I.
In the prodigious development which advanced the empire of the czars after the impulse which the genius of Peter the Great had given it, one can certainly signalize more than one Russian minister of foreign affairs whose name has a right to be commemorated by history. For instance, the mind of Count Panine was not an ordinary one, who conceived and caused to be accepted by different states the idea of armed neutrality at sea, and this at an epoch when Russia scarcely began to be reckoned among the maritime powers of the second or third class. If in this bold conception, as well as in the still more interesting attempts of Panine to limit the absolute power of the czars by aristocratic institutions, the remote influence of an Italian origin could be seen (the Panine descended from the Pagnini of Lucca), one cannot, however, overlook the perfectly indigenous, largely, autochthonal character of another famous minister of the same century, that of the Chancellor Bestoujef, whose figure Rulhière has drawn so very originally. Bestoujef, who spoke perfectly, feigned stammering, and had the courage to simulate this defect for seventeen years. In his conversations with foreign ambassadors he stammered in such a manner as not to be understood. He also complained of being deaf, of not understanding all the finesses of the French language, and had the same thing repeated a thousand times. He was in the habit of writing diplomatic notes with his own hand in a manner perfectly illegible. They were sent back to him and sometimes he could decipher their meaning. Having fallen into disgrace, Bestoujef immediately recovered his speech, hearing, and all the senses.
Very different is the type which was presented during all of the first half of this century by the immediate predecessor of Prince Gortchakof, the chancellor of the emperors Alexander I. and Nicholas. Connected with Germany by origin and the interests of his family, never even having learned to speak the language of the country whose relations with other powers he watched over, Count Charles Robert de Nesselrode did not the less complete a long and laborious career to the satisfaction of his two august masters, and figured with honor in congresses and conferences at the side of Talleyrand and Metternich. Without having recourse to the too Asiatic subterfuges of a Bestoujef, Count Nesselrode knew and practiced all the allowable tricks of the profession, and few men equaled him in the art of preserving an air of dignity and ease in the midst of the most embarrassing situations. He knew how to change his conduct without too great a change of language, and among other things managed in a very delicate manner the transition between the policy of the czar Alexander I. (unfavorable to the Greeks) and the frankly philhellenic sympathies of his successor. During the last Oriental crisis he placed all the resources of a shrewd and subtle mind at the service of a cause in which he saw nothing but grave dangers, and of which he ignored the national and religious side completely. Differing from Bestoujef, and much more European in this sense than in many others, M. de Nesselrode lost in his disgrace or rather in his retreat, the greater part of his faculties and his virtues, and above all caused an immense deception by his posthumous memoirs, composed in the decline of life and of a hopeless insignificance. But perhaps this was nothing but a last trait of cleverness and diplomatic malice in order to deceive on this point profane curiosity, and to leave behind him a work as empty and uninstructive as possible of a life so well filled.
Not one, however, of the Russian statesmen who have just been named was a great minister in the Occidental acceptation of the word. No one of them (in order to make comparisons in absolute monarchies only) had the position of a Duke de Choiseul in France during the last century, the authority of a Prince Clement de Metternich in Austria in the present century, or even the notoriety and popularity which Prince Gortchakof actually enjoys in Russia itself. Bestoujef, Panine, Nesselrode were, one may say, much better known abroad than in their own country, and their contemporaries were far from attributing to them the merit which posterity later saw in them, thanks to the posthumous revelations of the archives. No one of them was raised to power by a current of opinion, nor sustained in his position by public favor; not one of them pretended to show an individuality, to impress a personal direction on the affairs, which he conducted. This is because since Peter the Great to the present government, the éclat of the imperial name in Russia cast into the shade every other name, and instead of being a favorite or a great captain, every state servant was only the subaltern executor of a single and absolute will. The external policy, above all, was then considered as the exclusive domain of the sovereign, and the very fixity of the system rendered in some degree secondary and unimportant the question of the persons charged with fulfilling it. In fact, from the time of Peter the Great, the Russian government has always had in its relations with Europe certain traditions approved by experience, and certain sacred principles, from which it never deviated even in a small degree. The minister of foreign affairs at St. Petersburg, whatever his name might be, always had to labor to augment Russian prestige among the Christian populations of the Orient, to guard the maintenance of the equilibrium of power between Austria and Prussia, and to extend the influence of his government among the secondary States of Germany. To these rules, so to speak, elementary and invariable, of the external Russian policy, there was added from the year 1815 an international principle of preservation, a superior idea of solidarity between the governments for the defense of established order, the feeling of the duties and of the common interests created in the representatives of the monarchical authority in opposition to subversive passions sprung from the revolution, and it was this ensemble of the views and convictions of the two emperors Alexander I. and Nicholas which Count Nesselrode had, during almost half a century, to enforce, in all the acts and documents emanating from the chancellor's office at St. Petersburg.
It has been the destiny of the successor of Count Nesselrode to break little by little with all this ensemble of traditions and principles, and to inaugurate for the empire of the czars, in its external relations, an entirely new policy. One may dispute the merit of this policy, and dispute it the more widely as it is still far from having borne all its fruit. What is indisputable and astonishes at first sight, is that Prince Gortchakof has been able to attach his name to a change of system which is marked in the diplomatic annals of his country, and to create for himself, as minister of foreign affairs in Russia, a situation entirely personal, an important position, such as none of his predecessors ever had. Alexander Mikhaïlovitch is not only the faithful servant of his august master, he is the veritable chief of his department, the directing minister; he accepts boldly his part of the responsibility, and above all his share of the éclat in the different transactions of Europe. An equally new phenomenon in Russia, this minister not only retains the favor of his sovereign, but also that of the nation. He manages the public opinion of his country, he watches over it, sometimes he even flatters it, and it repays him. It has had some moments of infatuation for Alexander Mikhaïlovitch, even some moments of enthusiasm,—after the affairs of Poland; more than that, it has in a measure brought forward and created him. This elevation of the plenipotentiary of Vienna to the high position left vacant by Count Nesselrode in the month of April, 1856, was not without its results.
In 1815, on his triumphal return from the congress of Vienna, Alexander could select as he wished from the celebrated men who then formed the état-major of Russian diplomacy, the least known and the most humble of this illustrious body. Passing over Capo d'Istria, Pozzo di Borgo, Ribeaupierre, Razoumovsky, Stakelberg, d'Anstett, it was lawful for him to confide the direction of the external policy to a German gentleman of Westphalian origin, born at Lisbon, and Russian only by naturalization. In 1856, after the congress of Paris, the choice of Prince Gortchakof for the same position was, we will not say imposed, but certainly indicated to the Emperor Alexander II. by the voice of the people, or, if one likes it better, by that voice of the salons which did not delay at this moment in taking more and more a popular tone. And since his début at the Hotel of the Place du Palais the former pupil of Zarkoe-Zeloe distinguished himself by liberal ways and advances made in a public spirit, which must have occasionally astonished his predecessor, still living and in possession of the honored title of chancellor. For the first time, a Russian minister had mots, not only for the salons, but also for the lecture halls and the bureaux of journalists, words which went straight to the heart of the great lady and country gentleman, the humble student and proud officer of the gardes. His aphorism on Austria[26] went the rounds of all the Russias. Another aphorism, taken from a circular, soon transported the nation: the celebrated phrase, "Russia does not sulk, but meditates," seemed to be dictated by the very soul of the people, and drew from it a cry of enthusiasm. It was then that one remembered the awakening of the Russian spirit after a long period of compression; the journals, the thoughtful periodicals, inaugurated their joyful ébats, the authors, the literary men, began to have an importance hitherto unknown; Alexander Mikhaïlovitch, who always displayed a liking and sympathy for Russian literature, the former fellow scholar of Pouchkine, passed for a patriotic statesman in the eyes of Pogodine, Axakof, Katkof, etc. One perceived that he had a great hatred for Austria, a pronounced desire for the French alliance, and the nation, which also shared equally and even in an exaggerated manner, these two sentiments, saluted in him the national minister par excellence. A strange comparison, well made to demonstrate the inanity of words and the instability of things on earth, is the manner in which the most decided partisan of the empire of the Hapsburg, M. de Bismarck, the future conqueror of Sadowa, entered into the cænaculum of diplomats; and at the same time it was the implacable enemy of the Germans and the warm friend of the French whom, in 1856, the Russians exalted above all in the person of their vice-chancellor, the statesman who, later, by a policy of omission and commission, was to favor as no one else did, the dismemberment of France and the constitution of a Germany greater, more powerful, and more formidable than the history of past centuries has ever known! It is true that by the "Germans" the Russia of 1856 meant principally the Austrians,[27] and that in the France of that day it admired above all a certain absolutism in the democratic instincts which showed itself touched with the misfortunes of Italy, which professed to sympathize with Roumania, Servia, Montenegro, and which had not yet pronounced the fatal name of Poland.
"Calm yourself," the emperor of the French said to M. de Cavour, in the month of April, 1856, after the closing of the congress of Paris,—"Calm yourself; I have a presentiment that the present peace will not last long."[28] Prince Gortchakof had without doubt the same presentiment, and perhaps others more positive in this respect. The thought of "making war for an idea," the thought of freeing Italy, had long been fixed in the mind of Napoleon III.; at the moment of signing the treaty of Paris "with an eagle's feather," he let his hidden and dreaming glance fall on the classic plains of Lombardy. Now, for the enterprise which France meditated against Austria, and in which it could scarcely count on an angry neutrality of England, it was thought useful to secure in good season the friendship of Russia and Prussia. Prussia had emerged from the Oriental crisis very much weakened with its policy "of the free hand;" England, Austria, and Turkey had even had little desire to admit it to the honors of the congress. The president of the council at Berlin, M. de Manteuffel, was obliged to wait long in the antechamber, while the plenipotentiaries of Europe were in full deliberation, and it was only at the instance of the emperor of the French that the Prussian envoy was at last admitted. Napoleon III. insisted absolutely, in 1856, on allowing that Prussia to retake its position in Europe which fourteen years later was to dethrone him! As for Russia, we have already spoken of the politenesses and cordialities of which Count Orlof was the recipient from France during all the time of the congress. Since then, in the successive arrangements of the various difficulties which the execution of some of the clauses of the treaty of Paris caused to arise (Belgrade, Isle of Sérpents, navigation of the Danube, etc.), one saw the arguments or interpretations of the Russian plenipotentiary sustained almost constantly by the plenipotentiary of France. In the different and numerous conferences and commissions which followed in these years, 1856-1859, for regulating the pending questions, the distribution of the votes was almost invariably thus: England and Austria on one side, on the other France, Russia, and Prussia.[29]
Although Prince Gortchakof acknowledged with good grace all these attentions of the cabinet of the Tuileries, he was not sufficiently complaisant to follow it in a campaign of remonstrances against the government of Naples, a campaign undertaken in concert with the cabinet of Saint James, in consequence of the famous letters addressed to Lord Aberdeen by M. Gladstone on the régime of King Ferdinand II. A similar intermeddling in the internal affairs of an independent state did not seem very correct in the eyes of the successor of Count Nesselrode; but he was the more forward in seconding the Emperor Napoleon III. in his generous designs every time that there was a question of ameliorating the lot of the Christian populations in the Ottoman empire, of augmenting their autonomy, and, as was said then, of reforming the Turk. "To reform the Turk," maliciously thought M. Thouvenel, ambassador of France at Constantinople, "it is necessary to begin by first impaling him;" one commenced, however, by applying to him the question of hatt-houmayoum, by interrogating him concerning his intentions in favor of the rajahs of Bosnia, Bulgaria, and Herzegovina, and by thus annoying in a certain degree the cabinets of Vienna and London. Much greater was naturally the solicitude for the vassal States of the good padishah, for Moldavia, Wallachia, Servia, and Montenegro; these States already had a demi-independence, they made it possible to render it entire.
The little Prince of Montenegro, former protégé and servitor of the Emperor Nicholas, had come to visit the sovereign of France after the peace of Paris, and since his return had quarreled with the sultan, in consequence of which the Algésiras and L'Impétueuse appeared before Ragusa. French vessels in the waters of the Orient to menace Turkey, to the great mortification of England and Austria, to the great rejoicings of Russia, all this scarcely two years after the war in the Crimea! The sight was surely not wanting in originality, and prepared the world for a series of surprises. At about the same time, Servia expelled Prince Alexander Kara Géorgevitch, and recalled to the throne the old Miloch Obrenovitch. The Porte protested, England and Austria joined in this protest; but, thanks to the combined efforts of Russia and France, they ended by acknowledging the right of the national Servian assembly, whose principal grievance against the dethroned prince was his having shown too much sympathy for the allies in the war of 1853! The question of the Danubian Principalities presented an aspect serious, and also piquant. France and Russia had begged at the congress of Paris for the complete union of Moldavia and Wallachia; the other Powers were opposed to it, and, weary of war, they had agreed to accept a combination which completely assimilated the administration in the two countries, while maintaining their separation. It was, as later in Italy, the project of confederation opposed to that of unity; but then there was also given on the banks of the Danube the first example of that national strategy, which was soon to show itself on a larger scale in Tuscany and Emelia. The twofold election of Prince Couza was in truth the first trial of that popular diplomacy, which later, in Italian affairs, took pleasure in so often confounding the combinations of high plenipotentiaries and high contracting parties, and proclaimed in the face of the world a deed accomplished by the suffrage of the nation. The popular votes annulling the arrangements of diplomacy, and the understanding of France and Russia to respect these votes, these are the two salient traits of the policy in the years 1856-1859, a policy which the liberal opinion of Europe received with favor without being too much astonished at such a concordance of views between the cabinets of the Tuileries and St. Petersburg on this very ground of the Orient, still warm with the bullets of the war; on this ground, from which Russia should have been, in the opinion of the allies of 1853, completely shut out, and where she now regained influence and a footing, modestly it is true, and under the protecting shadow of France.