The Crimean War (63 page)
Authors: Orlando Figes
Tags: #History, #Military, #General, #Europe, #Other, #Russia & the Former Soviet Union, #Crimean War; 1853-1856
In Sevastopol, the troops had been preparing to spend a second winter in the Crimea. No one really knew if they would have to fight again, but there were all sorts of rumours about being sent to the Danube or the Caucasus or some other quarter of the Russian Empire for a spring campaign. ‘What will become of us?’ wrote the battalion commander Joseph Fervel to Marshal de Castellane on 15 December. ‘Where will we find ourselves next year? That is the question everybody asks but no one can answer.’
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Meanwhile, the troops occupied themselves with the daily business of survival on the heights above Sevastopol. Supplies improved and the soldiers were provided with better tents and wooden huts. The bars and shops at Kamiesh and Kadikoi were always full, and Mary Seacole’s hotel did a roaring trade. There were various amusements to keep the soldiers occupied – theatre, gambling, billiards, hunting and horse racing on the plain while the weather allowed it. Boatloads of tourists arrived from Britain to see the famous battle sites and collect souvenirs – a Russian gun or sword, or a bit of uniform plundered from the bodies of the Russian dead that remained in the trenches for weeks and even months following the capture of Sevastopol. ‘Only the English could have such ideas,’ noted a French officer, who was amazed by the morbid fascinations of these war tourists.
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Towards the end of January, as news of the impending peace arrived, the allied soldiers began to fraternize increasingly with the Russians. Prokofii Podpalov, the young soldier who had taken part in the defence of the Redan, was among the Russians encamped by the Chernaia river, the site of the bloody battle in August. ‘Every day we became more friendly with the French soldiers on the other side of the river,’ he recalled. ‘We were told by our officers to be polite to them. Usually, we would go up to the river and throw across (the river wasn’t wide) some things for them: crosses, coins and so on; and the French would throw us cigarettes, leather purses, knives, money. This is how we talked: the French would say “Russkii camarade!” and the Russians: “Franchy brothers!”’ Eventually, the French ventured over the river and visited the Russians in their camp. They drank and ate together, sang their songs for each other, and conversed in sign language. The visits became regular. One day, on leaving the Russian camp, the French soldiers handed out some cards on which they had written their names and regiments, and invited the Russians to visit them in their camp. They did not return for a few days, so Podpalov and some of his comrades decided to visit the French camp. They were amazed by what they saw. ‘It was clean and tidy everywhere, there were even flowers growing by the tents of the officers,’ Podpalov recalled. The Russians found their friends, and they were invited to their tents, where they drank rum with them. The French soldiers walked them back to the river, embraced them many times, and invited them to come again. A week later Podpalov returned to the French camp on his own, but he could not find his friends. They had left for Paris, he was told.
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Paris and the New Order
The Peace Congress was scheduled to begin at the French Foreign Ministry on the Quai d’Orsay in the afternoon of 25 February. By midday a large and excited crowd of spectators had gathered along the Quai d’Orsay to watch the arrival of the delegates. Stretching from the Pont de la Concorde to the rue d’Iéna, the onlookers had to be kept back by infantrymen and the gendarmerie to allow the carriages of the foreign dignitaries to pass by and pull up outside the newly completed buildings of the Foreign Ministry. The delegates arrived from one o’clock, each one cheered with cries of
‘Vive la paix!
’ and ‘
Vive l’Empereur!
’ as they stepped out and entered into the building. Dressed in morning coats, the delegates assembled in the magnificent Hall of Ambassadors, where a large round table covered with green velvet and twelve armchairs around it had been laid out for the conference. The hall was a showcase for the decorative arts of the Second Empire. Satin crimson drapes hung from the walls. The only pictures were life-size portraits of Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie, whose dominating gaze was a constant reminder to the delegates of France’s new position as the arbiter of international affairs. On a console by the fireplace was a marble bust of Napoleon I –
persona non grata
in diplomatic circles for more than forty years. The Paris congress marked what Napoleon III wanted to believe was the return of Napoleonic France to the Concert of Europe.
1
‘Vive la paix!
’ and ‘
Vive l’Empereur!
’ as they stepped out and entered into the building. Dressed in morning coats, the delegates assembled in the magnificent Hall of Ambassadors, where a large round table covered with green velvet and twelve armchairs around it had been laid out for the conference. The hall was a showcase for the decorative arts of the Second Empire. Satin crimson drapes hung from the walls. The only pictures were life-size portraits of Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie, whose dominating gaze was a constant reminder to the delegates of France’s new position as the arbiter of international affairs. On a console by the fireplace was a marble bust of Napoleon I –
persona non grata
in diplomatic circles for more than forty years. The Paris congress marked what Napoleon III wanted to believe was the return of Napoleonic France to the Concert of Europe.
1
The choice of Paris as the venue for the congress was a sign of France’s new position as the pre-eminent power on the Continent. The only other city where it might have taken place was Vienna, where the 1815 treaty had been signed, but the idea was rejected by the British, who had been suspicious of the diplomatic efforts of the Austrians since the beginning of the war. With diplomatic power shifting briefly to Paris, Vienna now appeared a city of the past. ‘Who could deny that France comes out of all of this enlarged,’ wrote Count Walewski to Napoleon, after learning that he would become the host of the congress. ‘France alone will have profited in this struggle. Today she holds first place in Europe.’
The congress came only three months after the ending of the
Exposition Universelle
, a glittering international event rivalling London’s Great Exhibition of 1851. Five million visitors had made their way through the exhibition halls on the Champs-Elysées. The two events placed Paris at the centre of Europe. This was a major victory for Napoleon III, whose decision to enter the war had always been influenced by his need for prestige at home and abroad. From the start of the peace talks the previous autumn, he had emerged as the key player, on whom all the other powers depended for the satisfaction of their interests. ‘I am struck by the general deference to the Emperor Napoleon,’ wrote Princess Lieven to Baroness Meyendorff on 9 November. ‘The war has carried him pretty high, him and France: it has not enhanced England.’
2
Exposition Universelle
, a glittering international event rivalling London’s Great Exhibition of 1851. Five million visitors had made their way through the exhibition halls on the Champs-Elysées. The two events placed Paris at the centre of Europe. This was a major victory for Napoleon III, whose decision to enter the war had always been influenced by his need for prestige at home and abroad. From the start of the peace talks the previous autumn, he had emerged as the key player, on whom all the other powers depended for the satisfaction of their interests. ‘I am struck by the general deference to the Emperor Napoleon,’ wrote Princess Lieven to Baroness Meyendorff on 9 November. ‘The war has carried him pretty high, him and France: it has not enhanced England.’
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Peace talks had been going on throughout the winter, and by the time the delegates arrived in Paris, most of the controversial issues had already been resolved. The main sticking point was the tough stance of the British, who were in no hurry to end a war in which they had not had a major victory to satisfy their honour and justify their losses of the previous eighteen months. The capture of Sevastopol had, after all, been a French success. Urged on by a belligerent press and public, Palmerston reiterated the minimum conditions he had set out on 9 October, and threatened to keep on with the war, starting with a spring campaign in the Baltic, if the Russians failed to come to peace on British terms. He pressed Clarendon, his Foreign Secretary, to accept nothing less than complete Russian submission to his conditions at the Paris congress.
Despite his assertions, Palmerston’s demands were in a state of flux. By November he had given up on the idea of securing independence for Circassia: no representative from that confused territory could be found to sign a treaty on its behalf. Yet he continued to insist that Russia should be deprived of the Caucasus and Central Asia, and was adamant that British firmness could obtain this. Russia was negotiating from a weak position, he wrote to Clarendon on 25 February, and was showing ‘impudence’ by arguing against the latest version of the British terms: the complete removal of Russian ships and arsenals from the Black Sea and the evacuation ‘of every part of Turkish territory [including Kars] now occupied by Russian troops’. These conditions, Palmerston maintained, were ‘not dishonourable to Russia … but only calculated to be manifest and patent pledges of the sincerity of her disclaimer of aggressive intentions’. Warning Clarendon about Count Orlov, the leader of the Russian delegation to Paris, he revealed his Russophobic attitudes:
As to Orloff, I know him well – he is civil and courteous externally, but his inward mind is deeply impregnated with Russian insolence, arrogance and pride. He will do his best to bully without appearing to do so. He will stand out for every point which he thinks he has a chance of carrying, and he has all the cunning of a half civilized savage.
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The French and the Italians were disgusted by Palmerston’s behaviour (Victor Emmanuel, the Piedmontese king, described him as a ‘rabid animal’). Eager for peace, the French did not share the British inclination to punish Russia. They needed a rapprochement with the Russians to realize Napoleon’s plans in Italy. Sympathetic to the cause of Italian unification, the French Emperor calculated that he could regain Savoy and Nice – captured by the French in 1792 but returned to Piedmont by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 – by helping the Piedmontese to conquer Lombardy-Venetia from the Austrians and expel the Habsburgs from the rest of Italy. Requiring the support or armed neutrality of the Russians to defeat the Austrians, the French were unwilling to go along with Palmerston’s punitive initiatives against Russia. Their main point of difference with the British concerned the boundary of Bessarabia, a territory to be given back by Russia to Ottoman Moldavia. Palmerston, supported by Austria, took a tough line, arguing that Russia must not have any means of access to the Danube, the key Austrian anxiety. The Russians wanted to use Kars as a counterweight to Bessarabia, and the French supported them. But, under pressure from the British and the Austrians, Napoleon persuaded Orlov to accept a compromise at Paris. Overall, the Russians lost about a third of the Bessarabian land they had taken from the Turks in 1812, including the Danube delta, but they retained the Bulgarian communities of Bessarabia and the strategically important mountain ridge running south-east from Chotin. The British claimed a victory; Austria celebrated the liberation of the Danube; and the Russians felt the loss of (southern) Bessarabia as a national humiliation. It was the first territory the Russians had ceded to the Turks since the seventeenth century.
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On the other major issues the powers largely came to terms before the Paris congress met, guided by the Four Points agreed by the allies in 1854. The British had attempted to add a fifth point that would take away from Russia all its lands in the southern Caucasus (Circassia, Georgia, Erivan and Nakhichevan) but the Russians insisted that they held these territories by the Treaty of Adrianople and the Turks backed up their claims. However, the Russians were forced to surrender Kars. They also lost out in their efforts to avoid the full effect of the Third Point – the demilitarization of the Black Sea – by negotiating an exclusion for Nikolaev (20 kilometres inland from the coastline on the Bug river) and for the Sea of Azov.
On the question of the two Danubian principalities (the main subject of the First Point), there was a lively exchange of ideas. The British were broadly in favour of restoring Ottoman control. The French gave their backing to the Romanian liberals and nationalists who wanted to unite the principalities as an independent state. The Austrians were flatly opposed to the establishment of a nation state on their south-eastern border, as they had significant Slav minorities with national aspirations of their own. The Austrians rightly suspected that the French were backing the Romanians as a way of putting pressure on the Austrians to give up their interests in northern Italy. The three powers all agreed to end the Russian protectorate over the Danubian principalities and to guarantee the free commercial navigation of the Danube (the Second Point). But they could not agree on what to replace it with – other than the collective guarantee of the great powers under the nominal sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire with vague plans for elections at some point in the future to determine the views of the population in Moldavia and Wallachia.
As for the question of protecting the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire (the Fourth Point), representatives of the allied powers met with the Grand Vizier Ali Pasha and the Tanzimat reformer Fuad Pasha (the Sultan’s delegates to the Paris congress) in Constantinople in early January to impress on them the need for the Porte to show that it was serious about granting full religious and civil equality to the Empire’s non-Muslims (including Jews). Reporting on the conference to Clarendon on 9 January, Stratford Canning was sceptical about the Turkish ministers’ expressions of commitment to reform. He thought they were resentful of the foreign imposition of reform, that they saw it as undermining Ottoman sovereignty, and concluded that it would be difficult to get any protection for the Christians implemented properly. The Turks had always lived in the belief that the Christians were inferior, and no law passed by the Sultan could overcome that prejudice in the short period of time expected by the West. ‘We may expect procrastination on the ground of respect of religious antipathies, popular prejudices, and unassociating habits,’ wrote the veteran diplomat, who further warned that forcing through reforms might lead to a revolt by the Muslims against the Sultan’s Westernizing policies. In response to a 21-point draft programme presented by the allies’ representatives, the Sultan issued the Hatt-i Hümayun on 18 February. The decree promised to his non-Muslim subjects full religious and legal equality, rights of property, and open entry on merit to the Ottoman military and civil service. The Turks hoped that the reform would prevent any further European intervention into Ottoman affairs. They wanted the Hatt-i Hümayun excluded from the Paris talks, on the grounds of Turkish sovereignty. But the Russians – who had been named in the Fourth Point as one of the five great powers that would guarantee the security of the Sultan’s Christian subjects – insisted that the issue was brought up. They were satisfied with the compromise solution – an international declaration joined by the Porte on the importance of Christian rights in the Ottoman Empire – and in their domestic propaganda the Russians even used it as a symbol of their ‘moral victory’ in the Crimean War. In one sense they were right, in so far as the Paris congress restored the status quo in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, as Russia had demanded on behalf of the Greeks against the Latin claims, a point made by the Tsar many times. In a manifesto published on the day the peace was signed, Alexander invoked Providence for bringing to pass ‘the original and principal aim of the war … Russians! Your efforts and sacrifices have not been in vain!’
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Finally, there was the unspoken question of Poland. The idea of restoring Polish independence from Russia had first been advanced among the wartime allied diplomats by Walewski, the son of Napoleon I by the Polish Countess Marie Walewska. After the capture of Sevastopol, the French Emperor wanted to do something for Poland: an independent Polish kingdom fitted the Napoleonic ideal of a new Europe based on nation states to overthrow the 1815 settlement. At first Napoleon III supported Czartoryski’s programme for the restoration of Congress Poland, the autonomous kingdom established by the Vienna treaty, whose freedoms had been undermined by the Russians. Later on, as the pre-congress talks got under way and it became apparent that none of the other powers would come out in favour of the Poles, Napoleon gave his backing to Czartoryski’s pared-down list of conditions for Polish language rights and the defence of Poland against Russification. But Orlov would have none of this, insisting that Russia’s rights in Poland were based, not on the 1815 treaty, but on the Russian conquest of Poland during the suppression of the Polish insurrection of 1830–31. In the interests of improving his relations with Russia, whose support would be needed against the Austrians in Italy, Napoleon decided to give up on the Poles. Nothing more was said about the Polish question at the Paris congress. Even Palmerston, who rarely missed a chance to confront Russia, advised Clarendon not to make an issue of the Poles. ‘It would not be expedient,’ he explained, ‘to require Russia to restore the Kingdom of Poland.’
The advantage to the Poles would be very doubtful; if they could be made independent of Russia, that indeed would be a great advantage both for the Poles and for Europe, but the difference either for the Poles or for Europe between the present condition of the Kingdom of Poland and that which was established by the Treaty of Vienna would be hardly worth all the difficulties which we should have to encounter in endeavouring to carry such a change into effect. The Russian Govt would say as it said in former years that Poland had rebelled and was conquered, and that consequently it is held now by right of conquest and not by the Treaty of Vienna, and that therefore Russia is freed from the obligation of that Treaty. The Russians would moreover say that to make such a demand is to interfere in the internal affairs of Russia.
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