Day after day new decrees were issued, of ever increasing violence.  The tzar became suspicious of all strangers of whatever nation, and endeavored to rear a wall of separation around his whole kingdom which should exclude it from all intercourse with other parts of Europe.  The German universities were all declared to be tainted with superstition, and all Russians were prohibited, under penalty of the confiscation of their estates, from sending their sons to those institutions.  No foreigner, of whatever nation, was allowed to take part in any civil or ecclesiastical service.  The young Russians who were already in the German universities, were commanded immediately to return to their homes.

Apprehensive that knowledge itself, by whomsoever communicated, might make the people restless under their enormous wrongs, Paul suppressed nearly all the schools which had been founded by Catharine II., reserving only a few to communicate instruction in the military art.  All books, but those issued under the surveillance of the government, were interdicted.  The greatest efforts were made to draw a broad line of distinction between the people and the nobles, and to place a barrier there which no plebeian could pass.  Some one informed Paul that in France the revolutionists wore the chapeau, or three-cornered hat, with one of the corners in front.  The tzar immediately issued a decree that in Russia the hat should be worn with the corner behind.

We have said that Paul was bitterly hostile to all foreigners.  The emigrants, however, who fled from France, with arms in their hands, imploring the courts of Europe to crush republican liberty in France, he welcomed with the greatest cordiality and loaded with favors.  The princes and nobles of the French court received from Paul large pensions, while, at the same time, he ignobly made them feel that he was their master and they were his slaves.  His dread of French liberty was so great, that with all his soul he entered into the wide-spread European coalition which the genius of Pitt had organized against France, and which embraced even Turkey.  And now for the first time the spectacle was seen of the Russian and Turkish squadrons combining against a common foe.  Paul sent an army of one hundred thousand men to cooeperate with the allies.  Republican France gathered up her energies to resist Europe in arms.  The young Napoleon, heading a heroic band of half-famished soldiers, turned the Alps and fell like a thunderbolt into the Austrian camp upon the plains of Italy.  In a series of victories which astounded the world he swept the foe before him, and compelled the Austrians to sue for peace.  The embassadors of France and Germany met at Rastadt, in congress, and after spending many months in negotiations, the congress was dissolved by the Emperor of Germany, in April, 1799.  The French embassadors set out to return, and were less than a quarter of a mile from the city, when a troop of Austrian hussars fell upon them, and two of their number, Roberjeot and Bonnier, were treacherously assassinated.  The third, Delry, though left for dead, revived so far as to be able, covered with wounds and blood, to crawl back to Rastadt.[25]