Alexander I- the Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon

by Marie-Pierre Rey

  On January 18 Adam Czartoryski replied that the Poles would only rally to Russia if the tsar promised to respect a certain number of conditions: the May 1791 constitution had to be restored, all Polish lands unified, and the new state had to have access to the sea. But he expressed doubts about the feasibility of the plan: he stressed the confidence the Poles had placed and continued to place in Napoleon, and he was doubtful about the attitude of German troops. In his reply Alexander reasserted that he was in favor of a sovereign Poland with a national army, but he still refused to give Byelorussia and the lands east of the Dnieper and Dvina Rivers to any new Polish entity. In a general way, he was aware of the difficulties and stakes:

  It is beyond doubt that Napoleon is trying to provoke Russia to break with him, hoping that I will make the mistake of being the aggressor. In the current circumstances, this would be a mistake that I am decided not to commit. Everything changes if the Poles want to unite with me. Strengthened by the 50,000 men that I would owe them, by the 50,000 Prussians who then might without risk join in the same way, and by the moral revolution in Europe which will be the necessary result, I might get as far as the Oder without encountering opposition. […] As long as I cannot be sure of cooperation with the Poles, I have decided to not begin war with France.54

  But he still remained attached to his plan. For this purpose he approached the king of Prussia and in October 1811 ordered the commanders of Russian troops stationed on the western border to prepare to go on campaign. Russia, he announced to them, was liable to start a sudden offensive.55 However, ultimately, the king of Prussia’s reservations and those of Czartoryski won out over Alexander’s bellicose intentions. In April 1812 he wrote to his Polish friend:

  Your preceding letters have left me too little hope of success to authorize me to act, and I could not so reasonably resolve unless I had some probability of success. Thus I must resign myself to see what happens and to not provoke by my actions a struggle whose importance and dangers I appreciate, though without believing that I can escape it.56

  By this date the tsar had given up his plan for an offensive war. But while he had long been hesitating over the path to take, as of the spring of 1811, the Russian Empire was also preparing a defensive war whose first manifestations—building fortresses, installing regiments—were visible in Russian Poland and aroused Napoleon’s anger against Caulaincourt, who was called back to Paris. Judged by Napoleon as guilty of having succumbed to Russian propaganda—“Alexander wants to make war against me! You are the dupe of Alexander and the Russians! You speak like a Russian! You have become Russian!”57 Napoleon rebuked him when he returned—and of having been inattentive to the preparations begun by the imperial army in Poland, Caulaincourt was in May replaced by General Lauriston, whose room for maneuver would prove nonexistent. While Caulaincourt did remain an indefatigable partisan of the alliance, as a lucid observer in September 1810, he composed a judicious portrait of Alexander in a letter to the French minister of foreign affairs.

  With respect to this prince, it seems to me he is not judged for what he is. He is thought weak, but that is a mistake. No doubt, he can bear much contrariness and hide his discontent, but this is because his goal is the general peace, and he hopes to reach it without violent crisis. But this facility of character is circumscribed: he will not go beyond the circle he has traced; this circle is made of iron and will not bend because deep down at the bottom of this character of benevolence, frankness, and natural loyalty as well as elevated sentiments and principles, there is an acquired sovereign dissimulation, which marks a stubbornness that nothing can vanquish. The talent of a government and of anyone who deals with him must therefore be to divine this limit, for the emperor will never exceed it.58

  On the day of Caulaincourt’s departure, as a mark of his esteem, Alexander gave him both the Order of St. Andrew and a magnificent lacquer box with a lid decorated with a miniature portrait of himself.

  Napoleon, for his misfortune and that of his empire, took no notice of his ambassador’s warnings. In June 1811 in his chateau in St. Cloud, he spoke privately with Caulaincourt for almost seven hours. During the interview Napoleon complained several times that the Russian alliance had been of no use in his anti-British strategy, that Russia was sabotaging the continental blockade, and that, taking into account the many bones of contention, war had become unavoidable. Caulaincourt tried to temporize, to convince him of the need to pursue the alliance, but Napoleon would have none of it. On August 15, trying to intimidate the tsar by proclaiming his aggressiveness and his condescension toward him, Napoleon during a diplomatic meeting launched into an insulting and public diatribe against Russian ambassador Kurakin that says much about the deteriorating relations between the two supposed allies:

  You have just been beaten near Rustschuk because you lacked troops and you lacked them because you withdrew five divisions from your Danube army to transport them to Poland. […] I am not so stupid as to accept that it was Oldenburg that concerns you—one does not fight for Oldenburg. I clearly see that it is about Poland; I am starting to believe that you want to take it away. Well, no, you will not have one village, not one windmill of the grand duchy. Even if your armies were camped on the heights of Montmartre, I would not give you one inch of Warsaw territory! I do not know if I will beat you, but we will fight. I have 800,000 men, and each year I will have 250,000 more. You are counting on allies. Where are they? Austria, from whom you have stolen 200,000 souls in Galicia? Prussia, from whom you have taken Bialystok? Sweden, which you have mutilated by taking Finland from it? All these grievances will not be forgotten, you will have all of Europe against you! [...] You resemble a hare that has received a bullet in the head and that turns and turns without knowing what direction to go.59

  Far from being intimidated, Alexander wove his own web: in February 1811, despite the insult over the marriage of Marie Louise, he renewed contact with Austria. He received (discreetly, at the home of Count Tolstoy) General Saint-Julien, the Austrian envoy, and told him he wanted to avoid any conflict to come, while declaring firmly:

  Your sovereign knows that since my peace with France I have applied myself in particular to avoiding anything that could cause a new explosion. Nevertheless, recent events might well lead to war. I will avoid it as long as possible, but if the dignity of my empire requires it, and if I am forced to, then I will draw my saber. […] I have 200,000 men assembled on those of my borders that might be threatened—and behind them 130,000 more. I desire that your sovereign be informed of how I could oppose an enemy. But I am far from proposing any transaction to your court, knowing very well Austria’s situation.60

  In March he sent the Austrian emperor a secret letter asking him to remain neutral in the event of a future war between Russia and France; for the price of this neutrality, he offered to help him to recover his former Italian and Balkan possessions. But without closing the door on any negotiations, Franz’s answer remained evasive.61

  At this date the tsar still hoped to benefit from Austrian support. But Alexander would be disappointed: on March 14 Austria signed a treaty in Paris that set up an alliance with France and called for Austria to bring a contingent of 30,000 men in case of conflict. But Alexander did not give up. After another meeting with Saint-Julien on April 7, he obtained from Chancellor Metternich an oral and secret agreement guaranteeing that Austria would only participate weakly and pro forma in the coming war,62 in violation of the agreement just concluded with France. Meanwhile Alexander approached Bernadotte of Sweden, who, furious with the fact that in January 1812 Napoleon had occupied Swedish Pomerania to strengthen the blockade, agreed to sign a treaty of alliance that guaranteed Swedish neutrality in exchange for putting at the disposal of Sweden 35,000 Russian soldiers to help it to conquer Norway. Wanting to have as much freedom of movement as possible, Alexander tried also to conclude a quick peace with the Ottoman Empire, which would be accomplished in May 1812. Finally, diplomatic contacts with Britain were secretly revived
.

  This shows that diplomatic activity was at its most furious when, on June 24, 1812, the Grande Armée—composed of 20 nations and 12 languages, totaling almost 450,000 men—abruptly invaded Russian territory.

  CHAPTER 10

  Between Domestic Reforms and Military Preparations

  1807–1812

  The years from 1807 to 1812 were also of major importance on a domestic level. Upon the return to peacetime, Alexander could again devote himself to the work of reform begun in 1801 that the upheavals and subsequent military engagements had abruptly frozen after 1805. But as we have seen, the fragile and ambiguous peace of Tilsit and of Erfurt left little respite: on one hand, because its negative impact was quickly felt on Russian economy and development, and on the other hand, because starting in 1810 military consultations and preparations took the upper hand, gradually tearing the tsar away from his domestic preoccupations.

  The Hour of Reform

  When peace was restored, Alexander revived his work from 1801 to 1804 and again asserted his desire to reform the empire’s administration to make it more effective and just. He devoted all his energy to these issues in the years from 1807 to 1811—despite his personal suffering. In July1810 he lost his little Zinaide, born of his liaison with Maria Naryshkina “and with her, a part of the happiness I enjoyed in this world.”1

  To help him in this reforming task, he chose the support not of his old friends from the inner circle (who had fallen into disfavor since Tilsit), but rather the help of Mikhail Speransky, a “new man.”

  Between 1801 and 1805 the tsar tried to rationalize the central administration by creating ministries in September 1802 and officially fixing the responsibilities of ministers and of their departments. But while making central administration more effective, reform also had a tendency to accentuate the compartmentalization of ministries and the absence of any coordination among them. Moreover, some key sectors continued to evade the newly installed central administration. In 1808 the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which was concerned with policy and security as well as public health, did manage to eliminate an epidemic of the plague by resorting to draconian quarantine measures, but the same year it proved incapable of ensuring the provision of foodstuffs in the zones most affected by disastrous harvests. Worse, no other ministry was able to supplement this deficit, since there was no ministry of agriculture.2 In 1807–1808, while peace was restored, there remained a lot to do, both concerning the responsibilities and functioning of ministries as well as their relations with regional and local administrations. Finally, while even before coming to the throne Alexander had expressed his intention to reform the regime by orienting it to a constitutional monarchy, by 1807 no concrete progress had been made in this direction.

  The years from 1803 to 1807 were a period of reflection and maturation: in 1803, as we recall, a constitution had been granted to the Ionian Islands.3 Prepared by Gustav Rosenkampf, this constitution was intended by Alexander to serve as an experiment—and perhaps a model—for the Russian Empire. In 1804 the tsar had confided to Baron Rosenkampf that he desired to grant his subjects civic rights, as well as participation in political affairs.4 But the jurist’s deliberations resulted in the publication of merely a short brochure (written in German) presenting “fragments of a constitution but in no order, with lacunae and omissions like the agrarian question.”5 So by 1807 the idea of a constitutional reform still remained in suspension. In this context, at the end of 1808 Alexander charged Mikhail Speransky with working on a reform likely to change deeply the political structure of the whole empire.

  Born in 1772 in a small village situated in the Vladimir province, the son of a priest, Speransky had been educated at the Vladimir seminary, then at Alexander Nevsky seminary in St. Petersburg, where he graduated in 1791; after 1792 he taught theology there, before being named director in 1795. In 1797 he entered the civil service. He in no way resembled Alexander’s old friends in the inner circle. Of extremely modest origins, Speransky owed his extraordinary social ascension to his superior intelligence, his grasp of the interest of the state, and his devotion to work. Speaking fluent French, English, and Russian, reading Greek and Latin, imbued with classical humanism while being open to the contemporary world, Speransky had been supported by Prince Kurakin and entered the imperial chancellery in 1801 as assistant to Dimitri Troshchinsky to draft laws; he was assigned the following year to the new Ministry of Internal Affairs. As secretary of state there, he soon became the right-hand man of Kochubey, preparing for him many contributions to the secret committee. The two men were linked by mutual esteem and friendship; later, Speransky’s daughter would marry Kochubey’s nephew,6 thus entering into one of the richest and most illustrious families of Russia.7

  Working in the shadow of Kochubey, Speransky got close to the members of the secret committee and was soon noticed by the tsar. In 1803 he was promoted head of the sole department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, making him de facto vice-minister, and a year later, when the ministry was split into three “expeditions,”8 he became head of the second, in charge of state management. In this post he began to reflect on reforming the state and wrote synopses for the tsar’s attention, such as Reflections on the Structure of the Imperial State or his Note on the Judicial Organization and Public Offices in Russia, and even a little work titled On the Spirit of Government. In the course of 1808, after the Peace of Tilsit, Speransky grew in the tsar’s favor: when Novosiltsev left Russia and Kochubey began to lose his influence, he was named “reporter of affairs of the highest importance” to Alexander, becoming his principal assistant. The tsar took him to Erfurt and presented him to Napoleon and to Talleyrand. Speransky had frequent conversations with the French minister, whom he pleased with his uncommon intelligence; Napoleon appreciated him too and even offered him a gold snuffbox with his effigy entirely surrounded by diamonds.9 On their return to St. Petersburg, Alexander appointed Speransky vice-minister of Justice (in place of Novosiltsev) and gave him the mission of preparing a legal code designed to introduce new political practices.

  Speransky soon got down to this task, fully in accord with Alexander’s ideas and objectives. As Speransky stressed in a letter he sent to the tsar during his later exile in Perm, it was indeed within the framework of an intense collaboration between the two men—the fruit of shared reading and conversations10—that the plan of 1809 saw the light of day.

  For the monarch as well as for Speransky, whose qualities as administrator were allied with unequalled analytic capacities,11 Russia was a European country presenting no specificity able to explain the political backwardness in which it found itself. Therefore, it should engage as quickly as possible in structural reforms that would bring it closer to the European model.12 A man of culture, a connoisseur of the writings of Montesquieu and of the Italian Enlightenment jurist Beccaria, of the thinking of Jeremy Bentham (with whom he was in correspondence), and of Dumont (whom he would meet),13 Speransky wished to implement a system that was liberal in inspiration and tinged with ethical and spiritual references. He wanted to guarantee a certain number of freedoms to individuals, to legally ensure the protection of the people against the excesses or weakness of bureaucracy, all leading to a political life that would be both just and moral. But there was no question of installing in Russia a constitutional government like the American or French ones (the latter on the model of the Year VIII Constitution) that might be liable to dispossess the sovereign of his prerogatives; the sovereign should remain the inspirer and master builder of which reforms to promote. Eventually, such reforms would indeed facilitate the establishment of a monarchical regime that was both “tempered” by, and consolidated under, the law.

  With this structure in mind, Speransky went to work, and by November 1809 he gave his achievement to the emperor in the form of three documents: a long report titled Introduction to the Code of State Laws, a Brief Summary on the Formation of the State, and a General Overview of All Reforms and Their Chronology. Meanwhi
le, he was active on other fronts. In December 1808 he revised two decrees that Alexander rapidly adopted: the first one, in April 1809, was titled “On Court Ranks”14 and obliged nobles to serve in the army or administration in order to advance their careers; in August the second established an examination system for admission to the civil service and also banned the appointment to any rank above college assessor (the eighth rank of the Civil Table of Ranks)15 of anyone lacking a university diploma. This latter measure was designed to combat incompetence and inefficiency in the bureaucracy and to facilitate the social ascension of educated commoners—but it was badly received by the nobility, which started to feel its prerogatives under attack.

  Speransky’s reform agenda, particularly his long report introducing the legal code, was ambitious: in the vice-minister’s opinion, “the general goal of reform consists of decreeing and instituting an autocratic government based on an infallible law.”16 Henceforth, supreme power would be limited by a national system of representation that would be founded on property rights (not just on the rights of the nobility), and this power would be expressed in legislative, judicial, and administrative domains. For Speransky, it was crucial not only to apply the concept of national representation, but indeed to integrate into this representation a range of social categories of those who owned property (the bourgeoisie and rich free peasants) wider than the nobility alone, whose political and social conservatism he feared (as did Alexander).

  Moreover, in the lineage of liberal ideas inherited from the French Enlightenment, Speransky’s plan tried to create a separation of powers: legislative power would reside with a state duma; an independent judicial power should be entrusted to the senate; and executive power, which would be responsible to legislative authority, would be incarnated by the ministries. The state duma would be the keystone of the arrangement, the body that would limit imperial power. No law could be adopted without its agreement; it would enjoy the right to oversee ministerial executive bodies; ministers would be responsible to it; and it would have the right of remonstrance.