Alexander I of Russia

• 1. Introduction

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  Alexander I of Russia was born at 10:45 on the 23rd of December 1777 in Saint Petersburg, held at the baptismal font by Catherine the Great herself and counted Frederick the Great and Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor among his godfathers. He would grow up to outlast Napoleon, enter Paris in triumph, and reshape the map of Europe. Yet the man who did all this died in a provincial city called Taganrog with his mind deteriorating, suspected even by some historians of matching a schizophrenic profile. And then came the legend: that he had not died at all.

  His life raised questions that his era could not quite answer. Was he a reformer or a tyrant? A Christian crusader or a cynical opportunist? A man who genuinely mourned his murdered father, or one who helped arrange the murder? Napoleon called him a shifty Byzantine. Thomas Jefferson called him estimable. To Klemens von Metternich, he was a madman to be humoured. The man who bore the nickname 'the Blessed' seemed to be a different person to everyone who met him.

  His reign lasted from 1801 to 1825, and it touched nearly every major upheaval of the age: the Napoleonic Wars, the redrawing of Europe at the Congress of Vienna, the suppression of revolution, and the expansion of Russia into the Caucasus. How one man navigated all of that without fully committing to any single vision is the thread that runs through everything that follows.

• 2. A Childhood Between Courts

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  Frédéric-César de La Harpe, Alexander's Swiss tutor, carried the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment into the Russian court and planted them directly in his young pupil's mind. At the same time, Alexander's military governor Nikolay Saltykov was instilling in him the habits and assumptions of Russian autocracy. The result was a man permanently split between two visions of what a ruler should be.

  His grandmother Catherine the Great dominated his early years. She raised Alexander and his brother Constantine herself, separating them from their father Paul, and she reportedly considered bypassing Paul altogether and naming Alexander her heir directly. At her court Alexander wore the elaborate dress fashions of French courtly life; at his father's estate at Gatchina Palace, he wore simple Prussian military uniforms and performed military drills on demand.

  His religious instructor, Andrey Afanasyevich Samborsky, was unusual even by the unconventional standards of the court. He was an unbearded Orthodox priest who had spent long years in England and taught Alexander and Constantine excellent English, which was a genuinely rare accomplishment for future Russian rulers at the time.

  At the age of 15, Alexander was married to 14-year-old Princess Louise of Baden, who took the Orthodox name Elizabeth Alexeievna. Catherine presided over the ceremony. He would later confess to his friend Frederick William III of Prussia that the marriage, arranged by his grandmother as a political match, proved to be a misfortune for both husband and wife.

  Catherine died in November 1796 before she could alter the succession. Her son Paul came to the throne, and Alexander found himself navigating between a father he described as making Russia a 'plaything for the insane' and a court system built on absolute power he considered corrosive to everything around it.

• 3. The Weight of a Crown

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  On the 23rd of March 1801, Paul I was assassinated. Alexander, then 23 years old, was inside Saint Michael's Castle when it happened. His accession to the throne was announced by General Nicholas Zubov, who was himself one of the assassins. Historians have never settled Alexander's precise role in the conspiracy. The most widely held theory is that he knew of the plot and accepted the throne, but insisted his father should not be killed. The gap between what he agreed to and what actually happened would burden him for the rest of his life.

  Alexander was crowned in the Kremlin on the 15th of September of that year and moved quickly to reshape the government. The old over-centralised Collegia were abolished and replaced by new ministries answerable to the Crown, a Committee of Ministers, a reconstituted State Council meant to become a legislative second chamber, and a Governing Senate reorganised as the Supreme Court. Plans for a full constitution and a parliament were drawn up and then quietly shelved.

  Mikhail Speransky, the son of a village priest, became one of Alexander's closest advisors and the architect of many of these administrative plans. Alexander also extended the right to own land to most classes of subjects in 1801 and created a new legal category of 'free agriculturalist' in 1803, allowing masters to voluntarily emancipate serfs. The great majority of serfs remained unaffected.

  At the start of his reign, Russia had three universities: at Moscow, Vilna, and Dorpat. Alexander founded three more, at Saint Petersburg, Kharkiv, and Kazan, and supported literary and scientific institutions across the country. His friend Beethoven dedicated the Opus 30 Violin Sonatas to him in 1803, and Alexander gave the composer a diamond when they met at the Congress of Vienna in 1814.

  Behind the reformist energy, the fundamental structure of Russian autocracy remained untouched. Speransky's elaborate constitutional plans were never enacted. The codification of laws begun in 1801 was never completed during Alexander's reign.

• 4. The Continental Gamble

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  La Harpe returned to Russia from Paris after years away and brought with him an almost infectious admiration for Napoleon Bonaparte and the French institutions of the day. Alexander was briefly swept up in it. Then La Harpe made another visit to Paris and came back with a document he called Reflections on the True Nature of the Consul for Life, which Alexander said tore the veil from his eyes and revealed Bonaparte as nothing more than 'the most famous tyrant the world has produced'. The final blow was the execution of Louis Antoine, Duke of Enghien, on fabricated charges. The Russian court went into official mourning for the last of the Princes of Condé, and diplomatic relations with France were severed.

  Alexander joined Britain in the War of the Third Coalition in 1805 and suffered defeats at the battles of Austerlitz and Friedland. The rout at Friedland on 13 and the 14th of June 1807 was decisive. Napoleon, rather than pressing for punishing terms, offered Alexander partnership. The two emperors met at Tilsit on the 25th of June 1807, and Alexander came away with promises of influence over the Danubian Principalities and a free hand in Finland. Napoleon sketched visions of the two emperors eventually driving the Ottomans out of Europe and marching together across Asia.

  Alexander used the alliance pragmatically. He wrested Finland from Sweden in 1809 after Sweden refused to join Napoleon's Continental System, adding the Grand Duchy of Finland to his titles. But Russia's trade with Britain could not survive the blockade the Continental System required. Alexander allowed trade to continue secretly and in 1810 formally withdrew Russia from the system altogether.

  The frictions accumulated. Napoleon's encouragement of Polish ambitions alarmed Alexander, who told the French ambassador that 'the world is not large enough to come to an understanding on the affairs of Poland, if it is a question of its restoration'. Napoleon's annexation of Oldenburg in December 1810 was a personal grievance: Wilhelm, Duke of Oldenburg was Alexander's uncle. By 1811 it was clear that France was not honouring its side of the Treaty of Tilsit, including its promised support for Russia's war against the Ottoman Empire. The alliance was finished in all but name.

• 5. Moscow and Its Aftermath

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  Before Napoleon crossed into Russia in the summer of 1812, Alexander had spent months securing his flanks. In April 1812 he signed a mutual defence treaty with Sweden. In May, the Treaty of Bucharest formally ended Russia's war with the Ottoman Empire. His diplomats extracted commitments from Prussia and Austria that they would offer Napoleon minimal assistance if he invaded.

  When the invasion came, the minister of war Michael Andreas Barclay de Tolly commanded the Russian army and retreated deep into the country for nearly three months. The Russian nobility pressured Alexander to replace him, and Alexander appointed Prince Mikhail Kutuzov. On the 7th of September 1812, at a small village called Borodino 70 miles west of Moscow, the Grande Armee met the Russian army in the largest single-day battle of the Napoleonic Wars. More than 250,000 soldiers fought and roughly 70,000 became casualties. Neither side achieved a clean victory. The Russian army withdrew the following day, still unbroken.

  Napoleon entered Moscow a week later to find an empty city. Count Fyodor Rostopchin, the city's governor, had ordered fires set at strategic points before the evacuation. The loss of Moscow did not move Alexander to negotiate. After a month in the burning city, Napoleon moved his army southwest toward Kaluga, where Kutuzov was encamped. The Russian army blocked the advance and forced a retreat through country the French had already stripped of supplies.

  By the time the remnants of the Grande Armee crossed the Berezina river in November 1812, only 27,000 soldiers remained. The French had lost approximately 380,000 men dead and 100,000 captured. The campaign ended on the 14th of December with the last French troops leaving Russian soil. Napoleon left the army before the crossing to return to Paris and consolidate his position there.

  For Alexander, the occupation and burning of Moscow was a transformation. He declared that his own soul had found illumination and that he now understood his mission as the peacemaker of Europe. Prussia, then Austria, abandoned their imposed alliance with Napoleon, and the War of the Sixth Coalition began.

• 6. Paris and the Peace

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  Alexander pushed east toward France at the head of Coalition forces in January 1814, facing French armies that numbered only around 70,000 men. Napoleon won the initial engagements at Brienne and La Rothiere, which demoralized the Austrian Emperor Francis I and Frederick William III of Prussia, who considered ordering a general retreat. Alexander refused. He imposed his will on the commander Karl Philipp, Prince of Schwarzenberg, and pressed the advance.

  On the 30th of March, Coalition armies assaulted Paris from the north and east. Russian forces attacked near Belleville, then drove the Young Guard back at Romainville. Prussian troops under Gebhard Leberecht von Blucher took French positions around Aubervilliers from the north. Württemberg troops seized Saint-Maur to the southeast. Russian forces then stormed the heights of Montmartre. The French positions finally gave way.

  On the 31st of March, Talleyrand handed the keys of Paris to the tsar. That afternoon Alexander rode into Paris at the head of the Coalition armies, followed by the King of Prussia and Prince Schwarzenberg. It had been nearly 400 years since a foreign army had entered the French capital, not since the Hundred Years' War. He offered generous terms. He declared himself to be bringing peace to France rather than vengeance.

  Napoleon abdicated unconditionally on the 6th of April and was exiled to the Isle of Elba under the Treaty of Fontainebleau, signed on the 11th of April.

  At the Congress of Vienna the following year, Alexander's behaviour unsettled the other powers. He kept Poland within his sphere, which Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, reproached him for directly. Metternich suspected that behind Alexander's language of evangelical humility lay vast schemes of expansion. During the Congress, at Easter 1815, Alexander expressed a wish to visit a Slavic church. Emperor Francis I of Austria took him to a service at the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church of St. Barbara in Vienna, whose parish priest was the Ukrainian religious and political figure Ivan Snihurskyi, later Bishop of Peremyshl.

• 7. Reaction and Retreat

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  Metternich's influence over Alexander solidified in October 1820 at the Congress of Troppau. During a private conversation over afternoon tea, Alexander confessed his political errors. 'You have nothing to regret,' Metternich replied. Alexander answered: 'But I have.' On the 19th of November he signed the Troppau Protocol, which gave collective Europe the right to intervene in the internal affairs of sovereign states to suppress revolutionary movements.

  At home, Alexander moved against the institutions he had once championed. Speransky was replaced as chief advisor by Aleksey Arakcheyev, a strict artillery inspector who oversaw the creation of military settlements: farms worked by soldiers and their families under military discipline, designed to make part of the army economically self-supporting. Foreign teachers were expelled from schools as education shifted toward religious conservatism.

  When the Greek revolt against the Ottoman Empire broke out, Alexander found himself torn between his role as guardian of conservative European stability and his identity as leader of the Orthodox world. Under Metternich's influence, he initially sided against the Greeks. He expelled the revolt's leader Alexander Ypsilantis from the Russian Imperial Cavalry and ordered his foreign minister, Ioannis Kapodistrias, himself a Greek, to disavow any Russian sympathy with the uprising. In 1822 he even turned back a delegation from the Greek Morea province heading to the Congress of Verona.

  Gradually, away from Metternich's direct influence, Russian policy began to soften toward the Greek cause. In 1823, a cholera pandemic reached Astrakhan, and Alexander ordered an anti-cholera campaign that was later imitated in other countries. But his mind and health were deteriorating. The final years of his reign were marked by increasing suspicion, withdrawal, and religious intensity.

• 8. Taganrog and After

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  In the autumn of 1825, Alexander traveled south because his wife Elizabeth was seriously ill. He caught typhus during the journey and died on the 19th of November 1825 in Taganrog, a city on the Sea of Azov. News of his death did not reach Saint Petersburg until December. He left no legitimate children; his two daughters by Elizabeth had died in infancy, and his relationship with his longtime mistress Maria Naryshkina had ended in 1818 with the death of their daughter Sophia Naryshkina in 1824 at the age of eighteen.

  The succession was chaotic. Alexander's brother Constantine refused the throne. His other brother Nicholas was reluctant to take it. In the weeks of uncertainty that followed, a group of liberal army officers launched the Decembrist revolt, which was suppressed. Nicholas I eventually became emperor. Elizabeth died a few months after Alexander, as his body was transported back to Saint Petersburg. He was interred at the Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral on the 13th of March 1826.

  The legend that followed him was stranger than his life. A widely circulated story held that Alexander had faked his death and retreated to Siberia under the name Feodor Kuzmich, living as a hermit. Svetlana Semyonova, president of the Russian Graphological Society, compared the handwriting of Alexander and Kuzmich and concluded they were identical. When a priest attending Kuzmich on his deathbed asked whether he was in fact Alexander the Blessed, Kuzmich reportedly answered: 'Your works are wonderful, Lord. There is no secret which is not opened.' He neither confirmed nor denied it. The ambiguity suited a man whose entire reign had been built on never quite committing to either side of any question he faced.