18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 37

[cahn]

More diaries of our favorite 18th-century Prussian diary-keeper have been unearthed and have been synopsized!

January 18th: Blessed be thou to me! Under your light, my Prince Heinrich was born!

Comments

[luzula]

Thanks so much for the research, that's very interesting! I hadn't previously considered this as a thing at all...

[mildred_of_midgard]

I have to expand on something I found after posting this, when flipping through Massie:

The difference was that Peter's problem with the nobility was more usually that he was forcibly shipping them abroad to learn Western ways and they kept trying to sneak back!

While this was true, the reverse was also true. Peter tried to impose mandatory service on all the nobles; two thirds in the army and one third in civil service. They all had to register and report for service, and they did not like it at all. Many tried to escape abroad (sometimes inventing urgent errands that took them out of the country), enter monasteries, or disappear into the wild when census-takers came knocking. (Russia having more land than people, it was easier to disappear than in, say, Prussia.)

Massie doesn't say whether they had to get permission to go abroad on their invented errands, but based on that passage I found in my previous comment, plus my *sense* from my reading that Catherine the Great would not have gone for nobles leaving the country without permission, I'm going to guess either yes, they already did, or else this is when and how that rule started.

The easiest way to illegally emigrate, of course, is the same way as the easiest way to illegally immigrate today: to get permission from the relevant government and then just stay in the new country forever. (Also what Algarotti did in his Frexit, of course, and of course many Soviet defectors (which is why so many celebrities had KGB escorts when they traveled to the West).)

ETA: It occurred to me to check Catherine and Diderot, and I found this relevant passage:

Over time all individuals were bound to other individuals, to the state, or both. This was the case for the nobility, who were obliged to serve the state in administrative or military capacities, as well as for town dwellers, who, unlike nobles, required permission to move from one town to another. As Isabel de Madariaga drily notes, in eighteenth-century Russia “all that was not specifically authorized was forbidden, and only that could be done which was specifically authorized.” [Followed, of course, by a discussion of serfdom.]

Still no definitive answer on nobles and leaving the country, but the obligation to serve is pointing in that direction.

ETA2: More Russian findings, from a more reliable looking book (The Reforms of Peter the Great: Progress Through Violence in Russia):

It was impossible for a nobleman of the Petrine era to avoid service by legal means, and the illegal routes were interdicted by very harsh decrees, threatening nobles with public punishment and publication of the names of “no-shows” on special boards nailed to gallows. More terrifying than moral humiliation for the nobleman was the confiscation of holdings for refusal to serve. Decrees promised to give part of the holdings of the “no-show” to delators.

And:

Compelled to perform lifelong service in the army and the state offices, the nobles persistently begged for at least long leaves in order to establish order on their estates, where only old men and children remained.

Compulsory education:

The decree of 20 January 1714 is unique in Russian history: the nobleman who has not acquired the basics of knowledge necessary for service is forbidden to marry: “Dispatch to all the guberniias [provinces] several persons from the mathematical schools to instruct noble sons, except the single homesteaders and those of bureau rank, in ciphering and geometry and establish such a punishment that he will not be free to marry until he is schooled.”

These draconian measures were increasingly not enforced under Peter's successors, and Peter III revoked compulsory service entirely in 1762. Then Catherine, who first revoked Peter's reforms and then re-implemented them under her own name because they were so obviously badly needed (and she needed the nobility's support), lightened up restrictions on the nobility, but it's not clear to me whether this included travel abroad.

[luzula]

Wow, that is...a lot! As power struggles between monarch and aristocracy go, that sounds like an extreme in monarchical power.

Russian nobility

[mildred_of_midgard]

Contemporaries thought so too! It was a trope to pityingly/condescendingly refer to the Russian nobility as "slaves", and for the nobles to complain about their fates. Consider, for example, the ice wedding, in which one of the parties was a prince. You could not pull this off in just any country in Europe!

The (Russian) author of the more reliable-looking book on Peter's reforms I just cited makes the case that during Peter's time, at least, the nobles were *not* the ruling class, they were a differently oppressed class:

In this regard a question arises: can one call this bureaucratized, regimented nobility that was obligated to study in order then to serve and to serve in unlimited military and civil service (even those discharged from service “for old age and for wounds” for which they had often been examined by the autocrat himself were assigned to garrisons or “whoever will be suited to whichever occupation”), the ruling class-estate in the sense that we understand this, as applied to the times of Catherine the Great and Nicholas I?

It may be objected, to the contrary, that the nobles were the ruling class, for they enjoyed the right of owning lands settled by bondaged peasants whom they exploited. This is true, of course, but as applied to the Petrine era serf ownership was not the exclusive right of the noble class. Bondaged peasants and even slaves could be owned in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries by representatives of the service estate and the merchantry. Only subsequently did the nobility succeed in gaining the monopoly right on owning settled lands.

Ah! Looking at the coverage of Alexei in this book, it says "he decided on a terrible crime for a Russian subject--fleeing abroad, which was state treason." That's broader than the "civil servant committing treason and soldier committing desertion" description from that essay I cited in my original post.

Judging by some other things he says, that may actually have been one of the things changed by Catherine, I'm not sure. But since she didn't come into power until the 1760s, that's still a good half of the century.

Mecklenburg

[mildred_of_midgard]

I remembered that I had a book on Mecklenburg and Duke Karl Leopold's attempt to impose absolutism on his nobles. Sure enough, 1717, September 23, he locks down the border against nobles fleeing, in an effort to keep their property.

Given that the imperial execution was placed on him that year and shortly thereafter he had to leave the country, at which point FW and G1, followed by FW and G2, started wrangling over who should occupy Mecklenburg in his absence, that might not have been enforced after 1717, but it does show that he tried!