She was 37 and from the Old World; he was 75 and from the New World. Catherine Dashkova was born a countess in Russia, had married (at 15) a prince, and at the age of 18 may have played a part in the coup which brought Catherine the Great to the throne in 1762. Franklin was one of the world’s leading statesmen: a diplomat, scientist, inventor, and author.
Yet they had more than in common than it seems. Catherine had been a sickly child and became a voracious reader. There is no doubt about her intelligence and breadth of knowledge, and as she did not quite get on with the Empress – she despised the talentless male favourites the empress liked to decorate her court with, and also seems to have been peeved at not being appointed colonel of the Imperial Guard – she went to Europe for a few years, became a friend of Enlightenment thinkers such as Diderot and Voltaire (and later sent her son to Edinburgh University). She had a degree in mathematics and also wrote plays. This was not of course on the same scale as the frighteningly multitalented genius Franklin, but was closer in intellectual achievement to Franklin than most men could aspire to, then or now.
Catrherine and Franklin met in Paris and took to each other straight away. While older men have of course been known to ‘take’ to younger women, Franklin’s later invitation to Catherine to join the American Philosophical Society in 1789 was not given lightly (it would be another 80 years before another women was invited). This was the only time they met, though they were to exchange a few affectionate letters and notes over the years, and Catherine reciprocated Franklin’s invitation later in 1789 by arranging for him to join the Russian Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg (she founded the Academy, and was its first president) : ‘I was greatly surprised, when reviewing the list of its members some days ago, I did not find your name in the number. I hastened therefore to acquire this honour for the academy. . . I shall always recollect with pride the advantage I had to be personally noticed by you’.
What Happened Next
Catherine returned to Russia in 1782, the year after meeting Franklin, to a temporarily warm welcome from the equally intellectually curious (if not intellectually equal) empress. Catherine the Great died in 1796, and the new emperor meanly imposed village exile on Dashkova so that she could ‘think about 1762’. After another coup, she was allowed back to Moscow, and died in 1810. Her Memoirs were published in London in 1840. The brief encounter between Catherine and Franklin was actually of lasting international importance. Catherine knew that Russia had to modernise, and she channelled the works of Franklin and other Enlightenment thinkers throughout the country’s institutions, thus having a deep influence on many practical aspects of Russian life, most significantly perhaps on the development of the Imperial Navy. Russia subsequently became an important ally of the new US state (Dashkov relations were still actively promoting US-Russia entente in the 1860s) and the lines of intellectual and political influence laid by Dashkova played an important part in the success of the Union during the Civil War, during which the Russian fleet acted – astonishing as it seems – as a de facto Pacific fleet for the Union, preserving its west flank from naval attack.