1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow

2

Alexander

When Catherine the Great came to the throne, exactly half a century before 1812, Russia had been of little significance outside the immediate area of eastern Europe. Peter the Great had done much to modernise his kingdom, and he put it on the map by building a fancy new capital at St Petersburg. In 1721 he even awarded himself the title of Emperor. But he was succeeded by a series of largely ineffectual monarchs, most of them ushered in through disreputable palace revolutions. They were feared by their subjects but generally despised by the other rulers of Europe, none of whom recognised the imperial title Peter had assumed.

Catherine changed all that. She worked hard at organising the state, involved herself in the affairs of Europe, and initiated an aggressive foreign policy which over the next fifty years was to add the whole of Finland, what are now Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, most of Poland, the Crimea, some of what is now Romania, the Kuban, Georgia, Kabardia, Azerbaidjan, parts of Siberia, Chukchi and Kamchatka to her dominions, as well as part of Alaska and a military settlement just north of San Francisco. This not only increased the size and population of Russia, it also brought her frontiers six hundred kilometres further into Europe and her rulers into European affairs. By 1799 Russian armies were operating in Switzerland and Italy. In a memorandum to Catherine’s successor Paul I, the Russian Chancellor Fyodor Vasilievich Rostopchin wrote: ‘Russia, as much by her position as by her inexhaustible resources, is and must be the first power in the world.’1 It was a constant aim of Russian policy to extend that power over the Balkans, Ottoman Turkey and into the Mediterranean.

Many in Europe were alarmed at this seemingly inexorable onward march of Russian power. There was talk of ravening Asiatic hordes and some fear, particularly after the first partition of Poland in 1772, that Russia might engulf the whole of Europe as the barbarians had done with ancient Rome. ‘Poland was but a breakfast … where will they dine?’ Edmund Burke wondered, echoing the fears of many.2 Diplomats were struck by the single-mindedness and ruthlessness of Russia’s foreign policy: she did not play by the same rules as others. What few appreciated was the extent to which Russia saw herself as a special case.

When Ivan IV, popularly known as the Terrible, was crowned in the Uspensky cathedral in the Kremlin in 1547, he took the title of Tsar (Caesar) and laid claim to the legacy of Byzantium. ‘Ivan was claiming not only sovereignty, independence from other powers,’ in the words of Geoffrey Hosking, ‘but the actual superiority of his realm, as the universal Christian monarchy, to all others on earth.’3 He used the regalia of Byzantium and had himself depicted alongside Roman emperors. His successors and their political servants remained faithful to this legacy and the mission it imposed. It was not for nothing that Catherine had named her two eldest grandsons Alexander and Constantine.

France had traditionally kept a string of allies in the east – Sweden, Poland and Ottoman Turkey – whose purpose it was to contain the then dominant threat of Habsburg power in central Europe. When Russia began to impinge, she depended on this ‘barrière de l’est’ to guard against the new threat developing in the east. But by the end of the eighteenth century, Sweden had declined as a power, Poland had ceased to exist, and Turkey had been pushed out of the Crimea and Moldavia, and was in a state of political decay. France would have to look elsewhere for allies.

In 1801 General Bonaparte, who was then First Consul, decided to make an ally of Russia herself. When, during negotiations on the exchange of prisoners, the British and Austrians refused to accept seven thousand of their Russian allies taken prisoner by the French in Switzerland in exchange for French prisoners they were holding, Bonaparte offered them free to Tsar Paul. He even volunteered to clothe and arm them. Paul, who had previously held everything to do with revolutionary France in abhorrence, was as disarmed by this chivalrous gesture as he was annoyed by the mean-mindedness of his Austrian and British allies. Bonaparte, who knew how much the Russians lusted for a harbour in the Mediterranean, followed this up by offering Paul the island of Malta (which was about to be captured by the British anyway). He would at this stage even have contemplated awarding Constantinople to Russia in order to enlist her support against Britain. He was well on the way to achieving this when, on the night of 23–24 March a group of generals and court officials forced their way into Paul’s bedroom in the Mikhailovsky Palace in St Petersburg and murdered him.4

Paul had been mentally and emotionally unstable, if not actually mad, and there was an open sense of relief in Russia at his death. Whenever his son and successor Alexander showed himself in public in the first weeks of his reign, he was mobbed by people kissing his hands and clothes, and Pushkin later wrote of ‘the magnificent dawn of Alexander’s days’. But while he stands out among the monarchs of his day by his generous nature, his lack of vindictiveness and his hatred of injustice and cruelty, Alexander was also marked by severe psychological problems.

Though not unintelligent, he suffered from an inability to think through the consequences of his words and actions. This need not have mattered much had it not been for the education his grandmother, Catherine the Great, had devised for him. She was a despot who admitted no liberal ideas in or near her dominions. Yet alongside mathematicians and priests, she engaged the services of the Swiss republican philosophe Frédéric César de La Harpe as tutor for her grandson. The child was subjected to a regime of moral education which consisted of the study of improving stories drawn from the scriptures, history and mythology, as well as a whole canon of secular Enlightenment morality. His limited mind could hardly have been expected to square the religious precepts with the profane, or to accommodate within the despotic reality the radical concepts preached by La Harpe. ‘This little boy is a knot of contradictions,’ Catherine commented, somewhat disingenuously, after a few years of this diet.5

Alexander’s principal failings – vanity, weakness and laziness – also need not have mattered much, had it not been for the brand of moral education to which 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 showed remarkable determination in adversity. He raised more troops, and in 1807 called up a peasant militia. But he had to take precautions to ensure that these serfs would remain loyal to a system that kept them enslaved. News of the revolutionary happenings in France over the past fifteen years was slow to spread among the uneducated peasants of central and eastern Europe. But that very slowness meant that it often mingled with local legend and even religious millenarian longings as it went, with the result that the figure of Napoleon was sometimes confused with a number of mythic folk heroes, lending him the attributes not only of a liberator, but of a messiah as well. The Russian authorities were well aware of this, and prepared accordingly as the French armies drew close to the boundaries of the empire.