During his infancy Paul was taken from the care of his mother by the Empress Elizabeth, whose ill-judged fondness allegedly injured his health. As a boy he was reported to be intelligent and good-looking. His extreme ugliness in later life is attributed to an attack of typhus, from which he suffered in 1771. It has been asserted that his mother hated him, and was only restrained from putting him to death while he was still a boy by the fear of what the consequences of another palace crime might be to herself. Lord Buckinghamshire, the English ambassador at her court, expressed this opinion as early as 1764. In fact, however, the evidence goes to show that the empress, who was at all times very fond of children, treated Paul with kindness. He was put in charge of a trustworthy governor, Nikita Panin, and of competent tutors.
Her dissolute court provided a bad home for a boy destined to become the sovereign, but Catherine took great trouble to arrange his first marriage with Wilhelmina of Hesse-Darmstadt (who acquired the Russian name "Natalia Alexeevna") in 1773. She allowed him to attend the council in order that he might be trained for his work as emperor. His tutor Poroshin complained of him that he was "always in a hurry", acting and speaking without thinking.
After his first marriage Paul began to engage in intrigues. He suspected his mother of intending to kill him, and once openly accused her of causing broken glass to be mingled with his food. Yet, though his mother removed him from the council and began to keep him at a distance, her actions were not unkind. The use made of his name by the rebel Pugachev in 1775 tended no doubt to render his position more difficult. When his wife died in childbirth in that year his mother arranged another marriage with the beautiful Sophia Dorothea of Württemberg, renamed in Russian "Maria Feodorovna". On the birth of his first child in 1777 the Empress gave him an estate, Pavlovsk.
Paul and his wife gained leave to travel through western Europe in 1781-1782. In 1783 the Empress granted him another estate at Gatchina, where he was allowed to maintain a brigade of soldiers whom he drilled on the Prussian model.
It is claimed that as Paul grew his character became steadily degraded, and that he was not incapable of affection nor without generous impulses, but he was flighty, passionate in a childish way, and when angry capable of cruelty. The affection he had for his wife turned to suspicion. He fell under the influence of two of his wife's maids of honour in succession, Nelidova and Lopuknina, and of his barber, a former Turkish prisoner of war named Kutaisov (Koroiissov). For some years before Catherine died, a claim has been from some authors that he was hovering on the border of insanity. Catherine contemplated setting him aside in favour of his son Alexander, to whom she was attached. Paul was aware of his mother's half-intention - for it does not appear to have been more - and became increasingly suspicious of his wife and children, whom he rendered perfectly miserable. No definite step was taken to set him aside, probably because nothing would be effective short of putting him to death, and Catherine shrank from the extreme course. When Catherine was seized with apoplexy he was free to destroy any will by which she left the crown to Alexander.
It is alleged that the four-and-a-half years of Paul's rule in Russia were "unquestionably the reign of a madman" as his future assassins and some historians would later call it. In line with the view that Paul was mad, it is suggested that the excitement of the change from his retired life in Gatchina to omnipotence drove him almost below the line of insanity.
In 1797 he allowed famous Russian writer Radishchev to return from Siberian exile. Yet still Radishchev was kept in his own estate under police supervision.
In 1798, Paul was elected as the Grand Master of the Order of St John, to whom he gave shelter following their ejection from Malta by Napoleon. The Pope could never accept Paul as the Grand Master due to the fact that he was an Orthodox Monarch.
His independent conduct of the foreign affairs of Russia plunged the country first into the Second Coalition against France in 1798, and then into the armed neutrality against Great Britain in 1801. In both cases it seems as if he acted on personal pique, quarrelling with France because he took a "sentimental" interest in the Order of Malta, and then with England because he was flattered by Napoleon. Besides the previosly abandoned plans of joint Russo-French naval assault onto the British Isles, another of his gravest mistakes was the dispatching of the Cossack expeditionary force to India (Indian March of Paul). But his so-called political follies might have been condoned. What happened to be unpardonable was that he treated the people about him like a shah, or one of the crazy Roman emperors. But it is more likely that the Emperor was just trying to follow in the footsteps of Peter the Great. The inscription on the monument to Peter the Great erected in Paul's times near the Mikhailovskiy (St. Michael) Palace reads in Russian "To the Grandfather from the Grandson", a subtle but obvious mockery of Latin "PETRO PRIMO CATHERINA SECUNDA", the pompous dedication by Catherine on the 'Bronze Horseman', the most famous statue of Peter in St Petersburg.
He began by repealing Catherine's law which exempted the free classes of the population of Russia from corporal punishment and mutilation. Nobody could feel himself safe from exile or brutal ill-treatment at any moment. The Emperor also discovered outrageous machinations with the Russian treasury. If Russia had possessed any political institution except the tsardom he would have been put under restraint. But the country was not sufficiently civilized to deal with Paul as the Portuguese had dealt with Alphonso VI, a very similar person, in 1667. In Russia, as in medieval Europe, there was no safe prison for a deposed ruler. Paul's premonitions were well-founded.
A conspiracy was organized, some months before it was executed, by Counts Pahlen and Panin, and a half-Spanish, half-Neapolitan adventurer, Admiral Ribas. The death of Ribas delayed the execution. On the night of the nth of March 1801 Paul was murdered in his bedroom in the St Michael Palace by a band of dismissed officers headed by General Bennigsen, a Hanoverian in the Russian service. They burst into his bedroom after supping together and when flushed with drink. The conspirators forced him to the table, and tried to compel him to sign his abdication. Paul offered some resistance, and one of the assassins struck him with a sword, and he was then strangled and trampled to death. He was succeeded by his son, the Emperor Alexander I, who was actually in the palace, and to whom general Nicholas Zubov, one of the assassins, announced his accession.
The common popularist and unresearched view of Emperor Paul I, is that he was mad, that he had a mistress, that his fascination with, and subsequent adoption of the Order of St John and his induction into the office of Grand Master, are seen in this context as indulging further his delusions, and that these eccentricities and his unpredictability in other areas led to his assassination. Such a portrait of Paul is a gift to those who seek to discount and ridicule the reign of Paul I. Given that as histories are often written by the victorious or dominant party to any conflict, in this context, how true is that picture of Paul?
Comparatively recent research has rehabilitated the character of Paul I. The popularist view of Paul was originally generated by his assassins in justification of their actions. It would be easy for authors writing about Paul I to follow the propaganda uncritically, ignoring new research, which has been available for nearly three decades. It is as if the propaganda has become accepted historical fact through being venerated by age.
In the 1970s, two academic Panels provided the assessments of new research into Paul I. These were at Montreal in 1973 and St Louis in 1976. Some of the findings were presented in a book edited by Hugh Ragsdale in 1979; Paul I: A reassessment of His Life and Reign, University Center for International Studies, University of Pittsburgh, 1979. The reappraisal of Paul I has demonstrated his character as someone of high morals, who followed his conscience. Dismissed as unlikely is Paul's infidelity in having a mistress, and the involvement with the Order of St John is understood against a background of his idealising their history as a lesson in high chivalric ideals, he wished the Russian Nobility would adopt. Paul saw in the Russian Nobles an element of degeneracy, and introducing the high ideals of the Knights of Malta, was Paul's method of reform. Paul suffered a lonely and strict upbringing and whilst he was eccentric and neurotic, he was not mentally unbalanced. Whilst an analysis of his biography reveals an obsessive-compulsive personality, what the evidence reveals is that he had "characteristics fairly common in the population at large". Where Paul differed, was that by 1796 he had to manage the whole of the Russian Empire.
A reasonable and balanced picture of Paul I, can be gained from;
Hugh (Ed) Paul I: A reassessment of His Life and Reign, University Center for International Studies, University of Pittsburgh, 1979.
For early literature tending to confirm the claim that Paul was mad see;
For Paul's early life; K. Waliszewski, Autour d'un trone (Paris, 1894), or the English translation, The Story of a Throne (London, 1895), and P. Morane, Paul I. de Russie avant l'avenement (Paris, 1907).
For Paul's reign; T. Schiemann, Geschichte Russlands unter Nikolaus I (Berlin, 1904), vol. i. and Die Ermordung Pauls, by the same author (Berlin, 1902).
Most of the original text is from http://1911encyclopedia.org with the editorial corrections by G.N.Boiko-Slastion. The additional comments about the more recent reassessment of Paul were added by Dr Michael Foster.
Other readings : (in Russian) V.V.Uzdenikov.Monety Rossiyi XVIII-nachala XX veka (Russian coinage from XVIII to the beginning of XX century).Moscow - 1994.ISBN 5-87613-001-X.
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Preceded by: Catherine II (Catherine the Great) | List of Russian Tsars |
Succeeded by: Alexander I |