Russia Against Napoleon (13 page)

This dispute over the Ottoman ‘principalities’ was sidelined by beginning Franco-Russian negotiations on the future of the whole Ottoman Empire. These revealed both Rumiantsev’s great appetite for Ottoman territory and total French unwillingness to give Russia Constantinople and access to the Mediterranean. These discussions were then overtaken by the crises caused by French and Russian efforts to implement the terms of the Treaty of Tilsit which called for the imposition of the Continental System on the rest of Europe. The Russian share of this enterprise was to impose the Continental System on the Swedes, which they achieved (at least on paper) as a result of defeating Sweden in the war of 1808–9. From the Russian perspective, the key justification for this expensive war was that it would lead to the annexation of Finland, thereby making Petersburg far more secure against Swedish attack in the event of any future conflicts. The peace treaty was signed at Friedrichsham in September 1809: Alexander signalled his satisfaction by promoting Rumiantsev to chancellor (the top position in the Russian civil administration) and granting the Finns a generous degree of autonomy.

Meanwhile the French attempt to impose the Continental System on Iberia had gone disastrously wrong. The Portuguese government and royal family fled to Brazil, escorted by the British navy. Now completely dependent on British goodwill, they immediately opened the whole Portuguese Empire to British trade. Far worse were the results of Napoleon’s deposition of the Spanish Bourbons and attempted takeover of Spain. This exposed Alexander and Rumiantsev to even more criticism in Petersburg society for supporting Napoleon. It opened up not just Spain but also the Spanish Empire to British trade, thereby driving a further enormous hole into the Continental System. The Spanish insurrection also persuaded the Austrians that this might be their last opportunity to strike while Napoleon was absorbed elsewhere and their finances could still sustain the army of a great power.

Alexander had explained his support for the Continental System to Frederick William by arguing that ‘I have reason to hope that this will be a means to hasten the general peace of which Europe has so urgent a need. So long as the war between France and England continues, there will be no tranquillity for the continent’s other states.’ Some of his advisers had warned him all along that it was fanciful to imagine that even combined Franco-Russian pressure could make Britain negotiate. Now Alexander himself was forced to acknowledge that Napoleon’s policy had made the peace which Russia needed more remote than ever. France’s blundering aggression in Spain had given Britain ‘immense advantages’ and spurred Austria into a military build-up which could unleash further war on the continent.
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It was in the middle of this threatening international situation that Alexander travelled to Erfurt in central Germany in September 1808 for the long-awaited follow-up meeting to Tilsit. Amidst great festivities and a cascade of mutual admiration in public, the relationship between the two monarchs had noticeably chilled since the previous year. To an extent this simply reflected the fact that Russia’s relative position had improved, so there was more room for bargaining and less need for unlimited deference to Napoleon. Russia had long since recovered from the defeat of Friedland. French armies were no longer deployed threateningly on her borders. Instead they were struggling in Spain or awaiting the possibility of a new war with Austria. France needed Russia and therefore abandoned her opposition to Russian annexation of Moldavia and Wallachia. In return, Alexander promised to support Napoleon in the event of an Austrian attack but since this was already implicit in the Treaty of Tilsit the Russians were not making any real concession.

Much more interesting than the rather meaningless negotiations and agreements at Erfurt were the letters between Alexander and his family concerning the meeting with Napoleon, for they reveal much about his innermost thoughts. One week before the emperor’s departure his mother had written him a long letter imploring him not to go. In the light of Napoleon’s kidnapping of the Spanish royal family, the Empress Marie was nervous about her son’s safety in a foreign town garrisoned by French troops and controlled by a man devoid of any scruples or limits. Though she admitted that peace had been a necessity at Tilsit, she spelled out the dangerous subsequent results of the alliance with France. Napoleon had manipulated Russia into waging an expensive and immoral war against Sweden, while blocking peace with the Ottomans and even trying to insinuate himself into Russo-Persian relations. Still worse were the domestic consequences of the disastrous break with Britain and adherence to the Continental System. Commerce had collapsed and prices of basic necessities had shot up, halving the real value of salaries and forcing officials to steal in order to feed their families. Declining state revenues and the demoralization and corruption of government officials threatened a crisis. However, Napoleon’s difficulties in Spain and Austrian rearmament offered Russia a chance to unite with France’s enemies and end her dominion of Europe. At such a moment, argued the empress, it would be disastrous for Alexander’s prestige and Russia’s interests if he made a pilgrimage to visit Napoleon and consolidate the Franco-Russian alliance.
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Marie’s arguments were not new. Many of Alexander’s diplomats could have made exactly the same points, and Count Tolstoy had indeed frequently done so in his dispatches from Paris. Alexander could ignore his officials much more easily than his mother, however. Though often exasperated by Marie, he was at heart not just a loyal and polite son but also a devoted one. So before departing for Erfurt he set out and justified his policies in a long handwritten letter to her.

Alexander opened by stating that in a matter of such huge importance, the only consideration had to be Russia’s interests and well-being, to which all his cares were devoted. It would be ‘criminal’ if he allowed himself to be swayed by ignorant, shallow and shifting public opinion. Instead he must consult his own conscience and reason, looking realities squarely in the eye and not giving way to false hopes or emotions. The basic reality at present was that France was immensely powerful, more powerful and better placed than even Russia and Austria combined. If even republican France in the 1790s, weakened by misgovernment and civil war, could defeat all Europe, what must one say now about the French Empire, led by an autocratic sovereign who was also a military genius and sustained by an army of veterans hardened by fifteen years of war? It was an illusion to think that a few setbacks in Spain could seriously shake this power.

At present Russia’s salvation lay in avoiding conflict with Napoleon, which could only be done by making him believe that Russia shared his interests. ‘All our efforts must be devoted to this so that we can breathe freely for some time. During this precious time we can build up our resources and our forces. But we must do this in complete silence and not in making our armaments and preparations public or in declaiming in public against this man whom we distrust.’ Not to go to a meeting with Napoleon which had been planned for so long would arouse his suspicions and could prove fatal at such a moment of international tension. If Austria started a war now, it would be blind to its own interests and weaknesses. Everything must be done to save Austria from this folly and to preserve her resources until the moment arrived when they could be used for the general good. But this moment had not yet come and, if his expedition to Erfurt resulted in ‘stopping so deplorable a catastrophe’ as Austria’s defeat and destruction, it would repay with interest all the unpleasant aspects of meeting with Napoleon.
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There is good reason to believe that in this letter to his mother Alexander was speaking from the heart. Knowing her loathing for Napoleon, however, it is possible that he was exaggerating his dislike and distrust of the French monarch. Alexander had no such reason for pretence when writing to his sister Catherine, who was probably the person whom he trusted more than anyone else in the world. After departing from Erfurt and bidding an unctuous farewell to Napoleon he wrote to her that ‘Bonaparte thinks that I am nothing but an idiot. “They laugh longest who laugh last!” I put all my trust in God.’
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During the six months which followed the meeting at Erfurt the main aim of Russian foreign policy was to avoid a Franco-Austrian war. Alexander and Rumiantsev were convinced that if war came, Austrian hopes of effective help from risings in Germany or British landings would prove false. The Habsburg army would certainly be defeated and Austria would either be destroyed or weakened to such a degree that she would be forced to become a French satellite. Russia would then be the only independent great power left to oppose Napoleon’s domination of the whole European continent. The emperor remained committed to the French alliance as the only way to buy time for Russia. If Petersburg openly sided with Austria not merely would Napoleon destroy the Habsburg army before Russian help could arrive, he would then turn all his forces against a Russia which was still far from ready for a life-and-death struggle.

Alexander refused Napoleon’s demand for concerted Franco-Russian warnings in Vienna, partly because he did not want to insult the Austrians and partly because he feared that too strong Russian support might even inspire Napoleon himself to start a war aimed at eliminating the Habsburg monarchy or simply at raiding the Austrian treasury to pay for the upkeep of his bloated army. Nevertheless he did warn the Austrians that if they attacked Napoleon Russia’s obligations under the Treaty of Tilsit would force her to fight on France’s side. On the other hand, since he believed that Austrian armaments could only be explained by fear of French aggression, he promised that, if the Austrians partially disarmed, Russia would publicly guarantee to come to their assistance in the event of a French attack. Right down to the outbreak of war on 10 April 1809 Alexander found it almost impossible to believe that Austria would take the suicidal risk of attacking Napoleon. When this actually happened, the emperor blamed the Habsburg government for allowing itself to be carried away by public opinion and its own emotions.
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The Austrian attack on Napoleon left Alexander no alternative but to declare war. Had he failed to meet his clear treaty obligations the Russo-French alliance would have collapsed and Russia and France would probably have been at war within a matter of weeks. While in theory Austria’s enemy, Russia’s overriding war aim was that the Austrian Empire should be weakened as little as possible. The last thing Russia wanted to do was damage the Austrian army, since its survival was the main guarantee against Napoleon imposing crushing peace terms on the Habsburgs. In addition, the Russians were strongly opposed to any addition of territory to the Duchy of Warsaw. The Russian army which invaded Austrian Galicia therefore devoted much of its efforts to avoiding the Habsburg forces and impeding the advance of the Duchy’s Polish army, which was supposedly its ally. Of course it was impossible to hide such tactics, especially when Russian correspondence intercepted by the Poles made their intentions clear. Napoleon was furious and never really believed again in the usefulness of the Russian alliance. Predictably, the war ended in Austria’s defeat. In the peace treaty of Schoönbrunn, signed in October 1809, Napoleon revenged himself on Alexander by handing a large slice of Galicia to the Poles.

The war between Austria and France was the beginning of the end of the Russo-French alliance but two developments over the winter of 1809–10 disguised this for a time. Napoleon agreed that his ambassador in Russia, Armand de Caulaincourt, should draft a Franco-Russian convention which would lay to rest Russian fears about Poland’s possible restoration. More or less simultaneously he divorced his wife, the Empress Josephine, and sought the hand of Alexander’s sister. Rumours that Napoleon was in pursuit of a Russian grand duchess had been floating around for some time. In March 1808 a very worried Empress Marie had asked the ambassador in Paris to find out whether this was a real danger. At that time the obvious target would have been the Grand Duchess Catherine. The marriage of this extremely feisty and strong-willed young woman with Napoleon would have been interesting and combustible. For all her ambition, however, Catherine could not stomach the idea of marrying the Corsican bandit. Perhaps to avoid any possibility of this, in 1809 she married her distant cousin, Prince George of Oldenburg, instead. This left the only possible Russian bride as the Grand Duchess Anna, just turned 16 when Napoleon’s proposal arrived.
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Napoleon’s request for Anna’s hand was very unwelcome to Alexander. He neither wanted to marry his sister to a Bonaparte nor to insult the French emperor by refusing to do so. Paul I had decreed in his will that his daughters’ marriages should be in their mother’s hands and in a sense this was a glorious excuse for Alexander to dodge the issue, though by pleading inability to impose his will on a mere woman he confirmed all Napoleon’s suspicions about his weakness. Alexander rather dreaded a tantrum from the empress on this issue but in fact mother and son saw eye to eye on the matter and this was just one sign of their growing agreement on political questions. Of course Marie was horrified by the idea of the marriage but she fully understood the dangers of annoying Napoleon. She wrote to her daughter Catherine that Alexander had told her that Russia’s western frontier was very vulnerable, with no fortresses to cover the likely invasion routes: ‘The Emperor told me that if God granted him five years’ peace, he would have ten fortresses, and his finances in order.’ The Empress accepted the fact that it was the duty of the imperial family to sacrifice themselves for the good of the state but she could not bear the thought of losing her daughter, who was still a child, to Napoleon. The fact that two of her older daughters had been married young and that both had died in childbirth strengthened this revulsion. In the end the Grand Duchess Catherine came up with a compromise: Napoleon would not be refused outright but merely told that, having lost two daughters, the Empress was determined that her last one should not marry before the age of 18.
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