Secret Lives of the Tsars (22 page)

“The Emperor is still the same,” wrote his foreign minister;
“fear and weakness are still at their height. We are afraid of everything, we are incapable of making a firm decision; it is even impossible to advise him, for fear that the advice will not be accepted.… He is a combination of weakness, uncertainty, terror, injustice, and incoherence that drives one to grief and despair.”

But with a plea from the Prussian king, Frederick William III, Alexander I became more resolute. “Tell me, Sire, I beseech you,” Frederick William wrote in August 1806, “if I may hope that your troops will remain within reach to come to my aid and if I may count on them in case of aggression.” Though the Prussian king had proven to be an inconstant friend, allying with Napoleon after the Russian defeat at Austerlitz, Alexander gave his fellow sovereign all the assurances he needed to officially demand the removal of all French troops from his kingdom. Bonaparte, of course, responded with an invasion.

Prussia was quickly and easily subdued in October, its king and queen forced to flee. But now Alexander picked up Frederick William’s broken sword. Having apparently learned little from his ignominious defeat at Austerlitz, the emperor’s armies confronted Napoleon’s first at Eylau—“It was not a battle but a slaughter,” Bonaparte remarked—then at Friedland, where Alexander once again found himself defeated and humiliated by the enemy’s superior forces.

“Sire,” his brother Constantine said to him, “if you don’t want to make peace with France, well, give a loaded pistol to each of your soldiers and ask them to blow their brains out! You will achieve the same result as you will obtain from another and final battle which will unfailingly open the gates of your empire to the French troops, who are experienced in combat and always victorious!”

Constantine’s blunt assessment was conclusive: Alexander would have to come to terms with “the Corsican ogre.” And he would do it face-to-face. The historic first meeting between the monarchs was a grandiose affair, just as Bonaparte intended it. A raft was set up in the middle of the Nieman River, upon which were two white tents, the larger of which was embellished on one side with the letter N and on the other side, A. The two sovereigns were rowed out to the raft from opposite banks of the river and, upon arrival, greeted each other heartily.

Physically, they were in vivid contrast: Alexander, tall and slender, with powdered chestnut hair and luminous blue eyes—the very portrait of grace and elegance, dressed in the resplendent green uniform of Peter the Great’s own Preobrazhensky regiment. Beside him was the diminutive Bonaparte, only recently royal—coarse, rather pasty, with a protruding stomach and steely eyes. Yet it was he who held the upper hand; the military master who gradually seemed to entrance the Russian emperor.

While Alexander knew there was little he could do to preserve his unreliable ally Prussia, he believed that Napoleon simply wanted to be left alone to dominate central Europe, and, in exchange, would not interfere with Russia’s ambitions at the expense of Turkey. To some extent, Bonaparte indicated as much. But as negotiations continued amid glittering festivities in the town of Tilsit, Napoleon, “by slow degrees … pulled the covers over to his own side of the bed,” as biographer Henri Troyat wrote. Alexander was left to sign a rotten treaty that, among other conditions, hobbled Russia’s expansion, left open the question of Polish hegemony, and, perhaps worst of all, obligated the tsar to participate in an economically ruinous blockade of British trade.

“Russia had been pushed into a loveless and unequal marriage with France,” wrote Zamoyski, “and soon adopted the sullen resentment of the unhappy wife. Sooner or later, she would be unfaithful, and Napoleon would have to go to war again in order to bring her back to bed.” But for the time being, the appearance of contentment was maintained as medals and honors were exchanged in ceremonious brotherhood.

Both emperors left Tilsit with conflicting impressions of the other. “My dear,” Napoleon wrote to Josephine, “I have just seen the Emperor Alexander; I was very pleased with him; he is a very handsome, good young emperor; he is cleverer than commonly thought.… He is a hero out of a novel. He has all the manners of an agreeable Parisian.” Later, though, he commented, “No one could have more intelligence than the Emperor Alexander, but I find that there is a piece missing in his character, and I cannot discover what it is.”

Similarly, the Russian tsar made lauding public pronouncements about his erstwhile enemy. “I shall confess to you that no one ever had more prejudices against a person than I had against [him],” Alexander said to Napoleon’s envoy, General Savary; “but after three-quarters of an hour of conversation with him, they all disappeared like a dream and I never remembered them, so deeply was I struck by what he said to me.”

But dissembling was second nature to Alexander I. He needed peace with Napoleon, certainly, but he still cordially hated him. “Fortunately, with all his genius, Bonaparte has a vulnerable side,” the emperor wrote to his mother: “It is vanity, and I have decided to sacrifice my pride for the salvation of the empire.” And in a private message to the king of Prussia:
“Have patience. We shall take back what we have lost. He will break his neck. In spite of all my demonstrations of friendship, and my external actions, at heart I am your friend and I hope to prove it to you by acts.”

Still, no matter his secret motives, in the minds of his subjects Alexander had shaken hands with a monster. “The dissatisfaction with the Emperor is increasing, and the remarks one hears on all sides are frightening,” reported the Swedish ambassador. “It is only too true … that in private gatherings and even in public assemblies there is often talk of a change of reign and that people so far forget their duty as to say that the whole male line of the reigning family should be proscribed.”

The emperor’s close advisor, Nicholas Novosiltsev, was so concerned about the mounting hostility that he dared whisper in Alexander’s ear, “Sire, I must remind you of the fate of your father.”

“Good heavens,” the emperor responded, “I know, I see that, but what can I do against the destiny that is leading me?”

Alexander’s wife, the gentle, lovely, and much-betrayed Empress Elizabeth, expressed grave reservations about her husband’s apparent rapprochement with Napoleon. But what galled the empress even more was her own mother-in-law’s fierce stance against Alexander’s policy of appeasement.

“The Empress who, as a mother, should support and defend the interests of her son, from thoughtlessness, from pride (and certainly for no other reason, for she is incapable of evil intentions), has succeeded in becoming like a leader of an insurrection,” Elizabeth reported to her mother; “all the malcontents, of whom there are a great number, rally around her, praising her to the skies, and never has she attracted so many
people to Pavlovsk [the dowager empress’s palace] as this year. I cannot express to you how indignant it makes me.”
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The emperor hoped to distract the people from their outrage over his ill-received truce by expelling the Swedes from the Baltic, as Napoleon had suggested at Tilsit. (“The lovely ladies of St. Petersburg must not hear from their palaces the cannons of Sweden,” the French emperor said at the time. “Sweden is your geographical enemy.”) But even the annexation of Finland was greeted with indifference. And the question of Poland began to loom ever larger. Napoleon coveted it as a reconstituted kingdom under French control, but for Alexander, that would be an unthinkable hazard to Russia’s border security. “Poland is the only question on which I shall never compromise,” he declared. “The world is not big enough for us to reach an accommodation on the affairs of that country.”

With relations unraveling yet again, a second meeting between the emperors was scheduled for September 1808, at Erfurt. It was what Alexander had to do to buy time. “There is no room for the two of us in Europe,” he wrote to his sister. “Sooner or later, one of us will have to bow out.” In the meantime, though, he had to appear amenable. Still, the prospect of another shameful accommodation horrified his mother. “Alexander, stay away from it!” she pleaded. “You will ruin
your empire and your family. Turn back, there is still time. Listen to the voice of honor, to the prayers and supplications of your mother. Stop, my child, my friend.”

The emperor tried to reassure the dowager empress by explaining his rationale. “Let us not hasten to declare ourselves against him,” he wrote; “we would run the risk of losing everything. Rather, let us appear to consolidate the alliance so as to lull him into a sense of security. Let us gain time and prepare. When the time comes, we shall look on serenely at Napoleon’s downfall.”

The encounter at Erfurt, once again arranged by Bonaparte, took on an entirely different tenor than at Tilsit, although with the same superficial cordiality. “I have much affection for the Emperor Napoleon and I shall prove it to him at every opportunity,” Alexander said disingenuously to Marshal Jean Lannes, who greeted him. Then, with gritted teeth, the Russian tsar proceeded to play the part of Napoleon’s willing ally. The emperors amicably dined together and showed each other every courtesy during the formal ceremonies of the summit meant to permanently bind them.
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There was even a bit of fraternal bonding one night at a theatrical performance, when the randy Russian emperor showed particular interest in the “actress” Antoinette Bourgoin, known as “the goddess of joy and pleasures.”

“I do not advise you to make advances to her,” Napoleon warned.

“You think she would refuse?” Alexander responded.

“Oh no!” said the French emperor. “But tomorrow the post leaves, and in five days all Paris would know the details of Your Majesty’s figure from head to toe.… And then, I take an interest in your health. So I hope you will be able to resist temptation.”

Beneath the bonhomie, however, Napoleon found a far more intractable Alexander than he expected. With urgent business in rebellious Spain (which Bonaparte had annexed), the French emperor was eager to secure the Russian tsar’s promise that he would fight with his forces if Austria became aggressive during his absence. Alexander hedged. “Emperor Alexander is as stubborn as a mule,” Bonaparte exclaimed in frustration. “He plays deaf to whatever he doesn’t want to hear. This confounded business in Spain is costing me dear!”

At one point Napoleon became so irate that he threw his hat down on the floor and stomped on it. “You are violent, I am stubborn,” Alexander remarked coolly in response to the tantrum. “So anger will get you nowhere with me. Let us talk, let us reason, or I shall leave.”

While the French emperor insisted on Russian assistance with Austria, Alexander had a few demands of his own—not the least of which was France’s evacuation of Prussia. Napoleon was stunned: “Is it my friend, my ally who proposes that I abandon the only position from which I can threaten Austria’s flank if she attacks me while my troops are in southern Europe, four hundred leagues from home?… It is a system of weakness that you are proposing to me. If I agree to it, Europe will soon be treating me like a little boy.”

It was during these tense negotiations that Alexander was secretly approached by Napoleon’s recently resigned foreign minister, Talleyrand, who seemed to have treason on his
mind. “Sire,” he said, “what did you come here for? It is up to you to save Europe, and you will succeed in doing that only if you hold your ground against Napoleon. The French people are civilized, their sovereign is not. The sovereign of Russia is civilized, his people are not. The sovereign of Russia should therefore be the ally of the French people. The Rhine, the Alps, the Pyrenees are conquests of France. The rest is the conquest of the Emperor, France doesn’t care about it.”
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Talleyrand’s confidence reassured Alexander that his position was stronger than anyone, especially Napoleon, believed. An agreement was reached, and though it provided for Russia’s assistance against a bellicose Austria, the tsar really had no intention of ever fighting his former ally. “Bonaparte claims that I am only a fool,” he wrote to his sister. “He laughs best who laughs last. As for me, I place all my hope in God.”

With false promises made, the summit was concluded as genially as it began. “Everything is going well,” a placated Napoleon wrote to Josephine. “I am pleased with Alexander. He must be pleased with me! If he were a woman, I think I would make him my sweetheart.”

But since Alexander was most decidedly not a woman, Napoleon was determined to make the tsar’s sister his wife. He informed the Russian emperor of his plan to repudiate his wife, Josephine, “so as to consolidate his work and found his dynasty.” Marriage to a Russian grand duchess would give the next generation of Bonapartes the perfect royal pedigree. To avoid such a calamity, the emperor’s sister Catherine was hurriedly
engaged to the Duke of Oldenburg. He was not particularly attractive, but then anybody would be better than the odious Corsican.

Not to be deterred, Napoleon simply proposed that a younger sister, Anne, become his bride—never mind that she was only thirteen. Dowager Empress Maria was understandably aghast at the prospect of her little girl replacing “the whore” Josephine in Napoleon’s bed. Yes, it would be dangerous for Russia to deny Napoleon his underage prize. But so be it.

Though Alexander tried to soften the blow of his rejection by assuring Napoleon the matter could be revisited when Anne actually hit puberty, the French emperor wasn’t fooled. And the insult he felt was only aggravated by the lavish wedding of his first choice, Catherine, to the Prince of Oldenburg—a celebration that included his vanquished enemies, the king and queen of Prussia. Bonaparte would get his revenge by eventually attacking Oldenburg. “It’s like a public insult,” exclaimed Alexander, “a slap in the face of a friendly power.” Plus, Napoleon never bothered to wait for Anne—which, though a relief, was also a slap at Russian honor. Instead, he married Marie Louise of Austria, which prompted the Prince de Ligne to quip, “Austria has sacrificed a beautiful heifer to the Minotaur.”