Alexander I

Alexander I., Paulovitch, Czar of Russia, was born in 1777, and educated by his grandmother, Catherine II., one of his instructors being La Harpe, a Swiss republican. He married Louisa Maria of Baden, but separated from her. After the assassination of his father, the weak-minded Paul, he was next in succession, and was probably a party to the murder which opened his way to the throne in 1801. The young sovereign began his career with many enlightened reforms, encouraging education, abolishing torture and other judicial abuses, and liberating the press. At the same time he adhered to the hereditary policy of national aggrandisement. He procured the cession of Georgia, and then joined the coalition of England, Austria, and Sweden against France. The Battle of Austerlitz (1805) broke up this alliance, and Alexander, after briefly dallying with Prussia during the Jena campaign, came to terms with Napoleon at Tilsit, receiving a strip of German territory as his reward. Pursuing the same policy he adopted the "continental system," attacked Sweden for importing British goods, and annexed Finland to Russia. In 1809 the treaty of Vienna brought the Czar, a fresh accession of territory in the shape of Eastern Galicia, which Austria had to yield. The encouragement given by France to Polish malcontents severed the friendship that had lasted five years, and in March, 1812, Alexander declared war. Then followed the terrible Russian campaign, and, whatever sentiments may have been previously inspired by the Czar's ambition and treachery, his stubborn courage and resolution certainly broke Napoleon's record of triumph. During the final years of the great European struggle Russia was loyal to the allied Powers, and when the Congress of Vienna rearranged the map of Europe, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw fell to Alexander's share. He was also the moving spirit in the Holy Alliance, a confederacy to suppress European reforms. Troubles in Poland, religious melancholy, and dread of revolution darkened the rest of his reign. He died in 1825 of an intermittent fever contracted in a visit to the Crimea, leaving the crown to his brother Nicholas.