Alexander I- the Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon

by Marie-Pierre Rey

  I leave to your judgment whether to communicate to the British minister the acts that were concluded in Paris, either entirely or in part, thereby showing them my frankness and securing their assurance that the secret conditions will not be revealed. I think it is necessary on this occasion to communicate (for your information alone) that I absolutely do not intend to enter with the French government into any ulterior plan whatever, and that Talleyrand’s reference to some ulterior entente in his meetings with Count Morcoff could only relate […] to concerted measures relative to German affairs.9

  Thus, throughout 1801 the tsar felt a distrust toward Bonaparte’s France that pushed him to get closer to legitimist European monarchs—even while he remained attached to his liberal convictions—and to diversity his interlocutors. From this perspective Alexander decided to visit the King of Prussia, Frederick-Wilhelm, and Queen Louise, sticking to the planned trip despite the signing on March 25, 1802, of the Peace of Amiens between France and England.

  At the tsar’s initiative plans for the visit were formed at the end of 1801 and were warmly welcomed by the royal couple, who hoped in fact to sound out Alexander and if possible obtain his support on the current issue between France and Russia, i.e., German reparations. The emperor’s goals were less precise: it was a matter of diversifying Russia’s diplomatic contacts and asserting sympathy, mixed with the admiration that (like his father and grandfather) he felt for Prussia and the Prussians. However, the plan for a private trip met opposition from Czartoryski and Kochubey, who saw it as an unwise diplomatic choice. In December 1801, in a letter to Simon Vorontsov, Kochubey expressed his alarm at Alexander’s pro-Prussian sentiments and the parallel diplomacy to which the tsar was resorting:

  I saw him on this occasion—as on so many others—briefed in the most favorable manner on the King of Prussia personally and on his ministers. I discovered that this prince had written individual letters to the emperor, of which [our] ministry here had no knowledge. This correspondence, and even more so the approaches by the hereditary Prince of Mecklenburg, the Duke of Holstein, and all this family of ministers we had seen in Pavlovsk, had left (I believe) deep traces that are undoubtedly harmful to an impartial system that, in my opinion, is most suitable for us.10

  The plan for the trip also ran up against repeated warnings from Maria Feodorovna; although of German origin, she feared that this initiative, reminding the Russian court of the blindly pro-Prussian commitments of Peter III and then Paul I, would arouse visceral reactions within the army, even suspicions of a plot. But Alexander ignored the criticism: he was determined to carry out this trip, and in fact its diplomatic consequences would prove important—to Kochubey’s great regret, as shown in his correspondence. When the tsar was on the point of leaving in June 1802, Kochubey had just sent to Simon Vorontsov a dispatch in which his discontent wrestled with his desire to clear himself of any responsibility in the affair:

  I hope, my dear friend, to have no need to assure you that I had no part in such an impolitic initiative, and it was not up to me to prevent it. It seems that the emperor, without saying anything to anybody, had last year promised the King of Prussia to meet him somewhere on the border, and everything was arranged through the hereditary prince of Mecklenburg, his brother-in-law, a sot of the first order. Three weeks ago, summoned to Court, I was told by the emperor of this trip and ordered to get ready to travel. I was then (and I am still) very angry. Who will imagine that two sovereigns are going to review a few regiments? At bottom that is what it will be, but who will imagine that a minister of foreign affairs had no knowledge of this jaunt? Yet this is only too true. Whatever the case, I am accompanying the emperor.11

  En route, accompanied by Kochubey, Novosiltsev, and Grand Marshal Count Tolstoy, Alexander stopped at Narva, then at Tartu, where he visited the university, before staying two days in Riga, where he was warmly welcomed by the population of Lithuania. And on June 10, after nine days of traveling, the tsar made his entry into Memel.

  •••

  Received with luster and sympathy by the royal couple, the young sovereign was soon caught up in a whirlwind of receptions, parades, parties, and balls given in his honor for almost a week. At the Prussian court everybody judged him to be as handsome as he was considerate and kind; Queen Louise, then age 26, was soon captivated by his charm. In return he was conquered by the queen’s beauty, culture, and intelligence, but the relationship remained platonic despite the temptations offered to the seductive Russian tsar, as he admitted to Czartoryski:

  After one of the interviews with the Prussian Court, the emperor, who was smitten elsewhere at the time, told me he had been seriously alarmed by the arrangement of rooms that communicated with his own and that at night he locked himself in so nobody came in to surprise him and induce him into dangerous temptations that he wanted to avoid. He even declared this forthrightly to the two princesses12 with more frankness than gallantry and courtesy.13

  Remaining within suitable limits, the relationship formed between Louise and Alexander coincided with the cordial sentiments that were quickly established between the tsar and Frederick-Wilhelm. In only a few days close ties were sealed, placing Prussia under the “protective” wing of Russia.

  In his memoirs Czartoryski strongly criticizes Alexander for his attitude, reproaching him for having in the name of chivalric chimeras committed Russian diplomacy to a direction that was not in accord with its interests. According to him, it was a harebrained idea shared neither by Russian diplomats nor by Prussian ones.

  Relations with Prussia were all personal between the two sovereigns, and there was scarcely any sympathy between the cabinets. And the opinion of [our] army and [our] salons was no more favorable to Prussia: its equivocal conduct, its flat submission to France, and the acquisitions that this submission had secured it, were badly viewed by the Russians, who did not spare their sarcasm. Yet the emperor was faithful to his friendship with the king and the high opinion he had formed of the Prussian army.14

  However, this negative verdict should be moderated. If after 1802 the Prussian component assumed a significant weight in Russian foreign policy, this was due to the imperial desire to guarantee in principle a balance among states, as much as to Alexander’s feelings for Queen Louise or his fascination with Prussia’s grand past. Moreover, if sympathy for Prussia pushed the tsar to take a close interest in German compensations, he did not forget the interests of the smaller German states with which he had many familial ties. His grandfather was born Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, his grandmother Catherine II was called Sophia Frederica Augusta of Anhalt-Zerbst, his mother was Sophie-Dorothea de Württemberg, he had married Louise of Baden and his brother Constantine a princess of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. All this explained the personal interest Alexander had in the issue of compensations for Germany and the diplomatic effort he exerted for this purpose. In June 1802 the Russian sovereign asked his ambassador in Paris to prepare a bilateral convention on territorial changes to be planned for Germany; in August he pleaded during discussions held in the German sovereigns’ diet in favor of the interests of Prussia and of the small German states so dear to him—and he managed to be effective. During the meeting of the imperial deputation in March 1803, a plan for territorial reparations was officially presented by France and Russia. Adopted by the diet a month later, this text was confirmed by Emperor Franz of Austria in May 1803. It gave several substantial advantages to Prussia: dispossessed of 127,000 subjects on the left bank of the Rhine, it recuperated more than 500,000 elsewhere; and as regards the Grand Duchy of Baden, after having lost 30,000 subjects, it obtained almost 30,000 others, gaining the towns of Heidelberg (with its prestigious old university) and Mannheim.

  So, on German issues the Franco-Russian rapprochement achieved concrete results that, without affecting Russia’s vital interests, brought it some diplomatic advantages. On the one hand, Alexander was able to advance the interests of German principalities, and on the other hand, for little expense he had d
emonstrated his loyalty with regard to France. But at the end of 1802, the French refusal to take account of Russian intercession in favor of the king of Piedmont-Sardinia was a first source of tension between the two powers, pushing Russia gradually along the path to an alliance with England. Alexander I, still attached to peace, profited from the interval to reorganize the administration of foreign affairs.

  In September 1802 the creation of a new Ministry of Foreign Affairs was accompanied by the dismissal of Victor Kochubey, whose attachment to the principle of Russian diplomatic neutrality was increasingly out of phase with Alexander’s perspective, and the appointment of the very Anglophile Count Alexander Vorontsov (1741–1805). He was undeniably an experienced diplomat: he had been successively chargé d’affaires in Austria (1761–1762), minister plenipotentiary in England (1764–1768) and then Holland; he had participated in the negotiation and signing of agreements with France (1786), with the king of Naples and the king of Portugal (1787), and with Sweden (1790); finally, he had negotiated the Treaty of Jassy with the Ottoman Empire (1791), before being dismissed in 1792. At his side Prince Czartoryski was promoted to vice-minister.

  The same day, on September 20, a second decree confirmed the existence of the Colleges of War, Admiralty, and Foreign Affairs. In its first years the latter college tended to keep a number of its prerogatives, to the detriment of the corresponding ministry, remaining the body where the empire’s foreign policy was elaborated and executed. Moreover, the fact that Vorontsov recruited within the college the experienced civil servants he needed to move the new chancellery forward only accentuated the primacy of the college over the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, further confusing the boundaries between the old and the new structures.15 But the authority of the ministry was gradually asserted; its new chancellery was composed of four departments or “expeditions”: the first managed Asian affairs; the second, Ottoman affairs, the mission to Constantinople, and commercial issues; the third, the Russian diplomats and chargé d’affaires in posts abroad; and the fourth, relations with representatives from foreign countries who were posted in Russia. The division of these various responsibilities into distinct departments aimed to ensure a clearer and more rational working of the ministry.

  With the agreement of Alexander I, Vorontsov recruited as diplomats both foreigners and non-Russian speaking subjects of the empire whom he judged to be best qualified: French émigrés brought to Russian soil by the tumult of the Revolution, as well as German aristocrats from the Baltic provinces like Count Lieven (future ambassador to London) and Count Stackelberg (who would be sent to Vienna). An old tradition—one that was now more widespread than under the reign of Catherine II—this recruitment of non-Russian speakers did not fail to arouse criticism from a Russian nobility that felt itself dispossessed of its rights, as well as doubts about the capacity of western Europeans to understand and serve the interests of the Russian Empire.

  In early 1804 a sick Vorontsov left Foreign Affairs, and the post of minister then fell to Prince Czartoryski—to the annoyance of a certain number of diplomats, courtiers, and some close to Alexander, including his mother, who were either worried or furious to see responsibility for all Russian diplomacy incumbent on a Pole, although he was a subject of the Russian Empire. But battling winds and tides, Alexander imposed his choice and would keep Czartoryski in his post until June 1806, when he would be dismissed due to his opposition to the rapprochement with Prussia and to the entry of Russia into the new coalition.

  In parallel with the reorganization of the administration of foreign affairs, Alexander began to study restructuring the army, its organization, and how it worked. Wanting to introduce reforms, he called upon Arakcheev.

  In April 1803, three years after having been exiled to his estates by Paul I, Arakcheev received a message from Alexander, calling him back to St. Petersburg. Arakcheev obeyed and arrived in the capital in May, to be named inspector general of artillery and commander of the artillery battalion of the Guard; the tsar gave him carte blanche to reorganize and reinforce the artillery. Arakcheev applied himself to the task, beginning by inspecting over several months the regiments of the imperial army, which then included 446,000 men. From his observations he concluded that it would be desirable to separate artillery from infantry and give artillery its own chain of command and its own resources, and that it should cease being considered as simply support for the infantry. From this perspective he founded artillery schools for officers and troops and created a magazine, the Artillery Review, whose purpose was to arouse an esprit de corps among gunners. However, this reform aroused criticism from infantry officers, and as we shall see, during the first engagements against Bonaparte, it was not yet fully operational.16

  The reorganization of Foreign Affairs and the beginnings of restructuring the army unfolded as Alexander (still a pacifist in European issues) led a much more aggressive policy in the south.

  At his accession, as we remember, the tsar was not in favor of the annexation of the kingdom of Kartl-Kakhetia that had begun under Paul’s reign. And he only gradually rallied to the arguments of those within the Permanent Council who defended it. But once this decision was ratified, Alexander engaged in an expansionist policy in the Caucasus, extending the authority of the Russian Empire over small independent states to the west and situated on the border of the Black Sea, using the establishment of political protectorates that would lead after varying periods to pure and simple annexations. Thus, in 1803 the principality of Mingrelia, a year later the kingdom of Imereti, and then the principality of Guria passed successively under Russian control.

  The object of imperial covetousness was, of course, the innumerable natural resources of the Caucasus—in addition to the mines, there were silk and the madder of the Transcaucasus, the cotton of eastern Armenia—and the ambition to increase the volume of Russian exports to the Ottoman Empire and Persia. But it was also a matter of taking into account the strategic role of the Caucasus as a “buffer zone” against the Ottomans and Persians.

  Establishing Russia in the Caucasus soon translated into tangible advantages: whereas in 1802 the countries of Asia represented only 3.3 percent of Russian exports, this rose to 30 percent in 1827, testifying to the growing role played by this region in imperial commerce. But it soon also posed problems on the domestic and foreign levels.

  In the case of the ancient kingdom of Kartl-Kakhetia, the choice of annexation implied setting up a Russian administration staffed by Russian civil servants that referred largely to Georgian laws and customs. But once in place this administration made clumsy missteps and humiliated the Georgian nobility, which was now dispossessed of any power. By 1802 this aroused serious anti-Russian ferment. In response, Alexander named General Tsitsianov as commander general of the Caucasus; the descendant of a Georgian prince who had supported Russia, he appeared to the tsar as a providential man: nominating a general to this post was significant of Alexander’s will to quickly integrate the Caucasus into the empire. So, the sovereign expected much from Tsitsianov and his knowledge of Georgia. But Tsitsianov quickly made himself the violent champion of an authoritarian order, someone who despised the indigenous people. In a short time his methods resulted in a Georgian revolt that burst out in 1804; two years later, when Tsitsianov mounted an offensive against Persia destined to seize the principality of Baku, he was brutally assassinated there.

  Thus Russian settlement in the Transcaucasus appeared particularly fragile, even more so because it also ran up against international obstacles: it contravened both the interests of the shah of Persia, dispossessed by the Russians of his territories, and the interests of the Ottoman Empire, traditionally attached to the same region. In 1806, at the height of the conflict between Russians and Ottomans, the Imeretians,17 hostile to Russian tutelage, made common cause with the Ottomans. At the start of Alexander’s reign, expansionism into the Transcaucasus was proving a difficult process on both military and diplomatic levels.

  The scope of the obsta
cles and the military and human cost of this engagement convinced Alexander that he should stand apart from the European theater in order to avoid having to fight on several fronts. But French schemes ended up trumping this guiding principle.

  Throughout the years from 1801 to 1803, Alexander tried to be pacifist, but this did not prevent him from becoming increasingly critical of the First Consul, as the topics of dissension between France and Russia kept multiplying. In a letter sent to Laharpe in July 1803, which says a lot about his own state of mind and the strength of his liberal convictions, the young emperor vividly deplored the “treachery” of Bonaparte and his evolution toward a form of power that was increasingly personal and “tyrannical”:

  Like you, dear friend, I have reconsidered my opinion of the first consul. Since becoming Consul for Life, the veil has fallen and things have gone from bad to worse. He began by depriving himself of the finest glory reserved for a human that it remained for him to gather: proving that he was working without any selfish interest, solely for the happiness and glory of his country and faithful to the constitution to which he himself swore, to relinquish after ten years the power he held in his hands. Instead of that, he has preferred to mimic [royal] courts while violating his country’s constitution. Now he is one of the most infamous tyrants that history has produced.18

  In 1803 the tsar and Vorontsov were still trying to stall, avoiding any confrontation with Bonaparte, while showing increased Russian interest in European affairs. In July 1803 d’Oubril, the Russian chargé d’affaires in Paris, expressed to Bonaparte’s foreign minister Talleyrand the tsar’s desire to reestablish peace in Europe and to guarantee it by respecting the equality among states.

  Far from wanting to rekindle the fire of war on the continent, His Majesty’s heart’s desire would be to make it cease everywhere, but he also wishes that the French government, since it declares it has the same wish, would leave at rest those who have the strongest desire not to take part. His Majesty’s sole desire is for peace to be reborn in Europe, for nobody to try to arrogate any supremacy at all, and for the French government also to recognize the equality of states that are less strong but just as independent as it is. Russia, one cannot repeat enough, has no desire or interest in making war. It is the force of circumstances that will dictate the position it will take.19