Catherine the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  News that the Prussians had seized Verdun reached Paris on Sunday morning, September 2. The massacres began that afternoon. Twenty-four priests being brought to the prison at the Abbaye de St.-Germain-des-Prés were pulled from the carriages transporting them and, before entering at the prison gate, slaughtered with swords, knives, axes, and a shovel on the cobbles of the narrow street. Prisoners already held in the abbey were pushed, one by one, down steps into a garden, where they were hacked to death with knives, hatchets, and a carpenter’s saw. Other bands attacked other prisons: 328 prisoners were slaughtered in the Conciergerie; 226 at the Châtelet; 115, including an archbishop, at a Carmelite convent. At the Bicêtre, 43 adolescent boys were butchered. Thirteen were fifteen-year-olds, three were fourteen, two were thirteen, and one was twelve. Women of all ages including adolescent girls were brutally violated. When the Princesse de Lamballe refused to swear an oath of hatred against the royal couple, she was hacked to death. Her head was taken to the Temple to dance on a pike before the eyes of the king and queen.

  On September 9, the French defeated the Prussians at Valmy, ending the allied invasion and forcing the Prussian army to retreat to the Rhine. The French did not stop there; they swept on to capture Mainz and Frankfurt. On September 21, three weeks after the massacres, the French monarchy was abolished and a republic established. In December, the National Assembly proclaimed that wherever France’s armies marched, the existing form of government would be replaced by the rule of the people.

  On January 21, 1793, Louis XVI was executed. This was too much for some who, until then, had believed in the revolution. General François Dumouriez, the military victor of Valmy, who had been Danton’s friend, deserted to the Austrians; Lafayette had defected after the storming of the Tuileries. The provinces rose against the Paris government and then paid dearly. When Lyon, France’s second city after Paris, capitulated, those to be killed, most of them peasants or laborers. were roped together in groups of two hundred, herded to fields outside the city, and executed by cannon firing grapeshot into the bunched human mass. One of Robespierre’s agents was present and reported to his master: “What delights you would have tasted could you have seen national justice wrought on two hundred and ninety scoundrels! Oh, what majesty! What a lofty tone! It was thrilling to see all those wretches chew the dust!”

  A new executive committee of the government, the Committee of Public Safety, was created that included Danton and Robespierre. Eventually, Robespierre decided that the revolution was ideologically impure. A Reign of Terror was instituted “to protect the republic from its internal enemies … those who whether by their conduct, their contacts, their words, or their writings, showed themselves to be supporters of tyranny or enemies of liberty” or those “who have not constantly manifested their attachment to the revolution.” Over nine months, the official count of those executed was sixteen thousand; there were estimates that the Terror actually claimed two or three times that number.

  Informed that Louis of France had been sent to the guillotine, a shaken Catherine became physically ill. She remained in seclusion for a week and ordered six weeks of court mourning. She ordered a total break in relations with France. The French chargé d’affaires, Edmond Genet, was expelled. The Franco-Russian commercial treaty of 1787 was annulled and all trade between the two countries was prohibited. No vessel flying the tricolor flag of the revolution was allowed in Russian waters. All Russian subjects living or traveling in France were recalled, and all French citizens in Russia were given three weeks to publicly pledge allegiance to the king of France or leave Catherine’s empire. Of fifteen hundred French citizens in Russia, only forty-three refused to take this oath. In March 1793, two months after his brother’s death, she welcomed the Count of Artois to St. Petersburg, agreed to finance him, and exhorted him to work together with other émigrés. But she still held back from military involvement in the war against France. With Austria and Prussia rebuffed, she believed that little could be achieved without Britain and that Britain had no intention of going to war. William Pitt, the prime minister, had said as much: that British policy was concerned with the security of Europe, not with the nature of the French government. The execution of Louis XVI changed Pitt’s mind. The king’s execution, Pitt said, was “the foulest and most atrocious act the world has ever seen.”* The French ambassador was ordered to leave England. Once again, France acted first. On February 1, 1793, France declared war on Great Britain.

  Six months after her husband’s death, the widowed Marie Antoinette, her hair white at thirty-seven, was taken from her children in the Temple tower and placed in the prison of the Conciergerie. The former queen of France—a Hapsburg archduchess, the daughter of an Austrian empress, the sister of two Austrian emperors, and the aunt of a third—remained alone for two months in a cell eleven feet by six feet. On October 5, 1793, she was placed in a tumbrel and taken through the streets to the guillotine.

  The tumbrels continued to roll. The massive blade rose and fell forty, fifty, sixty times a day. Terrified politicians guillotined one another in order to escape the guillotine themselves. Hundreds went to their deaths for no better reason than personal quarrels or neighborhood jealousies; their crime was being “under suspicion.” The victims included twenty peasant girls from Poitou, one nursing a baby while sleeping on the cobbles of the Conciergerie courtyard, awaiting execution. The poet André Chénier was guillotined because he was mistaken for his brother; then, informed of its mistake, the Commune guillotined the brother, too. Antoine Lavoisier, the scientist, requested a short stay of his execution in order to complete an experiment. “The revolution has no need of scientists” was the reply. One of the condemned was the eighty-year-old Marshal Duke de Mouchy, whose elderly wife did not understand what was happening. “Madame, we must go now,” her husband said gently. “God wishes it, let us therefore honor His will. I shall not leave your side. We shall depart together.” As they were taken from the prison, someone shouted, “Courage!” Mouchy replied, “My friend, when I was fifteen, I went into the breach for my king. At eighty, I go to the scaffold for my God. I am not unfortunate.” French émigrés and refugees told these stories to Catherine.

  The Terror crested and began to ebb. On July 13, 1793, Marat was stabbed in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday. It was on April 5, 1794, that Danton was sent to the guillotine by Robespierre. Three and a half months later, on July 27, 1794, Robespierre’s head rolled into a basket. With the death of Robespierre, the worst of the Terror came to an end. The Directory followed, and, in 1799, the Consulate. A young army general, Napoleon Bonaparte, became first consul until 1804, when he crowned himself emperor. The wars begun by revolutionary France in 1792 continued under Napoleon, until they had spanned twenty-three years. With the downfall of Napoleon, the former Count of Provence, the older of the surviving brothers of Louis XVI, returned to France and ascended the throne as Louis XVIII. He was succeeded by his younger brother, the former Count of Artois, who became King Charles X. Then followed the last king of France, Louis Philippe. None of these three kings was an improvement on the amiable, indecisive Louis XVI, who failed as a monarch but was devoted to his country, endured his imprisonment with dignity, and went to his death bravely and without bitterness.

  The lasting symbol of the French Revolution is the guillotine. The executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, reinforced in literature by Dickens’s image of Madame Defarge sitting and knitting at the foot of this implacable machine, have imprinted this method of inflicting death deep on cultural memory.

  Originally, the guillotine was designed to give practical effect to the belief that the purpose of capital punishment was the ending of life rather than the inflicting of pain. Until it took its first victim, in April 1792, condemned prisoners in France had sometimes died horribly; they could be broken on the wheel or torn apart by four horses, each tied to one limb of the victim. More generally, noblemen were beheaded by sword or axe and commoners were hanged. But headsman were clumsy an
d swords and axes dull, while nooses often strangled slowly while the choking victim danced in the air. The guillotine was meant to be humane and deliver an instant, painless death; its inventor, Dr. Jospeh Guillotin, described its operation: “The mechanism falls like thunder; the head flies off; blood spurts; the man is no more.” It was also considered more equitable because it was to be used on all condemned people regardless of class. In any case, it had a long life of service. It was used in imperial Germany, the Weimar Republic, and Nazi Germany, where, between 1933 and 1945, sixteen thousand people were guillotined. It remained a form of execution in France until 1977; four years later France abolished the death penalty.

  Whether the guillotine was more humane than the axe, the noose, the electric chair, the firing squad, and lethal injection is a medical, as well as a political and moral, question. The most effective resolution would be to let the question fade away by the universal prohibition of state-inflicted death penalties. While societies struggle toward this goal, a second medical or scientific question may be asked: was death by guillotine so instantaneous as to be truly painless? Some believe not. They argue that because the blade, cutting rapidly through the neck and spinal column, had relatively little impact on the head encasing the brain, there may not have been immediate unconsciousness. If this is true, should one believe that some victims were aware of what was happening? Witnesses to guillotining have described blinking eyelids and movement of the eyes, lips, and mouth. As recently as 1956, anatomists experimenting with the severed heads of guillotined prisoners explained this by saying that what appeared to be a head responding to the sound of its name or to the pain of a pinprick on the cheek might only have been a random muscle twitch or an automatic reflex action; that no intelligent awareness was involved. Certainly, the shock of the blow to the spinal column and a sudden, massive drop in cerebral blood pressure must bring a loss of consciousness rapidly, if not instantaneously. But in that flicker of time, was there awareness?

  In June 1905, a respected French medical doctor was permitted to experiment with the freshly severed head of a prisoner named Languille. He reported that “immediately after the decapitation … the spasmodic movements ceased.… It was then that I called out in a strong sharp voice: ‘Languille!’ I saw the eyelids slowly lift up … with an even movement, quite distinct and normal.… Next, Languille’s eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves.… I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me.… After several seconds, the eyelids closed.… I called out again, and once more the eyelids lifted and living eyes fixed themselves on mine with perhaps even more penetration than the first time. Then there was a further closing of the eyelids … [and] no further movement.”

  What awareness, if any, a severed head might have is something that Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Georges Danton, Maximilien Robespierre, and tens of thousands of others who died by the guillotine may have discovered. We cannot know.

  71

  Dissent in Russia, Final Partition of Poland

  THE FRENCH REVOLUTION had a dramatic impact on Catherine, not only because the empress was horrified by the degradation, humiliation, and violent destruction of the French monarchy but because she feared that revolutionary fervor would spread. Her belief that she must act to protect herself and Russia precipitated a significant reversal in her early liberal thinking about freedom of thought and expression. In the political and military sphere, her fear of what she called the “French poison” resulted in—or was used to justify—a rare event in European history: the complete disappearance of a large, proud nationstate.

  In the beginning, as a young woman and new empress, Catherine had been the admiring friend of the philosophes. Voltaire and Diderot had acclaimed her as the most liberal sovereign in Europe, the Semiramis of the North. By them and from her reading of Montesquieu, she been taught that the best form of government was benevolent autocracy, informed and guided by the principles of the Enlightenment. In her first years on the throne, she had hoped that she could correct or at least ameliorate the workings of some of the more inefficient and unjust institutions in Russia, among them serfdom. She had summoned the Legislative Commission in 1767 and listened to the complaints and recommendations of different classes of people, including peasants. But then had come the Pugachev rebellion. After this, she still had cordial friendships with various philosophes, but she was no longer a disciple. She questioned and often challenged their utopias.

  By 1789, after twenty-seven years on the throne, Catherine had achieved some of the liberal goals formulated in her youth. She had helped to create a Russian intelligentsia. Among the nobility, more people attended universities, traveled abroad, spoke foreign languages, and wrote plays, novels, and poetry. Promising young men were sent at state expense to study and acquire knowledge in foreign schools and universities. Educated men, not born to the nobility, had become senior government officials, poets, writers, doctors, architects, and painters. But then, seeming to call into question her early efforts and goals, came the grim reality of Pugachev, followed, twenty years later, by the events in France.

  Catherine had observed with dismay the destruction of the French monarchy and the Old Regime. Every month, French émigrés and refugees arrived in Russia with frightful stories. More than any other European monarch, she felt that the ideology of radical France was also directed at her, and the more radical France became, the more defensive and reactionary were her responses. She now discovered dangers implicit in Enlightenment philosophy. Some responsibility for the excesses of the revolution seemed traceable to the writings of philosophers she had admired. For years, their writing had attacked and undermined respect for authority and religion. Were they not, therefore, at least partly responsible? How had they and she failed to see where this path was leading?

  In 1791, she ordered all bookshops to register with the Academy of Sciences their catalogs of available books that were opposed to “religion, decency, and ourselves.” In 1792, she ordered the confiscation of a complete edition of the works of Voltaire. In 1793, she ordered provincial governors to forbid the publication of books that appeared “likely to corrupt morals, concerned with the government, and, above all, those dealing with the French revolution.” She began to fear the ease with which revolutionary ideas could cross frontiers, and the importation of French newspapers and books was prohibited. In September 1796, the first formal system of censorship during her reign was established. All private printing presses were closed; all books were to be submitted to a censorship office before publication. One of the first to be affected by these new restraints was a young, intellectual nobleman who had risen to a significant position in the imperial administration.

  Alexander Radishchev was born in 1749 in Saratov province, the oldest of eleven children of an educated, noble landowner who possessed three thousand serfs. At thirteen, Alexander entered the Corps des Pages in St. Petersburg and served at court. At seventeen, he was among twelve young men chosen to study philosophy and law at the University of Leipzig at state expense; there, he knew Goethe, a fellow student. In 1771, at twenty-two, he returned to Russia, where he served first as a clerk in the offices of the Senate and then on the legal staff of the College of War. In 1775, Radishchev married and took a post in the College of Commerce, presided over by Alexander Vorontsov, a brother of Catherine’s friend Princess Dashkova. Eventually, he became the director of the St. Petersburg Customs House.

  During the 1780s, Radishchev began writing a book, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. In 1790, he printed a few copies on his private home printing press. As required, he submitted a copy to the chief police censor in St. Petersburg. This official glanced briefly at the book’s title, assumed it to be a travelogue, approved it, and returned it to the nobleman in the Customs House. Radishchev then printed six hundred copies anonymously. His timing was unlucky, coming a year after the fall of the Bastille, and while Russia was still at war with Turkey and Sweden.


  Radishchev’s Journey was not a travelogue. Instead, it was a passionate indictment of the institution of serfdom and a criticism of the government and social structure that permitted serfdom to exist. He began with an emotional appeal:

  Shall we be so devoid of humane feeling, devoid of pity, devoid of the tenderness of noble hearts, devoid of brotherly love, that we endure under our eyes an eternal reproach to us … [by keeping] our comrades, our equal fellow citizens, our beloved brothers in nature, in the heavy fetters of servitude and slavery? The bestial custom of enslaving one’s fellow men … a custom that signifies a heart of stone and a total lack of soul, has spread over the face of the earth. And we Slavs, sons of glory among earth-born generations … have adopted this custom, and, to our shame … to the shame of this age of reason, we have kept it inviolate even to this day.

  Radishchev illustrated the effects of serfdom by creating numerous scenes described by “the traveler” as he passed through villages, towns, and staging posts during his journey. He portrayed the abuse of serf labor, the shocking verdicts of corrupt judges, and the defenseless situation of serf women at the mercy of predatory owners. In one episode, three brutal sons of a landlord attack, bind, and gag a beautiful serf maiden on the morning of her wedding day, intending to use her for their “beastly purpose.” The serf bridegroom sees what is happening, charges the three evildoers, routs them, and “breaks the head” of one of them. As punishment, the landlord then orders a merciless flogging of the bridegroom. The young serf accepts this—until he sees the landlord’s three sons dragging his future wife back into their house. He breaks free, saves the girl, and faces his three enemies, whirling a fencepost over his head. At this point, other serfs arrive, and in the ensuing melee, the landlord and his three sons are beaten to death. All of the serfs involved are condemned to penal servitude for life. Radishchev told this story not only as an example of the nature of master-serf relationships but also to warn his readers that many serfs, driven to desperation, were only awaiting a chance to rise in revolt: