«…On leur coupera la barbe et ils faudroient bien qu’ils endossent le frac»: la relation inédite de Charles René Pictet de Rochemont sur les mœurs de la haute société de la Moldavie en 1808
«… On leur coupera la barbe et ils faudroient bien qu’ils endossent le frac»: Charles René Pictet de Rochemont on Moldavia’s Nobility in 1808. An Unprecedented Narrative

Summary/Abstract: Charles René Pictet de Rochemont was born in Lancy near Geneva but had been living in Odessa for a short time before joining the Duke of Richelieu’s trip to Iași in April – May 1808. There he visited General Prozorowski, the Commander-in-chief of the Russian army during the campaign.Even if the contact with the Moldavian nobility was brief, it resulted in several remarkable observations made by the young Swiss on the manners and habits of the social elite. At the time, they had started embracing the European practice without fully giving up the traditional, Oriental one. These observations were initially written in one of Pictet de Rochemont’s letters to his friend and associate, Léonard Revilliod. However, they will be resumed and further detailed in a narrative published by Pictet de Rochemont in the same year (1808) and in another letter, sent to his sister – Amélie Pictet de Rochemont – in Geneva. These three writings (representing the documentary foundation of this research) are added to the already known series of observations belonging to the Baron d’Hauterive, Johann Christian von Struve, the Duke of Richelieu, Count de Langeron, Count de Rochechouart, Charles-Frédéric Reinhard etc. Nonetheless, Pictet de Rochemont’s story makes it even clearer than the other authors’ writings which were the “ground zero” for the Moldavian (and, generally, the Principalities) nobility’s Europeanisation process, which ended half a century later.

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