NIU Series in Orthodox Christian Studies

France and Russia, 1848–1870

Heather L. Bailey

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501749520
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

Focusing on the period between the revolutions of 1848-1849 and the First Vatican Council (1869-1870), The Public Image of Eastern Orthodoxy explores the circumstances under which westerners, concerned about the fate of the papacy, the Ottoman Empire, Poland, and Russian imperial power, began to conflate the Russian Orthodox Church with the state and to portray the Church as the political tool of despotic tsars.

As Heather L. Bailey demonstrates, in response to this reductionist view, Russian Orthodox publicists launched a public relations campaign in the West, especially in France, in the 1850s and 1860s. The linchpin of their campaign was the building of the impressive Saint Alexander Nevsky Church in Paris, consecrated in 1861. Bailey posits that, as the embodiment of the belief that Russia had a great historical purpose inextricably tied to Orthodoxy, the Paris church both reflected and contributed to the rise of religious nationalism in Russia that followed the Crimean War. At the same time, the confrontation with westerners' negative ideas about the Eastern Church fueled a reformist spirit in Russia while contributing to a better understanding of Eastern Orthodoxy in the West.

Chapter 1

Roman Catholicism, Russian Orthodoxy, and Russophobia in France, 1830–1856

“A thousand times better the Turk or the Tartar, than the Greek or the Russian!”

—L’Univers, August 23, 1846

Russia’s place in the European schema has been a question at the forefront of the minds of European rulers, statesmen, clergy, intellectuals, political radicals, and revolutionaries at least since the era of Peter I. Reflection on the question has often produced a presupposition, practically inherent in the question itself, of some kind of dichotomous relationship between Russia and the West.¹ Because of the Slavophile-Westerner debate among nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals, it is tempting to think of the Russia vis-à-vis the West dichotomy as a construction of Russian intellectuals. Yet the dichotomous construction has been as much or more created and perpetuated in western European—especially British, French, and German—discourses. The debate between the Slavophiles and the Westerners was part of a broader European debate, a broader attempt to define civilization.² In the nineteenth century, the religious divide between the Orthodox world and the historically Roman Catholic ecumene (including England and Protestant states) was, for many westerners, an obstacle to a conceptualization of Europe as a family of Christian nations, a Christian commonwealth, or even a collection of nations with a common heritage derived from classical Greek and Roman culture, on one hand, and Christianity, on the other.

Across Europe, core civilizational values were contested in the nineteenth century. In the West, the century was marked by a protracted culture war, or a transnational struggle between Catholicism and liberalism.³ Simultaneously, Russian educated society debated about how Russian history and culture fit into this fray of civilizational values, but western Europeans had their own ideas about that subject. So the Slavophile-Westerner debate, much of which was carried out in the western press, both reflected and shaped western attitudes about Russia. With the Slavophile-Westerner controversy being a European debate about the nature of civilization, and not merely a controversy in Russian educated society, the first version of Westernism was the idea that Russia needed Roman Catholicism.⁴ In 1843 Marquis Astolphe de Custine (1790–1857) broadcast to the world that the Russian emperor had recently had a nobleman (Peter Chaadaev) declared insane for the crime of setting “Russia in a blaze” by suggesting that the “Sclavonian race” needed Catholicism.⁵ As the Chaadaev case indicates, western European ideas about Russia—even sometimes the most negative critiques—were formed in dialogue with Russian intellectuals who shaped those debates, sometimes intentionally and sometimes inadvertently.

In France, the Revolution left deep rifts concerning the core values that undergirded French society. In the realm of religion the Revolution produced two central problems: it generated controversies regarding church-state relations and opened questions about the compatibility or lack thereof between Christianity and liberalism. These problems did not just pit liberals or anticlericals against Roman Catholics (and vice versa), but were sources of intra-Catholic strife.

Prior to the Revolution, Gallicanism meant mainly that authority in the church resided in the episcopacy as a whole, and that the French state, not the pope, had the right to appoint the bishops. The Gallican Articles of 1682 defined state prerogatives in administering religious affairs and limited papal authority in France. During the Revolution, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the Concordat, and Organic Articles were Gallican arrangements that limited papal prerogatives and required the loyalty of Catholic clergy to the French state. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the high clergy in France were largely Gallican and royalist in orientation.⁶ This close connection between church and state was problematic because it associated the church with royal or imperial power and implicated the church in the suppression of democratic liberties. Furthermore, state interference in religious affairs that restricted the prerogatives of the church and/or papacy alienated pious Catholics from the state.

To halt what they viewed as state attempts to subordinate the church, a few democratically minded Catholics—Félicité de Lamennais (1782–1854), Charles Forbes René de Montalembert (1810–1870), and Jean-Baptiste-Henri Dominique Lacordaire (1802–1861)—became convinced that it was necessary to separate church and state. The liberal version of ultramontanism was born. Understanding that the church would be persecuted so long as it was associated with an oppressive state, liberal ultramontanes believed that the independence of the church could only be restored by severing ties between church and state in France while simultaneously bolstering the papacy as the locus of church authority.⁷ Since Napoleon had enhanced the bishops’ authority over the priests in their dioceses, and the episcopacy predominantly favored Gallicanism, ultramontanism was attractive to members of the lower clergy who associated the episcopacy with arbitrary power and preferred the idea of papal paternalism.⁸

The rifts between French Catholics widened and intensified in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848–1849, which not only produced regime change in France, leading within a few years’ time to the Second Empire, but nearly toppled the pope’s temporal power. Italian republicans seized Rome and drove Pope Pius IX into exile, until foreign military intervention restored him to his throne. In France, fear of socialism in the wake of the June Days—during which the Gallican and liberal archbishop of Paris, Denis-August Affre, died on the barricades while trying to restore peace—and President Louis-Napoleon’s assistance to Pope Pius IX brought the Catholic clergy into an alliance with Louis-Napoleon (Napoleon III after December 2, 1852).

Gallicanism and ultramontanism were compatible with republicanism, but during the Second Empire, the anti-Gallican, royalist, and antidemocratic variety of ultramontanism first represented by Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821) found vigorous expression in the daily of the reactionary layman Louis Veuillot (1813–1883).⁹ Popular among the lower clergy, L’Univers, the mouthpiece of intransigent ultramontanism, waged war against liberal Catholics and Gallicans.¹⁰ Marie-Dominique-Auguste Sibour, archbishop of Paris from 1848 to 1857, tried unsuccessfully to suppress Veuillot’s paper, but Pius IX supported the layman. The Gallican Sibour lamented: “The Ultramontane school [of Lamennais and Lacordaire] was once a school of liberty. It has been turned into a school of slavery with two main objects: the idolatry of temporal power and the idolatry of spiritual power.”¹¹

Sibour’s comment reflected the bitter conflict between the intransigent ultramontanes and the liberal Catholics, a group “who valued political liberty,” believed in “the broad principles” of 1789, and opposed Veuillot.¹² There were Gallicans and nonintransigent ultramontanes among the liberal Catholics, who believed ultra-Catholicism (i.e., Jesuitism or intransigent ultramontanism) fueled church-state conflict. Believing that the Jesuitical form of Christianity defied “human liberty,” some representatives of the liberal school distanced themselves from Jesuits, who vowed special obedience to the pope and were typically ultramontane.¹³ To contend with the threat of republican anticlericalism, French Catholic reformers tried to convince the enemies of the church that Jesuitism, not Christianity or Catholicism per se, posed a threat to liberty and they encouraged politicians to support Gallicanism.¹⁴ While anti-ultramontane Catholics supported specific state prerogatives as checks against papal interference in French ecclesiastical affairs, Napoleon III’s foreign policy drove them closer to the ultramontanes.¹⁵

As divisive as the debates about the compatibility of liberalism and Catholicism and the extent of papal authority were—Pope Pius IX considered the liberal Catholics “the most pernicious enemies of the church”¹⁶—in the decades leading up to the Vatican Council (the 1850s and 1860s), French Catholics mostly tended to agree, when the very existence of the papacy was called into question, that it was necessary to preserve the temporal as well as spiritual authority of the papacy to ensure that the papacy preserved its independence. There was another issue on which there was almost universal agreement among them. The Catholic Church was the fount of civilization, and those who had not been reared in its den were neither properly Christianized nor civilized. Those who belonged to the schismatic “Greek” or “Russian” or “Greco-Russian” church fell into this category and provided an important other against which Frenchness could be defined.

French Anti-Orthodox Russophobia from the Polish Revolution to the Crimean War

The idea that Russia was a menace to European—that is, Christian—civilization became ubiquitous in France in the first half of the nineteenth century, following a centuries-long tendency among western European writers to contrast Russia with Europe. Nineteenth-century narratives about Russia have kinship ties with early modern European “despot-slave” narratives that portrayed Russia as a despotic state wherein tyrants lorded over a society of slaves; but early modern narratives were not characterized by the anti-Russian hostility that permeated nineteenth-century accounts.¹⁷ The general scorn European observers expressed for what they perceived as uncivilized, slavish people led by ignorant, drunken priests performing countless formal, exterior, and superstitious rituals contributed to anti-Russian sentiment. Disdain for Orthodox piety and a climate of Russophobia contributed to the policy decisions in France and Britain that led to the Crimean War.¹⁸

French Russophobia emerged in the campaign of 1812. The preparations for the military campaign included a propaganda program that publicized an influential and fraudulent document purporting to be the “Testament” of Peter I, bequeathed to his successors, and indicating his plan for the conquest of Europe.¹⁹ The “Testament” appeared in Des progrès de la puissance russe (The advances of Russian power, 1812), published anonymously, but the work of Charles Louis Lesur (1770–1849).²⁰ One of Russia’s supposed aims was to establish a “sacerdotal supremacy” over all the “disunited Greeks or schismatics” (Orthodox Christians) of Hungary, Turkey, and Poland. “Under this pretext and by this method, Turkey would be subjugated and Poland … would be pulled under the [Russian] yoke.”²¹ Thus Lesur highlighted the link between the “Greek religion” and Russian imperial ambitions.

Lesur’s work perpetuated anti-Orthodox stereotypes but lacked certain themes that later came to characterize specifically Roman Catholic publications, namely emphasis on the “Greek religion” as schismatic and on Caesaropapism as the essence of despotism. Regarding Peter I’s abolition of the patriarchate, Lesur claimed that while the Russian patriarchate existed, it balanced the power of the “tzar,” but after its elimination the emperor became président of the Holy Synod.²² Lesur described Russia as a country with a distorted version of Christianity, a land not properly civilized but on the rise. Drawing on a large corpus of western writing about Russia, Lesur presented Russian religious praxis but not necessarily the Orthodox faith per se in a purely negative light, portraying the Russian religion as an even more idolatrous version of “the Greek religion, already so fraught with superstitions.”²³ The Russian people worshipped St. Nicholas rather more than God. The lower clergy were entirely ignorant, largely illiterate, and morally debauched to an extreme degree, but the upper clergy had pure morals.²⁴ While religion had not benefited Russian society as much as it had other societies, Lesur stated that this was not due to “the difference of dogmas of the Greek church, but to the crude superstitions that degrade it, and to the stupid ignorance, to the disgraceful vices of which its lower clergy is generally accused.”²⁵ A footnote listed the differences between the Greek and Latin religions, noting that “the Greek religion does not differ essentially from the Latin religion.”²⁶

Although Russophobia surfaced with publication of the “Testament” during the Napoleonic era, it was in the 1830s and 1840s that Russia came to be regarded as Europe’s greatest threat.²⁷ One major trigger of rising Russophobia was the Polish question, an insoluble problem connected to the Eastern question and Panslavism. Statesmen and much of the public in Britain and France looked favorably on the idea that a resurrected, sovereign Poland could potentially check Russian power by assuming the cultural and religious leadership of the Slavic world. They rea...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Terminology and Transliteration
• Introduction
• 1. Roman Catholicism, Russian Orthodoxy, and Russophobia in France, 1830–1856
• 2. The Archpriest as Publicist and Polemicist
• 3. The “Byzantine Firework” of Paris
• 4. A Spectacular Success: The Paris Church, the Russian Orthodox Press, and the Public Image of Orthodoxy
• 5. The Church Chained to the Throne of the “Czar”
• 6. Guettée, Vasiliev, L’Union chrétienne, and the Public Image of Orthodoxy
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index