Secret Lives of the Tsars

by Michael Farquhar

  An uproar then erupted among the agitated men as the emperor remained obdurate. A scuffle broke out and the single candle lighting the room was tipped over. Now, in the semidarkness, the conspirators fell upon Paul, who fought back ferociously. Finally, a sash was drawn around his neck and tightened until the breath finally left him. Hearing the commotion, Empress Maria rushed to the room, but her passage was blocked. “Päulchen, Päulchen!” the horrified woman screamed in German. She was perhaps the only one left who still cared about the mad monarch.

  While Paul met his end upstairs, his son Alexander waited anxiously downstairs in his own apartments to learn what the night had wrought. Pahlen found him clinging to his wife, their foreheads touching in tender uncertainty. Then, when he was told what had transpired, the new emperor burst into sobs—stricken by the fact that he had passively participated not only in parricide, but regicide as well. Pahlen addressed him sternly: “That’s enough childishness. Go reign. Come show yourself to the Guards!” His wife Elizabeth exhorted him as well.

  “It was a night,” she wrote, “that I shall never forget.”

  * * *

  *1 Shockingly, the young princess seemed to be equally attracted to the pug-faced prince. “I am more than content,” she wrote after meeting Paul. “Never, dear friend, could I be happier. The Grand Duke could not be more kind. I pride myself on the fact that my dear bridegroom loves me a great deal, and this makes me very, very fortunate.” After their engagement Sophia Dorothea wrote to Paul: “I cannot go to bed, my dear and adored Prince, without telling you once again that I love and adore you madly.”

  *2 Paul and Maria would have ten children in all, including the future emperor Nicholas I.

  Alexander I (1801–1825): Napoleon’s Conqueror

  One of us—either he, Napoleon, or I, Alexander—must lose his crown.

  —EMPEROR ALEXANDER I

  To Russians, it is known as the Patriotic War of 1812—the great struggle that inspired Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. But behind all the bloodshed and misery that accompanied France’s ill-fated invasion of Russia, the war was also a personal confrontation between two emperors: the seemingly invincible upstart Napoleon and the fourteenth Romanov of the line, the brooding, duplicitous Alexander I.

  It was the opening salvo of an epic clash. And it came in the form of an insult—a stinging barb delivered by Napoleon Bonaparte, the potbellied Corsican who was about to proclaim himself emperor of France, and aimed right at the heart of the Russian sovereign, Alexander I.

  In 1804, the French leader had ordered the abduction and subsequent execution of the Duke d’Enghien, a member of France’s deposed Bourbon dynasty. Alexander was appalled that the base-born Bonaparte would dare lay hands on a person of royal blood. Yet with Russia in no position to respond militarily to such “revolting high-handedness,” all the emperor could do at the time was order a week’s mourning for the murdered prince and erect a memorial cenotaph in St. Petersburg dedicated to the victim “of a Corsican Monster, the Terror of Europe, the Scourge of Mankind.”

  Alexander also issued a tepid protest. Napoleon’s response, however, was anything but: Were the murderers of Emperor Paul ever arrested? he asked belligerently through his foreign minister, Talleyrand, while sharply reminding Alexander that France had never protested against that regicide and suggested the Russian emperor similarly restrain himself now.

  The staggering punch was published in a widely read newspaper, which made excruciatingly public what had privately tormented Alexander since his father’s murder three years before. Not only did Napoleon give lie to the official story that Paul had died of apoplexy; he also drew unwelcome attention to the fact that the dead emperor’s son had stood by and allowed the killers to escape justice.

  Thus, while Alexander I had politically opposed Bonaparte and his expansionism in Europe, the Russian emperor’s opposition now became a personal vendetta against the man he described as “one of the most famous tyrants that history has produced.”

  The very idea of Napoleon in his assumed role of a royal personage offended Alexander, who, though educated with certain egalitarian principles, certainly knew what an emperor was. And the raw greed with which the Corsican upstart eyed his neighbors made him all the more odious. “This man is insatiable,” the emperor exclaimed. “His ambition knows no bounds; he is the scourge of the world. He wants war, does he? Very well, he shall have it, and the sooner the better.”

  Though Russian interests were not directly compromised as Napoleon gobbled up neighboring territory, Alexander nevertheless allowed himself to be drawn into a coalition with Britain and Austria to halt his outsized ambitions. It was a moral imperative for the emperor; the first step in what he idealistically hoped would result in a harmonious union of civilized nations, where conflicts would be arbitrated to avoid bloodshed and “the sacred rights of humanity” would triumph. As historian Adam Zamoyski wrote, “He had assumed the role of knightly defender of a Christian monarchical tradition against the onslaught of the barbarism as represented by Napoleon.” Plus, like any young man steeped in martial tradition and training—yet who had never seen war—the emperor longed to test his mettle in actual combat.

  Napoleon, who saw no purpose or gain from war with Russia, tried to dissuade Alexander from the alliance, but the emperor was unmoved. In fact, in his haughty rejection of Bonaparte’s peace overture, he addressed him as “the Head of the French Government,” so insufferable did he find Napoleon’s recent adoption of the imperial title. Yet while Alexander avoided addressing his adversary as emperor, he could not escape that quality most closely associated with Bonaparte: military genius. Soon enough, he would see it for himself at Austerlitz.

  Proud and splendid, Alexander I rode out to confront his enemy at Wischau (now part of the Czech Republic) on November 25, 1805—the first Russian monarch to do so since Peter the Great. It was a minor victory for the Russians and their Austrian allies, who now became more convinced of their superiority. “We are certain of success,” proclaimed the emperor’s aide-de-camp, Peter Dolgoruky; “we have only to go forward, as we did at Wischau.” But then, ten days later, came Austerlitz. It was an overwhelming rout, one that decimated the ranks and sent them fleeing for their lives. Twenty-five thousand soldiers were killed—“only a drop of blood” for Russia, as the Sardinian ambassador Joseph de Maistre noted—but one that devastated Alexander nonetheless. “A deep sorrow could be read on his face,” General Alexis Ermolov said later; “the remnants of all the regiments were passing before him and he had tears in his eyes.” Indeed, that evening the crushed sovereign, once so certain of victory, sat under a tree and sobbed.

  Napoleon, meanwhile, was jubilant. “I have defeated the Austro-Russian Army commanded by two emperors,” he crowed in a letter to his wife, Josephine. “The battle of Austerlitz is the finest of all I have fought.” Invigorated by his triumph, which forced Austria out of the coalition and sent Alexander home in shame, Bonaparte gave no thought to peace. And therein victory was the seed of his ultimate destruction: All Europe was now aroused against him. Thus, as his biographer Alan Schom noted, “The Austerlitz campaign was to prove one of the greatest mistakes of his career.”

  The Napoleonic rampage through Europe continued. Soon after Austerlitz, he dissolved the centuries-old Holy Roman Empire in Germany and essentially took over most of it. Alexander watched in dismay, but with his army depleted and bled dry, there was little he could do except try to ensure the security of his own borders through flaccid negotiation.

  “The Emperor is still the same,” wrote his foreign minister; “fear and weakness are still at their height. We are afraid of everything, we are incapable of making a firm decision; it is even impossible to advise him, for fear that the advice will not be accepted.… He is a combination of weakness, uncertainty, terror, injustice, and incoherence that drives one to grief and despair.”

  But with a plea from the Prussian king, Frederick William III
, Alexander I became more resolute. “Tell me, Sire, I beseech you,” Frederick William wrote in August 1806, “if I may hope that your troops will remain within reach to come to my aid and if I may count on them in case of aggression.” Though the Prussian king had proven to be an inconstant friend, allying with Napoleon after the Russian defeat at Austerlitz, Alexander gave his fellow sovereign all the assurances he needed to officially demand the removal of all French troops from his kingdom. Bonaparte, of course, responded with an invasion.

  Prussia was quickly and easily subdued in October, its king and queen forced to flee. But now Alexander picked up Frederick William’s broken sword. Having apparently learned little from his ignominious defeat at Austerlitz, the emperor’s armies confronted Napoleon’s first at Eylau—“It was not a battle but a slaughter,” Bonaparte remarked—then at Friedland, where Alexander once again found himself defeated and humiliated by the enemy’s superior forces.

  “Sire,” his brother Constantine said to him, “if you don’t want to make peace with France, well, give a loaded pistol to each of your soldiers and ask them to blow their brains out! You will achieve the same result as you will obtain from another and final battle which will unfailingly open the gates of your empire to the French troops, who are experienced in combat and always victorious!”

  Constantine’s blunt assessment was conclusive: Alexander would have to come to terms with “the Corsican ogre.” And he would do it face-to-face. The historic first meeting between the monarchs was a grandiose affair, just as Bonaparte intended it. A raft was set up in the middle of the Nieman River, upon which were two white tents, the larger of which was embellished on one side with the letter N and on the other side, A. The two sovereigns were rowed out to the raft from opposite banks of the river and, upon arrival, greeted each other heartily.

  Physically, they were in vivid contrast: Alexander, tall and slender, with powdered chestnut hair and luminous blue eyes—the very portrait of grace and elegance, dressed in the resplendent green uniform of Peter the Great’s own Preobrazhensky regiment. Beside him was the diminutive Bonaparte, only recently royal—coarse, rather pasty, with a protruding stomach and steely eyes. Yet it was he who held the upper hand; the military master who gradually seemed to entrance the Russian emperor.

  While Alexander knew there was little he could do to preserve his unreliable ally Prussia, he believed that Napoleon simply wanted to be left alone to dominate central Europe, and, in exchange, would not interfere with Russia’s ambitions at the expense of Turkey. To some extent, Bonaparte indicated as much. But as negotiations continued amid glittering festivities in the town of Tilsit, Napoleon, “by slow degrees … pulled the covers over to his own side of the bed,” as biographer Henri Troyat wrote. Alexander was left to sign a rotten treaty that, among other conditions, hobbled Russia’s expansion, left open the question of Polish hegemony, and, perhaps worst of all, obligated the tsar to participate in an economically ruinous blockade of British trade.

  “Russia had been pushed into a loveless and unequal marriage with France,” wrote Zamoyski, “and soon adopted the sullen resentment of the unhappy wife. Sooner or later, she would be unfaithful, and Napoleon would have to go to war again in order to bring her back to bed.” But for the time being, the appearance of contentment was maintained as medals and honors were exchanged in ceremonious brotherhood.

  Both emperors left Tilsit with conflicting impressions of the other. “My dear,” Napoleon wrote to Josephine, “I have just seen the Emperor Alexander; I was very pleased with him; he is a very handsome, good young emperor; he is cleverer than commonly thought.… He is a hero out of a novel. He has all the manners of an agreeable Parisian.” Later, though, he commented, “No one could have more intelligence than the Emperor Alexander, but I find that there is a piece missing in his character, and I cannot discover what it is.”

  Similarly, the Russian tsar made lauding public pronouncements about his erstwhile enemy. “I shall confess to you that no one ever had more prejudices against a person than I had against [him],” Alexander said to Napoleon’s envoy, General Savary; “but after three-quarters of an hour of conversation with him, they all disappeared like a dream and I never remembered them, so deeply was I struck by what he said to me.”

  But dissembling was second nature to Alexander I. He needed peace with Napoleon, certainly, but he still cordially hated him. “Fortunately, with all his genius, Bonaparte has a vulnerable side,” the emperor wrote to his mother: “It is vanity, and I have decided to sacrifice my pride for the salvation of the empire.” And in a private message to the king of Prussia: “Have patience. We shall take back what we have lost. He will break his neck. In spite of all my demonstrations of friendship, and my external actions, at heart I am your friend and I hope to prove it to you by acts.”

  Still, no matter his secret motives, in the minds of his subjects Alexander had shaken hands with a monster. “The dissatisfaction with the Emperor is increasing, and the remarks one hears on all sides are frightening,” reported the Swedish ambassador. “It is only too true … that in private gatherings and even in public assemblies there is often talk of a change of reign and that people so far forget their duty as to say that the whole male line of the reigning family should be proscribed.”

  The emperor’s close advisor, Nicholas Novosiltsev, was so concerned about the mounting hostility that he dared whisper in Alexander’s ear, “Sire, I must remind you of the fate of your father.”

  “Good heavens,” the emperor responded, “I know, I see that, but what can I do against the destiny that is leading me?”

  Alexander’s wife, the gentle, lovely, and much-betrayed Empress Elizabeth, expressed grave reservations about her husband’s apparent rapprochement with Napoleon. But what galled the empress even more was her own mother-in-law’s fierce stance against Alexander’s policy of appeasement.

  “The Empress who, as a mother, should support and defend the interests of her son, from thoughtlessness, from pride (and certainly for no other reason, for she is incapable of evil intentions), has succeeded in becoming like a leader of an insurrection,” Elizabeth reported to her mother; “all the malcontents, of whom there are a great number, rally around her, praising her to the skies, and never has she attracted so many people to Pavlovsk [the dowager empress’s palace] as this year. I cannot express to you how indignant it makes me.”*1

  The emperor hoped to distract the people from their outrage over his ill-received truce by expelling the Swedes from the Baltic, as Napoleon had suggested at Tilsit. (“The lovely ladies of St. Petersburg must not hear from their palaces the cannons of Sweden,” the French emperor said at the time. “Sweden is your geographical enemy.”) But even the annexation of Finland was greeted with indifference. And the question of Poland began to loom ever larger. Napoleon coveted it as a reconstituted kingdom under French control, but for Alexander, that would be an unthinkable hazard to Russia’s border security. “Poland is the only question on which I shall never compromise,” he declared. “The world is not big enough for us to reach an accommodation on the affairs of that country.”

  With relations unraveling yet again, a second meeting between the emperors was scheduled for September 1808, at Erfurt. It was what Alexander had to do to buy time. “There is no room for the two of us in Europe,” he wrote to his sister. “Sooner or later, one of us will have to bow out.” In the meantime, though, he had to appear amenable. Still, the prospect of another shameful accommodation horrified his mother. “Alexander, stay away from it!” she pleaded. “You will ruin your empire and your family. Turn back, there is still time. Listen to the voice of honor, to the prayers and supplications of your mother. Stop, my child, my friend.”

  The emperor tried to reassure the dowager empress by explaining his rationale. “Let us not hasten to declare ourselves against him,” he wrote; “we would run the risk of losing everything. Rather, let us appear to consolidate the alliance so as to lull him into a sense of security. Let us
gain time and prepare. When the time comes, we shall look on serenely at Napoleon’s downfall.”

  The encounter at Erfurt, once again arranged by Bonaparte, took on an entirely different tenor than at Tilsit, although with the same superficial cordiality. “I have much affection for the Emperor Napoleon and I shall prove it to him at every opportunity,” Alexander said disingenuously to Marshal Jean Lannes, who greeted him. Then, with gritted teeth, the Russian tsar proceeded to play the part of Napoleon’s willing ally. The emperors amicably dined together and showed each other every courtesy during the formal ceremonies of the summit meant to permanently bind them.*2 There was even a bit of fraternal bonding one night at a theatrical performance, when the randy Russian emperor showed particular interest in the “actress” Antoinette Bourgoin, known as “the goddess of joy and pleasures.”

  “I do not advise you to make advances to her,” Napoleon warned.

  “You think she would refuse?” Alexander responded.

  “Oh no!” said the French emperor. “But tomorrow the post leaves, and in five days all Paris would know the details of Your Majesty’s figure from head to toe.… And then, I take an interest in your health. So I hope you will be able to resist temptation.”

  Beneath the bonhomie, however, Napoleon found a far more intractable Alexander than he expected. With urgent business in rebellious Spain (which Bonaparte had annexed), the French emperor was eager to secure the Russian tsar’s promise that he would fight with his forces if Austria became aggressive during his absence. Alexander hedged. “Emperor Alexander is as stubborn as a mule,” Bonaparte exclaimed in frustration. “He plays deaf to whatever he doesn’t want to hear. This confounded business in Spain is costing me dear!”