Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (103 page)

The tumbrels continued to roll. The massive blade rose and fell forty, fifty, sixty times a day. Terrified politicians guillotined one another in order to escape the guillotine themselves. Hundreds went to their deaths for no better reason than personal quarrels or neighborhood jealousies; their crime was being “under suspicion.” The victims included twenty peasant girls from Poitou, one nursing a baby while sleeping on the cobbles of the Conciergerie courtyard, awaiting execution. The poet André Chénier was guillotined because he was mistaken for his brother; then, informed of its mistake, the Commune guillotined the brother, too. Antoine Lavoisier, the scientist, requested a short stay of his execution in order to complete an experiment. “
The revolution has no need of scientists” was the reply. One of the condemned was the eighty-year-old Marshal Duke de Mouchy, whose elderly wife did not understand what was happening. “
Madame, we must go now,” her husband said gently. “God wishes it, let us therefore honor His will. I shall not leave your side. We shall depart together.” As they were taken from the prison, someone shouted, “Courage!” Mouchy replied, “My friend, when I was fifteen, I went into the breach for my king. At eighty, I go to the scaffold for my God. I am not unfortunate.” French émigrés and refugees told these stories to Catherine.

The Terror crested and began to ebb. On July 13, 1793, Marat was stabbed in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday. It was on April 5, 1794, that Danton was sent to the guillotine by Robespierre. Three and a half months later, on July 27, 1794, Robespierre’s head rolled into a basket.
With the death of Robespierre, the worst of the Terror came to an end. The Directory followed, and, in 1799, the Consulate. A young army general, Napoleon Bonaparte, became first consul until 1804, when he crowned himself emperor. The wars begun by revolutionary France in 1792 continued under Napoleon, until they had spanned twenty-three years. With the downfall of Napoleon, the former Count of Provence, the older of the surviving brothers of Louis XVI, returned to France and ascended the throne as Louis XVIII. He was succeeded by his younger brother, the former Count of Artois, who became King Charles X. Then followed the last king of France, Louis Philippe. None of these three kings was an improvement on the amiable, indecisive Louis XVI, who failed as a monarch but was devoted to his country, endured his imprisonment with dignity, and went to his death bravely and without bitterness.

The lasting symbol of the French Revolution is the guillotine. The executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, reinforced in literature by Dickens’s image of Madame Defarge sitting and knitting at the foot of this implacable machine, have imprinted this method of inflicting death deep on cultural memory.

Originally, the guillotine was designed to give practical effect to the belief that the purpose of capital punishment was the ending of life rather than the inflicting of pain. Until it took its first victim, in April 1792, condemned prisoners in France had sometimes died horribly; they could be broken on the wheel or torn apart by four horses, each tied to one limb of the victim. More generally, noblemen were beheaded by sword or axe and commoners were hanged. But headsman were clumsy and swords and axes dull, while nooses often strangled slowly while the choking victim danced in the air. The guillotine was meant to be humane and deliver an instant, painless death; its inventor, Dr. Jospeh Guillotin, described its operation: “
The mechanism falls like thunder; the head flies off; blood spurts; the man is no more.” It was also considered more equitable because it was to be used on all condemned people regardless of class. In any case, it had a long life of service. It was used in imperial Germany, the Weimar Republic, and Nazi Germany, where, between 1933 and 1945, sixteen thousand people were guillotined. It remained a form of execution in France until 1977; four years later France abolished the death penalty.

Whether the guillotine was more humane than the axe, the noose, the electric chair, the firing squad, and lethal injection is a medical, as well as a political and moral, question. The most effective resolution would be to let the question fade away by the universal prohibition of state-inflicted death penalties. While societies struggle toward this goal, a second medical or scientific question may be asked: was death by guillotine so instantaneous as to be truly painless? Some believe not. They argue that because the blade, cutting rapidly through the neck and spinal column, had relatively little impact on the head encasing the brain, there may not have been immediate unconsciousness. If this is true, should one believe that some victims were aware of what was happening? Witnesses to guillotining have described blinking eyelids and movement of the eyes, lips, and mouth. As recently as 1956, anatomists experimenting with the severed heads of guillotined prisoners explained this by saying that what appeared to be a head responding to the sound of its name or to the pain of a pinprick on the cheek might only have been a random muscle twitch or an automatic reflex action; that no intelligent awareness was involved. Certainly, the shock of the blow to the spinal column and a sudden, massive drop in cerebral blood pressure must bring a loss of consciousness rapidly, if not instantaneously. But in that flicker of time, was there awareness?

In June 1905, a respected French medical doctor was permitted to experiment with the freshly severed head of a prisoner named Languille. He reported that “
immediately after the decapitation … the spasmodic movements ceased.… It was then that I called out in a strong sharp voice: ‘Languille!’ I saw the eyelids slowly lift up … with an even movement, quite distinct and normal.… Next, Languille’s eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves.… I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me.… After several seconds, the eyelids closed.… I called out again, and once more the eyelids lifted and living eyes fixed themselves on mine with perhaps even more penetration than the first time. Then there was a further closing of the eyelids … [and] no further movement.”

What awareness, if any, a severed head might have is something that Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Georges Danton, Maximilien Robespierre, and tens of thousands of others who died by the guillotine may have discovered. We cannot know.

71
Dissent in Russia, Final Partition of Poland

T
HE
F
RENCH
R
EVOLUTION
had a dramatic impact on Catherine, not only because the empress was horrified by the degradation, humiliation, and violent destruction of the French monarchy but because she feared that revolutionary fervor would spread. Her belief that she must act to protect herself and Russia precipitated a significant reversal in her early liberal thinking about freedom of thought and expression. In the political and military sphere, her fear of what she called the “French poison” resulted in—or was used to justify—a rare event in European history: the complete disappearance of a large, proud nationstate.

In the beginning, as a young woman and new empress, Catherine had been the admiring friend of the
philosophes
. Voltaire and Diderot had acclaimed her as the most liberal sovereign in Europe, the Semiramis of the North. By them and from her reading of Montesquieu, she been taught that the best form of government was benevolent autocracy, informed and guided by the principles of the Enlightenment. In her first years on the throne, she had hoped that she could correct or at least ameliorate the workings of some of the more inefficient and unjust institutions in Russia, among them serfdom. She had summoned the Legislative Commission in 1767 and listened to the complaints and recommendations of different classes of people, including peasants. But then had come the Pugachev rebellion. After this, she still had cordial friendships with various
philosophes
, but she was no longer a disciple. She questioned and often challenged their utopias.

By 1789, after twenty-seven years on the throne, Catherine had achieved some of the liberal goals formulated in her youth. She had helped to create a Russian intelligentsia. Among the nobility, more people attended universities, traveled abroad, spoke foreign languages, and wrote plays, novels, and poetry. Promising young men were sent at state expense to study and acquire knowledge in foreign schools and
universities. Educated men, not born to the nobility, had become senior government officials, poets, writers, doctors, architects, and painters. But then, seeming to call into question her early efforts and goals, came the grim reality of Pugachev, followed, twenty years later, by the events in France.

Catherine had observed with dismay the destruction of the French monarchy and the Old Regime. Every month, French émigrés and refugees arrived in Russia with frightful stories. More than any other European monarch, she felt that the ideology of radical France was also directed at her, and the more radical France became, the more defensive and reactionary were her responses. She now discovered dangers implicit in Enlightenment philosophy. Some responsibility for the excesses of the revolution seemed traceable to the writings of philosophers she had admired. For years, their writing had attacked and undermined respect for authority and religion. Were they not, therefore, at least partly responsible? How had they and she failed to see where this path was leading?

In 1791, she ordered all bookshops to register with the Academy of Sciences their catalogs of available books that were opposed to “religion, decency, and ourselves.” In 1792, she ordered the confiscation of a complete edition of the works of Voltaire. In 1793, she ordered provincial governors to forbid the publication of books that appeared “
likely to corrupt morals, concerned with the government, and, above all, those dealing with the French revolution.” She began to fear the ease with which revolutionary ideas could cross frontiers, and the importation of French newspapers and books was prohibited. In September 1796, the first formal system of censorship during her reign was established. All private printing presses were closed; all books were to be submitted to a censorship office before publication. One of the first to be affected by these new restraints was a young, intellectual nobleman who had risen to a significant position in the imperial administration.

Alexander Radishchev was born in 1749 in Saratov province, the oldest of eleven children of an educated, noble landowner who possessed three thousand serfs. At thirteen, Alexander entered the Corps des Pages in St. Petersburg and served at court. At seventeen, he was among twelve young men chosen to study philosophy and law at the University of Leipzig at state expense; there, he knew Goethe, a fellow student. In
1771, at twenty-two, he returned to Russia, where he served first as a clerk in the offices of the Senate and then on the legal staff of the College of War. In 1775, Radishchev married and took a post in the College of Commerce, presided over by Alexander Vorontsov, a brother of Catherine’s friend Princess Dashkova. Eventually, he became the director of the St. Petersburg Customs House.

During the 1780s, Radishchev began writing a book,
A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow
. In 1790, he printed a few copies on his private home printing press. As required, he submitted a copy to the chief police censor in St. Petersburg. This official glanced briefly at the book’s title, assumed it to be a travelogue, approved it, and returned it to the nobleman in the Customs House. Radishchev then printed six hundred copies anonymously. His timing was unlucky, coming a year after the fall of the Bastille, and while Russia was still at war with Turkey and Sweden.

Radishchev’s
Journey
was not a travelogue. Instead, it was a passionate indictment of the institution of serfdom and a criticism of the government and social structure that permitted serfdom to exist. He began with an emotional appeal: