LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

he was subjected, and which expanded his perceived duties well beyond his capacities. He had to keep notebooks, ‘archives of shame’, in which he jotted down every failing, every piece of bad behaviour, every loss of temper or lack of diligence in study. ‘I am an idler, given over to irresponsibility, incapable of true thought, speech and action,’ the twelve-year-old notes on 19 July 1789. ‘Egoism is one of my shortcomings, and vanity its main cause; it is easy to see to what they might lead me if I give them a chance to develop,’ on 27 August.⁶ This continuous self-flagellation only aggravated an innate sense of inadequacy.

      When he came to the throne at the age of twenty-three, Alexander was a young man of great charm, burning with desire to improve the world. But as he struggled to live up to what he thought was expected of him, he was undermined by a terrible moral canker. His father’s murderers had naturally made him a party to their plans, since it was in order to put him on the throne that they had decided to act. He would claim that he made them swear they would not kill Paul, but he was nevertheless an accomplice in the crime of parricide. He could hardly penalise them, so they continued to hold high office at court and rank in the army. Alexander was racked with guilt for the rest of his life for the part, however passive, he had played in the murder.

      He was indeed a mass of contradictions. He claimed to despise the principles of hereditary monarchy, and recoiled before the necessity of assuming power. ‘My plan is to settle with my wife on the banks of the Rhine, where I shall live peacefully as a private person finding happiness in the company of friends and in the study of nature,’ he confided to one of his friends at the age of nineteen. But he soon fell out of love with his wife and with the notion of a tranquil, private life. He also used to hold forth on the liberal constitutions he was going to introduce. But once he had gained power, he grew jealous of letting anyone else have any say in how things should be done, and notoriously took offence whenever privileges and rights he had granted were actually invoked.⁷

      Alexander wanted to bring an element of professionalism into the governance of the Russian empire through the introduction of institutional structures. He reorganised the civil service, making entrance into the higher grades dependent on a university degree or a written exam (which did not endear him to the nobility). He set up ministries and a State Council, which were supposed to help run the country. What he would have liked to introduce was something along the lines of the system Bonaparte was creating in France – authoritarian government mobilising the whole nation in an efficient way along rational and liberal lines. But this would have required emancipating the serfs and breaking down the entire social structure of Russia, and he lacked the nerve to implement it.

      Absorbed as he was by internal reforms, Alexander paid little attention to foreign policy. He was horrified by Bonaparte’s abduction and judicial murder of the Duc d’Enghien, and joined every other ruler in Europe in robust condemnation of the act. It offended every fibre in his chivalrous nature, and he felt the outrage personally: the Duke of Baden, on whose territory Enghien had been seized, was his father-in-law. He therefore couched his condemnation in grandiloquent terms. But he was made to regret it. The French response was to remind the world that Paul’s assassins had not only never been punished, but actually held high office at his son’s court, thereby putting in question Alexander’s right to point the finger at anyone, in view of the part he had played in the murder of his own father. Alexander was stung, and hated Bonaparte for it. When Bonaparte took the title of Emperor a few months later, Alexander’s hatred turned to indignant rage, and the bearer of Peter the Great’s invented title denounced that taken by the upstart Corsican.

      Alexander believed that Europe had reached a crisis, moral as well as political, and wrote to the British Prime Minister William Pitt suggesting a reorganisation of the Continent into a league of liberal states founded on the sacred rights of humanity. Pitt was not interested in the scheme, but he pandered to Alexander, and, allowing him to dream of greater things, in 1805 managed to enrol him into the third coalition against Napoleon: Austria and Russia were to attack France, and Britain would pay for it.

      Russia had no reason for going to war with France, as none of her interests were threatened, and France was Russia’s cultural beacon. Russian society was divided on the matter. While those who regarded Napoleon as an evil being who had to be crushed were probably in the majority, there were plenty who thought otherwise. The former Chancellor Count Rostopchin was vociferous in his criticism, propounding the view that Russia was being used by Britain; his future successor, Count Nikolai Rumiantsev, regarded France as Russia’s natural ally. Napoleon had many admirers in Russia, particularly among the young – some of whom would be drinking his health even after the war had begun.⁸

      But Alexander had come to see the whole question as part of a wider moral issue. He had assumed the role of knightly defender of a Christian monarchical tradition against the onslaught of the new barbarism as represented by Napoleon. An element of emulation also came into it, for he longed to distinguish himself on the battlefield. He had inherited his father’s love of parades and the minutiae of military life – he was always checking details of uniforms and drill – and believed that a Tsar’s place was at the head of his troops. He therefore insisted on setting off to war in person, although he gave overall command of his armies to the only experienced general to hand, the fifty-eight-year-old Mikhail Ilarionovich Kutuzov.

      Kutuzov had first seen action against Polish insurgents, and subsequently distinguished himself in several campaigns against Turkey. In 1773 in the Crimea he had received a bullet in the head which severed the muscles behind his right eye, causing it to sag in a grotesque way; eventually he lost sight in it. Kutuzov had been military governor of St Petersburg at the time of the murder of Tsar Paul, so he knew a thing or two about that. This was not the least of the reasons for which Alexander feared and resented him, and as a result he dismissed him and exiled him to his country estate. There, Kutuzov relieved his boredom and his rheumatic pains with drink and whatever sexual solace the rural retreat could provide his notorious appetite. And it was there, in the summer of 1805, that he suddenly received the order to take command of the army and join forces with the Austrians.

      The army was not ready, so Kutuzov set off with an advance guard to reinforce the Austrian General Mack. Napoleon acted with speed and surrounded Mack, forcing him to surrender at Ulm while Kutuzov was still on the march. Massively outnumbered, Kutuzov was obliged to fall back and join up with the Russian main army, led by Alexander, and the remainder of the Austrian forces under the Emperor Francis.

      Napoleon had never seen any good reason for France and Russia to fight, and was convinced that Alexander had been manipulated by Britain into joining the coalition. He therefore sent General Savary to the Tsar with the suggestion that they get together and sort out any differences amicably. But Alexander haughtily declined, famously addressing his reply to ‘the Head of the French Government’, as he could not stomach acknowledging Napoleon’s imperial title.

      Kutuzov wanted to retreat further, but Alexander was determined to fight, and obliged him to give battle at Austerlitz on 2 December. Like a subaltern playing at being commander, Alexander overruled Kutuzov’s suggestions and made him adopt a plan devised by one of the Austrian generals. On the day, he bossed and chivvied Kutuzov for the slowness of his deployment, and then watched in horror as the allied army was routed. Forced to flee from the battlefield, Alexander was mortified. ‘He was himself even more thoroughly defeated at Austerlitz than his army,’ according to the French diplomat Joseph de Maistre.⁹ The Tsar now resented Kutuzov all the more, and dismissed him from his command, giving him the minor post of Governor of Kiev.

      Austria sued for peace, but the war went on, as Prussia joined the coalition. The thirty-five-year-old King Frederick William III had sat on the fence, until his beautiful and spirited wife Louise had finally induced him to come out against Napoleon. But in a whirlwind campaign in October 1806 his renowned army was routed at Jena and Auerstädt, and he had to flee his capital of Berlin. Napoleon entered the city and pursued Frederick William, who took refuge in East Prussia at the side of the Russian army, now under the command of General Lev Bennigsen.

      Alexander

Скачать книгу