In December 1825, a group of Russian aristocrats and officers tried to overthrow the regime of Tsar Nicolas I ... In this new episode of the Europe 1 Studio podcast "At the heart of History", Jean des Cars returns to the plot of Decembrists and their terrible condemnation.
In Saint Petersburg, during the oath of Tsar Nicolas I, the Decembrists broke out a riot to overthrow the sovereign… In this new episode of the Europe 1 Studio podcast "At the heart of History", Jean des Cars recounts the dark consequences of this plot led by aristocrats.
In Saint Petersburg, on December 14, 1825, the new Tsar Nicolas I made public the manifesto by which his brother and predecessor, Tsar Alexander I, chose him as his successor.
He announces that the swearing-in ceremony will be held in front of the troops, Senate Square.
On this cold December day, a confrontation will occur between the regiments loyal to Nicolas I and those who support his older brother, Constantine.
The latter shout: "Long live Constantine!"
, "Long live the Constitution!"
They think that's the name ... of Constantine's new wife!
The face to face will last several hours.
The rioters (because there is indeed a plot behind this riot), do not know very well how to act.
They have no specific plan and no leader to guide them.
Opposite, the troops loyal to Nicolas 1st are requested to remain calm by the new emperor.
The Tsar is in a hurry to get it over with, but he has no desire to begin his reign with a massacre.
The situation drags on.
It will take a dramatic turn when Miloradovich, the Governor of St. Petersburg, who is trying to set up a dialogue between the two factions, is killed.
The mounted guards, loyal to Nicolas 1st and who try to control the most agitated rioters, are repulsed.
Nicolas 1st is afraid and wants to end it.
The artillery is called in reinforcement, the guns thunder on the place of the Senate.
The insurgents are dispersed, leaving nearly seventy dead in the place.
The repression is immediate and violent.
There are arrests throughout the day.
The Tsar established a High Court of Justice, made up of members of the Council of the Empire, the Senate and the Holy Synod.
This jurisdiction is a compendium of Russian institutions: government, parliament, religion.
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If there are very many arrests, only the ringleaders will be brought before the Court.
There are 121 of them. They are charged with three counts: attempted regicide, revolt and mutiny.
Five of them will be condemned to quartering, twenty-five to life imprisonment in Siberia, sixty-two to forced labor sentences of varying duration, twenty-nine are sent to relegation to Siberia, they are all degraded.
Three hundred soldiers, who had followed the rioters, are subjected to the knout, a "typically Russian" torture lavished with a kind of whip, which tears, with each blow, shreds of flesh from the back of the condemned man.
They are then sent to the Caucasus where the Russian Empire is waging a murderous war.
The first Russian revolution is put down in twenty-four hours by Nicolas 1st.
From that day on, he deserves his nickname of "iron tsar".
But why this confusion during his swearing in?
And who are these rioters, the majority of whom come from the aristocracy?
The complicated succession of Alexander I
If this revolt could have broken out on December 14, 1825, it is because the death of Tsar Alexander I had led to a succession crisis.
It is a specialty in the Russian Empire!
Alexander I, the Czar, opponent and admirer of Napoleon, died on November 19, 1825, far from Saint Petersburg, in Taganrog, a provincial town on the road to Crimea.
Alexander I has no son but he has two brothers.
The eldest, Constantine, should logically succeed him.
But a non-royal marriage keeps her from the throne.
Preferring his private life to the Crown, in 1822 he wrote from Warsaw, where he resided, to his brother Alexander I that he renounced his succession.
Alexander then draws the consequences.
He drew up a manifesto designating his younger brother, Nicolas, as his successor.
Then, unfortunately, he deposits this document in the patriarchal archives so that it remains secret, which was not clever ... His death therefore opens a period of interregnum.
Constantine is in Warsaw, Nicolas, who is in Saint Petersburg, is acting.
Then, unaware of the existence of the manifesto, he takes an oath to his older brother Constantine and asks the troops to do the same.
All of them do.
At the same time, in Warsaw, then Russian territory, Constantine, who had renounced the throne, took the oath to his brother Nicolas.
It is obvious that this situation can only cause trouble!
Russia has two emperors, one in Warsaw, the other in St. Petersburg, and each has taken an oath for the other!
Nicolas ends up receiving a message from his brother confirming his refusal of the Crown of the Romanovs and asking him to seek the manifesto of Alexander I which makes Nicolas his successor.
Nicolas understands that it is necessary to put an end, as quickly as possible, to this interregnum and to be proclaimed tsar.
Indeed, he received a lot of information from various origins: an insurrectionary movement is about to break out.
The political situation must be clarified as soon as possible.
This is what he did on December 14, 1825. But it is already too late: the insurrection breaks out, as I told you at the beginning of this story.
But who are these conspirators whose plot failed and who henceforth will be called the Decabrists in Russia (decabra in Russian) and in France the Decembrists?
The Decembrists: Enlightened Aristocrats
It is essentially the nobility which will be at the origin of the conspiracy of 1825. The moods of the Russian nobility go back to the tragic and brief reign of Peter III, the husband of the one who was to become Catherine the Great after her death. it got rid of it too by a coup.
During the few months of his reign, Peter III had not achieved much except to annoy everyone.
He had taken only one edict and it concerned the nobility.
For her, he had removed the obligation to serve the Russian Empire.
On the other hand, he had decided to keep him the property of his lands and especially of the peasantry which went with it in a middle-aged state of serfdom.
This decision put the nobles at odds since they were no longer useful (they were forbidden to do so) but they retained considerable privileges over a large part of the population.
Within society, they felt they were parasites, an embarrassing status they owed to the maintenance of serfdom.
At the start of the 19th century, almost all of Europe was indignant at this situation specific to Russia.
The Russian aristocracy itself is a little ashamed of it.
The campaign of 1814-1815 against France, the arrival of the Cossacks in Paris with the officers had allowed them to discover "the Lights".
On returning to Russia, many of them had gathered in secret societies to try to find a way to end this disastrous social state.
The first of these companies was created in 1817 by officers who returned from France.
It is called the Union for the Salvation of the Loyal Sons of the Fatherland.
It only asks for a constitutional regime rather than tsarist absolutism.
Soon, it will be replaced by the Union du Bien Public where various theories clash.
This is the case for all Russian political groupings from the 19th to the beginning of the 20th century.
It is finally split into two, the Northern Union and the Southern Union.
The first, the most traditionalist, is led by Muraviev and still calls for the advent of a constitutional monarchy.
The second, led by Tourgueniev (nothing to do with the writer), wishes in priority the emancipation of the peasants.
The most astonishing representative of this reform movement is a high ranking officer, Paul Pestel.
Intelligent and cultured, he defends his ideas in an underground organization, Russkaja Pravda, the Russian Truth.
Much more radical than the other reformers, he wanted Russia to become a Republic and the nobility to lose their privileges and be found in society.
He is opposed to Muraviev not only on the choice of the regime but also on his organization.
For the Russian immensity, Muraviev proposes a federal system.
On the contrary, Pestel wants a centralized state where the diversity of the peoples of the Empire is erased in the face of uniformity.
Its slogan is "One Empire, One People".
To achieve this, he considers a long period of dictatorship necessary.
Needless to say, his radicalism will make him many enemies among reformist dissidents.
It is certainly the image of Pestel that scared Nicolas I the most and pushed him to an uncompromising repression.
A trial, convictions
The tribunal constituted by Nicolas I delivered its verdict on July 13, 1826. The five leaders, as has been said, were condemned to quartering.
Since this punishment cannot be applied because Europe does not understand such barbarism, it is replaced by hanging.
The five condemned, including Pestel and Muraviev, are publicly executed outside the walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress.
Among them, there is also the poet Ryleev and this arouses the anger of his friend, the great poet Pushkin, who had supported the movement.
This famous writer will never forgive the autocrat these deaths for example.
Most of the rest are sentenced to forced labor and exile in Siberia.
Siberia is an immense space then little exploited where the icy winters and the scorching summers make survival difficult.
Certainly, there were already a few large cities, notably Irkutsk, where wealthy merchants engaged in the successful trade in furs and tea imported from China.
Siberia was therefore in the process of development and required hands to mine it, build new towns and villages, work in the mines which are full of semi-precious stones and all kinds of minerals, and also proceed to the felling of the trees of the immense forest.
Before sending the Decembrists into exile, Nicolas I deprived the rebels of all their ranks of officers, their titles of nobility, their property and all privileges as well as the right to return to the big cities.
It was therefore with shackles on their feet and having lost all social identity that the condemned, most of whom belonged to the nobility, went by convoy to the Siberian steppe and taiga.
The failure of the plot and the punishment suffered by the Decembrists upset Russian opinion, especially that of the elites.
The leaders were young nobles representing the most educated faction in the country.
Their fathers had defeated Napoleon on the battlefields and their sons were taken to court for wanting to defend the ideas their fathers had discovered in France after their victory.
Two contradictory judgments testify to the confusion of the spirits in 1825. Thus, the count Rostopchine declares: "In general, it is the cobblers who want to become lords. Here, it is our lords who wanted to transform themselves into cobblers."
For the historian Kliutshevsky: "Their fathers were Russians whom education had transformed into French. The sons were through their education French people who passionately wanted to become Russians. This movement led by nobles and soldiers ended the political role of the nobility. "
After the plot and its repression, Nicolas 1st is troubled.
He who did not want to start his reign in a bloodbath, behaved like a tsar and enforced order, which was also his duty.
He ends up convincing himself of the correctness of his reasoning and declares to the Ambassador of France, the Count de La Ferronnays: "I have received thousands of testimonies of loyalty and devotion. That is why the memory of this plot , far from inspiring in me the slightest mistrust, dispels all my apprehensions. Righteousness and confidence disarm hatred more surely than suspicion and mistrust, which only belong to the weak. I begin my reign under sad auspices and with terrible obligations. I will know how to fulfill them. "
Be that as it may, the Decembrist insurrection deeply marked Nicolas 1st.
It undoubtedly leads the Tsar to be wary of the nobility as well as of any manifestation of independence and initiatives on the part of his subjects, whoever they may be.
Another disastrous effect will be to get the Tsar to block the road to so-called "harmful" ideas.
It closes their borders.
In 1826, he adopted the Code of Censorship and submitted any publication to a committee responsible for granting or refusing its imprimatur.
Importing publications from abroad then becomes very risky.
This type of measure is all the more absurd because at the same time, the government encourages the sending of students abroad where no one controls the courses they take or their reading.
While the czar, suspicious, locks Russia, the outlaws, shackles on their feet, discover the horror of Siberia.
But very quickly, comfort will come to them.
Their wives fight for them and join them.
Bibliographic resources:
Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, from the French Academy,
Les Romanov
(Fayard, 2013)
Jean-Pierre Arrignon,
A History of Russia
(Perrin, 2020)
Henri Troyat, of the French Academy,
La lumière des Justes
(Flammarion, 1966)
Jean des Cars,
The saga of the Romanovs
(Plon, 2008)
"At the heart of History" is a Europe 1 Studio podcast
Author and presentation: Jean des Cars
Production: Timothée Magot
Director: Jean-François Bussière
Distribution and editing: Clémence Olivier and Salomé Journo
Graphics: Karelle Villais