Alexander I- the Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon

by Marie-Pierre Rey

  My annoyances are much greater than you think. My former student begins to get carried away, and if this continues, goodbye to peace. He has favorites who flatter him, he is getting accustomed (without realizing it and in the greatest innocence) to the taste of liquor, and the habit is a bad thing. Overall he does nothing worthy, and I often have scenes with him […]. He is spoiled in every sense.39

  And in June:

  This dear student is thoroughly spoiled. Apart from the scenes that I noted previously […], yesterday he had a fine one atop the figurehead column in the middle of the pond. Monseigneur took it into his head to walk around the edge as if he were walking on a wide board, afterward he jumped through an opening where the stair was, and when his wife and I objected, he gave us paltry and childish excuses for jumping again.

  I do not need to comment on this, but to give you an idea of his way of life, I will tell you he has invited me to a pleasure party tomorrow, for the mating of his English mare with Rostopchin’s stallion, adding that Rostopchin had assured him that he would be very interested in seeing the movements of the two horses during this act. Judge from this, my dear count, whether I should accept the invitation.40

  Alexander was neglecting his wife while she, deprived of the company of her sister, who had returned to Karlsruhe, was feeling more and more alone. Lacking affection and without a moral compass, Elizabeth was not long in losing her head and throwing herself into an amorous friendship—distinctly ambiguous—with Countess Varvara Golovina. During the second half of the year 1794, the very beautiful wife of the court marshal, aged 29, became the young wife’s intimate, and they shared readings, discussions, and promenades. If this lively and reciprocal friendship seems to have been—at least at first—encouraged by Alexander, it seems likely that he was, out of naïveté or indifference, not really aware of the measure or nature of such an attachment, which, as Elizabeth acknowledged covertly in letters to the countess, attested to a social prohibition. And she lied to Alexander when she spoke to him about the relationship. In December 1794, in a particularly exalted letter, Elizabeth writes to Varvara:

  I love you so much and I will love you despite the whole world. Moreover, they cannot forbid me from loving you and I am even in some fashion authorized by someone else41 who has the right (just as much if not more) to order me to love you. You understand me, I hope.42

  This lends credence to the idea of Alexander’s complacency. But in the spring of 1795,43 the most cryptic and the most heretical letter that Elizabeth wrote to the countess appears to exonerate Alexander from any complicity:

  Oh, my dear, the 30ths. How long they will take to come back! My God, all the sensations that merely the memory of these sweet moments brings back to me! The grand duke who has read your letter has just asked me for an explanation. I partly told him. And thinking of this happy 30th of May turns me upside down. You may imagine, I hope, how dear the date of the day when I gave myself totally to you shall remain to me.44

  The letters to the Countess Golovina, sensual and inflamed, abruptly stop in the autumn of 1795, and lacking sources, it is difficult to know why. In the following years this relationship appears to be calmer; Countess Golovina remained a close friend and confidante of Elizabeth, and her interesting Souvenirs45 were written with the latter’s approval.

  At the same time court obligations involved Alexander and Elizabeth in an incessant whirlwind of activities, as frivolous as they were vain. Writing to her mother, the young woman recurrently states that her time is consumed with parties, balls, concerts, and various entertainments. At the start of 1794, supported in this project by his grandmother, Alexander launched into the construction of a marionette theater, whose puppets, some months later, would offer the court a ballet called Dido.46 And consequently, the young Grand Duke neglected his studies more and more.

  Of course, he defended himself in his letters to Maria Feodorovna; his weekly schedule continued, at least on paper, to grant a predominant place to the teaching of Laharpe, whom he saw four mornings a week, the rest of the time being devoted to other disciplines, notably religion and the study of fortifications. In reality, the student was less assiduous and used excuses about the most banal impediments, as attested by this little note he sent at the start of 1794:

  My dear Monsieur de Laharpe, I ask a million pardons; I am obliged again today to cancel our engagement. I hope that you will excuse this, for it comes from the fact that my wife is not well and she was obliged to take medicine. I beg to see you another time! I count even more on your indulgence because you are also a married man, and consequently know the care that must be taken over one’s wife.47

  This lack of studiousness did not escape those close to the Grand Duke. In May 1794 a letter written at Tsarskoye Selo that General Protasov addressed to Count Vorontsov complains of growing laziness:

  We arrived here on the 13th. Our two young people are very happy to do nothing, and consequently they did not do much in town either. Idleness, laziness, sloth and an indifference to all serious things on the part of our dear Grand Duke are at their height.48

  Alexander’s frivolity was largely encouraged by Catherine herself. In the autumn of 1793, the empress became convinced that her grandson’s education was finished and the presence of Laharpe was now useless. Doomed from this point on, Laharpe managed to benefit from a reprieve thanks to Saltykov’s intervention,49 but this was merely a postponement, and a year later, on October 23 (O.S.), 1794, Laharpe was officially dismissed, given the title of colonel, travel expenses of a thousand ducats, a salary corresponding to his grade, and a pension. This news was a tragedy for Alexander, who, in a moving letter to his mother, expressed his deep distress and sorrow:

  I am on the eve of losing M. de La Harpe, who will soon receive his dismissal and will leave. This causes me grief all the greater in that I see him also, I dare say so, annoyed to quit me. I have done everything in the world to bring a remedy: I spoke to Count Saltykov who told me that the Empress wanted to dismiss him upon my marriage and that it is only because of his petitions that he was kept on, but that now after having recompensed him she wants to dismiss him, and all that is due to the old story on the subject of his correspondence with his parents that was discovered and that Esterhazy interpreted badly and made a Jacobin of him.

  I cannot tell you what pain this gives me; this was a true friend I had, who surely did not spoil me and to whom I owe everything that I know. He promised to prepare me a plan of studies so that I should continue. This loss is terrible for me; only your acts of kindness, my dear and good Mama, might soften my grief. I dare hope for them by trying to make myself worthy.

  Adieu, dear and good Mama, I kiss your hands tenderly.50

  In April 1795, tormented by the idea of leaving his student for good, Laharpe composed the Instructions that he gave him at his departure. The text abounds with practical and material advice: he should get up early and not go to bed late, so as to be able to study in the morning; it is best to awaken at a fixed hour and to devote little time to his toilette. Then he mentions Alexander’s environment at the court and puts him on his guard by stressing that “there are only two persons with whom your eminent situation permits you to live on a footing of familiarity: the companion who is your happiness, and your brother who was your childhood friend. Tighten with all your strength the ties that unite you with these two persons and who must assure you long enjoyment of domestic happiness.”51

  Finally, he insisted on the qualities the future emperor should demonstrate in his government:

  I have often told you this before and I will end here. The only friend that never flatters is a good judiciary, and it is only by the light of such a torch that you will distinguish the deeds and merit that you will one day employ. May you by this means be made invulnerable, and may your generous and human heart, led by a just and enlightened mind, make you worthy of the eminent post to which you will be called for the service of a great people.52

  This text, which refle
cts values dear to Laharpe (the notion of a “just and enlightened mind” is no doubt the key to his 11 years of teaching), also testifies to the tutor’s worry at leaving an adolescent who seemed to him vulnerable, isolated, and no doubt not yet firm in his moral principles and habits. In response to this letter, Alexander sent him on the day of his departure in May 1795 his portrait and Elizabeth’s in a frame surrounded by diamonds, accompanied by a short letter of farewell full of affection, gratitude, and sorrow.53 By losing Laharpe, Alexander lost not only a tutor and a man he could trust but still more a man whose moral landmarks and strict conscience had served him as a compass. More and more exposed to the traps of the court, and always confronted by the antagonism between his grandmother and his father, Alexander now had to confront alone the tensions and political gambles during the end of Catherine II’s reign.

  Faced with Catherine’s Political Aims

  Laharpe’s departure reinforced the already noticeable changes after the grand duke’s marriage. The formerly studious and structured way of life that kept Alexander on the margins of the court gave way to practices and behaviors that aimed to place him in the orbit of power. For by giving him his own court, very fine apartments, and a generous pension, Catherine was evidently trying to inculcate in her grandson her own taste for the pomp and magnificence of autocratic power. But at the same time—and this is another paradox in the empress’s attitude—she delegated to Alexander no political responsibility whatever and in no way prepared him to execute the high office that she would transmit to him. Instead, she confined him to a life of performance and futile pleasures.

  After Laharpe left him, and after he was given an individual court and some persons of merit were dismissed, he was even more badly surrounded and a more idle prince. He spent his days in tête-à-tête with his young wife, his valets, or in the company of his grandmother. He lived more indolently and more obscurely than the heir of a sultan inside the harems of a seraglio.54

  According to Masson, whose judgment on the end of Catherine’s reign is pitiless, Alexander seems to have been caught by laziness, futility, and idleness—the three court maladies against which the devoted Laharpe had repeatedly warned his student—all in a period of barely a few months. Yet this criticism appears excessive, for the young man was aware of the distractions multiplying around him and tried (for what it was worth) to remain faithful to the line of conduct set by his tutor. In February 1796 he wrote to Laharpe:

  For me, I have reformed myself. I get up early and work in the morning according to the plan you know. This was starting to go well, I was becoming very sedentary in the study, but an obstacle arose. They wanted me to take morning walks from ten to eleven. Here is already an interruption, but still I do what it is possible to do. At this moment there is another one: festivals on the occasion of the marriage of the second son of the heir to the throne, but that will end soon and Lent is approaching. We are going to the countryside and I will go back to reading and studying more than ever. I find myself strong in my regime, I feel marvelous, I am gay most of the time, despite my troubles, and quite happy with my wife and my sister-in-law.55

  In fact, from then on, Alexander opted for a way of life that he subsequently never quit: he got up early, spent little time on his toilette, and lunched frugally; in a general way, he ate and drank with moderation, while appreciating fine cuisine. But it was difficult to impose on himself a rigorous discipline when all around him the mood was in favor of distraction and partying. Thus, it is not certain that Alexander was long able to resist the court example, and no doubt in his letter to Laharpe he tends to draw a flattering picture; he may have deluded himself about his constancy and application to studies. But the fact that he tried to keep a semblance of organization and regularity in his daily life and that he tried to continue his learning on his own, attests that Laharpe’s virtuous influence upon the young man remained potent.

  Moreover, while he did read and study less than previously, to the point that he paid attention to Elizabeth’s advice about his reading, and although the lifestyle imposed by Catherine tended to doom him to the fatuousness of court life, his horizons gradually widened, and he began to take an interest in politics. Alexander cultivated very strong friendships with a small number of young people who came from old noble families that had long been close to power, who were cultivated and open minded, attracted to the Enlightenment spirit and to liberal ideas.

  At the heart of this group was Viktor Kochubey, born in 1768 of Tartar origin, nephew of the chancellor and Minister of Foreign Affairs (Alexander Bezborodko), who had been frequenting Alexander since 1792 and therefore was his oldest friend. In 1784, at the age of 16, Kochubey was sent as an auxiliary diplomat in the Russian embassy to Sweden. He profited by taking courses at the University of Stockholm and wrote an essay devoted to the rights of man. During his stay in Europe, extending from 1788 to 1792, he studied political science in London and then philosophy in Paris and began to emulate liberalism. In July 1792 his uncle, worried about the harmful effect that long months spent in revolutionary France might have on the young man’s career, recalled him to St. Petersburg. A few months later, at the age of 24, Kochubey was named by Catherine to the prestigious post of Russian ambassador to the Ottoman court in Constantinople.

  Count Paul Stroganov was the youngest of Alexander’s friends. Born in Paris in 1772, Paul was the only son of the wealthiest dignitary of the age, Count Alexander Stroganov. A patron of the arts and a great collector,56 an independent mind and a Freemason, Count Alexander was incapable of evaluating his fortune precisely and was ignorant about the exact number of his serfs. He had raised his son to worship the Enlightenment and liberalism, and he encouraged him to go to Europe in 1790. Alongside his tutor, the Republican mathematician Charles-Gilbert Romme, Paul went first to Switzerland, where he met the Genevan jurist Louis Dumont, a close friend of Jeremy Bentham, then to France. There he frequented the Jacobin Club under the name of Paul Otcher (a pseudonym he took from the name of one of his father’s estates in the province of Perm); he became its librarian, took as mistress the Revolutionary courtesan Théroigne de Méricourt, and even wore the Phrygian red bonnet! But the scandal of his love affairs and his radical convictions reached the ears of Catherine II. In 1791 Paul Stroganov was abruptly brought back to Russia at the express demand of the empress; furious, she admonished the old count for his paternal irresponsibility and condemned Paul to internal exile on family lands near Moscow. In 1796 the ban was lifted, and Paul quickly entered the circle of Alexander’s favorite friends.

  That same year, Adam Czartoryski was 26. Handsome, elegant, cultivated, and intelligent, the young Pole came from an old princely family. After the 1795 Polish uprising against Russian rule led by Kosciuszko, which was brutally put down by Russian troops, he was sent by his parents to St. Petersburg with his brother Constantine in order to obtain, as reward for their allegiance, the lifting of the confiscation of his family’s enormous wealth. Alexander was fascinated by his thorough education in the spirit of the Enlightenment, the cultivated milieu in which he grew up before his arrival in Russia—he had relationships with Herder and Goethe and had stayed in England where he studied British political organization, in Scotland where he met the philosopher David Hume, in Germany, and in France. In addition, he had an aura of bravura, since in 1794 he had taken up arms against Russia under the flag of Kosciuszko, veteran of the American War of Independence. In the spring of 1796, as Prince Czartoryski himself stressed in his memoirs, he became an intimate friend of the grand duke57—before seducing Elizabeth and becoming, no doubt at the end of 1796 or the beginning of 1797, her close friend and then her lover.

  The fourth and older member of the little group was a cousin of Paul Stroganov, who as son of a sister of Count Alexander, had been raised by his uncle. Born in 1761, Nikolay Novosiltsev had served in the Russian army during the wars against Sweden in 1788 to 1790 and had then held several posts within the College of Foreign Affairs. He figured
as a man of letters who knew the law, economics, and diplomacy of the age; wielding an elegant pen, he was also characterized, unlike the sober Alexander, by an epicureanism and a noted taste for alcohol.

  In the course of the meetings and conversations of this group of young men, the young Grand Duke revealed a sharpened critical mind that broke with the naïveté of his former judgments.

  •••

  In fact, from 1793 the evolution of the Polish question and the role played by Catherine had aroused negative commentary from the young Grand Duke. After 20 years of the status quo, Poland had suffered in 1793 a second division that allowed the Russian Empire to take a portion of White Russia (the region of Minsk) and the western Ukraine.58 In March 1794 a national uprising led by Kosciuszko (who had prestige from the American Revolution), was rapidly defeated by Russian and Prussian troops and resulted only in a new partition. In October 1795 the Russian Empire obtained the rest of Lithuania, as well as the duchy of Courlandia59 in Latvia, previously disputed between Russia and Poland.

  This new dismemberment aroused Alexander’s disapproval, and in a letter to his mother, he disavowed Catherine’s choices. But, still very young (he was only 17 then), he summoned moral and religious considerations that were still vague. Politics as yet had no place in his approach:

  You ask me, dear Mama, what I think of Polish affairs, and I am groaning, but I have always thought like you—as you remember—that they cannot end well. The Supreme Being who is just cannot suffer an injustice, and sooner or later it will be punished. I dare say that, because I am certain that nobody but you and my wife will see this letter.60

  On the other hand, things were different a year later: Alexander was now capable of elaborating critical judgments about Catherine’s policies, this time not only in the name of morality and religion, but in the name of politics and by reference to Enlightenment ideals. Recounting a conversation he had had with the grand duke in the spring of 1796, Adam Czartoryski wrote: