From the very beginning of the war the Russian Empress had an ardent ally and ideological supporter. It was Voltaire, who detested the “uncivilized” rule of the Turkish Sultans, and hated both the Pope and the French king Louis XV, an ally of the Turks and Polish confederates. It was Voltaire who actively pushed
6 Albert Sorel, The Eastern Question in the Eighteenth Century. The Partition of Poland
& the Treaty of Kainardji (New York, 1969), 26.
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Catherine to begin this war (even before it started); he invented an entire mythology of war, which he proclaimed throughout his odes devoted to Catherine and her victories. The French philosopher even composed several triumphant odes to celebrate the most glorious episodes of Catherine’s military campaigns. He compared the Russian war with medieval crusades (“Voici le vrai temps des croisades”) and summoned Catherine (called in his poems
“Minerva” or “Pallas”) to avenge the “holy places.”7
In his ode On the Russian War against the Turks in 1768 (Sur la guerre des Russes contre les Turcs en 1768), he had already predicted the great outcome of combat — Russian victories over the Turks in Byzantium, Moldova, Wallachia, and the Crimea:
La Minerve du Nord vous enflamme et vous guide;
Combattez, triomphez sous sa puissante égide.
Gallitzin vous commande, et Byzance en frémit:
Le Danube est ému, la Tauride est tremblante;
Le sérail s’épouvante, L’univers applaudit.8
Voltaire was the first to elaborate a conceptual framework for Catherine’s strategy of war. He considered the Russian campaign against the Ottomans to be a legitimate action on the part of the
“enlightened” “Minerva of the North” to depose a cruel tyrant of the East. The war against the Turks received his utmost sanction as a messianic war in which the Russian troops had to fulfill an old European dream. Voltaire enthusiastically outlined some of the main objectives of Catherine’s war: first, to liberate Europe from fanatical barbarians, second, to undermine the strength of the Ottoman Empire (interpreted as a kind of an empire of evil!), and finally, to restore the intellectual cradle of humanity, Ancient Greece, which had perished under a centuries-old religious and cultural yoke. Voltaire’s Hellenic cult was especially “mythological”: the
7 Ouvres complèts de Voltaire, 8 (Paris, 1877), 492.
8 Ibid., 490. (“Minerva of the North enflames and guides you / Combat, triumph under her powerful aegis. / Galitsin leads you, and Byzantine is trembling;
/ Danube vibrates, Tauride is shaking; / The harem is in fear, / The universe applauds.”)
philosopher believed that the liberated Greeks should re-instate a kingdom of wisdom, culture, and civilization, which would be an alternative to a modern society ensnared by clerical dogmatism and intellectual darkness.
Voltaire vigorously encouraged Catherine to wage war through constant references to her historical “mission” and “mighty wisdom.” Thus, he prophesied in his letter written right on the eve of war (on November 15, 1768):
“S’ils vous font la guerre, Madame, il pourra bien leur arriver ce que Pierre le Grand avait eu autrefois en vue, c’était de faire de Constantinople le capitale de l’Empire russe. Ces barbares méritent d’etre punis <…>. J’espère tout de votre genie et de votre destine. <…> Je pense très sérieusement que si jamais les Turcs doivent etre chassés de l’Europe, ce sera par les Russes.”9
Catherine, in her turn, was glad to encourage Voltaire to develop his Utopian projects that converged with her own imperial strategy. Voltaire elaborated the concept (which soon became popular in Russian military odes) of Catherine’s Russia as a messianic heir in the ancient struggle with the “barbarians.” Russia, as he declared in his poetry and letters, had inherited this historical mission, which had been abandoned by France and Austria. The Empress happily accepted Voltaire’s symbolic interpretation of her as the ancient goddess Pallas with a spike and shield that protected Europe from an eternal enemy.
In her turn, Catherine willingly relayed news of each new military success to Voltaire. She also spoke about the great mission of her “young” Empire, making particular reference to the obvious lack of will on Europe’s part to oppose the Turkish power:
“In Europe, any desire to act against Turkey is over.”10
9 Documents of Catherine the Great. The Correspondence with Voltaire, 20. (“If you are going to make war, Madame, it could happen what Peter the Great had in mind, it meant to make Constantinople the capital of Russia. The Barbarians deserve to be punished <…> I believe in your genius and destiny <…>
I seriously think if the Turks should be chased out of Europe, it could be by Russians.”)
10 Sbornik russkogo istoricheskogo obsh’estva, 10 (1872), 351.
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She also playfully informed Voltaire that she was learning Greek in order to properly welcome the philosopher in Constantinople, the former capital of Byzantium. 11
These private letters to Voltaire during the war were a part of Catherine’s political strategy: the Empress selected certain facts and opinions, putting aside anything that could jeopardize her image among her French audience.12 She attempted to ignore and/or hide any points of contention with the Enlightenment philosopher, putting forward instead their ideological parallels. It was especially significant that, in her drafts, Catherine crossed out the most ambitious passages that revealed her “imperial” goals and military vainglory. She eliminated the sections describing her determination to triumph over an erstwhile invincible colossus, and moderated her zealous tone.
The draft of her letter to Voltaire written on January 8, 1770 contained some pompous phrases that were eliminated from the fair copy:
“You compared my plan to send a navy expedition to the Mediterranean Sea with Hannibal’s enterprise. However, the Carthaginians dealt with a powerful colossus, in its full strength, while we face only a weak ghost who falls to pieces as soon as we lay a hand on him.”13
On the other hand, Voltaire also had his own game. His passionate “militarism” included a good portion of irony.
Voltaire’s odes and letters contained the everlasting dream of the Enlightenment philosopher to help a monarch establish a just state based on Reason. At the same time, they implied a hidden skepticism on the part of the author of Candide toward any kind of rationalistic programming of life.
In his ode A l’impératrice de Russie Catherine II, à l’occasion de la prise de Choszim par les Russes, en 1769 (To the Russian Empress Catherine II, on the occasion of the seizure of Khotin by the Russians, in
11 Ibid.
12 Alber Sorel, The Eastern Question, 52.
13 Sbornik russkogo istoricheskogo obsh’estva, 10, 401.
1769) Voltaire ironically employs the rhetorical devices of solemn hymns by the exemplary king’s odist, the Ancient Greek lyric poet Pindar. Thus, he begins his ode by addressing Apollo and the Muses, and he continues by constructing “genealogical” metaphors in which the Russian Tsarina discovers herself to be a “relative” of the Ancient Gods:
O Minerve du Nord! ô toi, soeur d’Apollon!
Tu vengeras la Grèce en chassant ces infâmes, Ces ennemis des arts, et ces geôliers des femmes.
Je pars; je vais t’attendre aux champs de Marathon.14
Catherine’s first military success made Voltaire, as he wrote in his letters, obviously, quite jokingly, “pray to Allah” and “out-prophesy Mahomet.”15 The philosopher apparently got carried away and afterward ironically deflated his poetical adulation for Catherine.
Meanwhile, in comparing Catherine’s war to a crusade, Voltaire always (and quite seriously) rejected the notion that his position had any religious basis. In a letter written on May 27, 1769, he ridicules all religious fanatics equally, both Christians and Muslims alike.16 He emphasizes a great difference between ancient times and Catherine’s war, which was aiming, in his opinion, to eradicate fanaticism. Moreover, he includes the Empress in an honorable circle of his atheistic allies. In his poem written in 1770 and entitled Ode Pindarique. A propos de la guerre présente en Grèce (A Pindaric Ode. On the Russian War in Greece), the Goddess Pallas, Voltaire’s voice in the ode, makes the statement:
“C’est moi qui conduis Catherine Quand cette étonnante héroine, Foulant à ses pieds le turban, Réunit Thémis et Bellone,
14 Oeuvres complète de Voltaire, 10, 533. (“Oh Minerva of the North, you, a sister of Apollo! / You will avenge Greece by pursuing these infidels, / These enemies of the Arts and jailers of women. / I ‘m going away; I shall await you in the fields of Marathon.”)
15 Ibid, 493.
16 Ibid, 492, 533.
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Et rit avec moi, sur son trône, De la Bible, et de l’Alcoran.”17
Voltaire’s image of Catherine as a warrior against the “ignorant”
Turks and protector of philosophy and the arts was rather flattering.
However, the mention of her “laughter” toward the Bible was very risky, though Voltaire softens the sentence by entrusting it to the ancient (and pagan!) Goddess. In his “Pindaric” ode to the Russian Empress, Voltaire attempts to establish the rules of his game.
According to them, Catherine II, having been symbolically accepted to the Enlightenment “republic of letters” as an equal member, had to tolerate all his witty atheistic jokes. For his part, Voltaire pledged to represent her not as a ‘Tsarina’ and Head of the Russian Church, but as a sophisticated (and devoid of any prejudices) member of an international, non-confessional community of open-minded intellectuals. Catherine II playfully and slyly followed this “rule,”
but only in her letters to him. It was a part of her image that was used only for the benefit of foreign liberals.
In depicting the Russo-Turkish war, Voltaire persistently returns to Hellenic motifs. He proclaims that, after this war, a resurrected and renovated Greece (liberated by Catherine II) will be the best model of a secular society that has been freed of tyrannical regimes as well as of any form of religious fanaticism.
This concept represented a kind of cultural Utopia in which the ancient hero Achilles would be born again, having denounced both the years of the Turkish yoke as well as Byzantium’s scholastic rule.
Voltaire treated both the Byzantine Empire and the Ottoman Porte as almost equally “tyrannical.” According to Voltaire, the former was a kingdom of a scholastic religion that had led Greeks to intellectual degradation and eventually to their slavery under the Turkish yoke.
Voltaire wrote in his “Pindaric” ode:
Et la posterité d’Achille, Sous la règle de saint Basile,
17 Ibid, 492. (‘’It’s me who leads Catherine / When this surprising heroine, / Pulling down the turban under her heels, / Unites Themis and Bellona, / And, sitting on her throne, laughs, as I do, / At Bible and Koran.”)
Fut l’esclave des Ottomans.18
Voltaire apparently ignored the Christian component of the Russian mythology of war and deliberately filled his odes with ancient images and classical myths as a clear alternative to modern — “oppressive” — religions. He never used the paradigm of the “holy war” of Christians against Muslims that would become quite common in Russian military odes.
On the contrary, Russian military odes from the beginning cultivated the ambitious idea of restoring Christianity in Byzantium, which had, many centuries before, given the “light” of Christianity to Russia. Vasilii Petrov declares as much in his ode On the Seizure of Khotin (На взятие Хотина), written in 1769:
Take miserable Byzantium This light from the Russians,
Who had taken it from you in ancient times.19
This cultural Utopia was very characteristic of the entire mythology of war in Russian letters at the time. It constituted a division between Voltaire, who ridiculed the “oppressive” and
“schismatic” Christianity of Byzantium’s past (before the Turkish occupation), and his Russian counterparts. For later, Byzantium should be returned to the Christian family, and even become a Christian satellite of Russia.
On this point, Russian poets made efforts to “correct”
Voltaire and to redirect his anti-tyranny invectives. Thus, Ippolit Bogdanovich, working on his famous translation of Voltaire’s ode A l’Impératrice de Russie, Catherine II (To the Russian Empress, Catherine II, 1771), removes Voltaire’s criticism of Byzantium, and instead, inserts his own passage in which he describes the Turks’ genocide of the Christians. Bogdanovich writes in this section of the poem entitled A Translation of some Verses of Voltaire, a Glorious French Writer, 1771):
18 Oeuvres complète de Voltaire, 492. (‘’And Achilles’ progeny, / Under the rule of Basile, / Became slaves of Ottomans.’’)
19 V. Petrov, Sochineniia, I, 46.
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<…> In order that the unscrupulous pasha’s audacious hand Would be able to abuse our Christian blood.20
Voltaire’s poem does not contain any antagonism between the Muslim pasha and his Christian victims. He only protests against the possibility of a poet and a free man becoming playthings in the hands of a tyrant:
<…> Qu’un bacha dans mon sang trempe à son gré ses mains <…>21 Voltaire considered Catherine’s successful war with the Turks to be revenge on behalf of the entire civilized world for a kind of historical regression, a miserable retardation in humanity’s continual movement from darkness to light. Voltaire’s odes to Catherine put her actions in a different perspective by presenting an imperial war as the liberation of oppressed nations and the restoration of law, science, and the arts brought about by the enlightened ruler. This concept played a mobilizing role, helping the Russian Empress to shape the political mythology of her military campaign. At the same time, Voltaire’s odes influenced Russian poets to make a turn toward Hellenic culture and images.