It’s hardly a catch-penny title, as the title accurately reflects the contents:

Pure Catholicism. (El Catolicismo Neto.) A religious journal in the Spanish Language, published quarterly by Messrs. Partridge and Oakey, Paternoster-row, with the object of promoting the knowledge of the pure religion of the Gospel.  Price 1s. 6d. a number.  But the paper will be supplied gratuitously to such Spaniards, and natives of countries where the Spanish language is spoken, as may not have the means of purchasing it. (London, 1849) RB.23.b.7452(1)

Look inside and you will find a tipped-in slip:

In the Royal Gazette of April 2nd 1851 the Catholicismo Neto was prohibited by the Spanish Government at the request of the Bishop of Lerida: decreto prohibiendo la introduccion, circulacion y ventas de una Revista que se imprime en Londres titulado El Catolicismo Neto.

Spanish-language printing in London was often motivated by the desire to spread Protestantism among the Catholics, and the earliest authors so published were converts.

This copy bears the bookplate of Philip H. Calderon, with the motto “Por la fe moriré”.

This is the artist Philip Hermogenes Calderon R.A. (1833–1898), historical genre painter. He was the son of the Revd Juan Calderón, a Spanish former priest who came to England in 1845 and became minister to the Spanish Reform church and professor of Spanish literature at King's College London (allow me as a King’s alumnus to remark that such posts were not as lofty as they sound); the faith referred to in the family motto is presumably Protestantism.

Philip Hermogenes Calderon, from Percy Lubbock, George Calderon. A sketch from memory (London, 1921)  010855.dd.6.

Much information about the family, and an interesting link with the British Library, can be found in Percy Lubbock’s memoir of George Calderon.  

George was Philip’s son. Born in 1868, after Rugby, Trinity and the Bar he studied in St Petersburg (1895-97);

his knowledge [of Russian] was in some ways that of a scholar, and before long [in 1900] he took up a post in the library of the British Museum, where use was made of his special familiarity with certain Slavonic subjects.  (Lubbock, p. 41)

but

As the process [of research for a book he was writing] went on, he found it increasingly difficult to maintain, beside his regular work on the staff of the Museum. The implications of the book grew and spread, and at length it became clear that it could never be finished in by-hours; he left the Museum in 1903, and never afterwards held any professional post (Lubbock, p. 65).

P. R. Harris says sternly: ‘he only stayed three years’ (p. 445). Among other publications, George translated Two Plays by Anton Tchekhof (London, 1912; 11758.cc.1) and Ilya Tolstoy’s Reminiscences of Tolstoy (London, 1914;  010790.g.50); he was reported missing presumed killed at Gallipoli  on 4 June 1915.

George Calderon, from Percy Lubbock’s memoir.

Descended from the ultra-orthodox seventeenth-century playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca, the Calderons, grandfather, father and son, were both insiders and outsiders. Insiders because father was an RA, and his son, WWI victim and secretary to The Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage, boasted Rugby, Trinity and the Bar and the BML in his CV. Outsiders because the Revd Juan Calderón’s Protestantism made him a stranger in his own country and his grandson was a mediator between Britain and the literature of Russia.  

Barry Taylor, Curator  Hispanic studies

References

Barry Taylor, ‘Un-Spanish practices: Spanish and Portuguese protestants, Jews and liberals, 1500-1900’, Foreign-language printing in London 1500-1900, ed. Barry Taylor (London, 2003) 2708.h.1059,  pp. 183-202

Percy Lubbock, George Calderon. A sketch from memory (London, 1921)  010855.dd.6.

David Cast, ‘Calderon, Philip Hermogenes (1833–1898)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 

Percy Lubbock, ‘Calderon, George Leslie (1868–1915)’, rev. Katherine Mullin, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004

P. R. Harris, A History of the British Museum Library 1753-1973 (London, 1998) 2719.k.2164

Patrick Miles, ‘Calderonia – a writer goes to war’ website and blog: https://georgecalderon.wordpress.com/front-page/

On 28 September 1922, a German steamer called the Oberbürgermeister Haken left Petrograd for Germany carrying a cargo of prominent Russian philosophers, scientists and other members of the intelligentsia. Six weeks later a second followed. Nearly two hundred intellectuals were expelled on these ‘philosophers’ ships’ taking what books and possessions they could carry. It was, as numerous historians recall, the culmination of one of Lenin’s last major campaigns before the series of strokes which would marginalise him politically and then, in 1924, kill him.

The ‘philosophers’ ship’ Oberbürgermeister Haken (image from Wikimedia commons).

The most famous figure to be exiled in this way was the Christian-existentialist philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev (Berdiaev). Once a Marxist and briefly a member of the Union of Liberation (Soiuz Osvobozhdeniia), Berdyaev had nevertheless become bitterly opposed to the Bolsheviks, writing that:

The Russian revolution has turned to be a consistent application of Russian nihilism, atheism, and materialism – a vast experiment based on the denial of all absolute spiritual elements in personal and social life… (‘Kto vinovat?’ (Who is to be blame?) in Russkaia svoboda, N 18, 1917. Pp. 3-9 – British Library P.P.4842.dca; translation  from Donald Alexander Lowrie, Rebellious Prophet. A Life of Nicolai Berdyaev, p. 146)

Nikolai Berdyaev (eproduced in  the English translation of his ‘essay in autobiography’, Dream and Reality (London, 1950) 010790.i.84.

Berdyaev’s public criticism of the regime had aroused the attention of the secret police, which included him in a list of 186 ‘anti-Soviet intellectuals’. He was arrested on the night of the 16th and, after a week in prison, released pending his deportation. Though he was not treated cruelly during this time, he was hurt badly by the idea of leaving for Germany.

In 1921 Russia’s civil war had ended, and although the Red Army had been victorious the Bolsheviks remained poised for a further outbreak of war. Dissident intellectuals were seen as a potential threat to be exploited by the enemies of the Bolsheviks. In this light Trotsky argued in favour of the expulsion in an interview with the American journalist Louise Bryant (published in Izvestiia, 30 August, 1922, p.1 ), comparing the case to that of the Socialist Revolutionary Party:

Recently you witnessed the trial of the [Socialist Revolutionaries], who, during the Civil War were the agents of foreign governments fighting against us. The court judged them as warranting the death penalty. Your press, for the most part, conducted a despairing campaign against our cruelty. Had we got the idea straight after October to the send the SR gentlemen abroad we could have saved ourselves from being called cruel. (Translation from Lesley Chamberlain, The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia, p. 121).

While the Bolsheviks sought to rationalize and Europeanize Russian society,  many of the expelled intellectuals were idealists and religious adherents wedded to a more traditional Russia. For the Bolsheviks, the spirituality of the old intellectual classes was fundamentally opposed to the rationality of the new workers’ state. Berdyaev in particular was critical of their zealotry for modernity, attacking the way that socialists

… take over from bourgeois capitalist society its materialism, its atheism, its cheap prophets, its hostility against the spirit and all spiritual life, its restless striving for success and amusement, its personal selfishness, its incapacity for interior recollection. (Novoe srednevekov’e:  Razmyshlenie o sud’be Rossii i Evropy. (Berlin, 1924;  8094.bbb.42) English translation from: Lewis Owens, ‘Metacommunism: Kazanzakis, Berdyaev and “The New Middle Age”’, Slavic and East European Journal vol. 45, no. 3 , p. 436)

As such, he looked forward to the start of a ‘new middle age’ of spiritual rebirth. After his deportation, Berdyaev lived in Berlin, where he and other exiles founded the Russian Scientific Institute, of which he served as the Dean, as well as the Religious-Philosophical Academy, before moving to France. He died in 1948 without seeing his country again. Had he stayed in Stalin’s Russia, it is unlikely that he would have survived the purges of the 1930s.

Mike Carey, Collaborative Doctoral Award Student

Bibliography

Lesley Chamberlain, The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia (London, 2007) YK.2007.a.12891.

Paul R. Gregory, ‘The Ship of Philosophers: How the Early USSR Dealt with Dissident Intellectuals’, Independent Review,  vol. 13 no. 4 (Spring, 2009), 485-92.

Donald Alexander Lowrie, Rebellious Prophet. A Life of Nicolai Berdyaev (New York, 1960) 10865.bb.24.

Lewis Owens, ‘Metacommunism: Kazantzakis, Berdyaev and “The New Middle Age”, Slavic and East European Journal  vol. 45, no. 3 (Autumn, 2001), 431-50. PP.8005.aa.  

In an earlier earlier blog post I wrote about Napoleon III’s defeat at the hands of the Prussians in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 as illustrated in our last collection of caricatures (Cup. 648.b.8)  to be conserved to ensure that it is fit for use.  Following the Emperor’s abdication, a provisional Government of National Defence was proclaimed on 4 September 1870, with General Trochu, the military governor of Paris, at its head.

Le plan de Trochu: seule histoire vraie du siège de Paris. Paris: Publication du Journal Le Grelot (Supplément).  [27 August 1871].

This satirical print, Trochu’s plan: the only true story of the Siege of Paris, pokes fun at the General’s plan for defending the city from the besieging German troops.  The main image shows Trochu clutching his plan and standing on a dish with scuttling rats: as the lyrics in the accompanying song put it, Parisians were reduced to eating ‘rats, mares and mules, and dogs in place of bread’. The smaller image on the left refers to the unsuccessful sorties (the French word means ‘exit’ as well as ‘military sorties’ or breakouts) that Trochu made under pressure of public opinion. The caricature on the right alludes, in an untranslatable pun (‘repasser’ means both to ‘to iron’ and ‘to go back across’), to the sortie of 30 November-2 December when Trochu’s troops crossed the Marne to meet the Prussians, but then had to retreat back across the river.  The lyrics, composed cumulatively over time starting with the first verse in early autumn through to the following spring by a group of ‘well-known journalists’, sarcastically attribute every disaster – military defeats, starvation, bombardments and the eventual capitulation of Paris on 28 January 1871 – to deliberate manifestations of Trochu’s plan to be welcomed.

Trochu resigned on 22 January 1871. The new government, elected on 8 February and led by Adolphe Thiers, who had been a minister under King Louis Philippe, now tried to seize the guns that had been used to defend Paris in an attempt to disarm the city. Parisians fought off the government troops and kept their artillery, but this bungled attempt provoked the very rebellion it had been designed to forestall. A Commune (municipal council) to run the city was elected on 28 March, with the red flag as its symbol. The government retreated to Versailles. Its army, defeated by the Prussians, now turned its guns on its own people and encircled Paris. Government troops entered the city in the last week of May in what became known as the ‘semaine sanglante’ (‘bloody week’).

This pro-Commune lithograph shows Parisians fighting on the barricades led by a woman dressed in red (the colour of the Commune), in a pose reminiscent of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People.

Règne de la Terreur. Guerre civile. Insurrection de Paris, du 18 mars 1871 au 28 mai. Ruines de Paris. Les décrets et derniers documents de la Commune.  Paris: Imprimerie Beillet, [1871]

By contrast, this anti-Commune print depicts the defeated Commune as a dying ‘pétroleuse’, a scandalously bare-breasted dishevelled harpy, carrying a container of petroleum and brandishing a burning firebrand, with a petrol bomb tucked into the skimpy folds of her dress. She is contrasted with the upstanding female personification of the victorious army. The small vignettes all around the print show burnt-out landmark buildings set alight in the face of the advancing government troops. The incendiaries were alleged to be female revolutionaries dubbed ‘pétroleuses’.  The two smaller images show respectively the Commune’s shooting of Generals Lecomte and Thomas, and the execution of the archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur Darboy, depicted raising his arms in a pose recalling the central figure in Goya’s Third of May, in the prison of La Roquette. The archbishop, who was courageous and dignified in the face of the execution squad, became an instant and enduring martyr for the Catholic right. The government’s repression of the Commune was pitiless: an estimated 25,000 communards were killed, a further 12,500 tried and over 4,000 were deported to New Caledonia in the Pacific. Others fled into exile including the caricaturists Faustin and Pilotell, represented in our collection, who forged new careers for themselves in Britain.

The republican government’s bloody repression of the Commune made plain that the Republic did not represent the people as a whole and turned the Commune into an enduring Socialist myth. By the same token it proved to the propertied classes that a republican government was not synonymous with Revolution.

Calliste, L’Irascible…Le Statu Quo! (Bruxelles: Ch. Sacré-Duquesne, [1870-1871])

This satirical lithograph shows President Thiers as a monarchical republican crushing the Commune, symbolised by its red flag, while the moderate Orleanist monarchists, represented by the sons and grandsons of King Louis Philippe, trample on the flag while doing obeisance to him. The legitimist Comte de Chambord, grandson of the Bourbon Charles X, hovers above flying the white flag of the Bourbon monarchy: his rejection of the tricolour as the new national flag scuppered his chances of becoming king and restoring the monarchy.

Teresa Vernon, Lead Curator French Studies

References/Further Reading

Robert Tombs, The Paris Commune, 1871. (London, 1999). YC.1999.a.3641

Gay L. Gullickson, Unruly Women of Paris: Images of the Commune. (Ithaca, 1996). YC.1997.a.1077

Help us raise funds to conserve this collection of caricatures from the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune. By making a contribution, you support our conservators’ efforts to clean, repair, and reback these precious volumes, making them accessible to users both now and in the future. Please make a donation at http://support.bl.uk/page/care-for-collections today; every amount makes a difference .