Alexander's Conservative Turn Revisited: The Lycée Richelieu and the Contradictions of Catholic Education

• In Event: Autocracy, Ideology, and Ritual in the Reign of Alexander I

Abstract

The story of the reign of Alexander I is often presented in the form of a series of polarities, most commonly a "liberal" period replaced somewhere between 1812 and 1820 with a "conservative" one. These polarities have encouraged considerable projection on the part of historians, who tend to equate the former period with good things like Enlightenment and cosmopolitanism and the latter with bad things like Orthodoxy, cultural nationalism, and military colonies. This paper aims to trouble this binary by considering the case of the Lycée Richelieu, the ancestor of today's Odesa University. Founded in 1817 on the initiative of the duc de Richelieu and his close friend the Abbé Nicolle, aiming to bring enlightenment to Novorossiia with the strong support of Alexander himself, it underwent a deep structural reform in 1820 in the course of which Nicolle was ejected and forced to return to France. While this looks like a clear-cut case of bad Alexander succeeding good Alexander, I argue that not all is as it seems--and in fact that the "old" lycée was just as reactionary as the new one, just in a different way. I argue this in part by looking at Nicolle's subsequent career in Restoration France and the diverse group of students who supported him after his resignation.

Author

• Gregory Afinogenov, Georgetown U