VIII.
During the reigns of Nicholas I. and Alexander II. the German-Austrian influence reached its zenith at the Court of Petersburg. Nicholas I. was the brother-in-law of the Prussian Hohenzollern. An able and an honest man in his private relations, he was in his political capacity a Prussian martinet, as even Treitschke is compelled to admit, and he organized his Empire on the strictest Frederician principles. The Court, the Army, and the bureaucracy were Prussianized as they had never been before. A German bureaucrat, Nesselrode, who could not even speak the Russian language, for forty years controlled as Foreign Minister the policy of the Russian Empire. Even as his grandfather, Peter III., even as his brother, Alexander I., had saved Prussia from destruction, so Nicholas I. saved Austria from a similar fate. Francis Joseph had ascended a throne shaken to its foundations. Hungary was in open rebellion. The young Austrian Emperor appealed to Russia for help. Nicholas I. sent an army to quell the revolution, and established his cousin on the Hungarian throne. It is unnecessary to add that Francis Joseph was as loyal and as grateful to Russia as Frederick the Great had been!
Alexander I. had refused to accept Napoleon I. as a brother-in-law. Even so did Nicholas I. refuse to recognize Napoleon III. as Emperor of the French. It was a gratuitous insult inspired by Prussia; it was opposed to Russian interests, and it was one of the main causes of the Crimean War.