A Compartive Study of the Reigns of Catherine the Great and Marie
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FEMININE WILES AND AUTHORITY: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE REIGNS OF CATHERINE THE GREAT AND MARIE ANTOINETTE ____________ A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of California State University Dominguez Hills ____________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in Humanities ____________ by Jodi Patel Spring 2018 Copyright by JODI ELLEN PATEL 2018 All Rights Reserved This thesis is dedicated to my husband Jayendra B. Patel, who supported me in pursuit of my studies as I further divided my attention away from our marriage; and to my children, Richard G., Joseph S., Michael F., and David A. Guistolise, who also sacrificed their rights to my time and attention. I would also like to dedicate this work to Lou Rodriguez, my junior high history teacher who first ignited my love of history and to Dr. Tom Kelly, who inspired me to study history at the graduate level. Finally, I would like to dedicate this work to Cheryl Hague, who mentored me through my B.A. and whose remarks about writing her own thesis kept me (mostly) sane while I wrote mine. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am truly grateful for the guidance and encouragement my mentor Dr. Howard Holter gave me both during my time in his class and while I wrote my thesis. I only regret that life did not permit me to meet and work with him when I was younger. His academic work—to the extent I am familiar with it—would have been a template I would have joyously followed had I benefited from his mentorship earlier in life. I also wish to thank Dr. Patricia Cherin for her encouraging remarks and sharp eye. Lastly, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to all those professors who designed and shaped the HUX program. This program was everything I had hoped to find in a graduate program, and I stand in awe at the vision of those who created it. I only wish I could have taken every course offered in the original program. Thank you for guiding my intellectual growth and curiosity. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE COPYRIGHT PAGE .......................................................................................................... ii DEDICATION ................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................... iv TABLE OF CONTENTS .....................................................................................................v ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... viii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION. ..........................................................................................................1 2. REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE .................................................................................4 3. CONTEXTUAL CONSIDERATIONS .........................................................................13 Russian Context .....................................................................................................13 French Context .......................................................................................................15 4. EARLY LIVES OF THE SUBJECTS ...........................................................................18 Catherine’s Early Years .........................................................................................18 Marie Antoinette’s Early Years .............................................................................22 5. ROYAL MARRIAGES AND TRANSITIONS ............................................................27 Sophia Becomes Catherine ....................................................................................27 Marie Antoinette Becomes Marie Antoinette ........................................................31 6. SEXUAL POLITICS AND POWER.............................................................................37 Catherine’s Lovers and Political Success ..............................................................37 Sexual Awkwardness in France ............................................................................40 7. INTERLUDE: THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE PAMPHLETEERS ..................43 v CHAPTER PAGE 8. THE POWER OF PUBLIC OPINION ..........................................................................51 Peter’s Iconoclasm and Catherine’s Iconography ..................................................51 Marie Antoinette as Profaned Icon ........................................................................57 9. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS ............................................................................61 WORKS CITED ................................................................................................................67 vi ABSTRACT Catherine the Great and Marie Antoinette were near contemporaries, and they faced many similar challenges in their respective positions. At first glance, one would expect Marie Antoinette to have been more successful: she was the daughter of Maria Theresa of Austria while Catherine was an obscure German princess. However, Catherine became Catherine the Great while Marie Antoinette’s historical reputation is that of a spendthrift floozy. History has been discourteous to Marie Antoinette, and the tenuous relationship between France and Austria put her at a disadvantage; however, Marie Antoinette failed to take advantage of her educational opportunities. Furthermore, her lack of ambition allowed her political enemies to slander her with impunity. Catherine, however, not only exceeded her tutors’ expectations, but she also refused to allow tradition to circumscribe her education. Additionally, Catherine’s political ambition required her to act in ways that created a public image for her that demanded respect. 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Despite the fascinating personalities and individual studies of Catherine the Great of Russia and Marie Antoinette of France, there exists no sustained scholarly comparison of these famous contemporaries. In theory, it is Catherine who would seem to have been at a disadvantage: she was a minor German princess with a rather ambitious mother whose ill-advised intrigues while in Russia earned her the scorn of Empress Elizabeth (Memoirs 13). Marie Antoinette, by way of contrast, was the daughter of Maria Theresa of Austria—a woman who had been a central player in European politics for decades. Nevertheless, it is Marie Antoinette who could not bring herself to embrace her new subjects, nor was she seemingly capable of assuming the ponderous responsibilities that her birth and marriage required of her. Catherine, however, embraced Russia fully, learning Russian and converting to Russian Orthodoxy—despite her Lutheran father’s protests—and left a legacy of strong but enlightened rule that has withstood the carping criticism of her detractors notwithstanding the fact that she came to the throne by way of a coup d’etat. Both queens were married to weak, ineffectual men. While Marie Antoinette was married to a good man whose incompetence was arguably the result of his trust in his aristocratic advisers, Catherine was married to a grown child who was mentally and emotionally incapable of governing. Both women were unfaithful to their husbands. Nevertheless, while Marie Antoinette’s unjustifiably sullied reputation seemingly gave 2 license to libel in the pamphlets of the time, Catherine’s affairs seem rather strategic: for example, Grigory Orlov helped Catherine attain the throne. Ultimately, Catherine literally got away with Peter’s murder (for this is what the public perceived at the time, even if she was not, in fact, guilty) while Marie Antoinette was made the scapegoat for France’s problems and was executed more as a symbol than as a human being. In part, surely the cultural context of each queen plays a role. France was the headquarters of the Enlightenment while the majority of Russia’s government officials were barely literate (de Madariaga 53). Thus while it is true that in both countries the average citizen was illiterate and therefore unqualified to organize for government reform of any kind, France’s social structure spawned a bourgeois class that assumed the responsibilities of government and international commerce; Russia’s more primitive economy and government tended to keep officials focused on their own provinces (de Madariaga 49). Nevertheless, in one important way, Russia was more advanced than France: while France, like the rest of the continent, adhered to Salic Law, Russia had a long history of powerful women who were able to contribute to society in ways other than reproduction and caregiving. Still, the fact remains that Marie Antoinette and Catherine the Great took radically different approaches to their respective reigns, and in both cases, their approaches led directly to their respective countries’ governments changing significantly in response to their leadership skills. It is my contention that, despite modern day sentiments, good government lies not in the type of government (i.e., representative vs. autocratic) but in the leadership of the ruler(s) of said government. Therefore, although it is true that France 3 and Russia were radically different places in terms of cultural identity and sociopolitical development, Marie Antoinette’s ignorance of politics and early dependence upon her mother’s approval doomed her to live out the role that many in the French aristocracy had foreordained for her. They saw her as l’Autrichienne, an