A week later the émigré French colonel Alexandre Michaud, one of the tsar’s favourite adjutants, arrived from Kutuzov. ‘My God – what sad news you bring me, colonel,’ sighed Alexander as he read the marshal’s report: ‘The occupation of Moscow is not the conquest of Russia. I move with the army in the direction of Tula to preserve the immense resources prepared in our central provinces.’
Petersburg was bewildered. Revolution seemed possible. When Alexander entered Kazan Cathedral, he was received in sepulchral silence. Two days later, after no word from Kutuzov, he wrote: ‘Not receiving any news from you about the accidents befalling the armies entrusted to you, I can’t hide my own anxiety and the depression caused in St Petersburg. I want you to set yourself a rule: send reports to me every two days!’
His brother Constantine, whom Catiche called a ‘hopeless’ master of hysterical hindsight, now joined his mother and Chancellor Rumiantsev in a demand for peace talks, but Alexander refused, stiffened by the sister who longed to fight herself: ‘My dear, no peace and even if you were at Kazan, no peace!’
‘Be persuaded,’ he replied, ‘my resolution to fight is more unshakeable than ever: I would prefer to cease to be than compromise with the monster who is the scourge of mankind.’ Then even Catiche wavered: ‘You are loudly accused of your empire’s misfortune.’
Alexander kept his nerve but painfully admitted that ‘As to talent, I may be lacking it but it cannot be acquired . . . Napoleon who blends the most terrible roguery with the most transcendent talent is backed by the whole of Europe,’ so ‘it’s hardly astonishing if I meet with reverses’. He warned Catiche that Napoleon plotted to turn her against him: family loyalty was essential. ‘I am more determined than ever to fight to the end.’*
Sending Michaud back to Kutuzov, Alexander made clear he would achieve victory and, even if he lost his throne, he would happily live as a peasant eating potatoes before he signed a peace: ‘Napoleon or me. Me or him! We cannot reign simultaneously. I’ve learned to understand this, he won’t deceive me!’
To everyone, the destruction of Moscow seemed an apocalyptic moment, and it stimulated Alexander’s growing mysticism. ‘The burning of Moscow illuminated my soul and the judgement of God on the frozen battlefield filled my heart with the warmth of faith.’ It was a stronger Alexander who now emerged, despatching his adjutant Alexander Chernyshev to plan the counter-offensive. Chernyshev led cavalry raids against the French, the beginning of a partisan war against the invaders.
As Kutuzov rested his infantry and allowed his cavalry to harass French lines while winter approached, Napoleon wasted over a month in the Kremlin: ‘I considered the business done.’ He expected Alexander, whom he still regarded as weak, to negotiate terms. Instead he was now discovering that the Russians were fighting a patriotic war such as he had experienced only in Spain. ‘This is a war of extermination,’ he explained. ‘To burn their own cities! A demon has got into them. What a people!’ The demon was the spark of the Russian nation, the war was its crucible. Kutuzov mocked Napoleon for failing ‘to spot a trap visible to the whole world’ and his ‘absurd cheek in offering peace when he could no longer make war’. But Alexander berated Kutuzov, ‘Nothing’s been done to take action against the enemy,’ and warned him: ‘Remember you still have to account to the offended nation for the loss of Moscow.’
On 6 October, Kutuzov managed to bloody the French at Tarutino – just as Napoleon finally realized that he had fatally misjudged Russia and Alexander. Winter was coming and he had to retreat fast. He left the Kremlin with the Grande Armée. In pique, he ordered the Kremlin to be destroyed. When he heard the distant crump of explosives he announced that the ‘ancient citadel of tsars no longer exists’. But the charges, like the campaign, never ignited.15
Kutuzov wept when he heard that Napoleon was retreating, but he was in danger of being outflanked when the Grande Armée headed for Maloyaroslavets. On 11–12 October, at the closely fought Battle of Maloyaroslavets, Kutuzov ruined Napoleon’s hope of an orderly retreat. The old marshal followed in a parallel march, harassing the French but keeping his distance.
Napoleon sent a peace offer to Alexander. ‘Peace?’ replied Alexander. ‘But as yet we’ve not made war. My campaign is only just beginning.’ He was frustrated by Kutuzov’s slow pursuit. On 3–6 November, Kutuzov bruised the passing French at Krasnyi in a rolling skirmish in which he took over 20,000 prisoners and killed a further 10,000. ‘Yet another victory,’ Kutuzov told his wife, but he was keen to avoid more battles. ‘I’m by no means sure’, said Kutuzov, ‘the total destruction of Napoleon would be of such benefit.’
His forces were down to fewer than 60,000 men and he let the other armies, under the German-born general, Prince Peter Sayn-Wittgenstein from the north and Admiral Chichagov from the south, take over the pursuit. Kutuzov had let Napoleon escape. ‘It is with extreme sadness that I realize that the hope of wiping away the dishonour of Moscow’s loss by cutting off the enemy’s retreat has been lost,’ wrote Alexander, thanks to Kutuzov’s ‘inexplicable inactivity’. Kutuzov offered to resign. When he reoccupied Smolensk, Alexander bit his lip and awarded him a resounding new title: prince of Smolensk.
As two Russian armies converged on him, Napoleon and the remnants of his army, harried by Cossacks and facing total destruction, raced to cross the Berezina River. In a feat of French engineering, luck, courage and Russian incompetence, Napoleon crossed the Berezina and then, abandoning his men to Russian winter and revenge, he raced for Paris. ‘It seems the All-Powerful has brought on the head of this monster all the miseries he intended for us,’ Alexander wrote with grim satisfaction to both Arakcheev and Catiche as Napoleon’s retreat turned to rout in the first week of November.
‘The delight is general,’ replied Catiche, though she reflected her brother’s view that Prince Kutuzov-Smolensky ‘shines with splendour he doesn’t deserve’. On 11 December,* Alexander arrived back in Vilna to retake supreme command from the ailing Kutuzov, appointing as chief of staff his intimate Prince Peter Volkonsky who became, along with Arakcheev, his omnipresent lieutenant. The two men loathed each other. Vilna with its 30,000 corpses resembled a vast refrigerated mortuary. Entering a gruesome warehouse where ‘they’d stacked corpses as high as the walls’, he saw something moving. ‘I suddenly spotted, amid those inanimate bodies, living beings.’ The emperor finally got the chance to reflect on the fall of Napoleon, telling his pretty courtier Sophie de Tisenhaus about the irresistible gaze of those ‘light-grey eyes . . . What a career he’s ruined! The spell is broken.’
Kutuzov had no intention of pursuing Napoleon into Europe, in which he was supported by the dowager empress and Catiche. Russia had lost 150,000 men; the army was down to 100,000. But Alexander had a different vision of a personal and national mission, one that was now decisive in European history. He left Nikolai Saltykov, that relic of the reigns of Elizaveta and Catherine, in charge in Petersburg, and advanced into Europe to destroy Napoleon. ‘You have saved not just Russia,’ he told his soldiers, ‘but all of Europe.’16
On 1 January 1813, Alexander and his army crossed the Niemen into Napoleon’s empire, immediately reaching out to the Prussian king, who by late February had joined this new alliance against France, fielding 150,000 Russians and 80,000 Prussians, all to be funded by Britain.
This newly confident Alexander summoned the seven attractive wives of his generals – but not his own empress – to join him in ‘a small feminine court’. The first to arrive was Princess Zinaida Volkonskaya, twenty-three years old, sensitive, cultured and a sublime singer, unhappily married to a ne’er-do-well adjutant who was also accompanying the emperor. As they travelled, Alexander often called on the ladies, but he visited Zinaida alone. ‘You alone have the rare talent of making all those around you more lovable since you yourself are full of indulgent kindness.’
Germany was the new battleground. Napoleon astonished Europe with the speed with which he rebuilt his army. Now Alexander had recruited Pr
ussia to his coalition, he needed Austria, whose foreign minister, the thirty-nine-year-old Count Clemens von Metternich, hoped to restore Austrian status by escaping the French alliance and mediating with Russia. Son of a minor aristocrat from the Rhineland, he had risen fast to become Emperor Francis’s leading adviser, a wealthy magnate and a prolific lover. Metternich’s ‘blue-eyed benevolent gaze’, wrote the novelist Stendhal, ‘would fool God himself’. Metternich’s letters to his many mistresses were filled with vain boasts and emotional neediness, but in the service of Austria he played his hand skilfully. If he was smug, he had much to be smug about. This was the man Alexander had to coax away from Napoleon.
In early March, Alexander’s army, co-operating with the Prussians, advanced into Saxony. On 16 April, Kutuzov died, freeing Alexander of his bête noire. In Dresden for Easter, Alexander was now convinced he was doing ‘a sacred duty’. He wrote to Golitsyn: ‘Since Petersburg, not a day passes without my reading the Holy Scripture.’ He celebrated with his troops: ‘At midnight we sang the Pascal hymn on the banks of the Elbe. It would be difficult to express to you the emotion I felt penetrate me as I looked back on this year and reflected where Divine Providence has brought us.’ But his piety did not get in the way of his affair with the married Zinaida. Meanwhile Napoleon, fielding a new army, was advancing.
In late April and early May, the allies, facing Napoleon at Lützen and Bautzen, commanded by the mediocre Wittgenstein and Alexander, were narrowly defeated, though their armies remained intact. The Prussians despaired, but Alexander’s cool optimism reassured them. He sacked Wittgenstein and reappointed Barclay, who bought time by defeating the French in smaller engagements while Alexander worked on the Austrians.
‘We are all in the best possible spirits,’ the tsar wrote to Zinaida on 14 May. ‘Our troops distinguished themselves even if the final result was not quite as successful as we had hoped,’ but ‘to all the hopes I have for military success, I must add the sincerest one for the joy of seeing you as soon as possible!’ Then he declared his feelings for her. His love was accepted.
‘I’ve often said I was afraid of disturbing you when I expressed my sentiments to you,’ he wrote, because ‘I wanted to be sure you yourself were sure too and had not misunderstood. It’s my heart that now dictates these words to you!’ The tsar added that the love letter was being delivered to her by her own husband, Prince Nikita Volkonsky, whom Alexander mocked as ‘the ordinary post’. On 4 June, Napoleon, exhausted and short of cavalry, agreed to an armistice. Alexander ‘much to my regret had to agree to this’. It turned out to be Napoleon’s mistake.
Setting up headquarters at Reichenbach, Emperor Francis and Metternich arrived to negotiate with both Alexander and Napoleon. Fearing that the fall of Napoleon would herald Russian domination, Metternich offered him the chance to keep most of his conquests, including much of Germany, in return for making concessions to Russia, Austria and Prussia, a balance-of-power compromise. Metternich found himself close to Ratiborschitz, the palace of his new mistress, Wilhelmina de Biron, duchesse de Sagan, who, as granddaughter of Empress Anna’s favourite, was a semi-detached Russian. At exhausting meetings at Sagan’s chateau, Alexander tried to persuade Metternich to declare war on France.
Alexander’s affair with Zinaida was at its height and he anticipated the ‘reward’ – sexual, presumably – that he hoped to receive: ‘I await the moment of our meeting with the liveliest impatience . . . Forever yours heart and soul. A.’ Days later he joined her at Teplitz where the coalition leaders were gathered. ‘I am impatient to be at your feet,’ he told Zinaida. ‘May I come to you between 7 and 8?’ Afterwards he wrote, ‘I’m so grateful for the indulgence with which you received me. These moments will never be erased from my mind.’ The erotic and the mystical were combined in him. After one enjoyable assignation, he declared that ‘My only ambition is to give peace to the universe.’
Sweden, under its crown prince and ex-Napoleonic marshal Bernadotte, had already joined the alliance, which was now boosted by £2 million of British cash. Napoleon agreed to extend the armistice and negotiate a compromise in Prague. Metternich was delighted, Alexander furious, but the breathing space had its advantages. ‘It gives me hope of seeing you,’ Alexander wrote to Catiche, who was in Prague to canvass the Austrians. ‘I can’t thank you enough for all you’ve already done,’ said the tsar. ‘I regret you’ve said nothing yet about Metternich and what’s needed to have him wholly ours: I have the necessary funds so don’t be shy!’ The tactics of bribery, Alexander confided, ‘are the safest of all’.
In July, when the negotiations opened, Napoleon went back on his word, offering only a return to the status quo before 1812. On 1 August, Austria declared war, throwing another 130,000 men into the field against France, its last condition being that Prince Karl von Schwarzenberg be appointed commander-in-chief. Alexander ‘kissed and pummelled me as if I was his long-lost brother’, wrote the modest Schwarzenberg, who complained bitterly to his wife about Alexander’s entourage: ‘I have to put up with weaklings, fops, pedlars of crackpot schemes, intriguers, blockheads, gasbags, nit-pickers, in a word, innumerable vermin.’
On 5 August, the armies set off towards Dresden which they could have taken. Instead the clumsiness and procrastination of multinational command, exacerbated by ‘Tsar Alexander’s unfortunate compulsion to meddle in decision-making’, allowed Napoleon to take Dresden. The allies retreated, but two days later the Russians redeemed themselves. Commanded by Barclay and spearheaded by Alexander’s Guards, they defeated the French at a savage little battle at Kulm, watched by the tsar. Those days would provide his favourite memories, for at last Alexander, the joke of Austerlitz and liability of 1812, had won military laurels. The tide had turned.17
As he wrangled his allies towards France, Alexander and the monarchs were accompanied by a bedraggled caravan of courtiers, grandes dames and grandes horizontales – among them Prussians, Corsicans, Frenchmen, even Laharpe, the tsar’s boyhood tutor. The ministers lolloped along in mud-spattered formal dress with swords and decorations as they spent their boring days soaked in the rain, stranded on marshy roads until suddenly terrified by the roar of cannon and the sight of shattered bodies, sharing hovels at night and, if not too fastidious, raddled tavern whores. Alexander the soldier kept up with his troops, so that Metternich and his own ministers were always trying to catch up with him. ‘Throughout military operations,’ Metternich told his mistress Wilhelmina, ‘I’d spend evenings with His Imperial Majesty from 8/9 p.m. to midnight.’
‘I lead a dog’s life,’ Alexander told Catiche on 5 October, ‘and can scarcely cope with the terrible pressure of work on my hands.’ Alexander thanked the Supreme Being. ‘My belief that God reserves for himself alone the power to conduct everything and my confidence in him has grown stronger,’ he wrote to his mystical brother, Golitsyn. ‘With us, everything goes brilliantly.’
After abandoning Dresden, Napoleon massed 203,000 men at Leipzig where the allies, with 326,000, challenged his hold on Germany. On 4 October 1813, Alexander, accompanied by Francis, Frederick William and Bernadotte of Sweden, presided over the Battle of Nations, where 500,000 men with 2,000 guns slashed and blasted each other for three days. For once, Alexander’s heated protest at Schwarzenberg’s plan saved the allies from disaster. When enemy cavalry threatened the tsar’s own position, he directed a charge by Cossack Guards that scattered them.
Only Arakcheev shamed himself by fleeing when a shell landed near by. Alexander was ebullient. ‘Almighty God has granted us a striking victory over the famous Napoleon,’ he told Golitsyn. ‘And here we are two days’ march from Frankfurt!’*
Alexander was in a hurry to invade France, but Metternich saw Austria balancing Russia and France. ‘I argued at least three hours with your fine emperor. I told him off as I do my son,’ he boasted to Wilhelmina. ‘I dashed over to Meiningen to arrange a few points in the destiny of the world with Emperor Alexander.’ By the end of October, they were in
Frankfurt where Alexander found a new mistress, Madame Bethmann, a bosomy Dutch banker’s wife whom Metternich mocked as ‘a Dutch cow’.
At Basel on Russian New Year’s Day, Alexander, Francis, Frederick William and 200,000 men crossed the Rhine into France. The tsar pushed for a quick advance on Paris, which horrified Metternich. The Austrians wanted only a partial invasion to force Napoleon to compromise and possibly leave his son on the throne.
A new civilian now joined the caravan. Viscount Castlereagh, the tall, laconic British foreign secretary and paymaster of the coalition, distrusted Alexander’s overbearing swagger and mystical rapture, both moods alien to British phlegm. ‘The most dangerous for us’, Castlereagh told his prime minister, the Earl of Liverpool, on 6 January 1814, ‘is the chevaleresque tone of Emperor Alexander. He has a personal feeling about Paris, distinct from political-military considerations,’ a keenness to parade his Guards through Paris to avenge Moscow. Yet Castlereagh agreed with the tsar that Napoleon had to go.
Alexander now ordered Schwarzenberg to march on Paris. Schwarzenberg refused. When Metternich and Castlereagh caught up with them at Langres on 13 January, they found the tsar in a frenzy. ‘Tsar Alexander has had another of those fits of buffoonery that often seize him,’ wrote Schwarzenberg. ‘Heaven protect us!’ Castlereagh wished the tsar would be ‘more measured in his projects . . . more intelligible in his own views’. But it was easy to misunderstand Alexander. He did see the fall of Napoleon as his own personal apotheosis and millenarian triumph, but this shrewd analyst understood the Corsican monster better than the others: lasting peace could be made only in Paris. Castlereagh wanted the Bourbons restored to the throne. Alexander entertained a farrago of schemes oscillating between a regency for Napoleon’s son under Empress Marie-Louise and a constitutional monarchy or a progressive republic with Bernadotte as consul or king. Napoleon, recapturing his old flair, won a series of battles but success made him more intransigent. On 26 February at Chaumont, the allies agreed not to make a separate peace and to fight Napoleon to the end.