Alexander I: Tsar of War and Peace

by Alan Palmer

  In Paris it was said Alexander had left the city because urgent business called him back to Warsaw and St Petersburg. But his itinerary for the following five weeks gives the lie to that story. After two days in Brussels he turned south and travelled nearly two hundred and fifty miles as fast as his carriage would carry him to Dijon, then after attending a review of Austrian troops he crossed the Rhine and made for Wiesbaden and Frankfurt. Subsequently he travelled to Switzerland, visiting Konstanz, Zurich and Basle ‘journeying a great deal on foot, admiring the natural wealth of the countryside, often entering the homes of the peasants’, wrote one of his aides.42 Then northwards to Nuremberg and ultimately Berlin, before at last turning eastwards on 8 November and heading for Warsaw, and the responsibilities he was assuming as King of Poland. He had wandered across Europe as though in flight from himself, or from others. It was a strange epilogue to his years of mission.

  * The Holy Alliance, in its revised form, was a statement by the rulers of Austria, Prussia and Russia asserting their conviction of the need for ‘the Councils of Princes’ to be influenced by ‘the precepts of Justice, Christian Charity and Peace’. Other European sovereigns were invited to subscribe to the Alliance. Most of them did so; but not the Pope (who would not be associated with heretics and schismatics) nor the King of England (for constitutional reasons). As originally drafted the Alliance implied a promise of universal brotherhood between subjects as well as between rulers. Metternich left out such dangerous phrases; but significantly, when the terms of the Holy Alliance were announced in Russia, Alexander published the original text rather than the Treaty actually signed on 26 September.

  † The Second Treaty of Paris (20 November 1815) deprived France of two fortresses ceded to the Netherlands, the Saar valley to Prussia, and small areas along the frontiers with Switzerland, Bavaria and Sardinia-Piedmont. The French had to accept and maintain an Allied army of occupation which would garrison seventeen fortresses in northern and eastern France for at least three years and possibly five. They were also required to pay a war indemnity of seven hundred million francs and to return the art treasures originally brought to Paris by Napoleon as trophies of war.

  On the same day the British, Austrian, Russian and Prussian representatives signed a Quadruple Alliance, renewing the Treaty of Chaumont of 1814, and pledging themselves to joint action to uphold the peace settlement if it were again menaced by France. Article VI of the Quadruple Alliance provided for occasional meetings of the spokesmen of the Four Great Powers to discuss the general problems of Europe. It was from this Article that the so-called ‘Congress System’ of the period 1818–25 emerged.

  19

  Contrasts

  Alexander in Congress Poland (November 1815)

  Warsaw welcomed Poland’s new king on 7 November 1815 with guarded optimism and a display of officially stimulated enthusiasm. Alexander, wearing Polish uniform and the cordon of the White Eagle, made a fine entry into the city. He graciously declined the keys offered to him at the western gate by the civic dignitaries: ‘I come here not as a conqueror but as a protector and friend’, he declared. As he rode on to the Citadel acknowledging cheers from pretty Polish girls at open windows in the old town, it seemed as if the Poles had indeed, as one of them remarked, ‘finally found a King and a father’. At one moment he saw the mother of Adam Czartoryski curtseying to him from a balcony and raised his sword to her in a deeply respectful salute.1 Observers found the gesture comforting for as commander-in-chief of the Polish army the Grand Duke Constantine was already arousing opposition by his harsh discipline and bursts of ungovernable rage; the Polish nobility were counting on Alexander’s good sense to restrain his brother and they hoped he would turn for advice to his old friend, Prince Adam. Provided the Tsar-King respected the wishes of the patriots, there was some prospect of genuine Russo-Polish collaboration. It was gratifying to see he had not forgotten the ageing Princess Isabella Czartoryska, and most people assumed that, before leaving his Polish capital, he would nominate her eldest son as his Viceroy.

  For three weeks the aristocracy entertained Alexander liberally and he responded with appropriate pleasantries. There were brilliant receptions in the great houses night after night. On 17 November Alexander attended a ball given by Adam Czartoryski’s sister with whom he danced a vigorous Polonaise. Once again he was dressed as a Polish officer, wearing the distinctive cavalry uniform of his new subjects, the dress of men who had led charges against the Russians at Borodino and Dresden and Leipzig. He was amiably disposed to the Radziwills and other families whose members had fought against Russia in the recent campaigns. Tactfully he explained that he wished to ‘forget’ the past: he wisely refrained from using the words ‘pardon’ or ‘forgive’. Privately he even admitted he was disappointed at not having been able to achieve more for Poland at the Congress of Vienna: ‘The other sovereigns were strongly opposed to all my Polish projects’, he declared; and he added encouragingly, ‘But at least we have made the first step forward.’2 If this was the mood of their new King then there seemed to the Poles no reason why in time they should not receive ‘the western lands’ of Russia, the Polish-Lithuanian territories annexed by Catherine in 1793 and 1795. To any patriotic Pole this would be ‘the second step’ of a truly enlightened ruler.

  The Poles had no cause for complaint over the constitutional structure of the ‘Congress Kingdom’. At the end of his third week in Warsaw Alexander duly signed the Constitutional Charter drawn up by Czartoryski. On paper it was a liberal instrument of government.3 The Polish nation was promised ‘for all time to come’ a bi-cameral Diet (Sejm), which would share legislative power with the Tsar-King, and a separate executive State Council of five ministers and a number of royal nominees. The Charter guaranteed to the Poles freedom of worship for the ‘Christian faiths’, freedom of the press, and freedom from arbitrary arrest; and it also provided for an independent judiciary. There would be a Polish Secretary in St Petersburg and an Imperial Commissioner in Warsaw. In practice, of course, all these institutions were oligarchic rather than democratic and there was an almost inevitable risk of encroachments on civil liberties from the Russian element in the administration. The Upper House, the Senate, was a nominated body, with preference given to the older aristocracy and the Catholic episcopate; and the right to elect to the Lower House (in which there were nominated representatives as well as deputies) was limited to the gentry in the countryside and to property-owners in the towns. Moreover the Diet met for only one month in every two years and possessed no right to initiate legislation, being permitted only to discuss laws laid before it. Nevertheless these provisions did at least give the Poles the opportunity of internal self-government with a system of tariffs and taxation of their own, and the terms of the Charter were accepted by Alexander with perfect sincerity. Whatever others at St Petersburg might feel, the Tsar himself consciously separated in his mind the ‘Kingdom of Poland’ from the Empire as a whole. On more than one occasion in the following seven years he gave his advisers the impression that he was using Poland as a field for constitutional experiments which might be implemented on a larger scale in Russia proper.4

  Yet when he travelled on eastwards from Warsaw to Vilna in the closing days of November, Alexander left behind him a disappointed city. On the eve of his departure he had, as expected, nominated a Viceroy; but he chose, not Adam Czartoryski nor any other representative of the traditional Polish dynasties, but a relatively obscure member of the lesser nobility, General Joseph Zaionczek, who had previously served Napoleon. The General was an old man, incapacitated from a war wound. If the sovereign was to be represented by a figurehead then he was an admirable man for the post. But real authority rested with Constantine, as commander-in-chief of the army, and Novosiltsov, the Imperial Commissioner. Czartoryski was indeed made a member of the State Council and a Senator, nominally President of the Senate; but he saw the elevation of Zaionczek as a warning that Alexander was under pressure from Russian nationalists who rese
nted the reconstitution in any form of a Polish kingdom. And as Constantine and Novosiltsov became increasingly powerful in Warsaw, there were many others in the city who shared Czartoryski’s misgivings.5

  There is no doubt Alexander’s Polish policy aroused resentment among many Russian landowners and veteran officers. Count Lanskoi, the Tsar’s first administrator of the liberated Grand-Duchy, had voiced the feelings of a considerable number of his compatriots when, in the previous May, he protested to the Tsar at the proposal to give the Poles an army of their own: it would be, he said, ‘a snake spouting its venom at us’.6 Alexander knew that many of his Russian subjects regarded the Poles as hereditary enemies, hardly less of a menace than the Turks, and it was intolerable that a nation which had collaborated so flagrantly with Napoleon in 1812 should be the chief beneficiary of Russia’s final victory. Hence Alexander could not identify himself too closely with specifically Polish causes and ambitions, and he certainly could not risk returning to Russia dependent for what happened in Warsaw on so able and unpopular a figure as Czartoryski. It would, of course, have been far wiser not to have patronized the Polish nobility in the first place. As it was, the Tsar’s inconsistencies alienated the sympathies of his new subjects in the Congress Kingdom while failing to allay the suspicion of his old subjects that the Poles had in some way stolen a march on them. The contradictions of his half-solution of the Polish Question were to confound politics for the remainder of his reign and beyond it.7

  St Petersburg Once More

  It took Alexander more than a fortnight to travel back from Warsaw to St Petersburg, far longer than he had anticipated. The roads were deep in snow and passage of the rivers was treacherous. Moreover there were frequent delays caused by broken bridges, only partially repaired after the ravages of the 1812 Campaign. Alexander was well able to see for himself the huge tasks of reconstruction. He stopped briefly at Vilna, where once again the aristocrats in Society fluttered around him8 and then he journeyed on through Riga and Pskov until he eventually reached the Winter Palace in the small hours of 14 December. Elizabeth, who had lingered in Germany while he was in Poland, was already back in the capital, having arrived a day and a half ahead of her husband.9 For the first time in three years sovereign and consort were in residence at St Petersburg.

  ‘The great soul has now once more entered its great body’, reported Joseph de Maistre to his master,10 and the metaphor was well chosen. For the Tsar returned home still uplifted by the spiritual introspection of the past year. Peace was celebrated not with public festivities but with a long and solemn act of thanksgiving in the Kazan Cathedral. The clergy, in all the cities of the Empire, read out the original draft of the Holy Alliance, and the manifesto which the Tsar promulgated on the Russian New Year’s Day reflected his preoccupation with mystical experiences. His subjects were told that their deeds had been accomplished through the strength of God and that, for the betterment of their souls, they should choose to humble themselves before the Almighty rather than take pride in what had been achieved. When he was hailed as ‘conqueror of the invincible’ he modestly deprecated the honour: he thanked army and people for their courage and fortitude during the long struggle with that ‘impious criminal of common law’, Bonaparte, but in general he called upon those who wished to serve him to continue ‘the fight against the spirit of evil which is threatening to overcome the good’.11 Whatever might happen elsewhere in Europe, the public morality of Russia would be based upon the tenets of the Holy Alliance. For the next five years his statements of policy, both in home affairs and diplomacy, were befogged with apocalyptic obscurity.

  Those of his subjects who understood the problems of government were puzzled. During the Tsar’s absence abroad, administration had depended on the decisions of a Committee of Ministers headed by old General Saltykov. The Committee had been able to handle day-to-day problems but refused to accept responsibility for any major changes in finance or home affairs. Alexander himself was aware that good government had virtually broken down; shortly before leaving Warsaw he sent a stern message to Saltykov complaining of the way in which the Committee was shirking its duty.12 But by then the damage was already done. ‘A quarter of a million unsettled matters await the supreme decision’, a French diplomat reported to Paris shortly after Alexander’s return.13 Some, at least, of the public acclamation welcoming the Tsar sprang from a belief he would set things right again. Alexander was pleased to receive a verse epistle written ‘in love and gratitude to our great monarch’ by the star pupil of the new Lyceum at Tsarskoe Selo, Alexander Pushkin.14 But sixteen-year-old romantics, with an age of peace ahead of them, are not likely to be satisfied with vague assurances of religious exaltation and, like others of his generation, young Pushkin was soon to be disillusioned. For veterans, who had seen for themselves ‘how good it is in foreign lands’, it was even harder to be expected to find consolation for the incompetence and iniquities around them in words of Holy Writ.15 The contrast between the Tsar’s status as Europe’s liberator and arbiter and his failure to provide the ‘great body’ of his Empire with a wise administration was an intolerable affront to officers and men who had fought their way ‘to the banks of the Rhine and the Seine’ and wished to see a policy of benevolent reform in their own land. As one of the returning Guards officers later explained, ‘It became unbearable to watch the empty life in St Petersburg, listening to the grey beards who lauded everything that was old and poured scorn on every progressive thought. We had left them a hundred years behind.’16

  Had Alexander been an unimaginative reactionary ruler, insensitive to foreign impressions himself, like his brothers Constantine and Nicholas, he might well have met this mood of frustration by rigid repression, establishing a régime at least as tyrannical as in his father’s day. But, in a muddled way, he understood and sympathized with the soldiers who had served him abroad. Despite his love of military showmanship, he always hated the all-pervading grief and social disruption of war and he felt a responsibility for those who had suffered. He believed, rightly, that the best way of combating Russia’s ills was by efficient administration. Less justifiably, he thought this objective could be attained only through a disciplined and fundamentally militaristic system, for he was after all his father’s son. Almost as soon as he returned to St Petersburg he selected the man who was to have his confidence for the remainder of his reign, and who indeed in a sense had never lost it. On 5 January 1816 General Arakcheev was appointed Saltykov’s deputy on the Committee of Ministers, with responsibility for supervising the Committee’s activities and reporting on them to the Tsar. Although Arakcheev was not given the titles which Speransky enjoyed six years previously, he was now as much the Tsar’s grand vizier as the State Secretary had ever been, the sole intermediary between the sovereign and his ministers.17 Speransky’s elaborate Council of State was a thing of the past.

  The Arakcheev System and the Military Colonies

  Arakcheev had never been a popular figure in St Petersburg. The passage of time had not brought out any redeeming features in his character. In Alexander’s eyes he had two supreme virtues: absolute loyalty and a capacity for hard work. To everyone else, however, he seemed an uncultured bully, terrifying and unlovable, ‘a man’, wrote one of his lieutenants, ‘with … cold colourless eyes, a thick and very inelegant nose shaped like a shoe, a rather long chin, and tightly compressed lips on which no one could remember having seen a smile or a laugh’.18 He carried out orders without questioning them and had something of the brutal administrative energy which had marked out Peter the Great, but he also possessed greater mental powers than his enemies cared to admit; he was, for example, perfectly able to prepare digests of the Committee’s sessions, summarizing for Alexander details of financial questions with the skill he had once shown in explaining army regulations and all the ritual of a military parade. Since Arakcheev sought neither monetary rewards nor honours, he regarded the sheer exercise of authority as sufficient recompense for the services he wa
s rendering to the State; but he was determined to let people discover how powerful he was, and he therefore took delight in making petitioners to the Tsar deliver their appeal in the first instance to his own office in Liteiny Prospect.19 He alone – and not the Minister of the Interior or the Minister of Police or one of the chamberlains of the Palace – would decide who was to see the Tsar, when, and about what topics. The fact that unlike so many of his petitioners Arakcheev had remained in St Petersburg during the dramatic months of the campaign against Napoleon did not increase the general respect for him or for his office. It was bad enough to return from ‘free-thinking Europe’ and endeavour to settle down again in ‘feudal Russia’; but then to find every prospect of improved conditions blocked by the obdurate taskmaster in Liteiny Prospect was galling in the extreme. Arakcheev, long despised by St Petersburg Society and feared throughout the lower ranks of the army, swiftly became the hated symbol of frustrated hopes and repression, the most evil of the good Tsar’s counsellors.