Alexander I Tsar of war and peace by Palmer, Alan Warwick - 1974

New York U. S. A.: Harper & Row. Very Good+ in Fair dust jacket 1974. First US Edition. Hardcover. Marfree, acidfree NrFine 1st US Ed perf-bound in full brown cloth, sienna endpapers, unclipped illus dj has edgewear & few chips of 1" or less, maps + 23 illus; superclean remainder-- no names, not marked-in, underscored or discard. Mails from NYC usually within 12 hours.; 487 pages; Tsar of all Russia during the tumultuous years when the European order was turned topsyturvy by Napoleon, Alexander I earned a reputation as an idealistic muddlehead among his contemporaries, such no-nonsense political realists as Metternich, Talleyrand and Castlereagh. It is a point of view largely shared by Palmer in this meticulously scholarly biography of a man whose vision always exceeded his grasp. Injected with a heady dose of liberal ideas by his grandmother, Catherine the Great, and his Swiss tutor La Harpe, Alexander dreamed of emancipating the serfs and giving Holy Russia a constitution. Ruler of the most autocratic and militaristic of states, Alexander wanted to bestow liberty on Poland (which had been partitioned off the map by his grandmother) and peace and brotherly love on all. When at the close of the Napoleonic wars Alexander presented the statesmen of Europe with the Holy Alliance which proposed to regulate international politics by the principles of Christian love, the diplomats were understandably embarrassed, uneasy and cynical. As he grew older Alexander became more and more mystically inclined; the grand projects with which he filled his reveries were stillborn. Russia remained administratively backward, repressive and unenlightened and his own popularity, once vast, dimmed. As Palmer puts it, "He was a holy ikon refusing to work its miracle." It is perhaps unfortunate that Palmer devotes so much of the book to the well-charted diplomatic and military maneuvers of the period without bothering to fully penetrate the irresolute, emotional, guilt-ridden but oddly likable character of Alexander I whose aborted liberal fancies were to have such far-reaching repercussions on Russian history. (Kirkus Reviews) .