Panin was partial to an Anglo-Russian alliance, while Rostopchin supported a rapprochement with France. Starting at the end of 1799, because he was disappointed with the behavior of his allies and was yielding to the influence of Rostopchin and Suvorov (who had been defeated in Zurich in September), Paul seemed to be reconsidering his participation in the Second Coalition.

  In effect, while Russian troops had not spared any effort in the Italian campaigns, the Russian-Austrian alliance was not long in vacillating over its first victories. Quickly, the subjects of contention between the two powers multiplied,45 pushing Paul to break in October 1799 the pact formed seven years earlier by Catherine. Meanwhile, relations between Britain and Russia deteriorated because London did not appreciate seeing the emperor of Russia proclaim himself “Protector of Malta” and make advances in the Mediterranean, a zone where Great Britain thought it had privileged rights. Thus Russia found itself isolated again on the international scene. In this context, Bonaparte’s coup d’état (18th Brumaire) introduced a new factor to which Paul was sensitive: Bonaparte’s power was set to last and that reality had to be dealt with. The tsar asserted:

  A change is taking place in France, and we have to await the outcome with patience, without exhausting ourselves […] I am full of respect for the First Consul and his military talent. […] He acts—he is a man with whom one can deal.46

  Consequently, in March 1800 Russia officially quit the Second Coalition, and on the eighteenth, the emperor announced to Ambassador Lord Whitworth that he had requested his recall to London. Between the start of March and the end of May—when the ambassador had to leave Russian territory—Lord Whitworth and Vice-Chancellor Panin tried in vain to reverse this new course of Russian diplomacy. The departure of the ambassador was followed by a de facto suspension of relations between Britain and Russia. In October 1800, after the British seized Malta and unleashed the tsar’s anger, Rostopchin submitted to Paul an ambitious diplomatic plan. On the one hand, an alliance with France would in time allow Russia to impose a division of the Ottoman Empire and to retake Constantinople and the straits; it would eventually result in “the fusion of the thrones of Peter [the Great]
and Constantine.”47 On the other hand, an alliance with Prussia and Austria and a policy of armed neutrality against England, if circumstances permitted, could lead to open conflict. Paul acquiesced and was soon in a showdown with England. In October 1800, in reprisal for the taking of Malta, British merchant ships were captured and sequestered in Russian ports, and their crews (1,043 people in all) were arrested and sent to various towns and districts.

  These incidents, manifestations of a major crisis between Britain and Russia, were perceived in Paris as favorable signals; the First Consul’s reaction was not long in coming. Weeks later, Paul received a letter from Bonaparte proposing an alliance that the emperor accepted with enthusiasm in January 1801. Anxious to show his goodwill, Paul expelled from imperial territory all the French émigrés, including the future Louis XVIII; he asked his chancellery to accelerate preparations for war against England and ordered the chief of the Cossack army of the Don to organize an expedition against the British army in India.

  It was precisely this diplomatic switch of sides and these anti-British decisions that were adopted in urgency that served as catalyst for the plot fomented by Panin. For the vice-chancellor, the new pro-French course of Russian diplomacy was inconceivable in and of itself; Paul’s bellicose actions and the rush with which he involved Russia in a very hazardous military expedition in India demonstrated the “madness” of the tsar and fully justified carrying out the plot that had been in gestation for several months. Far from being the machinations of a handful of nobles to get rid of the intolerable and bizarre actions of a despot, the plot now assumed the dimensions of an act to save the nation’s health and maybe even tinged the conspiracy with the spirit of sacrifice.

  Alexander—already hostile to the political evolution of the regime and concerned to remedy it, undermined by threats against himself, and raised by Laharpe to worship the tyrannicide heroes of ancient Rome—was extremely receptive to these notions. Thus it is at the intersection of political and psychological predicaments that we must situate the tsarevich’s tacit agreement to the plot. But very quickly the cruel execution of a man in his nightshirt driven to hide behind a screen replaced a heroic gesture with a brutal reality whose memory, as traumatic as it was demeaning, would hang over the new emperor forever.