Catherine & Diderot

CATHERINE& DIDEROT CATHERINE & DIDEROT THE EMPRESS, THE PHILOSOPHER, AND THE FATE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT Robert Zaretsky Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2019 Copyright © 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer i ca First printing Jacket design by Laura Shaw Design Jacket art: (front) Catherine the Great, 1763 (oil on canvas) by Fedor Stepanovich Rokotov (c. 1735–1808) / Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia / Bridgeman Images; (back) Portrait of Denis Diderot, 1767 (oil on canvas), by Louis Michel van Loo (1707–1771) / Louvre, Paris, France / Bridgeman Images 9780674240865 (EPUB) 9780674240872 (MOBI) 9780674237353 (PDF) The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Names: Zaretsky, Robert, 1955– author. Title: Catherine & Diderot : the empress, the phi los o pher, and the fate of the Enlightenment / Robert Zaretsky. Other titles: Catherine and Diderot : the empress, the phi los o pher, and the fate of the Enlightenment Description: Cambridge, Mas sa chu setts : Harvard University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018034816 | ISBN 9780674737907 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Catherine II, Empress of Rus sia, 1729–1796. | Diderot, Denis, 1713–1784. | Enlightenment— Russia— History. Classification: LCC B4215.E5 Z37 2019 | DDC 194— dc23 LC rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2018034816 Frontispiece: Illustration by A. de Neuville, from François Guizot, A Popu lar History of France, from the Earliest Times, trans. Robert Black, vol. 6 (Boston: Dana Estes and Charles E. Lauriat, ca. 1883), p. 321. Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images. To Julie, with all my love and gratitude Contents PROLOGUE 1 1. THE SEA AT SCHEVE NINGEN 7 2. READING VOLTAIRE IN SAINT PETERSBURG 31 3. R IS FOR RIGA 42 4. GLASNOST 68 5. THE SHADOW LANDS 91 6. THE HERMITAGE 109 7. EXTRAORDINARY MEN AND EVENTS 139 8. COLIC AND CONSTITUTIONS 166 9. THE ROAD NOT TAKEN 185 10. SEND FOR SENECA 205 EPILOGUE 221 Notes 229 Acknowl edgments 249 Index 253 CATHERINE& DIDEROT Prologue n the morning of april 5, 1774, a carriage swayed past the elaborate dikes that, like giant staples, bound together the polders checkering the Dutch lowlands. Staring out the dust- Omatted win dows of the cabin wer e two travelers, an elderly Frenchman and young Greek officer. The latter, Athanasius Bala, excitedly insisted their voyage “seemed so short that I can hardly persuade myself that we’ve reached our destination.”1 The wrinkled and sagging face of his older companion, Denis Diderot, reflected just how long and demanding their voyage had been, but Diderot’s mind thrummed with plans and ideas. They were headed to The Hague, the port city that served as the Dutch Republic’s seat of government. Though a good distance from Diderot’s final destination, Paris, this prosperous port city would serve as a haven. He would find there the peace and perspective necessary to order his thoughts— which, as friends and foes knew, could be as wild and subversive as the Dutch landscape was tamed and predictable. As Bala tried to glimpse what lay ahead of the carriage, Diderot in- stead focused on what lay behind. Slightly more than four weeks (and three carriages) earlier, he had departed from the capital city of imperial Russia— Saint Petersburg— where he had spent five months as the official 1 CATHERINE& DIDEROT guest of the individual who had assigned Bala, a royal court officer, to escort Diderot on his return voyage: the Empress Catherine II. After several years’ worth of increasingly insistent invitations, the empress had fi nally succeeded the previous October in bringing Diderot to her capital city. What was an already formidable journey in the eigh teenth century for someone in the prime of life was even more challenging for Diderot, whose sixty years of often- hardscrabble life had made for a frail old age. He had always been, moreover, the most reluctant of travelers, and was deeply attached to his friends, his family—in par tic u lar his daughter, Angélique, then pregnant with her first child—and his books. Nevertheless, at this late stage of life Diderot’s reluctance to travel was outdone by his even greater reluctance to refuse the imperious call from Saint Petersburg. The reasons, both practical and philosophical, for Catherine’s invita- tion and Diderot’s ac cep tance, and the remarkable series of events that followed, are the subject of this book. In nearly all of the many scholarly and popu lar biographies devoted to Catherine, readers can find a brief account of Diderot’s sojourn in Saint Petersburg. And while biographers of Diderot in general devote more space to the subject, there are, remark- ably, no historical narratives devoted exclusively to an event that had galvanized the attention of enlightened Europe. At the end of the nine- teenth century, the French literary historian Maurice Tourneux published Diderot et Catherine II, which is less a narrative than a collection of historical documents and commentaries. A century later, the British novelist Malcolm Bradbury issued his superb novel To the Hermitage, which weaves, with side- splitting results, Diderot’s experience in Tsarist Rus sia with the narrator’s own visit as an academic attending a Diderot conference in post- Soviet Rus sia. As a novelist, though, Bradbury took the liberty of, in his words, “improving” on history when he thought necessary. No doubt Diderot himself is to blame, in part, for this odd state of affairs. As Bradbury notes in his book’s preface, his protagonist is “now generally remembered only as a Pari sian district or a Metro stop.”2 In 2 Prologue 2013 the commemorations for the tri-centenary of Diderot’s birth led to calls, mostly from intellectuals and writers, to place his remains in the Pantheon— France’s hall of fame for its national heroes and, increasingly, heroines. But the calls have remained unheeded, Diderot’s bones remain buried in their original resting place (the church of Saint Roch), and his name remains tied to a subway station in an unfashionable neighborhood in southeastern Paris. Quel dommage. For what also remains is the subversive power of Diderot’s life and writing. The monumental work conceived, edited, and partly written by Diderot—the twenty- eight- volume Encyclopédie— presented his age’s greatest challenge to the rules that governed society, politics, and religion. Among the relatively few of his works of fiction and philosophy published during his life, a couple of titles earned their author a lengthy stay in prison—an experience that, more than once, he risked repeating later in life. Since his death, just five years before the event for which many would hold him responsible— the French Revolution— several of Diderot’s most radical works have been discovered and published. Rameau’s Nephew, D’Alembert’s Dream, The Nun, and Jacques the Fatalist and His Master continue to challenge, in lasting ways, our literary sensibilities and moral sentiments. Soon after we begin one of these novels, we find ourselves rubbing our eyes, stunned to find an eighteenth- century writer whose technique and talent seem rooted in our own century. But Diderot is subversive for another, if somewhat paradoxical, reason. We tend to think of the great thinkers as isolated and imperious indi- viduals who sacrifice the life of everyday duties and pleasures in the pursuit of ideas and ideals. Yet Diderot collapses this ste reo type: his character combined heart- stopping originality with heart-warming congeniality. He was fully engaged in the politi cal and social issues of his day, but at the same time remained fully engaged in the lives of his friends, fa mily, and (yes) mistresses. Not only was Diderot one of the most provocative thinkers of his age, but as Bradbury (who was clearly smitten by the 3 CATHERINE& DIDEROT Frenchman) observes in his preface, he was also “the most pleasing of all the phi los o phers.”3 In the time and attention he gave to maintaining his friendships, supporting his family, and assisting struggling writers (even though it cost him precious time and energy), Diderot acted on his profound conviction that human beings seek the good for others as well as for themselves. More so than the vast majority of his philosophical peers then and now, Diderot was a mensch. In a certain re spect, the same claim can be made for his host in Saint Petersburg. Few eighteenth- century monarchs were as consistently humane, and affectinglyhuman, as the Empress of All Russias, Catherine II. She displayed these qualities not just in her interactions with her subor- dinates, but also with her subjects—at least to the degree possi ble for an absolute ruler of the vast and backward empire over which she reigned. It was, in part, Catherine’s desire to apply her humane impulses by trans- forming them into law and institutions that led her to reach out to French philosophes like Diderot. As a largely isolated teenager in Saint Petersburg, Catherine had discovered and devoured the works of Enlight- enment thinkers like Montesquieu and Voltaire, and sought to rule in the spirit of these writings once she came to power. (That Catherine also expected the approbation and applause of enlightened Eu ro pe ans, and in par tic u lar of prominent philosophes, marks her as fully human.) Who better, Catherine believed, to discuss the la men ta ble state of her country’s legal and civil codes than, as she repeatedly called him, this “extraordinary” man? And who better, thought Diderot, to legislate the Enlightenment than this ruler who, he repeatedly insisted, combined “the intelligence of Caesar and the beauty of Cleopatra”? This, then, was the promising background when, in October 1773, Diderot arrived in Saint Petersburg and was granted, much to the chagrin of the imperial court, the unpre- ce dented freedom to visit Catherine in her private quarters at the Her- mitage every after noon in order to converse about philosophical and po liti cal matters.

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