Haha more or less! Just gotta talk dirty to him about divine right and he’s all good to go
L’Aigle Triomphant: A Napoleonic Victory TL
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
Easily. Spain had a lot of momentum before 1808 and being cut off from its American import and export markets crippled it for over a century
Constantine's Russia - Part I
Constantine's Russia - Part I
Historians since 1807 have remarked, sometimes stupefied, with awe at the curious luck enjoyed by Russia in the early 19th century, building off of its emergence as a genuine great power under the Tsarina Catherine until her passing in 1796. Perhaps no country in the history of the world had enjoyed such successes and victories without firing a single shot; and where the Russians did fire shots, against Persia in their long war that ended in 1813, they succeeded in expanding their Empire deep into the Caucasus. It was lost on nobody, certainly not European statesmen, that Russia was the great eight hundred pound bear in the room at Aix, and Talleyrand had carefully crafted every diplomatic settlement following the return of Charles IV of Spain to his rightful throne after the Bayonne Restoration to appeal to Russia while isolating Austria, Prussia and Britain, and this Russophile policy, endorsed by Napoleon in the spirit of Tilsit and the follow-up at Erfurt, had been a smashing success for both parties.
Having not fought in Europe since the Peace of Stockholm in 1809, Russia nonetheless had seen the Danubian Principalities fully vested as her protectorate, earned Finland as a Grand Duchy, been granted effective suzerainty over the entire Baltic and with it political and economic domination over the severely diminished Prussia, Free State of Gdansk and Sweden, and also earned some land in return for her neutrality in the Bukovina. The only strategic drawback to Russia was a re-established Polish entity on her borders in the Duchy of Warsaw, but it was broadly understood, at least by powers not in Poland, at Aix that this was a bulwark against Prussian and Austrian aggression rather than being aimed at Russia. As such, all of Russia's immediate strategic imperatives in Europe were largely solved and her expansions to the East could continue unabated and adventurously into Central Asia - if the mercurial Tsar Constantine was cooperative.
Constantine was a curious figure. He had come to power with the sudden death by typhus of his brother Alexander in early 1814 at a time when the Russian Court was debating the breaching of its alliance with France; unlike his moderately-liberal brother, who dealt with Napoleon cautiously and with little trust on his end, Constantine was a frenetic Francophile who loved and admired his brother-in-law to the point that even French officialdom found it uncomfortable. While not intending on importing the views of the French Revolution as synthesized into a monarchist fashion to Russia anytime soon, Constantine nonetheless viewed the Peace of Aix as the settlement of an epochal struggle between absolutism and constitutional government and took the view, one not shared in Vienna or London, that Aix represented a division of Europe into spheres of interest between Paris and St. Petersburg.
As such, Constantine looked to making Romanov Russia a "middle path" between the revolutionary enlightened despotism of Bonaparte France and the absolutist reactionary governance of Habsburg Austria, dismissing the Hanoverian British model as "un-continental" and too weak to impose itself on Europe, with its string of defeats in the various coalitions and the shakiness of its own economy and system of governance at home. Laws promulgated under his brother in 1801 but suspended due to the various Napoleonic crises in Europe to create new councils and administrative bodies were continued, spearheaded by the chief liberal mind in Russia, Count Mikhail Speransky. Speransky risen to power under Alexander but found many of his putative reforms stillborn by Alexander's jealous guarding of his own authority and contempt for talents that outshone his own; Constantine was a very different animal, however, vain and cruel and prone to flattery, which made him easy for Speransky to influence. The late 1810s and the entirety of the 1820s until Constantine's death thus saw Speransky's administrative reforms of Russian government at the local and imperial level, as well as reforms of the clergy, promulgated and implemented, often over the heads of reactionary enemies, particularly in the nobility. The most defining of the Speransky Reforms would come in 1824, with the emancipation of the serfs in every province after it had been gradually done piecemeal in the Baltic provinces, Bukovina and Poland between 1816 and 1821. The government also took on a great role in economic development under Speransky, and continued its investment in education. [1]
Nonetheless, Constantine remained an erratic figure, and for all the liberal reforms pursued to modernize Russia and the country's booming economy, his rule was arbitrary; for all the new political rights enjoyed by Russians, he aggressively stifled dissent through the Ochrana, one of the first formal secret police forces in the world, and lese majeste censorship laws were not only kept but strengthened. He refused to hear information that did not appeal to him and surrounded himself with flatterers, particularly French and German artists. He was fond of affairs up until he finally annulled his marriage to Anna Feodorovna, originally of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and instead in 1821 married Amelia of Wurttemburg, also an unhappy marriage but one which produced him five legitimate children, including four sons who all lived to adulthood - Pavel, Konstantin, Aleksandr and Nikolai (a daughter, Yekaterina, would die in infancy). More than anything, Constantine was regarded as untrustworthy both by his courtiers and his contemporaries, and even as Russia enhanced herself internally she isolated herself externally.
This would prove to have tremendous consequences in 1822, when the first great crisis of the post-Aix era erupted in the Greek Uprising. With violence having erupted in Serbia already starting in 1817, revolts in the Balkans seemed to be spreading, and the Eastern Question was being asked more loudly than ever, with all of the four remaining great powers - France and her allies, Austria, Russia and the navally inclined Britain - seeming to have a different answer...
[1] It is definitely worth noting that by the standards of post-Vienna Europe, Alexander I was pretty liberal, which Speransky had a big part in, and Constantine was an outright admirer of Bonaparte rather than viewing the Franco-Russian alliance as a partnership of convenience. So a Speransky who gets to do his thing and a Russia that didn't spend 1808-12 prepping itself for the next war with France is a big, big change.
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i didn't know constantin was a time traveller and f*ck the balkans
D’oh fixed
Russia getting its major reforms done in 1816-20 has big butterflies down the line, to say the least
Can't wait to see them!
And are seeing a wikibox of Napoleon when is his time to go?
Awesome! Can't wait to see which wikiboxes you'll come up with on this timeline, they are some of your best work!
Wow, you’re too kind! I would say that there are a number of media makers on this site considerably better at wikiboxes than I, a novice; @Rattigan and @MaskedPickle come to mind
That they would. I’m sticking to strict butterflies ITTL rather than my “they mostly gotta be real people” approach in CdM/BCM
Gonna check those out! But you give yourself too little credit man! Yours are fantastic!
Not as a criticism, but if emancipation is done along the same lines as in OTL Baltic provinces, the next few years, Constantine would be quite busy squashing the rebellions. OTOH, if it is done as in OTL in Russia, the next decade or more Russia would be in a deep economic crisis.
BTW, in OTL Okhrana, contrary to the silly wiki definition, was not secret (see photo below). Of course, you can make it one but it hardly could be functional within the Russian bureaucratic state. The secret part of it were the lowest level employees: the plainclothesmen tracking movements of the suspects (“filers”, not different from those of the ordinary police) and few agents-provocateurs who were not its employees. Most of the rest were the assigned officers of the Corps of Gendarmes or the civic state servants. It was, with the exceptions explicitly made on a high level, operating within the Russian laws.
For what seems to be your purpose, the secret police could be counterproductive. OTL Okhrana was functioning in a seriously different society and had been targeting “educated middle class”, which was pretty much absent in the 1820 and whatever was there hardly mattered in the terms of anti-government activities. Source of a problem was nobility, which makes “filers” irrelevant and on the relevant social level you’d have a big problem because the relevant cadres (Gendarme officers) would not work undercover: they were nobles and such a work was dishonorable (even in the late XIX). They were wearing uniforms, their offices had been well-known and they were acceptable in a noble society.
Of course, the whole thing is entirely up to you, I’m just nitpicking. 😉
To be fair, I don't see emancipation going to work out without Russia suffering some kind of malice in return.
The “malice” IMO was not as important as the preconditions. In OTL by the mid-1800s percentage of the serfs already shrunk by various “natural” reasons and, what was probably more important, the land-owning nobility was in a deep debt to the state: its estates had been mortgaged and “over-mortgaged” to the state-owned bank and even ability to make the minimal required payments was a result of the government’s lenient policies, which could be changed at any time. Many profitability factors of the early XIX either gone or shrunk (Britain’s need in some traditional items of the Russian agricultural exports decreased due to the colonial imports and changed technology).
Then goes importance of the landed nobility as a class. In OTL by 1812 an overwhelming majority of the officers were not land owners but they were still dominant in the civic administration. This changed during the reign of NI who, by the decades of a consistent effort, turned Russia into the state governed by the professional bureaucrats (by his own words, “Russia is ruled by the heads of the departments”) an overwhelming majority of which did not have any serfs or estates and fully depended upon the state service. As a result, the land-owning class by the time of AII had been pretty much squeezed out of the state apparatus, being present mostly on the top levels (where emancipation would not hurt too much and even could be profitable) and through the family and social connections while surviving mostly due to the government’s good graces. Which means, pretty much unimportant. AII killed most of it with a remarkable ease and throwing a bone, “the release payments”, in the worst (for them) possible form proved to be quite enough. Almost forgot. After 1825 (actually, considerably earlier) the Guards ceased to be the kingmakers and became just a privileged but politically unimportant part of the army. Even their privileges were not those of the time of CII or Paul I: they were subjects to a discipline stricter than in average army units.
Situation in the early XIX was seriously different and could not be drastically changed in a short term.
So realistically speaking, could Constantine I and Speransky realistically abolish serfdom within their own lifetimes? From that argument and from what could be discerned, probably not, but perhaps the groundwork could be laid with the Tsar's immediate successor? It's certainly possible he would live to see the end of the 1830s (he died of cholera in 1831, so it could be a case of wrong place, wrong time there)
Well, the gradual approach was, of course, possible. For example, there was always a possibility to start something like Kiselev’s reforms for the state peasants, which would help to create a framework for the further steps.
Oh yeah, Russia's 1820s are going to be a rollercoaster of economic upheaval with the graduated emancipation of the serfs, this is definitely not a pure Russia-wank even if Kostya and Speransky together put it ahead of the ball where Nicky I left things
NI actually conducted a thorough work on the ways toward abolishing serfdom and even implemented the part of it for the state peasants so AII was not starting from the scratch. I’m simply unsure how it could be done much earlier without all political and economic conditions of the 1850s. But, this is just my personal view.