ABSTRACT
The news of Paul’s murder spread like wildfire through the Empire. In St Petersburg, crowds thronged the streets, strangers embraced one another, and all gave thanks for deliverance from the tyrant. The new Tsar, Alexander I, had long been the idol of the younger generation—a generation which had grown up under the heady influence of French revolutionary ideology and Western liberal ideas, however rigorously these trends had been discountenanced in Russia during the preceding decade. The peasants looked to him for deliverance. At the same time, the nobility and gentry, whose rights had been brutally trampled on by Paul, greeted with approval the announcement that Alexander proposed to rule in all respects ‘according to the spirit and the heart of his illustrious grandmother’, that is to say, with a proper regard for the privileges of the upper classes.
