Alexander I- the Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon

by Marie-Pierre Rey

  The whole estate, peasants as well as soldiers, lived at a military pace. In this martial world he had constructed Paul seemed in full bloom, desiring to transmit to his children, whom he treated as soldiers and adults, the values of discipline, courage, endurance, and outstripping oneself—quite different values from those on display at Catherine’s court. Paul’s severity was moderated by the extreme attention he paid to the well-being of his men: over one decade, he founded a hospital, a school, and an orphanage for the children of soldiers, set up a church open to both Catholic and Lutheran worship, though favoring the Orthodox faith. He encouraged the creation of factories making glass, porcelain, and textiles. Moreover, in Gatchina the social order counted for little: minor nobles of the impoverished class, men rising from the ranks, even the dregs of the regular army could earn, by their bravery and total fidelity to the Grand Duke, Paul’s confidence, his esteem—and promotion. This was the case with the young Alexis Arakcheev. From the minor nobility, but poor to the point of having only a single pair of riding breeches that he washed every night, Arakcheev entered the cadet school at age thirteen7 as an artillery student and distinguished himself by his great capacity for work, his sense of discipline, and his excellent scholastic results.8 He arrived in Gatchina as a lieutenant in September 1792; one month later he was made captain and had the privilege of dining at the Grand Duke’s table.9 In 1796 he was named colonel, promoted to the role of inspector and leader of the infantry battalion, and shortly afterward assumed command of Paul’s army.10

  Alexander was quickly seduced by the way of life at Gatchina. Booted and strapped into their Prussian uniforms, he and his brother participated in maneuvers once a week in the summer.11 The two boys appreciated the frank and direct sociability of the soldiers, the cult of order, the ties of virile camaraderie, and the physical activity, all of which were lacking at the Great Court. They were happy to share the masculine world of their father.

  Their tasks as corporals, their bodily fatigue, the need to avoid inspection by their grandmother when they came back exhausted from exercises, in accoutrements that had to be taken off, and even the jokes of their father, of whom they were afraid, all made this career attractive. It had no relation with the career the Petersburg public and Catherine herself would want them to pursue.12

  However, repeated exposure to the cannon fire of Gatchina soon resulted in Alexander’s deafness in the left ear. Detected in the spring of 1784, this infirmity deeply affected the empress,13 and according to Count Rostopchin, it began to affect Alexander’s character: “What made the Grand Duke disagreeable in society was his deafness; you had to speak very loudly since he heard nothing in one ear.”14 The court doctors did not hesitate to use an electrical treatment that prevented Alexander from becoming totally deaf and improved his condition somewhat,15 without restoring his full auditory faculty.

  Then a real complicity united Paul and his sons, and several witnesses report it: The young grand dukes believed deep in their hearts, and actually they were, more part of the so-called Gatchina army than the Russian Army. Gatchina was Paul’s favorite castle, as his autumn residence where, more removed from Petersburg, with less restraint he could indulge in his fads. The grand dukes were sorry not to be able to go, but even so they could adopt the appearance of Paul’s troopers and speak of what was happening in his little army, saying “That’s our manner, in the Gatchina manner.”16

  After the spring of 1795, Alexander and Constantine began to go to Gatchina or Pavlovsk four or five times a week to participate in the summer military exercises supervised by the Grand Duke. They were prodded by Laharpe, who, while he did not share Paul’s values, still wished to see the adolescents express their filial love and become closer to their father. The following year, the rhythm of exercises accelerated: in June and July the two boys participated daily in maneuvers, from six in the morning to one o’clock in the afternoon. “This summer, I can truly say that I did my military service,” Alexander wrote to Laharpe with some pride.17

  At Gatchina as at Pavlovsk, when discipline became too harsh or their father too severe, the grand dukes could count on the goodness and generosity of their mother, who brought them unfailing support and interceded in their favor. It often happened that Maria Feodorovna, who detested conflict and lived serenely, surrounded by her daughters, composed excuses on behalf of her sons:

  Constantine (I have tried to imitate your style),

  “I dare protest before our God, my dear Father, that I did not come last evening after supper to your antechamber because I thought I was dismissed by you, and having done the same thing last Sunday, to come would contravene the order. The reproach you gave me and my brother makes us both very unhappy. We have not merited it and at the cost of our blood we will prove, my dear papa, that all our education has been based on our sacred duties to you. Please receive at your feet your son, who with the most profound respect…”18

  The changeable moods of Paul and his growing hatred of Catherine II did have an effect on the relations he had with his sons; the Grand Duke often oscillated between tenderness and anger—and even disdain—toward Alexander and Constantine, whom he perceived as Catherine’s allies. But Maria Feodorovna was keen to maintain strong ties with her sons, despite the interdictions imposed by Catherine’s strictness and Paul’s bizarre behavior. The letters19 she exchanged in 1792–1793 with Alexander while at the Tauride Palace attest to the profound affection and complicity that united them. This trait, relatively neglected by the historians, appears very important to me. Alexander always felt toward his mother the gratitude, affection, and trust that were durably woven over the course of these difficult years. And this very strong relationship largely explains the role and prerogatives that she would exercise at the court well after Alexander’s marriage and his accession to the imperial throne. This is a subject to which we will return.

  From an early age, then, Alexander lived in a dual world: this duality of place and people as models of values and behavior laid the groundwork for an uncomfortable if not destabilizing situation and no doubt led the child to feel, if not distrust, then at least reservations about those around him. Did it push him, as several historians have asserted,20 to practice duplicity and to raise it to a consummate art? This thesis appears excessive to me. Of course, being torn between two worlds, each of which tried to attract him away from the other, Alexander was constrained from early on, out of prudence or fear, to adapt and compromise, to hedge. But this necessity was related to a survival instinct and only marginally affected the adolescent’s character. Far from indulging in the least cynicism, Alexander appears as a young man who was reserved in social relations but capable of great sincerity and voluble as soon as he felt confidence in himself, as the letters he addressed to his mother and close friends and his conversations with Laharpe bear witness. Starting in 1792–1793, though, Alexander’s universe underwent new changes, due to decisions made by Catherine the Great regarding his future.

  Alexander’s Marriage

  In 1790, when Alexander was only 13 years old, Catherine was already planning her grandson’s engagement. She carefully considered a plan, confided it to Grimm, and in November 1790 sent Nicholas Rumyantsev to Karlsruhe to examine and judge the two daughters of the hereditary Prince of Baden, Charles Louis and his wife, Amalie-Friederike of Hesse-Darmstadt. Louisa Maria Augusta was aged eleven,21 and Friederike Dorothea was two years younger. Satisfied with Rumyantsev’s report, the empress decided in 1792 to have the two little German princesses conveyed to St. Petersburg, intending to make one of them the future spouse of her grandson. On October 31 (O.S.), 1792, she wrote in an explicit way to Grimm:

  We are expecting this evening the two Baden princesses: one is thirteen and the other eleven. You must suspect that here we do not marry so young; that is not the present purpose, but rather provision for the future. While waiting, they will accustom themselves to us and see our uses and customs. As for our man, he does not think of that; he is in the in
nocence of his heart, and this is a diabolic trick I am playing on him, for I am leading him into temptation.22

  The first encounter between Louisa and Alexander took place on November 14: the two adolescents, very intimidated, exchanged only a few words. But in the days that followed a real closeness arose between them, which allowed Catherine to accomplish her plan. In January 1793, with the agreement of an Alexander more and more conquered by the young girl, she sent the margrave a letter asking for his consent for the marriage between Louisa and her grandson. With the consent quickly obtained, Alexander was authorized by his grandmother to kiss the girl for the first time on the occasion of Easter; on June 2, 1793, Louisa converted to the Orthodox faith and was baptized under the name Elizabeth Alexeievna. The next day the engagement was celebrated, after sumptuous preparations:

  They started by arranging that part of the Winter Palace that lies at the corner of the Neva and the Admiralty, placing priceless mirrors and hangings there. The bedchamber became a model of elegance and magnificence. The hangings were of white cloth from Lyon with borders embroidered with large roses; the columns of the alcove, the doors and glass wainscoting, pink in color, were mounted in gilded bas-reliefs with white cameos that, applied on these transparent masses, gave them the air of floating on the wave of an atmosphere more extensive than the chamber […].

  The baptism of the princess and the engagement took place on the twentieth and twenty-first of May.23 In the chapel of the palace, she made her confession of faith in a loud voice. She was beautiful as an angel. Her dress was pink, embroidered with large white roses with a white skirt embroidered with roses of the same species, but in pink, not one diamond, and her lovely blond hair was floating down—like Psyche! […] The Grand Duke, whose childish hairstyle had been changed, wore a suit of silver brocade embroidered with silver. […] It was a fine spectacle to see this great Empress mounting a platform with the lovely couple to present them to God and to the nation. Me, I cried copiously.24

  A few weeks later, on October 9, Catherine had the marriage of the two adolescents celebrated in the church of St. Savior of the Transfiguration. The church bells rang for three days and the festival lasted for two weeks, culminating on October 22 in sumptuous fireworks over the tsarina’s private meadow.

  Catherine’s rush to hold the engagement and then marriage of Alexander is explained largely by psychological factors: Alexander had reached puberty at the age of 12, and when the grand duke reached 14, General Protasov had noted “in both his statements and in his nocturnal dreams, strong physical desires that grew in the course of his frequent conversations with pretty women.”25 Thus Catherine charged a lady of the court with initiating her grandson “in the mysteries of all the transports engendered by sensual delight,”26 and she decided to marry him quickly in order to channel his impulses and desires. To this motive should be added political aims: starting in 1793, as her hostility to Paul grew, her design to transmit imperial power to her grandson grew stronger. So, by a precocious marriage, she was ensuring the durability of her dynasty.

  Catherine’s choice appeared judicious, and observers present at court heaped praise on Elizabeth’s extraordinary beauty, her charm, and modesty. The young girl had received a brilliant education at the Baden court: she spoke and wrote French and German,27 had studied history, geography, philosophy, French and German literature, and thanks to the geographical proximity of the Baden principality with France, she was au fait with all the cultural novelties coming from Paris.

  During her stay in Russia, the French portrait painter Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun met Elizabeth at Tsarskoye Selo a few months after the marriage. Right away, she was smitten with the young princess:

  She was seventeen at most. Her facial traits were fine and regular, in a perfect oval; her delicate skin was not animated but of a pallor in harmony with the expression on her face, whose sweetness was angelic; her blond hair floated around her neck and forehead. She was dressed in a white tunic, attached by a belt knotted casually around a small and supple waist like that of a nymph. I cried to myself: “She is Psyche!”28

  This uncommon beauty was combined with great vivacity of mind. Despite her young age and her inexperience at the Russian court, she had character, convictions, and firm opinions that she expressed most particularly in her correspondence with her mother, the Margravine of Baden. And it is to her that we owe the most precise physical and psychological portrait of Alexander as an adolescent:

  Very tall and well-formed, especially the legs and feet well turned, although the feet are a little big; light brown hair, blue eyes, not very big but not small either; very pretty teeth, charming skin color, straight nose, rather handsome.

  A few months later, in January 1793, she made a more critical judgment of her fiancé:

  You ask me if the Grand Duke truly pleases me. Yes, Mama, he pleases me. For some time he has pleased me like mad, but presently, now that I begin to know him (not that he loses by being known, on the contrary), one notices little nothings, truly nothings, which are not to my taste and have destroyed the excessive way in which I loved him. I still love him very much, but in another way. These little-nothings are not in his character, for on that side surely I believe there is nothing to reproach, but in the manners, in something exterior.29

  Although deprived of the company of her relatives—her sister Friederike Dorothea remained in St. Petersburg only until the wedding and then went home—Elizabeth was not timid. It was she who took the initiative of declaring her sentiments to the Grand Duke30 and who in the summer of 1793 sent him little notes written in halting Russian, alternating with passionate letters written in a fluent French, like this one in August written from the Tauride Palace:

  You tell me I have the happiness of a certain person in my hand. Ah, if this is true, his happiness is assured forever. I will love him, he will be my best friend my whole life—unless there is heavenly punishment. It is he who taught me not to rely on myself too much, he is right and I admit it. He holds my life’s happiness in his hands. It is certain to make me forever unhappy if ever he stops loving me. I will bear everything except that. But it is to think badly of him to even have such an idea. He loves me tenderly. I love him too and this causes my happiness. Farewell, my darling. Have these sentiments, this is my great desire. Of me you can be certain that I love you beyond words.

  Goodbye, my friend.—Elizabeth.31

  On his side, Alexander also wrote very short love notes that he accompanied sometimes with sketches, like a little horse’s head, badly drawn with pencil on paper, and carefully folded into four in a little envelope.32

  While the two adolescents seemed to find great happiness in their nascent idyll, very quickly difficulties arose due to the increasingly stifling atmosphere of Catherine’s court.

  To watch over the young couple to whom she had given sumptuous apartments and a small court, the empress had appointed Count Golovin as the Grand Duke’s Hofmeister, and the Countess Shuvalova as Elizabeth’s. Hated as much by Paul as by Alexander, the latter employed herself, on Catherine’s orders, with limiting contact and meetings between Alexander and his parents. Several letters exchanged between Alexander and his mother in 1793–1794 mention the ruses to which Maria Feodorovna and her son resorted in order to meet without the knowledge of the redoubtable countess who monitored the visits by the young couple. Alexander often regretted not being able to meet his parents “in total freedom.” In a letter dated the end of 1792, he complains that the countess “has already gossiped about our going as seldom as possible to Papa’s” and hopes that “since I am going today to my sister Olga’s, you will make a little visit there so I may speak to you at ease.”33 In the autumn of 1793, he inveighs against “this cursed countess” who “has done us so much evil, for she is still partly the reason why we do not enter your apartments and they always dismiss us at the door.”34 A few months later he congratulates himself on reaching “an accommodation with the countess […] that will procure us the happi
ness of seeing each at least on the same footing as previously, for how it has been during these two last occasions has pained my heart more than you can imagine.”35 In the autumn of 1794, he expressed in a letter to his mother the sadness and weariness he felt at being permanently separated from her.36

  Deprived of the presence of Paul and Maria Feodorovna, the young couple found themselves increasingly exposed to court intrigues. Platon Zubov, the nominal favorite of Catherine II, got it into his head to seduce the well-behaved Elizabeth and acted with little discretion. She remained above reproach but found herself in a very embarrassing position with the empress, whose reaction she feared.

  At the same time, when the exciting spring love of the first months had passed, Alexander and Elizabeth, inexperienced and barely nubile, had difficulty transforming their real affection for each other into an actual conjugal relationship. At the end of 1793 or the very beginning of 1794,37 Alexander admitted this embarrassment to his mother, in modest circumlocutions:

  You ask me, my dear Mama, if my little Lisa is pregnant. No, not yet, for the thing is not accomplished. It must be agreed that we are big children and very maladroit ones, since we take all the trouble imaginable to do so but we do not succeed.38

  In the following months, this situation was not remedied. The immature Alexander preferred to spend his time in the company of young noblemen of his age or with his valets, shied away from his wife, and committed pranks of doubtful taste. More than once, General Protasov despaired in his letters to Count Vorontsov, admitting in May 1794: