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Tsar Alexander's Background: Character and Thinking
Contrary to what most superficial observers think Tsar Alexander was far more a product of the West than of Russia. As far as his descent goes he was a grandson of Catherine II who was born a German princess. Alexander's father Paul I was the offspring of Catherine and one her Russian lovers. Paul married another German noblewoman with the result that Alexander was a quarter Russian at best, the rest being German. This needs to be stressed because of the persistent image of him as a typical Russian mystic. We will deal with the mystic part later but suffice it to say here that he was by descent more German than Russian and not a Romanov to boot.
His character was a curious mix of great intellectual gifts and of some less desirable traits such as fearfulness, impetuosity, and vanity. A strong sense of justice pervaded his thinking from earliest youth which had been nourished undoubtedly by his egalitarian tutor Frederic Cesar de Laharpe. Laharpe, a true child of the French Revolution, probably instilled in him the Rights of Man as a legal maxim denoting equality before the law but, as Franz Buechler points out, Alexander's religious awakening during the struggle against Napoleon widened this sense into one of the brotherhood of Man, all men being children of God. It is this spiritual approach that supplied Alexander with what undoubtedly can be seen as genuine love for his fellow human beings, a position radically at odds with the still dominant theory that rulers ruled by divine right to which most of his fellow monarchs and their ministers clung at the time. It is perhaps typical that one of the epithets hurled by Metternich against Alexander's brainchild, the Holy Alliance, was that it represented a philanthropic document under the guise of religion. Metternich's use of the word philanthropy in this sneering sense typifies belter than anything else could do the fact that Alexander was indeed-and proud of-being a friend of mankind while Metternich was a prisoner of the outmoded idea that men are mere playthings in the hands of a ruler and that serving their ruler was the most important part of their duties.
If we have just contrasted...