SOURCE: Haslip, Joan. “‘Les Philosophes.’” In Catherine the Great, pp. 160-69. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977.

[In the following excerpt, Haslip focuses on Catherine's relationship with Voltaire, noting that Catherine's correspondence with him and other French philosophers demonstrates the challenges she faced in negotiating between her Western-influenced ideals and the traditions of Russia.]

Catherine's correspondence with Voltaire, a man thirty-five years her senior, the doyen of the philosophes and the most widely read writer in Europe, was inspired by a mixture of hero-worship, expediency and a passionate desire for fame. Voltaire was a name to conjure with. One mention from his pen placed one among the immortals; even his criticism was preferable to being ignored. In order to curry favour with the patriarch of Ferney, the Autocrat of all the Russias, the head of the Orthodox church, proclaimed herself in her letters as Voltairian in philosophy and a sceptic in religion. In the beginning, Voltaire showed a certain reluctance to embark on a correspondence with a woman whom he and his friends referred to in private as la belle cateau (the handsome wench), or simply as ‘the wench’. At heart he agreed with D'Alembert ‘that converts of this kind gave philosophy little cause to boast’. But Catherine was both persistent and generous, and the veteran philosopher, who had professed an admiration for the Princess Johanna, could hardly refuse the offers of friendship made by her more famous daughter. Ivan Shuvalov, the friend of Voltaire who, in Elisabeth's reign, had commissioned him to write the life of Peter the Great, was recalled from exile and forgiven by Catherine for his ‘gaffe’ in having extolled the heroism of the Princess Dashkof. He and his nineteen-year-old nephew, Andrei, who had completed his education at Ferney, received appointments at court and were admitted into the charmed circle of the Empress's personal friends. It is even asserted that the young Andrew, an accomplished French scholar and talented versifier, edited and corrected Catherine's letters to Voltaire. But neither he nor his uncle was in Russia in 1763 when Catherine made her first overtures through one of her French secretaries.

Voltaire had barely completed his Russian history and was still under the spell of Peter's complex character when he received a letter from the young woman who had placed herself on the throne of the Romanovs, condoned the murder of Peter's grandson, and connived at that of his great-nephew. In this letter she professed to be the patriarch's most ardent disciple, having discovered his works at a time when she was so unhappy as to be on the verge of suicide. She worshipped him as ‘the divinity of gaiety’, who had helped to console her in her misery and later completed her education. ‘Whatever style I possess,’ she wrote, ‘whatever powers of reasoning, have all been acquired through the reading of Voltaire.’

The old man was touched and flattered at having another royal disciple who would spread his doctrines through northern Europe. He was impressed by the little German Princess, whom her fellow monarchs had predicted would not keep her throne for more than a few weeks, and had not only proved them wrong, but in the first year of her reign had had the courage to discard the old alliances of Russia and, by signing a treaty with the King of Prussia, had brought her former lover to the throne of Poland. She had opened out her frontiers to foreign immigration and invited German colonists to settle in the sparsely inhabited areas of the Volga basin. Barely ten years later, she was proudly announcing to Voltaire ‘that her colony of Saratof had grown to twenty-seven thousand souls’.

New towns and villages were changing the face of Russia. Hospitals and schools were being built, not only in St Petersburg and Moscow but in all the provincial towns. Following the tradition of her predecessor, European architects and painters were being offered princely salaries to help in embellishing the capital. Not a Ukaze was passed in the Senate without having been first considered by the Empress. Yet this extraordinary young woman still found the time to dedicate several hours a day to the compiling of what was called her Nakaz, the most ambitious plan of legislation which had yet been introduced in Russia.

Voltaire, at first, was inclined to be a dilatory correspondent, and few of his letters survive from the first years. But by the end of 1765 he had fallen completely under the spell of the new ‘Semiramis of the North’. The name was more apt for Catherine than for Elisabeth. It was almost too apt, for Semiramis, like Catherine, had murdered a husband in order to mount a throne. But the Empress was not over-sensitive. Semiramis or cateau, what did it matter, so long as she harnessed his genius to her chariot. The incense of Voltaire compensated for the disapproval of the Paris salonières, who, with the exception of Madame Geoffrin, referred to her as a ‘Tzar-slayer, usurper and a whore’. The Duchess de Choiseul voiced the general opinion in a letter to Madame Deffand,

She [Catherine] has had the wit to realize that she needs the protection of men of letters. She flatters herself that their base eulogies will impenetrably conceal from the eyes of her contemporaries and from posterity the various crimes with which she has astonished the world and revolted humanity. That obscure, vile and mercenary writers lend her their abject pens I can understand—but Voltaire?

And of them all, it was Voltaire who ended by being the most sycophantic. ‘The northern star’, ‘Semiramis’, ‘Sainte Catherine’, were only a few of the names given to his heroine, and the most gratifying of all was when he called her ‘Emperor’ instead of ‘Empress’. She in return showered him with rich gifts, of sable pelisses and jewelled snuff-boxes. There was no limit to her generosity. She gave diamonds to his niece and paid exorbitant sums for the watches produced by his colony of unemployed, a philanthropical experiment which Voltaire, as usual, succeeded in making highly profitable. But being a sensible, hard-headed German, Catherine could not refrain from mentioning that he had sent her twice as many watches as she had ordered—something a Russian prince would never have deigned to notice.

The Empress's purchase of Diderot's library in 1764 won her a paeon of praise from the encyclopaedists. She not only allowed it to remain in his possession for his lifetime, but appointed him librarian with a salary of a thousand livres a year to which she added another thousand ‘for the pain and trouble he had taken in putting together such a fine collection’. Even D'Alembert wrote to thank her for her generosity towards his collaborator and friend, to which Catherine replied with becoming modesty ‘that she never thought that buying Diderot's library would bring her so many compliments’. But she could not quite forgive D'Alembert for refusing to act as tutor to her son, and with that gentle admonishment in which she excelled, she wrote to him, ‘Your philosophy, founded on the love of mankind, requires you to serve mankind. In refusing to do so, you fail in your duties.’ Nevertheless, she could afford to forgive his ungraciousness now that she had Denis Diderot on her payroll.

The fifty-year-old cutler's son from the provincial town of Langres was the most celebrated and controversial figure of what was known as ‘The Republic of Letters’, a republic without frontiers whose citizens were trying to find a new approach to life, a new medium in which to express themselves and their ideas. Diderot was as warm-hearted as Voltaire was cynical, as rough as he was polished, as simple as he was sophisticated, retaining throughout his life the enthusiasms of adolescence and the innocence of a child, fed by the pure flame of his genius. As Catherine once described him, ‘He was in certain ways a hundred, in others not yet ten.’

He rose to fame as the guiding spirit and the chief editor of the new Encyclopaedia, ‘the bible of the enlightened’, of which the first volume appeared in 1751. Ten more were to follow and its publication was regarded as the greatest event in civilization since the invention of printing. It revolutionized the whole concept of living, arousing curiosity and doubt in the minds of men. It defied nature, declaring that experience was only derived from sensation, that the universal aim in life was happiness through the combined exercise of intelligence and the senses. This humanistic philosophy set new standards, glorifying the dignity of labour, stressing the importance of industry and of technical knowledge, warning against superstition and ‘the myths and mysteries of the Roman Church’. Within a few months of its appearance, it had already been denounced by the French government, the Jesuits and the Jansenists, and during its chequered career its printing licence was twice removed and only grudgingly restored.

The vicissitudes of its publication in France gave Catherine the opportunity to proclaim herself the protector of the arts and sciences by offering to have the remaining volumes printed in Riga. But this offer was made only a few months after her accession and the editors of the Encyclopaedia were not yet prepared to trust their future to a country ‘so perilously close to Siberia’.

Ten years later, both Denis Diderot and Frederick Melchior Grimm, the news-vendor of Europe whose Chroniques Littéraires, written from Paris, enlivened the tedium of various German courts, were both on their way to Russia in the service of the Empress Catherine. Even Voltaire, who was by then in his late seventies, was toying with the idea of paying his personal respects to ‘Sainte Catherine’. But, strangely enough, this appeared to be the last thing she wanted, and one finds her writing urgently to Grimm, ‘For God's sake, try and persuade the octogenarian to stay at home. What should he do here? he would either die here or along the roadside from cold, weariness and the bad roads. Tell him that cateau is seen better from a distance. By the way, “cateau” tickled me not a little.’ For once, her habitual self-confidence appears to have failed her and she was nervous of exposing herself and her country to the scrutiny of Voltaire's cold and dissecting eye. Neither ‘the wench’ nor the octogenarian had any wish for a closer relationship. If Voltaire ever sincerely contemplated going to Russia, it was to see for himself the Empire created by his hero, Peter, rather than to pay homage to the Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst. The last volume of the history of Russia had only just appeared and Catherine would have liked him to live long enough to chronicle the triumphs of her reign. All she wanted was his praise, above all his praise of her Nakaz, the legal code, or rather the instructions, which she persisted in regarding as her greatest contribution to Russia.

To clean out the Augean stables of a corrupt and inefficient administration, to put an end to the terrible abuses which occurred in provinces thousands of miles distant from the capital, and protect the poor and weak from the exactions of the landlords, was more than even the most enthusiastic and determined of Empresses could achieve. Every department was in a state of chaos. The legal code dating back to the days of Tzar Alexis in the middle of the seventeenth century was completely out of date. Peter the Great had opened the flood-gates to reform, but half of his decrees had never even got into the statute books. Age-old privileges and abuses had merely been driven underground to reappear in some new and more vicious form under his weak and incompetent successors. He had attempted to curb the power of the aristocracy by obliging every nobleman to enter the service of the state. The civil, military and court hierarchy had been divided into grades extending from the humblest to the highest, from the College Registrar to the Chancellor of the Empire, from the cornet to the Field-Marshal, from the lackey to the Lord High Chamberlain. Hereditary nobility gave way to the nobility of service and every foreigner in state employ became automatically a gentleman, thereby making Russia into a happy hunting-ground for adventurers and scoundrels kicked out of their own countries. A new and prosperous middle class of bankers, tradesmen and manufacturers was established in the towns and given certain privileges on the pattern of the German guilds. Here again it was the foreigners who benefited, being permitted to acquire property and intermarry with Russians while continuing to trade under their own flag.

But the great reformer did nothing to alleviate the lot of the vast rural population. On the contrary, he degraded them, for in the old days the cultivators of the soil had been divided into three classes. There was the prosperous and free peasant proprietor; there was the farmer who worked the landlord's land on the metayer system, giving him a half share of the products while maintaining his personal liberty. And lastly, and by far the most numerous, was the serf attached to the land. One of the cruellest and most inhuman of Peter's decrees was to confound these three classes into one, subjecting them all to a fixed residence and a capitation tax to be collected by the landlord who had the right of determining the conditions of labour. This was not only equivalent to serfdom but it also increased the power of the aristocracy, whose abuses in other respects Peter had attempted to curb. His only philanthropic edict was to control the sale of slaves by decreeing that husbands should not be separated from their wives, nor children from their parents. But even this was suppressed, when his niece, the Empress Anna, whose cruelty and viciousness bordered on the pathological, legalized the sale of slaves by collecting dues on every sale.

No Romanov could have had a greater reverence for the reforming Tzar than the little German Princess who had usurped his descendant's throne. The adventuress in her thrilled to the magnificence of the achievements of a man to whom nothing had been impossible. He had made the country into a European power and conjured a modern Western capital out of a marshy swamp; he had built a navy, reformed the army, emancipated women, introduced religious tolerance and developed commerce. But he had died too young and his heirs, unworthy of their great inheritance, had allowed his reforms to founder into chaos. It was Catherine's task to complete his work and civilize the Empire he had created. But the cultivated, Western Princess, the pupil of a humanitarian Huguenot governess, could not yet reconcile herself to the thought that what Peter had achieved could never have been done without slave labour. The canals, the forts, the dock-yards, and above all his city on the Neva, were all the fruits of serfdom.

It was a system so utterly repellent to Catherine that one finds her writing in the first months of her reign ‘serfdom is damaging to the State, for it kills initiative, industry, the arts and sciences and destroys honour and prosperity’. The famous Nakaz or instructions to which she devoted three hours a day for the first five years of her reign, and which was to serve as a guide for a new legal code, makes direct reference to serfdom. But it insists that even the humblest has the right to be treated as a human being and that every citizen should be subject to the same laws. Inspired by Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws and later by Beccaria's Crime and Punishment which appeared in 1764, Catherine probably intended that every Russian should enjoy the same rights as citizens. But her friends and advisers soon managed to persuade her that the illiterate peasants on the Volga and the wandering tribes of the steppe could hardly be classified as citizens. Her attempt to improve the lot of the industrial serfs was a failure and the slightest hint of the future enfranchisement of the serfs met with violent protest from the very people who prided themselves on their liberalism. Even Princess Dashkova, who regarded herself as a disciple of Montesquieu, would have been horrified at the thought of running her estates on paid labour. So convinced was she of the rights and privileges of her class, that she later succeeded in convincing a confirmed democrat like Diderot of the necessity of serfdom in Russia.

Catherine herself was never entirely convinced. When Diderot was her guest in St Petersburg and ventured to criticize the dirt and squalor of the Russian moujik, the Empress replied with unusual bitterness, ‘why should they bother to be clean when their souls are not their own’. The opposition of her own subjects prevented her from realizing her ideals. She did not dare to defy the ruling classes on whom at first she depended for survival and who later contributed to the glory of her reign. When the Nakaz was published in 1767 it was shorn of all the dangerous and controversial ideas she had borrowed from Western philosophers. Prudent advisers like Nikita Panin had warned her that some of her maxims would be high explosives in the hands of immature and inexperienced legislators. To quote Montesquieu to magistrates who still abided by the advice of the early Tzars, ‘look to your office and indemnify yourself’, and to expect the principles of Beccaria to impress judges whose idea of punishment consisted of torture and the knout, was to demand the impossible of a people who had suffered three hundred years of Tartar domination and who valued human life by Asiatic rather than by European standards.

For all its deletions, imperfections and flagrant plagiarisms, the Nakaz was a sufficiently impressive document to earn Catherine the approval and admiration of Les philosophes, the prophets of enlightenment, of whom Voltaire was the acknowledged high-priest. Many of the maxims included in her instructions were for their benefit, rather than for the commission who from 1766 to 1768 assembled first in Moscow, then in St Petersburg, to digest and to discuss a new code of laws under the inspired guidance of their Empress. There were representatives from all parts of the Empire, beginning with the delegates from the state services, the Senate, the Holy Synod, the various Colleges and courts of Chancellory. The nobles sent a representative from every district, the merchants and tradesmen one from every city. The army, the militia, the free-born peasants and the fixed tribes, irrespective of their religion, were all allowed to choose a deputy from every province, even the atamans of the Cossacks were privileged to attend—all except the vast, voiceless majority of nearly ninety per cent of the population.

Five hundred and sixty-four deputies sat at the conference which opened in Moscow on 4 August 1767. Each representative was presented with a draft of instructions and a gold medal stamped with an effigy of the Empress on which was written ‘For the happiness of each and all’. One suspects that the latter was the more appreciated by the majority of the delegates, but what must have been particularly disappointing for Catherine was that some of the deputies were so unworthy of their privileges that many of the medals were promptly sold. But what could a Lap, a Kalmuck or a Cossack of the Don make of a document of six hundred and fifty paragraphs compiled and arranged by a German-born Princess and largely borrowed from the most advanced thinkers of the Western world. ‘The nation is not made for the sovereign, but the sovereign for the nation.’ ‘Liberty is the right to do all that is not forbidden by law.’ ‘It is better to spare ten guilty men than to put one innocent man to death,’ were maxims so new and alien to the majority of the Russian people as to be almost incomprehensible. Each deputy was only concerned with his own local grievances. Minor details were discussed for hours at numberless committees and the vital questions were barely touched, but Catherine was proud of her work and with superb self-confidence declared, ‘that the more people who read her instructions, the less crime there would be’.

She realized it had been no more than an experiment and later admitted it had not been entirely successful:

I summoned delegates from the whole Empire in order to learn the conditions of every section of my realm. Every part of my instructions provoked disagreement. I allowed them to cancel what they pleased and they omitted over half my draft. I begged them look upon the rest as rules upon which opinion could be based to serve as a guide in their law-making activities. They neither formed a code nor created a Parliament.

Much was started, nothing was finished. The merchants demanded the same privileges as the nobles and the right of owning serfs. The nobles demanded greater powers than they had already, and in the end very little was achieved. But Catherine's Nakaz was read with immense interest abroad and received the most laudatory notices. The most exaggerated in his praise was Voltaire who hailed her as a successor to Solon and Lycurgus, calling her Nakaz ‘the most beautiful monument of the century which will bring you more glory than ten battles because it is conceived by your own genius and written by your own fair little hand’. Fortunately for Catherine, she never heard the comments of the diplomatic corps which were very different from those of les philosophes. The English ambassador described her Nakaz as a comedy, the French dismissed it as a farce, but the Prussian envoy was more careful in his comments now that the philosopher King and the philosopher Empress were going into harness to perpetrate one of the most heinous political crimes of the century.