Alexander I of Russia: The Sphinx Who Broke Napoleon
Napoleon spent seven years trying to read him and settled on two insults: "shifty Byzantine," and "the Talma of the North," after the great tragedian of the Paris stage. Metternich thought him a madman to be humoured. Castlereagh granted him grand qualities and never stopped watching him. Thomas Jefferson praised his estimable character and his feel for natural rights. They were all describing the same man, and the disagreement is the point.
Raised to Be Two People
Catherine the Great took her grandson's education personally and built it out of contradictions. The Swiss republican Frédéric-César de La Harpe filled the boy with Rousseau's gospel of humanity; the military governor Nikolay Saltykov drilled him in the traditions of Russian autocracy. Alexander, born at the Winter Palace on 23 December 1777, learned to hold both at once and to display whichever the room required. At fifteen he was married to Princess Louise of Baden, who took the name Elizabeth Alexeievna; he later admitted he felt only a brother's love for her. A contemporary observer caught the finished product exactly: sincere in everything touching his own humanity, and a dissimulator in all things related to politics.
A Throne Bought with Blood
On 23 March 1801 a group of officers murdered his father, Paul I. What Alexander knew has been argued over ever since; the prevailing account is that he approved the conspiracy expecting a deposition rather than a killing, and that the outcome left him with a lasting sense of remorse and shame. General Pahlen ended the young man's paralysis with a sentence worth remembering: it was now time to reign as a sovereign. He was crowned on 15 September 1801, aged twenty-three, a parricide by omission and the most liberal-sounding autocrat in Europe.
The Reformer Who Ran Out of Reform
The early years were the hopeful ones. Alexander convened a private committee of liberal advisers, then leaned on Mikhail Speransky, the most capable administrator Russia had produced in a century. Together they abolished the sclerotic Collegium ministries, created a Committee of Ministers and a State Council, and founded universities at Saint Petersburg, Kharkiv and Kazan alongside those at Moscow, Vilna and Dorpat. On serfdom he moved as far as nerve allowed and no further: an 1801 decree extended land ownership to most classes, and an 1803 law created a category of "free agriculturalists." Roughly 47,000 serfs gained their freedom under it — about half of one per cent. Speransky fell from favour around 1812 and was replaced in the emperor's confidence by Aleksey Arakcheyev, an artillery inspector whose talent was discipline.
Duelling with Napoleon
Alexander joined Britain in the Third Coalition in 1805 and was beaten at Austerlitz, then at Friedland in 1807. He responded by doing the unthinkable: at Tilsit he allied with the man who had just defeated him and joined the Continental System against British trade. It bought him time and territory. Finland was taken from Sweden in 1809; the long Persian war of 1804–13 ended with the Caucasus ceded at Gulistan. He kept trading with Britain in secret and formally abandoned the blockade in 1810. At Erfurt in 1808 he had already shown Napoleon where the limits were: "You are violent, I am stubborn — let us talk or I am leaving."
1812
The invasion came in June 1812. Borodino, on 7 September, put more than 250,000 men on one field and produced some 70,000 casualties without resolving anything. Moscow burned. And then Alexander did the one thing Napoleon's entire strategy could not survive: nothing. He would not negotiate. "I put my hope in God, in the admirable character of our nation," he said, and waited. By November the Grande Armée was crossing the Berezina with 27,000 men left of an army that lost some 380,000 dead and 100,000 captured. Alexander described the moment as an illumination that revealed his divine mission as the peacemaker of Europe. As supreme commander of the coalition he drove the war west, saw France broken at Leipzig in the autumn of 1813, and entered Paris on 31 March 1814. Napoleon abdicated unconditionally on 6 April.
The Peacemaker Turns
At the Congress of Vienna his insistence on Poland alarmed everyone, Castlereagh most of all; he kept Congress Poland and ruled it as king from 1815, granting it a constitution Russia itself was never given. In September 1815 he founded the Holy Alliance, an attempt to bind the great powers by declared Christian principle rather than mere balance of power. His mysticism was by then genuine and deepening — he had met Baroness von Krüdener in the autumn of 1813 and made her the confidante of his most secret thoughts.
After 1818 the liberal disappeared. Conspiracies in the Imperial Guard, plots against his life, and the 1820 revolutions in Naples and Piedmont completed his conversion to Metternich's doctrine of collective security. Arakcheyev built military settlements where soldiers farmed under martial law. Foreign teachers were purged from the schools and education made religiously and politically conservative. He was still denouncing Napoleon as the genius of evil while defending liberty and enlightenment in the abstract, and no one could tell how much of it he meant.
Why Alexander Is Called a Genius
The defensible claim rests on one decision and one idea. The decision was in 1812: after Moscow burned, every convention of European warfare said the defeated sovereign now sued for terms, and Alexander declined to play. That refusal destroyed the largest army ever assembled in Europe more completely than any battle he ever fought — and he fought several, losing most of them personally. It was not tactical brilliance; it was a specific kind of nerve, the ability to absorb catastrophe without converting it into action, in a court screaming at him to settle. The idea was the Holy Alliance and the congress system that grew from it: the first serious attempt to organise the continent around a stated common principle, and the framework that kept the great powers from general war for decades.
The counter-case is heavy. His reforms mostly failed, freeing half a per cent of the serfs; he discarded Speransky, the one man capable of finishing them; he ended his reign with military colonies and censored universities. Contemporaries could not agree whether he was a visionary or an actor, and the sheer spread of their verdicts — Byzantine, madman, tragedian, statesman of estimable character — suggests the truth is that he was opaque by design, and that opacity is not the same thing as depth. The Decembrist officers who rose weeks after his death had learned their liberalism from his own early promises. That is the fairest measure of him: brilliant once, at the exact moment it counted, and a disappointment to almost everyone he had encouraged.
Legacy
He died of typhus at Taganrog on 19 November 1825 by the old calendar, aged forty-seven, and was buried at the Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral the following March. The succession was so confused — neither brother initially wanted the throne — that it gave the Decembrists their opening and their defeat. Almost immediately Russia began telling itself that he had not died at all, but had walked away to live as the Siberian hermit Feodor Kuzmich. It is a legend, and it says everything about the man that it was believable.
Achievements
- Emperor of all the Russias (1801–1825)
- Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour
- Knight of the Order of the Holy Spirit
- Knight of the Order of Saint Michael
- Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece — 1814
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