To make negotiating easier, Alexander and his advisers moved to Tilsit, on the west bank of the river Neman, where Napoleon had his headquarters. The two monarchs spent many hours together, indulging in conversations which ranged far beyond the treaty negotiations and inspecting Napoleon’s troops. Half of Tilsit was handed over to the Russians and the First Battalion of the Preobrazhensky Guards moved in to protect their emperor. All eyes were on the French army, however. A chance to inspect the men who had conquered Europe and to listen as one of history’s greatest generals explained the secrets of his success was not to be missed, especially by a monarch as interested in military matters as Alexander. In any case it suited the emperor’s purposes to play the role of deferential disciple and thereby flatter Napoleon. But the French monarch would have done well to have a careful look at the Preobrazhenskys, because his eventual downfall was to owe much to the Russian army’s veteran regiments.
In most respects the Preobrazhensky Guards were typical of the Russian army, or perhaps more truly, were the perfect embodiment of what a Russian regiment should be. Of course, its officers and veteran NCOs were very committed to their famous regiment. Like all Russian regiments the Preobrazhensky Guards were in many respects a self-contained little world. Soldiers doubled as tailors, cobblers and builders. In addition, a Russian regiment had full-time armourers, blacksmiths, joiners, carpenters, wagon-repairers, farriers and other artisans in its ranks. Doctors were a rather new addition: very unusually the Preobrazhenskys had four. Far more traditional and to be found in every Russian regiment were priests and other junior clergy. Full Orthodox masses were held on Sundays and major holidays. The priests addressed the troops, preaching the duty of loyal service to the tsar as protector of the Orthodox faith and community. Proper treatment of enemy prisoners and civilians was another common theme. In battle some priests were found right up in the firing lines. Their usual place was with the doctors, comforting the wounded and – very importantly – performing the proper burial services for the dead.62
Least typical of the army as a whole were the officers of the Preobrazhensky Guards. Although the great majority of Russian officers were nobles, 6 per cent were the sons of labourers, peasants or, most often, soldiers. In any case most Russian nobles scraped along on small incomes and the same was true of most officers. Roughly one-quarter of them in 1812 owned estates or were their heirs, and most of these estates were small. It was a very rare officer in a line regiment whose family owned more than 100 ‘souls’ (i.e. male serfs). In Alexander’s Russia there was almost no free education of any quality. Artillery officers were usually educated at cadet corps (i.e. military schools designed to train boys to be officers) and most had essential mathematical knowledge as well as foreign languages. But the great majority of infantry and even cavalry officers of the line read and wrote Russian, might have a smattering of arithmetic but had no other educational attainments.63
The officers of the Preobrazhensky Guards were very different. Though the personnel records underestimate officers’ wealth, even they show that two-thirds of the regiment’s officers came from families with 100 ‘souls’ or more. More than one-quarter owned more than 1,000 ‘souls’ and the commander of the First Battalion, Count Mikhail Vorontsov, was the heir to 24,000. With wealth went education and culture. The overwhelming majority of the officers spoke two or more languages and almost half spoke three or more. The Guards officers’ memoirs and diaries speak of literature, history and philosophy. Their education for the most part made them rounded gentlemen and interesting conversationalists rather than professional officers in any narrow sense. They were members of a Russian and European aristocratic elite that was nourished on French literature and Roman history.64
The relationship between Alexander and his Guards officers was strangely ambivalent. On the one hand the emperor took enormous pride in his Guards and felt at home amidst cultured, aristocratic officers. But in a curious way the officers of the aristocratic Guards regiments formed a species of republic in the heart of the Russian absolute monarchy. One officer recalled that ‘in service matters strict subordination existed but outside this all officers were equal’. If this is an exaggeration, it remains true that relations between officers of very different age and rank were surprisingly informal. This was helped by the fact that very many of these men’s families were related or had known each other for generations. For the monarch, this republic of Guards officers could be a source of concern. When ‘outsiders’ were put in charge of Guards units to tighten up discipline and treated the officers rudely, they were apt to face what amounted to strikes. At the back of an emperor’s mind there must also have lurked the memory of the many coups mounted by the Guards in the eighteenth century, the last of which had happened only six years before Tilsit. Indeed, the last great attempted coup by Guards officers was to occur in 1825, immediately after Alexander’s death. Its aim was to replace absolutism with a constitutional monarchy or even a republic.65
On 9 July, after the ratification of the Tilsit treaties, the two emperors took the salute at a parade of the French and Russian guards. After the parade, in a dramatic gesture which aptly concluded two weeks of play-acting between the monarchs, Napoleon asked Alexander’s permission to award the Légion d’honneur to the bravest soldier in the Preobrazhensky Guards. Mikhail Kozlovsky, the regiment’s commander, was thoroughly taken aback by this piece of Napoleonic populism and simply summoned forward the battalion’s right-hand marker, Grenadier Aleksei Lazarev. The bewildered Lazarev, a soldier’s son, suddenly found himself embraced by Napoleon, an officer of the Légion d’honneur, and the recipient of a pension of 1,200 francs a year.
But Alexander’s Russia in general and the Preobrazhensky Guards in particular were not best suited to such dramatic examples of French-style ‘social mobility’. Two years later Lazarev was ejected from the regiment for cheek to a sergeant-major. In 1819, back in the invalid (i.e. veterans) battalion of the Preobrazhenskys as an ensign, he was arrested for assaulting two civilians. Maybe Lazarev was just a difficult character. But soldiers’ sons who rose into the officer corps sometimes faced prejudice and had a hard time adapting to their new status. Even in line regiments a number of them were dismissed or censured after the war, their personnel records citing drunkenness, incompetence and other failings. If officers risen from the ranks faced difficulties in line regiments, Lazarev may well have found life even as a semi-retired ensign of the Preobrazhenskys quite a struggle. He committed suicide before his case could be resolved.66
After the treaties were ratified and the parades finished, Alexander left Tilsit and headed back to Petersburg. He divulged his innermost thoughts about recent events to no one. Just how much hope or confidence he had in his new relationship with France it is impossible to say. No doubt he believed that, whatever might follow as regards Russo-French relations, at least he had gained time for his empire and rescued it from a situation of great danger. Perhaps the truest guide to his thoughts is the comment he is said to have made to the Prussian king and queen about Napoleon: ‘He will break his own neck. Despite all my performance and external behaviour I am your friend and hope to prove that to you by my actions.’67