The Icon and the Axe

En route to the final showdown with Napoleon he stopped off to see the flourishing communities of Moravian Brethren in Livonia and the pilot community of Herrnhut in Saxony, attended Quaker meetings at London, and celebrated an outdoor Easter liturgy with his entire officer corps at the very spot in the Place de la Concorde in Paris where the Catholic King Louis XVI had been beheaded.51

One witness to this scene wrote ecstatically that "the smoke of incense mounts to the sky in order to reconcile heaven and earth. Religion and liberty have triumphed."52 Russian officers were encouraged to fraternize with French Masons; European romantics from the libertarian Mme de Stael to the restorationist Chateaubriand hailed the redeeming piety of the Russian monarch; while Lopukhin on his Baltic estate staged a symbolic burial of Napoleon at midnight by the light of five hundred burning crosses.63

Between Alexander's first entrance into Paris in 1814 and the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo the following year, there was a veritable chorus of voices prophesying a great destiny for Alexander. The aged Jung-Stilling professed occult knowledge that the end of the world would occur in 1819 or 1836; the millennium would begin in the East, with Alexander as the elected instrument of God. Alexander visited him and heard him preach in 1814, sent special grants to him thereafter, and remained in close touch until his death in 1817.64 During the same period the Baroness Kriidener, who had close links with Herrnhut and Jung-Stilling, conducted Pietistic devotion services with the Tsar and impressed him with his sense of mission to save Christendom.55 Other important associates of the period were the French mesmerist Nicholas Bergasse and the Bavarian mystic Franz von Baader, who early in 1814 had sent a memorandum to the rulers of Russia, Austria, and Prussia: On the Need Created by the French Revolution for a New and Closer Union of Religion with Politics.56 The following summer he resubmitted it to the Tsar alone, dedicating the memorandum to Golitsyn. All education and political rule must, in Baader's view, be suffused with Christian teachings; and Christianity itself must assimilate vital elements from other religions and mythologies.

Whether Mme Kriidener, Baader, or Alexander was its principal author, the Holy Alliance that was promulgated in September, 1815, and presented to the Russian people on Christmas day was the culmination of the effort to find a "Christian answer to the French Revolution." A Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox monarch publicly pledged themselves to base their entire rule "upon the sublime truths which the holy religion of

our savior teaches." The name of the alliance was taken from a prophetic passage in the Book of Daniel; the dedication is to "the Most Holy and Indivisible Trinity"; and the monarchs pledge aid to one another rather in the manner of a higher Masonic order. They speak of themselves as "three branches of the one family" pledged to aid one another in unfolding "the treasures of love, science, and infinite wisdom."37

It was, of course, mainly in Russia that the religious nature of the Alliance was taken seriously. In the first two years of its existence an extraordinary effort was made to transform Russian society in accordance with the spirit of the Alliance. Golitsyn was given a new portfolio without parallel in nineteenth-century Europe: as "minister of education and spiritual affairs." He maintained contact with Baader, who recruited for him a number of anti-scholastic and anti-papal Catholic mystics from Bavaria in order "to provide good priests for all the cults." Alexander commissioned Baader to write a manual of instruction for the Russian clergy, and Golitsyn enlisted him as his "literary correspondent" late in 1817. Baader and the other Bavarian mystics hoped to reunite Christendom with an esoteric neo-Platonic theology that would bypass both "Protestant rationalism" and "Roman dictatorship." Ignatius Lindl, a great preacher and leader of the Bavarian Bible Society, came to Russia in 1819; Johann Gosner came from Bavaria by way of Switzerland and Silesia the following year. They all played a leading role in the effort under Golitsyn to devise a system of instruction in which "simple unlearned people" could be "tutored by the Holy Ghost."68