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“Russica,” which partly explains her decision to write them in French. 72 Russia’s enemies throughout the eighteenth century were Sweden, Turkey, and, behind the scenes, France. Catherine fought France in part through words—via her representatives, articles in the press, political and historical books, and her correspondence, especially with Voltaire. 73 As with everything Catherine wrote, the fact that she was a writer demonstrated her explicit argument that Russia and Russians were civilized and that she was an enlightened ruler.
    Catherine persistently engaged her French critics from the very beginning of her reign. In her first letter to Voltaire, in 1763, Catherine wrote: “I will respond to the prophecy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau by giving him a most rude refutation, I hope, for as long as I live.” 74 In The Social
Contract
(1762), Rousseau disagreed with Voltaire’s hopeful assessment of Russia’s future in the first volume of
The History of the Russian Empire Under
Peter the Great
(1759). Rousseau saw no chance for progress in Russia because Peter the Great had crushed the desire for liberty, which had to develop naturally in the people. Yet even Voltaire thought that before Peter the Great, Russia had been a barbaric country. Encouraged directly by Shuvalov and indirectly by Catherine, Voltaire softened his negative assessments of Russia. Catherine’s correspondence with Voltaire, which, after proceeding at the rate of a handful of letters each year, increased to about forty letters each in 1770 and 1771 during the war with Turkey, as she spread her version of the war. Her letters to Mme. Geoffrin promoted Russia too, as for example when she writes: “For the past two months I have been busy working three hours every morning on the laws of this empire. It is an immense undertaking. But people in your country have many incorrect ideas about Russia.” 75 Throughout her reign, Catherine’s
Great Instruction
served as her most important credential in Europe that she was indeed an enlightened ruler. Indeed, the existence of her
Great Instruction
and the Legislative Commission confirmed that laws governed her reign.
    In Russia, Catherine banned accounts of her coup, and in France, she suppressed publication by Claude Carloman de Rulhière (1734–91), the former secretary at the French embassy, of his
History or Anecdotes on the
Revolution in Russia in the Year 1762. 76 Rulhière’s portraits of Peter and Catherine, though sympathetic, had nuances that Catherine would vigorously dispute indirectly through her middle and final memoirs. Rulhière’s
History
was well-known because of readings in the salons of Mme. Geoffrin and the Duc de Choiseul, the French foreign minister (served 1758– 70), Catherine’s outspoken opponent. To stop the readings, she turned to Voltaire, Diderot, and Mme. Geoffrin. Written in 1768, the work fed general European skepticism about Catherine’s chances of staying on the throne, given the series of coups in Russia.
    Catherine responded most energetically to Chappe d’Auteroche’s
Voyage in Siberia,
about his voyage to Russia and Siberia in 1761–62 at the behest of the French Academy, which he published at the urging of Choiseul. Despite his positive references to Catherine’s reforms, Chappe d’Auteroche, like Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Rulhière before him, insisted on the barbaric nature of the Russian people. His account of Catherine’s coup, which could only be secondhand, as he left St. Petersburg in May 1762, coincided with Rulhière’s
History
and thus angered Catherine. 77 Catherine’s Antidote makes more than a dozen references to herself and her
Instruction,
and a rebuttal to Rulhière’s assertion that she did nothing as Grand Duchess finds its way into Catherine’s final memoir. The promised third volume of
Antidote
never appeared. Instead, in 1771 she began to write her middle memoir, as another kind of defense of herself and Russia against