Russia, the Hapsburgs, who, after the Bourbons, were the most august, the most ancient dynasty of Europe, eagerly accepted what the Romanovs had refused. The War of 1812 with Russia was the result of that pro-German policy of the Russian Court.
IX
During the reigns of Nicholas I and Alexander II the German-Austrian influence reached its zenith at the Court of Petersburg. Nicholas I was the brother-in-law of the Prussian Hohenzollern. An able and an honest man in his private relations, he was in his political capacity a Prussian martinet, as even Treitschke is compelled to admit, and he organized his empire on the strictest Frederician principles. The court, the army, and the bureaucracy were Prussianized as they had never been before. A German bureaucrat, Nesselrode, who could not even speak the Russian language, for forty years controlled, as foreign minister, the policy of the Russian Empire. Even as his grandfather, Peter III, even as his brother, Alexander I, had saved Prussia from destruction, so Nicholas I saved Austria from a similar fate. Francis Joseph had ascended a throne shaken to its
