Tsar Alexander I 1777 – 1825
Tsar Alexander I 1777 – 1825, also known as Alexander the Blessed, served as Emperor of Russia from 23 March 1801 to 1 December 1825 and Ruler of Poland from 1815 to 1825, as well as the first Russian Grand Duke of Finland and Lithuania.
Alexander I was a patient of Begelius, and he awarded Carl Bernhard Trinius the Order of St. Vladimir IV Class,
Alexander knew Napoleon Bonaparte, Francis I of Austria, Klemens Wenzel Prince von Metternich, Johann Josef Wenzel Graf Radetzky von Radetz,
According to Carl Bojanus, Homeopathy entered Russia in the last years of Emperor Alexander I’s rule. In 1824, Karl Jakob Adam, who had become acquainted one year before to Samuel Hahnemann, arrived in Russia from Germany. [...]. He introduced to homeopathy Dr. Scherring, who later became the Chief physician of the Special Guardian Board….
Alexander and his younger brother Constantine were raised by their grandmother, Catherine the Great.
Some sources allege that she created the plan to remove her son (Alexander’s father) Paul I from succession altogether. Both she and his father tried to use Alexander for their own purposes, and he was torn emotionally between them.
From the free thinking atmosphere of the court of Catherine the Great and his Swiss tutor, Frederic Cesar de La Harpe, he imbibed the principles of Rousseau’s gospel of humanity.
But from his military governor, Nikolay Saltykov, he imbibed the traditions of Russian autocracy. Andrey Afanasyevich Samborsky, whom his grandmother chose for his religious upbringing, was an atypical, unbearded Orthodox priest, who had long lived in England and taught Alexander (and Constantine) excellent English.
Young Alexander sympathised with French and Polish revolutionaries, but his father seems to have taught him to combine a theoretical love of humankind with a practical contempt for humankind. These contradictory tendencies remained with him through life and are observed in his dualism in domestic and military policy.
On 9 October, 1793 when Alexander was still 15 years old, he married 14 year old Louise of Baden, who took the name Elizabeth Alexeievna. Meanwhile, the death of Catherine the Great in November 1796, before she could appoint Alexander as her successor, brought his father, Paul I, to the throne.
Paul I’s attempts at reform were met with hostility and many of his closest advisers as well as Alexander were against his proposed changes. Paul I was murdered in March, 1801.
Alexander I succeeded to the throne on 24 March 1801, and was crowned in the Kremlin on 15 September of that year. Historians still debate about Alexander’s role in his father’s murder. The most common opinion is that he was let into the conspirators’ secret and was willing to take the throne but insisted that his father should not be killed. Alexander’s having become Tsar through a crime that cost his father’s life would give him a strong sense of remorse and shame, which explains his increasing religiosity after the Napoleonic Wars.
At first, the Orthodox Church exercised little influence on the Emperor’s life. The young tsar was determined to reform the outdated, centralised systems of government that Russia relied upon. While retaining for a time the old ministers who had served and overthrown Paul I, one of the first acts of his reign was to appoint the Private Committee, also called ironically the “Comité de salut public”, comprising young and enthusiastic friends of his own — Victor Kochubey, Nikolay Novosiltsev, Pavel Stroganov and Adam Jerzy Czartoryski — to draw up a plan of domestic reform, which was supposed to result in the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in accordance with the teachings of the Age of Enlightenment.
Also Alexander wanted to resolve another crucial issue in Russia — the future of the serfs, although this was not achieved until 1861.
At the very beginning of Alexander’s reign, several notable steps were made, including establishing freedom for publishing houses, the winding down of activities in the intelligence services and prohibition of torture. In a few years the liberal Mikhail Speransky became one of the Tsar’s closest advisors, and drew up many plans for elaborate reforms.
The reformers’ aims far outstripped the possibilities of the time, and even after they had been raised to regular ministerial positions little of their program could come to pass. Russia was not ready for a more liberal society; and Alexander, the disciple of the progressive teacher Laharpe, was — as he himself said — but “a happy accident” on the throne of the Tsars. He spoke, indeed, bitterly of “the state of barbarism in which the country had been left by the traffic in men.”
The codification of the laws initiated in 1801 was never carried out during his reign; nothing was done to improve the intolerable status of the Russian peasantry; the constitution drawn up by Mikhail Speransky, and approved by the emperor, remained unsigned. Finally elaborate intrigues against Mikhail Speransky initiated by his political rivals led to his loss of Alexander’s support and subsequent removal in March 1812.
Alexander, who, without being consciously tyrannical, possessed in full measure the tyrant’s characteristic distrust of men of ability and independent judgement, in fact lacked the first requisite for a reforming sovereign: confidence in his people; and it was this want that vitiated such reforms as were actually realised.
He experimented in the outlying provinces of his Empire; and the Russians noted with open murmurs that, not content with governing through foreign instruments, he was conferring on Poland, Finland and the Baltic provinces benefits denied to themselves.
In Russia, too, certain reforms were carried out, but they could not survive the suspicious interference of the autocrat and his officials. The State Council and the Governing Senate, new bodies endowed for the first time with certain (theoretical) powers, became slavish instruments of the Tsar and his favourites of the moment.
The elaborate system of education, culminating in the reconstituted, or newly founded, universities of Dorpat (Tartu), Vilna (Vilnius), Kazan and Kharkiv, was strangled in the supposed interests of “order” and of the Russian Orthodox Church; while the military settlements which Alexander proclaimed as a blessing to both soldiers and state were forced on the unwilling peasantry and army with pitiless cruelty. Though they were supposed to improve living conditions of soldiers, the economic effect in fact was poor and harsh military discipline caused frequent unrest.
Even the Bible Society, through which the emperor in his later mood of evangelical zeal proposed to bless his people, was conducted on the same ruthless lines. The Roman Catholic archbishop and the Orthodox metropolitans were forced to serve on its committee side by side with Protestant pastors; and village priests, trained to regard any tampering with the letter of the traditional documents of the church as a mortal sin, became the unwilling instruments for the propagation of what they regarded as works of the devil…..
Upon his accession, Alexander reversed the policy of his father, Paul I, denounced the League of Neutrals, and made peace with the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (April 1801). At the same time he opened negotiations with Francis I of Austria of the Holy Roman Empire.
Soon afterwards at Memel he entered into a close alliance with Prussia, not as he boasted from motives of policy, but in the spirit of true chivalry, out of friendship for the young Frederick William III and his beautiful wife Louise of Mecklenburg Strelitz.
The development of this alliance was interrupted by the short lived peace of October 1801; and for a while it seemed as though France and Russia might come to an understanding. Carried away by the enthusiasm of Frederic Cesar de La Harpe, who had returned to Russia from Paris, Alexander began openly to proclaim his admiration for French institutions and for the person of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Soon, however, came a change. Frederic Cesar de La Harpe, after a new visit to Paris, presented to the Tsar his Reflections on the True Nature of the Consul for Life, which, as Alexander said, tore the veil from his eyes, and revealed Napoleon Bonaparte “as not a true patriot”, but only as “the most famous tyrant the world has produced.” Alexander’s disillusionment was completed by the murder of the duc d’Enghien. The Russian court went into mourning for the last member of the House of Condé, and diplomatic relations with France were broken off.
The events of the Napoleonic Wars that followed belong to the general history of Europe; but Alexander’s attitude throughout is personal to himself, though pregnant with issues momentous for the world…..
Sue :: Sep.07.2009 :: Russian History :: No Comments »