Alexander I- the Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon Read online

  © 2012 by Northern Illinois University Press

  Published by the Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, Illinois 60115

  Manufactured in the United States using acid-free paper.

  All Rights Reserved

  Design by Shaun Allshouse

  First published in French as Alexander Ier by © Éditions Flammarion, 2009

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rey, Marie Pierre.

  [Alexandre Ier. English]

  Alexander I : the tsar who defeated Napoleon / Marie Pierre Rey ; translated by Susan Emanuel.

  pages ; cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978 0 87580 466 8 (cloth) — ISBN 978 1 60909 065 4 (electronic)

  1. Alexander I, Emperor of Russia, 1777–1825. 2. Emperors—Russia—Biography. 3. Russia—History—Alexander I, 1801–1825. I. Emanuel, Susan, translator. II. Title. III. Title: Alexander the First.

  DK191.R4913 2012

  947’.072092 dc23

  [B]

  2012030680

  This book was published with the generous financial support of the Centre national du livre (Paris, France). Publié avec le soutien du Centre national du livre (Paris, France). Financial assistance was also kindly provided by the Fondation Napoléon (Paris) and the University of Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  Prologue

  PART ONE—THE CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH OF AN EMPEROR, 1777–1801

  1—Monsieur Alexander and Catherine the Great

  2—“The Monarch-in-Training”

  3—A Grand Duke Torn Between Greater and Lesser Courts

  4—The Tsarevich at Paul I’s Court: 1796–1801

  PART TWO —THE PROMISING REIGN: A Spirit of Reform, 1801–1807

  5—Reformist Attempts

  6—Reforming Program: 1801–1805

  7—On the International Stage: 1801–1805

  PART THREE—THE NAPOLEONIC WARS, 1805–1815

  8—From Military Fiascos to the Tilsit Agreements: 1805–1807

  9—The Time of the French Alliance: 1807–1812

  10—Between Domestic Reforms and Military Preparations: 1807–1812

  11—1812: The Duel of the Emperors

  12—A European Tsar: 1813–1815

  PART FOUR —AN INCREASINGLY CONSERVATIVE REIGN, 1815–1825

  13—Mystic Exaltation, Reformist Aspiration, and Conservative Practice: 1815–1820

  14—Russian Diplomacy in the “European System”: 1815–1825

  15—Twilight: 1820–1825

  By Way of Epilogue: The Feodor Kuzmich Mystery

  Notes to Introduction

  Notes to Prologue

  Notes to Chapter 1

  Notes to Chapter 2

  Notes to Chapter 3

  Notes to Chapter 4

  Notes to Chapter 5

  Notes to Chapter 6

  Notes to Chapter 7

  Notes to Chapter 8

  Notes to Chapter 9

  Notes to Chapter 10

  Notes to Chapter 11

  Notes to Chapter 12

  Notes to Chapter 13

  Notes to Chapter 14

  Notes to Chapter 15

  Notes to Epilogue

  Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  The writing of a life is a passionate intellectual adventure, the pitfalls of which may arouse doubts and speculations (and sometimes discouragement), so arduous is the task. I wish here to render amicable and sincere homage to those who supported me as I pursued this project. My gratitude goes first to my French editor, Hélène Fiamma, whose benevolent and confident help and the well-considered advice she always offered me have been extremely precious over the course of these six years of work.

  I would also like to thank the directors and curators of the archives and libraries who lent me their assistance: Sergei Mironenko, director of GARF, and Larissa Rogovaia and Elena Shirkova, archivists; Mikhail Ryzhenkov, director of RGADA; Christina Grafinger, curator at the Vatican Library and Archives; Mireille Pastoureau, curator at the Library of the Institut de France; Geneviève Chesneau, of the Library of the Chevalier de Cessole; as well as the staffs of the Imperial Library of St. Petersburg, the British Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and the Archives of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Anne Maitre, curator of the Gagarin and Saint Georges archives deposited at ENS-LSH in Lyon, and Father René Marichal, formerly in charge of these collections, gave me constant help in the exploration of these valuable documents. I thank them warmly.

  During the course of writing, I could count on the meticulous, attentive, and exacting readings by my friends Christine Moreau and Jean-Pierre Minaudier: the manuscript owes substantial improvements to them, and I am extremely grateful. My gratitude also goes to Korine Amacher who let me benefit from her solid knowledge of the reign of Alexander the First.

  As concerns the American edition of the work, I want to thank the publishers, Northern Illinois University Press, and in particular its director, Alex Schwartz, who received the manuscript with enthusiasm, and editor Amy Farranto for the constant care she brought to preparing the text. My gratitude also goes to my translator, Susan Emanuel, as well as to the French institutions that have financially supported the translation of the book and made its English-language edition possible: the Centre national du livre, the Fondation Napoléon, and the Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne. My gratitude is immense.

  Finally, this biography would not have seen the light of day or been accomplished without the unwavering support of my family, so the book is naturally dedicated to them.

  Author’s Note

  During the tsarist period, the Russian Empire lived at the rhythm of the Julian calendar, which in the eighteenth century was eleven days behind the Gregorian calendar used in the rest of Europe (and twelve days behind in the nineteenth century). To avoid resorting systematically to giving double dates, I have chosen to use the latter (Gregorian) dating system, except where the abbreviation (O.S.)—Old Style—indicates the use of the Julian calendar. Place-names (towns, villages, regions) are given their current appellations.

  Introduction

  In the history of the Russian Empire, Tsar Alexander occupies a singular place. Rare are the major political figures that have aroused such discussion and contradictory verdicts among their contemporaries. A “heavenly angel”1 in the eyes of Empress Elizabeth, his wife, endowed with a “fine mind” and “perfect equanimity in his humor, a quality very rare and precious in a sovereign, whose source lay in the goodness of his soul”2 for the Countess of Choiseul-Gouffier, Alexander was only a “crowned Hamlet” for Herzen, a “Talma3 of the North,” a “Greek of the Lower Empire, fake as a coin” and “stubborn as a mule”4 for Napoleon.

  If those close to him5 saw him as sincere, he was (in the astute and provocative judgment of the Swede Lagerbielke) a monument of duplicity: “In politics, fine as a pinpoint, sharp as a razor, and false as sea foam.”6 Possessing an “excellent heart, but perhaps a little weak,”7 in the eyes of the Austrian military envoy, Stutterheim, posted to St. Petersburg, he was by contrast described by the Marquis of Caulaincourt as a man of character: “He is thought to be weak but that is a mistake. He can undoubtedly bear many adversities and hide his displeasure […] but he will not go beyond the circle he has traced for himself, which is made of iron and will not be stretched.”8

  Beyond their antinomies, these contradictory perceptions attest to one indisputable fact: whether
he was the object of adulation or rancor, whether he crystallized hopes and desires or vexations, Alexander I remained (despite a reign of almost 25 years) an elusive person, “an inscrutable sphinx to the tomb,”9 even an enigma. And his sudden death, occurring in disturbing circumstances in 1825 when he was only 48, added to the mystery, feeding extravagant rumors and dividing his contemporaries.10

  Enigmatic in his lifetime, Alexander has remained so for posterity—and this is no less the paradox of his character—since the many historical studies of the tsar have not forged a uniform image of him. Quite the contrary.

  In the nineteenth century, several biographers stressed contrasting judgments of him and their need to use them in order to explain the contradictions of his reign.11 At the beginning of the twentieth century, the magisterial work devoted to him by Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich insisted on his irresolute character,12 whereas a book written shortly afterward by the Polish historian K. Waliszewski stressed his duplicity and his taste for dissimulation.13 Thus, both of them contributed to the dark legend of Alexander I. And for many tsarist historians, it was the tsar’s childhood14—the difficult years when, idolized by his grandmother Catherine II, he was cut off from his parents, the future Paul I and his wife, Maria Feodorovna—that lay at the source of his so-called “duplicity” and at the origin of his vacillating character.

  More recently, the historians (from the interwar period up to today) who have taken an interest in Alexander I have also created contrasting portraits that usually rely on biased interpretations and peremptory verdicts. In fact, while most of them do agree in stressing the secretive, even disguised, nature of Alexander—whom historians perceive as a “northern sphinx,”15 an “enigmatic tsar,”16 “mystical,”17 or even as “a will o’ the wisp”18—their verdicts become more polemical when politics enters the matter. He was a “prince of illusions”19 for Daria Olivier, an “ideological tsar”20 for Pierre Rain, and even a banal autocrat for Michael Klimenko,21 whereas for Allen McConnell he was a “paternalist reformer.”22 The Russian historian Vladimir Fedorov calls him a hard and secretive man, “republican in his words but autocratic in his deeds,”23 and Alexander Sakharov24 sees him as man of extreme complexity, torn apart and almost paralyzed by his own contradictions.

  In this context, to undertake a new biography of Alexander I might seem to be an impossible task, given that any coherence in the subject is hard to establish. But at the same time, the crucial importance of Alexander’s reign for Russian history and the changes of stature and status that the country underwent in those 25 years invite the historian to take up the biographical challenge.25

  In fact, Russia knew major changes during Alexander’s reign. On the domestic level, reforms of liberal inspiration were initially undertaken, notably the reorganization of the central administration and the creation of several universities, while by contrast the second half of the reign saw the establishment of the terrible military colonies of Count Arakcheev. In foreign affairs, conducting a very active expansionist policy, the Russian Empire managed to incorporate Finland and then Bessarabia, to extend toward the Caucasus, and to make a foothold on the American continent, whereas at the same time, amidst armed conflicts and hostile periods of peace, Russia assumed a predominant place in the concert of European nations. It was also under Alexander’s reign that tsarist Russia underwent the most tragic experience in its history, marked by the invasion of the Napoleonic armies and the burning of Moscow, its sacred capital, in 1812. In each of these episodes, Alexander’s role—his choices, his perceptions—was determining, due as much to the autocratic nature of imperial power as to the complex personality of the emperor.

  It is in order to better apprehend and comprehend this crucial 25 years that I have chosen to recount Alexander I’s life, relying on the existing voluminous bibliography and exploiting significant bodies of documents in the archives. In the course of my reading, it appeared to me that many of the books devoted to Emperor Alexander merely updated preexisting works, which themselves merely recycled previous writing, without drawing on direct archive sources. This excessive confidence in prior writings has contributed to reproducing and amplifying certain assertions, even pontifications, on the personality and reign of Alexander without their pertinence ever being analyzed or contested. To avoid falling into this trap, it was essential to go back to direct documentary and contemporary sources.

  To do so, I first went to the archives of the Imperial Russian State, meaning first to the personal papers of the Romanovs—including those of Alexander I26—and to the very precious stores of the Manuscript Collection in the library of the Winter Palace. These papers contain documents written in either French (the majority) or Russian. I have also consulted the diplomatic archives of several European states—French, Polish, Vatican—and I enriched the reading of these public documents by consulting private archives emanating from great noble families of Russia, Poland, and Italy, as well as by consulting ecclesiastical sources, including the Jesuit archives.27

  These documents were usefully illuminated by taking into account the abundant and often specifically pertinent correspondence, reminiscences, and memoirs written by those close to Alexander—his grandmother, Catherine II, his wife Elizabeth, his various tutors, as well as statesmen, military commanders, diplomats, courtiers, artists, and men and women of letters who came to court and to serve him, or else to oppose and fight him. Despite their polyphonic contrasts, even contradictions, these sources helped me to grasp the personality of Alexander, to draw out certain aspects of his reign little explored until now—for example, the key role played by his republican-minded tutor, his relations with his mother, and the eclecticism of his religious convictions—as well as to present entirely new material on his duel with Napoleon, his European dream, and his desire for the fusion between the churches of East and West.

  Finally, it appeared essential to let the reader hear the voice of Alexander, that is to say, to rely as much as possible on his private and public writings and on his precious correspondence.28 By turns serious and light-hearted, spontaneous and restrained, intimate and public, this rich correspondence allowed me to unveil more of the tsar’s mystery and to shed light on this strange judgment delivered by Napoleon in exile in Saint Helena:

  The Emperor of Russia is a man infinitely superior to all that: he has spirit, grace, and education; he is easily seductive, but he should not be trusted: he is without candor, a true Greek of the Lower Empire. […] Perhaps also he was trying to mystify me, for he is subtle, false, and adroit; he could go far. If I die here, he will be my true heir in Europe.29

  Prologue

  The Murder of Paul I: March 23, 1801

  In the early morning of March 24, 1801, for his first official outing as emperor, Alexander I, then aged 23, offered the courtiers gathered in the Winter Palace the strange image of a haggard man devastated with grief:

  The new emperor walked forward slowly, his knees seemed to be bent, his hair in disarray, his eyes swollen with tears; he stared straight in front of him, seldom inclining his head as if in greeting; his whole attitude and aspect were those of a man laid low by pain and broken by the disaster that had overcome him.1

  This suffering and sadness were accompanied by deep remorse. Returning to Russia in the spring of 1801 after having been exiled by Paul I, the Polish prince Adam Czartoryski, a childhood friend of Alexander, said he was told by the new sovereign:

  “If you had been here,” he added, “nothing of this would have happened to me; having you close to me, I never would have been entrained in this way.” Then he spoke to me of the death of his father with a painful expression and inexpressible remorse.2 […] “I must suffer; how can I stop suffering? This cannot change.” Sometimes when the conversation returned to this sad subject, Emperor Alexander still often repeated to me the details of the plan he had formed to establish his father in St. Michael’s Castle and then procure for him (as much as possible) the enjoyment of the imperial residence
s in the country. “St. Michael’s Castle was his favorite residence. He would have had the whole winter garden at his disposal for walks and horse-rides.”3

  Why this feeling of guilt? What happened during the night of March 23–24, 1801?

  The tragedy that unfolded in the sinister Michael Palace, where the imperial family had been in residence barely a month, was so confused and disordered that accounts of it diverge and even contradict each other. Since we cannot be certain about the exact circumstances of Paul’s death,4 we can only reconstruct the general outlines of the scenario.

  Around one o’clock in the morning, abruptly woken up by a group of tipsy officers who had managed to penetrate his apartments without the knowledge of his bodyguards and valet, Emperor Paul had only time to take refuge behind a folding screen. Quickly flushed out of his paltry hiding place, the frightened tsar tried to oppose the intruders by refusing energetically the abdication they were ordering him to accept. Furious at this refusal, the officers manhandled the tsar and under cover of the room’s darkness, they strangled him before one of them delivered the final blow. In a document written in 1826, based on the testimony that the conspirators had given a few years after Paul’s death, the Count of Langeron, a French emigrant who had gone into Russian service, wrote:

  The assassins had neither a cord nor a towel to strangle him. Karyatkin, I am told, gave his scarf, and this was how Paul perished: it is not known who should be given the horrible honor of his cruel end; all the conspirators participated, but it seems that Prince Yashvil and Katarinov were most responsible for this frightful crime. It appears that Nikolay Zubov, a species of butcher, cruel and emboldened by the wine he had gulped, punched him in the face, and since he grasped in his hand a gold snuffbox, one of its sharp edges wounded the emperor under his left eye.5

  Confusion and ambiguity dominate the account given of these events by the emperor’s younger son Constantine.

  I suspected nothing—I was sleeping as one sleeps at age twenty. Platon Zubov [Catherine’s last favorite and one of the main instigators of the plot], drunkenly entered the room making a lot of noise (already an hour had passed since my father ceased existence), and threw back my covering and said insolently, “Get up and get going to Emperor Alexander, he’s waiting for you.” You may imagine how astonished—and even frightened—I was. I looked at Zubov, I was still half asleep and thought I was dreaming. Platon pulled me by the arm to make me get up; I pulled on trousers and boots and followed him mechanically, taking the precaution of bringing my Polish saber, […] I came to my brother’s antechamber; I saw a crowd of noisy and overheated officers, and Uvarov drunk like them and sitting on a marble table, legs dangling. I entered my brother’s living room, I found him lying on a canapé and weeping, as well as the Empress Elizabeth; only then did I learn of the assassination of my father, I was so stunned by this news that I thought at first it was a plot from outside against all of us.6