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The Consortium on Revolutionary Europe Proceedings 1980 Paschalis M. Kitromilides REPUBLICAN ASPIRATIONS IN SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE IN THE AGE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION The Consortium on Revolutionary Europe Proceedings 1980 Paschalis M. Kitromilides REPUBLICAN ASPIRATIONS IN SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE IN THE AGE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION The Consortium on Revolutionary Europe Proceedings 1980 THE CONSORTI UM ON REVOLUTIONARY EUROPE 1750-1850 Proceedings 1980 Volume I Donald D. Horward Editor Warren Spencer Editor-in-Chief of the Series A*thens, Georgia (e) 1980 by the Consortium on Revolutionary Europe REPUBLICAN ASPIRATIONS IN SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE IN THE AGE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION Paschalis M. Kitromilides The age of the "Democratic Revolution" is considered to be the period which germinated the major ideological traditions which developed into the mainstream of nineteenth century political thought and in a way continue to provide the basic framework of political speculation. In this perspective, the revolutionary epoch issued the death certificate of the great European tradition of civic humanism which had been continued in the eighteenth century by the radical strain in the Enlightenment; it was finally discredited by the extremities of the Jacobin experiment with the republic of virtue and was thenceforth abandoned to the strictures of nineteenth century liberals like Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville. My purpose in this essay is to draw the attention of students of the history of political discourse to an ignored stream of thought which carried on for a few decades after the abortive republic of virtue the tradi­ tion of radical civic humanism in the politics of Southeastern Europe. This ideological tradition emerged and developed under the impact of the French Revolution in Southeastern Europe. The influence and perceptions of the great Revolution in that outlying region of the continent provided the catalyst for the political articulation of the effects of a century of social and cultural change in the area. The decay of the institutions of Ottoman rule made possible, in the course of the greater eighteenth century, increased contacts with the West and the inception of processes of change in society and culture that led in the long run to the* revolutions of the nineteenth century and the emergence of the independent national states of the Balkans.1 The news from Paris created a veritable turmoil in Southeastern Europe. Official and self-appointed French agents, members of the Balkan mercantile and educated classes and visitors to the Nest, the Greek and Serbian newspapers which appeared for the first time in Vienna in the early 1790s and gradually a pamphleteering literature brought the news, appropriately colored and interpreted, to the Levant.2 Responses were naturally both positive and negative. Those segments of society which had benefited from the mobility of social change and had, by and large, constituted the public of the local Enlightenment, tended to espouse the French cause and they voiced loudly their republican aspirations. On the opposite side stood and closed their ranks not only the power brokers of the Ottoman state but also the leadership of the Greek Orthodox Church--the exponents of hierarchy and tradition who saw in the French Revolution the coming of the Antichrist. These traditionalist elements were'joint in their mistrust and active hostility to the Revolution by the then aging representatives of the 275 earlier generation of the Enlightenment in Balkan culture such as Samuel Clain among the Rumanians in Transylvania, Dositej Obradovich among the Serbs and Eugenios Voulgaris among the Greeks. These pioneers of intellectual change who had paved the way for the champions of revolutionary ideas against which they now warned, remained votaries of enlightened absolutism, represented in their eyes by the Josephinist and Catherinian paradigms, as the appro­ priate strategy for cultural and political change. In their old age, therefore, they could never condone the extremities they perceived in the French model. The ideological phenomena of republicanism and radicalism could be considered as attempts to elaborate those alternative "maps of problematic social reality and matrices for the creation of collective conscience"' by means of which the exponents of cultural and poli­ tical criticism wanted to appeal to their compatriots and articulate the tensions of change in their societies. This quest took different forms among the major Balkan nationalities. Among the Serbs the cardinal event of the period was the outbreak of the Serbian Revolu­ tion in 1804. Basically a peasant war, it was the product of the interlocking pressures of change in Balkan society and of the revolutionary waves of the period,4 but it is difficult to character­ ize it as a product of modern nationalism and French revolutionary inspiration. To the extent that some form of modern ideological influence was felt in the politics of the Serbian Revolution, it was exerted against and not for the French revolutionary principles. Such was the influence exercised by the foremost figure of the Serbian Enlightenment, Dositej Obradovich who acted as the minister of education and tutor to the son of the Serbian leader Karageorge. Obradovich, as already noted, though a genuine exponent of Enlighten­ ment rationalism and humanism, was politically a believer in en­ lightened absolutism and hence an enemy of republicanism and the French Revolution.5 Articulate republic yearnings were therefore absent from the political culture of the Serbian Revolution. They were only conditionally voiced by the distinguished intellectual leader Sava Tekelija as a possible option among other alternative conceptions of the political future of his homeland. Yet some of the political principles for which the French Revolution was a symbol found their way into the historical patrimony bequeathed by the revolutionary period to the Serbian political tradition. One contribution to this legacy was the attempt, whose significance was first appreciated by Leopold von Ranke, at state-building on 7 the model of the modern rational state during the Serbian Revolution. Furthermore, the effects of revolutionary institutional change intro­ duced during Napoleon's occupation of the Illyrian provinces • (1806- 1812) set an important precedent for subsequent generations of Serbian liberalism.8 In the case of the Rumanians, geographic and political frag­ mentation and profound social and cultural cleavages practically neutralized the extensive French influences which had been absorbed through the channel of Greek cultural predominance in the Danubian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia during the century of Phanariot rule which had turned the region into a veritable French cultural province in Eastern Europe. Thus, several Rumanian boyars were exposed to French culture and were appropriately prepared to g receive with keen interest the political messages of the Revolution. This was the ideological background of the Initiatives for political 276 change undertaken by groups of enlightened boyars in both Wallachia and Moldavia during the Austro-Russian invasion of the principali­ ties in 1790-91. At that time the boyars voiced their aspiration for national emancipation from Ottoman overlordship and especially from Greek Phanariot rule with the reconstruction of the princi­ palities into an aristocratic republic geared to the national aspirations but also to the vested social interests of the boyar class. A similar development occurred in Transylvania with the formulation and submission by the local Rumanian leadership of the Supplex Libel lus Valachorum to the emperor Leopold II, appealing to ancient rights and claiming equality for the Rumanian estates with those of the other nationalities of the Habsburg domains. It is debatable, however, whether it is possible to trace any ideological equivalence between the principles of the French Revolution and those enunciated by the Supplex Libellus Valachoru» which has been tra­ ditionally regarded-as the charter of Rumanian nationalism.10 In 1802 the Moldavian boyar Dumitrache Sturdza codified the aspirations agitating his class in the different parts of the Rumanian lands, in his project for an "Aristo-Democratic Republic."11 This important document was quite indicative of the climate of political opinion among those Rumanians who responded positively to the French Revolu­ tion. In all these cases, national and political aspirations foundered on the severe social cleavage in Rumanian society between the landowning boyar class and the dispossessed peasantry. The nationalist initiatives of the boyars could never develop into a radical movement of political change so long as their insistence upon the idea of an aristocratic republic failed to satisfy the yearnings of a hostile or indifferent peasantry. This basic social cleavage in Rumanian society not only undenainded the espousal of the principles of the French Revolution by the boyars, but it also determined the failure of the Rumanian revolt under Tudor Vlad imircr,cu in 1821 and sealed the eventual defeat of Rumanian liberalism during the subsequent period (1830-1848) when the French liberal influence reached its apogee in Rumania.^ The specific constraints that acted as brakes on political radicalism among the Northern Balkan nations were absent among the Greeks. In contrast to the Serbs, who were reached by the Enlighten­ ment through their diaspora in the Habsburg empire and therefore absorbed its tempered German version, the Greeks
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