Synopsis
Denis Diderot and Catherine II's Reform Programme: From A New Hope to Terminal Despair
The reform programme that Denis Diderot proposed to Catherine II during his stay in St Petersburg between 1773 and 1774 has been widely discussed in modern scholarship. This interest is hardly surprising, since their weekly meetings are one of the best-documented encounters between the sword and the pen in the eighteenth century.
However, much of the existing scholarship has treated the episode in negative terms. In an study in 1951, Albert Lortholary arrived at a damning, yet highly influential assessment. In his view, Catherine’s relationship with Diderot in particular, and the French philosophes in general, was built on dissimulation on both sides. The Russian sovereign, Lortholary claimed, courted the philosophes in order to buy herself a good press in Europe. The philosophes, on the other hand, were flattered by the attention accorded to them and deceived their compatriots and themselves. Portraying the reigns of Russia’s reforming monarchs in the most glowing terms, they used Russia to shore up their cherished political ideal of ‘Enlightened despotism’. The function of this ideal was to tell a story of utopia. Rapid progress and the realisation of human happiness were readily attainable, if power and philosophy were joined and if, therefore, all obstacles to progress were swept away by the rational will of the enlightened ruler.
The central figure in Lortholary’s study was Voltaire, but Diderot played an ancillary and highly revealing role. For Lotholary, Diderot’s relationship with Catherine highlighted all of the problems inherent in the French Enlightenment’s engagement with Russia. These problems were allegedly illustrated in the radical volte-face that Diderot undertook in his assessment of Russia after he left St Petersburg. While at Catherine’s court, Diderot expressed his conviction that Russia would have a bright future. However, on his journey back to France, he changed his mind. Staying in Amsterdam in 1774, Diderot wrote his Observations sur le Nakaz, in which his previous optimism about Russia became subject to doubts. These first doubts developed into full-scale pessimism in his last writings on the Russian empire in 1780. In a short essay published in the third edition of Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes, Diderot paints a picture of Russia’s future in very dark colours; any lingering hope that reforms could improve the empire had been replaced by a conviction that Russia would inevitably decline and fall.
According to Lortholary, Diderot’s volte-face essentially indicated the superficiality of his politics. Both his initial optimistic vision of the swift improvement of Russia and his later fatalism were alleged to be effects of a rationalistic politics devoid of any understanding of history. The reader is invited to believe that, by refusing to take stock of the complex, historically grown realities presented by an empire such as Russia, Diderot simply theorized into thin air.
Lortholary’s is of course not the last word on Diderot’s relationship with Catherine and scholars of eighteenth-century Russia in particular have revisited the episode. Scholars such as Isabel de Madariaga and Simon Dixon have rejected the idea that Catherine was merely involved in a public relations exercise in her dealings with the philosophes. Portraying Catherine as a pragmatic reformer, they have argued that her interest in contemporary French thought was real, and that she can hardly be faulted for not having implemented all of the philosophes' reform proposals. Given that French thinkers disagreed among themselves on matters of politics, Catherine was forced to choose. The choices that she made were informed by her political pragmatism. Thus she could be influenced by the views of the equally pragmatic Montesquieu, while rejecting the utopian proposals put forward by Diderot. Catherine, in other words, found Diderot intellectually stimulating, but hopelessly ill-informed on political matters.
While such accounts have done a great deal to restore Catherine II’s reputation, they have further entrenched the negative interpretation of Diderot. We are still left with the impression that Diderot simply did not have a convincing theory of political action. In particular, de Madariaga implies that Diderot separated politics sharply from history. She claims that, in Diderot's view, politics was concerned with what ought to be universally established rather than what empirically exists. It necessarily followed that when historical reality clashed with a political utopia, Diderot arrived at an impasse; hence, the transformation of his views from utopian optimism into fatalism. Once Diderot realised that the empress was either unwilling or unable to implement his radical reforms, he turned his back on Catherine and Russia in bitter disenchantment.
I argue that such interpretations do not capture the complexity of Diderot’s political thought. In particular, the view that the writings on Russia demonstrate the utopian and ahistorical nature of Diderot’s political philosophy does not stand up to serious scrutiny. Instead, in my view, Diderot’s writings on Russia can only be properly understood if they are read in the context of his philosophy of history. Diderot outlined this philosophy of history in a series of contributions to Guillaume-Thomas Raynal’s Histoire de deux Indes, written between 1770 and 1780. If the Russian writings are integrated within this wider context, two important conclusions emerge. Firstly, far from ever holding overly exaggerated hopes of what Catherine could achieve, Diderot dampens expectations of the empress and her reforms throughout his writings. Secondly, the transition from relative optimism about Russia’s future to pessimism is not explicable by the ahistorical nature of his political thought, but instead by examining Diderot’s inability to determine firmly Russia’s position within the historical cycle.
Diderot, pace Lortholary and de Madariaga, consistently proposed a historically sensitive programme of reform for Russia, which centred on legislation, education and colonisation. This programme was influenced by Diderot’s reflections on a set of interrelated problems that are central to historical thought in the latter half of the eighteenth century. How does civilisation develop historically? How do human societies leave a pre- or proto-social stage of savagery, and how do they subsequently move towards increasing levels of socialisation, civilisation and enlightenment? Is the process of civilisation driven by impersonal socio-economic forces, or can it be influenced and directed by human beings in general, or by an enlightened ruler in particular?
Diderot’s answers to such questions were framed by his materialist philosophy of nature. In particular, Diderot was convinced that societies follow the same developmental trajectory as organisms. The basic form of such a trajectory is cyclical, leading from initial formation or birth, via a period of growth to decline and, ultimately, death through dissolution.
Crucially, Diderot believed that human beings are able to influence the development of a society if they understand both its material bases and its exact location on the historical cycle. A ruler may well be able to accelerate the development of a young, relatively under-developed, society if they assist, rather than contradict, the general, natural process. In the context of an old, declining, society, however, the scope for human intervention is decreased.
Diderot’s initial belief that Catherine could transform Russia if she heeded his advice was based on his understanding of Russia as a young, under-developed, society that was ready to embark on a progressive history. As such, Russia constituted a stark counterpoint to contemporary European societies that Diderot regarded as old and declining. However, his optimism did not last. It was increasingly overshadowed by a dark pessimism about Russia’s future. This change of heart was not caused by Diderot’s growing disillusionment with Catherine, but by persistent doubts about the ‘youthfulness’ of Russia as a society. Indeed, Diderot increasingly came to see Russia not as a young, malleable, country, but instead as an old, dying one without hope for reform or rejuvenation.
There is no doubt that Diderot’s writings on Russia are problematic. They sought to provide an outline for a historically sensitive programme of reform without a detailed understanding of Russian history prior to Catherine’s reign. In the absence of such an understanding, Diderot ultimately shifted from one extreme position to another: he gradually moved from an assessment of eighteenth-century Russia as a tabula rasa to the idea that the country might already be old and declining. Or, to put it more starkly, Diderot was never entirely sure whether Russian history was about to start, or whether it had already happened.
It is in this context that we might be able to find a more general problem in eighteenth-century French engagements with Russia. French thinkers struggled to come to terms with Russia, not because they were at core ahistorical, rationalistic and utopian thinkers. On the contrary, they struggled because they attempted to understand Russia historically without possessing an adequate history of the empire. Indeed, arguably the very first detailed empirical history of Russia produced from within the French Enlightenment tradition was published in 1782, and thus two years after Diderot had lost hope for the country: Pierre Charles Levesque’s Histoire de Russie. Levesque himself succinctly summarized the problem haunting Diderot. Commenting on his compatriots’ engagements with Russia, he wrote ‘[o]n a beaucoup parlé de la Russie, sans en connaître l’histoire’.
- Reto Speck, King’s College London, London (UK)
reto.speck@kcl.ac.uk
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