There was, however, even in the midst of these pacific sentiments, one jarring note. It was agreed in a fashion reminiscent of Alexander's foreign- policy manifesto of 17 July 1801 that surrendering the continent to the inordinate ambition of Bonaparte was not an acceptable option.
Unfortunately, the First Consul ofthe French Republic declined Alexander's pleas for moderation and peace and challenged the order of Europe in a fashion that could not be ignored. Bonaparte annexed Piedmont (April 1801), imposed satellite regimes in the Netherlands (October 1801) and Switzerland (February 1802), made himself First Consul for life (August 1802), then Emperor (May/December 1804), president of the new Italian Republic (February 1802) and subseqently King of Italy (May 1805), manipulated the Imperial Recess to his advantage (1803 ff.), seized the Duc d'Enghien in Baden, the home of the Tsaritsa Elizabeth of Russia, executed him (February 1804) and annexed Genoa (June 1805). The Third Coalition was naturally soon in the making.
By this time, Alexander had come under the influence of a remarkable friendship and the very different foreign-policy ideas that it engendered. As a young man of only nineteen years, Alexander had made the acquaintance of the Polish Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski. The two shared a passion for liberal ideas of statecraft and justice, and Alexander confessed emotionally to Czartoryski his embarrassment at his grandmother's partitions of Poland. There were hints of Alexander's intention to rectify the injustice, and it was clearly not a transient idea. In 1812 he was still writing about it to Czartoryski: 'Quel est le moment le plus propre pour prononcer la regeneration de la Pologne?'[115] Scarcely any sentiment could have brought the two men more nearly together. As the brief honeymoon of concord with the French Republic dissipated and a new conflict loomed, Czartoryski had become in 1803-4 de facto and then actual minister of foreign affairs. At this point, a new foreign- policy programme was formed.
While V P. Kochubei had argued that strategic invulnerability conferred upon Russia the good fortune of being able to follow an isolationist foreign policy, Czartoryski argued on the contrary that it imposed on Russia the obligation to follow an activist policy. Russia, he insisted, would most easily find its own peace by leading the continent to a peaceful condition. Obviously the biggest threat to the peace of Europe at the time was the expansionist policy of France, and that fact made it natural for Great Britain and Russia to seek each other's alliance against the threat. Once French power were curtailed, they agreed, it could best be contained by restoring the independence of the Italian states and forming a confederation of western German states on the French frontier.
As Kochubei had also observed, the antagonism of Austria and Prussia would naturally force them to follow Russia's lead. Russia might well undertake a kind of Pan-Slav drive to liberate the Balkan Slavs from the Turks, sharing some of the spoils with Austria if necessary, especially if there were a threat of French imperialism in that area. Moreover, it made sense for Russia to redress the injustice ofthe Polishpartitions, the more so as sharing those spoils with the neighbouring German states worked to Russia's disadvantage. Russia could easily win her Slavic brethren the Poles to her cause by re-establishing the kingdom under Russian Grand Duke Constantine.
The policy of Russia must be grand, benevolent and disinterested ... It must assure the tranquillity of all of Europe in order to assure its own and in order not to be distracted from its civilizing concerns [in developing] its own interior. Russia wants each power to have the advantages that justice confers on it, . . . the surest means of assuring the general equilibrium. But it will oppose with force any excessive ambition.[116]
This paper forms the background of the mission of N. N. Novosil'tsev to London in November 1804. Czartoryski drafted Novosil'tsev's instructions. If Russia should overstep the bounds of her own national interests - an important point - and mix in the affairs of Europe, he wrote, it should be for the purpose of establishing a benign and peaceful order of affairs on the continent of Europe, a permanent peace. The ascendancy of Bonaparte in Europe threatened, he said, to supplant all notions of justice, of right, and of morality in international affairs by the triumph of crime and iniquity and thus to suspend the security of the continent in general. Proceeding from these principles, he set out Alexander's particular aims: to return France to its ancient borders; to give it a new government; to liberate Sardinia, Switzerland and the Netherlands; to force the French evacuation of Naples and of Germany; to preserve the Turks - always a volatile and slippery issue - and to form larger states or a federation of states on the French frontiers as a barrier to French expansion.
In order to make success in the war as sure as possible, Alexander contemplated an imitation of Paul's policy of forcing a reluctant Prussia to take part in the coalition (Alexander's so-called Mordplan). In the peace to follow, Alexander imagined calling for something like national frontiers drawn along clearly recognisable lines of nationality and/or natural frontiers (a concept which would have disintegrated his own kingdom). Finally,
Alexander proposed a kind of concert system to sustain the peace after the war was won. He professed to be motivated by nothing more than the 'general wellbeing'.
Meantime, never mind the fact that Alexander had conspired on war aims and peace terms with the British in advance; he nevertheless represented his plans of 1805 as an armed mediation! That is, he would present to the French and British governments alike the Anglo-Russian terms as those of a coalition of Russia and Austria - and Prussia if possible - in an effort to mediate the conflict between Britain and France.
Here is a most reasonable facsimile of the politics of crazy Paul, who was seeking to use his Russo-Prussian Northern League of the winter of 1800-1 for the same kind of armed mediation between the French on the one hand and the Anglo-Austrian alliance on the other. The idea of the Concert of Europe as it grew out of Vienna is more fully developed than anything that Paul had in mind, but he was notably congress-prone. Short of the concert, and with the exception of the extravagances of the last two to three weeks of his life, it is essentially Paul's kind of plan, subject merely to the changes that the course of events had worked in political geography and alliances: that is, Bavaria and Wurttemberg had been indemnified sufficiently handsomely by Bonaparte to cease to look to Russia for protection, and while Paul had not stipulated in Paris in favour of Switzerland and the Netherlands, he had sent armies to liberate them. About the same time, Alexander renewed Paul's treaty of alliance with the Turks (11/23 September 1805).
Meantime, as implausible as it seems, Alexander did not hesitate, during his negotiations with the British, to urge their evacuation of the island of Malta, and he continued to defend the cause of neutral trade, both of which issues almost cost him the alliance ofLondon. Takingthe similarities ofthepolicies of the two sovereigns into account, either Alexander and his allies were under the spell of Paul - a ludicrous suggestion - or there was method in Paul's madness. Or there was something in the context of Russian foreign policy driving very different personalities to similar geopolitical conceptions. That context was very likely the product of the educational values of the Enlightenment and the challenge that the French Revolution posed to conceptions of political order in Europe.
115
W H. Zawadzki,
116
P.K.Grimsted(ed.),'Czartoryski'sSystemforRussianForeignPolicy:AMemorandum',