Marquis de Custine: Tragedy and grandeur of Russian vocation

By Nicolas Bonnal

In his beautiful and unique film Russian Ark, released ten years ago, Alexander Sokurov introduced us in the holy shrine of Russian culture and civilization. He used for that purpose a guide who happens to be a French envoyé, the marquis de Custine, who published famous Letters from Russia in 1839, at the time of great tsar Nicholas the First. For personal and political reasons which I won't explain here, Custine finishes his work bitterly, repeating Russophobe prejudices. Russia could already be presented like a giant full of despotism and oriental traits (Russians are drilled Tartars disguised!), with a curious church and an undemocratic agenda! Yet the marquis somewhat hostile to English model and sceptical on modern democracy starts his duty very well, underlining the grandeur et peculiarity of the Russian empire in the 1830's.        

Russia was very popular among French intellectuals and philosophers during eighteenth century. Empress Catherine knew how to deal with enlightenments, and she was no Russian...

Everything would be imported from Europe during those times, including populations, including the German colons who would become later one of the causes of the German-Russian conflicts (to pangermanist thinkers, a German-speaking land was a German land).

But after 1815, Russia abandons western fashions and wants to come back to her sources. After 1815, everything changes. Nicolas the First wants Russian be spoken at the Court. Population, the local one, increases rapidly, doubling each twenty years! The military power increases, the tsar explains that his despotism has nothing to do with tyranny, even if that obviousness is not understood in the West. At the same time, we assist a splendid emergence of Russian literature.

The descriptions of Saint-Petersburg or Russia made by Custine who is neither Balzac nor Tocqueville are rather mediocre. The critics of despotism are banal, something déjà vu. Custine is not Chateaubriand too, the great diplomat and writer who devised French Russian alliance in a wonderful essay of his legendary Memoirs and was an admirer of the traditional role of Russia in Europe. The best parts of the book are thus contained in letter XII and XIII, when Custine has his talks with the tsar and the empress, not with reformists. We enter here the core of Russian exception, of Russian singularity which lasts until nowadays; having not been liquidated by Americanization or Anglo mania, to use Custine's words.

In outstanding French, the tsar explains himself and his political choices: he knows that Russia is already under fire: In your country there are prejudices entertained against us, which are more difficult to triumph over than the passions of a revolted army. He had to fight the liberals in his own country; yet he still defends his political system, despotism: Despotism still exists in Russia: it is the essence of my government, but it accords with the genius of the nation.

Custine is then rather audacious: Sire, by stopping Russia on the road of imitation, you are restoring her to herself. Like Griboiedov (see wonderful Woe from Wit) and Gogol, he understands that Russians have too much imitated, that new times have begun, and that they will be conservative, traditional and peculiar! To the enemies of Russia this will produce the following dilemma: when Russians imitate, they are monkeys, and when they want to be Russian, they are labelled Tartars! Try to argue with such good critics!

Yet at the time of Nicholas, Russia has no more need to copy western courts. Anyway the new democratic system is already analyzed in these terms by Custine: a parliament is the aristocracy of oratory, substituted for the aristocracy of birth: it is the government of the lawyers.

The tsar agrees and adds justly, because all the political and social defects of parliaments are already well known: To buy votes, to corrupt consciences, to seduce some in order to deceive others; all those means I disdained, as degrading those who obey as much as those who command, and I have dearly paid the penalty of my straightforwardness; but, God be praised, I have done for ever with this detestable political machine. I shall never more be a constitutional king.

At this very moment, Custine seems to agree with the tsar and he interferes with these remarks about the political role of an aristocracy: Without an aristocracy, there would be nothing but tyranny both in monarchies and in democracies... No aristocrat can submit without repugnance to see the levelling hand of despotism laid upon the people. This however happens in pure democracies as much as in absolute monarchical governments. For Custine thinks like great French writers like Tocqueville and Chateaubriand that the end of the aristocracy is bad new for our nations: Formerly the warrior ennobled the land that he won; now it is the possession of the land which constitutes the noble; and what is called a nobility in England, appears to me to be nothing more than a class that is rich enough to pay for wearing a certain dress. This moneyed aristocracy differs, no doubt, very greatly from the aristocracy of blood, not to mention the contemporary role of aristocratic writers in French or Russian letters! With tsar Nicholas Custine foresees the perils of a democracy ruled by a ruthless moneyed aristocracy, like in England (Ireland almost died of hunger and half the British poor had to expatriate to avoid starvation in England after the Napoleonic wars): I dread the lawyers and their echo the newspapers, which are but speeches whose echo resounds for twenty-four hours. Such is the despotism which threatens us in the present day.

Of course we are in modern times, and soon will come the time of the demons described by Dostoyevsky. The Russia of this time is still preserved, but, as says Custine, the more I see of Russia, the more I approve the conduct of the Emperor in forbidding his subjects to travel, and in rendering access to his own country difficult to foreigners.

Let's get to the last point of these brief remarks on Russian exception: Custine guesses that the sources of Russian peculiarity are religious, as many thinkers later (the role of a national church is fundamental, not only in Russia). He describes so an orthodox ceremony: the Greek marriage rites are long and imposing. Every thing is symbolical in the Eastern Church. It seemed to me that the splendours of religion shed lustre over the solemnities of the court. He lets the tsar conclude wisely: In Russia, when religious power loses its influence, disorder is indeed formidable. Russia was thus the last bastion of tradition in Europe, having his clergy and his military spared by the curse of times until 1914. Like in Indo-European models described by famous scholar Dumezil, like in our middle-age too, human society was controlled by the sources of spirituality and authority. This was Russian exception, which had already been destroyed elsewhere in Europe and justified later so many democratic crusades.

I quote this final beautiful phrase of the Marquis:

The Emperor of Russia is a military chief, and everyday with him is a day of battle.

Nicolas Bonnal