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Russia Beyond: "Why did the Russian nobility speak French?"
When Prince Dimitri Golitsyne (1771-1844), military governor of Moscow, got angry and started swearing in Russian, his subjects were frightened but also had trouble hiding their smiles: He used the coarsest of insults, but uttered them with elite French pronunciation.
Dimitri Golitsyne, François Riss
The fact is that the prince's mother tongue was not Russian, but French. He spent most of his childhood in France, and when he became Governor General of Moscow in 1820, everyone noticed that he spoke Russian with a strong accent and made many mistakes when writing in that language.
It was a common occurrence in 19th-century Russia, as all members of the nobility spoke French among themselves, and even the war with Napoleonic France only temporarily curbed the habit, but never really stopped it.
Remaining misunderstood by servants
Russia's first hermitage was built at Peterhof, on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, on the orders of Peter the Great. In those days, "hermitages" were pavilions built for the leisure of the nobility. Here, they could "hide" from their servants, who were never allowed to go any further than the ground floor.
Alex 'Florstein' Fedorov (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The main feature of these premises, including Peterhof, was a lift system used to move dishes prepared by servants from the first to the second floor, so that they couldn't hear their masters' conversations.
Peter the Great and his friends dined at this hermitage on many occasions. They didn't yet speak perfect French among themselves, but this story shows that they needed such a language. When you're discussing millions of rubles, or millions of lives, you don't want your doorman or your dishwasher telling everyone. So French has become that language for Russians. But why not English or German, since there were so many Germans in the Russian Empire?
International language in European politics
Since the Middle Ages (from 1500 onwards), Latin has been the international language of science and diplomacy in Europe. Knowledge of this language, so difficult to master and so complex, distinguished the highly educated from the rest. Until the 18th century, Latin remained the language of reference for scientists, but French replaced it in international relations.
Public domain
In 1539, France adopted French as its official language and in 1635, a century later, the Académie française was created to reform it. A set of grammatical rules was created, and the 1648 Treaties of Westphalia became the first international documents of such importance to be written in French.
These agreements established the new European reality of sovereign states, in which French was the new diplomatic language. From the mid-17th century, Russian diplomats and scientists also began to learn French.
An influx of French tutors
In the 18th-century Russian Empire, only the wealthiest could afford to provide their children with a decent European education, by sending them abroad to study. Members of the lower nobility could invite a tutor from France. Tutors were hired to live on the nobles' estates and look after their children. Boys and girls were taught music, dance, horsemanship and social etiquette. The former also practiced fencing, while the latter concentrated on the arts.
Ferdinand de Braekeleer
Before the French Revolution, many of these tutors were petty criminals, fraudsters, or at least had not received the higher education they claimed. For example, historian Yuri Lotman writes that in 1770 a French emissary to St. Petersburg recognized his former coachman among the city's "tutors". Worse still, an escaped French convict, branded with the fleur-de-lis (the heraldic symbol of the Bourbons) like all convicts, passed himself off as a prince of the Bourbon dynasty in Russia, and almost married a daughter of the nobility, before he was unmasked by more educated Russians.
The situation changed after the French Revolution, when large numbers of educated Frenchmen, including devoted monarchists, fled their country to avoid the horrors of the Terror. They were welcome in the Russian Empire, an absolute monarchy at the time, as France had been.
From the late 18th century onwards, having a French-speaking tutor in the family was a must for almost all Russian noble lines. They had received a better education, and could therefore teach true French and French manners. In the countryside, they taught at boarding schools, and in the capital they were employed as home tutors on the estates and manors of the wealthiest noble families.
Rise above the crowd
Dmitry Kardovsky
Russian nobles of the 19th century quickly became fluent in French. Prince Dimitri Golitsyne, like many others, was more at ease speaking French than Russian. They not only adopted the language, but also turned to French culture. Around 70% of the contents of Russian nobles' libraries were in French. Russians read French translations of the works of George Byron, William Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Heinrich Heine and other European authors. It wasn't until the 19th century that English literature in its original language joined the rows of books belonging to Russian nobles.
French was widely used in love letters and private correspondence, even after Nicholas I decided that all state documents should be written in Russian only. Russian philologist Varvara Blinokhvatova notes that the fact that a literary or artistic work belonged to French culture was enough to "justify" its existence in the eyes of Russian nobility. The Russian nobility of the 19th century can certainly be considered bilingual; and this knowledge of French enabled them to recognize each other, and to spot the imposters among them.
The French themselves recognized the Russians' skills in mastering their language and culture. In Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir (1830), the hero, Julien Sorel, admires Prince Korasoff, a Russian nobleman who teaches a young Frenchman the finest manners of society. With Korasoff, Julien "at last knew high fatuity. He had befriended young Russian lords who initiated him," wrote the author, demonstrating that the Russians really were the ones who carried and preserved high culture.
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