The Crimean War

Nicholas have raised a storm of indignation in all the civilized states of Europe; these are the policies of rape and pillage; they are brigandage on a vast scale.³⁸

For the Ultramontane press, the greatest threat to Western civilization was Russia’s religion. If the westward march of the Tsar’s armies was not stopped, it was argued, Christendom would be taken over by the Orthodox and a new age of religious persecution would enslave the Catholics. ‘If we allow the Russians to take over Turkey,’ wrote the editor of the Union franc-comtoise, ‘we will soon see the Greek heresy imposed by Cossack arms on all of us; Europe will lose not just its liberty but its religion … We will be forced to watch our children become educated in the Greek schism and the Catholic religion will perish in the frozen deserts of Siberia where those who raise their voices to defend it will be sent.’ Echoing the words of the Cardinal of Paris, the Spectateur de Dijon called on the Catholics of France to fight a ‘holy war’ against the Russians and the Greeks in defence of their religious heritage:

Russia represents a special menace to all Catholics and none of us should misunderstand it. The Emperor Nicholas talks of privileges for the Greeks at the Holy Sepulchre, privileges bought with Russian blood. Centuries will pass before the Russians shed a fraction of the blood that the French spilled in the crusades for the Holy Places … We have a heritage to conserve there, an interest to defend. But that is not all. We are directly threatened by the proselytism of the Greek-Russian Church. We know that in St Petersburg they harbour dreams of imposing a religious autocracy on the West. They hope to convert us to their heresy by the limitless expansion of their military power. If Russia is installed in the Bosporus, it will conquer Rome as quickly as Marseilles. A swift attack would be enough to remove the Pope and cardinals before anyone could intervene.

For the Catholic provincial press, this holy war would also be a chance to reinforce religious discipline at home – to counteract the Revolution’s secularizing influence and restore the Church to the centre of national life. Frenchmen who had been divided by the barricades in 1848 would now be reunited through the defence of their faith.³⁹

Napoleon seized on this idea. No doubt he imagined that a glorious war would reconcile the nation to the repressive army of his coup d’etat. But his enthusiasm was never really shared by the French people, who remained on the whole indifferent to the Holy Lands dispute and the Eastern Question, even after news had reached them of the battle of Sinope. It was Napoleon who talked of following the ‘path of honour’ and fighting against Russian aggression; it was the press that voiced the ‘outrage of the French public’; but according to the reports of the local prefects and procurators, the ordinary people were unmoved. Although the French would fight – and die – in the Crimea in far greater numbers than the British, they were never as excited by the causes of the war as their allies were. If anything, the French were hostile to the idea of a war in which they would be allied with the English, their traditional enemy. It was widely felt that France was being dragged into a war that would be fought for British imperial interests – a theme constantly invoked by the opposition to Napoleon – and that France would pay the price for it. The business world was especially opposed to the idea of war, fearing higher taxes and a drain on the economy. There were predictions that before a year was out any war would become so unpopular that France would be forced to sue for peace.

By the end of January, anti-war feelings had spread to the Emperor’s entourage. At a council of senior officials assembled by Napoleon to discuss Russia’s protest against the arrival of the French and British fleets in the Black Sea on 4 January, two of the Emperor’s closest political allies, Jean Bineau, the Minister of Finance, and Achille Fould, a councillor of state, argued for an accommodation with Russia to avoid sliding into war. They were concerned by the lack of military preparations: the army was not mobilized or ready for a war in the early months of 1854, having been reduced to calm British fears of a French invasion after the coup d’etat of December 1851. Bineau even threatened to resign if war broke out, on the grounds that it would become impossible to raise the necessary taxes without major social upheavals (a threat he did not carry out). Napoleon was sufficiently sobered by these dissenting voices to think again about his plans for war and renew the search for a diplomatic resolution of the crisis. On 29 January he wrote directly to the Tsar, offering to negotiate a settlement with the mediation of the Austrians and suggesting as the basis of negotiations that the French and British might withdraw their fleets from the Black Sea if the Tsar withdrew his troops from the Danubian principalities. Napoleon’s letter was publicized at once – a move designed to prove to the anxious French public that he was doing everything he could for peace, as he himself confided to Baron Hubner, the Austrian ambassador in Paris.⁴⁰

Palmerston and his war party kept a close eye on the French. They were worried that Napoleon would try to back out of a military showdown with Russia at the last minute, and used every means at their disposal to stiffen his resolve and undermine his efforts at a diplomatic settlement. It was the British, not the French, who wanted war and pushed hardest for it in the early months of 1854.

Their task was made easier by the Tsar’s intransigence. On 16 February Russia broke off relations with Britain and France, withdrawing its ambassadors from London and Paris. Five days later the Tsar rejected Napoleon’s proposal for a quid pro quo on the Black Sea and the principalities. He proposed instead that the Western fleets should stop the Turks from carrying weapons to Russia’s Black Sea coasts – a clear allusion to the causes of Sinope. On this condition, and on it alone, he offered to negotiate with the Porte’s envoy in St Petersburg. Realizing that his defiant stand invited war, he warned Napoleon that Russia would be the same in 1854 as it had been in 1812.

It was an astonishingly blunt rebuff for the Tsar to make towards the French, who had offered him his best way to escape a showdown with the British and the Turks. The French approach was his last chance to avoid total isolation on the Continent. He had tried to build ties with the Austrians and Prussians at the end of January, sending Count Orlov to Vienna with a proposal that Russia would defend Austria against the Western powers (an obvious reference to Franz Joseph’s fears that Napoleon would stir up trouble for the Habsburgs in Italy) if they signed a declaration of neutrality together with Prussia and the other German states. But the Austrians were alarmed by the Russian offensive in the Balkans – they would not listen to the Tsar’s suggestion that they join in the partition of the Ottoman Empire – and made it clear that they would not cooperate with the Russians unless the Turkish borders remained unchanged. They were so concerned by the threat of a Serb rising in support of the Russian offensive that they placed 25,000 additional troops on their frontier with Serbia.⁴¹

By 9 February the Tsar knew that Orlov had failed in his mission. He had also learned that the Austrians were preparing to send their troops actually into Serbia to prevent its occupation by his troops. So it seems extraordinary that he should reject the one chance he had left – Napoleon’s overture – to avoid a war against the Western powers, a war he must have feared that he would lose, if Austria opposed Russia. It is tempting to believe, as some historians do, that Nicholas had finally lost all sense of proportion, that the tendency to mental disturbance with which he had been born – his impulsiveness and rash behaviour and melancholic irritability – had become mixed with the arrogance acquired by an autocratic ruler after almost thirty years of listening to sycophants.⁴² In the crisis of 1853–4 he behaved at times like a reckless gambler who overplays his hand: after years of patient play to build up Russia’s position in the Near East, he was risking everything on a war against the Turks, desperately staking his entire winnings on a single turn of the wheel.

But was this really gambling from his point of view? We know from Nicholas’s private writings that he took confidence from comparisons with 1812. He constantly referred to his older brother’s war against Napoleon as a reason why it was possible for Russia to fight alone against the world. ‘If Europe forces me to go to war,’ he wrote in February, ‘I will follow the example of my brother Alexander in 1812, I will venture into uncompromising war against it, I will retreat if necessary to behind the Urals, and will not put down arms as long as the feet of foreign forces trample anywhere on Russian land.’⁴³

This was not a reasoned argument. It was not based on any calculation of the armed forces at his disposal or any careful thought about the practical difficulties the Russians would face in fighting against the superior forces of the European powers, difficulties often pointed out by Menshikov and his other senior commanders, who had warned him several times not to provoke war with Turkey and the Western powers by invading the Danubian principalities. It was a purely emotional reaction, based on the Tsar’s pride and arrogance, on his inflated sense of Russian power and prestige, and perhaps above all on his deeply held belief that he was engaged in a religious war