Notes

Introduction

1.Gregory L. Freeze has challenged this model. On the imperial period, see Freeze, “Handmaiden of the State? The Church in Imperial Russia Reconsidered,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36, no. 1 (1985): 82–102; on the contemporary situation, see Freeze, “Russian Orthodoxy and Politics in the Putin Era,” Task Force on U.S. Policy toward Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia White Paper, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, February 6, 2017, http://carnegieendowment.org/2017/02/09/russian-orthodoxy-and-politics-in-putin-era-pub-67959.

2.Kirill reconsecrated the Cathedral of the Dormition in London and consecrated Holy Trinity Cathedral in Paris. For perspectives on what is at stake, see Andrew Higgens, “In Expanding Russian Influence, Faith Combines With Firepower,” New York Times, September 13, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/14/world/europe/russia-orthodox-church.html; Erasmus, “A New Orthodox Church Next to the Eiffel Tower Boosts Russian Soft Power,” The Economist, December 5, 2016, http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2016/12/ecclesiastical-diplomacy; and Sergei Chapnin, “The Demolition of the Church Legacy of Russian Emigration: How It Is Done,” November 15, 2016, https://www.wheeljournal.com/blog/2016/11/15/sergei-chapnin-the-demolition-of-the-church-legacy-of-russian-emigration-how-it-is-done.

3.According to Robert C. Blitt, the basis for close cooperation between the Russian Orthodox Church and the state was established in national security directives from 2000 and 2008. See Blitt, “Russia’s ‘Orthodox’ Foreign Policy: The Growing Influence of the Russian Orthodox Church in Shaping Russia’s Policies Abroad,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law 33, no. 2 (2011): 363–460.

4.Alberto Melloni, a professor of church history, suggests that there is “strong evidence Putin imposed the meeting of Patriarch Kirill with Pope Francis” (quoted in Victor Gaetan, “Pan-Orthodox Council: Russian Absence Saves Ecumenical Patriarch’s Status—for Now,” National Catholic Register, June 29, 2016, http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/pan-orthodox-council-russias-absence-saves-patriarchate-of-constantinoples). Leonid Bershidsky writes that by signing a joint declaration with Patriarch Kirill, Pope Francis treated the Russian Church “as an independent institution, not an arm of the Putin state and a pillar” of Putin’s regime. “The only thing Pope Francis achieved is a diplomatic success for Putin’s ‘conservatism,’ which he uses to make common cause with extreme right and religious groups throughout the world. He may be naive about this, but Patriarch Kirill and his Kremlin patron are not” (“Pope Francis Handed Putin a Diplomatic Victory,” Bloomberg View, February 13, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-05-15/-who-lost-russia-is-more-than-just-an-academic-question). The Economist reported that Patriarch Kirill could not have met Pope Francis without Putin’s “blessing”: “Mr. Putin has emphasised that Orthodox Christianity is a pillar of Russia’s national identity, appealing to conservative religious values to shore up his rule. When speaking on world affairs, the church is not an independent institution but, to some degree, an extension of the Russian state” (“Did the Pope Just Kiss Putin’s Ring?” The Economist, February 15, 2016, http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21693071-russia-wants-its-people-believe-western-publics-are-not-hostile-their-leaders-pope). See also Mark Woods, “Why Patriarch Kirill Is Really Consecrating Cathedrals in London and Paris,” Christianity Today, October 19, 2016, http://www.christiantoday.com/article/why.patriarch.kirill.is.really.consecrating.cathedrals.in.london.and.paris/98421.htm; and Alexander Baunov, “The Pope and the Patriarch: Russia’s Search for the Right West,” February 15, 2016, http://carnegie.ru/commentary/?fa=62772.

5.The idea for a new Russian Church in Paris was broached in a meeting between President Sarkozy and Patriarch Alexei in 2007 (Blitt, “Russia’s ‘Orthodox’ Foreign Policy,” 417; Vincent Jauvert, “L’Affaire de la cathédrale du Kremlin à Paris,” L’Obs, May 28, 2010, http://globe.blogs.nouvelobs.com/archive/2010/05/28/index.html).

6.Angela Charlton, “Russian Patriarch Blesses New Paris Church, a Putin Project,” Associated Press, December 4, 2016. Charlton characterized the consecration as “primarily a religious event,” but with “strong political overtones.” See also Hélène Combis-Schlumberger, “A Paris, une nouvelle cathédrale … pas très orthodoxe?” France Culture, March 31, 2016 (put online October 12, 2016), https://www.franceculture.fr/architecture/paris-une-nouvelle-cathedrale-pas-tres-orthodoxe.

7.Higgens, “In Expanding Russian Influence, Faith Combines With Firepower”; John Lichfield, “Paris Welcomes Kremlin-funded Russian Orthodox Cathedral—as French Court Tries to Seize Its Assets,” Independent, March 18, 2016, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/sainte-trinite-paris-welcomes-kremlin-funded-russian-orthodox-cathedral-as-french-court-tries-to-a6939601.html.

8.The Diocese of Korsun includes the Russian Orthodox churches of France, Spain, Portugal, and Switzerland that recognize the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate (official website of the Diocese of Korsun, https://www.egliserusse.eu/Quelques-mots-sur-le-diocese-de-Chersonese_a15.html).

9.Combis-Schlumberger, “A Paris, une nouvelle cathédrale.”

10.Ibid.

11.Cited in Lichfield, “Paris Welcomes Kremlin-funded Russian Orthodox Cathedral.”

12.Ibid.

13.On the multivocality of Russian society and the patriarchal church, see Freeze, “Russian Orthodoxy and Politics in the Putin Era”; and Gregory L. Freeze, “The Russian Orthodox Church: Putin Ally or Independent Force?” Religion and Politics, October 10, 2017, https://religionandpolitics.org/2017/10/10/the-russian-orthodox-church-putin-ally-or-independent-force/.

14.July 14, old style.

15.Owen Chadwick, A History of the Popes 1830–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 185.

16.Adrien Dansette suggests that in France, the liberal Catholic opposition to the infallibilist movement was a stronger force than specifically Gallican opposition. See Dansette, Religious History of Modern France, vol. 1: From the Revolution to the Third Republic, trans. John Dingle (New York: Herder and Herder, 1961), 300–305. Jean Maurain notes that even ultramontane bishops were concerned about the growing tendency of clergymen to circumvent their bishops with direct appeals to Rome. See Maurain, La Politique ecclésiastique du Second Empire de 1852 à 1869 (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1930), 809–10.

17.Christopher Clark, “The New Catholicism and the European Culture Wars,” in Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 39.

18.Mgr. [Louis-Victor-Emile] Bougaud, Le Christianisme et les temps presents, vol. 4: L’Église, 2nd ed. (Paris: Poussielgue frères, 1882), 270. Bougaud (1823–88) was vicar general of Orléans (1861–1886) and bishop of Laval (1886–1888). In this volume, Bougaud introduced the “dead and dying” branches cut off from the Roman Catholic Church: the “Greek schism” and Protestantism. The first he dispensed with in a paragraph before spending ninety pages on Protestantism. For Germain Ivanoff-Trinadtzaty, Guettée’s conversion invalidates Bougaud’s claim. See his L’Église russe face à l’Occident (Paris, 1991), 142.

19.Joseph de Maistre formulated a law of schismatic churches: “It is impossible to adduce an instance of a separated church that is not subject to the absolute dominion of the civil power.” He applied this law to the Gallican Church as well as others in The Pope; Considered in His Relations with the Church, Temporal Sovereignties, Separated Churches, and the Cause of Civilization, trans. Rev. Aeneas McD. Dawson (London: C. Dolman, 1850), 50; Du Pape, 2nd ed. (Lyon: Rusand and Paris: Librairie ecclésiastique, 1821), 1:99–100n1. Du Pape was originally published in 1819 and was frequently reprinted thereafter. Citations to the French edition follow the English, separated by a semicolon.

20.William Palmer pointed out the need for reforms in the Russian Church and the differences between the Greeks and Russians when it came to receiving converts. See Palmer, Dissertations on Subjects Relating to the “Orthodox” or “Eastern-Catholic” Communion (London, 1853). This work was also published in Greek (1852–54). It does not appear to have been translated into French, but it was discussed in the French Catholic press immediately after its appearance by the Russian convert to Jesuitism Ivan Gagarin in “Variétés,” L’Univers, April 24, 1853. Gagarin considered the work Protestant in orientation, although the author appeared almost Roman Catholic at points. On Palmer, see Robin Wheeler, Palmer’s Pilgrimage: The Life of William Palmer of Magdalen (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006). Decades prior to the Palmer affair, de Maistre wrote that it was “erroneous” to confound the Russian and Greek Churches, since the Russian Church was as isolated from the Greek patriarch as from the pope and all schismatic churches inevitably become national churches. See de Maistre, Pope, 50; Du Pape, 1:99–100n1.

21.Christopher Birchall, Embassy, Emigrants, and Englishmen: The Three Hundred Year History of a Russian Orthodox Church in London (Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Publications, 2014), 113–20.

22.Ibid., 117.

23.Ibid., 113–14.

24.Ibid., 117. When Stephen Hatherly converted in January 1856, Tolstoy hoped he would be ordained as an Orthodox priest and establish mission churches with services in English.

25.Despite these plans, only in Japan did the Russian Orthodox Church really become a center of missions (ibid., 120–21).

26.Mgr. Dupanloup, “Lettre de Mgr. L’Éveque d’Orléans,” quoted in Jean-Louis de Rozaven, De la réunion de l’Église russe avec l’Église catholique (Paris, 1864), xviii.

27.“All through the 1850s the French government and the French Church were united in Catholic policy. All through the 1860s the French government and the French Church were at loggerheads with each other, partly because the Emperor let down the Pope in 1859–60, and even more because the realization of what the Emperor was like enabled the old oppositions to reappear” (Chadwick, History of the Popes, 160).

28.Guettée wrote to Prince Augustin Golitsyn, who had embraced Roman Catholicism: “I have my reasons for being purely and simply catholic. In the creed I read that the Church is catholic and apostolic; I do not read that it must be Roman. If by this word one meant that the western Church has for its first bishop that of Rome, I would have nothing to say; one could be at the same time catholic and Roman; but as one can deserve today this last title only by submitting to new dogmas and to all the autocratic pretensions of the court of Rome, I do not want to be Roman, because I could not be [Roman] without ceasing to be catholic. I would say then, as St. Optatus of Milevis: ‘Christian is my name, catholic is my surname;’ and I would add with this great theologian that I am catholic because I believe in the complete revealed doctrine without omission and without addition. You are too much a theologian, monsieur prince, not to understand that it is impossible to be apostate when one always professed and still professes this doctrine which is that of the Church Fathers.” See René-François Guettée, Lettre à M. le prince Augustin Galitzin (Paris, 1862), 10. In his memoirs, Guettée explained that he had always been orthodox except for having accepted “the so-called divine authority of the pope” as it was taught in the church into which he was born. Acceptance of this error led to other errors of fact. He described himself as a victim of “ultramontane eccentricities” until his examination of the papal system revealed all the errors connected with it. “On all other questions, the teaching of the great western theologians was orthodox, and I was orthodox with them.” See Guettée, Souvenirs d’un prêtre romain devenu prêtre orthodoxe (Paris, 1889), 355.

29.Sometimes Russians called it “Cross Street,” an aptly named site for their church. The church’s address is 12 Rue Daru.

30.For a comprehensive parish history, see Nicolas Ross, Saint-Alexandre sur-Seine: L’Église russe de Paris et ses fidèles des origins à 1917 (Paris: Cerf, 2005); and Ross, Saint-Alexandre-Nevski: Centre spirituel de l’émigration russe, 1918–1939 (Paris: Syrtes, 2011).

31.For example, Lynn Marshall Case argued that the French press and public opinion were not aligned regarding support for the Crimean War and that the conflict “was not caused by the pressure of French public opinion” in French Opinion on War and Diplomacy during the Second Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1954), 49. Nonetheless, when it comes to policy making, the opinions that are publicly expressed are the ones that matter most, even if they represent the view of a minority. See John Howes Gleason, The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain: A Study of the Interaction of Policy and Opinion (New York: Octagon Books, 1972), 279.

32.See Birchall’s discussion of the “priest and diplomat” Iakov Smirnov, embassy priest in London from 1780 to 1840, and his successor, Popov, in Embassy, Emigrants, and Englishmen, 27–48, 57–58, 70–80. Oderova notes that Smirnov represented a transition in the role of the clergy abroad because during a break in Anglo-Russian relations in 1800–1801, he officially became a chargé d’affaires in England, setting a precedent sometimes followed later. In France, Oderova links the establishment of a permanent embassy church in 1816 to Alexander I’s vision of himself as the savior and leader of the Christian world and the defender of legitimacy. Russia’s first embassy chaplain in Paris served from 1724 to 1727. A permanent embassy chaplaincy was established in 1742, although there was not a fixed location and there were disruptions, as during the Napoleonic period. See M. V. Oderova, “Pravoslavnaia tserkov' pri russkom posol'stve v Parizhe (1816–1917 gg.)” (Candidate of Sciences diss., University of Moscow, 2009), 28–29, 34, 54–55; Ross, Saint-Alexandre sur-Seine, 8, 27–37.

33.Oderova, “Pravoslavnaia tserkov' pri russkom posol'stve,” 21–22, 79, 99–101; M. V. Oderova, “Protoierei I. V. Vasil'ev: Nastoiatel' pravoslavnoi tserkvi pri russkom posol'stve v Parizhe,” Istoriia, part 8, no. 2 (2008): 56–57.

34.Oderova, “Pravoslavnaia tserkov' pri russkom posol'stve,” 61–62.

35.On the “Civil Constitution of the Clergy” as authored by Gallicans, see Emmanuel Tawil, “Civil Religion in France: The Gallican Hypothesis,” George Washington International Law Review 41, no. 4 (2010): 827–38.

36.My definition of “Russophobia” is narrow, referring to intense vilification of Russia as an existential threat to western European nations or Christian civilization. J. S. Mill and Richard Cobden both used the term “Russophobia” in 1836 to criticize English statesmen like David Urquhart who favored aggressive policies against Russia. See “Russophobia,” Oxford English Dictionary; and Pierre Larousse, “Richard Cobden,” Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle (Paris, 1866–1877), 4:495.

37.Cited from an unpublished letter in Oderova, “Pravoslavnaia tserkov' pri russkom posol'stve,” 46.

38.Nadieszda Kizenko, “ ‘Vitriny samoderzhaviia’: Russkaia tserkovnaia arkhitektura za granitsei,” in Petr Andreevich Zaionchkovskii: Sbornik statei i vospominanii k stoletiiu istorika, ed. L. G. Zakharova, S. V. Mironenko, and T. Emmons (Moscow, 2008), 451. As Kizenko notes, outside the empire, Russian churches “propagandized the Russian spirit and Orthodox faith in locations where both these phenomena were perceived as foreign and exotic” (451). Oderova adopts Kizenko’s analysis in her dissertation, “Pravoslavnaia tserkov' pri russkom posol'stve.” For a survey of Russian church-building efforts around the globe, also emphasizing the imperial ideological significance of the churches, see Piotr Paszkiewicz, “In the Service of the Russian Empire 1721–1917: Functions and Ideological Contents of Russian Sacral Architecture in the Western Borderlands of the Empire and Beyond Its Confines (Summary),” in Paszkiewicz, W Słuz˙bie imperium Rosyjskiego 1721–1917: Funkcje i tres´ci ideowe rosyjskiej architektury sakralnej na zachodnich rubiez˙ach cesarstwa i poza jego granicami (Warsaw: Instytut Sztuki Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1999), 289–324. Paszkiewicz tends to link Russian church-building efforts to broader Russian goals of aggrandizement.

39.“Public nationalism” in post–Crimean War Russia took religious, secular, imperial, Panslav, Great Russian, statist, and populist forms. See Olga Maiorova, From the Shadow of Empire: Defining the Russian Nation through Cultural Mythology, 1855–1870 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 6–12.

40.C. S. Phillips writes that proclamation of the dogma represented “in fact, a direct and deliberate exercise of that ‘infallibility’ which was to be formally sanctioned by the Vatican Council of 1870.” See Phillips, The Church in France, 1848–1907 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1936), 55.

41.Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 119.

42.Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 297.

43.Ibid., 298–99.

44.On the controversies surrounding the Vatican Council and papal infallibility, see Chadwick, History of the Popes, 181–214.

45.Maurain, Politique ecclésiastique du Second Empire, 809–10.

46.“Decrees of the First Vatican Council,” Papal Encyclicals Online, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/ecum20.htm.

47.Phillips, Church in France, 158–65.

48.Stephen K. Batalden, Kathleen Cann, and John Dean, eds., Sowing the Word: The Cultural Impact of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 1804–2004 (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2004).

49.Batalden, “The BFBS Petersburg Agency and Russian Biblical Translation, 1856–1875,” in ibid., 169–70, 179, 182.

50.Birchall, Embassy, Emigrants, and Englishmen, 96.

51.Alexander II granted Neale a gift of £100 and Filaret sent him icons (ibid., 96–101).

52.For a treatment of papal primacy and Greek Orthodox theological responses to Vatican I, see Maximos Vgenopoulos, Primacy in the Church from Vatican I to Vatican II: An Orthodox Perspective (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013). For a recent study on Roman Catholic-Orthodox debates about papal primacy, see A. Edward Siecienski, The Papacy and the Orthodox: Sources and History of a Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

53.On another “trophy” convert, see D. Oliver Herbel, “A Catholic, Presbyterian, and Orthodox Journey: The Changing Church Affiliation and Enduring Social Vision of Nicholas Bjerring,” Zeitschrift für neuere Theologiegeschichte/Journal for the History of Modern Theology 14, no. 1 (2007): 52.

1. Roman Catholicism, Russian Orthodoxy, and Russophobia in France, 1830–1856

1.For an overview of European perceptions of Russia covering a span of five hundred years, see Iver B. Neumann, “Russia as Europe’s Other,” Journal of Area Studies 6, no. 12 (1998): 26–73. Common dichotomies drawn between Europe and Russia include civilized-barbarian, European-Asiatic, and democratic-totalitarian (ibid., 9).

2.See Catherine Evtuhov’s discussion of François Guizot’s influence on Ivan Kireevsky: “Guizot in Russia,” in The Cultural Gradient: The Transmission of Ideas in Europe, 1789–1991, ed. Catherine Evtuhov and Stephen Kotkin (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 55–72.

3.See Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, “Introduction: The European Culture Wars,” in Culture Wars, 3.

4.Andrzej Walicki, “The Religious Westernism of Ivan Gagarin,” in Cultural Gradient, 33. Walicki takes this characterization from Vladimir Soloviev’s periodization in his article on Westernism (“Zapadniki, zapadnichestvo”) in the Brokgauz-Efron Encyclopedia.

5.Marquis de Custine, Russia (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1854), 497.

6.W. J. Sparrow-Simpson, French Catholics in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1918), 15, 45–46.

7.Ibid., 18, 24–25. The three founders of democratic ultramontanism published one of Europe’s first Catholic newspapers, L’Avenir (1830–1831). Lamennais, a Catholic priest, sought to reconcile Catholicism and democracy, but opposed by the French hierarchy and the pope, he broke with the church and became an influential Christian socialist.

8.Philip Spencer, Politics of Belief in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Howard Fertig, 1973), 82, 85–88. Spencer considers Napoleon the “obstetrician” of ultramontanism.

9.Ibid., 145–46.

10.Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), 390–92; on Veuillot, see Phillips, Church in France, 13–16, 65–73; Dansette, Religious History of Modern France, 1:279–82.

11.Spencer, Politics of Belief, 145. On the struggle between Sibour, Veuillot, and Pius IX over L’Univers, see Phillips, Church in France, 65–70.

12.Spencer, Politics of Belief, 147–48. Liberal Catholics were not liberals in the theological sense. They were “as ready as any Intransigents to stamp on independent examination of Church history or biblical texts” (ibid., 152). The liberal Catholics dominated the academies and their principal organ was La Correspondant.

13.Geoffrey Cubitt, The Jesuit Myth: Conspiracy Theory and Politics in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 42.

14.Ibid., 41.

15.The “liberal” and “ultramontane” labels were moving targets in the nineteenth century, but in the post-1848 period, as a rule, liberal Catholics were more amenable to “modern civil and political liberties” than ultramontanes. Transigent ultramontanes accepted state prerogatives in the temporal sphere, while intransigent ultramontanes were more theocratic and hostile toward the modern state than transigents. See Vincent Viaene, Belgium and the Holy See from Gregory XVI to Pius IX, 1831–1859: Catholic Revival, Society, and Politics in 19th-Century Europe, as cited in Emiel Lambert, ed., The Black International/L’Internationale noire (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2002), 11–12.

16.In the aftermath of the Paris Commune, Pius IX said he feared the Communards less than “this Catholic liberalism, which is our true scourge” (Clark, “New Catholicism and the European Culture Wars,” 39). Clark cites G. G. Franco, Appunti storici sopra il Concilio Vaticano (1870), ed. G. Martina (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1972).

17.On ideas about Russia in early modern Europe, see Marshall T. Poe, “A People Born to Slavery”: Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476–1748 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). Poe suggests, on the basis of his review of about ninety descriptions of Russia published between 1549 and 1700, that Europeans had an exaggerated sense of tsarist authority and the slavishness of Russian society. He does not see these ideas as stemming from a Russophobic orientation but from “sometimes confused and inaccurate observations” (ibid., 116).

18.See Orlando Figes, The Crimean War: A History (New York: Picador, 2010), 4–5, 61–99. “Russophobia … was arguably the most important element in Britain’s outlook on the world abroad” (ibid., 70).

19.The purported “Testament” was supposedly discovered and obtained by the Chevalier d’Eon, a French secret agent sent to Russia during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). See Dimitry V. Lehovich, “The Testament of Peter the Great,” American Slavic and East European Review 7, no. 2 (1948): 111–24; Raymond T. McNally, “The Origins of Russophobia in France: 1812–1830,” Slavic Review 17, no. 2 (April 1958): 173–89; Albert Resis, “Russophobia and the ‘Testament’ of Peter the Great, 1812–1980,” Slavic Review 44, no. 4 (1985): 681–93; and Hugh Ragsdale, “Russian Projects of Conquest in the Eighteenth Century,” in Imperial Russian Foreign Policy, ed. Hugh Ragsdale and Valerii Nikolaevich Ponomarev (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 75–102. Translations of the “Testament” are included in Lehovich and Ragsdale. The “Testament” was also important for the emergence and proliferation of Russophobia in Britain. On English Russophobia, see Gleason, Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain; and Figes, Crimean War, 70–72.

20.M. L[esur, Charles Louis]. Des progrès de la puissance russe depuis son origine jusqu’au commencement du XIX siècle (Paris, 1812). For the introduction to and summary of the “Testament,” see 176–79.

21.Ibid., 178.

22.Ibid., 90, 386.

23.Ibid., 89.

24.Ibid., 90–91, 436.

25.Ibid., 435.

26.Ibid., 435.

27.Michel Cadot, La Russie dans la vie intellectuelle française 1839–1856 (Paris: Fayard, 1967), 9–10. By the late 1820s Russophobia was gaining traction in England, where some pamphleteers began calling for a preventive war against Russia and the partitioning of the Russian Empire. One work was by Lieutenant-Colonel George de Lacy Evans, On the Designs of Russia (London, 1828), translated into French by Prosper Gauja as Des projéts de la Russie (Paris, 1828). De Lacy Evans was the first to argue Russia was a threat to India (Figes, Crimean War, 49, 73–74).

28.Michael Boro Petrovich, The Emergence of Russian Panslavism 1856–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), 172–73.

29.On anti-Russian indignation in Britain, Figes writes: “Sympathies for Turkey, fears for India—nothing fuelled Russophobia in Britain as intensely as the Polish cause” (Crimean War, 78).

30.Ibid., 84.

31.Cadot, Russie dans la vie intellectuelle française, 10–11. McNally suggested that Russophobia was “merely reburnished after the Polish Revolution of 1830,” though the “tenor of Russophobia changed radically” after Nicholas I ascended to the throne (“Origins of Russophobia in France,” 183, 188).

32.Hans Kohn, Pan-Slavism: Its History and Ideology, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1953), 75–80, 121–22.

33.Ibid., 47.

34.Andrzei Walicki, Russia, Poland, and Universal Regeneration: Studies on Russian and Polish Thought of the Romantic Epoch (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1991), 159. Walicki cites Adam Gurowski, La Cause polonaise sous son véritable point de vue (Paris, 1831), 31.

35.Adam Gurowski, Russland und die Civilisation (Merseburg, 1833; published in French as La Civilisation et la Russie in St. Petersburg, 1840) and La Verité sur la Russie et sur la revolte des provinces polonaises (Paris, 1834); Russland und die Civilisation “excited much discussion on the Continent” (Figes, Crimean War, 89).

36.Walicki, Russia, Poland, and Universal Regeneration, 160–65.

37.Ibid., 169, 173, 178. Gurowski also published Le Panslawisme (Florence, 1848).

38.On the rejoining of Uniates to the Russian Church, see Theodore R. Weeks, “Between Rome and Tsargrad: The Uniate Church in Imperial Russia,” in Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia, ed. Robert P. Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 70–91; and Chadwick, History of the Popes, 413–14.

39.The German original appeared as Augustin Theiner, Die neuesten Zustände der katholischen Kirche beider Ritus in Poland und Russland seit Katharina II. bis auf unsere Tage (Augsburg, 1841). The French translation of Theiner included a preface by Montalembert: Vicissitudes de l’Église catholique des deux rites en Pologne et en Russie, 2 vols. (Paris, 1843). Cadot does not discuss either Horrer’s or Theiner’s work in detail, but he mentions their importance and places them within a broader framework of French public opinion on the Polish question (Russie dans la vie intellectuelle française, 461–65).

40.Cadot, Russie dans la vie intellectuelle française, 10.

41.Figes, Crimean War, 88.

42.Horrer’s review of Custine was one of the earliest and appeared in Correspondant, August 15, 1843 (Cadot, Russie dans la vie intellectuelle française, 243).

43.Marie Joseph Horrer, Persécution et souffrances de l’Église catholique en Russie (Paris, 1842), 3–4.

44.Ibid., 59–60.

45.Ibid., 1, 3.

46.De Maistre, Pope, 50; Du Pape, 1:99–100n1. Du Pape (1819) was written in response to Alexander Sturdza. Ideologist for Alexander I, Sturdza was one of the architects of the Holy Alliance, and Alexander I paid him to write an important policy document—Considerations sur la doctrine et l’esprit de l’Église orthodoxe (Stuttgart, 1816)—“to justify before western public opinion the religious policy [the Holy Alliance] of St. Petersburg.” Although he did not have much success publishing in western venues, Sturdza may rightfully deserve to be called Russia’s first Orthodox publicist. See Stella Ghervas, Alexandre Stourdza (1791–1854): Un intellectuel orthodoxe face à l’Occident (Geneva: Éditions Suzanne Hurter, 1999), 30, 62–65; and Ghervas, Réinventer la tradition: Alexandre Stourdza et l’Europe de la Sainte-Alliance (Paris: Champion, 2008).

47.Horrer, Persécution et souffrances, 16–17.

48.Ibid., 60–63. Horrer also served on the editorial board of L’Univers. See Eugène Veuillot, L’Église, la France et le schisme en Orient (Paris, 1855), 87.

49.One can practically choose any page at random and find one of these themes (Custine, Russia, especially 50, 264). When describing St. Basil’s in Moscow, Custine refers to the “minarets” that rise above the structure. “The effect of the whole dazzles the eye, and fascinates the imagination. Surely, the land in which such a building is called a house of prayer is not Europe; it must be India, Persia, or China!—and the men who go to worship God in this box of confectionary work, can they be Christians?” (ibid., 284).

50.Ibid., 187, 273, 495–96. See also the discussion of Custine in Veuillot, L’Église, la France et le schisme en Orient, 92.

51.Marquis Astolphe de Custine, La Russie en 1839 (Paris, 1843), 4:188.

52.Prince K was Peter Kozlovsky, who shared Custine’s view that “Russia’s barbarity” was tied to its “deviant religious faith.” See Robin Buss, “Introduction,” in Letters from Russia, by Marquis de Custine (New York: Penguin, 2014), Google e-book, no page. Elena Pavlovna Romanova, Nicholas I’s sister-in-law, received Kozlovsky and Custine at her salon. See Marina Soroka and Charles Ruud, Becoming a Romanov: Grand Duchess Elena of Russia and Her World (1807–1873) (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 144–49.

53.Custine, Russia, 28.

54.Ibid., 273.

55.Ibid., 193–94. While Custine argued that the Russian Church was enslaved to the temporal power, he followed Pierre Charles Levesque and clarified that Peter “did not declare himself head of the church, but he virtually became so by means of the oath which the members of the new ecclesiastical college took. It was to this effect: ‘I swear to be a faithful and obedient servant and subject of my natural and true sovereign… . I acknowledge him to be the supreme judge of this spiritual college.’ ” Levesque, as cited in Custine, Russia, 272–73. Levesque suggested that the abolition of the patriarchate took away an important “barrier” between the people and the emperor, strengthening Russian despotism. See Levesque, Histoire de Russie: Tirée des chroniques originales, des pièces authentiques, and des meilleurs historiens de la nation, new ed. 8 vols. (Hamburg, 1800), 5:94–96. First published in 1782, Levesque’s work saw its fourth edition by 1812.

56.Custine, Russia, 472.

57.The church music had an “absolutely celestial” effect, causing him to forget about despotism momentarily (ibid., 91). Later he wrote: “Sometimes I feel ready to participate in the superstition of this people. Enthusiasm becomes contagious when it is, or appears to be, general; but the moment the symptoms lay hold of me, I think of Siberia, that indispensable auxiliary of Muscovite civilization, and immediately I recover my calmness and independence” (ibid., 239).

58.Ibid., 461–62. See also 496–98.

59.Montalembert, “Avant-propos” to Vicissitudes de l’Église catholique, by Theiner, ii–iii.

60.Ibid., vii. My emphasis.

61.Theiner, Vicissitudes de l’Église catholique, xviii–xxiii; Montalembert, “Avant-propos” (ibid., i–iii).

62.Theiner, Die Staatskirche Russlands im Jahre 1839 nach den neuesten Synodalberichten (Schaffhausen, 1844); translated into French as L’Église schismatique russe, d’après les relations récentes du prétendu Saint-synod (Paris, 1846).

63.The same goes for Custine (Cadot, Russie dans la vie intellectuelle française, 240, 242).

64.L’Église schismatique russe was based on the 1836–1839 reports of the over-procurator of the Holy Synod, Protasov, to Nicholas I. It purported, as anti-Orthodox polemicists liked to claim, to describe the conditions of the Russian Church based not on personal opinions but on “impartial” readings of Russian sources. Adding to its value as a bible of anti-Orthodoxy, Theiner’s work cited Protasov at length and included translations of twelve pieces of “documentary evidence” to support Theiner’s stance on the Russian Church. The documents included Peter I’s letter to the patriarch of Constantinople (seeking approval for the creation of the Holy Synod), the patriarch’s letter to the Holy Synod (in response), and tables from Protasov’s reports with statistics on the Russian population and the numbers of churches, monasteries, clergy, and conversions in Russia. Perhaps because Theiner opposed the Jesuits and papal infallibility and adopted such a harsh tone toward Russia, the Jesuit convert Ivan Gagarin later claimed that Theiner’s judgments lacked merit and that the only value of his work was the inclusion of these documents. See Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin, review of Tableau d’une Église nationale d’après un pope russe, by Abbé Delière, Études religieuses, historiques et littéraires 7 (1862): 686. On Theiner, who released a few too many documents that he found in the Vatican archives and may not have reconciled himself to the decisions of the Vatican Council, see Klemens Löffler, “Augustin Theiner,” The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton, 1912), retrieved from New Advent, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14565b.htm.

65.Luquet, “Aux évêques de Russie,” in L’Église schismatique russe, by Theiner, xi, xiii. One pet theme of Roman Catholic polemicists was to cull phrases from the eastern liturgy that appeared to corroborate the idea that the Orthodox church, in its “primitive doctrines,” recognized the special status of the see of Peter as the center of unity in the church. Luquet repeats some of these ideas in his letter to the Russian bishops (ibid., xlvii–lii).

66.Ibid., cxl–cxli.

67.Ibid., cxliv.

68.Ibid., cxlv.

69.On subordination to temporal power as divine punishment, see especially Theiner, L’Église schismatique russe, 12.

70.See Horrer, Persécution et souffrances, 6, 8–15;

71.Theiner, L’Église schismatique russe, 1–2.

72.Ibid., 159.

73.Ibid., 66.

74.Ibid., 260.

75.Ibid., 102.

76.Ibid., 102.

77.Ibid., 88.

78.Ibid., 95. Using statistical tables from the Holy Synod’s reports for 1837, he argued that the material conditions are “infinitely miserable” for white clergy in the towns and “insupportable” for rural priests. He linked the material poverty of the clergy to their widespread immorality (ibid., 123–24, 135–37).

79.Ibid., 208. Theiner noted that the heresies in Russia resembled those that ravaged the Greek Church in the first centuries,” adding that “the Asiatic churches have always produced” schisms and heresies “in abundance.”

80.Ibid., 316.

81.Revelations of Russia is cited and incorrectly attributed to Haxthausen in Just-Jean-Étienne Roy, Les Français en Russie: Souvenirs de la campagne de 1812 et de deux ans de captivité en Russie (Tours, 1856). Roy also drew on Custine. The Caesaropapist despot-slave narrative is pronounced in this work.

82.Pierre Larousse, “Robert (Cyprien),” Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, 13:1253.

83.Charles Frederick Henningsen, Revelations of Russia or the Emperor Nicholas and His Empire in 1844. By One Who Has Seen and Describes, 2 vols. (London, 1844). Translated into French as Révélations sur la Russie, 3 vols. (Paris, 1845). Certain peculiarities of the French version are suggestive. Henningsen used the spelling “tsar,” while the French defaulted to the “czar” spelling. While Henningsen’s picture of the Russian clergy was not flattering, a detailed table of contents in the French edition supplies the heading “enslavement of the clergy” (Révélations sur la Russie, 2:326). These changes suggest that by the mid-1840s there were some established categories for thinking about Russian power and about the Russian Church.

84.Kohn, Pan-Slavism, 47; Cyprien Robert, “Les Deux Panslavismes,” Revue des deux mondes, new series, 16 (October–December 1846): 452–83.

85.Cyprien Robert, “Le Monde gréco-slave,” Revue des deux mondes, new series, 9 (January–March 1845): 444, 450.

86.Henningsen, Revelations of Russia, 1:298–300.

87.Ibid., 299–300. Henningsen attributed the emperor’s headship over the church to Peter I. “Peter utterly abolished the patriarchal office, and declared himself the head of the church” (ibid., 320).

88.Ibid., 301–10. Montalembert also put the number of Uniates at three million (“Avant-propos,” iv–v).

89.Henningsen, Revelations of Russia, 1:310–11.

90.Ibid., 315–16.

91.Ibid., 316–19. Robert added only four explanatory footnotes to the chapter on Russia’s national church. One was to dispute the claim that the persecution of the Jews (which he considered administrative and fiscal) under Nicholas was greater than the religious persecution of the Catholics. Another was to correct Henningsen’s mistaken idea that the Greek Church accepts the doctrine of predestination. Incidentally, Robert also supplied critical comments to a French version of the “Testament” of Peter I. See Cyprien Robert, ed., Testament de Pierre le Grand, ou Plan de domination européenne, laissé par lui à ses descendants et successeurs au trone de Russie, déposé dans les archives du Palais de Péterhoff, prés Saint-Pétersbourg (Paris, 1860). It contains mid-nineteenth-century documents concerning Russia’s aims and ambitions in Europe.

92.Henningsen used the language of “caste” to describe the white clergy, whom he also portrayed as “corrupt, ignorant, and debauched,” resorting to the most “unscrupulous” methods to earn a living. The upper ranks of the clergy, however, he described as having some pious men “of considerable erudition and learning.” His descriptions of Russian religious architecture and art presented motifs that were also found in Custine, and that were later echoed in the French press about the Russian church in Paris. Russian churches were picturesque with their “mosque-like domes” and “semi-Asiatic architecture” (Henningsen, Revelations of Russia, 1:323–27).

93.Mother Makrena was subsequently unmasked as a fraud. See Roman Koropeskyj, Adam Mickiewicz: The Life of a Romantic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 380. Figes accepts the story as authentic. In any case, the story contributed to anti-Russian feeling in both France and England in the years just prior to the Crimean War (Figes, Crimean War, 85–86).

94.“Plutôt mille fois le Turc ou le Tartar, que le Grec ou le Russe!” Luther’s rendition was: “A thousand times better the Turk or the Tartar than the mass.” See “Correspondance particulière de l’Univers,” L’Univers, August 23, 1846. The subheading reads: “On the preservation of Turkey. How we understand it, and in what manner it is beneficial to Catholicism.” The editorial introduction and the text of the letter both show that the Constantinople correspondent’s ideas were considered controversial among Catholics. The Veuillot brothers continued to trumpet the theme that Turkey was preferable to Russia in subsequent years, as did the ultramontanist editor (Jean-Baptiste-Victor Coquille) of Le Monde.

95.R. C. Lane, “The Reception of F. I. Tyutchev’s Political Articles in Russia and Abroad, 1844–1858,” European Studies Review 1, no. 3 (1971): 228.

96.Cadot, Russie dans la vie intellectuelle française, 376–77; Lane, “Tyutchev’s Political Articles,” 205–31.

97.Figes, Crimean War, xxii–xxiii.

98.See, for example, Prosper Fleury de Villecardet, “France et panslavisme” (Senlis, 1849).

99.V. de Mars, “Histoire politique: Chronique de la quinzaine. 14 juin 1849,” Revue des deux mondes, new period, 2 (April–June 1849): 1052–56.

100.Fr[anz] de Champagny, “De la question slave,” Ami de la religion, January 13, 1850, 169–70.

101.A. V. Myrikova, F. I. Tiutchev: Osobennosti politicheskogo diskursa (Moscow: Izdatel' Borob'ev A.V., 2003), 26.

102.Ibid., 28–29. Tiutchev was working on a treatise, Rossiia i zapad (Russia and the West). His first political article was a letter to the editor (Kolb) of Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung published in the March 21, 1844, issue. His second article, “La Russie et la révolution,” was not widely distributed but was excerpted by the French diplomat Paul de Bourgoing in Politique et moyens d’action de la Russie (Paris, 1849) and discussed in Mars, “Histoire politique,” 1053–56. Bourgoing was actually trying to dismiss Russophobic ideas. He portrayed Tiutchev as full of Panslav zeal but Emperor Nicholas I as committed to peace and the Concert of Europe.

103.Fyodor I. Tiutchev, “La Russie et la révolution,” as cited in W. Bruce Lincoln, Nicholas I: Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1989), 251.

104.Mars, “Histoire politique,” 1054–55.

105.Significantly, Tiutchev served as an adviser to Foreign Minister Alexander Gorchakov from 1857 to 1873 (Myrikova, F. I. Tiutchev, 8).

106.The Russian emperor sought better relations in part as a prerequisite for a potential marriage of his daughter Olga to a Hapsburg (Soroka and Ruud, Becoming a Romanov, 176).

107.The pope sought freedom of worship for Catholics and Uniates, their freedom to communicate directly with Rome, restoration of confiscated property, reversal of decrees on mixed marriages, and permission for the Holy See to have a representative in Russia. See Elena Astafieva, “Le Concordat de 1847 entre l’Empire russe et le Saint-Siège: Origines, contenu et suites,” in Le Droit ecclésiastique en Europe et à ses marges (XVIIIe–XXe siècles), ed. Brigitte Basdevant-Gaudemet and François Jankowiak (Leuven: Peeters, 2009), 52–53.

108.The concordat did not solve the most pressing problems, which remained “insoluble” because they involved Orthodox canon law (ibid., 56).

109.“Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs, 1848,” Orthodox Christian Information Center, http://orthodoxinfo.com/ecumenism/encyc_1848.aspx; on Khomiakov’s response, see Edward Every, “Khomiakoff and the Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs in 1848,” Sobornost', series 3, no. 3 (1948): 102–4.

110.On the relationship between the revolutions and Russophobia, see Figes, Crimean War, 92–99.

111.Myrikova, F. I. Tiutchev, 27; Chadwick, History of the Popes, 85–91.

112.Tiutchev, “La Papauté et la question romaine au point de vue de Saint-Petersbourg,” Revue des deux mondes, new period, 5 (January–March 1850): 117–33, 124.

113.Myrikova, F. I. Tiutchev, 50, 152.

114.Tiutchev, “La Papauté,” 122–23, 127.

115.Ibid., 133.

116.Ibid., 133.

117.See Kohn, Pan-Slavism, 150–51; and Myrikova, F. I. Tiutchev, 150–58.

118.Tiutchev, “La Papauté, 117. On Laurentie as the author of these opening remarks, see Lane, “Tyutchev’s Political Articles,” 213–14.

119.Laurentie, preface to Tiutchev, “La Papauté,” 117.

120.Ibid., 118.

121.Ibid., 118.

122.Ibid., 118. My emphasis.

123.Ibid., 118.

124.Myrikova, F. I. Tiutchev, 26–27.

125.Lane, “Tyutchev’s Political Articles,” 213. As a result of the reception of his articles published in the West, Tiutchev abandoned his work on Rossiia i zapad (Myrikova, F. I. Tiutchev, 28–29).

126.Cadot, Russie dans la vie intellectuelle française, 379.

127.Cadot says that Tiutchev’s piece resonated with some legitimist papers, but he does not cite any specifically (ibid., 378).

128.I. V. Vasiliev to K. S. Serbinovich, June 4/16, 1850, in Iosif Vasil'evich Vasil'ev, Parizhskiia pis'ma protoiereia Iosifa Vasil'evicha Vasil'eva k ober-prokuroram Sviateishago Sinoda i drugim litsam s 1846 po 1867 gg., ed. L. K. Brodskii (Petrograd, 1914), 134.

129.Ibid., 134.

130.Ibid., 134. It is not clear whether Vasiliev knew that Laurentie was responsible for having Tiutchev’s article published or for writing the editorial introduction. On Laurentie’s role, see Cadot, Russie dans la vie intellectuelle française, 379.

131.On the reactions to Tiutchev, see Cadot, Russie dans la vie intellectuelle française, 376–81; Lane, “Tyutchev’s Political Articles.”

132.On his outlook toward Russia, see Pierre-Sébastien Laurentie, Souvenirs inédits publiés par son petit-fils J. Laurentie (Paris, n.d.), 193–212.

133.Pierre-Sébastien Laurentie, La Papauté: Réponse à M. de Tutcheff, conseiller de Sa Majesté l’Empereur de Russie (Paris, 1852), 6. Laurentie drew heavily on de Maistre, a writer lacking Russophobic vitriol but who called the eastern bishops “sad playthings of the temporal authority that commands them as it commands soldiers.” See Joseph de Maistre, “Lettre à une dame russe sur la nature et les effets du schisme” (1810), cited in Laurentie, Papauté, 108. A decade later, with emancipation of the serfs in view, Laurentie pointed out that the Russian Church was not a force that could guide the emancipated peasants in the proper use of liberty because the Russian Church and clergy were serfs. See Pierre-Sébastien Laurentie, Le Pape et le Czar (Paris, 1862), 10, 19–20.

134.Aleksei S. Khomiakov, Quelques mots d’un chrétien orthodoxe sur les communions occidentales, à l’occasion d’un article de M. Laurentie (Paris, 1853), 11–12; reprinted in A.-S. Khomiakoff, L’Église latine et le protestantisme au point de vue de l’Église d’Orient (Lausanne, 1872), 3–88. Khomiakov’s brochure was also discussed in the “Chronique de la quinzaine. 30 novembre 1853,” Revue des deux mondes, new period, 2nd series, 4 (October–December 1853): 1031.

135.[Andrei Nikolaevich Murav'ev], Question religieuse d’Orient et d’Occident: Parole de l’orthodoxie catholique au catholicisme romain (Paris, 1853). Muraviev discussed the temporal power of the papacy as an abuse and affirmed that Peter I’s creation of a permanent council in place of a patriarch was canonical (ibid., 28–38, especially 38). Neale reprinted parts of this work in a collection of documents intended to counter Roman Catholic portrayals of the Eastern Church. See John Mason Neale, ed. and trans., Voices from the East: Documents on the Present State and Working of the Oriental Church (London, 1859).

136.Alexander Popovitsky, introduction to Question religieuse d’Orient et d’Occident, by Murav’ev, 3.

137.Ibid., 3–4.

138.Ibid., 4.

139.De Maistre had called on Catholic writers to use the designation “Photian” when writing about the eastern churches as a continual reminder of their Protestant origins. He argued that Photius, Luther, and Calvin were all born in unity with the church, until they protested and fell into schism. De Maistre explained why the designations “Greek,” “Russian,” “Orthodox,” or “Eastern” (orientale) were all problematic (Pope, 310–14; Du Pape, 180–86). Laurentie followed de Maistre. In response, Khomiakov argued that Protestantism had its origins in “Romanism,” when the local church of Rome elevated itself above the universal church (Quelques mots d’un chrétien orthodoxe, 26–27).

140.Muraviev added, “We have praised the zeal that the Romans display among the pagans; but we cannot keep silent about their lack of justice toward their brothers in Muslim lands” (Question religieuse d’Orient et d’Occident, 39). Ivan Gagarin refuted Muraviev in La Question religieuse en Orient, réfutation d’un écrit intitulé: “Parole de l’orthodoxie catholique au catholicisme romain” (Paris, 1854).

141.Vasiliev to Serbinovich or Protasov, October 18/30, 1852, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 146; Michon, La solution nouvelle de la question des Lieux saints (Paris, 1852).

142.Michon, Solution nouvelle de la question des Lieux saints, 6, 46–47, 93, 96.

143.Vasiliev to Serbinovich or Protasov, October 18/30, 1852, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 146. Kiselev gave 150 francs. Vasiliev sent the over-procurator a set of the paper’s issues.

144.See V. K. Ronin, “Russkaia publitsistika v Bel'gii v seredine XIX veka,” Slavianovedenie, no. 4 (July–August 1993): 3–4; see also Cadot on the Russian responses to Custine (Russie dans la vie intellectuelle française, 230–40).

145.Vasiliev to Serbinovich or Protasov, October 18/30, 1852, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 147.

146.Vasiliev says Louis-Joseph’s two sons were Evgeny and Iosif (Joseph), not Vladimir. For whatever reason he seemed to think the younger Pelleport (Vladimir) was named Joseph like his father (Louis-Joseph) (ibid., 147–48). Pelleport (Artamov) translated Goncharov’s Oblomov into French and wrote La Russie historique, monumentale, et pittoresque, with the collaboration of J.-G-D. Armengaud, 2 vols. (Paris, 1862–1865). His treatment of the Russian Church in the latter differs significantly from the attitude he expressed in some of his polemical works.

147.M. V. Nechkina, ed., Golosa iz Rossii: Sborniki A. I. Gertsena i N. P. Ogareva (Moscow: Nauka, 1975), book 10, part 4, 23.

148.Comte de la Fitte de Pelleporc [Pelleport], “Le Tzar est-il, en Russie, chef d’Église?,” La Voix de la verité, June 2, 1853, 1. La Voix de la verité reprinted the article from La Presse religieuse.

149.Michon identified Pelleport simply as a person who lived in Russia for a long time (La Presse religieuse, May 24, 1853).

150.Pelleporc, “Le Tsar est-il, en Russie, chef d’Église?,” pt. 1, La Presse religieuse, May 24, 1853.

151.Ibid.

152.Ibid., pt. 2, La Presse religieuse, May 26, 1853.

153.Ibid.

154.Jacques-Paul Migne, La Voix de la verité, June 2, 1853.

155.Abbé Michon, letter to the editor, La Voix de la verité, June 6/7, 1853.

156.On the evolution of Russophobia in the 1850s, see also Kohn, Pan-Slavism, 102–22.

157.Hippolyte Desprez, “L’Église d’Orient,” Revue des deux mondes, new period, 2nd series, 4 (October–December 1853): 847–48.

158.Ibid., 847–48.

159.Ibid., 842.

160.Ibid., 860–64.

161.Ibid., 864.

162.Terletsky was born in western Ukraine, moved to western Europe, became a Catholic priest of the eastern rite and a missionary who sought to reunite the Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox. He founded the Byzantine rite church of SS Cyril and Methodius in Paris in 1850. If he was a thorn in Vasiliev’s side in 1850, Terletsky nonetheless subsequently returned to the Russian Empire, rejoined the Orthodox Church, and became an archimandrite in Odessa in 1881; he died there in 1888. See Ivan Lysiak Rudnytsky, “Terletsky, Ipolit Volodymyr,” The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CT%5CE%5CTerletskyIpolitVolodymyr.htm.

163.“Statuts de la Société orientale pour l’union de tous les Chrétiens d’Orient” (Paris, 1852), 3–5; Archives nationales (France), F/19/6237, folder “Société orientale pour l’union de tous les Chrétiens d’Orient,” 1852–1854. For an English translation of Pius IX’s letter to the eastern bishops, see https://orthocath.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/pope-and-patriarchs-letters-of-pope-pius-ix-and-orthodox-patriarchs.pdf.

164.Vasiliev to Serbinovich, January 25/February 6, 1850, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 118–19.

165.Vasiliev to Serbinovich, April 8/20, 1850, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 124–25. Vasiliev cites Lacordaire’s sermon of April 14, 1850, which was published in Polish but was evidently not published in French: Kazanie P. O. Lacordaire miane w katedrze paryzkiéj dnia 14 kwietnia 1850 roku, na rzecz zatozenia kaplicy, greko-stowiansko-katolickiéj (Paris, 1850).

166.Archives nationales (France), F/19/6237, folder “Société orientale pour l’union de tous les Chrétiens d’Orient,” 1852–1854. The minister of public instruction and worship, Hippolyte Fortoul, sought direction and, if appropriate, financial support from the minister of foreign affairs, Édouard Drouyn de Lhuys.

167.McNally, “Origins of Russophobia in France,” 173; Lehovich, “Testament of Peter the Great,” 113, 119. Despite Catholic agitation over the Near East, Foreign Minister Drouyn de Lhuys said Napoleon III’s purpose behind the Crimean conflict was to “split the continental alliance,” for which the Eastern question merely provided a pretext (Soroka and Ruud, Becoming a Romanov, 192).

168.Mandement de Monseigneur l’Archévêque de Paris, qui ordonne les prières publiques pour le succès de nos armes en Orient (Paris, 1854). Scholars of France and Russia interpret Sibour’s pastoral letter as an official policy document. See L. V. Mel'nikova, Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov' i Krymskaia voina 1853–1856 gg. (Moscow: Kuchkovo pole, 2012), 61–64. This epistle provoked a response from Khomiakov. In his polemic with Laurentie, Khomiakov had argued that it had been “moral fratricide” for the West to change the creed unilaterally. The logical progression of the West’s “moral fratricide” was the “material fratricide” of the war (Cadot, Russie dans la vie intellectuelle française, 380–81).

169.Lettre pastorale qui ordonne des prières pour le succès de nos armes en Orient (May 10, 1854), cited in Jean-Paul Besse, Un précurseur, Wladimir Guettée: Du gallicanisme à l’orthodoxie (Lavardac: Monastère orthodoxe Saint Michel, 1992), 79.

170.The Palmer affair seemed to corroborate the notion that the Greek and Russian religion could not be the same, if the Greeks did not accept the validity of heterodox baptism and the Russians did. Henningsen recognized only an administrative and not a doctrinal separation between the Russian and Greek churches. His view appears to be largely consistent with de Maistre’s. The idea that the Greek and Russian churches did not share the same faith was perpetuated by Desprez, Eugène Veuillot, Roy, and the Russian convert to Catholicism Augustin Golitsyn, who, citing the example of baptism, wrote: “one makes a mistake in confusing the Russian church with the Greek church. No link unites these two churches, formerly so flourishing, still so full of future.” See Augustin Golitsyn, introduction to Document relatif au patriarcat moscovite, 1589, traduit pour la premièr fois en Français par le Prince Augustin Galitzin, by Arsenios [Archbishop of Elassona, 1550–1626] (Paris, 1857), 5.

171.Veuillot, L’Église, la France et le schisme, 75, 85, 95. Russia claimed its special rights to protect the schismatics, and Nesselrode liked to refer to the “Greco-Russian worship.” Veuillot thought “Greco-Russian worship” was a misnomer. Although prior to 1852 the Turks had not distinguished between the Christian sects in their empire, Veuillot believed Russian policy had changed that. “They make today a great distinction between the Catholics, the Franks, and the co-religionists of the czar.” The former supported the Ottoman government while the latter opposed it. Thus, Veuillot thought the influence of the Latins was growing within the Ottoman Empire (ibid., 422–62, especially 450, 455, 461–62).

172.While the Russian ambassador and most of the Russian colony left Paris, Vasiliev remained, under the protection of the Saxon envoy Baron Albin Leo von Seebach, to tend to the spiritual needs of Russian POWs, numbering about fifteen hundred in 1855. For his service during the war, he was awarded the Order of St. Ann, second degree, and became a well-known figure in Russia. See P. Sh., “Protoierei pravoslavnoi tserkvi pri russkom posol'stve v Parizhe Iosif Vasil'evich Vasil'ev (biograficheskii ocherk),” Illiustratsiia: Vsemirnoe obozrenie, October 23, 1858, 257–58; V. Orlovskii, “Protoierei Iosif Vasil'evich,” Zhivopisnoe obozrenie, no. 8 (1882): 123; and Oderova, “Protoierei I. V. Vasil'ev,” 60–61.

173.Ross, Saint-Alexandre sur-Seine, 133–38. For archival documentation, see Archives nationales (France), F/19/10933, folder “Charente Interieur. Culte Russe. Guerre de Crimée. Designation d’un aumonier pour assister les prisonnieres russes à l’ile d’Aix,” November 1854–March 1855. Oderova cites memoirs of Russian POWs on how Polish émigré and Catholic clergy would try to proselytize among the Russian soldiers and persuade them to join the foreign legion (“Pravoslavnaia tserkov' v Parizhe,” 149–55).

174.Archives nationales (France), F/19/10933, “Charente Interieur. Culte Russe. Guerre de Crimée,” Clement to Fortoul, November 24, 1854.

175.Seebach interceded with Napoleon III on Vasiliev’s behalf. Napoleon III wanted to meet the archpriest, who reportedly impressed the emperor with a bold, energetic, intelligent, and eloquent speech (Sh., “Protoierei pravoslavnoi tserkvi pri russkom posol'stve v Parizhe,” 257). According to Vasiliev’s daughter, the archpriest’s “passionate” and “brilliant” speech “made a deep impression on Napoleon and stunned him by its unexpectedness.” At the end of the speech, the French emperor “burst into compliments” for Vasiliev, apologized “for the suspicions of espionage,” and “dismissed all the accusations as slander. ‘Now that I know you personally I don’t believe a word of it.’ ” See L. I. Avtonomova, “Vospominaniia o zhizni i deiatel'nosti protoiereia I. V. Vasil'eva,” Istoricheskii vestnik 145 (August 1916): 309. Vasiliev’s correspondence is silent on the issue of his temporary ban from the island, except that he indicated in December 1854 that he planned to return to the island for Nativity services, but he did not return until Holy Week. His letter about the commemoration of Holy Week and celebration of Pascha reported that the French military authorities were accommodating of all his requests and even allowed him to celebrate the Resurrection with a midnight service according to the Orthodox custom (Vasiliev to Protasov, December 1/13, 1854, and Vasiliev to Alexander Ivanovich Karasevsky, May 18/June 1, 1855, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 166, 167–71).

2. The Archpriest as Publicist and Polemicist

1.The addition of a second priest made the Paris church unique among the other churches abroad (Oderova, “Pravoslavnaia tserkov' v Parizhe,” 53, 68).

2.[Muraviev], Le Raskol: Essai historique et critique sur les sectes religieuses en Russie (Paris, 1859). Raskol was a sequel to Muraviev’s work (published anonymously) Raskol oblichaemyi svoeiu istorieiu (St. Petersburg, 1854), which focused on edinoverie (unity of faith), an arrangement pursued by ecclesiastics, Catherine II, and Paul in the late eighteenth century to bring schismatics back into the official church by allowing them to adhere to the old rituals. Muraviev supported the edinoverie arrangement.

3.Filaret, however, accepted “the legality and the canonicity of the Petrine synodal structure.” See John D. Basil, Church and State in Late Imperial Russia: Critics of the Synodal System of Church Government (1861–1914) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 10, 153n20.

4.[Muraviev], Le Raskol, 3, 10. Muraviev entered the Russian service in 1823 and held a variety of posts in the Collegium of Foreign Affairs and the Holy Synod. He was also a member of the Academy of Sciences. See Vasil'ev, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 151n2.

5.Vasiliev to A. P. Tolstoy, January 15/27, 1859, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 186.

6.[Muraviev], Le Raskol, 256–58.

7.Laurentie, L’Union, March 4, 1859. Laurentie linked his critique of Le Raskol with the suppression of Dominican Jean-Marie Souaillard’s preaching in St. Petersburg, seeing the suppression of Catholic preaching as a further testimony of the unfortunate moral condition of the Russian Church. Vasiliev sent the March 4 and 5 issues of L’Union to the over-procurator, because they reported on the laying of the cornerstone (March 3) for the new Russian Church in Paris. See Brodsky’s commentary in Vasil'ev, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 189n2. The Holy Synod was not in the dark concerning western perceptions of the Russian Church. In referring to Haxthausen, Laurentie had his discussion of Russian sects in mind. Haxthausen saw it as problematic that Russia did not have an independent, central authority (the pope) who could arbitrate doctrinal disputes. Yet his description of Russian sects was detached and informational, rather than polemical. Haxthausen’s picture of Russia contrasted markedly with the Russophobic accounts discussed in the previous chapter, and even with the Russophile Laurentie’s depiction. Haxthausen did not portray the Russian people or clergy as servile. When in Russia, he was struck by the religious devotion of the Russian people and emphasized that, in contrast with western Europeans, people of all ranks expressed their devotion in public without the least shame. Furthermore, he commented on the absence of rank and complete equality that he observed at Russian religious services. His discussion of church-state relations bears some resemblance to other accounts by western Catholics, but is more nuanced. Haxthausen considered the patriarchate a weak institution created by the tsar and subject to the will of the civil power even during the reign of Nikon. Since the patriarchate never really had deep roots, it was easy for Peter I to dispense with it. Haxthausen accepted the idea that the temporal and spiritual powers were combined in the emperor’s hands, but the emperor was “not the Head of the Church in the same sense as the Pope of Rome.” The tsar only governed the external affairs of the church and “has never arrogated to himself the right of deciding theological and dogmatic questions.” The Russian people were deeply religious but poorly instructed on doctrinal matters. Regarding the common belief that the Russian popes—he used the term to refer to the parish clergy, and not in a derogatory manner—were not respected by the people, Haxthausen argued it was a half-truth: Russians had “unlimited love and veneration” for good priests and a lack of respect for those who neglected their flock. See Auguste de Haxthausen, The Russian Empire, Its People, Institutions and Resources, trans. Robert Farie, 2 vols. (London, 1856), 1:94–95, 257–59; 2:218–26. For the French edition, see Études sur la situation intérieure, la vie nationale et les institutions rurales de la Russie, 3 vols. (Hanover, 1847–1853), vol. 1, chap. 11; vol. 3, chap. 3.

8.Laurentie, L’Union, March 4, 1859.

9.Vasiliev to Serbinovich or Protasov, October 18/30, 1852, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 145.

10.Vasiliev to A. P. Tolstoy, January 15/27, 1859, and March 8/20, 1859, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 183–87 and 193–94. In the second letter he noted that Shuvalov was working on three compatriots. Besides Shuvalov and Gagarin, Vasiliev discussed works by Nikolas and Augustin Golitsyn.

11.[Grigory Petrovich, a.k.a. Père Agostino Maria, Barnabite] Schouvaloff [Shuvalov], My Conversion and Vocation, trans. Father C. Tondini (London, 1877), viii.

12.Ibid., 59.

13.Ibid., 137.

14.Ibid., 237–38.

15.Ibid., 294.

16.Ibid., 198–99, 295.

17.Ibid., 197–98.

18.Vasiliev to A. P. Tolstoy, March 8/20, 1859, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 193–94.

19.Gagarin became Roman Catholic in 1842, joined the Jesuit order in 1843, and became a priest in 1849. In 1857 Gagarin and Charles Daniel began publishing Études de théologie, de philosophie et d’histoire. Gagarin’s publications between 1856 and 1859 included “Les Starovères, l’église russe et le pape,” Études de théologie, de philosophie et d’histoire 2 (1857): 2–83 and La Russie sera-t-elle catholique? (Paris, 1856). Andrzej Walicki calls this latter work Gagarin’s “true credo,” although he adds that the work was mostly unnoticed in France. Haxthausen had it translated into German and promoted Gagarin’s program for uniting the churches (Walicki, “The Religious Westernism of Ivan Gagarin,” 37, 45). Provocatively, Gagarin translated into French Gregory XIII’s profession of faith for “Greeks” wanting to join the Roman Catholic Church (Profession de foi publiée par ordre du pape Grégoire XIII, à l’usage des grecs qui veulent entrer dans la communion de la Sainte Église catholique, apostolique et romaine [1858]). For a study of Gagarin from a Roman Catholic point of view, see Jeffrey Bruce Beshoner, Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin: The Search for Orthodox and Catholic Union (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002).

20.Vasiliev to A. P. Tolstoy, January 15/27, 1859, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 184. One of the Russian-language responses to Gagarin’s La Russie sera-t-elle catholique? was Artamov’s Iezuity krasnago petukha nam pustili ili razvratitsia-li Rossiia v latinskii katolitsizm? (Paris, 1859). It was published in the Russian Miscellany Abroad (Russkii zagranichnyi sbornik) series, edited in Paris by A. Franck. This series published works across the political and religious spectrums. It provided an outlet besides the semiofficial Le Nord or Herzen’s radical journal Kolokol for Russians to publish in the West, outside the bounds of Russia’s civil and ecclesial censorship systems. For a characterization of the series as “liberal,” see A Herzen Reader, ed. and trans. Kathleen Parthé (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012), 88–89, 89n4.

21.Vasiliev to A. P. Tolstoy, January 15/27, 1859, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 185. In 1857 a response to Gagarin’s La Russie sera-t-elle catholique? was published in Athens: Jugement sur les discours du jésuite Gagarin, concernant l’Union (de l’Église Russe). This work was evidently translated into Russian as Suzhdenie pravoslavnago greka o sposobe soedineniia tserkvei kakoi predlagaet Gagarin v svoeiu broshiurke: “La Russie sera-t-elle catholique?” (St. Petersburg, 1858). Vasiliev and A. P. Tolstoy corresponded in 1859 about Vasiliev’s preparation of a French translation of Suzhdenie pravoslavnago greka for publication in Paris. In January, Vasiliev explained that publication was delayed by the reticence of the publisher, A. Franck (cf. preceding note). Even when the publisher was ready to move forward, he recommended publishing the work in Leipzig and then importing it to France, but Vasiliev did not want to take the risk of having it printed and then not being able to import it (Vasiliev to A. P. Tolstoy, January 15/27, 1859, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 185). The publication was delayed until June, and in August Vasiliev sent Tolstoy ten copies (Vasiliev to A. P. Tolstoy, August 4/16, 1859, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 201–2). The French translation from Russian contains some embellishments such as a reference to Gagarin as a “defector from the national religion” of Russia: Orthodoxie et papisme: Examen de l’ouvrage du Père Gagarin sur la réunion des Églises catholique grecque et catholique romaine. Par un grec membre de l’église d’orient (Paris, 1859), 1.

22.[Sergei Sushkov], Confédération italienne: Le Pouvoir temporel des papes devant l’Évangile et les hommes (Brussels, 1859); Vasiliev to A. P. Tolstoy, August 4/16, 1859, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 202–3; Sergei P. Sushkov, “Vospominaniia o deiatel'nosti zashchitnikov pravoslaviia v Parizhe, v shestidesiatyikh godakh,” pt. 1, Tserkovnyi vestnik, no. 22 (1890): 370.

23.Elena Pavlovna’s father converted to Catholicism shortly before his death in Paris in 1852. On her attitudes toward Orthodoxy and other religious confessions, see Soroka and Ruud, Becoming a Romanov, 222–31, 236–37.

24.Ibid., 225.

25.Charles Deulin, “Cérémonie du mariage en Russie,” Le Monde illustré, December 1, 1860, 366. According to Oderova, she also gave Vasiliev money and copies of an Orthodox prayer book, asking him to improve on the translation and oversee its publication (“Pravoslavnaia tserkov’ v Parizhe,” 158).

26.The first issue appeared on October 8, 1859, and the paper was published weekly through June 30, 1860. The program was explained in the inaugural issue (H. Stouf, “France et Russie,” Gazette du Nord, October 8, 1859).

27.Some of their articles, or versions of them, also appeared in L’Union chrétienne.

28.Vasiliev, “La Russie religieuse,” Gazette du Nord, October 8, 1859.

29.Ibid.

30.Vasiliev to A. P. Tolstoy, August 25/September 5, 1859, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 209.

31.Francois Laurent, Principes de droit civil (Paris, 1869–1878), 24:277–78. The Court of Commerce of the Seine ruled that the placing of the work on the Index was “sufficient cause for the termination of the covenant” because, although the Index was not formally binding in France, the publishers were running an ecclesiastical library and Guettée, as an ecclesiastic, was writing for an ecclesiastical public. See L’Ami de la religion 158, October 16, 1852, 130–31. The report in L’Ami was reprinted from Gazette des Tribuneax.

32.Larousse, “Église,” Grand dictionnaire universel, 7:251–52. A polemic about Guettée’s history of the French Church took place between him and Abbé Jager in L’Ami in 1857, in volumes 175–76.

33.The Gallican minister of worship, Gustave Rouland, told Guettée that the emperor would not allow proceedings to be brought against the archbishop of Paris (Guettée, Souvenirs, 323–38; Besse, Un précurseur, 85–86).

34.Sushkov, “Vospominaniia,” pt. 1, 368; Guettée, Souvenirs, 354.

35.Sushkov, “Vospominaniia,” pt. 1, 370.

36.Ibid., 370.

37.Ibid., 370.

38.Ibid., 370.

39.Archives nationales (France), F/18/422, Ministère de l’Intérieur, Presse parisienne et agences de presse, folios 234–36, November 1859.

40.Vasiliev to Urusov, December 25, 1859/January 6, 1860, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 214. In his letter of October 19/31, 1862, to A. P. Akhmatov, Vasiliev requested “timely help,” in the form of 2,000 francs, for the continuation of the paper, having already invested his own time and material resources in its success. He believed that the periodical was especially timely given the crisis threatening Catholicism (Parizhskiia pis'ma, 258–59).

41.See Vasiliev’s letters to A. P. Tolstoy of August 4/16, and August 25/September 5, 1859, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 204, 205–10.

42.“Judging by the silence of Your Excellency and of Count A. P. [Tolstoy], it is obvious that L’Union chrétienne is met by you with distrust” (Vasiliev to Urusov, December 25, 1859/January 6, 1860, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 213).

43.Avtonomova, “Vospominaniia,” Istoricheskii vestnik 146 (November 1916): 317; Oderova, “Protoierei Vasil'ev,” 63.

44.Vasiliev to Urusov, December 25, 1859/January 6, 1860, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 213. Urusov assured Vasiliev that he was supportive of L’Union chrétienne (ibid., 237). Tolstoy’s ambivalence may have been expressed in personal conversations between Tolstoy and Vasiliev when Vasiliev was in Russia in 1861. Vasiliev continued to justify the publication in his correspondence and was clearly very attached to the project. See his letters to A. P. Tolstoy of December 20, 1861/January 1, 1862 and February 28/March 12, 1862, ibid., 253, 255.

45.Vasiliev to Urusov, December 25, 1859/January 6, 1860, ibid., 213. Le Croisé had a conservative Catholic but pro-imperial bent. See Roger Bellet, Presse et journalisme sous le Second Empire (Paris: Armand Colin, 1967), 302. Louis Veuillot was an inspiration to and collaborator of Ernest Hello, the founder of Le Croisé.

46.Hello, “L’Union chrétienne,” Le Croisé, November 19, 1859, 189–90.

47.Vasiliev to Urusov, December 25, 1859/January 6, 1860, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 213–14.

48.Vasiliev to Urusov, November 25/December 7, 1860, ibid., 237–38.

49.Ibid., 237–38; René-François Guettée, Histoire des jésuites (Paris, 1858–59).

50.Vasiliev to Urusov, November 25/December 7, 1860, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 237–38. Rewards were forthcoming, including an honorary doctorate conferred on Guettée by the Moscow Theological Academy in 1864.

51.René-François Guettée, The Papacy: Its Historic Origin and Primitive Relations (New York, 1866), xix.

52.Khomiakov’s first contribution was a response to Christian Karl Josias Bunsen’s translation of the scriptures (1860). He requested that Guettée publish both his opinion about the paper and his response to Bunsen. Guettée published only the latter, signed Ignotus (Unknown one), without publishing Khomiakov’s objections to L’Union chrétienne. See Aleksei S. Khomiakov, “Lettre à M. Bunsen, précédé d’une lettre au rédacteur du journal L’Union chrétienne,” in L’Église latine et le protestantisme, 312.

53.Aleksei S. Khomiakov, “Lettre au rédacteur de L’Union chrétienne à l’occasion d’un discourse du Père Gagarine, Jésuite” (1860), in ibid., 391.

54.Ibid., 391.

55.Vasilii P. Polisadov, “O novoi Parizhskoi gazete l’Union chretienne (Khristianskoe edinenie),” Strannik (November 1860), Bibliografiia, 78–101. Polisadov referred to Pravoslavnoe obozrenie, no. 1 (1860). Strannik was founded by Archimandrite Vitaly Grechulevich (1822–1885) in 1860 and was attached to the St. Petersburg Theological Academy.

56.Ibid., 92n2.

57.Ibid., 101. Polisadov probably referred to Fedor Andreevich Buhler, who was born in 1821, served in the Senate, traveled abroad from 1847 to 1850, and then entered the foreign service. Vasiliev added a different dimension to this episode. He indicated that Buhler sought permission from the Russian authorities before attempting to publish his response to Lacordaire. On seeing a draft of Buhler’s response, Nicholas I commented that “a polemic with Lacordaire is not necessary” (Vasiliev to Serbinovich, April 8/20, 1850, and June 4/16, 1850, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 124–26, 132). Lacordaire’s offensive sermon was given at a benefit for Terletsky.

58.Polisadov, “O novoi Parizhskoi gazete,” 80.

59.Ibid., 85.

60.Ibid., 86.

61.Ibid., 89.

62.Ibid., 91–92.

63.Ibid. 92. Here Polisadov inserted a long footnote about Lacordaire’s insulting sermon.

64.Ibid., 89.

65.Ibid., 90

66.Ibid., 90.

67.Ibid., 93.

68.Ibid., 100.

69.Yousouff, as cited in ibid., 94.

70.Ibid., 94–95. The editor added a footnote to clarify that the veterans of the Middle Ages referred to L’Univers and its editors.

71.Ibid., 99–100.

72.“Pis'mo protoiereia Iosifa Vasil'eva k nantskomu episkopu Alexandru Zhakme,” Strannik (May 1861): 113.

73.L’Empereur Napoléon III et l’Italie (February 4, 1859), Le Pape et le congrès (December 22, 1859), and La France, Rome et l’Italie (February 1861).

74.Jean-Mamert Cayla, Pape et empereur (Paris, 1860), 24.

75.Victor Martin, Vie de Monseigneur Jaquemet, évêque de Nantes (Paris, 1889), 446.

76.Antoine-Matthias-Alexandre Jaquemet, “Mandement de Monseigneur l’évêque de Nantes pour le saint temps du carême de l’an de grace 1861 sur les dangers du schisme,” Archives diocésaines de Nantes, Serie E 1E06/0118, 1861–01–29, 4.

77.Ibid., 6–7.

78.Ibid., 7.

79.Ibid., 7.

80.Marcel Launay, Le Diocèse de Nantes sous le Second Empire: Monseigneur Jaquemet, 1849–1869 (Nantes, 1982), 2:710–11. By veiling his indictment of Napoleon III, Jaquemet avoided the troubles that soon after afflicted his colleague, Monseigneur Louis-Édouard Pie, Bishop of Poitiers. In early 1861, Pie was called before the Council of State on charges of abuse of power for a criticism leveled against Napoleon III in his Mandement de Mgr. l’évêque de Poitiers au sujet des accusations portées contre le Souverain Pontife et contre le clergé français dans la brochure intitulée “La France, Rome et l’Italie” par M. A. de La Guéronnière (Paris, 1861). Pie’s prosecution provoked the indignation of the French episcopate. For Pie’s Mandement of February 22, 1861, see [Monseigneur Louis-Édouard] Pie, Oeuvres de Monseigneur l’évêque de Poitiers (Paris, 1883–84), 4:145–65.

81.Martin, Vie de Monseigneur Jaquemet, 445–46.

82.Ibid., 448. Vasiliev’s response to Jaquemet appeared as “Réponse aux attaques de M. l’évêque de Nantes contre l’église de Russie” in L’Union chrétienne, April 14, 1861, 185–89; it was reproduced in Le Nord, April 27, 1861, and in Guettée’s anti-ultramontane periodical: “Lettre à M. l’évêque de Nantes en réponse à ses attaques contre l’église de Russie,” L’Observateur catholique 12 (April–October 1861): 61–73.

83.The first issue appeared on July 1, 1855. According to Ronin, Russians in the West like Herzen and Turgenev, who were critical of the paper and saw it as a government organ, nonetheless read it faithfully. Under the direction of Nicholas Petrovich Poggenpol', Le Nord was not very successful at convincing people that it was “objective” and “independent,” but the paper still made important contributions by disseminating information about Russia in the West (Ronin, “Russkaia publitsistika v Bel'gii,” 11–12). See also M. K. Lemke’s commentary in A. I. Herzen, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem (St. Petersburg, 1919), 8:362–71.

84.Le Gaulois, January 31, 1892, and August 4, 1893. According to the entry for Nikolai Poggenpol' in the Brokhaus-Efron Encyclopedia, many of Le Nord’s articles published abroad were strictly censored in Russia. La Presse spoke very favorably of Poggenpol', rendering him “supreme homage” when it reported the journalist’s death in April 1894. He “struggled for forty years of his life in favor of ideas that are dear to us and that have today become those of two great peoples, arbitrators of the world.” See La Presse, April 11, 1894. See also Le Temps, April 11, 1894.

85.Martin, Vie de Monseigneur Jaquemet, 446. My efforts to locate where the Mandement was published have been unsuccessful. Generally, La Civiltà Cattolica is regarded as the official paper of Rome, but it does not appear to have been published there in 1861. Journal de Rome and L’Osservatore romano are also sometimes considered official organs of Rome, but I have been unable to access the former due to a lack of extant copies, and the latter entered publication only in July 1861.

86.According to Ralph Gibson, data for the diocese are plentiful, and in the 1860s, over 80 percent of men and women communed at Easter (A Social History of French Catholicism 1789–1914 [London: Routledge, 1989], 115–16, 170–75). Nantes was also generous when it came to collecting funds to support the papal cause, and about 11 percent of French zouaves were volunteers from this single diocese. See Launay, “Les Splendeurs de l’église de Nantes et les grands affrontements (1849–1914),” in Le Diocèse de Nantes, ed. Yves Durand (Paris: Beauchesne, 1985), 216–51.

87.Vasiliev’s letters appeared in L’Union chrétienne, April 14, 1861, 185–89; May 26, 1861, 233–40; June 2, 1861, 241–48; and June 16, 1861, 257–62. He also compiled his correspondence with Jaquemet into a booklet. See Antoine Mathias Alexandre Jaquemet and J. Wassilieff, Discussion entre Mgr. l’évêque de Nantes [i.e., A.M.A. Jaquemet] et M. l’archiprêtre J. Wassilieff au sujet de l’autorité ecclésiastique dans l’église de Russie (Paris, 1861).

88.In early 1861 Guettée was involved in a successful libel suit that he initiated against several papers, including L’Esperance du peuple de Nantes, that referred to him as an interdicted priest, which he was not. Since Jaquemet’s epistle does not appear to have been published in the main Parisian Catholic dailies, I suspect that Guettée saw it, perhaps in the diocesan L’Esperance, and brought it to Vasiliev’s attention.

89.“Lettre de Mgr. l’archevêque de Bonald et réponse de M. L’archiprêtre Wassilieff,” L’Union chrétienne, July 6, 1862, 282.

90.Le Nord, April 27, 1861; Vasil'ev, “Otvet na lozhnoe obvinenie protiv pravoslavnoi tserkvi russkoi,” Pravoslavnoe obozrenie (April 1861): 541–57; Vasil'ev, “Otvet na pis'mo nantskogo episkopa,” Pravoslavnoe obozrenie (July 1861): 235–71, and (August 1861): 385–421; Vasil'ev, “Pis'mo Vasil'eva k nantskomu episkopu,” Strannik (May 1861): 113–24; Vasil'ev, “Vtoroe pis'mo protoiereia Iosifa Vasil'eva k nantskomu episkopu Alexandru Zhakme,” Strannik (July 1861): 28–60; Vasil'ev, “Tolki russkoi tserkvi vo Frantsii,” Tserkovnaia letopis', May 13, 1861, 306–15; Vasil'ev, “Pis'mo nastoiatelia russkoi posol'skoi tserkvi v Parizhe o. protoiereia I. Vasil'eva k nantskomu episkopu Zhakme,” in Khristianskoe chtenie, pt. 1 (1861): 421–36 (published with a note saying it was extracted from the Journal de Saint-Petersbourg); and Vasil'ev, “Vtoroe pis'mo nastoiatelia russkoi posol'skoi tserkvi v Parizhe o. protoiereia I. Vasil'eva k nantskomu episkopu Zhakme,” Khristianskoe chtenie, part 2 (1861): 110–54, 213–54. Khristianskoe chtenie included a translation of Jaquemet’s letter to Vasiliev in the footnotes.

91.“L’Union chrétienne … declared war on M. Jaquemet the bishop of Nantes… . In a letter addressed to his diocesans, this bishop took the Tsar for the spiritual head of the Orthodox Church. I enlisted the archpriest I. Vasiliev to respond to him. He could not write in French at that time. I took it upon myself to respond to the bishop of Nantes, and Mr. I. Vasiliev agreed to sign my work.” Guettée added that Augustin Golitsyn suspected him of being the author (Souvenirs, 366). At another point, Guettée simply said that Vasiliev was not used to writing in French, so Guettée edited his submissions to L’Union chrétienne (ibid., 359).

92.“How could a Russian priest, occupying an honored official position, very intelligent, learned, diligent, and fervently committed to his church, entrust the execution of the holy duty of defending it against the hostile slanders brought against it to a French priest not even belonging [as of 1861] to the Orthodox Church!” (Sushkov, “Vospominaniia,” pt. 2, Tserkovnyi vestnik, no. 23 [1890]: 387).

93.Ibid., pt. 1, 369. See also S. A. Vengerov, Kritiko-biograficheskii slovar' russkikh pisatelei i uchenykh (St. Petersburg, 1889–1904), vol. 4, part 2, 161.

94.Sushkov, “Vospominaniia,” pt. 1, 369; pt. 2, 386–87.

95.Avtonomova, “Vospominaniia” (September 1916), 604, 606.

96.I suspect that Vasiliev was the primary author of the first letter, which was quite short, and that Guettée wrote more of the verbose second letter. Sushkov’s observation that Guettée could not have written the letters because they displayed Vasiliev’s style (concision, a tranquil and polite tone), which contrasted markedly with Guettée’s style (harsh and irritable toward adversaries) is more apropos of the first letter than of the second (Sushkov, “Vospominaniia,” pt. 2, 386).

97.Wassilieff, “Réponse aux attaques,” L’Union chrétienne, April 14, 1861, 186.

98.Ibid., 186.

99.Ibid., 186–87.

100.Ibid., 187. The Russian version in Pravoslavnoe obozrenie was a little toned down here, saying the church did not regard the emperor as having “any high authority in matters of faith” (Vasil'ev, “Otvet na lozhnoe obvinenie,” 547).

101.Wassilieff, “Réponse aux attaques,” 187.

102.Ibid., 189. A. Golitsyn actively spread propaganda claiming that Dmitry was the true tsar and a Catholic martyr by publishing an edition of Barezzi’s 1606 work Discours merveilleux et veritable de la conqueste faite par le jeune Demetrius (Paris, 1858).

103.Ibid., 189.

104.Of the Catholic papers, Le Monde had the greatest circulation, with 13,000 subscribers in 1860–1861, more than double the circulation of L’Ami (6,000), and substantially more subscribers than L’Univers (7,700) (Bellet, Presse et journalisme, 312–13).

105.L’Ami, April 25, 1861, 215.

106.Catholics complained that the Poles of the village of Dziernowicz in Warsaw diocese had been subject to persecution since 1858. The Russian government claimed that the deportation of prelates from the region was punishment for political crimes, not an example of religious persecution. See Frédéric de Rougemont, La Russie orthodoxe et protestante (Paris, 1863), 102.

107.L’Ami, April 25, 1861, 215–16.

108.Le Rebours, letter to the editor, Le Monde, April 30, 1861.

109.Ibid.

110.Ibid. Le Rebours was conscious of the polemical connotations of the language that he and Vasiliev used. He spoke of the “Greek” or “Russian” church but noted how Vasiliev called it “eastern catholic.” Similarly, the vicar-general preferred the term grecs-unis, as Uniats was a term tied to the Russian point of view.

111.Ibid.

112.Ibid.

113.Wassilieff, “Réponse aux attaques,” 189. Vasiliev argued that if the Uniates were forcibly joined to the Russian Church, like the Catholic polemicists argued, then having been raised in the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church, they should have resisted this unwelcome intrusion of secular authority on the practice of their faith.

114.Le Rebours, letter to the editor, Le Monde, April 30, 1861.

115.“Mauvaise foi de L’Ami de la Religion et de M. Augustin Galitzin à propos de la lettre de M. J. Wassilieff à M. L’évêque de Nantes,” L’Union chrétienne, May 5, 1861, 209–13; see also L’Union chrétienne, May 19, 1861, 225.

116.Jaquemet and Wassilieff, Discussion, 8.

117.Ibid., 8–9.

118.Ibid., 10–11.

119.Ibid., 12.

120.Ibid., 13–14.

121.Martin, Vie de Monseigneur Jaquemet, 448.

122.Ibid., 447–48.

123.Jaquemet and Wassilieff, Discussion, 17.

124.Ibid., 17–21.

125.Ibid., 25.

126.Ibid., 27.

127.Ibid., 31.

128.Ibid., 35. This idea echoes what Pelleport wrote in his 1853 article debunking the idea that the tsar was the head of the Russian Church. Vasiliev noted that history provided examples of individuals who were courageous and willing to stand up to political authorities; likewise, there were examples of the weak and cowardly, who succumbed to all sorts of indiscretions. The history of the papacy provided examples of both types of individuals and could rival Russia in figures who abused authority or were easily subjugated to those who abused authority. Thus, as suggested by the Ecclesiastical Regulation, placing power in the hands of a council was preferable to placing it in the hands of an individual (ibid., 37–39).

129.Vasiliev explained that the only difference was that the Synod was a standing council, rather than a council that met biannually, a difference that he did not consider significant.

130.Ibid., 39.

131.Ibid., 48.

132.Ibid., 51.

133.Ibid., 52. Golitsyn had also inserted the word “master.”

134.Ibid., 58–59.

135.Ibid., 55–58.

136.Ibid., 60–61.

137.Ibid., 60–61.

138.Ibid., 63–64. Guettée’s involvement is felt here, although Vasiliev had conducted a historical study of French law on church-state relations. Anyone who read the Paris newspapers in the spring of 1861 would know about Monseigneur Pie’s prosecution in the Council of State for abuse of power. Such state interference with the French Church contributed to the rise, growth, and success of ultramontanism in the first place. Although Launay characterizes Jaquemet as Gallican, Napoleon III’s Italian policies drove a wedge between the emperor and many formerly Gallican clergy (Diocèse de Nantes, 1:212–22 and 2:703).

139.Jaquemet and Wassilieff, Discussion, 63–64.

140.Ibid., 66.

141.Ibid., 66–72.

142.Ibid., 73–74. Adolphe Crémieux was minister of justice from February to June 1848 and was not minister of worship. His appointment evidently explains why the Ministry of Worship was separated from the Ministry of Justice in 1848 and combined with the Ministry of Public Instruction.

143.Ibid., 74–75.

144.Ibid., 76.

145.Ibid., 76.

146.Ibid., 76–77.

147.Ibid., 86.

148.Bonald was named a cardinal in 1841 and was appointed to the French Senate in 1852. Guettée had already polemicized against Bonald in the mid-1850s. See Besse, Un précurseur, 81.

149.L. B. Bonjean, Discours sur le pouvoir temporel des papes (Paris, 1862). Bonjean argued that there was a fundamental tension between the spiritual and temporal powers, that spiritual authority was paramount, and the temporal power contradicted Christ’s words: “My kingdom is not of this world” (ibid., 37). While arguing that the temporal power of the papacy was not necessary for maintenance of its spiritual power, and that historically the temporal power had been more harmful than beneficial, Bonjean did not suggest that the pope could be the subject of another political authority or that the papacy should not remain in Rome.

150.Ibid., 38.

151.Louis-Jacques-Maurice de Bonald, Discours que S. Ém. Mgr. le cardinal archevèque de Lyon devait prononcer devant le sénat dans la discussion de l’adresse (Lyon, 1862); Le Monde, March 22, 1862.

152.Bonald, Discours, 2.

153.Ibid., 2.

154.Ibid., 7.

155.S. V. Rimsky suggests that the letter to Archbishop Bonald has a different tone from the letter to Monseigneur Jaquemet. By pointing out Bonald’s mistakes, Vasiliev portrayed Bonald as an “incompetent man.” See S. V. Rimskii, Rossiiskaia tserkov' v epokhu velikikh reform (Tserkovnye reformy v Rossii 1860–1870-kh godov) (Moscow, 1999), 36. The tone of the letter probably points to Guettée as its primary author.

156.Iosif Vasil'evich Vasiliev, “À son éminence Monseigneur de Bonald cardinal archevêque de Lyon,” L’Union chrétienne, March 30, 1862, 169–71; Vasil'ev, “Perepiska protoiereia I. V. Vasil'eva s arkhiepiskopom Lionskim Bonal'dom,” Strannik (July 1862): 276–81, and (September 1862): 396–403.

157.Vasiliev, “À son éminence Monseigneur de Bonald,” 170. Valery Valerievich Skripitsyn, Russia’s former director of the Department of Religious Affairs of Foreign Confessions, also sent a letter to the editor of L’Union chrétienne in response to Bonald. He stressed, first, that there was a difference between a procurator and a minister, and second, that ministers have personal power while procurators just enforce the laws. He noted that while most European states had a minister of worship, Russia only had a procurator (L’Union chrétienne, March 30, 1862, 195).

158.Iosif Vasil'evich Vasil'ev, “Lettre de Mgr. l’archevêque de Bonald et reponse de M. l’archipretre Wassilieff,” L’Union chrétienne, July 6, 1862, 281.

159.De Maistre popularized the idea that Russian liturgical texts acknowledged the supremacy of St. Peter and his successors in Du Pape. Mgr. Luquet discussed papal primacy in Russian liturgical texts in his introduction to Theiner’s L’Église schismatique russe, xlvii–lii, citing an 1841 pastoral letter of the Uniate bishop of Ruthenia, Michel Lewicki (Mykhajlo Levitsky, 1774–1858, archbishop of Lviv). Gagarin developed the argument that the Russian state’s long history of refusal to recognize the authority of Rome was out of step with Orthodox liturgical tradition. See Gagarin, “Starovères, l’église russe et le pape.” Sushkov refuted Gagarin in “Examen de l’argument que les ultramontains pretendent trouver dans la liturgie russe en faveur de leur systeme papal,” L’Union chrétienne (published in several parts between March 30 and September 28, 1862). Gagarin responded with “La Primauté de Saint Pierre et les livres liturgiques de l’église russe,” in Études religieuses, historiques et littéraires (May–June 1863): 525–49.

160.“Lettre de Mgr. l’archevêque de Bonald et reponse de M. l’archiprêtre Wassilieff,” 281–84; “Perepiska protoiereia I. V. Vasil'eva s arkhiepiskopom Liunskim Bonal'dom” (September 1862), 396–403.

161.Vasiliev’s “À Monsieur Guizot, Membre de l’Academie Française,” was published in L’Union chrétienne beginning with the November 17, 1861, issue and concluding in the February 2, 1862, issue. In Russian: “Pis'mo protoiereia I. V. Vasil'eva k g. Gizo, chlenu frantsuzskoi akademii,” trans. A. I. Popovitskii, Strannik (May 1862): 156–84, and (June 1862): 219–39; and “Pis'mo o[tets] protoiereia I. Vasil'eva k g. Gizo, chlenu frantsuzskoi akademii,” Khristianskoe chtenie 1 (1862): 805–72.

162.François Guizot, L’Église et la société chrétienne en 1861 (Paris, 1861), 6, 263–64.

163.Ibid., 95–96. There was arguably more in this statement to provoke Guettée than Vasiliev.

164.Ibid., 7.

165.Ibid., 94.

166.Wassilieff, “À Monsieur Guizot,” November 17, 1861, 17–18.

167.Ibid., 17–18.

168.Ibid., December 1, 1861, 35.

169.Ibid., December 15, 1861, 52.

170.Ibid., January 19, 1862, 90–91.

171.“The ultramontanes regard the sovereigns of the whole world as the vassals and servants of the Papacy” (ibid., 89–90).

172.Ibid., December 29, 1861, 68.

173.Ibid., January 26, 1862, 99.

174.Ibid., 100.

175.Vasiliev rejected Guizot’s idea that church governance had moved from a democratic through an aristocratic to a monarchical phase. Church governance was collective from the beginning, guided by the Holy Spirit (ibid., December 1, 1861, 34). Guizot’s idea that authority in the church had evolved through these three phases was expressed in Histoire générale de la civilisation en Europe (Paris, 1828). Guettée also rejected this aspect of Guizot’s thought some years before he was associated with Vasiliev. See Guettée, Souvenirs, 80. In tracing the history of the council as the locus of authority, Vasiliev wrote that the apostles “established councils [sobory] that in their minds, represented the collective authority of the Church; consequently, it is justly said that the structure [ustroistvo] of Christian society is a structure essentially sobornoe.” See Vasil'ev, “Pis'mo protoiereia I. V. Vasil'eva k g. Gizo” (May 1862), 169.

176.Vasil'ev, “Pis'mo protoiereia I. V. Vasil'eva k g. Gizo” (June 1862), 235–37.

177.Ibid., 238.

178.Savva Tikhomirov, Khronika moei zhizni: Avtobiograficheskiia zapiski vysokopreosviashchennago Savvy, arkhiepiskopa Tverskago i Kashinskago, 9 vols. (Sergiev Posad, 1898–1911?), 6:532. On the 9,000 rubles as Vasiliev’s salary as head of the Education Committee of the Synod (1867–1881), see Oderova, “Pravoslavnaia tserkov' v Parizhe,” 168n492.

179.Rimskii, Rossiiskaia tserkov', 35. Citing the imperial Russian law code (Svod zakonov, 1857) which recognized the emperor as the “defender” of the church, the “custodian” of its dogmas, and the “guardian of right belief” (pravoverie), Rimsky follows the predominant view that the Petrine reform subordinated the church to the state, claiming that by the end of the Nikolaevan epoch, the church did not have a shred of independence left (ibid., 31, 34). Rimsky adds that Vasiliev’s polemical letters pleased the emperor, were considered “successful” in the Holy Synod, and contributed to Vasiliev’s reputation as an “adroit” man in Russian society (ibid., 36). Oderova accepts Rimsky’s conclusions about church-state relations in the synodal period in general and about Vasiliev’s letter to Jaquemet in particular (“Pravoslavnaia tserkov' v Parizhe,” 167–69).

180.Rimskii, Rossiiskaia tserkov', 37.

181.Wassilieff, “Réponse aux attaques,” 187.

182.L’Ami, May 18, 1861, 403–6.

183.Ibid., June 27, 1861, 748.

184.The editorial introduction to Vasiliev’s letter to Jaquemet in Tserkovnaia letopis' (Church chronicle) noted that remarks about the Russian Church and its priests being “submissive and silent slaves of the secular authority” had been around since the Western Church broke with the true Christian Church; and while the bishop of Nantes’s judgment was nothing new, it attracted attention “because the question about the Church is currently a topical question in France.” See the introduction to Vasiliev’s “Tolki o russkoi tserkvi vo Frantsii,” Tserkovnaia letopis', May 13, 1861, 306.

185.Augustin Golitsyn and Guettée continued the polemic. See Un Grec-Uni, “De l’émancipation du clergé russe,” L’Ami, August 27, 1861, 483–90; Journal de Bruxelles, August 20, 1861; and L’Union chrétienne, October 6, 1861, 385–86. See also Deacon N. R-Beloff’s series on the history of the Russian patriarchate in L’Union chrétienne, July 7, 1861, 283–85, and July 14, 1861, 294–96; and other articles in the July 28 and August 4 and 11, 1861, issues.

186.Rougemont, Russie orthodoxe et protestante, 21; L. Boissard, L’Église de Russie, 2 vols. (Paris: J. Cherbuliez, 1867), 1:xi–xii, 231–35, and 2:511–12. Theologisches Literaturblatt, Karl Zimmermann’s review in Darmshtadt, published Ianyshev’s German translation of Vasiliev’s letters and spoke positively about the tone and argument of Vasiliev’s correspondence with Jaquemet, with the caveat that the Russian Church was neither as free from the influence of the civil power as Vasiliev suggested, nor was as “shamefully dependent” as Jaquemet’s initial attack suggested. See “Zagranichnyi zametki,” Pravoslavnoe obozrenie, June 1862, 64–66.

3. The “Byzantine Firework” of Paris

1.The feast day is August 30 on the Julian calendar, and since the start of the twentieth century has fallen on September 12. The church’s location in the eighth arrondissement, an area renovated by Haussmann, explains his presence. Russian observers did not seem to attach particular significance to his attendance.

2.Conseil Paroissial de Saint-Alexandre-Nevsky, La Cathédrale Saint-Alexandre-Nevsky de Paris: Centenaire 1861–1961 (Paris: Conseil Paroissial de Saint-Alexandre-Nevsky, 1961), 31.

3.Church building was distinct from the practice that had been going on since the seventeenth century of assigning priests to embassies, consulates, or diplomatic missions and having some designated place for worship in a home or apartment. There were Russian chapels in Europe’s major cities by 1861, but these were home churches or private chapels. The Parisian church was preceded by the “Greek chapel” of Wiesbaden, an impressive Russian Orthodox church that Adolf of Nassau built between 1849 and 1855 as a burial chapel dedicated to his wife, Grand Duchess of Russia and Nassau, Elizabeth Mikhailovna. The eighteen-year-old grand duchess died in childbirth on her first wedding anniversary in January 1845. Simultaneously with the building of the Paris church, a Russian chapel was erected in Nice, founded by Empress Alexandra Fedorovna (consecrated in 1859). Nice did not become part of France until 1860. For typologies and locations of Russian churches abroad, see Kizenko, “ ‘Vitriny samoderzhaviia,’ ” 456–64; Oderova, “Pravoslavnaia tserkov' v Parizhe,” 21; Vladimir Cherkasov-Georgievskii, Russkii khram na chuzhbine (Moscow: Institut vseobshchei istorii RAN, 2003).

4.They described the Paris church as having a more slender, elegant, and less heavy appearance than the Byzantine style per se. See [I. F. Vasiliev and V. A. Prilezhaev,] Description de L’Église russe de Paris (Paris, 1861), 5–6.

5.On the decree, see Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy: From Alexander II to the Abdication of Nicholas II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 244n35. On the “Moscow-Byzantine style” as the preferred architectural style of the second half of the nineteenth century, see also Kizenko, “ ‘Vitriny samoderzhaviia,’ ” 454, 463.

6.Originally, use of the term had less to do with direct borrowing of Byzantine architectural models than with the ideas, characteristic of the age of Romanticism, that Russian culture had its roots in Byzantium and that there was an inseparable link between national and confessional identity. See E. I. Kirichenko, Russkii stil': Poiski vyrazheniia natsional'noi samobytnosti narodnost' i natsional'nost'. Traditsii drevnerusskogo i narodnogo iskusstva va russkom iskusstve XVIII–nachala XX veka (Moscow: Galart, 1997), 85–89, 420.

7.Paszkiewicz, “In the Service of the Russian Empire,” especially 299. Wortman stresses that under Alexander III, the style of sacred architecture shifted again, to emphasize that there was a Russian national style, based on seventeenth-century prototypes. The competition for the church to be built on the site of Alexander II’s assassination produced many plans in the Byzantine-Russian style, all of which were rejected by Alexander III in favor of a plan modeled directly after the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, and with a highly distinctive Moscow-Yaroslavl style. Wortman also connects Russian church building in the borderlands with Russifying and proseletyzing efforts (Scenarios of Power, 2:244–48, 252–55). See also Kirichenko, Russkii stil', 420.

8.See Anna Navrotskaya, “Aleksandr Nevskii: Hagiography and National Biography,” Cahiers du monde russe 46, no. 1/2 (2005): 299–300; and Nadieszda Kizenko, “The Church-War Memorial at Shipka Pass, 1880–1903,” Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 16–17 (2003): 245. Quotation from Kizenko.

9.Vasiliev and Prilezhaev, Description de l’Église russe de Paris, 8n1.

10.Kizenko writes that dedicating churches built abroad before 1917 to SS Alexander Nevsky or Nicholas—the patron saints of all the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian emperors—demonstrated “a wish … to extol and ‘publicize’ the name of the ruling emperor” and reflected the notion that these saints represented the “embodiment of the divine defense and protection of Russia and its rulers” (“ ‘Vitriny samoderzhaviia,’ ” 454).

11.Regarding a royal chapel in Warsaw dedicated to St. Alexander Nevsky and consecrated in 1846, Piotr Paszkiewicz writes that because of Nevsky’s symbolism as “a defender of Russia and her Orthodox faith against the attempts of Western Europe to convert her to Roman Catholicism,” dedicating a chapel “in the heart of Catholic Poland, to the militant saint of the Orthodox Church had no doubt a strong political and propaganda impact” (“The Beginnings of Orthodox Architecture in Warsaw,” Polish Art Studies 10 [1989]: 53). Paszkiewicz’s work highlights Orthodox churches and monuments in Poland as manifestations of the reassertion of Russian imperial authority after the 1830 and 1863 rebellions, respectively. New large-scale Orthodox building projects became prominent in Poland after 1863, especially from the mid-1870s on. See Paszkiewicz, “An Imperial Dream: The ‘Russification’ of Sacred Architecture in the Polish Lands in the 19th Century,” Ume˘ni, ve˘d. 49 (2001): 531–45; and Paszkiewicz, “Russian Monuments in the Western Borderlands of the Romanov Empire and Their Political Contents,” in Art and Politics: The Proceedings of the Third Joint Conference of Polish and English Art Historians, ed. Francis Ames-Lewis and Piotr Paszkiewicz (Warsaw: Instytut Sztuki Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1999), 61–70.

12.Vasiliev to Serbinovich, June 6/24, 1847, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 30–31. Archpriest Dmitry Stepanovich Vershinsky was still in charge of the embassy church when Vasiliev arrived, though he returned to Russia shortly after.

13.Vasiliev to Serbinovich, June 6/24, 1847 and October 5/17, 1847, ibid., 30–31, 44; Vasiliev to Protasov, December 28, 1847/January 9, 1848, ibid., 49–50.

14.Vasiliev to Protasov, December 28, 1847/January 9, 1848, ibid., 50–54.

15.Ibid., 51.

16.Ibid., 51.

17.Ibid., 51.

18.Vasiliev to Protasov, January 8/20, 1853, ibid., 148–49.

19.Polisadov began his foreign service in Geneva in 1847, was second priest in Paris from 1849–1853, and then transferred to Berlin where he served until 1858 (Oderova, Pravoslavnaia tserkov' v Parizhe, 225). On returning to Russia, Polisadov accepted posts as Professor of Theology at St. Petersburg University and as Archpriest of the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul.

20.“Iz arkhiva professora i rektora Moskovskoi Dukhovnoi Akademii prot. K. S. Smirnova,” Bogoslovskii Vestnik, no. 10–11 (1914): 449, as cited in Oderova, “Protoierei Vasil'ev,” 62.

21.Vasiliev to Baron Philipp Ivanovich Brunnov, September 6/18, 1856, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 173. Vasiliev sent a copy of this letter to Over-procurator Alexander Ivanovich Karasevsky on September 13/25, 1856, ibid., 171–72.

22.Anglicans maintained only private chapels in Paris until 1824, when a more visible embassy chapel was established on Rue Marboeuf. See http://www.stgeorgesparis.com/contact-map/history-of-st-george-s-paris. The website cites Roger Greenacre, The Catholic Church in France: An Introduction (London: Council for Christian Unity, 1996).

23.Vasiliev to Brunnov, September 6/18, 1856, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 174–75.

24.Vasiliev and Prilezhaev, Description de L’Église russe de Paris, 4. Not long afterward, the Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry and Holy Synod approved a request brought by Andrei Mikhailovich Tsitsovich to take up a subscription for a Church of the Ascension in Dalmatia (in the Austrian Empire). In the ministry, the project was deemed “useful” because it would strengthen Orthodoxy “in a land where the insufficient condition and poverty of Orthodox churches facilitates the successes of Catholic propaganda” (Kizenko, “ ‘Vitriny samoderzhaviia,’ ” 466–67). Taken with other evidence, this example suggests a concerted effort by secular and ecclesiastical authorities to counter Catholic hegemony but also suggests these measures were defensive—that is, aimed at preserving the Orthodox flock more than at proselytizing.

25.[Alexander I.] Popovitskii, “Protoierei Iosif Vasil'evich Vasil'ev,” Tserkovno-obshchestvennyi vestnik, no. 155 (December 30, 1881), 2.

26.Not all historians would agree with this characterization. Figes describes Gorchakov as a practitioner of Realpolitik (Crimean War, 434). Kohn says he knew how to appeal to the national and Panslav “mood” of educated society while following in Nesselrode’s footsteps (Pan-Slavism, 126).

27.Oderova, “Pravoslavnaia tserkov' v Parizhe,” 43.

28.Ross, Saint-Alexandre sur-Seine, 88–89.

29.Archives nationales (France), F/19/5590 (Cultes), folder 55, “Églises nationales étrangeres/Église anglicane, grecque et russe,” doc. 64, Milonas to Prince-President Louis Napoleon, May 3, 1852.

30.He also hoped Louis Napoleon would encourage the sultan to adopt the Napoleonic Code in the Ottoman Empire (Milonas to Prince-President Louis Napoleon, May 3, 1852, ibid., folder 55, doc. 67). Milonas, who signed his memo “Former Consul in the East,” had served as an officer in the French army and had a varied career that included service for the First Empire, Britain (after he left Napoleon’s service), and Russia. He ended up as one of the Greek refugees in France and founded a journal, Revue de l’Orient, in 1838, that printed just one issue. He then left France for Great Britain but returned to France in 1847. See Jean Savant, Napoléon et les Grecs: Sous les aigles impériales (n.p., 1946), 278, 283.

31.Archives nationales (France), F/19/5590, folder 55, doc. 68, Milonas to Fortoul, 1852.

32.Ibid.

33.Ross, Saint-Alexandre sur-Seine, 89–90.

34.There is no mention of Milonas in Vasiliev’s Parisian correspondence, but there is a two-year gap in the published correspondence between June 1850 and September 1852.

35.Archives nationales (France), F/19/5590, folder 55, doc. 67, Milonas to Prince-President Louis-Napoleon, May 2, 1852.

36.See Ross, Saint-Alexandre sur-Seine, 90–91. For the archival documentation, see Archives nationales (France), F/19/10933, folder “Culte grec. Demande en autorisation de célébrer les culte grec à Paris. 1853.”

37.Ross, Saint-Alexandre sur-Seine, 90; Archives nationales (France), F/19/10933, folder “Culte grec. Demande en autorisation de célébrer les culte grec à Paris. 1853.”

38.Ross, Saint-Alexandre sur-Seine, 90–91; Vasiliev to Protasov, October 8, 1853, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 151–53.

39.Vasiliev to Protasov, October 8, 1853, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 152.

40.Ross, Saint-Alexandre sur-Seine, 91.

41.Figes makes no mention of the church but discusses France’s efforts to mediate a conflict between Britain and Russia between mid-November 1856 and January 1857. Russia was able to weaken the Anglo-French-Austrian alliance by offering support for French aims in Italy (against Austria) (Crimean War, 435–36). Approval for the church was sought and obtained simultaneously with these diplomatic developments. See also W. E. Mosse, The Rise and Fall of the Crimean System (London: Macmillan, 1963). In April 1857, Russia obtained permission from the Kingdom of Piedmont to build a small church in Nice. Cavour hoped to tap into antipapal and anti-Austrian sentiment in Russia to further the cause of Italian unification (Mikhail G. Talalai, Russkaia tserkovnaia zhizn' i khramostroitel'stvo v Italii [St. Petersburg: Kolo, 2011], 98–99). For a detailed diplomatic study of Russia’s role in Italian unification, which makes, however, no mention of either Russian church, see O. V. Serova, Gorchakov, Kavur i ob'edinenie Italii (Moscow: Nauka, 1997).

42.This letter is located in the files of the Ministry of Worship at the Archives nationales (France), F/19/10933, folder “Autorisation de construire une église pour la communauté russe du rite grec, établie à Paris,” Kiselev to Waleski, December 12, 1856. As of 1858, there were about six hundred Orthodox Russians in Paris, and eight hundred by 1860 (Ross, Saint-Alexandre sur-Seine, 142n3).

43.Kiselev to Waleski, December 12, 1856.

44.Ibid.

45.Archives nationales (France), F/19/5590 (Cultes), folder 55, doc. 65, January 1857. My emphasis.

46.Oderova, “Pravoslavnaia tserkov' v Parizhe,” 40–41, 120.

47.Ibid., 40–41, 120.

48.Sh., “Protoierei pravoslavnoi tserkvi pri russkom posol'stve v Parizhe,” 258; Oderova, “Protoierei I. V. Vasil'ev,” 66. The Holy Synod contributed another 200,000 francs.

49.P. D. Kiselev signed the contract for the purchase of land in the name of the Russian embassy of Paris on October 17/29, 1857 (Oderova, “Pravoslavnaia tserkov' v Parizhe,” 31).

50.André, “Courrier de Paris,” Le Monde illustré, December 26, 1857, 2.

51.Vasiliev to A. P. Tolstoy, January 15/27, 1859, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 181.

52.The groundwork for this treaty was laid in 1857, when Grand Duke Constantine went to Paris and held talks with Napoleon III. French authorization for the church appears to have been a good-will gesture tied to Franco-Russian entente after the Crimean War. Thus, Oderova portrays the building of the church as a move toward cooperation in international politics, noting that “the temple became a kind of symbol of the union of Russia with one of the leading powers of Europe” (“Protoierei Vasil'ev,” 66). See also François Charles-Roux, Alexandre II, Gortchakoff et Napoléon III (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1913), 245–46. The laying of the cornerstone commemorated Alexander II’s ascension to the throne in March 1855 (Vasiliev to A. P. Tolstoy, February 19/March 3, 1859, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 188; B. “Pravoslavnaia tserkov' v Parizhe,” Vsemirnaia illiustratsiia, no. 295, August 24, 1874).

53.Vasiliev to A. P. Tolstoy, February 19/March 3, 1859, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 188.

54.Ibid., 188–89.

55.“Rech', proiznesennaia O. Protoiereem Iosifom Vasil'evym pri polozhenii pervago kamnia Pravoslavnoi Trekh-Prestol'noi Tserkvi v Parizhe vo imia soshestviia Sviatago Dukha, sv. Blagovernago Velikago Kniazia Aleksandra Nevskago i Sviatitelia Nikolaia Mirlikiiskago Chudotvortsa, 19 fevralia (3 marta) 1859 goda,” Dukhovnaia beseda, no. 13 (1859): 414–15.

56.Ibid., 415. Oderova also stresses Vasiliev’s efforts to present the church as apolitical (“Pravoslavnaia tserkov' v Parizhe,” 41).

57.Vasiliev to A. P. Tolstoy, February 19/March 3, 1859, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 188–89. The cornerstone reads: “Year 1859 the foundations of this Orthodox temple of three altars are laid to the successful reign of the Most Pious Sovereign the Emperor of All Russia Alexander II by the generosity of His Majesty, of the entire Reigning house, the Holy Governing Synod, and the sacrifices of the Orthodox, by the undertaking and efforts of prot. I Vasiliev, according to the design of prof. of architecture Roman Kuzmin, in the presence of the ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary to the Emperor of the French Napoleon III Count Paul Dmit. Kiselev, the building committee, and the builder and academician Ivan Shtrom” (ibid., 189n1; Ross, Saint-Alexandre sur-Seine, 151, 154).

58.He added that Gagarin dismissed these rumors (Vasiliev to A. P. Tolstoy, January 15/27, 1859, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 186).

59.La Presse, March 3, 1859. The paper had reported on November 12, 1858, that an “interesting ceremony” would soon be taking place.

60.Frédéric Gaillardet, “Les États-Unis et la Russie,” La Presse, September 4, 1860. In contrast with the Catholic press, Gaillardet used the expression “catholics of the Greek Church.”

61.Barrier, L’Univers, March 5, 1859.

62.Leontii, “Moi zametki i vospominaniia,” Bogoslovskii vestnik 3, no. 12 (1913): 813. Leonty subsequently became metropolitan of Moscow (1891–1893). Three other bishops were considered for the mission: Leonid [Lev Vasil'evich Krasnopevkov], the vicar-general of the Moscow metropolitanate, Archbishop Makary [Bulgakov] of Kharkov, and Archbishop Arseny [Fedor Pavlovich Moskvin] of Warsaw (until 1860, subsequently metropolitan of Kiev and Galicia). “All of these eminent candidates, representing the episcopacy, and especially the last would appear to attach to the event an official importance and were likely to be seen as a sign of the involvement of the Russian Church and State in the Parisian ceremony, which they [church and state] wished to avoid at all cost” (Ross, Saint-Alexandre sur-Seine, 172).

63.Alexander L'vovich Katansky noted that Vasiliev petitioned Filaret for a bishop to come to Paris, and that Filaret’s support was vital for securing support from the Synod (Vospominaniia starago professora [St. Petersburg, 1914], 215–16). Katansky became Vasiliev’s son-in-law in January 1867 and subsequently was a professor at the St. Petersburg Theological Academy and the editor of Tserkovnyi vestnik. See also Oderova, “Protoierei Vasil'ev,” 66. Vasiliev’s correspondence does not discuss plans for the consecration. There is a gap from December 1860 to December 1861, and he spent some time in Russia during that period.

64.Vasilii P. Polisadov [Protopriest], “Pis'ma O. Protoiereia V. P. Polisadova (O puteshestvii nashei dukhovnoi missii v Parizh i ob osviashchenii Parizhskoi tserkvi),” Dukh khristianina (October 1861), pt. 3 (Smes'): 2. There is a one-day discrepancy in the arrival date given by Leontii, “Moi zametki,” 814.

65.Polisadov, “Pis'ma,” 2. Ivan Flerov was Polisadov’s brother-in-law. Vasiliev, Polisadov, and Ianyshev all married daughters of Protopriest Efim Vasilievich Flerov (1793–1867), who were especially well educated (Oderova, “Pravoslavnaia tserkov' v Parizhe,” 62, 88).

66.Polisadov, “Pis'ma,” 3.

67.Ibid., 5.

68.Ibid., 14.

69.Ibid., 14–15.

70.Leontii, “Moi zametki,” 814.

71.Flerov explained this practice of wearing lay clothing in an editorial note to Polisadov’s account (“Pis'ma,” 16). The practice originated (along with trimming or shaving beards) because some Russian priests in foreign service were ridiculed or harassed by the locals (Kizenko, “ ‘Vitriny samoderzhaviia,’ ” 459; Oderova, “Pravoslavnaia tserkov' v Parizhe,” 60–61).

72.Polisadov, “Pis'ma,” 16.

73.Leontii, “Moi zametki,” 814.

74.Polisadov, “Pis'ma,” 16–17.

75.Ibid., 25. In most of the French newspaper press, Leonty was referred to as Monseigneur, bishop, and/or coadjutor of the metropolitan of St. Petersburg. L’Opinion nationale announced before the consecration that the church would be blessed by Leonty the “archbishop-suffragant of Novgorod and St. Peterburg,” September 10, 1861. Two of the most important Paris papers in terms of distribution, Le Constitutionnel and Le Siècle, reported after the fact that the church was consecrated by an archbishop. Le Siècle referred to the bishop charged with blessing the church as “the Archbishop of Great Novgorod” and as “the prelate of the great metropolis.” Novgorod formed part of the Metropolitanate of Novgorod, St. Petersburg, and Finland. See “Faits divers” (compiled by Alexis Grosselin), Le Siècle, September 12, 1861; and “Nouvelles diverses,” Le Constitutionnel, September 12, 1861.

76.La Presse announced the consecration on September 6, 1861, and L’Opinion nationale on September 10.

77.A. P. Zablotskii-Desiatovskii, Graf P. D. Kiselev i ego vremia: Materialy dlia istorii Imperatorov Aleksandra I, Nikolaia I, i Aleksandra II (St. Petersburg, 1882), 3:249; Ross, Saint-Alexandre sur-Seine, 145.

78.Polisadov, “Pis'ma,” 25; Pelliapork [Pelleport], “Osviashchenie russkoi tserkvi v Parizhe,” Pravoslavnoe obozrenie, no. 9 (September 1861): 145.

79.As cited by A. I. Popovitskii, “Osviashchenie Russkoi tserkvi v Parizhe,” Strannik (September 1861), Sovremmenaia khronika: 146.

80.Polisadov, “Pis'ma,” 25–26.

81.Ibid., 26.

82.Leontii, “Moi zametki,” 814.

83.Polisadov, “Pis'ma,” 27.

84.Pelleport considered Baudry especially important because he was a well-known archaeologist whose opinion carried weight, and Baudry’s expert opinion was that the rites had been preserved from novelty and Leonty served with tremendous dignity (Pelliapork, “Osviashchenie russkoi tserkvi v Parizhe,” 143; Ross, Saint-Alexandre sur-Seine, 177).

85.Polisadov, “Pis'ma,” 27.

86.The basement church had a capacity of three to four hundred (Le Temps, September 12, 1861). A Russian source claimed the church could accommodate up to two thousand people. See E. Kryzhanovskii, “Russkaia tserkov' v Parizhe,” Voskresnoe chtenie, no. 27 (October 22, 1861): 737.

87.La Presse, September 12, 1861.

88.Leontii, “Moi zametki,” 815.

89.Le Nord, September 13, 1861. For Polisadov’s description, see “Pis'ma,” 29.

90.Le Nord, September 13, 1861; Polisadov, “Pis'ma,” 29.

91.Polisadov, “Pis'ma,” 29.

92.Ibid., 29–30.

93.Zablotskii-Desiatovskii, Graf P. D. Kiselev, 3:249.

94.Leonty toured Paris but was a sight himself, the recipient of “polite attentiveness” everywhere he went in his monastic dress (“Moi zametki,” 815).

95.A technology developed by French photographers in the 1850s allowed photos to be mass-produced and mounted on 2.5 x 4 inch cards.

96.Leontii, “Moi zametki,” 815. Levitsky (Lewitzky), a pioneer in Russian photography, was one of thirty-three thousand people who were making a living from photography in Paris by 1861. See Helmut Gernsheim, A Concise History of Photography, 3rd rev. ed. (Toronto: Dover, 1986), 22, 55–56; and “Levitskii, Sergei L'vovich,” in Great Soviet Encyclopedia: A Translation of the Third Edition (New York: Macmillan, 1973–1983), 14:455.

97.Marinos Papadopoulos Vréto, “Léontius, évêque de Reval (Lithonie), Coadjuteur du Métropolitain de Saint-Pétersbourg; L’Archprêtre Joseph Wassilieff,” L’Illustration, Journal universel, September 28, 1861, 196–97. L’Illustration and Le Monde illustré were France’s earliest illustrated periodicals. See Rune Hassner, “Photography and the Press,” in A History of Photography, ed. Jean-Claude Lemagny and André Rouillé, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 76.

98.“The New Russian Church in Paris,” The London Illustrated News, September 21, 1861, 291illus., 304. Felix Thorigny (1824–1870) did the illustration. See the Illustrated London News Historical Archive, 1842–2003, accessed via find.galegroup.com; see also the article by Mac Vernoll and the illustration by the famous Émile Bayard (1837–1891) in Le Monde illustré, September 21, 1861, 598, 600illus.

99.Le Monde illustré, September 21, 1861, 598.

100.Le Constitutionnel, September 12, 1861.

101.For example, Le Temps reported that while the consecration service had not been open to the public, the bishop would be serving for the next few days and those services would be open to the public (September 12, 1861).

102.Avtonomova, “Vospominaniia” (August 1916), 312–15.

103.Ibid., 312–15.

104.Théophile Martin, “Faits divers,” L’Ami 10 (September 14, 1861), 637–38.

105.He did not think old Catholic Paris would feel celebratory given “the sorrows of so many of the faithful who are worried and full of trouble in seeing what is being contemplated here and elsewhere against Rome.” See V. D., “Nouvelles étrangeres: France (Correspondance particulière),” Journal de Bruxelles, September 12, 1861.

106.“Nouvelles étrangeres: France (Correspondance particulière),” Journal de Bruxelles, September 19, 1861.

107.In Postcolonial Studies, contact zones have been defined in terms of relationships between the dominant and dominated people in an empire, as “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination.” However, the concept of physical spaces and physical media where “peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations” is certainly useful in contexts other than colonialism. For this definition of contact zones, see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008), 7–8.

108.Some of the information about Orthodoxy in this brochure appeared in articles by Vasiliev and Prilezhaev that were published in Gazette du Nord in 1859. A version of Description de L’Église russe de Paris appeared in Russian as “Russkaia tserkov' v Parizhe” in the military and political paper Russkii invalid, no. 205 (September 20, 1861).

109.L’Opinion nationale, September 10, 1861. This article also reported that three hundred Russian aristocrats traveled to Paris for the festive occasion. The curious detail about Sheremetev’s serf choir was repeated in Le Siècle’s first report on the consecration on September 12, 1861. Leonty had in his entourage a choir of fourteen men under the direction of Grigory Fedorovich Lvovsky, precentor of the St. Petersburg Metropolitan Choir and of the choir of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the seat of the St. Petersburg metropolitanate. I am not aware of any connection between Sheremetev’s serf choir and Lvovsky’s choir. The source of the confusion is not clear. If Count Sheremetev was in Paris with his choir, it was to participate in the ceremony in a capacity other than singing and is a detail not mentioned in the Russian (in this case the more reliable) sources. On the Sheremetev serf choir, see Marina Ritzarev, Eighteenth-century Russian Music (New York: Routledge, 2016), 256–58. On the choir that accompanied Leonty, see Polisadov, “Pis'ma,” 48. On the choir of French opera singers who were on the payroll of the Russian church, see Vasil'ev to Leonty, December 7/19, 1861, “Iz arkhiva vysokopreosviashchenneishago Leontiia Mitropolita Moskovskago,” Russkii arkhiv 30, book 3 (1892), 102–3. See also Ross, Saint-Alexandre sur-Seine, 172, 216.

110.My emphasis. Le Siècle, Le Monde, La Presse, Le Moniteur, and L’Opinion nationale all ran the same article describing the exterior of the church between the eighth and tenth; thus, the error got perpetuated. The compiler of the miscellaneous news for Le Siècle, which published the report on the eighth, was Alexis Grosselin. Michaux, who catalogued the church’s art works in the 1880s, mistook Beideman’s exterior painting for a depiction of God the Father. See the work published for the church’s centennial celebration, Conseil Paroissial de Saint-Alexandre-Nevsky, La Cathédrale Saint-Alexandre-Nevsky de Paris, 6–7; and L. Michaux, Histoire et description de l’Église russe (Paris, 1888). Beideman’s exterior painting of Christ was already discussed by Adrien Robert in Revue universelle des arts 14 (1861): 66. It appears that Beideman (1826–1869) continued to refine the painting after 1861, since the church’s commemorative volume and Michaux date the work 1862. In Russia Beideman was known for his “Byzantine style” (B., “Pravoslavnaia tserkov' v Parizhe”).

111.“Bulletin du jour,” L’Opinion nationale, September 17, 1861.

112.Ibid.

113.Vretos courted Vasiliev’s daughter Sofia, as attested in Avtonomova, “Vospominaniia” (August 1916): 329.

114.Vréto, “Léontius, évêque de Reval; L’Archprêtre Joseph Wassilieff,” 196–97.

115.La Presse, September 4, 1860.

116.“It is on this very place and at the most elevated point of the central spire of the monument, that, following the usage of the Russian clergy, this imposing ceremony occurred” (La Presse, October 31, 1860).

117.Charles Deulin, “Édification d’une église russe à Paris,” Le Monde illustré, April 20, 1861, 246. Also a theater critic, Deulin had contributed to the Russophile paper La Gazette du Nord and was a friend of Pelleport (pseud. Artamov), with whom he collaborated on the French translation of Oblomov. The accompanying illustration, by the well-known artist Felix Thorigny, featured an exterior view of the church being observed by about eleven spectators. Thorigny’s illustration highlights how the church stood out against the backdrop, as there were few other buildings immediately surrounding it.

118.Ibid., 246. Deulin adopted the terminology of the Russian priest-publicists, referring to the “Orthodox Catholic Church of the East” (l’Église catholique orthodoxe d’Orient). He explained (as per Description de L’Église russe de Paris) that the Eastern Church was “based on the equality of the bishops,” governed by the ecumenical councils, and that it “preserves the Nicene Creed and the primitive organization in all their integrity.” He believed the St. Honoré suburb, where the new church was located, would become “the center of elegant and aristocratic Paris,” a “new Beaujon quarter”—referring to Nicolas Beaujon, 1718–1786, a wealthy banker who bought the Élysée Palace and founded the Beaujon Hospital.

119.La Presse and La Patrie, September 9, 1861.

120.La Patrie, September 12, 1861. La Patrie was a paper sympathetic to Franco-Russian rapprochement. In his article Lauzières relied on Description de l’Église russe de Paris to describe the church’s decorative features and their liturgical significance. The interior decoration of the church was not entirely finished by 1861. Beideman and Aleksei Petrovich Bogoliubov contributed more paintings in the 1860s and 1870s. See B., “Pravoslavnaia tserkov' v Parizhe.”

121.Louis Boniface, Le Constitutionnel, September 12, 1861.

122.Théophile Martin, “Faits divers,” L’Ami, September 14, 1861, 637–38.

123.Le Constitutionnel, September 21, 1861. Lengthy excerpts from this article were also printed in Revue universelle des arts 14 (1861): 63–66.

124.Robert, as cited in Revue universelle des arts, 64.

125.Ibid., 64. Robert found Evgraf Sorokin’s painting of Christ in the cupola “a little bizarre,” partly because “the archangels [cherubim] resemble hideous bats circling above a fire.” The painter redeemed himself with his “too beautiful” rendition of the Last Supper, however. Robert disliked Paul Sorokin’s Nativity and faulted him for his use of models that were too emaciated.

126.“Inauguration de la nouvelle église russe de la rue de la Croix-du-Roule,” Le Temps, September 12, 1861.

127.Ibid.

128.Ibid. Richard did not think that the paintings of the Last Supper, the Adoration of the Shepherds, the Entry of Jesus in Jerusalem, and the Sermon on the Mount in the four main cupolas really lived up to their themes. He praised the “military punctuality” of the painters who had gotten the paintings done in just a few months but clearly thought punctuality and artistic talent were two different things.

129.De Maistre wrote that Russia’s religion “is wholly external, and has no place in the heart. We must beware of confounding the power of religion on man with the attachment of man to religion,—two things which have nothing in common” (Pope, 287). Henningsen referred to icon paintings as “wretched daubs” and contrasted the interior decor of a Russian church, “decked out with a pompous magnificence, which renders it gaudy and glittering,” with the “solemnity and grandeur which, in the Roman-Catholic cathedrals, involuntarily fills the breast of the beholder with awe and veneration” (Revelations of Russia, 1:327–28). In a work on the Russian peasants based on the author’s fifteen years in Russia, the poet and composer Achille Lestrelin characterized the “Greek religion” as “a sumptuous religion, where everything speaks to the senses and nothing to the soul, a religion purely demonstrative, where devotion consists of infinitely making the sign of the cross and of striking the forehead on the floor of the church!” (Les Paysans russes: Leurs usages, mœurs, caractère, religion, superstitions et les droits des nobles sur leurs serfs [Paris, 1861], 169). Lestrelin perpetuated other well-established negative ideas about Orthodoxy, including the tsar-pope myth.

130.Edmond Texier, “Revue hebdomadaire,” Le Siècle, September 15, 1861.

131.Ibid.

132.Ibid.

133.Ibid.

134.Ibid.

135.Guérolt, L’Opinion nationale, September 16, 1861.

136.Ibid. This observation prompted a letter to the editor from Amand Chevé clarifying that one of the sixteen members of his choir was a Russian, Alexei Koporsky, whose “voice, very remarkable both in volume and solemnity, powerfully assists our French basses” (L’Opinion nationale, September 19, 1861). Koporsky served as one of the salaried psalm readers at the Paris church from 1851 to 1873 (Oderova, “Pravoslavnaia tserkov' v Parizhe,” 99, 216). On the development of Russian music, see Ritzarev, Eighteenth-century Russian Music.

137.Abbé Jouve, “Choral de l’Église de l’ambassade russe à Paris,” Revue de musique sacrée, June 15, 1862, 246–50. Jouve liberally praised the choral singing in the Russian church in this article, but the editor specifically clarified that Koporsky was not present when Jouve attended services, meaning Jouve heard only French singers (cf. preceding note). The choir was evidently singing arrangements composed by Dmitry Bortniansky.

138.Ibid., 249. On Jouve, see Louis Huz, Notice biographique sur M. l’abbé Jouve (Valence, n.d.).

139.Jouve, “Choral de l’Église de l’ambassade russe,” 249.

140.Typical descriptive information included reference to the church’s “Byzantine-Muscovite” architectural design and the fact that it was modeled on Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. It was usually noted that the church was built in the shape of a Greek cross, with a large gilded dome at the center, and four smaller pyramidal cupolas located at each corner, each surmounted by gilded elliptical domes topped with a gilded cross. Some guides added that the five domes had mystical significance, representing Christ and the four evangelists. The church’s dimensions were often included, along with mention of the eleven stairs leading up to the church’s porch—which was also topped by a small dome—and description of Beideman’s large fresco on the exterior of the building. Discussions of the interior mentioned the division of the church into three main parts, the vestibule, nave, and sanctuary. Attention might be drawn to the painting of Christ enthroned in the main dome and to the carved wood curtain (cloison) separating the sanctuary from the nave—that is, the iconostasis—and adorned with images of Christ, the Virgin, Apostles, and Saints. The main frescoes in the church were identified by subject and painter. A few more detailed guides added more theological description of the Holy or Royal doors, the middle set of three sets of doors on the iconostasis, traversed only by clergy. See Amédée d. Cesena, Le Nouveau Paris: Guide de l’étranger pratique, historique, descriptif et pittoresque (Paris, 1864), 554–55; A. Lasmarrigues, Paris monumental: Guide pratique de l’étranger dans Paris et ses environs (Paris, 1863), 195; Albert Montémont, Guide universel et complet de l’étranger dans Paris (Paris, 1865), 287; J. C. G. Marin de P***, A Fortnight in Paris; or, The Stranger’s Guide in Paris and Its Environs, Containing a Complete and Picturesque Description of all the Remarkable Objects of Interest in Paris and Its Environs, trans. from a new and enlarged French edition by J. Fisher (Paris, 1864), 273.

141.See, for example, Galignani’s New Paris Guide, for 1862 (Paris, 1862); and Galignani’s New Paris Guide, for 1866 (Paris, 1866). Both include the church in the walking tours section, and the 1866 version contains descriptive information (205–6).

142.Adolphe Joanne, Paris illustré: Nouveau guide de l’étranger et du Parisien (Paris, 1863), 39–41. See also Le Guide parisien, par Adolphe Joanne, contenant tous les renseignements nécessaires à l’étranger pour s’installer et vivre à Paris (Paris, 1863).

143.Cesena, Nouveau Paris, 116–17.

144.Marin de P***, 15 jours à Paris ou Guide de l’étranger dans la capitale et ses environs (Paris, 1863), 32, 284–85; Marin de P***, A Fortnight in Paris, vi, 30–31, 272–73. The guide mentions three other non-Roman Catholic monuments in addition to the Russian church.

145.Galignani’s New Paris Guide, for 1862; Galignani’s New Paris Guide, for 1866, 205–6.

146.Henri A. de Conty, Paris en pôche: Guide pratique illustré de l’étranger dans Paris et ses environs, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1867), 220.

147.Pol de Guy, Paris en 1867: Guide a l’exposition universelle (Paris, 1866), 268.

148.Bibliotheque de voyageur, Nouveau guide à Paris, avec plan et gravures (Paris, 1862), 311–12.

149.Edmond Renaudin, Paris-Exposition ou Guide à Paris en 1867 (Paris, 1867), 137.

150.Texier, “Revue hebdomadaire,” Le Siècle, September 15, 1861; Alexis Grosselin, “Faits divers,” Le Siècle, September 12, 1861.

151.“Prospectus,” La Semaine des familles: Revue universelle, October 2, 1858, 1–4.

152.René, “L’Église russe de Paris,” La Semaine des familles, March 21, 1863, 386.

153.Ibid., 386.

154.Ibid., 386.

155.Ibid., 387.

156.Ibid., 387. René referred to M. l’abbé [Louis-Henri] Delière, Tableau d’une Église nationale d’après un pope russe ou Compte rendu d’un ouvrage publié à Leipsic, par un prêtre de l’Église russe, sous ce titre: “Opisanie sel'skago dukhovenstva.” “Description du clergé de campagne” (Paris and Poitiers, 1862).

157.Ibid., 387.

158.Ibid., 387.

159.Ibid., 388; Description de L’Église russe de Paris, 3.

160.René, “L’Église russe de Paris,” 388.

161.Ibid., pt. 2 (March 28, 1863), 401–4. The illustrations were signed Pieron/ Pierron and the engravings were done by Adolphe Gusman (1821–1905).

162.Ibid., 401–2; Description de l’Église russe de Paris, 6. If the need to explain the Holy Doors is not clear, see Lestrelin, who mistranslated Tsarski dver (Royal door) as “porte du Tsar” (door of the Tsar), then explained: “No ecclesiastic, no foreigner can pass through this door, which is exclusively reserved to the priest who is officiating and to the emperor, in his capacity as supreme head of the orthodox Church” (Les Paysans, 175).

163.René, “L’Église russe de Paris,” pt. 2, 402. Of course, René cites the hymn in Latin: Adoro te devote, latens Deitas, Quae sub his figuris vere latitas. The English is Edward Pusey’s translation.

164.Ibid., 403; Description de l’Église russe de Paris, 9. My emphasis.

165.Description de l’Église russe de Paris explained that the architecture in Constantinople adopted attributes “more in harmony with the character and the genius of the eastern peoples,” 4. René added that the words “We will see God as he is, face to face” (cf. I Cor. 13:12; I John 3:2) characterize the “man of the West” (“L’Église russe de Paris,” pt. 2, 402).

166.René, “L’Église russe de Paris,” pt. 2, 404.

167.Ibid., 404.

168.Ibid., 404.

169.Vasiliev to Leonty, October 27/November 8, 1861, “Iz arkhiva vysokopreosviashchenneishago Leontiia,” 99. For purposes of comparison, before the fire in 2019, the Cathedral of Notre Dame received an average of more than thirty thousand visitors per day. See https://www.notredamedeparis.fr/en/la-cathedrale/les-informations-insolites/la-cathedrale-en-chiffres/.

170.Vasiliev to Leonty, October 27/November 8, 1861, “Iz arkhiva vysokopreosviashchenneishago Leontiia,” 99. The schismatic label always really bothered Vasiliev. He objected to the label, claiming that rather than return the epithet, Russian theologians called Christians of other confessions by the names they called themselves—Roman Catholic, Protestant, and so on. He was right, although Orthodox polemicists have not universally observed this general rule. The comment about Russians being Christian harkened back to Vasiliev’s first efforts to counter a prejudice that Russians were pagan or Mahometans (Vasiliev, “La Russie religieuse”).

171.Vasiliev to Leonty, December 7/19, 1861, “Iz arkhiva vysokopreosviashchenneishago Leontiia,” 102.

172.Vasiliev to A. P. Tolstoy, December 20, 1861/January 1, 1862, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 252–53.

173.Vasiliev to Leonty, December 7/19, 1861, “Iz arkhiva vysokopreosviashchenneishago Leontiia,” 102–3. As for Napoleon III, there is no indication that he visited the church until the Te Deum held there in 1867, after the assassination attempt against Alexander II in Paris.

174.When the treaty failed to obtain results, Empress Eugénie became a patron for the cause of the restoration of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, taking up an international subscription and seeking a cooperative approach between Catholic and Orthodox Christians for this project. While seventeen out of twenty-four states, including Greece, supported her subscription in 1865, Alexander II did not. See Alison McQueen, Empress Eugénie and the Arts: Politics and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 251–56. Correspondence between French Ambassador Montebello, French Foreign Minister Thouvenal, and Russian Foreign Minister Gorchakov can be found in “Russie. 1861, aout à decembre. Le duc de Montebello,” Correspondance Politique de l’Origine à 1871 (Russia), Archives diplomatiques, MNESYS 112CP/225.

175.Vasiliev added the observation that “the words of Bautain have great authority here.” Vasiliev to Leonty, March 18/30, 1862, in “Iz arkhiva vysokopreosviashchenneishago Leontiia,” 106. Louis-Eugène-Marie Bautain (1796–1867) served as vicar-general of Paris (1850–1857) and taught philosophy and theology at the Sorbonne. See Eugène de Régny, L’Abbé Bautain: Sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris, 1884). Bautain’s works circulated in Russia, and Bautain represented an ecumenical current in French theological thought that saw Catholics and Orthodox alike as belonging to the universal church. See Dom O. Rousseau, “Les attitudes de pensée concernant l’unité chrétienne au XIXe siècle,” in L’Ecclésiologie au XIXe siècle, ed. Maurice Nédoncelle (Paris: Cerf, 1960), 357; and Ross, Saint-Alexandre sur-Seine, 94.

176.Vasiliev to Leonty, February 20/March 4, 1862, in “Iz arkhiva vysokopreosviashchenneishago Leontiia,” 104.

177.Vasiliev to Leonty, February 5/17, 1863, ibid., 108. In this letter, Vasiliev mentioned that two editions of lithographs of the church had been published, one specifically for children.

178.Ibid., 110. In this letter Vasiliev expressed his concerns about the appointment of a new deacon to the church, insisting that the appointed deacon had to be attractive and have a decent voice. His opinion illustrates his commitment to the idea that the new church was intended to shape and educate European public opinion about Orthodoxy. “In a chapel, as this was earlier, outward qualities are not so necessary; but in our vast and grand church, which non-Orthodox [inovertsy] visit, a decent voice and comely appearance are necessary” (ibid., 109).

179.De Maistre introduced this expression, which became a common way for Catholic writers to refer to the Orthodox Church (Du Pape, 2:192). See Heather Bailey, “ ‘The Churches that Call Themselves orthodox’: Nomenclature for Russian Orthodoxy in Nineteenth-Century France,” Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies (2019).

180.It is also interesting to recall that as part of the Paris Peace Treaty of 1856, in efforts to shore up the Ottoman Empire and to eliminate a Russian pretext for intervention in the Near East, the western powers insisted that Turkey adopt a decree guaranteeing religious toleration and civil rights to non-Muslim subjects. This decree was resented by Muslim religious authorities, contributed to religious conflicts in the Ottoman Empire, and was not enforced (Figes, Crimean War, 427–32). Theoretically, the decree meant that the Ottoman Empire had more progressive legislation than Russia concerning toleration of religious minorities.

181.In 1847, already talking about the need for a new church, a project that required an understanding of French laws on religious confessions, Vasiliev sent Serbinovich his notes on “Legislation of the French Government concerning the Religious Confessions.” Vasiliev to Serbinovich, October 5/17, 1847, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 43.

182.Vasiliev to Serbinovich, March 14/26, 1849, ibid., 89.

183.Le Nord, February 8, 1861.

184.See ibid. and Sergei Sushkov, “L’Église de Russie: Vengée contre les calumnies du journal Le Monde,” L’Union chrétienne, September 29, 1861, 379.

185.Le Nord, February 8, 1861. A Russian subscriber to Le Nord wrote to the editor on this same subject, suggesting that it was typical of the Catholic ultramontanes to consider Protestant all who have contested and contest papal pretensions.

186.La Presse, March 3, 1859.

187.Mac-Sheehy, “Chronique du jour,” L’Union, March 5, 1859. It is curious and not at all typical that Mac-Sheehy referred to the church as a “cathedral,” since that would imply the establishment not only of a parish but of a diocese.

188.See the September 9, 11, and 14, 1861 issues of Le Monde.

189.Texier, “Revue hebdomadaire,” Le Siècle, September 15, 1861.

190.Ibid.

191.In 1861, a complaint was made against a curé in Sarrabee (Moselle) because he refused to hear the confession of a woman who was “dangerously ill” on grounds that “she received Le Siècle in a cafe that was the House of the Devil” (Archives nationales [France], F/19/5605, folder “1857–1862”).

192.Le Monde, September 16, 1861.

193.Ibid.

194.The first segment appeared about ten days after Coquille’s polemical article against Texier. The excerpts in Le Monde preceded the publication of a book that was partly a translation of Belliustin and partly an anti-Orthodox rant. See Le Monde, September 25, 1861, and October 1, 4, 9, 13, 1861. For the book, see Delière, Tableau d’une Église nationale.

195.Sushkov, “L’Église de Russie,” 379.

196.Ibid., 379–80.

197.Even the range of press coverage was impressive. Besides appearing in the most important mainstream newspapers including the prominent illustrated papers, reporting about the church reached into papers representing specific ethnic groups (e.g., Revue espagnole et portugaise) and special interests (e.g., Revue universelle des arts; L’Industrie du Nord et du Pas-de-Calais).

4. A Spectacular Success

1.Petrovich, Russian Panslavism, 29.

2.Maiorova, From the Shadow of Empire, 164. On the Crimean War as a turning point for Russian identity, see especially ibid., 6–8.

3.Petrovich, Russian Panslavism, 287.

4.[Popovitiskii], “Protoierei Vasil'ev.”

5.Oderova notes that the reaction to the consecration in the Russian press exceeded the bounds of regular reporting with “poetical odes,” and expressions of “rapture” glorifying Russia, its church, and its sovereign. “The Russian church truly became a means of the transmission of imperial ideology in the West” (“Pravoslavnaia tserkov' v Parizhe,” 49).

6.“Protoierei Iosif Vasil'evich Vasil'ev,” Pravoslavnoe obozrenie (January 1882): 176–77.

7.Kapelmans served briefly as editor of Le Nord before assuming the editorship of the French paper in Russia, Journal de St.-Pétersbourg.

8.Popovitsky was “always speaking out for freedom of conscience and for academic freedom” (“Popovitskii,” Entsiklopedicheskii slovar' F. A. Brokgauza i I. A. Efrona).

9.Mel'nikova, Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov', 224.

10.[V. I. Kapel'mans], “Osviashchenie russkoi tserkvi v Parizhe,” Dukhovnaia beseda, September 16, 1861, 589.

11.Ibid., 590.

12.Ibid., 595.

13.Ibid., 595–96.

14.Dukh khristianina was published in St. Petersburg from 1861 to 1865. For the offprint, see V. P. Polisadov, Pis'ma protoiereia V. P. Polisadova o puteshestvii nashei dukhovnoi missii v Parizh i ob osviashchenii Parizhskoi tserkvi (St. Petersburg, 1861).

15.Polisadov, “Pis'ma,” 21.

16.Ibid., 23–24.

17.Ibid., 5.

18.Leontii, “Moi zametki,” 815.

19.[Vasiliev and Prilezhaev,] Description de L’Église russe de Paris, 15.

20.Polisadov, “Pis'ma,” 27.

21.Ibid., 25, 27.

22.Ibid., 28. My emphasis.

23.“Nouvelles du jour,” Le Nord, September 13, 1861; Polisadov, “Pis'ma,” 29.

24.Polisadov, “Pis'ma,” 33.

25.Ibid., 36.

26.Ibid., 37.

27.Ibid., 38–39.

28.Ibid., 42–43.

29.Ibid., 43–51. This church was consecrated in May 1855. Following the consecration, memorial services were held for Elizabeth Mikhailovna, whose remains were relocated to the church. Prince Petr Viazemsky, who held important roles in the civil service under Alexander I and Nicholas I, attended these services. The account that he published is full of patriotic rhetoric about the faith, rites, and tongue of “Holy Rus,” and expresses the idea that the church is a sacred space where Russians experience a delight (naslazhdenie) that “sons of Western Churches” are deprived of. While his account expresses his religious nationalism and makes brief mention of westerners who observed the service or funeral procession, the Wiesbaden church was not conceived or inaugurated with an intent to attract publicity like the Paris church was. See P. A. Viazemskii, “Osviashchenie novosooruzhennoi nadgrobnoi eia imperatorskago vysochestva gosudaryni velikoi kniagini Elisavety Mikhailovny tserkvi vo imia sviatyia pravednyia Elisavety, v Visbadene,” Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnago prosveshcheniia, pt. 87, sec. 2 (1855): 1–15. Noting that the Russian clergy abroad were able to command the respect of the heterodox, Viazemsky did speak to the role of the foreign clergy as publicists, commenting that it was important for the Holy Synod to pay attention to the issue of whom to choose for foreign service (ibid., 10).

30.Leontii, “Rech', skazannaia preosviashchennym Leontiem, episkopom revel'skim, vikariem S. Peterburgskim, pri osviashchenii russkoi tserkvi v Parizhe,” Khristianskoe chtenie, pt. 2 (1861): 67–70; Leontii, “Rech' po sluchaiu osviashcheniia russkoi pravoslavnoi tserkvi v Parizhe, 30 Avgusta 1861 goda,” Strannik (September 1861), Sovremennaia khronika: 149–51; “Osviashchenie russkoi tserkvi v Parizhe,” Dukhovnaia beseda, September 16, 1861, 602–8. The first French translation appeared in the Journal de St.-Pétersbourg.

31.Polisadov, “Pis'ma,” 32–33.

32.Ibid., 32–33.

33.Guettée, “Consecration de l’église russe de Paris,” L’Union chrétienne, September 15, 1861, 361–62; and Guettée, “La Présence de Mgr. Léonce à Paris,” L’Union chrétienne, September 22, 1861, 369–70. A year later, Vasiliev mentioned to the over-procurator that about one-third of L’Union chrétienne’s three hundred subscribers were Orthodox (Vasiliev to Akhmatov, October 19/31, 1862, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 259).

34.Guettée, “Consecration de l’église russe,” 361–62.

35.Ibid., 362.

36.Polisadov, “Pis'ma,” 34.

37.Guettée, “Présence de Mgr. Léonce à Paris,” 370.

38.Ibid., 370.

39.Ibid., 370.

40.Ibid., 369–70.

41.Ibid., 370.

42.Ibid., 370.

43.Popovitskii, “Osviashchenie Russkoi tserkvi v Parizhe,” 144.

44.Ibid., 145. My emphasis.

45.Ibid., 148–49.

46.Pelliapork, “Osviashchenie russkoi tserkvi v Parizhe,” 141–42.

47.Ibid., 142.

48.J. Vilbort, L’Opinion nationale: Journal du soir, September 12, 1861.

49.“Nouvelles du jour,” Le Nord, September 13, 1861.

50.He mentioned that Bacciochi attended the event in a private, not public, capacity (Ross, Saint-Alexandre sur-Seine, 144; Zablotskii-Desiatovskii, Graf P. D. Kiselev, 3:249).

51.Polisadov, “Pis'ma,” 25–26.

52.[Kapel'mans], “Osviashchenie russkoi tserkvi v Parizhe,” 590–91, 593.

53.Popovitskii, “Osviashchenie russkoi tserkvi v Parizhe,” 147.

54.Pelliapork, “Osviashchenie russkoi tserkvi v Parizhe,” 146. Eighty-four thousand visitors in five days would translate into 16,800 people per day or 700 people per hour, around the clock.

55.Ibid., 143.

56.Ibid., 142.

57.Ibid., 145.

58.“Zagranichnye zametki,” Pravoslavnoe obozrenie, February 1862, 65–66. Replovsky’s authorship of these notes can be deduced given that they were sent from Stuttgart and he frequently sent correspondence to Pravoslavnoe obozrenie.

59.The empress expressed her reverence by crossing herself and making a Latin bow (curtsy) before leaving the temple (Vasiliev to A. P. Tolstoy, December 20, 1861/January 1, 1862, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 253; Vasiliev to Leonty, December 7/19, 1861, “Iz arkhiva vysokopreosviashchenneishago Leontiia,” 103; “Zamechatel'nye poseshcheniia pravoslavnoi parizhskoi tserkvi,” Strannik [January 1862], Sovremannaia khronika: 28–30).

60.Vasiliev to Leonty, December 7/19, 1861, “Iz arkhiva vysokopreosviashchenneishago Leontiia,” 102; “Zamechatel'nye poseshcheniia pravoslavnoi parizhskoi tserkvi,” 30.

61.Vasiliev to A. P. Tolstoy, December 20, 1861/January 1, 1862, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 253; Vasiliev to Leonty, December 7/19, 1861, 102; “Zamechatel'nye poseshcheniia pravoslavnoi parizhskoi tserkvi,” 30.

62.Vasiliev to Leonty, February 20/March 4, 1862, “Iz arkhiva vysokopreosviashchenneishago Leontiia,” 104.

63.Leonty to Archbishop Platon, January 12, 1862, “Chetyre pis'ma Mitropolita Leontiia k Arkhiepiskopu kostromskomu Platonu,” Russkii arkhiv 31, book 3 (1893): 88.

64.Ibid., 88. This letter also indicated that however much pleasure Leonty derived from the mission, it had been arduous. He indicated that some due thanks was still outstanding. “I’m still awaiting thanks for the journey, which cost me sleepless nights and intense exertion; however, I am forgetting myself.”

65.Leontii, “Moi zametki,” 815.

66.“Allocution prononcée le 30 août–11 septembre 1861 par Monseigneur Leoncé, évêque de Reval,” L’Union chrétienne, December 15, 1861, 49–50.

67.Leontii, “Moi zametki,” 815.

68.Ibid., 819.

69.“I expected that Your Grace would fulfill the commission well, but that everything would go so superlatively, I did not anticipate” (ibid., 818).

70.Ibid., 819. On Leonty’s transfer, see his “Moi zametki i vospominaniia,” Bogoslovskii vestnik 1, no. 1 (1914): 145–47.

71.Avtonomova, “Vospominaniia” (August 1916), 306.

72.[Vasiliev and Prilezhaev], Description de l’Église russe de Paris, 4; Russkii invalid, no. 205 (September 20, 1861); Kryzhanovskii, “Russkaia tserkov' v Parizhe,” 730.

73.Avtonomova, “Vospominaniia” (August 1916), 311–13.

74.Permission to have bells was granted later (ibid., 311–12). Avtonomova probably misremembered Vasiliev’s meeting with Napoleon III during the Crimean War, regarding the POWs on the Île-d’Aix, as a meeting about permission to build a new church. A Jesuit priest was reportedly involved in the attempt to ban Vasiliev from the island during the war. See Sh., “Protoierei pravoslavnoi tserkvi pri russkom posol'stve v Parizhe,” 257–58. Avtonomova’s account appears to be a misremembered version of what this article reported about Vasiliev, Russian POWs, the Jesuits, and Napoleon III.

75.Avtonomova, “Vospominaniia” (August 1916), 312–15.

76.Ibid., 312–14.

77.Ibid., 314. She also discussed strong reverence among French Catholics for the Mother of God and Catholic customs associated with first communion and commemorations for the dead (ibid., 327–28).

78.Ibid., 314–15.

79.Ibid., 315.

80.A twist on Kizenko’s discussion of Russian churches as “showcases of autocracy.” See Kizenko, “ ‘Vitriny samoderzhaviia.’ ”

81.Petrovich, Russian Panslavism, 32, 34–35.

82.Gorchakov was not sympathetic to Panslav ideology, and there was no real unity between the government and Panslavs—or a clear Panslav program, for that matter (ibid., 121, 128).

83.On the evolution of Panslavism, Petrovich writes: “the Slavophiles left a legacy of ideals—ultimate allegiance to a universal culture, the quest for inner justice rather than legal form, the stress on natural development rather than coercion, the preference for social rather than political solutions, the insistence on the right of each historic people to cultural self-determination—ideals which the earlier Panslavists accepted in the realm of theory and which the later Panslavists largely abandoned in practice” (ibid., 35). Kohn contrasts the “liberal” atmosphere of the first Panslav Congress in Prague (1848) with the “stern nationalist atmosphere” of the Moscow Congress (1867) (Pan-Slavism, 159).

84.The cornerstone of the Sacred Heart Basilica at Montmartre was laid in June 1875. This monument, however, was tied to themes of penitence with no parallel in the story of the Russian church of Paris.

5. The Church Chained to the Throne of the “Czar”

1.As much as the Polish question contributed to the atmosphere of Russophobia surrounding the Crimean War, there had been no resolution of the matter. While the French and British statesmen of 1856 would have welcomed an independent Poland, they concluded the costs would be too high. Therefore the Polish question had not been brought up at the Paris congress in 1856 (Figes, Crimean War, 416–17).

2.Soroka and Ruud, Becoming a Romanov, 286–91; Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, Un homme d’État russe (Nicolas Miliutine) (Paris, 1884), 302–11; Weeks, “Between Rome and Tsargrad.”

3.Leroy-Beaulieu, Un homme d’État russe, 104; on the fate of the concordat under Alexander II, see Astafieva, “Concordat de 1847,” 58–60.

4.Nikolai Miliutin reported that hostility reached “unbelievable extremes” (Soroka and Ruud, Becoming a Romanov, 288–90).

5.Vasiliev to Leonty, February 5/17, 1863, in “Iz arkhiva vysokopreosviashchenneishago Leontiia,” 110.

6.“The name ‘schismatic’ [for the Eastern Church] seems too gracious to them, and for the greater degradation they call it ‘Photian’ ” (Vasiliev to A. P. Akhmatov, December 22, 1863/January 3, 1864, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 267).

7.Pogodin was Russia’s first ideologue of Panslavism, formulating his vision of Slavic unity in secret memos as early as 1838 and 1839 but finding no willingness to entertain his ideas in Russian officialdom until after the Crimean War (Petrovich, Russian Panslavism, 26–31; Kohn, Pan-Slavism, 141–46).

8.Gregory L. Freeze, introduction to Description of the Clergy in Rural Russia, by Belliustin, trans. with an interpretive essay by Gregory L. Freeze (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Freeze, “Revolt from Below: A Priest’s Manifesto on the Crisis in Russian Orthodoxy (1858–59),” in Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime, ed. Robert L. Nichols and Theofanis G. Stavrou (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978), 90–124; Freeze, The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia; and Freeze, “Gagarin: A Critical Perspective on the Russian Clergy and Church in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Russian Clergy by I. S. Gagarin, trans. Ch. Du Gard Makepeace (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1976).

9.A collection of critical Russian responses was published anonymously in Berlin: Russkoe dukhovenstvo (Berlin, 1859).

10.The foreign publication even included an epigraph by Gagarin, who had been sentenced in absentia to Siberian exile for the crime of apostasy, should he ever return to Russia.

11.Freeze, introduction to Description of the Clergy in Rural Russia, 46.

12.Prince Pierre Dolgoroukow, La Vérité sur la Russie (Paris, 1860), 349. In this work, Dolgorukov challenged his compatriots’ belief that hiding Russia’s problems from foreigners was the best course of action and argued that publicity was the best medicine (ibid., 1–2).

13.Gustave de La Tour, “La Russie en 1861,” Le Monde, April 29, 1861. Le Monde covered the Jaquemet-Vasiliev debate starting on April 30, the day after La Tour’s first installment appeared. But discussion of the Jaquemet-Vasiliev polemic had already appeared in L’Ami.

14.Ibid.

15.Ibid., May 4, 1861.

16.Ibid. The second segment of La Tour’s piece appeared on May 1 and featured a lengthy discussion of Russian Panslavism.

17.“Du clergé des campagnes en Russie par un prêtre de l’église orthodoxe (Brochure en langue russe, imprimée à Leipzig),” in Le Monde, September 25 and October 1, 4, 9, 13, 1861.

18.Delière, Tableau d’une Église nationale.

19.Ibid., 3–4.

20.Ibid., 1.

21.Ibid., 3.

22.Ibid., 5–6. The idea of Russia as a colossus built on feet of clay was a popular theme in French Enlightenment and subsequently Russophobic literature, possibly originating with Diderot and reoccurring frequently thereafter (McNally, “Origins of Russophobia in France,” 179).

23.Delière, Tableau d’une Église nationale, 8.

24.Ibid., 7–8.

25.Ibid., 20.

26.Ibid., 25.

27.Belliustin, Description of the Clergy in Rural Russia, 191.

28.Ibid., 193.

29.Delière, Tableau d’une Église nationale, 90–91. The “great Catholic preacher” was Henri-Dominique Lacordaire, who, in his twenty-third lecture at Notre Dame (1844), said: “Now, since the definitive advent of the Catholic doctrine, we have seen three great doctrinal establishments form alongside it: Islamism, Protestantism, and rationalism. I do not mention the Greek schism although it has a considerable place in the world, because the Greek schism, foreign to all real movement, is actually the Catholic doctrine in the state of petrification” (Oeuvres, vol. 3: Conférences de Notre-Dame de Paris [Paris, 1872], 2:55). Other Catholic polemicists repeated Lacordaire’s idea about petrification of the Eastern Church, sometimes omitting the reference to “Catholic doctrine.”

30.Gagarin, review of Tableau d’une Église nationale, 687.

31.Ibid., 685–86.

32.Ibid., 686.

33.Ibid., 686.

34.Gagarin, Russian Clergy, iv.

35.Gagarin, La Réforme du clergé russe (1867) and La Clergé russe (1871).

36.Thomas William M. Marshall, Les Missions chrétiennes: Ouvrage traduit de l’anglaise avec l’autorisation de l’auteur, augmenté et annoté par Louis de Waziers (Paris: Ambroise Bray, 1865), 2:135–36. Marshall drew on de Maistre, Horrer, Theiner, Döllinger and Shuvalov, among others. Waziers about doubled the material on Russia, and cited from Belliustin, Delière, Dolgorukov, and Muraviev among others.

37.René, “L’Église russe de Paris,” La Semaine des familles, March 21, 1863, 387.

38.Bulletin de la Société des Antiquaires de l’Ouest et des Musées de Poitiers, 11 (1865–1867) (meetings for July and August 1865): 166–67.

39.The formal acceptance came from Metropolitan Isidor on June 5, 1862 (old style), and Vasiliev formally received Guettée into the church on the eve of the feast of St. Vladimir, July 14/26, 1862 (Vasil'ev, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 245–46).

40.Sergei P. Sushkov, “Le Clergé russe,” L’Union chrétienne. The first of seven segments appeared on June 8, 1862, 255–56; and the last appeared July 20, 1862, 301–3.

41.“Correspondance particulière du Nord,” Le Nord, May 10, 1862.

42.Ibid.

43.Le Nord, June 1, 1862.

44.Sushkov, “Clergé russe,” July 20, 1862, 302.

45.Ibid., June 15, 1862, 264.

46.See, for example, Horrer, Persécution et souffrances, 66–68, 183–85; Custine, Russia, 461–62. There was also a connection between Muraviev and Pogodin, as the former wrote to the latter that he “tried to rebut Catholic propagandists” but found it difficult, “especially with regard to the question of domination by the state” (Freeze, “Handmaiden of the State?” 92n43).

47.Jean-Louis de Rozaven, De la réunion de l’Église russe avec l’Église catholique (Paris, 1864). This work was a new and retitled version of L’Église catholique justifiée contre les attaques d’un écrivain qui se dit orthodoxe ou Réfutation d’un ouvrage intitulé “Considérations sur la doctrine et l’esprit de l’Église orthodoxe” par Alexandre de Stourdza (Lyon, 1822). Golitsyn also published L’Église russe et l’Église catholique, lettres inédites du R. P. Rozaven (Paris, 1862).

48.Dupanloup, “Lettre de Mgr. l’évêque d’Orléans,” in L’Église russe et l’Église catholique, xii–xiii.

49.Ibid., xiii–xiv. One of the conversions attributed to Rozaven was that of the famous Madame Swetchine (1782–1857), who subsequently moved to Paris and ran a salon that attracted some of the most eminent figures in French Catholicism. Gagarin was her relation. See Tatyana Bakhmetyeva, Mother of the Church: Sofia Svechina, the Salon, and the Politics of Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Russia and France (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016).

50.Dupanloup, “Lettre de Mgr. l’évêque d’Orléans,” xiii.

51.Ibid., xvi.

52.Ezequiel Adamovsky, Euro-Orientalism: Liberal Ideology and the Image of Russia in France (c. 1740–1880) (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006), especially 14, 115–16, 193–94, 223–25.

53.Dupanloup, “Lettre de Mgr. l’évêque d’Orléans,” xvi–xvii.

54.Ibid., xvii.

55.Ibid., xvii–xix. Besse writes that Dupanloup’s “Catholic liberalism was not less anti-Orthodox than the most zealous ultramontanism.” Noting that Dupanloup was inspired by Theiner’s L’Église schismatique russe, he considered Dupanloup’s depiction of the Russian Church more negative than Custine’s. Even Gagarin recognized that the Russian clergy was not just misunderstood but “slandered” in the West (Besse, Un précurseur, 129, 131).

56.Dupanloup, “Lettre de Mgr. l’évêque d’Orléans,” xix.

57.Ibid., xxi–xxii.

58.Ibid., xxii. Hedwig (ca. 1174–1243) was duchess of Silesia and was canonized by the Latin Church in the thirteenth century. St. John Sobiewski was a seventeenth-century Polish commander known for his role in fending off Ottoman westward expansion in the late seventeenth century but also for the loss of Kiev to Russia in 1686. See Stanislaus Tarnowski, “John Sobieski,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, retrieved from New Advent, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14061c.htm.

59.Dupanloup, “Lettre de Mgr. l’évêque d’Orléans,” xxii–xxiii.

60.George W. Moss, Russia in the Age of Alexander II, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (London: Anthem Press, 2002), 121–27.

61.L’Univers and Le Monde reported this, citing Le Moniteur and Figaro respectively (“Nouvelles diverses,” L’Univers, June 3, 1867; Le Monde, June 5, 1867; “Hier—aujourd’hui—demain,” Figaro, June 3, 1867).

62.On Berezowski as the son of Uniates, L’Univers cited La Presse on June 10/11, 1867.

63.Madame Jules [Céleste] Baroche, Second Empire: Notes et souvenirs (Paris: Crès, 1921), 374.

64.The horse was hit in the nostrils but survived and recovered.

65.Gustave Vapereau, “Alexandre II,” Dictionnaire universel des contemporains: Contenant toutes les personnes notables de la France et des pays étrangers, 4th ed. (Paris, 1870), 27.

66.Cucheval-Clarigny, La Presse, June 8, 1867.

67.Le Monde, June 3, 1867.

68.Le Monde, June 8, 1867.

69.Paulin Limayrac in Le Constitutionnel, as cited in La Presse, June 8, 1867.

70.L’Union, June 7, 1867.

71.For Veuillot’s analysis, see L’Univers, June 8, 1867; Guettée, “Sa Majesté Alexandre II l’Empereur de toutes les Russies à Paris,” L’Union chrétienne, June 9, 1867, 256.

72.Other high dignitaries also accompanied the sovereigns. On June 9, 1867, Le Monde reported that the ambassadors of Russia, England, and Prussia were in attendance.

73.E. Youllet, Le Monde, June 9, 1867.

74.L’Union, June 9, 1867.

75.René du Merzer, “Les Souverains à Paris,” L’Illustration, June 15, 1867, 370.

76.L’Illustration, June 22, 1867, 386, 388.

77.E. Bauer, “Nouvelles du jour,” La Presse, June 10/11, 1867. My emphasis. Bauer’s report also mentioned that the “czar” attended mass at ten in the Tuileries, served by the archbishop of Paris.

78.For circulation information on select Paris papers, see Bellet, Presse et journalisme, 312–13.

79.A few other embellishments were added: “On exiting the chapel, the emperor spoke to a few people, including a young princess for whom His Majesty was pleased to consent to sign a marriage contract.” The report also noted, “Mr. Vahilief, archimandrite, wore a magnificent vestment given by the czar” (Le Petit Journal, June 12, 1867).

80.Coquille in Le Monde, June 14, 1867. Compare with Le Monde’s June 9 report on the Te Deum, which appeared while Alexander II was still in Paris and was not politicized.

81.Ibid.

82.Figes, Crimean War, 433.

83.Guettée, “Sa Majesté Alexandre II,” 255–56.

84.Ibid., 256.

85.Le Petit Journal, July 8, 1867.

86.Ibid.

87.The confusion was due to the different formulas the western and eastern churches use to calculate the date of Pascha, and due to confusion between the Gregorian and Julian calendars. The Russians celebrated Ascension on June 6, 1867, and Pentecost ten days later. Meanwhile the Roman Catholics commemorated Pentecost on June 9, 1867.

88.Le Petit Journal, July 8, 1867.

89.Ibid.

90.See the Chronicle section in L’Union chrétienne, June 23, 1867, 271–72.

91.Ibid., 272.

6. Guettée, Vasiliev, L’Union chrétienne, and the Public Image of Orthodoxy

1.Guettée thought Archbishop Sibour stopped supporting him and started acting like an ultramontane because he wanted to be a cardinal (Souvenirs, 236). Abbé Migne told Guettée that he was Gallican but just found it necessary to present the ultramontane position publicly in order to further his publications (Besse, Un précurseur, 91; Guettée, Souvenirs, 118).

2.Guettée, Souvenirs, 369.

3.Bulletin des lois civiles écclésiastiques: Journal encyclopédique du droit et de la jurisprudence en matière religieuse et du contentieux des cultes 10 (April 1858): 81–98.

4.Ibid., 98.

5.Guettee was asked by a representative of Napoleon III, Abbé Vilain from the Imperial Chapel of the Tuileries, to produce a memorandum that would justify a policy of distancing France from Rome. Guettée’s Mémoire soumis à l’Empereur Napoléon III sur la restauration de l’Église gallicane (Paris, 1861) argued that authority had to remain with the bishops in unity and that the French Church had to beware of a situation where the papacy could abuse its power either by interfering, in accord with the interests of another secular ruler to whom the pope could be subjected, in the internal affairs of France, or by claiming to be an “infallible oracle of heaven” (ibid., 19). The memo declared the inevitable collapse of the temporal power, but suggested that the papacy’s “spiritual pretensions” would only increase (ibid., 8). Guettée believed that Napoleon III adopted a Gallican position after reading his brochure, although “he did not have the strength of character to execute it” (Guettée, Souvenirs, 374–75; Besse, Un précurseur, 147). The Gallican brochure that Guettée was suspected of writing was Rome et les évêques de France (Paris, 1861).

6.The papers targeted by the lawsuit were the “clerico-legitimist” La France centrale (Blois) and La Correspondance française, but others had carried the same report and were obliged to print corrections (L’Esperance du peuple de Nantes, Journal de Rennes, Courrier de Lyon). See L’Union chrétienne, May 19, 1861, 231, and July 28, 1867, 310; Besse, Un précurseur, 146; Guettée, Souvenirs, 394–97; “Correspondance judiciaire,” L’Indépendance belge, May 13, 1861.

7.Guettée, Souvenirs, 394–98.

8.Ibid., 357.

9.Translated as The Papacy; Its Historic Origin and Primitive Relations with the Eastern Churches (New York, 1866).

10.Guettée, Souvenirs, 357.

11.Ibid., 358.

12.Pierre-François Mathieu, Histoire des miraculés et des convulsionnaires de Saint-Médard (Paris: Didier, 1864), 44.

13.Ibid., 44.

14.“Russie (Correspondence particulière),” Journal de Bruxelles, September 17, 1869. Specifically, the report stated that it would be slandering the Jesuit Aloys Pichler to put him on the same rung as Guettée by saying Pichler had “abjured Catholicism” to join the Russian Church. Pichler’s work on the schism between the churches was placed on the Index, and he was known to be an opponent of papal power, so he had been invited to Russia, given a position in the Religious Affairs Department of the Interior Ministry, and put in charge of the Theological Section of the Imperial Library. When a number of library books went missing and were found in his home, he was tried and convicted of kleptomania and exiled to Siberia until he was pardoned in 1874. One theory behind the theft was that Pichler was planning to send the books to Rome since they had once belonged to the Jesuits and had been brought from Warsaw to Petersburg after 1830. See “The St. Petersburg Professor’s Kleptomania,” The Bulwark, or, Reformation Journal 21 (July 1, 1871): 19–20; and “Aloys Pichler,” in Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, ed. John McClintock and James Strong (New York, 1891), 8:184. Taken together with Guettée, the Pichler case is suggestive of a Russian policy of courting Catholic dissidents, a topic that would be worth investigating further.

15.See “Russie (Correspondence particulière),” Journal de Bruxelles, February 6, 1861, and June 27, 1862.

16.Guettée would not engage in polemics directly with Boulgak, addressing himself instead to Gagarin (Lettres au Révérend Père Gagarin de la compagnie de Jésus touchant l’Église catholique orthodoxe et l’Église romaine ou defense de “La papauté schismatique” contre les calomnies et les erreurs du parti jésuitique caché sous le pseudonyme de Boulgak [Paris, 1867], iii–iv).

17.See Nikolai Borisovich Golitsyn [pseud. N. Boulgak], Étude sur les rapports de l’Église catholique avec l’Église orientale (Paris, 1865), 1–2, 66. Boulgak alleged that Guettée called himself “abbé Guettée” instead of Vladimir to fool readers into thinking that he was a Catholic priest instead of a “deserter of his Church,” a rather disingenuous claim since Boulgak referred to himself as “an orthodox Russian.” See his La Russie est-elle schismatique? Aux hommes de bonne foi par un russe orthodoxe (Paris, 1859). For identification of N. Golitsyn as the author of this work, see [Louis Zozime Elie] Lescoeur, L’Église catholique et le gouvernement russe (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1903), 519n1.

18.“Nouvelles étrangéres: France. Correspondence particulière,” Journal de Bruxelles, June 5, 1867.

19.Ibid.

20.“Autre correspondance,” Journal de Bruxelles, July 31, 1867; L’Union chrétienne, July 28, 1867, 309–10, and August 11, 1867, 326–28.

21.“Autre correspondance,” Journal de Bruxelles, July 31, 1867.

22.Ibid.

23.Guettée, Souvenirs, 392.

24.Alexandre Sorel, Assassinat de Mgr. l’archevêque de Paris: Verger. Sa biographie et son procès, par un sténographe (Paris, 1857), 41–42; Guettée, Souvenirs, 245.

25.Guettée, Souvenirs, 379–99, especially 383–84 and 389–90.

26.Ibid., 384.

27.Ibid., 398–99.

28.Ibid., 411.

29.Besse, Un précurseur, 148; Patric Ranson, “Introduction” to De la papauté by Wladimir Guettee (Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 1990), 20.

30.Émile Mopinot, “Le docteur W. Guettée,” in Mopinot, Funérailles du docteur W. Guettée. (n.p., 1892), 9.

31.Even the positivist Émile Goubert referred to Guettée as a “Russian” but “formerly French” priest, while Goubert’s associate Grigory Nikolaevich Vyrubov (Wyrouboff) referred to Guettée as “the abbé turned Russian” (Gr. Wyrouboff, Em. Goubert, and Wladimir Guettée, La Science vis-à-vis la religion [Paris, 1865], 21, 30n1).

32.Guettée had moved printing of L’Union chrétienne to Brussels when the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870. He recalled that under the MacMahon presidency, efforts were made to intercept the journal and prevent its dissemination in France. Guettée was able to wrap the journals and send them by post to circumvent the attempted ban (Souvenirs, 364–65).

33.Ibid., 410.

34.Ibid., 420; Guettée, Lettre à M. Dupanloup, évêque d’Orléans à propos de sa pastorale au clergé et aux fidèles de son diocèse à l’occasion des fêtes de Rome et pour leur annoncer le future concile oecuménique (Paris: Lebigre-Duquesne frères, 1868), 44.

35.Cited in Besse, Un précurseur, 137.

36.“Stricken with the ban for his Gallican opinions, he combatted ultramontane doctrines for a long time, and ended by passing into the Greek church where he took the name of Vladimir” (B. Dupiney de Vorepierre, “Guettée,” Dictionnaire des noms propres, ou Encyclopédie illustrée de biographie, de géographie, d’histoire et de mythologie, 3 vols. [Paris, 1876–1879], 2:178). A dictionary of theology referred to Guettée as having been interdicted for Jansenist doctrines, noting that he ended up becoming a “Greek Orthodox” in the “Russian Church.” See Nicolas Bergier and [Abbé] Félix Le Noir, Dictionnaire de théologie approprié au mouvement intellectuel de la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, 12 vols. (Paris, 1873–1882), 6:242. Until the fourth edition (1870), Vapereau’s Dictionnaire universel des contemporains referred to Guettée as a priest under a ban for Jansenist doctrines.

37.Larousse and the fourth edition of Vapereau (1870) both said Guettée was removed from his ministerial functions without being formally banned and that he entered the “Eastern Catholic Church” (“Guettee [Wladimir],” in Larousse, Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, 8:1605; Vapereau, Dictionnaire universel des contemporains, 825, 1886–87). One account that talked about Guettée’s removal from the ministry without formal ban or censure also mentioned his founding of L’Union chrétienne and referred to it as the organ of the Eastern Catholic Church in France (Ernest Glaeser, Biographie nationale des contemporains [Paris, 1878], 223). Another mentioned that Guettée was almost interdicted but instead resigned from his chaplaincy, adding that he broke “definitely with the Roman Church in order to enter in the Eastern Church.” It also mentioned that he founded L’Union chrétienne, “the organ of the Eastern Church in France” (Adolphe Bitard, Dictionnaire général de biographie contemporaine française et étrangér: Contenant les noms et pseudonymes de tous les personnages célébres du temps présent [Paris, 1878], 606).

38.Edmond de Pressensé, “Opinions nouvelles au sein du clergé catholique,” Revue nationale et étrangère, politique, scientifique et littéraire, January 25, 1862, 221.

39.Raoul Dederen, Un réformateur catholique au XIXe siècle Eugène Michaud (1839–1917): Vieux-catholicisme—Œcuménisme (Geneva: Droz, 1963), 14–15, 108–9; Eugène Michaud, “La Théologie de Guettée,” Revue internationale de théologie/Internationale theologische Zeitschrift 6 (1894): 262–77.

40.Larousse noted that while condemned by the Index for Gallicanism, Guettée’s history of the French Church was more anti-ultramontane than Gallican, and that for Guettée, Gallicanism meant a purely spiritual church faithful to the primitive church. While Guettée was “more scholar than diplomat,” his work remained “a considerable monument of our religious history and of our national history” (“Église de France, composée surs des documents originaux et authentiques,” Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, 7:251–52). But one Catholic reviewer questioned why Father Rouquette cited Guettée and other “men systematically hostile to the Catholic religion” in a history of St. Clotilde. See P. Noury, “Bibliographie,” Études religieuses, historiques et littéraires (par des Pères de la Compagnie de Jésus), 4th series, vol. 2 (1868): 157.

41.Vasiliev to Urusov, November 25/December 7, 1860, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 237–38.

42.Vasiliev to Leonty, October 27/November 8, 1861 and March 18/30, 1862 in “Iz arkhiva vysokopreosviashchenneishago Leontiia,” 100, 106.

43.Vasiliev to Sushkov, July 18/30, 1862, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 246–47.

44.Vasiliev to Akhmatov, December 22, 1863/January 3, 1864, ibid., 262–63.

45.Savva Tikhomirov’s brief account of Guettée indicates that Vasiliev asked that Guettée be given a master’s, but Metropolitan Filaret already thought of Guettée as a defender of Orthodoxy fully deserving of a doctorate (Savva, Khronika moei zhizni, 4:265).

46.K. Istomin, “Dvadtsatipiatiletie vozvedeniia o. Vladimira Gette na stepen' doktora bogosloviia v Russkoi Tserkvi,” Vera i razum, no. 21 (November, 1889): 565–66.

47.Ibid., 567.

48.Tolstoy was over-procurator from 1865 to 1880. His two-volume study covered the period up to the death of Alexander I. He concluded with the argument that in spite of toleration of all confessions under the Russian emperors, the Roman Church in Russia was in a state of disarray by the end of Alexander I’s reign. He blamed these problems on papal intrusions in a sovereign state. Other themes apropos of Orthodox polemical literature included the notions that the Roman system was based on egoism, the idea that western accounts of the Latin Church in Russia had distorted the facts, and the relative closeness of the Gallican to the Orthodox Church (Dmitry Tolstoy, Le Catholicisme romain en russie, 2 vols. [Paris, 1863–1864]). Katansky considered Tolstoy’s publication of this work as a likely cause of his promotion to over-procurator (Vospominaniia starago professora [St. Petersburg, 1914], 206).

49.Besse says he met Aksakov and Pogodin (Un précurseur, 134–35). While that would not be surprising, Guettée does not mention such a meeting either in Souvenirs or in the three letters he sent to Vasiliev from Russia. Guettée recalled meeting Russians of all classes and was deeply impressed by his experiences, by Russian piety, and by the realization that what he experienced was so different from the pictures painted in the French press. See L’Union chrétienne: June 18, 1865, 263–64; July 2, 1865, 274–77; and July 9, 1865, 283–84; the letters are reproduced in Guettée, De la papauté, 312–20. Guettée attempted to meet Savva Tikhomirov, but the archbishop was traveling in the diocese at the time (Savva, Khronika moei zhizni, 4:265).

50.La Papauté schismatique (1863) was not translated into Russian until 1895, after Guettée’s death. But the French historian’s rebuttal of Renan’s Vie de Jésus (1863) was translated in 1864. No other book-length rebuttal in Russian would see publication until 1892 (the year of Guettée’s death). See Oproverzhenie na vydumanuiu “Zhizn' Iisusa” sochinenie Ernesta Renan s troistvennoi tochki zreniia bibleiskoi ekzegetiki, istoricheskoi kritiki i filosofii (St. Petersburg, 1864). Guettée’s Exposition de la doctrine de l’Église catholique orthodoxe (1866), dedicated to Empress Maria Alexandrovna, appeared in 1869 as Izlozhenie ucheniia pravoslavnoi kafolicheskoi tserkvi s ukazaniem razlichii vstriechaiushchikhsia v uchenii drugikh khristianskikh tserkvei (Saint Petersburg, 1869).

51.“Prisoedinenie k pravoslaviiu abbata Gette,” Strannik, no. 4 (September 1862), Sovremennaia khronika: 381.

52.“Donesenie protoiereia Iosifa Vasil'eva iz Parizha,” Strannik (December 1862), Sovremennaia khronika: 517–18.

53.Ibid., 517–18. Other Orthodox journals also spread the news: “Rasporiazheniia i izvestiia ko novgorodsko-S. Peterburgskoi mitropoli: Donesenie protoiereia Iosifa Vasil'eva iz Parizha,” Tserkovnaia letopis', December 22, 1862, 899–904; and “Donesenie prot. I. Vasil'eva iz Parizha (O prisoedinenii k Pravoslaviiu abbata Gette),” Pravoslavnoe obozrenie, part 4 (December 1862): 517–18. Vasiliev asked for 1,000 silver rubles for Guettée so that he would be able to live comfortably and work (Vasiliev to A. P. Tolstoi, December 19/31, 1861, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 245).

54.“Donesenie protoiereia Iosifa Vasil'eva iz Parizha,” Strannik, 518n1; “Raznyiia pozhertvovaniia, v pol'zu Parizhskoi tserkvi, i vostochnykh khristian, na Afon, v Ierusalim, i drugiia mesta,” Strannik (January 1862), Sovremennaia khronika: 30–31. Erkovsky lived in Terespol', in the Kingdom of Poland.

55.Avtonomova, “Vospominaniia” (September 1916), 605.

56.“Pis'mo sviashchennika Vladimira Gete k mitropolitu Novgorodskomu i S. Peterburgskomu,” Strannik (December 1862), Sovremennaia khronika: 519–20.

57.Leontii, “Moi zametki,” 815–16.

58.“Nekrolog: Sviashchennik Vladimir Gete,” Novosti, March 25, 1892.

59.Istomin, “Dvadtsatipiatiletie vozvedeniia o. Vladimira Gette,” 556.

60.Ibid.

61.Ibid., 557. See also 570.

62.Ibid., 569–70.

63.Probably a reference to John Mason Neale and William Palmer (“Nekrolog: Sviashchennik Vladimir Gete,” Novosti, March 25, 1892).

64.Ibid.

65.“Konchina o. Vladimira Gete,” Listok dlia Khar'kovskoi Eparkhii, no. 6 (March 31, 1892), 145–46.

66.Ibid., 145–46. The obituaries in Novosti and the Kharkov diocesan paper both mentioned that Guettée died in the home of his sister. Besse indicates that in order to stay in Luxembourg and to silence possible rumors, Guettée entered into a civil marriage with a resident of Ehnen, Catherine Bock. Besse notes that Bock was fifty-six years old when Guettée, about twenty years her senior, died. Presumably he includes this detail to support his position that Guettée did not betray his vow of celibacy (Un précurseur, 148–49). Guettée arrived at the belief that the obligatory celibacy imposed by the Roman Church was an abuse and that priests should be able to recover their legitimate right to marry (even after ordination) (Michaud, “Théologie de Guettée,” 270–71).

67.Ross, Saint-Alexandre sur-Seine, 245.

68.Guettée to Vasiliev, June 10/22, 1865, as cited in Guettée, De la papauté, 319–20.

69.This characterization appeared in an obituary in Novoe vremia, which was the basis of the obituaries in Strannik and Pravoslavnoe obozrenie. See M., “Protoierei I. V. Vasil'ev,” Novoe vremia, January 11, 1882; “Izvestiia i zametki: Protoierei I. V. Vasil'ev (Nekrolog),” Strannik 1, no. 1 (January 1882): 158; and “Protoierei Iosif Vasil'evich Vasil'ev,” Pravoslavnoe obozrenie (January 1882): 175. Vengerov’s bibliography lists about a dozen obituaries. In the secular press Novoe vremia, Novosti, and the short-lived liberal Poriadok printed obituaries. Besides the major theological journals in St. Petersburg and Moscow cited above, obituaries appeared in several of the diocesan papers (“Vasil'ev, Iosif Vasil'evich,” in Vengerov, Kritiko-biograficheskii slovar', vol. 4, pt. 2, 160).

70.“Protoierei Iosif Vasil'evich Vasil'ev,” Pravoslavnoe obozrenie, 175.

71.Orlovskii, “Protoierei Iosif Vasil'evich,” 121.

72.Ibid., 122. Vasiliev’s energy, erudition, self-sacrifice, and lack of one-sidedness were recurring themes in his obituaries.

73.Vasiliev was associated with the conversions of Julian Joseph Overbeck, who was received into the Russian Church in London in 1865, and Nicholas Bjerring in 1870. Archpriest Ianyshev and L’Union chrétienne were key influences on Bjerring, who subsequently returned to the Roman Catholic Church after a stint as a Presbyterian. See Herbel, “Catholic, Presbyterian, and Orthodox Journey.” In addition, Vasiliev reportedly turned another Frenchman to the Orthodox priesthood, a certain Father Victor. See Aleksandr Vasil'evich Nikitenko, Dnevnik, ed. N. L. Brodskii et al., 3 vols. (St. Petersburg: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhvestvennoi literatury, 1956), 3:209.

74.Popovitsky’s paper, Tserkovno-obshchestvennyi vestnik, published a number of articles critical of the black clergy (Rimskii, “Vasil'ev,” in Pravoslavnaia entsiklopediia, 7:232). Freeze refers to the organ as a liberal clerical newspaper but adds that clerical liberalism focused on clerical issues rather than broad social issues (Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia, 395).

75.[Popovitskii], “Protoierei Iosif Vasil'evich Vasil'ev,” 1. Popovitsky, who spent four years in Paris around mid-century, knew Vasiliev personally. On Popovitsky, see “A. I. Popovitskii,” Niva, no. 3 (1895): 70. Popovitsky’s and Orlovsky’s obituaries, which emphasized that Vasiliev stood out among Russia’s white clergy and discussed how his controversial ideas for the reform of church schools were supported by Over-procurator Dmitry Tolstoy, may suggest that a natural alliance sometimes formed between the white clergy and lay authorities as a counterbalance to synodal or episcopal authority in Russia, just as in France there was a natural alliance between the lower clergy and the papacy as a counterweight to the power of the French episcopacy. Western polemicists interpreted such collaboration between the white clergy and secular authorities as dependence of the church on the civil authority. Vasiliev’s sympathies for the white clergy, among whom he enjoyed a remarkably comfortable and prestigious position, perhaps contributed to some disdain that Archbishop Savva Tikhomirov expressed about him. Savva referred to Vasiliev as a proud “Frenchified Russian prelate” (Khronika moei zhizni, 5:381).

76.Oderova, “Protoierei I. V. Vasil'ev,” 57–58.

77.Orlovskii, “Protoierei Iosif Vasil'evich,” 122.

78.I have not found sources to corroborate her portrayal, but Avtonomova described Vasiliev as on excellent terms with Lacordaire and Dupanloup. See Avtonomova, “Vospominaniia” (September 1916): 603–4.

79.Ibid., 604. Vasiliev attended lectures on theology at the Sorbonne and recounted some of his impressions in his correspondence, but what the French clergymen he interacted with thought of him remains a mystery.

80.Ibid., 604.

81.[Popovitsky], “Protoierei Iosif Vasil'evich Vasil'ev,” 2.

82.N. I. Barsov, “Protoierei Iosif Vasil'evich Vasil'ev,” Russkaia starina 33 (1882): 528. [Popovitsky] “Protoierei Vasil'ev,” 2.

83.Orlovskii, “Protoierei Iosif Vasil'evich,” 122. Orlovsky mentions Guettée’s involvement but portrays Vasiliev as the principal person who took the initiative and bore the responsibility and risk for the paper.

84.Le Nord’s St. Petersburg correspondent wrote that Vasiliev’s letter to Jaquemet, along with a piece Sushkov published in response to Deputy Bernard-Adolphe Granier de Cassagnac, were the talk of St. Petersburg. “The dignified and simultaneously respectful tone that characterized the letter of our venerable churchman is generally applauded. And … we can be infinitely grateful to these men of talent and conviction who so brilliantly repel the unjust and slanderous attacks directed against our Church” (Le Nord, May 9, 1861). On Cassagnac’s comments, see Heather Bailey, “Roman Catholic Polemicists, Russian Orthodox Publicists, and the Tsar-Pope Myth in France, 1842–1862,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 53 (2019): 280–82.

85.Katanskii, Vospominaniia starago professora, 110; M., “Protoierei I. V. Vasil'ev”; Barsov, “Protoierei Iosif Vasil'evich Vasil'ev,” 529; Vengerov considered the letters to the bishop of Nantes and the letters to Guizot as the most important articles published in L’Union chrétienne, noting the attention they received in “the secular and ecclesiastical press of Europe and North America” (Kritiko-biograficheskii slovar', 4, part 2:160–62, quotation on 161).

86.See Polisadov’s introduction to Vasiliev’s “Pis'mo protoiereia Iosifa Vasil'eva k nantskomu episkopu,” 113.

87.This title was used when Vasiliev’s first letter to Jaquemet appeared in Pravoslavnoe obozrenie: “Otvet na lozhnoe obvinenie protiv tserkvi Russkoi.”

88.See Polisadov, introduction to Vasiliev’s “Pis'mo protoiereia Iosifa Vasil'eva k nantskomu episkopu,” 113n.

89.“Pis'mo protoiereia I. V. Vasil'eva k kardinalu Bonal'du, arkhiepiskomu liunskomu,” Strannik (July 1862), Sovremennaia khronika: 276.

90.Savva, Khronika moei zhizni, 6:532.

91.Orlovsky added that Roman Catholic writers found Vasiliev “a very strong and skillful opponent” (“Protoierei Iosif Vasil'evich,” 122).

92.Barsov, “Protoierei Iosif Vasil'evich Vasil'ev,” 529.

93.Avtonomova, “Vospominaniia” (September 1916), 604.

94.Ibid., 604.

95.Archimandrite Porfiry [Georgy Ivanovich Popov] wrote to Archbishop Savva from Rome about an encounter between William Palmer and Count Efimy Vasilievich Putiatin with Pope Pius IX in 1864. The pope brought up the issue of the Russian Church’s dependence on the secular power. Putiatin tried unsuccessfully to dismiss the claim. Porfiry reported that Vasiliev’s correspondence with the bishop of Nantes was not at all known in Rome (Savva, Khronika moei zhizni, 3:203–5).

96.[Popovitskii], “Protoierei Iosif Vasil'evich Vasil'ev,” 2.

97.Ibid., 2.

98.Ibid. The obituary in Novoe vremia also reported that it was at Vasiliev’s initiative that Bishop Leonty was sent to Paris for the consecration (M., “Protoierei I. V. Vasil'ev”).

99.Hello, “L’Union chrétienne,” Le Croisé, November 19, 1859, 189–90.

100.“Correspondance judiciaire,” L’Indépendance belge, May 13, 1861.

101.Gustave de La Tour, “La Russie en 1861,” Le Monde, May 1, 1861.

102.L’Ami, June 27, 1861, 748.

103.“Russie (Correspondence particulière),” Journal de Bruxelles, April 14, 1862.

104.Ibid., June 27, 1862. In the 1860s the correspondent periodically reported critically about articles in L’Union chrétienne, especially those that spoke positively about the Russian clergy’s level of learning and piety and those that challenged reports of persecution of Catholicism in the empire. See ibid., September 15, 1862; July 29, 1865; September 2, 1865; November 22, 1867; and September 17, 1869.

105.Wyrouboff [Vyrubov] and Goubert, Science vis-à-vis la religion, 16, 21. Goubert accused Guettée of using his platform “in France—this land of philosophical liberty” to denounce the scientist and positivist Vyrubov. He knew that if he did not respond, Guettée would take his silence for agreement. “The orthodox school will willingly take muteness to the account of its benefit.”

106.Urusov to Vasiliev, October 1/13, 1860, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 236–37. Despite seeming ambivalence, in the mid-1860s, Urusov sent an official request to Archbishop Savva Tikhomirov, asking for information that he could forward to Vasiliev for L’Union chrétienne. Urusov’s request concerned the Benedictine scholar Jean-Baptiste-François Pitra’s study of Greek canon law, based in part on unpublished sources Pitra found in the library of the Holy Synod (Savva, Khronika moei zhizni, 3:169–75).

107.Besse, Un précurseur, 104.

108.[Replovsky], “Zagranichnie zametki,” Pravoslavnoe obozrenie (March 1862): 123–24.

109.Ibid., 124–25.

110.Ibid., 125–26, 128.

111.Ibid., 127.

112.Ibid. (June 1862), 68–69.

113.Vasiliev to Sushkov, July 18/30, 1862, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 247. For the responses to Replovsky, see A. J. W. [assilieff], “Une critique indirecte de L’Union chrétienne qui nous est venue d’Allemagne par la Russie,” L’Union chrétienne, July 27, 1862, 310–12; and Vasiliev, “Quelques mots à l’address de M. R., createur, reformateur et multiplicateur des journaux religieux russes dans les pays étranger,” L’Union chrétienne, August 10, 1862, 326–27.

114.As cited in R[eplovskii], “Zagranichnie zametki,” Pravoslavnoe obozrenie (November 1862): 133–34.

115.Ibid., 133–34.

116.Ibid., 134.

117.Ibid., 135. Uniia means union but is used especially in connection with the creation of the Uniate church in 1596.

118.A letter from the deacon of the church of Jerusalem mentioned that Philotheos Bryennios, a Greek professor of church history, thought theological polemics should be modeled after Vasiliev’s letter to the bishop of Nantes. The archpriest was held up as an example for young people going into theology because his language reflected “peace, charity, and truth” and not the “black ink of passion and fanaticism” (“Du langage de la polemique théologique dans l’Église orientale,” L’Union chrétienne, September 14, 1862, 364–66). Bryennios’s discourse was published in Omonoia, the paper of the patriarch of Constantinople, founded in 1862.

119.Vasiliev to Akhmatov, October 19/31, 1862, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 259.

120.Ibid., 255–59. The three papers were Le Nord, L’Esprit public (Paris, 1862–1864), and La Semaine universelle (Brussels, 1862). Publicizing that Greeks and the Ecumenical Patriarch looked favorably on the magazine was also a way for the Orthodox publicists to confirm the doctrinal unity between the Greeks and Russians.

121.“Rasporiazheniia i izvestiia ko novgorodsko-S. Peterburgskoi mitropoli,” 903; “Pis'mo sviashchennika Vladimira Gete k mitropolitu Novgorodskomu i S. Peterburgskomu,” 520.

122.Vasiliev to Akhmatov, December 22, 1863/January 3, 1864, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 263–64.

123.Avtonomova, “Vospominaniia” (November 1916), 317.

124.Ibid., 317.

125.Ibid. (September 1916), 606.

126.Although Vasiliev was a mediator between Guettée and the Russian authorities at the beginning, and clearly was pleased to have Guettée on the side of Orthodoxy, Guettée’s fanatical temperament contrasted with Vasiliev’s and may have strained their relationship. At one point Vasiliev wrote to Over-procurator Akhmatov: “With all respect for the erudition and talent of my colleague,” Vasiliev wrote, “I grieve that I cannot instill in him calm[ness] and moderation in his expressions. In this respect, he would obey only you” (Vasiliev to Akhmatov, December 26, 1863/January 7, 1864, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 277). While Vasiliev made this comment privately with respect to a particular “detailed critique” that Guettée made of a papal epistle concerning the pope’s refusal to confirm three Gallican bishops named by Napoleon III, it is also suggestive of a fundamental difference in approach between Guettée and Vasiliev. Guettée’s religious polemics were often sarcastic, caustic, and bitter, and there are a few hints that not everyone saw such an approach as Orthodoxy’s best line of defense. Nikitenko commented in his diary on Guettée’s refutation of Renan: “Unfortunately, very unfortunately, the author, objecting to Renan and very successfully refuting him in many respects will fall into too much indignation and often will simply heap abuse on his opponent” (Dnevnik, 3:50).

127.Guettée’s friend Abbé François Martin de Noirlieu (1792–1870), who said he “understood perfectly” why Guettée joined the Orthodox Church, encouraged the Catholic dissident Michaud to get acquainted with Guettée. These two maintained an active correspondence, although Michaud remained with the Old Catholics (Guettée, Souvenirs, 357; Michaud, “Théologie de Guettée”; Dederen, Un réformateur catholique; Mopinot, Funérailles du docteur W. Guettée; Olga Novikoff, ed., Le Général Alexandre Kiréeff et l’ancien-catholisme [Berne, 1911]). On London and Popov’s relationship with Anglo-Catholics, see Birchall, Embassy, Emigrants, and Englishmen, 91–113. When Anglo-Catholics formed the Eastern Church Association in 1863, Popov served as a member of the standing committee. One of the aims of the committee was “to inform the English public as to the state and position of the Eastern Christians, in order gradually to better their condition through the influence of public opinion in England” (Birchall, Embassy, Emigrants, and Englishmen, 100).

128.Oderova, “Pravoslavnaia tserkov' v Parizhe,” 174–75.

129.“Konchina Vladimira Gete,” 145–46.

130.As Freeze notes, the Russian government actively publicized problems in order to engage the educated public in finding solutions (introduction to Description of the Clergy in Rural Russia, 50–51).

131.Murav'ev, “Zapiska A. N. Murav'eva o sostoianii pravoslavnoi tserkvi v Rossii,” Russkii arkhiv 21, book 3 (1883): 175.

132.Basil, Church and State, 10. “The negativism in Muraviev’s views had been inspired by criticism made among groups of German and Italian Jesuits (a charge that contained some truth)” (ibid., 10). Metropolitan Filaret accepted the canonical status of the synod but also tried to defend the church’s independence and pushed back against state interference (ibid., 10–12). See also Murav'ev, “Zapiska A. N. Murav'eva,” 175–203. Theiner, though, was not a Jesuit and had anti-Jesuitical leanings.

133.Like Filaret, Vasiliev saw the synodal structure as compatible with, not contrary to, church independence and believed in the possibility for resistance from the church should the state overstep its role as protector of the church.

134.Basil notes that canon law in Russia was taught beginning in the 1830s, although the first scholarly studies emerged only in the middle of the century. Only in the 1880s did serious criticism of the Ecclesiastical Regulation emerge. While by the early twentieth century, there were some canonists who saw the Holy Synod as an uncanonical institution, in the first real debates between canonists about church-state relations during the 1880s, the debates were over church-state relations in Byzantium, the extent to which Russian church-state relations emulated those of the Byzantine Empire, and about how much authority the state should have, or inversely, how much independence the church should have within the state. The canonists generally accepted the canonicity of the Synodal structure and the Ecclesiastical Regulation, without necessarily considering the Ecclesiastical Regulation entirely good (Basil, Church and State, 23, 35–51). It is intriguing that Basil’s study dates from 1861—the year of Vasiliev’s polemic with the bishop of Nantes—though Basil does not mention Vasiliev. It appears that he settled on this date because Boris Chicherin’s and Konstantin Pobedonostsev’s careers were taking off at this time.

135.Feodor [Bukharev], “Zametki na zagranichnyia pis'ma ottsa protoiereia o. Vasil'eva,” Syn otechestva: Gazeta politicheskaia, uchenaia i literaturnaia 29 (July 22, 1862): 673–78.

136.Ibid., 673.

137.As Vasiliev expressed it, Christ had transferred his authority to his disciples and their successors. Feodor disagreed with Vasiliev’s portrayal of a transference of authority, emphasizing the necessity of Christ’s direct action. Without the direct appeal to and action of Jesus Christ as the head of the church, spiritual authority could go awry whether individual or collective. Furthermore, Feodor emphasized that the Holy Spirit was sent to the church as a whole, and not just to those holding the apostolic succession. Such an emphasis fit in with his focus on the priesthood of the believer and his view that collective authority was not sufficient to prevent alienation between the clergy and the laity or predominance of the clergy over the laity. On Bukharev, see Paul Valliere, Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov. Orthodox Theology in a New Key (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 19–106. Valliere writes: “Feodor regarded the Orthodox laity as ‘a royal priesthood’ (I Pet. 2:9) and was genuinely excited by the idea of the priesthood of all believers. He called on his fellow clergy to shun ‘the self-exalting spirit typical of the western priesthood, a priesthood concerned above all with protecting and enhancing its privileges vis-à-vis the lay people’ ” (ibid., 66).

138.Feodor’s approval of the idea that Christ presided in the Synod was tied to a critique of Vasiliev’s argument that the church’s constitution was divine in origin while its discipline was human in origin, subject to the particularities of time and place. Feodor did not seem to think this view could gain much intellectual ground among Catholics, who, believing in the pope as Christ’s vicar on earth, accepted the church’s constitution and discipline as divine in origin. Since the papal spirit of predominance (e.g., the pope’s predominance over bishops; the clergy’s predominance over the laity) was tied to the belief that the church’s structure and discipline were divine in origin and the pope was Christ’s instrument, this spirit of predominance could not be countered or overcome by teaching that church discipline was human (Feodor, “Zametki na zagranichnyia pis'ma,” 678; Jaquemet and Wassilieff, Discussion, 67).

139.Conservatives in the church attacked and censored some of Feodor’s works (Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 35–37, 73).

140.Non-Russian readers would have been oblivious to jabs about the former theological academy professor and “former censor” as one of the “pious solitaires” of Russian monasticism reveling in his “mystical theory,” but for those in the know, these comments alluded to the controversy surrounding Feodor’s Orthodoxy and were meant to discredit the merits of his argument (Wassilieff, “Quelques remarques sur l’opinion de l’archimandrite Théodore concernant l’autorité de l’église et la tradition sacrée,” pt. 1, L’Union chrétienne, November 2, 1862, 3, and pt. 2, November 16, 1862, 18–19). In response to Feodor’s criticisms, Vasiliev noted that the pope, along with every Protestant and sectarian, claimed the kind of direct appeal and access to Christ that Feodor recommended. Thus, Feodor’s article further confused rather than clarified the nature of church authority. Emphasizing the direct access to and action of Christ in the church could not prevent those in positions of authority from abusing power, which Vasiliev defined as the attempt to appropriate Christ’s power instead of exercising it. To suggest that Christ transferred power to his apostles and their successors did not imply, as Feodor seemed to think, any abdication of Christ’s authority (pt. 1, 5). Vasiliev found Feodor’s idea on the relations between church and civil authorities too vague, theocratic, and rooted too much in the Old Testament (pt. 3, November 30, 1862, 37). As for Feodor’s criticism about Vasiliev’s belief in church discipline as human and subject to peculiarities of time and place, Vasiliev clarified that he believed the canons to be divine in the sense that they were made by the fathers in a spirit of piety and with divine aid, but not in the sense that they “emanated from God” and are either “infallible” or “irrefragable.” Only the church’s dogmas were infallible, while canons sometimes changed or became obsolete (pt. 3, 38).

141.Basil, Church and State, ix–x, 5, 145–49.

142.Alexander J. Schem reported that in 1859 the Metropolitan of St. Petersburg “abolished the censorship to which every sermon had to be submitted before a clergyman was permitted to preach it” and explained that “the applause given to the sermons of a French Dominican, Father Souillard [Schem’s spelling]” was a further impetus for more Orthodox preaching in the capital. See The American Ecclesiastical Year-Book, vol. 1: The Religious Statistics and History of the Year 1859 (New York: H. Dayton, 1860), 212.

143.Father Ioann Ioannovich Bazarov, who served at Wiesbaden and Stuttgart, believed service at any level in the foreign clergy required specialized education and skills. He successfully pushed for high standards for prichetniki (clergy beneath the rank of deacon) but believed the opportunities that clergy had to continue their education in western Europe had a reciprocal benefit when these men returned to Russia, where they could join the faculty of the ecclesiastical schools (Oderova, “Pravoslavnaia tserkov' v Parizhe,” 82–83).

144.Petrovich, Russian Panslavism, 62, 284–85. “For the Slavophile, freedom of speech, press, and conscience were not just legal rights; they were the necessary means by which each individual fulfilled his natural obligation to the community” (ibid., 56).

145.I. S. Aksakov, “Pochemu v pravoslavnoi Rossii ne dopuskaetsia svoboda sovesti,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii I. S. Aksakova, 7 vols. (Moscow, 1886–1887), 4:80–81.

146.Ibid., 4:79–80.

147.Ibid., 79.

148.Ibid., 79. Augustin Golitsyn cited Aksakov at length in the paper of the liberal Catholics, softening passages that spoke about the truth of Orthodoxy or western errors and obscuring Aksakov’s point of view. In this case, Golitsyn’s translation just referred to the “defects of the Roman organization” (“Le Progrès et l’ancien régime en Russie,” Le Correspondant, July 25, 1868, 375–76).

149.Aksakov, “Pochemu v pravoslavnoi Rossii ne dopuskaetsia svoboda sovesti,” 81.

150.Ibid., 81–82.

151.Ibid., 82. Golitsyn briefly summarized Pogodin’s position in opposition to liberty of conscience, commenting that Pogodin admitted coercion was necessary to keep the Russian people in the fold of the church. Without it, half the Russian people would become sectarians, and women would flock in droves to the Jesuit fathers. Golitsyn did not editorialize much on the debate except to say that he hoped the discussion would continue in Russian society and that the Russian legislation would be changed. He also commented that the Russian press was undergoing a liberalization, which he thought should be pointed out in a journal that tries “not to separate the interests of liberty from those of Christianity” (“Progrès et l’ancien régime en Russie,” 380).

152.For a collection of essays on legislative measures to curb Catholic influence in several national contexts, see Clark and Kaiser, eds., Culture Wars.

153.Aksakov, “Pochemu v pravoslavnoi Rossii ne dopuskaetsia svoboda sovesti,” 82–84.

154.Catholic polemicists regarded mixed marriages between Orthodox Christians and Christians of other confessions in the Russian Empire not as a form of toleration but as a coercive recruitment scheme for the “schismatic” church. From 1721 in central Russia and from the 1830s in the borderlands the children of mixed marriages had to be brought up Orthodox. There was some retreat from enforcement of these requirements in the 1860s, but Konstantin Pobedonostsev later reversed those concessions. See Paul W. Werth, “The Emergence of ‘Freedom of Conscience’ in Imperial Russia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 13, no. 3 (2012): 596–600. Werth notes that while freedom of conscience was promoted from several different sides, there was a push toward it from the Ministry of the Interior in the 1860s under Petr Valuev. On the bishops resisting pressure from lay officials for more tolerance, see Freeze, “Handmaiden of the State?,” 92–93.

155.With direct encouragement from Over-procurator A. P. Tolstoy, the London embassy chaplain, Evgeny Popov, translated the dogmatic theology of Makary (Bulgakov, 1816–1882) and catechism of Platon (Levshin, 1737–1812) into English (Birchall, Embassy, Emigrants, and Englishmen, 102–3, 115). Between 1830 and 1860 the clergy abroad translated “basic Orthodox liturgical books and prayerbooks” into the languages of their host countries. Besides Vasiliev’s and Popov’s translations, Bazarov worked on German translations. Bazarov also contemplated the founding of a periodical that would track noteworthy developments “in the realm of foreign spiritual life and scholarship, but also guard the truth of Orthodoxy from the influx of various foreign ideas” (Oderova, “Pravoslavnaia tserkov' v Parizhe,” 158, 165).

Conclusion

1.Igor' K. Smolich, Istoriia russkoi tserkvi 1700–1917, pt. 1 (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Spaso-Preobrazhenskogo Valaamskogo monastyria, 1996), 385–88.

2.Porfiry wrote to Savva about his conversations with Pitra, Palmer, and Father Paul Pierling (1840–1922) in Rome in the mid-1860s. These Catholic scholars did not deny that misinformation appeared in print but tended to be dismissive of it. Pierling admitted that the Poles were responsible for much of the tone in Le Monde. Palmer thought a lot of the misinformation was spread unintentionally (Savva, Khronika moei zhizni, 3:311–22).

3.Archimandrite Porfiry reported to Savva that, at a meeting between Count Putiatin and the pope in Rome, Palmer explained to Pius IX “that the Russian sovereign at the present time is not considered the head of the church, although there were times that the tsars autocratically managed church affairs” (ibid., 3:318–19).

4.In 1863, writing for the Genevan Evangelical Alliance, Rougemont cited Vasiliev’s letters to Jaquemet and partially accepted his explanation of Russian church-state relations (Russie orthodoxe et protestante, 21, 30).

5.Makary [Macaire], Introduction à la théologie orthodoxe (Paris, 1857); and Makary, Théologie dogmatique orthodoxe, 2 vols. (Paris, 1859–60). The works of Makary and Boissard’s L’Église de Russie were published by the Protestant publishing house of Joel Cherbuliez.

6.Boissard, L’Église de Russie, 1:xi–xii, 231–35; 2:511–12.

7.Larousse, “Église de Russie (L’),” Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, 7:254–55.

8.Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, L’Empire des tsars et les russes, 3 vols. (Paris, 1881–89). This work was destined to be one of the most important studies of Russia in the West for generations (Adamovsky, Euro-Orientalism, 195).

9.Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars and the Russians, 3rd French ed., trans. Zénaïde A. Rogozin, 3 vols. (New York, 1893–96), 1:246–47.

10.Ibid., 3:38–39.

11.See, for example, ibid., 37–38 and 587.

12.Ibid., 172–73.

13.Ibid., 45.

14.Ibid., 145, 162–63, 166.

15.Leroy-Beaulieu, L’Empire des tsars et les russes, 3:193.

16.Ibid., 194.

17.Ibid., 194, my emphasis. This language is lost in Rogozin’s English translation, Empire of the Tsars, 3:166.

18.As cited in Leroy-Beaulieu, Empire of the Tsars, 3:167; cf. L’Empire des tsars, 3:196.

19.His Russian sources include Nikolai Polevoi, Belliustin, Gagarin, Vladimir Solovyov, Barsov, Pobedonostsev, and Metropolitan Makary. One hint that he might have crossed paths with Vasiliev is that he had some familiarity with the ecumenical discussions between the St. Petersburg Society of the Friends of Religious Enlightenment—of which society Vasiliev was a member—and the Old Catholics (Leroy-Beaulieu, L’Empire des tsars, 3:92; Empire of the Tsars, 3:80).

20.“Raznyia pozhertvovaniia,” 30–31.

21.Birchall believes the improvements were deemed necessary “in response to the increased attention being focused on Orthodoxy by English people and the growing importance of the London Embassy.” Although the work was not completed until 1866, Popov consecrated the rebuilt church in February 1865 (Birchall, Embassy, Emigrants, and Englishmen, 82–86).

22.Petrovich, Russian Panslavism, 90–91. Petrovich sees the St. Petersburg Slavic Benevolent Committee’s role in founding St. Nicholas Church in Prague as an exceptional example of Panslav activity, since “in practice Russian Panslavic organizations showed almost no interest in actively encouraging the conversion of non-Orthodox Slavs outside Russia, except for the erection of an Orthodox church in Prague in 1874” (ibid., 91). It is possible that the lack of active proselytism stemmed from an assumption that heterodox Slavs had largely been coerced into adopting other faiths, and belief that once coercive mechanisms were removed, they would naturally gravitate back to Orthodoxy, provided there were churches for them to fill.

23.The churches in Geneva and Florence resembled St. Alexander Nevsky in that the initiative to build them came from embassy priests (Afanasy Petrov and Vladimir Levitsky) and their flocks, and the churches were financed by donations. See Antoine Nivière, “Les Églises russes à l’étranger entre le milieu du XIXe siècle et le début du XXe siècle (le cas de l’Europe occidentale),” in Religion et nation: Des rapports du spirituel et du temporel dans la Russie des XIXe–XXIe s., ed. Michel Niqueux (Lyon: ENS de Lyon, June 14, 2010). Online at Institut Européen Est-Ouest, University of Nancy, July 15, 2011, http://institut-est-ouest.ens-lyon.fr/spip.php?article352.

24.By 1911 there were twenty-two embassy churches in western Europe, as well as thirty churches in resort areas, eight memorial chapels for members of the imperial family, seven churches of the Brotherhood of St. Vladimir in Berlin, and twelve private chapels (Smolich, Istoriia russkoi tserkvi 1700–1917, 385; Paszkiewicz, “In the Service of the Russian Empire,” 303). Major church-building efforts were also undertaken in the Russian Empire’s western borderlands. The impressive Dormition Cathedral was erected in Helsinki between 1862 and 1868. The number of Orthodox churches in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth “increased from a few hundred in 1772 to nine thousand.” More than forty were built in Warsaw, including a huge church dedicated to St. Alexander Nevsky (1894–1912) (Paszkiewicz, “Imperial Dream,” 542–44). Paszkiewicz adds, “It was not by chance that the largest Orthodox church in the Kingdom of Poland, built in a city with a predominantly Catholic population, hostile to the tsarist authorities, was dedicated to the bellicose saint.”

25.Nivière, “Les Églises russes à l’étranger.”

26.Ibid.

27.Konstantin Pobedonostsev acknowledged to the foreign minister, when it was necessary to appoint a new rector in 1887, “that on account of the significance of the rector position in Paris among other such positions at our foreign churches,” it was necessary to consider not just seniority but the “still more special personal qualities of the priest summoned to fill this high post” (Oderova, “Pravoslavnaia tserkov' v Parizhe,” 63).

28.Vasiliev to A. P. Tolstoy, February 19/March 3, 1859, Parizhskiia pis'ma, 188–89.

29.See Ross, Saint-Alexandre-Nevski, 55–62. Hélène Runge, an expert on the history of the parish, dates the church’s official elevation to cathedral status to 1951. “Cathédrale Saint Alexandre Nevsky,” http://www.cathedrale-orthodoxe.com/cathedrale/historique/.

30.Paul Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology: ‘Behold, I Make All Things New’ (London: T & T Clark, 2019), 90.

31.See Paul Ladouceur, “Dispatches from the Western Front: The Future of the Archdiocese of Russian Orthodox Churches in Western Europe,” Public Orthodoxy, an editorial forum of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center of Fordham University, June 21, 2019, https://publicorthodoxy.org/2019/06/21/dispatches-from-the-western-front-the-future-of-the-archdiocese-of-russian-orthodox-churches-in-western-europe/#more-5307. Since 1999, the archdiocese has officially been known as the Patriarchal Exarchate for Orthodox Parishes of the Russian Tradition in Western Europe.

32.In 2001, while head of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department for External Relations, (then Metropolitan) Kirill published an article in favor of close cooperation between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian Foreign Ministry to recover churches abroad (“Religiia i diplomatiia: Vzaimodeistvie vneshnikh tserkovnykh sviazei Moskovskogo Patriarkhata s Ministerstvom inostrannykh del Rossii,” Tserkov' i vremia, no. 3 [2001], cited in Nivière, “Les Églises russes à l’étranger”).

33.Conseil Paroissial de Saint-Alexandre-Nevsky, Cathedrale Saint-Alexandre-Nevsky de Paris: Centenaire, 43. Ross emphasizes that the imperial Russian civil code allowed parishioners to be considered the owners of parishes (Saint-Alexandre sur-Seine, 147). For details on attempts by the Soviet government to seize control of the church in the 1920s and the parish’s efforts to secure its legal status, see Ross, Saint-Alexandre-Nevski, 230–41, 401–11.

34.Paul Ladouceur, e-mails to Heather Bailey, October 4 and October 7, 2019. The Russian Holy Synod officially approved the joining of the archdiocese to the Moscow Patriarchate on October 7, 2019, although an unspecified number of the diocese’s parishes and clergy do not plan to follow. See “Zhurnaly zasedaniia Sviashchennogo Sinoda ot 7 oktiabria 2019 goda,” no. 123, http://www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/5508653.html?goal=0_9357f9bbb5-ede13647ba-70126111&mc_cid=ede13647ba&mc_eid=44fd105d7a.

35.The exarchate was established in December 2018.

36.On jurisdictional rivalries in relation to Orthodox geopolitics, see Vassilis Pnevmatikakis, “Repenser la géopolitique de l’Orthodoxie à travers l’ecclésiologie: Le Cas de la diaspora orthodoxe en France,” Cahiers d’études du religieux: Recherches interdisciplinaires (online), February 15, 2016, https://journals.openedition.org/cerri/1568?lang=en#ftn30; “La territorialite de l’église orthodoxe en France, entre exclusivisme juridictionnel et catholicité locale,” Carnets de Geographes (online): https://journals.openedition.org/cdg/918.

37.Oderova, “Pravoslavnaia tserkov' v Parizhe,” 50.

38.Runge, “Cathédrale Saint Alexandre Nevsky”; Cathédrale Saint-Alexandre-Nevsky de Paris: Centenaire, 39–43.

39.For other critics who stress the cathedral’s political purposes, see Galia Ackerman, cited by Combis-Schlumberger, “À Paris, une nouvelle cathédrale”; and Nivière, “Les Églises russes à l’étranger,” especially the conclusion and note 63.

40.United Nations International Migration Report 2017, Highlights (New York: United Nations, 2017): http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/publications/migrationreport/docs/MigrationReport2017_Highlights.pdf. Incidentally, the economic returns to Russia from its diaspora are poor. While Mexico and Russia have the second and third largest diasporas and roughly the same gross domestic product per capita, as much as $28 billion flows into Mexico annually from its diaspora while Russia receives “less than $500 million” (Vladislav L. Inozemtsev, “Russia’s Exceptional Diaspora,” The Russia File, March 14, 2017, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/russias-exceptional-diaspora).

41.Inozemtsev, “Russia’s Exceptional Diaspora.”

42.See for example, http://www.ruhram.eu/en/; and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGMgTDYFq6I&feature=youtu.be

43.Mission Statement of the Russkiy Mir Foundation, https://russkiymir.ru/en/fund/.

44.“Patriarch Kirill Announces Statistical Data on the Life of the Russian Orthodox Church,” The Russian Orthodox Church Department for External Church Relations, November 29, 2017, http://Mospat.ru/en/2017/11/29/news153384/. There are about thirty thousand more churches now in Russia than there were in the mid-1980s. While the number of churches, monasteries, and Russians self-identifying as Orthodox are certainly impressive, some observers have raised questions about whether the spiritual revival driving this growth runs deep. See the section “Believing without Belonging” in Gregory Freeze, “Russian Orthodoxy and Politics in the Putin Era”; Sergei Chapnin, “A Church of Empire: Why the Russian Church Chose to Bless Empire,” First Things, November 2015, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/11/a-church-of-empire; Vladimir Rozanskij, “The majority of Russians do not want to fast during Lent,” AsiaNews.it, March 1, 2017, http://www.asianews.it/news-en/The-majority-of-Russians-do-not-want-to-fast-during-Lent-40070.html.

45.“Full text of the Joint Declaration Signed by Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill,” Catholic News Agency, https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/full-text-of-joint-declaration-signed-by-pope-francis-and-patriarch-kirill-61341, articles 15 and 16.

46.“Consolidated Versions of the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union,” Official Journal of the European Union (7.6.2016), https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:12016ME/TXT&from=EN. My emphasis.