According to several contemporaries, not all the mentors chosen by Catherine to educate the grand dukes were up to the tasks assigned them. Charles Masson, then part of the team, later delivered severe and ironic verdicts on his colleagues and on the personal responsibility of the empress for the vagaries in the education of the two boys:
Catherine composed an education plan for her grandsons, as she had composed instructions for the legislation of her peoples. Derived from Locke and Rousseau, […] this plan does honor to her mind; if the plan had been followed, then Alexander and Constantine would certainly have been the best raised princes in Europe. […] But as we saw with the code, once the laws were drawn up, they were left to a committee of ignoramuses, bigots, and buffoons, which fortunately never gathered. Similarly, the education of the young princes was entrusted to people who were barely able to read the plan whose spirit and letter they were supposed to follow. The only rule that they managed to understand was this (apparently because it was negative): the young grand dukes will not be taught either poetry or music, because it would take too long for them to become skillful. They tried to extend this rule to all the sciences.18
In fact, General Saltykov aroused contrasting but uniformly severe judgments on the part of his contemporaries. While Masson asserts with some contempt that the general’s role was almost non-existent—“His main occupation was to keep them from strong winds and to keep their chests uncongested”19—Saltykov was described by Countess Golovina20 as a servile courtier who had a harmful influence on Alexander’s character development:
His tutor Count Saltykov, a clever, scheming and treacherous man, constantly dictated behavior that would destroy openness of character and replace it with continual study of his own words and actions. Count Saltykov wanted to reconcile the favor of the Empress and that of her son, and so he involved the young Grand Duke in continual deception.21
And Prince Adam Czartoryski stressed the hypocritical good manners used by the old courtier and his role as intercessor between Catherine and her son Paul:
Count Nicholas Saltykov […] supervised the education of the two grand dukes. Small in stature, with a huge head, grimacing and nervous, and a state of health that demanded constant attention, […] he passed as the most astute courtier in Russia. […] The count was not only the channel by which messages and admonitions from Empress Catherine passed to the young grand dukes, but it was he who carried the word each time Catherine had something to say to Grand Duke Paul, and he omitted or softened what was sometimes disagreeable or overly severe in the orders or reproaches the Empress sent to her son. He did the same with the answers he carried back, he kept back half the things he had been told and modified the rest such that both sides were satisfied with being reciprocally explained to each other, as much as circumstances allowed. This ruse as intermediary meant he alone knew the truth and he refrained from speaking it. Perhaps there was merit in filling this role, but it has to be recognized that a man with the bearing and character of the Count was scarcely suitable for directing the education of the young heir of an empire, nor could he have a salutary impression on his character.22
Whatever the case, beyond these unflattering portraits, it should be stressed that despite his moral deficiencies and incompetence in education, Saltykov knew how to surround the two children with affection. And Alexander remained grateful for this affection to the point that in 1818 when Saltykov died, the emperor attended the burial of his old governor and accompanied his coffin on foot to the cemetery.
Severe about Saltykov, Masson was equally so about Protasov, whom he considered insignificant and weak in character, in a manner both comical and crude:
Protasov, governor of the elder, would have been more in place if he had been named apothecary. He came each day to make a report to Saltykov of the most insipid details, especially of the number of stools the prince had produced. Blinkered, mysterious, bigoted and pusillanimous, he was not wicked, but he made himself ridiculous in the eyes of everybody, except his pupil’s, who noticed only his attachment to him and acknowledged his gratitude, whereas according to malign courtiers General Protasov merited only contempt.23
On the other hand, most of the teachers were men of talent: in his memoirs, Masson pays homage to the pedagogic qualities of Kraft, Pallas, and Laharpe. But he also stresses that these teachers had only limited latitude and remained, with respect to decency and morality, under the strict control, even censorship, of Saltykov and Protasov, as he relates in this amusing anecdote.
The famous Pallas gave them a botany class in the gardens near Pavlovsk. The explanation of the Linnaean system about the sexes of flowers and their propagation gave the young people their first ideas about that of humans, and led to a flood of questions both very pleasant and naïve. This alarmed their governors: Pallas was told to avoid details about pistils and stamens, and the botany course was halted.24
Masson also salutes Samborski’s humanity, which he judged open and tolerant. But to Masson, the priest, who wore neither a beard nor religious vestments, appeared to be an original, more preoccupied with spreading his expertise in agronomy than with teaching the Orthodox faith to the young grand dukes. In fact, Samborski gave them only the superficial rudiments of a religious education, to the point that while Alexander was henceforth pleased to follow the Orthodox liturgy and to observe its rites, he neither read nor knew scripture, and as he would admit much later, he was not a sincere believer.
Catherine was full of prudence and spirit, she was a great woman and her memory will live forever in the history of Russia. But relative to that part of the education that develops true piety in the heart, we were at the court in St. Petersburg at the same point as in everything else: much exterior practice, but the holy essence of Christianity was hidden from us.25
Throughout these years of study, unlike Constantine who was pugnacious and rebellious and made life difficult for his governors whom he did not hesitate to slap or bite, Alexander proved a rather assiduous student, full of the desire to learn:
Kraft spoke one day of the hypotheses of certain philosophers on the nature of light, and said that Newton had thought that it was a constant emanation from the sun. Alexander, then aged twelve, responded: “I don’t think so, for if it were, the sun would become smaller every day.” This objection, made with as much naïveté as spirit, had in fact been the strongest one offered to the great Newton. It proved the sagacity of the young Grand Duke.26
At Catherine’s express request, the children were raised in modesty, if not prudery: the empress stressed this principle forcefully in her instructions to Saltykov, even if it was thwarted by the slackness of her own morals and those of her courtiers. But it is far from the principle to the reality, and on this point the testimony of Masson is again both precious and funny:
Catherine had required that her grandsons be kept in perfect ignorance of the mysteries of love, reserving such instruction for herself and intending to have them initiated when she wanted to marry them; but a pleasant event aborted this plan. One day, a greyhound belonging to the princes mated with a female in their presence; they observed curiously this maneuver and demanded an explanation. General Protasov, quite frightened, tried in vain to separate the dogs, and we know what physical obstacle prevents this. So the princes had time to examine things, and Alexander responded to his governor who assured him that the dogs were fighting: “Oh, no! No! You can’t fool me. I see that they are marrying.” This was a thunderclap for Protasov, who was responsible for the prince’s innocence. He came trembling to tell Count Saltykov that the cat was out of the bag. They conferred and precautions were taken so the princes did not go to entertain the grandmother with what they had seen. She would have been outraged to see her plan fail.27
Thanks to these witnesses, we may measure to what point the daily life of the grand dukes as much as their intellectual and psychological development, starting in 1784, were punctuated by the permanent contact they had with governors and tutors app
ointed by Catherine. It was a disparate group, since in the intimate circle of the grand dukes there coexisted well-tempered characters and less courageous men, scholars with established reputations and notoriously ignorant courtiers. The motivations that guided Catherine in such choices were confused, to say the least. But starting in the second half of 1784, these disparities assumed less importance. From that date, Frédéric-César de Laharpe, initially the French teacher, rose to the rank of principal governor of their imperial Highnesses, which substantially changed the situation.
•••
Nobody in Alexander’s life would have such great importance as the Swiss Frédéric-César de Laharpe.28 In May 1797, two years after the latter had to leave Russia, Alexander addressed to his mother-in-law, the Princess of Baden, who was then on the verge of meeting her son-in-law’s former tutor, a letter that illuminates the gratitude and affection that he felt toward Laharpe:
I am writing to you, dear Mama, via Mr. de La Harpe, my tutor whom I recommend to you as my intimate friend and as a man to whom I owe everything except life itself. He was with me from the age of seven, he is a man of intact integrity and probity with uncommon enlightenment and knowledge. I must admit that he alone never flattered me and his advice was not founded on his personal interest but really sprang from the attachment he always felt for me. My gratitude to him knows no bounds. Finally, as I have said, he is a man to whom I owe everything.29
Many years later, when he was on the point of acquiring his title as liberator of Europe and was at the height of his power, Alexander introduced his former tutor to the King of Prussia and his sons, and again he paid him homage in Langres in 1814 by asserting: “Everything that I know, and perhaps all that I am worth, I owe to M. Laharpe.”30
Born in April 1754 in Rolle,31 a large village in the Vaud canton, Laharpe was the son of a former Swiss military man coming from the minor nobility. He pursued his studies at the high school in Rolle, during which he became passionate about ancient history,32 then completed his secondary studies at the seminary of Haldenstein, before studying mathematics and philosophy in Geneva and then law in Tubingen. Received as a doctor in law at the age of 20, he was soon established as a lawyer, staying alternately in Berne in the winter and the rest of the time in Rolle. But this peaceful life bored him, and the aristocratic spirit of the Vaud, quite removed from the Genevan democratic spirit, bothered his republican convictions. He soon left the bar and envisaged going to fight in North America. Then he was approached by Baron Grimm, who proposed in 1782 that he play the mentor and accompany to Italy for a year the young Count Yakov Lanskoy (younger brother of Catherine’s favorite) and his cousin. Laharpe immediately accepted a mission in which he found the unexpected opportunity to “travel over beautiful Italy, the object of my desire.”33 Beyond the intellectual, artistic, and financial attraction of the trip, the episode proved decisive in Laharpe’s life, since he acquitted his task so well—“the good conduct, the wisdom and fine mind of Sir Laharpe have so well captivated those present and those absent,”34 the empress wrote about him—that Catherine II invited him to bring young Lanskoy to St. Petersburg and pay a visit. At the end of 1782, the two men arrived in the capital, and barely a year later, in March 1784, the young Swiss gentleman was chosen by the empress to teach French to the elder of her grandsons. But quickly the ambitious and enterprising Laharpe aspired to nobler and more important posts.
Desirous to leave the relative anonymity of the other tutors to the grand dukes, he wrote (only three months after his nomination as French teacher) a pedagogic memorandum addressed to Catherine through the intermediary of Count Saltykov. Very ably and perhaps obsequiously, the text takes inspiration from the educational plan just concocted by the empress, to convince her to give the education of the future emperor greater unity and coherence—and suggesting that the author of the memo would himself be able to accomplish this arduous task. Seduced by the intelligence and ambition of the project, Catherine II recorded that “the person who composed this appears assuredly capable of teaching more than just the French language,”35 and from mid-September, she made Laharpe the principal tutor of the grand dukes.
For more than ten years, on a daily basis, Laharpe designed the ensemble of courses dispensed by the various tutors, including Masson, Pallas, Samborski, and Kraft, while delivering his own teaching. But this task was not always easy, as he recognized in his autobiographical account; Laharpe was well aware of his youth and inexperience: “Raised in solitude, completely foreign to high society, having lived more with books and fantastic beings than with real men, I had to spend a dozen years at the court without directors and without advisors.”36
Moreover, he was a convinced republican. He would adopt the cause of the French Revolution and expect much from it for the future of Switzerland, at the very time when Catherine was renouncing the values of tolerance and openness advocated during the first half of her reign and when she began to engage in a repressive policy toward the ideas of freedom and national sovereignty carried by the French Revolution. After 1789–1790 she closed the Masonic lodges, and several writers who (on the model of Alexander Radishchev) had been denouncing in their writing both absolutism and the cruelty of serfdom were arrested and imprisoned. But Laharpe did not remain inactive in Russia. In 1790–1791, he wrote more than 60 pamphlets calling on his compatriots from the Vaud canton to quit the tutelage of Berne in order to join the republic of Geneva. But in the autumn of 1791, these writings destined for his compatriots earned him a denunciation to Catherine by authorities in Berne who had intercepted them. Summoned before the Empress to explain these pamphlets, he wrote a letter that both reaffirmed his democratic sentiments as a Swiss citizen but denied forcefully that he had ever disseminated his ideas to the two boys. Convinced of the tutor’s loyalty, the empress attached no more importance to this affair: “All she required of me was to remain apart from the affairs of Switzerland as long as I remained in her service,” recalled Laharpe in his Memoirs.37
However, a year and a half later, the affair opened up again and a cabal was formed at court. For the Prince of Nassau-Siegen and Count Esterhazy, whose wife was from Berne, and for several French emigrants38 who had been chased out by the French Revolution and taken refuge in St. Petersburg, the education of the grand dukes could not be confided to a republican without some danger. The cabal destabilized Laharpe, who suffered from its harassment; on the occasion of the recent engagement of Alexander, when the officers in his service received promotions in grade and financial compensation, only Laharpe obtained no gratification at all. He envisaged quitting Russia, but at the end of June 1793, a new conversation with Catherine II renewed her confidence in him and convinced him to remain. “Monsieur, you may be a Jacobin, a Republican, anything you want; I believe you are an honest man, and that is enough for me. Remain with my grandchildren, keep my confidence in them, and give them your care with accustomed zeal.”39
To these difficulties linked to Laharpe’s democratic convictions were added the nasty remarks and vexations that on a daily basis he suffered from a court that was increasingly hostile to events in France and from whom the excesses of the Jacobin Terror had removed any taste for Enlightenment philosophy. Sometimes Laharpe slumped into discouragement: “When I was with my students, few weeks passed without my being tempted to abandon everything, with so many obstacles, chicanery, and disgust heaped on my path; but calm regained me when, forgetting my surroundings, I looked toward the future and fixed my sights on the goal to which my labors were devoted,” he wrote many years later, in February 1810, to his friend Stapfer.40 But his passion for teaching, his growing affection for Alexander and the evolution of his personal life—Laharpe married a woman from St. Petersburg and thanks to this found himself better integrated into Russian society—all convinced him to remain at his post and to meet the challenge he had set himself: to inculcate in Alexander not only knowledge but principles and moral qualities, to shape the future emperor such that he would rei
gn for the good of his people.
As he explained in the memorandum sent to Catherine in June 1784,41 for him it was not a matter of turning the future emperor into an erudite man, a specialist to be recognized in some field (physics, mathematics, or philosophy) but rather an “honest man” and an “enlightened citizen” capable of exercising his critical mind and thereby best performing his functions as emperor. From this standpoint, Laharpe belonged to the lineage of the writings of Bishop Fénelon, who back in the seventeenth century had given credence to the idea that any monarch should as a child be inculcated with a quality education and high moral principles so that once he ascends the throne, he will become an exemplary sovereign. But, at the same time, the tutor’s use of the concept of “enlightened citizen” attests to the fact that he was also a man of the Enlightenment, passionately attached to the ideals of democracy and the republic, and very influenced by the thinking of Rousseau and his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality.
In August 1785, in a letter addressed to his friend Jean Marc Louis Favre, Laharpe recounts the nature of his teaching. Mentioning the history course he was giving the young men,
[I] insisted in a republican way on equality, and after having shown the earliest chiefs dressed in a tiger or lion skin and seated on a stone instead of a throne and living in a cabin covered with tree branches, I showed the same men ceasing to believe themselves the equals of others, having become kings not by divine mandate but by the grace of God who made men such that the one who is strongest, most adroit, and most spiritual and the most able thinks he has a decisive right to rise above his peers and always profits from the situation whenever their negligence and patience allows him to do so peacefully. I pronounced to my student this hard-to-digest doctrine and applied myself to making him feel and to firmly convincing him that all men are born equal, and that the hereditary power of some was a matter of pure accident.42
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