THE AD-HOC ASSEMBLIES AND THE EUROPEAN COMMISSIONERS

No part of the world is more deserving of the serious consideration of great European Powers than these Principalities; on none, perhaps, do more important consequences depend. Sir Henry Bulwer Lytton to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Malmesbury, 27 July 18586 During the last months of the war, in 1855–56, and in the post-war period, the Romanian question had acquired more prominence as an issue in its own right, but remained entangled within anti-Russian and anti-Austrian positions in the European political arena. Articles and memoirs from all Moldo-Wallachian camps – radical, moderate, conservative – were being circulated in the press or sent directly to the French foreign ministry and the British cabinet.7 In the Principalities themselves, a pro-unification campaign was gaining strength, with the blessing of the French and Russian con- sular agents there, and to the great irritation of the Austrians.8 Austria and Turkey worked together in trying to undermine the unification movement, while Britain hesitated, although in practice both Stratford Canning and Colquhoun were against unification and were agitating against it in Constantinople and .9 After the , Austria, jointly with Russia, continued to oppose the return of the Romanian exiled former revolutionaries to their homes, a return which, it was suspected, was likely to supply the embattled Principalities with an important group of liberal-oriented politicians and a left-wing counterweight to the conservative and mod- erate factions on the ground. After the war, émigrés of a radical persua- sion such as Rosetti and the Brătianu brothers started to come round

6 The National Archives, London, PRO/FO 198/12. General Report of the European Commission in the Principalities. 7 N. Corivan analysed some of these memoirs in Din activitatea emigranţilor români în Apus, esp. Ch. 2: “Memoriile anonime şi memoriile străine”. For the originals of some of these memoirs, cf. Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Paris, Turquie, Mém. et Doc., vol. 54, as cited by Corivan. 8 Schroeder, Austria, 383. 9 Ibid., 391. 294 1856 to the more moderate positions of those in the diaspora who believed in diplomatic efforts rather than in armed insurgency and occult con- spiracy. The underground activities of Mazzini’s Central European Committee were now seen to belong to the pre-Crimean era, and open lobbying was the order of the day once again. The Vienna Conference (March–June 1855) had abolished the Russian protectorate over the Romanian Principalities. Russia was required to cede to an area of around 5,000 square kilometres in southern Bessarabia – the province Russia had annexed in 1812 – which, crucially, left her with- out access to the Danube and was going to sour relations with the new, united of 1859. The next stage in the negotiations, held in Constantinople, concluded with the protocol of 11 February 1856, which left the two Principalities as separate entities under Ottoman suzerainty. Largely engineered by Stratford Canning, this document emphasised once more Britain’s support for the inviolability of the , attempting to pre-empt initiatives calling for the union of the Romanian territories. A series of publications by pro-Romanians had been circulating before and during the Paris peace negotiations of 1855–6, popular- ising the Principalities, their history and culture, and sending both implicit and explicit unionist messages. Ubicini had been particularly active: in 1855 he edited Ballades et chants populaires de la Roumanie, which he published in the Revue d’Orient, and in 1856 his study “Prov- inces d’origine roumaine” was included in a propaganda monograph which he co-edited for the publishers Firmin Didot.10 The Romanian Cezar Bolliac’s Topographie de la Roumanie11 attempted to bolster the unionist project by emphasising the territorial extent of the ancient Dacian ‘Empire’ (which had covered the two Romanian Provinces and ), and the shared Latinity of the Romanians in all three regions, ideas which, as shown, were far from being endorsed by the Hungarians. One may question the political impact of such publica- tions, but there are suggestions that they were read and may have been quite effective in shaping the thinking of politicians at the time of the Congress. Lord Palmerston is said to have had a copy of Henry

10 Provinces danubiennes et roumaines, ed. Ubicini and Chopin (Paris, 1856). 11 Paris: Just. Rouvier Libraire-éditeur, 1856.