The Marquis was a devout Catholic with many friends among the Hôtel Lambert group. Through one of his Polish contacts, who had a half-sister at the Russian court, he gained entrée to the highest circles of St Petersburg society and even had an audience with the Tsar – a guarantee of Western interest in his book. Custine’s Polish sympathies turned him against Russia from the start. In St Petersburg and Moscow he spent a lot of time in the company of liberal noblemen and intellectuals (several of them converts to the Roman Church) who were deeply disenchanted with the reactionary policies of Nicholas I. The suppression of the Polish uprising, which came just six years after the crushing of the Decembrist revolt in Russia, had made these men despair of their country ever following the Western constitutional path. Their pessimism no doubt left its mark on Custine’s dark impressions of contemporary Russia. Everything about it filled the Frenchman with contempt and dread: the despotism of the Tsar; the servility of the aristocracy, who were themselves no more than slaves; their pretentious European manners, a thin veneer of civilization to hide their Asiatic barbarism from the West; the lack of individual liberty and dignity; the pretence and contempt for truth that seemed to pervade society. Like many travellers to Russia before him, the Marquis was struck by the huge scale of everything the government had built. St Petersburg itself was a ‘monument created to announce the arrival of Russia in the world’. He saw this grandiosity as a sign of Russia’s ambition to overtake and dominate the West. Russia envied and resented Europe, ‘as the slave resented his master’, Custine argued, and therein lay the threat of its aggression:
An ambition inordinate and immense, one of those ambitions which could only possibly spring in the bosoms of the oppressed, and could find nourishment only in the miseries of an entire nation, ferments in the heart of the Russian people. That nation, essentially aggressive, greedy under the influence of privation, expiates beforehand, by a debasing submission, the design of exercising a tyranny over other nations: the glory, the riches, which are the objects of its hopes, console it for the disgrace to which it submits. To purify himself from the foul and impious sacrifice of all public and personal liberty, the slave, sunk to his knees, dreams of world domination.
Russia had been put on earth by Providence to ‘chastise the corrupt civilization of Europe by the agency of a new invasion’, Custine argued. It served as a warning and a lesson to the West, and Europe would succumb to its barbarism ‘if our extravagances and iniquities render us worthy of the punishment’. As Custine concluded in the famous last passage of his book:
To have a feeling for the liberty enjoyed in the other European countries one must have sojourned in that solitude without repose, in that prison without leisure, that is called Russia. If ever your sons should be discontented with France, try my recipe: tell them to go to Russia. It is a journey useful to every foreigner; whoever has well examined that country will be content to live anywhere else.29
Within a few years of its publication,
