Alexander I- the Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon

by Marie-Pierre Rey

  Still, the unanimity that surrounded Alexander was severely tested with the burning of Moscow. On September 15, prostrated by the terrible news, Catherine wrote to her brother of her distress, offering help and enjoining him to continue the fight:

  Moscow is taken, there are inexplicable things. Do not forget your resolution: no peace and you have the hope of recovering your honor. If you are in pain, do not forget your friends who are ready to fly to you, and only too happy if they might be of some help, so make use of them.

  But my dear, no peace, and even if you were at Kazan, no peace.57

  But this catastrophe in no way affected Alexander’s determination, as he says in a brief note written back to Catherine:

  Yesterday morning, my dear, I received your sad letter of the 3rd. There are things it is impossible to conceive. But be persuaded that my resolution to fight is more unshakeable than ever; I would prefer to cease to be what I am than to compromise with the monster that performs the misfortune of the world.58

  However, in the following days Catherine, under the influence of criticism starting to arise, was more severe. She sent her brother a letter in which she echoed the harsh reproach to which the abandoning of Moscow gave rise in a court that was really unpredictable:

  The taking of Moscow has raised the exasperation of spirits to a pitch; discontent is at its highest point, and no consideration is shown for your person. […] You are loudly accused of your empire’s misfortune, of general and particular ruin, and of having lost the country’s honor and your own. It is not just one class but all of them are united in decrying you. […] One of the principal accusations concerns failing to keep your word about Moscow, which expected you with impatience, and the neglect in which you left it. You seem to have betrayed it. […] I leave you to judge the situation of a country where the leader is despised; there is nothing that people are not ready to do to recover honor, but in the desire to sacrifice everything for the fatherland, people say, “where will this lead, when everybody is massacred, ruined by the ineptness of the leaders?” The idea of peace, fortunately, is not general; far from it, for the feeling of shame that follows the loss of Moscow gives birth to the desire for vengeance. People complain about you loudly. [...] Save your honor that is under attack. Your presence can bring spirits back; neglect no available means.59

  Harshly criticized for having abandoned the holy city without a fight, Alexander found himself also under pressure from Constantine, Maria Feodorovna, and Rumyantsev, who did implore him to accept peace talks with Napoleon. And yet again, at a key moment, the emperor found at his sides only his wife to support him. But he remained unshakable. In a very fine long letter written to Catherine on September 7, he justifies his choices:

  After having sacrificed the utility of my personal amour-propre by leaving the army because it was claimed that I was harmful to it, that I was depriving the generals of any responsibility, that I inspired no trust in the troops, that the reverses imputed to me were more annoying than those imputed to my generals, then judge for yourself, my good friend, how painful it must be for me to hear that my honor is under attack, when I only did what people wanted me to in leaving the army when I had no other desire than to stay there. I was firmly resolved to return to it before the appointment of Kutuzov, which I renounced only after this nomination, in part by the memory of what the courtesan character of this man had produced in Austerlitz, and in part by following your own advice and that of several others of the same opinion as you. […]

  At present, let us examine whether I could have come to Moscow? As soon as it was made a principle that my presence in the army would do more harm than good, when the army was approaching Moscow after its retreat from Smolensk, could I decently be in Moscow? Although I could never have thought Moscow might be abandoned in such an unworthy way, yet I did have to say to myself that if after one or two lost battles such a thing could happen, then what role could I have played and would I have to come to Moscow to pack my baggage with the others?

  Then he says he is wounded by the lack of trust emanating from his own family at such a difficult moment for him. He confesses the breadth of the task that faces him against a talented aggressor, and he insists once more on his will to stand firm:

  As for me, dear one, all I can answer for is my heart and my intentions and my zeal for everything that can tend to the good and to the utility of my fatherland, according to my best convictions. As for talent, perhaps I lack some, but it is not provided; it is a blessing of nature and nobody has ever procured it. Seconded as badly as I am, lacking instruments on all sides, directing so enormous a machine in a terrible crisis and against an infernal antagonist who possesses the most horrible wickedness joined to the most eminent talent and is helped by all the forces of Europe as a whole, and by a mass of talented men who have been trained for twenty years in war and revolution, one would be obliged to agree, if one is fair, that it is not astonishing that I feel reversals. […] You will recall that often I foresaw this in talking with you; the very loss of two capitals was believed to be possible, and it is perseverance alone that was considered to be the remedy for the evils of this cruel period. Far from discouraging me despite all the setbacks I have suffered, I am resolved more than ever to persevere in the struggle, and all my care goes to this goal. It is with frankness I admit to you that being misunderstood by the public or by a mass of beings who know me poorly or not at all, is a lesser pain for me than that of being similarly treated by the small number of those to whom I have devoted all my affections and who I hope would know me deeply. But even if this pain was added to all those others I bear, I protest before God that I would not accuse them and would see in this only the common fate of unfortunate beings, that of being abandoned.60

  The events of October and November proved the tsar to be right: Napoleon’s debacle silenced his critics and put a halo around Alexander of unequalled prestige. But the scope of the doubts that had gripped him throughout these crucial months, the isolation from which he suffered, and the criticism heaped on him gradually led him closer to God, as he discovered in himself a vibrant and sincere faith.

  •••

  For whole years Alexander had remained indifferent to faith and religious questions. Of course, he had been educated with respect for and the practice of Orthodox precepts, but in reality his faith belonged to a vague deism inherited from the Enlightenment. In his meetings with Abbot Eylert in 1818, the tsar would describe the superficiality of his religious practice, and he would impute it to the education he had received from Catherine II:

  Catherine was full of caution and spirit, she was a great woman, and her memory lives forever in the history of Russia. But as regards this part of an education that develops real piety of the heart, we at the Court of St. Petersburg were at almost the same point as everywhere else: lots of words, but little meaning; lots of external practices, but the holy essence of Christianity was hidden from us. I felt the emptiness in my soul and a vague presentiment accompanied me. I came, I went, I gave myself distractions.61

  In his private correspondence he often spoke (as did Enlightenment men) of “the Supreme Being.” Moreover, his initiation into Freemasonry62 tended to remove him a little more from the Orthodox religion. But from 1812, while the threat of war was insistent, Alexander rediscovered both pious practice and the great religious texts. However, at this moment his “return to the altar” was more a political act than a specifically religious one. Faced with a foreign enemy that was in the majority Catholic, it was a matter of proclaiming his attachment to Russian identity and to Orthodoxy, confounded into the same entity. However, after June 1812 and the traumas of the invasion, his doubts and anguish were combined in a painful “Way of the Cross” that led to God. For in fact this desperate struggle of unequal strength against an enemy whose superior intelligence he was the first to recognize, was for him a struggle against Evil, over whom he could not triumph alone. If he managed to beat Napoleon this was because he had been ele
cted and supported by God. In his conversations with Abbot Eylert he would declare:

  In the end, the burning of Moscow illuminated my soul, and the judgment of God on the frozen battlefield filled my heart with a warmth of faith that it had never felt before. From this moment, I learned to know God as Holy Scripture has revealed him. Henceforth I learned to understand—and I understand now—His will and His law, and the decision to devote my person and my reign only to Him and to His glory, matured and was fortified in me. Since that time, I have become another man: to the deliverance of Europe from ruin, I owe my own salvation and my deliverance.

  Only since Christianity has become for me more important than everything else, only since the faith in the Redeemer has manifested its force in me—and I thank God for it—his peace has entered into my soul. […] Ah, I did not arrive there all of a sudden; believe me, the road led me there through many other struggles and many doubts.63

  The burning of Moscow was the turning point of his existence. Several witnesses, like Countess Edling and Alexander Golitsyn, as well as Alexander’s own words attest in unison to the intensity of this spiritual revolution. On the eve of Napoleon’s invasion, Alexander had rediscovered the New Testament, but until the taking of Moscow, his interest in sacred writings did not have primordial importance. By contrast, after the burning of the sacred city, his sharpening awareness that the end of the world was possible brought him closer to the Apocalypse, the Book of Revelation that he so admired, as he confided to Golitsyn: “There, my dear brother, there are only wounds and lumps.”64

  From now on, books of piety and the Bible became his preferred reading, and he meditated, prayed, and withdrew into himself, drawing from them the serenity and peace that the political situation refused him. At the end of 1812, when Napoleon left Russian territory, it was a profoundly transformed Alexander that rose from the ashes and rubble left by the Grande Armée. Animated by this sincere (though still vague) faith, he would lead his troops right to Paris, armed with a plan to make the European continent a place of peace and fraternity.

  CHAPTER 12

  A European Tsar

  1813–1815

  At the end of 1812, the debacle and then retreat of the Grande Armée marked the end of the French occupation. Russia had triumphed over its invader, and the whole country celebrated the political courage of the leader who, in his stubbornness in pursuing the combat and refusing any compromise with Napoleon, enabled the empire to emerge as uncontested victor. At this time and more than ever, Alexander I was indeed the tsar of all the Russias, a tsar united with his people in an affinity that was both political as well as moral and religious. It was not by chance that the senate proposed conferring on him the title “blessed.” Imbued by a vibrant faith that led him to see God’s hand in the Russian victory, evoking the pitiful end of the Napoleonic army, he wrote to his friend Alexander Golitsyn that “the Lord was marching before us. It is He who vanquished our enemies.”1 He did not stop thanking Providence for the crucial help; on the commemorative medal struck in honor of the victory, he had engraved the motto “Non nobis, sed nomine tuo, Domine,” (Psalm 113: “Blessed be the name of the Lord”), and he tried to establish a close link between patriotic faith and religious faith throughout the empire. In 1811, when war was imminent, Our Lady of Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg had received a miraculous icon that was popularly believed to have sustained Ivan the Terrible in his conquest of the city of Kazan and then in 1612 delivered the country from the Polish invasion. Now that the new conflict was over, in this same cathedral Alexander chose to celebrate the heroes of the patriotic war. In 1813 he exhibited there more than a hundred flags and imperial eagles taken from the soldiers of the old guard of Napoleon,2 and he had the remains of Marshal Kutuzov (who had died abruptly in April) transferred there as a symbol of the national resistance to the invader. But while proclaiming loudly and long his gratitude to God, his faith in his people, and his attachment to his empire, Alexander at the end of 1812 did not think he had yet finished with Napoleon.

  Entering Paris!

  At the end of 1812, Alexander was convinced that the fight should be pursued, that the interest of Europe required new military engagements.

  At the same time, Madame de Staël, the French writer and political theorist, was visiting Russia and met the tsar. His confidences during their conversation, shortly before the emperor left for Kalisch,3 usefully illuminate for historians his psychology and objectives at the time. Madame de Staël recalled:

  I finally saw this monarch, absolute by law as by custom and yet so moderate by inclination. […] What first struck me about him was an expression of goodness and dignity such that the two qualities appeared inseparable and seemed to be a single one. I was also touched by the noble simplicity with which he tackled the great interests of Europe, from the first phrases that he addressed to me. I have always considered as a sign of mediocrity that fear of dealing with serious matters inspired in many of Europe’s sovereigns: they are afraid to pronounce words that have any real meaning. Emperor Alexander, on the contrary, talked with me as a British statesman would; they put strength in themselves and not in the barriers that might surround them. Emperor Alexander, whom Napoleon had tried to make misunderstood, is a clever man who is remarkably educated, and I do not believe that in his empire a minister would be found who is stronger than he as regards judgment and leadership. […] Alexander gives and withdraws his trust with greatest reflection. His youth and his exterior advantages alone, at the beginning of his reign, could have made people suspicious of his lack of thought but he is serious as only a man who has known misfortune can be. Alexander expressed his regrets at not being a great captain; I replied to this noble modesty that a sovereign was rarer than a general, and that to sustain the public spirit of his nation by his example was to win the most important of battles, and the foremost of this kind that was won. The Emperor spoke to me with enthusiasm of his nation and all that it was capable of becoming. He expressed the desire, which everybody knows about him, of improving the condition of a peasantry that was still subject to slavery. “Sire,” I said, “your character is a constitution for your empire and your conscience is its guarantee.” “Even if those things were so,” he answered, “I would always be merely a happy accident.” Fine words, perhaps the first of this kind that an absolute monarch ever pronounced!4

  Madame de Staël’s portrait is interesting on more than one count. It attests once again to Alexander’s charm, his modesty tinged with religious humility, and his melancholy—“I would always be merely a happy accident”—but also his determination as regards European matters and his political projects. At the end of 1812, the tsar was convinced that Napoleon was still a danger. In his eyes the French emperor had not been annihilated—Alexander was aggrieved at Kutuzov for having, out of nonchalance or the desire to spare Russian blood, let Napoleon escape during the Berezina River crossing—and he estimated that consequently Napoleon would not remain as he stood. Sooner or later the French emperor would reconstitute his army and take the offensive again; moreover, the greatest uncertainty hovered on the international plane, in particular over the Polish issue. Two birds could be killed with one stone: push French troops back beyond the Rhine to guarantee the security of the Russian Empire5 and definitely liberate Europe from the French tyrant in order to reestablish it on new values. In the November 1812 ukase he sent to Count Rostopchin, Alexander stresses that the sacrifices made by the people of Moscow had enabled the triumph over the enemy and asserted forcefully, “Russia, by the harm it has suffered, has bought its tranquility and the glory of being the savior of Europe.”6 Similarly, in December from Vilnius where he rejoined his army as supreme commander again, he declared to his fighters: “You have saved not just Russia but all of Europe,”7 thus encompassing the War of 1812 in a much larger perspective than strictly the defense of Russian land.

  Geopolitical and ideological imperatives thus converged to push him to take the offensive. But once agai
n this plan ran up against solid objections from his sister Catherine and his mother (both influenced by Karamzin), by his general staff (Kutuzov in the forefront) and by his government, men like Razumovsky and Shishkov. Their arguments were primarily of a political nature: these new campaigns would spill more Russian blood; while the country was no longer directly threatened, the people would not understand why he had to fight again, and it could imperil the fine unity forged earlier that year. But there were also geopolitical arguments: on the one hand, “the complete fall of Napoleon would strengthen England, which will draw all the benefits,”8 and on the other, the true interests of Russia were not in Europe but in the Ottoman Empire and in Asia, so imperial diplomacy should be oriented in that direction. Finally, in the event the offensive was decided upon, in order to be successful, it would have to wait at least until the reserve troops were ready. But none of these objections convinced the sovereign, and on January 13, 1813, Russian troops placed under his command and Kutuzov’s crossed the Niemen and penetrated Prussian territory.

  At that moment Prussia was still allied with France, at least formally, but this alliance was coming undone. On December 30 General Johann Yorck, commander of a Prussian auxiliary corps based in Tauroggen, had concluded under his own authority with Russian General Dibich, a neutrality agreement that let the Russian troops into Prussia without resistance. Meanwhile, Alexander wrote to Frederick-Wilhelm III to propose Russian aid in the reestablishment of Prussia’s status and its borders; on February 22 he sent all Germans as well as other peoples fighting alongside Napoleon a generous proclamation designed to counter the Napoleonic mirage: “Profiting from victory, we extend a helping hand to oppressed peoples.”9