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Smirnov V. Charlemagne and Peter the Great: The Idea of a Christian Empire in German Romanticism and Russian Social Thought in the First Half of the 19th Century

Vladimir Smirnov
Saint Petersburg State University
Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation
ORCID: 0000-0003-1560-0685
E-mail: pustota94@yandex.ru

 

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ABSTRACT. The idea of a single Christian empire, so popular in Germany during the conservative era of Romanticism, was often associated with the empire of Charlemagne, who, according to a number of German romantics, united Christian peoples into a single supranational system. The romantic pairing of the private and the public presupposes that the German nation-state constitutes both the legacy of Charlemagne’s great empire and the sprouts of the emerging Christian empire, thereby serving humankind’s universal interests. This idea was most distinctly expressed by Novalis in his essay “Christianity or Europe”. Görres saw in Charlemagne an heir to the Roman hegemony, who managed to simultaneously unite many warring peoples and build an organic hierarchy, at the basis of which the principle of German military democracy was preserved. The assimilation of German Romanticism into the Russian social thought is mainly associated with Slavophilism, in which the ideal of an organic society associated with general will is opposed to the imperial bureaucracy, and the Slavophil criticism of Peter’s reforms has been thoroughly researched. Nevertheless, the positive assessment of the figure of Peter the Great pertained not only from the pro-Western positions and did not depend solely on the military and political successes of the era. Not unlike German Romantics, there was a strong Messianic element in the Russian social thought, which assumed that Europe’s rebirth would take root in Russia, that had finally opened up to the world thanks to the reforms of Peter the Great. 

 

KEYWORDS: empire, Charlemagne, Peter the Great, German romanticism, romantic historiosophy

 

DOI 10.31250/2618-8619-2022-2(16)-6-17
УДК 930

 

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