Alexander I- the Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon

by Marie-Pierre Rey

  On July 9 the two sovereigns separated, promising to send each other new representatives to ensure the maintenance of the dialogue, and Alexander returned to his capital.

  But while the tsar was rather relieved at the results obtained in the course of difficult negotiations undertaken as the vanquished party, he ran up against an open revolt at home. His closest friends and advisors (Czartoryski had called the Tilsit agreements “disastrous”62), the court, and the elites were all furious at the defeat and reproached him for the courtesies exchanged with Napoleon and the immoral alliance just concluded with the “Beast of the Apocalypse.” For them, the tsar had only bowed before the French emperor, and the many concessions he had made proved his inability to defend the interests of Russia; they only augured growing submission to France. The court buzzed with rumors of plots, and for the first time since the accession of Alexander to the throne in March 1801, the threat was serious.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Time of the French Alliance

  1807–1812

  While the Russian popular imagination was soon carried away by the drama on the raft in a direction favorable to Alexander—the rumor circulated that good Tsar Alexander profited from the meeting on the Niemen to baptize the Antichrist—by contrast, within the elites and the army, the Peace of Tilsit aroused such criticism that imperial power seemed threatened. Despite this turmoil, the autocratic tsar, inflexible and deaf to all reproaches, remained faithful to his new line. In effect, he imposed the French alliance on the country, as in 1805 he had imposed the Prussian alliance.

  Yet, despite the dismay that it ignited among the court Anglophiles, this diplomatic change did not constitute a disavowal of Alexander’s convictions. Throughout the years from 1807 to 1812, he would proclaim his goodwill toward Napoleon and his desire to respect the spirit and the letter of the alliance. But he was already convinced that it could not last, given that it was imposed by circumstances. Sooner or later, the struggle against Napoleon would resume, for which French expansionism was responsible. The Peace of Tilsit was thus only a pause in the military confrontation, a breathing space from which the most advantage should be drawn, diplomatically and geopolitically. Here, far from appearing to be vacillating or hesitant, Alexander on the contrary demonstrated his maturity, if not his political cynicism. He remained attached to a conception of a European balance of power that condemned French hegemonic tendencies, and he continued to proclaim his stubborn faithfulness to Prussia: in August 1807, upon his return to Russia, he publicly affirmed his disagreement with Napoleon’s proposals at Tilsit that aimed to increase Russian territory at the expense of “our ally.”1 This shows how reluctantly he had entered into the French alliance. But he would respect his commitments despite the incomprehension and anger that his decisions induced among his close entourage within the court.

  The Peace of Tilsit and Its Consequences

  Upon his return to St. Petersburg, the tsar found he had unleashed an explosion of blame. The atmosphere was tense: a palpable and worried mood pervaded the diplomats in post in St. Petersburg. Count of Stedingk, the Swedish ambassador, wrote to his king in October 1807:

  Discontent with the emperor is increasing and the statements heard everywhere are frightening. The emperor’s loyal servants and friends are in despair, but there is nobody who knows how to remedy the evil and who has the courage to make him recognize the great danger in which he finds himself. They say they see no cure, that the emperor is obstinate in his opinion, that he is not ignorant of the bad opinion, but that he attributes it to foreign causes, to the millions the English throw around to make partisans (which is entirely false and something that Savary alleges), and that he wants only the good of his subjects, and so has nothing to fear from them. However, it is too true that in particular societies and even in public assemblies, people often entertain the thought of a change of reign, and forget their duty to the point of saying that the whole masculine line of the reigning family should be proscribed.2

  As regards our court observer Joseph de Maistre, he was even more explicit in his correspondence with his master, the king of Sardinia: “To get out of this perilous situation, many people see only the Asiatic remedy,”3 meaning, of course, the assassination of the tsar, and his replacement by Maria Feodorovna or Catherine Pavlovna. In fact, anchored in positions viscerally hostile to the alliance with France, mother and daughter encouraged the cabal, to the point of arousing the anger of Empress Elizabeth, livid at this moral betrayal. At the beginning of September 1807, she wrote to her mother, speaking of Maria Feodorovna, who in her castle in Pavlovsk was leading the revolt:

  The empress, who as a mother should support and defend the interests of her son, instead out of carelessness or amour-propre, (and certainly for no other reason, for she is incapable of bad intentions), has managed to resemble the leader of a revolt. All the malcontents, who are numerous, rally around her, praising her to the skies, and never has her court been so large, never has she attracted so many people to Pavlovsk as this year. I cannot tell you how indignant this makes me. At a time like this, when she is aware of how bitter the public feels toward the emperor, at this moment she attracts, honors, and flatters those who shout the loudest! I do not know why, but I cannot find this conduct praiseworthy, especially from a mother. […] They say the Grand Duke Constantine, when his brother’s back is turned, shouts like the others about what has happened and still happens. […] Finally, I assure you there are moments when this good emperor, who is the best person in the whole family, appears to me verrathen und verkauf [betrayed and sold] by his own family.4

  Isolated in his stubbornness in supporting the French alliance, the emperor was not helped in his task by Napoleon’s decisions, either. After the Tilsit meetings he chose to send to the Russian court his faithful Savary, not as ambassador, but as “officer-general attached to the person of the emperor.”5 No choice could have been more disastrous; everyone in St. Petersburg knew that the person who commanded the imperial police in 1804 had played a key role in the kidnapping of the Duke d’Enghien—and hence in his death. Making the best of it, Alexander proved amiable to the newcomer, but the court, seeing this selection as a provocation that showed the French emperor’s contempt, unanimously shunned him. Barely arrived, Savary seemed a pariah. The welcome interview granted by Maria Feodorovna to the new French ambassador lasted fifty seconds!

  Of course, the court included a few Francophiles like Count Rumyantsev, promoted to minister of foreign affairs in place of Budberg at the end of 1807.6 An experienced diplomat trained in the school of Catherine II, Rumyantsev had been previously in charge of foreign trade and now performed both functions.7 But the Francophiles’ task was hard, so set was the court in its radical opposition, sharpened by the shocking presence of Savary. Elizabeth herself was “embarrassed” (a euphemism) by the presence of the Duke of Rovigo (the title Napoleon gave to Savary) in St. Petersburg. In a letter to Rumyantsev in October 1807, the empress did not conceal her unease:

  I have just received a letter from the emperor in which he tells me I must invite General Savary to dine at least twice in the space of ten days; having failed out of ignorance to do what he desires, I hastened to repair this fault today. Do me the pleasure, Count, if that is possible, of coming to me today, for I admit that I am embarrassed by the obligation the emperor is imposing on me.8

  Barely settled in St. Petersburg, General Savary perceived the rebellious tendencies at court, and he confided to the emperor that he was worried about “the consequences […] this license might have in a country where palace revolutions were only too common.”9 But Alexander himself was well aware of the danger he was in: since mid-January 1807, to better discern the mood of the court and the elites and to try as much as possible to prevent difficulties, he had set up a “Committee for General Security” whose reports, increasingly alarming, also attest to the scope of the discontent. Yet Alexander kept his head down, declaring to the French emissary: “Oh, by God, I know it, I
see it, but what do you want me to do against the destiny that leads me to this dangerous situation?”10 But, at the same time, he resorted to taking protection from Count Arakcheev, to whom he granted extraordinary powers. In December 1807 an imperial decree assimilated all the orders given by Arakcheev to orders personally signed by the emperor;11 some weeks later, the count was promoted to the rank of minister of war. “Like a guard dog with his obtuse ferocity and unconditional loyalty,”12 Arakcheev, in whom Alexander had total confidence, was thus tacitly charged with watching over the son as he had previously watched over Paul.

  The choice of the French alliance, taken despite criticism and risk, also separated the tsar from his Anglophile friends within the former inner circle. Guilty of having in concert with the British ambassador spread a pamphlet of British inspiration titled “Reflections on the Peace of Tilsit,” Novosiltsev and Czartoryski were asked to leave Russia, while Kochubey had to give up his portfolio as interior minister. All three were relieved of their responsibilities; the sovereign thought that the new policy should be carried out by new men who were less marked by their pro-English commitments. For Alexander the price paid for the French alliance was thus very high on the political as well as the psychological and affective levels.

  In November 1807, perhaps because the personality and past of Savary scarcely suited the St. Petersburg court, Napoleon replaced him with Armand de Caulaincourt, while Alexander sent to Paris Count Tolstoy as emissary. Initially the tsar wanted to make Kurakin, one of the two Tilsit negotiators, his representative in the French capital, but the latter, saying he was too old, declined the offer. In reality, his refusal is largely explained by his ties to Maria Feodorovna, “the rabid Napoleonophobe.”

  Arriving in St. Petersburg in December 1807, Caulaincourt did his best to be amiable but did not manage to soften the court, which remained set in its hostility to the French emperor and to his representative, who (despite himself) had been mixed up in the murder of the Duke d’Enghien.13 Courtiers were sarcastic about Caulaincourt. In a dispatch to Sardinia, Joseph de Maistre echoed many others with his biting irony:

  I am much amused in considering Caulaincourt. He is well-born and boasts about it; he represents a sovereign who makes the world tremble; he has six or seven hundred thousand in rent; he is foremost everywhere. But he has the common air underneath the embroidery; he is stiff as if he had marionette strings in his joints. Everybody thinks he is like Ninette14 at Court.15

  Yet, on December 8 Alexander received him like “an old friend,” putting at his disposal the sumptuous Volkonsky Palace on the banks of the Neva, “whose splendors eclipse by far the elegant and comfortable Thélusson mansion Napoleon had just bought from Murat to make it the Paris residence of Alexander’s representative. [The Volkonsky] was the finest mansion in St. Petersburg and without argument the finest building after the palace of Grand Duke Constantine.”16 That very evening, the French ambassador witnessed a performance at the Winter Palace, sitting in the same row as the imperial family despite court grumbling. Yet little by little, thanks to the wealth Caulaincourt deployed (to the point of indebtedness), the magnificence of the receptions he organized, and the quality of his table, but still more to his tenacity to please and to convince people of his sincere interest in Russia, he managed over the months to rally a great part of the court, with the notable exception of Maria Feodorovna and those close to her, unshakably Francophobes.

  Meanwhile in Paris, the task of Count Tolstoy appeared easier, since he chose to serve the alliance with France by serving his tsar faithfully. When appointing him, Alexander had been sufficiently explicit, declaring: “Remember one thing, it is not a diplomat I need, but a brave and honest soldier, and that is just what you are.”17 But his Prussophile convictions and his mistrust of Napoleon quickly took the upper hand. From his first meeting with the emperor, Tolstoy made many criticisms of the person he continued to call “Bonaparte,” correctly pointing to the essential problem:

  Bonaparte’s views of us are evident. He wants to make us an Asiatic power, push us back into our ancient borders. […] As for Constantinople, he is trying to remove our troops in order to be the master there by proposing we throw one part of our army against Sweden and use the other on distant campaigns, in Persia, the Indies.18

  But this lucid critique of the French emperor would push Alexander during his meeting at Erfurt with Napoleon in October 1808 to replace Tolstoy19 with Kurakin as better able to represent him.

  At the same time, Franco-Russian relations were proving complex and more strained than the elaborate demonstrations of friendship at Tilsit would have augured. Stumbling blocks soon appeared. Admittedly, promises of fidelity to the alliance had been given by Russia; on November 6, having failed in its mediation of peace between France and England, the tsarist government broke off its relations with Britain in accord with those Tilsit commitments. But deep divergences on the Ottoman and Polish issues still separated the allies.

  Relying on the verbal guarantees given by Napoleon at Tilsit, Alexander charged Count Tolstoy in Paris with arranging a diplomatic act to ratify the surrender of the provinces of Moldavia and Walachia to the Russian Empire; we recall that Russia had occupied them during its military campaign against the Ottoman Empire. But in response, for the price of its “benevolence” in this affair, France demanded territorial compensation, specifically a new enlargement of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. This would strengthen a state already placed under French influence, and it appeared to the Russians as a dangerous security threat—hence the categorical refusal of Russian diplomacy and the resultant impasse in negotiations. In February 1808 Napoleon tried to restart the dynamic of the alliance by proposing “a campaign against the pearl of the British Crown, India”; he implied that as a counterpart to Russian participation in this campaign, he would be ready for concessions on the Ottoman question. For Napoleon it was a matter of obtaining at whatever cost Russian support against England, and so the Indian expedition might adequately seal this commitment. For this purpose he proposed to the tsar a new bilateral meeting in order to determine together the details of the coming campaign.

  Skeptical at first, Alexander ended up supporting the idea; on March 13, 1808, in a letter to Napoleon,20 he accepted both the principle of Russian participation in a campaign against India and the idea of a new meeting, on the express condition that France would take into account a certain number of Russian demands. The same day, receiving Caulaincourt, the tsar reaffirmed his priorities: in the event of the two allies’ sharing the Ottoman Empire, Constantinople and the three European provinces (Bessarabia, Moldavia, Walachia) would be annexed by Russia and the straits would be put under Russian control. A few weeks later, in a new meeting, Alexander declared very explicitly about Constantinople:

  Geography wants me to have it, because if it belonged to another, I would no longer be master at home. Nor is it inconvenient for others (the emperor will admit) for me to have the key to the door of my house.21

  But these declarations remained without effect: discussions in March between Caulaincourt and Rumyantsev led to nothing concrete. French diplomats thought they could not grant Russia a blank signature on the Ottoman issue. Napoleon also proposed another currency of exchange: in a letter to the tsar in February, he suggested a Russian advance toward the Baltic Sea, in the direction of Finland, which was then a possession of Sweden, ally of England. For the French emperor it was a matter of offering Russia some territorial compensation that would in no way harm his own interests and would permit anchoring Russia more solidly in the French camp.

  Armed with this support, Alexander a few days later began the conquest of Finland, without even having formally declared war on Sweden. Fifty thousand combatants were thrown into battle, and on March 2 the fall of Helsinki resulted in the siege of Sveaborg. Isolated by ice, the fortress, which could not receive reinforcement by sea, was forced to capitulate in May, which temporarily halted hostilities.

  Meanwhile, the Polis
h question remained another thorn of contention between the Tilsit allies. For Napoleon, Poland should in time be restored, and this restoration should take place under the aegis and protective wing of France, while for the tsar, a reconstituted Poland, if transformed into a bastion of French interests, could only represent an unacceptable threat to Russia, on both the security level and for its own territorial integrity. A new Poland might then aspire to reconstitute the old Polish-Lithuanian kingdom to the detriment of the Russian Empire.

  Thus, in September 1808 as the tsar was getting ready to leave for Erfurt, none of the bones of contention that divided the allies had been resolved. For many in Russia, the meeting to which Alexander I had imprudently consented was a mistake, so much did St. Petersburg view the alliance as a fool’s game. Moreover, by then Napoleon had freed himself of any political and moral restraints: he had kidnapped the pope, he had deposed the Spanish sovereign and led him into a trap in Bayonne. Russia was afraid for the personal safety of the tsar. On August 25 Maria Feodorovna wrote to dissuade Alexander from going to Erfurt. She was very worried for his life and reasserted her hostility for any new demonstration of Franco-Russian “friendship,” for which Russia and its tsar might have to pay the costs.