• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2570 0

stopped me to show me a Paris newspaper which contained an article written by Prince Adam Czartoryski senior, about which he was very angry. In it he believed he had discovered Napoleon’s real intentions. Thus, by flattering the Poles with the hope of the re-establishment of their entire kingdom, he was seeking to deepen the divisions between them and Russia. Speaking with complete sincerity and much emotion, the emperor complained bitterly of the foolishness of his Polish subjects. They hated the Russians and were less than attached to him, but he had had no part in the partition of Poland, and in his heart he had always condemned it; as for the Russians of the current day, they were guiltless of the evils the Poles had experienced in those times. Taking advantage of his candour, I observed to him that he was forgetting that I was myself Polish [and] that I had fought for my fatherland in the insurrection of 1794. . . ‘I have not forgotten,’ he answered. ‘I know what you have done and I esteem you all the more for it . . . Napoleon needs to win over the Poles, and is therefore flattering them with bright hopes, whereas I, by contrast, have always respected your nation, and hope one day to prove it to you.’4

If Poland and the Balkans were Alexander’s immediate concerns, a number of other issues inclined to estrange him from Napoleon. One was the issue of the emperor’s second marriage. At Erfurt the idea had been very tentatively raised that he should marry Alexander’s second sister, the sixteen-year-old Grand Duchess Anna. The emperor had discovered that he had fathered a child by his Polish mistress, Maria Walewska (in other words, that his lack of an heir was the fault not of himself but of Josephine) and so on 22 November 1809 Caulaincourt was formally instructed to press the emperor’s suit at the Russian court. This, however, did not produce the desired result. Though Napoleon made a variety of gestures that were intended to smooth the way for his proposal - the most famous was a verbal promise to obliterate the very word ‘Poland’ from history - the response in St Petersburg was to prevaricate. Setting aside the tsar himself, who was not keen on the marriage, the dowager empress was clearly opposed to it, as were the many great magnates who felt that closer links with France had to be resisted at all costs. Faced with a demand for a definite answer in February , Alexander asked Napoleon to postpone the matter for two years on the grounds that Anna was still too young for marriage. This infuriated Napoleon: given the urgency of the case, Alexander’s action amounted to outright rejection.

But it was not long before Russia also had cause for anger. The Grand Duchess Anna was not the only eligible princess in Europe, and Austria possessed an alternative bride in the Archduchess Marie-Louise, who was eighteen and the eldest daughter of Francis I. Desperate to forge links with France, Metternich had suggested this possibility as early as August 1809 and the matter had been unofficially discussed with Vienna in the course of the winter. No sooner had Alexander’s definitive ‘no’ arrived in Paris, then, than Napoleon pounced. The very same post that carried the emperor’s letter to Alexander acknowledging the rejection of Anna therefore also carried another announcing his betrothal to Marie-Louise. For once there had been no duplicity on Napoleon’s part: to the very end it had been the Russian grand duchess who had been his favoured candidate. To save face, it was made out that the choice had been open and equal, and that ultimately it was Marie-Louise who suited France best. In St Petersburg, however, the betrothal was interpreted in a very different fashion. Napoleon, it was concluded, had been playing a double game designed to humiliate Russia. And even in Vienna, which had effectively been presented with a fait accompli, there was much dissatisfaction at the emperor’s failure to obey the rules of protocol, let alone display a modicum of courtesy. In his correspondence with Metternich, Francis was sullen and resentful: