For Napoleon, the conflict with Russia in the Holy Lands served as a means of reuniting France after the divisions of 1848–9. The revolutionary Left could be reconciled to the coup d’état and the Second Empire if it was engaged in a patriotic fight for liberty against the ‘gendarme of Europe’. As for the Catholic Right, it had long been pushing for a crusade against the Orthodox heresy that was threatening Christendom and French civilization.
It was in this context that Napoleon appointed the extreme Catholic La Valette as French ambassador to Constantinople. La Valette was part of a powerful clerical lobby at the Quai d’Orsay, the French Foreign Ministry, which used its influence to raise the stakes in the Holy Lands dispute, according to Persigny.
Our foreign policy was often troubled by a clerical lobby (coterie cléricale ) which wormed its way into the secret recesses of the Foreign Ministry. The 2 December had not succeeded in dislodging it. On the contrary, it became even more audacious, profiting from our preoccupation with domestic matters to entangle our diplomacy in the complications of the Holy Places, where it hailed its infantile successes as national triumphs.
La Valette’s aggressive proclamation that the Latin right to the Holy Places had been ‘clearly established’, backed up by his threat of using the French navy to support these claims against Russia, was greeted with approval by the ultra-Catholic press in France. Napoleon himself was more moderate and conciliatory in his approach to the Holy Lands dispute. He confessed to the chief of the political directorate, Édouard-Antoine de Thouvenel, that he was ignorant about the details of the contested claims and regretted that the religious conflict had been ‘blown out of all proportion’, as indeed it had. But his need to curry favour with Catholic opinion at home, combined with his plans for an alliance with Britain against Russia, also meant that it was not in his interests to restrain La Valette’s provocative behaviour. It was not until the spring of 1852 that he finally recalled the ambassador from the Turkish capital, and then only following complaints about La Valette by Lord Malmesbury, the British Foreign Secretary. But even after his recall, the French continued with their gunboat policy to pressure the Sultan into concessions, confident that it would enrage the Tsar and hopeful that it would force the British to ally with France against Russian aggression.5
The policy paid dividends. In November 1852 the Porte issued a new ruling granting to the Catholics the right to hold a key to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, allowing them free access to the Chapel of the Manger and the Grotto of the Nativity. With Stratford Canning away in England, the British chargé d’affaires in Constantinople, Colonel Hugh Rose, explained the ruling by the fact that the latest gunship in the French steam fleet, the Charlemagne, could sail at eight and a half knots from the Mediterranean, while its sister ship, the Napoleon, could sail at twelve – meaning that the French could defeat the technologically backward Russian and Turkish fleets combined.6
The Tsar was furious with the Turks for caving in to French pressure, and threatened violence of his own. On 27 December he ordered the mobilization of 37,000 troops from the 4th and 5th Army Corps in Bessarabia in preparation for a lightning strike on the Turkish capital, and a further 91,000 soldiers for a simultaneous campaign in the Danubian principalities and the rest of the Balkans. It was a sign of his petulance that he made the order on his own, without consulting either Nesselrode, the Foreign Minister, Prince Dolgorukov, the Minister of War, or even Count Orlov, the chief of the Third Section, with whom he conferred nearly every day. At the court there was talk of dismembering the Ottoman Empire, starting with the Russian occupation of the Danubian principalities. In a memorandum written in the final weeks of 1852, Nicholas set out his plans for the partition of the Ottoman Empire: Russia was to gain the Danubian principalities and Dobrudja, the river’s delta lands; Serbia and Bulgaria would become independent states; the Adriatic coast would go to Austria; Cyprus, Rhodes and Egypt to Britain; France would gain Crete; an enlarged Greece would be created from the archipelago; Constantinople would become a free city under international protection; and the Turks were to be ejected from Europe.7
At this point Nicholas began a new round of negotiations with the British, whose overwhelming naval power would make them the decisive factor in any showdown between France and Russia in the Near East. Still convinced that he had forged an understanding with the British during his 1844 visit, he now believed that he could call on them to restrain the French and enforce Russia’s treaty rights in the Ottoman Empire. But he also hoped to convince them that the time had come for the partition of Turkey. The Tsar held a series of conversations with Lord Seymour, the British ambassador in St Petersburg, during January and February 1853. ‘We have a sick man on our hands,’ he began on the subject of Turkey, ‘a man gravely ill; it will be a great misfortune if he slips through our hands, especially before the necessary arrangements are made.’ With the Ottoman Empire ‘falling to pieces’, it was ‘very important’ for Britain and Russia to reach an agreement on its organized partition, if only to prevent the French from sending an expedition to the East, an eventuality that would force him to order his troops into Ottoman territory. ‘When England and Russia are agreed,’ the Tsar told Seymour, ‘it is immaterial what the other powers think or do.’ Speaking ‘as a gentleman’, Nicholas assured the ambassador that Russia had renounced the territorial ambitions of Catherine the Great. He had no desire to conquer Constantinople, which he wanted to become an international city, but for that reason he could not allow the British or the French to seize control of it. In the chaos of an Ottoman collapse he would be forced to take the capital on a temporary basis (en dépositaire) to prevent ‘the breaking up of Turkey into little republics, asylums for the Kossuths and Mazzinis and other revolutionists of Europe’, and to protect the Eastern Christians from the Turks. ‘I cannot recede from the discharge of a sacred duty,’ the Tsar emphasized. ‘Our religion as established in this country came to us from the East, and these are feelings, as well as obligations, which never must be lost sight of.’8
Seymour was not shocked by the Tsar’s partition plans, and in his first report to Lord John Russell, the Foreign Secretary, he even seemed to welcome the idea. If Russia and Britain, the two Christian powers ‘most interested in the destinies of Turkey’, could take the place of Muslim rule in Europe, ‘a noble triumph would be obtained by the civilization of the nineteenth century’, he argued. There were many in the coalition government of Lord Aberdeen, including Russell and William Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who wondered whether it was right to go on propping up the Ottoman Empire while Christians were being persecuted by the Turks. But others were committed to the Tanzimat reforms and wanted time for them to work. Procrastination certainly suited the British, since they were caught between the Russians and the French, whom they distrusted equally. ‘The Russians accuse us of being too French,’ the astute Queen Victoria remarked, ‘and the French accuse us of being too Russian.’ The cabinet rejected the Tsar’s notion that an Ottoman collapse was imminent and agreed not to plan ahead for hypothetical contingencies – a course of action likely in itself to hasten the demise of the Ottoman Empire by provoking Christian uprisings and inspiring repressions by the Turks. Indeed, the Tsar’s insistence on an imminent collapse raised suspicions in Westminster that he was plotting and precipitating it by his actions. As Seymour noted of his conversation with the Tsar on 21 February, ‘it can hardly be otherwise but that the Sovereign who insists with such pertinacity upon the impending fate of a neighbouring state must have settled in his own mind that the hour of its dissolution is at hand’.9