Adam Zamoyski - Phantom Terror - The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848

Gradually, Alexander came to realise that he must assume the responsibility fate had reserved for him. ‘I believe that if my turn to rule ever came, instead of going abroad, I would do better to work at making my country free and thereby to preserve it from being in the future used as a plaything by lunatics,’ he wrote to La Harpe. He began to see his life’s task as that of transforming the Russian autocracy into a constitutional monarchy and freeing the serfs. His turn came in 1801, following Paul’s assassination, in which he was passively complicit. He liberated political prisoners, repealed much of his father’s repressive legislation, lifted censorship and restrictions on travel, brought in educational reforms, founded universities, set up a commission to codify the laws, and commissioned his friend Aleksandr Vorontsov to draw up a charter for the Russian people modelled on the French Declaration of the Rights of Man.11

In 1804, when negotiating an alliance with Britain, he put forward a project for the transformation of Europe into a harmonious federation that would make war redundant. In 1807, when he signed a treaty with Napoleon at Tilsit, he believed that he was entering into a grand alliance of the Continent’s superpowers to ensure peace and progress. He gradually changed his view, and came to see the Emperor of the French as evil. He endured Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 with readings from the Bible and fervent prayer as his army was defeated and Moscow burned, and celebrated the French army’s expulsion with thanks to the Lord. Instead of making peace with Napoleon, a peace he could have dictated to great advantage for Russia (as many in his entourage wished), Alexander prosecuted the war. ‘More than ever, I resign myself to the will of God and submit blindly to His decrees,’ he announced in January 1813 as he set out to liberate Europe from the French ‘ogre’: he was convinced that he was merely a tool in the hands of the Almighty. Once he had achieved his purpose of forcing Napoleon to abdicate, he demonstrated (in a way that was to cost the allies dear in 1815) the spirit of Christian charity by granting him generous terms and sovereign status on the Mediterranean island of Elba.12

While he continued to hold Orthodox services, Alexander sometimes combined them, as on 10 April 1814, when according to both the Julian and the Gregorian calendars Easter fell on the same day, with Catholic and Protestant ones. In London, which the victorious allies visited following the defeat of Napoleon, he attended Bible Society meetings and communed with Quakers. In Baden on his way back to Russia he was introduced to the German Pietist Johann Heinrich Jung Stilling, with whom he held long discussions on how to bring about the kingdom of God on earth.

Over the next months Alexander would follow a path he believed to be dictated by God. He was frustrated by the practical difficulties he encountered at the Congress of Vienna, and believed that Napoleon’s escape from Elba was God’s punishment for the venial behaviour of its participants, himself included. At Heilbronn, on his way to join Wellington before Waterloo, he met Baroness Krüdener, who convinced him that he was the elect of God, and that he must concentrate on carrying out His will. Alexander was at the time absorbed in a book by the German philosopher Eckartshausen, which put forward the thesis that some people were ‘light-bearers’ endowed with the capacity to see Divine Truth through the clouds obscuring it from the multitude. That and the baroness’s words only reinforced his sense of being marked out by the Almighty. They knelt together to give thanks on hearing news of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, and she followed him to Paris afterwards, moving into a house next door to the Élysée Palace where he took up his quarters. They saw each other every day, praying and holding often bizarre services, culminating in the spiritual jamboree on the plain of Vertus.13

Wellington, Castlereagh and many others thought the tsar had gone a little mad. Metternich had long regarded him as a child in thrall to dangerous enthusiasms. A cynical pragmatist, the Austrian foreign minister had no time for such nonsense, confident as he was that with Napoleon removed from the scene everything would return to normal. But in 1815 Alexander was probably the only one among the Continent’s monarchs and chief ministers who understood something of the longings and anxieties agitating European minds, and that many wanted something more than just peace, order and a full stomach.

His Holy Alliance was a genuine attempt to put the world to rights. He believed that only a system built on Christian morality could hope to bind the wounds opened up by the events of the past quarter of a century and restore harmony to a profoundly fragmented world. And although his approach may have been naïve and his solution half-baked, he alone among the monarchs and ministers who fashioned the Vienna settlement appreciated that no peace treaty, however equitable, could alone hope to bridge the chasm that had opened up in 1789.

News of the fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 had had an electrifying effect as it travelled across Europe and beyond, over the Atlantic to the United States and the European colonies of the Americas. Although the event did not in itself amount to much more than an alarming outbreak of rioting, mutiny and mob rule, it was universally interpreted as standing for something else, and accorded immense significance. The English statesman Charles James Fox declared it to be ‘the greatest event that ever happened in the World’. Rather than wait and observe further developments before reaching an opinion, most educated people immediately took up one of two diametrically opposed positions. It was as though they had seen a long-awaited signal.1

To those who identified with the ideological canon of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, the grim old fortress (which was largely redundant) was an emotionally charged symbol of the oppressive and iniquitous ancien régime whose institutions and practices were unacceptable to the modern mind. It stood for everything that was wrong with the world. Its fall was therefore seen as the harbinger of a new age, immeasurably more just and moral in every way than the existing one. There was nothing logical or reasoned about their response.

‘Although the Bastille had certainly not been a threat of any sort to any inhabitant of Petersburg,’ noted the French ambassador to the Russian court, ‘I find it difficult to express the enthusiasm aroused among the shopkeepers, merchants, townsfolk and some young people of a higher class by the fall of this state prison.’ He went on to describe how people embraced in the street as though they had been ‘delivered from some excessively heavy chain that had been weighing them down’. Even the young Grand Duke Alexander greeted the news with enthusiasm.2

From London, the barrister and legal reformer Sir Samuel Romilly wrote to his Genevan friend Étienne Dumont: ‘I am sure I need not tell you how much I have rejoiced at the Revolution that has taken place. I think of nothing else, and please myself with endeavouring to guess at some of the important consequences which must follow throughout Europe … the Revolution has produced a very sincere and very general joy here … even all the newspapers, without one exception, though they are not conducted by the most liberal or the most philosophical of men, join in sounding forth the praises of the Parisians, and in rejoicing at an event so important for mankind.’3

This view was echoed in Germany, where poets such as Klopstock and Hölderlin hailed the Revolution as the greatest act of the century, and numerous Germans flocked to Paris to breathe the air of freedom. ‘If the Revolution should fail, I should regard it as one of the greatest misfortunes that had ever befallen the human race,’ wrote the Prussian civil servant Friedrich von Gentz in a letter to a friend on 5 December 1790. ‘It is philosophy’s first practical triumph, the first instance of a form of government based on principles and on a coherent and consistent system. It is the hope as well as the consolation for so many of the old evils under which humanity groans.’4