Alexander I- the Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon

by Marie-Pierre Rey

  PART TWO

  THE PROMISING REIGN

  A Spirit of Reform, 1801–1807

  CHAPTER 5

  Reformist Attempts

  After the death of Paul I, the accession of Alexander to the imperial throne launched an explosion of jubilation and optimism in both St. Petersburg and Moscow. The new sovereign’s youth, his charm, and the liberal education he had received all appeared to be favorable omens. Both court elites and educated public opinion thought that this auspicious reign could only bring better days. Reflecting a widespread feeling, poet and statesman Gavrila Derzhavin proclaimed his relief in verse:

  The raucous north wind has ceased to shout

  The terrible frightening eye has closed.1

  Young Countess Edling, newly settled in St. Petersburg with her parents (she would later become a lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth) also remembered:

  A new century and a new reign had both begun. That of Paul I, somber and uncouth for Russia, had just ended in the most terrible catastrophe. Honest men, while deploring the crime, felt their hearts open to joy and hope. Everyone hurried to leave the enforced isolation in which we had lived, asking only to forget the past and to salute a new era with transports of joy.2

  No voice in Russia was raised to denounce the plot of which Paul had been the victim, although a few acid comments emanated from foreign observers: Madame de Staël wrote ironically that “in Russia the government is a despotism mitigated by strangulation,”3 while on the occasion of Alexander’s coronation on September 27, 1801, in the Cathedral of the Dormition in the Kremlin, Count Golovkin reported:

  The French police of Vienna seized a letter from Madame de Noisseville, an émigrée who had remained in Russia, to Count O’Donnell, chamberlain to the Emperor of Austria. In it was found this daring phrase (worthy of Tacitus) that the Tuileries was pleased to spread: “I have seen the young prince walking to the cathedral, preceded by the assassins of his ancestor, surrounded by those of his father, and by all appearances, followed by his own.”4

  The general benevolence toward the new sovereign appeared all the more justified because the empire had many so many dysfunctions to remedy.

  The Russian Empire in 1801

  At the start of the nineteenth century, despite the assertion of its stature as a great power on the international stage5 and the industrial progress achieved under the reigns of Peter the Great and then Catherine the Great6—for example, Russia became world leader in the production of cast iron—the empire was held back by a daunting range of archaic impediments.

  On the political level, whereas in western Europe the time was ripe for the assertion of the inalienable rights of the individual, the Russian Empire was still characterized by the all-powerfulness of an emperor who was considered a monarch by divine right and who could govern the state as he liked and impose his will on all his subjects. The emperor incarnated the sole source of right and justice, and he exercised his power through an extremely centralized7 administrative apparatus, which was in turn relayed by a corrupt local bureaucracy—despite the efforts made by Peter the Great and then Catherine II to fight against these scourges.

  Imperial power was exercised over a society that remained extremely compartmentalized, although it was in full demographic expansion. The population was growing spectacularly—from 32 million in 1795 to 34 million in 1801 and to 41.7 million in 18118—in part due to territorial expansion, yet Russian society at the start of the nineteenth century remained largely rural—only 4 percent were city dwellers. Society was characterized by a very imbalanced division into hermetically sealed orders:9 nobility, clergy, merchants, free peasants, and serfs. At Alexander’s ascension, almost 225,000 nobles counted for 0.6 percent of the total population;10 215,000 were men of the church; 119,000 were merchants, to whom should be added 15,000 higher officers and as many civil servants, for a total of 590,000 persons representing 1.73 percent of the population. The remaining were largely illiterate peasants numbering a bit more than 33 million. They included 13 million state peasants working for the emperor on his rural domains or in manufacturing, in particular the metal factories of the Urals, but the majority of them were serfs—more than 20 million of them—possessed by property owners.11 To these owners (who had complete authority over them), serfs owed compulsory labor (by those who worked the land) or a tax in money (from those who worked in industry or as artisans). In the regions of agricultural production with rich soil like the “black lands” of the center, the Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the Volga, compulsory labor often meant working four or five full days a week, if not sometimes seven, despite the recommendation12 pronounced by Paul in 1797 limiting the corvée to three days. The living conditions of peasants were very hard. Treated as cattle, worked to the bone, under pressure economically and financially, peasants suffered their fate with religious fatalism but revolted regularly: in 1801, 32 of 42 regional governments in the empire were touched by peasant rebellions13 that aroused among landowners the agonizing specter of a new revolt like Pugachev’s.

  Although constituting a single order, the nobility of the empire was extremely heterogeneous: in 1797, 83.5 percent of nobles owned fewer than 100 serfs, while 1.5 percent of nobles possessed more than a thousand of them, and this fraction alone counted for more than a third of the peasant population subjected to serfdom.14 Moreover, nobles had an ambiguous relation to power. We recall that, in her desire to modernize the country economically, Catherine II had sought to make the nobility the prime mover in this development. Accordingly, she freed it from the obligation to serve the state and sent it back to its estates. In parallel, from a concern to rationalize and make the administration more efficient, the empress had given a greater role to representatives of the nobility and even granted some autonomy in the management of local affairs.15 Pushed by the state to move in the direction of growing liberty, the aristocratic elites had started to benefit at the local level from responsibilities that were administrative and social, if not political. Thus many charitable works and philanthropic associations were created. Benefiting from the intellectual freedom supported by Catherine at least until 1790–1791 (in 1783 the state monopoly on printing had been abolished and private publishing began), the nobility had contributed to the development of intellectual societies, salons, and Masonic lodges. These various sites were propitious for the circulation of ideas and in barely a few years had fostered the emergence of an embryonic civil society. But there was an inherent paradox that Alexander inherited at the start of the nineteenth century: the imperial desire to structure Russian society into quite distinct orders with rights and duties to the state in fact derived from edicts issued by the sovereign (like the Charters of the Nobility and of Towns promulgated in 1785)16 and thereby contributed to anchoring Russian society in a paternalist mold that was unpropitious for private initiative and dynamism, and more and more anachronistic. Moreover, by sowing terror and arbitrary rule and by weakening elites, Paul’s reign had further undermined the nobility: exposed to the tsar’s hare-brained schemes and his anger when they did try to play a public role, the nobles had a tendency to withdraw in on themselves at the very moment when a new wave of censorship, rigid and omnipresent, once again prevented any creativity.

  Frozen on the political level as well as on the social, the Russian Empire appeared quite hemmed in by enclaves. Thanks to three centuries of continuous expansion,17 the empire had great ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity. When Alexander came to power, the Eastern Slavs—then considered “Russian” in the wider sense of the term and today divided into Russians, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians—formed 83 percent of the tsar’s subjects, but they were very much in the minority on the banks of the Baltic Sea, in Poland, and in the middle valley of the Volga, where Slavs were faced with peoples who spoke Finnish and Hungarian languages, with peoples like the Balts and Turks, with German speakers (including the Jews) and Polish speakers. However, the percentage of each of these peoples other than Russians in relation to the who
le population was never more than three percent. Orthodox believers (about 80 percent of the population, on a par with the percentage of Russians) included a majority of Ukrainians (a minority of them adhered to the Uniate Church that used Orthodox liturgy but was subject to papal authority in Rome), a portion of the Byelorussians, and some other peoples like the Chuvash,18 Mordavians, and Maris,19 who had all been Christianized in the seventeenth century. But other faiths were also represented: Catholicism accounted for a little more than 10 percent of the total population and was well implanted among the Poles, Lithuanians, some of the Byelorussians, and the Balts; Lutheranism (5 percent of the total) was in the majority in the Baltic provinces and among the German peoples of the empire; Islam (4 percent) was the religion of the Tatars of the Volga, the Tatars of the Crimea, and Bashkirs; and finally Judaism (2.5 percent) was present in the western part of the empire. There were also more isolated minority religious groups. At the start of the nineteenth century, by the annexation of a portion of Armenia,20 the Russian Empire had integrated Christians belonging to the Monophysite Gregorian Church, while in Siberia, Kalmuks and Buriats had remained faithful to Lamaism since the seventeenth century. Lastly, there were also even some remnants of paganism in Siberia and in the general peasantry.

  This cultural, religious, and ethnic diversity did not help the empire’s cohesion, especially because communication was still limited. Here, too, the country suffered from patent backwardness: more than 100,000 villages and market towns and 583 cities were barely linked to each other by roads that were mediocre at best and river routes that were not navigable throughout the whole year. Centers of population remained very isolated. The first steamboat made its appearance on the Neva only in 1815, and the first railroad line did not begin operating until 1837. Moreover, on the level of trade and commerce, Russia played only a modest role: in 1801 its share of world trade was only 3.7 percent.21 Thus, on the territorial level, as well as socially and economically, the empire was split into enclaves.

  Faced with this backwardness, the elites of the nobility remained rather passive, out of fear that any challenge to the social order might hurt their own privileges, particularly any challenge to the system of serfdom, which assured their existence and their status. Yet among them some personalities who had rallied to Enlightenment ideals or who had been influenced by liberalism were hoping for reforms: they aspired to a political evolution toward a parliamentary system, with greater freedom for the nobility vis-à-vis the tsar’s power, as well as for economic and social changes—including an eventual reform of serfdom. They were well aware that serfdom was deplorable on the moral plane and inefficient on the economic plane.

  Within this very narrow liberal elite, some great aristocrats were very close to the court: Vice-Chancellor Panin, the Zubov brothers, and Count Pahlen were all Anglophiles who had been involved in the plot against Paul. There were also writers of more modest origins who had made some of the first critiques of the empire: Novikov played a role in the dissemination of Enlightenment ideas, the young Karamzin was a supporter of a constitutional government, and Radishchev wrote The Voyage from St. Petersburg to Moscow (1790), which was the first attack on serfdom and peasant backwardness. As we saw, he had been imprisoned by Catherine and then condemned to internal exile by Paul. When Alexander reached the throne, the expectations of this enlightened elite were all the greater because the young sovereign had since 1796–1797 made himself a critical observer of the empire and of its political regime. By his behavior and the first measures he adopted, he incarnated the very idea of reform.

  A New Style

  From the first weeks of his reign, while remaining personally haunted by the tragedy of his father’s assassination, Alexander separated himself from Paul on all levels. Just as much as the former emperor had created terror in his entourage, so the new one seduced everyone with his charm, ease, and charisma, to which the emissary from Napoleon to the Court of St. Petersburg would later testify:

  Nature had done much for him […] and it would have been difficult to find a model so perfect and so gracious. […] He spoke French in all its purity, with no foreign accent, and always employed lofty expressions. As there was no affectation in his speech, one could easily infer that it was the result of careful education.22

  From the start Alexander adopted a lifestyle radically different from that of Paul and his predecessors. Upon his arrival on the throne on March 24, he ordered his mother to leave the St. Michael Palace and to come back to the Winter Palace. He also granted her the privileged status of Dowager Empress, giving her prerogatives and prestige that were unprecedented in Russian history. Henceforth she became a powerful actor in the new Imperial Russia, on both the symbolic and political levels. As stressed by Marie Martin in her biography of Maria Feodorovna, this new situation was established to the detriment of Alexander’s wife, Elizabeth. Indeed, in most official ceremonies Alexander gave his arm to his mother while Elizabeth followed them on her own; the years that followed would officially confirm this hierarchy. Dining seating plans mentioned in the journal of the maitre d’hôtel, published for St. Petersburg in 1806, specify the place of each member of the imperial family at the table:

  The Empress [Maria Feodorovna] was found to the right of Alexander when he was present, meaning in the place of honor. The Grand Duchess Catherine, aged eighteen, sat to her brother’s left, or in the second place of protocol. Elizabeth sat close to her mother-in-law. Another detail: when the writings of the period speak of the Empress, without any other precision, they are almost equally referring to Maria Feodorovna and to Elizabeth.23

  At the same period, in his report addressed to Talleyrand, then the Minister of Foreign Affairs, French Ambassador Savary confirms Maria Feodorovna’s power and the scope of her prerogatives:

  The protocol favors the Mother Empress. All the external honors and all the salutations are directed to her. In public ceremonies, Maria Feodorovna often takes the Emperor’s arm; Empress Elizabeth walks behind her, and alone. I saw the troops bearing arms and the Tsar on horseback waiting for his mother, who had not yet arrived. No favor in Russia is granted and no nomination made unless one goes to render homage to her and kisses her hand to thank her. But nobody says anything to Empress Elizabeth; that is not the practice. The great of St. Petersburg are careful not to let two weeks go by without making an appearance before the Dowager Empress. Elizabeth almost never goes there, but the Emperor dines there three times a week, and often sleeps there.24

  Alexander also paid substantial income to his mother, which allowed her to maintain a veritable parallel court, more brilliant than that of the emperor, and to direct with an iron hand a large network of charitable organizations and educational institutions whose role would be crucial throughout Alexander’s reign.

  Several historians have seen in the unprecedented status of Maria Feodorovna the concern of Alexander to “render back” to his mother the status of empress that the death of Paul had prematurely removed. While this explanation cannot be excluded, it seems important also to stress the deep, frank, and sincere affection that united son and mother, the breadth of the trust that the young man placed in Maria Feodorovna, and the need Alexander felt to carry out a tacit division of roles: to his mother the imperial luster and to himself simplicity and proximity to his subjects. Alexander Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky (later the tsar’s aide-de-camp and then a historian of the wars of 1812) very quickly detected the humanity—quite unprecedented in the Russian Empire—in Alexander’s conduct.

  His predecessors had been enclosed like Asiatic monarchs in the narrow confines of their palaces; the people only saw them on solemn occasions, surrounded by the pomp and splendor of supreme power. […] After Peter the Great, Alexander was the first to reject etiquette as an archaic custom and to appear among the people as a private person. With his wife, he made impromptu visits to balls and soirées given by certain great lords. […] He travelled in ordinary carriages that were distinguishable from others only by
their extraordinary cleanliness. He walked alone around the city. […] For the first time, his subjects could recognize and love the man who lay inside the external appearances.25

  This taste for simplicity and for a form of proximity with his subjects, contrasting as much with the military confinement in which Paul had lived as it did with the magnificent lifestyle led by Catherine, no doubt relates to the lessons received from Laharpe. For the tutor ancient virtue implied, if not a form of asceticism, then at least simplicity, sobriety, and temperance. But it is also explained by Alexander’s desire to escape the shackles of a court that he had distrusted and despised since childhood. Finally, in a more secret way, the circumstances by which the young emperor had reached the throne lay at the origin of a melancholy, even depressive, sadness:

  A sort of melancholy spread over the beginning of his reign that contrasted with the sparkle they wanted to give the coronation festivities.

  The young and handsome couple who were going to be crowned did not appear to be happy. […] The coronation festivities were for Alexander a source of redoubled sadness. […] He had bouts of devastation, to the point that they feared for his reason. […] I strove to soften the bitterness of the reproaches he constantly made to himself. I tried to reconcile him to himself, for the sake of the great task that lay before him. […] My exhortations only imperfectly obtained their effect, but they did manage to engage him to take enough control of himself so that the public could not read too much into his soul. But the gnawing worm would always remain.26