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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.
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So first of all, a thousand apologies for not getting an episode out last week. We are back in the United States for all of August, and I got the first episode out no problem, but in that second week, we were in Seattle and Portland, and I just didn’t have as much time to work as I was planning. I have, however, now settled on a farm in east central Illinois, so I’ll be good to go from here on out. No more interruptions, no more delays, and I really do apologize.
Our extended background coverage of Russian history that we’ve been doing over the past few episodes has in part been about setting up the Russian Revolution, obviously, but it has also been about filling in some of the gaps in the Revolutions podcast. Russia has been lurking in the background of many of our previous series. They were there at the end of our series on the French Revolution. They were a big part of the conservative reaction to the liberal and national revolutions of the 1820s and 1830s that we talked about in our episodes on the July Revolution. They played a huge role in stamping out the Revolutions of 1848. But I have just sort of kept them lurking in the background. So part of what I’m up to over here is filling in some gaps, explaining the Russian angle on events that we’ve already covered. And if I had some file on my computer called, say, The Great Revolution where I cut and paste all the material I have written for the podcast into a single document arranged in strict chronological order, the material from these next three episodes would be inserted back amidst stuff that I wrote years ago. So this week’s episode would find a home back with blocks of text from late series three, next week’s episode would go along with events I talked about in series six, and the episode after that with events I talked about in series seven. Meanwhile, episodes 10.9 and 10.10 would be pasted back under a chapter heading called something like Pre Seven Years War. I mean, if such a file existed, I mean.
So really getting back to it now, we wrapped up two weeks ago with the advent of the French Revolution. Now for the leaders of the Russian Empire, the French Revolution was a troubling development and led to a turn away from the long-standing embrace of the French Enlightenment that had been fostered by Catherine the Great. Now we know that Catherine hated the revolution and opened up her court to homeless French émigrés. But in real politic terms, France was a long ways off, and the concrete upshot of all the upheavals out west was the partitions of Poland by Austria, Prussia and Russia. But aside from Poland, Catherine was not really looking to get embroiled in affairs off in the west. She tended to still direct Russian ambition south, where they could pry territory away from the Ottomans around the Black Sea or from the Persians in the Caucasus. Now what Catherine would have done through the tumultuous next few years, as revolutionary France became Napoleonic France, is an interesting alternative history question, but it will remain an alternative history question, because just as an obscure French general named Napoleon Bonaparte was waging the first Italian campaign that would turn him from obscure French general into name an entire era of European history after me, Catherine the Great died in November of 1796. And that puts us right around episode 3.4 45.
The death of Catherine brought to the throne, her 42 year old son, Paul. Now in Paul’s estimation, his ascension was long overdue. Really, he felt like he should have already celebrated his 20th anniversary as emperor. Paul was eight years old when his mother conspired to overthrow his father, and it was understood at the time that Catherine would be officially serving in some regency capacity until the heir to the throne, that is Paul, came of age. But after 10 years on the throne, Catherine decided she disliked her son just about as much as she liked wielding power, and so she stalled and delayed and made no move to step aside. And she had done such an excellent job building up a base of political support for herself that nobody challenged this. She just stayed empress, even after Paul became old enough to receive his rightful inheritance. And as Catherine’s personal favor was powerful, very powerful, anyone who thought about drifting into Paul’s orbit was assured that they would be committing political suicide. So Paul spent the next 20 years mostly estranged from his mother and the imperial court in St. Petersburg. He was just off living on his own personal estate, unhappy about his marginalization, but unable to do anything about it.
Paul’s first wife Natalia died in childbirth in 1776, but his second wife, a German princess rechristened Maria Feodorovna, gave birth to 10 children over the next 20 years. The eldest was a boy named Alexander who was born in 1777. Alexander and his younger brother Konstantin, who was born two years later, had their upbringing and education monitored closely by their grandmother, Catherine, who wanted them raised in the progressive and modern manner of the European Enlightenment, and also maybe keep them away from Paul, and see if they didn’t turn out a little bit better than he did. So both boys were tutored by a Swiss French man named César de La Harpe who formerly oversaw their educations until 1795, and who then became a trusted friend and advisor to Alexander as the years went on. The thoroughly marginalized Paul, now rightly worried that his mother Catherine wanted his son Alexander to succeed her, skipping Paul entirely. And though Alexander found both his grandmother and his father to be suffocating each in their own way, whatever plans Catherine was laying to skip Paul, Alexander himself wanted no part of it. When the old empress died in November of 1796, there was no succession struggle. Paul became Tsar Paul the First, Alexander became the tsarevich, the heir to the throne.
Finally out from under his mother’s shadow, Paul was able to have it his own way, for all the good it would wind up doing him. Catherine had been very expansionist in her foreign policy, especially towards the Ottomans and Persians in the south, but Paul was critical of all that, and he actually halted plans for a further campaign south. But though early on he insisted on a less expansionist foreign policy, he also became more personally invested in what revolutionary France was up to. Specifically, it was the Egyptian expedition of the now very famous General Bonaparte that caught the tsar’s attention. Now on a personal level, Tsar Paul was angry at Bonaparte’s capture of Malta in June, 1798. Temperamentally inclined towards a kind of romantic medieval chivalry, Paul took offense at the expulsion of the Knights of Malta, and he stepped in to be their patron and benefactor after the French capture of their island. This, we talked about in episode 3.48. On the national interest level, Russia could not help but be alarmed by France, thrusting its power across the Mediterranean and directly threatening Russia’s underbelly. So as we discussed in episode 3.49 the Egyptian expedition had the nearly unthinkable effect of putting the Russians and Ottomans on the same side as they face this shared French threat. Britain made great diplomatic hay of all this, and in late 1798, Paul agreed to bring Russia into what was becoming the second coalition. We then talked about how this went in episode 3.51 in 3.52 with the legendary general Suvarov fighting one last valiant campaign in Switzerland, which was stymied by bad logistical planning and the ultimately irreconcilable cross-purposes of Austria and Russia. The way the Russian thought, Russia was concerned about defeating France, Austria was concerned about picking up more territory in Italy. Then up north, a joint British Russia invasion of the Netherlands stalled out due to weather and stiffer than expected resistance, so by early 1800, Paul decided to pull Russia out of the second coalition in a huff, and instead formed the League of Armed Neutrality with Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Prussia to patrol the Baltic Sea and protect neutral shipping from the British Navy.
So this is all leading Paul in this slow hundred and 80 degree turn that was probably bringing him into alliance with France, because France was now led by First Consul Bonaparte, whose autocratic tendencies Paul felt much more comfortable with, as opposed to all the Republicans and Jacobins who haunted the nightmares of absolute monarchists everywhere.
But Paul’s real enemies were not Republicans and Jacobins, but rather unhappy French nobles. As I said, Paul’s personal worldview seemed to idealize out of date medieval chivalry, and many at court and in the army had trouble getting on board. The frustration of members of the Russian army was ratcheted up because Paul was also very much into Prussian military methods of drilling parade, dress and punishment, and he dismissed anyone from his service who went against this trend while clinging to a small clique of favorites, so a lot of very capable officers were being fired. And in short, every day he was in power. Paul seemed to have fewer friends and more enemies. There were also plenty of holdovers from Catherine’s circle who didn’t think Paul was up to the job of being tsar at all, and this reason turned towards working with the hated French Republic was very troubling. So in early 1801, the grumbling turned into active planning, but 24 year old Tsarevich Alexander was told something was up, and he indicated that he wasn’t opposed to something being up as long as his father was simply removed and not killed. That was the plan anyway.
So in March of 1801, a group of officers drank up some courage and then stormed their way into Paul’s chamber intent on forcing him to abdicate in favor of Alexander. When the tsar refused, things got rough. He was pushed, then beaten, then strangled, then trampled. After waiting a lifetime, Tsar Paul was dead after less than five years on the throne.
Alexander was mortified when he found out that his father had been killed and it would haunt him off and on for the rest of his life, but there was nothing to be done, but accept that what was done was done. Alexander became Tsar Alexander the first and he would rule Russia for the next 24 transformative years. In terms of Russia’s role in European affairs, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great may have both imported the west into Russia, but Alexander was about to export the power of Russia back into the west. And in short order, he would become convinced that he actually was the personal savior of Europe. And while Alexander and meshed Europe deeper and deeper into western affairs, Alexander himself proved to be the living embodiment of mercurial. Over the years he would shift from liberal to conservative, back to liberal, and back to conservative again. Sometimes he favored enlightened idealism, other times, a devout Christianity. Sometimes he liked strict absolutism, other times he favored constitutional government, it depended on the time and the place. Sometimes he was expansionist, sometimes he was closed up and defensive. Alexander led Russia through an age where the empire itself faced a constant identity crisis, switching friends and enemies every few years. This was a formidable and traumatic period for Russia when they were at times devastated victims, and other times the masters of Europe. These were the years of war and peace.
When Alexander came to power, he brought with him a kind of personal liberalism coupled with a reformist instinct. Initially working through a small state council of younger men that Alexander liked and trusted this younger clique of leaders took the system of departmental colleges run by committee that had been set up by Peter the Great, and converted it into a system of ministries with a single minister in charge. And those ministers could then get together and discuss empire-wide problems. This was in keeping with more modern methods of government, and Alexander was far more open to borrowing French advancements and administration than his father had ever been. Alexander’s minister reforms here in the early 19th century would prove to be the at least indirect beginning of most of the government departments that govern Russia to this very day, most of which continued to function even after the Bolsheviks hung an under new management sign on the door in 1917.
In foreign affairs, Alexander watched with a carefully neutral eyes, the War of the Second Coalition, which his father had already pulled Russia out of, gave way to the Year of Peace, and then as the Year of Peace ended with the British re-declaring war on the French in March of 1803. But Britain’s insistence of war on France now and forever did not yet move their old allies back into the fighting. This took a series of provocations by First Consul Bonaparte. The most scandalous of these was the shocking secret execution of the Duke Don d’Enghien in March of 1804. This execution is where we get Fouche’s famous quote, “that it was worse than a crime, it was a mistake.” The execution of the Duke really seems to have outrage the Russian aristocracy, outrage which was exacerbated a few months later when the monstrous upstart Bonaparte had the temerity to declare himself Emperor Napoleon just a few months later, I mean, who did he think he was?
After months of negotiation, the British finally convinced Alexander to bring Russia into what was becoming the third coalition in April of 1805. And then Napoleon proceeded to crown himself King of Italy in May of 1805, which I will remind you from episode 5.5 young Simone Bolivar just so happened to be in Milan at that same moment.
Anyway, all of this spooked the Austrians into joining the British and Russians and the War of the Third Coalition could really get going in earnest. But the War of the Third Coalition was a very short war, because this is just as the Grande Armée is taking its place in the annals of military history, and everything that follows will fit in alongside stuff we talked about in episode 3.54. Napoleon routed the Austrians in the Ulm campaign in the fall of 1805, and total victory was only temporarily put off by the arrival of Russian reinforcements led personally buys Tsar Alexander. Now the head of the Russian army, General Kutuzov, was wary of fighting, but Alexander insisted on bringing Napoleon to a decisive battle. And so the combined Austrian and Russian armies agreed to take advantage of what they perceived to be France’s dangerously weakened right flank, and here comes the Battle of Austerlitz. Having fallen into Napoleon’s carefully laid trap, the French crushed the Austrians and Russians. Rather than defeating the upstart Napoleon, Tsar Alexander had helped hand him his greatest victory.
The Austrians were forced to sign a punitive peace treaty in December of 1805, which paved the way for the disintegration of the Holy Roman Empire. Alexander and the Russians, meanwhile, were allowed to pull backwards in unmolested retreat, partly because Napoleon was hoping to eventually turn Alexander to his side.
The surrender of Austria and collapse of the Holy Roman Empire then spooked the Prussians out of their decade of neutrality, and they hopped into what became known as the Fourth Coalition a few months later, the Fourth Coalition just being the Third Coalition but swap Prussia for Austria. The resulting War of the Fourth Coalition was also very quick. The Prussians dove in too hard, too fast, and too unsupported, and they got their asses kicked in October of 1806, knocking them out of the war immediately, oopsie daisy. Tsar Alexander and the Russians then braced as Napoleon charged across Poland to the Russian frontier. The Russians managed to check the French at Eylau in February of 1807, but then they too fell to the apparently invincible might of Napoleon. In June of 1807, the Russians lost the Great battle of Friedland. Defeated, Alexander and the Russians sued for peace.
Now the thing is, Napoleon never really wanted to be fighting the Russians. I mean, hell yes, stomp up and down on the Prussians and the Austrians, but Napoleon did not see Russia as just another potential carcass for France to gorge itself upon. And so for the past several years, Napoleon had tried to break Alexander away from the allied coalition. His basic pitch was that France and Russia were simply too geographically distant to have any real conflict of interest. And so when the two emperors met for a post-war settlement at Tilsit in July of 1807, Napoleon was incredibly generous and he laid it on Alexander very thick. There’s our was quite taken with all this, he liked what Napoleon was saying about the possibility of joining forces to combat all the enemies of Christendom out in the East. And so unlike the punitive treaties Napoleon forced on Prussia and Austria, it was a treaty of mutually beneficial friendship that he offered Russia. And Alexander took him up on his offer.
Alexander agreed to basically switch sides and joined Napoleon’s continental system blockading the British. Alexander was also happy to make further war against Britain’s ally Sweden, with Finland being the reward for Russia’s efforts. France, meanwhile, agreed to give aid to Russia in her ongoing wars in the south, more on that in a minute, but despite all this friendly friendship, the seeds of future trouble were laid as Napoleon’s creation of the Duchy of Warsaw out of Polish territories really did seem to put France right on Russia’s front doorstep, and they were not so geographically distant anymore.
Now, as we also discussed in episode 3.54, Tilsit was kind of the high water mark for Napoleon. And the breakdown of his friendship with Russia would be the principle cause of his downfall. But before we get into all that, we do need to peel off and talk about the two other whole wars that Russia was fighting at the same time. As I mentioned earlier, the territorial ambitions of Russia had long looked south towards the Black Sea and the Caspian sea and 1802. In fact, just after Alexander came to power and before he ever joined the Third Coalition, the Russian army drove south into the Caucasus to snatch territory away from Persian hegemony. And at this point, we’re talking about the Qajar Empire, who had self dubbed themselves the Sublime State of Persia. The Persians naturally fought back against Russian encroachment on their northwestern border, beginning the Russo-Persian War which would last from 1802 to 1813, and which would remain an ongoing conflict all through these years, where so much of the attention was supposed to be on the Napoleonic Empire.
Then in the wake of the French victories at Austerlitz, Napoleon encouraged the Ottomans to make aggressive moves into Wallachia and Moldavia in 1806 that would bog the Russians down as Napoleon marched the War of the Fourth Coalition to its conclusion at Friedland. But after the treaty of Tilsit, the French abandoned their support for the Ottomans, so the Russo-Turkish War that began there in 1806 would just kind of continue in sporadic bursts until 1812. So in our western European-centric realm of history, we tend to think that the Napoleonic Empire must have been the sole focus of everyone’s attention, but all through these years, the tsar, his diplomats, and his soldiers were simultaneously dealing with wars down around the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, both of which, I should add, would wind up very favorable for Russia.
So while all these wars continued, Napoleon was worried that his ties with Alexander were not as tight as he wanted them to be. And both emperors were kind of not living up to the promises they had made at Tilsit. So they arranged a second conference, this one in the German principality of Erfurt in September and October 1808. But this time old Tallyrand went in for his classic double dealing behind the back cross-purposes diplomacy. Now wary of Napoleon’s expansionism and the punitive settlements in central Europe, Tallyrand had resigned as foreign minister, but he was invited to Erfurt to act as a special advisor and special advise he did. Meeting secretly with Alexander, Tallyrand counseled the tsar to remain aloof to Napoleon’s overtures. Tallyrand’s hope was that without a strong Russian alliance that Napoleon would be forced to dial back his ambitions and fall into a stable balance of European power, which Tallyrand thought essential for the longterm survival of France. This special advising worked: Tallyrand successfully derailed Napoleon’s attempt to woo Alexander. And though both emperors left Erfurt with a 14 point pledge of alliance and friendship, things were getting awfully lip service-y.
Now one domestic consequence of Erfurt is another round of domestic political reform. Since coming to the throne seven years earlier, Alexander had come to rely on the son of a priest who had risen through sheer force of intellect to become first a professor of math and science, then a secretary in the foreign office, and then a close personal advisor to the tsar. And this is Mikhail Speransky.
Speransky is sometimes called the father of Russian liberalism, though it was a very autocratic brand of liberalism that he pursued. At Erfurt, he met personally with Napoleon to discuss the latest methods of French administration and Speransky left with a bunch of ideas to fit into a plan of empire-wide constitutional reform that he had been working on for years. And his big reform idea is that he wanted to introduce some kind of elective participatory government. Now what he wanted to do was create a system of dumas, or legislative assemblies. These would start at the local level, then move up to a district duma and then a provisional duma, and then an imperial duma. With the delegates to each duma electing the members who would go on to the next highest order. At the Imperial level, they would then be the lower legislative house, who would join with a reformed state council made up of about 35 highly trusted men who would act as an upper chamber for discussion and analysis of proposed laws before they reached the tsar’s desk.
Now, this all has the appearance of constitutional government, but these dumas and state council would not have any real authority of their own, they were purely advisory. But they would open up a participatory system that might be a good way to invite discussion and proposals that the tsar could accept or deny as he saw fit. Now, despite the fact that Speransky was prime minister and in many ways, practically the only minister of importance from 1809 to 1812, he was only partially successful with his reforms. The upper state council was successfully created and went into operation, but the dumas would remain an unfulfilled platform of Russian liberals for decades to come.
On the foreign front, the Russian army successfully beat the Swedish in what is called the Finnish War, and they took Finland over, and Speransky was successful in setting up post-war Finland on a constitutional basis, because it seemed wise to not try to impose tsarist absolutism on the Finns. And they were granted a constitution where the tsar would reign as a constitutional monarch. And though none of this was as of yet being imported into Russia itself, Alexander seemed fine with it, which gave heartburn to conservative Russians. They feared the tsar was getting too French, too modern, and too liberal.
Further trouble with Napoleon though changed Alexander’s posture once again. By 1810, relations between Alexander and Napoleon had devolved into a series of very cordial threats that led Alexander to decide to open Russia to neutral shipping again, opening up a huge hole in Napoleon’s continental system that was supposed to be blockading the British. With his Spanish ulcer simultaneously bleeding, Napoleon decided he still had the might to go march on Moscow and force Alexander and the Russians to submit to his will. With the looming war against France now the sole object of the tsar’s attention, Russia sought to wrap up their ongoing wars against the Turks and the Persians. In consecutive treaties in 1812 and 1813, the Russians walked away with ownership of western Moldavia and all of the Caucasus, as well as securing from the Persians exclusive rights to operate a navy in the Caspian sea, which is a major concession that often gets lost in the story of Napoleon’s invasion and retreat from Russia. But the Russians taking control of the Caspian Sea is like, a pretty big deal.
With Napoleon now massing close to half a million men on the Russian frontier, Alexander made the decision to dismiss his prime minister Speransky in an effort to consolidate the Russian nobility behind him. But the campaign strategy of Alexander’s minister of war Barclay de Tolly was not exactly designed to appeal to the ego of the Russian nobility. They were to avoid an open battle and instead just withdraw east, deeper and deeper into the heart of Russia. After Napoleon crossed the frontier in June of 1812, they allowed his army to advance at will, but at each step necessarily extending French lines of supply and communication. The strategy was so unpopular though that eventually the tsar had to sack Barclay de Tolly and appoint General Kutuzov to be the new commander in chief, but Kutuzov simply stuck with that same strategy. It was hard. It was brutal. At times it was humiliating, but it worked. Napoleon led about 450,000 men into Russia in June of 1812. They advanced and they advanced, but they did not draw the Russians into a fight until September of 1812, the battle of Borodino, just a hundred miles west of Moscow.
This was the single bloodiest day of the Napoleonic Wars. And at the end, it turned out to be a tactical draw. Which was a strategic disaster for the French. Although the Russians abandoned their capital with Moscow when the French army entered an occupied it for a month, Tsar Alexander refused to surrender. The Russian army then moved south, and stood ready to block any attempt by the French to go off and find food or fodder. Finally recognizing his position was hopeless, Napoleon had to retreat along the same line he had advanced. As the French departed, Moscow caught fire and was engulfed in flames. The Russians then harassed the retreating Napoleonic army along a line devoid of food and fodder through a hard early winter.
Finally, in December of 1812, the last French troops departed. Over the course of these catastrophic six months, something like 2 million soldiers and civilians died, but the Russian army had not been conquered. Napoleon had not bent them to his will. Instead Russia became the springboard from which the final campaigns to defeat Napoleon sprang.
Thanks to Russia’s great achievement of endurance, Alexander was now one of the principle pillars of the anti-Napoleon coalition. And just as Napoleon had once dragged a mass of people from west to east Alexander now dragged that same mass of people from east to west. Soon enough, they were liberating the Germans from the French yolk and the Austrians and the Prussians rejoined the war. They all kept pushing all the way back to France, crossing into French territory in January of 1814, and fighting battles on French soil for the first time in like 20 years. When Napoleon showed real signs of life in the Six Days Campaign, the Emperor Francis of Austria and King Friedrich Wilheim the Third of Prussia wanted to break off the advance, but Alexander was now convinced that he was the divine savior of Europe and it was his mission to defeat the antichrist Napoleon. Alexander’s personal Christian piety had now advanced into a kind of deep cosmic theology. Helped along by the arrival of a German baroness turned mystical evangelical named Barbara von Krüdener, who the tsar had met in Basel in the fall of 1813, and who had told him straight up, yes, that is your mission. You are the divine savior. You must defeat the antichrist. So she now traveled with the tsar and he took counsel and prayed with her frequently. This was now a holy war, at least for Alexander.
In late March 1814, the allies advanced on Paris and leading French politicians, including Tallyrand and Fouche and a recently out of retirement Marquis de Lafayette, engineered the surrender of the French capital, and demanded the abdication of Emperor Napoleon. Tallyrand handed the key of the city to Tsar Alexander.
Alexander was probably now the single most important leader in Europe. The tsar of Russia held the future of Europe in his hands. And he was lobbied from all sides to settle post-Napoleonic France and post-Napoleonic Europe this way and that. Now Alexander personally preferred to put the Duke d’Orléans, the future King Louis Philippe, onto the French throne, but he was persuaded by the British’s desire to restore the Bourbons. Now through all of this, Alexander preached peace and understanding and reconciliation, that the allies had made their war on Napoleon, not on France. He was thus mighty vexxed when Napoleon escaped from Elba and launched the Hundred Days. ‘Cause those Hundred Days saw many supposedly peace seeking and chastened French leaders hop back into a war of French aggression. It was a very different and a much harder Alexander who thus arrived back in Paris after Waterloo. And though his views would not shift overnight, he was now beginning his long turn away from enlightened liberalism and towards a reactionary conservatism.
And next week, we will see Alexander forge the Holy Alliance with Prussia and Austria, and begin to turn Russia into the power that would always seek to destroy liberalism and nationalism wherever they reared their dangerous, chaotic, and revolutionary head.