Russia Against Napoleon_ The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace - Dominic Lieven [39]
the Emperor Napoleon and in general everyone in France makes a mistake about this country. They don’t know it well and believe that the emperor governs as a despot, whose simple decree is enough to change public opinion or at least to determine all decisions…[This] is wrong. For all his goodness and the gentleness of character for which he is famous, the Emperor Alexander perhaps imposes his views on public opinion more than any previous monarch. The Empress Catherine, who was beyond question the most imperious of women and the most absolute sovereign who ever reigned, did this much less than him. Of that you can be sure. Nor did she ever find herself in such difficult circumstances as he now faces. She understood this country so well that she won over all elements of public opinion. As she herself once told me, she handled carefully even the spirit of opposition of a few old ladies.2
In fact Rumiantsev was preaching to the converted and the French embassy in Petersburg kept a very wary eye on public opinion. It was widely believed that the coups which overthrew Alexander’s father and grandfather had been motivated in part by opposition to their foreign policies, though Caulaincourt himself stressed the manner in which these monarchs had infringed the personal interests of key members of the Petersburg aristocracy. In his dispatches he told Napoleon that memories of Emperor Paul and dislike of the Grand Duke Constantine were some guarantee against an attempt to overthrow Alexander I. When the Russian monarch travelled to Erfurt to meet Napoleon in September 1808, Caulaincourt noted that with the totally dependable Dmitrii Lobanov-Rostovsky as military governor of Petersburg and the very loyal Fedor Uvarov in command of the Guards nothing untoward was likely to happen in the emperor’s absence. Subsequently, however, the ambassador noted that the cultivation of Russian nationalist circles by the emperor’s sister, Grand Duchess Catherine, represented a potential threat to the throne. With the exception of some rather brief moments, above all in 1809, Caulaincourt stressed that, though few Russians wanted war, the support of Alexander and Rumiantsev for the French alliance made them isolated and unpopular figures in Petersburg.3
To some extent hostility to France was due to a sense of injured pride. Eighteenth-century Russia had won its wars, so Austerlitz and Friedland were a humiliating shock. Needless to say, such public humiliation was all the harder to bear for proud aristocrats brought up to feel an acute concern for their honour and reputation. Prince Serge Volkonsky recalls that he and his young fellow-officers of the Chevaliers Gardes regiment burned with desire to revenge Austerlitz and took out their frustrations by breaking the windows of the French embassy and then racing off before anyone could catch them.4
Nor were matters necessarily much different among the army’s senior officers. Alexander’s first ambassador in Paris after Tilsit was Lieutenant-General Count Petr Tolstoy. Tolstoy was an ambassador of heroic bluntness: he was in fact not a diplomat but a fighting general and longed to escape from the Paris embassy, where in his opinion he was wasting his time on a fool’s errand. He told his superiors in Petersburg repeatedly that Napoleon (whom in general he pointedly continued to call Bonaparte) was bent on the domination of all Europe, and ‘wants to make us an Asiatic power, to push us back behind our old frontiers’. Repelled and humiliated by French arrogance and vainglory, Tolstoy came close to fighting a duel with Michel Ney after the ambassador had sung the praises of the Russian army a bit too loudly for the Frenchman’s taste and had argued that French victory in 1807 was due to luck and to overwhelming numbers.5
Such feelings were shared