
Some of them fostered education and allowed religious tolerance, freedom of speech, and the right to hold private property. The monarchs who embraced it followed the participles of rationality. Key Terms enlightened despotism Also known as enlightened absolutism or benevolent absolutism, a form of absolute monarchy or despotism inspired by the Enlightenment. She cultivated and corresponded with French encyclopedists but did not support a free-thinking spirit among her own subjects as much as among famous French philosophers. Catherine had a reputation as a patron of the arts, literature, and education.Catherine did not advocate democratic reforms but addressed some modernization trends, including dividing the country into provinces and districts, further increasing the power of the landed oligarchs, and issuing the Charter of the Towns, which distributed all people into six groups as a way to limit the power of nobles and create a middle estate.Her religious policies aimed to control populations and religious institutions in the multi-religious empire and were not an expression of religious freedom. Catherine converted to the Russian Orthodoxy as part of her immersion in the Russian matters but personally remained largely indifferent to religion.An estimated 62,000 pupils were educated in some 549 state institutions near the end of Catherine’s reign, a minuscule number of people compared to the size of the Russian population. However, despite the experts’ recommendations to establish a general system of education for all Russian Orthodox subjects from the age of 5 to 18, excluding serfs, only modest action was taken. Catherine believed a “new kind of person” could be created by inculcating Russian children with European education.These culminated in Pugachev’s Rebellion, the largest peasant revolt in Russia’s history. Consequently, the unrest intensified and more than fifty peasant revolts occurred between 17.

However, military conscription and economy continued to depend on serfdom, and the increasing demands of the state and private landowners led to increased levels of reliance on serfs.


