The Illustrious Dead Read Free Page B

father’s fate, of his mother, and of his people, who were so often a mystery to him.
    Soon after Alexander’s accession in 1801, Napoleon attempted to pry him from his alliance with the Kingdom of Prussia and neutralize Russia as a player in the game for Europe. But Alexander, with his own ambitions for empire, eventually came to regard Napoleon as all the European monarchs did, as a usurper who had enslaved half of Europe and unsettled the rest. He turned down Napoleon’s proposals and joined forces with Austria for a climactic battle on December 2, 1805: Austerlitz.
    Austerlitz was Napoleon’s apogee. There he faced highly rated generals and outthought them at every turn in a battle that unfolded so seamlessly it was as if he had written out the events in longhand the night before. His army proved to be deft and maneuverable, even swelled to the then-unprecedented size of 75,000 men (a figure that would be dwarfed by the Grande Armée in 1812). The emperor fought a new kind of warfare, emphasizing speed, concentrated power, surprise, and improvisation.
    After another crushing victory over Russian forces at Friedland in June 1807, Napoleon and Alexander finally met at Tilsit the following month for a peace conference and the emperor laid siege to him as if he were a romantic conquest. The satanic elf that Alexander had been warned about turned out to be a fascinating charmer, a seducer of great intellectual skill and apparent honesty. Napoleon for his part allowed himself to believe that Alexander was a kindred soul, at least for his present purposes. “He is a truly handsome, good and youthful emperor,” he wrote, and the two spent nearly two weeks firming up their alliance.
    The main result was the humiliation of Prussia, which was cut down to almost half its size, and an uneasy stalemate over Poland, which Alexander and the political class in Moscow had always considered to belong to the homeland. Napoleon wanted to keep Poland outside of Russian control, as a buffer against any ambitions Alexander might have on his empire. Not only that, he had proposed enlarging the grand duchy with the 1.3 million citizens of western Galicia. This would turn Poland into a significant nation-state and a staging ground for Napoleon’s armies.
    Despite himself, Alexander was swayed by Napoleon and left Tilsit hopeful of a long-lasting alliance. But the return to Moscow dashed cold water in his face. Almost every segment of his power base was against the treaty—from his mother the empress, who hated Bonaparte to her marrow; to the business class, worried about French merchants expanding into their traditional markets in the Baltic; to the military elite, largely French-speaking but traumatized by two wars in which Napoleon had shredded their ranks. “Love for the Tsar has changed to something worse than hatred, to a kind of disgust,” wrote a Russian observer in his diary. There were warnings that Alexander would be assassinated like his despised father. A wave of Russification swept through the upper classes, with traditional arts and language finding a new popularity in the face of what was considered a French humiliation.
    Napoleon’s true target in courting Alexander was, of course, England. He had contemplated an invasion of the British Isles almost as soon as he came to power, but the inherent difficulty of the enterprise, and the looming power of the Royal Navy, had foiled his plans at every turn. What he’d failed to do militarily he tried to do commercially with the Continental System, an economic blockade instituted in 1806 and adopted by Alexander’s Russia after the Tilsit conference. But the blockade was a failure. Smugglers carrying English goods regularly skirted the French authorities and their lackeys and did a booming business in Portugal, Spain, and Italy, often with the corrupt approval of Napoleon’s handpicked rulers. Even his brothers Joseph in Naples, Louis in Holland, and Jérôme in Westphalia, who