Romanov Domesticity, 1796–1855

POLITICS

In 1796, Catherine died. Her son Paul seized the powers of autocrat eagerly and issued strict regulations to his courtiers and military. Paul was peevish; he had lived too long under the thumb of his unloving mother. He sought to undermine her reputation in a variety of ways, one of which was the publication of a new law of succession in 1797 that prohibited women from inheriting the crown ever again. Unfortunately, Paul’s political skills resembled those of his father more than his mother, so he made enemies, especially among the military high command. In 1801, army officers murdered Paul in his bed and thrust his son Alexander onto the throne.

Alexander I (ruled 1801–25) was an intelligent, thoughtful man, steeped in the Enlightenment. In the early years of his reign he reformed the government and the law code and improved the administration and funding of higher education. Alexander also joined the European‑wide coalition fighting Napoleon, suffered defeats, but distinguished himself in 1812 by refusing to surrender, even after the French occupied Moscow. The Russian army thereafter played an important part in Napoleon’s defeat, and Alexander entered the peace negotiations that followed as one of Europe’s most highly regarded monarchs. On his return to Russia, he pursued conservative domestic policies.

In November 1825, the forty‑eight‑year‑old emperor suddenly died of natural causes, possibly typhus. The succession was muddled, for Alexander was childless. His younger brother Nicholas took power, then immediately had to suppress a revolt by an army faction, the Decembrists, that was calling for a constitutional monarchy. The Decembrists were easily routed, but the existence of revolutionary sentiments within the military elite alarmed Nicholas, already a conservative by temperament and training.

For thirty years, he labored to keep democratic ideas from penetrating Russia, while continuing the policies of his predecessors. He promoted elite education and government reform, in hopes of making both elite and government into instruments of his will. He maintained a huge army. This required raising government revenues, which in turn led the emperor to consider abolishing serfdom, for he and many of his advisers believed that the bondage of the peasantry inhibited economic development. And, to his credit, Nicholas also thought that serfdom was morally indefensible. In 1842 he described it as “an evil, palpable and obvious to everyone.” “However,” he added, “to attack it now would be, of course, an even more disastrous evil.”²⁵

Thus torn between the old evils that he knew and new ones that he dared not foster, Nicholas spent his reign trying to limit the consequences of his own reforms, while pursuing a foreign policy that caused him to be seen abroad and at home as an aggressive reactionary. He funded the universities, but clamped them under strict controls to prevent faculty from teaching pernicious subjects. He presided over a huge expansion in the number of books, newspapers, and magazines imported to and printed in Russia, but had them censored. Ultimately he failed to maintain control over the minds of his ruling class. By the 1840s, proposals for major reform were circulating among intellectuals and government bureaucrats. In 1853, Nicholas blundered into the Crimean War with Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire. It was a disaster for the Russian army and a demonstration of the nation’s military and economic inferiority to the Great Powers. In February 1855, before peace could be made, Nicholas died of pneumonia. He left behind an intelligentsia seething with new ideas and an heir, Alexander, who was committed to major reforms.

EMPRESS MARIA (1759–1828) AND EMPRESS ALEXANDRA (1798–1860)

Nicholas was a happy subscriber to the variant of the cult of domesticity that prevailed among the European nobility. It may seem odd that the cult, which arose within a bourgeois critique of the aristocracy, won fans among aristocrats. It did so perhaps in part because, especially after the French Revolution, such people were afraid to be out of step with the cultural changes of the time, on which the middle class was having increasing influence. The cult also appealed to the nobility for the same reason it appealed to lower‑ranking folk: it was based on an ancient vision of family life in which man provided and woman served. The cult valued her emotional service more than her physical labor, which was a shift of emphasis from earlier gender ideals, but a shift only. The notion of the gentle, all‑forgiving, virtuous mother preached by the cult had been present for centuries in the idealizations of the Virgin.

Because the cult was rooted in these widely accepted universals and because it held out promises of loving families and sheltering homes in a time of rapid, unsettling economic and political change, it traveled easily. It was picked up by conservative rulers, such as Nicholas, who saw its potential to shore up the status quo; by republican Americans, who believed that mothers could teach democratic values to the citizens of the new United States; and later in the nineteenth century by nationalists from Wales to Poland, who granted women a central role in preserving ethnic identity. Feminists made use of the cult as well, arguing that women should be permitted to apply their moral sense and housekeeping skills to social improvement. After Europeans disseminated it around the world, non‑Europeans as remote from one another as Hindu fundamentalists and Chinese communists incorporated its ideas into their worldviews. Even as all these devotees adapted the cult of domesticity to their cultures and objectives, its core ideas about women remained remarkably stable. Their influence endures in the twenty‑first century.

The nobles’ variant of the cult arose in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries from their own critique of the customs of family life in their class. Many of these people agreed with bourgeois critics who charged that aristocratic parents paid too little attention to their children. Catherine the Great shared these discontents, and in the memoirs she wrote in the 1790s, she portrayed herself as a lonely child, dominated first by an autocratic, self‑absorbed mother who slapped her for the least misbehavior, then by Empress Elizabeth, who was still more distant and controlling.²⁶ The ideal of a sympathetic, attentive mother had tremendous appeal to people who had had such childhoods. Catherine complained about her own mother while being a distant and demanding mother herself, which may explain why her son Paul was drawn to the cult of domesticity.

So was his wife Maria, whose parents, the duke and duchess of the German principality of Württenberg, had brought her up to believe in the importance of loving relations between royals. Maria married Paul in 1776, after his first wife died in childbirth; the young people had the good fortune to love one another. An energetic woman, Maria remodeled the couple’s palace at Pavlovsk, outside St. Petersburg, patronized charities, attended the many court ceremonies and religious observances, and painted, embroidered, carved cameos, and played several musical instruments. Maria enjoyed her heavily scheduled life, first as grand duchess, then as empress, but she also believed that she should be an attentive and affectionate mother. So she oversaw the education of eight of her ten children (her eldest sons, Alexander and Constantine, were reared by Catherine) and kept in close touch with all of them when they were grown. She also commissioned poets to sing her praises as a loving mother, and she stressed her devotion to family by undertaking extended periods of mourning for deceased relatives and having monuments constructed to commemorate her parents and husband. All this was sincere, and it served as a repudiation of her mother‑in‑law Catherine, with whom she had a frosty relationship. It also gave the royal stamp of approval to the nobles’ variant of the cult of domesticity.

Maria remained true to the ancient principle that marriage among royals must serve the purpose of preserving the dynasty. So she was disappointed when her oldest sons, Alexander and Constantine, could not reconcile the promptings of their hearts with their obligations as princes. Alexander barely tolerated the wife that had been chosen for him and, perhaps as a consequence, had no children. Constantine insisted on marrying his beloved, a Polish noblewoman who was not of royal rank. Then he renounced his claim to the throne. Fortunately for the house of Romanov, Nicholas, Maria’s third son, did not disappoint. He contracted a love match with Princess Charlotte of Prussia, and she became an empress who personified the ideals of the cult of domesticity even more perfectly than her formidable mother‑in‑law.

Christened Alexandra on her baptism into Orthodoxy, the new grand duchess set about having babies and developing her reputation as a frail, shy consort. In part this image arose because Alexandra was in fact a retiring woman who lacked Maria’s self‑confidence and energy. It also reflected a shift in the aristocratic cult of domesticity, away from the culturally accomplished women of the late eighteenth century to a more emotional, even childlike, ideal. Artists portrayed Alexandra as a pale, willowy, and serene woman, swathed in gauzy dresses and hung with ropes of pearls. Courtiers declared reverently that she had taken an oath never to use the word “command.” Court poets portrayed her as radiating happiness. “Near her all our thoughts are song!” crooned Vasili Zhukovskii. Perhaps this was not mere sycophancy. Nicholas wrote to Alexandra after twenty years of marriage, “God has bestowed upon you such a happy character that it is no merit to love you.”²⁷

Nicholas and Alexandra, like their British counterparts Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, were deeply committed to one another and to being good parents. The emperor was a devoted husband who considered his wife both friend and confidant. The empress returned his love in full measure. Breakfasting with his family frequently, the emperor expected his children to tell him about their lessons and whatever else they were doing. The family also often dined together. A bevy of nannies and tutors did the work of rearing the children, but Nicholas and Alexandra’s brood were far closer to their parents than their predecessors had been.

Government spokesmen publicized the royal family’s happy home life to promote the popularity of the emperor, tapping into deep affinities within the Russian public, elite and poor folk alike. The image of domestic felicity conveyed in pictures, poetry, and public appearances was reassuring and endearing. By presenting it as in tune with ideas fashionable in the great capitals of Europe, Nicholas’s publicists also portrayed the monarch and his consort as cosmopolitan enlighteners of their people, a role played by all the Romanovs since Peter.²⁸ There were older ideas at work in the campaign as well. Emphasizing Nicholas’s dutiful and loving attention to his children reinforced the notion that the emperor was also the caring father of his country. Catherine had done the same when she portrayed herself as the enlightened empress and as Matushka.