After ratifying the treaties of peace and alliance with France Alexander left Tilsit and travelled back to Petersburg, where he arrived on 16 July 1807. The previous day the capital had witnessed a twenty-one-gun salute and a service in the Kazan cathedral to celebrate peace. Similar celebrations occurred in Moscow, where Bishop Augustin put a good face on events by telling his congregation that Napoleon had been so impressed by the Russian troops’ courage that he had decided he needed Russia for a friend. The Orthodox Church did have some explaining to do since, on the orders of the government, it had been declaiming from the pulpit for many months against Napoleon the Antichrist. Apparently, the story now went round many Russian villages that the tsar had met Napoleon in the middle of a river in order to wash away his sins.1
Alexander could afford for the moment to ignore the bafflement of his peasant subjects over his sudden friendship for the former Antichrist. He could not be so nonchalant about the opinion of the Moscow and Petersburg aristocracy, and of the generals and Guards officers who formed a key element in this elite. In the autumn of 1807 Count Nikolai Rumiantsev took over as foreign minister. Subsequently he told the French ambassador, the Marquis de Caulaincourt, that
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
