Astolphe de Custine

Astolphe de Custine
Marquis de Custine
File:Astolphe de Custine.png
Spouse(s)	Léontine de Saint-Simon de Courtomer
Issue Enguerrand de Custine
Full name Astolphe-Louis-Léonor
Father	Armand Renaud-Louis-Philippe-Francois, Marquis de Custine
Mother	Delphine de Sabran
Born	18 March 1790 Niderviller, France
Died	25 September 1857 (Aged 67) Paris, France

Astolphe Louis Léonor, Marquis de Custine (18 March 1790 – 25 September 1857) was a French writer, best known for his travel writing, in particular an account of his visit to Russia, entitled La Russie en 1839, sometimes considered the Russian counterpart to Tocqueville's essay Democracy in America. This work documents not only Custine's travels through the Russian Empire, but also the social fabric, economy and way of life during the reign of Nicholas I.

Biography

Early life and education

Astolphe de Custine was born in Niderviller, the second son of Armand de Custine and Delphine de Sabran. His family belonged to the French nobility and possessed the title marquis since the early 18th century. The paternal branch of the family also owned a famous faience factory. His mother, the Marquise de Custine, came from the House of Sabran. The Custine family had been established in Lorraine since the 13th century and had relations with Germany, Luxembourg and France. He is also the grandson of the French general Adam Philippe de Custine. This grandfather owned many estates, including a castle in Niderviller, where Astolphe was born. Astolphe's father, born in 1768, was therefore very rich and allied to the European nobility, while his mother, born in 1770, descended from a family of ancient nobility that made her related to King Louis XV. They were 19 and 17 years old respectively when they married in July 1787. It was his grandmother who chose the first name Astolphe, inspired by the homonymous character in the Italian poem Orlando Furioso.

Young Astolphe was severely affected by the Revolution: his grandfather, Adam Philippe, was guillotined in August 1793 and his father in January 1794; his mother remained incarcerated in the Parisian prison of Sainte-Pélagie, then at the Carmes until the fall of Robespierre in July 1794, and only narrowly escaped the guillotine. During this period, Astolphe was entrusted to the care of a faithful servant named Nanette Malriat Giblain. His mother was able to recover part of her property thanks to the protection of Joseph Fouché, Minister of Police under the Directory, the Consulate, the Empire and the Second Restoration.

In 1795, the Custine family returned to Lorraine. Astolphe then came under the moral responsibility of his Alsatian tutor, named Bertoecher. Delphine de Custine, known for her intelligence and great beauty, frequented literary salons, became friends with Germaine de Staël who dedicated her novel Delphine to her and in 1802 began a romantic relationship with François-René de Chateaubriand, whom the young Astolphe would consider for a time as his adoptive father. In October 1803, she bought the Château de Fervaques, near Lisieux, in Normandy, from the Duke of Laval.

The fall of Fouché, one of Delphine's dearest friends, caused a break with the imperial regime in 1810. Then began a European journey that took the mother and son to Germany and Switzerland (1811), then to Italy (1812), where Astolphe went to discover Calabria, from where he would bring back a very lively story and a passion for travel. In 1813, the son and mother, accompanied by the doctor and magnetizer David Ferdinand Koreff, returned to Geneva where they settled, not considering it prudent to return to Paris while the Napoleonic regime was coming to an end. In 1814, they joined King Louis XVIII and the Count of Artois in Basel, who were preparing for the Restoration. The young Astolphe had a role as aide-de-camp, the burlesque side of which he depicted in his correspondence while severely judging the legitimist camp. At the same time, he developed a social conscience: "I will return to the world to work for the happiness of my country."

Astolphe also made a brief entry into the diplomatic corps. In 1814, he attended the Congress of Vienna as an aide to Talleyrand, whose sagacity and impassive face he admired:

He has severed all the threads that lead the soul to the physiognomy; so that his face is as if dead, and has no more movement than a paralyzed limb. Man is separated from his soul: it is enough to make one shudder. Here is a saying attributed to him here: What can one hope for from the Congress? They are too afraid to quarrel. They are too stupid to understand each other!

During this stay, he perfected his German in the entourage of Schlegel and Schlosser, while feeling more and more tempted by a literary career, to the great displeasure of his mother who would like to see him pursue a diplomatic career. He frequented the salons of Rahel Varnhagen and Sophie Gay, two women he deeply admired and with whom he would remain in correspondence.

Marriage

In 1818, his mother, increasingly eager to see him married, arranged several attempts at an engagement, first with Albertine de Staël, daughter of Germaine de Staël, then with Clara de Duras, but Astolphe backed out three days before the marriage agreed with the latter — which led her mother Claire de Duras to write the novel Olivier ou le Secret.

In 1821, he finally married, despite his homosexuality, Léontine de Saint-Simon Courtomer. A son, Enguerrand, was born from this union in June 1822. In the summer of the same year, Custine made a trip to Scotland and England during which he met Edward, known as Édouard de Sainte-Barbe, a young man four years his junior whom he brought back to Fervaques. In March 1823, Léontine contracted tuberculosis and died at the age of twenty on July 7, 1823, leaving Astolphe free to live out his passion with Sainte-Barbe.

On 28 October 1824, Custine's life was irrevocably changed. That night, he was found unconscious in the mud outside of Paris, stripped to the waist, having been beaten and robbed. The attack had been carried out by a group of soldiers; with one of whom Custine allegedly had attempted to have a sexual encounter. However the exact reason for the attack was never proven. Nevertheless, news of the incident quickly spread around Tout-Paris, tarnished his reputation and for a long time associated the name Custine with homosexuality. Even though the literary salons, as opposed to the society salons, remained open to Custine, many people who were friendly with him sneered at him behind his back. His diplomatic career was also cut short by this incident. A family council decided to remove him from the capital: accompanied by Sainte-Barbe, Custine returned to the family estate of Fervaques in Normandy.

Literary maturation

The year 1826 was marked by the death of his son on January 2, then of his mother on July 13. These losses affected him greatly and triggered a resurgence of piety in him. He would henceforth seek fulfillment through travel, literature and religion.

In 1829, he published Aloys, or The Religious of Mont Saint-Bernard, without an author's name, in which a young man whose heart is "a real labyrinth" recounts how he was led to ask a young girl to marry him when he loved her mother. Custine thus transposes the story of his own aborted engagement to Clara de Duras: "He claims his errors, without denying the sad role of childhood, education, political and social data in his morbid evolution: but the lucid gaze he cast on them excludes all innocence." This book, which according to Tarn is in the tradition of The Princess of Cleves, will go through several editions and will be reissued in 1971.

In 1832, Custine bought the Belvédère, a small château built in 1816 in Saint-Gratien, from Mme de Neuflize. He renovated it and hosted many artists there: Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, Frédéric Chopin, Eugène Delacroix, Alfred de Musset, Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, George Sand, Alphonse de Lamartine and François-René de Chateaubriand, who was closely linked to his mother for twenty years.

The following years were spent in the romantic movement with varying degrees of success. Princess Mathilde, daughter of Jérôme Bonaparte, spent her summers first at the Château Catinat as a tenant of the Marquis de Custine, before buying, in 1853, the château built by the Count of Luçay.

Custine wrote poetry, novels and plays. In 1833 he published Beatrix Cenci: Tragedy in 5 Acts and in Verse and paid a theatre to perform the play, but the performances closed after three days. None of his literary works received much attention. Heinrich Heine called Custine "un demi-homme des lettres" (a half-man of letters).

In 1835, a Polish count, the 23-year-old Ignatius Gurowski (1812–1887), moved into Custine and Saint-Barbe's home in the rue de La Rochefoucauld to form a ménage à trois. Wrote Custine: "He has an excellent heart, an original mind, is graciously ignorant of everything, and what settles it all, a charming bearing and countenance." The capricious Gurowski was not an easy guest, running up debts and seducing both men and women, but appears to have amused the couple. The detailed register of homosexuals, then maintained by the Paris police prefecture, and which termed Custine's inclinations 'frantic', wrote of Gurowski with a comical note of possible despair: "It is hereditary in his family: his father and grandfather were of the same religion." In 1841 Gurowski married a Spanish infanta, Isabella Ferdinanda de Bourbon.

La Russie en 1839

Further information: La Russie en 1839

Custine eventually discovered that his knack was for travel writing. He wrote a decently received account of a trip to Spain and was encouraged by Honoré de Balzac to write accounts of other "half-European" parts of Europe, like southern Italy and Russia. In the late 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America appeared, whose last chapter contained the prophecy that the future belonged to Russia and America. Inspired by Tocqueville's work, Custine decided that Russia would be the subject of his next writing effort. Custine was later dubbed by some historians as "the de Tocqueville of Russia".

Custine visited Russia in 1839, spending most of his time in St. Petersburg, but also visiting Moscow and Yaroslavl. A political reactionary in his own country, fearful that democracy would inevitably lead to mob rule, he went to Russia looking for arguments against representative government, but he was appalled by autocracy as practiced in Russia and equally by the Russian people's apparent collaboration in their own oppression. He attributed this state of affairs to what he saw as the backwardness of the Russian Orthodox Church, combined with the disastrous effects of the Mongol invasion of medieval Russia, and the policies of Peter the Great.

Most of Custine's mockery was reserved for the Russian nobility and Nicholas I. Custine said that Russia's aristocracy had "just enough of the gloss of European civilization to be 'spoiled as savages' but not enough to become cultivated men. They were like 'trained bears who made you long for the wild ones.'" Custine criticized Tsar Nicholas for the constant spying he ordered and for repressing Poland (see November Uprising). Custine had more than one conversation with the Tsar and concluded it was possible that the Tsar behaved as he did only because he felt he had to. "If the Emperor has no more of mercy in his heart than he reveals in his policies, then I pity Russia; if, on the other hand, his true sentiments are really superior to his acts, then I pity the Emperor".

Later life

Astolphe de Custine died of a stroke on 25 September 1857. He was buried in the small chapel of Saint-Aubin-sur-Auquainville, near Fervaques. His family brought an action to annul the will in which he bequeathed his fortune to his lover Édouard de Sainte-Barbe. The latter died a little over a year after Custine, on 18 October 1858, but nevertheless won his case posthumously.

In popular culture

Sergey Dreyden stars as a character representing Custine in the 2002 film Russian Ark. His conversations with the time-travelling narrator are intended to reflect Russia's continued struggle to search for its own identity and define its relations vis-à-vis Europe.

References

Ancelot, Virginie (1858). "Le Salon du marquis de Custine." In: Les Salons de Paris: Foyers éteints. Paris: Éditions Jules Tardieu, pp. 235–45.

Antolini-Dumas, Tatiana (2003). "Paradoxes et subjectivité, l'itinéraire pictural de Quinet et Custine en Espagne." In: Écrire la peinture entre XVIIIe et XIXe siècles. Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Biaise Pascal, pp. 311–20.

Chastenet, Jonathan de (2003). L'Expression de la marginalité aristocratique dans les œuvres du marquis de Custine. Mémoire de DEA, université d'Angers.

Degout, Bernard; Gennaro Toscano & Corinne Le Bitouzé (2021). L'Archélogue, le peintre et l'écrivain: Millin, Catel et Custine. Paris: Lienart.

Diethelm, Marie-Bénédicte (2013). "La boue de Saint-Denis (1824): Astolphe de Custine, « un homme marqué du sceau de la réprobation »," Romantisme, Vol. CLIX, No. 1, pp. 47–58.

Forycki, Remigiusz (2019). "Métamorphoses de l’Europe dans les voyages d’Astolphe de Custine." In: L'Europe et ses intellectuels. University of Warsaw Press, pp. 59–67.

Gassouin, Olivier (1987). Le Marquis de Custine. Le courage d'être soi-même. Paris: Lumière & Justice.

Gross, Irena Grudzinska (1991). The Scar of Revolution: Custine, Tocqueville, and the Romantic Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Guyot, Alain (2015). "Custine et « la poétique des voyages »: L’épître dédicatoire à Miss Bowles dans L'Espagne sous Ferdinand VII (1838)," Viatica, No. 2. Retrieved 4 April 2024.

Guyot, Alain (2019). “Une immense lanterne magique”: le “Nord du Nord” du marquis de Custine." In: A. Bourguignon & K. Harrer, eds., L'Écriture du Nord du Nord: construction d’images, confrontation au réel et positionnement dans le champ littéraire [actes du coll. intern. CEGIL / LIS / UQàM – Nancy, nov. 2018]. Berlin: Frank & Timme, pp. 55–68.

Kennan, George F. (1971). The Marquis de Custine and his Russia in 1839. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Le Roy, Claude (2012). "La Mère et le fils." In: Delphine de Custine: reine des roses. Milon-la-Chapelle: H&D, pp. 197–285.

Liechtenhan, Francine-Dominique (1990). Astolphe de Custine voyageur et philosophe. Paris: Éditions Champion-Slatkine.

Liechtenhan, Francine-Dominique (2000). "De l'abus de l'historiographie. Approches de l'histoire russe de Herberstein à Custine," Cahiers du Monde russe, Vol. XLI, No. 1, pp. 135–49.

Luppé, Albert de (1957). Astolphe de Custine. Monaco: Éditions du Rocher.

Muhlstein, Anka (1996). Astolphe de Custine (1790-1857): Le dernier marquis. Paris: Grasset.

Pia, Pascal (1971). Romanciers, poètes, essayistes du XIXe siècle. Paris: Denoël.

Platon, Mircea (2016). "Astolphe de Custine’s Letters from Russia and the Defense of the West," Russian History, Vol. XLIII, No. 2, pp. 142–80.

Sigrist, Christian (1990). Das Russlandbild des Marquis de Custine. Von der Zivilisationskritik zur Russlandfeindlichkeit. Frankfurt: Lang.

Tarn, Julien-Frédéric (1985). Le Marquis de Custine ou les Malheurs de l'exactitude. Paris: Fayard.

External links

• Works by Astolphe de Custine at Gallica
• Works by Astolphe de Custine at Project Gutenberg