Enlightenment

Fyodor Rokotov painted Catherine in profile in 1763, the first full year of a reign that had begun by coup. Pale gown, sash, a dark ground: this is an empress already seated, not a princess still reading in someone else’s court. Do not ask the canvas to do 1762’s work. The last chapter closed when the Guards, the Senate and the Church put her on the throne and Peter III died at Ropsha. This page is what she claimed to think once the night had become a government. Law, letters, and an autocracy she had no intention of sharing sit in the same year as a profile portrait. The painter’s job was likeness. The empress’s job, as she described it, was to look like a philosophe without ceasing to be a sovereign.

She was the daughter of a poor German princeling and had come to Russia at fifteen to marry the heir. She matured in an atmosphere of intrigue and struggle for power. She developed her mind by reading contemporary literature, especially the works of the French Encyclopaedists and of German jurists and cameralists. When she seized power at thirty-three she was, in Britannica’s phrase, intellectually and experientially prepared, as more than thirty years of her reign were to show. The preparation is the subject here. Southern wars, partitions, Pugachev and the Charter of 1785 have other pages. They should not be smuggled into a portrait year as if a reading list were already a Black Sea fleet.

The historiography of the reign, Britannica records, has been dominated by two approaches: a dramatization of her personal life, and the viewpoint of nineteenth-century liberalism that took her self-description as a philosophe on the throne literally. Marxist and Soviet historians, when they treated the years at all, saw pressures from a serf-owning nobility facing an expanding market. Those frames can wait beside the documents. This article needs the Instruction, the commission, the adjournment, and the retained autocracy. Rokotov’s 1763 profile is a year, not a philosophy. The philosophy has a date of its own: 10 August 1767, and a hall that closed in December 1768 without a code. Keep the coup in the previous era. Keep the wars in the next articles. Keep this page as a briefing that did not become a statute.

The leaf is identified as her Instruction, the Nakaz. The file names no printer and no sitting of the commission. Use it as proof that a text existed on paper, then return to dated facts. A photograph of type is not 564 deputies in a hall.

Russian remembers the document as Nakaz Yekateriny Velikoy. Britannica’s English title is the Instruction of Catherine the Great. Both names point to the same briefing, written as a guide for a legislative commission intended to consider internal reforms and to devise a new code of laws. The leaf in the picture cannot carry Montesquieu’s name or Beccaria’s. The next paragraphs can. What the image must not be asked to do is stand in for the gentry’s opposition or for the December adjournment. Type on a page is the Instruction’s body. Politics is what happened when 564 deputies were told to discuss it, and serfs were not in the room.

The Instruction is dated 10 August 1767, 30 July Old Style. Catherine compiled it from Montesquieu and from Cesare Bonesana, marchese di Beccaria, as a guide for a legislative commission that was to consider internal reforms and devise a new code of laws. The last code, issued in 1649, had become largely inoperative after Peter’s reforms and the transformation of society. Peter and his successors had recognised the need by appointing commissions; none of those efforts had reached a finished code. She wished to make her reign brilliant and herself an ideal enlightened monarch. The Nakaz is that wish in the form of a briefing. It is not yet a statute. It is a set of recommendations offered as the basis of government reform and of a new legal language for an empire that still ran on an old book.

The document generally favoured a society of free individuals acting in accordance with the law. All men should be considered equal before the law. Law should protect the populace, not oppress it. Law should forbid only acts directly harmful to an individual or the community, leaving people free to do anything not forbidden. It disapproved of capital punishment, torture, and the perpetuation of serfdom. It also upheld the principle of absolutism in government, insisting that all political power was derived from the autocrat, who was subject to no law. That last clause is not a slip in an otherwise liberal memorandum. It is how an empress could sound like a student of Montesquieu without offering the assembly a lock on her own will.

To discuss the Instruction she gathered an elective assembly of 564 deputies, chosen from all classes except the clergy and the serfs, and from all parts of the empire. She met opposition from the gentry when she tried to fix definite limits on their power over the serfs. Far from engaging in a struggle with the ruling class, she yielded to their desires. Their power was increased. A number of crown estates were distributed among the ranks of her favourites, turning their peasant population into serfs. The commission adjourned in December 1768. It had neither prepared a legal code nor agreed on measures for restructuring the government. Catherine made no further efforts to create legislation to implement her principles. The Instruction had little impact inside Russia. It did serve as a major stimulus to Russian political thought.

She instructed a commission to imagine equality before the law, then reminded it that the autocrat was subject to none.

A prolific writer, she corresponded regularly with Voltaire, Diderot, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Baron Friedrich Melchior de Grimm and others, not to speak of fellow potentates such as Frederick II, Maria Theresa and Joseph II. The letters were part of how she wished to be seen in Europe. They do not repeal the adjournment of 1768. A salon in ink is not a code. Historiography of the reign has been pulled two ways: a dramatization of her personal life, which was indeed colourful for the number and variety of her lovers, and the viewpoint of nineteenth-century liberalism, which took literally her self-description as a “philosophe on the throne.” Neither romance nor that label is a substitute for the commission’s empty desk.

Even before she seized power she wrote that the task of good government was to promote the general welfare of the nation by providing for the security of person and property. Government should operate in a legal and orderly fashion, furthering the interests of individual subjects and giving groups and classes as much autonomy in the pursuit of their normal activities as possible. All the same, she believed the autocratic state had important functions. She had no intention of relinquishing or limiting her authority, even though she was willing to withdraw from those areas of national life that could be safely administered by an educated elite. The sentence is the whole of her Enlightenment as policy: a legal surface, a retained centre, and a preference for letting an educated few manage what the crown did not need to touch.

Recent scholars, Britannica notes, have seen her government as working to further the formation of a modern civil society in which social classes and groups pursue their own interests rather than serving the needs of the state exclusively. That reading sits beside the older liberal one and beside the Marxist emphasis on serf-owning nobles under market pressure. None of those frames produces a code in December 1768. They are ways of describing a woman who kept the autocracy, spoke of welfare and property, and still thickened landlord power when the gentry said no. The Instruction remains what it was: a stimulus, a self-portrait in legal prose, and a document that disliked serfdom’s perpetuation while a reign created more serfs on gifted estates.

Gunnar Berndtson painted Diderot with Catherine in 1893. It is historical theatre, a century late. Use it for the European conversation she wanted, then put it aside. The meetings, whatever their furniture, did not produce a code.

Stop this page before the Black Sea shore, before Crimea, before Poland is partitioned, before a Cossack claims to be Peter III. Those are the next articles, not this one’s hidden plot. Enlightenment here is a reading list, a Nakaz dated in two calendars, a hall of 564 names that excluded serfs, an adjournment, a correspondence with named philosophes, and a philosophy of welfare that kept the crown. Rokotov’s profile is the face of that bargain. The leaf of type is its paper. Berndtson’s later room is how Europe liked to imagine the conversation. The code that was never written is the honest hole in the middle. A stimulus to political thought is not nothing. It is also not a new Ulozhenie.

A German-born empress used French and Italian books to tell a Russian assembly what law might be. She told it, in the same breath, that she was the source of political power. The assembly went home in December 1768. She remained. Favourites received estates; peasants on those estates became serfs; the gentry kept a power the Nakaz had seemed to want to fence. Readers who want the empire’s widening, the annexation of a khanate, three partitions, a peasant war, or the Charter to the Gentry will find them in order. This article’s last inventory should stay small. No statue of reason was raised in the Senate. No peasant signed the Instruction. The profile of 1763 still looks past that absence, as court portraits are paid to do.