Alexandre Ier Pavlovitch, empereur de toutes les Russies

Alexander came to the throne in 1801 after the plot that smothered his father Paul I — a family drama that long marked his quest for moral legitimacy. A young emperor, he first dreamed of a Europe reorganised on « liberal » principles; armies soon confronted him with reality. In 1805 he joined the Third Coalition: Austerlitz broke him. In 1806-1807 Eylau then Friedland forced him to negotiate. On the Niemen in July 1807 the Tsar and the Emperor of the French met at Tilsit: the encounter, half theatre half geopolitics, founded a Franco-Russian alliance that divided Europe into spheres of influence — and rested on fragile trust.

Caulaincourt, ambassador at Saint Petersburg, kept personal ties with Alexander; his Paris dispatches told of the growing gap between Tilsit’s promises and Russian interests: the Continental Blockade strangled exports of timber, hemp, grain. Alexander temporised, then hardened. In 1810 he officially authorised neutral shipping: a disguised declaration of economic war. Napoleon chose invasion; Alexander chose strategic retreat and climate.

The expedition of six hundred thousand men — figure as symbolic as real — crossed the Niemen in June 1812. Alexander gave effective command to old Marshal Kutuzov after court debate over Barclay de Tolly and Bagration. Borodino bloodied September; Moscow opened then burned. The decision to abandon the capital without a final pitched battle remains one of the campaign’s most disputed moves; for Alexander it fit a long-term logic: Russia was not a province to hold in fifteen days.

The French retreat became European legend. Alexander did not chase cavalry glory: he let nature, Cossacks and logistics do the work. In Paris in 1814 he entered as a theatrical liberator, lectured kings, imposed terms that foreshadowed the Congress of Vienna. His relation to Napoleon mixed fascination and rejection: two empires, two messianisms that could not share one continent.

Alexander dominated the Congress of Vienna diplomatically alongside Metternich and Castlereagh: borders, compensations, policing of ideas. In 1815 he promoted the Holy Alliance — a text at once pious and conservative — binding monarchies against any future revolution. European liberals hated him; sovereigns consulted him. His late reign swung between repression and utopian projects; the Decembrist conspiracy (1825) would erupt just after his death.

He died at Taganrog in November 1825 in circumstances that still feed rumours of substitution or monastic withdrawal. For Empire Napoléon, Alexander I remains the adversary who survived the greatest army of the century and imposed on Europe the counter-model of an empire by land and patience.