Catherine the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  It was not simply her unmatched collection of paintings or the elegant neoclassical palaces she built for herself and others that made Catherine’s reputation as a patron of the arts. The single most famous artistic work produced in Russia during her reign was Étienne Maurice Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter the Great. Since its unveiling in 1782, this unique masterpiece, commissioned by Catherine in a deliberate effort to assert her claim to the legacy of the greatest of Russian tsars, has stood for two and a quarter centuries on the bank of the Neva River in the middle of the city Peter founded.

  Empress Elizabeth, Peter’s daughter, idolized her father, but she had never erected what Catherine considered an appropriate monument to him. Now Catherine, not born a Russian but hoping to be accepted as the great tsar’s true political heir, decided that there should be a supreme visual tribute to the figure who had made Russia a great European power. She considered herself, a daughter of Europe coming to Russia eighteen years after Peter’s death, as resuming his journey to civilization and greatness. She wanted Russians to understand and accept this connection between them.

  Because she believed that no one in Russia had sufficient talent to do the work she wanted done, she instructed her ambassador in Paris, then Prince Dmitry Golitsyn, to find a French sculptor to design and cast a heroic equestrian statue in bronze. The price originally offered was 300,000 livres. Golitsyn approached three well-known French sculptors; they asked 450,000, 400,000, and 600,000 livres. Golitsyn then spoke to his friend Diderot, and Diderot spoke to the sculptor Étienne Maurice Falconet, director of the sculpture workshop of the Royal Sèvres porcelain factory. Falconet seemed an unlikely candidate. The son of a poor carpenter, he was considered competent but not brilliantly talented. Although Catherine had told Golitysn and Diderot that her monument was to be on a grand scale, Falconet was known for his small figures in porcelain, greatly admired by Louis XV’s mistress Madame de Pompadour. At fifty-one, he had never worked on a large scale. Nevertheless, he succumbed to Diderot’s persuasion, accepted the empress’s offer, and agreed to work for 25,000 livres per year, saying that he was ready to devote eight years to the work. In fact, he remained in Russia for twelve years.

  Falconet arrived in St. Petersburg in 1766, and Catherine greeted him enthusiastically. It pleased her that Falconet had asked less in payment than the sum offered and far less than others had asked. Although in Paris Falconet had a reputation for a prickly ego, once he reached St. Petersburg and began working on the first clay models of the statue he seemed in constant need of his patron’s approval. Catherine obliged by showing him not only enthusiasm but deference. In 1767, when Falconet submitted his first design for the statue of Peter, she protested her lack of knowledge and excused herself from expressing an opinion. She recommended that the artist rely on his own judgment and the probable views of posterity. Falconet argued back, “My posterity is Your Majesty. The other may come when it will.”

  “Not at all,” Catherine replied. “How can you submit yourself to my opinion. I do not even know how to draw. The merest schoolboy knows more about sculpture than I do.”

  Pleased by the value the empress placed on his judgement, Falconet began to offer advice on the paintings that Diderot was buying and sending. His comments were often obsequious. “What a charming picture,” he wrote of a painting by a lesser-known artist. “What magnificent brushwork! What beautiful tones! What a sweet little head of Aphrodite! What an admirable consistency!” Concerning another painting, he said, “We should fall on our knees before it. Anyone who dares to think otherwise has neither faith nor morals. After all, I do know something about it; it is practically my profession.” To which Catherine replied, “I think you are right. I am well aware of the reason I cannot approve. It is because I don’t understand enough to see in it all that you do.” Often, after taking a private first look at her new paintings, Catherine wanted to share them with Falconet. “My paintings are beautiful,” she wrote about one arriving shipment. “When would you like to come and see them?”

  Catherine may have assumed an ignorance of art, but in imagining her statue of Peter, she knew what she wanted. Falconet had never hoped to work on the scale that the empress was demanding, but her high expectations elevated his design and effort. In order to help him understand the appearance and movements of a rearing horse, the empress made available two of her favorite animals, along with their trainers, who could make them rear as the artist wished. Meanwhile, Falconet’s apprentice, eighteen-year-old Marie-Anne Collot, who had come with him from Paris, began working on the head and face of the tsar, using Peter’s death mask and the portraits available. She remained in Russia as long as Falconet and later married the sculptor’s artist son who came to visit.

  By the summer of 1769, Falconet’s work on the statue was sufficiently advanced to allow the public to see the model. Not every reaction was favorable. One point of contention was the presence of the serpent the sculptor had placed beneath the horse’s rear hooves. Falconet was told that the creature was inappropriate and should be removed by people who did not realize that the support given by attachment to the serpent was essential. Without the three points made up by the hooves and tail resting on the serpent’s back, the horse would not stand. “They have not made, as I have, the calculation of forces which I need,” the sculptor declared of his critics. “They do not know that if their advice were followed, the work would not survive at all.” Catherine had no intention of getting involved in the controversy and replied to Falconet, “There is an old song which says ‘what will be, will be.’ That is my response to the serpent. Your reasons are good.”

  By the spring of 1770, the model was complete, and there were more complaints. Falconet was said to have represented the Russian hero dressed as a Roman emperor, provoking leaders of the Orthodox Church to complain that this Frenchman had made Peter resemble a pagan monarch. Catherine calmed these critics by declaring that Peter was wearing an idealized representation of Russian costume. Later, Catherine wrote again to reassure her sensitive artist: “I hear only praise of the statue. I have heard from only one person a comment which was that she wished the clothing was more pleated, so that stupid people would not think it was a chemise, but you can’t please everybody.” Finally when the completed clay version was unveiled, Catherine still had to reassure the nervous Falconet, who now was worrying that there seemed to be no reaction to his work; people weren’t speaking to him, he complained. Again, Catherine tried to reassure him. “I know that … in general everyone is very happy,” she told him. “If people don’t say anything to you, it is out of delicacy. Some feel they aren’t qualified enough; others are perhaps afraid of displeasing you by telling you their opinion; still more can’t see a thing. Don’t take everything the wrong way.”

  While the colossal statue was being molded, the sculptor and his patron were trying to find a base on which to mount the work. Prospectors searching in nearby Finnish Karelia for granite for the new Neva quays had discovered an enormous, monolithic rock, deeply embedded in marsh. When unearthed, it was twenty-two feet high, forty-two feet long, and thirty-four feet wide. Its weight, experts calculated, was fifteen hundred tons. Catherine decided that this Ice Age boulder must serve as the pedestal for her statue. To bring it to St. Petersburg, a system was worked out that in itself was an engineering feat. Once winter came and the ground was frozen, the boulder was dragged four miles to the sea. It was cradled in a metallic sledge, which rolled over copper balls serving the function of modern ball bearings; the balls rolled in tracks hollowed out in logs laid end to end. It took capstans, pulleys, and a thousand men to inch the stone along, a hundred yards a day, from the forest clearing to the coast of the Gulf of Finland. There, a specially constructed barge was waiting; once it was loaded, the barge was supported on each side by a large warship to prevent its capsizing. In this fashion, the boulder moved slowly across the gulf and was towed up the Neva River, to be brought ashore, maneuvered into position, and deposite
d at its final site on the riverbank.

  By this time, five years had gone by. Another four years were spent finding the right casting master and constructing a mold to cast the immense mass of copper and tin into the form of the statue. Horse and rider together would weigh sixteen tons, with the thickness of the bronze varying from one inch to a quarter of an inch. At one point in the casting, the mold broke, pouring out molten bronze. Fires started and were extinguished, and then the melted, hardened metal had to be pried and scraped up, remelted and recast. Failure followed failure and money drained away. Falconet’s relations with Catherine frayed. What had been enthusiasm and encouragement on her part turned to indifference and irritation. Falconet, nervous and irascible, was unable to stand up to the empress, who could not understand the constant delays. At first, he had pleased her with his artistic temperament; eventually she wearied of it. Writing to Grimm and commissioning him to hire two Italian architects, she expressed her frustration: “You will choose honest and reasonable people, not dreamers like Falconet; [I want] people who walk on the earth, not in the air.”

  Falconet remained in Russia for nearly twelve years, but eventually, he could not continue. In 1778, tired of the delays, exasperated by criticism, and broken in spirit and health, Falconet asked permission to leave, Catherine paid him what was due but refused to see him. He returned to Paris, where he became director of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. In 1783, he suffered a stroke, although he lived another eight years. He continued to write about art, but he never sculpted again.

  After Falconet’s departure, another four years—sixteen years in all since the sculptor had come to Russia—were to pass before his statue was unveiled. Catherine did not invite the sculptor to return for the ceremony. But time has made up for her ingratitude. The result of his twelve years of work became a permanent landmark in St. Petersburg, Russia’s best-known monument and, then and now, one unparalleled in the world. During the nine-hundred-day siege in the Second World War, the city suffered constant German air and artillery bombardment. Falconet’s statue, exposed on the riverbank, was never touched.

  On August 7, 1782, Catherine presided over the formal unveiling of the statue. Looking down from a window of the nearby Senate building at the massed Guards regiments and an immense crowd in the square below, the empress gave a signal. The drapery fell away and cries of admiration and awe burst from the crowd.

  There was Peter, immortalized in bronze, his head almost fifty feet in the air. He wore a simple Roman shift and was crowned with a laurel wreath. He faced the Neva flowing before him. His left hand grasped the reins of his horse, rearing on the crest of a wave frozen in stone. His right arm was outstretched, the hand pointing across the river to the fortress and the first buildings of the city he had created. The serpent, symbolizing the difficulties he had overcome, lay trodden and crushed under the horse’s rear hooves. The horse’s tail rested on the serpent, providing the three points needed to give the statue balance. On either side of the granite base, metallic letters embedded in the stone bore the inscriptions TO PETER THE FIRST, FROM CATHERINE THE SECOND—on one side in Russian, on the other in Latin. Thus the empress paid tribute to her predecessor and identified herself with him.

  In his classic poem “The Bronze Horseman,” Alexander Pushkin wrote:

  The Image with an arm flung wide,

  Sat on his brazen horse astride …

  Him, Who moveless and aloft and dim

  Our city by the sea had founded,

  Whose will was Fate. Appalling there,

  He sat, begirt with mist and air.

  What thoughts engrave his brow!

  What hidden Power and Authority He claims!

  Proud charger, whither art thou ridden

  Where leapest thou? And where, on whom

  Wilt plant they hoof?

  This was the greatest of all Russian poets’ description of a French sculptor’s representation of the greatest of Russian emperors, created by the inspiration and determination of a German-born empress. The statue was the culmination and embodiment of Catherine’s effort to identify herself with her predecessor. Catherine was Peter’s equal—his only equal—in vision, strength of purpose, and achievement during the centuries that Russia was ruled by tsars, emperors, and empresses.

  70

  “They Are Capable of Hanging Their King from a Lamppost!”

  HIS MOST CHRISTIAN MAJESTY, Louis XVI, king of France and Navarre, was a gawky, amiable, well-intentioned man whose joys in life came from eating heartily, hunting stags, and tinkering with the inner workings of locks. Surrounded by ministers offering contradictory advice, he had difficulty making decisions. Demands that he choose one way or another threw him into confusion; once he had chosen, he continued to vacillate and sometimes changed his mind. This unfortunate thirty-five-year-old monarch was in his sixteenth year on the throne when, in May 1789, he summoned the Estates-General to meet at Versailles. Louis did not do this because he wished to, or because it was part of the usual practice of French kings. Rather, Louis acted because he had no choice; his government desperately needed to raise money to avoid national bankruptcy.

  Outwardly, France still seemed to be at the summit of European culture and power. Its population of twenty-seven million was the largest in Europe. It possessed the richest, most productive agriculture on the continent. It was the center of intellectual thought, and its language was the lingua franca of literate, educated people everywhere. Since William of Normandy had triumphed at Hastings in 1066, it had been the victor on numberless battlefields. From the beginning of the sixteenth century, the great kings of France—Francis I, Henri IV, Louis XIV—had been preeminent among the monarchs of Europe. But when, in 1715, the Sun King had been succeeded by his great-grandson, Louis XV, and still the endless wars continued, success had become intermittent. In the Seven Years’ War, ending in 1763, England had stripped away most of France’s important colonial possessions in North America and India. In return, by backing the American colonists in their fight for independence, France had taken revenge. The euphoria following the military triumph in America was as great in Paris as in Philadelphia.

  But wars cost money and the bills had to be paid. The nation’s finances had been depleted, then ravaged, by war; still, government expenditures continued to mount. The treasury responded by borrowing, and by 1788 interest on the debt absorbed half the government’s spending. Taxes, levied most heavily on the lower class, were crushing, and in the fertile land of France, common people were impoverished. Poor harvests in 1787 and 1788 resulted in grain shortages and rising food prices. Facing financial collapse, the king and the government had no choice but to call a meeting of the Estates-General, France’s long-dormant representative body. By summoning this assembly, the government was admitting that it could raise taxes no further without the consent of the nation.

  The Estates-General met at Versailles on May 5, 1789. Three estates—classifications of people—were represented by twelve hundred delegates. The clergy, considered the First Estate, owned 10 percent of the land in France, were exempt from most taxes, and had three hundred delegates. The nobility, the Second Estate, owned 30 percent of the land, enjoyed many tax exemptions, and made up another three hundred delegates. One hundred of these noblemen were liberal-minded, and fifty, under forty years old, were ready, even eager, for change. The commoners of the Third Estate, represented by six hundred delegates, were there to speak for the people who made up 97 percent of the French population. The great majority of these people were agricultural peasants, although the Third Estate also included urban laborers. Bread constituted three-fourths of an ordinary person’s diet and cost one-third to one-half of his or her income. The bourgeoisie, or middle class—bankers, lawyers, doctors, artists, writers, shopkeepers, and others—were also reckoned among the Third Estate. Plagued by heavy taxes, food shortages, unemployment, poverty, and general restlessness, the Third Estate was anxious, even desperate, for change. Its delegates were aware, ho
wever, that they had been summoned not for the purpose of improving the condition of the people they represented but because the government was desperate for money.

  Within a few weeks of the first meeting, delegates from the two privileged estates, the clergy and the nobility, succeeded in making the commoners feel their inferior status. On June 20, members of the Third Estate arrived at the usual meeting place to find themselves locked out by armed guards and forced to stand and wait in a heavy rain. Someone remembered the existence of a covered tennis court nearby and it was to this place that the six hundred delegates hurried. Once there, they vented their feelings by declaring themselves to be the true National Assembly and swore “to God and the country never to be separated until we have written a solid and equitable constitution as our constituents have asked us to.” Forty-seven members of the liberal nobility joined this new National Assembly and swore to what became known as the Tennis Court Oath.