Catherine the great enlightened despot. Catherine the Great: An Enlightened Despot? 2022-12-18
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Catherine the Great, also known as Catherine II, was the Empress of Russia from 1762 until her death in 1796. During her reign, she implemented a series of sweeping social, economic, and political reforms that earned her the reputation as an "enlightened despot."
Catherine was born in Stettin, Prussia (now Szczecin, Poland) in 1729. She was raised in a household where she was exposed to the ideas of the Enlightenment, a intellectual movement that emphasized reason, individual rights, and liberty. As a result, Catherine was well-educated and had a strong interest in Enlightenment philosophy.
Upon ascending to the throne in 1762, Catherine set out to modernize and westernize Russia. She implemented a series of legal reforms, including the Charter of the Towns, which granted more freedoms to urban dwellers and granted them the right to elect their own officials. She also established a new criminal code that reduced the use of capital punishment and introduced trial by jury.
Catherine was also a patron of the arts and sciences. She founded the Imperial Academy of Arts and Sciences and encouraged the development of education and scholarship in Russia. Under her reign, Russia experienced a cultural and intellectual flowering known as the "Catherine Era."
Despite her enlightened policies, Catherine was also a strong autocrat who did not hesitate to use her power to crush dissent. She suppressed the Pugachev rebellion, a peasant uprising, with brutal force, and she was not above using censorship to control the flow of information.
Overall, Catherine the Great was a complex figure who combined enlightened ideas with autocratic rule. She implemented significant reforms that improved the lives of her subjects and made Russia a more modern and enlightened society, but she also used her power to suppress dissent and maintain her own authority.
Catherine the Great: An Enlightened Despot
They hired teachers and tutors from different parts of Europe, transforming their country estates into centers of architecture, painting, sculpture, and landscape art in the process. However, this did not mean that the rest of Europe was immediately receptive to Catherine's reign. Then Simon Dixon told us about the horse. Catherine likewise used her reading and prodigious correspondence to develop her own theories of governing 12. The Enlightenment, however, did not change Catherine's view about the need for an iron-fisted rule over Russia.
Catherine introduced some educational reforms despite the lack of a national school system. While there was a start to industry, Russia had no free peasantry, no sizeable middle class, and no legislation that was conducive to private enterprise. Intended to discourage infanticide, the foundling homes allowed unwed mothers to give birth in safe conditions and in secret. Baron Bragg -- historian, journalist and novelist -- is Controller of Arts for London Weekend Television. When Catherine assumed the Russian throne, the country's revenue was 28 million rubles-an amount that was estimated to fall short of expenditure by the staggering sum of 7 million 24.
Regarding foreign policy, the borders of the Russian Empire were extended by some 520,000 square kilometers 200,000 square miles , mostly at the expense of the Catherine was also involved in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth throughout her reign. As such, she believed that strengthening her authority had to occur by improving the lives of her subjects. Sophie first met her husband who would become Tsar Peter III of Russia when she was just 10. The building was commissioned from Giacomo Quarenghi by the Society for Education of Noble Maidens and constructed in 1806—08 to house the Smolny Institute for Noble Maidens, established at the urging of Ivan Betskoy and in accordance with a decree of Catherine in 1764. Patrons and connoisseurs of art eventually emerged from the aristocracy. The girls who attended the Smolny Institute, Smolyanki, were often accused of being ignorant of anything that went on outside the walls of the Smolny buildings. This caused a questioning of traditional practices, and people began to believe they could revise their government.
This powerful and immensely fascinating ruler had brought Russia forward intellectually, powerfully and with a sense of grace. Panin was the head of foreign affairs from 1763 to 1781. Alston, Education and the State in Tsarist Russia Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1969 , 15. To come up with Russian mining technicians, she founded Russia's first School of Mines in Saint Petersburg 38. These measures resulted in the Treaty of Kyakhta, which was signed in October 1768 50. Catherine then took concrete and decisive steps to rid the Russian bureaucracy of corrupt officials.
How Voltaire praised the 'enlightened despot' Catherine the Great
The middle-class students also studied the same subjects, except that foreign languages were replaced with domestic skills. They likewise resorted to bribery to compensate for the absence of salaries. Represented at all important auctions and frequently buying collections in bulk, she was said to have already acquired about 2,658 paintings by 1785 83. She also replaced the Hetman or Military Commander of Ukraine with a governor-general acting for a Little Russian Board. Politician to the finger-tips, she sought their attention, not simply out of vanity, but with the very material purpose of consolidating her position at home and abroad.
Hindsight: Catherine the Great: An enlightened despot? on Apple Podcasts
However, military conscription and economy continued to depend on serfdom, and the increasing demands of the state and private landowners led to increased levels of reliance on serfs. Foreign books, on the other hand, were very difficult to obtain-it took Catherine two years to get hold of a copy of Amyot's French translation of Plutarch's Lives 78. Available from JSTOR, accession number 4212734. They were married in St. As people became increasingly exposed to knowledge and rationality, they became open to innovations. In the same year, Catherine issued the Charter of the Towns, which distributed all people into six groups as a way to limit the power of nobles and create a middle estate.
As a result, the translated versions of the Greek and Roman classics arrived in Russia for the first time. She then went to the Semenovsky Barracks, where the clergy was waiting to ordain her as the only possessor of the Russian throne. Throughout her reign, she never entertained the idea of reducing the autocratic and technically absolute powers of the Russian crown 17. Being chased out of power by his own wife made Peter forever associated with impotence, incompetence and indecisiveness 6. Thomas Bompard, a manuscript expert at Sotheby's in Paris who looked after the archive, said: "Voltaire and Catherine never met, but the relationship between these great characters of the 18th century was conducted through these letters.
She nationalized church lands to pay for her wars, emptied the monasteries, and forced many of the remaining clergymen to find other ways to earn a living. Those who were proven guilty of this wrongdoing were punished severely. He said: "In Voltaire's bedroom there was a portrait of Catherine in front of his bed. But she waged cruel wars. Her reforms were praised by Voltaire and Frederick II of Prussia, two people very familiar with the idea of Enlightened Despots.
How Did Catherine The Great Be Considered An Enlightened...
To put it bluntly, Catherine was a usurper. An Enlightened Despot is the name for an absolute leader who entwines the ideas of the Enlightenment with the reforms they make for the benefit of their people. Petersburg during the reign of Catherine the Great. The Kremlin has recently promoted the return to Moscow of valuable artefacts from Russia's history, many of which were lost to foreign collectors during the the last century. In April 1764, Catherine issued the following instructions to the governor-generals: They were to rule in an enlightened and rational manner; they were to take an accurate census, map their provinces, and report on the people, their customs, agriculture and trade.
When Catherine the Great Invaded the Crimea and Put the Rest of the World on Edge
The unrest intensified as the 18th century wore on, with more than fifty peasant revolts occurring between 1762 and 1769. Under the League of Armed Neutrality that she established, she aimed to prevent the British Royal Navy from searching neutral shipping during the During her reign, Catherine also fought against the Persians while opening trade with the Japanese after expanding fur trapping eastward in Kamchatka and the Kuril Islands. The only thing a noble could not do to his serfs was to kill them. Catherine reformed the administration of Russian guberniyas and many new cities and towns were founded on her orders. Prior to Catherine's reign, Russian literature was composed mostly of Church service books.
