Russian conservative journalism of 1860 - early 1870s on French Revolution

Russian conservative thought of the second half of the 19th century due to a number of reasons was inferior to the other two socio-political trends - the liberal and the radical ones in terms of quantity and quality of publications of historical and journalistic nature. This is largely due to the fact that being close to the throne and pursuing conservative goals, proponents of this trend seldom saw much sense in the active epistolary activity, especially when it came to some particulars. Of course, the conservatives were brilliant masters of literary and journalistic expression. However, when they turned to history, they concentrated mainly on the domestic one. Works on foreign history in this environment were negligible. In particular this applies to publications on the French Revolution. If among the supporters of other areas of social and political thought of the second half of the 19th century the interest in the revolutionary events in France at the end of the 18th century was high, the conservatives, in general, did not go beyond stating the fact that the French Revolution was evil. As an example, an article entitled "The lessons of history. Essays on modern France "(1871) by a then famous Russian journalist E.M. Feoktistov (1828-1898) who developed from a liberal to a staunch conservative. One of the few people dealing with this issue in more detail was N.A. Lyubimov (1830-1897), a renowned physicist and conservative publicist. On the pages of "Russian Herald" starting with 1880 he published a series of articles on the French Revolution entitled "Against the current. Conversations about the revolution. Sketches and essays in conversations of two friends" that he later revised and published as a book, The Collapse of Monarchy in France (1893). There NA Lyubimov directly stated the reason that prompted him to turn to the subject, noting that the edge of the 1870s-1880s was of a distinctly revolutionary character, and those who then proposed to make the constitutional transformation of the state played for the revolutionaries, . He thus emphasizes the importance of his work, against the revolution as such by example of revolution in France. His articles rejected revolution and appealed to the contemporary reader by drawing parallels with the Russian reality of that time. The author showed great erudition for a journalist in this matter, a good knowledge of the sources and the historiography of the issue citing both. But, like any work of journalistic nature, it was written with clear accents (in this case - conservative ones). In this sense, it is definitely biased. But this bias is of interest in this context.

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