Beate Barbara Juliane Freifrau von Krüdener (; ), often called by her formal French name, Madame de Krüdener, was a Baltic German religious mystic, author, and Pietist Lutheran theologian who exerted influence on wider European Protestantism, including the Swiss Reformed Church and the Moravian Church, and whose ideas influenced Tsar Alexander I of Russia.
Family background Baroness von Krüdener was born in Riga, Governorate of Livonia. Her father, Baron Otto Hermann von Vietinghoff genannt Scheel, who had fought as a colonel in Catherine II's wars, was one of the two councillors for Livonia and a man of immense wealth. He was a man of rationalistic views and a leading freemason. Her mother, the Countess Anna Ulrika von Münnich, was a granddaughter of Burkhard Christoph von Münnich, a celebrated Russian field marshal, and a strict Lutheran.
Barbe-Julie de Vietinghoff, better known as Madame von Krüdener (Mme. de Krüdener) later in life, but, as a child, referred to as Juliana, was one of five children born into the wealthy Vietinghoff family.
Father Her father, Otto Hermann von Vietinghoff-Scheel, had started accruing his wealth from a young age, for as a young man, he proved to possess a knack for business. With his high ambitions, he entered into commercial enterprises that became highly successful. Some of his treasures included grand properties in Kosse (present-day Viitina, Estonia) and Marienburg, as well as his grandiose townhouse in Riga, where Barbe-Julie was born. Although he was never assigned an official title, he enjoyed the official rank as a privy counselor and as a senator and "would exclaim with pride 'I am Vietinghoff', and behave with all the arrogance of a great noble".
Mother Barbe-Julie's mother, Anna Ulrika von Münnich von Vietinghoff-Scheel, was herself born into nobility. Her grandfather, the famed Field Marshal Burkhard Christoph von Münnich, despite having been exiled for many years in Siberia, had led many successful campaigns against the Tartars and the Turks. Catherine II also made him one of her favorites, although, sometimes the status was fickle. Mme. de Vietinghoff mirrored her grandfather's success in her own household, as a mother of five (she bore two sons and three daughters), she was extremely dedicated, despite the death in infancy of her first son, and her physically handicapped eldest daughter (who was both mute and deaf, and whom the family eventually placed in an asylum in 1777).
Education
Her education, according to her own account, consisted of lessons in French spelling, deportment and sewing. At an early age, Barbe-Julie began learning French and German. The former allowed her access to the writings of the great philosophers, such as Voltaire and the Encyclopedists. It also gave her access to French culture, which her parents, along with other nobles, attempted to emulate and imitate. The importance of French ideals and culture seem to have replaced a need for religious studies, and because both of her parents were of German background. In spite of the quotation given ("it still remains unclear as to whether or not the Vietinghoff family were of Orthodox or Lutheran faith") the Vietinghoff family certainly was of Lutheran faith.
Marriage Although Barbe-Julie "was still an overgrown, undeveloped, silent girl, with a rather large nose and an uncertain complexion, [she possessed] ample promises of future beauty in her big blue eyes and curling chestnut hair, and in her singularly well-shaped hands and arms". Her potential beauty, combined with her being the heir to her parents’ wealth, resulted in an onslaught of marriage proposals. Her parents arranged for her to be married to the local neighborhood baron despite Barbe-Julie's incessant protesting.
Seeing no way out of her situation, the young baroness first started conversing with God. She begged him to save her from this horrid situation. He answered her with a case of the measles that left her less attractive (at least temporarily), which became at least a part of the baron's incentive to politely decline the marriage proposal. As a result, Barbe-Julie began to believe that she personally had a divine connection with God.
However, when Baron Burckhard Alexius Constantin von Krüdener, a widower sixteen years her senior, sought her hand, she had no such qualms. He was a well-educated (he attended the University of Leipzig), and a well-traveled man, who, like her father, was in favour with Catherine II. However, the baron, a diplomatist of distinction, was cold and reserved, while Barbe-Julie was frivolous, pleasure-loving, and possessed of an insatiable thirst for attention and flattery; and the strained relations due to this incompatibility of temper were made worse by her limitless extravagance, which constantly involved the young baroness and her husband in financial difficulties. At first, all went well. This was due to the fact that despite having an older husband for whom she did not possess any passionate feelings, his title and position in society were such that he could provide her whatever she might desire. At the same time, she endowed him with an even higher social status because of the social standing of her own family. However, this socially advantageous exchange left, for the baroness, much to be desired. Despite being materially pleased she was romantically unsatisfied. Her "earliest griefs arose from the fact, that, in her youthful inexperience, having chosen with her head, she expected at the same time to satisfy the longings of a singularly romantic heart". First she would pretend that her husband was something that he was not: a lover. This is especially evident in her description of him in her book. "The glowing description of the Count in Valérie represents Baron Krüdener more as his wife’s ardent imagination loved to picture him, than as he really was. The truth is, he did not lend himself readily to the role of a hero of romance". These notions, as well as the separation between her real husband and her fictional husband helped lead to marital instability and to the eventual love affairs she had with others.
On January 31, 1784, a son was born to them, named Paul after the grand-duke Paul (afterward emperor), who acted as god-father. The same year Baron Krüdener became ambassador at Venice, later (1786) at Munich where he remained until transferred to Copenhagen in 1787.
In 1787 the birth of a daughter (Juliette) aggravated the nervous disorders from which the baroness had for some time been suffering, and it was decided that she must go to the south for her health; she accordingly left, with her infant daughter and her stepdaughter Sophie. In 1789 she was at Paris when the Estates General met; a year later, at Montpellier, she met a young cavalry captain, Charles Louis de Frégeville, and a passionate attachment sprang up between them. They returned together to Copenhagen, where the baroness told her husband that her heart could no longer be his. The baron was coldly kind; he refused to hear of a divorce and attempted to arrange a modus vivendi, which was facilitated by the departure of de Frégeville for the war. All was useless; Juliana refused to remain at Copenhagen, and, setting out on her travels, visited Riga, St. Petersburg — where her father had become a senator of BerlinHe died while she was there in 1792. — Leipzig and Switzerland. In 1794 her husband became ambassador at Madrid. In 1800 her husband became ambassador in Berlin, and she joined him there. But the stiff court society of Prussia was irksome to her; money difficulties continued; and by way of climax, the murder of the Tsar Paul, in whose favor Baron Krüdener had stood high, made the position of the ambassador extremely precarious. The baroness seized the occasion to leave for the baths of Teplitz, whence she wrote to her husband that the doctors had ordered her to winter in the south. He died on June 14, 1802, without ever having seen her again.
Religious development
Towards the end of the Napoleonic wars religious thought was in tune with the general disillusionment with the ideals of the French Revolution, and thus a search for an alternative. She had an influence on the Swiss Réveil, and for a time her ideas had a profound effect on Alexander I of Russia. Through her contact with the Russian Emperor she and Henri-Louis Empaytaz, a member of the Réveil, were in part responsible for the religious aspects of the Holy Alliance.
Meanwhile, the baroness had been reveling in the intellectual society of Coppet and of Paris. She was now thirty-six; her charms were fading, but her passion for admiration survived. She had tried the effect of the shawl dance, in imitation of Emma, Lady Hamilton; she now sought fame in literature, and in 1803, after consulting Chateaubriand and other writers of distinction, published her Valérie, a sentimental romance, of which under a thin veil of anonymity she herself was the heroine. In January 1804 she returned to Riga, Livonia.
At Riga occurred her conversion. A gentleman of her acquaintance when about to salute her fell dying at her feet. The shock overset her not too well-balanced mind; she sought for consolation and found it in the ministrations of her shoemaker, an ardent disciple of the Moravian Brethren. Though she had "found peace", however, the disorder of her nerves continued and she was ordered by her doctor to the baths of Wiesbaden.
At Königsberg she had an interview with Queen Louise, and, more important still, with one Adam Müller, a rough peasant, to whom God had supposedly revealed a prophetic mission to King Frederick William III. Chiliasm was in the air. Napoleon was evidently Antichrist, and the latter days were about to be accomplished. Under the influence of the pietistic movement, the belief was widely spread, in royal courts, in-country parsonages, in peasant novels: a man would be raised up from the north from the rising of the sun (Isa. xli. 25); Antichrist would be overthrown, and Christ would come to reign a thousand years upon the earth. The interview determined the direction of the baroness's religious development.
A short visit to the Moravians at Herrnhut followed; then she went, via Dresden, to Karlsruhe, to sit at the feet of Heinrich Jung-Stilling who had great influence at the court of Baden and Stockholm and St. Petersburg.The consorts of Alexander I of Russia (Elizabeth Alexeievna), and of Gustav IV Adolf of Sweden (Friederike Dorothea), were princesses of Baden. By him she was instructed in the chiliastic faith and in the mysteries of the supernatural world. Then, hearing that a certain pastor in the Vosges, Jean Frédéric Fontaines, was prophesying and working miracles, she determined to go to him. On June 5, 1801, accordingly, she arrived at the Protestant parsonage of Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines, accompanied by her daughter Juliette, her stepdaughter Sophie and a Russian valet.