The ceremony established within the palace became equally strict, and equally dreaded. Woe betide him who, when permitted to kiss the hand of Paul, did not make the floor resound by striking it with his knee as loud as a soldier with the butt-end of his firelock. It was requisite, too, that the salute of the lips on his hand should be heard, to certify the reality of the kiss, as well as of the genuflection. Prince George Galitzin, the chamberlain, was put under arrest on the spot by his majesty himself, for having made the bow and kissed the hand too negligently.
If this new reign was fatal to the army and to the poor gentry, it was still more so to the unhappy peasantry. A report being spread that Paul was about to restrict the power of masters over their slaves, and give the peasants of the lords the same advantages as those of the crown, the people of the capital were much pleased with the hopes of this change. At this juncture an officer set off for his regiment, which lay at Orenberg. On the road he was asked about the new emperor, and what new regulations he was making. He related what he had seen, and what he had heard; among the rest, mentioning the ukase which was soon to appear in favour of the peasants. At this news, those of Tver and Novgorod indulged in some tumultuous actions, which were considered as symptoms of rebellion. Their masters were violently enraged with them; and the cause that had led them into error was discovered. Marshal Repnin was immediately despatched at the head of some troops against the insurgents; and the officer who had unwittingly given rise to this false hope, by retailing the news of the city on his road, was soon brought back in confinement. The senate of St. Petersburg judged him deserving of death, and condemned him to be broken, to undergo the punishment of the knout, and if he survived this, to labour in the mines. The emperor confirmed the sentence. This was the first criminal trial that was laid before the public; and assuredly it justified but too well those remains of shame which had before kept secret similar outrages.
The most prominent of Paul’s eccentricities was that mania which, from his childhood, he displayed for the military dress and exercise. This passion in a prince no more indicates the general or the hero than a girl’s fondness for dressing and undressing her doll foretokens that she will be a good mother. Frederick the Great, the most accomplished soldier of his time, is well known to have had from his boyhood the most insuperable repugnance to all those minutiæ of a corporal to which his father would have subjected him; this was even the first source of that disagreement which ever subsisted between the father and the son. Frederick, however, became a hero; his father was never anything more than a corporal. Peter III pushed his soldato-mania to a ridiculous point, fancying he made Frederick his model. He loved soldiers and arms, as a man loves horses and dogs. He knew nothing but how to exercise a regiment, and never went abroad but in a captain’s uniform.
Paul, in his mode of life when grand duke, and his conduct after his accession, so strongly resembled his father that, changing names and dates, the history of the one might be taken for that of the other. Both were educated in a perfect ignorance of business, and resided at a distance from court, where they were treated as prisoners of state rather than heirs to the crown; and whenever they presented themselves appeared as aliens and strangers, having no concern with the royal family. The aunt of the father (Elizabeth) acted precisely as did the mother of the son. The endeavours of each were directed to prolong the infancy of their heirs, and to perpetuate the feebleness of their minds. The young princes were both distinguished by personal vivacity and mental insensibility, by an activity which, untrained and neglected, degenerated into turbulence; the father was sunk in debauchery, the son lost in the most insignificant trifles. An unconquerable aversion to study and reflection gave to both that infatuated taste for military parade, which would probably have displayed itself less forcibly in Paul had he been a witness of the ridicule they attached to Peter. The education of Paul, however, was much more attended to than that of his father. He was surrounded in infancy by persons of merit, and his youth promised a capacity of no ordinary kind. It must also be allowed that he was exempt from many of the vices which disgraced Peter; temperance and regularity of manners were prominent features of his character—features the more commendable, as before his mother and himself they were rarely to be found in a Russian autocrat. To the same cause, education, and his knowledge of the language and character of the nation, it was owing that he differed from his father in other valuable qualities.
The similarity which, in some instances, marked their conduct towards their wives, is still more striking; and in their amours, a singular coincidence of taste is observable. Catherine and Marie were the most beautiful women of the court, yet both failed to gain the affections of their husbands. Catherine had an ambitious soul, a cultivated mind, and the most amiable and polished manners. In a man, however, whose attachments were confined to soldiers, to the pleasures of the bottle, and the fumes of tobacco, she excited no other sentiment than disgust and aversion. He was smitten with an object less respectable, and less difficult to please. The countess Vorontzov, fat, ugly in her person and vulgar in her manners, was more suitable to his depraved military taste, and she became his mistress. In like manner, the regular beauty of Marie, the unalterable sweetness of her disposition, her unwearied complaisance, her docility as a wife, and her tenderness as a mother were not sufficient to prevent Paul from attaching himself to Mademoiselle Nelidov, whose disposition and qualities better accorded with his own, and afterwards to a young lady of the name of Lopukhin, who, it is believed, rejected his suit. To the honour of Paul it is related that he submitted to that mortifying repulse with the most chivalric patience and generosity. Nelidov was ugly and diminutive, but seemed desirous, by her wit and address, to compensate for the disadvantages of her person; for a woman to be in love with Paul it was necessary she should resemble him.
On their accession to the throne, neither the father nor the son were favourites with the court or the nation, yet both acquired immediate popularity and favour. The first steps of Paul appeared to be directed, but improved, by those of Peter. The liberation of Kosciuszko and other prisoners brought to public recollection the recall of Biron, Munich, and Lestocq, with this difference—that Peter III did not disgrace these acts of clemency and justice by ridiculous violences, or by odious and groundless persecutions. Both issued ukases extremely favourable to the nobility, but from motives essentially different, and little to the honour of the son. The father granted to the Russian gentry those natural rights which every man ought to enjoy; while the son attempted the folly of creating a heraldic nobility in Russia, where that Gothic institution had never been known. In the conduct which he observed towards the clergy, Paul, however, showed himself a superior politician. Instead of insulting the priests, and obliging them to shave their beards, he bestowed the orders of the empire on the bishops, to put them on a footing with the nobility, and flattered the populace and the priesthood by founding churches, in obedience to pretended inspiration.
In his military operations, however, his policy appears to have abandoned him, because here he gave the reins to his ruling passion. The quick and total change of discipline he introduced in his armies created him nearly as many enemies as there were officers and soldiers. In the distrust and suspicions which incessantly haunted him, his inferiority to his father is also evident. One of the first acts of Peter III was to abolish the political inquisition established by Elizabeth; whereas Paul prosecuted no scheme with greater alacrity than that of establishing a system of spies, and devising means for the encouragement of informers. The blind confidence of the father was his ruin, but it flowed from a humanity of disposition always worthy of respect. The distrust of the son did not save him; it was the offspring of a timorous mind, which by its suspicions was more apt to provoke than to elude treason.[k]
Paul’s Foreign Policy
In regard to foreign matters Paul’s initial policy was one of peace. He put a stop to the levying of recruits after the manner adopted by his mother—that is, in the proportion of three men to every five hundred souls—recalled his army from Persia, and left Georgia to take care of itself. He showed compassion for the Poles, recalled the prisoners from Siberia, transferred King Stanislaus from Grodno to St. Petersburg, visited Kosciuszko at Schlüsselburg and released him in company with the other prisoners. He bade Kolitchev, envoy extraordinary at Berlin, inform the king that he, Paul, wished neither conquest nor aggrandisement. He dictated to Ostermann a circular directed to the foreign powers, in which he declared that of all the countries of the world Russia alone had been constantly engaged in war since 1756; that forty years of warfare had reduced the population; that the emperor’s humanity would not allow him to withhold from his beloved subjects the peace for which they longed; that though on account of these considerations Russia could take no active part in the struggle against France, the emperor would “nevertheless remain closely united with his allies, and would use every means to oppose the rise of the mad French Republic which threatened all Europe with upheaval by the destruction of its laws, privileges, property, religion, and customs.” He refused all armed assistance to Austria, which was alarmed at Napoleon’s victories in Italy, and recalled the fleet that Catherine had adjoined to the English fleet for the purpose of blockading the coasts of France and Holland. He even received overtures made by Caillard, the French envoy to Prussia, and caused him to be informed that the emperor “did not consider himself at war with the French, that he had never done anything to harm them, but was rather disposed to keep peace with them, and would induce his allies to hasten the conclusion of war, to which end he offered the mediation of Russia.”
It was not long, however, before relations again became strained between France and Russia. By the Treaty of Campo Formio the Ionian Isles had been given to the French, who thus acquired a threatening position in the East and increased power over the Divan. The Directory authorised Dombrowski to organise Polish legions in Italy. Panin, at Berlin, intercepted a letter from the Directory to the French envoy, which spoke of a restoration of Poland under a prince of Brandenburg. Paul, on his side, took into his pay the troops of the prince of Condé, and established ten thousand émigrés in Volhinia and Podolia. He offered an asylum to Louis XVIII after his flight from Brunswick, and installed him in the ducal palace at Mitau with a pension of 200,000 rubles. The news that a French expedition was being secretly organised at Toulon made him fear for the security of the coasts of the Black Sea, which were immediately put in a state of defence. The abduction of Zagurski, the Russian consul at Corfu, the capture of Malta by Napoleon, the arrival at St. Petersburg of the banished knights who offered Paul the protectorate of their order and the title of grand master, the invasion of Helvetian territory by the Directory, the expulsion of the pope and the proclamation of the Roman Republic—all were events that precipitated the rupture.