Alexander I

George Dawe painted Alexander in 1826, the year after the emperor died at Taganrog. Dark coat, star, a later likeness in Peterhof: this is a face already finished, not the young man who woke as tsar the morning after a murder. Do not ask the canvas to do 23 March 1801. The last article closed in St Michael’s Castle. This page is what the son claimed to want once the night had become a government. Good laws, a committee of friends, a priest’s son at a desk, and an autocracy he had no intention of sharing sit in the same reign as a portrait painted after death. The painter’s job was likeness. The emperor’s job, as Britannica records it, was to look like a dawn after Paul without ceasing to be a sovereign.

Aleksandr Pavlovich was born on 23 December 1777, 12 December Old Style, in St Petersburg, first child of Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich and Grand Duchess Maria Fyodorovna. Catherine took him from his parents and raised him herself to prepare him to succeed her. She was determined to disinherit her own son, who repelled her by his instability. She had already written the manifesto that deprived Paul of his rights and designated the grandson as heir when she died suddenly on 17 November 1796. Alexander, who knew of it, did not dare to disclose the manifesto. Pavel became emperor. The grandson waited. The waiting ended in a bedchamber he had been told would only produce an abdication.

Paul’s reign, Britannica’s Alexander life says, was a dark period. The monarch’s tyrannical and bizarre behaviour led to a plot. Alexander became tsar the next day. After the darkness into which Paul had plunged Russia, he appeared to his subjects as a radiant dawn. He was handsome, strong, pleasant, humane, and full of enthusiasm. He wanted his reign to be a happy one and dreamed of great and necessary reforms. When he came to the throne in March 1801, Russia was in a state of hostility with most of Europe, though its armies were not actually fighting; its only ally was its traditional enemy, Turkey. The new emperor quickly made peace with both France and Britain and restored normal relations with Austria. His hope that he would then be able to concentrate on internal reform was frustrated by the reopening of war with Napoleon in 1805. The wars have their own articles. This page needs the committee, the secretary, and the plan that stayed on paper.

The lithograph is Mikhail Speransky after George Dawe, pasted into a later manuscript of letters to Alexander. Use it as proof that a face existed on paper, then return to dated facts. A print is not the Plan of 1809, and it is not a police carriage at midnight in March 1812.

With four friends of noble families but motivated by liberal ideas — Prince Adam Czartoryski, Count Pavel Stroganov, Count Viktor Kochubey, and Nikolay Novosiltsev — he formed the Private Committee, the Neglasny Komitet. Its avowed purpose was to frame “good laws, which are the source of the well-being of the Nation.” Britannica’s English keeps that phrase. Russian remembers the circle as unofficial. Both names point to the same room: a tsar who wanted reform talked about with friends, not a constitution locked onto the autocracy. The committee is the dawn as a working habit. It is not yet a code. It is not yet 1812. Keep the raft and the burning city for later pages. Keep this page as a briefing that did not become a statute.

Under Alexander, Speransky was assigned to ever more responsible positions, at first in the new Ministry of the Interior, where he drafted legislation and was the prime mover in founding Severnaya pochta, or Novaya Sankt-Petersburgskaya gazeta, Russia’s first official newspaper. In 1807 he became intimately associated with the emperor as administrative secretary and assistant. In 1808 he accompanied Alexander to his meeting with Napoleon, who described him as “the only clear head in Russia.” He reorganized the seminaries and secured the establishment of the first Russian lycée. In 1809 he laid the basis for his own downfall by two measures that outraged the bureaucratic nobility: holders of court titles must perform actual service to the state; officials must pass examinations in order to be promoted. The angry nobles began to refer contemptuously to him as the popovich.

It was in 1809, also, that he proposed his new “constitution,” the Plan of 1809. Well aware that Alexander wanted no tampering with the essence of the autocracy or with its basis in serfdom, Speransky prepared complicated plans for dividing the population into three classes with varying degrees of political and civil rights and for creation of elective assemblies, the dumas, and an appointive State Council. The latter was set up on 1 January 1810. The dumas, innocuous though they would have been, remained on paper. In 1807–12, when he had the emperor’s confidence, he was responsible for financial and administrative reforms designed not to change the essence of the state structure but to improve its functioning. His obvious pro-French leanings added to the hostility of nobles whose pocketbooks had suffered by Russian participation in the Continental System.

His aloof personality and his continued association with persons inferior to him in social standing prevented him from making friends among men with political prestige. He was left defenseless against high-placed enemies at court, including the emperor’s sister, Catharine of Oldenburg. In 1811 the historian N. M. Karamzin attacked him in the memoir Of Old and New Russia. In March 1812 Speransky was summarily dismissed. Returning home at midnight, he found a police carriage waiting. Without even taking leave of his daughter, he started for exile in Nizhny Novgorod, then Perm in the Urals. Two years later he was permitted to return to an estate near Novgorod. Only in 1816, after appealing to Count A. A. Arakcheyev — whom Pushkin, Britannica notes, contrasted with Speransky as Alexander’s “evil genius” — was he allowed to reenter state service as provincial governor in remote Penza. The next article is Napoleon’s Europe, not this exile. Keep the carriage as the end of the secretary’s first career.

He asked friends for good laws and a priest’s son for a constitution, then kept the autocracy and sent the secretary away in a police carriage.

Defeated at Austerlitz in December 1805, Russian armies fought Napoleon in Poland in 1806 and 1807, with Prussia as an ineffective ally. After the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807 there were five years of peace, ended by Napoleon’s invasion in 1812. Those campaigns have their own pages. What belongs here is the emperor who hoped to reform at home and was pulled into war, who used Speransky in the Tilsit years, and who discarded him on the eve of the invasion. The dawn did not become a constitution. The State Council sat. The dumas did not. Serfdom remained the basis Alexander would not tamper with. A liberal reputation and an autocratic centre can live in the same man. Britannica’s Alexander is that man: alternately fighting and befriending Napoleon, dreaming of necessary reforms, and leaving the essence of the state where he found it.

He died on 1 December 1825, 19 November Old Style, at Taganrog. He took part in the Congress of Vienna, drove for the Holy Alliance in 1815, and took part in the conferences that followed. Those belong to the Paris article. The Decembrists belong to a later square. This page should stop at the committee, the secretary, the plan, the examinations, the State Council, the carriage in March 1812, and a reputation for liberalism that never offered the assembly a lock on the crown. Dawe’s 1826 portrait is a face after the reign. The lithograph is the secretary. Borovikovsky’s grand duke in a Guards coat, painted in 1802–03, is the young man Catherine had trained and Paul had feared — already in uniform, not yet the man of the raft or of Taganrog.

Keep Borodino out of this page except as a date that ended the peace of Tilsit. Keep Senate Square out of it. Alexander here is an accession after murder, a Private Committee that wanted good laws, a Speransky who drafted a constitution the dumas never received, a dismissal on the eve of 1812, and an autocracy that survived the dawn. Readers who want the Niemen, the fire of Moscow, or the occupation of Paris will find them in order. This article’s last inventory should stay smaller than a patriotic war. No peasant signed the Plan of 1809. No Guards regiment was asked to swear to a duma. The later portrait still looks past that absence, as court portraits are paid to do.

Borovikovsky’s grand duke wears a Preobrazhensky coat and a Maltese cross he would later set aside. It is a likeness from the first years of the reign, not a sitting from Vienna. Use it for the heir Catherine raised, then put it aside.

Stop this page before the raft, before Smolensk, before a congress in a Viennese ballroom. Those are the next articles. Alexander here is a dawn that kept the night’s powers: a committee of four names, a secretary called priest’s son, a State Council without elective assemblies, and a police carriage in March 1812. Dawe’s posthumous coat is the official face. The lithograph is the mind he used and discarded. The grand-duke portrait is the boy who did not dare to disclose a grandmother’s manifesto. A stimulus to reform talk is not nothing. It is also not a constitution.

Paul left him a male line and a murdered father. Catherine left him a reading list and a throne she had meant him to have sooner. He made peace in 1801, dreamed of good laws, hired Speransky, and still would not limit the autocracy or touch serfdom’s essence. The wars that followed pulled the dream off the desk. The next pages are those wars, in order: Napoleon’s Europe, the year 1812, and Paris. This article should not smuggle them in as if a Private Committee were already a burning capital. The dawn remains what it was: a handsome emperor, a secretary in exile, and a State Council that sat while the dumas stayed on paper.