Barbara von Krüdener
Barbara Juliane von Krüdener | |
---|---|
Freifrau von Krüdener | |
Riga County, Riga Governorate, Russian Empire | |
Died | 25 December [O.S. 13] 1824 Belogorsk, Taurida Governorate, Russian Empire |
Noble family | Vietinghoff Krüdener (by marriage) |
Spouse(s) | Baron Burckhard Alexius Constantin von Krüdener |
Issue | 2 |
Father | Baron Otto Hermann von Vietinghoff genannt Scheel |
Mother | Countess Anna Ulrika von Münnich |
Beate Barbara Juliane Freifrau.
Family background
Baroness von Krüdener was born in
Barbe-Julie de Vietinghoff, better known as Madame von Krüdener (Mme. de Krüdener) later in life, but, as a child, referred to as Juliana, was one of five children born into the wealthy Vietinghoff family.[citation needed]
Father
Her father, Otto Hermann von Vietinghoff-Scheel, had started accruing his wealth from a young age, for as a young man, he proved to possess a knack for business. With his high ambitions, he entered into commercial enterprises that became highly successful. Some of his treasures included grand properties in Kosse (present-day Viitina, Estonia) and Marienburg, as well as his grandiose townhouse in Riga, where Barbe-Julie was born.[citation needed] Although he was never assigned an official title, he enjoyed the official rank as a privy counselor and as a senator and "would exclaim with pride 'I am Vietinghoff', and behave with all the arrogance of a great noble".[4]
Mother
Barbe-Julie's mother, Anna Ulrika von Münnich von Vietinghoff-Scheel, was herself born into nobility. Her grandfather, the famed Field Marshal Burkhard Christoph von Münnich, despite having been exiled for many years in Siberia, had led many successful campaigns against the Tartars and the Turks.[3] Catherine II also made him one of her favorites, although, sometimes the status was fickle. Mme. de Vietinghoff mirrored her grandfather's success in her own household, as a mother of five (she bore two sons and three daughters), she was extremely dedicated, despite the death in infancy of her first son, and her physically handicapped eldest daughter (who was both mute and deaf, and whom the family eventually placed in an asylum in 1777).[5]
Education
Her education, according to her own account, consisted of lessons in
Marriage
Although Barbe-Julie "was still an overgrown, undeveloped, silent girl, with a rather large nose and an uncertain complexion, [she possessed] ample promises of future beauty in her big blue eyes and curling chestnut hair, and in her singularly well-shaped hands and arms".[7] Her potential beauty, combined with her being the heir to her parents’ wealth, resulted in an onslaught of marriage proposals. Her parents arranged for her to be married to the local neighborhood baron despite Barbe-Julie's incessant protesting.[8]
Seeing no way out of her situation, the young baroness first started conversing with God. She begged him to save her from this horrid situation. He answered her with a case of the measles that left her less attractive (at least temporarily), which became at least a part of the baron's incentive to politely decline the marriage proposal. As a result, Barbe-Julie began to believe that she personally had a divine connection with God. [9]
However, when Baron Burkhardt-Alexis-Constantine Krüdener, a widower sixteen years her senior,
On January 31, 1784, a son was born to them, named Paul after the grand-duke Paul (afterward emperor), who acted as god-father. The same year Baron Krüdener became ambassador at Venice, later (1786) at Munich where he remained until transferred to Copenhagen in 1787.[3]
In 1787 the birth of a daughter (Juliette) aggravated the nervous disorders from which the baroness had for some time been suffering, and it was decided that she must go to the south for her health; she accordingly left, with her infant daughter and her stepdaughter Sophie. In 1789 she was at
Religious development
Towards the end of the Napoleonic wars religious thought was in tune with the general disillusionment with the ideals of the French Revolution, and thus a search for an alternative. She had an influence on the Swiss Réveil, and for a time her ideas had a profound effect on Alexander I of Russia. Through her contact with the Russian Emperor she and Henri-Louis Empaytaz, a member of the Réveil, were in part responsible for the religious aspects of the Holy Alliance.[13][14]
Meanwhile, the baroness had been reveling in the intellectual society of Coppet and of Paris. She was now thirty-six; her charms were fading, but her passion for admiration survived. She had tried the effect of the shawl dance, in imitation of Emma, Lady Hamilton; she now sought fame in literature, and in 1803, after consulting Chateaubriand and other writers of distinction, published her Valérie, a sentimental romance, of which under a thin veil of anonymity she herself was the heroine. In January 1804 she returned to Riga, Livonia.[3]
At Riga occurred her conversion. A gentleman of her acquaintance when about to salute her fell dying at her feet. The shock overset her not too well-balanced mind; she sought for consolation and found it in the ministrations of her shoemaker, an ardent disciple of the
At
A short visit to the Moravians at
This remained for two years her headquarters. Fontaines, half-charlatan, half-dupe, had introduced into his household a prophetess named
Further wanderings followed: to
In 1812 she was at Strassburg, whence she paid more than one visit to
The empress
Association with Tsar Alexander
In the spring of 1815 the baroness was settled at Schlüchtern, a Baden enclave in Württemberg, busy persuading the peasants to sell all and fly from the wrath to come. Near this, at Heilbronn, the emperor Alexander established his headquarters on June 4. That very night the baroness sought and obtained an interview. To the tsar, who had been brooding alone over an open Bible, her sudden arrival seemed an answer to his prayers; for three hours the prophetess preached her strange gospel, while the most powerful man in Europe sat, his face buried in his hands, sobbing like a child; until at last he declared that he had "found peace".[3]
At the tsar's request, she followed him to
In this religious forcing-house, the idea of the Holy Alliance germinated and grew to rapid maturity. On September 26 the portentous proclamation, which was to herald the opening of a new age of peace and goodwill on earth, was signed by the sovereigns of Russia, Austria and Prussia. Its authorship has ever been a matter of dispute. Madame de Krüdener herself claimed that she had suggested the idea, and that Alexander had submitted the draft for her approval. This is probably correct, though the tsar later, when he had recovered his mental equilibrium, reproved her for her indiscretion in talking of the matter. His eyes, indeed, had begun to be opened before he left Paris, and Marie Kummer was the unintentional cause. At the very first séance the prophetess, whose revelations had been praised by the baroness in extravagant terms, had the evil inspiration to announce in her trance to the emperor that it was God's will that he should endow the religious colony to which she belonged! Alexander merely remarked that he had received too many such revelations before to be impressed. The baroness's influence was shaken but not destroyed, and before he left Paris Alexander gave her a passport to Russia. She was not to see him again.[3]
She left Paris on October 22, 1815, intending to travel to St. Petersburg by way of Switzerland. The tsar, however, offended by her indiscretions and sensible of the ridicule which his relations with her had brought upon him, showed little disposition to hurry her arrival. She remained in Switzerland, where she presently fell under the influence of an unscrupulous adventurer named J. G. Kellner. For months Empeytaz, an honest enthusiast, struggled to save her from this man's clutches but in vain. Kellner too well knew how to flatter the baroness's inordinate vanity: the author of the Holy Alliance could be none other than the "woman clothed with the sun" from the Book of Revelation.[3][19]
She wandered with Kellner from place to place, proclaiming her mission, working miracles, persuading her converts to sell all and follow her. Crowds of beggars and rapscallions of every description gathered wherever she went, supported by the charities squandered from the common fund. She became a nuisance to the authorities and a menace to the peace; Württemberg had expelled her, and the example was followed by every Swiss canton she entered in turn. At last, in May 1818, she set out for her estate in Kosse, Livonia (now Viitina, Estonia), accompanied by Kellner and a remnant of the elect.[3]
The emperor Alexander having opened the
Character assessment
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve wrote of Madame de Krüdener:[3]
Elle avait un immense besoin que le monde s'occupât d'elle ... ; l'amour propre, toujours l'amour propre ...[20]
— Sainte-Beuve (1852).[21]
A kindlier epitaph written in her own words, uttered after the revelation of the misery of the Crimean colonists had at last opened her eyes:[3]
The good that I have done will endure; the evil that I have done (for how often have I not mistaken for the voice of God that which was no more than the result of my imagination and my pride) the mercy of God will blot out.
— Barbara von Krüdener.
Clarence Ford wrote in a Victorian biography:
Mme. de Krüdener, ... preserved a certain magnetic attraction up to the very last years of her life. Added to this she possess[ed] an extreme gracefulness of carriage and lightness of motion, which, together with her fair curling hair that fell in soft ringlets around her face, lent an air of unusual youthfulness to her appearance.
— Clarence Ford (1893).[22]
Works
- Valérie, ou, Lettres de Gustave de Linar à Ernst de G…, Paris, Henrichs, 1804. available onGallica archive.
- Écrits intimes et prophétiques de Madame de Krüdener, Paris, Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1975. Worldcat.
- Le Camp de Vertus, ou la Grande revue de l'armée russe, Lyon, Guyot frères, 1815. Available on Gallica archive.
Books about her
- Madame de Krüdener et son temps, 1764-1824.Paris, Plon, 1961. Worldcat.
- Lady of the Holy Alliance. Ernest John Knapton: New York, Columbia University Press, 1939. Worldcat.
Notes
This article needs additional citations for verification. (December 2011) |
- .
- .
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x Phillips 1911
- ^ Ford 1893, p. 5.
- ^ a b Ford 1893, p. 6.
- ^ Ford 1893, pp. 7, 8.
- ^ Ford 1893, p. 8.
- ^ Ford 1893, pp. 8, 9.
- ^ Ford 1893, p. 9.
- ^ Ford 1893, p. 10.
- ^ Ford 1893, p. 17.
- ^ He died while she was there in 1792.
- ^ Stunt 2000, p. 30.
- ^ Phillips 1911a, p. 559.
- Gustav IV Adolf of Sweden (Friederike Dorothea), were princesses of Baden.
- ^ She had been condemned some years previously in Württemberg to the pillory and three years imprisonment as a swindler (Betrügerin), on her own confession. Her curious history is given in detail by M. Muhlenbeck.
- ^ In 1809 it was obviously inconvenient to have people proclaiming Napoleon as "the Beast".
- ^ Berckheim had been French commissioner of police in Mainz and had abandoned his post in 1813.
- ^ Revelation xii 1.
- ^ It can be translated as "She had a huge need that the world paid attention to her ... self-esteem, ever self-esteem ..."
- ^ Sainte-Beuve 1852, p. 1026.
- ^ Ford 1893, p. 14.
References
- Ford, Clarence (1893), The Life and Letters of Madame De Krüdener, London: A. & C. Black
- Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin (January–March 1852), Revue des deux Mondes, 1849-1855, 13: 1026 ,
- Stunt, Timothy C. F. (2000), From awakening to secession: radical evangelicals in Switzerland and Britain, 1815-35 (illustrated ed.), Continuum International Publishing Group, p. 30, ISBN 978-0-567-08719-5
- Phillips, Walter Alison (1911a). . In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 1 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 556–559. This work in turn cites:
- Empaytaz, H. L. (1840), Notice sur Alexandre Empereur de Russie (2nd ed.), Paris
- Attribution
- public domain: Phillips, Walter Alison (1911). "Krüdener, Barbara Juliana, Baroness von". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 15 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 929–930. This article incorporates text from a publication now in the
Further reading
- Empeytaz, H. L. (1840), Notice sur Alexandre, empereur de Russie (in French) ((2nd ed.), Paris (Much information about Madame de Krüdener, but coloured by the author's views)
- Eynard, Jean-Gabriel (1849), Vie de Madame de Krüdener (2 volumes) (in French), Paris was for a long time during the 19th century the standard life and contains much material, but is far from authoritative.
- Ghervas, Stella (2008), Réinventer la tradition. Alexandre Stourdza et l'Europe de la Sainte-Alliance (in French), Paris: Honoré Champion, ISBN 978-2-7453-1669-1
- Knapton, E. J. (1937), "An Unpublished Letter of Mme De Krüdener", The Journal of Modern History, 9 (4): 483, S2CID 144342757
- Mühlenbeck, Eugène (1909), Étude sur les origines de la Sainte-Alliance (in French), Paris
{{citation}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) This was the most authoritative study published by 1911 and it contains numerous references. - Troyat, Henri (1982), Alexander of Russia: Napoleon's Conqueror, New York: Dutton, ISBN 978-0802139498
External links
- Works by Freifrau von Barbara Juliane Krüdener at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Barbara von Krüdener at Internet Archive
- New International Encyclopedia. 1905. .