Secret Lives of the Tsars

by Michael Farquhar

  At one point Napoleon became so irate that he threw his hat down on the floor and stomped on it. “You are violent, I am stubborn,” Alexander remarked coolly in response to the tantrum. “So anger will get you nowhere with me. Let us talk, let us reason, or I shall leave.”

  While the French emperor insisted on Russian assistance with Austria, Alexander had a few demands of his own—not the least of which was France’s evacuation of Prussia. Napoleon was stunned: “Is it my friend, my ally who proposes that I abandon the only position from which I can threaten Austria’s flank if she attacks me while my troops are in southern Europe, four hundred leagues from home?… It is a system of weakness that you are proposing to me. If I agree to it, Europe will soon be treating me like a little boy.”

  It was during these tense negotiations that Alexander was secretly approached by Napoleon’s recently resigned foreign minister, Talleyrand, who seemed to have treason on his mind. “Sire,” he said, “what did you come here for? It is up to you to save Europe, and you will succeed in doing that only if you hold your ground against Napoleon. The French people are civilized, their sovereign is not. The sovereign of Russia is civilized, his people are not. The sovereign of Russia should therefore be the ally of the French people. The Rhine, the Alps, the Pyrenees are conquests of France. The rest is the conquest of the Emperor, France doesn’t care about it.”*3

  Talleyrand’s confidence reassured Alexander that his position was stronger than anyone, especially Napoleon, believed. An agreement was reached, and though it provided for Russia’s assistance against a bellicose Austria, the tsar really had no intention of ever fighting his former ally. “Bonaparte claims that I am only a fool,” he wrote to his sister. “He laughs best who laughs last. As for me, I place all my hope in God.”

  With false promises made, the summit was concluded as genially as it began. “Everything is going well,” a placated Napoleon wrote to Josephine. “I am pleased with Alexander. He must be pleased with me! If he were a woman, I think I would make him my sweetheart.”

  But since Alexander was most decidedly not a woman, Napoleon was determined to make the tsar’s sister his wife. He informed the Russian emperor of his plan to repudiate his wife, Josephine, “so as to consolidate his work and found his dynasty.” Marriage to a Russian grand duchess would give the next generation of Bonapartes the perfect royal pedigree. To avoid such a calamity, the emperor’s sister Catherine was hurriedly engaged to the Duke of Oldenburg. He was not particularly attractive, but then anybody would be better than the odious Corsican.

  Not to be deterred, Napoleon simply proposed that a younger sister, Anne, become his bride—never mind that she was only thirteen. Dowager Empress Maria was understandably aghast at the prospect of her little girl replacing “the whore” Josephine in Napoleon’s bed. Yes, it would be dangerous for Russia to deny Napoleon his underage prize. But so be it.

  Though Alexander tried to soften the blow of his rejection by assuring Napoleon the matter could be revisited when Anne actually hit puberty, the French emperor wasn’t fooled. And the insult he felt was only aggravated by the lavish wedding of his first choice, Catherine, to the Prince of Oldenburg—a celebration that included his vanquished enemies, the king and queen of Prussia. Bonaparte would get his revenge by eventually attacking Oldenburg. “It’s like a public insult,” exclaimed Alexander, “a slap in the face of a friendly power.” Plus, Napoleon never bothered to wait for Anne—which, though a relief, was also a slap at Russian honor. Instead, he married Marie Louise of Austria, which prompted the Prince de Ligne to quip, “Austria has sacrificed a beautiful heifer to the Minotaur.”

  But these marital travails became insignificant after Austria declared war on France in 1809. By the terms of the treaty signed at Erfurt, Alexander was now obligated to aid his enemy. And he made every effort to pretend to do so. “If you make a move, I will march [on France’s side],” the emperor warned the Austrian envoy Prince Schwarzenberg, in what was really a bit of theater. “You will set fire to Europe and you will fall victim to that fire.”

  Privately, though, Alexander was far more conciliatory. “The Emperor assured me that nothing would be neglected that was humanly possible to think of to avoid striking blows at us,” Schwarzenberg reported; “he added that his position was so strange that although we found ourselves in opposite camps, he could not help wishing for our success.”

  The tsar proved good to his word, if not to Napoleon, then to the Austrians. His forces barely touched theirs in the ensuing battles. “I am loath to accuse the Russian generals of such perfidy,” Prince Poniatowski reported to Napoleon, “but I cannot conceal from Your Majesty that there is perfect concert between them and the enemy.” Russia’s limp partnership did little to hamper the French, however, and Austria was decisively crushed. “You have been colorless,” Napoleon ranted at Count Nicholas Rumiantsev. “The saber was not drawn a single time.”

  The spoils of victory were commensurate with Russia’s efforts in the conflict. The French emperor tossed his “ally” a scrap of territory in Poland. “Napoleon has humiliated Alexander,” wrote the journalist Nicholas Gretsch, “by giving him, out of the lands taken from Austria, not some province but 400,000 souls, the way our tsars used to reward their accomplices.” Worse, Alexander’s greatest fear was realized when Poland was almost entirely reconstituted under French protection. And despite Napoleon’s empty assurances that he was ready to “eliminate the words Poland and Poles not only from all political transactions, but also from history,” Russia’s vital buffer from invasion was breached.

  A decisive clash was now all but inevitable. Simply put, Bonaparte could not afford to retreat and leave his conquered territories exposed, and Alexander could not tolerate having him so close by. Thus both emperors prepared for the war neither really wanted. But first there was posturing on both sides. Napoleon later admitted that they had got themselves “into the position of two blustering braggarts who, having no wish to fight each other, seek to frighten each other.”

  “Before two months are out, Alexander will sue for peace,” the French emperor confidently declared. “A shattering blow dealt at the heart of the empire on Moscow the great, Moscow the holy, will deliver me in one instant that whole blind and helpless mass.” The Russian tsar was equally belligerent. “If once the war be fairly entered upon,” he told the French ambassador, “one of us—either he, Napoleon, or I, Alexander, must lose our crown.”

  Napoleon’s threatening presence actually had the effect of buoying the once-wavering Russian emperor. “Irresolute at first, he would let himself be driven back and forth between opposite solutions for a long time,” wrote his biographer Henri Troyat; “then, like a marble that has found a groove, he would never deviate from his path. It was as if his stubbornness were the natural consequence of the difficulty he had experienced in coming to a decision. His strength was born of weakness, his persistence was the result of previous vacillation.”

  Alexander had no illusions about what war would bring. “It is going to cause torrents of blood to flow,” he said, “and poor humanity is going to be sacrificed again to the ambition of a man who seems to have been created for its misfortune.” But he was ready. Napoleon, on the other hand, seemed somewhat less certain on the eve of his invasion. “The Emperor, who was ordinarily so gay and so full of ardor at times when his troops were executing a major maneuver, remained very serious and preoccupied for the rest of the day,” reported Napoleon’s close advisor (and former ambassador to Russia) Armand de Caulaincourt. Some interpreted his somber mood as a foreboding of disasters to come. But none could have possibly imagined just how dreadful the Russian expedition would be.

  On June 24, 1812, Napoleon made his fateful passage across the Nieman River into Russian territory. It was his longdreaded declaration of war. But there would be no battle. Alexander’s troops had amassed around the Lithuanian town of Vilna, but given Bonaparte’s surprise crossing and the vast size of his Grande Armée, a tactica
l decision was made to burn Vilna and retreat. Bonaparte was about to receive a foretaste of what was to come in Mother Russia.

  “Six hundred thousand men of all the European nations politically subject to Napoleon were marching in two columns, without stores, without rations, in a country [Lithuania] impoverished by the continental system [blockade] and only recently ruined by heavy requisitions,” wrote Countess Tiesenhausen. “In the town and in the countryside, unheard of disorders. Churches looted, the sacred vessels, even the cemeteries were not respected, the unfortunate women outraged.… The looters were shot [by order of Napoleon]. They went to execution with incredible insouciance, their little pipes in their mouths. What difference did it make to them if they died now or later.… The army had been without bread for three days. At Vilna they gave the soldiers bread that was not properly kneaded or baked, a kind of biscuit; there was no fodder for the cavalry, and they fed the horses with wheat cut in the fields at the end of June. They were dying like flies and their carcasses were thrown in the river.”

  And so it went for the rest of the summer as Bonaparte’s Grande Armée plunged deeper and deeper into the heart of Russia—either finding ruined villages and scorched fields in their path, or leaving them in their wake. Nature did the rest.

  “The heat in this part of the world at this time of year is nothing like the heat of southern Europe,” wrote one French soldier. “It was not just the heat of the sun we had to bear, but the vapors emanating from the baking earth. Our horses kicked up a cloud of burning sand as fine as dust, with which we were so covered that it would have been difficult to distinguish the color of our uniforms. This sand, which got into our eyes, subjected us to excruciating pain.”

  And still, other than a few skirmishes and a fruitless assault on the fortress town of Smolensk,*4 the French soldiers had yet to engage decisively in the arena that most favored them: the battlefield. Indeed, all they encountered was a perpetual Russian retreat. “This is no way to fight,” one disaffected Georgian prince exclaimed. “We are going to lead them to the very gates of Moscow.”

  In fact, it was outside Moscow, around the town of Borodino, that the fleeing Russian bear finally bared its claws. It was a vicious, bloody battle, after which both sides claimed victory. “My dear,” Napoleon wrote his new wife, Marie Louise, “I write you from the battlefield of Borodino. Yesterday I beat the Russians, their whole army.… The battle was hot … I had many killed and wounded.” At the same time the Russian commander Prince Michael Kutuzov was reporting to his wife, “I am well, my dear, and I am not beaten: I have won the battle with Bonaparte.”

  But if the Battle of Borodino itself was not conclusive, the aftermath was. Rather than engage the enemy again, Kutuzov decided to abandon one of Russia’s proudest, most sacred cities. “You are afraid of the retreat through Moscow,” he told his associates, “but for my part I consider it providential, because it will save the army. Napoleon is like a torrent that we cannot yet stop. Moscow will be the sponge that absorbs it.… I feel that I shall have to pay the piper, but I sacrifice myself for the good of my country. I order retreat.” That night Kutuzov could be heard quietly weeping in his bed.

  A massive exodus from the old capital commenced, reducing the population of Moscow from 250,000 to 15,000—mostly invalids, wounded soldiers, and freed prisoners. The Grande Armée then poured in, mixing freely with the looters and scavengers who remained. “Soldiers, vivandieres [women attached to French regiments], convicts, and prostitutes ran through the streets,” recorded Captain Eugene Labaume, “entered the deserted palaces and snatched everything that could gratify their greed. Some covered themselves with stuffs woven of gold or silk; others put over their shoulders, without choice or discernment, the most highly prized furs; many covered themselves with women’s and children’s pelisses, and even the convicts hid their rags beneath court garments. The rest, flocking to the cellars, broke down the doors and drinking the most precious wines, staggered off with their immense booty.”

  Within a short time, the great city, built mostly of wood, was in flames. Some believed the Russians started the fires themselves, to obliterate anything useful to the enemy; others said it was the Antichrist, Bonaparte himself, who created the apocalypse. The inferno raged for days, and the eerie red glow it produced could be seen for miles around; the sound was like a hurricane. “It was the most grand, the most sublime, and the most terrific sight the world has ever beheld,” Napoleon reminisced.

  “So now the horde of barbarians is lodged in the ruins of that beautiful capital,” Empress Elizabeth wrote to her mother. “They acted there as they have done everywhere else. Our people began to set fire to the object of all their affections rather than let it fall undamaged into the hands of the enemy, and the great nation [the French] will not stop sacking, looting, and destroying so long as there is anything left to destroy. In the meantime, our army has gone around Moscow and is posted in the vicinity of the road by which the enemy came and is already beginning to disrupt his communications. When Napoleon entered Moscow he found nothing of what he hoped for. He was counting on a public, there no longer was one, everyone had left; he was counting on resources, he found almost nothing; he was counting on the moral effect, the discouragement and prostration he would cause the nation, he has only aroused rage and the desire for vengeance.… Every step that [Napoleon] takes in Russia brings him nearer to the abyss. We shall see how he endures the winter!”

  While there may have been a tactical advantage in sacrificing Moscow, for many it was as if the very soul of the nation had been ripped out. “I regard Russia as lost forever,” Rostopchin wrote to his wife. And in their agony and grief, the people blamed their emperor. Roxanne Stourdza, a lady-in-waiting to Empress Elizabeth, witnessed the dark mood when she accompanied Alexander to the celebration of his coronation anniversary in St. Petersburg:

  “Our windowed carriages moved slowly through the immense crowd whose very silence and angry faces contrasted with the festive occasion. So long as I live I shall never forget the moment when we ascended the steps of the cathedral, between two ranks of common people who uttered not a single cheer. One could have heard the sound of our footsteps, and I have never doubted that one spark would have been enough, at that moment, to produce a general conflagration. A glance at the Emperor told me what was going on in his mind and I felt my knees buckle under me.”

  “You are openly accused of having brought disaster upon your empire,” the emperor’s sister Catherine wrote to him, “of having caused general ruin and the ruin of private individuals, lastly, of having lost the honor of the country and your own personal honor.… You need not fear a catastrophe of the revolutionary sort, no! But I leave it to you to judge the state of affairs in a country whose leader is despised.… The idea of peace, fortunately, is not widespread; far from it, for the feeling of shame following the loss of Moscow gives rise to the desire for revenge.”

  “Of course there are things that it is impossible to imagine,” Alexander responded. “But be persuaded that my resolve to struggle is more unshakable than ever; I should rather cease to be what I am than compromise with the monster who is the curse of the world.… I place my hope in God, in the admirable character of our nation, and in my steadfast determination not to bow under the yoke.”

  Meanwhile, Bonaparte brooded in the Kremlin, hoping for some change in fortune. After all his efforts, he possessed only a ruined city, surrounded by enemies, and without supplies. “Suddenly Napoleon felt as if in Russia he was faced with another Spain,” Troyat wrote, “this one gigantic, fierce, Asiatic, polar.” Still, he somehow had to save face; his ego absolutely demanded it. But that could only come with an accommodation from the Russian emperor. “I want peace, I need peace, I must have peace!” he insisted to one of his emissaries. “Just save my honor.” Alexander, however, had lost too much to even consider his adversary’s increasingly desperate entreaties.

  “All the news that you will receive from me, all my exhortations
, all the ukases [imperial orders] addressed to you, in a word everything convinces you of my firm resolve,” the emperor wrote to Kutuzov: “at the present time no proposal from the enemy will persuade me to cease combat and, by so doing, to fail the sacred obligation to avenge the offended motherland.”

  There was perhaps no concept as alien to Napoleon Bonaparte as retreat. Through years of glorious campaigns and conquests, he rarely had to face it. Now, just four months after crossing the Nieman, the ignominious prospect he had long avoided became his only option. So, on October 23, 1812, Bonaparte marched out of the remnants of Moscow to face his doom.

  “God, my Creator, You have heard our prayers at last!” exclaimed Kutuzov. “From this moment, Russia is saved!”

  Winter, the greatest weapon in Russia’s arsenal, was on its way. And the wrath of an outraged populace would aid its lethal scourge. For the once-grande Armée, Russia became, in the words of one, “this enormous tomb.” In all, 400,000 soldiers died; 100,000 more were taken prisoner. Some of those who managed to survive recounted the horror of that unforgiving retreat: tales of frozen bodies, half eaten by wolves, of menacing peasants quick to torture, of starvation so severe that dung became nourishment.

  “We continued to advance without knowing where our steps were taking us,” one French soldier wrote. “A raging storm drove in our faces the snow that was falling out of the sky in large flakes, together with that which it swept up from the ground, and seemed to desire with all its might to oppose our progress. The horses could no longer move forward over the frozen ground and collapsed; the convoys and, for the first time, the cannon remained behind for lack of teams to draw them. The route over which the Grande Armée was hurrying to Smolensk was strewn with frozen corpses. But the snow had soon covered them like an immense shroud, and little mounds, like the tombs of the ancients, showed us only faint traces of our buried comrades in arms.”