Alexander I of Russia

Alexander I of Russia (Russian: Александр I Павлович, Aleksandr I Pavlovich; Saint Petersburg, December 23, 1777-Taganrog, December 1, 1825) was Emperor of the Russian Empire from March 23, 1801, King of the Tsarate of Poland from 1815, and the first Grand Duke of Finland.

Biography

Alexander was the son of Grand Duke Paul Petrovich Romanov, later Tsar Paul I, and his wife the German princess Maria Fyodorovna, daughter of the Duke of Wurtemberg, as well as the grandson of Catherine the Great. Grown up in the free-thinking atmosphere of his grandmother's court, he was tutored in the principles of Jean-Jacques Rousseau by his Swiss tutor, Frédéric-César de La Harpe. From his military governor, Nikolai Saltykov, he learned the traditions of Russian autocracy, while his father inspired his own passion for military parades and taught him to combine a theoretical love of humanity with a practical contempt for the man. And these contradictory tendencies remained in his character throughout his life: they revealed themselves in the fluctuations of his politics and influenced through him the fate of the world.

That enlightened thought allowed him to become friends with Napoleon Bonaparte, albeit for a very brief period; however, the pressure of the nobility and his family made him break this alliance and Alexander I again became an enemy of France.

He died in 1825 of typhus.

Reign

On March 23, 1801, Alexander ascended the throne after the assassination of his father. The conspirators had introduced him into his circle, convincing him that they were not going to kill Tsar Paul I, but to force him to abdicate so that Alexander would seize power. But after the assassination, Alexander felt great remorse and guilt for having become emperor in such a way, through a crime. This would explain his progressive inclination towards the Orthodox Church after the Napoleonic Wars and his conservative policies from then until his death.

From the first moment he showed his intention to develop an important role on the world scene, and put all the ardor of youth into the task of making his political ideals come true. At the same time that he retained some of the old ministers who had served the ousted Emperor Paul I, one of the first acts of his reign was the appointment of the Privy Committee, also ironically called the "Comité du salut publique» (in the manner of the French Public Safety Committee). The Committee was made up of the tsar's young and enthusiastic friends (Víktor Kochubéi, Nikolai Novosíltsov, Pável Stroganov and Adam Jerzy Czartoryski), with the purpose of shaping a long-awaited program of internal reforms. More importantly, the liberal Mikhail Speransky became one of the Tsar's closest advisers, almost a trusted one, laying out many plans for reform until his fall from grace in 1811.

His intentions, inspired by admiration for English institutions, exceeded the possibilities of the time, and even after having elevated them to ministerial level, few of these reforms came to fruition. Russia was not ripe for freedom, and Alexander, a disciple of the revolutionary La Harpe, was, as he himself put it, a happy accident on the throne of the tsars. The truth is that he complained bitterly about the "state of barbarism in which the country had been left due to the traffic in men."

Three thousand peasants had been sold as if of a diamond bag. If our civilization were more advanced, it would abolish slavery even if it cost me my head.

Alexander complained that widespread corruption had left him without men, and filling government administrative posts with Germans and other foreigners accentuated the resistance of the Old Russians to these reforms. This reign, which had begun with great promises of improvements, ended up tightening even more, if possible, the chains that oppressed the people of Russia, more a consequence of the Tsar's defects than of corruption and the backwardness of the Russian way of life. His love for freedom proved unreal, despite appearing sincere. His vanity increased by presenting himself to the world as the benefactor of his people, but his theoretical liberalism was joined by an autocratic character, without this representing any contradiction to him.

You always want to instruct me!" - he said before Gavrila Derzhavin, his Minister of Justice. "But I am an autocratic emperor and I will be, and nothing more!" Prince Czartoryski wrote: "I could have graciously agreed that everyone could be free, if everyone freely chose to be free. »

However, his temperament, together with the lack of firmness in his purposes, made him postpone and finally abandon those measures whose principles he had publicly supported in the person of Speranski and which, however, powerfully influenced the history of the Russian constitutionalism of the 19th and 20th centuries, at least in Russia itself, because it allowed the territories of Finland and Poland political advances that it did not want to concede to Russia.

Legislation

The codification of the laws started in 1801 was not completed during his reign. Nothing was done to remedy the plight of the Russian peasantry. The Constitution drafted by Mikhail Speransky and approved by the Emperor remained unsigned. Alexander, in fact, possessed to a great extent all the tyrannical characteristics, such as distrust of his people's ability to have an independent opinion. He also lacked the first requirement to be a reformist sovereign: confidence in his subjects; and it was this that vitiated the reforms that were carried out. He experienced them only in the outlying provinces of his empire, and the Russians noted with indiscreet murmurings that, not content with ruling through foreigners, he now granted Poland, Finland, and the Baltic provinces the benefits denied them.

A failed attempt at reform

Alejandro I

In Russia too, of course, certain reforms were carried out, although they could not survive the suspicious interference of the autocrat and his officials. The newly created Council of Ministers and the Council of State, governed by a Senate, endowed for the first time with certain theoretical powers, finally became mere instruments of slavery to the Tsar and his favorite of the moment.

The elaborate educational system, culminating in the reconstruction or founding of the universities of Dorpat, Vilnius, Kazan, and Kharkov, was strangled for the sake of "Order" and "Orthodox Piety." And, although he had created the Council of the Empire and ordered the creation of a draft Constitutional Charter and had said to the nobles of Livonia: "Liberal principles are the only ones that can give happiness to the peoples...", was limited to incomplete measurements; he distanced himself from his friends from the "Committee of Public Health"; the liberal Speranski fell out of favor; he ordered the filing of the memory of the future ambassador Pavel Kiseliov on the & # 34; progressive abolition of serfdom in Russia & # 34;; buries the "Draft Constitution for the Russian Empire" drawn up by the commission chaired by Count Nikolai Novosiltsov. The riots that broke out in many countries, the revolution in Spain, the murder of his agent August von Kotzebue put an end to his liberalism. Forgetting his phrase addressed to the Baltic nobility, he banned in 1822 Masonic lodges and secret societies. The press and writers, the six universities and all teaching are subjected to severe surveillance. Students are forbidden to read the New Testament even though the Tsar himself had it printed in Russian. Many books are burned and banned, among others, The Politics of Aristotle, the works of Byron, the History of the Revolution of Thiers, the Meditations i> de Lamartine. The surveillance becomes so severe that there are only forty listeners left at the University of Saint Petersburg and fifty at the Kazan University. Censorship is fierce; textbooks are purged of impiety and rationalist theories and "everything that is detrimental to the spiritual nature of man, inner freedom and God's providence". The tsar grants freedom to the serfs in the Baltic provinces, but he does nothing to improve the lot of the slaves in Russia proper; he even censures 75 nobles from the St. Petersburg government who have emancipated the serfs from him. It is the triumph of obscurantism. Speranski will say of he: "He is too weak to govern and too strong to be governed". He lacks method and stability; he is content with incomplete measures, takes back what he has given and undoes what he has done. More suspicious, insecure and reserved than Louis XV himself, he played hide-and-seek with his advisers and secretly received some ministers.

Meanwhile, the military colonies that Alexander had proclaimed as a blessing for the soldiers and for the State, were forcibly constituted by unwilling peasants and cruel and heartless soldiers. Even the Bible Society, through which the Emperor in his evangelical zeal had purposed to bless his people, was conducted along the same ruthless lines of action. The archbishop of the Catholic Church and the Orthodox were forced to serve on these committees together with Protestant pastors and preachers from the villages, trying to enforce the texts of the traditional Church documents, and reminding that any attempt to transgress them it was a deadly sin. Soon the committees became the unwanted tools of what they themselves called "the work of the Devil."

Despite his deep convictions, he was unable to abolish serfdom in Russia, fearing the discontent this might provoke among the landed gentry. Serfdom had been a big problem for a long time, and the Russian Enlightenment considered it the main obstacle for Russia to join the Industrial Revolution that was taking place in the West. The father of Russian literature, the romantic poet Aleksandr Pushkin, had to go into exile because Alexander I did not like his Ode to Freedom.

The liberal Speranski having fallen, he was replaced in private by the harsh and reactionary general Alekséi Arakchéyev, (1769-1834), almost like a regent with full powers; in fact, he led the Empire from 1815 to 1825. From his last name came the word arakchéievschina , which means: “politics of extreme reaction, police despotism”.

European politics. The fight against Napoleon

The great questions of European politics attracted Alexander much more than the attempts at internal reforms which, deep down, hurt his pride by showing him the narrow limits of his absolute power. Already the day after his accession to the throne, he had reversed Pablo's policy, denouncing the "League of Neutrals", and made peace with the United Kingdom (April 1801), at the same time that he opened negotiations with Francisco I. He established a close alliance with Prussia in Memel, although not for political reasons, as he boasted of saying, but because of his spirit of true chivalry and the friendship that united him with Frederick William III and his beautiful wife Luisa de Meckenburg-Stretlitz. The development of this alliance was interrupted by the brief peace with France in October 1801, and for a time it seemed that Russia and France might come to an understanding. Carried away by the enthusiasm of La Harpe, who had returned to Russia from Paris, Alexander began to openly proclaim his admiration for French institutions and for the person of Napoleon Bonaparte. However, a change would soon take place. La Harpe, after a new visit to Paris, presented to the tsar his reflections on the true nature of the consulate for life, of which Alexander said that he lifted the blindfold from his eyes and revealed to a Bonaparte that he was not a true patriot, but only "the most famous tyrant the world had ever produced." His disappointment was already complete after the execution, sponsored by Napoleon, of the Duke of Enghien in 1804, one of the last hopes of the Old Regime in France. The Russian court went into mourning for the last of the Princes of Condé, and diplomatic relations with Paris were severed.

Napoleon, Alexander I, Queen Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, pregnant, and her husband Federico Guillermo III of Prussia in Tilsit, 1807

After the battle of Austerlitz (December 2, 1805) in which the Third Coalition formed by Austrians and Russians was defeated by Bonaparte, and an insecure peace, he declared war on France between November 16 and 28, 1806 although Russia had been in two conflicts with Persia and with Turkey for some time. The indecisive battle of Pultusk followed, the terrible defeat of Eylau (February 8, 1807), resulting in 26,000 dead or wounded Russians, and the defeat at Friedland of the Russian army, commanded by the German Bennigsen, in which some 16,500 men, including 25 generals.

Finally, Napoleon and Alexander I agreed to an armistice, the so-called Peace of Tilsit, which was negotiated directly between the two emperors, leaving only minor matters to the secretaries and diplomats; the great victim was the king of Prussia. Napoleon was decorated by Alexander with the Order of Saint Andrew and Alexander received the Legion of Honor from him. On July 8, 1807, the procedures were completed and the Fourth Coalition ended, as Napoleon was seeking to maintain peace in Europe by ensuring an alliance with Austria or Russia.

However, the subsequent Continental Blockade of the ports to the English ships decreed by Napoleon was suffocating the Russian trade of imports and exports, and Alexander dared to break it and prepare the invasion of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. After the ultimatum presented to Aleksandr Chernyshov in 1812, Alexander allied himself with the Swedes, and the Grande Armée or Great Napoleonic Army, of more than 400,000 men according to Henry Vallotton, among French, North German, Prussian, Austrian, Italian, Danish, Poles and Swiss, crossed the border Niemen River. They will be opposed by another 400,000 commanded by generals Mikhail Barclay de Tolly, Piotr Bagration and Aleksandr Tormasov.

Alexander hastily makes peace with Turkey in Bucharest (May 28, 1812), though he does not do the same with Persia. After the first skirmishes (Dvina, Dnieper, Mahiliou, Drissa, Pólatsk, Ostrovno (Vitebsk), Smolensk) Alexander appoints generalissimo, on the proposal of an extraordinary commission, the one-eyed general Mikhail Kutúzov, now sixty-eight years old. On September 6, 1812, the bloody battle of Borodino takes place between 127,000 French and 580 artillery pieces and 120,000 Russians, also with considerable artillery. The result after twelve hours of horror: a pyrrhic French victory. Napoleon lost 47 generals and 37 colonels killed or wounded, but the worst thing was how the remaining Russian soldiers were scattered, so that Napoleon could hardly take prisoners; What's more, he couldn't find supplies because Mikhail Kutuzov carried out the most difficult of military operations: a good retreat, using the scorched-earth tactic: villages and warehouses of fodder and food are burned, bridges are demolished, poles and signs are uprooted. Orientation: The French do not possess detailed maps of vast Russia.

Napoleon advancing with his troops through a burning Moscow.

The order is given to evacuate Moscow, which from 200,000 inhabitants now has 10,000, and everything that the enemy can take advantage of is burned. Murat, Mortier, Caulaincourt, Berthier, Beauharnais, Davout, Lauriston and Gorgaud entered the capital on September 14, 1812, while Napoleon remained hoarse and with the flu in Mozhaisk, and already recovered, entered Moscow on September 14. The walls they are covered in threatening graffiti in French; Napoleon asks about the boyars, but they have all left: there are no Frenchified among the Russians. A few days later a terrifying fire ripped through the capital, built mostly of wooden houses, and Napoleon left the Kremlin, where he returned on September 18. The French detained 23 Russian arsonists, who they said was the idea of Police Director General Ivachin, before they were shot and hung from lampposts. On the other hand, two Frenchmen who raped a fourteen-year-old Russian woman were sentenced to death and executed. Some think that the fire was actually the work of the nobleman Fiódor Rostopchín, who began by burning his own palace. On August 12, Wellington entered Madrid and Soult was forced to lift the siege of Cádiz. Scarce supplies were running out, winter was approaching.

So Napoleon ordered what was left of Moscow to be burned a second time and the French army abandoned it on October 18, 1812. Alexander exclaims: "Napoleon or me. He or I. We cannot reign both at the same time. I have learned to know him; he will not deceive me anymore & # 34;. And he writes to Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte on October 1: & # 34; After this wound, all the others are nothing but scratches. I and the nation at whose head I am honored to stand are determined to persevere and bury ourselves in the ruins of the Empire rather than compromise with the modern Attila". On October 18, Kutuzov defeated Murat's vanguard, and harass the withdrawal with continuous guerrilla attacks, avoiding frontal encounters. Stragglers and foragers are systematically killed. Even Napoleon himself was about to perish at Maloyaroslavets at the hands of the Cossacks when he recklessly advanced; that same night, in a moment of uncharacteristic discouragement for him, he told Caulaincourt: "I always beat the Russians, but it is of no use to me...".

The pass of the river Berézina with what remained of the Great Armée in November 1812, Peter von Hess

The dwindling Grande Armée makes its way in fits and starts to Smolensk with heavy losses; On November 6, winter is brought forward for fifteen days and an impressive snowfall falls throughout Russia. Fodder and supplies are lacking, there is rationing, hunger, cold, accumulated fatigue. The horses, with bad shoes for this type of roads, break their legs; on the contrary, the Cossack cavalry does not stop attacking. When arriving at Vilnius, the French army already only has 36,000 men; many of the wounded had had to be abandoned, and in Vilnius they bury the dead using the trenches they had dug on the way as mass graves; the columns fragment and disperse into groups that are easily attacked; Fighting and desertion increased in the heterogeneous French army and many threw away cartridges and weapons. After arriving at Smolensk, Napoleon sends his pontoon boats to prepare the passage of the Berezina river through the bridge that was in Borísov, but was occupied by Kutúzov; the pontooners build two bridges at the height of the village Studzionka. The infantry passes through one and the heavy artillery and carts through the other; the bridge does not hold and sinks; but spenders repair it under Russian bullets.

Alexander led the Sixth Coalition that united the adversaries of France, which finally succumbed. Russian troops entered Paris in 1814 and Alexander I was noted for his kindness in his salons. He visited the former Empress Joséphine at the perfumed Château de Malmaison, and met Napoleon's adoptive son, Eugène de Beauharnais, his sister Hortense and her two children, including the future Napoleon III. Although he despises the Bourbons, he promotes the accession of King Louis XVIII to the throne. And he opposes the Prussian requirements, which claim French territories such as Alsace or Flanders, preventing France from being divided.

In September 1815, he was at the origin of the Holy Alliance signed between Russia, Prussia and Austria, aimed at restoring the Ancien Régime or Old Regime in Europe, seriously damaged throughout Europe by liberal revolutionary ideology. This pact will last until his death in 1825.

Indeed, after the Congress of Vienna (from September 18, 1814 to June 9, 1815), which rearranged the European scene after the Napoleonic period, in which Alexander obtained the old Duchy of Warsaw, he sponsored the creation of the Holy Alliance in September 1815 uniting with Austria and Prussia in a pact of mutual defense of the monarchical and anti-liberal regime.

Elizaveta Alekséievna, wife of Tsar Alexander I.

Marriage

In 1793 Alexander married Luisa de Baden (baptized Elizaveta Alekséyevna), with whom he only had two daughters, who died at a young age.

Offspring

Monkey of Tsar Alexander I of Russia

By his wife Tsarina Elizabeth Alekseevna (Elizaveta Alekseevna) he had two daughters who did not reach adulthood:

• 1. Maria Aleksándrovna, great Duchess of Russia (1799-1800).
• 2. Elizaveta Aleksándrovna, great Duchess of Russia (1806-1808).

He also had nine bastard children with various mistresses:

With Sofia Vsevolzhskaya (1775-1848):

• Nikolái Lúkash (11 December 1796-20 January 1868).

With Maria Narýshkina (1779-1854):

• Zinaída Narýshkina (1806-18 May 1810).
• Sophía Narýshkina (1808-18 June 1824).
• Emanuel Naryshkin (30 July 1813-31 December 1901).

With Marguerite-Josephine Weimer (Marguerite Georges) (1787-1867):

• María Aleksándrovna Parízhya (1814-1874).
• Guillermina Alejandrina Aleksándrova (1816-1863).

With Veronica Dzierzanowska:

• Gustavo Ehrenberg (1818-1895)

With Princess Varvara Turkestanova (ru:Туркестанова, Варвара Ильинична) (1775-1819):

• Maria Turkestanova (1819-1843)

With Maria Ivanovna Katachárova (1796-1824):

• Nikolái Vasílievich Isákov (1821-1891)

Profile of your personality

Autocrat and Jacobin, mystic and mundane at the same time, he appeared to his contemporaries like a riddle that each interpreted according to his own temperament. Napoleon called him a "distrustful Byzantine." For Metternich he was crazy (and modern studies tend to consider him suffering from schizophrenia). And Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, writing about him to Lord Liverpool, gave credit to his "great qualities" but added that he was "suspicious and indecisive".

In opposing Napoleon, "the oppressor of Europe and the disturber of world peace," Alexander fantasized that he was the instrument of a divine mission. In his instructions to Nicholas Novosiltsov, his special envoy to London, the tsar set out the elaborate motivations for his policy in language that baffled the common sense of the prime minister, Pitt, just as he would later do in the Holy Alliance treaty with the minister. Foreign Affairs, Castlereagh. Even today, the document is of great interest, since in it we find formulated for the first time, in an official dispatch, these exalted ideals of his international policy, which played an important role in world affairs at the close of the revolutionary era. It was published at the end of the 19th century in the compilation of Nicholas II and the Hague conference. The reason for the war, Alexander argued, was not just the liberation of France, but "the universal triumph of the sacred rights of humanity."

Mystery about his death

San Fiódor Kuzmich

Alexander officially passed away on December 1, 1825 in Taganrog; his grave is in Saint Petersburg. The tsar's death was always covered with suspicion. He allegedly died during a trip to the Crimea, and the legend circulated that he had faked death in order to retire to lead the life of a hermit (under the name of Fyodor Kuzmich). His grave, opened in 1926, was found empty.

Hearing of Alexander I as a gentleman of the Spanish branch of the Golden Toys.

Titles, honors and appointments

Russian Awards

• Grand Master of the Order of Saint Andrew (Russian Empire).
• Grand Master of the Order of Saint George (Russian Empire).
• Grand Master of the Order of the White Eagle (Russian Empire).
• Grand Master of the Order of Saint Alexander Nevski (Russian Empire).
• Grand Master of the Order of Santa Ana (Russian Empire).
• Grand Master of the Order of San Estanislao (Russian Empire).
• Grand Master of the Order of St. Vladimiro (Russian Empire).

Foreign Awards

• Great Knight of the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of St. George (Kingdom of the Two Sicilies).
• Big Cross Knight of the Royal Order of San Fernando and Merit (Kingdom of the Two Sicilies).

Ancestors

Succession