public doubts regarding the empress’s role in Ivan’s death could be managed. Within the Russian government, the court, the nobility, and the army, the opinion was that whether or not Catherine bore some responsibility, she had done what had to be done. In Europe, however, where Catherine had been working to present herself as a daughter of the Enlightenment, it was not so easy. Some supported what Catherine had done; others disapproved; some both approved and disapproved. Madame Geoffrin, the leader and hostess of the dominant literary and artistic salon in Paris, wrote to Stanislaus Poniatowski in Poland criticizing Catherine for becoming too involved in the trial and sentence. “The manifesto she [Catherine] has issued on the death of Ivan is ridiculous,” she said. “There was no necessity of her saying anything whatever. Mirovich’s trial was entirely sufficient.” To Catherine herself, with whom she occasionally corresponded, Madame Geoffrin wrote, “It seems to me that if I were on the throne, I should wish to let my actions speak and impose silence on my pen.”
Offended by these judgments from afar, Catherine fired back:
I am tempted to say to you that you discuss this manifesto as a blind man discussed colors. It was never composed for foreign powers, but to inform the Russian public of Ivan’s death. It was necessary to say how he died. To have failed to do so would have been to confirm the malicious rumors spread by the ministers of courts which envy me and bear me ill will.… In your country, people find fault with this manifesto; in your country they have also found fault with the Good Lord, and here people sometimes find fault with the French. But it is nonetheless true that here this manifesto and the criminal’s head have put an end to all fault-finding. Therefore, the purpose was accomplished and my manifesto did not fail of its object. Therefore, it was good.
With Ivan’s death there was no longer a legitimate adult claimant to the throne. Therefore, there was no focal point for a succession crisis. Until nine years later, in 1772, when Paul reached his majority at eighteen, Catherine’s crown was secure.
50
Catherine and the Enlightenment
IN THE MIDDLE of the eighteenth century, most Europeans still regarded Russia as a culturally backward, semi-Asiatic state. Catherine was determined to change this. The intellectual and artistic life of the century was dominated by France, and Catherine’s governess in Stettin had made French her second language. During her sixteen years as an isolated, embattled grand duchess, she had read many of the works of the great figures of the European Enlightenment. Of these, the writer with the greatest effect on her was Francois-Marie Arouet, who called himself Voltaire. In October 1763, after fifteen months on the throne, she wrote to him for the first time, declaring herself to be his ardent disciple. “Whatever style I possess, whatever powers of reasoning, have all been acquired through the reading of Voltaire,” she told him.
Voltaire was sixty-one when, in 1755, he had decided to settle down. Two imprisonments in the Bastille; voluntary exile in England; an initially euphoric sojourn at the court of Frederick of Prussia, followed by misunderstanding, estrangement, and, eventually, painful rupture; a complicated warm and cool relationship with Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour—all this was behind him. He was ready to bury himself in work and he believed that he would find a haven of tranquillity in the independent republic of Geneva, governed by a council of aristocratic Calvinists. Already a millionaire from his writing, he bought a villa with a splendid view of the lake and called it Les Delicies. Soon he was in trouble again. A number of Genevois disapproved of an article about their city in Diderot’s
It seemed a safer haven. The Chateau de Ferney was on French territory, but only just; Geneva was three miles away; Paris and Versailles were three hundred. Should the French authorities decide to make trouble for him again, he needed only an hour to move back across the border to Geneva, where he still had many admirers. Geneva was also the home of the publisher who was then printing
Voltaire had not moved to this new dwelling to live in idleness. Instead, he saw Ferney as well placed to be his command post for an intensification of violent intellectual combat. The philosophical wars of the Enlightenment were being fought in earnest. Louis XV had forbidden Voltaire to return to Paris. The man of letters was eager to fire back, and Ferney became the launching point for his philosophical, intellectual, political, and social fusillades. He wrote books, brochures, histories, biographies, plays, stories, treatises, poems, and over fifty thousand letters that now fill ninety-eight volumes. The Seven Years’ War had concluded, and France had lost both Canada and India to England. Voltaire rubbed salt into these wounds by denouncing war as the “great illusion.” “The victorious nation never profits from the spoils of the conquered; it pays for everything,” he said. “It suffers as much when its armies are successful as when they are defeated. Whoever wins, humanity loses.” He fired polemical salvos against Christianity, the Bible, and the Catholic Church. At one point, he considered Jesus a deluded eccentric,
A further advantage to Ferney was that the most direct roads between northern and southern Europe passed through Switzerland, and these roads were traveled by many of the European intellectual and artistic brotherhood. Voltaire, in his chateau, was living in the geographical heart of Europe, and was therefore assured of a swarm of visitors—too many. A multitude came to see him from every quarter: German princes, French dukes, English lords, Casanova, a Cossack hetman. Many were English, to whom Voltaire spoke in their own language: the parliamentary statesman Charles James Fox, the historian Edward Gibbon, the biographer James Boswell. When uninvited people arrived, Voltaire told his servants, “Send them away. Tell them I am very sick.” Boswell begged to be allowed to stay overnight and see the patriarch in the morning; he said he would sleep in “the highest and coldest garret.” He was sent to a pleasant bedroom.
Nor did Voltaire confine himself to intellectual matters. In 1762 and during the years following, Voltaire became “the Man of Calas.” The backdrop to this affair was the persecution of Protestants in France. Protestants were excluded from public office; couples not married by a Catholic priest were considered to be living in sin; their children were considered illegitimate. In the southern and southwestern provinces of France, these laws were grimly enforced.
In March 1762, Voltaire learned that a sixty-four-year-old Protestant Huguenot, Jean Calas, a dealer in linens in Toulouse, had been executed under torture. His eldest son, suffering from depression, had committed suicide in the family’s house. The father, Jean, knowing that the law demanded that the body of a suicide be dragged naked through the streets, pelted with mud and stones, and then hanged, persuaded his family to join him in reporting a natural death. The police saw the rope marks on the son’s neck, however, and charged that Calas had murdered his son to prevent him from converting to Catholicism. A high court prescribed torture to make Calas confess. He was placed on the rack and his arms and legs were pulled from their sockets; in agony, he admitted that his son’s death was a suicide. This was not the confession the authorities wanted; they demanded that he confess to murder. Fifteen pints of water were poured down his throat; he still protested his own innocence. Another fifteen pints were forced into him; he was convinced that he was drowning, but still cried that he was innocent. He was stretched on a cross in the public square before the Toulouse cathedral. The public executioner took a heavy iron bar and crushed each of his four limbs in two places; the old man still proclaimed his innocence. He was strangled and died.
Donat Calas, the youngest of six Calas children, came to Ferney and begged Voltaire to defend his dead father’s innocence. Voltaire, appalled and infuriated by this cruelty, undertook the legal rehabilitation of the victim. For three years, from 1762 to 1765, he hired lawyers and mobilized European opinion. During the summer of 1763, he wrote
