The Icon and the Axe

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 New books and ideas flowed in from France and were soon superseded by more daring and fashionable ones.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