Alexander I- the Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon

by Marie-Pierre Rey

  Adieu, my dear friend. Your friendship will be my consolation in my difficulties. Tell your wife a thousand things from me and receive the compliments of mine. If I can be useful to you, make use of me and tell me what I can do.71

  Encouraged by a letter hinting at a return to Russia (although the tsar did not formally ask him72), Laharpe set off. Despite difficulties—Panin detested him as a “French agent” and unbeknownst to Alexander refused to grant him the passport he needed to enter Russia—Laharpe reached St. Petersburg in August 1801, having decided to support the young sovereign in his reforming enterprise. But the person whose teaching had inspired Alexander to issue decrees to end public hangings and to abolish torture and who was in the eyes of court conservatives and even of certain liberals a “dangerous man”73 (in Panin’s words) due to his democratic ideals and his so-called “Bonaparto-philia,” was no longer the radical republican he had been in 1796–1797. More circumspect about the benefits of republican government, he had also changed his views about the future of Russia. For him, due to its size and its political immaturity, the empire should tend only in the long term toward a constitutional monarchy in the British style, while in the medium term it should take inspiration from the Prussian model of an enlightened monarchy. Moreover, the allegation that he favored Bonaparte was unfounded: Laharpe met Bonaparte only once (in Malmaison in 1800); his inclination toward a rapprochement between France and Russia is explained strictly by geopolitical considerations and not out of any sympathy for the First Consul.

  Laharpe was not appreciated among those close to Alexander, perhaps because his positions were judged as being too moderate and too idealistic, or because of his age, and no doubt because of his lower social status (from the minor nobility, and a foreigner to boot). They had a tendency to treat him with condescension, if not contempt. The former tutor would never be admitted to the committee’s sessions; in the eyes of Prince Czartoryski, his influence on the tsar was insignificant:

  De La Harpe was then about forty-something. […] He appeared to us (and I say us, because we all made the same judgment), much below his reputation and the high idea that the Emperor had formed of him. He was of that generation of men fed by illusions at the end of the 18th century, who thought that their doctrine—a new philosopher’s stone, a new universal remedy—explained everything, and that sacramental phrases would suffice to make various difficulties disappear in practice. […] The Emperor, without perhaps admitting it to himself, felt the high opinion he held of his so-called governor diminish, but he still sought reasons to show his skill to us. […] The fact is that M. de La Harpe’s stay in Petersburg at the start of the Emperor’s reign was very insignificant, and he had little or no influence on the reforms that Alexander later accomplished.74

  Yet this is too severe: if in fact Laharpe was not associated with the working group, he did continue until his departure in the autumn of 1802 to have the emperor’s ear. The two men saw each other almost every day, either at court or more discreetly at Laharpe’s house (the former tutor was living with his father-in-law in the Quai des Anglais), which the sovereign visited in the evening, incognito, outside protocol and convention. They frequently exchanged short notes and long memoranda, with Laharpe endeavoring throughout his stay to gratify the young sovereign with advice of all kinds. If Alexander sometimes made a little fun of his old teacher, whose behavior seemed to him old-fashioned and whose longer notes sometimes irritated him, the young monarch remained attached to the civic values and morality dispensed by Laharpe and even listened to a certain number of ideas defended by the Swiss, for example on schools and the educational system.75 In a general way he was sensitive to the prudence for which his old tutor was calling. In several letters he sent to Alexander even before his arrival in St. Petersburg, Laharpe insisted on the need to develop education as a priority and only then to turn to reform of the justice system and the legal code,76 but not to rush things. “Make haste slowly,”77 wrote Laharpe in a letter dated April 1801: “All this requires time,”78 he said in October. For if Laharpe advocated reform, he was at the same time quite aware that it would not fail to encounter the marked hostility of a certain number of social categories, with the nobility in the front rank.

  Reform is necessary, but it will have against it all those who have profited, do profit, or hope to profit from abuses, in particular: 1) all high authorities, 2) all the nobility with few exceptions, 3) the great majority of the bourgeoisie that in its circle of activity has assumed the habit of domination and lacks enlightenment, 4) almost all men of a mature age, whose habits run in the opposite direction and who change with difficulty. […] Reform has in its favor: 1) Alexander I, who sees in absolute power only the laws that his country has given him, as a means to procure civil liberty for the Russian people, 2) a few nobles more enlightened than others, having the generosity and warmth that are the privilege of youth, of which mature age has too often deprived others, 3) a portion of the bourgeoisie, not knowing too much about what it desires, 4) a few men of letters without influence, 5) perhaps also the subaltern officers and simple soldiers.79

  This advice about caution corresponds to a number of warnings from members of the secret committee as well as to analysis of some senators, hostile to any challenge to autocratic power and any evolution toward a constitution. Simon Vorontsov, a high dignitary from the reign of Catherine II, wrote in a characteristic way:

  As for what you tell me of the Emperor’s desire to diminish his own authority, this means a change in the constitution of the state, it means giving new laws to thirty million habitants. So, when it is not a matter of changing the constitution of a single little republic like Geneva or Lucca, it would take years to weigh this change before executing it, if one wants to avoid troubles and great misfortune. But to make such essential changes in the vastest Empire in the world, in a population of more than thirty million, in an unprepared, ignorant, and corrupt nation, and at a time when the fermentation of minds is universal on the whole continent, is—I do not say risky—but unfailingly to bring trouble, if not the fall of the throne and the dissolution of the empire.80

  So it is this bundle of appeals to prudence, reinforcing Alexander’s own doubts, more than the fall of Pahlen, that explains the evolution we witness after June–July 1801.

  •••

  What can we conclude from the first months of the reign of Alexander I? Clearly, from his accession, the young emperor had his heart set on announcing, by his style of living and by his adoption of political measures with strong symbolic significance, his concern to put a stop to the arbitrary rule of Paul and to set the country on the path to reform. In fact, in a few weeks, a new edifice began to take shape in Russia. However, despite the constitutional convictions that he manifested to his close advisors, the tsar was nevertheless shaken by the pessimism that reigned within the little group, by the counsel of prudence from Laharpe, by his own distrust of a nobility that did not seem mature enough to bear the idea of reform. As of that summer, a hardening seemed to appear. In this evolution and in Alexander’s hesitations, certain historians see an illustration of his so-called duplicity, while others blame his supposedly irresolute character or his attachment to a superficial liberalism, behind which lurked his taste for absolute power. In reality, it seems that in the summer of 1801 the sovereign’s hesitations merely reflected his awareness of the high stakes in establishing a government of law and the fear—quite legitimate for an emperor of 23—of assuming this project.

  CHAPTER 6

  Reforming Program

  1801–1805

  In the spirit of the rulings adopted by the emperor in the spring of 1801, the four years that followed led to intense reform activity on the political, economic, and social fronts. Some modest decisions were to disappoint the expectations of the liberal Anglophiles and the more radical members of the secret committee, yet they were not anodyne: in many domains what was adopted between 1801 and 1805 contributed to outline new administrative p
ractices and to foster the takeoff (timid but real) of a civil society.

  Political Changes: Limited But Significant

  In the wake of their first working sessions in the summer of 1801, the members of the secret committee continued to reflect on reform, successfully pushing the emperor to persevere in this direction. As Adam Czartoryski recalled:

  Although these meetings for a while merely passed the time in endless discussions without any practical result, it is true to say that there was no domestic improvement, no useful reform, attempted or achieved, during Alexander’s reign that was not born in these confabs.1

  The variety of subjects they touched upon demonstrates this; the group remained active until the end of 1802, when the increasing constraints of foreign policy led Alexander to disperse the group for a while and to postpone his reforming activity until later. In the course of their working sessions, the members recurrently returned to the great issues of the day: How to promote the rule of law without dangerously weakening imperial power? How to establish a legal state in a country devoid of any political culture? How to advance the reform of serfdom without challenging the existing order and without undermining the whole political and social edifice? Finding convincing answers to these key questions proved all the more difficult because the inner circle suffered from a lack of legitimacy. This little group that was calling for the establishment of a legally based state resulted only from the tsar’s will—and some would say, his whim—which earned him ferocious criticism from the court and high administration. Moreover, while the committee was studying crucial questions to be solved, while it was drawing the emperor’s attention to the need to tackle them in a methodical and gradual manner, Alexander was also taking the brunt of the conservative influence of the existing government machinery:

  The true government—the Senate and Ministers—continued to administer the country and to conduct affairs as it wished. It sufficed for the Emperor to leave the particular room where our meetings took place for him to fall back under the influence of old ministers, and so none of the decisions we had taken inside our unofficial committee could be implemented.2

  Probably these conservative influences explain, at least in part, the modesty of those reforms that were ultimately undertaken. One should also mention (as does the Russian historian Alexander Sakharov) the emperor’s firm conviction that, while indispensable, the desired reforms were liable to harm prerogatives that overall suited him quite well. Some historians also mention the fear that Alexander may have felt at the idea of arousing a wave of hostility likely to lead to his assassination, remembering the examples of his father and his grandfather.3 These various considerations cannot be eliminated despite the fact that no surviving document confirms the supposed fear of a plot. In any case, it is worth noting that any projects undertaken by the secret committee between 1801 and 1805 came up against the problem of what method to follow. How to concretely tackle a profound reform of the political and social system when the intermediaries on which such reforms had to rely were lacking? This crucial question did not stop haunting the members of the group and they were unable to answer it. For if political reform might find possible support from within the nobility, particularly from the senatorial party that was favorable to any change likely to make the senate the foundation of a legally based state, it was also doomed to be opposed by the nobility, the most traditional social stratum of Russian society and also the least favorable to any reform of the social order, especially of serfdom. This was the major problem, if not the impasse. Laharpe tried to bring some elements of a solution to this difficulty. In his individual meetings with the sovereign, he insisted repeatedly on the narrowness of the possible relays of reform—a minority of educated nobles, a portion of the nascent bourgeoisie, some thinkers “without influence”—and he stressed the need to undertake reform in a gradual fashion and to set concrete and modest objectives—at least until imperial action was able to find wider intermediaries thanks to progress in education.

  Consequently, due to the committee’s hesitations, to Laharpe’s advice, as well as to the tsar’s cautious nature (as Stroganov often deplored, he did not always expound clear thoughts to the committee),4 the decisions adopted during the period from 1801 to 1805 seem limited and modest. Yet they remain emblematic of Alexander’s will to pursue a reforming program.

  Despite Stroganov’s call for the proclamation of a constitution establishing a strict separation of powers (for him the foundation of any legal state), no constitutional text was adopted in the period. The tsar stuck to simple reform of the central administration. Instituted in April 1801, two and a half months before the fall of Pahlen, the Permanent Council included eight to ten members, who were joined by a minister, depending on the issue being dealt with. Its function was to examine state affairs and to prepare a reform of the administration. Until its disappearance in 1810, it was an important consultative body: it would be directly associated with restoring the Charter of the Nobility, as well as with dissolving the “secret expedition”; in some cases where it expressed a different opinion from the emperor’s, it did manage to prevail. For example, back in January 1801, Paul I had hurriedly ratified an act of union between Russia and the kingdom of Kartl-Kakhetia, determined to use it to annex the region. Alexander proved hostile to pursuing such an annexation, although the Permanent Council was favorable to it. In August the secret committee took up the subject in turn: Novosiltsev and Stroganov were against annexation. But the following month, yielding to the view of the Permanent Council, Alexander issued a manifesto confirming the annexation of the kingdom.5

  Prepared by Novosiltsev, a manifesto to reform the senate was adopted in September 1802.6 As supreme judicial body the Senate was now divided into functional departments in order to be more effective and rapid in its judgments. Any case not decided at the departmental level would be brought before the senate’s General Council, which would set the nature and scale of punishment, with no possible appeal. However, while the prerogatives of this body were now clarified, they remained strictly limited to the judicial sphere and were not extended to the political field. Unlike the aspirations outlined in the text of July 1801,7 the reformed senate was not transformed into a House of Lords with legislative powers in the British style.

  In line with that July 1801 senatorial document, several projects that emanated from liberals who were more or less close to power did quickly see the light of day. Thus came a plan defended by Paul Stroganov, who (despite his distrust of the nobility) intended to increase the powers of the senate and so transform it into a master institution in charge of applying any future constitutional law. Likewise, Count Mordvinov’s project (presented in May 1802 to the Permanent Council) to make the senate a political body of which only a portion of the members would be elected rather than appointed by the sovereign (specifically two senators per province8), would be a first step toward a representative monarchy. Discussed by the secret committee, these various projects did not always win support: again, in May 1802, the arguments advanced by Alexander’s personal advisors remained the same. Taking account of the mentality and retrograde behavior of the nobility, there could be no question at present of entrusting it with the least parcel of power by means of a reformed senate. In essence the nobility would be incapable of making good use of power. A year later, although the manifesto of September 1802 had given the senate a “right of remonstrance” (article 9, the right to attract the monarch’s attention to the necessary coherence of all laws with each other), Senator Severin Potocki asked for an audience with the tsar. At the head of a delegation of senators, he argued that the text adopted in December 1802 by the minister of war with the approval of the emperor9 did not respect existing legal provisions. Alexander’s response was swift: in March 1803 he declared that the right of remonstrance would only apply to laws already edicted in the past and not to future laws. Thus two years after Alexander became tsar, the dream of certain liberals—to see the senate gain influence and pow
er and then be transformed into a political body—was over. From this date power remained concentrated in the hands of an autocratic monarch.

  While the 1802 manifesto affected only peripherally the structure of the senate, it did have a noticeable impact on administrative reform by creating new ministries.

  The old ministerial colleges founded by Peter the Great were now replaced by eight new hierarchical and centralized ministries: Foreign Affairs, Army, Navy, Domestic Affairs, Finances, Justice, Commerce, and Public Education. Three of the old colleges (War, Admiralty, and Foreign Affairs) remained but were placed under the authority of the new ministries.10 At the head of each ministry was a minister named by the emperor (seconded by an assistant and a secretary) who became “the sole master in his jurisdiction.”11 Each ministry would include a chancellery, a vice-minister, and several departments directed by heads; on a daily basis they reported to the minister about current situations and aided him in taking decisions. All ministers were by right members of the Permanent Council.

  In principle, the senate possessed a supervisory power over the executive bodies of the state,12 including the ministers, but in practice the latter referred directly to the emperor, which of course weakened the potential power of the senate. Ministers worked in close collaboration with the emperor; they could propose new laws and amendments to existing ones. Every year each minister was to present the emperor with a written overview of activity; this report would then be transmitted to the senate, which could demand explanations or clarifications. In reality, the fact that ministers often came from the senate further diminished the latter’s freedom of action, thereby contributing (in the expression of the historian John Ledonne) to the emergence of a veritable “ministerial despotism”13—a trend that the emperor encouraged.