Alexander I- the Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon

by Marie-Pierre Rey

  The idea is quite clear: while he defended himself to Catherine II from the accusation of distilling “subversive” ideas to his pupils, he could not prevent these theses from being present in his teaching.

  Among the subjects he taught Laharpe gave crucial importance to history, particularly Roman history. To transmit it in a living way, he drew examples able to nourish moral reflection that would be useful to the future monarch. Strong ideas stand out from his curriculum: each man, including the sovereign, should respect the laws;43 tyranny and the oppression of one man by another are to be condemned; “it is always dangerous to reduce men to despair;” a good prince should be prudent and temperate in his behavior; he should work for the good of his people and never descend into laziness and idleness; he should not resort to torture. Here, Laharpe left ancient history in order to indulge in a digression on the Calas case of the eighteenth century, the death by torture of a Protestant merchant falsely accused of killing his own son. Laharpe explained the affair at length to his students as a demonstration of the involvement of Enlightenment philosophers in favor of Calas’s posthumous exoneration. Thus he writes in his notes as an aside to his Roman history course:

  The legal assassination of the virtuous Calas in that century by one of the premier courts of France finally awakened public attention by exciting the indignation of all honest men. The immortal Montesquieu and Voltaire in France, Beccaria in Italy, and several other philosophers and orators employed eloquence equal to the importance and grandeur of their subject, and their generous efforts were successful in several countries where torture and barbaric punishment were abolished.44

  One of the key ideas in Laharpe’s teaching was that the monarchical claim of divine right was an illusion, imposed by individual men to justify the extent of their power. He wrote in his notes:

  Would it not be exceptionally absurd to believe that the Creator of these countless suns that shine above our heads has given some individuals, often weaker than others, the right to dispose by whim of all other creatures? How can we think that Caligula, Nero, Borgia, Philippe II, Genghis, Louis XI—these monsters born for the shame and misery of humanity—could be the envoys or representative of the Great Being?45

  And Laharpe called on his pupils to promote laws and a constitution for the greater happiness of all: “Everywhere that the sovereign is merely the first magistrate of the nation, the first servant of the state, and the father of his people, he has kept power by means of the law and the love of his subjects much better than by citadels and soldiers.”46

  Concerned with the quality of his teaching, Laharpe read much and drew the sources of the learning he transmitted from the best works of his time: thus Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was chosen as the text for Roman history.47 To give flesh and depth to his teaching of ancient history, Laharpe had students read the great authors of antiquity in French translation; to lead them to take an interest in the Middle Ages, he gave them extracts from the works of Joinville and Geoffroy de Villehardouin. So he was concerned with access to original sources as much as with conveying a taste for living details; in this he proved a modern teacher, anxious to seduce his audience and bring them to wonder deeply about the facts and their significance.

  Although history occupied a predominant place in Laharpe’s teaching, literature was also very present. His course in literature for the year 178648 attests to the wealth and diversity of an education that—again in a very modern way—alternated the study of ancient authors (Seneca, Cicero, Titus Livy, Sallustus) with that of modern writers (Molière, Corneille, Racine, La Bruyère) or was devoted to contemporary philosophers (Montesquieu and Voltaire in the foreground). For each, he would give a biographical summary, a thematic commentary, and a detailed study of one work.

  Alongside history and literature Laharpe gave rudiments of a geography that would complement the lessons from Pallas. As a doctor of law and a former lawyer, he taught law to his young pupils, insisting on the nature of law and on the obligation to respect it to ensure good governance.49 On the other hand, physics and mathematics continued to be taught respectively by Kraft and Masson and at a very honorable level. In 1790, at the age of twelve, Alexander mastered all arithmetical operations with and without fractions and decimals and could resolve equations of the first degree, and he was starting to learn logarithms.50

  Seconded by Saltykov and Protasov, Laharpe also watched over the child’s moral and social education. In Catherine’s opinion, Alexander was growing up in a harmonious way. In September 1787, when he was getting ready to celebrate his tenth birthday, the empress was insisting on his good looks, amiability, and seduction (traits that recur in the recorded observations of her contemporaries):

  Monsieur Alexander is in body, as in heart and mind, a person of rare beauty, goodness, and understanding: he is lively and composed, prompt and thoughtful, has profound ideas and yet singular ease in everything he does, so that one could say that he has done that all his life; he is tall and strong for his age, and nimble and agile on top of it. In a word, this boy reconciles a number of contradictions, which makes him singularly loved by those surrounding him. Those of his age easily share his opinions and willingly follow him. I fear only one danger for him: that of women, for he will be chased, and it is impossible this will not happen, for he is a figure that sets everyone alight; moreover he does not know he is handsome and until now has not made much of his looks. (You will understand why we do not make him more aware of the fact.) And he is very educated for his age: he speaks four languages, is familiar with the history of all countries, he reads willingly, is never idle; all the amusements of his age please him and are to his taste. If I speak to him seriously, he pays attention, listens and responds with equal comfort. If I make him play blind man’s bluff, he enjoys it. Everybody is equally happy with him, and me also.51

  In light of Laharpe’s course notes and the reports he regularly sent to Count Saltykov and even the empress, the knowledge dispensed by Laharpe over the years 1784 to 1795 appears very broad. Moreover, in line with Catherine the Great’s instructions, Laharpe taught calmly, rarely punishing the grand dukes. While he often deplored that Constantine, scatterbrained and barely interested in studying despite his lively mind, was content with superficial learning, he complained little about Alexander, whom he perceived as a serious and attentive student. However, around the age of 12 or 13, the future emperor tended to become lazier and more negligent in his work. This led Laharpe to increase his reprimands and to oblige Alexander to perform self-criticism in a regular diary that he kept at the request of his tutor. In 1790 the child wrote: “Instead of encouraging myself and redoubling my efforts to profit from the years of study that remain to me, each day I become more nonchalant, apply myself less and am more incapable, and each day I am approaching my peers who stupidly think they are perfections just because they are princes. At thirteen, I am as much like a child as at eight, and the more I advance in age, the more I approach zero. What will I become? Nothing, by all appearances.” Or else: “I, the undersigned, have lied to cover my laziness and get out of trouble, by claiming not to have a moment to execute what was assigned to me two days ago, whereas my brother did the same things and in the same interval of time. On the contrary, I have gallivanted about, chatted, and behaved since the beginning of the week as a man devoid of emulation and insensible to shame and to reproach.”52

  •••

  What can we conclude from this education, from its methods and content? By all the evidence, Laharpe undertook to transmit to his students by modern methods (and using encouragement rather than constraint), making use of original sources rather than school textbooks, a great breadth of knowledge, nourished by references taken from Greco-Roman antiquity, from French classicism of the seventeenth century, and from the contemporary thought of Enlightenment philosophy. These references all had the goal of leading the future sovereign to a virtuous practice of power, with respect for morality and the law, and maybe eve
n respect for a constitution that might eventually be adopted in the name of equality among men. And from this standpoint Laharpe’s instruction served a dual function, both educational and political. But this educational model presented limits, even defects, which some contemporaries hastened to note. For example, the fabulist Krylov wrote Education of the Lion Cub, in which an eagle (representing Laharpe) undertakes the education of a lion cub (Alexander); while the instruction allows the future king of animals to know everything about the needs and way of life of birds, at the same time the little lion proves completely ignorant of the needs of his fellow creatures, to whom he promises to teach the art of making nests as soon as he is on the throne. The moral of the fable leaps out: any teaching illustrated by references other than to national ones is doomed to failure. This objection is important, since in fact Laharpe was not familiar with Russian history and literature and did not feel capable of teaching them; thus, his instruction sinned by the small importance it granted to the national situation. This was also the verdict of the historian Kliuchevski, for whom Alexander was being fed on “political and moral dogmas” and a whole “kaleidoscope of heroic images and political ideals” in which Russia, in its “past and unattractive present,” was left out of account.53 But, at the same time, might not openness to other horizons constitute an advantage in the game of someone who was to put the international stage in his line of sight?

  Later, some54 objected that Laharpe’s teaching, too dense and too abstract, could only result in sowing confusion in two childish minds that were incapable of understanding the notions presented to them. Here again, the criticism is important. Yet, if we refer to the tutor’s course notes, we perceive that Laharpe distrusted abstract learning and used specific examples and references to make his teaching concrete and accessible.

  However, Laharpe’s education did not, in fact, fulfill the ambitious mission he set himself; in practice, it would remain incomplete, if not abortive. Many of the ideas he tackled were only superficially “absorbed” by Alexander, who later admitted he was incapable of mastering them. This semi-failure was less the responsibility of the devoted tutor than of Catherine because, starting in 1792–1793, the empress constantly subjected the adolescent to all sorts of court obligations and imposed on him concerns and an adult lifestyle that, even before the departure of Laharpe, contributed to alienating the disciple from his master.

  CHAPTER 3

  A Grand Duke Torn Between Greater and Lesser Courts

  Paul had no influence or authority over the education of his sons. He was obliged to ask Saltykov for permission to see them, or to win over their chamber valets in order to know what was happening around them. During the summer, they had permission once or twice a week to go spend one or two hours with their parents.1

  Masson testifies in this passage from his Secret Memoirs on Russia to the fact that Catherine the Great’s whims ruled the education of her grandsons. For entire years she kept them from Paul and his wife Maria Feodorovna. Throughout his childhood Alexander’s daily life was very unequally divided between the worlds of his grandmother and of his parents.

  Life Split between Grandmother and Parents

  The childhood of the future emperor unfolded in the almost exclusive shadow of his grandmother; the time he spent in the company of his parents was almost stolen. As their correspondence attests, Maria Feodorovna and her son constantly invented stratagems to try to meet face to face in private. Yet, the influence over him of Paul and Maria Feodorovna was far from negligible. By discovering in their company aspects and conversations quite different from those he observed at the Great Court, Alexander was confronted with two opposite models, each totally contrasting with the other.

  At the Winter Palace, at Tsarskoye Selo (25 kilometers south of St. Petersburg), or the Tauride Palace, “Monsieur Alexander” witnessed as a privileged observer the spectacle of a great court wholly occupied with celebrating—in luxury, pomp, and magnificence—the power and glory of Catherine the Great. He rubbed shoulders with obsequious and servile courtiers, devoted servants, artists, and writers of great talent. Even though after 1790–1791 the era no longer belonged to the Enlightenment, he found there a certain freedom of expression and thought. He could enjoy the manifest affection of his grandmother, her equanimity of humor, and her attentive care, the warm and mischievous presence of his brother Constantine, and the patient attention of his tutors. However, behind this amiable facade he also sensed the breadth of the corruption afflicting the court and the country. Behind the play of anodyne words, jokes, and gallantry, he divined the licentiousness in which Catherine indulged in the company of lovers whose age tended to approach scandalously close to her grandsons’: in 1796 Platon Zubov, the last of the dozen official and hired lovers who succeeded each other in the bed and heart of the empress during the 34 years of her reign, was only three years older than Alexander.

  At the Great Court, Alexander dressed in French style—velvet frock coat, silk stockings, and ribboned shoes; he applauded enthusiastically at theatre plays, concerts, and parties given in the parks of the castles or on the banks of the Neva River, in the company of young nobles. Some of these young aristocrats, older than he, began to figure among his close friends: Victor Kochubey, Paul Stroganov, and then after 1795 the Polish prince Adam Czartoryski. As for his parents, Alexander saw them rarely at the Great Court. Paul was permitted to attend only twice a week to hear the reports drawn up by his mother’s ministers; he dined with her on Sundays. Maria Feodorovna preferred to welcome her son at Pavlovsk or Gatchina, where she felt freer than under the gaze of the courtiers.

  The passage of time did not bring Grand Duke Paul any closer to Catherine. Admittedly, Paul had renounced his liberal and constitutional ideas, and he shared the absolutist conceptions of his mother on domestic policy. But on the diplomatic level, he remained deeply pacifist and always condemned the expansionist policy she was conducting against Poland and the Ottoman Empire;2 in his eyes it was costly and was detracting from the country’s domestic development. These divergences exacerbated Catherine’s distrust of her son and her wish to keep him removed from Alexander. Relegated to his domain of Gatchina, starting in August 1783, he spent the summer and autumn months there, living in Pavlovsk the rest of the year. Over the years Paul bore this situation imposed on him with increasing difficulty, as he confided in 1784 in a letter addressed to a major dignitary:

  I am thirty years old and I have nothing to do. […] My serenity, I assure you, does not depend on the circumstances that surround me; rather it is based on my clear conscience and the conviction that there are virtues that are not dependent on any earthly power, and it is toward them that I must tend. This helps console me in the many troubled periods […], this teaches me patience, which many interpret as a sign of my gloomy character. As regards my behavior, you know that I try to make it coincide with my moral concepts and that I can do nothing against my conscience.3

  In fact, although “hated and despised by his mother, humiliated by the favorites, ridiculed by the courtiers, living alone and forgotten under a brilliant and sumptuous reign,” Paul “kept regular and austere habits amidst the corruption and disorder of his mother’s court.”4 There was no question of libertine living in his entourage. Both out of love for Maria Feodorovna, who watched over him tenderly, and out of revulsion at his mother’s immorality and licentious behavior, he made every effort to respect morality and propriety. In 1785 he did begin an idyll with the young maid of honor Catherine Nelidova, but this relationship remained platonic: the conjugal life led by the grand ducal couple was a decisive break with the amorous and sensual effusions of Catherine II.

  At Gatchina as at Pavlovsk, Paul and his wife led a rather modest existence that contrasted, too, with the opulence of the empress’s way of living. This restraint is explained by Paul’s simple tastes but also by financial motives: Paul and his wife had to support the needs of their family and the costly upkeep of their two castles. Paul even had to tak
e out loans from several of his in-laws. So he felt a growing sense of frustration toward Catherine, who refused to increase his pension—no doubt out of fear that he would be tempted to support a bigger army—even when she was showering her favorite with extravagant gifts. In 1789, when the Count of Ségur came to say good-bye to the Grand Duke before returning to France, he received the confidences of an increasingly exasperated Paul:

  He talked to me almost exclusively and for several hours, of his supposed grievances against the Empress and Prince Potemkin, the disagreeableness of his position; the fear that people had of him, and the sad fate that was being prepared for him by a Court accustomed to wanting (and able to bear) only the reign of women.5

  Bitter about his future, Paul nevertheless reigned as absolute and despotic master over Gatchina, which he used as an entrenched camp and a model estate.

  In 1783 his troops consisted only of two squadrons of 30 men each; thirteen years later, on the eve of his ascension, Paul kept 2,399 men divided into four infantry battalions, a company of chasseurs, four regiments of cavalry (gendarmes, dragoons, hussars, and Cossacks) and an artillery of twelve cannons (foot and horse), all commanded by 19 command officers and 109 senior officers.6 At Gatchina Paul, who rose at four every morning for the first parade, could give himself over to his passion for military things. All his men wore uniforms—short jackets, gloves to the elbows, very high boots—that closely resembled those of the Prussian Army, and under his direction they performed incessant maneuvers and parades in iron discipline; imperfect execution was punished with beatings and cruelty.