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By Root 3555 0

of the Tilsit treaties, the two emperors took the salute at a parade of the French and Russian guards. After the parade, in a dramatic gesture which aptly concluded two weeks of play-acting between the monarchs, Napoleon asked Alexander’s permission to award the Légion d’honneur to the bravest soldier in the Preobrazhensky Guards. Mikhail Kozlovsky, the regiment’s commander, was thoroughly taken aback by this piece of Napoleonic populism and simply summoned forward the battalion’s right-hand marker, Grenadier Aleksei Lazarev. The bewildered Lazarev, a soldier’s son, suddenly found himself embraced by Napoleon, an officer of the Légion d’honneur, and the recipient of a pension of 1,200 francs a year.

But Alexander’s Russia in general and the Preobrazhensky Guards in particular were not best suited to such dramatic examples of French-style ‘social mobility’. Two years later Lazarev was ejected from the regiment for cheek to a sergeant-major. In 1819, back in the invalid (i.e. veterans) battalion of the Preobrazhenskys as an ensign, he was arrested for assaulting two civilians. Maybe Lazarev was just a difficult character. But soldiers’ sons who rose into the officer corps sometimes faced prejudice and had a hard time adapting to their new status. Even in line regiments a number of them were dismissed or censured after the war, their personnel records citing drunkenness, incompetence and other failings. If officers risen from the ranks faced difficulties in line regiments, Lazarev may well have found life even as a semi-retired ensign of the Preobrazhenskys quite a struggle. He committed suicide before his case could be resolved.66

After the treaties were ratified and the parades finished, Alexander left Tilsit and headed back to Petersburg. He divulged his innermost thoughts about recent events to no one. Just how much hope or confidence he had in his new relationship with France it is impossible to say. No doubt he believed that, whatever might follow as regards Russo-French relations, at least he had gained time for his empire and rescued it from a situation of great danger. Perhaps the truest guide to his thoughts is the comment he is said to have made to the Prussian king and queen about Napoleon: ‘He will break his own neck. Despite all my performance and external behaviour I am your friend and hope to prove that to you by my actions.’67

Neither contemporaries nor historians found Alexander an easy man to understand. An excellent actor, who operated behind a screen of charm and flattery, he remained secretive, opaque, distrustful and elusive. To many observers both in his lifetime and subsequently he appeared to be a mass of contradictions. On the one hand he was a champion of enlightened and liberal principles, but on the other he did very little to ameliorate the authoritarian system of government he inherited, or the world of serf and master on which it rested. He sounded like his grandmother, Catherine II, when he spoke of liberal reforms, but acted like his father, Paul I, in his obsessive concern for the correct drill and appearance of his soldiers on the parade ground. In foreign affairs he put forward high-minded schemes for international peace and order, while simultaneously pursuing a policy of realpolitik. All this has persuaded some critics that he was simply confused and hypocritical.68

It is true that the emperor combined very different interests and enthusiasms, inherited from his grandmother and father. He also played to the European gallery, as Catherine had done, seeking to depict himself as a truly enlightened European man and monarch. Brought up on enlightened European ideas by his Swiss tutor and then forced to operate within a Russian context, at one level Alexander believed that Russia was unworthy of him. One side effect of this was a tendency to trust foreign military advisers more than his own generals. There was something in Alexander’s nature which made him want to seduce and win the sympathy of every person he met. If this applied most strongly as regards women, he used seduction, sensibility