The Memoirs of Catherine the Great by Catherine the Great

Diderot an offer to publish the
Encyclopedia
in Russia at her expense, a grand gesture in a bid to gain friends by offending France, which had stopped its publication twice. Though he refused, Catherine’s magnanimous gestures impressed the
philosophes
and established her reputation with them. In 1765 she purchased Diderot’s library, and in 1778 that of Voltaire. Through intermediaries, in 1762 she invited d’Alembert to tutor her son, and in 1767, her lover, Orlov, invited Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) to live on his estate, most likely with Catherine’s permission. The speed, consistency, and vision with which Catherine moved to claim her intellectual spoils once on the throne are stunning.
    The “invisible hand” that guided Catherine in her letter to Hanbury-Williams in 1756 was history, or history as she had read it, especially as the
philosophes
understood and wrote the history of rulers. These rulers, and the histories of them, served Catherine as models for thinking about her own life and her memoirs as history. In 1762, in her first letter to d’Alembert, Catherine acknowledges his refusal to be her son’s tutor and compares herself to Queen Christina of Sweden (1626–89, reigned 1632–54). 61 Catherine had read and annotated d’Alembert’s Mémoires et
réflexions sur Christine, reine de Suède
(1753), which presents a model life for a woman ruler that attracted and challenged Catherine. One of the most noted learned women of Europe, Christina corresponded with the philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) and invited him to Sweden. Doubtless, Count Gyllenborg had Christina in mind as he advised Catherine on her education. D’Alembert argues that despite Christina’s abdication in 1654, her life is worthy, “not in her reckless love of glory and conquests, but in the grandeur of her soul, in her talent for rule, in the knowledge of men, in the expansiveness of her views, and in her enlightened taste for the sciences and arts.” 62 Like d’Alembert, Voltaire emphasizes the individual and culture in his histories of great rulers—Henry IV (1553–1610), Louis XIV (1638–1715), Charles XII (1682–1718) of Sweden, and Peter the Great—and their contributions to the overall progress of mankind. Under Louis XIV, Voltaire connects the flowering of the arts and humanities with his rule and with the prominence of educated women in French society.
    While Catherine purposefully and selectively published many of her writings during her lifetime, the continuous stream of the whole of her writing, including her unpublished memoirs, served the still larger purpose of the future professional history of her reign. When Catherine thanks Voltaire for
The History of the Russian Empire Under Peter the Great,
commissioned by Shuvalov in 1757, she discusses the business of writing history. 63 She writes that had she been Empress when he was writing, she would have given him “many other memoirs,” and that she is collecting Peter’s papers and letters, “in which he paints a picture of himself,” for publication. 64 Catherine proposed materials to Voltaire for him to write Le Siècle de Catherine II. 65 Catherine’s handwriting, in documents described as in “her own hand” and “written by herself,” does more than ascertain authorship; it is fundamental to her overall historical project. Like Peter’s letters, about which Catherine uses Horace’s metaphor from the
Ars Poetica
for writing as painting, these writings would create her self-portrait as an individual and a ruler. From the very beginning of her reign, Catherine actively supported the collection and publication of Russian historical documents, and similarly thought about the future of her own papers.
    Central to the mutual interests of Catherine and the
philosophes
were the mind and character of Catherine, precisely the declared subject of her final memoir in its opening maxim. This memoir in particular is therefore an Enlightenment