Alexander I of Russia
Alexander I, nicknamed "the Blessed", was Emperor of Russia from 1801, the first king of Congress Poland from 1815, and the grand duke of Finland from 1809 to his death in 1825. He ruled Russia during the chaotic period of the Napoleonic Wars.
The eldest son of Emperor Paul I and Sophie Dorothea of Württemberg, Alexander succeeded to the throne after his father was murdered. As prince and during the early years of his reign, he often used liberal rhetoric but continued Russia's absolutist policies in practice. In the first years of his reign, he initiated some minor social reforms and major liberal educational reforms, such as building more universities. Alexander appointed Mikhail Speransky, the son of a village priest, as one of his closest advisors. The over-centralized Collegium ministries were abolished and replaced by the Committee of Ministers, State Council, and Supreme Court to improve the legal system. Plans were made but never consummated, to set up a parliament and sign a constitution. In contrast to his westernizing predecessors such as Peter the Great, Alexander was a Russian nationalist and Slavophile who wanted Russia to develop on the basis of Russian culture rather than European.
In foreign policy, he changed Russia's position towards France four times between 1804 and 1812, shifting among neutrality, opposition, and alliance. In 1805 he joined Britain in the War of the Third Coalition against Napoleon, but after suffering massive defeats at the battles of Austerlitz and Friedland, he switched sides and formed an alliance with Napoleon in the Treaty of Tilsit and joined Napoleon's Continental System. He fought a small-scale naval war against Britain between 1807 and 1812 as well as a short war against Sweden after Sweden's refusal to join the Continental System. Alexander and Napoleon hardly agreed, especially regarding Poland, and the alliance collapsed by 1810. Alexander's greatest triumph came in 1812 when Napoleon's invasion of Russia descended into a catastrophe for the French. As part of the winning coalition against Napoleon, he gained territory in Finland and Poland. He formed the Holy Alliance to suppress the revolutionary movements in Europe, which he saw as immoral threats to legitimate Christian monarchs.
During the second half of his reign, Alexander became increasingly arbitrary, reactionary, and fearful of plots against him; as a result, he ended many of the reforms he had made earlier on in his reign. He purged schools of foreign teachers, as education became more religiously driven as well as politically conservative. Speransky was replaced as advisor with the strict artillery inspector Aleksey Arakcheyev, who oversaw the creation of military settlements. Alexander died of typhus in December 1825 while on a trip to southern Russia. He left no legitimate children, as his two daughters died in childhood. Neither of his brothers wanted to become emperor. After a period of great confusion, he was succeeded by his younger brother, Nicholas I.
Early life
Alexander was born at 10:45, on 23 December 1777 in Saint Petersburg, and he and his younger brother Constantine were raised by their grandmother, Catherine. He was baptized on 31 December in the Grand Church of the Winter Palace by mitred archpriest Ioann Ioannovich Panfilov. His godmother was Catherine the Great, and his godfathers were Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor, and Frederick the Great. He was named after Alexander Nevsky, the patron saint of Saint Petersburg. As competing aspects of his upbringing, he imbibed the principles of Rousseau's gospel of humanity from the free-thinking atmosphere of the court of Catherine and his Swiss tutor, Frédéric-César de La Harpe, whereas he imbibed the traditions of Russian autocracy from his military governor, Nikolay Saltykov. Andrey Afanasyevich Samborsky, whom his grandmother chose to be his religious instructor, was an atypical, unbearded Orthodox priest. Samborsky had long lived in England and taught Alexander and his brother Constantine excellent English, a very uncommon accouterment for potential Russian autocrats of the time.On 9 October 1793, when Alexander was still 15 years old, he married 14-year-old Princess Louise of Baden, who took the name Elizabeth Alexeievna. His grandmother was the one who presided over his marriage to the young princess. Until his grandmother's death, he was constantly walking the line of allegiance between his grandmother and his father. His steward, Nikolai Saltykov, helped him navigate the political landscape, engendering dislike for his grandmother and dread in dealing with his father.
Catherine had the Alexander Palace built for the couple. This did nothing to help his relationship with her, as Catherine would go out of her way to amuse them with dancing and parties, which annoyed his wife. Living at the palace also put pressure on him to perform as a husband, though he felt only a brother's love for the Grand Duchess. He began to sympathize more with his father, as he saw visiting his father's fiefdom at Gatchina Palace as a relief from the ostentatious court of the empress. There, they wore simple Prussian military uniforms, instead of the gaudy clothing popular at the French court they had to wear when visiting Catherine. Even so, visiting the tsarevich did not come without a bit of travail. Paul liked to have his guests perform military drills, which he also pushed upon his sons Alexander and Constantine. He was also prone to fits of temper, and he often went into fits of rage when events did not go his way. Some sources allege that the empress Catherine planned to remove her son Paul from the succession altogether and make Alexander her successor instead.
Tsarevich
Catherine's death in November 1796 brought her son Paul to the throne before she could appoint Alexander as her successor. Alexander disliked his father as emperor even more than he did his grandmother. He wrote that Russia had become a "plaything for the insane" and that "absolute power disrupts everything". It is likely that seeing two previous rulers abuse their autocratic powers in such a way pushed him to be one of the more progressive Romanov tsars of the 19th century. In the country as a whole, Paul was widely unpopular. He accused his wife of conspiring to become another Catherine and seize power from him as his mother did from his father. He also suspected Alexander of conspiring against him.Emperor
Ascension
Alexander became Emperor of Russia when his father was assassinated on 23 March 1801. Alexander, then 23 years old, was in the Saint Michael's Castle at the moment of the assassination and his accession to the throne was announced by General Nicholas Zubov, one of the assassins. Historians still debate Alexander's role in his father's murder. The most common theory is that he was let into the conspirators' secret and was willing to take the throne but insisted that his father should not be killed. Becoming emperor through a crime that cost his father's life would give Alexander a strong sense of remorse and shame. Alexander I succeeded to the throne that day and was crowned in the Kremlin on 15 September of that year.Domestic policy
The Orthodox Church initially exercised little influence on Alexander's life. The young emperor was determined to reform the inefficient, highly centralised systems of government that Russia relied upon. While retaining for a time the old ministers, one of the first acts of his reign was to appoint the Private Committee, comprising young and enthusiastic friends of his own—Viktor Kochubey, Nikolay Novosiltsev, Pavel Stroganov and Adam Jerzy Czartoryski—to draw up a plan of domestic reform, which was supposed to result in the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in accordance with the teachings of the Age of Enlightenment.A few years into his reign the liberal Mikhail Speransky became one of the Emperor's closest advisors, and he drew up elaborate plans for reforms. In the Government reform, the old Collegia were abolished and new Ministries were created in their place, led by ministers responsible to the Crown. A Committee of Ministers under the chairmanship of the Sovereign dealt with all interdepartmental matters. The State Council was created to improve the technique of legislation. It was intended to become the Second Chamber of a representative legislature. The Governing Senate was reorganized as the Supreme Court of the Empire. The codification of the laws initiated in 1801 was never carried out during his reign.
Alexander wanted to resolve another crucial issue in Russia, the status of the serfs, although this was not achieved until 1861. His advisors quietly discussed the options at length. Cautiously, he extended the right to own land to most classes of subjects, including state-owned peasants, in 1801 and created a new social category of "free agriculturalist", for peasants voluntarily emancipated by their masters, in 1803. The great majority of serfs were not affected.
When Alexander's reign began, there were three universities in Russia, at Moscow, Vilna, and Dorpat. These were strengthened, and three others were founded at St. Petersburg, Kharkiv, and Kazan. Literary and scientific bodies were established or encouraged, and his reign became noted for the aid lent to the sciences and arts by the Emperor and the wealthy nobility. Alexander later expelled foreign scholars.
After 1815 the military settlements were introduced, with the idea of making the army, or part of it, self-supporting economically and for providing it with recruits.