Russia Against Napoleon

The Russo-French Alliance

After ratifying the treaties of peace and alliance with France Alexander left Tilsit and travelled back to Petersburg, where he arrived on 16 July 1807. The previous day the capital had witnessed a twenty-one-gun salute and a service in the Kazan cathedral to celebrate peace. Similar celebrations occurred in Moscow, where Bishop Augustin put a good face on events by telling his congregation that Napoleon had been so impressed by the Russian troops’ courage that he had decided he needed Russia for a friend. The Orthodox Church did have some explaining to do since, on the orders of the government, it had been declaiming from the pulpit for many months against Napoleon the Antichrist. Apparently, the story now went round many Russian villages that the tsar had met Napoleon in the middle of a river in order to wash away his sins.¹

Alexander could afford for the moment to ignore the bafflement of his peasant subjects over his sudden friendship for the former Antichrist. He could not be so nonchalant about the opinion of the Moscow and Petersburg aristocracy, and of the generals and Guards officers who formed a key element in this elite. In the autumn of 1807 Count Nikolai Rumiantsev took over as foreign minister. Subsequently he told the French ambassador, the Marquis de Caulaincourt, that

the Emperor Napoleon and in general everyone in France makes a mistake about this country. They don’t know it well and believe that the emperor governs as a despot, whose simple decree is enough to change public opinion or at least to determine all decisions…[This] is wrong. For all his goodness and the gentleness of character for which he is famous, the Emperor Alexander perhaps imposes his views on public opinion more than any previous monarch. The Empress Catherine, who was beyond question the most imperious of women and the most absolute sovereign who ever reigned, did this much less than him. Of that you can be sure. Nor did she ever find herself in such difficult circumstances as he now faces. She understood this country so well that she won over all elements of public opinion. As she herself once told me, she handled carefully even the spirit of opposition of a few old ladies.²

In fact Rumiantsev was preaching to the converted and the French embassy in Petersburg kept a very wary eye on public opinion. It was widely believed that the coups which overthrew Alexander’s father and grandfather had been motivated in part by opposition to their foreign policies, though Caulaincourt himself stressed the manner in which these monarchs had infringed the personal interests of key members of the Petersburg aristocracy. In his dispatches he told Napoleon that memories of Emperor Paul and dislike of the Grand Duke Constantine were some guarantee against an attempt to overthrow Alexander I. When the Russian monarch travelled to Erfurt to meet Napoleon in September 1808, Caulaincourt noted that with the totally dependable Dmitrii Lobanov-Rostovsky as military governor of Petersburg and the very loyal Fedor Uvarov in command of the Guards nothing untoward was likely to happen in the emperor’s absence. Subsequently, however, the ambassador noted that the cultivation of Russian nationalist circles by the emperor’s sister, Grand Duchess Catherine, represented a potential threat to the throne. With the exception of some rather brief moments, above all in 1809, Caulaincourt stressed that, though few Russians wanted war, the support of Alexander and Rumiantsev for the French alliance made them isolated and unpopular figures in Petersburg.³

To some extent hostility to France was due to a sense of injured pride. Eighteenth-century Russia had won its wars, so Austerlitz and Friedland were a humiliating shock. Needless to say, such public humiliation was all the harder to bear for proud aristocrats brought up to feel an acute concern for their honour and reputation. Prince Serge Volkonsky recalls that he and his young fellow-officers of the Chevaliers Gardes regiment burned with desire to revenge Austerlitz and took out their frustrations by breaking the windows of the French embassy and then racing off before anyone could catch them.⁴

Nor were matters necessarily much different among the army’s senior officers. Alexander’s first ambassador in Paris after Tilsit was Lieutenant-General Count Petr Tolstoy. Tolstoy was an ambassador of heroic bluntness: he was in fact not a diplomat but a fighting general and longed to escape from the Paris embassy, where in his opinion he was wasting his time on a fool’s errand. He told his superiors in Petersburg repeatedly that Napoleon (whom in general he pointedly continued to call Bonaparte) was bent on the domination of all Europe, and ‘wants to make us an Asiatic power, to push us back behind our old frontiers’. Repelled and humiliated by French arrogance and vainglory, Tolstoy came close to fighting a duel with Michel Ney after the ambassador had sung the praises of the Russian army a bit too loudly for the Frenchman’s taste and had argued that French victory in 1807 was due to luck and to overwhelming numbers.⁵

Such feelings were shared by members of Alexander’s family. Even while the emperor was negotiating at Tilsit, his sister the Grand Duchess Catherine wrote to him that Napoleon was ‘a blend of cunning, personal ambition and falseness’ who should feel honoured just to be allowed to consort with the Russian monarch. She added: ‘I wish to see her [i.e. Russia] respected, not in word but in reality, seeing that she certainly has the means and the right to be so.’ Catherine’s mother, the Dowager Empress Marie, became the centre of Petersburg aristocratic opposition to the French alliance. Most of Petersburg high society closed its doors to Caulaincourt when he first arrived and some of these doors remained closed throughout his stay, despite Alexander’s annoyance. Many French royalist émigrés lived in Petersburg or served in the Russian army. Their manners, education and style won them much sympathy in Petersburg high society and contributed to its hostility to Napoleon. Among the most prominent émigrés was the Duc de Richelieu, who became governor-general of New Russia (i.e. southern Ukraine) but returned to France after the Restoration to serve Louis XVIII as prime minister. Also to the fore were the Marquis de Traversay, who served as Minister of the Navy from 1811, and the two sons of the Count de Saint-Priest, France’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire before 1789. Best known of all was Joseph de Maistre, along with Edmund Burke the most famous political thinker of the European counter-revolution, who served as the exiled King of Sardinia’s envoy to Petersburg in these years.⁶

The ‘legitimist’ sympathies of the Petersburg drawing rooms were not just a product of snobbery and nostalgia for Old Regime France, however. They were also rooted in the sense that Napoleon’s actions were a challenge to the religious and historical principles on which their own state and society rested, as well as to any stable system of international relations in Europe. Baron Grigorii Stroganov, for example, had been Russia’s envoy to the Spanish court for many years. When Alexander requested him to continue to serve in the same capacity at the court of Joseph Bonaparte, Stroganov refused. Stroganov wrote to the emperor that Napoleon’s deposition of the Bourbons violated ‘the most sacred rights’, indeed precisely those rights on whose basis Alexander himself ruled. In kidnapping and deposing his own Spanish allies, Napoleon had also violated in the crudest manner ‘the holiness and the good faith of treaties’. If Stroganov continued to represent Russia in Madrid he would feel personally dishonoured before the Spanish people and ‘of all the sacrifices which I am ready to bear for the glory and the service of Your Imperial Majesty that of my honour is the only one which I am not in a position to offer’.⁷

In addition to these sentiments, there was a strong strain of Anglophilia in Petersburg society. Britain was seen as not just very powerful but also as the freest of the European states. Unlike other countries, Britain’s freedoms actually seemed to enhance its power, allowing the state to sustain a huge level of debt at very manageable cost. The wealth, entrenched rights and values of its aristocracy were seen as a key to both British freedom and British power, and were compared favourably with Napoleon’s bureaucratic despotism. If the Vorontsov and Stroganov families were Petersburg’s most prominent aristocratic Anglophiles, some of Alexander’s closest friends from his own generation also belonged in this camp.

In addition, Adam Smith was widely read and the British economy much admired by many of the key individuals who shaped Russian economic and financial policy. Nikolai Mordvinov, the elder statesman of Russian economic policy, was a great disciple of Smith and Ricardo for example. Dmitrii Gurev, the minister of finance, called the British system of public finance ‘one of the most extraordinary inventions of the human understanding’. All this admiration was by no means merely abstract. These men believed that Russia’s interests were closely aligned with Britain’s. Britain was the main market and the main carrier of Russian exports. In 1808–12 Mordvinov in particular was terrified that if Russia continued to adhere to Napoleon’s economic blockade of Britain these export markets would be lost for good. In his opinion mutually profitable trade relations with Britain were by no means incompatible with selective protection of fledgling Russian industries. Meanwhile not just these Anglophiles but almost all Russia’s senior diplomats in 1808–12 came to agree that Napoleon’s drive to dominate the continent was the main threat to Russian interests and that Britain was a natural ally in the face of this threat. If, unlike Petr Tolstoy, they did not bombard Petersburg with these opinions that was because they wished to keep their jobs and often sympathized with Alexander’s own view that it was in Russia’s interests to postpone the inevitable conflict with France for as long as possible.⁸

The papers of General Levin von Bennigsen, the commander-in-chief in 1807, go to the core of Russian geopolitical thinking at this time. Like most members of the ruling elite, Bennigsen supported peace in 1807 but disliked the French alliance. Equally common was his view that, although British naval power was sometimes used in ways that damaged Russian pride, French domination of continental Europe was much more of a threat to key Russian interests. In particular, it was in Napoleon’s power to re-establish a Polish state of 15 million people on Russia’s borders and this would be a huge threat to Russian security. Bennigsen also believed that if Napoleon was allowed to strangle Russia’s foreign trade then the economy would no longer be able to sustain Russia’s armed forces or the European culture of its elites. The country would revert to its pre-Petrine, semi-Asiatic condition.

In Bennigsen’s view, Britain’s global position was so strong that it would be immensely hard for Napoleon to break, even if all of continental Europe united behind this goal. A crucial factor in British global power was its hold on India, which Bennigsen considered unassailable. He argued that the British had created a European-style military system in India funded by local taxpayers. This army, ‘formed on the same principles as our European regiments, commanded by English officers, and excellently armed, manoeuvres with the precision of our grenadiers’. In the past Asiatic cavalry armies had invaded India over its north-west frontier and conquered the subcontinent but these had no chance against the Anglo-Indian infantry and artillery. Meanwhile no rival European army could reach the subcontinent because the British dominated the sea-routes and the logistical problems of getting a European-style army across Persia or Afghanistan were insurmountable. Having himself campaigned in northern Persia, Bennigsen spoke with authority on this point. The conclusion which Bennigsen drew from this analysis was that for Russia to ally with France against Britain was suicidal. In the first place French victory over Britain was flatly contrary to Russian interests. Secondly, Russian finances and the economy would disintegrate long before any economic war with Britain could be successful.⁹

The alliance with Napoleon always had many more potential enemies than friends in Petersburg. Nevertheless there were possible sources of support. Any sensible official concerned with the empire’s internal affairs knew that Russia faced many domestic problems with very inadequate resources to meet them. Hugely expensive foreign policies and wars were a disaster from this perspective. In 1808–12 the key figure in Russian internal affairs was Mikhail Speransky, whom Tolstoy – still very much the provincial aristocrat when he wrote the novel – caricatures unfairly in War and Peace. Speransky was an unlikely person to find in the top ranks of Russian government. The son of a penniless provincial priest, sheer ability had resulted in him being sent to Russia’s leading ecclesiastical academy in Petersburg. From there, his obvious career would have been as a bishop and a senior administrator in the Orthodox Church. He was plucked from this life by Aleksandr Kurakin’s brother, who made Speransky his private secretary and then transferred him to the state bureaucracy to help him in his official duties.

Speransky’s great intelligence, his skill as a draftsman of laws and memoranda, and his astonishing work ethic won him the admiration first of a range of top officials, and then of Alexander himself. Though there is no reason to doubt Alexander’s enthusiasm for Speransky, the emperor will also have realized that a chief adviser without connections in the Petersburg aristocracy posed no threat and could easily be thrown to the wolves in case of necessity. In 1808–12 Speransky was in reality the emperor’s main adviser on financial matters, the restructuring of central government, and the affairs of newly acquired Finland. In 1809–12, as Alexander began to run aspects of Russian diplomacy and espionage behind Rumiantsev’s back, he used Speransky as the conduit for secret reports designed for the monarch’s eyes alone. Alexander also discussed secretly with Speransky plans for the fundamental reform of Russian society and government, entailing both the emancipation of the serfs and the introduction of elected assemblies at central and regional level.

Any individual with this degree of imperial favour would have attracted enormous jealousy and criticism in Petersburg society. The fact that Speransky was a parvenu and lacked the time or the skill to forge useful connections made him all the more vulnerable. Rumours floated about concerning Speransky’s plans to emancipate the peasants. Some of his reforms, designed to improve administrative efficiency, damaged the interests of members of the aristocracy. Much of noble opinion saw Speransky as a ‘Jacobin’ and a worshipper of that heir of the Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte. There was little truth in this. Speransky admired some of Napoleon’s administrative and legal reforms but his plans for representative institutions were closer to English models than to Napoleon’s bureaucratic despotism. Moreover, though Speransky would have loved to be allowed to get on with domestic reform untroubled by external complications, he was under no illusions that Napoleon would leave Russia in peace to do this.¹⁰

A somewhat more real ‘Bonapartist’ was the minister of the navy, Admiral Pavel Chichagov. The admiral was a far more familiar type than Speransky in the Russian government of Alexander’s day. Though from a run-of-the-mill gentry family, Chichagov was well educated and himself the son of a prominent admiral. The French ambassador believed that Chichagov was one of the strongest supporters of the Franco-Russian alliance, and so too did many Russians. In September 1807, for instance, the admiral wrote to Alexander denouncing British maritime tyranny and hailing Napoleon’s genius. Aged only 40, still relatively young for a minister, the admiral was an intelligent and energetic man, with a lively mind. There were those who said that his conversation was more impressive than his deeds, but both Caulaincourt and Joseph de Maistre considered Chichagov to be one of the most intelligent and interesting figures in Petersburg. Among the admiral’s failings was a tendency to get somewhat carried away by his own wit and to go too far in conversation. Like most Russian noblemen, he was also very quick to take offence if he considered his pride to have been affronted. That could make him a poor subordinate and an overbearing commander. Much worse, Chichagov was generally disdainful of Russian backwardness and inclined to compare his own country unfavourably with others, above all with Napoleonic France. When he did this to a flagrant degree during a long stay in Paris, Russian diplomats there were very unamused. They kept a close eye on him in case he blurted out Russian secrets. Alexander actually shared many of Chichagov’s views, admired him and forgave him his outbursts. But by 1812 there were many knives in Petersburg long since sharpened and waiting to plunge into Chichagov’s back.¹¹

If the Russo-French alliance was to survive, however, the key group which Napoleon needed to cultivate in Petersburg was what Caulaincourt called the ‘Old Russians’ and whom one might realistically call the Russian isolationists. In almost all cases ethnic Russians and often from the older generation, these men saw no reason why Russia should involve itself in European affairs because of (as they would have whispered) Alexander’s infatuation with Queen Louise of Prussia or his fantasies of universal peace and brotherhood. In some cases a desire to avoid diplomatic and military entanglement in Europe went along with a dislike of Frenchified manners and values invading Russian society and ‘subverting’ its traditions. Many of the aristocratic isolationists, however, were highly cultivated men, as much at ease conversing in French as in Russian. Often isolationism also had its own aggressive strategic agenda. It saw expansion to the south against the Ottomans as Russia’s truly national interest and objective, looking back to the victorious wars of Catherine II as a model for future Russian grand strategy. Isolationists also recalled that the great leaders of Russian southward expansion under Catherine – field-marshals Petr Rumiantsev, Grigorii Potemkin and Alexander Suvorov – were all ethnic Russians, unlike so many of the men who commanded Alexander’s armies in the Napoleonic era.

There were parallels between these Russian isolationists and eighteenth-century British debates about grand strategy. Many English politicians demanded a truly ‘national’ policy of colonial and maritime expansion, and denounced involvement on the continent of Europe as mere pandering to the Hanoverian dynasty. Opinions which could be shouted from the rooftops in Britain could only be whispered in Russia. Nor were the Romanovs as obviously foreign as the Hanoverians. But when the male line of the dynasty died out in 1730, the succession had passed down through a daughter of Peter the Great who had married into the princely house of Holstein. The deference of Peter III and his son Paul I to the ‘Great Frederick’ and his Prussian army suggested to some Old Russians that a distinctly German and poisonous element had entered the Romanovs’ bloodstream. In August 1809, thoroughly disillusioned by Alexander’s foreign policy, Field-Marshal Prince Prozorovsky wrote to Prince Serge Golitsyn, fellow ‘Old Russian’ aristocrat and veteran of Catherine’s wars, that if Napoleon continued to trick and weaken Russia then no doubt the Prozorovskys and Golitsyns would hang on to their estates one way or another but the ‘House of Holstein’ would cease to sit on the Russian throne.¹²

The parallels between Russian and British debates on strategy reflected a basic common geopolitical reality. Britain and Russia were great powers on the European periphery. For both countries it was more profitable to use their power outside Europe, where pickings were easier and other European rivals found it almost impossible to intervene. Acquisitions in the European heartland were far more expensive to acquire and defend. By 1800, however, if both Britain and Russia could benefit from their peripheral position the key advantages rested with Britain. In terms of the security of the two empires’ core territory, the seas were a better barrier than the plains of Poland and Belorussia. To an extent, what Poland was to Russia, Ireland was to the English, in other words a vulnerable frontier territory inhabited by religious and historical enemies. Having expropriated almost the entire native elite, however, the English were confident that the Irish back door into Britain was secure unless the country was invaded by a large French army. The power of the Royal Navy made it almost certain that it would not be. No Russian statesman could feel a similar security about Poland.¹³

The British were also much better placed as regards new acquisitions on the periphery. As Russian southward expansion brought them within range of Constantinople and even sent their fleet into the eastern Mediterranean they were entering a region which other great powers considered as crucial and where they could intervene effectively to block the Russians. Moreover, though southward expansion brought Russia gains in ‘Ukraine’ and on the Black Sea shore which were of great significance, they could not compare with the enormous advance of British power between 1793 and 1815. With the French, Spanish and Dutch navies all more or less eliminated, the British were able to take over much of South America’s trade, eliminate their key rivals in India, begin to use Indian exports to break into the Chinese market and consolidate their hold on naval bases which stretched across the globe and greatly enhanced their control of international trade. The basic geopolitical realities underlying the Napoleonic era pointed towards future British global predominance, especially since geopolitics was reinforced by the first signs of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. This had to cause unease in some Russian minds. On the other hand, the overriding current geopolitical priority was that both Russian and British security would be in great danger if any other power dominated continental Europe.¹⁴

The most prominent representative of the ‘Old Russians’ between 1807 and 1812 was Count Nikolai Rumiantsev, the foreign minister in this period. Before Peter the Great’s time the Rumiantsev family had been middling gentry, far beneath the status of the princes Volkonsky, Lobanov or Golitsyn, but Nikolai’s grandfather, Aleksandr Rumiantsev, had been a close associate of Peter from childhood and throughout his reign. He died a full general, a count and a wealthy man. Peter ensured that Aleksandr Rumiantsev married into the core of the old Muscovite aristocracy. As a result, his grandson Nikolai’s connections were formidable: he was for example the first cousin of Aleksandr Kurakin.

The relationship which really mattered, however, was with Nikolai’s father, the great hero of Catherine’s reign, Field-Marshal Count Petr Rumiantsev. As the Foreign Minister once said to Caulaincourt, ‘only the hope of achieving a great benefit for his country could inspire the son of Field-Marshal Rumiantsev’ to remain in public service. Acutely conscious of his heritage, Nikolai Rumiantsev was a ferociously proud Russian patriot, determined that his country should be second to none. One aspect of his patriotism was his enormous interest in old Russian manuscripts and other artefacts. Not only did he fund the collection, publication and display of these treasures, he also participated enthusiastically in expeditions across Russia to find them. Many of the greatest old Russian and Slavic collections in contemporary Russian libraries and museums owe their origins to this remarkable man, who ultimately bequeathed his treasures to the public.¹⁵

In Rumiantsev’s youth not only had Russia been on the march southwards under his father’s command, it had also been Europe’s leading producer of iron. As Rumiantsev was well aware, however, by 1807 its relative economic position was slipping. During Rumiantsev’s service as Foreign Minister, Russia established diplomatic relations with the United States. The first American envoy to Russia was John Quincy Adams, the son of an American President and himself to hold this office in the 1820s. Rumiantsev once confided to Adams that ‘it was no subject for exaltation to a great empire that the choicest of its productions for exportation were hemp and tallow, and bees-wax and iron’. His interest in economic affairs was partly that of an immensely wealthy landowner, very aware of the impact of new farming methods in western Europe. In addition, however, he had run the empire’s canals and other waterways for many years, and had served as minister of trade since 1802. This was a unique background for a Russian foreign minister.¹⁶

For Rumiantsev, Napoleon was in one sense a sideshow, in another an opportunity. What really concerned him was growing British domination of the global economy. The foreign minister welcomed Napoleon’s economic blockade of Britain: ‘It would be better that the whole commerce of the world should cease to exist for ten years, than to abandon it for ever to the control of England.’ As he told Adams, Russia would not go the way of India. As minister of trade, he had introduced new laws to ensure that foreigners did not take over Russian domestic trade or production. Meanwhile British control of Russian overseas trade threatened ‘a dominion, something like they had in India’ and this ‘could not be endured’. Rumiantsev cultivated the United States both as an alternative carrier of Russian trade and as a potential check on British domination of the global economy. He was constantly on the search for new markets for Russian goods in the Americas and China.¹⁷

Rumiantsev faced an uphill task, however. Granted that Napoleon’s throttling of European trade offered involuntary protection to a number of nascent Russian industries such as sugar production, was Russian society or the Russian economy yet in a position to take advantage of this? Of course Caulaincourt welcomed Rumiantsev’s ideas, but even he believed that the absence of a middle class and of large numbers of skilled artisans would heavily constrain Russian economic potential. To a great extent, too, the Industrial Revolution depended on the marriage of coal and iron, but in Russia only the coming of the railways could span the distance between the country’s huge deposits. In more immediate and policy-related terms, Rumiantsev came to despair of Napoleon’s Continental System, the Pan-European blockade of British trade by which the emperor hoped to bring his arch-enemy to its knees. In Rumiantsev’s opinion it was actually harming Britain’s competitors and handing global trade to the British on a plate.¹⁸

In political terms too the success of Rumiantsev’s strategy lay in Napoleon’s hands. Isolationism was only a viable strategy if Napoleon refrained from threatening Russian security. Above all, in Rumiantsev’s view, that meant no encouragement to the Poles. Any restored Polish state would be bound to want back its pre-partition frontiers, thereby depriving Russia of much of Ukraine and Belorussia. As he told Caulaincourt, though all his own political capital had been invested in the French alliance, ‘I will myself be the first person to tell the Emperor to sacrifice everything rather than consent to Poland’s re-establishment or to agree to any arrangements which even indirectly lead to its restoration or convey any idea about it’.¹⁹

If Alexander himself did leave Tilsit with any illusions about the French alliance they were soon dissipated. The first dispute revolved around Moldavia and Wallachia, Ottoman provinces occupied by the Russian army during the ongoing war. The Russians wished to annex them to compensate for the costs of the war started by the Ottomans in 1806. Very possibly the arrival of Nikolai Rumiantsev as Foreign Minister increased their appetite for expansion at Turkey’s expense. Since this acquisition was not written into the Treaty of Tilsit the French claimed compensation for themselves to balance Russia’s gain. Alexander believed that Napoleon had encouraged him to annex these provinces in conversations at Tilsit, so he was taken aback by this demand. What truly appalled him, however, was the French claim for Silesia as compensation. Not only was Silesia far more valuable than the two Turkish provinces, it was also the richest remaining province of Prussia. To remove it would both dishonour Alexander before Frederick William and reduce Prussia to the status of a petty principality, totally incapable of shielding Russia’s western borders. In addition, Silesia was situated between Saxony and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, whose sovereign was the Saxon king. The Saxon-Polish monarchy was Napoleon’s leading outpost and client-state in eastern Europe. If (as was likely) Napoleon added Silesia with its large Polish population to the Saxon-Polish monarchy then Russian fears of a reborn Polish threat would increase enormously.

This dispute over the Ottoman ‘principalities’ was sidelined by beginning Franco-Russian negotiations on the future of the whole Ottoman Empire. These revealed both Rumiantsev’s great appetite for Ottoman territory and total French unwillingness to give Russia Constantinople and access to the Mediterranean. These discussions were then overtaken by the crises caused by French and Russian efforts to implement the terms of the Treaty of Tilsit which called for the imposition of the Continental System on the rest of Europe. The Russian share of this enterprise was to impose the Continental System on the Swedes, which they achieved (at least on paper) as a result of defeating Sweden in the war of 1808–9. From the Russian perspective, the key justification for this expensive war was that it would lead to the annexation of Finland, thereby making Petersburg far more secure against Swedish attack in the event of any future conflicts. The peace treaty was signed at Friedrichsham in September 1809: Alexander signalled his satisfaction by promoting Rumiantsev to chancellor (the top position in the Russian civil administration) and granting the Finns a generous degree of autonomy.

Meanwhile the French attempt to impose the Continental System on Iberia had gone disastrously wrong. The Portuguese government and royal family fled to Brazil, escorted by the British navy. Now completely dependent on British goodwill, they immediately opened the whole Portuguese Empire to British trade. Far worse were the results of Napoleon’s deposition of the Spanish Bourbons and attempted takeover of Spain. This exposed Alexander and Rumiantsev to even more criticism in Petersburg society for supporting Napoleon. It opened up not just Spain but also the Spanish Empire to British trade, thereby driving a further enormous hole into the Continental System. The Spanish insurrection also persuaded the Austrians that this might be their last opportunity to strike while Napoleon was absorbed elsewhere and their finances could still sustain the army of a great power.

Alexander had explained his support for the Continental System to Frederick William by arguing that ‘I have reason to hope that this will be a means to hasten the general peace of which Europe has so urgent a need. So long as the war between France and England continues, there will be no tranquillity for the continent’s other states.’ Some of his advisers had warned him all along that it was fanciful to imagine that even combined Franco-Russian pressure could make Britain negotiate. Now Alexander himself was forced to acknowledge that Napoleon’s policy had made the peace which Russia needed more remote than ever. France’s blundering aggression in Spain had given Britain ‘immense advantages’ and spurred Austria into a military build-up which could unleash further war on the continent.²⁰

It was in the middle of this threatening international situation that Alexander travelled to Erfurt in central Germany in September 1808 for the long-awaited follow-up meeting to Tilsit. Amidst great festivities and a cascade of mutual admiration in public, the relationship between the two monarchs had noticeably chilled since the previous year. To an extent this simply reflected the fact that Russia’s relative position had improved, so there was more room for bargaining and less need for unlimited deference to Napoleon. Russia had long since recovered from the defeat of Friedland. French armies were no longer deployed threateningly on her borders. Instead they were struggling in Spain or awaiting the possibility of a new war with Austria. France needed Russia and therefore abandoned her opposition to Russian annexation of Moldavia and Wallachia. In return, Alexander promised to support Napoleon in the event of an Austrian attack but since this was already implicit in the Treaty of Tilsit the Russians were not making any real concession.

Much more interesting than the rather meaningless negotiations and agreements at Erfurt were the letters between Alexander and his family concerning the meeting with Napoleon, for they reveal much about his innermost thoughts. One week before the emperor’s departure his mother had written him a long letter imploring him not to go. In the light of Napoleon’s kidnapping of the Spanish royal family, the Empress Marie was nervous about her son’s safety in a foreign town garrisoned by French troops and controlled by a man devoid of any scruples or limits. Though she admitted that peace had been a necessity at Tilsit, she spelled out the dangerous subsequent results of the alliance with France. Napoleon had manipulated Russia into waging an expensive and immoral war against Sweden, while blocking peace with the Ottomans and even trying to insinuate himself into Russo-Persian relations. Still worse were the domestic consequences of the disastrous break with Britain and adherence to the Continental System. Commerce had collapsed and prices of basic necessities had shot up, halving the real value of salaries and forcing officials to steal in order to feed their families. Declining state revenues and the demoralization and corruption of government officials threatened a crisis. However, Napoleon’s difficulties in Spain and Austrian rearmament offered Russia a chance to unite with France’s enemies and end her dominion of Europe. At such a moment, argued the empress, it would be disastrous for Alexander’s prestige and Russia’s interests if he made a pilgrimage to visit Napoleon and consolidate the Franco-Russian alliance.²¹

Marie’s arguments were not new. Many of Alexander’s diplomats could have made exactly the same points, and Count Tolstoy had indeed frequently done so in his dispatches from Paris. Alexander could ignore his officials much more easily than his mother, however. Though often exasperated by Marie, he was at heart not just a loyal and polite son but also a devoted one. So before departing for Erfurt he set out and justified his policies in a long handwritten letter to her.

Alexander opened by stating that in a matter of such huge importance, the only consideration had to be Russia’s interests and well-being, to which all his cares were devoted. It would be ‘criminal’ if he allowed himself to be swayed by ignorant, shallow and shifting public opinion. Instead he must consult his own conscience and reason, looking realities squarely in the eye and not giving way to false hopes or emotions. The basic reality at present was that France was immensely powerful, more powerful and better placed than even Russia and Austria combined. If even republican France in the 1790s, weakened by misgovernment and civil war, could defeat all Europe, what must one say now about the French Empire, led by an autocratic sovereign who was also a military genius and sustained by an army of veterans hardened by fifteen years of war? It was an illusion to think that a few setbacks in Spain could seriously shake this power.

At present Russia’s salvation lay in avoiding conflict with Napoleon, which could only be done by making him believe that Russia shared his interests. ‘All our efforts must be devoted to this so that we can breathe freely for some time. During this precious time we can build up our resources and our forces. But we must do this in complete silence and not in making our armaments and preparations public or in declaiming in public against this man whom we distrust.’ Not to go to a meeting with Napoleon which had been planned for so long would arouse his suspicions and could prove fatal at such a moment of international tension. If Austria started a war now, it would be blind to its own interests and weaknesses. Everything must be done to save Austria from this folly and to preserve her resources until the moment arrived when they could be used for the general good. But this moment had not yet come and, if his expedition to Erfurt resulted in ‘stopping so deplorable a catastrophe’ as Austria’s defeat and destruction, it would repay with interest all the unpleasant aspects of meeting with Napoleon.²²

There is good reason to believe that in this letter to his mother Alexander was speaking from the heart. Knowing her loathing for Napoleon, however, it is possible that he was exaggerating his dislike and distrust of the French monarch. Alexander had no such reason for pretence when writing to his sister Catherine, who was probably the person whom he trusted more than anyone else in the world. After departing from Erfurt and bidding an unctuous farewell to Napoleon he wrote to her that ‘Bonaparte thinks that I am nothing but an idiot. “They laugh longest who laugh last!” I put all my trust in God.’²³

During the six months which followed the meeting at Erfurt the main aim of Russian foreign policy was to avoid a Franco-Austrian war. Alexander and Rumiantsev were convinced that if war came, Austrian hopes of effective help from risings in Germany or British landings would prove false. The Habsburg army would certainly be defeated and Austria would either be destroyed or weakened to such a degree that she would be forced to become a French satellite. Russia would then be the only independent great power left to oppose Napoleon’s domination of the whole European continent. The emperor remained committed to the French alliance as the only way to buy time for Russia. If Petersburg openly sided with Austria not merely would Napoleon destroy the Habsburg army before Russian help could arrive, he would then turn all his forces against a Russia which was still far from ready for a life-and-death struggle.

Alexander refused Napoleon’s demand for concerted Franco-Russian warnings in Vienna, partly because he did not want to insult the Austrians and partly because he feared that too strong Russian support might even inspire Napoleon himself to start a war aimed at eliminating the Habsburg monarchy or simply at raiding the Austrian treasury to pay for the upkeep of his bloated army. Nevertheless he did warn the Austrians that if they attacked Napoleon Russia’s obligations under the Treaty of Tilsit would force her to fight on France’s side. On the other hand, since he believed that Austrian armaments could only be explained by fear of French aggression, he promised that, if the Austrians partially disarmed, Russia would publicly guarantee to come to their assistance in the event of a French attack. Right down to the outbreak of war on 10 April 1809 Alexander found it almost impossible to believe that Austria would take the suicidal risk of attacking Napoleon. When this actually happened, the emperor blamed the Habsburg government for allowing itself to be carried away by public opinion and its own emotions.²⁴

The Austrian attack on Napoleon left Alexander no alternative but to declare war. Had he failed to meet his clear treaty obligations the Russo-French alliance would have collapsed and Russia and France would probably have been at war within a matter of weeks. While in theory Austria’s enemy, Russia’s overriding war aim was that the Austrian Empire should be weakened as little as possible. The last thing Russia wanted to do was damage the Austrian army, since its survival was the main guarantee against Napoleon imposing crushing peace terms on the Habsburgs. In addition, the Russians were strongly opposed to any addition of territory to the Duchy of Warsaw. The Russian army which invaded Austrian Galicia therefore devoted much of its efforts to avoiding the Habsburg forces and impeding the advance of the Duchy’s Polish army, which was supposedly its ally. Of course it was impossible to hide such tactics, especially when Russian correspondence intercepted by the Poles made their intentions clear. Napoleon was furious and never really believed again in the usefulness of the Russian alliance. Predictably, the war ended in Austria’s defeat. In the peace treaty of Schoönbrunn, signed in October 1809, Napoleon revenged himself on Alexander by handing a large slice of Galicia to the Poles.

The war between Austria and France was the beginning of the end of the Russo-French alliance but two developments over the winter of 1809–10 disguised this for a time. Napoleon agreed that his ambassador in Russia, Armand de Caulaincourt, should draft a Franco-Russian convention which would lay to rest Russian fears about Poland’s possible restoration. More or less simultaneously he divorced his wife, the Empress Josephine, and sought the hand of Alexander’s sister. Rumours that Napoleon was in pursuit of a Russian grand duchess had been floating around for some time. In March 1808 a very worried Empress Marie had asked the ambassador in Paris to find out whether this was a real danger. At that time the obvious target would have been the Grand Duchess Catherine. The marriage of this extremely feisty and strong-willed young woman with Napoleon would have been interesting and combustible. For all her ambition, however, Catherine could not stomach the idea of marrying the Corsican bandit. Perhaps to avoid any possibility of this, in 1809 she married her distant cousin, Prince George of Oldenburg, instead. This left the only possible Russian bride as the Grand Duchess Anna, just turned 16 when Napoleon’s proposal arrived.²⁵

Napoleon’s request for Anna’s hand was very unwelcome to Alexander. He neither wanted to marry his sister to a Bonaparte nor to insult the French emperor by refusing to do so. Paul I had decreed in his will that his daughters’ marriages should be in their mother’s hands and in a sense this was a glorious excuse for Alexander to dodge the issue, though by pleading inability to impose his will on a mere woman he confirmed all Napoleon’s suspicions about his weakness. Alexander rather dreaded a tantrum from the empress on this issue but in fact mother and son saw eye to eye on the matter and this was just one sign of their growing agreement on political questions. Of course Marie was horrified by the idea of the marriage but she fully understood the dangers of annoying Napoleon. She wrote to her daughter Catherine that Alexander had told her that Russia’s western frontier was very vulnerable, with no fortresses to cover the likely invasion routes: ‘The Emperor told me that if God granted him five years’ peace, he would have ten fortresses, and his finances in order.’ The Empress accepted the fact that it was the duty of the imperial family to sacrifice themselves for the good of the state but she could not bear the thought of losing her daughter, who was still a child, to Napoleon. The fact that two of her older daughters had been married young and that both had died in childbirth strengthened this revulsion. In the end the Grand Duchess Catherine came up with a compromise: Napoleon would not be refused outright but merely told that, having lost two daughters, the Empress was determined that her last one should not marry before the age of 18.²⁶

By the time the Russian semi-rejection reached Napoleon in February 1810 he had long since opted for his second-best option, namely marriage with the daughter of the Austrian emperor, the Archduchess Marie-Louise. Alexander stifled both his resentment that Napoleon had been simultaneously negotiating with both courts and his deep fear that an Austrian marriage would contribute to the breakdown of the Franco-Russian alliance and Russia’s isolation. Almost simultaneously he was shocked to learn that Napoleon had refused to ratify the convention barring the restoration of Poland. Napoleon assured the Russians that he had no intention of restoring a Polish kingdom but could not sign a convention which bound France to stop anyone else, including the Poles themselves, from doing so. In a sense the dispute over the convention’s wording was nonsensical: no one could hold Napoleon to any agreement he signed and his record of fidelity to treaties was not impressive. In a way, however, that made his refusal even to pretend to meet Russian wishes as regards Poland even more suspicious in Russian eyes. From this moment on Franco-Russian relations went into a steep decline, which continued until the outbreak of war in June 1812. It was no coincidence that in early March 1810 the new minister of war, Mikhail Barclay de Tolly, drafted his first memorandum on measures for the defence of Russia’s western border from French attack.²⁷

Meanwhile the Continental System was beginning to cause Russia major difficulties. Alexander recognized always that Russian adherence to Napoleon’s economic blockade of Britain was ‘the basis of our alliance’ with France. To restore relations with Britain would be to breach the core of the Treaty of Tilsit and make war with Napoleon inevitable. For that reason he refrained from doing this until French troops actually crossed his border in June 1812. By 1810, however, it was clear that something had to be done to reduce the damage being caused to Russia by the Continental System.²⁸

The biggest single problem was the collapsing value of the paper ruble, which by 1811 was almost the only currency in use in the empire’s Russian heartlands. In June 1804 the paper ruble had been worth more than three-quarters of its silver equivalent: by June 1811 it was valued at less than one-quarter. This had two key causes. In the first place, the only way the state could pay for its enormous military expenditures in 1805–10 was by printing more and more paper money. Secondly, the Continental System, added to general economic and political uncertainties, had resulted in a collapse in business confidence. Even the silver ruble lost one-fifth of its value against the pound sterling in 1807–12. The value of the paper ruble on the foreign exchanges plummeted. This had a dramatic effect on the cost of sustaining Russian armies fighting in Finland, Moldavia, the Caucasus and Poland: Caulaincourt reckoned that the campaign against the Swedes was costing Alexander the equivalent of fifteen French silver francs per man per day, commenting that ‘the Swedish war is ruining Russia’. By 1809 state income was less than half of expenditure and crisis was looming. The real value of the government’s tax income that year was 73 per cent of what it had been five years before. At a time when Russia needed to prepare for war against Napoleon’s empire this was nothing short of a potential catastrophe.²⁹

The government’s response to this crisis took a number of forms. A resounding statement was issued pledging that the paper rubles were seen as a state debt and would be redeemed. No more printing of paper money was to be permitted. All unnecessary expenditures were to be cut and taxes raised. Above all, the import of all luxury or inessential items was to be banned outright or charged prohibitive duties. Meanwhile encouragement and protection would be given to neutral ships docking at Russian ports and carrying Russian exports. The emergency taxes brought in little cash and when war broke out again in 1812 the pledge on new printing of paper money had to be forgotten. But the ban on imports and the encouragement of neutral shipping did make an immediate impact on Russian trade and finance.

Unfortunately, they also made a big impact on Napoleon. He claimed – in fact falsely – that French imports to Russia were being targeted. With more truth he argued that neutral ships were being used as a cover for trade with Britain. Since he himself at this very time was annexing much of north Germany in order to tighten controls on trade, Russian and French policy was diametrically opposed. Alexander refused to back down in the face of French protests, however. He argued that necessity forced these changes and that it was his right as a sovereign ruler to determine tariffs and trade rules so long as these did not contravene his treaty obligations.

Dire financial crisis as well as Russian pride was involved in his stubbornness. Both the emperor and Rumiantsev might have been more inclined to compromise had they not come to the correct conclusion that the Continental System had largely been transformed from a measure of economic war against Britain into a policy whereby France bled the rest of Europe white in order to boost its own trade and revenues. At a time when Napoleon was demanding the virtual elimination of Russian foreign trade, he was issuing more and more licences for French merchants to trade with Britain. To rub salt into Russian wounds, the occasional French vessel armed with such licences even tried to sell British goods in Russia. As Caulaincourt told Napoleon, the Russians could hardly be expected to accept the costs of France’s economic war with Britain when France itself was increasingly evading them. The Continental System’s effects had long since been denounced by many Russian statesmen. By early 1812, however, even Rumiantsev admitted that Napoleon’s policy lacked any honesty or coherence, telling John Quincy Adams that ‘the system of licences is founded upon falsehood and immorality’.³⁰

By now, however, the key issue had long since become not specific sources of disagreement between France and Russia but the clear evidence that Napoleon was planning a massive invasion of the tsar’s empire. At the beginning of January 1812 the French minister of war boasted that Napoleon’s army had never before been so well equipped, trained and supplied for a forthcoming war: ‘We have been making preparations for more than fifteen months.’ In keeping with the general level of French security before 1812 the boast was made within earshot of a Russian informant. The Russians were in fact exceptionally well informed about French intentions and preparations. Already in the summer of 1810 a number of young and usually very competent officers had been sent as attachés in the Russian missions scattered throughout Germany’s princely courts. Their job was to gather intelligence. Within Germany the greatest source of intelligence was the Russian mission in Berlin, since January 1810 headed by Christoph Lieven. The majority of Napoleon’s units preparing to invade Russia either travelled across Prussia or deployed within it. Since the Prussians loathed the French it was not difficult to gain abundant information about all these units and their movements.³¹

By far the most important source of intelligence, however, were Russia’s diplomatic and military representatives in Paris. Petr Tolstoy was recalled in October 1808 and replaced as ambassador to Napoleon by Aleksandr Kurakin. By 1810, however, Kurakin had been partly sidelined not just by Napoleon but also by Alexander and Rumiantsev. In part this was because the ambassador, already a martyr to gout, was badly burned in a fire at the Austrian embassy early in 1810 during a great ball to celebrate Napoleon’s marriage to the Archduchess Marie-Louise. It was also, however, because Kurakin was overshadowed by two exceptionally able younger Russian diplomats in Paris.

One of these men was Count Karl von Nesselrode, who served as deputy head of mission under first Tolstoy and then Kurakin. Nesselrode in fact was secretly in direct communication with Alexander via Mikhail Speransky. The other Russian was Aleksandr Chernyshev, not a diplomat but an officer of the Chevaliers Gardes, an aide-de-camp of Alexander I and the emperor’s former page. When first appointed deputy head of mission in Paris Nesselrode was 27 years old. When Chernyshev was first sent by Alexander with personal messages for Napoleon he was only 22. Partly as a result of their brilliant performance during these crucial years in Paris both men made outstanding careers. Ultimately Nesselrode was to serve as foreign minister and Chernyshev as war minister for decades.

In certain respects the two young men were very different. Karl Nesselrode came from an aristocratic family from the Rhineland. His father’s career in the service of the Elector Palatine ended in dramatic style when the elector took objection to his wife’s infatuation with young Count Wilhelm. After serving the kings of France and Prussia, Wilhelm von Nesselrode worked as Russian minister in Portugal, where his son Karl was born and christened as an Anglican at the church of the British legation in Lisbon. Not until late adolescence did Karl Nesselrode have any experience of life in Russia but his subsequent marriage to the daughter of the finance minister, Dmitrii Gurev, strengthened his position in Petersburg society. Nesselrode was a calm, tactful and even at times self-effacing man. That led some observers to miss his great intelligence, subtlety and determination.

No one ever called Aleksandr Chernyshev self-effacing. On the contrary, he was a genius at self-promotion. Chernyshev came from the Russian aristocracy. An uncle, Aleksandr Lanskoy, had been one of Catherine II’s lovers. Aleksandr Chernyshev first gained the Emperor Alexander’s attention at a ball given by Prince Kurakin to celebrate the tsar’s coronation in 1801. The poise, wit and confidence of the 15-year-old immediately struck the emperor and resulted in Chernyshev’s selection as an imperial page. This was to be a fitting start to the career of an elegant and handsome man who glittered in society and always loved the limelight. Chernyshev once wrote of a fellow-officer that he was ‘full of that noble ambition which obliges any individual who feels it to make himself known’. This certainly was a self-portrait too. But Chernyshev was much more than mere ambition and glitter: he was a man of outstanding intelligence, courage and resolution. Though an excellent soldier, in common with other intelligent aristocratic officers of his day his vision was far broader than the narrow military world. Just as Nesselrode’s reports sometimes discussed grand strategy, so too Chernyshev was deeply aware of the political context of Napoleonic warfare.³²

Together the two young men ran the Russian espionage operation in Paris. It helped that they saw eye to eye as regards French intentions and became firm friends. On the whole, as one would expect, Nesselrode’s sources were mostly diplomatic and Chernyshev’s most often military but there were many overlaps. Nesselrode, for example, procured one report on the military resources of the Duchy of Warsaw. He spent a good deal of money buying secret documents, paying 3,000– 4,000 francs for some memoranda. The serving French minister of police, Joseph Fouché, and the former foreign minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, both appear to have been providers of these materials but whether there were other intermediaries and precisely how payments were arranged and documents acquired are matters which Nesselrode – very sensibly – did not go into in his reports.

The information he bought or otherwise acquired covered a range of topics. One report, for instance, concerned Napoleon’s eccentricities, eating habits and growing forgetfulness during a period at the palace of Rambouillet. Given the extent to which the survival of Napoleon’s empire and the fate of Europe hung on this one man’s life and health such reports were significant. Nesselrode begged Speransky to ensure that only he and the emperor saw or mentioned this material. These details of Napoleon’s behaviour were so private that any leak would result in his source being revealed. Nesselrode made a similar plea for total secrecy about another purchased memorandum detailing intelligence operations in Russia’s western borderlands and naming many names. He added that his source for this document was extremely valuable and could produce further such documents if protected. The crucial point was that Russian counter-intelligence must watch the individuals mentioned but stage its arrests in a manner to protect his source at all costs.³³

Probably the single most important document bought by Nesselrode was a top secret memorandum on future French policy submitted by the French foreign minister, Champagny, to Napoleon at the emperor’s request on 16 March 1810, in other words at precisely the crucial turning point when the plan to marry a Russian princess had failed, Napoleon had refused to ratify the convention on Poland, and Barclay de Tolly was drawing up his first report on the defence of Russia’s western frontier. Champagny wrote that geopolitics and trade meant that Britain was Russia’s natural ally and a rapprochement between the two powers was to be expected. France must return to its traditional policy of building up Turkey, Poland and Sweden. It must, for instance, ensure that the Turks were kept ready as allies for a future war with Russia. Indeed, French agents were already working quietly on the Ottomans to this end.

As regards Poland, even Champagny’s more modest scenario was to increase the power of the King of Saxony, who was also Grand Duke of Warsaw, by giving him Silesia. A second scenario, which Champagny called ‘more grandiose and decisive and perhaps more worthy of Your Majesty’s genius’, envisaged a full-scale restoration of Poland after a victorious war with Russia. This would entail pushing the Russian border back beyond the river Dnieper, turning Austria eastwards against Russia and compensating it in Illyria for Polish lands it would have to give to the new Polish kingdom. In all circumstances Prussia must be destroyed since it was an outpost of Russian influence in Europe. Within a matter of weeks the memorandum was on Alexander’s desk. In the circumstances its contents were little short of dynamite.³⁴

Aleksandr Chernyshev also had a number of permanent, paid agents. One of them worked in the council of state near the heart of Napoleon’s government, another was in military administration, and a third served in a key bureau of the war ministry. There may well have been more, at least on an occasional basis. The published documents provide rather more details about the content of their reports than is the case with most of the memoranda purchased by Nesselrode. We have everything from general memoranda on the domestic political situation and the position in Spain to detailed information about the redeployment of artillery to infantry battalions, the organization of transport and rear services for future campaigns, and reports on new arms and equipment.

Some of these documents bore explicitly on the coming war with Russia. Chernyshev reported that Napoleon was rapidly increasing his cavalry arm, his measures proving ‘how much he fears the superiority of our cavalry’. Special wagons – larger and stronger than the previous models – were being built to survive Russian conditions. Chernyshev disguised himself to get into one of the workshops where they were being constructed and drew sketches. He reported that one of his sources stated that Napoleon intended to deliver the decisive blow by his central column, which would advance on Vilna under the emperor’s own command. He expected to be able to recruit large numbers of Polish soldiers in Russia’s western borderlands. Probably Chernyshev’s most valuable agent was the officer in the heart of the war ministry who had worked previously for the Russians but whom Chernyshev now exploited to maximum effect. Every month the ministry printed a secret book listing the numbers, movements and deployment of every regiment in the army. On each occasion a copy was delivered to Chernyshev, which he re-copied overnight. The Russians could follow the redeployment of Napoleon’s army eastwards in precise detail. Given the sheer scale and cost of this redeployment one could hardly imagine that it would end without a war, as Chernyshev himself remarked.³⁵

Both Chernyshev and Nesselrode were far more than mere purchasers of secret memoranda. They moved in Paris society, gleaning an immense amount of information along the way. Some but by no means all of this information was provided by Frenchmen who disliked Napoleon’s regime. Chernyshev in particular was accepted into the heart of Napoleon’s own family and intimate circle. King Frederick William wrote to Alexander that Prussian diplomats reported that Chernyshev’s ‘relations with many individuals provide him with means and opportunities that no one else possesses’. Because of their intelligence and political sophistication Nesselrode and Chernyshev could evaluate the huge amounts of information they received and encapsulate it in the very shrewd appreciations they sent to Petersburg. Both men, for instance, were at pains to disabuse Alexander of any illusions that Napoleon would not or could not attack Russia so long as the war in Spain continued. They stressed the enormous resources he controlled but also the implications of his domestic problems for his campaign in Russia. Both men reported that the longer the war dragged on and the further Napoleon was pulled into the Russian interior the more desperate his situation would become.³⁶

The last report that Chernyshev submitted to Barclay de Tolly from Paris gives one a flavour of his overall views and methods, as well as of the aristocratic confidence with which this young colonel wrote to a minister far his senior in age and rank. He noted that ‘I speak often to officers who are of great merit and knowledge and who have no affection for the head of the French government. I have asked them about what strategy would be best in the coming war, taking into account the theatre of operations, the strength and the character of our adversary.’ With one accord these Frenchmen had told him that Napoleon would long for big battles and rapid victories, so the Russians should avoid giving him what he wanted and should instead harass him with their light forces. The French officers told him that ‘the system we should follow in this war is the one of which Fabius and indeed Lord Wellington offer the best examples. It is true that our task will be more difficult in that the theatre of operations is for the most part open countryside.’ Partly for that reason, it was crucial to have large reserve forces held well in the rear so that the war could not be lost by a single battle. But if the Russians could ‘sustain this war for three campaigns then the victory will certainly be ours, even if we don’t win great victories, and Europe will be delivered from its oppressor’. Chernyshev added that this was very much his own view too. Russia must mobilize all its resources, religion and patriotism included, to sustain a long war. ‘Napoleon’s goal and his hopes are all directed towards concentrating sufficient strength to deliver crushing blows and decide the matter in a single campaign. He feels strongly that he cannot remain away from Paris for more than one year and that he would be lost if this war lasted for two or three years.’³⁷

From the summer of 1810 onwards it was clear to Alexander and most of his key advisers that war was inevitable, and sooner rather than later. At best its outbreak might be postponed for a year or so. In these circumstances the key point was to prepare as effectively as possible to fight the coming war. Preparation for war occurred in three distinct spheres: there were the purely military plans and preparations (to be discussed in the next chapter); the diplomatic efforts to ensure that Russia fought Napoleon with as many friends and as few enemies as possible; and, last but not least, the government needed to create the greatest possible degree of internal unity and consensus if Russia was to survive the enormous shock of Napoleon’s invasion. Though in principle distinct, the military, diplomatic and domestic political spheres in fact overlapped. For example, whether or not Prussia fought in the Russian or enemy camp depended greatly on whether Alexander adopted an offensive or defensive military strategy.

Inevitably too, as war loomed, the influence of the army and, above all, of Mikhail Barclay de Tolly grew. The war minister invaded the diplomatic sphere by, for example, insisting on the need to end the war with the Ottomans immediately. He also stressed the key importance of raising the morale and national pride of the population. In an important letter to Alexander in early February 1812 Barclay noted that, apart from narrowly military preparations,

we must try to raise the morale and spirit of Russia’s own population and arouse its commitment to a war on whose outcome Russia’s very salvation and existence will depend. I make bold to add here that for the last twenty years we have been doing all we can to suppress everything that is truly national but a great nation which changes its customs and values overnight will quickly go into decline unless the government stops this process and takes measures for the nation’s resurrection. And can anything aid this process better than love for one’s sovereign and one’s country, a feeling of pride at the thought that one is Russian in heart and soul? These feelings can only be brought forth if the government takes the lead in this matter.³⁸

Mikhail Barclay de Tolly was of course not an ethnic Russian. Originally of Scottish origin, his family had settled in the Baltic provinces in the mid-seventeenth century. To most Russians he was just another Baltic German. During the 1812 campaign this made him the target of savage attacks and libels by many Russians. But Barclay’s advice to Alexander in February 1812 echoed exactly what the nationalists in the ‘Old Russian’ and ‘isolationist’ camp had been saying for many years. The best-known public figures in the ‘Old Russian’ camp were Admiral Aleksandr Shishkov in Petersburg and Count Fedor Rostopchin in Moscow. Russia’s leading historian, Nikolai Karamzin, and Serge Glinka, the editor of a patriotic journal, were close to Rostopchin. Karamzin was a scholar and a ‘public intellectual’, with no personal political ambitions. Though an admiral, Aleksandr Shishkov had not served afloat since 1797 and behaved much more like a professor than a military officer. A kind and generous person in his personal relations, he became a tiger when defending the cause to which he devoted much of his life, which was the preservation of the national purity of the Russian language and its ancient Slavonic roots from corruption by imported Western words and concepts.

Count Fedor Rostopchin shared the commitment of Karamzin and Shishkov to preserving Russian culture and values from foreign influences. The fictional stories he published between 1807 and 1812 all aimed at this goal and made a big impact. His fictional hero, Sila Bogatyrev, was a no-nonsense squire who stood up for traditional Russian values and thoroughly distrusted all foreigners. In his view, French tutors were corrupting Russian youth. Meanwhile the Russian state was being manipulated by the English and tricked by the French into sacrificing its blood and treasure for their interests. Unlike Karamzin and Shishkov, Rostopchin was extremely ambitious and a politician to his fingertips. A favourite of Paul I, he had been out of office ever since Paul’s death. Alexander distrusted the Russian nationalists and disliked their ideas. He particularly disliked Rostopchin. The count was indeed in many ways a ruthless and unpleasant man. Though a great nationalist, he had none of Karamzin’s or Glinka’s generous or warm feelings towards the ordinary Russian. On the contrary, in Rostopchin’s view ‘the rabble’ could never be trusted and must be ruled through repression and manipulation.

Rostopchin was a sharp and amusing conversationalist. He could be unguarded. It is said that he once commented that Austerlitz was God’s revenge on Alexander for the part he had played in his father’s overthrow. The emperor took his own high-mindedness very seriously and did not take kindly to sly comments at his expense. His father’s murder and his own role in the disaster at Austerlitz were the bitterest memories of his life. But Alexander too was an exquisite politician. He knew that he had to use even men he disliked, particularly at a moment of supreme crisis such as the impending war with Napoleon. However much he disliked Rostopchin and distrusted his ideas, Alexander knew that the count was an efficient and resolute administrator, and a skilful politician. Above all he was a fine propagandist, absolutely loyal to the regime but with a handle on the emotions of the masses, whose behaviour would matter greatly in the event of a war on Russian soil. In 1810 Rostopchin was given a senior position at court, though encouraged not to put in too many appearances. He was kept available in case of need.³⁹

The person who brought Alexander and Rostopchin back into contact was the Grand Duchess Catherine. After her marriage, Catherine’s husband was appointed governor-general of three central Russian provinces in 1809. He and his wife took up residence in Tver, within easy distance of Moscow. Catherine’s salon in Tver attracted many intelligent and ambitious visitors, including Rostopchin and Karamzin. Her reputation as the most ‘Russian’ member of the imperial family was well known. It was she who commissioned Nikolai Karamzin to write his Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia, which was to be the most influential and famous expression of the ‘Old Russian’ viewpoint. The influence of the Memoir had nothing to do with any impact on public opinion. The work was designed for Alexander’s eyes alone. Given its sharp criticism of government policies the Memoir could never have been published at that time and remained unknown to any but a tiny circle for many decades. Karamzin delivered the Memoir to Catherine in February 1811. The next month, when Alexander stayed in Tver with his sister, Catherine summoned Karamzin to meet the emperor, to read passages from the Memoir to him, and to discuss its ideas with the monarch.

Karamzin sharply criticized Russian foreign policy in Alexander’s reign. In his view, the empire had been dragged into quarrels which were not its concern and had often lost sight of its own interests. The crafty British were always alive to the possibility of getting other countries to bear the main burden of Britain’s ancestral struggle with France. As for the French and Austrians, whichever empire dominated European affairs would deride Russia and call it ‘an Asiatic country’. Apart from reflecting these deep-rooted Russian insecurities and resentments, Karamzin also made many specific criticisms. In the winter of 1806–7 either Bennigsen’s army should have been massively reinforced or Russia should have made peace with Napoleon. The actual peace treaty signed at Tilsit was a disaster. Russia’s overriding interest was that Poland must never be resurrected. Allowing the creation of the Duchy of Warsaw was a major error. To avoid this, no doubt Silesia would have had to be left to Napoleon and Prussia abandoned. This was unfortunate but in foreign affairs one had to consult one’s own self-interest alone. The alliance with France was fundamentally flawed.

Shall we deceive Napoleon? Facts are facts. He knows that inwardly we detest him, because we fear him; he had occasion to observe our more than questionable enthusiasm in the last Austrian war. This ambivalence of ours was not a new mistake, but an inescapable consequence of the position in which we had been put by the Tilsit peace. Is it easy to keep a promise to assist one’s natural enemy and to increase his power?⁴⁰

If anything, the analysis of Alexander’s domestic policy was even more critical. Alexander had kept Catherine informed of his discussions with Speransky and some of this she had passed on to Karamzin. The core of his Memoir was a defence of autocracy as the only form of government which could stop the Russian Empire from disintegrating and guarantee ordered progress. For Karamzin, however, autocracy did not mean despotism. The autocrat must rule in harmony with the aristocracy and gentry, as Catherine II had done. State and society must not become divorced, with the former simply dictating to the latter. Karamzin conceded that Paul had indeed acted despotically but after his removal Alexander should have returned to the principles on which Catherine’s rule was founded. Instead he had allowed the introduction of foreign bureaucratic models which, if developed, would turn Russia into a version of Napoleonic bureaucratic despotism. Aristocrats rooted in the Russian social hierarchy were being displaced in government by mediocre bureaucrats with no stake in society. Moreover, if the peasants were emancipated anarchy would ensue, because the bureaucracy was far too weak to administer the countryside.⁴¹

Karamzin’s arguments made a lot of sense. Catherine II had ruled in harmony with the ‘political nation’, in other words the elites. In subsequent decades a bureaucratic monarchy was created without strong roots in society, even among the traditional elites. That was a major factor over the much longer term in the isolation and ultimate fall of the imperial regime. On the other hand, to the extent that Karamzin’s criticisms were directed against Speransky, they were mostly unfair. Russia was woefully under-governed. A much larger and more professional bureaucracy had to be developed if Russia was to flourish. Society could not control the growing bureaucratic machine by old-fashioned methods such as aristocrats hopping from positions at court into top posts in government. Only the rule of law and representative institutions could hope to achieve this goal, and Speransky – perhaps unknown to Karamzin – was planning to introduce them.

Even if he had known all Speransky’s plans, however, Karamzin would probably still have opposed them. Given the cultural level of the provincial gentry he might well have considered the introduction of representative assemblies premature. Certainly he would have argued that the eve of a great war with Napoleon was a mad moment at which to throw Russia into chaos by fundamental constitutional reform. Unlike most of Speransky’s opponents, Karamzin was in no way motivated by personal enmity or ambition. Nevertheless he would probably have pointed out to Alexander that most Russian nobles considered Speransky to be a Jacobin, a worshipper of Napoleon and a traitor, and that this was a very dangerous state of affairs on the eve of a war in which national unity was crucial and the war effort would depend enormously on the voluntary commitment of the Russian aristocracy and gentry.

In fact the emperor was far too good a politician not to understand this himself. In March 1812 Speransky was dismissed and sent into exile. In these weeks that preceded the outbreak of war Alexander was overworked and under great pressure. He also hated confrontations like the long private meeting with Speransky which preceded the latter’s removal. The emperor was also outraged by reports of snide comments by Speransky about his indecisiveness, faithfully passed on by the Petersburg grapevine. The result was a hysterical imperial outburst, culminating in a threat to have Speransky shot. Since Alexander sometimes enjoyed histrionics and on this occasion his audience was a rather dimwitted and deeply impressed German professor, we can take all this hysteria as the performance of a brilliant actor letting off steam. Alexander’s actions after Speransky’s fall betray a politician’s cool rationality. Speransky was to some extent replaced by Aleksandr Shishkov, appointed imperial secretary in the following month and largely employed to draft resounding patriotic appeals to the Russian people during the subsequent years of war. In May Fedor Rostopchin was named military governor of Moscow, with the job of administering and maintaining morale in the city which would be not just the army’s major base in the rear but also crucial to sustaining public enthusiasm for the war throughout the empire’s interior.

As regards diplomatic preparation for war, Alexander put little effort into mending fences with Britain. This partly reflected his wish to postpone the outbreak of war for as long as possible and deny Napoleon any legitimate justification for invading Russia. He also knew that the moment war began Britain would automatically become his enthusiastic ally so preparation was not necessary. In any case there was not much direct help that Britain could offer for a war fought on Russian soil, though the 101,000 muskets it provided in the winter of 1812–13 were to be very useful. In terms of indirect help, however, the British in Spain were doing far more than they had ever managed before 1808. The performance of Wellington and his troops had not just transformed perceptions of the British army and its commanders. In 1810 it had also shown how strategic retreat, scorched earth and field fortifications could exhaust and ultimately destroy a numerically superior French army. In 1812 Wellington’s great victory at Salamanca not only boosted the morale of all Napoleon’s enemies but also ensured that scores of thousands of French troops would remain tied down in the Iberian peninsula.

The key issue before 1812, however, was which way Austria and Prussia would go, but here Russian diplomacy faced a very uphill struggle. It is true that Rumiantsev, and probably Alexander, did not help matters by their stubborn determination to hang on to Moldavia and Wallachia. There were influential figures in Vienna who saw Russia as a greater threat than France because Napoleon’s empire might well prove ephemeral whereas Russia was there to stay. Probably, however, Austria would have swung into Napoleon’s camp whatever Russia did.

Francis II was embarrassed to have to own up to the existence of the Franco-Austrian military convention aimed against Russia, and all the more so because the terms of this convention had been discovered by Russian espionage in Paris. But he told the Russian minister, Count Stackelberg, that he had been forced into this convention by the ‘strict necessity’ to preserve the Austrian Empire; the same necessity, added Francis, which had led him to sacrifice his daughter to Napoleon. The basic point was that Austria had made a similar decision in 1810 to the one that Russia had made at Tilsit. Confronting Napoleon was too dangerous. Another defeat would spell the end of the Habsburgs and their empire. By sidling up to Napoleon Austria preserved its existence for better times. If the French Empire survived, so would Austria as its leading satellite. If on the contrary Napoleon’s empire disintegrated then Austria, having regained its strength, would be well placed to pick up many of the pieces. The main difference between Russia in 1809 and Austria in 1812 was that the Habsburgs were in a much weaker and more vulnerable position. For that reason the Habsburg war effort in support of Napoleon in 1812 was far more serious than the Russian campaign against Austria had been in 1809. Nevertheless the two empires did quietly maintain diplomatic relations throughout 1812 and the Austrians stuck to their promise made on the eve of the war never to increase their auxiliary corps above 30,000 men and to move their troops into Russia through the Duchy of Warsaw, keeping the Russo-Austrian border in Galicia neutralized.⁴²

The Prussian situation was even clearer. King Frederick William loathed and feared Napoleon. All other things being equal, he would have far preferred to ally himself with Russia. But things were not equal. Prussia was surrounded by French troops who could overrun the country long before Russian help could arrive from the other side of the river Neman. In the king’s view, the only way in which Prussia could ally itself with Russia was if the Russian army surprised and pre-empted Napoleon by invading the Duchy of Warsaw. To be effective this would require Austrian assistance and Polish consent. To that end Frederick William urged Alexander to support the re-establishment of an independent Polish kingdom under a Polish monarch.⁴³

The Russians might well have conceded this had they been defeated by Napoleon, but they were unlikely to do so before the war had even begun. The emperor was in fact discussing the restoration of Poland with his old friend and chief adviser on Polish affairs, Prince Adam Czartoryski. Conceivably, had his feelers to the Poles met an enthusiastic response, he might have considered a pre-emptive strike to occupy the Duchy of Warsaw and win Prussian support, but there is no evidence in the Russian diplomatic or military archives of preparations for an offensive in 1810 or 1811. Alexander was in any case convinced that Russian security and Russian public opinion made it essential that any reconstituted Poland had the Russian emperor as its king. In 1811–12 this idea could not compete in Polish hearts with the hope of a restored Poland, within its full old borders, and guaranteed by the all-conquering Napoleon. The union of the Russian and Polish crowns was also unacceptable to the Austrians.⁴⁴

By the summer of 1811 Alexander had decided on a defensive strategy. He made this clear to both the Austrians and the Prussians, thereby ruling out the last faint hopes that either country would join him against Napoleon. In August 1811 the emperor told the Austrian minister, the Count de Saint-Julien, that although he understood the theoretical military arguments for an offensive strategy, in the present circumstances only a defensive strategy made sense. If attacked, he would retreat into his empire, turning the area he abandoned into a desert. Tragic though this would be for the civilian population, he had no other alternative. He was arranging echelons of supply bases and new reserve forces to which his field army could retreat. The French would find themselves fighting far from their bases and even further from their homes: ‘It is only by being prepared, if necessary, to sustain war for ten years that one can exhaust his troops and wear out his resources.’ Saint-Julien reported all this to Vienna but added, significantly, that he doubted whether Alexander could hold his nerve and pursue such a strategy when the invasion actually occurred.⁴⁵

To Frederick William, Alexander was even more explicit. In May 1811 he wrote to the king:

We have to adopt the strategy which is most likely to succeed. It seems to me that this strategy has to be one of carefully avoiding big battles and organizing very long operational lines which will sustain a retreat which will end in fortified camps, where nature and engineering works will strengthen the forces which we use to match up to the enemy’s skill. The system is the one which has brought victory to Wellington in wearing down the French armies, and it is the one which I have resolved to follow.

Alexander suggested to Frederick William that he set up his own fortified camps, some of which should be on the coast where they could be supplied by the British navy. Not at all surprisingly, this prospect did not appeal to Frederick William, whose country would first be abandoned by the Russians and then fought over and ravaged as enemy territory by the French. In his last letter to Alexander before war began, Frederick William explained that he had seen no alternative but to succumb to Napoleon’s pressure and join the French alliance. ‘Faithful to your strategy of not taking the offensive, Your Majesty deprived me of any hope of prompt or real assistance and placed me in a situation where the destruction of Prussia would have been the preliminary to a war against Russia.’⁴⁶

Though it failed as regards Austria and Prussia, Russian diplomacy did achieve its other key goals by ending the war against Turkey and neutralizing any threat from Sweden.

The Ottomans had declared war against Russia in 1806 in the wake of Austerlitz. This seemed a good opportunity to win back some of the territories and other concessions which the empire had been forced to make to Russia in the last forty years. The Russians instead soon overran the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, and made their acquisition the key Russian war aim. No doubt over-impressed by his father’s achievements, Rumiantsev in particular was hell-bent on acquiring the provinces and too optimistic about how easy it would be to get the Turks to concede them. As war with Napoleon loomed and most Russian diplomats and generals yearned to end the sideshow in the Balkans, Rumiantsev’s stubbornness made him many enemies but in fact there is not much evidence that Alexander was any more willing to give way than his foreign minister.

One reason the Turks proved so recalcitrant was that they were urged to resist Russian demands first by the British and then by the French. Since by 1810 they were well aware that a war between Napoleon and Russia was in the offing, they had every incentive to hold out and wait until the Russians became desperate to cut their losses and redeploy their troops northwards against the French.

There were also military reasons why the war dragged on. In the field the Ottoman army was hopeless. To win battles in this era required infantry trained to deliver rapid volleys and to move in formation across the battlefield. The troops must be able to shift between column, line and square according to circumstances and to do so rapidly and in good order. The infantry needed to be supported by mobile artillery and by cavalry trained to charge home in massed formation to exploit any wavering by the enemy. Though all this sounds simple, amidst the terrors of the battlefield it was anything but. To achieve this an army required good training, a strong core of veterans, and experienced officers and NCOs. Behind the army there had to stand a state and a society capable of providing reliable officers and of paying the large sums needed for men, arms, food and equipment. The main European armies achieved this and so did the British in India. The Ottomans did not, for many reasons, of which inadequate financial resources was probably the most important. By the 1770s their untrained and ill-disciplined levies could seldom stand up to the Russians in open battle.

In siege warfare the Ottomans remained formidable, however. Napoleon discovered this in his Egyptian campaign. Having scattered Muslim armies on the battlefield without difficulty, he came to a halt before the fortress of Acre. The Balkans were the Ottomans’ main strategic theatre. Fortresses here were far stronger than Acre. They were generally defended, often from house to house, not just with skill but also very great tenacity. Perhaps the only comparison in the Napoleonic Wars was the siege of Saragossa, which the French finally took after immense bloodshed and resistance. The terrain of the Balkans helps to explain why siege warfare often prevailed in this theatre. Unlike in western Europe, there were few good roads and population densities were low. A good fortress could block the only viable invasion route into a district. The Ottomans were also experts at ravaging the countryside, and at raids and ambushes. An army which sat down to besiege a fortress would find its supply columns raided and its foraging parties forced to scatter over great distances. In 1806–12 the Russians faced all these problems. Pressed by Alexander to end the war, on occasion the Russian commanders attempted premature storming of fortresses and suffered heavy casualties. At Rushchuk in 1810, for example, 8,000 men of a force of barely 20,000 became casualties in an unsuccessful attempt to storm the town.⁴⁷

Finally, in the winter of 1811–12 the crafty new Russian commander-in-chief, Mikhail Kutuzov, cut off the main Ottoman army as it attempted to manoeuvre against him, and forced it to surrender. In so doing he made one of his greatest contributions to the 1812 campaign before it had begun. With his main armies lost, his treasury empty and intrigue rife in Constantinople, the sultan agreed to peace, which was signed in June 1812. The peace came too late to allow the Army of the Danube to be deployed northwards to face Napoleon’s invasion, but soon enough for the troops to reach Belorussia by the autumn and pose a huge threat to Napoleon’s communications and his retreating army.

At the other, northern end of the Russian line the obvious danger was that, with French power resurgent, Sweden would revert to its traditional role as a French client. When Marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte was elected as heir to the Swedish throne in August 1810 this danger appeared to be confirmed. Since he was Joseph Bonaparte’s brother-in-law as well as Napoleon’s marshal, on the surface Bernadotte appeared likely to prove a reliable French client. In fact, he had stored up a good deal of resentment against Napoleon and moved quickly to reassure Alexander I about his peaceful intentions regarding Russia. It helped greatly that Aleksandr Chernyshev had established a close relationship with Bernadotte before any question of the Swedish throne came up and was able to act as a trusted intermediary between him and Alexander both in Paris immediately after his election and in an important special mission which he undertook to Stockholm in the winter of 1810. Even before Bernadotte’s final selection as Swedish crown prince, Chernyshev was able to reassure Petersburg that he had got to know the marshal well, that Bernadotte was well disposed towards Russia and that he was certainly no admirer of Napoleon.⁴⁸

Although personal factors mattered, cool calculation guided Bernadotte’s actions as the de facto ruler of Sweden. He realized that if he joined Napoleon and helped to defeat Russia this would bring about Europe and Sweden’s ‘blind submission to the orders of the Tuileries’. Swedish independence would be better assured by Russian victory and he did not despair of Alexander’s chances, given ‘the immense resources of this sovereign and the means he has to offer a well-calculated resistance’. Moreover, even if Sweden did succeed in recapturing Finland from Russia this would not be the end of the story. Russia would not go away, she would always be stronger than Sweden, and she would also always seek to regain Finland in order to increase the security of Petersburg. Much better therefore to seek compensation for Finland’s loss by taking Norway from Denmark.

The British stance must also have been a key factor in Bernadotte’s thinking. If Napoleon attacked Russia, Britain and Russia would become allies. Since Sweden’s crucial foreign trade was totally at Britain’s mercy, to join Napoleon in attacking Russia could spell ruin. By contrast, neither London nor Petersburg would mind too much if Sweden despoiled Napoleon’s faithful ally, the Danish crown, of its Norwegian territories. On these considerations the Russo-Swedish alliance was signed in April 1812. It stored up some problems for the future by promising Bernadotte a Russian auxiliary corps to help him defeat the Danes, and by giving this task priority over a joint landing in Napoleon’s rear in Germany. In the spring of 1812, however, what concerned the Russians was that they did not need to guard Finland or Petersburg from a Swedish invasion.⁴⁹

Any overview of the years between Tilsit and Napoleon’s invasion of Russia is likely to come to the conclusion that the collapse of the Russo-French alliance and the descent into war were not surprising. Napoleon was aiming at empire in Europe or at the least for a degree of dominance which did not allow for the existence of independent great powers not subject to French orders. In these years the Russian Empire was much too powerful and its elites far too proud to accept French dominion without putting up a stiff fight. Eighteen-twelve was the result.

To an extent, the main difficulty in making sense of these years is that Napoleon ‘blundered towards empire’. In other words he did not always sort out priorities or match ends to means, and often used tactics of bullying and intimidation which harmed his own cause. In the famous expression of the American historian Paul Schroeder, Napoleon could never see a jugular without going for it. In addition, his views on economics were often crude and his grasp of naval matters limited. Though true, this is not however the whole truth.⁵⁰

The Napoleonic empire was above all the result of the sudden increase in French power brought about by the Revolution of 1789. This increased power took everyone by surprise. French expansion was partly driven by the army’s desire for plunder and the French government’s wish that other countries should pay this army’s costs. Napoleon’s personality was also a major factor. But French grand strategy has to be judged within the context of the policies of the other great powers and, above all, of the century-old struggle with Britain. After 1793 British naval superiority more or less confined French imperialism to the European continent. The enormous gains made by the British outside Europe since 1793, not to mention their ever-growing economic power, meant that, unless Napoleon created some form of French empire within Europe, the struggle with Britain was lost. It is true that Napoleon undermined his own cause by never working out a coherent and viable plan for the creation and maintenance of this empire. On the other hand, the whole Napoleonic episode was so brief that this is not altogether surprising.⁵¹

Napoleon’s greatest rivals, the British and Russian empires, were not peace-loving democracies anxious to stay at home and cultivate their gardens. They were themselves expansionist and predatory empires. Many of the criticisms aimed at Napoleon’s empire could, for example, be applied to British expansion in India in this period. They would, for example, include the repatriation of Indian wealth back to Britain by the subcontinent’s British rulers and the impact on Indian manufacturing of incorporation into the British Empire on terms set by London. In 1793–1815, too, the main engine for British territorial expansion in India was a formidable but very expensive European-style army, which needed to conquer new lands to justify its existence and pay its costs, and which was itself fuelled by plunder. Particularly under Richard Wellesley, British territorial expansion was pursued with a single-mindedness worthy of Napoleon, and justified in part by reference to the need to preserve Britain’s position in India against the French threat.⁵²

The basic point was that it was far harder to create an empire in Europe than overseas. Ideology was a factor here. Within Europe, the French Revolution had glorified concepts of nationhood and popular sovereignty which in principle were the antithesis of empire. The experience of Napoleon’s wars – economic as much as military – did nothing to legitimize the idea of empire in Europe to Europeans. Meanwhile, however, on the whole European opinion was becoming more inclined than before to accept the idea of Europe’s civilizing mission and inherent cultural superiority over the rest of the world. The French, with some justice, saw themselves as the leaders of European civilization and they regarded the continent’s eastern periphery in particular as semi-civilized. Even they, however, would hardly have applied to Europeans a British senior official’s view of ‘the perverseness and depravity of the natives of India in general’. Nor would many Europeans have believed them had they done so.⁵³

More immediately important was the fact that the British in India were the heirs of the Mughals. Empire was hardly a novelty in India and the regimes which the British overthrew were not in most cases very ancient or deeply rooted in their regions. Despite some subsequent claims by nationalist myth-makers, in Europe too Napoleon was not usually faced by nations in the full modern meaning of the word. But many of the regimes he faced were deeply rooted in the communities they ruled. History and ancient myths, common religions and vernacular high cultures linked rulers to ruled.⁵⁴

Above all, the geopolitics of Europe was different. General Levin von Bennigsen’s comments go to the heart of British geopolitical invulnerability in India. A would-be European emperor was faced with a much harder task. Any attempt to dominate the continent would bring down on one’s head a coalition of great powers with a common interest in preserving their independence and with military machines honed by generations of warfare at the cutting edge of technology and organization. Even if, as with Napoleon, the would-be emperor could conquer the continent’s heartland, he was still faced by two formidable peripheral concentrations of power in Britain and Russia. To make things worse, the conquest of these peripheries demanded that the conqueror mobilize simultaneously two different types of power. In the British case this meant seapower, in the Russian a military-logistical power sufficient to penetrate and sustain itself all the way to the Urals. This challenge – subsequently faced by the Germans in the twentieth century – was very difficult.

There are usually three stages in the creation of empires, though these stages often overlap. First comes the conquest of empire and the elimination of foreign threats. This is generally a question of military power, diplomatic craftiness, and geopolitical context. To survive, however, an empire needs institutions, otherwise it will disintegrate with the death of the conqueror and his charisma. Establishing these institutions is the second stage in creating an empire and is often harder than the first stage, particularly when huge conquests have occurred in a short period. The third stage requires the consolidation of imperial loyalties and identities in the subject populations, and above all, in the pre-modern world, in their elites.⁵⁵

Napoleon made great progress in the first stage of empire-building, took some steps towards creating imperial institutions but still had a very long way to go in legitimizing his power. To do him justice, he faced a daunting task. A thousand years after the death of Charlemagne, it was rather late in the day to dream of restoring a European empire. Three hundred years after the printing of the vernacular Bible, the imposition of French as a pan-European imperial language was unimaginable. An imperial project backed by a universalist, totalitarian ideology might have gone some way towards establishing empire in Europe for a time. But Napoleon was in no sense a totalitarian ruler, nor was his empire much driven by ideology. On the contrary, he had put the lid on the French Revolution and done his best to banish ideology from French political life. Even the uprooting of local elites in conquered Europe went well beyond Napoleon’s desires or his power. In 1812 his empire was still very dependent on his personal charisma.⁵⁶

Many European statesmen understood this and acted accordingly. On the eve of his departure for the Americas in 1809, Count Theodor von der Pahlen, the first Russian minister to the United States, wrote that

despite the triumphs of France and its current dominance, within less than fifty years nothing will remain to it but the empty glory of having overthrown and oppressed Europe. It will have acquired no real benefits from this for the French nation, which will find itself exhausted of men and treasure once it can no longer raise them from its neighbours. France’s immense current influence depends wholly on the existence of a single individual. His great talents, his astonishing energy and impetuous character will never allow him to put limits on his ambition, so that whether he dies today or in thirty years’ time he will leave matters no more consolidated than they are at present.

Meanwhile, added Pahlen, as a new European Thirty Years War continued, the Americas would grow enormously in strength. Of the European powers only the English would be in a position to derive any advantages from this.⁵⁷

The implication of this comment is that in the eyes of history the triumphs and disasters of the Napoleonic era would seem the proverbial tale full of sound and fury, not (let us hope) told by an idiot but also not adding up to much. There is some truth in this. Aspects of the Napoleonic saga were more spectacular than significant. Nevertheless it would be wrong to be too dismissive of the fears and efforts of Europe’s statesmen in these years.

Like all political leaders, Russia’s rulers had to confront pressing contemporary realities. They could not live on hopes for a distant future. They might well share Theodor Pahlen’s longer-term perspectives and believe that, if they could buy time and postpone the conflict with Napoleon, it might actually pass them by. The emperor himself could die or lose his fire. That after all was the rationale behind Nesselrode’s spies assiduously reporting whether Napoleon was still eating a good breakfast. Unless fortune intervened, however, Russia’s leaders from mid-1810 had to confront the reality that Napoleon was preparing to invade their empire. No doubt if they caved in to his demands war might be averted for a time. But to subscribe to his current version of the Continental System was to undermine the financial and economic bases of Russia’s position as an independent power. By definition, this would leave it open to Napoleon to establish a powerful Polish client state which would shut Russia out of Europe.

The chances of Napoleon establishing a lasting empire across Europe may have been poor, though this was far from self-evident in 1812. His regime certainly could put down deep roots west of the Rhine and in northern Italy. It was also well within his power to implement the strategy set out in Champagny’s memorandum of 1810, which Russian espionage had acquired for Alexander. There was every reason to fear in 1812 that Napoleon would defeat the Russian army and force peace on Alexander I. This would have resulted in the creation of a powerful Polish satellite kingdom, with its own ambitions in Ukraine and Belorussia. Austria could easily have become the loyal client of Napoleon after 1812, as it became Prussia’s first lieutenant after 1866. With its ambitions turned to the Balkans and against Russia, it would have been a useful auxiliary of the French Empire against any threat from the east. Within Germany, a stroke of Napoleon’s pen could have abolished Prussia and compensated the King of Saxony for losing his largely theoretical sovereignty over Poland. Meanwhile for at least a generation the combination of French power and regional loyalties would have kept the Confederation of the Rhine (Rheinbund) under Paris’s thumb. Russia would be permanently under threat and at the mercy of a Europe organized along these lines. On top of this the consequences of defeat might well include a crushing indemnity and the sacrifices a victorious Napoleon might require Russia to bear in his ongoing war against the British. In 1812 the Russian state had much to fight for.⁵⁸