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Imperial Letters on Education: Baron Friedrich von Grimm’s Correspondence with Catherine the Great on Schools in Germany, Austria, and Russia (1776-1796)

German scholar and diplomat Fredrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm (1723-1807) undertook extensive correspondence with Russian Empress Catherine the Great (1729-1796) on matters related to her interest in reforming education in Russia. Von Grimm, son of a Lutheran pastor from Regensburg, was closely associated with Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau and Diderot, and became a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences during his first trip to St. Petersburg in 1773. He returned to Russia in 1776 as a diplomat from Saxe-Gotha and became an influential foreign advisor to Catherine and arranged for Russia’s procurement of Diderot’s and Voltaire’s libraries as well as great European works of art for the imperial collection. As the empress was interested in reforming Russia’s schools, she solicited von Grimm’s advice and he wrote a series of letters to her on European pedagogical approaches, peasant schools, and related matters. Near the end of her reign, Catherine appointed him Russian ambassador to Hamburg. Von Grimm’s Mémoire Historique sur l’origine et les suites de mon attachement pour l’impératrice Catherine II was published in Russian and French by the Russian Imperial Historical Society (Yakov Grot) in 1880 with an appendix containing his letters on education, which appear in this paper in their first English translation.