It has been several decades now since Gregory Freeze first brought our attention to the fact that Russia's Synodal Church (1721–1917) was not some “handmaiden” of the “secular state,” but instead a complex institution inhabited by an array of clergymen who regularly criticized “the existing order,” articulated their own Orthodox understandings of the Church's “interests and needs,” and pursued “political and social ambitions” at odds with the state. Despite the transformative effect that Freeze's scholarship has had on the study of Russia's Synodal Church, as well as similar effects that scholars like Irina Papkova (2011) and Katja Richter (2013) have had on our understanding of church-state relations in post-Soviet Russia, the general view of the Russian Church is still one of “servant” to the Russian state. This image resonates in popular depictions of the Russian Church as beholden to power and wealth and among public commentators who see the Russian Church almost exclusively as a “soft power” extension of the Putin regime in international affairs and as a conservative pillar of that same regime in domestic affairs. What, we might ask, accounts for the persistence of this particular image of the Russian Church?

Heather Bailey's excellent new book, The Public Image of Eastern Orthodoxy: France and Russia, 1848–1870, both draws upon and moves beyond Freeze's early revisionist work and its scholarly legacy to offer us a fascinating account of how French and Russian publicists helped to generate competing images of Orthodox Christianity during the mid-nineteenth century, images that still shape the ways we think and talk about Russian Orthodoxy. Bailey begins her study in the forty-five year period between Napoleon's invasion of Russia and Russia's defeat in the Crimean War (circa 1812–1856) to explain how Russian Orthodoxy came to be portrayed in French journalism and scholarship as an ersatz, backward religion predisposed to schism, Caesaropapism, and state tutelage, images that fit neatly into French and émigré portrayals of Russian empire and autocracy. This initial foray into anti-Orthodox and anti-Russian sentiments among French publicists, especially among proponents of ultramontanism, is followed by a series of interlocking chapters that examine not only the vicissitudes of Orthodoxy's “public image” in Russia and France, but also how these competing and shifting images helped to solidify a set of ideological questions about Russia and “the West.” Where, if anywhere, did Russian Orthodoxy belong in the history of Christianity and, by extension, where did Russia belong on Europe's cultural gradient? French Catholic images of Eastern Orthodoxy decidedly placed the Russian Church outside the providential course of sacred history, while Russian Orthodox images of the faith and its Church made Eastern Orthodoxy both heir to and guardian of authentic Christianity.

In Bailey's account, the details of this cross-cultural debate are mainly captured in one building, St. Aleksandr Nevskii Church, which was founded in Paris in 1861 as part of a broader effort to “refashion” Orthodox Christianity's image in France and across western Europe (8); in two “priests-publicists” (14), Archpriest Iosif Vasilievich Vasiliev, who oversaw the construction of St. Aleksandr Nevskii Church and who actively engaged in French debates about Orthodox Christianity, and a former Catholic priest named René-François Guettée, who converted to Russian Orthodoxy in 1862 and who partnered with Vasiliev to rehabilitate Eastern Orthodoxy in France's public imagination; and in one journal, L'Union chrétienne, which in 1859 became the first Orthodox periodical published in western Europe and was used by Vasiliev and Guettée to promote Orthodox Christianity through the larger project of ecumenism. These four intersecting points—church, journal, and two historical actors—help to illuminate key aspects of Bailey's study. We learn how outreach efforts among the Orthodox faithful were varyingly received by members of French society, sometimes to good effect, but often in ways that exacerbated both real and perceived differences between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, not to mention between Russia and France. We likewise learn how the Orthodox press in Russia, which was broadly shaped by its own providential narratives about Russia's salvific role in European and world history, enthusiastically received what it imagined to be the successful campaign of Vasiliev, Guettée, and others to recast Eastern Orthodoxy in a more favorable light, even when such was not the case. In turn, the success of this project, both actual and imagined, reverberated in the first decade of Russia's Great Reforms era (1861–1871), helping to shape governmental and ecclesiastical efforts to reform the Russian Church in accordance with its public image at home and abroad. It is thanks to Bailey's hard work that we can see anew the lasting, if paradoxical, images of Russian Orthodoxy as both problem and solution to a complex of equally long-lasting questions about east and west.