Mother of the Church: Sofia Svechina, the Salon, and the Politics of Catholicism in Nine-teeth-Century Russia and France by Tatyana V. Bakhmetyeva (review)

Bakhmetyeva provides a compelling portrait of Svechina, of early nineteenth-century Russian Catholicism, and of the wider world of nineteenth-century French Catholicism, where Svechina played an important role. She uses extensive primary and secondary printed and archival sources, particularly those of the Bibliothèque Slave. Born into an aristocratic family in Moscow in 1782, Sofia Soimonova early demonstrated unusual intellectual talent and received an excellent education in languages, literature, science, and philosophy. Married at seventeen to the forty-year-old General Nikolai Svechin, she played an active role in St. Petersburg's salons, where women, who had little public role, became "deeply enmeshed" (p. 36).

The Russian nobility had become increasingly westernized and, like elites in Western Europe, were shaken as Enlightenment humanism was challenged by the French Revolution and Napoleon. While almost all aristocrats were baptized into the official Russian Orthodox Church, its clergy, with few exceptions, like Metropolitan Filaret Drozdov, were scorned as uneducated and its theology as lacking. Hence, many, like Emperor Alexander I, looked for answers elsewhere: Masonry, Pietism, mysticism, and, for a few, Catholicism. In the salons, Svechina encountered Russian converts to Catholicism, Jesuits, and Catholic émigrés, most importantly, Joseph de Maistre. Like other converts, she first sought certainty in Orthodoxy before becoming a Catholic in 1815.

Bakhmetyeva exaggerates the number of converts; at most there were several dozen, not two to three hundred (p. 55), as well as the number of male converts. Men ran "the risk of jeopardizing their careers" (p. 69), if they rejected the official church, which was condemned as unpatriotic, especially under Nicholas I. It is misleading, however, to claim that converting meant choosing "Catholic France" (p. 4) over Russia, for as Bakhmetyeva says later, Napoleon was seen as the Anti-Christ (p. 52) and the Catholic Church as a bulwark of legitimacy. The author shows how the expulsion of the Jesuits, welcomed by Russia earlier, from St. Petersburg in 1816 dismayed the small Russian Catholic community, leading some to emigrate to Catholic Western Europe, like Svechina in 1816. The author also discusses later Russian converts to Catholicism.

The strongest part of Bakhmetyeva's book is her description of Svechina's influence in Paris, where she lived until her death in 1857. There, her salon attracted prominent Catholics like Lamennais, Lacordaire, Falloux, Montalembert, Ravignan, Ozanam, Tocqueville, and Dupanloup. Fervently devout, she promoted a liberal Catholicism which looked to the pope against state control of the Church in France but saw her hopes diminish after Pius IX condemned modern thought. She remained loyal to Russia and depended on income from her estates there, condemning the Polish Revolution of 1831 and lamenting the Crimean War as a civil war.

There are a few errors and typos. The Russian Bible Society was not an "innocuous" expression of universal Christianity (p. 75), but was promoted by the emperor himself and condemned by the Catholic Church. Gabriel Gruber was not "deported to Russia" in 1784 (p. 83), but went voluntarily. Some French and Russian transliterations are inconsistent. For example, Jean Gagarine and Ivan Gagarin are the same person. Also, it should be St. Francis Xavier, not St. Xavier (p. 84), laissez, not laissât (p. 158), Raeff, not Raef (p. 276), obrashchenii, not obrashtchenii (p. 283), Kozlovskii, not Kozlocskii (p. 283), Gesù, not Gésu (p. 299), and Fidelis Grivel, not Fidelio Grivel (p. 313). And there were not 300,000,000 French in Russia after 1812 (p. 277).

The book is strongly recommended as a comprehensive account of Sofia Svechina and of Catholicism in early nineteenth-century Russia and in the ensuing decades in France.