Speransky increased his portfolios: secretary of state, vice-minister of justice, director of the Commission to Prepare Laws and the Commission for Finnish Affairs, author of the financial reform, chancellor of the University of Turku—he had more offices and power than ever. A veritable workhorse, ambitious out of a concern to reform the empire and lead it toward more efficiency and justice, Speransky attracted enmities—of which he was well aware. In February 1811 he confided to the tsar, complaining humorously of “having been in just one year by turns a Martinist,38 a Freemason,39 a defender of liberty, a persecutor of serfdom—and ending as a passionate Illuminato.”40 And even though his probity was not in doubt, he would soon be accused of being paid by France through the intermediary of Caulaincourt.
Throughout 1810 and 1811 Alexander paid no attention to the attacks on his minister, yet while being seduced by the ambitious and complex agenda, he hesitated to put it into effect. Some historians have seen these hesitations, or even turnarounds, as a new manifestation of the supposedly vacillating nature of the tsar, even of his duplicity and his instinctive fondness for the autocratic regime he had inherited from Catherine and from Paul. Others attribute his hesitations to his fear of hostile reactions from the nobility.41 However, neither of these views seems supported by any evidence. Admittedly, Alexander was always hesitant by nature, “too weak to govern and too strong to be governed,” as Speransky would recklessly declare. Admittedly, by 1810, confronted with the realities of power since 1801, he no longer showed the idealism that characterized his advent. But he did remain desirous to promote a liberalization of the Russian political system, as witnessed by the trust with which he honored Speransky. However, the perennial question of how to apply reforms still stumped him: how to accept giving up part of his prerogatives when the so-called educated classes appeared stuck in their conservatism and incapable of thinking of reform? On what forces and abilities should he lean to apply reform at the top and relay it out to the provinces? These crucial questions, remaining unanswered, put a brake on Alexander’s reforming will, already thwarted by the inertia, if not opposition, of a portion of senior dignitaries. Consequently, the 1809 plan resulted in measures that were modest in effect.
Reform did lead to defining in a clearer and more rigorous way the responsibilities and functions of the ministries; but contrary to the reformers’ wishes, ministers remained responsible to the emperor and not to the Council of State. The state duma did not see the light of day, and the plan for a civil code was postponed indefinitely.42 Only the Council of State began to function but in a quite different way from what Speransky had projected. While initially it was supposed to be a body “charged with supervising the activities of ministries and elaborating all the great law projects at the imperial level,”43 it became in reality a key body in the governmental structure for the execution of imperial desires—without possessing any legislative initiative. Composed of four departments (laws, economy, civil affairs, and military affairs) and a plenary assembly, the Council of State was throughout Alexander’s reign made up of members appointed for life by the emperor, a large majority of whom44 came from the high landowning nobility and more than a third of whom had the title of prince or count. All came from the first three classes of the Table of Ranks; almost two-thirds of them had served in the army, not in civil administration; and they were largely Orthodox. Their average age was 56 years and three months. This data45 delineates a milieu that was homogeneous but relatively little inclined to the spirit of reform. Herein lies the whole ambiguity of the choices made by Alexander: while deploring the conservatism of the aristocracy, it was on that group that he relied to make the council work, putting an end to Speransky’s hope of seeing the sphere of responsibilities open up to wider social categories. That said, did the tsar between 1810 and 1825 have any real possibility of relying on other social groups? That can legitimately be doubted.
Suffering from the tsar’s procrastinations, the implementation of the 1809 plan also suffered from the deterioration in relations with France and the increasingly Francophobe mood that overwhelmed the Russian elites. After 1811–1812, while clouds accumulated on the international scene and the blockade against England took an increasingly negative impact on the Russian economy, it was time for military preparations—and so there was even less scope for reform.
The Russian Empire on a War Footing
As of 1808–1809, and even more from 1811, Alexander was worried about and convinced of the unavoidable dimension of the coming conflict. In November 1811, in a letter to his sister Catherine, he deplored the evolution of the situation:
Never have I led such a dog’s life. Often in the week I get out of bed to sit at my desk and I leave it only to eat a morsel alone, and then go back until I go to bed. […] You say I am lazy not to come see you—ah, if only I could. […] We are on continual alert: all circumstances are so thorny, things so tense, that hostilities may commence at any moment. It is impossible to leave my center of administration and activity. I have to wait for a more propitious moment, or else war will definitely prevent me from coming.46
A few days later, in January 1812, he wrote her that he kept himself “more a sentinel than ever, but the horizon is increasingly dark.”47 In this menacing situation he had to try to plan the defense of the empire as best he could.
As we have seen, at first the tsar dreamed of leading an offensive war but then ran up against the procrastination of the king of Prussia as well as the doubts about Polish cooperation expressed by Prince Czartoryski. So eventually Alexander decided on a firmly defensive war. But if he hesitated over the turn that military operations would take, starting in 1808 he expressed his desire to give the empire a more effective and better-structured army. In 1801 the young tsar had already undertaken to reform the army, following proposals from a military commission charged with examining the troop situation and their reorganization. The measures adopted tended to significantly augment military personnel, including in peacetime. While in 1801 the Russian army had included 446,000 men, this total rose to 475,000 in 1805. The infantry still remained the pillar of the Russian army, but the cavalry, and especially the artillery, provided with more efficient weapons, saw their role strengthened. With a company of engineers, the Russian army gained technical skill and know-how. But this first wave of reforms, undertaken in peacetime, no longer sufficed as war approached. We saw that in January 1808 Alexander named Arakcheev to the posts of minister of war and inspector-general of the infantry and artillery. Perceived as narrow-minded and ignorant by many courtiers—including Joseph de Maistre—in a few months Arakcheev began to reinstill strict discipline within the army, he fought corruption and the irresponsibility of officers by pitiless measures, and he worked to improve the provisioning of food and munitions. In parallel, a maniac for order and cleanliness like Alexander himself, Arakcheev transformed his estate at Gruzino into a colony of “peasant-soldiers” that charmed the tsar all the more because it reminded him of the impeccable order at Gatchina. After the visit he made in 1809, Alexander wrote his sister Catherine of the admiration he felt for Gruzino, and he began to dream of having an army composed of peasant-soldiers who would be well fed, well disciplined, and wholly devoted to the mother country. But in January 1810 the appointment of Barclay de Tolly to the war ministry changed the situation: there was no question of a utopia of peasant-soldiers in the short term; there were urgent and pragmatic measures that the new minister, helped by Prince Peter Volkonsky as director of the supply corps, had to implement.
In February–March 1810 the minister proposed a plan to reinforce the western border and to make the Dvina-Dnieper the principal line of defense. Moreover, to protect Finland from any potential attack from Sweden, Barclay proposed installing two divisions and two fortresses, one in the northern part of Finland and the other on the Aland Islands.48 A few months later, in August 1810, Barclay de Tolly enjoined the tsar and Foreign Affairs Minister Rumyantsev to make peace with the Ottoman Empire a
s quickly as possible, in order to redeploy the forces from the southern theater to the western border, which stretched almost 1100 verstes from the Baltic to Ukraine.49 Sensitive to this argument, Alexander made the Peace of Bucharest in May 1812.
In parallel, continuing the actions of Arakcheev and with his support, Barclay de Tolly worked to improve the army numerically and qualitatively. In October Arakcheev submitted to the Council of the Empire a plan titled “On the matter of military recruitment.” Despite the extreme length of military service—25 years even in peacetime—Arakcheev worried in his report about the insufficiency of reserve troops in the regular army and its high rate of unfit men. He estimated that ten percent of the men were incapable of adapting to the military regime and pace—and he worried about the need to remedy these deficiencies as fast as possible. Armed with this report, which supported his own analysis, Barclay de Tolly proceeded to increase troop strength. Between September 1810 and March 1812, in three successive enrollment campaigns, he increased the proportions of recruits among the population. Whereas an imperial ukase of September 1810 recruited one man in 700, that of 1811 enrolled one per 500, and in March 1812 two per 500.50 He also forced regiments to conduct more frequent mobilization exercises, increased the level and frequency of training, had storehouses built to stock munitions and grain, and launched into the consolidation of the western frontier. Aware that Russia would be alone against Napoleon and could count only on its own resources—this was a leitmotif that ran through several of his reports to the tsar—Barclay de Tolly was concerned to increase the army’s efficiency. And very quickly, in terms of strength, equipment and training, the measures took effect. In 1811 Alexander had 225,000 armed and equipped men divided into small units between the Dvina and the Dnieper. A year later, on the eve of the war, the Russian army, without counting Cossack troops, was composed of three armies structured into a dozen infantry corps and five cavalry corps, each corps constituting “a vast autonomous unit on the French model,”51 or in all 380,000 foot soldiers, 62,000 cavalry, 43,500 gunners, and 4,500 engineers. Yet the fortification of the border took longer to achieve, and when the Grande Armée invaded imperial territory in June 1812, it was still not finished, making Barclay de Tolly’s efforts fruitless.
Reorganizing the Russian army at the price of some tensions—Barclay’s leadership encountered a rebellious protest from some generals who were not inclined to accept the authority of a German-speaking Russian, moreover a Lutheran—Barclay engaged also, with Alexander’s full support, in the intense activity of information gathering and espionage.
In December 1810, even before the signing of the secret military agreement, friendly relations with the king of Prussia took the form of secret cooperation between the war ministries of the two countries. Maps of Germany, Holland, and central Europe, very detailed topographically (“the quintessence of the secret map collections possessed by the Prussian depository”52), were secretly sent to Barclay de Tolly in Berlin by Count Lieven, Russian ambassador in Berlin. In parallel, Barclay had recourse in Paris to the information services of a Cossack colonel, Alexander Chernyshev. An aide-de-camp to the tsar, whom he served as courier between St. Petersburg and Paris, aged 30, Chernyshev was a distinguished dancer and a seducer. In his memoirs Laure d’Abrantes expounded wittily on the success he had with the women at court during a ball at the Tuileries:
They looked at each other like wild cats when the Northern Lovelace appeared among them. […] Everything about him, even his attire, that waspish way of being enclosed in his suit, his hat with its plume, and hair thrown in big tufts, and that Tartar face, his almost perpendicular eyes—everything was of an original and curious type.53
In 1806 the Russian chargé d’affaires d’Oubril had made the acquaintance of someone called “Michel,” a French functionary in the military transport office of the war ministry. For pay, Michel transmitted copies of reports he wrote for his ministry. Later, the deterioration of relations between France and Russia made Michel’s information even more precious. Becoming worried about his fate, Michel tried to step back. But it was too late: the victim of blackmail by the Russians, Michel was obliged to deal with Chernyshev, to whom he had to supply complete and detailed information on the French army. Until February 1812, when he was arrested with three accomplices before being tried and condemned to death for “high treason” and then guillotined in April,54 he had enabled the Russian headquarters to be informed, precisely and frequently, about “situation notebooks,” i.e., bimonthly reports (transmitted by Ambassador Kurakin without knowing their content) on the resources, strength, and position of Grande Armée regiments.
This military espionage was backed up by political espionage. In 1808 Alexander I charged Speransky with setting up an information service in Paris, unbeknownst to the diplomatic corps. At its center was Count Nesselrode,55 the recipient in Paris of all correspondence to Russia and charged with forwarding it secretly to Speransky. And Talleyrand, again in return for pay, sent Nesselrode secret reports on the state of France. In these epistolary exchanges all parties used code names: according to circumstances, Talleyrand was called “my cousin Henry,” or “handsome Leander”; Fouché (the police minister) was “Natasha” or “the president”; the tsar became “Louise.” These letters are today in the Nesselrode archives; they had no military or logistic interest, but they did enable Alexander to grasp the mood of the country and better understand the balance of power on France. They were grimly converted into cash by Talleyrand; he was already being paid in “trade licenses with England” but did not hesitate to become greedy, exposing himself to the tsar’s irritation. On September 15, 1810, he wrote to Alexander that he “needed fifteen hundred thousand francs” and that:
It is important I have them by November. While a simple thing in itself, I must take precautions in the choice of means to procure them. If Your Majesty finds that in addressing myself to you, I have only rendered homage to your generous qualities […], then I beg you to write to M. Bentham that he gives M. Labinski, his consul in Paris, a note of credit for the sum to him, Bentham, in Frankfurt.56
But the tsar firmly refused.
Through these two espionage networks, one can measure how in 1808 (and again after 1810) Alexander I had an almost obsessive concern to know as much as possible about Napoleon, to figure him out in order to detect his resources, his capabilities, and his possible weaknesses. The tsar had not been fascinated by the emperor for a long time, but he remained very impressed by him: Alexander’s behavior reveals his desire to take the exact measure of his potential adversary. Meanwhile, while he continued to talk of a defensive position, affirming long and loudly that he would not start the war and would never take the initiative in a conflict, Alexander undertook to prepare public opinion and to galvanize its patriotic sentiments by making pledges to the conservative and French-hating elites.
•••
From 1804 Alexander expressed the conviction that the war to conduct against Napoleon would be a war of ideas as much as of men and that the support of the people, in an engagement whose violence and breadth was fearful to him, would therefore be crucial. This conviction had been more or less consciously reaffirmed in 1805–1806 when he chose to turn Napoleon into an anti-Christ to fight. But in 1812, after the French alliances of Tilsit and Erfurt had confounded the reference points, to the disgust of those who hated the French, Alexander more than ever had to ensure the support of public opinion and quell the doubts, and even virulent criticism, that swirled around him. The atmosphere at court remained tense, and rumors of plots resurfaced. In his dispatch to his king, the envoy from the Stockholm court wrote in April 1812:
Even now, Your Majesty will hardly understand how far freedom of speech goes in so despotic a country as this. The more the storm threatens, the more they doubt the skill of the one who is steering. The Emperor, who is informed about everything, cannot fail to know how much he has ceased to have the trust of his nation. There must even exist a party in
favor of the Grand Duchess Catherine, wife of Prince Oldenburg, at the head of which, they say, is Count Rostopchin. […] With the facility of this nation to lend itself to revolutions, its penchant for being governed by women, it would not be astonishing if someone profited from the current crisis to carry out a change.57
The tsar endured increasingly open attacks; he was reproached for his alliance with France, for his inopportune choices that were said to reflect his inability “to steer,” for the weight of the blockade that, imposed by Napoleon to asphyxiate England, was impoverishing Russia by the day.
On the eve of the blockade’s implementation, it was to England that Russia exported the greater part of its primary materials, including iron, hemp, wood, linen, wheat, potassium, and wax; England alone absorbed more than half of Russian foreign trade.58 Moreover, before the execution of the blockade, most Russian exports—particularly wheat—were transported to western Europe by ships usually flying the British flag. In 1804 from the port of St. Petersburg (through which 49 percent of exports and 43 percent of imports by sea transited), British ships brought 63 percent of the merchandise, and Russian ships only 35 percent.59 The blockade pronounced by Alexander on November 21, 1807, two days after breaking off relations with the British, but enforced only from spring 1808, interrupted these flows—without Russian traders and industrialists being able to find other suppliers. In 1808 the volume of exports of Russian goods circulating from the Baltic seaports was three times lower than in 1806.60 This disruption entailed an economic and financial crisis: in a few months, the ruble assignat lost half its value, the slump in agricultural products depressed the imperial treasury as never before, and the deficit grew from 126 million rubles in 1808 to 157 million a year later.61 The energetic financial measures taken by Speransky improved the situation a little—in 1810 the deficit was only 77 million62—but the situation remained worrying, and public discontent was at its height. It was therefore time for Alexander to show his determination to safeguard Russian interests and to give the signals that the public was expecting. In December 1810, as mentioned, an imperial ukase partially lifted the blockade and imposed customs duties on French luxury goods. In the spring of 1812, the tsar adopted political decisions that aimed to prepare the people for the idea of a war that Alexander did not doubt would be major. In April 1812 he wrote to Adam Czartoryski:
Alexander I- the Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon Page 30
