After Lomonosov's death in 1765, the Enlightenment seemed to be moving toward its greatest triumphs under the new empress, Catherine the Great. If Peter had opened a window to Europe and Elizabeth had decorated it with rococo frills, Catherine threw open the doors and began to rebuild the house itself. She looked beyond the technological accomplishments of the North European Protestant nations to the cultural glories of France and Italy and the political traditions of England. But this early optimism was soon to fade. The all-pervading sun of the Enlightenment found the Eastern skies more cloudy than they at first appeared.
The Dilemma of the Reforming Despot
The reign of Catherine illustrates dramatically the conflict between theoretical enlightenment and practical despotism that bothered so many eighteenth-century European monarchs. Few other rulers of her time had such sweeping plans for reform and attracted so much adulation from the philosophes, yet few others were so poor in practical accomplishment. In her failure, however, she created the conditions for future change-posing vexing questions for the aristocracy while creating intolerable conditions for the peasantry. As the only articulate ideologist to rule Russia between Ivan IV and Lenin, she changed the terms of reference for Russian thought by
i linking Russian culture with that of France, and by attempting to base imperial authority on philosophic principles rather than hereditary right or religious sanction.
The attractions of France had, of course, been noticed earlier. Peter had visited the Sorbonne and sent three students to Paris for study in 1717. Kantemir and Tred'iakovsky both spent most of the thirties absorbing French culture in Paris. The former translated Moliere and wrote independently in the manner of French satire; the latter, as secretary of the Academy of Sciences and court poet, began the wholesale introduction of Gallicisms into Russian speech. From the beginning, the uneasy aristocracy looked to French thought for philosophic guidance as well as forms of expression; and this philosophic thirst brought them into conflict with the guardians of Orthodoxy in the new state Church. Throughout Elizabeth's reign the Holy Synod made repeated efforts to suppress Fontenelle's Discourse on the Plurality of Worlds, with its popularized image of an infinite universe.10
Under Catherine, however, the stream became a flood.1 Fontenelle was freely published but hardly noticed. New books and ideas flowed in from France and were soon superseded by more daring and fashionable ones. The previous book was discarded before it had been used, like an unworn but suddenly outmoded hat. The first French thinker to enjoy popular vogue under Catherine was "the immortal Fenelon," whose poem Telemaque provided an exciting image of a Utopian society and whose Education of Girls partly inspired Catherine's experiments in educating noble women.11 Fenelon was succeeded by Montesquieu, and Montesquieu by Voltaire- with each infatuation more intense than the last.
Francomania had an artificial and programmatic quality that did much to determine the character-or lack thereof-of aristocratic culture. Contact with France took place frequently through intermediaries. Catherine herself acquired her own taste for things French during her education in Germany; the first systematic Russian translations of French works were by the German "Normanist" Gerhard Friedrich Miller, in a Russian journal which was an imitation of German imitations of Addison and Steele; Moliere reached Russia largely through Baltic intermediaries, and his influence on Russian satire of Catherine's day was mixed in with that of Ludvig Holberg, "the Danish Moliere." The Russian word for "French" is derived from German, and the word for "Paris" from Italian.12
If French culture often reached Russia through intermediaries, it was nonetheless generally viewed as a single, finished product to be rejected or accepted en bloc. Even more than in the original confrontation with the Byzantine, Russians sought to transplant French achievement without the
critical spirit which had accompanied it. Catherine saw in the French Enlightenment the means of placing her rule on firm philosophic foundations and providing a national guide for the moral leadership of Europe. The Russian aristocracy used French culture to establish a common identity. The French tongue set them off from both the Russian- or Ukrainian-speaking peasantry and the German-, Swedish-, or Yiddish-speaking mercantile elements of the empire. Chateaux, parks, and theatrical productions provided a congenial and elegant place for leisured gatherings and communal functions and a relief from the austerities of long years of warfare.
Catherine described the purpose of her reign in one of her many philosophical parables: "the thornless rose that doesjiot sting."13 The rose represents virtue which can ?? attainedH6rily~by following the guide, reason, and avoiding the irrational temptations that try to impede this secular pilgrim's progress. Catherine saw no element of pain or unhappiness in true virtue which must naturally lead to "the heavenly city of the eighteenth century philosophers": the rule of justice and right reason.
Her self-confident optimism helped her to create, and forced her to confront, the dilemma of the reforming despot. This dilemma was also to haunt her grandson Alexander I and his grandson Alexander II, while his grandson Nicholas II was to flee in terror from even facing it. How can one retain absolute power and a hierarchical social system while at the same time introducing reforms and encouraging education? How can an absolute ruler hold out hope for improvement without confronting a "revolution of rising expectations"? The two Alexanders, like Catherine, were to find it necessary to check the liberality of their earlier years with despotic measures later. Each of them was to be succeeded by a despot who would seek to block all reform. But the Prussian methods of these successors-Paul, Nicholas I, and Alexander III-could not solve essential problems of state, and thus rendered the need for reform even more imperative. By frustrating moderate reformers, moreover, Paul, Nicholas I, and Alexander III strengthened the hand of extremists in the reformist camp and saddled their imperial successors with artificially pent-up and exaggerated expectations.
The scent of violence hovered about all these imperial reformers. Catherine and Alexander I had each come to power by encouraging the assassination of their predecessors and next of kin; Alexander II, whose reforms were the most far-reaching of all, was rewarded not with gratitude but assassination.
It was almost certainly fear which drove Catherine first to confront the dilemma of reforming despotism. Her position on the throne was initially little more secure than that of her recently murdered husband, Peter III. Threatened in particular by the plan of Nikita Panin to limit severely
imperial authority by an aristocratic Imperial Council, Catherine turned in 1763 to the drawing up of a comprehensive defense of absolute monarchy. After three separate drafts, she submitted it to a specially convened legislative commission of 1766-7 which had a majority of non-aristocratic elements subject to her bidding. The commission unanimously awarded Catherine the title "Catherine the Great, Wise, Mother of the Fatherland" and arranged for the publication in Russian, German, French, and Latin of the final draft of her flowery philosophic defense of monarchy, generally known as the Instruction, or JVakaz.1*
Catherine and her successors paid a severe price, however, for this curious method of legitimizing usurpation. By undercutting the Panin proposals for bringing the aristocracy into the business of government, Catherine added to the already substantial sense of rootlessness which beset this class. The fact that she subsequently granted the aristocracy vast compensatory economic authority over their serfs and exemptions from government service only increased their capacity for idleness without increasing their sense of participation in affairs of state.
Even more important was the unsettling effect of justifying one's right to power on the totally new grounds of natural philosophy. Though the legislative commission did not in fact codify any laws, its detailed discussion and formal approval of Catherine's treatise helped put a large number of new and potentially subversive political ideas in circulation. According to the Nqkqz,Russja_was a Euroj3ejm__state, its subjects "citizens," and its proper laws those of the rational,
natural order rather than the traditional historical one. Although th£uA£fl amp;zz~was not widely distributed within Russia, the legislative commission was broad enough in its representation to carry its ideas to every social group in Russia except the bonded peasantry. With four out of 18 million Russians represented by the 564 deputies, the commission was the first crude attempt at a genuinely national assembly since the zemsky sobers of the early seventeenth century;15 but it was strikingly different from all previous assemblies ever held on Russian soil in that it was totally secular. There was one deputy from the Synod, but none at all from the clerical estate.
Catherine's basic idea of the "good" and "natural" encouraged scepticism not only toward revealed religion but toward traditional natural philosophy as well. Her "Instruction" directed men's thinking not to ultimate truths or ideal prototypes but to a new relativistic and utilitarian perspective. It seems altogether appropriate that Jeremy Bentham, the father of English utilitarianism, was one of the most honored of foreign visitors to Catherine's Russia; and that translated books of and about Bentham in Russia soon began to outsell the original editions in England.16
Like a true utilitarian, Catherine defined legislation as "the Art of conducting People to the greatest Good," which is "whatever may be useful to mankind" in a given tradition and environment. Autocracy must rule through intermediary powers and clear laws, which require that the individual "be fully convinced that it was his Interest, as well as Duty, to preserve those Laws inviolable." The French monarchy rightly appraised the subversive implications of such an approach to the justification of authority, confiscating some two thousand copies en route to France in 1771, and preventing any of the twenty-four foreign versions of the work from being printed there.17
Catherine admired not only Bentham but his adversary, Blackstone, whose Commentaries she carefully studied and had translated in three volumes. She was widely admired not only in England but also in Italy, where a vast treatise was dedicated to her in 1778, celebrating the victorious alliance of power and reason in the eighteenth century.18 Nearly one sixth of the articles in Catherine's Nakaz were taken directly from the work of another Italian, Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishment, which armed Catherine with her conviction that crime comes from ignorance and poor laws, and punishment should be precise and pedagogic rather than arbitrary and vindictive.19
But it was always with the French that Catherine felt the greatest kinship. Commenting on the new alliance with France in 1756 just after it was concluded and well before her own accession to the throne, Catherine wrote that "if the gain is not great in commerce, we shall compensate ourselves with bales of intelligence."20
The bales had already begun to arrive with the first appearance of a French-language journal on Russian soil in 1755, and with the unprecedented sale of three thousand copies of Voltaire's Philosophy of History in St. Petersburg alone within a few days of its appearance in 1756.21
Vfll^ffi^QiLbecanie-aie official historian of the Russian Empire and a kindoLpatron. saint for the secuErlaristocracy. The many-sided French Enlightenment was thought to be all of a piece, with Voltaire at its center. Friend and foe alike spoke of Vol'ter'ianstvo ("Voltairianism") as the ruling force in Western culture, just as they had spoken of Latinstvo ("Latinism") in the fifteenth century. With Catherine's active encouragement, much of the Russian aristocracy became enamored with Voltairianism, which had the general meaning of rationalism, scepticism, and a vague passion for reform. In the first year of her reign, at the age of 34, she opened a correspondence with Voltaire, who was nearly 70. Almost all of the sixty-odd separate works of Voltaire translated into Russian in the last third of the eighteenth century appeared during Catherine's reign. At least 140 printed
translations of Voltaire's works were published in the course of the aristocratic century; numerous abstracts and handwritten copies were made; and no aristocratic library was thought complete if it did not contain a substantial collection of his works in the original French. The name of Voltaire was enthroned literally as well as figuratively; for the new high-backed, thin-armed easy chair in which Russian aristocrats seated themselves for after-dinner conversation was modeled on that on which Voltaire was often depicted sitting, and is known even today as a Vol'terovskoe kreslo or "Voltaire chair."22
If Voltaire was the symbol, the Gallicized German Friedrich Grimm was the major source of information for Catherine's court. He supplemented his famed literary newsletter on the intellectuaT Efe of the salons with a voluminous correspondence with the Empress, who showered him with many favors, including eventual appointment as her minister in Hamburg. Grimm became a kind of public relations man for Catherine, and was probably only partly jesting when he rephrased the Lord's prayer to read "Our mother, who art in Russia . . ."; changed the Creed into "I believe in one Catherine . . ."; and set ? "?? Catherinam Laudamus" to the music of Paisiello.23 Voltaire avoided distinctively Christian terminology, addressing Catherine as "ajmest in your temple," confessing that "there is no God but Allah, and Catherine is the prophet of Allah."24 Only a more systematic materialist like Helvetius was able to refrain from theistic references altogether, dedicating his last great work, On Man, His Intellectual Faculties and His Education, to her as a "bulwark against 'Asiatic despotism,' worthy by her intelligence of judging old nations as she is worthy of governing her own."25
On this all-important question of government, Catherine was most indebted to Montesquieu. His mighty Spirit of the Laws was both the final product of a lifetime of urbane reflection and the opening salvo in the "war of ideas" against the old order in France.26 Within eighteen months of its first appearance in 1748, Montesquieu's work had gone through twenty-two editions, and infected previously untouched segments of society with its ranging curiosity about politics, its descriptive and comparative approach, and its underlying determination to prevent arbitrary and despotic rule.
All these features of Montesquieu's work appealed to the young empress as she sought to fortify herself for combat against the political chaos and religious mystique of Old Russia. Her attitude upon assuming power was that of one of her generals, who satirically remarked that the government of Russia must indeed be directed "by God himself-otherwise it is impossible to explain how it is even able to exist."27 Her Nakaz sought to introduce rational order into the political life of the Empire, and Montes-
quieu was her major source of inspiration. She set aside three hours each day for reading the master, referred to his Spirit oj the Laws as her "prayer book,"28 and derived nearly half of the articles in the Nakaz from his works.29
To be sure, Catherine's entire effort went against Montesquieu's own assumption that Russia was foredoomed by its size and heritage to despotic rule; and she distorted or neglected some of his most celebrated ideas. Montesquieu's aristocratic "intermediary bodies" between the monarch and his subjects served not, in Catherine's proposal, to separate power between executive, legislative, and judicial functions but rather to consolidate government functions and create new lines of transmission for imperial authority.
Nevertheless, Catherine was closer to the spirit of Montesquieu's politics than many who followed him more literally on specific points. Her effort to make monarchy unlimited yet fully rational; her sense of adjusting political forms to environmental necessities; her increasing recognition of the need for active aristocratic support so that the spirit of honor could be enlisted to support the rule of reason-all of this was clearly in the spirit of the man who did so much to turn men's eyes away from the letter to the spirit of law.
If the Spirit of the Laws provided Catherine with the image of rationally ordered politics, the Encyclopedia of Diderot and D'Alembert, which began to appear three years later in 1751, provided the image of rationally ordered knowledge. Her enthusiasm for this work soon rivaled her passion for Montesquieu. D'Alembert declined Catherine's invitation to serve as tutor to her son; but Diderot considered transferring the editorial side of his work to Riga, and eventually sold
his library to Catherine and came to St. Petersburg.30 Three volumes of the Encyclopedia had been translated almost immediately into Russian under the supervision of the director of Moscow University. A private translation was concurrently being made by the future historian Ivan Boltin, and many articles and sections were translated individually.
For the rational ordering of economic life, Catherine turned first (at Diderot's suggestion) to the French physiocrat, Lemercier de la Riviere; then, following his unhappy visit to Russia,31 she sent two professors from Moscow to study under Adam Smith in Glasgow. Her most original approach was the founding in 1765 of a Free Economic Society for the Encouragement in Russia of Agriculture and Household Management: a kind of extra-governmental advisory body. Two years later she offered one thousand gold pieces for the best set of recommendations on how to organize an agricultural economy "for the common good." The society received
164 entries in this remarkable Europe-wide contest, with the greatest response and the prize-winning essay coming from France.32
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