The Catherine Palace. Michael Streich

Catherine the Great and Enlightenment Reforms

Michael Streich

 Catherine the Great died in 1796, several years after the start of the French Revolution. Despite her openness to Enlightenment ideas, her correspondence with pre-revolutionary thinkers like Voltaire and Diderot, and her attempts at internal reform, the violent phases of the Revolution turned Catherine against her earlier inclinations. In the end, she considered sending an army to France to restore the monarchy. Catherine’s depiction as an enlightened despot has left open the door of debate: to what extent did Catherine accept the progress and reform associated with Enlightenment belief?

 

Catherine as Empress After 1762

 

With the assistance of highly placed government officials and the elite Guards units in St. Petersburg, Catherine engineered a bloodless coup in 1762, deposing her inept and highly unpopular husband, Peter III. Intelligent and exceptionally literate, Catherine was devoted to Russia, embraced Orthodoxy, and determined to reform government and foreign policy.

 

Catherine became an avid art collector, filling the Winter Palace (later the Hermitage) with priceless masterpieces. She came to the throne as the most literate and best educated autocrat in the history of Russia. She spoke French fluently, wrote plays, essays, and treatises on a number of topics. Catherine valued books and acquired the libraries of both Voltaire and Diderot upon the deaths of those great thinkers.

 

She invited both Voltaire and Diderot to St. Petersburg. Denis Diderot accepted her invitation and spent afternoons discoursing, freely advising what progressive changes she could facilitate in Russia. Yet, as she admitted in her writings, neither Diderot nor the other philosophes fully appreciated what it was like to govern. Her foreign policy hardly reflected Enlightenment ideas. In 1778, the Prussian king, Frederick II, commented that “the empress of Russia is very proud, very ambitious, and very vain.”

 

Catherine’s reforms, such as in administration and law, were tempered with a sense of paranoia that engulfed her entire reign. Within a two year period, there were 13 pretenders to the throne, some claiming to be Peter III. This culminated in the 1773 Pugachev Revolt, perhaps the greatest peasant uprising of the century.

 

An Enlightened Monarch or True Autocrat

 

Catherine rose at five every morning. Referring to herself as the “first servant of the state,” (much like Frederick the Great said of himself), she worked long hours. Under her rule, more books were published in Russia than in all previous years and the modern Russian language replaced the older “church Slavonic” language. Moscow University was founded and Catherine encouraged the building of elementary and intermediate schools.

 

No reforms, however, limited her role as the autocratic ruler of Russia. As with other so-called Enlightened Monarchs (Frederick the Great, Joseph II of Austria), Catherine was willing to reform certain aspects of civic and social life, but not at the expense of her own power. Under Catherine, serfdom expanded and became more firmly entrenched. Censorship prohibited the publication of books that criticized her reign or the autocratic system.

 

By the time the Bastille fell in Paris in 1789 to French mobs, Catherine had already become reactionary. Events in France, at least for Catherine, represented the effects of unbridled Enlightenment thinking. Additionally, she recalled all too vividly the peasant challenges to her own legitimacy. What she owed Russia was order and stability rather than chaos and turmoil. Hence, she retreated from liberalism.

 

Sources:

 

Anthony, Katherine, Catherine the Great (New York: Garden City Publishing Company, 1925)

Hingley, Ronald, The Tsars 1533-1917 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968)

MacKenzie, David and Michael W. Curran, A History of Russia, the Soviet Union, and Beyond 4^th Edition (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1993)

Riasanovsky, Nicholas V., A History of Russia 2^nd Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969)

[copyright owned by Michael Streich; all reprints subject to written permission from the author]