[Back in his rooms the emperor] gave a diatribe on the ingratitude of people for whom a kingdom had been re-conquered at the price of his blood, while their own was spared and who did not know how to yield on a simple question of etiquette. When he had calmed down, he was told that perhaps [D’Artois] felt […] it was not a matter of etiquette but of feeling, since he believed that the Duke of Vicence was guilty in the [Enghien] affair. “I told him no.” [answered the emperor] […] [It was pointed out that] one might excuse his [D’Artois’s] repugnance by remembering that the Duke d’Enghien was his close relative. The Emperor halted his pacing. “His relative… his relative… his repugnance.” Then he stopped and looked at his interlocutors; “I eat every day with Owarow!” A bomb falling in their midst would not have had more effect. After a moment of stupor, the Emperor resumed pacing and spoke of other things. […] General Owarow was supposed to have strangled Emperor Paul56 with his two enormous thumbs, and Alexander was shocked to see our princes refuse to make their susceptibilities yield to politics, when he had made much more poignant sacrifices for the sake of politics.57
Afterward, things went from bad to worse: when he arrived in Compiègne in April 1814, Louis XVIII received Alexander, who had come to plead for keeping the tricolor cockade and to enjoin him to be careful with “the past twenty-five years of glory.”58 Louis treated him with coldness and condescension; seated in a large armchair, he only offered the tsar a simple chair to sit on, which enraged the latter.
Still, it was thanks to Alexander’s influence as much as to British diplomacy (equally anxious for balance), and to Talleyrand’s know-how as plenipotentiary to the new king, that France was relatively spared in the first treaty of Paris, signed on May 30, 1814.
Indeed, France kept the borders it had possessed in January 1792. Thus, it kept Avignon and a large part of Savoy and Mulhouse but had to give back the left bank of the Rhine and territories annexed by Napoleon in Italy, Holland, and Switzerland. It did not have to pay any war reparations, and England was forced to give France back all its colonies except for Tobago and St. Lucia in the Caribbean, an island in the Indian Ocean, and Malta. On the political level it was decided to convene a congress in Vienna to settle the remaining European issues. The treaty also carried secret clauses that ceded Venetia to Austria and the port of Genoa to the kingdom of Sardinia. In May 1814, then, thanks to Alexander’s benevolent intervention, France was able to limit the scope of its losses.
After the signing of the treaty (and almost two months after his arrival in the French capital), Alexander left Paris with ambivalent feelings. Admittedly, he had fully succeeded in his enterprise of captivating public opinion and obtaining the approval of the elites; he had pushed for the adoption of the constitutional charter in the name of the balance of power (an ideal he shared with British diplomacy); and he had allowed France to emerge relatively unscathed from its defeats. But he still felt bitter, disappointed by the ingratitude of the reigning dynasty. And a similar disappointment soon arose in his relations with the British monarchy.
At the end of May 1814, the tsar went to London with his secretaries of state Nesselrode and Kapodistrias in order to consolidate political contacts formed in the course of the anti-Napoleonic period. As in Paris, if not more so, his arrival had been expected “with impatience and passionate enthusiasm”59 and aroused extraordinary infatuation:
The effect of his presence was very remarkable: it produced a striking impression, and when one adds to this natural gift, the halo of glory that then surrounded him, one understands the prodigious enthusiasm that he excited in England. Frenetic demonstrations broke out in the streets, in the City, in the theaters. For the fifteen days he remained in London, I can say without exaggeration that there were never less than 10,000 persons stationed around the park and the street where his hotel was located. Traffic was entirely interrupted at certain hours of the day, he could take a walk at ease only once and had to go out clandestinely through the mews.60
As in Paris, the tsar was showered with honors: Oxford University made him a doctor in civil law, and many poems and songs were dedicated to him—but again, his head was not turned.
His spiritual quest, which he pursued in London, brought him many conversations and spiritual exercises in an open-minded and ecumenical approach. He met members of the London Biblic Society and attended a Quaker meeting. Impressed by the approach of the Society of Friends to religious matters, he invited three of them (William Allen, Stephen Grellet, and John Wilkinson) to visit him the next day at his hotel to continue their spiritual conversation. Allen recalled:
About prayer he declared that he entirely shared the Friends’ point of view, that it was an internal and spiritual matter. He declared that he himself prayed every day. […] He remarked that divine prayer did not consist of exterior ceremonies or a repetition of words that miscreants and hypocrites might easily adopt, but of a submission of the spirit before God.61
Meanwhile, still seeking a subtler reading and interpretation of the Bible, he began a correspondence with Madame de Krüdener, a pietist of Lithuanian origin whose mystical renown had spread across Europe.
But in London the popular enthusiasm was not shared by the ruling elites. Minister Castlereagh was worried about a popularity that seemed politically dangerous; in the public festivities that punctuated the tsar’s stay, he arranged for Alexander to be “accompanied by other victors,” specifically the king of Prussia and General Blücher, in order that “he would not be the sole object of admiration,”62 as Castlereagh stated in a letter to the prime minister. The court did not spend much effort on the tsar; the Countess of Lieven, wife of Alexander’s ambassador to London, noted that during the imperial stay of two weeks, the regent gave only two “grand dinners and two soirees” in his honor. So we may conclude that the British government held itself back.
This quite British mistrust of the extreme feelings that the tsar aroused was reinforced by the behavior of Grand Duchess Catherine. Recently widowed by George d’Oldenburg, she settled in London to be closer to her brother, but her incessant intrigues and her haughtiness were inimical to the prince regent, and by association they discredited the tsar, too. It should also be noted that in a very undiplomatic way Alexander reserved his attentions for the Whig Party, which was in opposition, and this preference annoyed the ruling Tories, without winning him any sympathy from the liberals. In Britain there was a total misunderstanding. “He is a vain man, an imbecile,”63 said Lord Grey in an uninspired and unjustified judgment.
The Congress of 1815 and the Holy Alliance
After his stay in western Europe, Alexander returned for a few weeks to more familiar lands. He left London for Portsmouth on June 22, embarked at Dover for Calais, and traversed Holland to rejoin Elizabeth, who was with her relatives in Baden. He spent several days there with friends, including Laharpe, who had made the trip. There, a delegation of four Russian dignitaries came to meet him and to offer him in the name of the senate and Holy Synod the title of “Blessed by God,” and a monument to be erected to his glory. Alexander declined both proposals: his victory was the work of God and not his own, and it was not fitting to salute his success other than by prayers to God. Shortly after, he asked the governor of St. Petersburg to cancel all the celebrations planned in honor of his forthcoming return: the Russian blood spilt in the ordeal should not occasion festivities. Upon his arrival in St. Petersburg on July 25, it was with the greatest discretion—without fanfare or a parade—that he went to the Kazan Cathedral to praise God.
While a month’s stay in his capital should have allowed Alexander to recover peace and serenity, it proved rather painful. In his absence, Maria Naryshkina, who had fallen in love with Prince Gagarin, decided to break with the tsar, as she abruptly informed him when he got back. Without giving him the main reason for the breakup, Maria gave moral and political motives, and Alexander seems to have acquiesced. In a letter to his sister Catherine in the summer of 181464 (a pencil draft in whi
ch not all words are legible), Alexander mentions the arguments given by Maria and movingly speaks of his distress at the rupture with his longtime mistress:
You suppose me happy within an adored and united marriage [i.e., household] with her with whom I hoped to spend the rest of my life. Alas, we saw each other, but only to experience most cruelly the pain that separates us forever. I found her suffering, but physical suffering was only the consequence of her moral suffering.
Since the great events that have just happened, her desire to see me had become totally unbearable since people think she is the obstacle to a rapprochement with my wife. […] I love her too much to make her act against her conviction. She says she does not want my nation to have a wrong to reproach me for, and so the happiness of fourteen years of union65 will be sacrificed to our duties. I am about to depart for Vienna, and consequently am on the eve of a separation that, if not eternal, still breaks forever the relationship in which I put my life’s happiness.66
The tsar’s grief was immense and the shock difficult to bear, given the strength of the relationship that since 1803 had given him the home he had never been able to build with Elizabeth. After all this time his love remained, if not whole, then at least preeminent, and the break affected him deeply. Three years later, in a letter to a friend, the tsar would express himself in a less gentle way about his former mistress; maybe by this time he had learned more about her real motive:
I cannot delay telling you about the arrival of Madame de Naryshkine. I hope you know my present state well enough not to have the least worry on my account. Even if I were still a social man there would be no merit in my remaining totally immune to this person, after all she has done.67
Whatever the case, Alexander’s return to Russian land was only a stopover, and two months later he was en route for Austria, where he would participate in the Congress of Vienna. He halted in Pulawy at the Czartoryski family estate, where he had a long conversation with Prince Adam and Novosiltsev about the future of Poland. He arrived in Vienna on September 25.
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The Congress of Vienna was a key event for the diplomacy of the nineteenth century, and there is an immense bibliography devoted to it. Everything about it was outsized: its duration (it sat from November 1814 to March 1815), the vertiginous number of states present or represented (216 states, including two emperors, five kings, and 209 principalities, or almost 20,000 people, if you include diplomatic staff, servants, spies, and demi-mondaines),68 the importance of its decisions (it redrew the map of Europe), and its finally dramatic coup, since it was during the Congress of Vienna that Napoleon launched what would become his Hundred Days (March 1 to June 18). With its official sessions, its consultations, salons, asides, receptions, reversals, and celebrations on the margins of the political discussions, the Congress of Vienna also inaugurated the era of modern professional diplomacy. So we should not be surprised if several contemporary diplomats have been interested in this event and written books and articles about it.69 Finally, bringing together a number of princes and princesses and aristocrats of all ranks, the Congress, amid the festivals and concerts (Beethoven conducted his Seventh Symphony there), was a venue for much merrymaking, many intellectual exchanges—and romances.
For example, it was in Vienna that Grand Duchess Catherine made a conquest of Prince Wilhelm of Württemberg, who would become her second husband. And during the Congress Elizabeth (who had broken up with the Polish prince when having an affair with Okhotnikov) saw Adam Czartoryski again; at age 45 he forgave her for the infidelity, and they fell in love with each other again. In the GARF archives lies Elizabeth’s draft of a moving letter (dated February 13, 1815)70 that tells us much about the empress’s feeling for him. She complains of the destiny that forces her “to sacrifice to the legal order the true happiness of her life, in separating her from the being who[m] she had been accustomed during the fourteen best years of her existence to regard as another self.” On March 8, when Elizabeth was to leave Vienna the same day, Czartoryski begged her to divorce Alexander and marry him; out of loyalty he informed Alexander of his request for marriage. But Alexander was hostile to the plan, less out of attachment to Elizabeth than for reasons of state: while difficult negotiations were opening in Vienna about the future of Poland, the divorce and remarriage of the empress of Russia with a Polish prince known for his commitment to reestablishing the Polish state, would not be accepted by Russian public opinion and would risk compromising the current Russo-Polish rapprochement. This argument ultimately convinced the dutiful Elizabeth to renounce her own happiness, and in November 1815 she went back to St. Petersburg for good. After having traversed a deep crisis and envisaging retiring to a convent or even ending her life, she decided by the end of 1815 or the beginning of 1816 to remain in Russia, “to suffer in silence,” and to “submit herself entirely to the will of Providence.”71
Meanwhile, while working frantically on diplomatic affairs, Alexander was flitting about, having affairs, for example with the Duchess of Sagan (who shortly before had been the mistress of Metternich!) and Princess Bagration, plus platonic flirtations with the Princess of Auersperg, the Countess of Szechenyi, and the Countess de Sabran. This behavior did not suit the tsar’s mystical predilections but may be explained by the crisis in his own private life. He had been devastated by the rupture with Maria Naryshkina and tried to forget the beautiful Polish woman in a frenzy of seduction.
•••
The purpose of the Congress of Vienna, a crucial diplomatic event, was to redesign the European map by undoing most of the changes born of the French Revolution and empire, for the sake of implementing two other principles: the security of the European continent and its balance. It relied on the work by a statistical commission that “translated imperturbably into numbers of people the indications given of the envisaged exchanges of territories, and traded souls for souls, a thousand acres for a thousand acres, quantitatively and without worrying about national sentiments.”72
In this task the agreement was general among the victors: the Congress validated the provisions of the first treaty of Paris of May 1814 that had been ferociously negotiated by Talleyrand and Alexander, and it created a new confederation composed of 39 German states endowed with a federal diet to sit in Frankfurt. But disagreements soon arose among the allies: Austria and Prussia each aspired to assert their hegemony in Germany; Prussia and England were opposed over Saxony; Austria and England contested Russian claims over Poland.
Alexander I was the only monarch to take a direct part in the work of the Congress. Given the stakes, he relied on the help of Prince Razumovsky, his former ambassador to Vienna, on Count Stockelberg, the current ambassador, and Count Nesselrode, de facto minister of foreign affairs before becoming so officially, Baron Anstett, and two diplomatic advisors, Pozzo di Borgo (a Corsican who was notoriously anti-Napoleon), and Kapodistrias, the former state secretary of the Ionian Islands, who had gone into Russia’s service when they were acquired by France in 1807. Three of these men were foreigners, like the diplomatic corps as a whole, which was hardly “Russian.” Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky recorded in his diary:
Russia presents the unique example of a country whose diplomatic corps is composed in large part of foreigners. Some of them do not even know our language, some have seen of Russia only the city of St. Petersburg. In consulting a directory, I noted that out of 37 civil servants employed by Russia in its various embassies, there were only 16 bearing Russian names. [...] Does this not testify to the true grandeur of a country, so sure of its strength that it is completely indifferent about who represents it outside!73
But others within the court did not share this optimistic view: the situation began to arouse grumbling within the Russian nobility, which felt itself dispossessed of its rights. It doubted the capacity of western Europeans to be able to understand and serve the interests of the Russian Empire—a subject to which we shall return.
During his stay in Vienna, Alexander alternate
d between lunches with those close to him—his sisters Catherine and Marie, Laharpe—and state dinners to which he invited the crowned heads who were participating in the congress, taking care to provide his guests with refined cuisine. When he invited Emperor Franz I to lunch, he had his French cooks prepare traditional Austrian dishes but did not depart from his preference for a certain Burgundy wine, the only one that he drank and that he had brought to the caves of St. Petersburg three times a week.74 He also had frequent working talks with his state secretaries, as well as with Laharpe and Czartoryski on the Polish question.
•••
In 1814 nothing seemed to force or even predispose the tsar to the least indulgence on the Polish question. The defiance of the Polish elites in response to the hand extended by the tsar in 1811, the active participation of 100,000 Polish soldiers in the Grande Armée, and the atrocities that Russian memoirists imputed to them during the invasion of 181275—all strengthened the deep bone of contention between Russians and Poles. However, unlike those agitated by the topic, Alexander treated the question with moderation: in January 1813 he had assured a worried Czartoryski that vengeance was a sentiment he did not feel76—and he did not take long to prove it. In February 1813, when he was in Vilnius, he published a manifesto granting amnesty to the Poles for their engagement on Napoleon’s side and liberated Polish war prisoners.77 In May 1814, in a solemn letter to the patriot leader Kosciuszko—we remember that he was the subject of a disagreement between Catherine, her son, and her grandson—Alexander informed him of his plan to reconstitute a Polish entity, asking the old hero to help him in this enterprise. At the same time, Czartoryski, supported by Kochubey—once more in the tsar’s favor and since March 1812 president of the economic department of the Council of State—as well as by Novosiltsev, tirelessly defended the Polish case to the emperor. For Czartoryski, the salvation of Poland and its future required an agreement between Russia and Poland that would guarantee the existence of a country that would be independent but dynastically linked to Russia, with its recomposed territories ruled by a constitutional monarch.
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