• 1 On the notion of military enlightenment, see Christy Pichichiero, Military Enlightenment: War and C (...)
• 2 These two institutions were lately the subject of in-depth new studies that provide a foundation fo (...)

2Against this backdrop, this article explores what is probably the earliest known episode where French eighteenth-century actors held up an educational model borrowed from Russia as an example. In particular, we focus on an overlooked link between the French and Russian educational systems that may provide a unique perspective on the circulation of some of the Military Enlightenment’s pedagogical concepts, disciplinary practices, and more.1 What makes this episode especially interesting and significant is that it involved the École Royale Militaire (ERM) established in Paris in 1751. This school is remarkable on several levels, be it for the way it was showcased in Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie, for being funded by a proprietary lottery which was the biggest in European history until that point, or for serving as an inspiration for the Bentham brothers’ panopticons; overall, it was among the most significant educational innovations in pre-Revolutionary France. On the Russian side, this episode involved the Noble Land Cadet Corps. Established in St. Petersburg in 1731, it played a central role in the social and cultural life in mid-eighteenth-century Russia and, just like the École in France, was the Empire’s most innovative educational institution of its day.2

• 3 AN (Archives Nationales), K 149, n^o 8¹, Mémoire “Collège de Cadets Etably à Petersbourg en 1732 Sou (...)
• 4 AN, K 149, nº 5¹, Mémoire “Collège académique”, 22 April 1750.

3It was while lobbying Louis XV for the establishment of the École in 1750 that its founder, Joseph Pâris-Duverney (1684–1770), a financier, statesman, and an early patron of Madame de Pompadour presented the Russian school as a model to be emulated.3 Although Duverney cited a few French antecedents to the institution he proposed, such as the Collège Mazarin (degraded in his mind by the lack of military exercises in its curriculum), he argued that “of all the models that one could take [for the École] there is perhaps none better than the cadet school established in St. Petersburg in 1732 by Field Marshal Count von Münnich.” Indeed, according to him, “there is perhaps no great Prince who cannot envy the honor of such an establishment. We are not ashamed to aver that it gave birth to the idea which we have taken the liberty to propose to Your Majesty…”4 Among the numerous memoranda he authored advocating for the École, Duverney prepared a detailed eight-page description of the Russian school and submitted it to the king on April 18, 1750.

• 5 Deni Didro, Sobranie sochinenei v desiati tomakh [Denis Diderot, Collected works in ten volumes] (M (...)
• 6 Marc Cheynet de Beaupré, Joseph Pâris-Duverney, vol. 2, 557.

4This counterintuitive connection tends to be overlooked in the historiography of cultural exchanges between Russia and France. It was only natural for someone like Denis Diderot to assume in 1773 that the influence must have run in the opposite direction and that it was the St. Petersburg Cadet Corps that was predicated on French examples; Catherine II does not seem to have objected to this suggestion.5 Scholars of the École, however, have long noted Duverney’s reference to the Cadet Corps as the model for this institution. Marc Cheynet de Beaupré, the author of the most recent and most comprehensive study of Duverney unequivocally states that “c’est de L’École des Cadets de Saint-Pétersbourg que Joseph Paris reconnaissait ouvertement s’être inspire.”6

• 7 The Ecole militaire is a key disciplinary institution in the genesis of the modern state. A good ov (...)
• 8 Haroldo A. Guízar, “‘Make a Hard Push For It’: The Benthams, Foucault, and the Panopticons’ roots i (...)

5The École occupies an important place not only in the history of eighteenth-century French education but is also central to Michael Foucault’ story of the genesis of disciplinary power, and in that sense, of the genesis of modernity writ large.7 As Foucault stressed, it is while visiting the École in Paris that Samuel Bentham conceived of the “panoptic” idea that would find its expression in his brother Jeremy’s legendary Panopticon.8 Although Foucault himself does not mention Duverney’s reference to the Cadet Corps, the Panopticon’s supposed Russian roots have recently attracted sustained interest from scholars. They have focused on the fact that this scheme was first designed by Samuel Bentham in the autumn of 1786 during his tenure as a supervisor of works on Prince Potemkin’s estate of Krichev in the Mogilev province.

• 9 Simon Werrett, “Potemkin and the Panopticon: Samuel Bentham and the Architecture of Absolutism in E (...)
• 10 Alessandro Stanziani, “The traveling panopticon: Labor institutions and labor practices in Russia a (...)

6Viewed from this perspective, the Panopticon becomes for Simon Werrett an embodiment of essentialized Russianness, of supposed “theatricality” and “dualism” of Russian culture. He goes as far as to argue that “Panopticon subsumed the spatial structure of the Russian estate into a single building,” that it became “a theatre of absolutism” and even somehow paralleled the ways in which omnipresence and omniscience of God were allegedly manifested in the architecture of Orthodox churches.9 For Alessandro Stanziani, too, the Panopticon as a system for controlling labor “drew inspiration from a particular image of Russian serfdom and from the Bentham brothers’ experiences” in Russia.10 Since the Panopticon was presented by Foucault as a symbol of Western European modernity, discovering its Russian roots allows these scholars to problematize the juxtaposition between the West and the “rest,” between the modern and the non-modern, between free and unfree labor practices. In that sense, by drawing attention to the overlooked link between the École and the Noble Cadet Corps this article also seeks to add a new dimension to the much-studied connection between Panopticon and Russia.

• 11 Guízar, The École Royale Militaire, 14.

8The idea to set up a military school had been germinating for years in Duverney’s mind. Already in 1725, he had suggested the raising of 60,000 militiamen and a year later six companies of cadets to train officers for the militia were also raised, only to be disbanded by 1733.11 The main motivations animating him in 1750 were straightforward: they included the wish to build a monument to Louis XV comparable to Louis XIV’s Invalides and Saint-Cyr, a stratagem to ally the nobility more closely to the absolutist state, a penchant for dabbling in educational innovation, the need to reform the military after the War of the Austrian Succession, and a desire to aid impoverished nobles through charity. It is less immediately obvious, however, why Duverney felt the example of the Russian institution suited his designs. Indeed, while the Cadet Corps was not unfamiliar to the Western European audience, the information available about it was scarce, and its reputation was hardly established.

• 12 Published in P.P. Pekarskii, ed., Markiz de la Shetardi v Rossii, 1740-1742 godov. Perevod rukopisn (...)
• 13 Voltaire also discussed his plan for a work on “useful deeds” of Peter with Claude-Étienne Darget w (...)

9It would have been natural to suspect that Duverney learned about the Corps from French diplomatic representatives in Russia, but these do not seem to have reported on the Russian school in any detail. An anonymous “description of the Russian court” found among the French diplomatic papers and dating to 1737, mentions the Corps briefly in a list of von Münnich’s accomplishments. It claims erroneously that this school counted as many as 1200 cadets, but otherwise has little to say about it beyond praising the Corps for “supplying the army with excellent people every year.”12 Characteristically, when in May 1737 Voltaire asked Prussian Crown Prince Frederick to engage a “serviteur éclairé” in Russia to furnish him with information for his work on the state of the “art militaire” and “progrès dans les sciences, quels établissements ; quel fruit en a-t-on tiré ?” in Russia, the Cadet Corps was not in any way covered in the responses to the French writer’s inquiries provided by two experienced diplomats with a record of service in Russia, Ulrich Friedrich de Suhm and Jean-Gotthilf Vockerodt.13

• 14 C.G. Jöcher, ed., Eröffnetes Cabinet Grösser Herren Oder Gegenwärtiger Zustand aller Reiche und Sta (...)
• 15 Christian Friedrich Hempel, Leben, Thaten, und betrübter Fall des weltberufenen russischen Grafen (...)

10To be sure, some references to this school are found in the European press already in 1733, when a very short description of the Cadet Corps, largely based on a translation of an earlier publication in Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti, appeared in Eröffnetes Cabinet Grösser Herren Oder Gegenwärtiger Zustand aller Reiche und Staaten der Welt, Nebst andern Merckwürdigkeiten published by avid German bibliophile Christian Gottlieb Jöcher in Leipzig.14 A more substantial description of the Cadet Corps is contained in a popular biography of von Münnich published in 1742 by one Christian Friedrich Hempel, who also authored biographies of Count Ostermann and Empress Anna’s favorite Biron around the same time. Drawing on the very same publication in Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti and some other sources, Hempel presented the Corps as one of von Münnich’s many achievements and briefly described its aims, the composition of the student body, its curriculum, and the students’ uniforms and flags. However, he does so in a short two pages, a much more summary précis than the eight pages drafted by Duverney.15

• 16 Elizabeth Justice, “Tri goda v Peterburge [Three years in St. Petersburg],” in Iu.N. Bespiatykh, ed (...)

12The Corps tended to attract the attention of such visitors not so much because of its superior pedagogy, but rather because of the building it occupied, the Menshikov Palace. In the 1730s it was still seen as one of the largest, if not the largest, edifices in the capital, eclipsing even the imperial palace itself. Characteristically, Elizabeth Justice (d. 1752), an Englishwoman who spent three years as a governess in St. Petersburg in the mid-1730s, mentions in her description of the city that the Menshikov Palace allegedly had as many rooms as there are days in a year, without referring to the Cadet Corps at all.16

• 17 See the Russian translation of the diary published as Francesco Algarotti, “Okno v Evropu”: dnevnik (...)

13Besides its size, the palace also attracted attention because of the personality of its former owner, Peter I’s all-powerful favorite Prince Aleksandr Menshikov. Count Francesco Algarotti (1712-1764), a cosmopolitan diplomat, man of letters, and connoisseur of art who traveled to St. Petersburg in 1739 with the embassy of Lord Baltimore stressed in his diary that the Corps “is quartered in the palace of Prince Menshikov, what a great example of the inconstancy of the Fortune…” Algarotti did say a few words about the institution itself, though. He claimed that the school had 300 students divided into companies and that the “idea to establish this school has been suggested by Count Münnich.” He believed, however, the Corps to be based on a French model, or more precisely, “after the example of how the musketeers are trained in France.”17

• 18 Peder von Haven, “Puteshestvie v Rossiiu [A voyage to Russia]” in Bespiatykh, ed., Peterburg Anny I (...)

14Many of the travelers who visited St. Petersburg in that period provided not only brief but also misleading reports about the Corps. One such traveler who mentions the Corps – he dubs it “The Cadet Academy” – is Peder von Haven (1715-1757), a Danish student who came to Russia in 1736 and secured employment there as a secretary, staying until 1739. Alas, von Haven can only report that the “Academy” has a “few hundred” young nobles and erroneously claims that it also includes naval cadets. Beyond that, von Haven is obligated to admit that he “has not acquired a sufficiently clear idea” of the institution to provide a detailed description.18

• 19 John Cook, Voyages and travels through the Russian Empire, Tartary, and part of the Kingdom of Pers (...)

15John Cook (1712-1804), a physician from Scotland who also arrived in Russia in 1736, but ended up staying there for over a decade, erroneously believed the Corps to have as many as fifteen hundred cadets. He correctly stressed, however, that the cadets are secluded within the confines of the Menshikov Palace which, allegedly, had only one entrance, and that the graduates were promoted to officer rank. Beyond that, he offered some details about the cadets’ punishment: they were “not to be whipped with a birch, or any other common rod of correction, because they are gentleman,” but rather with a specially made thin steel device that imitated a sword and was, therefore, less dishonorable. Cook also commented at length on the bitter and bloody hostility that allegedly existed between the cadets and the soldiers of the Guards.19

• 20 Betty Kemp, “Sir Francis Dashwood’s Diary of His Visit to St Petersburg in 1733,” The Slavonic and (...)

16Francis Dashwood (1708–1781), of Society of Dilettanti and Hellfire Club fame, subsequently the 11^th Baron le Despencer and briefly the Chancellor of the Exchequer, visited St. Petersburg in 1733 as a part of his Grand Tour. Among other places of interest in the Russian capital Dashwood also mentioned the Cadet Corps. Like others, he noticed that the palace where the Corps was quartered used to belong to the exiled Menshikov. Dashwood recognized (quite correctly) the Prussian influence at the Corps: “They exercise after the Prussian manner” and he also noted the “strict discipline” at the school. The size of the Corps he estimated to be at “about 400 cadets.”20

• 21 S.A. Mezin, “Rossiia i Peterburg 1734 goda v zapiskakh d’Agei de Miona [Russia and St. Petersburg i (...)
• 22 AN, K 149, n^o 8¹, p. 7.

17The only account from that era authored by a Frenchman is by Captain Philippe Charles d’Agay de Myon, one of the officers taken prisoner of war after the capture of Danzig, albeit swiftly released. It was during his captivity that he observed a parade of the Cadet Corps in October 1734, an event that he briefly described in his memoir composed in 1746 based on diary notes. All he had to say was that the Corps was a well-disciplined unit and that the cadets were much better groomed and performed exercises more gracefully than other troops. He also noted that the graduates received appointments in accordance with their inclinations and talents – something that was indeed stressed at the Corps21 and was also noted in Duverney’s memorandum.22

• 23 The only full publication of the document is the Russian translation in: K.R. Berk [Carl Reinholdt (...)

18The most detailed and accurate eyewitness description of the Cadet Corps dating to this era was penned by Carl Reinhold Berch (1706-1777), a Swedish traveler who visited St. Petersburg in 1735-1736. He stresses several themes, such as the role of Field-Marshal Count Burkhard Christoph von Münnich (1683-1767) as the founder of the Corps; strict regulation of the daily routine at the school; the Prussian influence there (he specifically and correctly points to the Berlin Cadet “house” as a model for the Russian school and the alma mater of some of the officers hired by von Münnich). Berch also lists the subjects taught at the Corps and describes, quite accurately, some of the teaching methods used there – such as the rule that cadets should not speak their native language in class, or that teachers had to take attendance, which was indeed an important disciplinary innovation.23

• 24 Guízar, “‘Make a Hard Push For It,’” 151-173.

19What is interesting about Berch’s narrative is that he cites the source of his observations: he mentions an excursion around the school given to him by the Corps’ major. They visited classes and dormitories (which he found very clean and well-kept) and discussed the teaching methods employed at the Corps. Berch observed the major talking to the cadets “lovingly,” praising the worthy youths and gently shaming the insufficiently diligent ones. This suggests that similar excursions could be made available to other foreign visitors. Indeed, this sort of visit by Samuel Bentham to the École militaire’s dormitories in October 1775 was the very genesis of the idea for the panopticons he would later design in Krichev, Russia, in 1786.24

• 26 Mezin, Didro i tsivilizatsiia Rossii, 89, 158.

22As we can see, Locatteli brings up the fate of the “unfortunate Prince Menzikoff” whose spectacular rise and fall fascinated European audiences, but otherwise fails to mention any details about the Corps whatsoever. Insofar as he says anything specific about the Corps, he – or his purported informants – are widely off the mark. Instead of focusing exclusively on military drill, the Corps did provide extensive training in languages and, to a lesser extent, in humanities; and contra Locatelli, it was pioneering in the Russian context in terms of seeking to inculcate “the grand Principles of Religion and Morality” in the cadets. All of this did not matter for the author, of course, as for him the Corps was but yet another exhibit in his overall narrative of a hasty and therefore faulty and unsustainable Westernization of Russia, where they “endeavored to run before they could creep.” Locatelli’s take on this subject directly foreshadows – and may have directly influenced – Denis Diderot’s critique of Peter I’s reforms and his calls for a gradualist approach to civilizing the barbarian nations.26 It is unlikely that Duverney could have been unaware of

• 27 A. Mézin, V. Rjéoutski, eds., Les Français en Russie au siècle des Lumières: Dictionnaire des Franç (...)

25“Voyager,” of course, is an ambiguous term in the context of the era when modern tourism had not yet been born. Does Duverney use it in the narrow sense of someone who travels entirely for pleasure, purposefully excluding those coming to Russia on business, diplomatic assignments, or in search of employment? He also mentions that this information was “collected out of curiosity (on les a recueillis par curiosité),” so his informant was presumably not a French diplomat or spy who explored the Corps as a part of his official duties. Still, confining ourselves to a narrow definition of “voyager” is probably untenable in eighteenth-century realities when Russia was an exceedingly rare destination on the Grand Tour. An exhaustive biographic dictionary of francophone visitors to eighteenth-century Russia identifies fewer than fifty such persons for the entire century, the majority of them coming in its last decades and virtually none in the 1730s-1740s.27 So, we have to allow for the possibility that Duverney referred to his informant as a “voyager” in a looser sense, in which case the list of our potential suspects would expand dramatically.

• 28 AN, K 149, n^o 8¹, p. 8.

26As concerns the timing of his source’s visit to the Cadet Corps, Duverney casually mentions at the very end of the memorandum that even though the curriculum at the Cadet Corps is very ambitious, “there are hardly any cadets who stayed there for more than eight years without becoming employable.”28 This might be taken to mean that the mysterious informant observed the school no earlier than eight years after its founding, that is, no earlier than 1740.

• 29 According to his memoirs, he only “founded the Cadet Corps at the [empress’s] order.” He repeated t (...)

27Furthermore, the memorandum mentions Empress Anna and heavily focuses on Field-Marshal von Münnich as the founder of the Corps. Not only does the author describe, quite accurately, von Münnich as the founding director of the Corps responsible for putting the idea into practice, but he also assigns to him the honor of having “conceived” this project (“il conçu le Projet d’Etablir une Ecolle dans laquele on pût former des Sujets capables de deffendre l’Etat”), something for which there is no direct evidence and which the field marshal himself never claimed.29 However, Empress Anna died in October 1740, and von Münnich was forced to resign all his commissions in March 1741. At the very end of the same year, after a coup placed Empress Elizabeth on the throne, he was arrested, accused of high treason, and received a death sentence in January 1742 that was commuted to exile to Siberia for life. Yet, despite the disgrace that befell von Münnich, the memorandum still stresses his role.

• 30 Prince Anton Ulrich von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, the consort of Princess Regent Anna (27.03.1741 (...)

28The explanation for this focus on von Münnich’s might be that this figure was important for Duverney (or his informant) as a model for the role that he intended to play in setting up École, that of both the conceiver and creator of a school. Beyond that, though, it is noteworthy that the memorandum does not seem to provide any specific information about the Corps that would date to the period after von Münnich’s exile. At one point the author does refer obliquely to von Münnich’s dismissal, or rather to a “director who succeeded him (le directeur qui luy a succédé).” All the author has to say about this new director, however, is that “there is no doubt” that he “has the same regard for the cadets (on ne doute pas… n’ait les mêmes Egards pour les Cadets)” as von Münnich did. Meanwhile, the Corps had several director-generals between von Münnich’s dismissal and 1750.30 The fact that the author of the memorandum refers to the single “director who succeeded him” might be taken to imply that he either wrote his account before all these changes at the top of the Cadet Corps in the 1740s or was not aware of them.

• 31 The Mademoiselle de La Chétardie was a close friend of the father of the comte d’Argenson, minister (...)

31Moreover, in France, La Chétardie had close connections with the d’Argenson family via an aunt, including the Minister of War Marc-Pierre de Voyer de Paulmy, Comte d’Argenson (1696-1764, in office 1743-57). La Chétardie also enjoyed connections with the Pâris clan. On October 15, 1743, he stopped at the Brunoy residence of Pâris de Montmartel, one of Duverney’s brothers and likewise a powerful royal banker, on his return trip to St. Petersburg. Some months later, after his final expulsion, it was Duverney himself who obtained passports for La Chétardie and his entourage to travel through Prussian territory on their return home.31 Alas, we lack documentation of La Chétardie so much as mentioning the Cadet Corps in his dispatches.

• 32 Wladimir Berelowitch, “Evropeiskie obrazovatel´nye puteshsestviia russkikh aristokratov [Educationa (...)
• 33 Aleksandr Khovanskii’s testimony at the Secret Chancellery, March 22, 1748. RGADA (Russian State Ar (...)

32If not a Frenchman, could Duverney’s source be a Russian? Indeed, aristocratic Russians increasingly frequently traveled to Paris in the 1740s. To name a few, a group of high-born chevaliers d’ambassade were attached to the Russian mission in the French capital during that decade, while Russian Vice-Chancellor Mikhail Vorontsov paid an unofficial visit to Paris.32 All of them were well familiar with the St. Petersburg Cadet Corps. For instance, two of these chevaliers d’ambassade, the Khovanskii brothers, were close relatives and friends of Mikhail Sobakin, a civil official and minor poet who was a graduate of the Cadet Corps. The chevaliers extensively socialized in Paris. A description of the setting at the residence of Heinrich Gottfried Gross, the Russian ambassador in Paris, provided later by one of the chevaliers, Prince Aleksandr Khovanskii, helps us to imagine how the information might have circulated on such occasions. Allegedly, the ambassador’s guests had asked Khovanskii all sorts of questions about Russian customs, including how nobles were assigned to service. These were supposedly “very hard on you”: “We’ve heard that everyone in your country, regardless of nobility, is enrolled as a private soldier, and every noble is forced to enter service at a certain age.” Notably, while Khovanskii vehemently rebutted these claims, the subject of the Noble Cadet Corps as an alternative channel of entering service was not brought up.33

• 34 Jean-Jacques Boucher, Le comte de Lowendal: Ulrich-Frédéric Woldemar, Maréchal de France 1700-1755 (...)
• 35 Algarotti, Letters from Count Algarotti to Lord Hervey, vol. 1, 115.
• 36 J. Maurens, ed., Voltaire : Histoire de la Guerre de 1741 (P.: Garnier, 1971), 266 ; Jean-Pierre Bo (...)

34The source of Duverney’s information does not have to have been either a Russian or a Frenchman, of course: if a broader definition of a traveler is applied, it could have well been one of the many foreigners who in the 1740s had quit the Russian service and moved to Western Europe. One of them was Hessen-Homburg himself, who went to Europe for health reasons while still holding the title of the Corps’ director and who died in Berlin in 1745. While we know nothing about his possible connections with Duverney, such connections are well-documented in the case of Ulrich Friedrich Woldemar, count von Löwendal (1700-1755). The Danish Löwendal began his career as a cadet in the Saxon army and eventually made his way to the Russian service. There he participated in three campaigns, served as an artillery general under von Münnich, and learned the Russian language.34 He went on to join the French service in 1743 as a lieutenant general and we know that he corresponded with Duverney, although not specifically about the Cadet Corps. Algarotti described Löwendal in glowing terms as someone who is “very witty, understands every language, knows all the courts and all the armies of Europe, is a florid speaker, intrepidly bold; and, it is said, singularly intent upon making his fortune.”35 Voltaire himself noted of Löwendal that “il lisait beaucoup ; il écrivait aussi, et il a dû laisser plusieurs manuscrits qui, venant d’un si habile homme, ne doivent pas être négligés.”36

• 37 Marie Armande Jeanne Gacon-Dufour, Correspondance de plusieurs personnages illustres de la cour de (...)
• 38 The reference to Duverney’s visit to Chambord is found in AN, MM 656, p. 2.
• 39 AN, MM 678, Letter by the comte d’Argenson to Pâris-Duverney, 10 February 1756; AN, MM 665, memoran (...)

35Was Duverney’s memorandum among these “numerous manuscripts”? We know that there was a connection, indeed, a close and familiar relationship between Löwendal and Duverney. The former served as the carrier for a letter between the latter and a certain count in mid-1750: “Monsieur de Löwendal repart ce soir pour Chambord; il veut bien, mon cher Duverney, se charger de ma lettre, et vous dire combien je suis votre ami.”37 We also know that it was at Chambord in early May 1750 that Duverney discussed the project for the school with Maurice de Saxe before the latter’s death.38 All of this makes it imminently possible that the highly experienced, intelligent, and well-traveled Danish general could have served as a source of intelligence about the workings of the Cadet Corps for Duverney. His son François-Xavier-Joseph would go on to be admitted to the École militaire in 1756, a year after the marshal’s death, but had a short and unhappy stint there.39

• 40 The report of the Cadet Corps’ director of March 19, 1737, cited in V. Stroev, “Savants et Hommes d (...)
• 41 Georges Dulac, “Science et politique: les réseaux du Dr António Ribeiro Sanches (1699-1783),” Cahie (...)

36Another example of a foreigner who had served in Russia and then moved to Western Europe in the 1740s is Antonio Nunes Ribeiro Sanches (1699-1783). This Portuguese-born medic made a successful career in Russia, serving with von Münnich in the army, receiving an appointment to the Cadet Corps itself in the late 1730s, and then to the imperial court, before being forced to leave the country because of his alleged Judaism. Incidentally, he was already corresponding with Betskoi on the cadets’ health in 1737.40 By 1747 he was again in Paris and in close contact with intellectual circles there, including Diderot and Betskoi. Later, in 1761, the Real Colégio dos Nobres was established in Lisbon partly on his suggestion. Sanches was, therefore, well-informed about the Cadet Corps, and in subsequent years he penned numerous memoranda on education.41 In other words, he was well-positioned and well-qualified to inform Duverney about the Cadet Corps.

• 42 Nelson de Campos Ramos Junior, “Mediador das Luzes: Concepções de progresso e ciencia em António Nu (...)
• 43 In his monograph on this school, Rómulo de Carvalho asserts that “Para a organização do seu project (...)
• 44 An element of this paradox in pedagogical thinking is described here: “While Rousseau was imagining (...)

37Alas, just as with other potential sources, we have no direct evidence of links between Duverney and Sanches. The medic did correspond with a professor of Latin at the École militaire by the name of Joseph Valart, but this fact sheds no light on any role Sanches may have had in inspiring Duverney.42 Sanches’s possible borrowings or neglect of the Russian and French models for the Portuguese college of nobles is an interesting topic but one too far afield from our focus to detail in this article.43 We know that Betskoi borrowed from Sanches and Rousseau but all we can say for now is that he applied pedagogical theory in an unsystematic, eclectic way, to the point of being counterintuitive at times.44

• 45 For an exploration of the reasons Duverney overlooked a French precedent which combined elements of (...)

38While the memorandum submitted to Louis XV described in considerable detail the inner workings of the Russian school and presented it as the best model for the one he was setting up in France, Duverney never spelled out explicitly what was it exactly that he found so attractive about the St. Petersburg institution, as opposed to, say, the Berlin Noble Cadet Corps, the Wolfenbüttel Fürstliche Akademie, or Turin’s Accademia Reale.45 Nor does the founding charter of École bear evidence of direct textual borrowing from that of the Cadet Corps. The best we can do, therefore, is to try to deduce the reasons for Duverney’s enthusiasm regarding the Russian school and the influence it might have had on his design for the École from the ways in which the Cadet Corps is described in the memorandum.

• 46 K.V. Tatarnikov, E.I. Iurkevich, Sukhoputnyi shliakhetnyi kadetskii korpus. 1732-1762. Obmundirovan (...)

42The memorandum also stresses the focus on foreign languages at the Corps, in particular, that “it is imperative for them to apply themselves [to learning languages] because all the lessons… and the command for the exercises are never given in their native language but in one of those they are taught. When they are able to comprehend to some extent a foreign language, they are taught Geography, History, Geometry & so on.” The importance of foreign languages is indeed emphasized in the Corps’ charter, which also commands (in case there are not enough Russian-speaking teachers) to first make cadets master foreign languages, which would be allegedly easier than training foreign teachers to deliver their classes in Russian. More specifically, however, just as the memorandum claims, the cadets were ordered to refrain from speaking their native languages in class: instead, the Russians were to speak Latin, French, or German, and the Baltic nobles Russian, French, or Latin.46 This norm is not found in the charter, but was introduced in 1732 by an internal order: again, this is something that a visiting foreigner might have learned from a Corps insider.

• 47 AN, K 149 n^o 1, p. 7. “Émulation” is defined in the context of the École militaire in detail in Guí (...)
• 48 AN, O¹ 1605-283, Mémoire que présentent à nos seigneurs du Conseil de l’École Royale Militaire les (...)

44Duverney is clearly interested in the anthropological assumptions that, as he seems to have believed, underpinned the pedagogical practices at the Russian institution. Among the more irenic facets of the motivational schemes present in the St. Petersburg school, the memorandum approved of the rewards for the officers, surmising that it fostered émulation (not mere imitation but a powerful spur born of personal interest, love of glory, honor, and hope) in them as it did among students.47 Similarly some years later the École’s inspectors praised émulation in their school and among themselves as the basis for institutional solidity.48

• 49 This may be a rudimentary foreshadowing of the psychometric approaches that the French psychologist (...)
• 50 Service Historique de la Défense, Vincennes, Y^a 145, Article XIX, Edit du Roi, 22 January 1751, f.  (...)

45Another important principle stressed in Duverney’s April 18, 1750 memorandum is the idea that at the Corps the cadets are assigned to different subjects according to their “taste” and “ability” (“Cela dépend de leur gout et de leur aptitude pour telle ou telle partie, et l’art des maîtres doit être de démêler ce gout et cette aptitude”).49 This assertion closely parallels the Corps’ charter (and a multitude of internal documents), which stressed that cadets’ “inclinations” should be monitored and taken into consideration. As we have seen, this focus on “inclinations” at the Corps was also noted by such foreign observers as d’Agay de Myon. Article 19 of the edict of 26 January 1751 creating the École militaire used similar language to describe the employment of the graduates, who were to be assigned “dans nos troupes, ou dans les autres parties de la guerre, suivant les talens & l’aptitude que l’on reconnoitra en eux.”50

• 53 P.F. Luzanov, Sukhoputnyi shliakhetnyi kadetskii korpus (nyne 1-i kadetskii korpus) pri grafe Minik (...)
• 54 RGVIA (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv), f. 314, оp. 1, d. 1711, l. 24-32.
• 55 Luzanov, Sukhoputnyi shliakhetnyi kadetskii korpus, 34.

48True to this intention, the gates of the compound were guarded by sentinels, and special rules regulated the cadets’ access to the city, depending on the season and the time of the day. Numerous internal documents prescribed the correct ways of behaving in the classrooms and the dining hall, of leaving and entering, etc.53 Diverse orders and regulations, such as the 1734 Reglèment, outlined a comprehensive system of surveillance and reporting to which not only all the officers and teachers but also the cadets themselves were expected to contribute.54 Each room had to have a cadet “headman,” and in July 1732 director von Luberas ordered that in such cases “two or three or more of them should go to the same place, and one of them is to have supervision over them so that they behave decently and go everywhere together and not alone.”55 The author of the memorandum seems to be aware of this specific disciplinary practice, as he asserts that “les Cadets ne sortent jamais que deux à deux ou quatre à quatre.” This detail was not mentioned in the Corps’ charter but was introduced in the internal regulations adopted at the Corps in 1733 – another indication that the anonymous informant was likely to have personally visited the Russian school.

• 56 Cheynet de Beaupré, Joseph Pâris-Duverney, 546.
• 57 AN, K 149, n^o 1, Mémoire sur l’utilité de l’établissement d’un Collège académique pour la jeune nob (...)
• 58 Untitled and undated mémoire. AN, K 149, n^o 26, p. 1.
• 59 AN, K 149, n^o 1, p. 6; AN, K 149, n^o 5¹, unpaginated. Duverney concluded this sentence by stating t (...)

51These themes crop up, for example, in a letter Duverney sent in November of 1742 to the maréchal de Noailles during a campaign to complain of “the incompetence reigning among the troops as well as their indiscipline.”56 In his twenty-one memoranda arguing for the creation of the École, he returned time and again to the topics of discipline and loyalty. In his very first mémoire of January 11, 1750, for instance, Duverney complains that “the education of our youth maintains among us still the rudeness of barbaric times.”57 The military school he proposed would remedy this by inculcating “the spirit of subordination which holds to the knowledge of duty and lifts true courage.” The students at the École were “to begin by acquiring morals before acquiring talents, probity putting in play all the other qualities….”58 The de facto panoptic surveillance would make it a “reasonable collège” with the result that even “savages” – his way of referring to prospective noble students – would be “civilized” in an establishment like it: “des Sauvages, S’il est permit de le dire, Se civiliseroient dans une pareille maison.”59

• 60 AN, K 149, n^o 1, p. 7.

52While the description of the panoptic surveillance in the Cadet Corps betrays the admiration of the memorandum’s author for such “fatherlike” vigilance, Duverney’s memorandum of January 11, 1750 explains that at the École, too, the students were meant to be “éternellement sous les yeux des maitres les plus habiles” and the school itself would be “exposé sans cesse aux regards du public.”60 Once the École was created, we find, for example, the administration condemning the misbehavior of those students

• 62 AN, K 149, n^o 1, p. 1.

53While the memorandum’s authors saw Russia as a country that still showed vestiges of its “ancient barbarity” – the fact that made the creation of such an excellent school as the Cadet Corps there all the more surprising and praiseworthy – Duverney himself did not, as we have seen in the previous paragraph, hesitate to apply the term “barbaric” to the state of education for nobles in his native France. This was the first sentence of the first memorandum he wrote for the court in January 1750: “On Se plaint, et avec raison, que l’éducation de la jeunesse se sent encore parmi nous de la grossiereté des temps barbares.”62 Pâris-Duverney would likely have agreed with La Bruyère’s dictum that “tous les étrangers ne sont pas barbares, et tous nos compatriotes ne sont pas civilisés.” For Duverney, the idea of “barbarism” seems to include indiscipline, libertinage, disorder, disloyalty, and all the other ills afflicting the military. The Russians, in other words, were “barbaric” not because they were Russians, but because they had not been sufficiently “tamed” – as were too many of the French. So, while we are accustomed to seeing the men of Enlightenment – and their Russian admirers – eagerly advocating for all things French to be brought to Russia by way of civilizing it, here the enlightened Duverney proposes to employ in France the methods for “taming” nobility that have been perfected in “barbaric” Russia.

• 63 See Fedyukin, The Enterprisers, 159-161.
• 64 Cf. Phillip S. Gorsky, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Mo (...)

55Indeed, while Duverney was proposing to import a model from Russia, the model itself was hardly purely “Russian,” as he himself also realized. Yet another feature of the Corps that is picked up in the memorandum is the presence of Prussian officers at the school. Just as the author claims, they were specifically recruited by von Münnich to implement in St. Petersburg the practices borrowed from the Berlin Cadet Corps created by Frederick William I in 1717.63 This was not something described in the official documents (even though the Corps charter does refer vaguely to the “example of Prussian, Danish and other royal cadet establishment”), but as we have seen, some of the more perceptive foreign observers of the Corps did pay notice to it. The Berlin Cadet Corps, in turn, was more than just another innovative school for training officers: recent scholarship presents it as an apotheosis of the religiously driven “disciplinary revolution” in Brandenburg-Prussia.64 Indeed, the disciplinary regime there was directly based on pedagogic theories and practices implemented and perfected by the leading Pietist theologian and pedagogue August Hermann Francke (1663-1727) at his teaching establishment in Halle. Pietist influences among the German-born dignitaries of Empress Anna’s reign, including the Pietist connections of von Münnich himself, are well-documented – and to complete the full circle, they also fit well with von Münnich’s well-known and well-publicized enthusiasm for Fenelon and his pedagogy. Rather than a unidirectional transfer, the case explored in this article presents an excellent example of the circulation of ideas and models in Europe where the very notion of the origins and the end destination, of the source and the recipient need to be taken with a grain of salt. It is also an example of how our focus on the transborder migration of labels often obscures how these labels serve to mask the transmutation of the underlying practices.