Russia Against Napoleon (11 page)

On 9 July, after the ratification of the Tilsit treaties, the two emperors took the salute at a parade of the French and Russian guards. After the parade, in a dramatic gesture which aptly concluded two weeks of play-acting between the monarchs, Napoleon asked Alexander’s permission to award the Légion d’honneur to the bravest soldier in the Preobrazhensky Guards. Mikhail Kozlovsky, the regiment’s commander, was thoroughly taken aback by this piece of Napoleonic populism and simply summoned forward the battalion’s right-hand marker, Grenadier Aleksei Lazarev. The bewildered Lazarev, a soldier’s son, suddenly found himself embraced by Napoleon, an officer of the Légion d’honneur, and the recipient of a pension of 1,200 francs a year.

But Alexander’s Russia in general and the Preobrazhensky Guards in particular were not best suited to such dramatic examples of French-style ‘social mobility’. Two years later Lazarev was ejected from the regiment for cheek to a sergeant-major. In 1819, back in the invalid (i.e. veterans) battalion of the Preobrazhenskys as an ensign, he was arrested for assaulting two civilians. Maybe Lazarev was just a difficult character. But soldiers’ sons who rose into the officer corps sometimes faced prejudice and had a hard time adapting to their new status. Even in line regiments a number of them were dismissed or censured after the war, their personnel records citing drunkenness, incompetence and other failings. If officers risen from the ranks faced difficulties in line regiments, Lazarev may well have found life even as a semi-retired ensign of the Preobrazhenskys quite a struggle. He committed suicide before his case could be resolved.
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After the treaties were ratified and the parades finished, Alexander left Tilsit and headed back to Petersburg. He divulged his innermost thoughts about recent events to no one. Just how much hope or confidence he had in his new relationship with France it is impossible to say. No doubt he believed that, whatever might follow as regards Russo-French relations, at least he had gained time for his empire and rescued it from a situation of great danger. Perhaps the truest guide to his thoughts is the comment he is said to have made to the Prussian king and queen about Napoleon: ‘He will break his own neck. Despite all my performance and external behaviour I am your friend and hope to prove that to you by my actions.’
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Neither contemporaries nor historians found Alexander an easy man to understand. An excellent actor, who operated behind a screen of charm and flattery, he remained secretive, opaque, distrustful and elusive. To many observers both in his lifetime and subsequently he appeared to be a mass of contradictions. On the one hand he was a champion of enlightened and liberal principles, but on the other he did very little to ameliorate the authoritarian system of government he inherited, or the world of serf and master on which it rested. He sounded like his grandmother, Catherine II, when he spoke of liberal reforms, but acted like his father, Paul I, in his obsessive concern for the correct drill and appearance of his soldiers on the parade ground. In foreign affairs he put forward high-minded schemes for international peace and order, while simultaneously pursuing a policy of realpolitik. All this has persuaded some critics that he was simply confused and hypocritical.
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It is true that the emperor combined very different interests and enthusiasms, inherited from his grandmother and father. He also played to the European gallery, as Catherine had done, seeking to depict himself as a truly enlightened European man and monarch. Brought up on enlightened European ideas by his Swiss tutor and then forced to operate within a Russian context, at one level Alexander believed that Russia was unworthy of him. One side effect of this was a tendency to trust foreign military advisers more than his own generals. There was something in Alexander’s nature which made him want to seduce and win the sympathy of every person he met. If this applied most strongly as regards women, he used seduction, sensibility and charm on men too. Alexander was sensitive and highly strung. He evaded confrontations, disliked hurting people’s feelings and acted by indirect means to get his way. These elements of Alexander’s personality had a big influence on the way he ran his government and his army. In foreign policy he sometimes received information and operated through private channels unknown to his foreign minister and ambassadors. In the army he used private links to subordinates as a means to watch over his commanding generals. Excessive sensitivity, even an element of moral cowardice, stopped him from pruning the military structure of command of a number of superfluous generals. He was also very inclined to avoid overt responsibility for difficult decisions, operating from behind the backs of his generals to get his way, and distancing himself from them if failures occurred.

Alexander’s personality was of crucial importance in determining how Russia faced up to the challenge of Napoleon in 1807–14. Nevertheless his actions and even his ideas are incomprehensible unless one understands the context and the constraints within which a Russian monarch operated. Not just Alexander’s father but also his grandfather, Peter III, had been overthrown and murdered. So had the previous male monarch, Ivan VI. From his earliest days Alexander had been surrounded by court and political faction and intrigue. As emperor, he was the supreme source of honour, wealth and status. Most people to whom he spoke wanted to use him to advance their own interests or policies. They operated in patron–client networks which hid the truth from him and tried to reduce his independence. These networks spread across court, government and army, which were still essentially one community. The arrogant, ambitious and jealous men who peopled the networks were often very exhausting to manage. But the emperor had to manage them if he was to survive and if the army and bureaucracy were to function effectively. Faced with this Petersburg milieu, an emperor could be forgiven a large degree of suspicion, evasiveness and duplicity. Over the years a world-weary despair about human nature was almost bound to grow. As one of his confidants once remarked, ‘in your position an angel would have developed a suspicious personality’.
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During these years the shrewdest foreign observer in Petersburg was Joseph de Maistre, the envoy of the King of Sardinia, whose mainland territories had been annexed by Napoleon. He commented that it was ‘in the nature of Alexander’s personality and his system of rule that top officials operate only in their own limited sphere. He cheerfully and without repugnance employs simultaneously two mortal enemies, not allowing either of them to swallow the other.’ By this method the chances of conspiracy were reduced. Usually more to the point, the emperor had a better chance of knowing what was really going on behind his ministers’ always deferential and obedient façade. The iron fist was always present and sometimes used but in general Alexander preferred subtler methods. To an extent, secrecy became second nature, almost an end in itself. To do Alexander justice, however, it was usually not just safer but also more efficient for the monarch to operate by manipulation, seduction and bribery. It was also only natural that a monarch sometimes sought advisers who were not part of the Petersburg networks but were entirely dependent on himself. Foreigners were one obvious source of such advice.
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When Alexander looked over the heads of the Petersburg networks he saw a vast Russia administered by a woefully inadequate government bureaucracy. In the countryside, where over 90 per cent of his subjects lived, public order, taxation and conscription depended entirely on the cooperation of the landowners. Alexander disliked serfdom but he could not destroy the foundations on which his entire system of government rested and least of all when faced with the need to mobilize all his empire’s resources against Napoleon. In any case, was not the weakening of the landowners’ power more likely to lead to anarchy than progress, given the current level of development of Russian government and society? He did begin to chip away at serfdom by making voluntary emancipation easier and above all by breaking with his ancestors’ policy of ‘donating’ thousands of state peasants to private owners.
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There are many reasons to believe that, in principle, Alexander favoured representative institutions but Russian realities were a powerful disincentive to constitutional reform. Given the weakness of the state administration and the power of the Petersburg patron–client networks, did the emperor really want to strengthen these networks by giving them a parliament through which to exert extra influence on laws, taxation and government? Any representative institutions in Russia would be dominated by the serf-owners: no other group could remotely match their wealth, education or status. Would not such institutions make it harder to modernize Russia and abolish serfdom? Did it not make more sense to improve the bureaucracy so that it could bring enlightened reform to a conservative society? Still less could the emperor be blamed for his approach to foreign affairs. In desiring a more peaceful and cooperative international order while pursuing his own country’s interests he was no more hypocritical than the allied leaders after both twentieth-century world wars.
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Though in retrospect one can advance these arguments in Alexander’s favour, at the time he was widely perceived as well-meaning but feminine and weak. In 1812 this perception mattered greatly. The Austrian foreign minister, Count Metternich, spoke for most foreign diplomats and many members of the Russian elite when he wrote that ‘I count on no shred of firmness from the Emperor Alexander’, as the French penetrated ever deeper into Russia and finally took Moscow. Napoleon’s own strategy makes little sense unless one takes such calculations into account. But in fact Alexander’s courage did not desert him in 1812. It also sufficed to overcome the enormous risks and difficulties of invading central Europe in 1813, building an international coalition, and leading it all the way to Paris.
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Back in September 1810, as Franco-Russian relations began their descent into war, the French ambassador in Petersburg tried to warn his government that Alexander was much tougher than he seemed.

People believe him to be weak but they are wrong. Undoubtedly he can put up with many upsets and hide his discontent but that is because he has before him an ultimate goal, which is peace in Europe, and one which he hopes to achieve without a violent crisis. But his amenable personality has its limits, and he will not go beyond them: these limits are as strong as iron and will not be abandoned. His personality is by nature well-meaning, sincere and loyal, and his sentiments and principles are elevated but beneath all this there exists an acquired royal dissimulation and a dogged persistence which nothing can overcome.
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After ratifying the treaties of peace and alliance with France Alexander left Tilsit and travelled back to Petersburg, where he arrived on 16 July 1807. The previous day the capital had witnessed a twenty-one-gun salute and a service in the Kazan cathedral to celebrate peace. Similar celebrations occurred in Moscow, where Bishop Augustin put a good face on events by telling his congregation that Napoleon had been so impressed by the Russian troops’ courage that he had decided he needed Russia for a friend. The Orthodox Church did have some explaining to do since, on the orders of the government, it had been declaiming from the pulpit for many months against Napoleon the Antichrist. Apparently, the story now went round many Russian villages that the tsar had met Napoleon in the middle of a river in order to wash away his sins.
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Alexander could afford for the moment to ignore the bafflement of his peasant subjects over his sudden friendship for the former Antichrist. He could not be so nonchalant about the opinion of the Moscow and Petersburg aristocracy, and of the generals and Guards officers who formed a key element in this elite. In the autumn of 1807 Count Nikolai Rumiantsev took over as foreign minister. Subsequently he told the French ambassador, the Marquis de Caulaincourt, that

the Emperor Napoleon and in general everyone in France makes a mistake about this country. They don’t know it well and believe that the emperor governs as a despot, whose simple decree is enough to change public opinion or at least to determine all decisions…[This] is wrong. For all his goodness and the gentleness of character for which he is famous, the Emperor Alexander perhaps imposes his views on public opinion more than any previous monarch. The Empress Catherine, who was beyond question the most imperious of women and the most absolute sovereign who ever reigned, did this much less than him. Of that you can be sure. Nor did she ever find herself in such difficult circumstances as he now faces. She understood this country so well that she won over all elements of public opinion. As she herself once told me, she handled carefully even the spirit of opposition of a few old ladies.
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In fact Rumiantsev was preaching to the converted and the French embassy in Petersburg kept a very wary eye on public opinion. It was widely believed that the coups which overthrew Alexander’s father and grandfather had been motivated in part by opposition to their foreign policies, though Caulaincourt himself stressed the manner in which these monarchs had infringed the personal interests of key members of the Petersburg aristocracy. In his dispatches he told Napoleon that memories of Emperor Paul and dislike of the Grand Duke Constantine were some guarantee against an attempt to overthrow Alexander I. When the Russian monarch travelled to Erfurt to meet Napoleon in September 1808, Caulaincourt noted that with the totally dependable Dmitrii Lobanov-Rostovsky as military governor of Petersburg and the very loyal Fedor Uvarov in command of the Guards nothing untoward was likely to happen in the emperor’s absence. Subsequently, however, the ambassador noted that the cultivation of Russian nationalist circles by the emperor’s sister, Grand Duchess Catherine, represented a potential threat to the throne. With the exception of some rather brief moments, above all in 1809, Caulaincourt stressed that, though few Russians wanted war, the support of Alexander and Rumiantsev for the French alliance made them isolated and unpopular figures in Petersburg.
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To some extent hostility to France was due to a sense of injured pride. Eighteenth-century Russia had won its wars, so Austerlitz and Friedland were a humiliating shock. Needless to say, such public humiliation was all the harder to bear for proud aristocrats brought up to feel an acute concern for their honour and reputation. Prince Serge Volkonsky recalls that he and his young fellow-officers of the Chevaliers Gardes regiment burned with desire to revenge Austerlitz and took out their frustrations by breaking the windows of the French embassy and then racing off before anyone could catch them.
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Nor were matters necessarily much different among the army’s senior officers. Alexander’s first ambassador in Paris after Tilsit was Lieutenant-General Count Petr Tolstoy. Tolstoy was an ambassador of heroic bluntness: he was in fact not a diplomat but a fighting general and longed to escape from the Paris embassy, where in his opinion he was wasting his time on a fool’s errand. He told his superiors in Petersburg repeatedly that Napoleon (whom in general he pointedly continued to call Bonaparte) was bent on the domination of all Europe, and ‘wants to make us an Asiatic power, to push us back behind our old frontiers’. Repelled and humiliated by French arrogance and vainglory, Tolstoy came close to fighting a duel with Michel Ney after the ambassador had sung the praises of the Russian army a bit too loudly for the Frenchman’s taste and had argued that French victory in 1807 was due to luck and to overwhelming numbers.
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Such feelings were shared by members of Alexander’s family. Even while the emperor was negotiating at Tilsit, his sister the Grand Duchess Catherine wrote to him that Napoleon was ‘a blend of cunning, personal ambition and falseness’ who should feel honoured just to be allowed to consort with the Russian monarch. She added: ‘I wish to see her [i.e. Russia] respected, not in word but in reality, seeing that she certainly has the means and the right to be so.’ Catherine’s mother, the Dowager Empress Marie, became the centre of Petersburg aristocratic opposition to the French alliance. Most of Petersburg high society closed its doors to Caulaincourt when he first arrived and some of these doors remained closed throughout his stay, despite Alexander’s annoyance. Many French royalist émigrés lived in Petersburg or served in the Russian army. Their manners, education and style won them much sympathy in Petersburg high society and contributed to its hostility to Napoleon. Among the most prominent émigrés was the Duc de Richelieu, who became governor-general of New Russia (i.e. southern Ukraine) but returned to France after the Restoration to serve Louis XVIII as prime minister. Also to the fore were the Marquis de Traversay, who served as Minister of the Navy from 1811, and the two sons of the Count de Saint-Priest, France’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire before 1789. Best known of all was Joseph de Maistre, along with Edmund Burke the most famous political thinker of the European counter-revolution, who served as the exiled King of Sardinia’s envoy to Petersburg in these years.
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The ‘legitimist’ sympathies of the Petersburg drawing rooms were not just a product of snobbery and nostalgia for Old Regime France, however. They were also rooted in the sense that Napoleon’s actions were a challenge to the religious and historical principles on which their own state and society rested, as well as to any stable system of international relations in Europe. Baron Grigorii Stroganov, for example, had been Russia’s envoy to the Spanish court for many years. When Alexander requested him to continue to serve in the same capacity at the court of Joseph Bonaparte, Stroganov refused. Stroganov wrote to the emperor that Napoleon’s deposition of the Bourbons violated ‘the most sacred rights’, indeed precisely those rights on whose basis Alexander himself ruled. In kidnapping and deposing his own Spanish allies, Napoleon had also violated in the crudest manner ‘the holiness and the good faith of treaties’. If Stroganov continued to represent Russia in Madrid he would feel personally dishonoured before the Spanish people and ‘of all the sacrifices which I am ready to bear for the glory and the service of Your Imperial Majesty that of my honour is the only one which I am not in a position to offer’.
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In addition to these sentiments, there was a strong strain of Anglophilia in Petersburg society. Britain was seen as not just very powerful but also as the freest of the European states. Unlike other countries, Britain’s freedoms actually seemed to enhance its power, allowing the state to sustain a huge level of debt at very manageable cost. The wealth, entrenched rights and values of its aristocracy were seen as a key to both British freedom and British power, and were compared favourably with Napoleon’s bureaucratic despotism. If the Vorontsov and Stroganov families were Petersburg’s most prominent aristocratic Anglophiles, some of Alexander’s closest friends from his own generation also belonged in this camp.

In addition, Adam Smith was widely read and the British economy much admired by many of the key individuals who shaped Russian economic and financial policy. Nikolai Mordvinov, the elder statesman of Russian economic policy, was a great disciple of Smith and Ricardo for example. Dmitrii Gurev, the minister of finance, called the British system of public finance ‘one of the most extraordinary inventions of the human understanding’. All this admiration was by no means merely abstract. These men believed that Russia’s interests were closely aligned with Britain’s. Britain was the main market and the main carrier of Russian exports. In 1808–12 Mordvinov in particular was terrified that if Russia continued to adhere to Napoleon’s economic blockade of Britain these export markets would be lost for good. In his opinion mutually profitable trade relations with Britain were by no means incompatible with selective protection of fledgling Russian industries. Meanwhile not just these Anglophiles but almost all Russia’s senior diplomats in 1808–12 came to agree that Napoleon’s drive to dominate the continent was the main threat to Russian interests and that Britain was a natural ally in the face of this threat. If, unlike Petr Tolstoy, they did not bombard Petersburg with these opinions that was because they wished to keep their jobs and often sympathized with Alexander’s own view that it was in Russia’s interests to postpone the inevitable conflict with France for as long as possible.
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The papers of General Levin von Bennigsen, the commander-in-chief in 1807, go to the core of Russian geopolitical thinking at this time. Like most members of the ruling elite, Bennigsen supported peace in 1807 but disliked the French alliance. Equally common was his view that, although British naval power was sometimes used in ways that damaged Russian pride, French domination of continental Europe was much more of a threat to key Russian interests. In particular, it was in Napoleon’s power to re-establish a Polish state of 15 million people on Russia’s borders and this would be a huge threat to Russian security. Bennigsen also believed that if Napoleon was allowed to strangle Russia’s foreign trade then the economy would no longer be able to sustain Russia’s armed forces or the European culture of its elites. The country would revert to its pre-Petrine, semi-Asiatic condition.

In Bennigsen’s view, Britain’s global position was so strong that it would be immensely hard for Napoleon to break, even if all of continental Europe united behind this goal. A crucial factor in British global power was its hold on India, which Bennigsen considered unassailable. He argued that the British had created a European-style military system in India funded by local taxpayers. This army, ‘formed on the same principles as our European regiments, commanded by English officers, and excellently armed, manoeuvres with the precision of our grenadiers’. In the past Asiatic cavalry armies had invaded India over its north-west frontier and conquered the subcontinent but these had no chance against the Anglo-Indian infantry and artillery. Meanwhile no rival European army could reach the subcontinent because the British dominated the sea-routes and the logistical problems of getting a European-style army across Persia or Afghanistan were insurmountable. Having himself campaigned in northern Persia, Bennigsen spoke with authority on this point. The conclusion which Bennigsen drew from this analysis was that for Russia to ally with France against Britain was suicidal. In the first place French victory over Britain was flatly contrary to Russian interests. Secondly, Russian finances and the economy would disintegrate long before any economic war with Britain could be successful.
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The alliance with Napoleon always had many more potential enemies than friends in Petersburg. Nevertheless there were possible sources of support. Any sensible official concerned with the empire’s internal affairs knew that Russia faced many domestic problems with very inadequate resources to meet them. Hugely expensive foreign policies and wars were a disaster from this perspective. In 1808–12 the key figure in Russian internal affairs was Mikhail Speransky, whom Tolstoy – still very much the provincial aristocrat when he wrote the novel – caricatures unfairly in
War and Peace
. Speransky was an unlikely person to find in the top ranks of Russian government. The son of a penniless provincial priest, sheer ability had resulted in him being sent to Russia’s leading ecclesiastical academy in Petersburg. From there, his obvious career would have been as a bishop and a senior administrator in the Orthodox Church. He was plucked from this life by Aleksandr Kurakin’s brother, who made Speransky his private secretary and then transferred him to the state bureaucracy to help him in his official duties.

Speransky’s great intelligence, his skill as a draftsman of laws and memoranda, and his astonishing work ethic won him the admiration first of a range of top officials, and then of Alexander himself. Though there is no reason to doubt Alexander’s enthusiasm for Speransky, the emperor will also have realized that a chief adviser without connections in the Petersburg aristocracy posed no threat and could easily be thrown to the wolves in case of necessity. In 1808–12 Speransky was in reality the emperor’s main adviser on financial matters, the restructuring of central government, and the affairs of newly acquired Finland. In 1809–12, as Alexander began to run aspects of Russian diplomacy and espionage behind Rumiantsev’s back, he used Speransky as the conduit for secret reports designed for the monarch’s eyes alone. Alexander also discussed secretly with Speransky plans for the fundamental reform of Russian society and government, entailing both the emancipation of the serfs and the introduction of elected assemblies at central and regional level.