The assassination of Tsar Paul I on March 23 came as a blow to Napoleon, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life):
He suspected British spies were behind the murder, although the actual perpetrators were a group of Russian nobles and the Hanoverian General Levin von Bennigsen. Paul was mentally unstable, although not certifiably insane like George III of Britain, Christian VII of Denmark and Maria ‘the Mad’ of Portugal, who all occupied European thrones at the time, albeit with regencies exercising actual control. Paul’s policies supporting the middle classes had been seen as threatening the Russian nobility. His twenty-three-year-old son and heir Alexander, who was in the palace at the time of the assassination, may have had an intimation that the nobles were going to demand his father’s abdication (which they did indeed secure, before they stabbed, strangled and kicked the Tsar to death). Alexander was crowned tsar later that year. Although he theoretically had absolute power, he knew that he had to work with the nobility if he were to escape his father’s fate.
Alexander I was a riddle. Reared in the Enlightenment atmosphere of his grandmother Catherine the Great’s court, and taught Rousseauian principles at a young age by his Swiss tutor Frédéric de La Harpe, he was nonetheless capable of telling his justice minister, ‘You always want to instruct me, but I am the autocratic emperor, and I will this and nothing else!’ He has been described as combining a theoretical love of mankind with a practical contempt for men. Well-meaning, impressionable and egotistical, he was so good at playing a part that Napoleon later dubbed him ‘the Talma of the North’, and on another occasion ‘a shifty Byzantine’. He claimed that he would happily abolish serfdom if only civilization were more advanced, but never genuinely came close to doing so, any more than he ever carried through the codification of Russian law that he promised in 1801 or ratified the liberal constitution he had asked his advisor Count Mikhail Speranski to draw up a few years later.
Which do you prefer to see in your ruler between the two:
- A theoretical love of man, and a practical contempt? or
- A practical love of man, and a theoretical contempt?
I know my answer, but I did have to consider it for a moment.
…local puppets content with the whole place being a British economical colony.
Paul’s policies opposing export-oriented slave driver economy had been seen as threatening the major landowners who ran it. The rest of nobility was not necessarily united in this or any other position.
The same conflict flared later under Alexander II.
Something similar happened in USA, but the pro-protectionism industrialist faction and pro-Britain slave driver faction were geographically separated, so the industrialists could amass power and win (if at the cost of a poisonous alliance).
As a side note, they killed him in part because the word of this coup got out, and a mutiny opposing it was on the table, so the participants expected their extortion to be reverted with bayonets once garrison troops reach the palace. Because the common people knew which side of their bread is buttered too, and the garrison soldiers were common people.
That said, if Paul I was politically savvy and did not push away what little patriotic aristocracy he had, it’s entirely possible that the coup could be deterred, and/or this swamp would be successfully dried under his rule.