In January 1846, the influential British journal, The Foreign Quarterly Review, hailed the publication of a book entitled, Eastern Europe and the Emperor Nicholas: “Truly a hopeful book – a burst of sunshine lighting up one of the darkest and saddest fields that ever shocked the sight of pitying freemen.”^[1] This was certainly not the first book published in Britain to deal with that region we sometimes refer to as “Eastern Europe.” Ever since Sigismund von Herberstein’s “discovery” of Russia in 1517, the British reading public had been receiving reports about that part of the continent.^[2] Eastern Europe and the Emperor Nicholas was, however, the first English-language publication to call that region by this later politically-loaded term, and to define Eastern Europe as a region in great detail.^[3]
The author, Charles Frederick Henningsen, laid out over this three-volume work the defining features of that region: Four “despotic” regimes – Turkey, Prussia, Austria, and Russia – ruled over “some 85 to 100 millions of the Sclavonic race.” And that “race” was no homogeneous mass, but composed of a great variety of peoples: Poles, Muscovites, Ruthenians, Lithuanians, Bulgarians, Serbians, Bosnians, Montenegrins, Moravians, and Bohemians, to name only the most mentioned. In one form or another, all these peoples, even the Muscovites, suffered great oppression under the yoke of these despotisms. Henningsen called on the “constitutional states” of Western Europe to help remove their suffering.
The appearance of this book raises a number of interesting historical questions, but what seems the most intriguing question today is why. Why was it that in 1846 this English writer saw fit to present to his Western audience the term and the idea of “Eastern Europe” as a region as it had never been before?
This article will argue that Henningsen’s book appeared at a time when educated Europeans in the process of redividing the continent along an East-West, as opposed to an earlier North-South axis. Henningsen’s personal background, a naturalized British citizen of Scandinavian origin, pushed him towards a redivision of the continent that placed his origins in the “civilized world.” His advocacy of the Polish cause and call for active intervention by the “constitutionally governed states” of the West necessitated an analysis that painted all the partitioning powers as common oppressors. His realization that there were a great variety of peoples of various historical origins, yet all belonging to a single race, necessitated a term that cut across the borders of those empires. Because Henningsen was calling for the emancipation of all these peoples, he had to construct, indeed imagine, a region that would incorporate all of them. Moreover, his call for the raising of these peoples’ cultural existence to a political level reflected a fundamental shift in the place of culture in European society.^[4]

EASTERN OR NORTHERN EUROPE?

Historically, the region of Eastern Europe is actually quite a recent idea. As a geographical and political region, its borders were only clearly defined in the post-World War II period, and those borders are now shifting again.^[5] But as an intellectual construct, Eastern Europe has a longer history. Grafting from Edward Said, one can argue that, like the Orient, Eastern Europe is an idea that “has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West.”^[6] Agreeing with Larry Wolff, I think that the intellectual construction of Eastern Europe is even more crucial than the Orient, because the former is considered to be part of the continent where the West has staked its claim. “The otherness of the subject is less emphatically highlighted. For the eastern lands of Europe were undeniably part of Europe, and the analysis of those lands called for a subtle balance of exclusion and inclusion, a careful demi-Orientalization.”^[7]
Still in the early modern period many educated Europeans thought of their continent as divided not between East and West, but North and South. Wolff asserts that “the fundamental cultural division of Europe into South and North was taken for granted in the age of the Renaissance. From the perspective of Machiavelli’s Florence, the French and Germans were barbarians of the North, and this point of view was securely founded on that of ancient Rome and Mediterranean civilization.”^[8] Robin Okey argues that the Europeanization of Russia and Sweden, the cultural reorientation wrought by the Reformation, and the revival of the ancient world’s distinction between classical and northern countries in the sixteenth century combined to shift ideas about the axis of Europe to a North-South orientation. “By the eighteenth century the “northern courts” were well understood to be St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Berlin, with Warsaw in limbo.”^[9]
While Wolff argues that the redivision of the continent into East and West occurred during the Enlightenment through the writings of intellectuals like Voltaire, Okey claims that the North-South axis “was to dominate public perception until the early nineteenth century.”^[10] No doubt these distinctions are not that inconsistent. What Wolff sees as an emerging sense among European intellectuals of a distinction between West and East, between Romano-Anglo and Slavic cultures, Okey finds later by focusing on the more popular perceptions among the masses, as they entered into public life in the nineteenth century. For it was then that “ideological issues were sharpened, and nationalism focused attention once more on cultural difference.”^[11] The great “unwashed” masses of Europe could not become part of the older European-wide, elite high culture, but could be brought into a “national,” vernacular culture. As the middle and lower classes demanded greater access to the public sphere and attained it by degree, they threw off the hierarchical structures of pre-industrial society; their vernacular culture became the primary form of identification. Ernest Gellner states: “In modern societies, culture does not so much underline structure: rather, it replaces it.”^[12] And it is crucial to stress Gellner’s almost dismissive reference to the long and complicated historical process: modernization, industrialization and their effects on the role of culture in society proceeded “notoriously... in an uneven manner.”^[13] That the emergence of a modern industrial society, requiring a “universal high culture,” emerged earlier in the West than in the East of Europe is then of central importance.
Intimately tied to this reorientation of Europe was the relative position of Russia. Okey suggests that the confrontation between the Western powers and Russia over the “Eastern Question” (the decline of the Ottoman Empire) led the West to associate the derogatory terms “eastern/oriental/Asian” increasingly with Russia, particularly after the Crimean War and the 1869 publication of Nikolai Y. Danilevsky’s Russia and Europe.^[14] But one could argue that the reorientation of Russia to the East was the culmination of a long process that began with the Enlightenment ideas of intellectuals like Voltaire, and was spread gradually through the “notoriously” uneven procession of industrialization across Europe and the concomitant rise of mass vernacular cultures. The older conception of a North-South axis did not disappear quickly, it lingered long before gradually fading away.^[15]
Hence, in January 1843, when the Marquis de Custine published his four volumes, La Russie en 1839, the geographical and intellectual location of Russia in relation to Europe was still quite unclear. Custine’s scathing critique of the Russian Empire was “an immediate, and indeed most astonishing, success” throughout Europe (Russia excluded).^[16] Warning Europe of the dangers and weaknesses of its own “cosmopolitan democracy,” Custine predicted the fall of the Western democracies into “internal somnolence and the world’s contempt.” He then prophesied that “the floodgates of the North will be opened once more in our faces, and we shall be subjected to a final invasion, no longer by ignorant barbarians but by sophisticated, enlightened masters, masters more enlightened than ourselves, for they will have learned from our excesses how we could and should be ruled.”^[17]Yet, in the very next paragraph, Custine also warned that “Providence is piling up so many inactive forces in the East of Europe. Some day this sleeping giant will arouse himself and violence will put an end to the reign of speech.”^[18] Referring to the Russians as “barbarians of the North” and in other places as situated in “the East,” and noting their “oriental” dress and manners, Custine seemed quite unsure of Russia’s geographical location.^[19] Such was not the case for Charles Frederick Henningsen.

A POET, WRITER AND SOLDIER OF FORTUNE

Henningsen was born on 21 February 1815 of Scandinavian parents in Brussels, Belgium.^[20] His parents seem to have had great sympathy for Britain and had their son christened in London, so that he could “enjoy the benefit of English citizenship.” In 1830 they moved to the City, in the wake of the Belgian revolution,^[21] and that revolution became the subject of Henningsen’s first book, Scenes from the Belgian Revolution, published in 1832 when he was only seventeen years old.^[22]
While Henningsen certainly exhibited an early literary talent, his interests were more with fighting in, than writing about, national struggles. At the age of nineteen he entered the service of the Carlists in Spain, winning numerous honours and recognition under General Zumalacarregui.^[23] When the Duke of Wellington’s envoys, Lord Elliot and Colonel Gurwood, visited Zumalacarregui in April 1835, they were “particularly struck with the conversation of a young countryman of their own who had joined the Carlists as a volunteer about a year before.” They noted his rapid rise in the military staff and also his learning. Colonel Gurwood described him as “a fine handsome young Englishman, accomplished by education, and speaking several languages with perfect ease and correctness, whose picturesque details of his short military experience were exceedingly instructive, and who took the warmest interest in the Duke of Wellington’s mission.”^[24]
With Zumalacarregui’s death in late 1835, Henningsen returned to Britain and committed his “picturesque details” to paper. A Twelvemonth’s Campaign with Zumalacarregui during the War in Navarre and the Basque provinces of Spain was well received. The prominent writer, John G. Lockhart,^[25] editor of The London Quarterly Review, considered Henningsen’s book “the only full and fair account we have yet had of the northern insurrection – its origin, objects, and progress – down to the death of his chief. A more interesting memoir, we do not hesitate to say, we have never read.”^[26] Thus, Henningsen began a practice he repeated several times: His military exploits provided him with the first-hand experience of peoples, places and events, about which he would then write and publish.
Henningsen’s predilections for military adventures next took him to the Caucasus in the early 1840s.^[27] There he became involved in the Circassian rebellion, led by the revolutionist prophet, Shamil. It is not entirely clear on which side Henningsen fought, but most biographers place him in the Russian service.^[28] Henningsen’s military role is also uncertain, but from the knowledge he obtained, he compiled a report on the Caucasian countries, which was published as a public document by the Russian government.^[29]
However, probably as a result of his experience in the Russian forces in the Caucasus, Henningsen soon became quite opposed to the Russian Empire. His own account of the struggles in Circassia, published in 1844 in his first volumes on Russia, Revelations of Russia, reveals an intimate knowledge of the Russian forces’ strength, living conditions, and losses in the Caucasus.^[30] This account is also revealing of some of the influences on Henningsen’s writings and ideas about Russia and Eastern Europe. In the concluding chapter, he bemoaned the very high casualty rates for Russian forces in the Caucasus, especially that of the officers. Henningsen found in those Russian armies “all those who spoke out or acted against the despotic regime.” Pushkin, “called by his admirers the Russian Byron,” Lermontov and Bestushev were all “forced to carry a musket there;” the latter two never returned. The Tsarist government sent to the Caucasus all those “whose liberal opinions or dangerous views have given umbrage to the jealousy of a watchful government.” Into the ranks of its armies the government also condemned thousands of survivors from the Polish revolution of 1830-31, dooming them “to fight against the liberties of a gallant people [the Circassians], in expiation of having faithfully defended their own!”^[31] Serving in battle alongside the very people most hostile to the Tsar and his state, Henningsen surely gleaned many of his views on Russia and Eastern Europe.
By autumn 1843, Henningsen had returned to England and settled down to do some writing. His first article on Russia appeared in October 1843, just nine months after the first publication of Custine’s treatise. In “St. Petersburg and Its Inhabitants in 1843,” appearing in the October issue of The New Monthly Magazine, Henningsen presented a similar view of the Russian capital to that of Custine: “St. Petersburg – the offspring of the first Peter – is the type of modern Russia with the existence of which it is coeval – modern Russia, corrupt, polished, and uncivilized, its oriental barbarism glossed over by the varnish of European usages.”^[32] This description follows closely Custine’s contempt for the Russians’ attempts to appear “civilized.” But while Custine labeled the Russians as “barbarians of the North” and loathed their attempts “to ape the South,” Henningsen identified their “barbarism” with the East.^[33]
In August 1844, with the publication of Henningsen’s two volume book, Revelations of Russia, his ideas began to take clearer shape as reflected in his review of some recent literature on Russia. He remarked on the work of the German traveler, Johann Georg Kohl.^[34] Full of minute if not profound details, Kohl’s work was “a daguerreotype of all that externally meets the eye in shops, in market-places, in streets, and in churches. It is the description of the exterior of a pyramid, brick by brick, which gives us no idea of its magnitude, purposes, or form; but this happens to be precisely what is least interesting in Russia.”^[35]
In contrast, Henningsen considered Custine’s work to be “brilliant.” The Marquis’s descriptions of Russia proper displayed his extraordinary ability to delve beneath the veneer of Russian life, to detect “the misery, the oppression, and the tinsel-covered leprosy corroding the heart of the people.” But Custine had not had enough experience in Russia to back up his intuition with facts. Henningsen pointed out that the Sclavonians were not “white Arabs,” the “tame, servile feeble, sallow, rye-fed Muscovite,” was not the “restless, enduring, carnivorous, quick-eyed Cossac [sic]” and the Finns were definitely not “the scattered remnant of a barbarous horde still lingering in the neighborhood of St. Petersburgh, and hardly in 1836 converted from paganism.”^[36] Still, Henningsen recommended Custine’s book for its true insights into the Russian regime and thanked the Marquis above all for “enlightening the French public” to the despotic nature of that regime.^[37] Summing up his literary review, Henningsen asserted that his Revelations would explain the underlying causes of many of the events and scenes described by Custine. Hence, it is not surprising that in many ways the two works discuss similar themes.
Both wrote about Russia as a despotic, oppressive regime. This was hardly a new interpretation. Sigismund von Herberstein had railed against the “tyranny of the Grand Duke of Muscovy” in 1549.^[38] Both also wrote about the character and responsibility of the Tsar. However, while Custine’s judgment of the Tsar was deeply ambiguous,^[39] Henningsen’s was decidedly negative and damning. He admitted that Nicholas I had given evidence “of a moral resolution on all trying occasions,” but provided numerous examples of the Tsar’s “nervous temperament,” “morbid anxiety” and general lack of personal courage.^[40]
Henningsen also placed greater responsibility for the despotic nature of the regime on the Tsar. While Custine was “utterly fascinated” by Nicholas, he eventually did conclude that “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.”^[41] Henningsen was far more resolute. “On the whole, therefore, Nicholas is neither better nor worse than the average of his predecessors, inclusive of the great Tsar who first made Russia European; but he has done, and he bids fair to do, more injury to mankind than all of them put together.”^[42] Tsar Nicholas had been placed by “the chances of birth” at the head of a huge oppressive machine. With a modernized, centralized bureaucracy at his fingertips, the Tsar had attained the vain wish of Nero that “all Romans had but one neck.” “Modern centralization, and its science of administration, have virtually realized this for Nicholas; at least, he can reach the necks of the remotest of his subjects, and tighten the chain that, under his predecessors, all were liable to wear, but of which, under his despotism, none escape the infliction.”^[43] Possessing absolute authority over this massive bureaucratic machine and all the regime’s other oppressive organs, Nicholas had to bear primary responsibility for its actions.
In contrast to Custine, Henningsen was not from the noble class, and while he admired the personal appearance of the Tsar, he had little trouble laying most of the blame at his feet. Perhaps, this emphasis also reflected Henningsen’s attitude towards the Muscovite people. Here he also differed profoundly from Custine, who followed Herberstein’s suggestion that the rigors of the regime were perhaps “an unavoidable response to the nature of the Russian people.”^[44]By contrast, Henningsen held that the Russian people were “essentially guiltless.” Having been oppressed for centuries, the majority were by nature passive, essentially unpatriotic, and without national feeling. “There is no national interest, no Russia interest; there is only the interest of the house of Romanoff. Russia is a mere possession of the emperor and his family; it is a vast and important one, but the time is looked forward to when it may become comparatively insignificant.”^[45]
Even more important than Henningsen’s absolution of the masses of the Russian Empire was his understanding of their constituent parts. For as Henningsen pointed out, these people were no homogeneous mass. While Revelations of Russia was mainly an attack on the Tsarist government, Henningsen took great pains to explain the great variety of people enduring its oppression. In a chapter on the regions of Russia, Henningsen recounted region by region the ethnic make up of the population, culminating in an extensive chart that broke the population of the entire empire down into “race” and then “people.” The Sclavonic race, numbering 52 million, was broken down into: Muscovites (38 million); Little Russians and Cossacs (7 million); White Russians, Samogitians, and Poles (6 million); and Bulgarians, Servians, and others (1 million). Henningsen included the populations of the Lithuanians, or “Letti,” Finns, Esthonians (“a mixed race of Finns and Letti”), Laplanders, Tatars (“in 26 tribes, or nations”), Mongul races, Jews, Germans, “the Manchew races,” Armenians, Georgians, Circassians, “Esquimaux” (in North America), Greeks, Gypsies and Persians.^[46] Despite this great heterogeneity, Henningsen stressed the numerical preponderance of the Sclavonic race over all others, a ratio of about five to one, and within that race – the preponderance of the Muscovites.^[47]
In the spirit of the age, much of Henningsen’s descriptions were couched in the language of blood and race. Hence the principality of Finland was inhabited by “the pure Finnish race,” and Estonia, Latvia, and Courland were populated by people called Esti and Letti, or Lithuanian, and were “more or less mixed with the Finns.”^[48] Little Russia, comprising the districts of “Kief, Tchernigoff, Volyhnia, Pultava, Charcow, and Podolia,” was inhabited by the Little Russians (Malo-Rossi), “a people differing, morally and physically, as much from the Muscovites, or the Great Russians, (Veliki-Rossi,) as the men of Kent from the inhabitants of southern Ireland.”^[49] Like the Poles and Muscovites, the Little Russians originated from the Sclavonic race, “but the Little Russians have preserved the breed in comparative purity.” The Muscovites had been mixed over the centuries with the blood of Finns, Huns, Mongols, and Tartars, “by whom they were so often conquered, that the chief resemblance they continue to exhibit to the Little-Russians, or to the Poles, now consists in their language.” The Little-Russian was clearly the positive reflection of the “misshapen, passive Muscovite.” Tall and “well made,” he was handsome, dark-haired, dark-eyed, and “carries his head high; his glance is independent, his step elastic.” The Little-Russians also gave rise to the Cossac nations: “their costume, their wide trowsers, as well as their general aspect and bearing, remind us strongly of these warrior tribes.”^[50]
Such a complex explanation of the multi-ethnic and racial composition of the Russian Empire was certainly very different from Custine’s view. The Marquis’s informant, the Russian Prince Kozlovski, contrasted the chivalrous Poles with the obedient Russian warriors.^[51] But Custine himself made very little distinction between the “Slavonian race” and the Russian people, at times suggesting that the terms were synonymous: “The finely endowed Slavonic race has too delicate a touch to mingle indiscriminately with the Teutonic people. The German character had even at this day a less affinity with the Russian than has the Spanish, with its cross of Arab blood.”^[52] Even when Custine suggested that there were two “nations” in Russia, they were both Russian. “These two nations are – Russia as she is, and Russia as they would have her to appear in the eyes of Europe.”^[53]
The German traveler, Kohl, had noted distinctions among the peoples of the Russian empire in a book published in London in the same year. Having visited Ukraine in the 1830s, Kohl asserted that the Little Russians held a “national hatred” toward the Great Russians. They had been freemen before their country was annexed to the “Moscovite empire.”^[54] For the first century after that annexation, Little Russia had continued to have its own hetmans and retained much of its “ancient constitution and privileges.” Those privileges had since been swept away by Tsarist “reforms,” but the Little Russians held onto their free past: “To this day, the battle of Poltava is remembered throughout Little Russia with the feelings similar to those with which the battle of the White Mountain is remembered in Bohemia.”^[55] Like Henningsen, Kohl noted the great variety of peoples living under the tsar. However, Kohl did not consider the political possibilities that these national distinctions implied. He did suggest that if the Russian empire were to “one day fall to pieces, there is little doubt that the Malorossians will form a separate state.”^[56] But Henningsen was one of the first to argue that the historical and cultural differences among these people could cause the disintegration of that Empire. In his next book, Henningsen took the national distinctiveness of these peoples and created a political programme for their liberation, extending his critique to all the oppressed peoples of what he decided to call “Eastern Europe.”

HENNINGSEN’S EASTERN EUROPE

In 1846 Henningsen published a systematic analysis of not only Russia, but of a geographical area. Both a study of the region and a political tract, Eastern Europe and the Emperor Nicholas defined that region in political, historical, and cultural terms, and advocated a revolutionary transformation.
Henningsen drew a definitive political distinction between the “constitutionally governed states” (Great Britain, France, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland, Holland, Norway and Sweden) of Western Europe and the “eastern portion.” The latter was divided up among four despotisms, “whose rule is established over heterogeneous races, nearly always subdued by a minority, and ruled over by a system of deceit and terror which has hitherto acted on the jealousies, ignorance, and abasement, which for their own selfish ends these governments still strive to perpetuate amongst more than half the population of the most civilized quarter of the globe.”^[57] Hence, though these empires were clearly not part of Western Europe, and their peoples were “ignorant,” they were still at least a part of the “civilized” world.
The intriguing map appended to Eastern Europe and the Emperor Nicholas reinforced Henningsen’s political distinction. The territories of the “constitutionally governed states” of the West, all in pink, were juxtaposed to the “four despotisms” of Eastern Europe: Prussia and the German states in blue, the Austrian Empire in yellow, the Turkish Empire in brown, and the Russian Empire in white. While the West appeared to be united in its pink (perhaps British) color, the East was divided.^[58]
For Henningsen, this difference between East and West, between despotism and constitutionality, had a clear historical basis. In the West, the privileges of one group of men, the feudal nobility, had been despoiled for the benefit of the larger community. All ranks were subjected to the same laws and taxation, and “every immunity of which the privileged orders were deprived, was added to the sum of the liberties of the people.” But this was not the historical case in Eastern Europe: “There, in fact, the excessive privileges of the aristocracy have been suppressed, not to divide amongst the whole people rights monopolized by a class, but only to confiscate them for the benefit of despotism.”^[59] While the privileges of the nobility became the rights of many in the West, they became the privileges of the few in the East.
Henningsen also defined his Eastern Europe in cultural terms. He repeatedly strove to refute what he perceived to be the popular opinion in England, which regarded the Sclavonic race “as either irrevocably gathered beneath the sceptre of the Tsars, or as already Russianized.” Poland’s fate was to be regretted, but regarded “as a misfortune beyond the power of man to remedy, and on which it is now idle to waste sympathies which may be thus diverted from some more useful channel.”^[60] The bulk of Sclavonians had been absorbed into the Russian identity and “as to the rest of the Sclavonic family, supposed to be widely scattered amongst dominant races, its origin is regarded as only of recollection from motives of historic interest, – not as a matter of political consideration.”^[61]
This brings us to the heart of Henningsen’s work. For Eastern Europe and the Emperor Nicholas was no mere travelers’ guide. Henningsen wished to make the cultural existence of the peoples of the Sclavonic race a political matter. He sought to raise their cultural existence above the oppressive structures of these despotic regimes and give them a political existence. He clearly advocated a programme of change, and called on the people of the West to get involved.
To the “common opinion” in England Henningsen retorted that these peoples were not being absorbed, but “rapidly increasing” in numbers. At the very least they constituted 85 million people, while the Germans did not “in reality” number over 35 million. Besides 20 million Poles, there were also 25 millions other Sclavonians living outside the Russian Empire, none of whom had “become absorbed and lost in the Germanic multitude.”^[62] On the contrary, the Sclavonians were daily awakening from centuries of slumber, and “with the exception of the Muscovites, there is no portion of their race which is not more or less agitated by new-born aspirations of independence, or at least of liberty.”^[63]
Henningsen attributed the rapid “awakening” of the Sclavonic peoples to two developments: the recent spread of “the motive power of steam,” which had radically changed the material world; and rise of the popular press: “We must not forget that though several ages have elapsed since the discovery of printing, its development as a political enigma is comparatively recent, and its uses in eastern Europe still more so.”^[64] At present, daily newspapers were circulating throughout the region, even in “the remotest villages.” And as a result, “the inhabitants must progress more in a twelve month period (at least in political knowledge) than they could have formerly done through a long life of casual contact with a western people.”^[65] Although admittedly in a less sophisticated form, Henningsen’s explanation for the rise of these national movements is very suggestive of more modern theories of nationalism.^[66]
While Henningsen celebrated the “awakening” of these peoples, he was not a whole-hearted advocate of the emergence of “national feeling” in Eastern Europe.

“The author is not amongst those who, blinded by the fact that a strong instinct of nationality has often preserved the liberties and existence of a people, view such national feeling with unqualified admiration, whether it relate to an innumerable people, or to an insignificant tribe. On the contrary, he regards it only as one of those barbarous means by which beneficial results have been produced in a comparatively barbarous age, as it is to be hoped even our own will rank by contrast with succeeding centuries; a means which, if not eventually laid by, will prove more fatal to the advance of human progress, than it has ever been restrictive of those despotisms so pernicious in all ages to the enlightenment of mankind.”^[67]

The “principle of nationality and patriotism” was not “one of those immutable truths, which, like parallel lines, produced as far as the human mind can imagine, still remain unchanged.”^[68] Indeed, if carried to its logical extension this principle would result in absurdity: “From the parish, the circle would diminish to the family, and thus return to a savage state, from which it is obvious that it has only emerged by the adoption of the diametrically opposite principle of fraternisation.”^[69] Thus, Henningsen celebrated the amalgamation of all distinct tribes, races and nations as “a happy event,” and regarded “every nationality buried as a benefit to society.” But before such a burial, the nationality had to be fairly dead. Otherwise, “notwithstanding all the earth heaped upon it, it will rise in sanguinary resurrection from the grave in which it has been violently laid, to commence a fearful struggle with its oppressors.”^[70]
This was exactly how Henningsen viewed Eastern Europe: the Sclavonic peoples had not been brought into “fraternization” with the Germanic people, but subjugated to them. And Russia was no exception: “The sovereigns of the house of Romanoff, either wholly German, or if not so issuing from a stock which had been for many generations replenished from the princely families of Germany, has almost always administered the empire by German favourites, who prove tools as pliant and less dangerous than the Muscovites.”^[71] In these circumstances, the development of national feeling among the various branches of the Sclavonic peoples was useful in removing the oppression of the despotic “Germanic” empires of Eastern Europe: “such a feeling derives its relatively beneficial importance only from the uses to which it happens to be turned.”^[72]
Henningsen was not only describing an emerging popular feeling. The Poles and Ruthenians had always possessed their own histories. The Poles were the only portion of the Sclavonic race to escape the Tartar and Turkish yoke. “The Polish republic, with its freedom fatally anarchic, lasted as it is well known till little more than half a century ago.” Admittedly, this “freedom” was that of Sparta or Rome or the southern states of America, and “only extended to one favoured class which kept the remainder in a state of Helotism.”^[73] However, the Polish and Ruthenian peasantry were “unequivocally Sclavonic” and had become “equally inspired with the spirit of independence of their lords.”^[74] Indeed, the bloody wars these peasants waged with their “Polish patricians,” their emigration into “the dominions of the Tsars,” and their many Cossack communities across Siberia “were all the consequences of their earnest craving for freedom.”^[75]
This history of an independence of spirit was crucial to Henningsen’s programme. For he saw the Poles and Ruthenians as playing a central role in the liberation of the Sclavonic race. Because the Poles had made the earliest and farthest advance in civilization of any of the Sclavonic branches, they formed “the connecting link, which, by mingling the spirit of both, unites the west of Europe with the east.” Hence, the Poles were “predestined to an inevitable antagonism with Russian despotism,” and were “peculiarly, and it might be said solely fitted” to undermine the elements that constituted that despotism’s strength.^[76]
But the Ruthenians, uniquely situated by history, language and religion between the Muscovites and the Poles, were also to play a central role in overthrowing the despotisms of Eastern Europe. Those passive, unwarlike Muscovites (“35 millions”) were an admittedly daunting colossus. Under the Tsar’s age-old subordination, they could be used to enforce and expand his rule. But they could also be roused to action against the Tsar through the mediation of the Ruthenians.

“The Ruthenian’s strong instinct of independence – the recollection of his former liberties and privileges, all associated in his songs and traditions with his Polish fraternity, – the very facilities which his language, and often his religion afford, all tend to render him as apt to receive a political or social impulse from Poland, as he is well fitted to transmit a portion of it to the Muscovite. He forms, therefore, the transitory link through which, the unquiet spirit of the Sclavonic race – not only beyond the frontiers of Russia-proper, but beyond the pale of the Russian empire – may act with galvanic rapidity, at any given moment, upon the old Russian (Muscovite) people.”^[77]

Thus “infected” through a long history of “Polish fraternity” with ideas of liberty and independence, and able to transmit those ideas to rouse the passive Muscovite, the Ruthenian would play a crucial role in the overthrow of not only the Tsarist regime, but of all the evil despotisms ruling over the vast Sclavonic race in Eastern Europe.

HENNINGSEN’S POLITICAL PROGRAMME

Clearly, Henningsen’s Eastern Europe was a mass of potential nations on the verge of insurgency. At present the region was dominated by four despotic empires, but their domination was largely illusory. The Ottoman empire was old and dying,^[78] but even the Hohenzollern, Habsburg, and Romanov dynasties only appeared all powerful. They were in reality only houses of cards.
Henningsen argued that the impression in Britain that these empires were omnipotent was largely the result of government-controlled Prussian press agencies. The Prussian empire’s strength, supposed constitutionality and patriotic feeling were actually the product of Prussian “hireling writers” and had “no existence anywhere, but in their pages, or in the mouths Prussian employes.”^[79] The Prussian government had repeatedly promised reform and the people had been patient. But they had now lost all positive feeling for the Prussian regime. Moreover, most of the population was not German, but Sclavonic – “aliens in race, interests, and affection to the reigning family and their German subjects.” Indeed, there was no real Prussia behind the imperial propaganda. Other than “the barren sands of Brandenburg,” Prussia’s territory consisted of “disaffected dependencies, at best apathetically indifferent, and more often cankered to the core by religious, political, or national animosities.”^[80]
While the Prussian regime existed by fraud, the Habsburgs ruled by playing off the many divisions within the empire. The Habsburg empire was a “heterogeneous compound of diverse races, without community of interests, language, predilections, or religion.” It was an empire gathered together “not even through the prestige of military successes,” but by the Imperial cabinet’s “perfidies, marriages, and treaties,” which compensated for the “ill-fortune of the field.”^[81] With a population of five or six million Germans, ten million Magyars and Italians, and twenty million Sclavonians, Metternich had never made any attempt to place the imperial sovereignty on a broader base, to include these diverse peoples.^[82] Indeed, the state had become so intimately tied up with the machinations of the aging prince that it could not survive his demise. “The existence of the state may be said to hinge on the life of Metternich, who himself has long been prone to boast, not of the solidarity of the state, but of the tact which still keeps its discordant elements together.”^[83]
Yet, the Austrian regime only appeared to be the most absolute and arbitrary to those who were “unacquainted with the Russian autocracy.”^[84] And even that autocracy was unstable. The dominant population, the Muscovites, were unpatriotic, passive, and “would bend to a foreign yoke, rather than make the slightest voluntary sacrifice to extend their dominion over other races.”^[85] Though the Muscovites often disliked the Poles they did not wish to fight them. During the 1830 Polish uprising, the Tsarist government had deemed it “necessary” in order to excite Muscovite soldiers to action, “to spread the report amongst the Russian regiments, that they were being sent to Warsaw to drive out the French, who were atheists, and disbelieved in God and St. Nicholas.”
The Muscovite passivity to the Poles applied even more so to the Ruthenians: “When it proves, therefore, difficult to excite the Muscovites against the Poles, it may be imagined how little they could be depended on to take any part against the Ruthenians, a people whose superiority they tacitly acknowledge, whose religion they share, and whose dialect so nearly assimilates to their own.”^[86] And the Ruthenians, “infected” with Polish ideas, were “becoming daily more problematic.” The Tsarist regime had failed “to digest this antithetic ailment,” and “should the growing sympathies of the Ruthenians for the rest of their Sclavonic brethren be kindled at any critical juncture, a consuming fire will thus be lighted in the very vitals of the state.”^[87]
Thus, Henningsen’s Eastern Europe was wrapped up in potentially grave turmoil: the despotic regimes that ruled the region were on the verge of collapse, largely due to the “awakening” of the various Sclavonic peoples to “national feeling.” These peoples no longer wished to live under these oppressive regimes and had turned to the Poles, the Ruthenians and through them the Muscovite masses for assistance. But they were also turning to the West for assistance, though Henningsen lamented that they “know not how to reach our ear.”^[88]

AN APPEAL TO THE WEST

In the concluding chapter of the final volume, Henningsen appealed to the West, and the British people in particular, for help. Having suggested that the West take a share of the blame for the situation in Eastern Europe, Henningsen entreated its assistance. He argued first that it was in the West’s own interests to intervene. Under a free government the hundred million people of Eastern Europe could become better customers for Western manufactured goods than even those of the United States. At the same time, the region could provide, through the “productiveness of its soil,” the necessary food stuffs for Western Europe, transported more easily without the difficulties of an oceanic crossing.^[89]
Henningsen also appealed to the “deeply-rooted moral feeling” which he considered to be in ascendancy especially among the British. Their willingness to make “real pecuniary sacrifices” in order to redress a “wrong comparatively colossal,” namely the slave trade, had shown their willingness to act on moral grounds. Indeed, Henningsen believed that the abolition movement signified the awakening of “a great national consciousness” among the British people to their responsibility to oppressed peoples outside their own country. “The time is undoubtedly approaching when no man will dare publicly meet the appeals of nations to our sympathy and protection by the question, ‘what is it to us?’”^[90]
In conclusion, Henningsen noted the West’s superior capabilities: “we are not without the means of giving weight to our intercession or remonstrances.” The despotic regimes of the East were in reality extremely unstable and “everywhere so vulnerable and accessible, that they would probably dissolve before the mere volition of Western Europe.”^[91] France could now be trusted to advance not only her own cause, but that of “humanity.” The constitutional form of government had spread over half of the continent; the peoples of Eastern Europe were preparing a “great movement” against their absolutist rulers; and the peoples of the West were daily becoming more sympathetic. This sympathy was increasing as a result of the greater elucidation of the region’s complexities, an elucidation that only augmented the West’s hostility to the despotic regimes, and one which the author hoped “not vainly to have devoted these volumes.”^[92]

BRITISH REACTIONS TO HENNINGSEN’S IDEAS

How were Henningsen’s views received by that audience? His books came out at a time when British views of Russia were in considerable flux. John H. Gleason argues that with the denouement of the Near Eastern crisis in 1841, a rising tide of British Russophobia was cut at the quick. The cooperative settlement in the Near East, the defeat of the Whigs in the 1841 election, and with it the replacement of the “fractious Lord Palmerston” with the “urbane Earl of Aberdeen” at the Foreign Office, and the lack of divergence of British and Russian interests elsewhere combined to create a “new Anglo-Russian cordiality.”^[93] In 1844, the year that Revelations of Russia appeared, Tsar Nicholas and his foreign minister, Nesselrode, visited Britain, and in meetings with Peel and Aberdeen agreed to preserve the “independence and integrity” of the Ottoman empire.^[94] The 1846 election brought Palmerston back into the Foreign Office, but Gleason argues that Palmerston’s immediate protest against Austria’s annexation of Cracow, and Russia’s complicity in it, did not “immediately disrupt the harmony.”^[95] Henningsen’s books appeared in this very period of amicable Anglo-Russian relations, in which anti-Russian propaganda was largely out of favor and in decline.^[96] Thus, it is not that surprising that his books were not that widely reviewed.
The two reviews of Eastern Europe and the Emperor Nicholas were, however, very favorable. The New Monthly Magazine noted the prolific outpourings of the author on this theme, referring not only to Revelations of Russia, but a three volume novel that Henningsen had published in 1845, entitled: The White Slave: Or, the Russian Peasant Girl. The reviewer agreed with Henningsen that “a hundred volumes would scarcely suffice” to inform the British public of the evils of the Tsarist regime. The English seemed profoundly interested in the welfare of “the humble African race,” but completely unaware of the “several millions of prostrate Sclavonian tribes.” The review worried that because Eastern Europe and the Emperor Nicholas exposed to the British public the truly “monstrous system which so profoundly demoralises and so cruelly oppresses our fellow-creatures in Eastern Europe,” it will be charged with “Russo-phobia.” “It is not Russo-phobia, it is a simple question of the welfare of millions of human beings, and the author who brings his knowledge and abilities to the earnest task of awakening sympathy for the sun-burnt Servian, the toiling Slave, the tasked Russian serf, or the prostrate Pole, is labouring in a great and good cause, to which we heartily wish every possible success.” The reviewer concluded by recommending the book “to all sober-minded and philanthropic readers, and all who have the welfare of the human race at large, at heart.”^[97] While the review was very positive, it seemed to associate Eastern Europe very closely with Russia.
The Foreign Quarterly Review displayed a much deeper understanding of Henningsen’s work and lauded his accomplishment:

“It is nothing less than an announcement, substantiated by manifold evidence, of the proximate regeneration and enfranchisement of the whole Sclavonic race, the downfall of the Czar’s accursed tyranny, the dissolution of those highly artificial compounds of heterogeneous elements, the kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian empire, and the augmentation of the better moiety of the European federation by the accession of eighty emancipated millions.”^[98]

A revolution was coming that would “eclipse even that of France, in point of magnitude and importance.” The reviewer did not doubt that it was coming, but if the reader required proof, “then, we refer to the volumes before us.”^[99]
Book reviews are not, of course, the only sources of evidence of popular opinion and the reception of new ideas. Henningsen’s books were clearly directed towards a popular audience: he wrote in an amusing style and made space in his volumes for numerous anecdotes and incidents. As one review predicted, Henningsen’s Revelations of Russia would appeal to a wide and varied audience: to both the thoughtful, “for the terrible picture it conveys of a despotism which has no principle, no limits, and no rule, beyond the personal will and interest of the despot;” and the idle, “for a body of mingled anecdote, description, personal portraiture, and living and moving sketches of society, manners, and modes of being, that are stranger than fictions of romance, yet evidently as true as an observant eye and a skillful hand can make them.”^[100]
Moreover, Henningsen’s books appear to have been quite widely read. Revelations of Russia went into three editions and was translated into French and German.^[101] In addition, portions of it appeared in The New Monthly Magazine and in the American periodical, United Service Magazine.^[102] The White Slave was reprinted and was published in the United States by Harper’s “Library of Select Novels” series. By the time that Eastern Europe and the Emperor Nicholas appeared, Henningsen had already established himself as a writer of considerable popularity, and though this work did not go into extra editions, it was translated into German.^[103] Indeed, some biographers have suggested that Henningsen’s work “opened the eyes” of the Western public to the true conditions in Russia.^[104]
Yet, considering that Henningsen advocated a political programme one must also admit that his writings made little apparent political effect. He may have been widely read, but his ideas were never translated into public policy. And this is perhaps not so surprising as the influence of British public opinion in forming government policy is highly questionable in this period. As Kingsley Martin has argued, “public opinion, after all, does not declare war, write dispatches, or mobilize troops.”^[105] Even in democratizing nineteenth-century Britain, the link between public opinion and policy was indirect at best. Gleason found that, at least up to 1841, British statesmen were often ahead of and even led public opinion.^[106]
Indeed, despite Henningsen’s optimistic vision of Britain’s “deeply-rooted moral feeling” and possible intervention in the “gathering storm” of Eastern Europe, when the Revolutions of 1848 broke out, that “constitutional state” played a less than revolutionary role. When the Hungarians rose up under Kossuth, Henningsen immediately became “fascinated by the leader’s eloquence,” and as in the past he got involved.^[107] Unfortunately, he did not manage to arrive to help Kossuth until the summer of 1849, after the revolutionaries had crossed over into the Ottoman Empire. Kossuth had been courting British support for some time, and had even made it clear that “a member of the British royal family would be acceptable as king of free Hungary.”^[108] When “an enthusiastic British journalist” arrived in Kossuth’s camp and offered his services, “Kossuth majestically appointed Henningsen his plenipotentiary in what remained of independent Hungary.” Henningsen was to travel in disguise to the fortress of Komaron and assume “supreme power in the name of Kossuth with the right to order executions.” He did not get very far, and was only in Belgrade when he learned that Klapha had surrendered the fortress to General Haynau.^[109]
At that point, the Hungarian and Polish exiles in Turkey became the center of an international dispute. Russia and Austria demanded from the Porte the rebels’ extradition. Lord Palmerston then verbally attacked Austria and Russia in the pages of the Morning Post.^[110] Palmerston sent the Mediterranean fleet under Admiral Parker close to Turkish waters and the French chimed in with support. To Henningsen it may have appeared that the West would finally stand up against the despotic regimes of Eastern Europe. But then Austria and Russia backed down, and Palmerston, “a friend of both Ottoman and Austrian integrity, and certainly no friend of Hungarian independence,” took no further interest in the Hungarians’ plight.^[111] Fortunately for Kossuth, the United States government invited him to America. In September 1851, Kossuth, his wife, and a few aids-de-camp were allowed to leave Turkey on board the U.S. frigate, Mississippi. Henningsen soon joined them.
Henningsen’s involvement in the Hungarian Revolution and its failure, and the failure of the 1848 revolutions in general seem to have been a grave disappointment to him. He left Europe and took up permanent residence in America. He soon married a “southern belle,” Williamina Connelly, the niece of an important Southern senator, and got to know the Southern people and their problems.^[112] He joined up with William Walker’s Filibusters and fought in Nicaragua. Later he even served in the Confederate army in the American Civil War, though he resigned before its conclusion. He spent the rest of his life out of the public eye in Washington and died a poor man in 1877. His obituary in The New York Times noted that “among his associates General Henningsen was known as gentleman of urbanity, liberality, and cultivation. He was an accomplished linguist. He has not been prominent in any way in many years.”^[113]
As to Henningsen’s ideas on Eastern Europe, any resonance they had in British society was buried beneath the jingoistic rhetoric of the Crimean War. When war broke out, the Russophobia of the 1830s re-emerged with even greater vigor. The British press poured forth stereotypes describing the people of Russia as “Scythian hordes.”^[114] In such an atmosphere, Henningsen’s complex differentiations had no place. Thus, in terms of British policy and public opinion, Henningsen’s writings were quite ineffectual.

CONCLUSION

Yet, it would hardly do justice to Henningsen’s accomplishments to conclude on that note. For such innovative ideas cannot be judged solely by their political impact. Henningsen was the first to present in a sophisticated form the idea of Eastern Europe to the English-language reading public. His Eastern Europe was not composed of three all-powerful empires ruling over a docile, homogeneous mass. He saw in that region the “awakening” of a great variety of “Sclavonic peoples” with their own cultures, and bemoaned their oppression by a “Germanic” minority. He repeatedly asserted that these people were daily becoming more conscious of their own “national feeling.” While he worried about this feeling’s more extreme manifestations, he saw it as a means for these people to overcome their oppression. Henningsen advocated a political programme that sought to convince the West that it should help in this revolutionary endeavor. That he failed in that respect should not detract from the complex and novel conception of Eastern Europe that he brought to his Western audience.
Henningsen’s creation of the region of Eastern Europe reflected a fundamental shift in the intellectual construction of the European world. As Gellner argues, industrialization necessitates the universalization of culture and a minimum level of literacy throughout the entire population. A fundamental feature of any industrial society is near universal literacy. Such a universalization of one culture can only be carried out by the state, and only on a national basis. Hence, industrialization requires the politicization of one national culture.^[115] At the time that Henningsen was writing, industrialization and this concomitant universalization of national cultures was fundamentally transforming the nature of European societies. National culture was becoming the defining feature of the state and a preeminently political matter.
At a time when the intellectual axis of Europe was shifting from North-South to East-West, only the latter orientation placed Henningsen’s origins (Scandinavia) and adopted home in the “civilized world.” Coming from and writing for an industrializing British society, in which this universalization of culture was taking place most rapidly, Henningsen defined his Eastern Europe not solely by the borders of the empires that ruled over that region, but also by the “awakening” national groups that lived there. The central point of all his writings on Eastern Europe and his political programme was that the cultural existence of these peoples should become an international “political matter.” Hence, we can say that Henningsen’s writings not only presented the idea of Eastern Europe as a region to the West, as it had never been before, but that they reflected the fundamental transformation occurring in an industrializing European society, that is, the redefinition of Europe in national cultural terms, and the concomitant spread of nationalism as a political idea.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
of Charles Frederick Henningsen (1815-1877)
1. Analogies and Contrasts; or Comparative Sketches of France and England. By the author of “Revelations of Russia.” London, 1848.
2. Eastern Europe and The Emperor Nicholas. By the author of “Revelations of Russia;” “The White Slave.” 3 Vols. London: T.C. Newby, 1846. (Translated into German).
3. The Emperor Nicholas, His Nobles, Serfs, and Servants // The New Monthly Magazine. 1844. Vol. 70. Pp. 477- 493. (This article appeared in a quite modified form in Revelations of Russia: The Emperor Nicholas and his Empire in 1844).
4. The Emperor Nicholas, His Nobles, Serfs, and Servants (Concluded) // The New Monthly Magazine. 1844. Vol. 71. Pp. 216 - 231. (This article appeared in a quite modified form in Revelations of Russia: The Emperor Nicholas and his Empire in 1844).
5. Kossuth and “The Times.” By the author of “The Revelations of Russia.” London, 1851.
6. The Last of the Sophias: a poem. London, 1831.
7. The Most Striking Events of a Twelvemonth’s Campaign with Zumalacarregui in Navarre and the Basque Provinces. 2 Vols. London: John Murray, 1836. (Translated into Spanish, German, and French).
8. The National Defenses. By the author of “The Revelations of Russia,” etc. London: T.C. Newby, 1848.
9. The Past and Future of Hungary, by C.F. Henningsen, Secretary to Governor Louis Kossuth, author of “Twelve Months’ Campaign with Zumalacarregui,” “Revelations of Russia,” “Eastern Europe,” etc. Cincinnati: E. Morgan, 1852.
10. Revelations of Russia: or the Emperor Nicholas and His Empire in 1844. By one who has seen and describes. 2 Vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1844. (Translated into French and German).
11. Revelations of Russian in 1846. By an English resident. Third edition. 2 Vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1846. (Translated into German).
12. St. Petersburg and Its Inhabitants // The New Monthly Magazine and Humorist. 1843. Vol. 69. Pp. 241- 259. (This article appeared in a quite modified form in Revelations of Russia: The Emperor Nicholas and his Empire in 1844).
13. Scenes from the Belgian Revolution. London, 1832.
14. The Siege of Missalonghi. London, 1832.
15. Sixty Years Hence: A Novel. By the author of “The White Slave,” etc. 3 Vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1847.
16. The White Slave; or, The Russian Peasant Girl. By the author of “Revelations of Russia.” 3 Vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1845.