In this meticulously researched monograph, Heather L. Bailey examines and compares the public image of Orthodoxy in France between the revolutions of 1848 and the First Vatican Council (1869–70). By conflating the Church with Russian imperial power, French publicists helped to forge an image of the ‘bogeyman’ of the Russian Church, enslaved to a tsar-pope who used it for the purposes of expanding his empire. These images helped to reinforce western ideas that Russians were not civilised, Christian or western, and were used by ultramontane journalists to warn French Catholics about the importance of centralised papal authority and the dangers of Napoleon iii's aggression towards the papal states in 1859–60. It was to defend against simplistic images of his Church in the French public sphere that Archpriest Iosif Vasiliev (1821–81), a Russian Orthodox priest stationed in Paris, started the bimonthly French-language journal L'Union chrétienne in 1859. This he did with the assistance of Father René-François Guettée (1816–92), a fiercely anti-ultramontane French Roman Catholic priest. Vasiliev hoped that Guettée, who eventually converted to Orthodoxy, could help to legitimise Russian Orthodox claims of being an apostolic Church (p. 54). Vasiliev sought to bolster these claims by pushing Russian imperial administrators to support the construction of a new church, the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, in 1861. The ornate building drew thousands of curious tourists, and Bailey argues that it was able to convince some French citizens that Russian Orthodoxy was, indeed, Christian. Yet, it also sharpened distinctions between Russian Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism by visually demonstrating the ‘otherness’ of Orthodoxy (p. 114). In the second half of the book, Bailey traces the largely unsuccessful attempts of Vasiliev and his journal to challenge the continual reduction of the Church as the handmaiden of the Russian state. But if Vasiliev and Guettée were not able to make many inroads in the French public sphere, their work did have important reverberations in Russian public life. Bailey argues that the cathedral in France appealed to Russian national pride and fuelled and reflected Russian panslavic nationalism and Slavophilism, claims which could have used further development and clarification, given how complex and multifaceted these movements were. Finally, she traces how criticisms of the Russian Church in Paris helped to raise the awareness of Russian Orthodox laypeople and clerics alike about the necessity for church reform. The scrutiny of the French press had laid bare the problems with authority in the Russian Church, with the relationship between Church and State, and with the state's respect for religious freedom. Bailey provides intriguing evidence for the idea that the push for reform that would take place in the early twentieth century in Russia began with the work of Vasiliev in France. This book is an important contribution to the study of imperial Orthodoxy, and of the role of religion in international relations. It helps to illuminate the activities of later Russian Orthodox missionaries in other countries, and, as Bailey shows in a satisfying conclusion, sheds light on the workings of the contemporary Russian Orthodox Church in its relations with foreign countries.