Mother of the Church: Sofia Svechina, the Salon, and the Politics of Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Russia and France

By Tatyana V. Bakhmetyeva

Sofia Petrovna Svechina (1782–1857), better known as Madame Sophie Swetchine, was the hostess of a famous nineteenth-century Parisian salon. A Russian émigré, Svechina moved to France with her husband in 1816. She had recently converted to Roman Catholicism, and the salon she opened acquired a distinctly religious character. It quickly became one of the most popular salons in Paris and was a meeting place for the French intellectual Catholic elite and members of the Liberal Catholic movement. As a salonniére, Svechina developed close friendships with some of the most noted public figures in the Liberal Catholic movement. Her involvement with her guests went deeper than the typical salonniére's. She was a mentor, spiritual counselor, and intellectual advisor to many distinguished Parisian men and women, and her influence extended beyond the walls of her salon into the public world of politics and ideas. In this fascinating biography, Tatyana Bakhmetyeva seeks to understand the creative process that informed Svechina's life and examines her subject in the context of nineteenth-century thought and letters. It will appeal to educated readers interested in European and Russian history, the history of Catholicism, and women's history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Release date: Jan 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9781609091989

Book preview

Mother of the Church

Sofia Svechina (1782–1857) from an engraving by Eugène Leguay (image courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France)

Mother

of the

Church

Sofia Svechina, the Salon, and the Politics of Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Russia and France

Tatyana V. Bakhmetyeva

NIU Press / DeKalb, IL

Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb 60115

© 2016 by Northern Illinois University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5

978-0-87580-737-9 (paper)

978-1-60909-198-9 (e-book)

Cover design by Shaun Allshouse

Composition by BookComp, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bakhmetyeva, Tatyana, author.

Title: Mother of the church—Sofia Svechina, the salon, and the politics of

Catholicism in nineteenth-century Russia and France / Tatyana V. Bakhmetyeva.

Description: DeKalb : Northern Illinois University Press, 2016. | Includes

bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016011180 (print) | LCCN 2016030364 (ebook) | ISBN

9780875807379 (paperback) | ISBN 9781609091989 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Swetchine, Madame (Anne-Sophie), 1782-1857. | Catholic

converts—France—Biography. | France—Intellectual life—19th century. |

Saint Petersburg (Russia)—Intellectual life—19th century. |

Salons—France—History—19th century. | Salons—Russia

(Federation)—Saint Petersburg—History—19th century. | Catholic

Church—France—History—19th century. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY

/ Religious. | HISTORY / Europe / Russia & the Former Soviet Union. |

HISTORY / Europe / France.

Classification: LCC BX4668.S94 B35 2016 (print) | LCC BX4668.S94 (ebook) | DDC

282.092 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016011180

To Stewart, always

Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

PART I: ST. PETERSBURG

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1 The World in Flux: The French Revolution, Napoleon, and the Russian Nobility

CHAPTER 2 In the Salons of St. Petersburg

CHAPTER 3 At a Religious Crossroads

CHAPTER 4 Becoming Catholic, Becoming Russian

PART II: PARIS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 5 Making Paris Home: The Micro-Politics of Friendship

CHAPTER 6 Neutral Grounds in Paris: The Early Years of Svechina’s Salon

CHAPTER 7 Svechina and French Religious Politics, 1830–1848

CHAPTER 8 The Kingdom of Saint-Dominique

CHAPTER 9 Opportunities Lost

CHAPTER 10 The New Crisis and the End

CONCLUSION Writing the Modern Saint

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Illustrations

FRONTISPIECE Sofia Svechina (1782–1857), from an engraving by Eugène Leguay (image courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France)

FIGURE 1 Sofia Soimonova as a young girl, artist unknown25

FIGURE 2 Joseph de Maistre, lithograph from a painting by Pierre Bouillon (image courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

FIGURE 3 Charles de Montalembert (image courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France)

FIGURE 4 Henri Lacordaire (image courtesy of BIU Santé, Paris)

FIGURE 5 Henri Lacordaire’s conferences at Nôtre-Dame (image courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France)

FIGURE 6 Alfred de Falloux, ca. 1837, artist unknown

FIGURE 7 Alexis de Tocqueville, lithograph by Théodore Chassériau (courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Acknowledgments

As with any book, this one not only took many years of research but was also shaped—and re-shaped—through many conversations with colleagues and friends; it went through multiple drafts generously read by yet more colleagues and friends who gave feedback and offered ideas; it was completed only because family—and yet more friends—provided emotional support and created a stimulating and happy social environment. Now, thinking back, I feel that I should have kept a detailed diary, a travel log, in which I noted the name of everyone whom I encountered on this journey and who helped me to complete it. Alas, I kept no such record and have to rely on my memory. The journey has been a long one—too long, in fact. Please forgive me if I fail to acknowledge your help or advice.

Several institutions and organizations provided financial assistance to this project. The University of Rochester History Department’s travel and research grants, the John Tracy Ellis Dissertation Award from the American Catholic Historical Association, and travel grants and a Dissertation Award from the University of Rochester’s Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies all helped support several trips to archives in France and Russia. A grant from the Friends of the University of Rochester Libraries funded the purchase of several important sources, making it easier to work at home.

The staff of the University of Rochester Libraries and especially the Interlibrary Loan Department seemed to possess a magical ability to make books and materials appear almost at the moment I ordered them. Friends and colleagues at the University of Rochester History Department were, of course, an inspiration. Among them, I want to single out Jean Pedersen, whose incredibly detailed and helpful notes and suggestions left me in awe of her intellectual generosity.

Abroad, members of the Society of Jesus from the Center for Russian Studies/Slavic Library in Meudon, especially Father René Marichal, made my time working in the archives of the center unforgettable. Wonderful food, splendid conversations, and peaceful walks in the park that surrounded the archive gave me much needed respite from lonely hours in the library. Sister Natalie, former curator of the Slavic Library, helped me navigate through the maze of the archive. The monks of the Order of St. Benedict from the Solesmes Abbey shared not only their heavenly music and their enthusiasm for Sofia Svechina but also rare documents from their archives. Sandrine Lacombe from the Archives Nationales sought me out to inform me that the archives had purchased a new collection of documents related to Svechina and allowed me access to these documents even before they were cataloged and processed.

My dissertation advisers, Dorinda Outram and Brenda Meehan, readily and generously shared their truly inexhaustible knowledge, while their patience and support sustained me through the early stages of this journey. When failing health forced Brenda Meehan to step down as my adviser, she remained a true inspiration both professionally and personally until her untimely death. Dorinda Outram took over the advising of this project in its final dissertation stage and then continued to share her insights as I was working on the book.

My anonymous reviewers’ comments helped me to broaden the narrative both contextually and structurally and encouraged me to push my analysis farther. My editors, Amy Farranto and Nathan Holmes, readily—and patiently—offered support and guidance. It was a pleasure to work with them and a privilege to publish this book with the Northern Illinois University Press.

Finally, I want to thank my family for their support and patience. My mother, Lyubov Bakhmetyeva, eased the pressure of parenting and running the household. My children, Daria and Sophia, grew up with this project, first getting familiar with it when it was a dissertation, then as it turned into a book. Having to compete with it for my attention, they came to see it as another sibling, and not a very pleasant one. I also want to thank my step-children, Henry and Cea, who readily welcomed me into their lives several years ago, turning what could have been a formidable challenge of building a new family into an easy transition that made the writing process much easier.

But most of all I want to thank my husband, Stewart Weaver, who is my daily inspiration in every aspect of life, including professional. His eloquent and graceful writing style is an ideal that I will never reach. But his love, support, and encouragement make me try nevertheless. His coming into my life enriched it in more ways than he can imagine. It is to him that this book is dedicated, with love.

Introduction

On September 14, 1857, Parisians passing by Montmartre Cemetery might well have wondered whether they had missed an announcement of the recent death of some dignitary as they watched the graveside gathering of several noted French politicians and intellectuals. Those whose curiosity was sufficiently piqued to ask after the deceased might have heard for the first time the name of Sofia Svechina—or Madame Swetchine as she was known to everyone in the funeral party—a Russian émigré who had died a few days earlier in her apartment on Rue Saint-Dominique. Once the hostess of a prominent Parisian salon and the center of an impressive orbit of French Catholic intellectuals, Svechina had outlived her fame, and having heard her name, the passersby would most likely have moved on, idle curiosity satisfied. But those who lingered to ask more would have heard, perhaps, a remarkable story.

Sofia Svechina was born into a prominent and educated Russian noble family in 1782. Her father, Petr Aleksandrovich Soimonov (1737–1800), was Catherine the Great’s personal secretary and one of the guardians of the Academy of Science in St. Petersburg. At the age of seventeen, Svechina married her father’s friend, forty-two-year-old General Nikolai Sergeevich Svechin (1759–1850). At this point Svechina appeared to have been on her way to a conventional career as a Russian noblewoman: she became a lady-in-waiting at the court of the Empress Maria Fedorovna and lived at the Winter Palace next to the apartments of the heir to the throne (soon to become Emperor Alexander I), who was among her close friends. Like many other Russian noblewomen, she opened a salon in St. Petersburg, one frequented by many illustrious French émigrés and distinguished Russians.

Despite her growing success as a hostess and her seemingly idyllic life, Svechina and her husband left Russia and moved to France in 1816. Their sudden emigration coincided with another important event in Svechina’s life: her conversion to Roman Catholicism at a time when conversion to any foreign religion was not only illegal in Orthodox Russia but also, in the wake of Russia’s war with Napoleonic and Catholic France, highly controversial. In Paris Svechina and her husband found a new home, and it was there that her true career blossomed when she opened a salon that quickly became one of the best known and most original in Paris—a surprising success for a foreigner of humble origin.

Svechina’s salon soon acquired a distinctively religious character and turned into a meeting place for the French intellectual Catholic elite, the members of the Liberal Catholic movement who gathered around Svechina, surrounding her, as one of her biographers, Armand de Pichard, admiringly put it, like luminous rays.¹ Closest to her was Father Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire (1802–1861), a celebrated Catholic writer and preacher credited with the revival of the Dominican order in France, in whose life Svechina played the role of a spiritual advisor.² Also among the members of her intimate circle were Count Alfred de Falloux (1811–1886), historian, publicist, writer, and minister of education under the Second Republic, and Count Charles de Montalembert (1810–1870), a leader of the Parti Catholique in the Chamber of Peers. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), celebrated author of Democracy in America, historian and political thinker, who met Svechina late in her life and confided in her, thought that she was a perfect combination of saintliness and genius,³ as did Viscount Armand de Melun (1807–1877), a Catholic politician who determinedly sought to alleviate the plight of the working class. Svechina intimately knew both Frédéric Ozanam and Sister Rosalie Rendu, two passionate fighters for social justice who were later beatified by the Catholic Church for their work among the poor. Her salon also attracted many Russians living in or passing through Paris; some of them lingered there for years, like Ivan Gagarin (1814–1882), Svechina’s relative, one of the first Russian Jesuits, and an advocate of Russia’s conversion to Catholicism. And there were many others. Together, these French and foreign politicians and intellectuals formed an impressive circle of friends, followers, and acquaintances, many of whom left memoirs in which they spoke of Svechina with admiration, respect, awe, and love.⁴

Although other salonnières also surrounded themselves with men of talent, their influence over these men was often limited to providing a forum for their works or easing their access to important social networks. Svechina, on the other hand, as Duke Albert de Broglie insisted, had power over souls, serving as a mentor, spiritual counselor, and even an intellectual advisor to many distinguished women of Parisian society and many influential men.⁵ It was to her that many of these intellectuals sent drafts of their books and articles, humbly asking for her opinion. It was her advice they sought when their careers were in flux, as did Montalembert, Lacordaire, and Falloux. It was to her that they confessed the most intimate struggles of their souls, as was the case with Alexis de Tocqueville.

Not everyone was enamored with Svechina. To the French literary critic Charles Sainte-Beuve (1804–1869), her salon seemed dull, excessively pious, and rehearsed, quite unable to live up to what he saw as the ideal salon: gay, brilliant, inspired, wise, witty, [a place] where enjoyment, audacity, wisdom, and folly charm the hours.⁶ Other critics too thought her religiosity excessive and mocked the title given to her by her admirers, the Mother of the Church.⁷ Still others, including many in her native Russia, found her intellect limited, her education unsystematic and undisciplined, her mind wandering, and her sophisms as published by Falloux silly and childish, not worthy to appear even in a school album.⁸ Her alleged humility seemed to these critics to mask her need for power, while her influence on some of her followers, especially Lacordaire, they saw as potentially impeding and destructive, calling her his grey shadow.⁹

Svechina’s later biographers struggled to reconcile these conflicting views of her as they sought to explain the enigma of her influence. Among those attentive readers and reviewers who pondered these questions was the great American novelist Henry James, who devoted a chapter of his volume on French literary criticism to Sofia Svechina and the English translation of Falloux’s biography. Despite his praise of the book and of its subject, James’s article on Svechina, which appears among others on such French writers as Georges Sand, Guy de Maupassant, and Victor Hugo, betrayed a sense of bewilderment about Falloux’s fascination with her. Anticipating a similar bewilderment on the part of his readers, James explained it by the inability of the English language to capture Svechina’s French spirit, which, once removed from its French context, lost its charm, he thought, and, more importantly, its interest.¹⁰ Other commentators struggled with the mystery of her appeal as well. Some found the key to it in the intellectual work which she underwent for more than fifty years, and which explains the influence she exercised over all who approached her.¹¹ Others suggested instead that [Svechina] was childless and probably a maternal instinct lay at the root of much of her strange power and stressed that it was sympathy and understanding, arising from her own great sensitivity, that attracted people to her.¹² Yet others concluded that those who look for the means by which [Svechina] exercised and carried into the most diverse spheres an influence which, for thirty years, was ever on the increase, are amazed to discover that she neither sought nor combined any means whatever.¹³

Thus, when it comes to the mystery of Sofia Svechina’s appeal, we are still confronted with many questions. Why and how did this woman—whom her biographers remembered as humble and modest both in personal taste and demeanor, but intellectually powerful, but whom her critics saw as limited and manipulative—gain such a level of admiration and devotion both in St. Petersburg and in Paris? Why did so great a number of distinguished intellectuals of her time seek her counsel? What was the source of her mysterious power? And beyond such questions of her influence and authority are others that pertain to her own life. To begin with, why did she convert to Catholicism at a moment when such conversion could not have been interpreted as anything but a betrayal of her native country, a country that was, after all, just recovering from a war with Catholic France? Why did she leave Russia at the moment of its greatest triumph, never to return to her homeland again? How did she succeed in the highly competitive and crowded world of Parisian salons? These questions drive this book’s original exploration of Svechina’s life, punctuating and shaping the narrative.

My main goal in revisiting Svechina’s life is to understand the creative process that lay behind it and to understand her life in the context of the world that informed it. Instead of looking at Svechina as a singular subject in isolation, this book places her within the web of her social connections; it looks at her personality as influenced by and interacting with the world around it rather than standing over it like a colossus.¹⁴ This approach suggests that rather than seeing Svechina’s life as a linear and continuous narrative in the manner of conventional biography, one can seek out those particular moments in her life when shifts of self-presentation occur and conflicts emerge and explore her life through a series of questions instead of a series of dates.

One of the first and largest historiographical questions that this book explores is that of the conversion of a large number of Russian nobles (capital nobles in particular) to Catholicism at the beginning of the nineteenth century, of which Svechina’s was only one prominent example. To decipher these conversions—and to understand Svechina’s conversion—one must view them within the context of two deep crises, political and cultural, that affected the Russian nobility at the turn of the century. The first crisis, triggered by the French Revolution, was an intellectual and spiritual one. In Russia, just as everywhere else in Europe, the apocalyptic events of the French Revolution came to be understood as a direct result of the corrupting ideas of the philosophes. This understanding encouraged the European and Russian nobility to search for alternative ways of thinking, pushing them away from Enlightenment rationalism and toward religion and mysticism. The second crisis, triggered by the Napoleonic wars, was one of Russian national identity. The Russian elite, heavily informed by French culture, now, in the aftermath of the war with Napoleonic France, had to view this culture as hostile and alien—a change that forced Russian nobles to reimagine their national identity in opposition to, rather than in collaboration with, the West. As a result, Russian nobles, especially those closest to the court, experienced a sense of loss and disorientation as they had to abandon some elements of a bicultural identity that had been important to their sense of self. But some resisted this change, developing an alternative, cosmopolitan vision of national identity, which they enacted through their conversions to Catholicism. Svechina’s case stands right in the middle of these two crises, offering a unique opportunity to understand how the Russian capital nobility experienced the tensions and conflicts of their era and tried to resolve them.

Part I, St. Petersburg, places Svechina and her fellow converts in the context—and at the roots—of an emerging debate about Russian national identity and the nature of Russian civilization that in the 1840s and 1850s led to the appearance of two groups of intellectuals, Slavophiles and Westernizers. This debate, the accepted view has it, was triggered by Petr Chaadaev (1794–1856) who in 1836 published the first of the several Philosophical Letters in which he expressed many of the views that conjured to life both the Westernizers, who were inspired by Chaadaev’s ideas, and the Slavophiles, who were infuriated by them. Chaadaev, despite his lasting influence on Russia’s intellectual life, often appears in modern historiography as an intellectual loner because of his emphasis on Catholicism as a necessary element of Russia’s Westernization, an element that was rejected by most other largely secular and rationalist Westernizers. The story of Svechina and other converts, however, suggests that Chaadaev’s ideas represent the culmination of the thinking of a much larger group of people who, like him, thought that Russia’s destiny, its past, present, and future, should be linked to Europe and who saw Catholicism as a path to bring together two civilizations, the Russian and the European. In their criticism of this idea, the Slavophiles of the 1840s were responding not only to Chaadaev but to the whole Russian Catholic movement, of which Svechina was a notable and prominent member.¹⁵

The scarcity of the sources about Svechina’s conversion makes it necessary to explore it by way of a collective portrait of Russian converts, who, one by one, add pieces to the puzzle of noble conversion to Catholicism at the turn of the century. In the course of this exploration, the first part of this book, while discussing Svechina’s individual conversion, tells the story of a whole generation caught at the crossroads of history and reconstructs the world of the Russian nobility that Svechina inhabited. Chapters 1 and 2 recreate her physical world; they explore Svechina’s experience of Russia’s war with Napoleon, her marriage, and her social life in the peculiar world of Russian salons. Chapters 3 and 4 bring to life the world of ideas in which she lived; they look more closely at the inner movements of her mind that eventually led to her embrace of the Roman Catholic faith.

Another important issue that this book addresses is that of the building and inner workings of the salon. The history of the salon as an important cultural institution remains a popular topic among historians, who in recent years have significantly expanded our understanding of the origins of this institution, the trajectory of its development, and its changing functions.¹⁶ And yet, as our understanding of the nature of salons is becoming more nuanced, their internal dynamics remain less understood. Often, we see very little of the creative process that went into the opening of a particular salon, of the strategies that salon hostesses used to create their networks and to maintain them; we do not know much about how they selected celebrities to serve as focal points of their salons or how they advanced the careers of their protégés. The existing literature often talks about salon hostesses as mediators, but how did they mediate? Similarly, salons are often characterized as neutral grounds. Once again, what does this mean? How was this neutrality achieved, and how did it manifest itself in daily salon interactions? It is these questions that this book attempts to address in Part II, Paris, bringing readers directly into Svechina’s salon and inviting them to observe closely how she constructed it, and how she operated her networks to advance the careers of her friends and protégés, and how she maintained a neutral forum for political discussion. Chapters 5 and 6 closely follow Svechina as she finds her way into the world of Parisian salons, meeting other hostesses, apprenticing with them, building her network, selecting a physical space for her salon, and identifying both celebrities who could serve as focal points of her salon and protégés whose careers she could help to advance, building her reputation as an influential hostess in the process.

Focusing on the history of Svechina’s salon, chapters 7 and 8 address another important issue: the creativity that women exercised in using religion as a way out of the private and into the public sphere. Women’s religiosity has traditionally been seen as proof of their natural inclination toward things emotional and irrational, seemingly confirming the validity of a dichotomy between private and public: men operate in politics and thus in the public sphere, while women dominate religion—that is, the private sphere.¹⁷ The story of Svechina’s salon challenges these assumptions in several important ways. First, the success of a salon frequented by a number of leading Catholic intellectuals suggests that the renewed interest in religion in the first decades of the nineteenth century was not limited to women. The re-Christianization of French society was a much wider project, in which men also actively participated, and it was characterized not only by the return to traditional forms of religiosity perceived as female but also by the intense intellectualization and politicization of religion—something that was supposed to make it a modern force for a modern society. In this project of the modernization of religion, Svechina’s salon was a leading influence.

Second, Svechina’s life also suggests that women’s interest and participation in all things religious did not always lead to their exclusion from public life. Her model of authority demonstrates that it was precisely the sphere of religion that turned Svechina into a person of power, one who used her spiritual authority and her highly valued personal abilities (such as that of fostering friendships and repairing relationships among her salon visitors) to advise her protégés on their careers and intellectual work, advocate for their interests, and create alliances that benefited their careers while simultaneously advancing the cause of the Liberal Catholic movement. Using not institutionalized but private channels, she—paradoxically—gained public authority. Furthermore, Svechina’s case demonstrates that models of female authority were not always based on breaking away from and/or standing in opposition to existing structures and institutions—a strategy that, in fact, often limited women’s ability to empower themselves. Her model of authority was based on positioning herself between the existing structures rather than apart from them. In every instance of her life, she sought reconciliation rather than rupture. In that respect Svechina resembles such women as George Sand, Marie d’Agoult, Hortense Allart, and Delphine Gay de Girardin who, Whitney Walton argues, constructed an alternative position for women between the two poles of feminist equality and republican motherhood.¹⁸

Finally, just as the study of salons is inextricably linked to the study of political culture, so the study of Svechina’s salon is linked to the study of French religious politics. In an attempt to solve the puzzle of Svechina’s authority and influence, this book places her in the midst of a small but important group, the Liberal Catholics, who struggled to find their place in the increasingly complex landscape of political parties and ideas as they pursued their ultimate goal: reconciliation between the modern world and their faith. Svechina was not only deeply personally involved in this project but often guided it by advising its leading proponents. Yet, her role in it—and in the personal and intellectual lives of the members of the Liberal Catholic movement—is still not fully understood or acknowledged even as interest in Liberal Catholicism itself grows. In Carol E. Harrison’s recent book on the French Liberal Catholic movement, for instance, Svechina’s name surprisingly does not appear at all, even though an entry on Svechina in a modern dictionary of religion strongly asserts that her place in the movement was quite prominent:

During the July monarchy and first years of the Second Empire, no important matter of the Church of France was undertaken or decided without consulting her. No religious activity or even internal attitude of any significance was adopted without her consent and approval in the critical moments of their lives by men such as Armand de Melun, Charles de Montalembert, Henri Lacordaire, Prosper Guéranger, Alfred de Falloux, and a few others.¹⁹

Addressing this omission, this book restores Svechina to her central position within the Liberal Catholic movement as it attempts to solve the enigma of her appeal. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 argue that it was above all Svechina’s ability to create a neutral space and to balance her salon—and herself—at the intersection of ideas, identities, and politics that lay at the core of her influence. It was this skill that she shared with those Liberal Catholics who found themselves in a state of crisis in the 1820s and early 1830s, under attack by both conservative Catholic and liberal politicians. To survive as an influential movement, they needed to regroup and renegotiate their position within the Church, for it was only by remaining within the Church that they could continue their work and have any standing among Catholics. Yet, as one of the leaders of the movement, Father Henri Lacordaire, pointed out in one of his letters to Svechina, the French clergy were divided. One part wants the ancient Church of France with its maxims and its methods, he wrote, while the other part believes that France is in a state irreparably new.²⁰ Svechina sought to close the gap between these two camps by creating a place of intersection, a neutral ground, where the two could meet and turn their differences into similarities. It was also Svechina who helped the members of the movement to rebuild their public careers, consolidate their ranks, and recruit new believers. As a result of these efforts, at the end of the 1830s, Liberal Catholics emerged from the crisis of the 1820s as a political group, influential both within and outside the church. They led the fight for freedom of education and seemed successful in bringing about a rapprochement between the middle class and the church.

Unfortunately, their success was short-lived. By the early 1850s, Liberal Catholics had lost both their conservative Catholic and liberal secular allies. While their failure came as a result of a number of political developments and bad decisions by their leaders, one cannot overlook the fact that it coincided in time with the closing of Svechina’s salon and her gradual debilitation. This coincidence leaves one wondering whether the closing and her illness too contributed to the collapse of the Liberal Catholic movement.

The story of Svechina’s salon is, thus, the story of Russian conversions to Catholicism, of the European salon, of Liberal Catholicism. But more importantly, the story of Svechina is ultimately also the story of the nineteenth century, a century not only of conflict and revolution, of the confrontation of classes, identities, beliefs, and ideologies, but of possibilities and experimentations as people who lived through these conflicts sought models on which future societies, both Russian and French, might be built. For Svechina and the members of her milieu, the only possible foundation for these new societies was the Catholic Church. Her story, thus, is also the story of a long and uneasy process that religion in general, and the Catholic Church in particular, went through to negotiate its place in the new political and cultural landscape, to adapt to the new realities, and to claim its right to be an important political force that had the ability to reconcile past and present. This process is far from over, and Sofia Svechina and the Liberal Catholics have an important place in its history.

Part I

St. Petersburg

It is necessary to have reasons and reasons very powerful to embrace a new religion, austere and persecuted, difficult in its demands. No reasons are necessary to persist in a belief that one sucked with mother’s milk. Force of habit, prejudice, or vested interest are reasons enough.

—Countess Ekaterina Rostopchina¹

Prologue

In early June of 1815, at the age of thirty-three, Sofia Svechina and her adopted daughter Nadine set off for the Bariatynskii family country estate in Peterhof. Such a country excursion was nothing unusual for a Russian noble family. Following the tradition established by Peter the Great, who wanted to socialize his courtiers in the habits of the Western aristocracy, Russian nobles routinely abandoned the capital for their country homes with the arrival of summer. Like all members of the nobility, Sofia Svechina loved these summer retreats. Trips to the country offered her a chance to slow the pace of her daily routine and devote time to other much treasured activities: reading, writing, and thinking without distraction. In the countryside she could finally restore her moral strength through study and solitude.¹ Such trips also allowed her the pleasure of reuniting with her younger sister Ekaterina. The sisters had been close since early childhood. In fact, following the death of their mother soon after Ekaterina’s birth, Sofia filled the maternal void in her younger sister’s life and became not only her friend and playmate but also her caregiver. After Sofia’s marriage, Ekaterina continued to live with her until her own marriage to Prince Grigorii Ivanovich Gagarin (1782–1837) in 1809. But even then the sisters remained intimate. They often travelled together and rented summer houses, either on one of the Neva islands, at Peterhof, or at Tsarskoe Selo.² Childless herself, Svechina delighted in spending time with her small nephews. The boys reciprocated her affection and followed their aunt everywhere, so much so that Svechina at times had to lock herself in her room to catch a moment’s peace and to find time for reading. While she read in her room, the boys patiently waited by her door, ready to greet her when she emerged.³

The summer of 1815 was very different, however. The earlier idyllic family country escapes were a thing of the past as both sisters had recently been through life-shattering experiences. Sofia’s sister Ekaterina had separated from her husband, whose imprudent affair in 1813 with the Tsar’s favorite, Maria Antonovna Naryshkina, had cost him not only his family but also his position at court. As the secretary to the State Council in the Department of Laws, Prince Gagarin was recognized for his brilliance and had once had, by all accounts, a very promising career ahead. Unfortunately, he had attracted the attention of Naryshkina, whose incomparable beauty, noted even by those who disliked her flirtatious personality, proved an irresistible temptation. When the couple’s plans to elope were discovered, Gagarin’s career foundered, as did his family life.⁴ Svechina followed the drama closely and shared with her friend Roksandra Sturdza the agony that her sister’s suffering caused her.⁵ But her sister’s misfortunes were not the only source of grief for Svechina at the time. Her own life too had been shattered as yet another scandal unfolded, this one involving herself and her husband.

Sometime in the years 1812–1813, Sofia Svechina and her husband, General Nikolai Svechin, had purchased a house from Aleksandr L’vovich Naryshkin (1760–1826), who, as it happened, was not only a close associate of Svechina’s father, Petr Soimonov (with whom he had supervised the Imperial Theater some years earlier), but also a brother-in-law of the very Maria Naryshkina whose love affair with Prince Gagarin had ruined Sofia’s sister’s marriage. Naryshkin had long lived beyond his means, and even his famous parties, which dazzled the noble society of St. Petersburg and Tsar Alexander himself, often were organized on credit.⁶ The sale of his house, which had been in his family since the seventeenth century, was meant to improve his financial situation. It stood at the corner of Vozdvizhenka and Mokhovaia streets, right in the heart of Moscow, offering a splendid view of the Kremlin. Given its advantageous location and substantial size, the house was a bargain: it had suffered much damage during the 1812 Moscow fire and needed repair. It was probably the bargain price that attracted the Svechins, whose finances were always tight. But the investment went terribly wrong, and they suffered significant financial losses on the purchase when the house went into foreclosure because of Naryshkin’s debts.⁷ The general travelled back and forth between Moscow and St. Petersburg in an attempt to rescue the situation. Svechina, who remained in St. Petersburg, followed the events from afar, growing increasingly concerned as the general’s health deteriorated under the emotional and physical stress of their financial ruin.⁸

A trip to the countryside seemed like a welcome escape not only from heat, then, but also from her worries. But other things were on her mind when she departed for the Bariatynskii estate in early June. She was concerned about her adoptive daughter, Nadine, who, always somewhat sickly, had fallen seriously ill again in March 1814 and whose health Svechina hoped to restore in the fresh country air. More importantly, however, in solitude she hoped to find an answer to a question that preoccupied her mind: for a while now she had debated the issue of religious affiliation and felt torn between two faiths, two Churches, the Orthodox and the Catholic. She once said that in religious matters moderation had its own criminals—the neutrals.⁹ Not guilty of the crime of neutrality, she instead found herself powerfully drawn to both Churches. Such dual loyalty, however, was impossible as the two Churches were very much at odds, each viewing the other as schismatic and heretical and each claiming the exclusive title of the One True Church. It was to test and reflect on these rival claims that Svechina now undertook her retreat. Naturally, the place to focus on this task was in the countryside, away from the distractions of the capital.

The lifestyle that the countryside encouraged was that of the English gentry: long promenades in shadowy alleys of manor parks, lazy boat rides in the local lakes, picnics in the fields, and, of course, long hours of quiet reading and study. Svechina, who always longed for an existence apart from the crowd, as she wrote to her friend Roksandra Sturdza,¹⁰ cherished these quieter moments during her sojourns in the countryside, where she could build a grand wall of China between herself and the rest of the world.¹¹

The Bariatynskii estate, which belonged to the family of Svechina’s friend Anna Ivanovna Tolstaia (Bariatynskaia), offered her just such quiet. Located not far from the summer palace where the imperial family celebrated the name day of the empress every June, the estate suited Svechina’s purposes perfectly. It stood on a high hill from which opened a lovely view to the Gulf of Finland; a beautiful wooded alley joined the house and the sea. Around the estate, as the Countess Varvara Golovina, who also frequented this beautiful spot, recalled in her memoirs, were many wonderful places for walks and forests, gardens, many flowers, and fruits. From the study window to the right, the city [was] visible, to the left—the sea.¹² Here, in this study, Svechina finally decided to confront the question that had long distracted her. Her seclusion ended in a ceremony of abjuration from Orthodoxy on October 27 (November 8), 1815. On that day she was officially welcomed into the Catholic Church by a Jesuit priest, Father Jean Rozaven.¹³ Why she converted is the subject of Part I of this book.

Chapter 1

The World in Flux

The French Revolution, Napoleon, and the Russian Nobility

On the night of June 24, 1812, Emperor Napoleon, with his 680,000-man strong well-seasoned Grand Armée, crossed the river Nieman near the Lithuanian town of Kovno, violating Russian borders in an apparent act of war. Although war with Napoleon had long been felt to be inevitable, the attack came as a shock to both Tsar Alexander I and his subjects. The war was of a sort that Russians had not experienced for a long time; from the reign of Peter the Great, Russia had always directed its wars outward, making them mostly offensive. The war of 1812 was to be a defensive war, a war against an aggressor who had long since become a household name. Russians followed Napoleon’s victories somewhat apprehensively and somewhat admiringly, but always attentively. Even though they boded ominously for Russia, his spectacular conquests earned him quite a few admirers in the Francophilic circles of the capital.¹ But now Russia had to face his seemingly invincible army and potentially become yet another entry on his long list of vanquished enemies.

The initial surprise of the French advance quickly turned to panic and fear in some quarters and anger in others. The tsar’s proclamations and manifestos, however, calmed the early confusion, panic, and anger, changing it into a determination to fight and hopes of eventual victory. In his proclamations Alexander appealed to his subjects in the way a father would appeal to his children, presenting the approaching struggle as one for the survival of not only their land, but their homes and families, as a struggle for life and death, as an apocalyptic battle. This appeal to the patriotic feelings of the Russians achieved the result he hoped for: the war became a truly patriotic one, unifying people of all social estates and leaving them equally determined to participate in the war effort.

Sofia Svechina, like many other Russians, experienced the war of 1812 very personally. Her husband, General Nikolai Svechin, petitioned to return to active military service and on July 21, 1812, was appointed a commander of the Novgorod militia (opolchenie). Although he was never to be involved in military action, Svechin nevertheless resumed the nomadic life of an active officer as he worked to organize and supply the militia. Accustomed to her husband’s quiet presence, Svechina missed him, joking to her friend Roksandra Sturdza that she and her husband were now like Sun and Moon, never seen together.²

In an attempt to keep herself busy during her husband’s absence, Svechina briefly moved to her country estate near Nijnii Novgorod. But her country sojourn did not last: although she loved the peace and solitude, the prolonged isolation and predictable daily routine of country life never appealed to her. Writing from the estate, she confessed to Sturdza that she had no taste for the countryside since she liked neither to plant nor sow.³ She soon returned to St. Petersburg, where she reconnected with her old acquaintances and plunged herself anew into St. Petersburg’s social life.

She found that the social life had dramatically changed. The atmosphere in both capitals, Moscow and St. Petersburg, had become somber and quiet. People on the streets seemed anxious, even somewhat paranoid: Russian nobles who spoke French ran the risk of being apprehended by the mob as French spies. Refugees from the western parts of the empire brought with them confusion and uncertainty. Grief, fear and despair has taken hold of everyone, wrote one witness, Varvara Bakunina, in a letter to a friend.⁴ Many packed their belongings and left St. Petersburg, expecting its inevitable fall. Seized by anger, the citizens turned against anything French, jeering a company of French actors off the stage as they attempted to perform a French play that had been enthusiastically received by the Russian public not long before. The French actors had to be escorted from the capital under heavy protection. Gypsies and Russian music took their place on stages in the capital. Even French fashion was shunned; ladies appeared at balls wearing Russian national costumes.⁵ Patriotism became fashionable, something that Pushkin ironically observed in an unfinished novel about 1812 that described social circles and drawing rooms filled with patriots; some threw the French snuff out of their snuffboxes and began to use the Russian variety; others burned French pamphlets by the dozen; others turned away from Lafitte and took to sour cabbage soup instead.⁶

While carefree amusements and balls still provided much-needed escape from unsettling news, the conversations in salons turned to more serious topics and were now conducted in Russian, instead of the more familiar French. Salons themselves looked emptier as many men left for the battlefield. The mood of gloom and foreboding that descended upon the capital was expressed in and further exacerbated by the packing away of some of the national treasures in preparation for their removal to safety; in anticipation of the invader’s possible capture of the capital, the authorities even considered moving Falconet’s famed statue of Peter the Great, the bronze horseman, who had stood guard over the Neva’s bank since 1782.⁷

Svechina, however, found this quieter and gloomier St. Petersburg much to her liking; the extravagant festivities of the capital’s nobility had never appealed to her. More importantly, although social life slowed down, public life suddenly became busier than ever as the war paradoxically offered women of the nobility new opportunities, of which Svechina took full advantage. Inspired by the upsurge of patriotism and determined to partake in the war effort, noblewomen of Russia organized the Imperial Women’s Patriotic Society in the fall of 1812. The initiative came from a group of women that included among others Princess Varvara Repnina, Countesses Maria Nesselrode, Ekaterina Uvarova—and Sofia Svechina. The initiative was approved by the emperor, who announced the creation of the society in a special decree of November 1812, placing it under the protection of his wife Empress Elizaveta Alekseevna who became the society’s official director.

Svechina was thrilled that the society had received such a powerful patroness and hoped that the empress’s participation in its activities would bring increased interest from the public. It is a great benefit to the society to have the active protection of the Empress, she wrote to a friend, adding, This benevolence will, at all times, be a powerful and permanent safeguard; it is not only the elevation of her rank that makes me think this, but the power that she exercises on opinion, which she alone can turn in our favor.⁸ Encouraged by the protection of the imperial family, the founding group advertised their new project in one of St. Petersburg’s newspapers, explaining the goals of the society and inviting both new members and donations. The initial membership fee—200 rubles—was high even for some members of the nobility, but the society nevertheless grew steadily. Already by the end of the first year, it had expanded to almost one hundred members and attracted such notable society women as Elizaveta