Alexander I: Tsar of War and Peace

by Alan Palmer

  On 11 April the Allies agreed on Napoleon’s fate. Their terms were embodied in a formal document subsequently known as the Treaty of Fontainebleau.13 It was conveyed by Caulaincourt to Napoleon on the following day. After an abortive attempt to poison himself, Napoleon signed the Treaty on the morning of 13 April. Seven days later, with the Treaty duly ratified, he set out for Elba; and in Paris Alexander and his allies began to study the possibilities of drafting a peace treaty with France, as a first step towards the reconstruction of Europe as a whole.

  Peacemaking in Paris

  Castlereagh had hoped it would be possible to reach a preliminary agreement on outstanding diplomatic questions while the Allies were together in Paris that summer.14 He was speedily disillusioned. The capital of France, he confessed in a note to his government, ‘is a bad place for business’.15 After weary months of campaigning across the continent it was tempting for the political and military leaders of the Allied states to enjoy the trivial whirl of festivity and entertainment before again immersing themselves in what Alexander described apologetically as ‘the muddied waters of politics’.16 It was also, from the Tsar’s point of view, expedient to protract as long as possible the celebration of peace. Militarily he was in an unassailable position. His troops were masters of central and eastern Europe from the Vistula to the Rhine: they stood guard over Dresden and Leipzig; they garrisoned the cities and towns of Poland; they paraded in Basle and Magdeburg; and they completed construction of ‘Fort Alexander’ and ‘Fort Constantine’ on the Karthaus hill at Coblenz, above the vineyards of the Moselle. A string of fortified camps across France from Montmirail to Metz confirmed Russian military power: no other national contingent in Paris itself was so strong. Because of the slow response in the Tsar’s vast Empire to any sense of urgency, Russia was in 1814 at last ready for war at a time when her Allies sought only peace. Time was as much on Alexander’s side now as in the crisis months of the Napoleonic invasion. His prime task was to undermine the political influence of Austria, by wearing thin the friendship of Castlereagh and Metternich and by establishing a new Franco-Russian understanding, ensuring close collaboration between his own ministers and the representatives of Bourbon France. If he could also retain his undoubted popularity with the people of Paris and win the support of what Metternich termed ‘the Polish French and Frenchified Poles’ in the city, so much the better for Russia.17 The hour called for elaborate exercises in charm and in tact. No other contemporary public figure could display these qualities to such advantage.

  Alexander began well enough. He was generous, tolerant and courteous. When obsequious French dignitaries suggested a change in name for the Pont d’Austerlitz so as to spare their liberator pained memories, he declined the proposal: ‘It is enough’, he declared, ‘for people to know that the Emperor of Russia and his army have crossed over the bridge.’18 He found the right words for any occasion. Thus he was heard acknowledging to Lafayette the need to abolish serfdom in Russia and he went out of his way to assure Kosciuszko publicly at Countess Jablonowska’s ball that he believed in the merits of a free Polish state.19 It is true that when passing through the ground floor of the Louvre he asked, with gentle irony, whether Napoleon had found a use for the Salle de la Paix; but he was in no sense vindictive towards his fallen enemy or his dignitaries of state. The young English radical, John Cam Hobhouse, went to Sir Charles Stuart’s ball in the Hotel de Montesquieu on 4 May and was surprised to find Tsar Alexander waltzing with the wife of Marshal Ney and the widow of Marshal Augereau, ‘both nice-looking women’;20 and other visitors to Paris commented on the attentions Alexander lavished on Napoleon’s stepdaughter, Hortense, and his stepson, Eugène Beauharnais, who had commanded the left wing of the Grand Army at Borodino. Years afterwards Hortense’s second son, Louis (then aged six), remembered the tall curly-haired Russian visitor to whom he had tried furtively to present a small ring as a gesture of friendship and affection. Alexander, though retaining in the Hermitage many gifts from Napoleon I, politely declined this addition to the collection from the future Napoleon III.21

  But the strangest and saddest of Alexander’s friendships in Paris was the attachment he formed for young Louis’s grandmother, the Empress Josephine. Robbed of her first husband by the Revolution and of her second by the empty necessity of dynastic ambition, Josephine had spent four years in seclusion at Malmaison, watching the shadows lengthen around her as the Imperial sun sank lower in Europe’s skies. Although only fifty, she was a tired woman overtaxed by the buffeting of life but still regarded with sympathy and respect by the people of Paris whose changing fortunes she had shared for over thirty years. It therefore seemed natural to the Tsar to pay a courtesy call on her at Malmaison.22 Each was charmed by the other. When Alexander returned to the Rue St Florentin he wrote at once to Josephine urging her not to be anxious for the future: ‘Though I have no wish to exploit the permission you have been kind enough to accord me, Madame’, he wrote, ‘I look forward to presenting my respects to you on Friday at your dinner hour.’23 He came again and again; and Josephine ordered new clothes and began planning elegant dinners, recapturing for Malmaison some of the glory the house and gardens had known during the Consulate. Other foreign royalties came, and in mid-May there was a party and picnic at Hortense’s estate of Saint-Leu, near the forest of Montmorency, where Josephine was delighted by Alexander’s company although, she confessed privately, saddened by the thought of Napoleon caged on Elba. That day she wore too flimsy a dress and contracted bronchial trouble from which she never fully recovered.24

  Neither Alexander nor Josephine herself realized she was a sick woman, and she persisted in keeping up her self-imposed duty as First Lady of Paris. On Tuesday, 24 May, she gave a magnificent dinner for Alexander, to which were also invited the Grand Duke Constantine, the young Grand Dukes Nicholas and Michael (recently arrived from St Petersburg) and the cream of Russian military society. Josephine and Alexander were partners for the opening dance of the ball which followed the dinner. Then, as it was a fine evening, they walked together between the rhododendrons to the uniquely designed hothouse which was Josephine’s especial pride. The night air, and all the contrasts in temperature, were too much for Josephine. By Saturday morning she was feverish and next day at noon she died.25 Alexander, deeply grieved, went in person to Saint-Leu to convey his regrets to her son and daughter. Since the change of allegiance in the French army made it difficult to provide an appropriate guard of honour for her funeral procession, Alexander ordered his own regiments, in full-dress uniform, to line the simple country road from Malmaison to he parish church at Rueil, where she was buried.26 It was a strange trick of irony that this final military homage should be rendered by Guards of the sovereign whom Napoleon had first taken into his confidence over his plans for a divorce and re-marriage. But there were so many surprising contradictions in Paris in these summer days that nothing, in life or in death, seemed unusual any longer.

  Despite his romantic enthusiasm for Josephine, Alexander tried in all honesty and good sense to accord the restored Bourbons the dignity and respect which they deserved as rulers of France. On Easter Day he arranged for seven priests, assisted once again by singers from his Imperial chapels, to offer solemn thanks to Almighty God for the downfall of tyranny at an improvised altar close to the spot where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had been guillotined.27 And as soon as Louis XVIII returned to France from Buckinghamshire, Alexander journeyed north to Compiègne to welcome him. It must, however, be admitted that the two sovereigns did not take to one another. Louis resented Alexander’s advice that he should show moderation towards the French people so that they might bask in ‘the memory of twenty-five years of glory’; and Alexander, for his part, was intensely irritated by the words chosen by Louis to thank the Prince Regent for Britain’s help in securing his restoration.* The Tsar was also surprised at Louis’s personal manners: it was odd to be pushed to one side by a monarch who insisted on entering the dining room ahead of his g
uests; and it was embarrassing to sit at table with a host who petulantly called on his attendants to serve him first with every dish. ‘We barbarians of the North are more polite in our homes’, Alexander remarked to one of his aides afterwards. ‘Anyone would think it was he who had come to place me on my throne.’28

  Such personal antipathies should not, of course, be exaggerated. Outwardly Alexander maintained good relations with the restored Bourbons. He wanted a treaty of peace with France so as to secure western Europe before tackling outstanding problems of European reconstruction elsewhere. For once Metternich agreed with him, though for different reasons. To the Austrians it seemed desirable to get Alexander away from the Polish expatriates in Paris before beginning serious negotiations over the future of Germany and the Vistulan lands. Castlereagh, too, wanted an early treaty with France so as to set it before Parliament while the country was still in such a haze of happy relief at the end of the war that it would not dispute too closely the actual terms of peace. The only statesman who believed that the treaty with France should form part of the general European settlement and not be drawn up on its own was the Prussian Chancellor, Hardenberg. On 29 April and again on 21 May Hardenberg proposed settlements of the German and Polish Questions; but each time the relative importance of differing regions in Europe produced such tension between the Great Powers that Alexander had no difficulty in convincing his colleagues that the time was not yet ripe to discuss such matters.29 Good progress was made on the draft French treaty throughout May, the Russians showing greater generosity over the frontiers in the north than either the British or the Austrians. No reparations were claimed, no limitations imposed on the size of the French army, no troops of occupation were forced on the defeated country, no insistence was made on returning the art treasures brought to the Louvre by Napoleon as trophies of victory. The boundaries of France corresponded closely to the frontier line of 1792, with the addition of Chambery, Annecy and the Papal enclave of Avignon. All the peacemakers congratulated themselves on their moderation and the treaty was duly signed on 30 May.30 It was subsequently known as the First Peace of Paris. Later settlements would prove far harder to achieve, as everyone suspected at the time.

  Technically, with the state of war legally ended and with an international congress pending in the autumn at Vienna, there was no reason why the sovereigns and statesmen should not have left Paris and returned home as soon as the French treaty was signed. Emperor Francis, ill-at-ease in the French capital, did indeed go back to Vienna, leaving Metternich and Schwarzenberg as his representatives with the other Allies. But for several months there had been talk of a visit by the Tsar to London, a proposal extended during the closing days of April into a general invitation for all the Allied leaders to participate in the peace celebrations of Napoleon’s most persistent enemy. It was hoped, by both Castlereagh and Metternich, that the traditional calm of London would provide a more agreeable setting for discussions on Polish and German affairs than the crowded and excitable salons of Paris.31 Alexander, too, expected diplomatic negotiations during the Allied State Visit and he accordingly insisted on taking with him to London, not only the surviving Russian military heroes whom the crowds wished to cheer, but Nesselrode and even Czartoryski (whose knowledge of Polish matters had brought him back into Alexander’s favour once Napoleon was overthrown). The Tsar and his attendants left Paris on 3 June for the two-day carriage journey to Boulogne where the Duke of Clarence (the future King William IV) was waiting in H.M.S. Impregnable to sail the foreign dignitaries across to Dover.32

  Catherine Blazes an English Trail

  No Russian Tsar or Grand Duke had come to England since Peter the Great’s sensational four months at Deptford in 1698. News of Alexander’s forthcoming visit accordingly created widespread excitement in the daily press and there was a brisk and profitable trade in semi-biographical pamphlets lauding his virtues. He was hailed by one writer as ‘the spotless hero’ on one page and ‘the magnanimous hero’ on the next, while another author greeted him as ‘the Christian Conqueror who Saved Paris’, and the anonymous compiler of what purported to be his impartial and authentic Life described him as ‘the agent appointed by Providence to restore Peace to the World’.33 Some of these impressions coincided remarkably closely with Alexander’s own estimate of his qualities, but ultimately they were an embarrassment. They necessitated a standard of behaviour and moral leadership which only a warrior saint or an accomplished actor could attain: Alexander had never been the one and was by now too exhausted to be the other.

  For several weeks before leaving Paris Alexander received first-hand reports of life in England from his sister Catherine. She had arrived at Sheerness as a self-invited guest two months previously, disembarking from the Duke of Clarence’s frigate on the very day the Tsar entered Paris.34 Since there was a wealth of no-talent bachelors among the Prince Regent’s brothers and cousins, everyone in London Society assumed Catherine had come in search of a husband. This was unfair. She was not out on a consort-safari as she already had high hopes of a Habsburg Archduke and, though she received proposals of marriage from the Dukes of Clarence and Sussex, she resolutely rejected all English suitors. The prime purpose of her visit was curiosity and the need for intellectual gratification. ‘She speaks English fluently and readily’, noted the Speaker of the House of Commons when he met her at dinner with the Prime Minister, Liverpool, on 5 April;35 and there is no doubt she believed she could dazzle the cultivated society of London by exercising her extremely able mind. So indeed she might have done had she been able to infiltrate gracefully into Devonshire House, or one of the other accepted centres of feminine Whiggism. But Catherine made three mistakes: she behaved as the Grandest Duchess of Russia rather than as the widowed Duchess of Oldenburg, the title by which the English invariably called her; she made plain her detestation of music (‘It makes me ill’); and she quarrelled early in her visit with the Russian ambassador who, had she been prepared to talk and listen to him, could have saved her from a crop of unfortunate solecisms.36 As it was, she decided that she liked the City of London but not the world of fashion: ‘People need different tastes from mine to find pleasure in Society here’, she wrote to her brother four weeks after her arrival. She added, however, ‘Some aspects of life command respect and admiration. By an unexpected favour I was able to visit Parliament and were I an Englishman I should never leave there.’37

  This last sentence should have put Alexander on his guard. Already she was irritated beyond measure at the Regent and his Court: ‘You know I am far from being puritanical or prudish’, she declared, ‘but with him and his brothers I have not only frequently to stand on my dignity but I do not even know what to do with my eyes and my ears. They have a brazen way of looking where eyes should never go. Our sister Marie would certainly die here.’38 If life in London was too licentiously frivolous for the grand-daughter of Catherine the Great, she had every intention of amusing herself in her customary way by allowing free flow to her love of mischief and political intrigue. Henceforth she delighted in fanning her brother’s jealousies, pitting his vanity and exhibitionism against the even more escapist vanity and exhibitionism of the Regent. Dorothea Lieven, the wife of the Russian ambassador, was too similar in temperament to the Grand Duchess to be a reliable chronicler of her visit and yet she was correct in suggesting that Catherine with her ‘resolute and imperious character … startled and astonished the English more than she pleased them’.39 There is no doubt Alexander would have been better served in London by the presence of his wife than his sister. But there was never any question of Elizabeth’s coming. She had seized the opportunity of returning peace to visit her mother in Baden, the first occasion she had gone home to her birthplace in twenty-two years. Catherine’s flamboyant egotism was no substitute for her sister-in-law’s patience and understanding.

  It was Catherine who insisted that Alexander would be better advised to stay with her in the Pulteney Hotel, off Piccadilly, than accept a suite of ro
oms in one of the royal palaces – a gesture hardly pleasing to the Regent. And it was again Catherine who made a point of cultivating the Opposition leaders and who wrote enthusiastically to her brother about the young Princess Charlotte who was, at that moment, on bad terms with her father, the Regent.40 The picture which Alexander gained of London’s intrigues from his sister was mightily prejudiced before ever he set foot on the Impregnable’s decks. On the other hand, Catherine correctly recounted the way in which ‘everyone smiles and claps hands at the mention of your name’. She went on a six-day tour of Oxfordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire: ‘All classes bless you and pay homage to your private character’, she wrote to Alexander on her return to London. ‘At the little town of Banbury the inhabitants came to meet me and insisted on leading in my carriage unharnessed of horses simply because I was sister to the great Emperor of Russia.’41 The visit to England held promise for Alexander of a triumphal progress: reality, alas, fell far short of expectations.

  Alexander in England (June 1814)

  The Impregnable, with Alexander and Frederick William and their suites aboard, made the crossing to Dover on 6 June in unseasonably gusty weather, and the Tsar had the mortification of discovering he was a bad sailor. The imperial and royal visitors were greeted with a twenty-one-gun salute from a naval squadron and a hundred rounds of ceremonial cannon from Dover Castle, which brought excited townsfolk rushing to the harbour. Alexander, coming ashore in the early evening, abandoned his original plan of driving immediately to London and thankfully accepted hospitality for the night from a local resident, a Mr Fector.42 Among the crowd on the quay was the young daughter of a British diplomat, Maria Capel, who was far from impressed by the Tsar’s bearing: ‘I was near enough to touch them and think the Emperor not the least handsome’, she wrote with the ruthless candour of a seventeen-year-old to her grandmother, ‘horribly Pink and Pudding-like.’ He left Dover at seven the following morning, with the minimum of fuss. Maria Capel remained critical of him: ‘I am afraid’, she wrote, ‘Alexander will cause great discontent by going Incog. this morning for the whole road has for 10 days been covered with triumphal arches and the inns full of flowers. Alexander did not pull off his hat or even bow to the people, which I think is rather odd.’43