Steampunk Terminators

On the​ third morning of his ill-fated occupation of Moscow, Napoleon Bonaparte woke up in the Kremlin to find the city on fire. The isolated blazes set by the retreating Russian armies had spread overnight and were now threatening to leap across the Moskva river to consume the palace. A Russian policeman, hidden in the Kremlin’s arsenal, was caught trying to set light to the building; he was bayoneted to death after a brief interrogation from Napoleon himself. In his memoir of the 1812 campaign, the French general Philippe-Paul de Ségur recalled Napoleon pacing his apartments as the windows grew hot to the touch, unable to believe what he was seeing. ‘It is their own work!’ he kept repeating. ‘What men! – These are indeed Scythians!’

Eighteen months later, the Scythians were in Paris, but in a surprising new guise. Tsar Alexander I arrived on the last day of March 1814 at the head of an army of half a million troops from Russia, Britain, Sweden, the Habsburg Empire and the German principalities. No fires were started. Alexander had come, he assured the Senate, as a ‘friend of the French people’. In the face of opposition from the Bourbons and their émigré aristocratic allies, he insisted that the restored French monarchy should be a constitutional one, even attempting to persuade Louis XVIII to retain the tricolour flag. Wild rumours circulated, aided by the claim of former tutor, Frédéric-César de La Harpe, that the tsar was a secret republican, intent on surrendering his throne after instituting free trade, perpetual peace and constitutional government across Russia, Europe and the Atlantic world.

Travelling on to London that summer, Alexander was greeted by thronging crowds. William Wilberforce praised his anti-slavery stance in the House of Commons, calling him the ‘benefactor, not of Europe only, but of the human race’. Undeterred by Napoleon’s brief return to power in 1815, Alexander sought to confirm his status as Europe’s saviour with the publication, on Christmas Day, of a treaty between himself and the crowned heads of Prussia and the Habsburg Empire. It announced that, following the violence and disorder of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, these three sovereigns – and any other Christian rulers who wished to join them – would unite in a Holy Alliance to govern according to the principles of fraternity and justice. They would dispense with wars among themselves and put aside the political and confessional divisions that had long fractured the unity of Christendom.

The text of the treaty, though short, was the product of a complex drafting process, as Isaac Nakhimovsky shows. The first version was put together by Alexander himself in consultation with his foreign minister, Ioannis Kapodistrias, and Kapodistrias’s secretary, Alexander Sturdza. Both were future leaders of the Greek independence struggle who blended Orthodox religious commitment with a willingness to engage in what Sturdza’s biographer, Stella Ghervas, calls ‘defensive reform’. Their draft was, in turn, heavily edited by the Habsburg foreign minister, Metternich, whose alterations to the text gave it the patrimonial and conservative tone that would later earn it the contempt of Mazzini, Marx and other 19th-century radicals.

The accompanying manifesto, signed by Alexander alone, conveyed the more expansive vision of political regeneration captured by his triumphant tour through Europe. The official treaty described the signatory princes as ‘fathers’ to their nations, followed by a rote injunction to duty and obedience among Christian subjects. Alexander’s manifesto, however, claimed that the treaty bound the sovereigns not only to one another but also to those they ruled. It could be read not only as a private agreement between monarchs but as a public commitment to constitutional and international reform.

Nakhimovsky shows that networks of largely Protestant republicans and reformers engaged in elaborate interpretations of the Holy Alliance, viewing it as a triumph for what some called ‘liberal’ politics. Onto the blank canvas created by the vague wording of the treaty and the emptiness of Alexander’s public persona, they projected their own dreams of a European future: independence for oppressed nationalities, freedom of the seas, emancipation of the enslaved, the ending of war, the conciliation of the Churches and the colonisation of Eurasia.

Even at the time, however, this wasn’t the most obvious or dominant response to the treaty. Aristocratic conservatives in the German-speaking lands welcomed its promised restoration of the divine authority of monarchs. British Whigs and radicals sought to taint the Tory ministry by association with what William Cobbett called the ‘infernal system’ of Continental despots. In the frontispiece to William Hone’s 1821 broadside The Right Divine of Kings to Govern Wrong! Dedicated to the Holy Alliance, George Cruikshank depicted the alliance as a kind of steampunk Terminator, crushing skulls under its iron feet, its faceless head wreathed with daggers, its arms (made of chains) brandishing flame and sword. The print was prompted by the first of many notorious counter-revolutionary interventions launched by the ‘brother sovereigns’, against the Neapolitan revolution of 1820-21. An invasion of Spain soon followed, to restore Ferdinand VII’s absolute rule, and the allies stood by when the Greeks rose up against their Ottoman rulers. By the time of the 1848 revolutions, ‘holy alliance’ had become an all-purpose signifier for a reactionary cabal. When Marx and Engels searched for a term to describe the enemies of communism, they naturally invented a ‘holy alliance’ for themselves, composed of ‘Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police spies’.

Textbook histories of 19th-century Europe usually conclude this litany of repression with a quote from Metternich himself, who, in spite of his earlier anxieties about its contents, retrospectively described the Holy Alliance as a ‘loud-sounding nothing’. At most, they follow Metternich in regarding it as the fleeting and idealistic counterpart of the Concert of Europe, a more substantial and enduring system of treaties and conferences inaugurated at the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15. They then move on to the more exciting and revolutionary 1830s and 1840s, leaving the bizarre interlude of the post-Napoleonic restoration behind. Nakhimovsky’s book, by contrast, fully inhabits the feverish world of the postwar 1810s and 1820s. He is interested not so much in what the Holy Alliance was, or why it ‘failed’, as in what it might have meant. How was it that people such as Wilhelm Traugott Krug, Immanuel Kant’s successor as professor of logic and metaphysics at Königsberg, could welcome the Holy Alliance as ‘the most liberal of all ideas’?

Two aspects of Alexander’s self-presentation in the years leading up to the treaty secured its credibility as an instrument of progressive reform. The first was his successful mobilisation of one of the most enduring political scripts of the Enlightenment: the virtuous monarch as ‘friend of mankind’, able to rise above the power-political interests of his dynasty to reform both his own realm and the basic structures of European politics. During the 17th century, French kings had sought to claim this role. But Louis XIV’s unsuccessful bid for European and Atlantic supremacy during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14) had called into question claims that French power could be exercised in the interests of Europe as a whole.

In the course of the 18th century, other candidates began to emerge. The first was Frederick II of Prussia, with whom Voltaire authored the Anti-Machiavel of 174o, a manifesto for the kind of reformed and reforming monarchy demanded by the age of Enlightenment. Voltaire broke with Frederick in 1753, and turned his attention to the Romanovs: entranced by Catherine II’s promise to publish the Encyclopédie after it was censored by the French authorities, he marvelled in a letter to Diderot that ‘it is France that persecutes philosophy! And it is the Scythians who show it favour!’

Over the next two decades, a number of Enlightenment thinkers – Diderot, Bentham, Herder – either travelled to St Petersburg or followed Voltaire in opening a philosophical correspondence with Catherine. They were animated not so much by Voltaire’s regard for the modernising zeal of the heirs of Peter I, but by the belief that it was Russia’s very ‘barbarism’, its proximity to the despotic rule and military virtue of the nomadic Scythians described by Herodotus, that made it the perfect agent for the regeneration of Europe.

In a continent already suffused with premonitions of its own decadence, the purification promised by exertions of Russian power was a serious temptation. The French, Swiss, British, Italian, Polish and German intellectuals entertained by Catherine and, later, Alexander found their own celebrity advanced by an exotic association with the court of the Romanovs, as well as a chance of seeing their pet schemes – legal and constitutional reform, Protestant-inspired religious education, Swiss neutrality, Polish autonomy – favoured by the continent’s most important rising power. In return, the Russian empire gained prestige, new ideas and a counterweight to domestic noble and clerical interests, even if few of the projects proposed by Catherine or Alexander’s correspondents went beyond speculative letter-writing.

Yet there was more at stake in such relationships between European intellectuals and the Russian court than the simple exchange of political and cultural capital. They reflected a distinctive pattern of 18th and 19th-century thinking about the preconditions for reform. In order for any state to be capable of guaranteeing prosperity and freedom for its own citizens, a suitably benign international environment had to be established, free of the distorting pressures of military, fiscal and colonial competition. In the absence of states that were internally reformed and thus capable of political virtue, however, there would be no escaping the warfare and colonial conquest that 18th-century pessimists, such as Rousseau or the Russophile English cleric John Brown, believed to be driving the continent towards a future of unrelenting chaos and despotism.

In his 1795 essay ‘Towards Perpetual Peace’, Kant wrote that to break this cycle of violence and oppression might require a single ‘powerful and enlightened republic’ to establish itself as the centre of a new European order. He was referring, not very subtly, to revolutionary France, at that moment emerging as the conquering force that would humble the continent’s old powers. Such arguments were common during the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. By the time Alexander ascended to the Russian throne in 1801, however, the two powers around which they commonly revolved – Britain and France – had once again exhausted their credibility as potential guardians of a future European peace, Britain through its colonial aggression and attacks on neutral shipping, France through its descent into dictatorship and conquest.

It was in this specific wartime context that Russian pretensions to mediation could attract liberal enthusiasm that would see Alexander hailed as a ‘friend of mankind’ from Poland to Massachusetts to Haiti. Disappointed revolutionaries and representatives of middle and neutral powers began to look to St Petersburg in the first decade of the 19th century. La Harpe, fresh from an unsuccessful stint as director of the Helvetic Republic imposed on the Swiss cantons by Napoleon, rejoined Alexander’s circle and began extolling the virtues of his former pupil’s republican conscience. The Polish patriot Adam Jerzy Czartoryski and the Florentine priest Scipione Piattoli circulated ambitious memoranda and letters detailing the ways in which Russia, with or without Napoleon’s assistance, could reorder the continent and the Atlantic world, checking the ambitions of the Prussians and Habsburgs and establishing the freedom of the seas against British privateering. Alexander repeatedly offered Russia’s services as mediator in maritime disputes between Britain and the United States, establishing contact, via La Harpe and Czartoryski, with Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson entertained hopes that Alexander could convince Napoleon to exempt the American republic’s shipping from searches and attacks at sea. In 1806 he wrote to Alexander to say that together, the US, France and Russia could turn the tables on Britain, restoring the liberty of commerce in defiance of the Royal Navy’s embargo on France.

The vogue for such grand designs in the early years of Alexander’s reign is well captured by a minor character in War and Peace, the abbé Morio, whom Tolstoy modelled on Piattoli. He appears only briefly at the start of the novel, as an accessory to Pierre Bezukhov’s awkward introduction to St Petersburg high society. After we learn that this ‘profound thinker’ has been welcomed at the emperor’s court, we hear a snippet of his conversation with Pierre:

‘The means are … the balance of power in Europe and the law of nations,’ the abbé was saying. ‘It is only necessary for one powerful nation like Russia – barbaric as she is said to be – to place herself disinterestedly at the head of an alliance having for its object the maintenance of the balance of power of Europe, and it would save the world!’

‘But how are you to get that balance?’ Pierre was beginning.

How indeed? The revolutionary blueprints created for Alexander by La Harpe, Czartoryski and Piattoli, veterans of failed patriotic uprisings in Switzerland and Poland, rested on a vision of the virtuous monarch as an alternative to the weak and fallible power of the sovereign people. Representative and constitutional government might secure liberty and order in the long term, but in taking the decisive public actions that could shape such an order, an exceptional monarch would be the difference between success and failure. Russia’s ‘barbarism’ was again crucial: under the quasi-oriental despotism of the Romanovs the virtue of an absolute ruler could be allowed its freest expression.

This was why a second aspect of Alexander’s self-presentation, his flirtation with evangelical Protestantism, would so powerfully shape contemporary views of the Holy Alliance. The excitement he generated among Wilberforce and other British evangelicals initially stemmed from his attempts to create a multi-confessional religious establishment in Russia, which extended to the creation of a Russian Bible Society modelled on its British counterpart. His apparent openness to abolitionist ideas only increased their enthusiasm. Three days before the Holy Alliance was established, Alexander held a meeting with the British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson to discuss Russian support for a universal ban on the slave trade. Clarkson later facilitated a correspondence between Alexander and Henri Christophe, leader of the breakaway kingdom of Northern Haiti, about the role Russia could play in preserving Haiti’s independence.

The person who did most to convince Europeans that Alexander was a monarch of unusual piety and virtue, however, was Juliane von Krüdener, a well-connected Pietist preacher known for her millenarian prophecies. By 1814 she was describing Napoleon as the ‘Antichrist’ and proclaiming Alexander as Europe’s saviour. Her influence over him was demonstrated when she stood by his side during an inspection of Russian troops stationed outside Paris following the victory at Waterloo. It was Alexander’s public association with Krüdener, rather than Western prejudices about Orthodox Christianity, that would lead the British foreign secretary Lord Castlereagh to dismiss the Holy Alliance as ‘sublime mysticism and nonsense’, and the French diplomat Dominique de Pradt to call it the ‘apocalypse of diplomacy’.

Krüdener’s critics, however, misunderstood both the complexity of her spirituality and its distinctive appeal in postwar Europe. She had found fame as the author of Valérie (1803), an epistolary novel about the scandalous and unrequited love felt by her hero, Gustave, for the young wife of his adoptive father. Despite Krüdener’s avowed Protestantism, Gustave finds solace at a Catholic Mass in Venice, and after his death is buried by a kindly priest. Krüdener’s ‘mysticism’ cared little for Europe’s old confessional divisions. It was a Protestant sensibility, but one that lent itself to a kind of romantic, individualist ecumenicism, in which religious experience could be detached from confessional allegiance and refocused on Christ’s moral example.

Whether or not Krüdener actually helped to draft the treaty, as she claimed, her writing and preaching resonated powerfully with the Holy Alliance, which presented itself as an intimate spiritual union between the souls and consciences of its signatories rather than a conventional treaty between sovereigns. It thereby encouraged contemporaries to hope that the lifeless machine-states of the post-Napoleonic restoration might yet be endowed with the spirit of the Enlightenment, appropriately chastened and fortified by a new awareness of Christianity’s importance to a politics of just and measured progress. This was the synthesis that Krug, who left his lecture halls in Königsberg to hold an ecstatic private interview with Krüdener in 1818, christened ‘liberal’. The Holy Alliance, he wrote in 1816, was the product not of the ‘power of princes’ but of the ‘power of liberal ideas’. It offered a stabilising framework, at once ethical and geopolitical, within which a Christian and European civilisation could face the real enemy of progress: the Ottoman Empire.

Such partialities, then as now, reflect a politics that associates supposedly universal ideas with the distinctive cultural and racial capacities of a white Christian Europe. A century later, the fascist jurist Carl Schmitt identified the Holy Alliance as a European civilisational ideal to be sharply differentiated from the empty universalism of the League of Nations. Today the Holy Alliance is almost wholly the property of the fascist international, invoked by elements of a European far right united, above all, by its Islamophobia. Nakhimovsky is at pains to distance his account of the Holy Alliance from these resonances. He uses it instead as a kind of placeholder for a more general problem of political theory, which he refers to as ‘federative politics’. The Holy Alliance didn’t disappear from view following the nationalist revolutions of 1848 and the subsequent reorganisation of Europe into sovereign nation-states. It was constantly invoked in the interwar and postwar era, as contemporaries searched for precedents for a European order shaped by what Raymond Aron described as parallel ‘holy alliances’, centred on the ideological power and military might of the US and the Soviet Union. This recurrence – as well as the stubborn persistence of another form of federal politics in the European Union – is of course the result of the imperial ambitions of the great powers. But it also reflects the complexities of a world of interconnected, unequal but notionally sovereign states. Is it better to try to recognise, and organise, that complexity through treaties and alliance systems, or to pretend that all states can simply fend for themselves in a no-holds-barred system of power-political rivalry?

Nakhimovsky uses Mazzini’s 1849 essay ‘Towards a Holy Alliance of the Peoples’ as a foil for this argument, opening the book with Mazzini’s quip that, in signing the Holy Alliance, the ‘masters of the world had united against the future’. But the essay can also be read as a confirmation of Nakhimovsky’s claim. Even as Mazzini railed against the Holy Alliance as a reactionary force, he grappled with the problem of building a transnational, democratic counter-power centred in Italy, capable of reordering Europe and the world on its own terms. This popular alliance – aspects of which look rather like the organising structures of the International Working Men’s Association, in which Mazzini would later participate alongside Marx and Engels – would take the form of a system of associations and councils, acting as a constituent power for the coming ‘great confederation of nations’. The peoples of Europe, not their sovereigns (however Christian), had the capacity to guide the continent, with ‘republican faith’, towards the shining future that awaited it. What are the conditions under which such a politics of collective purpose becomes plausible, on a continental (or even planetary) scale? This question preoccupied Mazzini as much as it did the other subjects of Nakhimovsky’s book. A lot still rests on the answer.