Portrait of a Surprising, Insightful French Aristocrat

A TASTE FOR FREEDOM

The Life of Astolphe de Custine

by Anka Muhlstein

Helen Marx Books / Turtle Point Press

$16.95, 392 pages paper

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In 1839, the Marquis de Custine, a sensitive and intelligent French aristocrat, set off on a three-month journey to Russia. Four years later, he published a book. “Letters From Russia” was an instant bestseller translated into several languages and, before long, banned in Russia. A century later, Custine’s grim portrait of a nation enslaved took on new significance as a prophetic vision of Stalinism. The perspicacity of its insights deeply impressed George F. Kennan, architect of America’s Cold War containment policy.

Unlike his contemporary Alexis de Tocqueville, who traveled west to examine American democracy, Astolphe de Custine journeyed east looking for evidence that an enlightened autocracy might be the answer to the horrors of mob rule. Custine’s own family had suffered greatly under the Reign of Terror, even though they had actively supported the French Revolution: His mother had been imprisoned, his father and his grandfather, a Revolutionary general, had been guillotined.

As a well-connected aristocrat, Custine went to Russia armed with introductions, not only to various Russian princes, but to Tsar Nicholas I himself. Yet despite Nicholas’ charm and lavish hospitality, Custine found Tsarist Russia a veritable hell on Earth. The Russia his book describes is a nightmare. Spies are everywhere. People sent to Siberia disappear without a trace. The ruler shows no concern for the lives of his people, and, what Custine finds far more amazing, “among all the voices testifying to the glory of this single man, not one rises above the chorus to speak for humanity against the miracles of autocracy. You can say of the Russians, both great and small, that they are intoxicated with slavery.” No matter how enlightened a despot may be, Custine concludes, subjugating all of society to one man’s will is toxic: “I went to Russia to seek arguments against representative government and I have returned a supporter of constitutional rule.”

Who was Astolphe de Custine and what enabled him to write so penetratingly and passionately of a country in which he had spent only three months? The title of Anka Muhlstein’s biography suggests one good answer: “A Taste for Freedom.” Although Custine, born in 1790, had grown up in the shadow of the Revolution and the Terror, he was not as reactionary as many of the Royalists who backed the return of the Bourbon dynasty. Spending time in the entourage of the future Charles X, he was shocked by the future monarch’s stupidity, narrow-mindedness and obstinate refusal to acknowledge any of the positive changes wrought by the Revolution or by Napoleon. Too independent-minded for a diplomatic career, Custine relished the company of artists and intellectuals, like Balzac, Hugo and Chopin.

Muhlstein devotes several chapters to Custine’s extraordinary mother, Delphine, who raised him at home rather than sending him off to school. Astolphe, her only surviving child, grew up to be a tall, shy, clever young man whom many aristocratic mothers considered a splendid catch for their daughters. Unfortunately for them, his tastes ran in the other direction. Although he dutifully married and fathered a son (both his wife and his child died tragically young), Custine was homosexual. In 1824, he became involved in an ugly public scandal as the victim of what now would be called a “gay-bashing.” Instead of breaking him, as Muhlstein shows us, it liberated him, giving him the courage to live openly with his male partner. When he died in 1857, he left the bulk of his estate to this man, who’d shared his life for 30 years.

Rather than plod through events year by year, overwhelming the reader with heaps of data, Muhlstein focuses on some of the central themes of her subject’s life: his politics, his sexual identity, his travels, his literary tastes and aspirations. She also supplies enough social and historical background to put him in context. Her biography, which won the Goncourt Prize in France, is perceptive, sympathetic and sprightly. There’s not a dull moment in it.