Authors: Adam Zamoyski
But Alexander produced a draft convention which would excise the words ‘Poland’ and ‘Poles’ from all official correspondence, ban the wearing of Polish decorations and forbid the use of Polish emblems in the Grand Duchy. He wanted Napoleon to pledge that he would never allow the restoration of Poland, and that he would take up arms against the Poles if they attempted it. Napoleon replied that while he could declare his opposition to such a revival, he would not and could not undertake to hinder it. The wording suggested by Russia was nonsensical, as it bound France to pledges she would be in no position to carry out. He pointed out that he could have re-established Poland if he had wished to in 1807, and added the whole of Galicia to the Grand Duchy in 1809, but had not done so because he had no intention of doing so. Nevertheless, tens of thousands of Poles had fought loyally alongside the French for over a decade, inspired by their hopes of a free motherland and by France’s sympathy to their cause. To sign the text suggested by Russia would ‘compromise the honour and dignity of France’, as Napoleon put it to Champagny.
3
Alexander continued to insist on his draft rather than the more general one proposed by Napoleon. Hoping to put pressure on the Emperor to acquiesce, he dropped hints that he might not find it so easy to keep up the blockade against Britain without wholehearted support from him. But his increasingly urgent insistence with regard to the convention, as well as the suspicions he voiced, revealed how little he trusted Napoleon, who began to wonder what lay behind it all. ‘One cannot conceive what aim Russia might have in mind in refusing a version which accords her everything she wants in favour of
one which is dogmatic, irregular, contrary to common prudence, and which, ultimately, the Emperor cannot subscribe to without dishonouring himself,’ he wrote to Champagny on 24 April 1810.
4
On 30 June, when Champagny brought a communication from St Petersburg with a list of complaints and a renewed demand that he sign the Russian draft of the convention, Napoleon lost his temper. He summoned the Russian ambassador, Prince Kurakin. ‘What does Russia mean by such language?’ he demanded. ‘Does she want war? Why these continual complaints? Why these insulting suspicions? If I had wished to restore Poland, I would have said so and would not have withdrawn my troops from Germany. Is Russia trying to prepare me for her defection? I will be at war with her the day she makes peace with England.’ He then dictated a letter to Caulaincourt in St Petersburg telling him that if Russia was going to start blackmailing him and using the Polish question as an excuse to seek a
rapprochement
with Britain, there would be war.
5
It was the first time Napoleon had mentioned war, and it was a remark thrown out in the heat of the moment. The last thing he wanted was war with Russia. Russia, on the other hand, was increasingly looking forward to one. Russian society had been hostile to the French alliance from the start, and attitudes had only hardened over the years. The reasons were cultural and psychological rather than strategic.
Russia was a young society, and its upper echelons consisted of a rich social and ethnic mix. At court, in the administration and in the army old boyar families jostled with a new aristocracy whose origins lay in the political instability and culture of favouritism of the past century, which had produced grand aristocratic families such as the Razumovskys and the Orlovs, only a couple of generations from the servants’ quarters or the barrack room. To this, conquest and annexations had added Germanic Baltic barons, Polish nobles, Georgian and Balkan princes, while the need for talent in the rapidly expanding state had sucked in immigrants from many lands. It was a mobile society, highly dynamic, but also beset by cultural insecurity.
Over the past hundred years educated Russians had drawn heavily on French culture. To them more than to any other European society, France was the fount of civilisation. The nobility were brought up by French tutors on French literature, and spoke French amongst themselves.
*
Few of them had any more Russian than was needed to give orders to servants. French books were as widely read in Moscow and St Petersburg as in Paris. Fluency in French was mandatory for anyone wishing to make a career in the army or the administration. The only senior officer in the Russian army in 1812 not to speak French fluently was General Miloradovich, who was of Serbian extraction, and Alexander prided himself on the fact that his French was better than Napoleon’s.
6
Underpinning this francocentrism was a huge colony of teachers, artists, musicians, tailors, dressmakers, cabinetmakers, jewellers, dancing masters, hairdressers, cooks and servants, some of whose parents or grandparents had settled in Russia and established dynasties. From the beginning of the revolution in France they were joined by thousands of French émigrés, some from the highest aristocracy, many of whom took service in the Russian army.
†
Knowledge of French meant much more than just a linguistic skill. It implied familiarity with the literature of the past hundred years and with the ideas of the Enlightenment, as well as with all the pseudo-spiritual and occult fads of the day. Freemasonry had spread through the upper reaches of Russian society, and its more spiritual offshoots, such as Martinism,
‡
were embraced with enthusiasm. Alexander himself had close relations with many Masons, and even founded a lodge consisting of himself, Rodion Kochelev, a follower of Saint-Martin and Swedenborg, and Aleksandr Nikolaevich Galitzine (whom he
had also appointed Procurator of the Holy Synod). This seemingly paradoxical situation was symptomatic of a wider malaise, for the dependence on French culture sat uneasily with a visceral attachment to traditional Orthodox values. And while French culture ruled and society spoke French, dressed French and aped the French in everything, there had always been a concurrent resentment of France herself. The revolution had magnified this resentment, and the events of 1805–1807 had turned it into something of a national movement.
For most young officers, military service had meant little more than attending parades (the non-commissioned officers did all the training, so all they had to do was lead their men) and court festivities. The rest of the time was given over to gaming, drinking and womanising. They underwent hardly any training or military instruction. ‘We had no sense of morality, an entirely false conception of honour, very little true education and, in almost every case, a surfeit of foolish high spirits which I can only call depraved,’ wrote Prince Sergei Volkonsky, a junior officer of the Chevaliergardes.
7
They marched away to war in 1805 as though they were off to a hunting party. Some, like Tolstoy’s Prince Andrei, dreamed of emulating Napoleon. They were routed at Austerlitz. They were defeated at Pultusk and two other minor battles in the following year; in 1807 they lost the bloody battle of Eylau, and were finally vanquished at Friedland.
Most of the Russian officers took these defeats very badly. The campaign had been a sobering experience, and they had begun to grow up. Even the most depraved of the aristocratic layabouts felt a spark of patriotism flare inside them, and the valour of their soldiers had awakened a novel respect for these serfs in uniform. They felt humiliated at the apparent facility with which the French could inflict defeat on them however hard they fought, and their resentment of them was heavily tinged with an inferiority complex which shines through their writings on the subject. Lieutenant Denis Davidov and his brother officers were outraged when the Comte Louis de Périgord, the bearer of a letter from Marshal Berthier to General Bennigsen,
did not remove his fur
kolpak
when ushered into the Russian general’s presence. They saw it as an insult to Russia’s honour, and developed a dogged determination to go on fighting until they finally won a battle against France. They regarded the peace of Tilsit as something akin to a betrayal.
8
The wounded pride of these officers was reflected by a sense of humiliation felt by sections of the nobility back home. Once nations have embarked on the pursuit of great-power status they begin to develop a curious perspective on what represents a threat to their very existence. And the Russians were fast catching up with the French in this respect. ‘Our land was free, but the air had grown heavier, we walked about freely but could not breathe,’ complained Nikolai Grech after Tilsit. ‘Hatred of the French grew apace.’ But there was more to it than mere hatred. There were the beginnings of a sense of mission. Ordinary backwoods xenophobia came together with anti-Masonic paranoia and the first stirrings of Romanticism to create a conviction that Russia was somehow different from other European countries, more spiritually alive, and that she should reject the mainstream (i.e. French) culture of Europe and go her own way.
9
There was a flurry of pamphlets, passionately argued, semireligious, deeply anti-French, advocating a return to Russian values, and in 1808 Sergei Glinka founded a new periodical,
Russkii Viestnik
, which was to be ‘purely Russian’, and would oppose the treacherous philosophy of the West with the manners and virtues of old Russia, an imagined culture of idyllic innocence. Defenders of the Russian language joined the fray, and a discussion club,
Biesieda
, was founded by a group including the poet Gavril Romanovich Derzhavin to combat foreign influences in literature. Patriots denounced the employment of French tutors and chambermaids as ‘gallomania’, and the retired Admiral Aleksandr Semionovich Shishkov called for children to be brought up in traditional Russian ways. Alexander’s sister Catherine, whose German husband George of Oldenburg had been given the post of Governor of Tver, Yaroslavl and Novgorod,
somehow contrived to become the
belle idéale
of the most fervent champions of Russian culture. They included the former Chancellor Count Fyodor Rostopchin and the historian Nikolai Karamzin, who used to refer to her as ‘the demi-goddess of Tver’.
10
In these circumstances, the creation by Napoleon of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw was as a red rag to a bull. Russia had actually gained a piece of Polish territory in the operation, but territory was not the only consideration. Orthodox Russian traditionalists tended to regard the Catholic and unmistakably Western Poles as the rotten apples in the Slav basket. Now the Polish inhabitants of Russia’s western provinces, some of whom had only become subjects of the Tsar a dozen years back, could potentially form a terrible fifth column of Western corruption inside the Russian empire.
This kind of thinking gave rise to a paranoid conviction, voiced by Sergei Glinka and others, that France under the satanic leadership of Napoleon was bent on the subjugation of Russia, and that Tilsit and indeed any peace concluded with her was but a truce putting off the terrible day. The sense of paranoia was only intensified when, at the end of May 1810, the Swedes elected Napoleon’s Marshal and kinsman, Jean Baptiste Bernadotte, Prince of Ponte-Corvo, to the position of Crown Prince and
de facto
ruler of Sweden.
With its colony in Pomerania, Sweden still ruled over more than half of the entire coastline of the Baltic Sea. She had lost Finland to Russia in 1809 and a constitutional crisis resulted in the half-mad Gustav IV being toppled in favour of Charles XIII. The new King was senile and childless, and in their search for a successor the Swedes turned to Napoleon for advice. He declined to involve himself in their internal affairs, and in the end they chose a man they believed he might have nominated, and whom they considered to be agreeable to him. Their mistake was to have momentous consequences.
Bernadotte was an old colleague of Napoleon. When the two were no more than aspiring officers he had succeeded, and possibly supplanted, the future Emperor in the affections of the lovely Désirée Clary, whom he had subsequently married. Désirée’s sister Julie had
married Napoleon’s brother Joseph, which might have made for a happy family. But it did not. Bernadotte was jealous of his colleague’s meteoric rise. While he happily accepted the rank of Marshal of France and the princely title Napoleon had bestowed on him, he cloaked his resentment in righteous disapproval of Napoleon’s assumption of the imperial purple and his pursuit of conquest. Napoleon for his part had a low opinion of Bernadotte and once said that he would have had him shot on at least three occasions had it not been for the bond of kinship.
11
When Bernadotte became Crown Prince of Sweden, Napoleon realised that he might prove less than cooperative, but assumed he would behave as a Frenchman and as a Swede. Sweden had traditionally been a close ally of France, and her natural enemies had always been Russia and Prussia. Only the previous year Russia had invaded and forced her to give up Finland after a protracted war. The Swedes’ friendly feelings towards France were put under a certain amount of strain by the Continental System, but their long coastline permitted them to breach it and trade with Britain, while their Pomeranian colony on the northern coast of Germany meant that they could sell on to the German market with profit.
The Russians could only view the combination of the creation of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, Napoleon’s marriage to the daughter of the Emperor of Austria and the recent developments in Sweden as aggressive encirclement, and Bernadotte’s election was greeted with uproar.
All these feelings were given added poignancy by the economic hardships caused by the Continental System, which had turned into a regular tariff auction. Britain had responded to Napoleon’s Berlin decree of 1806 banning her ships from all ports under his control by declaring that any ship trading with a port from which her ships were excluded was fair game for confiscation by the Royal Navy. French, Spanish, Dutch and German traders tried to get around this by using neutral American vessels to carry goods, but Britain decreed that no vessel could be considered neutral if it were carrying goods between
hostile ports. In order to get around this, American ships would pick up their cargoes, take them to an American port, unload them, reload them and take them to a European port. Britain refused to accept this as legal. Napoleon retaliated in December 1807 by decreeing that any ship which had put in at a British port or paid British duty was automatically liable to seizure. On 1 March 1809 the United States closed its ports to all British and French shipping, but Napoleon managed to reach an agreement with the Americans to the detriment of Britain, which would ultimately lead to the outbreak of hostilities between Britain and the United States in 1812.