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McGrew finds – as did the Chevalier de Bray – the fundamental elements of Paul’s foreign policy to be stable and consistent. Paul found Russia’s vital interests in a stable and lasting peace in Europe. He preferred hereditary monarchy, but the form of government was less important than its behaviour. It was the expansionist policy of the Directory rather than its republican nature that provoked Paul’s hostility. Aggressive states were objectionable whether republican or monarchical.

His principles, in foreign as well as domestic policy, marked out the Russian future . . . he attempted to open new directions in Russian foreign policy. In all of his efforts, he showed himself to be disinterested. He had no territorial claims to make; he offered himself as a mediator and . . . a guardian [of the smaller powers]. The Europe Paul wanted to see was one in which each state would be safe, in which there was justice for the smaller principalities as well as protection . . . The ideas he pursued became the writ of postNapoleonic Europe; what he failed to create at the end of the eighteenth century, Metternich finally realized between 1815 and 1848.15

Alexander I

As Alexander assumed power, the most urgent issue was the approach of the English fleet, which, having left the wreck of Copenhagen (2 April 1801) in its wake, was sailing for St Petersburg. Alexander assured his allies of the Armed Neutrality that he would not forsake them and their common principles, but he warned that these principles were subject to some accommodation with London. In the maritime convention embodying that accommodation, the English surrendered paper blockades, and the Russians surrendered everything else, including the issue of ‘free ships, free goods’ as well as English rights of search of vessels under convoy. Denmark and Sweden adhered with obvious reluctance to the Anglo-Russian settlement. In the meantime, the British fleet left the Baltic, and Alexander lifted the Russian embargo on British trade.

There was irony in the Russian position in this conflict. According to the observation of a rather canny American diplomat on temporary assignment in Berlin, John Quincy Adams, ‘the question whether free ships shall make free goods is to the empire of Russia, in point of interests, of the same importance that the question whether the seventh commandment is conformable to the law of Nature would be to the guardian of a Turkish Haram’.16 Two sovereigns as

15McGrew, Paul, pp. 17, 320.

16Adams to Secretary of State, 31 January 1801; US National Archives, Record Group 59. Emphasis added (HR).

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different as Catherine and Paul had, however, subscribed to the same principle, and as Alexander wrote to his ambassador in Stockholm before the convention was signed, ‘The pretensions of the English are absurd . . . their conduct is revolting, the exclusive dominion of the seas to which they presume is an outrage to the sovereigns of the commercial states and an offense to the rights of all peoples.’17 Alexander was disgusted by the new British attack on Copenhagen, and he would repeat this whole set of attitudes both before and after Tilsit.

Once the crisis of conflict with Britain had passed, Alexander circulated to Russian embassies abroad his first general exposition of foreign policy. In traditionally familiar fashion, he announced the withdrawal of Russia from European affairs as formerly argued by N. I. Panin and represented in Alexander’s own reign by V. P. Kochubei. Aggrandisement, Alexander said, was inappropriate for so vast a state as Russia. He wanted no part of the ‘intestine dissensions’ of Europe and was indifferent to the question of the forms of foreign governments, as Paul obviously had been. His aim, rather, was to give his people the blessing of peace. In other words, he was at this point isolationist, non-interventionist. Yet even here there was a hint of ambivalence. If he took up arms, Alexander said, it would only be to protect his people or the victims of aggrandisement threatening the security of Europe.

As Alexander turned to the next major item of unfinished business inherited from his father, the negotiation with the First Consul, he found that he was, on the one hand, obliged by the treaties and other commitments of the previous reign; and, on the other hand, he was embarrassed by many of them. Though he admitted that his obligations in Italian questions were awkward, Alexander continued to solicit generous treatment for the kingdoms of Naples and Sardinia. In fact, Bonaparte, as soon as he learned of the death of Paul, hastened in both principalities to make pre-emptive arrangements – closing of ports, stationing of French troops in Naples, preparations for annexations in Sardinia – before Alexander could intervene, and Alexander was left with little choice in questions about which at the time he did not seem deeply to care. When the treaty of peace and the accompanying political convention were signed, they reflected French wishes. As in the treaty of Teschen, the two powers would mediate German indemnities. Russia was to mediate French peace with the Turks. Bonaparte engaged himself to maintain the integrity of Naples as stipulated in the treaty that French troops had just imposed on it

17Alexander to Budberg, 9/21 April 1801; Vneshniaia politika Rossii XIX i nachala XX veka, ed. A. L. Narochnitskii et al., 8 vols. (Moscow: Politizdat, 1960–1972), vol. I, p. 19.

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(28 March 1801), and French troops were to remain there until the fate of Egypt was settled. The reference to Sardinia was a gossamer gloss leaving the French army fully in charge there.

In the reorganisation of Germany, Alexander’s wishes were simple: to alter the German constitution as little as possible and to strengthen Germany such as to avoid revolutionary anarchy and make it more capable of resisting French aggression. What happened here was that Bonaparte was able to use the principle of secularisation of ecclesiastical estates – how many divisions had the pope? – and the proximity and the power of France to reward and seduce the south German states, thus converting them from Russian clients into French satellites.

In the lull of 1801–5 between the two storms of the Second and Third Coalitions, Alexander found a respite for deliberate reflection on the issues of foreign affairs, and here we find a rare and genuinely interesting effort to enunciate something like an official doctrine of Russian foreign policy. The first compelling conception to emerge was the presentation of V. P. Kochubei to the Unofficial Committee in summer 1801. It envisaged a remarkable harmony of domestic and foreign policy, and its basic principles were clear and persuasive.

Russia had two natural enemies, Kochubei maintained, Sweden and Turkey, and two natural rivals, Austria and Prussia. Both Sweden and Turkey were weak, unable to challenge Russia dangerously, and the best policy was simply to maintain them in their present condition, weak enough to be harmless, not so weak as to require the protection of Russia from the designs of another great power. The notorious antagonism of Prussia and Austria required both to solicit the favour of Russia, a state of affairs that easily enabled Russia to preserve a constructive sphere of influence in the German Empire. Russia, Kochubei observed, was sufficiently great both in population and in geographical extent to enjoy extraordinary national security. It had little to fear from other powers so long as it did not interfere in their affairs; yet it had too often entered the quarrels of Europe that affected Russia only indirectly, entailing costly and useless wars. In so far as possible, Russia needed to remain aloof from European alliances and alignments, to establish a long period of peace and prudent administration.

There was, however, even in the midst of these pacific sentiments, one jarring note. It was agreed in a fashion reminiscent of Alexander’s foreignpolicy manifesto of 17 July 1801 that surrendering the continent to the inordinate ambition of Bonaparte was not an acceptable option.

Unfortunately, the First Consul of the French Republic declined Alexander’s pleas for moderation and peace and challenged the order of Europe in a

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fashion that could not be ignored. Bonaparte annexed Piedmont (April 1801), imposed satellite regimes in the Netherlands (October 1801) and Switzerland (February 1802), made himself First Consul for life (August 1802), then Emperor (May/December 1804), president of the new Italian Republic (February 1802) and subseqently King of Italy (May 1805), manipulated the Imperial Recess to his advantage (1803 ff.), seized the Duc d’Enghien in Baden, the home of the Tsaritsa Elizabeth of Russia, executed him (February 1804) and annexed Genoa ( June 1805). The Third Coalition was naturally soon in the making.

By this time, Alexander had come under the influence of a remarkable friendship and the very different foreign-policy ideas that it engendered. As a young man of only nineteen years, Alexander had made the acquaintance of the Polish Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski. The two shared a passion for liberal ideas of statecraft and justice, and Alexander confessed emotionally to Czartoryski his embarrassment at his grandmother’s partitions of Poland. There were hints of Alexander’s intention to rectify the injustice, and it was clearly not a transient idea. In 1812 he was still writing about it to Czartoryski: ‘Quel est le moment le plus propre pour prononcer la reg´en´eration´ de la Pologne?’18 Scarcely any sentiment could have brought the two men more nearly together. As the brief honeymoon of concord with the French Republic dissipated and a new conflict loomed, Czartoryski had become in 1803–4 de facto and then actual minister of foreign affairs. At this point, a new foreignpolicy programme was formed.

While V. P. Kochubei had argued that strategic invulnerability conferred upon Russia the good fortune of being able to follow an isolationist foreign policy, Czartoryski argued on the contrary that it imposed on Russia the obligation to follow an activist policy. Russia, he insisted, would most easily find its own peace by leading the continent to a peaceful condition. Obviously the biggest threat to the peace of Europe at the time was the expansionist policy of France, and that fact made it natural for Great Britain and Russia to seek each other’s alliance against the threat. Once French power were curtailed, they agreed, it could best be contained by restoring the independence of the Italian states and forming a confederation of western German states on the French frontier.

18W. H. Zawadzki, A Man of Honour: Adam Czartoryski as a Statesman of Russia and Poland,

1 7 95 –1 83 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), p. 36. P. K. Grimsted, The Foreign Ministers of Alexander I: Political Attitudes and the Conduct of Russian Diplomacy, 1 801 –1 825 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 44, 46, 47. A. Gielgud (ed.), Adam Czartoryski: Memoirs and correspondence with Alexander I, 2 vols. (Orono: Academic International Press, 1968), vol. I, pp. 95–8. Alexander to Czartoryski, 1/13 April 1812; Vneshniaia politika Rossii, vol. VI, p. 351.

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As Kochubei had also observed, the antagonism of Austria and Prussia would naturally force them to follow Russia’s lead. Russia might well undertake a kind of Pan-Slav drive to liberate the Balkan Slavs from the Turks, sharing some of the spoils with Austria if necessary, especially if there were a threat of French imperialism in that area. Moreover, it made sense for Russia to redress the injustice of the Polish partitions, the more so as sharing those spoils with the neighbouring German states worked to Russia’s disadvantage. Russia could easily win her Slavic brethren the Poles to her cause by re-establishing the kingdom under Russian Grand Duke Constantine.

The policy of Russia must be grand, benevolent and disinterested . . . It must assure the tranquillity of all of Europe in order to assure its own and in order not to be distracted from its civilizing concerns [in developing] its own interior. Russia wants each power to have the advantages that justice confers on it, . . .

the surest means of assuring the general equilibrium. But it will oppose with force any excessive ambition.19

This paper forms the background of the mission of N. N. Novosil’tsev to London in November 1804. Czartoryski drafted Novosil’tsev’s instructions. If Russia should overstep the bounds of her own national interests – an important point – and mix in the affairs of Europe, he wrote, it should be for the purpose of establishing a benign and peaceful order of affairs on the continent of Europe, a permanent peace. The ascendancy of Bonaparte in Europe threatened, he said, to supplant all notions of justice, of right, and of morality in international affairs by the triumph of crime and iniquity and thus to suspend the security of the continent in general. Proceeding from these principles, he set out Alexander’s particular aims: to return France to its ancient borders; to give it a new government; to liberate Sardinia, Switzerland and the Netherlands; to force the French evacuation of Naples and of Germany; to preserve the Turks – always a volatile and slippery issue – and to form larger states or a federation of states on the French frontiers as a barrier to French expansion.

In order to make success in the war as sure as possible, Alexander contemplated an imitation of Paul’s policy of forcing a reluctant Prussia to take part in the coalition (Alexander’s so-called Mordplan). In the peace to follow, Alexander imagined calling for something like national frontiers drawn along clearly recognisable lines of nationality and/or natural frontiers (a concept which would have disintegrated his own kingdom). Finally,

19P. K. Grimsted (ed.), ‘Czartoryski’s System for Russian Foreign Policy: A Memorandum’,

California Slavic Studies 5 (1970): 19–91.

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Alexander proposed a kind of concert system to sustain the peace after the war was won. He professed to be motivated by nothing more than the ‘general wellbeing’.

Meantime, never mind the fact that Alexander had conspired on war aims and peace terms with the British in advance; he nevertheless represented his plans of 1805 as an armed mediation! That is, he would present to the French and British governments alike the Anglo-Russian terms as those of a coalition of Russia and Austria – and Prussia if possible – in an effort to mediate the conflict between Britain and France.

Here is a most reasonable facsimile of the politics of crazy Paul, who was seeking to use his Russo-Prussian Northern League of the winter of 1800–1 for the same kind of armed mediation between the French on the one hand and the Anglo-Austrian alliance on the other. The idea of the Concert of Europe as it grew out of Vienna is more fully developed than anything that Paul had in mind, but he was notably congress-prone. Short of the concert, and with the exception of the extravagances of the last two to three weeks of his life, it is essentially Paul’s kind of plan, subject merely to the changes that the course of events had worked in political geography and alliances: that is, Bavaria and Wurttemberg¨ had been indemnified sufficiently handsomely by Bonaparte to cease to look to Russia for protection, and while Paul had not stipulated in Paris in favour of Switzerland and the Netherlands, he had sent armies to liberate them. About the same time, Alexander renewed Paul’s treaty of alliance with the Turks (11/23 September 1805).

Meantime, as implausible as it seems, Alexander did not hesitate, during his negotiations with the British, to urge their evacuation of the island of Malta, and he continued to defend the cause of neutral trade, both of which issues almost cost him the alliance of London. Taking the similarities of the policies of the two sovereigns into account, either Alexander and his allies were under the spell of Paul – a ludicrous suggestion – or there was method in Paul’s madness. Or there was something in the context of Russian foreign policy driving very different personalities to similar geopolitical conceptions. That context was very likely the product of the educational values of the Enlightenment and the challenge that the French Revolution posed to conceptions of political order in Europe.

In any event, the awkward alliance – a compromise version of it – was made, and the Austrians adhered to it. War aims stipulated the French evacuation of north Germany (including Hanover), the Netherlands, Switzerland and Piedmont-Sardinia, as well as the augmentation of these territories such as to constitute in future a barrier to French expansion.

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Of course, all of these grand plans went terribly awry. The Austro-Russian armies were crushed at the battle of Austerlitz in December 1805, whereupon Austria, deserted briefly by a panicked Alexander, made peace (Pressburg). Prussia, having persisted in the most undignified neutrality since 1795, rallied to the cause too late, and with equal lack of dignity, only to be routed utterly at Jena and Auerstadt¨ in October 1806. Whereupon Russia, after extensive tergiversations, returned to the fray in the most inauspicious circumstances imaginable, carrying on the fight virtually alone until the lost battle of Friedland in June 1807, whereupon it, too, made peace.

By this time, Alexander was thoroughly disgusted with his former allies. As the Baron de Jomini remarked after the costly but indecisive battle of Eylau – February 1807, on the wintry plains of Poland, nearly a thousand miles from Paris – ‘Ah, if only I were the Archduke Charles!’ In Alexander’s opinion, the British were worse than the Austrians. The great wartime prime minister, William Pitt, had died in January 1806, and the Ministry of All the Talents that followed him – Lord Grenville and Charles James Fox – was a vain misnomer. Until the coming of Viscount Castlereagh to the Foreign Office in March 1812, British foreign policy was simply adrift in demoralising, defeatist incompetence, and Alexander’s grievances against London were multiple: Russia was bearing a disproportionate burden of the war; the British were niggardly with loans and subsidies; they might have but did not open in Western Europe something like a second front; their navy’s enforcement of the British code of maritime commerce was an offence both to Russia and the neutrals. Finally, the Russians had stumbled imprudently into a war with Turkey for fear of Napoleon’s designs on the Balkans, and London, always suspicious of the Russians’ own designs in the East Mediterranean, stubbornly refused to assist them.

The war had ceased to be popular in Russia, and Alexander’s frustration disposed him to a change of front. Here was the celebrated peace of Tilsit and the Franco-Russian alliance attached to it. It recognised the whole of the Napoleonic order of Europe, the Bonaparte dynasty in Naples, the Netherlands and Westphalia; the Grand Duchy of Warsaw; the Confederation of the Rhine; French possession of Cattaro and the Ionian Islands. Russia would mediate peace between France and Britain; France would mediate between Russia and Turkey; and, failing peace, each power would join the other at war. The ancient idea of the partition of the Ottoman Europe was stipulated. Russia would join the Continental System to bar British trade from the continent, and Portugal, Denmark and Sweden would be forced to join it as well.

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Of course, this new system, so contrary to Czartoryski’s, naturally had to be embodied in a new Russian foreign minister, Count N. P. Rumiantsev. Rumiantsev identified with it naturally, as he was the son of Field Marshal Petr A. Rumiantsev, who had led Catherine’s successful campaigns against the Turks. Rumiantsev stood for a division of Europe into eastern/Russian and western/French spheres. Hence he represented one of two traditional variants of Russian foreign policy, the isolationist impulse that we formerly saw in V. P. Kochubei. If the peace was popular in Petersburg, however, the alliance was not. Alexander hoped in vain that the promised partition of the Ottoman Empire and the conquest of Swedish Finland would compensate for the substantial obligations and burdens of the alliance.

And now Alexander turned fondly again to his pet projects of liberal reform at home. This time, his whole ‘secret committee’ was concentrated in a single person, arguably the most able civil servant in the history of Russia, a priest’s son who had married an English woman, Mikhail Speranskii. Alexander asked for the project of a constitution, and Speranskii drafted a prudently progressive document. The French alliance and the Speranskii constitution alike provoked the problem of public opinion again. Napoleon’s emissaries carefully monitored the massive Russian discontent with the French alliance. General Savary reported that France had only two friends in Russia, the emperor and his foreign minister. One of Alexander’s courtiers allegedly warned him bluntly, ‘Take care, Sire, you will finish as your father did!’20 Speranskii’s constitution was naturally never implemented, but the mere drafting of it provoked consternation, and when the war of 1812 approached, Alexander, in deference to the good Russian sentiments that the nation at war would require, dismissed the unpopular Francophile Speranskii and the constitution with him. When another of his intimates questioned the dismissal of so devoted a public servant as Speranskii, Alexander responded, ‘You are right, . . . only current circumstances could force me to make this sacrifice to public opinion.’21

In fact, the arrangements of Tilsit almost predictably contained irreconcilable elements of conflict. The most conspicuous factor here was the unlimited ambition of Napoleon. As Napoleon later remarked after his meeting with Alexander at Erfurt, Alexander expected to be treated as an equal, and it was not Napoleon’s habit to deal with others as equals. Particular issues abounded. There was the persistent suspicion of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Moreover, Napoleon stubbornly refused to evacuate his troops from the

20F. Ley, Alexander I et la Sainte-Alliance (Paris: Fischbacher, 1975), p. 32.

21N. K. Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr Pervyi: ego zhizn’ i tsarstvovanie, 4 vols. (St Petersburg: Suvorin, 1897–1898), vol. III, pp. 41–2. Emphasis added (HR).

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Prussian territory of Alexander’s friend, King Frederick William of Prussia. Here were two offensive encroachments on Russian sensitivities in Eastern Europe. In addition, the Continental System was a burden: Britain was a natural commercial ally of Russia; France was not. Finally, Napoleon clearly had no intention of sharing what might have been the most ostentatious Russian benefit of the alliance, the Ottoman possessions of the Balkans. In December 1810, Alexander, thoroughly disillusioned now of the raptures of Tilsit, repudiated the Continental System, and the coming of war was only a matter of time.

The defeat of Napoleon in Russia faced Alexander with a dramatic foreignpolicy choice. His commander of the armies, Field Marshal M. I. Kutuzov, stood shoulder to shoulder with Foreign Minister Rumiantsev: Russia was rid of Napoleon, and there was no need to send the armies into Europe. Alexander, however, perhaps predictably, followed the system formerly laid out by Czartoryski.

The Russo-Prussian Treaty of Kalisch (27 February 1813) stipulated an alliance to deliver the nations of the continent from the French yoke and the restoration of Prussia to its possessions of 1806. The Russo-Austro-Prussian Treaty of Toeplitz (9 September 1813) stipulated the restoration of the Austrian Empire, dissolution of Napoleon’s Confederation of the Rhine, and an arrangement of the future fate of the Duchy of Warsaw agreeable to the three courts of Russia, Prussia and Austria. This last point, of course, was soon to become a subject of contention. The British joined the coalition in the treaty of Reichenbach (27 June 1813), which stipulated the restoration of Hanover to the British monarchy and, of course, subsidies for the continental powers.

By this time, the outline of the treaties of Vienna was emerging. The treaty of Chaumont (1 March 1814) committed the allies to a German confederation robust enough to sustain its independence; the restoration of an independent Switzerland; independent Italian states between Austria and France; the restoration of Ferdinand VI of Spain; an augmentation of the Netherlands under the sovereignty of the Prince of Orange; the accession of Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands to the treaty; and a concert among the powers to maintain these peace terms for twenty years.

The first Treaty of Paris (30 May 1814) recognised Louis XVIII as king of France, reduced France to its frontiers of 1792, restored Malta to Great Britain and stipulated French recognition of the terms of Chaumont. The second Treaty of Paris (20 November 1815) – after Napoleon’s return and the battle of Waterloo (18 June) – reduced France to the borders of 1790, assessed an

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