Alexander I- the Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon

by Marie-Pierre Rey

  Coming back to St. Petersburg by the end of June, the emperor found Elizabeth quite weak. A few weeks later her doctors, worried about her condition, advised the empress to go at the end of the summer to a more temperate climate. Alexander decided they would both go to Taganrog, a small town of 10,000 inhabitants situated on the Azov Sea. This choice appeared incongruous to many: the region was known to be very windy, which led Pyotr Volkonsky to say that he could not “conceive the idea of doctors who found nothing better in Russia as a climate than Taganrog.”34 In fact, it was Alexander who imposed this destination: he wanted to return to a region that he had visited in May 1818.

  •••

  While his departure for Taganrog was imminent, the emperor received twice in St. Petersburg in the month of August his aide-de-camp General Alexander Michaud. From a family originating in Savoy, born in Nice, friend of Joseph de Maistre whom he frequented in Moscow, a fervent Catholic, Michaud had first served the king of Sardinia before entering the service of Russia. He was illustrious in the war against the Ottoman Empire, and during the 1812 campaign he served the tsar as colonel and aide-de-camp. A man of character—he had opposed part of the general staff by pushing for the abandonment of the Drissa camp because he considered it indefensible—it was he who was charged by Kutuzov with telling the emperor about the abandonment of Moscow. Finally, in the weeks following the catastrophe, he was one of those who persuaded Alexander not to yield and to continue to resist the enemy.

  The dates and content of their conversations in August and September of 1825 cannot be known for certain. There is no mention of them in the Russian archives, but that is scarcely surprising since many documents linked to Alexander’s reign, including some letters, Maria Feodorovna’s diary, and part of Elizabeth’s have all disappeared, no doubt destroyed at the request of Nicholas I.35 But during these conversations the emperor may have asked the devoted General Michaud to perform a crucial mission: to go to Rome, meet Pope Leo XII discreetly, and share with him the imperial desire to see the Orthodox Church reintegrated into the pontifical bosom, and for this purpose to send to the Russian court a negotiator who spoke good French. With such a directive, Michaud may have gone to Rome in September.

  This extraordinary mission, whose stakes were of crucial importance—it was no less than a matter of trying to end the schism of Christianity—has since the final third of the nineteenth century aroused a historiographic polemic. In 1877, relying on confidential sources, the Jesuit father Jean Gagarin published a little work titled “The Russian Archives and the Conversion of Alexander I.”36 Formerly Prince Gagarin, he had converted to Catholicism at the age of 27 in 1841 and a year later entered the Society of Jesus. Banished since his conversion and then living in Paris, Gagarin had a plentiful correspondence37 with major Russian and French intellectuals, serving as confessor to a number of the wellborn and receiving frequent visits from Russians, Catholic or not, who were visiting Paris. The little work published in 1877 described Alexander I’s attraction to Catholicism and “revealed” his desire to see a fusion between churches of East and West. While Gagarin does not always mention his sources very precisely—as his detractors have remarked—his archives (which I have consulted) do include the documents on which he relied.38 We find there an astonishing recollection (written in the hand of the Baroness de Ricci) from the duchess de Laval Montmorency39 who, then very old, could only write these final lines, adding her signature to the bottom of the document. In this note, certified by Gagarin in 1877, we read:

  I certify having learned from the mouth of General Michaud that he, aide-de-camp of Emperor Alexander, had from this prince the secret mission of carrying to the reigning Pope (I think it was Leo XII) the homage of perfect submission to his spiritual authority. The general went on his knees to the Pope and recognized him in the name of the emperor as head of the Church.40

  More than 40 years after the publication of this first assertion, Father Pierling, a Jesuit trained by Father Gagarin as an archivist and historian, took up his predecessor’s study. In a first brochure published in 1901 under the provocative title “Did Emperor Alexander I Die a Catholic?”41 he revived the hypothesis of a conversion by Alexander to Catholicism and a plan to unite the two churches, but this time Pierling delivered sources which, although independent one from another, nevertheless converged.42 He reveals first that Michaud, well after the death of Alexander, confided his secret to two close friends: Constance de Maistre (here he accepts the assertion of Gagarin, whose archives he consulted) and the Count Toduti de l’Escarène (later a minister of the king of Sardinia), who reported the confidence to his sovereign in a little memorandum written in 1841, a few weeks after the death of Michaud.43 In a roundabout way Michaud is said to have mentioned “a secret” to a member of his family, his niece, the Countess Paoletti de Rodoretto,44 with whom he often stayed in Palermo in the last years of his life. In fact, in 1869 the Countess Paoletti de Rodoretto published in Turin a little book of a hundred pages titled “Glances at the life of S. E., Count Alexander Michaud de Beauretour, Lt. General, aide-de-camp of Their Majesties the Emperors of Russia, Alexander I and Nicholas I, and on the life of his brother Louis Michaud, engineer and aide-de-camp of His Majesty Emperor Alexander I”45 that I found. She asserts that in 1825 Michaud had to go “on the emperor’s orders” to Italy, with permission to go to Nice,”46 that the emperor lent him one of his particular carriages and provided all the expenses of the trip,47 and that Michaud had kept a secret linked to Alexander:

  Even when in the close intimacy of his family, where he thought he was able to give free reign to his effusions, one still noticed much reticence, causes of the regrettable lacuna that mar my book a bit.

  In effect it is accepted by us, his nieces, living close to him and almost never leaving him, that he had at the bottom of his heart many secrets, now buried with him in the silence of the tomb. How many times, for example, we heard him cry out, in speaking of the grandeur of the sentiments and actions of emperor Alexander: Ah, if only it was permitted to me to say everything! But I promised to remain silent!48—a final homage to the memory of this prince so favored by Heaven and so worthy of being loved.49

  To these sources emanating from Catholics close to General Michaud, Pierling adds others coming from the Vatican: Mauro Cappellari, former abbot of a monastery, who became pope under the name Gregory XVI, confided to his personal secretary Gaetano Moroni (who noted it in his diary and then published it in his Dizionario) that he was once designated by Pope Leo XII to go to St. Petersburg at the tsar’s request to prepare for the fusion of the churches; he declined this mission, though, in favor of father Orioli. The latter was getting ready to go when the tsar’s sudden death in Taganrog put a stop to the plan.

  Barely published, Pierling’s brochure was forcefully denied by Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich, Russian biographer of Alexander I but also a member of the imperial family, who refused to validate this thesis because no other Russian source attested to the stated facts and because nothing proved the existence of an interview between the aide-de-camp and the pope. But Pierling persisted (and in 1913 published) a revised edition of his previous brochure;50 this time he refers very precisely to Vatican sources that prove that an interview did take place between Pope Leo XII and General Michaud on December 5, 1825,51 without anything about its content having filtered through. This publication made Nicholas Mikhailovich waver, and in the posthumous edition of his biography of Alexander I, he supplied new details:

  The fact is that Michaud […] took a leave-of-absence to settle in Italy where he died in 1841, leaving for Emperor Nicholas I, then reigning, a sealed box, that Michaud’s family delivered after his death to the emperor. We managed to discover receipts from Prince P. M. Volkonsky, proving that this box containing the papers was received, but these have disappeared, probably burnt by Emperor Nicholas.52

  By 1913, then, there was no more trace in the Russian archives of the documents that could have been sent to Russi
a by Michaud’s family; as for the pontifical sources that I have consulted, they are scarcely explicit, mentioning the request for an audience with the pope by Count Italinsky on November 25, 1825, the tsar’s envoy to the Holy See, on behalf of Michaud and Rakiety, “secretary general of the Ministry of Religion and Education of the Kingdom of Poland,”53 as well as on December 3, the response from Cardinal della Somaglia, fixing the audience with the pope for Monday, December 5. But there are no minutes, and so the Vatican archives permit only one established fact: at the request of Alexander I, General Michaud met with Pope Leo on that date.

  What did they say to each other? In his investigation of 1913, Pierling stuck to the testimony left by those close to the general, while implying (a hypothesis confirmed by Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich) that Michaud, haunted by his secret, had written an explanatory letter to Nicholas I, a letter that came to the tsar in 1841 by means of his brother Gaétan Michaud. In fact, in 1846, five years after having sent the document to Russia, Gaétan Michaud reported the affair to a friend, Father Bresciani, who consigned it in turn to his diary,54 regretting that the plan to reconcile the churches had led to nothing. But in 1913, Pierling could go no farther in his investigation beyond a network of assumption. The written sources were lacking.

  However, in 1932 the affair resurfaced: if the letter sent by Gaétan Michaud was indeed destroyed when it arrived in Russia, the draft of this letter had remained in the Michaud family archives in Nice, where a local scholar, Louis Cappatti,55 found it this year. He then published an article titled “Count Michaud de Beauretour, Alexander I, and the Pope in 1825,” which revealed that the draft of the letter written by Michaud in June 183556 when he was staying in Turin had been found in the archives of the deceased canon Augustin Michaud Beauretour, the general’s nephew, and that this draft now belonged to Count Felix Michaud de Beauretour, the nephew of the latter, who agreed to show it to him. And in his article Cappatti reproduced the whole text of Michaud’s extraordinary letter, of which these are the main passages:

  I was in the service of His Majesty the terrible year of 1825, at Kaminskii-Ostrof where His Majesty arrived from Czarkoye-Selo to spend the day a few days before the Peterhof Party. (His Majesty received that day the ambassador of France, Count de la Feronais,57 who excused himself to take the waters.) His Majesty did me the honor of calling me and ordering me to sit at his side, giving me orders in approximately these terms. […]

  To remove any suspicion by Your Imperial Majesty that my religion might be the cause of a story invited by false zeal, my religions teaches me, Sire, that I would be damned without recourse for all eternity if I dared use it for falseness, deception, and lying or betrayal, and if, in dying, I did not consign it to flames!

  “Dear general,” His Majesty said to me: “I want to give you a mark of the trust that I have in you, I am sending you to Rome, you will go to the Holy Father, you will tell him that long ago I formed the desire in my heart to see the two Churches reunited, that several reasons have prevented me from letting him know my intentions until now, that I am sending you to beg him to choose a reliable monk that you will bring back to me next year in the month of May. Tell him that the matter must be dealt with between he who is the Head of the Catholic Church and me who am […] here.” (His Majesty made a pose as if his modesty made it repugnant to give himself the title of the Head of the Greek Church [...]) I took over: “Yes, Sire, you represent here the head of your Church. […]”

  “You will say then that because this affair is between him and me, I regard the thing as easy to achieve with the help of divine Providence, but make him feel the importance of secrecy; first nothing ever in writing; when his confidant arrives here, we will understand each other easily, I hope. And I do not doubt that the Holy Father will put his goodwill into it, as I will do on my side, but he should not let his choice fall on some person of high rank, we must absolutely avoid anything to give warning. I would like (if possible) for him to choose among the mendicant orders of St. Francis, or the Camaldules [a branch of the Benedictines] or Capuchins. I have had occasion to know a good one in Verona, he was confessor to the king of Naples, but I do not mean to say that he should send me that one, for he would be too visible, having been in Verona. Moreover, tell him that I do not conceal to me the difficulties that we will encounter in bringing Russia to this great step!

  But I have full confidence in God! So that we will succeed, I am well determined to do everything possible, the Holy Father will do the same, and God will do the rest, and if necessary we will die martyrs!

  Do not forget to tell the Holy Father that I beg him to choose someone who knows French.” […]

  I left for Nice where I let my relatives know of my desire to profit from the moment of jubilee to go see Rome. […] Arriving in Rome we had the misfortune to find the Holy Father ill, so that I stayed almost 40 days without seeing him. […] Finally [Minister Italinsky]58 presented me to the Holy Father on December 6 or 7.59

  I seized this opportunity to procure an individual audience with His Holiness by begging him to allow me to present my brother [...] and the Holy Father assigned me the following Friday, December 9.

  Here, Sire, are the means I used to make known to His Holiness that I had a secret to reveal to him: I warned my brother that […] I needed as a military man to say a word of confession to the Holy Father and ask permission to put myself at his feet after the presentation, and that seeing me lay down my sword, he should withdraw.

  In fact, after several minutes of conversation, I told the Holy Father that his moments were too precious to abuse his time, and I begged him to let me go down on my knees to tell him something in confession that pertained to resting my conscience.

  The Holy Father said he was ready to listen to me and my brother went behind a curtain. Kneeling, I declared under the seal of confession to His Holiness the mission with which I was charged […], at which the Holy Father marveled and gave me an accolade of tears in his eyes, telling me:

  “Ah, general! What comfort you bring to my heart, what a beautiful message you have.” Embracing me, he praised the emperor and thanked Heaven for the good news I had brought. He added that we had to see each other several times to arrange everything, and that he had an excellent subject to give me to bring to Russia, a Camaldule of highest merit and exemplary faith, he was man who would please His Majesty, in whom I could place total trust.

  But when I remarked that His Majesty begged him to send someone who spoke French, there was a moment of embarrassment: “Ah, I don’t think so, unfortunately my Camaldule is ignorant of this language, it is pity, but we will choose another one; I am even more annoyed because I want to make this Camaldule a Cardinal, and first I would have wanted him to perform this fine mission.”

  I think, Sire, that the current Holy Father is very probably the Camaldule of whom the Holy Father was speaking, since he made him Cardinal shortly afterward. His Holiness gave me a way of entering secretly in the evening, where I had several tête-à-tête discussions, always with the promise of the greatest secrecy, the importance of which he recognized. He had already chosen the monk and introduced me to him, I should plan for us to find ourselves together at the end of April in Piedmont, to arrive in Russia in May. When the fatal news arrived of the death of His Majesty the emperor Alexander of always glorious and immortal memory, it made the Holy Father sick and he could only see me three days later, to mourn with me the loss we had just suffered, about which the Holy Father was desolate and inconsolable. I told him I was leaving right away to arrive in time to meet the funeral convoy and render my final duties to His Majesty, my august master.

  I excused myself and left for Nice where I stopped only 24 hours.

  Your Majesty will recall that I asked upon arriving in St. Petersburg, after my compliments and condolences, for permission to leave immediately to join the funeral convoy escort that was supposed to arrive in Moscow the same day.

  I have just, Sire, freed my conscience o
f a weight that would have overcome me at my last moment, if I had carried with me a secret that I am depositing in the heart of Your Imperial Majesty, fully convinced by the profound esteem that Your Majesty had for his August brother, and being persuaded that he could form so delicate a plan only after much pure and holy reflection, and in the conviction of his Faith and fine conscience. Your Majesty will perhaps find it good one day to realize the holy project that his august brother had conceived, which by his prayers will attract heavenly blessings on his reign and on his enterprises, if Heaven has destined Your Majesty to receive the glory of such holy work.

  I am, Sire, the faithful devoted and grateful servant, his Aide-de-Camp.60

  Two major questions are posed by this document. First, is it authentic? Nothing permits me to doubt it. Why should the nephew of General Michaud (or his grand nephew), who had no ties with Russia (and later Russia became a communist regime)—why would they elaborate a forgery that no longer had any stakes? Still, to try to see more clearly, and out of concern for honesty and rigor, I tried to take up Cappatti’s investigation. Alas, today, 55 years after the publication of the article, the document is nowhere to be found, either in the Michaud archives or in the Nice archives. However, in Cappatti’s archives (conserved in a private library, the Cessole Library61) we find a typescript of Michaud’s letter. As a good historian, Cappatti had taken care to type the document with which he had been entrusted for a while and kept a version. Without being determinative, this point is not negligible: for Cappatti, a serious scholar, there must have been no doubt that this was a genuine and authentic document. The second question is whether the document could be an older forgery, which returns us to the question of the trustworthiness of Michaud himself: might he have embellished (or even wholly invented) this mission—which would make it as fable?

  My long investigation, full of pitfalls, enables me to be certain that Michaud did indeed meet Leo XII at least once in December 1825; in his letter to Nicholas I, he gives within two days (ten years after the fact) the exact date of the first conversation to which Vatican archives also attest; moreover, nothing in the background of this officer, who was deeply attached to Alexander I, brave on the front, and a fervent Catholic, would suggest the creation of a fable. So it appears that Michaud was indeed sent by Alexander on an exploratory mission for the rapprochement between, or even fusion of, the churches of East and West—toward which in fact Alexander’s political and religious vision and psychology were tending. The messianic ecumenism of the Holy Alliance plan, Alexander’s concept of an international church incarnated by the Biblical Society (which he never banned, even after Golitsyn’s fall), the crucial importance he granted to the church within the soul, his tolerance62 of other Christian faiths, and finally his lack of interest in the functioning of the Orthodox Church—all tend to confirm the credibility of this project. In addition, we know that during the Congress of Verona, Alexander and French foreign minister Chateaubriand frequently discussed religious matters. On this occasion the writer-diplomat Chateaubriand (who had written The Genius of Christianity in 1802) appears to have discerned in Alexander’s convictions the desire to unite the churches of East and West: