Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman

by Robert K. Massie

Informed that Louis of France had been sent to the guillotine, a shaken Catherine became physically ill. She remained in seclusion for a week and ordered six weeks of court mourning. She ordered a total break in relations with France. The French chargé d’affaires, Edmond Genet, was expelled. The Franco-Russian commercial treaty of 1787 was annulled and all trade between the two countries was prohibited. No vessel flying the tricolor flag of the revolution was allowed in Russian waters. All Russian subjects living or traveling in France were recalled, and all French citizens in Russia were given three weeks to publicly pledge allegiance to the king of France or leave Catherine’s empire. Of fifteen hundred French citizens in Russia, only forty-three refused to take this oath. In March 1793, two months after his brother’s death, she welcomed the Count of Artois to St. Petersburg, agreed to finance him, and exhorted him to work together with other émigrés. But she still held back from military involvement in the war against France. With Austria and Prussia rebuffed, she believed that little could be achieved without Britain and that Britain had no intention of going to war. William Pitt, the prime minister, had said as much: that British policy was concerned with the security of Europe, not with the nature of the French government. The execution of Louis XVI changed Pitt’s mind. The king’s execution, Pitt said, was “the foulest and most atrocious act the world has ever seen.”*...