Alexander I- the Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon

by Marie-Pierre Rey

  We touched on the reunion of the Greek and Latin Church: Alexander was inclined to it, but he did not think he was strong enough to attempt it; he wanted to make the trip to Rome, and he remained on the border of Italy; more timid than Caesar, he could not cross the sacred torrent because of the interpretations that would unfailingly have been made of his trip. These interior struggles did not occur without self-doubt: in the religious ideas with which the autocrat was dominated, he did not know if he was obeying the hidden will of God, or if he was not ceding to some inferior suggestions that made him a renegade and a sacrilege.63

  The Vatican archives also contain an exchange of letters between the pope and Alexander in which the latter says he is ready to visit the pontiff as soon as he finds himself near Rome. Yet this trip did not take place, at the express demand of Maria Feodorovna, according to Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich:

  The tendency of Emperor Alexander to Catholicism was suspected in the imperial family; the Empress Mother feared that a meeting with the Holy Father would determine her son to enter the bosom of the Church, and she insistently begged him not to go to Rome. Emperor Alexander, always full of deference toward his mother, promised this and kept his word.64

  Once again, this testimony shows Alexander’s attraction to Catholicism. And—not the least of the arguments—is that this enterprise to fuse the churches had already been envisaged by Paul I, who had, as we recall, asked a Jesuit, Father Gruber, for a memorandum on this question that was on his worktable the very morning of his death. In this context could we advance the hypothesis that his son, in the grip of growing mysticism and remorse in 1824 and 1825 might have tried to redeem the original parricide? Whatever the case, this capital project that would no doubt have run into ferocious opposition from both the Orthodox Church and believers, would remain a dead letter due to the death of the emperor on the morning of November 19 (O.S.).

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  On the evening of September 13, two days before the empress’s departure, Alexander surreptitiously left St. Petersburg at 4:00 in the morning; he stopped at the Saint Alexander Nevsky monastery, where he received the blessing of the metropolitan Seraphim and spoke at length with Father Alexis, an ascetic, before resuming his route. He was accompanied by a small retinue, his chief of staff and aide-de-camp General Dibich, his doctors Wylie and Tarasov, the boatswain, Colonel Solomko, and four junior officers and some valets. Throughout his voyage he was writing to Elizabeth, who was herself on the way to Taganrog. On September 17 he sent her a thoughtful note:

  I do not want to let this day pass, dear one, without offering you my felicitations and my best wishes. May God grant you all that I desire for you and may he make you enjoy all his blessings!

  I very much desire that you may travel as happily and as agreeable as we. The weather is ravishing and the roads perfect. I also hope that you will be tolerably satisfied with the inns. Adieu, dear one, may God accompany and guide you in all things.65

  Arriving in Taganrog on September 25 in the evening, Alexander established himself in a very modest palace, where he spent a peaceful and retired life, alternating reviews of the troops, promenades, and prayers while waiting for Elizabeth’s arrival. She joined him on October 5, accompanied by Pyotr Volkonsky,66 Secretary of State Longinov, two maids of honor (Princesses Volkonskaia and Valueva), three doctors (Stoffregen, Dobbert, and Reinhold), and a pharmacist (Prott). For their domestic happiness the couple led a tranquil and unadorned life as simple individuals. Far from the court and the turbulence affecting the empire, Alexander and Elizabeth appeared to have renewed their ideal as adolescents—to live retired “in a little house” on the banks—not of the Rhine, but of the Azov Sea. In a letter to her mother dated October 5, the empress evokes her new life with evident joy:

  The town is really pretty and pleasant. One sees the sea from almost every street, and my house, of which the emperor has taken care in all its details with so much solicitude, is pretty and heimlich.67

  Three days later, in a new letter to her mother, she described her new residence in detail:

  The emperor has arranged it very well, in part with things sent from Petersburg, in part with quite pretty furniture made here, and by his really touching care for me I am well and comfortably lodged. […] The house has only a ground floor; it is up at the end of a street called “Greek street” and its longest side faces this street, and a garden with a courtyard is beside us. On the corner, the view is of the ramparts of this ancient citadel I told you about, but from the apartments that look out on the courtyard, one sees the sea through a little garden adjacent to the house. There is in a corner of this garden a terrace where the view is magnificent and I would want warmth to be able to come and dream lazily on this terrace. A room which as deep as the house, is the main room. From there one enters on the right to the emperor, who has given himself only two rooms, and on the left to my lounge; then comes my cabinet with a good comfortable divan, a piece of furniture precious to me, and it is from this cabinet that I am writing to you. After comes the bedroom, which by the arrangement of doors, windows and by proportion reminds me of your red bedroom in your house in Karlsruhe. From the little door at the back, one enters in a lovely little room with one window, which the emperor has destined for my dining room; from this room one sees on one side a very small bathroom and on the other a rather large chamber for the maids, which gives onto the courtyard. At the end there is another little cabinet that the emperor has had arranged as a library for me, so as to give me a view of the sea from at least one room.68

  In October the emperor undertook a new trip that led him to Crimea on November 1. He lingered there, and again the desire to abdicate and end his imperial charge was felt to be pressing. To Pyotr Volkonsky he confided half-seriously, half-daydreaming:

  Soon I am going to move to the Crimea, I am going to live like a simple mortal. I have served twenty-five years and soldiers are given leave after this lapse of time. […] And you, too, you will resign and you will be my librarian.69

  This growing lassitude of power is also explained by two other factors: first, it was during his stay in Taganrog that he learned from General Dibich of the catastrophe that occurred in Gruzino on September 22: the assassination by servants of Anastasia Minkina, Arakcheev’s mistress and the mother of his only son, which plunged Arakcheev into a deep depression to the point that he refused to serve the state anymore. The sympathetic emperor then invited him out of affection to spend a little time in Taganrog before going back to his post:

  Come to me, you have no friend who could love you more sincerely. We are in a very tranquil place. You will organize your life as you wish. But your pain will be softened by chatting with a friend who shares it deeply. But I swear to you by all that is most sacred to you, remember that the country needs you. I say that your services are indispensable to it and to me, who am inseparable from the fatherland.70

  Although this letter says a lot about Alexander’s affection for him, the count, lost in grief, did not even answer it; renouncing exercise of all of his functions, he named (without informing the tsar) one of his subordinates to replace him. So, after September 1825 the government of the empire was totally adrift. At the same time the investigation led by Sherwood culminated: around Pavel Pestel, commander of the Viarka infantry regiment, a secret society was indeed hatching a plot. Alongside Pestel figured a number of great Russian names: Ermolov, Orlov, Guriev, and several high-ranking officers were implicated in the plan. But despite the report submitted by Sherwood, Arakcheev, overcome by his family tragedy, took no preventive measures against the conspirators. On October 20 Alexander learned from a second source of the imminence of a conspiracy to depose him. He merely asked for more information and did not enact any repressive measure. This lack of a reaction from either Arakcheev or Alexander himself would undeniably facilitate the preparation and implementation of the Decembrist coup.

  During his stay in Crimea, the tsar inspected the troops and naval installation
s and visited the great monasteries of the peninsula. But on November 8, while he was riding by horse to the abbey of St. Georgey near Sebastopol, he caught cold; despite a fever he pursued his Crimean tour, visiting barracks and military hospitals. Increasingly febrile, to the point that his doctors wondered whether if he might have contracted typhoid fever by contact with hospitalized soldiers, he refused to take care of himself for several days, until November 26, by which time his condition had seriously deteriorated. But the fever did not fall, and he weakened day to day: on November 27 he asked for an Orthodox priest, made confession, and received the last rites, before dying on December 1 (November 19 (O.S.) at 10:50 a.m., with Elizabeth at his side. That very day, she wrote to her mother to share the devastating news:

  Dear mama, our angel is in Heaven and I am on earth, of all those who mourn him, I am the most unhappy creature; if only I could soon join him! Oh, my God, it is almost beyond human strength but since he sent it, it must no doubt be borne. I do not understand, I don’t know if I am dreaming, I cannot think out or understand my existence.71

  A few weeks later, she wrote her mother again, expressing her suffering:

  All the earthly ties are broken between us… Friends from childhood, we walked together for thirty-two years. Together we traversed all the stages of life. Often distant, we always found each other again, in one way or another. Finally, on the true path, we tasted only the sweetness of our union. It was at this moment he was taken away from me.72

  Exhausted and overwhelmed with grief, the empress was even incapable of setting off to accompany the funeral convoy; and it was only in the spring of 1826 that she started to come back to St. Petersburg. But on May 15, while she was stopping in Belev in the region of Tula, Elizabeth, aged 45, died suddenly of a heart attack. She had survived Alexander by less than six months.

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  In 1824, a year before Alexander’s death, Count Langeron wrote to the contemporaries of Catherine II that they would not recognize their country if by chance they came back to earth because, he said, “between the Russia of 1790 and that of 1824, there is a distance of three hundred years.”73 Why this judgment? How had the 24 years of Alexander’s reign transformed the Russian Empire?

  On the international stage the country had become a major actor, not only due to the power of the army and the victories bitterly won over Napoleon but also due to the constant interest expressed by the tsar in European matters, his desire to make Russia a European power on a par with Great Britain or France. Alexander I had also contributed to modifying the image of Russia and Russians in western Europe: in 1801, and still more in 1812, due to the Napoleonic propaganda that played on this register, they had appeared as dangerous barbarians, living on the edge of the civilized world. But as of 1814–1815 these hostile impressions faded, ceding to a more nuanced, even complimentary, discourse. There is no doubt that the trip made by Alexander through western Europe in these two years was a determining stage in this evolution, so much did the tsar use his persona, his charm, and his seductiveness to convince the western European elites of Russia’s full-fledged belonging to European civilization. It is within the same perspective that we should situate his attachment to the Holy Alliance: of course, after 1821–1822 it was transformed into an instrument of repression, designed to support authoritarian monarchies in their antirevolutionary combat, but as retrograde as this change was, it did not prevent the tsar from making himself—until his death—a promoter of a European cause that he wanted to advance in the name of a shared identity. Does this mean that Alexander, obsessed by European matters, might have neglected and even sacrificed national interests? A view spread by some nationalist Russian historians, this thesis does not resist examination of the facts. While European matters did occupy a predominant place in the tsar’s diplomatic analyses, to the point that one can speak of his “European dream,” the membership of Russia in European civilization was supposed to be a factor in its national power. In other words, for the emperor, the engagement in European questions was in turn to signify a growth in Russian power. For him, these two notions were closely connected.

  Moreover, in the course of Alexander’s reign, the empire had considerably expanded, both to the west and to the south; the annexation of Finland, the breakthrough realized in the Caucasus, the integration of Bessarabia and the creation of a Polish state under Russian control were the fruits of an expansionist dynamic that clearly placed Alexander in the lineage of Peter the Great and Catherine II.

  On the other hand—crucially—Alexander’s continuous engagement in the service of Russian power and geopolitical interests was largely accomplished to the detriment of the domestic scene and its development. The long wars against France proved terribly costly on the demographic, financial, and economic levels. Maintaining the imperial army seriously hurt the state budget, and after the 1812 invasion the cost of reconstructing territories was particularly high, given the heavy damage caused by the Grand Army’s invasion. But the consequences were also political: as soon as diplomatic and strategic questions became more pressing in 1805, until they assumed vital importance in 1812, domestic affairs found themselves either conditioned by diplomatic priorities (it was because national union required a scapegoat that Speransky—a Francophile in the court’s eyes—was removed from power in 1812) or completely dropped (in the hour of peril, there was no time to launch into hypothetical reforms). When the country finally acquired peace in 1812, the tsar, still dragged into the diplomatic scene, continued to invest a large part of his energy there—again at the expense of domestic politics. And this situation had major consequences.

  With the exception of the first years of the reign, when the spirit was reformist and a certain number of concrete initiatives were taken (remaking the education system and the creation of new universities), and when the emperor was envisaging granting political liberties and even a constitution to his people, then with the exception of the “Speransky years” (1807–1812) that coincided with the return of peace and gave priority to domestic issues, the tsar’s reforming activity remained, in fact, limited despite the hopes he had raised when he came to the throne. Overall, the country was more “administered” than truly “governed,” since ultimately the initiatives taken at the top of the state were not numerous or very convincing.

  On the economic and social levels the Russian Empire changed little: the urban population represented only four percent of the total population at the end of the eighteenth century; the demographic rise, despite the Napoleonic wars, that Russia enjoyed in these 25 years, did not change the ratio. While in the middle of the eighteenth century the Russian Empire was the first world producer of iron, at the end of that century it was joined by Great Britain, then largely outstripped in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Finally, on the political level, while the tsar occasionally entertained ideas of constitutional reform and the abolition of serfdom, and even though they were materialized in some working documents, these ideas never passed the sketching stage. For this failure, some historians have blamed in turn a lack of courage on Alexander’s part, his vacillating character, his adherence on the surface to reformism, his fear of being the victim of a plot woven by a reactionary aristocracy. But in reality none of these accusations sticks: he proved himself courageous and even stubborn in many circumstances. We remember his capacity to resist the pressure from a court bristling with rumors hostile to the Tilsit accords, his trip to Erfurt, and his conduct at the head of his Cossack regiments in the 1813 campaigns. Nor can we doubt his sincere attachment (at least until 1820–1821) to liberal ideas and reform projects.

  On the other hand, despite his initial optimism and his efforts to modernize the imperial administration and to give the country, by means of educational reform, new elites emanating from widened social categories, Alexander was, throughout his reign, confronted with a major problem: the absence of auxiliaries and powerful supports able to accomplish a program to which a majority of the nobility rem
ained aggressively hostile, well aware that constitutional plans would eventually lead to a questioning of the current order, notably of serfdom. This reality, the lack of relays, and the hostility of the nobility was, I believe, determinative in Alexander’s renunciations. But other factors were at play, particularly his faith. The emperor whose absolute power was by nature sacred could also have hesitated, as his faith grew, to undo a mandate received from God and which he had to transmit, intangibly, to his successor.

  However, despite these renunciations that seriously compromise an assessment of the reign, important changes were achieved during this quarter century; apart from an increase in Russian power and an opening toward Europe, we should stress the breadth of the rights granted to Finland and to Poland—both places for the apprenticeship of constitutionalism—the abolition of serfdom in Baltic lands, a prelude to an overall abolition, the creation of universities that later played the role of training grounds for new ideas. Finally, although the Russian nationalist movement was previously attached to exalting the popular roots of the Russian culture as much as demarcating itself from Western influences and touched only a small elite, after 1812 it was significantly enlarged. Moving between social differences, the war against Napoleon welded the nation against the invader and contributed to the emergence of a national consciousness and of a national identity going beyond the narrow circles of the intelligentsia. So, far from the immobility and conservatism of which historiography has often accused it, the reign of Alexander was in many respects a period of political, intellectual, and social germination that, beyond the reign of Nicholas I, would prepare minds for the great reforms of Alexander II.