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16 Cards in this Set

  • Front
  • Back
  1. What did she call Burke?
  2. How did she change tune?
  3. What did she do in 1796
  4. What were some of the books banned:
  1. The English Demosthenes
  2. Removed Diderot's books from the Moscow University, banned them. Felt it was the philosophers fault for undermining religion and authority
  3. Set up her first censorship
  4. The tragedy of the death of Caesar, Paradise Lost
  1. What did James Harris observe in 1778?
  2. What was he?
  1. In an absolute monarchy, everything depends on the disposition and character of the sovereign'
  2. British envoy to Russia
  1. What did Catherine possess
  2. What did the Russian historian N.M Karamzin say about Catherine's time in 1811?
  1. A desire to impress in both physical and intellectual capacity.


    2. Should we compare all the known epochs of Russian history, virtually all would agree that Catherine's epoch was the happiest for Russian citizens, virtually all would have preferred to love then than any other time'

Conclusions on Catherine

  1. She was no hypocrite. There was certainly a discrepancy in rhetoric and reality, but she did believe in her reforms.
  2. Catherine was the first ruler of Russia to conceive of drawing up legislation setting out the corporate rights of the nobles and the townspeople, and the civil rights of the free population. All these groups were given a legal framework within which these rights could be pressed.
  3. She did not increase the power of the nobles over the serfs, nor did she turn large numbers of state peasants into private serfs or even attempt to regulate relations between them in law.
  4. She was not a revolutionary like Peter, who forced his policies on a reluctant society without counting the human cost. She paid attention to public opinion, as she said to Diderot, 'what I despair of overthrowing, I undermine'. Her absolute authority rested, as she well knew, on her sensitivity to the possible. In the words of Le Donne. 'she remains the finest gift go the German lands to her adopted Country'.
  1. Who was V.S. Popov
  2. Who did he write a letter to
  3. What did it relate
  1. Catherine's former procurator-general
  2. Alexander I
  3. 'I select the circumstances, I get advice, I explore the ideas of the enlightened part of the public and conclude therefrom what impact my decree will have' - Only when she was certain she had general approbation did she issue her decrees. Herein, was he secret of what, outsides observed, was unlimited monarchic power.
  4. This puts into a new light all her draft reforms that went nowhere!


  1. Frederick the Great
  2. Thomas Carlyle
  3. Arthur Marwick
  4. Catherine
  1. 'Four French ministers don't work as hard as this one women, who must be counted amongst the ranks of great men'
  2. 'In all epochs of the world's history, we shall find the Great man to have been the indispensable saviour of his epoch; the lighting without which the fuel never would have burnt'
  3. In the Nature of History; 'What a rebarbative and anachronistic phrase!'
  4. LC offered her the epithet 'great', she declined, not wishing to judge herself before posterity had time to assess her value.
  1. De Tocqueville
  2. P. I. Bartenev
  1. Seeking the polar opposite of the U.S' pluralist distribution of power, he said of Russia, 'the whole power of the society is in one man'
  2. (Creator of the Ruskii Arkhiv) 'Our history in the 18th Century is predominantly biographical in character: everything in that century depended, in the main, on personalities. In fact, never has the fate of individuals had such an important influence on the general progress of state life'
  1. Dukes
  2. Le Donne
  1. Faults the 19th Century Russian historians, Solovjev and Kliuchevskii, for placing too much emphasis on the role of the individual.
  2. The role of the ruler has been over-emphasised, will the role of the ruling classes, which alone make the rulers' power effective, has been neglected.
  1. Bartlett
  1. Russian 18th Century history can well be depersonalised, Catherine's reign can be understood as a response to the circumstances, the conjectures, the ideas of the period, in both internal and external affairs. He stresses the breadth of the social foundation underpinning Russian culture in Catherine's time, he wants enlightened absolutism to be seen as a contextual and enabling part of Russia's enlightenment, but as neither its fundamental determinant nor its context'
  1. Marxist historian Perry Anderson

  1. The sway of absolutism ultimately operated within the necessary bounds of the class whose interests it secured


  1. Braudel
  1. The Longue Duree. Monarchs were prisoners, not so much of the nobility but the environment

  1. A limited absolutism?
  2. Consensus and not Conflict?
  1. Government was moulded more by pressures within the political society than by efforts of Kings and officials to shape it from above?
  2. where ideological, political and economic power move in the same direction, it is extremely likely that a great social energy will be created.
  1. Morrill
  1. Finds the key to Tudor government in the enhancement of royal authority by consent, a story of the mutual benefits to be derived from controlled growth in the responsibilities and powers of the monarch

Dixon

Catherine ruled by consent as much as compulsion, although that form always was available when exhortation failed.

Norbert Elias

Kingship Mechanism. Vulnerable to charges of crudity, it was among the first to examine the court as the fulcrum of monarchical power.




But, court history is unconvincing if structural and functionalist explanations leave the key personalities; namely the monarchs out of the account. Catherine herself, was the key actor on the stage that she built for herself.

Dixon 2

Offer a unapologetic reassertion of the individual, and especially the ruler, as crucial to the history of early-modern Europe.
The madness of King George showed how far political life in even a limited and constitutional monarchy could be paralysed by the ruler's absence.
Rulers made an impact by their presence, it mattered that Rudolf II was a mystic fascinated by the occult, because, his search for an eirenic solution, capable of neutralising the extremes of dogmatic Catholicism and fissiparous Protestantism, was inherently hostile to both and thus helped to destabilise the multi-denominational Habsburg empire.
It mattered that Charles I was attracted to Neoplatonism because his interest in the hierarchy of things was symptomatic of a more general obsession with order and hierarchy that paralysed the state, it extended from his daily routine to the determination of political relationships.
It is shown how much it mattered that Catherine the Great was committed to the ideals of the European Enlightenment. (Above all other principles)