Alexander I: Tsar of War and Peace

by Alan Palmer

  A Russo-French army of fifty thousand men, including perhaps a few Austrians, marching via Constantinople into Asia, would no sooner appear on the Euphrates than it would throw England into panic and force her to seek mercy from the continental powers. I am within striking distance in Dalmatia, Your Majesty on the Danube. Within a month of our plans being settled, this army could be at the Bosphorus. The blow would be felt in India and England would be on her knees. I should reject no preliminary agreement which might enable me to achieve so magnificent a result. But the mutual interest of our states must be counter-balanced and combined … Everything could be settled and signed before 15 March. By 1 May our troops could be in Asia and Your Majesty’s army in Stockholm … Wisdom and policy dictates that we must do as destiny demands and keep pace with the irresistible march of events … What was decided at Tilsit will determine the destiny of the World.

  The letter reached St Petersburg on 25 February and was immediately conveyed by Caulaincourt to the Tsar. Alexander read it in the ambassador’s presence, ‘his expression gradually becoming more and more animated’, as Caulaincourt at once reported back to Paris.25 ‘This is the way it was at Tilsit,’ Alexander commented, as his eyes ran down the page. ‘There’s the man in all his greatness.’ Napoleon had suggested they might once again meet to discuss the future division of Asia; and Alexander immediately declared to Caulaincourt his willingness to journey westwards into Germany for fresh discussion with Napoleon as soon as the Emperor wished. Meanwhile Rumiantsev and Caulaincourt would discuss means of reconciling the conflicting interests of the two empires in Turkey and the Near East.

  These problems, and especially the fate of Constantinople, could not be speedily settled over a glass of tea, as Alexander knew full well. But while the diplomats were studying the map of south-eastern Europe there was no reason why the Generals should not recover lost prestige by a successful campaign against Sweden’s Finnish provinces.26 Even before the arrival of Napoleon’s letter, Alexander had authorized General Buxhöwden to cross the Finnish frontier with a force of some 24,000 men; and, at the time of Caulaincourt’s audience, the Tsar and his ministers were anxiously awaiting first reports from Finland. They knew that the army consisted of a small corps of regular veterans supplemented by hastily levied serfs, badly equipped and ill-trained; and success depended on taking the Swedes by surprise. At first all went well for Buxhöwden. The Swedes had only a thin line of defenders stretched along an extensive frontier and they offered little serious resistance. Within three weeks General Sukhtelen’s corps was in Helsinki; but there the Russians were faced by the formidable island fortress of Sveaborg, its guns commanding the seaward approach to the city. Once Sveaborg was in Russian hands then Alexander knew he could proclaim the annexation of Finland. But for nearly two months Sveaborg defied the invader. Alexander’s wish to present his subjects with a victory before Easter was frustrated. At last, on 3 May, with no sign of a relief force breaking through the Russian blockade, the fortress surrendered. And six days later the Tsar proclaimed the incorporation of the Grand-Duchy of Finland in his Empire. A Te Deum was sung in the Kazan Cathedral and a victory parade ordered in the streets of the capital.

  But, though Sweden was a traditional enemy, this latest war failed to capture the public imagination. It completed the ruin of Baltic trade, and seemed to many a wastage of men and material. Few onlookers lined the streets for the victory procession. Even the weather was against Alexander. The day was bitterly cold and gusty squalls off the Gulf blew around the prancing statuary along the quays ‘to the discomfiture of everyone, especially the ladies’, as Joseph de Maistre wrote.27 It was a hollow triumph nor did it even mark the ending of the war, for Finnish guerrillas continued to resist in the woods and forests and the Swedes showed no inclination to make peace.

  The Death of Lisinka (May 1808)

  Within three days of the parade, tragedy enveloped the Tsar’s private life. Early in the morning of 12 May his eighteen-month-old daughter died from convulsions in her mother’s arms as Alexander and Elizabeth stood helplessly beside her cot. They had known as they watched the troops filing past that she was suffering from a dental infection and onlookers noted the anxiety on Elizabeth’s face as she waited for the parade to end so that she could resume her long vigil; but no one in the family thought that the child’s life was in danger. Momentarily the shock unnerved Alexander and he saw his loss as a penalty of retribution. Wylie sought to console him; there was every hope that he and Elizabeth would have other children. But Alexander was not to be comforted. ‘No, my friend’, he said sorrowfully, ‘God does not love my offspring.’28

  For Elizabeth the death of ‘Lisinka’ was an even greater wound, one from which her spirit never fully recovered. Throughout the preceding year she had resented ‘each moment that takes me away from my little angel’, as she had written before the child’s illness. Lisinka had been a bond strengthening her love for Alexander, enabling her to ignore all those hours he chose once more to pass with Maria Naryshkin, steeling her loyalty to him in the hard tussle with his family. Now that Lisinka was gone the pleasures and quarrels of the world seemed ephemeral and for more than two years Elizabeth remained in mourning, appearing on state occasions sombre behind the magnificence of Alexander and Marie Feodorovna, as though she were a spectral figure from a hidden past. It was not that she wished to draw attention to her wretchedness. She accepted the burden of duty mechanically, weaving into the tapestry of daily life a thin thread of spiritual vision, which those close to her sensed but could not themselves perceive. Sometimes alone and sometimes with her sister, she would find understanding, walking silently in the gardens of Tsarskoe Selo or beside the reeds off Kammionyi Island or beneath the trees surrounding the Nevsky Monastery, where both her babies were buried. In later years, other tortures of the mind led Alexander himself to seek similar consolation; but for the moment, though sympathizing at first with Elizabeth’s anguish, he could not share her sensitivity and became impatient with her protracted sorrow. It seemed enough to him to lose himself in the ordered pattern of government. Being too busy to weep for long and readily indulging his passion for others, he failed to recognize for more than a decade the inner loneliness of his consort. His imagination, terrifyingly gloomy whenever he lost confidence in his public mission, never fully comprehended her depths of private grief; and the breach between husband and wife became wider with every month that passed, as everyone at Court could see.

  Erfurt

  The early summer of 1808 brought Alexander a succession of political disappointments. The talks between Rumiantsev and Caulaincourt made little progress; for, as Napoleon himself demanded, ‘Who was to hold Constantinople?’29 The war with Sweden dragged on; and it was clear that the Finns were not as yet ready to enjoy the benefits of Tsarist rule. The French remained in Prussia and continued to court the Polish gentry. And the meeting with Napoleon, first projected in early March, was postponed because national insurrections by the peoples of Spain and Portugal kept him at Bayonne. It was difficult to conjure up armies to march down the Euphrates when one’s attention was focused on the Ebro and the Tagus.

  Yet by August it was clear that Russia stood to gain from the embarrassments of the French in the Iberian Peninsula. If Napoleon needed to mount full-scale military operations south of the Pyrenees, he would have to withdraw troops from Prussia; and once he weakened his position in Germany, he would depend upon Russian goodwill to maintain the existing order and to restrain the Austrians from taking advantage of the Spanish crisis to seek revenge for Austerlitz. So long as Russian friendship was essential for French security, Alexander might reasonably expect a free hand against the Turks. Hence, while continuing to shower compliments on Napoleon personally each time he met Caulaincourt, Alexander now began to determine the pace of events in a way which had seemed impossible during the patronizing exchanges at Tilsit a year before. In the last week of the month Alexander wrote to Napoleon informing him that, unless he hear
d otherwise from the French, he had every intention of setting out for central Germany on 13 September and he hoped to meet Napoleon a fortnight later in Erfurt, the small town in Thuringia where the two Emperors had agreed, in the spring, that they would gather in conference.30

  The Tsar’s message arrived in Paris on 5 September. The news from Spain and Portugal continued to be bad, and there was ample evidence that many prominent Austrians were seeking to encourage Emperor Francis to strike once more at the French. Napoleon was accordingly determined to strengthen his alliance with Russia and to let the Habsburgs show how little they counted in Europe’s affairs. On the very day he received Alexander’s letter, Napoleon ordered Marshal Lannes to set out for the Vistula and escort the Tsar westwards to Thuringia.31 At the same time Napoleon’s court dignitaries were instructed to plan entertainments and festivities for the Erfurt Congress so as to present the Emperor of the French as a second Charlemagne. Everyone of cultural eminence in Germany was invited to Erfurt, provided he was neither a Prussian nor an Austrian subject; and all the tributary kings and princes of the new European order were expected to attend, though not the King of Prussia and certainly not the Emperor of Austria. Moreover, to stress the links between metropolitan France and Napoleon’s German dependencies, it was decreed that the Théatre Français – a company of thirty-two actors and actresses, with the great François-Joseph Talma at their head – should set out for Thuringia and honour their sovereign’s guests with a heavy programme of classical tragedy. Alexander should thus see for himself the panoply of French majesty, and measure it in his mind against childhood memories of his grandmother’s Court. How could such a pageant fail to gratify his vanity?

  Napoleon left St Cloud for Erfurt on 22 September convinced he would again be able to charm and flatter Alexander. On the day before he set out, he visited a special panorama of Tilsit in the Boulevard des Capucines, as though seeking to rekindle the emotional fire which had ignited so readily in the Prussian borderlands the previous summer.32 Over fourteen months the exchange of courtesies, gifts and letters had dulled Napoleon’s natural suspicion of a man who had already once veered from collaboration with France into open hostility. Then, in 1803, the Tsar had depended for advice on Czartoryski, with his strongly anti-French bias; but now, if Alexander turned to anyone, it was to Rumiantsev, whom Napoleon knew to be ‘strongly convinced’ that Russia’s ‘best interest is to remain united with France’. As he travelled to Erfurt Napoleon consistently undervalued Alexander’s political astuteness and exaggerated both his dependence on Rumiantsev and his attachment to the French connection. ‘Tell the Emperor he can count on me just as he can on you’, Alexander instructed Caulaincourt as they prepared for the Erfurt Congress; and both Caulaincourt and Napoleon took him at his word.33

  People far closer to Alexander than Napoleon or his ambassador were equally convinced of the Tsar’s loyalty to his Tilsit engagements. Throughout the summer of 1808 Marie Feodorovna and the Grand Duchess Catherine tried to persuade him of his folly in seeking another meeting with ‘Bonaparte’. In an almost hysterical letter a week before the Tsar’s departure from the capital, his mother urged him not to go to Erfurt: he should not risk his person by associating himself with so unscrupulous a ruler deep in Germany; and he should turn back from his foolish policy of bolstering the French at a time when it was becoming clear that ‘the idol was about to topple’.34 Patiently the Tsar replied, carefully explaining his policy: Russia, he said,

  needs to breathe freely for a time and, during this valuable interlude, must build up her material and her forces … Only in deepest silence must we work and not by making known our armaments nor our preparations, nor yet by loudly denouncing the one whom we are defying … If such be the will of God, we shall see his fall with calmness … The wisest of all policies is to await the right moment to act.35

  The Dowager Empress was not convinced. She made abundantly clear her strong disapproval of Alexander’s journey to Thuringia and the policy which she assumed he still intended to pursue: but she did not try to prevent her second son, Constantine, from attending the Erfurt Congress as well as his brother.

  Alexander sent his retinue ahead of him and travelled lightly in a calèche, a four-wheeled carriage with a falling top, so that he could cover the seven hundred and fifty miles from Petersburg to Erfurt ‘faster than any courier’.36 He broke his journey for a couple of days in Königsberg, where Frederick William and Louise offered him such hospitality as they could afford.37 Louise, like his mother, warned Alexander not to trust Napoleon and begged him to seek the early evacuation by the French of the Prussian lands. As ever, Alexander was deeply moved by her entreaties; but he contented himself with vague assurances, pledges of personal devotion and counsels of patience. He also had talks with Baron vom Stein, Prussia’s chief minister and a relentless foe of Napoleon. Stein urged Alexander to take the lead in organizing, together with the Prussians and Austrians, a concerted front against the French hold on Europe. Alexander was impressed by the forcefulness of Stein’s personality but had no wish to involve himself at that moment in diplomatic intrigues. After an affectionate farewell to Louise, he hurried on to Bromberg (Bydgoszcz), where he crossed the Vistula, and Kustrin (Kostrzyn), where he turned south so as to avoid the embarrassment of passing through occupied Berlin. In Paris Napoleon’s agents kept him well informed of the general mood at Königsberg and he was far from pleased to hear that ‘these wretched Prussians’ had been ‘interfering once more’ in his affairs.38

  But everything that Marshal Lannes reported to the Emperor was pleasantly reassuring. Lannes had greeted Alexander, in Napoleon’s name, as soon as he crossed into the Grand-Duchy of Warsaw. He found him full of goodwill and impressed by the attentions accorded him as he journeyed westwards. From Bromberg to Erfurt, a distance of more than 350 miles, the towns were occupied by French troops and Alexander found he was constantly being saluted by Guards of Honour from some of the finest regiments that had fought against his army. But Alexander’s thoughts were racing ahead of him. ‘If everything goes well as I hope it will’, he told Marshal Lannes more than once, ‘I greatly wish to see Paris and spend a long time there with the Emperor Napoleon.’39

  Such news was gratifying to Napoleon; but he was suddenly confronted by an unexpected problem. Alexander’s calèche was bowling along at such a pace that it began to seem as if he would arrive in Erfurt before his host. Napoleon had not minded keeping him waiting on the right bank of the Niemen before the famous meeting on the raft. But the Erfurt Congress was intended to be a magnificent spectacle in honour of France’s friend and ally, and the opening scene of this living pageant would be ruined should the Tsar make his entry too soon. Napoleon, who had twice stopped in the Rhineland to review brigades of cavalry on his way from St Cloud, was now forced to drive his horses so hard that he covered the 150 miles between one breakfast and the next. Even so he would have lost the undignified race had not Alexander – or was it the resourceful Lannes? – proposed a break in Weimar to take rest, refreshment and a bath before setting out on the final lap to Erfurt. Napoleon arrived in time to check with the King of Saxony and with General Oudinot (who commanded the citadel) that all was ready to awaken Gothic Erfurt from its two centuries of sleep. Then, once sure the triumphal arches were in position and the artillery almost primed for the salute, Napoleon rode out towards Weimar to greet the Tsar.40

  They met in the village of Münchenholzen, a few miles east of the town, early in the afternoon of 27 September, the seventh anniversary of the Moscow coronation. Alexander stepped down from his carriage and the two men embraced and exchanged pleasantries before the Tsar mounted a horse provided from the French imperial stables and saddled with white ermine in his honour. Side by side Napoleon and Alexander rode slowly into town: the crowd, unused to such occasions, marvelled at the colour of the uniforms, at the burnished glint of steel from swords and helmets as the escort trotted past, and at the tall, erect figure of the Tsar, who seemed s
o much more impressive on horseback than the Emperor of the French. Many onlookers recorded their impressions that day, for it was not often that History rode down their streets; and yet most felt stunned by the sheer noise as much as by anything they saw – bells pealing from towers and steeples, the low hills on either side of the town throwing back the thunder of Oudinot’s guns and the less predictable salvoes of the city’s own cannon ranged along the ramparts. And down in the narrow streets themselves, there was the constant iteration of drums, the rattle of troops springing to attention as the procession moved by, the roar of ‘Vivent les Empereurs’. Napoleon looked contented, Alexander beamed affably (for he was too deaf to be troubled by the din). That night the town was illuminated, the two sovereigns remained talking until ten o’clock, Napoleon declared the townsfolk exempt from paying for the festivities, and everyone joined in the celebrations, even if a little doubt remained over what precisely was their purpose.41

  Napoleon’s good humour continued for most of the next week. They talked of political questions in the morning, rode in the afternoon, dined with the rulers of Saxony, Bavaria, Württemberg, Weimar and Westphalia, and in the evening attended the theatre or a concert. ‘I am well pleased with Alexander and he must be with me’, Napoleon wrote back to the Empress Josephine. ‘If he were a woman, I think I would make him my mistress.’42 On 4 October the Emperors, and all the attendant royalty, were present at a production of Voltaire’s Oedipus; and when Talma reached the verse ‘The friendship of a great man is a favour from the Gods’, Alexander stood up and shook Napoleon’s hand vigorously while all the audience cheered this spontaneous act of live theatre.43 Two days later the royal cavalcade moved to Weimar where Alexander’s sister, Marie Pavlovna, helped to entertain her father-in-law’s guests. The Tsar had the doubtful pleasure of being escorted around the battlefield of Jena by Napoleon himself, who showed Alexander exactly how he had defeated Frederick William; but more to Alexander’s taste was a Grand Ball in Weimar, where he partnered the Queen of Westphalia. ‘The Emperor danced’, reported Napoleon to Josephine, ‘but not for me – after all, forty is forty.’44 No doubt at thirty Alexander might be excused such lightness of foot.