text: Maria Feodorovna transformed her court into the center of anti-Napoleon sentiment during the Napoleonic Wars and vehemently opposed any approach her son made to get to an agreement with Napoleon Bonaparte. When the French Emperor offered to marry her youngest daughter Anna Pavlovna, Maria strongly opposed the proposed marriage.
  Dowager Empress and Death
  Even past age 50, Maria Feodorovna retained traces of her youthful freshness.  Of a robust constitution, she outlived five of her ten children, including her eldest son and his wife, and saw the ascension to the throne of her third son, Nicholas I.  Once all her children were grown up, she maintained an avid correspondence with them, but both mother and children could be cool and remote at times because of their temperaments.
  In 1822, Empress Maria Feodorovna moved into the renovated Yelagin Palace, but died in Winter Palace, Saint Petersburg, Russia, on 5 November 1828, at the age of 69.  Her memory was revered by her children, who named their eldest daughters in her honour except for Grand Duchess Alexandra Pavlovna.  Later Russian tsarinas looked up to her and used her as a role model.  Pavlovsk Palace, in which Maria lived for so long and on which she left a major imprint, was maintained for her descendants as she left it, almost as a family museum, in accordance with her instructions, first by her younger son Michael and later by the Konstantinovich branch of the family, who inherited and kept it until the Russian Revolution.