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 by members of Alexander’s family. Even while the emperor was negotiating at Tilsit, his sister the Grand Duchess Catherine wrote to him that Napoleon was ‘a blend of cunning, personal ambition and falseness’ who should feel honoured just to be allowed to consort with the Russian monarch. She added: ‘I wish to see her [i.e. Russia] respected, not in word but in reality, seeing that she certainly has the means and the right to be so.’ Catherine’s mother, the Dowager Empress Marie, became the centre of Petersburg aristocratic opposition to the French alliance. Most of Petersburg high society closed its doors to Caulaincourt when he first arrived and some of these doors remained closed throughout his stay, despite Alexander’s annoyance. Many French royalist émigrés lived in Petersburg or served in the Russian army. Their manners, education and style won them much sympathy in Petersburg high society and contributed to its hostility to Napoleon. Among the most prominent émigrés was the Duc de Richelieu, who became governor-general of New Russia (i.e. southern Ukraine) but returned to France after the Restoration to serve Louis XVIII as prime minister. Also to the fore were the Marquis de Traversay, who served as Minister of the Navy from 1811, and the two sons of the Count de Saint-Priest, France’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire before 1789. Best known of all was Joseph de Maistre, along with Edmund Burke the most famous political thinker of the European counter-revolution, who served as the exiled King of Sardinia’s envoy to Petersburg in these years.6
The ‘legitimist’ sympathies of the Petersburg drawing rooms were not just a product of snobbery and nostalgia for Old Regime France, however. They were also rooted in the sense that Napoleon’s actions were a challenge to the religious and historical principles on which their own state and society rested, as well as to any stable system of international relations in Europe. Baron Grigorii Stroganov, for example, had been Russia’s envoy to the Spanish court for many years. When Alexander requested him to continue to serve in the same capacity at the court of Joseph Bonaparte, Stroganov refused. Stroganov wrote to the emperor that Napoleon’s deposition of the Bourbons violated ‘the most sacred rights’, indeed precisely those rights on whose basis Alexander himself ruled. In kidnapping and deposing his own Spanish allies, Napoleon had also violated in the crudest manner ‘the holiness and the good faith of treaties’. If Stroganov continued to represent Russia in Madrid he would feel personally dishonoured before the Spanish people and ‘of all the sacrifices which I am ready to bear for the glory and the service of Your Imperial Majesty that of my honour is the only one which I am not in a position to offer’.7
In addition to these sentiments, there was a strong strain of Anglophilia in Petersburg society. Britain was seen as not just very powerful but also as the freest of the European states. Unlike other countries, Britain’s freedoms actually seemed to enhance its power, allowing the state to sustain a huge level of debt at very manageable cost. The wealth, entrenched rights and values of its aristocracy were seen as a key to both British freedom and British power, and were compared favourably with Napoleon’s bureaucratic despotism. If the Vorontsov and Stroganov families were Petersburg’s most prominent aristocratic Anglophiles, some of Alexander’s closest friends from his own generation also belonged in this camp.
