Events were in fact rapidly tending to the rupture of the Franco-Russian alliance. Alexander, indeed, assisted Napoleon in the war of 1809, but he declared plainly that he would not allow the Austrian Empire to be crushed out of existence; and Napoleon complained bitterly of the inactivity of the Russian troops during the campaign. The Tsar in his turn protested against Napoleon's encouragement of the Poles. In the matter of the French alliance he knew himself to be practically isolated in Russia, and he declared that he could not sacrifice the interest of his people and empire to his affection for Napoleon. "I don't want anything for myself", he said to the French ambassador, "therefore the world is not large enough to come to an understanding on the affairs of Poland, if it is a question of its restoration."

The Treaty of Vienna, which added largely to the Duchy of Warsaw, he complained had "ill requited him for his loyalty", and he was only mollified for the time by Napoleon's The annexation of Oldenburg, of which the Duke of Oldenburg (January 3, 1754–July 2, 1823) was the Tsar's uncle, to France in December, 1810, added another to the personal grievances of Alexander against Napoleon; while the ruinous reaction of "the continental system" on Russian trade made it impossible for the Tsar to maintain a policy which was Napoleon's chief motive for the alliance. An acid correspondence followed, and ill-concealed armaments, which culminated in the summer of 1812 with Napoleon's invasion of Russia. Yet, even after the French had passed the frontier, Alexander still protested that his personal sentiments towards the Emperor were unaltered; "but", he added, "God Himself cannot undo the past". It was the occupation of Moscow and the desecration of the Kremlin, the sacred centre of Holy Russia, that changed his sentiment for Napoleon into passionate hatred. In vain the French Emperor, within eight days of his entry into Moscow, wrote to the Tsar a letter, which was one long cry of distress, revealing the desperate straits of the Grand Army, and appealed to "any remnant of his former sentiments". Alexander returned no answer to these "fanfaronnades". "No more peace with Napoleon!" he cried, "He or I, I or He: we cannot longer reign together!"

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Liberal political views

Once a supporter of limited liberalism, as seen in his approval of the Constitution of the Kingdom of Poland in 1815, from the end of the year 1818 Alexander's views began to change. A revolutionary conspiracy among the officers of the guard, and a foolish plot to kidnap him on his way to the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle, are said to have shaken the foundations of his Liberalism. At Aix he came for the first time into intimate contact with Metternich. From this time dates the ascendancy of Metternich over the mind of the Russian Emperor and in the councils of Europe. It was, however, no case of sudden conversion. Though alarmed by the revolutionary agitation in Germany, which culminated in the murder of his agent, the dramatist August von Kotzebue (March 23, 1819), Alexander approved of Castlereagh's protest against Metternich's policy of "the governments contracting an alliance against the peoples", as formulated in the Carlsbad Decrees of July 1819, and deprecated any intervention of Europe to support "a league of which the sole object is the absurd pretensions of absolute power."

He still declared his belief in "free institutions, though not in such as age forced from feebleness, nor contracts ordered by popular leaders from their sovereigns, nor constitutions granted in difficult circumstances to tide over a crisis. "Liberty", he maintained, "should be confined within just limits. And the limits of liberty are the principles of order."

It was the apparent triumph of the principles of disorder in the revolutions of Naples and Piedmont, combined with increasingly disquieting symptoms of discontent in France, Germany, and among his own people, that completed Alexander's conversion. In the seclusion of the little town of Troppau, where in October 1820 the powers met in conference, Metternich found an opportunity for cementing his influence over Alexander, which had been wanting amid the turmoil and feminine intrigues of Vienna and Aix. Here, in confidence begotten of friendly chats over afternoon tea, the disillusioned autocrat confessed his mistake. "You have nothing to regret," he said sadly to the exultant chancellor, "but I have!"

The issue was momentous. In January Alexander had still upheld the ideal of a free confederation of the European states, symbolised by the Holy Alliance, against the policy of a dictatorship of the great powers, symbolised by the Quadruple Treaty; he had still protested against the claims of collective Europe to interfere in the internal concerns of the sovereign states. On 19 November he signed the Troppau Protocol, which consecrated the principle of intervention and wrecked the harmony of the concert.

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Revolt of the Greeks

At Congress of Laibach, whither in the spring of 1821 the congress had been adjourned, Alexander first heard of the Revolt of the Greeks. From this time until his death his mind was torn between his anxiety to realise his dream of a confederation of Europe and his traditional mission as leader of the Orthodox crusade against the Ottoman Empire. At first, under the careful nursing of Metternich, the former motive prevailed.

He struck the name of Alexander Ypsilanti from the Russian army list, and directed his foreign minister, Giovanni, Count Capo d'Istria, himself a Greek, to disavow all sympathy of Russia with his enterprise; and, next year, a deputation of the Morea the Congress of Verona was turned back by his orders on the road.

He made some effort to reconcile the principles at conflict in his mind. He offered to surrender the claim, successfully asserted when the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II had been excluded from the Holy Alliance and the affairs of the Ottoman empire from the deliberations of Vienna, that the affairs of the East were the "domestic concerns of Russia," and to march into the Ottoman Empire, as Austria had marched into Naples, "as the mandatory of Europe."

Metternich's... opposition to this, illogical, but natural from the Austrian point of view, first opened his eyes to the true character of Austria's attitude towards his ideals. Once more in Russia, far from the fascination of Metternich's personality, the immemorial spirit of his people drew him back into itself; and when, in the autumn of 1825, he took his dying Empress Louise of Baden (January 24, 1779–May 26, 1826) for change of air to the south of Russia, in order—as all Europe supposed—to place himself at the head of the great army concentrated near the Ottoman frontiers, his language was no longer that of "the peace-maker of Europe," but of the Orthodox Tsar determined to take the interests of his people and of his religion "into his own hands." Before the momentous issue could be decided, however, Alexander died, "crushed," to use his own words, "beneath the terrible burden of a crown" which he had more than once declared his intention of resigning.

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Private life

On October 9, 1793, Alexander married Louise of Baden, known as Elisabeth Alexeyevna after her conversion to the Orthodox Church. He later told his friend Frederick William III that the marriage, a political match devised by his grandmother, Catherine the Great, regretfully proved to be a misfortune for him and his wife. Their two children of the marriage died young.

• Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna of Russia (29 May 1799 - 8 July 1800) - rumoured to be the child of Adam Czartoryski
• Grand Duchess Elizabeth Alexeievna of Russia (16 November 1806 - 12 May 1808); died of infection

Their common sorrow drew husband and wife closer together. Towards the close of his life their reconciliation was completed by the wise charity of the Empress in sympathising deeply with him over the death of his beloved daughter Sophia, by Princess Maria Naryshkina.

Alexander also had 9 illegitimate children.

With Sophia Vsevolojsky (1775-1848)

• Nikolai Loukache (11 December 1796 - 20 January 1868)

With Maria Naryshkina (1779-1854)

• Zenaida Naryshkina (1806 - 18 May 1810)
• Sophia Naryshkina (1808 - 18 June 1824)
• Emanuel Naryshkin (30 July 1813 - 31 December 1901)

With Marguerite-Josephine Weimer (1787-1867)

• Maria Alexandrovna Parijskaia (19 March 1814 - 1874)
• Wilhelmine Alexandrine Pauline Alexandrov (1816 - 4 June 1863)

With Veronica Dzierzanowska

• Gustave Ehrenberg (14 February 1818 - 28 September 1895)

With Princess Barbara Tourkestanova (1775 - 20 March 1819)

• Maria Tourkestanova (20 March 1819 - 19 December 1843)

With Maria Ivanovna Katatcharova (1796-1824)

• Nikolai Vassilievich Isakov (10 February 1821 - 25 February 1891)

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Ancestry

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Mysterious death

The Palace of Alexander I in Taganrog, where the Russian Emperor died in 1825.

Tsar Alexander I became increasingly involved in and increasingly more suspicious of those around him. On the way to the conference in Aachen, Germany an attempt had been made to kidnap him which made him even more suspicious of the people around him.

In the autumn of 1825 the Emperor undertook a voyage to the south of Russia due to the increasing illness of Alexander's wife. During his trip he himself caught a cold which developed into typhus from which he died in the southern city of Taganrog on November 19 (O.S.)/December 1, 1825. His wife died a few months later as the emperor's body was transported to Saint Petersburg for the funeral. He was interred at the Sts. Peter and Paul Cathedral of the Peter and Paul Fortress in Saint Petersburg on March 13, 1826.

The unexpected death of the Emperor of Russia far from the capital caused persistent rumors that his death and funeral were staged while the emperor allegedly renounced the crown and retired to spend the rest of his life in solitude. It is rumored that a "soldier" was buried as Alexander or that the grave was empty or that a British ambassador at the Russian court said he had seen Alexander boarding a ship. Some say the former emperor became a monk in either Pochaev Lavra or Kievo-Pecherskaya Lavra or elsewhere. Many people, including some historians, supposed that a mysterious hermit Feodor Kuzmich (or Kozmich) who emerged in Siberia in 1836 and died in the vicinity of Tomsk in 1864 was in fact Alexander I under an assumed identity. While there are testimonies that "Feodor Kozmich" in his earlier life might have belonged to a higher society, his identity as Alexander I was never established beyond the reasonable doubt. In 1925 the Soviets opened Alexander's tomb and did not find a body.^{[citation needed]}

The immediate aftermath of Alexander's death was also marked by confusion regarding the order of succession and by the attempt of military coup-d'etat by liberal-minded officers. The heir presumptive, Tsesarevich and Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich had in 1822 renounced his rights of succession, but this act was not publicly announced, nor known to anybody outside of few people within the tsar's family. For this reason, on November 27 (O.S.), 1825 the population, including Constantine's younger brother Nicholas, swore allegiance to Constantine. After the true order of succession was disclosed to the imperial family and general public, Nicholas I ordered that the allegiance to him to be sworn on December 14 (O.S.), 1825. Seizing the opportunity, the Decembrists revolted, allegedly to defend Constantine's rights to the throne, but in fact - in order to initiate the change of regime in Russia. Nicholas I brutally suppressed the rebellion and sent the ringleaders to the gallows and Siberia.

Some confidantes of Alexander I reported that in the last years the Emperor was aware that the secret societies of future Decembrists were plotting the revolt, but chose not to act against them, remarking that these officers were sharing "the delusions of his own youth." Historians believe that these secret societies appeared after the Russian officers returned from their Napoleonic campaigns in Europe in 1815.

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Other

Alexander I was the godfather of future Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom who was christened Alexandrina Victoria in honour of the tsar.

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Александр I Павлович

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See also

• Tsars of Russia family tree

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References

This article does not cite any references or sources. (March 2007) Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

• Henri Troyat, "Alexandre 1er", Flammarion, 1981.

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This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.