Alexander I- the Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon

by Marie-Pierre Rey

  Meanwhile, Alexander was undergoing severe admonitions from his mother. Long silent, Maria Feodorovna came out of reserve in the spring of 1806, and in a long letter written on April 30, she gave a very critical reading of the international situation, reproaching her son for having imprudently launched into a war against Napoleon, for not having been able to surround himself with competent and experienced senior officers, and finally, for having dangerously weakened the country’s position. There is no doubt that both Maria Feodorovna’s forthright (even brutal) reproaches and her pessimism about the current diplomatic and political situation were widely shared at court:

  It is said that the existence of Russia is in danger, it has lost its influence and esteem, it no longer counts in the balance of Europe, its allies are lost. Austria has made the most shameful peace in the face of our armies, so to speak; Naples had to be abandoned by our troops and is subjugated by France; finally, our troops have had to retreat everywhere; we were lured and then deceived by Prussia and betrayed by Austria. The glory of our armies has suffered the most regrettable failure; the prestige of invincibility acquired under the reign of the dead Empress and sustained in the reign of the departed emperor by Suvorov is destroyed, and never has a lost battle had so many grievous consequences. Our soldier is no longer what he once was, he has no confidence in his officers and generals. The military spirit has changed. In a word, the army is disorganized, and in this state of affairs, Russia is threatened with a new war. […] In this urgent peril, what are we doing, what measures are we taking? Our armies are on the borders, fortunately, but who is designing the plan of operation? The young military men who surrounded the emperor are devoted and attached to him, but do they have the knowledge and necessary experience for a job that demands veteran elders, who have the confidence of the nation and who have paid with their persons? Where are they? There is not one among all those who surround the emperor who enjoys this political confidence. He saw in the battle of Austerlitz that memory alone does not suffice, we need a reasoned plan, discussed with all the possible sangfroid of experience, that calculates for both success and for the possibility of a reversal, so that in the unfortunate case, people do not lose their heads. The emperor has proved his finest personal value, but the profession of war must be studied in the great school of experience; one has to consult people who have been through it. Why does he not surround himself with these old veterans, whose name alone would quell the clamor? […] The situation of England makes its friendship useful only on the sea, but if the fight begins, we alone will support it on the continent.27

  Finally there were insistent rumors, whispered softly by those who saw in the failure of Austerlitz, or in the genius of Napoleon, or in the atrocious military organization in the coalition camp, just the expression of God’s anger against the son who murdered his father.

  Despite these reproaches and insinuations and his isolation, Alexander stubbornly persisted in his diplomatic choices, in the pro-Prussian stance that he was the only one to promote. The sole master of his foreign policy in 1805–1806, the tsar was far from resembling the waverer depicted by some historians but rather appeared sure of his choices, even pigheaded, justifying Napoleon’s judgment that he was like a mule! And so he relaunched negotiations with Prussia—although that country was henceforth allied with France.

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  In fact, on February 15, 1806, Prussia had signed in Paris a treaty that confirmed the provisions agreed to in December on territorial exchange but added three new conditions: Prussia had to cede the fortified town of Wesel to France, close its ports to British ships, and declare war on England. On March 5 the king of Prussia ratified the agreement and explained this ratification to Alexander; in a letter to the tsar, he confessed to having been forced to this “extreme measure in order not to lose everything.”28 But signing this treaty put Prussia on bad terms with England and Sweden, and of course, defeated Austria was no longer part of the coalition. This meant that by March 1806 Napoleonic diplomacy had managed to isolate Britain and Russia in their anti-French determination. But Alexander I did not give up, sending the Duke of Brunswick, commander in chief of the Prussian armies, on March 7, a memorandum in which he offered Prussia a military alliance that would be the basis of a future anti-Napoleon coalition. But again Prussia played a double game: the Duke of Brunswick did accept the principle of an alliance with Russia, but in parallel on March 27 the Prussian minister of foreign affairs confirmed his intention to occupy Hanover and to close Prussian ports to British maritime ships—which took place the very next day. As a reprisal, Britain closed its ports to Prussian ships on April 5 and declared war on Prussia on May 11. The next day Sweden announced that it had joined the blockade of Prussia.

  Despite this difficult context—the members of the former coalition were now openly opposed to each other—the tsar remained omnipresent on the international scene. On May 13 he offered to mediate in Anglo-Prussian and Swedish-Prussian conflicts, pursuing in parallel secret negotiations with Prussia for a defensive military alliance. For Alexander it was crucial to try to bring the new enemies back together, both for diplomatic reasons (Prussia was still the pivot of his strategy) and for economic reasons. At the start of May, an alarming report written by Minister of Commerce Rumyantsev stressed the need to end the maritime war between the British and the Prussians that was hurting Russia’s Baltic trade.29 In July 1806 the Confederation of the Rhine was created under French protection, giving France dominant weight in German affairs, which made teeth grind in Berlin. The king’s entourage was increasingly irritated with Napoleon and hence increasingly in favor of rapprochement with Russia. France, who had not consulted Prussia about this creation and was planning to deprive it of Hanover to give instead to England, tried to mollify the king of Prussia by suggesting that he form a confederation of northern German states, of which his country would be the motor. But Berlin judged this unrealistic, and now the choice of alliance was made. On July 1 Frederick-Wilhelm agreed to sign a secret declaration that was reinforced by another secret text signed by Alexander on July 24. The documents reactivated the 1800 treaty: Prussia promised not to place itself alongside France in the event of a conflict over Austria or the Ottoman Empire, to seek peace with England, and to participate in preparations for a new coalition against France. In exchange, Russia would guarantee the independence and territorial integrity of Prussia. Thus in barely a few weeks, the tenacious tsar had managed to put an end to Russia’s diplomatic isolation and to make the new rapprochement with Prussia concrete.

  Czartoryski continued to disapprove of this direction, and on July 8 he was dismissed by the tsar, who put in his place as head of foreign affairs Baron Andre Budberg. This infantry general of German and Baltic origin was an experienced diplomat—he had been ambassador in Stockholm from 1796 to 1801—but above all he had been a resolute partisan of the war against Napoleon. This was why he had been chosen, although he would keep the post only a year, being dismissed in September 1807, ostensibly for health reasons.

  The forced departure of Czartoryski displeased Stroganov and Novosiltsev, the members of the old inner circle. Anglophiles, they deplored Alexander’s preference for Prussia, but the two friends were powerless to change his mind. Meanwhile, Alexander proceeded to some changes in the diplomatic apparatus: for example, in Vienna the tsar named one of his trusted men, Count Alopeus, whom he thought would work for an agreement with Austria.

  At the same time, relations between France and Russia had become peculiar, to say the least. In the spring of 1806, with the French consul in St. Petersburg assuring Alexander that Napoleon was favorable to talks with Russia, the tsar sent d’Oubril to Paris as “agent for prisoners of war,” charged with an exchange of prisoners from Austerlitz. Arriving in Paris on July 8, the emissary lingered there, seduced by Napoleon and Talleyrand, and on July 20, although he had no plenipotentiary power, he signed an imprudent “treaty of peace and friendship.”30 This text obliged the tsar to renounce an
y plan of war against France, without the latter granting sufficient concessions over Russian interests in the Ottoman Empire or in Germany. Thus as soon as he returned to St. Petersburg, d’Oubril was disavowed by the emperor and sent into exile on his estates. With ratification of the treaty abandoned, Russia could prepare for war: Alexander created a war council that began to reflect on ways of strengthening the country’s defenses. The tsar was convinced of an imminent confrontation.

  Yet it was Prussia and not Russia that provided the spark to ignite the conflict. On October 1 the king sent Napoleon an ultimatum, demanding the dissolution of the Confederation of the Rhine and the withdrawal of French troops beyond the Rhine. The response was swift: six days later the Grande Armée invaded Prussian territory. On October 14, in two battles, one at Jena led by Napoleon, where the old Duke of Brunswick was killed, and one in Auerstaedt led by General Davout, the Prussian army was annihilated. In the face of the French advance that captured all the fortresses in the kingdom and occupied the capital, Frederick-Wilhelm was forced to leave Berlin and flee with his wife Louise eastward, first to Grauden on the Vistula, then to Königsberg, and then Memel.

  Swift and irreversible, the Prussian defeat took the tsar by surprise and aroused great worry in St. Petersburg. When Frederick-Wilhelm called on his ally for aid, many (starting with Maria Feodorovna) advised Alexander not to intervene for various reasons: the trauma of Austerlitz was still too fresh and the Prussian army too weak (it had only 14,000 men), and the Russian army was even less ready to confront again the invincible Grande Armée because a portion of its troops was at the same time engaged in a war against the Ottoman Empire. But Alexander ignored these warnings and on October 26, 1806, announced in a solemn manifesto the start of a new war against France.

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  To lead the conflict against Napoleon, still traumatized by what happened at Austerlitz, the tsar chose to make General Bennigsen, not Kutuzov, the generalissimo of the Russian army. Originally from Hanover, Bennigsen had served Catherine II and been one of the conspirators who had caused the death of Paul I. But he was a very talented and experienced commander—and that was enough for Alexander. A month later the tsar ordered the Orthodox Church to excommunicate Napoleon: he wanted the country, particularly its elites, to be warned about the despotism incarnated by the French emperor in order to be able to resist his seduction. Napoleon’s aura as a military genius continued to daunt the Russians. To reach his ends, the tsar decided to resort to any weapon, using arguments as mendacious as they were detestable. Throughout 1806 an announcement from the Holy Synod, read out in all the Russian churches on Sundays and religious holidays, accused Napoleon, the “beast of the Apocalypse,” of wanting the end of the Orthodox Church—out of sympathy for the Jews. For the first time since the start of his struggle against Napoleon, Alexander resorted to anti-Semitic arguments31 in order to arouse in the population a nationalist as well as religious fervor. And for the first time in Russian history, anti-Semitism became a political weapon.

  Anti-Napoleonic caricatures and pamphlets were published in the press to incite elites to support the tsar; former Francophiles now figured among the most ardent despisers of the French. Among them, Count Rostopchin composed in French32 in the spring of 1807 a comedy called The Living Dead, in which “extravagant partisans of French fashion” are held up to public obloquy for the purpose of arousing patriotic enthusiasm in Moscow. In March 1807, under the chivalric pseudonym of Bogatyrev,33 he wrote a particularly virulent pamphlet in Russian:

  See what these damned people have done these last twenty years! They have annihilated, burned, devastated everything! They have trodden on the laws, soiled the temples, killed their tsar—and what a tsar! A real father! They have cut off heads like cabbages; all of them wanted to rule, sometimes one and sometimes another of these brigands. They imagined that this would mean equality and liberty, and yet nobody dared open his mouth or show the end of his nose. As for their justice, it was worse than Shemiakin’s [a famous Russian bandit]. Good God, what a people, these French! They are not worth a kopek! Our misfortune is that our youth read Faublas [knightly tales] and not history, otherwise they would have seen that each French head contains a windmill, a hospital, and a madhouse!34

  The mobilization also included economic and financial dimensions. Wealthy individuals, towns, and religious orders were asked to support the national war effort. From this standpoint, 1806 was a dress rehearsal for 1812.

  Deciding to follow at close hand the operations on the ground, the tsar went to join his army. He stopped first at Jelgava35 in Courland, where he met the Count of Lille, as the Bourbon heir was known. Alexander promised the future Louis XVIII to aid him to recover the French throne, while (significantly) saying he was hostile to a full restoration of the old French monarchical order. As he had already stated in his instructions to Novosiltsev in 1804, the achievements of the French Revolution and the empire could not be struck off by the pen of the new king.36 He then went to Palanga,37 a border town on the Baltic coast, where he met the king of Prussia, before going with him to Memel, where Queen Louise was waiting for them. Friendship between Russia and Prussia was once again celebrated by an alliance between tsar and king signed in April 1807 at Bennigsen’s headquarters at Bartenstein—however, it was still not unanimously accepted within the Russian army. Despite the mobilization and the resources being thrown in by Russia (120,000 men and 486 cannons, alongside 14,000 Prussian men and 92 cannons), the new campaign against Napoleon quickly turned into a catastrophe.

  Hostilities began on December 23, 1806, in Russian Poland and eastern Prussia. The coalition forces lacked supplies, forage, and munitions. After an assault that forced Bennigsen to retreat to Pultusk on December 26, and then the indecisive battle of Eylau—fought in a glacial blizzard38 on February 7–8—that even Napoleon himself called carnage (losses were estimated at 26,000 on the Russian side and 20,000 on the French), the disaster culminated in the battle of Friedland on June 14, 1807, the anniversary of the battle of Marengo, where Bonaparte had beaten the Austrians in 1800. This sounded the death knell of Russian hopes. With 12,000 dead or wounded, almost 10,000 taken prisoner (while the French lost only 1,645 killed and 8,000 wounded), the Russian army suffered a veritable catastrophe that forced the tsar, then present in the village of Olita on the Russian border where he had come to inspect the reserve troops, to engage in peace talks that had to be premised on a diplomatic and strategic revolution.

  From the Tilsit Meeting to the Alliance with Napoleon

  Since 1805, in reversal after reversal, Alexander had not ceased being confronted by Napoleon’s military superiority. Despite his deep conviction that the French emperor was a threat to Europe that Russia had to oppose, the disasters of 1807 forced him to a painful diplomatic reorientation, which he resolved to take despite himself and almost shamefully, one might say. For the first time since 1804, he did not keep his Prussian ally informed about his approaches to the French; later he would admit to Prince Kurakin, one of the diplomats present to help him at Tilsit when he met Bonaparte, how painful for him was the change in course dictated by circumstances.

  Admittedly, from a strictly military standpoint, the tsar, as Bennigsen suggested, could have pursued the war by bringing his army back beyond the Niemen River, even to the Dvina, where it could be reconstructed; the empire’s territory and resources were not yet in peril, even if the war had taken a heavy toll on the state budget. But at court, the defeats suffered in an already unpopular war (we remember Maria Feodorovna’s warnings) seemed incomprehensible, and so anger and calls for peace became more urgent, particularly on the part of Grand Duke Constantine, who had witnessed the disaster at Friedland.

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  At the same time, Russia had to face a second front: in August 1806 the Ottoman Empire, supported by France,39 had provoked the tsar by deposing the leaders of the principalities of Moldavia and Walachia and by closing the straits to Russian war ships, in breach of the
treaties concluded in 1774 and 1792. This violation led the Russian army to strike back by invading both principalities in November 1806. In return, the Ottoman Empire declared war on Russia, obliging her even when she was in difficulty in central Europe, to keep a part of her army in the Caucasus. On June 15, when the tsar was absent, a crisis meeting was organized by Grand Duke Constantine in St. Petersburg; taking part were Kurakin, Czartoryski, Novosiltsev, Budberg, and other high dignitaries. The participants were almost unanimously in favor of peace negotiations40 with France, and only Budberg still wanted to pursue the war. The defeat of Prussia, the neutrality of Austria that left Russia alone against France, evidently the fact that Britain was in no hurry to support her, and the existence of a second front with the Ottoman Empire were all unfavorable elements that inclined everyone to peace. Informed of the conclusions of this meeting, the tsar resolved to ask France for an armistice; two days after the catastrophe of Friedland, on June 16, he authorized Bennigsen to start peace talks and announced his intentions to send Prince Dimitri Lobanov Rostovski as his deputy in the armistice negotiations.