Catherine the Great in Russia
In 1763, Catherine had seized power in the traditional Russian manner of a palace revolution: she rode into St. Petersburg and was proclaimed Empress by the Archbishop; Peter III signed his abdication and duly died a few days later, apparently poisoned by the brother of Catherine’s lover. Catherine was a keen patron of the arts. She greatly embellished St. Petersburg, notably by her extensions to the Winter Palace.
Centralization in Government:
In the thirty-years between the death of Peter the Great and the accession of Catherine, Russia had seen no fewer than six rulers. During this period of dynastic turmoil the Russian nobility had reasserted their privileges. Peter I tried to replace the old aristocracy based on blood by a new one based on state service, but Peter III’s edict of 1762 releasing the nobles from obligation to do state service did little more than formally recognize the independence that they had regained for themselves during the intervening forty years. Catherine inherited Peter I’s machinery of government, but the machine no longer worked. At her accession she found that the pay of the troops that had fought in the Seven Years War was many months in arrears, that the navy was, in her own words, fit only to catch herrings, and that nearly half the state revenues failed to reach the exchequer.
Peter I’s successors had experimented with various forms of central council, and Catherine seems to have considered creating a permanent Council of State. The permanent organ of government was the Senate, instituted by Peter I. its members were appointed by the crown and directly responsible to it. Catherine retained the Senate, but allowed it a less significant role than it had played under Elizabeth. Peter’s system of ‘colleges’ had largely broken down; Catherine reduced their number, and allowed those departments dealing with military, naval and foreign affairs to complete their development into independent ministries.
(Local govt.)
Catherine’s chief constitutional reforms were in local government. She was convinced of the need for decentralization by the Pugachev rebellion, and in 1775, the year of its suppression, she turned to the reform of provincial administration. She replaced Peter I’s unwieldy gubernia with fifty smaller gubernia, each of 300-400,000 inhabitants and each subdivided into districts. Each gubernium was presided over a governor who assisted by collegiate boards of officials nominated by the central government, together with an Office of Public Welfare to supervise health, education and poor relief. The districts were administered by various courts elected by the nobles. Each district had an Assembly of Deputies which met every three years.
Peter I’s attempt to discipline the nobles from the centre was thus finally abandoned: Catherine was content to recognize her reliance of them and to entrust the control of the provincial administration to the only ruling class that Russia possessed. Russia was simply too large for complete centralization.
Law Reform:
Catherine’s dependence on the nobility was the limiting factor in the legal innovation of her reign. Peter I’s instructions for the drafting of a new legal code had never been implemented. Instead, Catherine prepared a draft of her own, the Nakaz or Instructions to the Commissioners for Composing a New Code of Laws. It opened with an uncompromising assertion of absolutism: ‘The sovereign is absolute’. Later articles asserted that all men were equal before the law, that the object of administration should be the prevention rather than the punishment of crime, that capital punishment should be used sparingly, and that serfdom ought to be rare and could only be justified by the needs of the state, though it was added that it would be dangerous to free all serfs at once.
The Instructions were intended to guide the deliberations of an assembly summoned to discuss law reform. The majority of the representatives wanted more local self-government, many wanted to pay taxes in cash instead of in kind, and the merchants wanted their monopolies respected. How little real relief the peasants could expect was shown by the articles deleted from the draft, which suggested that each peasant should be guaranteed food and clothes, that the nobility should be allowed to punish only as masters and not as judges, and that there should be peasant judges and a peasant jury system—these were all struck out.
Modern historians have agreed with contemporaries in viewing the whole episode as a propaganda stunt. It seems likely that Catherine genuinely wanted reforms, but that the Legislative Commission convinced her of their impracticability.
Catherine certainly made no serious attempt to abolish serfdom, even before the Pugachev rebellion. In 1765, permission had been given to landowners to send recalcitrant serfs to Siberia on their own initiative, and the right of appeal which the peasant had at least formally possessed was removed. Serfdom was actually extended by Catherine: she introduced it into the new lands of White Russia and the Ukraine.
Statistics illustrate the size of the problem facing Catherine, and it is perhaps not surprising that she shrank from tackling it, nor that she preferred instead to strengthen the position of the landowning classes. In 1785, the Charter of the Nobility formally recognized the nobles as a separate estate and confirmed their traditional privileges. Peter III’s edict of 1762 exempting them from state service was reaffirmed, as was their exemption from personal taxation, corporal punishment, and the billeting of troops. They were granted the exclusive right to set up factories and sink mines. In return they were required to ensure that the serfs paid the poll tax and discharged their compulsory military service.
Commercial and Economic Policy:
The central fact in Catherine’s economic policies was the need to find men and money for the army. If the vested interests of the nobles were one obstacle in the way of a liberal policy, her own interest in territorial aggrandizement was another. The annual expenditure during her reign rose from seventeen million to seventy or eighty million roubles. Much of this money was expended in conquests that added nearly 220,000 square miles of territory to her empire. Yet, Russia’s population remained both too sparse and too poor.
In 1771, Pugachev, a Don Cossack, appeared among the Cossacks of the Urals, where the hardships of the worked in the salt-mines combined with peasant grievances to provide raw material for revolt. It was against the background of social discontent, of which Pugachev was only the most spectacular expression that Catherine tried to pursue her policy of economic liberalism. Immediately after her accession she had abolished most of the state monopolies which Elizabeth had farmed out to individuals. She continued earlier efforts to establish free internal trade. The export of corn was permitted, and other export duties were abolished. Exports of flax, hemp, furs and skins, iron and naval stores increased, notably to England. Catherine also showed great interest in road and canal building. But by 1793, she had jettisoned her liberal views, and her last years saw a return to mercantilist policies, for which the disorder of the national finances provided sufficient excuse. During her reign, the merchants remained a somewhat underprivileged class. Much of Russia’s trade was in the hands of foreigners, and Russian merchants were still forbidden to own serfs or lands.
Religious Policy:
Catherine continued Peter I’s policy of subordinating the Church to the State. One of Peter III’s last acts had been to appropriate the remained Church lands, and this was confirmed by Catherine in 1764. Catherine’s secularization of Church lands deprived the Orthodox Church of political independence: henceforth the clergy were paid by the State.
The partition of Poland brought Catherine large numbers of Catholic subjects. She allowed them religious freedom and remained on polite terms with the Papacy, although when the Society of Jesus was dissolved in 1773 she did not expel the Jesuits from Russia. She extended toleration to the Jews and admitted wealthy Jews to municipal office. She seems to have genuinely shared the philosophes’ view on toleration, though no doubt she thought it good politics too.
Education:
She tried to build her educational system from top down. In 1764, she separated the Academy of Fine Arts, previously a department of Peter I’s Academcy of Science, from its parent body and gave it a new foundation. In the same year she founded the Smolny Institute for the daughters of noblemen. In 1763, she had established the College of Medicine, while her decision to be inoculated against smallpox has been called her greatest contribution to the Enlightenment.
Her scheme of education was nothing if not sophisticated. Even in the naval academies the course included fine arts, with dancing and acting. Not all the children of the nobility went to school. Many families engaged private tutors from abroad. In 1764 Catherine had sent a commission to report on British schools and universities. She accepted the recommendation that a national system of primary education should be set up to provide instruction in religion, reading, and perhaps a little writing and arithmetic. There may have been 300 free public primary schools in Russia by Catherine’s death, but they were all in towns, and in general, elementary education was left to village schools run by clergy and private schools provided by benevolent landlords. In Russia, as elsewhere in Europe, universal education was viewed with suspicion: a peasant might learn to forge a passport.
Catherine was in theory Enlightened and in practice an absolute monarch. But the practical limitations on her absolutism must be stressed. Catherine was evidently influenced by the ideas of the Enlightened philosophers, but the size of Russia, the political power of the nobles, and her own programme of conquest all prevented their being put into practice. Notably, she was the only exponent of ‘enlightened absolutism’ who lived long enough to see the graver excesses of the French Revolution; under its impact her regime became as oppressive as any in Europe.
Maria Theresa and Joseph II 1740-90
Maria Theresa (1740-80) and her son Joseph II (1765-90) provide an instructive commentary on the strengths and weaknesses of ‘enlightened absolutism’, not only in the contrast they present to their fellow monarchs on other European thrones, but also in the contrast they present to each other.
Maria Theresa was too devout a Catholic to approve of Voltaire, and if her political reforms seemed to owe something to Montesquieu, it was not because she had herself read him. Joseph, though nominally co-regent after 1765, was allowed a say only in the affairs of the royal household, public finance and the army. A memorandum which he drew up in 1765, at the age of 24, reflects the impatient idealism that he had to bridle as long as his mother lived.
Joseph’s claim to ‘have made philosophy the law-maker of my empire’ was no idle boast; but in doing so he became the only 18th century monarch to pursue the principles of the philosophes beyond the bounds of practical politics. He was the Enlightenment’s aptest pupil and its most spectacular failure.
Centralization in government:
The subjects of Maria Theresa spoke ten languages, and the only political unity they possessed was that of allegiance to the Habsburg family. The inadequacy of the financial and military administration based on the traditional provincial assemblies or Estates was amply demonstrated in the early stages of the War of the Austrian Succession.
With the help of Haugwitz, her administrator, she attacked the independence and traditional privileges of the Estates was quickly followed by the replacement of the separate Bohemian and Austrian chanceries by a single high court of justice ad a single ministry for all internal affairs in all the Habsburg lands except Hungary, Milan and the Netherlands.
The reforms in Vienna were matched by a reorganization of the provincial administration. Austria and Bohemia were divided into ten gubernia, each with a high court and an administrative council, which were directly dependent on the central government in Vienna. To these new gubernia and the provincial estates surrendered all their traditional administrative functions. Maria Theresa was less dependent on the Bohemian nobility, and Habsburg bureaucratization was accordingly more complete. Maria Theresa did not, however, try to extend her centralizing policy to Italy or the Netherlands, where the existing chanceries were allowed to pursue their routine unchallenged.
In contrast to these methods, Joseph II tried to Germanize Hungary at one stroke. The Hungarian Diet was deprived of all authority; a separate gubernium was established for Hungary and another for Transylvania. This drastic policy, coupled with Joseph’s attempt to abolish serfdom, provoked a rebellion in Hungary in December 1789.
Law Reform:
Haugwitz’s administrative reorganization applied the principle of the separation of powers demanded by Montesquieu. In 1749 the Bohemian and Austrian chanceries gave place to separate judicial and administrative bodies. But his reforms were not inspired by Montesquieu, and Maria Theresa’s reign saw only an empirical and piecemeal approach to the problem of law reform. A new criminal code introduced in 1770 retained the use of judicial torture, though this was abolished in 1776 at the instigation of Joseph and Kaunitz, the foreign minister.
Maria Theresa had no intention of depriving the gentry of their rights over their peasants, though she tried to stop the worst feudal abuses. When the lords still proved recalcitrant, the impatient peasants rose in revolt: 15000 of them besieged Prague itself. The government called out the army and the rebellion was harshly suppressed. Maria Theresa was confirmed in her determination to go no father in concessions to the peasants.
Joseph, however, was convinced his mother had not gone far enough. Yet even he did not try to abolish serfdom at the stroke of a pen. In 1781, he abolished the serfs’ personal dependence on their lords, though the robot was retained. The peasants were now to be allowed to own land, marry whom they pleased, take up new trades, and move from place to place at will; they were also granted the right of appeal to crown officials in criminal cases. Maria Theresa had already introduced these reforms on the crown estates; Joseph now applied them to all lands in Austria and Bohemia, and later extended to Transylvania and Hungary. The next stage was even more ambitious. In 1782 Joseph had ordered a land survey of all the Habsburg territories, and in the following year it was decreed that all lands, irrespective of the status of their occupier, were equally liable to taxation. Joseph died before this decree became effective. The opposition it provoked from those peasants who found their new taxes heavier than their old dues forced him to suspend its execution.
Although Joseph abolished feudal courts in Hungary, he retained them elsewhere for civil cases, and contented himself with establishing new higher courts. The Penal Code (1787) and the Code of Criminal Procedure (1788) made men equal before the law, gave wider opportunities for appeal to higher courts, and abolished the death penalty in most cases.
Commercial and Economic Policy:
The Habsburg system of government by bureaucracy was extended to commerce and industry. But mercantilist influence began to wane more quickly more under the Habsburgs than under Frederick the Great, who remained a mercantilist till the end, and Catherine the Great, who returned to mercantilism in her later years. Government regulations on industry were relaxed and government subsidies greatly reduced.
Commercial policy was affected by fiscal considerations, obviously. Between 1748 and 1760 a series of reforms for the first time imposed a systematic property and income tax on the nobility and clergy, and converted the peasants’ tax from one on persons to one of income. Financial burdens remained uneven: the peasants still paid twice as much as the nobles. But in 1775 the budget balanced for the first time. However, by 1789, the empire had an accumulated debt of nearly 400 million, which the land tax proposed that year was hoped to alleviate.
Religious Policy
Joseph disagreed with his mother over religious policy. Under Maria Theresa the privileged position of Roman Catholicism as the official religion of the Empire was heavily guarded. The Jews remained almost without civil rights: they were forbidden to own real estate, to hold office, or to practice crafts; they were required to wear distinguishing patches of yellow; they were excluded from schools. In the 1770s a campaign of persecution was launched against the Moravians, a Protestant sect.
In 1781, Joseph decreed full toleration to all except atheists and Deists: this included the right to hold property, to build schools, to enter the professions, and to be eligible for political and military office. Meanwhile the Catholic Church was nationalized. The bishops were forbidden to receive papal bulls and decrees without royal consent, and were required to take an oath of submission and fidelity to the Emperor. Marriage was made a civil contract and education was secularized.
The sixty million florins obtained from the confiscation of monastic property were applied to education, poor relief and the raising of clerical stipends. Joseph did not tamper with doctrine, but he did forbid religious proceedings and pilgrimages, restrict the use of incense and music, and substitute the vernacular for Latin in services. Joseph’s policy of toleration seems to have been based on principle rather on, as in the case of Frederick, political expediency.
His toleration extended to the abolition of the system of censorship. But even now freedom of the press was not absolute. Meanwhile the persecution of the Deists continued and the discussion of clerical celibacy was forbidden. No doubt Joseph continued to regard himself a Catholic, yet, whatever his intention, Joseph’s reforms helped to make skepticism and irreligion fashionable.
Education:
Maria Theresa tried to improve the Austrian school system. She established the Theresianum, where children of the nobility were educated alongside her own children, and in 1774 a national and centralized system of education was set up. Joseph adopted the same attitude in his dealings with the universities, which he regarded chiefly as training grounds for civil servants.
In Austria, as in Prussia, centralization in government had been motivated by the needs of war; and in Austria, as in France, a sound financial system depended on the curtailment of aristocratic privileges and the encouragement of a prosperous middle class. Joseph alone of the monarchs of the Enlightenment was ready to risk a frontal assault on the privileged orders, but his well-intentioned attempt to raise the status of his peasants to that enjoyed by their French counterparts before the Revolution was frustrated by the excesses of the peasants themselves.
Joseph found his aims equally thwarted by what he regarded as the excessive demands of the middle classes whose political aspirations his own reforms had done so much to arouse. He tried to apply the brake by tightening up press censorship in 1789, and bequeathed to his successors a secret police. Joseph, in spite of his secret police, illustrates the crucial weakness of ‘enlightened absolutism’: the monarch was never sufficiently absolute to succeed in being enlightened. The decisive fact was that Joseph’s enlightened absolutism overshot the objects and overstrained the possibilities of State interference; it was almost irreconcilable with the inner structure of the Habsburg monarchy. The tragedy of his failure, according to Fritz Hartung, lies not only in the fact that he succeeded to the throne in a state that was not yet ready to sustain his reforms, but also in himself and his inability to carry through the task he had set himself.