A Circle of Friends Balkan Studies Library

Editor-in-Chief Zoran Milutinović, University College London

Editorial Board Gordon N. Bardos, Columbia University Alex Drace-Francis, University of Liverpool Jasna Dragović-Soso, Goldsmiths, University of London Christian Voss, Humboldt University, Berlin

Advisory Board Marie-Janine Calic, University of Munich Lenard J. Cohen, Simon Fraser University Radmila Gorup, Columbia University Robert M. Hayden, University of Pittsburgh Robert Hodel, Hamburg University Anna Krasteva, New Bulgarian University Galin Tihanov, The University of Manchester Maria Todorova, University of Illinois Andrew Wachtel, Northwestern University

VOLUME 3 A Circle of Friends

Romanian Revolutionaries and Political Exile, 1840–1859

By Angela Jianu

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2011 On the cover: The Constitution, Bucharest, 11 June 1848. Copy after a watercolor by Costake Petrescu, undated. Reproduced by kind permission of the Museum of National History, Bucharest, Romania. The text on the flag reads: “Justice, Brotherhood”, the slogan of the Romanian revolutionaries.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jianu, Angela. A circle of friends : Romanian revolutionaries and political exile, 1840–1859 / by Angela Jianu. p. cm. — (Balkan studies library, ISSN 1877-6272 ; v. 3) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-18779-5 (hbk. : acid-free paper) 1. Revolutionaries—Romania— History—19th century. 2. Revolutionaries—Romania—Biography. 3. Exiles— Romania—Biography. 4. Exiles—Europe—Biography. 5. Romania—History— 1821–1859—Biography. 6. Romania—History—Revolution, 1848. 7. Romania— Politics and government—1821–1866. 8. Europe—Politics and government— 1848–1871. 9. Transnationalism—Political aspects—Europe—History—19th century. 10. Nation-building—Europe—History—19th century. I. Title.

DR244.J53 2011 949.8’016—dc22

2011000134

ISSN 1877-6272 ISBN 978 90 04 18779 5

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. For my parents, Magdalena and Nicolae Jianu

CONTENTS

List of Figures ...... ix List of Abbreviations ...... xi Acknowledgements ...... xiii

Introduction ...... 1

PART ONE STUDENTS AND REVOLUTIONARIES 1844–1848

Jules Michelet, “Madame Rosetti”, 1855 ...... 17 1837–1841: Early Diplomatic Ventures ...... 28 1844–1848: The Collège de France: Sociability and Protest ...... 33 Jules Michelet and ‘Les Franco-Roumains’: Dumitru Brătianu ... 51 1848 in Paris and Europe ...... 62 1848–1849: Bucharest between St. Petersburg and Constantinople ...... 67 A Transylvanian Interlude ...... 90 1848: Epilogue ...... 93

PART TWO EXILE 1849–1855

1849, Paris: Early Days in Exile ...... 115 1849: Dumitru Brătianu and the English ‘philo-Romanians’ ..... 127 Hungarians and Romanians in 1849–1850 ...... 136 April 1849: The Transylvanian Debacle ...... 164 July–August 1849 ...... 167 September 1849 ...... 172 December 1849 ...... 175 1850: ‘La Roumanie’ ...... 178 April–September 1850 ...... 183 viii contents

1851: London. Mazzini’s European Democratic Committee ...... 189 1851: London-Bucharest-Paris ...... 196 1852: Nantes-Paris-Bucharest ...... 214 1853: Nantes-Paris-London ...... 223 1853: Paris: “Madame Rosetti” ...... 234 1853–1854: Paris: Ion Brătianu and the ‘Hippodrome Affair’ ... 242 1853: Paris-Gallipoli-Constantinople: Rosetti’s War ...... 252 January–February 1854: London ...... 258 January 1854: Serbia ...... 263 The Crimean War ...... 273 The Daily News and the Romanian Principalities ...... 278 The End of the War and the Peace Conference ...... 285

PART THREE THE RETURN OF THE EXILES 1856–1857

A Republican Funeral ...... 291 The Ad-hoc Assemblies and the European Commissioners ...... 293 July 1856 ...... 301 6 October: The Brighton Meeting ...... 305 1857 ...... 313 The Elections ...... 320 1858: The Congress of Paris and the Union of the Principalities ...... 326

EPILOGUE

After Exile ...... 333 The Uses of the Press ...... 345 The ‘People Question’ ...... 350 The Uses of Exile ...... 353 Liberalism in Romania ...... 357 Conclusions ...... 359

Bibliography ...... 363 Index ...... 377 LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1: Map of the Romanian Principalities, Transylvania and the Ottoman Empire showing the main locations of the Moldo-Wallachian revolutionaries in exile, c. 1848–1858 ...... xv Fig. 2: Marie Rosetti as Revolutionary Romania by Constantin D. Rosenthal, c. 1850. Reproduced by kind permission of the National Art Museum, Bucharest, Romania ...... 16 Fig. 3: Constantin D. Rosenthal, Portrait of Marie Rosetti, undated (c. 1850) (Oil on synthetic slate) Reproduced by kind permission of the National Art Museum, Bucharest, Romania ...... 114

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

B. A. R. = Biblioteca Academiei Române (The Library of the Romanian Academy) EARSR = Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România FO = Foreign Office PRO = Public Records Office (National Archives, London) SMIMod = Studii şi materiale de istorie modernă (an annual publication of the Romanian Academy, Bucharest)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank staff at a number of research and academic libraries who have invariably responded with great solicitude to my requests. In Bucharest, the librarians in the manuscript sections of the Library of the Romanian Academy (B. A. R.) and the National Library have been most helpful. Staff at the National Archives in Bucharest were equally supportive. I also enjoyed the support of library staff at the “Nicolae Iorga” Historical Research Institute in Bucharest. In Britain, I was fortunate to have access to the major repositories of the British Library, the School of Slavonic and East European Studies Library, as well as of the university libraries at Huddersfield, York, and Warwick. Searches at the National Archives in Kew were a constant source of pleasant surprises. In Paris, I was privileged to be able to enjoy a few happy weeks at the Bibliothèque Nationale and to bask in the special atmosphere of Jules Michelet’s great city. I wish to express my gratitude to a number of historians and research- ers who were generous with their time, advice and other kindnesses. At the “Nicolae Iorga” Historical Research Institute, Violeta Barbu, Anca Popescu, and Raluca Tomi were always ready with suggestions, photocopies and encouragement. Lia Brad-Chisacof at the Institute of South-East European Studies in Bucharest kindly supplied photocopies of much-needed material, apart from sustaining an occasionally flagging morale. Karen Offen and Jane Rendall, my former PhD supervisor at the University of York (UK), read Part One of the manuscript and made a number of useful corrections and judicious suggestions. I am particularly grateful to Alex Drace-Francis and an anonymous reviewer for their attentive and sympathetic close reading of the manuscript. I have greatly benefited from Dr. Drace-Francis’ knowledge of Romanian history and historiography, as well as from the comprehen- siveness of his bibliographic lists. If I could not follow up on all of their suggestions, it is entirely my responsibility. Ivo Romein, the Balkans Studies Library series editor at Brill, patiently waited for the manuscript to be delivered and kindly offered his support in commissioning the map and obtaining permissions for the illustra- tions. I shall miss his cheering e-mail messages from Leiden. xiv acknowledgements

Mirjam Elbers at Brill patiently prepared the text for publication and put up with delays. I wish to thank Zoran Milutinović, the editor-in- chief of the Balkan Studies Library at Brill, for supporting this project and for giving a ‘home’ to the Romanian nineteenth-century exiles. Work on this book would have been nearly impossible to carry out without support from my own ‘circle of friends’. Anca Popescu welcomed me in her home and shared with me her knowledge of Ottoman history and the delights of Balkan cuisine. Violeta Barbu and Daniel Barbu are models of scholarly dedication and elegant hospitality. In Iaşi, Ruxandra Ciulu responded promptly with scans of a hard-to-find issue ofXeno- poliana. Paul Bembridge, currently a research fellow at the University of Exeter, has shared with me his love of the English language and his vast knowledge of the ‘occult arts’. I also wish to send a nod to Alan Wakeman, the man from ‘the old country’. My mother has made it all possible. It is to her and to my late father that this book is affectionately dedicated. Fig. 1: Map of the Romanian Principalities, Transylvania and the Ottoman Empire showing the main locations of the Moldo-Wallachian revolutionaries in exile, c. 1848–1858.

INTRODUCTION

[. . .] a monument to our friendship, which is going to tell our children how much we have loved each other and how sincerely we have done so. This is all we have got, but it will haunt the future. Alfred Dumesnil to Ion Brătianu, 10 July 18521 On 18 May 1876, more than two years after his death, the remains of Jules Michelet were exhumed from his tomb at Hyères (department of Var) and transported to Paris to be re-interred, with due pomp and circumstance, at the cemetery of Père Lachaise, the venue of so many of the historian’s walks and musings on death, memory and history. Michelet, the arch-Parisian, and perhaps the most inspiring nineteenth-century historian of the great city, had once called Père Lachaise “this immense history of the nineteenth century assembled in one place.”2 The choice of such a symbolically-charged burial place for him appears with hindsight as more than appropriate, but at the time, it was a cause of family disputes and legal battles. To be able to turn her husband’s funeral from a private event into a public, political one, Athénaïs Michelet defied not only the wishes of Michelet’s inheritors (notably of Alfred Dumesnil, his son-in-law), but also Michelet’s own, as they were inscribed in his testament of 1 February 1872, in which he requested to be buried with the least ceremony in the nearest cemetery, and the money thus saved to be donated to the poor.3 The tribunal civil de la Seine, however, where the matter was adjudicated, decided in favour of the widow, and Michelet’s remains left Toulon on 17 May, to be deposed overnight at his last Parisian address, at 76, rue d’Assas (formerly rue de l’Ouest). The next morning, as the funeral cortège was about to depart, Mme. Michelet was joined in her carriage by Michelet’s two trustees and by Marie Rosetti, an old friend of the Michelets and the wife of

1 Jules Michelet, Correspondance générale, ed. Louis Le Guillou, 12 vols. (Paris, 1994–2001), 7: 124. 2 Michelet, entry for 13 April 1842, in idem, Journal, ed. Paul Viallaneix, 2 vols. (Paris, 1959), 1: 395. 3 Paul Viallaneix, Michelet, les travaux et les jours, 1798–1874 (Paris, 1998), 543. 2 introduction a leading Romanian liberal.4 The huge cortège comprised intellectual peers and disciples, representatives of the Collège de France, students, and members of Italian, Romanian and Polish delegations, representatives of the ‘unfortunate’ nations whose loyal patron Michelet had been. Wearing buttonholes of yellow and red everlasting flowers – the civic funeral symbol preferred in republican circles – the crowd assembled at the Père Lachaise for one of the greatest of the republican funerals of a major Second Empire public figure. Alongside the four orators, the historians François Mignet and Ernest Bersot from the Institut, and Edouard Laboulaye and Ernest Havet from the Col- lège de France, who spoke about Michelet’s heritage as a historian, a republican and a man of honour, the historian’s role as spokesman for the smaller nations of Central and Eastern Europe was invoked by George Cantacuzino,5 Athénaïs’s former Romanian pupil and now a law student in Paris.6 Thus, owing to an act of loving betrayal by his widow, Michelet’s funeral became a public event laden with rich republican and anti- clerical symbolism, attended by thousands, watched by the police, a funerary ceremony which, along with the other funerals of major republicans, was partly subversive and partly integrative.7 It was integrative in the sense that it brought together not only the workmen and the students, as Michelet had always wished, but also the republicans of the old guard, who had suffered marginalisation and exile in the Second Empire, the new republicans poised for power in the 1870s, and the French left. Joined with them in mourning were representatives of the still consolidating Central-East-European left. Financed by national and international subscriptions, a classically- inspired monument by the sculptor Antonin Mercié was erected on Michelet’s tomb on 14 July 1882, also under the supervision of his ever-watchful widow. Above an effigy of their dead infant son, Lazare, lies the toga-draped figure of Michelet himself, mourned by the veiled figure of bereaved History. “May God allow me to be reunited with my dearly departed. Let Him receive my soul, replete with gratitude for so much good, for so many years of labour, for so many works

4 Ibid., 544. 5 The name appears as Georges Cantacuzène in French-language sources. 6 Viallaneix, Les Travaux, 545. For the entire account of the funeral see Mme. Michelet, La Mort et les funérailles de Michelet (Paris, 1876). 7 Avner Ben-Amos, Funerals, Politics and Memory in Modern France, 1789–1996 (Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. 127. introduction 3 and so many friends”, runs the inscription at the bottom of the tomb, an excerpt from Michelet’s diary. On one side, carved on a column are the names of the countries which subscribed to the monument. Among them were Greece, Poland, Hungary, Romania. Every element in the monument, from its classical design to the mythological allegory and the inscriptions, suggest that the historian was symbolically placed in a republican continuum that went from the ancient Roman republic to the dreamt-of pan-European confraternity of the ‘république universelle.’ Work and friendship had sustained Michelet in times of personal and political uncertainty: it was this stoical message that he had passed on to his circle of friends in Paris, many of whom were strangers in exile, young people with a mission, grappling with the huge task of not only writing about nations, but of actually building them. It was not so much a doctrine that Michelet had taught them, but a model of humanity.

The Events

The present narrative refers to the Romanian (or Danubian Princi- palities) of Wallachia and Moldavia as they were politically constituted until their unification in 1862 and their transformation into the Kingdom of Romania in 1881. By the fifteenth century, both Wallachia and Moldavia came under Ottoman control and were administered according to the principles of the dar al-‘ahd (‘abode of the covenant’) which guaranteed their autonomy in exchange for a regime of material obligations.8 The Principalities retained their own administration, political structures, religion and, until the eighteenth century, their own native princes. These were replaced by Greeks from the Phanar quarter in Constantinople from the early eighteenth century until 1822. Under the so-called Phanariot regimes, ruling princes were nothing more than top civil servants in the Ottoman state hierarchy, while continuing to behave as sovereigns by divine right at home. It was not until after the Crimean War, when the Principalities were placed under the guarantee of the European powers, that the princes started to disengage themselves from both Ottoman and Russian tutelage.

8 For the ‘dar-al-‘ahd’ system see Daniel Goffman,The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2002), 46. For a Romanian perspective on Ottoman administration in the provinces, see Viorel Panaite, The Ottoman Law of War and Peace: the Ottoman Empire and tribute payers (Boulder, Colorado, 2000). 4 introduction

In both principalities, the Prince was aided by a twelve-member (occasionally eight-member) Council (‘Sfatul domnesc’, called ‘Divan’ from the seventeenth century onwards) which comprised only boyars of the first class9 as well as the Metropolitan and a number of bishops. Membership in the Council was through direct appointment by the Prince. Family relations, matrimonial arrangements and client interests were all of paramount importance in the appointments, and Princes frequently ran the danger of being taken hostage by difficult- to-manoeuvre group interests and of being caught between the iron grip of the Porte on the one hand and the ambitions of the scheming boyars on the other. In addition to the Council, a second body of privileged social groups was associated to government, albeit infrequently: the Country – or National – Assembly (‘Adunarea ţării’), called up at irregular intervals to be consulted on fiscal matters or constitutional changes. Regarded by some historians as an assembly of the estates, or even as a representative body operating within a régime de notables, it may have been in fact simply a way for the Prince to widen decision- making to include boyars who were not members of the Divan, provincial landowners, as well as members of the clergy and the military.10 Like its Russian counterpart, the ‘Zemskij sobor’, the Assembly had no clear-cut composition or attributes and, under the double assault of the central power and the Ottoman suzerain power, its power declined in the seventeenth century. In addition to Ottoman suzerainty, and especially after the Russo- Turkish treaty of Küçük Kaynarca of 1774, Russia imposed a protectorate over the Principalities which de facto remained in place until the Crimean War. Starting with the eighteenth century, another great power became increasingly involved with the history of the Roma- nian Principalities: Austria. Contesting their Ottoman-appointed ruler and appealing to one great power or another (Russia, Austria, Turkey, France and Britain) for the preservation of the principalities’ semi- autonomy and of their own rights as a class became the Romanian elites’ main political objective and dominated Romanian political life up to the revolution of 1848 and its aftermath.

9 There were three classes of boyars. 10 For a more detailed discussion of the Country Assembly and the Wallachian state in the seventeenth century, see Cristina Codarcea, “Le caractère de l’état valaque – quelques considérations,” in Pouvoirs et mentalités, ed. Laurenţiu Vlad (Bucharest, 1999), 71–87. introduction 5

The early nineteenth century in Romanian history was a crucial period during which a small but influential group of reformist nobles and intellectuals addressed concepts such as the nation, the ethnic unity and the shared traditions of the Romanians in the various provinces they inhabited, rejecting the Ottoman, Russian and South-East European developmental models and steering their emergent nation towards the Western, and more specifically the French, model. France as a political template was a natural choice: although in the early modern period the Romanians evolved in a Slavonic cultural context, which meant that even their Romance language was written in Cyrillic up to the 1850s, they retained a strong connection to their Latin origins and an equally strong attraction to ‘fellow-Latins’ in Western Europe.11 The diplomatic and theoretical contributions of this small elite group prepared the ground for landmarks such as the abolition of the Ottoman commercial monopoly in 1829, the union of the Principalities in 1861, the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in 1866 and eventually for national independence in 1877. Up to the new regime created after the Crimean War, the domestic and foreign policies of the Romanian Principalities were forged at the intersection of several centres of power and influence: the Greek and native oligarchy, the suzerain and protecting powers and their respective consular representatives in the country, and the European concert, increasingly concerned over the integrity of the Ottoman Empire and the expansion of Russia’s sphere of influence. In the two Principalities, the oligarchs retained their almost absolute control over administration and economic management. A creeping tension started to build up between the first-class boyars of the Divan and national assemblies, politically conservative and generally oriented towards Russia, and the second-class boyars and younger intellectuals, of a liberal or radical orientation, who were employed in the provincial administration. The latter largely favoured Turkish over Russian control, and steered their country towards the French sphere of influence. There were considerable differences between Moldavia and Walla- chia in terms of patterns of land-ownership and boyar-peasant relations. The feudal seigneurial system was much stronger in Moldavia, possibly due to the influence of the Polish model, while the connection to the land was weaker among Wallachian boyars, which explains why

11 See note 25 below. 6 introduction they turned to capitalist forms of entrepreneurship and to civil service as their main source of income and status. In addition, for complex reasons, by the early nineteenth century, class divides (for instance between the boyar and the merchant, or ‘middle’, class) were much more blurred in Wallachia and crossing these boundaries in both directions was easier to accomplish than in the more segregated and class-conscious Moldavian society. The contrast between Wallachia’s more ‘democratic’ ethos and Moldavia’s more ‘aristocratic’ culture might explain why many Wallachian boyars of the generation born in the first two decades of the nineteenth century12 – people such as the Rosettis, the Brătianus, the Golescus, the ‘heroes’ of the 1848 saga – became quite quickly disengaged from the traditions and conventions of their class and embraced radical politics with surprising readiness. My narrative focuses on the Wallachian Romanians, rather than on the Moldavians: at this stage, the Wallachians – students in Paris in the 1840s and exiles after 1848 – appear to have been more actively engaged on the international stage and, owing to skilful handling of the written word, their interactions with French and British political and intellectual circles have left more tangible trails.13 It is not unusual for historians in the two academic centres, Bucharest and Iaşi, to dispute – more or less explicitly – the pre-eminence of one province over the other in the nineteenth-century nation-building effort.14 In some accounts, Moldavia is seen as the ‘sacrificed’ province, the victim of political quid pro quos largely engineered by the ‘exalted’ Wallachian radicals in the 1850s. This regional ‘rivalry’ is not addressed in this book. This narrative is not an archive-driven, revisionist or ‘definitive’ account of the revolutions of 1848 in Romania. It is not so much a

12 They were born between 1809 (Ştefan Golescu) and 1821 (Ion C. Brătianu). 13 For a serviceable summary of the state of the Romanian Principalities in the first half of the nineteenth century, and of the interplay of Greek, Russian and French cultural influences., see Béla Borsi-Kálmán,Hungarian Exiles and the Romanian National Movement, 1849–1867 (Boulder, Colorado, 1991), especially chapter one. Cf. also Keith Hitchins, The Romanians, 1774–1866 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), esp. chapter 3: “The Spirit of the Times, 1774–1829”. 14 Mihai Cojocariu’s Partida naţională şi constituirea statului român (1856–1859) (Iaşi, 1995) is a case in point. While not averse to the occasional disparaging aside on the Wallachians’ contribution to the events of 1848 and the 1850s, Cojocariu offers detailed information on the turbulent political life of both provinces in the years and months leading to the double election of Prince Cuza in 1859. In particular, it has the merit of highlighting the role played by the eminent Moldavian politician and historian Mihail Kogălniceanu in creating the blueprint for a new democratic culture. introduction 7 study of ‘hard facts’ as one of subjective perceptions of facts seen from the often emotional, biased, self-congratulatory or self-deprecating perspective of direct participants in the events. Its thematic focus is on the bonds and affinities which united the Wallachian exiles of 1848 both with each other and with their French, English, Scottish, Polish, Hungarian and Italian peers, and on the experience of exile which created inter-related groups of marginalised intellectuals in Europe between 1848 and 1859. Likewise, the thorny question of ethnic relations in Transylvania and the Austrian Empire is only contextual and viewed here from the often very unreasonable and emotionally charged angle of individuals on the Romanian and Hungarian sides. From this perspective, words such as ‘Magyar terrorism’ and accusations of ethnic hatred hurled privately or publicly from all sides in the heated dialogue should come as no shock to modern multicultural sensibilities. Likewise, ‘Russophobia’ is a term that might offend today, yet it should be remembered that not only was it the creation of a classic study written at the height of the Cold War by a Western historian,15 but that it also reflects the passionate personal reaction of individuals living well before the age of political correctness. The channels of anti-tsarist opinions were dissidents for whom Russian ‘protection’ in the nineteenth century often meant arrest, deportation, surveillance, expropriation and exile. It is, therefore, a political and emotional, not an ethnic, category.

The People

In Romania, the main leaders of the revolution of 1848 belonged to the nobility and the gentry. Some came from the country’s oldest and most prominent native boyar families of the first class, such as the Filipescu, Cretzulescu, Golescu, Ghica and Voinescu families. The Rosettis, although Italians from Constantinople originally, had been thoroughly integrated into native boyardom by the time Constantin Rosetti was born in 1816. The Brătianu brothers,16 Dumitru and Ion, Christian Tell, Ion Eliade Rădulescu, General Gheorghe Magheru, and

15 John Howes Gleason, The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain (Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1950). 16 For their origins and background, see Part One, 51 sqq. 8 introduction others belonged to the country gentry, but came from equally well- established families.17 Through his marriage to the Guernsey-born Marie Grant, Rosetti formed a close association with her brother, Effingham Grant, the secretary at the British consulate in Bucharest, and with the latter’s superior, Robert G. Colquhoun, the British Consul-General in Wallachia. Research for this study has revealed for the first time the genealogical ties uniting the two Scotsmen, Grant and Colquhoun, who both played central roles in the events of 1848 in Romania. They were constant allies of the beleaguered revolutionaries in 1848–49, providing laissez- passers and facilitating the correspondence of the exiles with the families back home. In addition, the consul’s dispatches to the Foreign Office, as well as his manuscript diary for 1848, held at the National Library of Romania, contain a rich, and only partly exploited so far, mine of information on the events and the people involved in them. The Golescu brothers and their cousins belonged to a formidable clan in which women played a major role. The matriarch, Zoe (Zinca) Golescu, born around 1792, was the “brave maman”, as she described herself in a letter of 1839,18 a “model for the mothers of future societies”, as Rosetti believed.19 A mother at the age of thirteen, in time she became the focal point of an entire microcosm comprising her four sons, one daughter, nieces, nephews and grandchildren. Widowed by 1830, she was the one who administered and sold lands, made loans and sent much-needed money, petitioned for the liberation of her exiled relatives, nurtured, consoled and comforted. The careers of her Western-educated sons, Ştefan, Nicolae, Radu and Alexandru, are perhaps the best epitome for the transformation of Romanian elite landowners into citizens and into what her son, Alexandru, called the “wild patriots” and the “sans-culotte republicans” of the new generation of 1848.20 To these native elite groups were added two prominent participants in the events who were not Romanian-born. Henric Winterhalder had

17 Mihai Sorin Rădulescu, Elita liberală românească, 1866–1900 (Bucharest, 1998), 147. The name ‘Eliade’ also appears variously as ‘Heliade’ and ‘Eliad’ in Romanian- and French-language sources. 18 George Fotino, Din vremea renaşterii naţionale a Ţării Româneşti: boierii Goleşti, 4 vols. (Bucharest, 1939), 1: 6. (Hereafter the four volumes will be cited as Fotino 1, 2, 3 and 4.) 19 Postscript to a letter from Effingham Grant to Ştefan Golescu, 27 October 1852, in Fotino 3: 390. 20 Fotino 2: 15–8, 34. introduction 9 arrived in Bucharest from Vienna at the age of twenty in 1828, and became a close friend and business associate of Rosetti’s. Although not academically-trained, he had a keen business sense, and later worked in journalism and contributed to the newspaper Românul [The Roma- nian], edited by Rosetti in exile in Paris. Constantin D. Rosenthal was a Hungarian-born Jewish painter, who participated in the 1848 events and who paid the ultimate price in an Austrian prison for his close involvement in conspiratorial revolutionary activities in Hungary. The French allies and associates of the exiled Romanian revolutionaries belonged to circles of students and intellectuals revolving round the historians Jules Michelet and Edgar Quinet at the Collège de France, where most of the Romanians attended lectures in the 1840s. In addition, through their marriages, the two French historians formed close links with groups of Romanians and other East- and Central-European expatriates in Paris. Michelet, in particular, had a powerful impact on this small, but active group of expatriate students who were seduced by his ideas on the “heroism of the mind”,21 on the people as the main agent of historical change, on a “social God”,22 and especially by his visionary concept of history-making (and history-writing) as resur- rection. As if prompted by Michelet’s idea that a generation of talkers should be replaced by a generation of action,23 these people were going to become the first modern revolutionaries of East-Central Europe, and later its generals, ministers, writers, civil servants, bankers and engineers, the new intelligentsia of a young Europe with liberal and democratic aspirations. Coming from areas whose nation-building projects were being crushed at the intersection of the great Eastern Empires (Austrian, Ottoman, Russian), the young men and women who listened to Michelet must have responded strongly to his impassioned warning that “violating the national being becomes the greatest of crimes.”24 On the French side, championing and disseminating such ideas went hand in hand with France’s notion of itself as an inspira- tional force and an example, as “la France universelle”, whose cultural

21 Jules Michelet, Cours au Collège de France, ed. Paul Viallaneix, 2 vols. (Paris, 1995), 2, “Postface”, 720. 22 Jules Michelet, L’Histoire universelle (Paris, 1834), 98. 23 Bible de l’Humanité: une année au Collège de France, in Jules Michelet, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Paul Viallaneix, 14 vols. (Paris: Flammarion, 1971–1987), 1: 565. 24 “Le crime de violer la personnalité nationale devient le plus grands des crimes.” Marin Bucur, ed., Jules Michelet şi revoluţionarii români în documente şi scrisori de epocă (1846–1874) (Cluj Napoca, 1982), 16, quoting from Michelet’s Histoire de la révolution française. 10 introduction and political patronage in Europe was and had to remain unparalleled. The East-Europeans responded to such missionary zeal by embracing an all-encompassing political Francophilia based on the hope that whatever was being accomplished in France would eventually benefit all nations, large and small, and that France would provide the moral and possibly even the military support for the changes. Francophilia had been a prominent feature of elite culture in the Romanian Principalities starting with the late eighteenth century, largely as a result of the country’s ethnic and linguistic Latin origins, which the Romanians were keen to foreground as a counter-weight to pan-slavism and Russian expansionism.25 The attraction was reinforced in the 1840s when the Romanians living in Paris had direct contact with the great nation and its political accomplishments. The kinship was so strongly felt on the Romanian side that it was no mere rhetoric to claim that “Romanians have two homelands: the land where they were born and France.”26 Most forty-eighters featuring in this narrative, including Constantin and Marie Rosetti, corresponded in French, which they found more comfortable than a still unwieldy, hybrid, transitional Romanian. Visiting Frenchmen found Wallachia quaintly and endearingly reminiscent of France. Hippolyte Desprez, a pro-Romanian journalist who was to make an important contribution to the Romanian exiles’ propaganda in Paris in the 1850s, was favourably impressed by Bucharest when he visited in 1847:

25 There are two classic studies on French influence in Romania: 1. Pompiliu Eliade’s De l’influence française sur l’esprit public en Roumanie (Paris, 1898), published in Romanian in 1982 (Bucharest: Editura Univers) and re-edited in 2000 (Bucharest: Editura Humanitas) as Influenţa franceză asupra spiritului public în România, and 2. John C. Campbell, French Influence and the Rise of Roumanian Nationalism (New York: Arno Press, 1971). More recent contributions include: Dan Berindei, “Diffusion des ‘idées françaises’ dans les pays roumains et l’impact de la Révolution de 1789” in the miscellaneous volume 1789 Weltwirkung einer grossen Revolution (Berlin, 1989) and the same material in Romanian in Dan Berindei, Românii şi Europa: istorie, soci- etate, cultură, vol. 1: Secolele XVIII–XIX (Bucharest: Ed. Museion, 1991). An older, but still useful study is Germaine Lebel’s France et les Principautés Danubiennes du XVIe siècle à la chute de Napoléon (Paris: Publications de la Faculté des Lettres d’Alger. ser. 2. no. 271955). Also relevant is the study by Al. Zub, Reflections on the Impact of the French Revolution: 1789, de Tocqueville, and Romanian culture (Iaşi, Portland: Center for Romanian Studies, 2000). For a short summary, see Lucian Boia, Roma- nia: borderland of Europe (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), “From the Balkans to the West”, 81–7. 26 Letter from Ion Brătianu and Constantin Rosetti to Edgar Quinet, 26 June 1848, quoted in T.-G. Djuvara, Edgar Quinet philoroumain (Paris: 1906), 20. introduction 11

[. . .] apart from the Oriental usage of offering pipes, sweetmeats and sherbet to anybody who visits, the salons of Bucharest do not differ in any respect from ours. Our newspapers and books are on display on all the tables; when one does not sing some aria from our operas, one reads aloud our vaudevilles in the evening; our politics is being debated with passion; everybody knows the names of our politicians, who, however, are far from returning the favour. No matter how obscure we are, we are received there with fraternal eagerness and soon we are made to feel as if en famille. There is no occasion or reason to remind ourselves that in Bucharest we are in a vassal country of the Ottoman Porte. In truth, there are no signs there of the Porte’s power: no crescent, no minarets, no trace of Turks. But there is a tri-colour flag which, emblazoned with the Romanian eagle carrying the cross in its beak, is carried by the battalions of a militia trained in European-style discipline.27 If one of the features of a modern society is the transformation of ‘subjects’ into ‘citizens’, then what impressed Desprez most was the rapid pace at which Europeanization had turned Romania into a modern nation and its members from “men fallen below the Greeks of the Bas-Empire” into “Romanian patriots.”28

The Texts

It would have been impossible to tell this story without some splendid editions of the journals and correspondence of the 1848 protagonists in Romania and France alike. I am indebted to the late Marin Bucur, in particular, for his editions of Rosetti’s works, diary and especially the two volumes of the Romanian politician’s correspondence with his wife, Marie.29 The Rosettis’ correspondence was pursued with occasional lapses from 1846 to 1883, a period during which the spouses were separated for a total of over twenty years. The letters were later dispersed, fragmented, or donated to libraries by their various owners in fits and starts. Even pages belonging to the same letter were chaotically placed under different shelf-marks in archives, Bucur

27 Hippolyte Desprez, Les Peuples de l’Autriche et de la Turquie: histoire contemporaine des Illyriens, des Magyars, des Roumains et des Polonais, 2 vols. (Paris, 1850), 1: 111–2. 28 Ibid., 113. 29 Marin Bucur, ed., C. A. Rosetti către Maria Rosetti, Corespondenţă, 2 vols. (Bucharest, 1988–1998) (Hereafter C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti). Fragments from the Rosettis’ correspondence had been previously published in Documente şi manuscrise literare, ed. Paul Cornea and Elena Piru, 2 vols. (Bucharest, 1969), 2: 245–351. 12 introduction revealed as he told the troubled ‘biography’ of this correspondence in the introduction to his edition. Some of Bucur’s work, notably his edition of the exchange of letters between Jules Michelet and the Roma- nian forty-eighters,30 was incorporated into the monumental edition of Jules Michelet’s correspondence, edited by Louis Le Guillou31 who, revealingly, recounts how, working under a Communist regime in the 1970s, Bucur had to be careful to tone down some of the revolutionaries’ less acceptable anti-Russian outbursts. The overlapping texts of the Romanian exiles and of their French mentors and friends constitutes a veritable “database” of the century, to use Le Guillou’s description of Michelet’s letters,32 and it forms the source base of the present study. It may be objected that my selection of primary texts has favoured the radical Rosetti-Brătianu-Golescu group, and that too little attention has been paid to the memoirs and testimonies of some of their more moderate peers, people like Ion Eliade Rădulescu or Ion Ghica, for instance, who did not share the radicals’ more extreme political views. However, I have tried to incor- porate opinions and attitudes critical of the ‘Rosetti group’ whenever possible. My emphasis has been on the international friendships and alliances that these men and women forged in exile rather than on the confrontational and factional aspects of party propaganda strategies and purely national politics. My focus on this group is also justified by their cohesiveness as the radical left-wing group in the revolution, by the abundance and availability of their correspondence, as well as by their future careers as founders of the Liberal Party and their significant contribution to building the institutions of modern Romania. Ion C. Brătianu was prime minister of Romania between July 1876 and April 1881 and between June 1881 and March 1888. His older brother, Dumitru, was briefly prime minister from April to June 1881. Nicolae Golescu occupied the same position from May to November 1868, his brother Ştefan between August 1867 and April 1868, and their cousin Alexandru G. Golescu between 2 February and 19 April 1870. The moderate Ion Ghica was prime minister in 1866–1867 and in 1870–1871. All of them occupied major ministerial positions between 1866 and the 1880s. Constantin Rosetti, for example, was minister for religious affairs and education from May to July 1866, as well as minister of the

30 Idem, Jules Michelet şi revoluţionarii români (1846–1874) (Cluj Napoca, 1982). 31 Michelet, Correspondance générale, ed. Le Guillou, 12 vols. (Paris, 1994–2001). 32 Ibid., Préface, 7. introduction 13 interior from May to November 1878 and from June 1881 to Janu- ary 1882, apart from pursuing an active career in journalism.33 Their post-1848 political careers were often controversial amidst a national history which remained turbulent, but, for better or for worse, they were there at a crucial time taking crucial, and not always savoury, decisions. Their legacy needs further explorations and clarifications. The initial impetus for this group biography was a wish to break the narrative silence which has left the Romanian forty-eigthters out of most older and recent accounts of 1848 accessible to Western academic and non-academic audiences.34 I hope that, by favouring a narrative rather than an issue-driven approach, and by founding my account on the group’s diaries and correspondence, I do justice to the ways the protagonists themselves attempted to present themselves to their Western audiences of the mid-nineteenth century. In addition, a life-narrative approach corresponds to Jules Michelet’s own preference for ‘biographising history’ and hopefully restores the flesh and blood of the group’s shared experience of exile in France and Britain.35 It is not an easy story to tell and much has been left out either by design or accidentally. The narrative has had to tread carefully and selectively amongst events, people, overlapping time-lines and conflicting data to present the reader with what I hope is a fairly manageable account. If this makes for a meandering story-line, I hope that this meandering captures the messiness of human experience in turbulent and uncertain times.

33 For the full list of their posts, see Mihai Sorin Rădulescu, Elita liberală românească, 155–60. Rădulescu has shown that Romanian politics between 1866 and 1914 was dominated by members of the boyar class of a liberal orientation. See ibid., 145–7 and idem, “Observaţii despre elita politică românească. 1866–1914”, Xenopoliana, 4, 1–4 (Iaşi, 1996): 113–20. 34 There is no separate chapter on the Romanian Principalities in, for example, R. J. W. Evans and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, eds., The Revolutions in Europe 1848–1849: from reform to reaction (Oxford University Press, 2000). The short chapter by Lothar Maier on the Moldo-Wallachian revolutions in Europe in 1848, ed. Dowe, Dieter, et al. (Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2001, 186–209) is an overview of the main issues, while Axel Körner’s edited volume 1848: A European Revolution? International ideas and national memories of 1848 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) contains a fleeting reference to C. D. Rosenthal. On the topic of exile, Sabine Freitag’s edited volume Exiles from European Revolutions: refugees in mid-Victorian Britain (Oxford, New York: Berghahn, 2002) does not mention Brătianu’s work in Britain and his links to Mazzini. 35 “biographiser l’histoire”, in Viallaneix, “Postface”, Cours au Collège de France, 2: 719. Jacques le Goff, “Michelet et le Moyen Age, aujourd’hui” in Michelet, Oeuvres complètes, 4: 60. On history and biography see Epilogue, 359–60. 14 introduction

Notes on the text

The name ‘Romania’ to designate the territories of the two Principali- ties was not used officially before 1862. The names used in the period studied (1840–1859) were ‘Valahia’ and ‘Muntenia’ for Wallachia and ‘Moldova’ for Moldavia. The term ‘Moldo-Wallachia’ was used as well, especially by French speakers. I have used ‘Romanian Principalities’ and ‘Danubian Principalities’ interchangeably. Place names and names of persons follow in general the Romanian spelling. Thus, I have used ‘Mavrocordat’ rather than the transliterated Greek ‘Maurokordhátos’. But I have used, for instance, ‘Bucharest’, ‘Wallachia’ and ‘Moldavia’, as they have been traditionally used by English-language speakers. The capital of Moldavia is designated by its name ‘Iaşi’ rather than by the Frenchified version ‘Jassy’. Place names in Transylvania are given, where possible, in their Romanian, Hungar- ian and German variants, according to the imperial dividing lines and boundary delineations of the time. All translations from the Romanian and French are mine, unless otherwise specified. I have generally followed my sources in giving many dates both in the ‘new style’, based on the Gregorian calendar, and in the ‘old-style’ Julian calendar, which was twelve days ahead. This was done solely with the purpose of easing the task of anyone wishing to follow-up on documents, given that there are often inconsistencies in the way they are cited in the literature. References to National Archives (PRO) pressmarks are provided only for unpublished documents. PART ONE

STUDENTS AND REVOLUTIONARIES 1844–1848 Fig. 2: Marie Rosetti as Revolutionary Romania by Constantin D. Rosenthal, c. 1850. Reproduced by kind permission of the National Art Museum, Bucha- rest, Romania. JULES MICHELET “MADAME ROSETTI”, 1855

It was the 18th of June 1848. Madame Rosetti was in labour, giving birth to her first child. Her husband waited, fretting anxiously by her bedside; he kept looking at his watch. His wife knew why: according to plan, at six o’clock the revolution was to start. Rosetti was to accompany two friends of his, whose role was to arouse the nation. The country was demanding him. His wife’s cries kept him there. No less impatient with the delay than he was, she desperately wanted him to be free. And he was. The child was born at last! “Thank God! . . . Embrace her and go!” were her first words; she smiled happily, although the first kiss she received as a mother was a farewell kiss. Stuck in her bed, at that moment of trouble, motionless and helpless, she endured much suffering and kept silent. She was not alone, and could not even follow her husband’s steps in her mind. Her room was open to visitors; compassionate women friends of hers came by out of curiosity, looking, observing. This room, this flat were – there was no doubt about it – the real centre of the revolutionary movement, this was France in Bucharest, the France of the February days. The actions of Paris, the burning speeches, had had their echoes in Rosetti’s salon. The birth itself, the infant’s cot, were terrifying omens: this child, this little Liby who appeared so innocent – was she not to be feared? Was she not the revolution? Tyranny kept its vigilant eye on Madame Rosetti, a spy in her room who did not leave her for one single moment. At the birth of her first child, when this young woman would have needed a mother’s care and embrace, a stranger was proffering her services only to denounce her. There was not one single motion, one single moan that was not noted: now and again a woman would sneak out of the room and went to tell the Princesse what she had witnessed or what she surmised. The revolution broke out in Bucharest on the 23rd of June, on the eve of the very day when the revolution of Paris perished in a bloodbath – perished, taking with it much else! The re-emerging liberties of all the nations of Europe suffered a deadly blow in the aftermath of this defeat!1

1 Excerpts from Jules Michelet, “Madame Rosetti”, in Légendes démocratiques du nord, ed. Michel Cadot (Paris, 1968), 216–7 (hereafter Légendes). A digitized facsimile of the 1854 edition can be downloaded from Gallica, the digital library of the Biblio- thèque Nationale de France. A recent edition was published by Editions Kryos (Paris) in 2008. 18 michelet “madame rosetti”

These fragments on the revolution of 1848 in Bucharest, the future capital of the unified Romania, show Jules Michelet at his florid best in their heightened intensity and their rather heavy-handed insistence on the symbolic value of individual human actions. Written in 1851–53, they encompass some of the French historian’s chief concerns and showcase some of his techniques as a historian: the interest in small, emerging nations, the concept of Paris and France as revolutionary guides to the world, the idea of an European interconnectedness of events, as well as the symbolically charged use of a mother figure and a birth to capture a vision of the ‘république universelle’ being painfully born under the watchful eye of absolutism. By mid-1848, police presence and surveillance of suspects’ homes had increased in Bucharest in the aftermath of turbulent events in neighbouring Moldavia, and the regime of Prince Gheorghe Bibescu,2 who ruled in Wallachia as Russia’s candidate, took precautions against the imminent outbreak of an uprising. Such was the state of alert in the country, the Prince’s wife – to whom Michelet’s account refers – had been allocated a personal guard of no fewer than two hundred soldiers. The fact that Liby, the newly-born girl, was baptised Sophia Liberté by her parents, Maria and Constantin Rosetti, was symbolic of their – and their chronicler’s – romantic hope for a new wisdom and freedom in a world which did not look promising to democrats, republicans and liberals. Liby was baptised by the priest Ion Snagoveanu, who was close to Romanian revolutionary circles and later became the Archimandrite Josaphat, founder of the Romanian church in Paris. At the ceremony, the priest was wearing a tri-coloured sash and the infant’s smock was adorned with a tri-coloured cockade.3 Marie Rosetti was born Marie Grant on 14 September 1819 in the parish of St. Peter Port in Guernsey.4 Her parents were Lieutenant Edward Effingham Grant and Marie Le Lacheur,5 a local woman from an old Guernsey family of Huguenot descent whom he had married in 1817 in the Town Church, the same church in which Marie and her

2 Through a son from his first marriage, Prince Gheorghe Bibescu (ruled 1842–1848) was the grandfather of the French writer of Romanian origin Anna de Noailles. 3 From a later testimony of Henric Winterhalder in Rosetti’s newspaper, Românul (27 January 1887): 67. 4 Although she is officially known as Maria Rosetti in Romania, I am using ‘Marie’, the name used by C. A. Rosetti himself in their life-long correspondence, written entirely in French. 5 ‘Le Lacheur’ rather than ‘Levasseur’, as the name has been transcribed in all Romanian-language secondary sources so far. michelet “madame rosetti” 19 four younger siblings were to be baptised. A Scotsman whose family originally came from Edinburgh,6 Marie’s father was born in Markyate in Hertfordshire in 1795, but his family resettled in Antigua and St. Vincent, in the Caribbean, where they became involved in the sugar trade. At the age of seventeen he became Lieutenant in the 8th West India Regiment of Foot, with headquarters in Trinidad, and later he joined the Royal African Corps, where he served from 1819 to 1832. Frustratingly, very few records of the family’s life in Guernsey have emerged so far: we do not know how Marie spent her childhood or where she was educated. We catch up with Marie and her widowed mother in 1847, when the latter lived at East Stonehouse, near Plym- outh, and gave her consent to her daughter’s marriage to the Roma- nian nobleman and future revolutionary, Constantin A. Rosetti, which took place there on 31 August of that year. It is generally accepted in Romanian accounts of the Rosetti family that Constantin met Marie around 1844 in the household of the Odobescu family in Bucharest, where she worked as a governess. This employment was probably secured for her by her brother Effingham,7 who was, throughout the 1840s, secretary to Robert G. Colquhoun, the British Consul General in the Romanian (then Wallachian) capital city.8 The Grants and the Colquhouns were related through Sir James Grant (b. 1679), who had married an heiress, Anne Colquhoun, on condition he took her name. One of Marie’s uncles was a George Colquhoun Grant who became Treasurer of St. Vincent in Antigua. This familial and diplomatic connection might explain the circumstances which led to Effingham Grant’s appointment in Bucharest in 1838. The British Consul held him in high regard and never lost an opportunity to recommend him to the Foreign Office. On one such occasion, he described him as a reliable young man “who joins to a

6 Recent genealogical research by Dinah Bott from the Priaulx Library in Guernsey (St. Peter Port) confirms older assumptions that Edward Effingham Grant was related to the Grants of Carron, a Scottish clan from Grantown on Spey, whose coat of arms was later incorporated into the Rosetti family’s heraldic insignia. For recent contributions by Romanian genealogists, see Rădulescu, Elita liberală românească, 97–8. I am grateful to Dinah Bott for the new information she communicated to me. Cf. the entry “Maria Rosetti. From St. Peter Port to the revolution”, on the website of the Priaulx Library. 7 Effingham Grant was born in Guernsey on 10 December 1820. I am grateful to Jean Vidamour from the Priaulx Library (Guernsey) for locating the birth and marriage records of the Grants. 8 For Robert Colquhoun’s background, see p. 70 below. 20 michelet “madame rosetti” thorough knowledge of Office Routine, a perfect knowledge of French, Italian, German and Wallachian Languages.”9 By 1846, eight years into his post, he had gained the consul’s confidence to such an extent that the latter asked for Lord Palmerston’s authorisation to place Grant, his secretary, rather than Vincent Lloyd, the Vice-Consul, whom he did not trust, in charge of the consulate during his forthcoming six-month leave of absence.10 Effingham Grant appears to have remained to a large extent the éminence grise of the British consulate in Bucharest and as such, was to play a crucial role both as spokesman for the British Consul liaising with Constantin Rosetti and his fellow-revolutionaries in 1848, and, on a more personal level, securing passports and safe passage to the members of the provisional government imprisoned by the Ottoman military after the defeat of the movement of 1848. In addition, his business partnership with Rosetti and his subsequent marriage to Zoe Racoviţă, a young girl from the Golescu family, one of Wallachia’s oldest and most distinguished families, made him a prominent member of the country’s liberal and entrepreneurial elite. Marie Grant’s employer, Colonel Ioan Odobescu, likewise, was to be one of the main actors in the 1848 drama, first as member of the provisional government and later as ‘traitor’ to the cause, and engaged in an ambiguous political game with Constantin Rosetti. Marie’s work as the governess of Odobescu’s children and her brother’s diplomatic position placed them both at the very centre of Wallachian political intrigues and of British-Romanian relations, and their involvement and role in the events of 1848 and beyond will be examined later. In 1844, when he met Marie, Constantin Rosetti was still the rather dissipated scion of two of the most important families in the land. Through his father, the high-ranking boyar Alexandru Rosetti, born in Constantinople, he came from a family which claimed descent from Italian forebears settled in Wallachia in the sixteenth or seventeenth century.11 Aristocratic titles had been granted to them quite recently

9 Private letter to John Bidwell, under-secretary for foreign affairs, Bucharest, 18 May 1847. (The National Archives, PRO/FO 78/697). 10 Dispatch from the Foreign Office to R. G. Colquhoun, 21 August 1846. (The National Archives, PRO/FO 786/12). 11 For the Rosetti genealogy, see entry “Familia Rosetti” in Radu Rosetti, Familia Rosetti, 2 vols. (Bucharest, 1938), 1. For more recent contributions, see Andrei Pippidi, “Originea familiei Rosetti şi confirmarea unei mărturii a lui Neculce”,Anuarul Institutului de istorie şi arheologie A. D. Xenopol, 20 (1983): 275–80, and Rădulescu, Elita liberală românească, 97–8. michelet “madame rosetti” 21 for services to the Austrian empire,12 and Rosetti’s father was an influential land-owner and civil servant in Ottoman-dominated Wallachia, although he was to remain a rather dim figure in Constantin’s personal family mythology. Here, the dominant image was to remain, for the rest of his life, that of his mother, Elena, née Obedeanu, from an old boyar family of Little Wallachia (Oltenia), in Romania’s south. Their son did not make much of aristocratic affiliations. A rebel with egalitarian instincts from his early youth, Rosetti was a nobleman who opposed noble privilege all his life and who renounced his family titles, lands and Gypsy slaves in order to live out and prove his commitment to the republican and the liberal cause.13 He described himself as the defender of the villagers and of the small artisans against the “ghosts of the feudal past.”14 Born on 2 June 1816 in Bucharest, Constantin Rosetti spent the years 1845 to 1848 intermittently in Paris, where he became one of a group of friends at the centre of a vociferous and faction-ridden coterie of East- and Central-European students who planned to re-design radically the political culture of their nascent states. Foreign travel and studies abroad had not been widely available to the Romanians in the decades prior to the 1840s, and Rosetti’s was the first generation of elite young men enabled by a relative political thaw and, in some cases, by family wealth, to choose Paris, the cultural and political capital of the nineteenth-century, as their place of life apprenticeship. The French option was dictated both by Romania’s Latin linguistic heritage – unique in South-East-Europe – and by personal connections and friendships forged previously with French diplomatic personnel, secretaries and other domestic staff engaged by the country’s wealthy families. Constantin Rosetti, largely taught at home in his early years, was a fluent French speaker, like everybody else in his generation, but, more unusually for that time, also had an English-language tutor, a certain Bernhardt Stolţ, who, among other duties, helped him translate the more difficult passages of Byron’sManfred . Rosetti published the entire text in 1843 at the publishing and printing house he

12 The title ‘Count of Rosetti’ was granted to Rosetti’s great-grandfather, Nicolae, by the Emperor Charles VI in 1733. Cf. Biblioteca Naţională, the St. Georges Collec- tion, Archive Dinu V. Rosetti, P. XLIII, Dossier 5, copy of document dated Vienna, 17 February 1842. 13 Marin Bucur, C. A. Rosetti: mesianism şi donquijotism revoluţionar (Bucharest, 1970), 6. 14 C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 6, 11. 22 michelet “madame rosetti” co-owned and co-administered with his friend Henric Winterhalter and his future brother-in-law, Effingham Grant, of which more later.15 Rosetti probably only completed one year of studies at the Saint Sava National College, the country’s foremost higher education institution, in 1832. Apart from natives such as Eufrosin Poteca, Simeon Marcovici and Petrache Poenaru, the great ‘conscience-moulders’ of the time, teaching staff included the French professor and Freemason J. A. Vaillant, the author of La Romanie (1844), one of the earliest monographs devoted to Romania in French.16 Rosetti enjoyed early successes as a poet and used his skills to translate into Romanian the works of Béranger and Lamartine, future acquaintances in Paris, as well as poetry by Victor Hugo. His diary entries for 15 November 1844 and January 1845 mention readings, sometimes in the company of friends, from Lamennais’ Paroles d’un croyant and from the works of Théodore Jouffroy, which shows that he was completely synchronised with the Parisian world of ideas of his time as well as with its protagonists, in whose circles he was soon to mingle.17 Rosetti’s tormented psyche must have been particularly attuned to the ideas of Jouffroy, the theorist of “the anxiety of the human soul confronted to the issue of man’s destiny.”18 Well-read, the young Rosetti was not, however, academically- oriented, and remained rebellious and pleasure-loving, with a darker Byronic side – a psychological profile which made him a brooding, fretful and exalted Romantic man of action rather than an introspec-

15 Bucur, C. A. Rosetti: mesianism, 10. On Rosetti’s early successes as a poet, see ibid., 24–47. His poetic output was commented on favourably in, among other works in French, Desprez, Les Peuples d’Autriche et de la Turquie, 1, chapter 3; Stanislas Béllanger, “Les Principautés Danubiennes”, Revue du XIX-e siècle, 1, 1 (Paris, avril– oct. 1854): 336–45; J. A. Vaillant, La Romanie (Paris, 1844), 3. 16 Bucur, C. A. Rosetti: mesianism, 10–16. Vaillant was also the founder in Iaşi, the Moldavian capital, of the para-Masonic secret society “The Sons of Trajan’s Colony”. For the significant role of the Saint Sava College in the education of political personnel in early and mid-nineteenth-century Romania, see Alex Drace-Francis, The Making of Modern Romanian Culture: literacy and the development of national identity (London, 2006), 102–3. 17 Paroles d’un croyant were published in Romanian as Cuvintele unui credincios (Bucharest, 1848), and in the Transylvanian periodical, published in Braşov, Foaie pentru minte, inimă şi literatură, 11, 1848. The latter was the cultural supplement of Gazeta de Transilvania [The Transylvanian Gazette], at the time subjected to Austrian and Russian censorship. Cf. p. 74 below. 18 Théodore Simon Jouffroy,Mélanges philosophiques (Paris, 1833), quoted in Paul Bénichou, Le Temps des prophètes: doctrines de l’age romantique (Paris, 1977), 29–32. michelet “madame rosetti” 23 tive Romantic poet. His escapades as a young man were such that his despairing mother is said to have caught a severe cold in church as she prayed for her wayward son.19 She died on 13 December 1844, a date which became a major watershed in Rosetti’s life: from then onwards, he changed the dating system in his personal Diary so that entries were (confusingly for readers and historians) headed by the number of days and years since his mother’s death rather than by the actual chronological dates. She and his brother Dimitrie, who committed suicide in 1842 at the age of thirty-nine, as a consequence of a love thwarted by social conventions, became the beloved ‘ghosts’ which presided over Rosetti’s long and troubled life, and to whom he addressed his meditations, prayers and requests for forgiveness in times of crisis. By 1845, he was already a man with a heavy emotional heritage and often prone to an indefinablemal ‘ du siècle’, that vague melancholy and disenchantment that posterity associated with the nineteenth century. The death of Sofia, a consumptive young woman whom he loved, made him exclaim in November 1844: ‘God, death has made me understand thee’.20 But far from being a serene acceptation of mortality, his ‘understanding’ of death underscored a quintessential ‘unfairness’ of divinity and a fear of failure and loss through death that accompanied him throughout his life. It was a mixture of fascination and revulsion with death not unlike that of his future mentor, the historian Jules Michelet. However, beyond Rosetti’s sense of personal loss lay a more comprehensive world-weariness and in particular a dissatisfaction with what he perceived as the dysfunctional public life of his home country, Wal- lachia. In a diary entry for 4 December 1844, he deplored what must have been one of the earliest modern instances of an East-European brain drain: Wallachia, in his view then, was a country depleted of its young men, who went abroad to seek better rewards for their talents rather than, in Rosetti’s words, have to play whist and dance the waltz, lie, be servile and commit the “thousand atrocities” demanded of those who wanted to attain a “position in society.”21 While, it might be said, the corruption of youth and the servitude demanded of aspiring social climbers are universals, Wallachian society had in addition been

19 Entry for 11 December 1844 in C. A. Rosetti, Jurnalul meu (henceforth Rosetti, Diary), ed. Marin Bucur (Cluj-Napoca, 1974), 48. 20 Entry for 30 November 1844 in ibid., 36. 21 Entry for 4 December 1844 in ibid., 40. 24 michelet “madame rosetti” plagued for decades by tensions between its old high-ranking ‘boyars’ who detained all the top offices, and the so-called ‘new’ boyars, former commoners with recent titles who either remained stuck at the bottom of the social ladder or found it impossible to rise within ossified political structures which remained largely venal and corrupt.22 That a meritocratic ethos was difficult to establish was corroborated by the British Consul, Robert Colquhoun, who informed Lord Palmerston on 14 February 1848 that: Of all the young men of talent or character hardly one is employed; the object of this is evident, were these men in service, they must advance in Rank, and once having attained a grade sufficient to qualify them to enter the first class of Boyars, these men may become dangerous as an opposition. All favors and ranks are therefore conferred on persons who may be styled in Truth parvenus, ready and willing for any service which may be required of them.23 Furthermore, constant Russian political interference and repeated military occupation had only complicated and worsened local circumstances. Russia administered the Principalities directly between 1806–1812 and 1828–1834, but even outside these periods, whenever native princes were appointed, they were chosen largely on the basis of their allegiance to Russia. The Russian consuls secured and maintained positions of great influence and authority and intrigued incessantly, thus keeping a firm grip on the administration of the Principalities until the eve of the Crimean War. The letters of the Golescu family reveal the impact of the Russian informal sphere of influence on Romania’s social life and the parallel deterioration of Russia’s image among a population which did not fail to tire of an exploitative alliance between Tsarist Russia and the native landowning oligarchy. The appointment in 1834 of Prince Alexandru Dimitrie Ghica as Russia’s candidate resulted in social tensions and financial difficulties, and in an intensification of censorship and fear throughout the rest of his reign, which ended in 1842, when he was deposed. The correspondents complained that, although the Prince was essentially of good faith, he

22 Neagu Djuvara has suggested that, between 1771 and 1848, political power in Romania was concentrated in the hands of around ten old native families, most notably the Filipescu, Văcărescu, Ghika (Romanianised Albanians), Racoviţă, Ştirbei, Kreţulescu, Brâncoveanu, Golescu, Grădişteanu and Bălăceanu families. See his “Les grands boïars ont-ils constitué dans las principautés roumaines une véritable oli- garchie institutionnelle et héréditaire?,” Südostforschungen, 46 (1987): 49–50. 23 The National Archives, PRO/FO 78/742, Jan. to Aug. 1848. michelet “madame rosetti” 25 was ineffectual and failed to improve the country’s administration, curb corruption and put an end to the endemic venality of offices.24 In addition, the Prince was caught up between the demands of an increasingly hostile ‘national party’ – the emerging liberal patriots and future nation-builders of modern Romania, of whom Rosetti was one – and the complex diplomatic games opposing the Russian consul Petru de Rűckmann (P. I. Rickman), the new and ambitious French consul, Adolphe Billecocq, and the British consul, Robert Colquhoun, as spokespersons for their respective countries. In September 1849, the French Consul in Bucharest Pierre-Eugène Poujade was disingenuously bemused by the diffusion of power in the Principalities, which became even more blatant under joint Ottoman-Russian occupation: “Who is in fact governing? Is it the Prince, the Ottoman commissioner or the Russian commissioner?”25 Foreign – Ottoman, but especially Russian – interference could often be overplayed by a native oligarchy keen to preserve its privileges and distract attention from its own venal misadministration of the country, but the limitations imposed by Turkish suzerainty and Russian protection were real. Russian troops had occupied the two provinces between 1806 and 1812, as well as from 1828 to 1834: requisitioning, censorship and the imposition of Russian-modelled military and political structures had alienated considerable sections of the elites and of the general population.26 As a consequence, owing to a mix of justified grievances as well as of manipulated perceptions, by the mid-1830s, Romania was in the increasingly firm grip of acute Russo- phobia. When he visited the country in 1836, the liberal professor and journalist Saint-Marc Girardin27 found the boyars well-informed on European politics, but sceptical that Russia might withdraw from

24 Fotino 1: 34–5. Cf. also Fotino 2, letters nos. 5, 6, 8, 9, 13. 25 Andrei Pippidi, “Tocqueville ministre et les Moldo-Valaques”, Revue roumaine d’histoire 32, 1–2 (1993): 150. 26 Cf. Dumitru Vitcu and Gabriel Bădărău, eds, Regulamentul Organic al Moldovei (Iaşi, 2004), esp. 18–20. The classic study of Russo-Romanian relations in the nineteenth century is Barbara Jelavich’s Russia and the Formation of the Romanian National State, 1821–1878 (Cambridge University Press, 1984). See also Apostol Stan, Protectoratul Rusiei asupra Principatelor Române, 1774–1856 (Bucharest, 1999). 27 Marc Girardin, self-styled ‘Saint-Marc’ (b. 1801–d. 1873), combined a life-long career in teaching French literature with journalism (at the Journal des Débats and the Revue des Deux Mondes) and politics. Faithful to the dynasty of Louis Philippe, and elected deputy in 1848, he was a liberal anti-republican. He was tutor of Greek to some of the Romanian forty-eighters in Paris, such as Ion Bălăceanu. See entry “Saint-Marc Girardin” in G. Vapereau, Dictionnaire universel des contemporains (Paris, 1865). 26 michelet “madame rosetti”

South-East Europe or that the West might offer diplomatic and military support against tsarism.28 The memoirs of his travels include an often-quoted conversation with an older boyar on political aspirations and morale in the Principalities: “As for me”, the old notable explained, “I am not entirely certain who we are. Are we Turks? Are we Russians? We are said to be vassals of Turkey and protégés of Russia. Is there anything left there to make us Wallachians and Moldavians? It is now more than a hundred years since we have been attempting to escape the Turks, and attempt in which we have demanded the support of the Russians. That hope made patriots of us all. Now that we have relinquished that illusion, there is no love lost between us and the Russians. On the day when they, too, become our masters, we will do with them as we have done with the Turks: we shall wait for someone else’s help. We, therefore, always lie in wait, always suspended.”29 More than anything else – and presaging later developments in East- ern Europe – the boyar dreamed of free speech (“one does not want to fear deportation in Siberia for expressing one’s opinions”),30 but was aware that freedom could only be attained with Western support. His reflections also suggest an identity crisis in a political context where enforced political allegiances undercut a growing sense of ‘Romanian- ness’ in the Moldo-Wallachian provinces. In spite of – or perhaps because of – the country being still in the grip of ancien régime political structures and ‘Byzantine-Phanariot’ mores, and being located at the junction of ‘evil empires’, the underground rumblings and stirrings of a new spirit of critical opposition to the past were beginning to be felt, especially during the 1830s. In that decade, an embryonic ‘national’ party emerged and revolution started to appear a distinct possibility.31 Although the activities of the new patriots were not confined to secret society meetings or symbolic gestures such as setting subversive texts to the tune of the Marseillaise, in a polity under surveillance, they involved a great deal of secret diplo-

28 Saint-Marc Girardin, Souvenirs de voyages et d’études, 2 vols. (Paris, 1852), 1: 247. 29 Ibid., 284. 30 Ibid., 290. 31 Ion Ghica, letter to D. Brătianu, early 1841, in Din arhiva lui Dumitru Brătianu: acte şi scrisori din perioada 1840–1870, ed. Al. Cretzianu, 2 vols. (Bucharest, 1933), 1: 109–10. (Hereafter Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu.) For an English-language account of this process, see Hitchins, The Romanians, 1774–1866, 168–72. michelet “madame rosetti” 27 macy. Significantly, their protest was not directed so much against old- regime structures as against foreign domination: Turkish suzerainty and especially the Russian protectorate, officially established by the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca of 1774, and reinforced after each Russo- Turkish conflict. 1837–1841 EARLY DIPLOMATIC VENTURES

On 20 July 1837, a number of deputies in the National Assembly of Wallachia, among whom the elder Brătianu – father to two of this book’s protagonists – rejected what they regarded as an infamous ‘additional article’ of the Russian-sponsored Organic Statutes (1831– 32). The article required the Wallachian assembly to seek Russian and Ottoman authorisation for any change to the Statutes, the country’s earliest modern and highly controversial quasi-constitutional charter.32 One of the rebel deputies, Ion Câmpineanu, an early champion of the unification of the two Principalities and of independence from Turkey, visited Paris and, more unusually for a Romanian in 1839, London, where he worked closely with the Polish émigrés to arouse concern over Russian expansionism in Western chancelleries. He met Lord Palmerston himself, and was given well-meaning reassurances that “the moment is not far when Europe will decide to take measures against Russia’s actions in the East and at that point his memoranda and reports will be given serious consideration.”33 Unfortunately for Câmpineanu’s objectives, his visit to London could not have come at a worse time. 1839 marked a shift in British political attitudes to Rus- sia, from an often vaguely-defined distrust to a more positive, pragmatic cultivation of relations with the Eastern empire in the interests of the European balance of power. Anglo-Russian clashes of interest in Central Asia, especially in Afghanistan, and the Near Eastern crisis provoked by the rebel Pasha of Egypt, Mehmet Ali, had persuaded the Foreign Secretary and the Whig cabinet that the only way to contain Russia and pre-empt the growth of her influence in Constantinople,

32 These documents are also known in the historical literature as the Organic Reg- ulations or as the Règlement Organique. See Ioan C. Filitti, Domniile române sub Regulamentul Organic 1834–1848 (Bucharest, 1915) and Vitcu and Bădărău, eds, Regulamentul Organic al Moldovei (text and introductory study). For the Wallachian protest against the additional article, see Radu R. Florescu, The Struggle against Russia in the Romanian Principalities, 1821–1854 (Iaşí, 1997; 1st edn. 1962, Munich), 184–5 and idem, “R. G. Colquhoun, Ion Câmpineanu and the Pro-Western Opposition in Wallachia, 1834–1840”, Slavonic and East European Review, 41, 97 (1963): 403–19. 33 Ion Ghica, “Ion Câmpineanu”, a speech delivered at the Romanian Academy, 28 March 1880, quoted in Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 11. early diplomatic ventures 29 was by co-opting her into international agreements regarding the status of the Ottoman Empire. This political re-alignment was to result in the Straits Convention signed in London in July 1841. In spite of a great deal of opposition both in Parliament and in the press, and excluding France from the proceedings, Britain, Russia, Prussia and Austria agreed by that treaty to safeguard the integrity of the Otto- man Empire against the Pasha’s expansionist ambitions in Syria and, crucially, to have the Straits closed to foreign warships in times of peace. Contrary to most expectations, this strategy of containment was to bear fruit in the following months and usher in a period of Anglo- Russian entente which was to last up to the Crimean War.34 It also illustrated Palmerston’s cornerstone belief that too much liberalism in foreign affairs was not necessarily a good thing and that a great power such as Britain should maintain “an influence both with the free, and the despot.”35 In spite of attacks in the press and extravagant accusations from circles close to the colourful Turcophile diplomat, MP and bête noire of Victorian politics, David Urquhart, that he was a “Russian spy”, in the longer term Palmerston could and did take credit for limiting Rus- sian influence in Constantinople by placing the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ under the joint protection of the five great powers and thus giving European Turkey a new lease of life.36 Unfortunately for the Romanian deputy, in the new circumstances created in 1839–1841, concern for Turkish and Russian policies in the Balkans and South-East Europe was momentarily frozen in Britain. Pro-Turkish, pro-Polish and anti- Russian MPs and politicians such as David Urquhart, Lord Ponsonby, Lord Dudley Stuart, Sir Henry Bulwer Lytton, continued to maintain a low-key, but steady, pressure on the cabinet. However, their efforts were not going to bear visible fruit until the 1850s and in the aftermath of the Crimean War. Lord Dudley Coutts Stuart earned his liberal political credentials in the 1830s by joining forces with the supporters of the Reform Bill and by defending the cause of dismembered Poland and the rights of the Polish refugees in Britain. He was involved in the activities of

34 John Howes Gleason, The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), Ch. 9: “The Near Eastern Crisis, 1839–1841”. 35 E. D. Steele, Palmerston and Liberalism, 1855–1865 (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 16. 36 Gleason, The Genesis of Russophobia, 267. 30 1837–1841 the London Literary Association of the Friends of Poland from its inception in 1832 to his death in 1854. He, along with Sir Stratford Canning, Joseph Hume, Robert Fergusson and others, believed that Russian expansion in the Middle East threatened British interests in the region, a stance which earned them some formidable opponents, among whom Richard Cobden, who accused them of unjustified war- mongering. Although Lord Dudley lost his parliamentary seat for Arundel in 1837, he continued his pro-Polish activities and resumed a sustained parliamentary campaign in 1847, as the new MP for Maryle- bone. When he died in November 1854, he was still actively involved with the Polish cause and, more generally, with the cause of the threatened Central-East European nations.37 Assessing the impact of public opinion in history is never an easy matter. The extent to which a handful of East-Central European expatriates and British radicals were likely to influence political decision-making and create, via largely extra-parliamentary activities, an anti-Russian current of opinion is debatable. The emergence of significant anti-Russian attitudes in Britain prior to the Crimean War and the 1860s has been disputed, amidst claims that British mid-nineteenth century ‘Russophobia’ – to use a term made famous in the 1950s – was to a large extent the post-hoc outcome of Cold-War apprehensions.38 However, it would appear that as early as the 1840s, David Urquhart’s contacts among the Romanian and Polish expatriates had a role in supplying him with a repertoire of anti-tsarist imagery which the anti- establishment Scot put into circulation in his periodical The Portfolio between 1836 and 1844.39 Urquhart’s hostility to tsarist Russia was, however, coupled with a liberal anti-interventionism which was contrary to his Wallachian friends’ objectives. In 1834, while on one his para-diplomatic trips to Turkey and the Middle East, David Urquhart, whose undeniable first-hand knowledge of the Ottoman Empire had made him a strong Ottoman supporter, sent back home a pamphlet, co-written with his friend, Lord Pon-

37 For further information see Krzysztof Marchlewicz, “Stuart, Lord Dudley Coutts (1803–1854)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, Oxford Uni- versity Press, Sept. 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/26701, accessed 20 Sept 2010]. 38 Jonathan Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: English liberalism, national identity and Europe, 1830–1886 (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 211–2. 39 Radu R. Florescu, “The Rumanian Principalities and the Origins of the Crimean War”, Slavonic and East European Review, 43, 100 (Dec. 1964): 52. early diplomatic ventures 31 sonby, then the British ambassador at the Porte. In their text, Eng- land, France, Russia, and Turkey, they claimed that Russia was still pursuing her objective – unattained in 1829 and 1833 – of acquiring Constantinople and the Straits, and as such continued to be a threat to stability in the area. The pamphlet received favourable reviews and went through five editions.40 At the other end of the spectrum of opinions on Russia, in March 1836, Lord Durham, British ambassador at St. Petersburg, compiled an estimate of Russian power and policies in which he concluded that “[t]he power of Russia has been greatly exaggerated”, being more of a defensive kind and making a Russian attack on other European powers highly unlikely. Palmerston considered it one of “the ablest and clearest documents ever received at the Foreign Office,”41 and as such adopted it as one of the theoretical bases for his choice of a policy of appeasement rather than intervention. Lord Durham’s analysis of Russia’s relative weakness coincided to a large extent with what the Romanian Dumitru Brătianu would later attempt to convey in his memorandum to Lord Palmerston of 16 January 1849, although his was the opposite aim of encouraging a military intervention against a weak and uncompetitive Russia.42 In the context of Palmerston’s conciliatory stance towards Rus- sia, Ion Câmpineanu’s courting of British diplomacy in 1839 was an entirely premature exercise. Frustrated with his lack of success in Lon- don, he started on his return journey via Austria and Transylvania in early 1840, aware that a ferman for his arrest and deportation had already been issued in Bucharest. In spite of protests from the British Consul, Colquhoun, and from Lord Palmerston himself, Câmpineanu was arrested by the Austrian police, deported and sentenced to exile in a sixteenth-century Wallachian monastery, to be released, a broken, disillusioned man, only in 1841.43 “If the Western governments want us to be Russian, I prefer persecution . . .”, he wrote to friends who had entreated him not to return.44 His contacts in Britain, among whom

40 There is evidence that some of Urquhart’s works, notably hisTurkey and its Resources (1833), were being read in the 1830s and 1840s in the Romanian Principali- ties and in Turkey in French, German and Turkish translations. See Cornelia Bodea, “David Urquhart, Principatele şi mişcarea naţională română”, in Unirea Principatelor şi puterile europene (Bucharest, 1984), 30–55. 41 Gleason, The Genesis of Russophobia, 172–3. 42 See Part Two, 128–9. 43 The Monastery of Plumbuita. 44 For a re-assessment of the role of this ‘forgotten man’ of Romanian history, see Radu R. Florescu, “Câmpineanu and the pro-Western opposition”, in The Struggle 32 1837–1841

Lord Dudley Stuart and David Urquhart himself, were to play crucial roles in maintaining a British interest in the Danubian Principalities after 1848, but the main legacy of his movement was the inspiration and encouragement it offered to the increasing radicalisation of the Wallachian opposition.45 Political Anglophilia was a short-lived affair for many East and Cen- tral Europeans in the 1830s and early 1840s. As the Wallachian régime toughened up against its ‘dissidents’, it was not England that offered a political model and a safe haven to disaffected Romanians and other East-Europeans, but France. The intellectual and political prestige of France was such in the 1840s, the Rosetti and his peers were soon to seek intellectual and political capital in the only place that could offer it to the emerging political class of a small nation in search of a new identity: Paris. The Romanians Constantin and Marie Rosetti, the Brătianu and the Golescu brothers, among many others, were to find themselves for over ten years – first as émigrés and students, then as exiles – at the centre of a very fractious and vociferous East-Central European diaspora.

against Russia, 179–98. For published contemporary sources on Câmpineanu and his mission, see also Faţa secretă a mişcării paşoptiste române: unitatea naţională (Bucha- rest, 2004), ed. Cornelia Bodea, esp. 347–488. 45 For further political agitation in pre-1848 Romania, cf. also the more overtly revolutionary movement of Dumitru Filipescu of 1840, a bolder push towards liberalism in Romania. See G. Zane, Le movement révolutionnaire de 1849: prélude de la révolution roumaine de 1848 (Bucharest, 1964) and idem, Bălcescu. Opera, omul, epoca (Bucharest: Editura Eminescu, 1973), 162–3. 1844–1848 THE COLLÈGE DE FRANCE: SOCIABILITY AND PROTEST

Le monde est un Sahara qui n’a qu’une oasis: Paris! Stanislas Béllanger “Le Moldo-Valaque”, 184446 In the generous legislative élan following the French Revolution, the Assemblée Constituante voted a law proclaiming the absolute equality of French nationals and foreigners, only to regret this step towards universal fraternity when France started to fill quickly with refugees and spies. Subsequent legislation consequently hardened throughout the Directoire and the Consulate, ultimately establishing the principles of modern surveillance of foreigners by the state with the Law of 12 messidor, year VIII (1 July 1800), which placed foreigners under the direct control of the Prefect of Paris. Thereafter, it was the Prefecture which issued passports and residence permits as well as arrest and deportation orders against those believed to pose a threat to the state. Laws of 3 December 1849 and 2 February 1852 further refined the criteria for naturalisation as well as for the expulsion of undesirable aliens.47 Yet, in spite of increasingly strict control, the foreigners kept arriving in Paris throughout the nineteenth century, both as visitors and as refugees. The Prefecture statistics for 1836 show 3,884 landlords offering 53,000 beds to foreign visitors in Paris. The number oflogeurs catering for foreigners grew to 5,183 five years later, which suggest the steady increase in demand for accommodation as well as the growing reputation of France as a cultural beacon and terre d’asile.48 To foreigners, mid-nineteenth-century Paris offered the combined attractions of a rapidly growing metropolis with its cultural and entertainment venues, its urban amenities, reputable institutions of higher education, and its restless, politically savvy masses, hardened by the revolutionary experiences of 1789 and 1830. Paris had a “quasi-mythic

46 Stanislas Béllanger, “Le Moldo-Valaque”, in Les Etrangers à Paris, ed. Louis Desnoyers et al., (Paris, 1846), 61. 47 G. Dallier, La Police des étrangers à Paris et dans le département de la Seine, Thèse pour le doctorat, (Paris: Université de Paris, Faculté de droit, 1914), 18–24. 48 Paul Gerbod, “Des étrangers à Paris au XIXe siècle”, Ethnologie française, 25 (1995, Octobre–Décembre): 569–79. 34 1844–1848 quality for persons who felt overwhelmed by the constraints, contradictions, and inequalities in their native societies.”49 For many Ger- man, Russian, Italian and East-European exiles, in spite of the relative conservatism of Louis Philippe’s régime, Paris retained its “highly charged significance” as the “refuge for displaced radicals and hence as the enemy of conservative regimes everywhere.”50 Germans such as Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx, who were fleeing Metternich’s repressive policies, and Poles such as the poet Adam Mickiewicz, seeking refuge from Russia’s heavy-handed intervention in fractured Poland, found themselves in Paris, where, in their eyes at least, political control and censorship were comparatively less aggressive. And although, in reality, ‘revolutionary’ France posed a lesser danger to old-regime Europe than some of these radicals hoped, Paris’s reputation as a den of republicans, conspirators and spies and as a school of liberal politics remained intact in the collective European imagination. But subjective representations of liberalism and freedom varied widely according to the émigrés’ background and country of origins. Thus, for instance the Russian literary critic Pavel Vasylievich Annenkov (b. 1813), a moderate liberal who lived in Paris between 1841 and 1843, had only words of praise for Louis-Philippe, the “distinguished bourgeois king”, and believed that France had a more liberal régime in the 1840s than at any time before or after: Out of fear of being reputed an egotistical “bourgeois” bereft of the faculty for understanding popular aspirations and the hidden miseries of the working classes, few people could bring themselves to give full voice to all they felt about the Paris of the 1840s. It is an undeniable fact, however, that travellers to Paris at the time came in contact with a city of irreproachable manners and customs, distinguished, as a natural outcome of the constitutional order, by an ease of social intercourse, by the possibility for any foreigner of finding appreciation and sympathetic response for any serious opinion or initiative, and finally, an integrity, relatively speaking, in all transactions between private parties. All this, as we know, immediately vanished with the advent of the Second Empire. To verify this brief sketch, it is sufficient to draw a comparison between it and what the city of Paris became after the loss of the July Constitution.51

49 Lloyd S. Kramer, Threshold of a New World: intellectuals and the exile experience in Paris, 1830–1848 (Cornell University Press, 1988), 7. 50 Idem, 18. 51 P. V. Annenkov, The Extraordinary Decade (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1968), 73, quoted in Kramer, Threshold, 37. the collÈge de france 35

Visitors from England and America, with a different set of political references and expectations, had less positive views of Louis Philippe’s France. The Scottish journalist James Grant, for instance, visiting Paris in 1843, was galled by the military and police presence on the streets and in public places. He describes France in the 1840s as a police state where informers were ubiquitous and where even minor criticisms of the régime uttered in private gatherings ended up in the Prefecture’s files or led to arrests. Many foreigners felt harassed by constant passport controls and police surveillance. “The sum of the matter is this”, he concluded, “that France, though nominally a free country, is not so in reality. In all that constitutes true freedom, England is incompara- bly before it.”52 The difference in emphasis between Annenkov’s perceptions and Grant’s could not be clearer. The Russian visitor, a moderate aristocrat with little appetite for radical politics, chose to focus on the advantages that polished French manners and easy intellectual and friendly intercourse between natives and foreigners could present for the latter’s activities and endeavours in the face of a relatively hostile political environment. As we shall see, it was precisely this aspect of their life in France that to the Romanian émigrés was a prominent facet of their experience of expatriation and later of exile. But, unlike Annenkov, many harboured dreams of barricades and of French support for a radical re-construction of their own society. Statistics show that Paris was already a densely populated city in the 1830s and 1840s: between 1831 and 1846 its population rose from 785,862 to 1,053,897, an increase of 34 percent. Some studies have attributed “at least 88 percent of the city’s new population in the July Monarchy period directly to immigration”, both from the provinces and from abroad.53 By the end of 1847 there were approximately 850,000 foreigners in France, 174,000 of whom were concentrated in Paris and the department of the Seine, amounting to 13 percent of the general population, and making Paris a restless, congested and potentially volatile cosmopolitan metropolis. However, these figures are in all probability lower than the actual numbers, as censuses only

52 James Grant, Paris and its People (London, 1844), vol. 1, 177, quoted in Kramer, Threshold, 39. For a comprehensive comparative survey of foreigners’ perceptions of July Monarchy Paris, see ibid., Ch. 1, “The Capital of Europe”. 53 Charles H. Pouthas, La population française pendant la première moitié du XIX siècle (Paris, 1956), 148, quoted in Kramer, Threshold, 23. 36 1844–1848 recorded foreigners residing in hotels and chambres garnies, excluding those living in private residences as well as travellers in transit.54 As far as political refugees proper were concerned, the French authorities granted right of entry to 15,000 of them in 1846.55 They were obliged to live in special centres called dépots and were given a subsidy (solde) which was increasingly used as an effective means of blackmail and control.56 The foreigners, whether legal or illegal immigrants and political refugees, were mostly Germans, English, Belgians, Italians, Russians and Poles. The Polish expatriate community, for instance, grew from 150 individuals in early 1831 to 4,000 by 1846 in the department of the Seine, an increase which reflected worsening political conditions in their partitioned country, and in Eastern Europe more generally, as much as the growing attraction of Paris as a hotbed of increasingly radicalised politics.57 In 1839, out of 13,502 illegal immigrants in France, three quarters were Poles.58 By 1851, there were 9,338 Poles in France. The case of Polish immigrants to nineteenth-century France is probably the best documented amongst the East-Europeans, and these figures are cited here mainly to suggest the scale of East-European immigration and the precarious lifestyle of the refugees, caught between the initial French largesse and the subsequent fears of and measures against political insurgency. The example of the Poles is illustrative also because they became a cause célèbre among the students of Paris, owing largely to the plight of their dismembered country and to the presence and propaganda of charismatic Poles such as the leader of the Polish moderate, monarchic would-be government-in-exile, Prince Adam Czartoryski, and the poet Adam Mickiewicz, Michelet’s colleague at the Collège de France. The Poles, like all the other ethnic communities, created self- support structures ranging from charitable institutions such as the

54 Kramer, Threshold, 24–5. Statistics of foreigners in nineteenth-century Paris vary, however. According to Gerbod, “Des étrangers”, 572, the first census of foreigners was collected in 1851, showing 62,241 foreigners in Paris, which amounted to 6.2 per cent of the Parisian population. 55 Gerbod, “Des étrangers”, 576. 56 Alain Faure, “A la recherche des réfugiés et des prisonniers politiques”, in Main- tien de l’ordre et polices en France et en Europe au XIXe siècle, published by the Société d’Histoire de la Révolution de 1848 et des Révolutions du XIXe siècle (Paris, 1987), 9–18. 57 The immigration figures quoted by Kramer,Threshold , 26–7, are based on French police bulletins and statistics calculated by Jacques Grandjonc, “Éléments statistiques pour une étude de l’immigration étrangère en France de 1830 à 1851”, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 15 (1975): 211–300. 58 Faure, “A la recherche”, 10. the collÈge de france 37

Institut Saint-Casimir, founded in 1846 to welcome homeless, aged or orphaned Poles, to ostensibly political organisations such as the increasingly radical Polish Democratic Society (the Société démocra- tique polonaise), established in 1832, and its rival, Prince Adam Czar- toryski’s circle of the Polish political right based at the Hotel Lambert in Paris, which became one of the main, if largely ineffectual, centres of East-European political and conspiratorial activities.59 Yet, in spite of the popular sympathy for the Polish cause, the French authorities became increasingly suspicious of such activities, especially around the time of the 1848–49 revolutionary events, when surveillance and deportations increased. La Tribune des Peuples, a Parisian daily coordinated by Adam Mickiewicz, ceased publication on 10 November 1849 after arrests of staff caused by the paper’s public support for the republican demonstrations of 13 June in Paris.60 Most Polish refugees lost their pensions, while members of the Polish Democratic Society, including leading figures in its Committee, such as Stanisław Worcell and Albert Darász, were expelled from France and settled in London, where they eventually gravitated towards Mazzini, Ledru-Rollin and the European Democratic Committee.61 There are no accurate statistics for other East Europeans in 1840s Paris, but as far as the Romanians are concerned, they were comparatively few in number. According to Stanislas Béllanger, the author of a witty ‘physiology’ of the expatriate Moldo-Wallachians in Paris, the number of Romanians living in Paris rose from 8 or 10 individuals in 1830 to around 50 in 1844.62 One of the Romanian forty-eighters in Paris estimated the number of his fellow-countrymen in the French

59 Gerbod, “Des étrangers à Paris”, 570; Slawomir Kalembka, “Les émigrés polonais, victimes de la répression politique (1848–1870)”, in Maintien de l’ordre et polices, 305–14. For the Hotel Lambert see also Małgorzata Willaume, “Les agents balkaniques de l’Hotel Lambert de 1838 à 1849 – portrait de groupe” in Idées politiques et men- talités, en Pologne et en Roumanie entre l’Orient et l’Occident (XVIII e–XX e siècles), ed. Gheorghe Platon and Veniamin Ciobanu (Cluj, 2002), 87–99. 60 Kalembka, “Les émigrés polonais”, 310–2. La Tribune des Peuples had a sizeable subscription list of 7,000 and regularly championed the cause of Poland and of other East-European nations against Russian encroachments. 61 For a very informative account of the activities of the Polish Democratic Society and its interactions with the Hungarian, Italian, German and Romanian revolutionary movements, see Eugene J. Kisluk, Brothers from the North: The Polish Democratic Society and the European revolutions of 1848–1849 (Boulder, Colorado, 2005). For the Romanian involvement with Mazzini’s European Committee, see Part Two, 189 sqq. 62 Stanislas Béllanger, “Le Moldo-Valaque”, in Desnoyers et al., Les Etrangers à Paris, 60. 38 1844–1848 capital to be around 100 in the early 1840s.63 They were 299 in 1861.64 Unlike the more numerous Poles, the Romanians, who did not have refugee status, were less-well organised and received no allocations, relying on family money or personal incomes. Students in the 1840s, exiles after the defeat of the revolution of 1848 in the Romanian Princi- palities, this small group of men and women forged strong friendships, as well as intellectual and political alliances across the very mainstream of Parisian political and intellectual life. In the eyes of French observ- ers, their anti-Russian stance was a particularly prominent feature. “When a Moldo-Wallachian arrives in Paris”, Béllanger wrote, “his first concern is to put as great a distance as possible between himself and the Russian embassy; when he goes out, he checks to see that he is not followed by an officially appointed agent; when he speaks, he always keeps his voice down to a whisper.”65 A young boyar couple visiting Paris had been known to flee in horror upon first learning that the roller coaster at the Grande Chaumière was called a montagne russe, Béllanger quipped.66 While the general public might have been bemused by such extreme – even though anecdotally relayed – feelings, the ‘Russian question’, notably Russia’s role in European civilisation, was not an unknown in French intellectual debates. A negative image of Russia had been advanced, for instance, by the Marquis Astolphe de Custine, whose very popular four-volume study La Russie en 1839 ran through five French-language editions within sixteen years of its publication in 1843. The book, banned in Russia itself, showed that not only the Poles and other satellite nations suffered, but that Russians, too, were oppressed at home by a despotic police state and an ignorant church. It caused considerable damage to Russia’s image abroad, in spite of propaganda counter-offensives mounted by agents of the notorious Third Section of the Russian political police.67 But not everybody was of the de Custine school of thought. To refer only to periods closer to 1848 and to figures whom the Romanians in

63 Ion Bălăceanu, Amintiri politice şi diplomatice 1848–1903, ed. Georgeta Filitti (Bucharest, 2002) (translated from the French), 17. 64 Jacques-Olivier Boudon, Paris: capitale religieuse sous le Second Empire (Paris, 2001), 164. 65 Béllanger, “Le Moldo-Valaque”, 78. 66 Ibid., 79. 67 Sidney Monas, The Third Section: police and society in Russia under Nicholas I (Harvard University Press, 1961), 230–3. the collÈge de france 39

Paris knew, the Russian issue had been the object of reflections by, for example, Théodore Jouffroy, a historian and thinker known to Con- stantin Rosetti. Because, Jouffroy argued, religion and tradition were major components of civilisation, by sheer virtue of being Christian, Russia was European and the Ottoman Empire was not. The Russians “are indeed behind us”, he contended in an essay of 1826, “but they are following in our footsteps.” On this basis, for instance, he justified Russian expansionism in Central Asia as a Christian crusade against the infidel.68 While admitting that Russia was ‘barbarous’, Victor Hugo, too, preferred an expansion of the Russian empire at the expense of the Ottoman, according to the principle that some ‘barbarians’ are preferable to others. “Let Russia’s civilizing mission direct its beam towards Asia,” Hugo urged in Le Rhin in 1841, “and shed upon it whatever light she possesses and, once the Ottoman Empire has crumbled – a grand providential act which is going to save civilization – let her enter Europe via Constantinople. France, re-established in all her glory, will look sympathetically as the Greek cross will replace the crescent on the ancient Byzantine dome of the Hagia Sophia. After the Turks, the Russians will only be one step away from us.”69 Imbued with French culture and armed with an emphatic sense of their own ‘European-ness’, despite coming from what some believed was the periphery of Europe, Constantin Rosetti and his friends were impervious to any conception of Russia’s Christian civilising mission – an idea which they would have found ludicrous. They sought the politically and intellectually congenial milieux in which to highlight the plight of an Eastern Europe left at the mercy of an ailing Otto- man Porte and an aggressive Tsarist foreign policy. Unsurprisingly, in Paris as in London, they were bound to be attracted into the orbit of republican, independent and radical circles and sometimes to embrace extreme or questionable forms of contention. It was while attending courses at the Collège de France and frequenting the famous professors who taught there in the 1840s, Jules Michelet and Edgar Quinet,

68 Théodore Jouffroy, “De l’état actuel de l’humanité”, 1826, in Mélanges philosophiques (1833), (Genève, 1983), 102–3, quoted in Franck Laurent, “Penser l’Europe avec l’histoire. La notion de civilisation européenne sous la Restauration et la monarchie de Juillet”, Romantisme – Revue du dix-neuvième siècle, 29, 104 (1999): 65. 69 Victor Hugo, “Le Rhin” (1841), in Oeuvres complètes, Voyages (Paris, 1985), 430, quoted in Laurent, “Penser l’Europe”, 65. On representations of Russia in the West, see also Part Two of the present study, 209 sqq. 40 1844–1848 as well as the equally controversial Adam Mickiewicz, that these young men were able to stir up a debate around such issues. Although the overwhelming majority of Romania’s future liberal elite studied in Paris, many of them, Rosetti included, never obtained a degree. They were often more happily engaged in scrutinising French political experience and institutions than they were in their own studies, and many ended up in the streets and on the barricades of Febru- ary 1848.70 In Paris in 1845, Constantin Rosetti’s own life remained undisciplined and unfocused, judging from his tortured, self-loathing Diary confessions. He was initiated into Freemasonry on the recommendation of his old college professor from Bucharest, J. A. Vaillant, who had been expelled from the Romanian Principalities for alleged conspiratorial activities against the regime, and was now a member of the lodge ‘La Rose du Parfait Silence’. It was one of the most resolutely republican lodges in Paris and endured as a safe haven for embattled republicans throughout difficult times under the Second Empire. Membership of the lodge included the lawyer Désiré Pilette, co-founder with Louis Blanc of the Journal des Ecoles, the economist and free-trade activist Frédéric Bastiat, the lawyer Odilon Barrot, a future Prime Minister under Louis Napoleon, who was also the president of the secret society ‘Aide-toi le Ciel t’aidera’, and a future close friend of the Romanian émigré groups, the anthropologist Paul Batail- lard. Rosetti’s attendance seems to have been regular and his promo- tion in the Masonic cursus honorum rapid. He attended and presided over the initiation of many of his Parisian friends, French and Roma- nian alike. Apart from his close associate Constantin David Rosenthal, the pre-eminent artist of the 1848 Romanian revolution, new initiates included the Brătianu brothers, Dumitru and Ion, both of whom were to become members of the Romanian provisional government in 1848 and share Rosetti’s subsequent exile in Paris.71 A passionate man, Constantin Rosetti was acutely aware of ‘the feminine’, and felt in perpetual need of a woman’s consoling presence. Although he had already met Marie Grant, she was left behind in

70 Cf. the memoirs of the Moldavian forty-eighter Vasile Mălinescu relayed by Ira- clie Porumbescu in 1848 la români: o istorie în date şi mărturii, ed. Cornelia Bodea (Bucharest, 1998), 3: 45–52. 71 Rosetti, Diary, 57, 72. Cf. also the commemorative volume Lui C. A. Rosetti la o sută de ani de la naşterea sa, 3rd edn., (Bucharest, 1916), 5. A membership list of the lodge ‘La Rose du Parfait Silence’ survived in the Brătianu archives. See Dan Berindei, Revoluţia română din 1848–1849: consideraţii şi reflecţii (Cluj-Napoca, 1997), 78–85. the collÈge de france 41

Bucharest pining for him, while he continued his romantic and erotic entanglements both in France and in Romania, at the age of twenty- nine and thirty still unable to decide whether he could or wanted to settle down or not. Marie Grant was a petite and striking dark-haired beauty, according to the later depiction of her in Légendes démocra- tiques du nord by a visibly smitten Michelet, who believed she might have had a Provençale origin on her mother’s side.72 Yet, in spite of her obvious charm, captured in the two known portraits by Rosenthal (see Figs. 2 and 3), Rosetti was slow to respond. His Diary and the early correspondence with Marie shed light on a singularly passionless love and on a protracted, unenthusiastic courtship. In the Diary entries for 1845 and 1846, amidst observations on La Nouvelle Héloise and George Sand’s Lélia, he often refers to the twenty-seven-year old Marie unflatteringly as “the Grant woman”, reserving his more romantic effusions for the idealised, deceased Sofia and for the unnamed, married woman whom social conventions prevented him from loving. Tormenting though the absence of a woman was in his emotionally needy life, love and marriage were not his priority at the time. Marie Grant had to wait. Like the Poles and other émigré communities in Paris, the Roma- nians built associative structures intended to offer both emotional support to vulnerable young men away from home and financial support to talented sons of impecunious families sent to study abroad. In Decem- ber 1845 Rosetti was appointed cashier of the Society of Romanian Students in Paris, established a few weeks earlier under the patronage of Alphonse de Lamartine. Lamartine, whose Voyage en Orient of 1831 – the result of a long sojourn in the Middle East – had presented a view of a decadent Porte suffocating vital Christian nations, seemed an ideal choice for the honorary position of patron. The forty-eighter and moderate liberal Ion Bălăceanu related later in his memoirs that, having called on Lamartine in the 1840s with a delegation of fellow students to plead in favour of the Principalities, the poet encouraged them warmly as they departed, saying: “As a Slavic nation, you have a great future ahead of you!”73 Such an exhortation, well-meant though it was and launched on the spur of the moment, must have sounded disheartening to young men of the only Latin nation in South-East Europe. Their propaganda efforts focused precisely on dispelling any

72 Michelet, “Madame Rosetti”, in Légendes, 229–30. 73 Bălăceanu, Amintiri politice, 17. 42 1844–1848 misconception that the Westerners might have had about the Roma- nians’ supposed Slavic origin, a fictional origin which, if misused, was likely to serve as an ethnic and cultural basis for the Russian protectorate. Nevertheless, the students chose to ignore the poet-politician’s initial confusion and continued to cultivate Lamartine both before and after 1848 in the hope of gaining an official channel for the defence of their embattled country. Rosetti noted in his diary how pleased and honoured he felt to be entrusted with the humble, yet essential, task of managing the Soci- ety’s precarious budget.74 He and his better-off companions offered loans from their private incomes in order to bring over to Paris and support young Romanians whom they personally selected, and they canvassed among the Romanian diaspora to obtain donations into the associations’ coffers. His 1846 appeal contained a particularly poignant message to women: “Women! You, who were the last at the feet of the cross and the first to gather at the grave, you, who bestow laurels onto heroes and myrrh onto martyrs; [. . .] you who have always been the sacrifice rather than the executioner, and who excel over men by the superiority of your feelings. Women and spouses! [. . .] Women and mothers! In the name of your sufferings, we appeal to you to support and help the Society of Romanian Students.”75 Throughout 1845 and 1846, members of rich expatriate families such as the Can- tacuzino, Mavrocordat and Balş, were all coaxed into donating. It was a small world built on encounters and coincidences that were little short of the miraculous for the tightly-knit Romanian community. The young French woman working as a governess for the Romanian Princess Alexandrina Cantacuzino was Athénaïs Mialaret, the future (second) wife of Jules Michelet.76 Frequenting the Cantacuzinos in the same period was Hermione Asachi (Asaky), the daughter of a prominent Moldavian poet, polymath and politician, and destined to be the

74 Rosetti, Diary, 64. 75 Apel la înfiinţarea Societăţii studenţilor români (Paris, 1846), quoted in ***, C. A. Rosetti ca tipograf. Omagiu din partea Institutului de Arte Grafice ‘Carol Göbl’, cu ocasiunea desvelirii monumentului seu în dziua de 20 Aprilie 1903 (Bucharest, 1903), 13. 76 Princess Alexandrina Cantacuzino, née Creţulescu (1810–1894) was the wife of Grigore Iordache Cantacuzino, one of the boyars who protested in 1837 in the Wal- lachian Assembly against the introduction of the ‘additional article’ in the Organic Statutes, as demanded by Russia. See pp. 26–7 above. Cf. Michelet, Correspondance, 5: 635–7. She is not to be confused with Alexandrina Gr. Cantacuzino (b. 1881), the leading feminist who founded the National Council of Women in 1921. the collÈge de france 43 second wife of Edgar Quinet. The personal connections being thus forged in the early 1840s were to sustain these groups of people throughout the various forms of exile and persecution they were to suffer after the defeat of the 1848 revolutions in Wallachia and the French coup d’état of December 1851. Jules Michelet’s lectures at the Collège de France were not only a source of intellectual inspiration for wide, cosmopolitan audiences of young men and women from all over Europe, but also the occasion for noisy and emotional displays of republican and national feeling, regarded with caution by the authorities and hotly debated in the press. Michelet had been the titular holder of the ‘chaire d’histoire et de morale’ at the Collège since 1838 and was at the height of his career both as a historian, as a teacher of history and as a politically engaged intellectual in a climate of ideas that was brewing with passions and tensions around 1846–47. Also since 1838, he had been a member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, established by the Convention in 1795, but he never accepted membership of the French Academy. Such affiliations suggest an independent spirit, embedded in the Revolutionary tradition and wary of association with the July Monarchy. The Collège de France was unlike any of the higher education institutions of France at the time. It had its origins in the institution of the ‘lecteurs royaux’ established by François I in 1530 as a symbol of trium- phant reason against the scholasticism of the Sorbonne.77 Throughout its history it retained its respect for the spirit of free exploration initiated by the Renaissance, combining freedom with flexibility, and was one of the few institutions of the Ancien Régime spared by the French Revolution.78 In the words of Ernest Renan, by the mid-nineteenth- century the Collège had become “a shelter open to all those who were not comfortable in the bosom of their motherland . . .”79 The atmosphere at Michelet’s lectures at the Collège was electri- fying, if not downright chaotic. On the re-opening of his course on 21 December 1842 after the holidays, three to four hundred people filled the corridors hoping to be allowed in the auditorium.80 On 29 Janu- ary 1846, one day after the publication of his study, Du peuple, the

77 Eric Fauquet, Michelet ou la gloire du professeur d’histoire (Paris, 1990), 235. 78 Annuaire du Collège de France 1981–82 (Paris, 1982), 7. 79 Questions contemporaines, 148, quoted in Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 14. 80 Fauquet, Michelet ou la gloire, 288. 44 1844–1848 professor himself had to ask the school administrator to remove the police from the street, suggesting that the presence of ladies in the audience was in itself a guarantee of order. One of his students, and later a member of the Franco-Romanian coterie, Eugene Noël, wrote this account in a letter to his parents: In spite of the rain pouring in bucketfuls, the queue had formed at the gates of the Collège de France starting with 8 in the morning. The day before, we had reinforced the gates with iron so that people could no longer bring them down. They were only opened to the crowds at a quarter to one, one quarter of an hour only until the commencement of the lecture. We arrived, Alfred [Dumesnil, student and son-in-law of Michelet] and myself, with M. Michelet, but only M. Michelet could pass; we had to be escorted by two very strong men, both porters at the Collège, and even so it was quite a big affair. You cannot imagine the thunder of applause that welcomed the professor. When calm was restored, an amazing silence fell on that vast crowd, and M. Michelet could finally speak. He said he was going to treat of a subject on which everybody would agree, that he was going to talk to us about the fatherland, a topic which enjoyed unanimity in France; and, again, there was universal applause. [. . .] There was not the slightest hint of trouble and I do not think one could imagine a more admirable audience. When the lecture was over, everybody lingered in the court and along the rue Saint-Jacques for more than half an hour in the rain, waiting to greet M. Michelet as he departed.81 Jules Michelet was an inspired speaker and his body of published and unpublished work was already vast: according to a self-assessment, between 1827 and 1847 he published twenty volumes and gave twenty series of lectures. However, he had earned his notoriety mainly through the war he had been waging in the early 1840s against the church’s grip on education and especially against the Jesuits. Des Jésuites, published on 20 July 1843,82 was a volume based on the joint course delivered by Michelet and Edgar Quinet that year, in which they asserted the supremacy of academic and intellectual independence in the face of what they believed was the stultifying control over schools, minds and hearts of the notorious religious order. By July 1844, the book had spawned more than one hundred works by other authors both against

81 Michelet, Cours au Collège de France, 2: 108–9. 82 There were four reprints in 1843 and further editions in 1844, 1845, 1860 and 1875. the collÈge de france 45 and for the ideas expressed by the two anti-clerical professors.83 Des Jésuites, with Du Prêtre (published in January 1845) Le Peuple (Janu- ary 1845), L’Histoire de la Révolution (the first two volumes, 1847–48) and his lectures of 1848 were, in Michelet’s own words, his “livres de combat”,84 and they did earn him fame – and notoriety – both in France and abroad. His English translator Charles Cocks informed him that he had had to beat two others to have his own translation of Le Peuple published before theirs, and that the Prêtre was already in its third English edition by March 1846.85 France in the 1840s was a place where the issue of academic freedom was not taken lightly. Academics and intellectuals aired their views in the press, and ideas voiced in amphitheatres were hotly debated by a wider public, even though they may only have reached a literate ‘bourgeois’ audience. Far from being purely ‘academic’, ideas mattered in a vital sense and floated in the air of the times, ready to be picked by an increasingly politicised nation and become part of the repertoire of political contestation. In the case of Michelet, it was more a case of a civic model of emotional engagement with politics which trickled out of the amphitheatre and into the street. When Michelet’s Du Prêtre was published, hostile critiques of it were published in the Revue des Deux Mondes, marking a re-orientation of a publication previously favourable to both Michelet and Quinet. The Minister of Education, the Comte de Salvandy, openly sought a public denunciation of the two historians by the academic staff of the Collège de France, and, although they did not oblige, Du Prêtre was promptly placed on the censors’ lists. This scandalous aura appealed to Michelet’s young, rebellious audience. In April 1845, just as the Chamber of peers debated the ‘Du Prêtre affair’, Michelet received a standing ovation from his students, an episode duly reported by the republican periodical Le National on 20 April.86 His colleague, Edgar Quinet, however, chose to resign. Michelet’s charisma and his passionately expressed political solidarity, combined with the national and international succès de scandale of

83 Fauquet, Michelet ou la gloire, 288–9. 84 Lecture of 1 April 1848 in Michelet, Cours au Collège de France, 2: 287. 85 Letter of 23 March 1846 in Michelet, Correspondance, 5:80. Le Peuple was reviewed in 1846 in Gazeta de Transilvania, the Romanian-language periodical soon to be censored by the Russian and Austrian authorities, alarmed at the extent of the pan-Romanian cooperation of 1848. Catherine Durandin, Révolution à la française ou à la russe (Paris, 1989), 99. See also p. 74 below. 86 Michelet, Cours au Collège de France, 2: 13. 46 1844–1848 his writings to captivate almost without reserve at least one section of French intellectual circles: the students. Among them, the more politically-oriented of the East-Europeans must have felt that they were not only under the guidance of a militant, polemical historian, unafraid to take on the established order and established ideas, but also that this was a public voice that they could ‘hire’ to speak on their behalf on the international arena. The texts, notes and synopses of some of Michelet’s lectures from the 1830s and 1840s have survived partly because devoted students such as Alfred Dumesnil, Michelet’s future son-in-law, and Etienne Gallois took notes, and partly because the embattled historian himself took the precaution of publishing his courses as he sensed that his chair was being threatened.87 Having lectured in 1838–9 on medieval institutions and art and on the role of women in medieval times, in the years 1846 through to 1848 the Master tackled topics that could not fail to interest the small group of Rosetti and his fellow-countrymen. The lectures contained an inflaming promise of a renaissance of the world, embedded in a fervent, if rather rambling, discourse punctuated by key words such as esprit nouveau, foi nouvelle, sacrifice, révolution morale. Michelet was, of course, thinking primarily of what he perceived as the slumbering, stagnant France of the July Monarchy, a country that needed a civic and spiritual rejuvenation through a return to the spirit of the unfinished and seriously flawed Revolution of 1789. However, his vision of the greatness of nations encompassed the smaller nations, those that appeared destined to remain passive and silent in world affairs. They, according to Michelet, were not necessarily to be judged according to a ‘quota system’ of what they contributed to world history. “Each of these nations”, he wrote, rehearsing Fichtean notions, “represents a superior excellence, a high mark of the human soul.”88 For the East Europeans, who came from small or oppressed nations, it was a seductive and empowering suggestion.

87 Jules Michelet, Notes recueillies à son Cours au Collège de France en 1838–39, ed. Etienne Gallois (Paris: Librairie Académique, 1877); Michelet, L’Etudiant: Cours de 1847–1848, 2nd edn. (Paris: Calman Lévy, Editeur,1877). (The first edition was published in Paris by Chamerot, Libraire-Editeur, in 1848 under the title Cours professé au Collège de France par J. Michelet, 1847–48 and contained the same material in a different order). 88 Paul Viallaneix, La Voie royale. Essai sur l’idée du peuple dans l’oeuvre de Michelet (Paris, 1971), quoted in Jules Michelet şi revoluţionarii români, ed. Bucur, 17. the collÈge de france 47

Nations, great or small, are indestructible, Michelet believed: “Those who torture nations, those who wrench those cries from the depth of their immortal souls, are in effect the revealers and founders of the nations which they attempt to destroy”, he declared in his lecture of 5 February 1846.89 As the Polish crisis deepened in the aftermath of a liberal insurgency which hung in the balance, Michelet did not hesitate to turn his lecture of 15 March 1846 into a public appeal on behalf of the Poles. According to Alfred Dumesnil, who was there, the audience on that day was more numerous than usual, and when the gates opened, a collection of funds was quickly organized to cries of “Vive la Pologne!” and the money deposited on the Professor’s desk. Michelet inflected his ideas on nationality towards a collective prayer, by appealing to a sense of international solidarity among his students: “I pray God for the victory of a people whom we all are holding in our thoughts”, he told his audience. “For where are our souls, Messieurs? On the Seine? No, it is on the Vistula. Well! Should this great people who is now stirring and of whom we have had no recent news, should this people not obtain the victory for whom we have been praying, we will not deem its cause any less legitimate and holy; it is holy because it is eternal, it is a cause that will ultimately triumph one day in the future.”90 On the same day, as if to show that the distance between the seminar room and the street was minimal, as the Master wished, a group of students led by Michelet’s seventeen-year-old son, Charles, went to the offices of the radical journal La Réforme bearing their subscription for Poland. It was an episode characteristic of the spontane- ous, yet elaborate, mise-en-scène organizing itself around Michelet’s lectures in that period. The theme of small, oppressed, but indestructible, nations was closely linked in Michelet’s thinking with France’s role in the world, a theme to which he returned in the short-lived euphoria of the early days of the Second Republic. As he resumed his course on 6 March 1848, after a brief suspension of the course, Michelet spoke about revolutionary France’s world mission in his Allocution aux écoles.

89 Michelet, Cours au Collège de France, 2: 117. 90 Letter to Eugène Noël, 15 March 1846, in Michelet, Cours au Collège de France, 2: 109. 48 1844–1848

France is charged with the mission of giving peace to the world – he said – the only peace that endures, that of liberty. Feared at this moment all over the world, let her take her seat among the nations, as an armed mediatrix who does not, however, impose the silence of terror onto the world, but on the contrary, who gives a voice to all the silent nations. France cannot abstain. Nothing in the world is alien to her. She finds and recognizes herself, as a thinking force and a tradition, in remote nations . . . And they, they look on her and recognize themselves in her. [. . .] No, we must have unity in the world, there is no denying this, free unity, holy unity, the unity of souls and hearts. And as a sign of this unity, here is this vacant chair! . . . It is the seat of Poland, the seat of our beloved and great Mickiewicz [. . .]. But Poland, what is Poland? She is the most generic representative of universal suffering. In her, I see the people who suffer [. . .]91 Poland was not the only international cause that Michelet embraced. He was equally interested in developments in Hungary and cultivated the friendship of August de Gerando, who, married to the Hungarian countess Emma Teleki, participated in the doomed Magyar revolution of 1848–9 and died in disappointment shortly afterwards. Michelet also pointed to “starving” Ireland, to “illiberal” Germany and to Italy, “suspended between life and death”, as being equally deserving of French solidarity. Rosetti in his diary declared himself not a little jealous of Poland’s and Hungary’s prominence in the French élan of internationalist sympathy, and later, as will be seen, also engaged in epistolary exchanges with the historian on the thorny question of Magyar- Romanian relations. But Romania’s place in French minds had yet to be earned. Michelet’s Romanian students were only starting to make themselves and their country’s cause known to their Master. Both he and they were to endure political defeat and the deprivation of exile before they could meet on a common ground of political thinking and emotional connectedness. Rosetti and his companions had started their ideological apprenticeship as Michelet developed and delivered his social philosophy in his lectures of late 1847, the main theme of which was France’s, and implicitly the world’s, need for “social renovation.” There was, he believed, a divide between the “privilégiés du loisir, du savoir” (i.e.

91 Michelet, L’Etudiant, 277–8. Mickiewicz’s course had been suspended in April 1844. the collÈge de france 49 the intellectuals) and “les hommes du travail”,92 and this rift had to be healed. Going to the people was not perhaps a novel idea world-wide, but uttered by a charismatic teacher to his large community of young intellectual disciples in a place like Paris, it gained renewed force, and was particularly relevant to the young men and women who were to import such ideas to Central and Eastern Europe. It was the intellectuals’ mission, Michelet preached, to blur social divisions and to create a ‘moral unity’ in the nation and in the world.93 The cheap, sensationalist literature and drama available to the working masses, he said, were inadequate vehicles of moral unity. What was needed instead was a “crusade of men meeting men”, a “grand mouvement social”, an “élan du coeur.”94 In his second lecture, entitled “The young man and the people”, he developed the theme which represented the moral foundation of his course: the idea of the young man as “mediator within the city” and principal agent of social reconstruction. Months later, in his concluding lecture of 1 April 1848, he returned to this theme and presented to his audience the enthralling vision of “l’alliance des écoles et du peuple”, the alliance of students and workers. 95 In order to achieve this cultural revolution, young men were supposed to follow a stoical path of disciplined self-denial. “[. . .] you are going to achieve this through work, through voluntary sacrifice day by day, through the exercise of the effectual virtues, les“ vertus efficaces”, he had advised his listeners in a lecture on the painter Géricault in 1846.96 In the incendiary days of pre- and post-1848 Paris, such messages of cross-class empathy and the noisy displays of student enthusiasm they occasioned were a threat to the regime and the course was suspended from 2 January 1848 to 6 March 1848. “From Mickiewicz to Quinet and from Quinet to myself, it is a coup d’État en trois coups”, he declared presciently in an open letter published by Le National on 4 January.97 On 6 January, around 1,500 of Michelet’s students and supporters gathered in front of his home on Rue des Postes to show

92 Inaugural lecture of 16 December 1847 in ibid., 12. 93 Ibid., 14–5. 94 Ibid., 26. 95 Ibid., 285, 287. 96 Jules Michelet, Géricault (Caen, 1991), 58–9. 97 Viallaneix, Michelet: les travaux et les jours, 324. Adam Mickiewciz, who held the Chair of Slavic languages and literatures, which he had inaugurated in 1840, had been suspended in 1844, while Quinet, holder of the Chair of languages and literatures of Southern Europe, had resigned from the Collège in 1845. 50 1844–1848 their support. The next day, the historian addressed them at the start of the lecture which inaugurated the new course – no longer delivered in the auditorium, but published in instalments. He denounced the representatives of the “parti-prêtre” and their “political and religious Jesuitism”, for whom the idea of social unity was anathema and who had finally manoeuvred to have his course suspended.98

98 Michelet, L’Etudiant, 85. JULES MICHELET AND ‘LES FRANCO-ROUMAINS’: DUMITRU BRĂTIANU

[. . .] le vent qui vient de France se fait sentir de loin. Brătianu, Letter to Jules Michelet 1 March 184699

Monsieur, Upon my arrival in France, you were the first man I encountered Le( Peuple had just been published); I then had long hours of conversations with you and I felt, as I always do after our meetings, younger, stronger, better. As I am a foreigner, it should be easy for you to guess which was the passage from your book which arrested my attention most and which encourages me to take the liberty of writing to you; it is where you speak about the feelings foreigners have for France. That passage surprised me to the highest degree while at the same time giving me the measure of the excellence of all your reflections on the world and on France.100 This was the opening gambit of Dumitru Brătianu’s first letter to Jules Michelet sent from Dijon on 1 March 1846. It was the first of a series of epistolary exchanges between an ebullient and verbose young Brătianu and a cautiously encouraging Michelet, an exchange which later became one of the channels for the emerging Franco-Romanian alliance. Born in 1818, Dumitru Brătianu came from a family of boyars from Oltenia (Little Wallachia in southern Romania), a region reputed for its people’s independence of mind and political restiveness. His father had a seat in the Principality’s National Assembly from November 1831 up to his death in 1844. In spite of his top position, he was one of the few older boyars to discard the customary Oriental-style clothes of his class for ‘European’ ones, a choice which, in that conservative climate, had the significance of a subversive pro-Western gesture.101 He was also, as already mentioned, one of a group of rebel deputies who

99 Idem, Correspondance, 5: 66. 100 Ibid., 64. 101 For the link between fashions and Westernization in old-regime Romania, see my study “Women, Fashion and Europeanization. The Romanian Principalities, 1750–1830” in Women in the Ottoman Balkans: gender, culture and history, ed. Amila Buturović and Irvin Cemil Schick (London, 2007), 201–30. 52 dumitru brătianu protested against the inclusion of the Russian-sponsored ‘additional article’ in the country’s constitutional chart.102 The family was rea- sonably wealthy and, after studies at Saint Sava College in Bucharest, in 1835 the young Dumitru was sent to Paris to study law, with an allowance of 500 imperial gold ducats from his father.103 On Sundays, he attended meetings of the Moldo-Wallachian students at the Pension Ducolombier on the Rue St. Hyacinthe.104 On 20 August 1839 Dumitru Brătianu and his fellow-Romanians Ion Ghica and Alexandru G. Golescu founded the ‘Society for the education of the Romanian people’ (Societatea pentru învăţătura poporului român). Part of their funding was used to send Armand Carrel’s Le National – where Ion Ghica, a future forty-eighter, was a regular contributor – and other French publications to readers in Romania.105 In 1841, Dumitru was joined in Paris by his younger brother, Ion, who became equally active in propaganda activities, although ostensibly he was there to pursue military training and forge a career in the army. Ion lost no time in making contacts and his network of friends and acquaintances quickly expanded across the political spectrum, from Odilon Barrot and the editors of Le National, to Paul Meurice, the writer and editor of l’Evénement, to the diplomat and deputy Edouard Drouyn de Lhuys,106 and others who, like their British counterparts, Lord Dudley Stuart and David Urquhart, were to make important contributions to Romanian propaganda in the 1850s.107 In the same year, 1841, Dumitru obtained his degree in law at the University of Paris, with a dissertation on property – a topic which was to engage the minds of his friends and associates in Paris as future

102 See p. 28 above. 103 Biblioteca Naţională, Ms., the Saint-Georges Collection, Packet CCVI, Dossier no. 7, I, Paris 1842–48. 104 Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu. 1: 9. 105 Ibid., 10. 106 Edouard Drouyn de Lhuys, b. 1805, diplomat and politician. He was a reformist member of the Constituante and of the Legislative Assembly. As foreign minister in the first cabinet after the election of Louis Napoléon as president on 20 December 1848, he supported the president and was favourable to sending French troops against the Italian republicans, but he successfully negotiated the withdrawal of troops on 15 September 1864. In 1849 he was French ambassador in London. After the Crimean War he took part in the Vienna conference, but resigned afterwards both from the ministry and from the Senate, where he returned in 1865. He received the Légion d’honneur in 1853. Cf. entry in G. Vapereau, Dictionnaire des contemporains (Paris, 1865). 107 Biblioteca Naţională, ms., the Saint-Georges Collection, Packet CCVI. Dossier no. 7, I, Paris, 1842–48. dumitru brătianu 53 members of the 1848 provisional government and as future liberal legislators after 1859. Brătianu’s planned doctorate in law was never to be completed, however, owing to the fast pace of changes engulf- ing the whole of Europe in 1848 and to his increasing involvement in political activism.108 In Wallachia in the 1840s, as already mentioned, the Ottoman- and Russian-sponsored government had created an efficient police state which was stifling the voices of the emerging liberal, nationalist opposition. “The state of everything here is to be pitied. Even insects suffer . . .”,109 Rosetti noted in his diary on 24 September 1846 during a visit to his home country. Brătianu and his fellow-expatriates in Paris did not spare efforts to mobilize public opinion on behalf of the Romanian Principalities in their bid for independence from Otto- man suzerainty and especially from the increasingly resented Russian influence. When the new Prince Gheorghe Bibescu was appointed in Wallachia in December 1842, Dumitru wasted no time in denouncing him in the Parisian press as Russia’s man.110 Dumitru Brătianu also formed links with lesser-known figures from the liberal, republican and radical opposition groups in France, such as Désiré Pilette, a republican lawyer and fellow Freemason, co- founder with Louis Blanc of the newspaper Les Ecoles and a co-editor of La Réforme. By 1846, Pilette had become 1er surveillant of the lodge ‘La Rose du Parfait Silence’, members of which, as already mentioned, included Constantin Rosetti, as one of the secretaries, the two Brătianu brothers, Dumitru and Ion, and another friend and forty- eighter, Alexandru Cretzianu.111 In spite of the theoretical interdic- tion for Freemasons to involve themselves in politics, French lodges became increasingly politicized during the July Monarchy and the Sec- ond Republic, their members contributing prominently to the political agitation of the pre-1848 period. From amongst the members of the provisional government in 1848, for instance, only Lamartine and the Montagnard Ledru-Rollin had no Masonic connections. When a delegation of the Grand Orient de France, in full Masonic regalia, was received by the French provisional government at the Hôtel de Ville on 6 March 1848, offering the new regime the support of the

108 Anastasie Iordache, Dumitru Brătianu: diplomatul, doctrinarul liberal şí omul politic (Bucharest, 2003), 907–59. 109 Rosetti, Diary, 186. 110 Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 14. 111 Ibid., 115, note 3. See p. 40 above. 54 dumitru brătianu forty thousand members of lodges nationwide, Adolphe Crémieux, the new Minister for Justice, a Montagnard and a Mason himself, thanked them, saying: “While it is true that Freemasonry has no direct political objectives, high politics, the politics of humanity, has always been close to the heart of the Masonic lodges.”112 Subsequently, the Grand Orient de France allied itself openly and actively to the new regime to such an extent that in the following decades it was customary for the republican, liberal regime to be quasi-identified with Freemasonry in the popular perceptions of the period. However, a law of 19 June 1849 decreed the closure of all secret societies, and surveillance of the Masonic lodges continued well into the 1850s. In spite of this, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Grand Orient evolved steadily towards an increasingly engaged anti-clerical republicanism.113 It is easy to see why the occult connections formed within the lodges could evolve into cosmopolitan political alliances of republicans and radicals biding their time for the changes to come. The Romanian students’ and émigrés’ Masonic affiliation was certainly more – or less – than a youthful quest for spiritual and mystical enlightenment or a fascination with arcane ancient rituals: it was a form of sociability which channelled their republican convictions and their participation in the “politics of humanity” invoked by Crémieux.114 Dumitru Brătianu’s first letter to Michelet, the opening sentences of which opened this section, and the correspondence that followed, were part of an increasingly cohesive campaign by the Romanian expatriates in the period 1846–1848 to win the voices of France’s élite intellectuals and journalists for the cause of the emerging Romanian nation. It would perhaps be cynical to suspect the young disciple’s rather dithy- rambic message of being simply a flattering, attention-seeking exercise: the admiration must have been genuine. But, tuning into the Master’s key ideas as well as into his phobias, Brătianu (signing himself ‘Dimi- tri Bratiano’, as he was known to French speakers) did write what Michelet wanted to hear: a hymn to France and to her global cultural-

112 Bulletin du Grand Orient de France, 4 (1848): 66–8. 113 Histoire des Franc-Maçons en France (Toulouse, 1981), ed. Daniel Ligou, 219–39. For earlier links between Freemasonry and republicanism, see Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (London, 1981), passim. 114 In the 1860s Adolphe Crémieux, who was Jewish, was to visit Romania to support legislation favourable to the country’s Jewish community. See my Conclusions, p. 339. On Crémieux, see Georges Renauld, Adolphe Crémieux: homme d’état français, juif et franc-maçon: le combat pour la République (Paris, 2002). dumitru brătianu 55 political mission. Having travelled to England, Germany and Italy, the young man found them lacking in grandeur and intellectual range: England was a commercialised “Anti-Christ”, he wrote, Germany was without spirit, Italy was a desert. Conversely, France, imitated world- wide even by those who claimed to despise her, was a “religion”, a new “holy land”, the land of the Revolution when, “for the first time, God showed Himself to man in all His greatness.”115 This flattering letter earned Brătianu an invitation to see the Mas- ter. Michelet also requested his permission to read out parts of the text in the amphitheatre of the Collège de France, without necessarily mentioning the sender’s name. “I shall remain for ever obliged to you for what you said about France”, the historian wrote on 23 March 1846, explaining that the letter had been hijacked for fifteen days by his daughter, Adèle, and by his son-in-law, Alfred Dumesnil, which explained the belated reply.116 This exchange is almost a case study for the heightened emotionalism of the period’s correspondence, not only between family members, but between members of groups sharing political and intellectual goals. It is characteristic in the letters of, say, Michelet, Quinet, Victor Hugo, and their networks of republican allies, disciples, families and friends. There are abundant expressions of brotherly and sisterly love between men and women alike, and also abundant amounts of tears unashamedly shed as each party receives news from the other. It was an emotional connection that was to prove life-savingly essential in the years after the revolution of 1848 and the coup d’état of 1851, when these networks found themselves uprooted and dispersed by exile, arrests and marginalisation. Brătianu’s warm reply encompasses the historian’s family in an imagined and desired community of political friendship: 24 March 1846 Monsieur, My letter or rather, the state of my soul, which you read in it, made you shed tears, and I am not surprised; you are possessed of such an affectionate heart! I also shed abundant tears reading yours, but they were tears of joy. And for this I am grateful to you, Monsieur, and to Madame your daughter and Monsieur your son-in-law, because such moments of joy are rare in my life.

115 Michelet, Correspondance, 5: 64–70. 116 Ibid., 80–1. 56 dumitru brătianu

I beg you to do whatever you will please with my letter, and with my name and with my person. I shall always be proud to walk with my head held high under your banner.117 Michelet’s son-in-law, Alfred Dumesnil, had arrived in Paris in 1837 from Rouen, accompanied by his mother, Adèle, the estranged wife of a merchant from that city. Mother and son attended Jules Michelet’s lectures at the Collège de France, and, after meeting the historian, they became practically part of his household. The widowed Michelet formed a close attachment to the intense, intellectual, Adèle Dumes- nil, which only ended upon her death from cancer in 1842. The intellectually gifted Alfred became an adopted son, partly overshadowing Michelet’s less brilliant own son, Charles, and married the historian’s daughter, Adèle, on 3 August 1843.118 In Paris, Alfred Dumesnil became part of an informal network of young people including, among others, the writer Eugène Noël, the soon to become famous Gustave Flaubert, both friends from Rouen, and Charles-Louis Chassin, a philo-Hungarian who translated the work of the Hungarian national poet Sandor Petöfi and was subsequently the biographer of Edgar Quinet. They all frequented the tiny fraction of the radical republican bourgeoisie of the July Monarchy. They shared youth, idealism and, unusually for a younger generation, a complete adherence to their elders’ ideas, in this case the liberal, anti-clerical-ideas circulated in the circles of their mentors, Michelet and Quinet. They also developed in their letters and writings a “romantic, gothic, lachrymose, narcissistic style” tinged with revolutionary touches. Their emphasis on emotion, art, nature, the connectedness of man and woman, of adult and child was shared by the older saint-simonians and fourièristes, as well as by popular writers such as Eugène Sue, George Sand, Hugo, Vigny and Michelet.119 These young men of the republican bourgeoisie passed this heritage on, while at the same time building among themselves a cult of friendship, nurtured

117 Ibid., 81. 118 It is such emotionally convoluted relationships that have made Jules Michelet a particularly attractive subject for psycho-biographies, and Arthur Mitzman has explored them with gusto. See, for instance, his Michelet Historian: rebirth and romanticism in nineteenth-century France (Yale University Press, 1990). 119 Arthur Mitzman, “Les amis d’Alfred Dumesnil: sociabilité juvénile et fraternité révolutionnaire à la veille de 1848”, in 1848 – Révolutions et mutations au XIXe siècle, Bulletin de la Société d’histoire de la révolution de 1848 et des révolutions du XIXe siècle (1990), 68. dumitru brătianu 57 by Michelet’s description of the “fédérations provinciales”, based on the “mystique of revolutionary brotherhood”.120 Although the social group in which they belonged – the students of the ‘lycées’ and the royal colleges – amounted, according to some calculations, to approximately only two percent of the educated French population of the July Monarchy, their role as transmitters of a republican heritage should not be underestimated, in spite of their often unimpressive political careers. (Both Alfred Dumesnil and Eugène Noël failed to be elected to the Assemblée Nationale after February 1848.)121 It would appear that their close-knit community of young ‘social romantics’ imploded after the collapse of the republican dream of 1848 and the second marriage of Michelet to the much younger Athénaïs Mialaret. However, although some sense of generational solidarity was lost, they continued an almost subterranean work and developed their themes within academia and the press and, not least, continued to build the cosmopolitan republican networks into which they co-opted, among other people, the East-European students of Jules Michelet. Another young member of the group was Armand Lévy (b. 1827), a law student who frequented Michelet’s lectures in 1847–1849. He worked for the Journal des écoles, for Ledru-Rollin’s La Réforme and joined Georges Sand, Barbès and Pierre Leroux among the contributors of La Vraie République, connections for which he was to be placed under surveillance after the dramatic events of 13 June 1848 in Paris, which resulted in the arrest and deportation of thousands of radical republicans.122 After a brief self-imposed exile in London, upon his return to Paris he joined the entourage of Adam Mickiewicz, whose secretary and translator he became. In the 1850s, as will be shown later in this account, he was to become an important member of the Franco-Romanian coterie and to contribute in a major way to their propaganda. Although Edgar Quinet had resigned, as shown, from the College de France in 1845, the Romanians were understandably keen to include him among their circle of supporters. On 1 January 1847, led by their friend Paul Bataillard – the anthropologist and future historian of the Central European Gypsies – they visited Quinet at home and presented

120 Ibid., 70. 121 Ibid., 68. 122 N. P. Smochină, “Sur les émigrés roumains à Paris de 1850 à 1856”, Mélanges de l’école roumaine en France, 11 (1933): 155–203, 168. 58 dumitru brătianu him with a collective letter with all their signatures. “. . . Unaware of what I might have done to deserve this precious tribute, I must see in it an earnest appeal addressed to me on behalf of the Moldo- Wallachian nation”, Quinet responded, adding: You possess everything that confers immortal rights, a tradition, an awakening literature, a language of your own – related to ours . . . You are surrounded, submerged by powerful enemies . . . But there exists something more powerful, more invincible, more indestructible than all the souls on earth . . . it is the heroic spirit of nationality . . . if it propagates, nothing will overpower you.123 Both Michelet and Quinet were going to fulfil their promises of support in the 1850s, in the intense years around the Crimean War and the Congress of Paris. Brătianu was not content simply with seeking the adherence of republicans in Paris, and courted, rather indiscriminately, personalities of widely contrasting political persuasions, with less than tangible results. In March 1847 he sent Count Charles Montalembert, one of the chief liberal Catholics of the day, known for his Polish sympathies, a number of what can only be termed ‘propaganda’ books, among which La Roumanie (1844) by the journalist, Freemason and one-time professor in Bucharest, J. A. Vaillant. Keen to publicize his country’s enlightened humanitarian credentials, he proudly informed Mon- talembert of the decree voted by the Wallachian National Assembly on 11 February 1847 regarding the liberation of the Gypsy slaves, large numbers of whom were still the property of the Church, the monasteries and other public institutions.124 Montalembert, who had passionately defended the rights of the Poles to independent nationhood in 1846,125 replied on 10 March 1847, saying, politely and vac- uously: “[. . .] I am filled with deep sympathy for the cause of the Moldo-Wallachians, for the independence and dignity of these pic- turesque provinces, so intimately connected to the dignity and inde-

123 Speech as reported by Paul Bataillard in Anul 1848 în Principatele române, 6 vols. (Bucharest, 1902–1910), 1: 42–3. 124 A number of private individuals from the boyar class, including Rosetti himself, had already emancipated their own Gypsy slaves, not unproblematically, given the economic co-dependence that had evolved between landowners and slaves. For the status of Gypsies in nineteenth-century Romania, see chiefly Viorel Achim,The Roma in Romanian History (Budapest, 2004). 125 Montalembert, Discussion sur les affaires de Pologne, Chambre des Députés. 14 March 1846, Chambre des Pairs, 18–19 March 1846, in Durandin, Révolution, 101–3, 132–3. dumitru brătianu 59 pendence of civilized Europe.”126 This reply, civil though it was, was, however, much less than the promise of a public defence of the Roma- nian cause, which Brătianu was seeking. Also in 1847, the founding members of the Society of Romanian Students in Paris, created in 1845 under the patronage of Lamartine, sent a message, probably penned by Dumitru Brătianu, to their patron, the deputy and future member of the French provisional government in 1848. Ostensibly they wrote to request official permission for holding meetings in the building of the Romanian library in Paris, in Place Sorbonne, but the message was in fact a thinly disguised piece of political publicity. The Romanians expected nothing less than a public expression of support from the French government. Wishing to be seen to spare the Ottoman suzerain’s sensibilities, they argued rather convolutedly that, should the French government put forth such declarations of support for the subjects of an Ottoman dominion, the Ottoman ambassador in Paris could not fail to see in them a mark of respect for the Porte itself. In addition, they hoped that, as one day France was going to be more familiar with the Moldo-Wallachian nation, she would welcome her little-known Latin relative into the sis- terhood of civilized European nations: Oh, Monsieur! If only man could penetrate the mystery enveloping the Romanian nationality; then you would see the secret links, the providential links connecting Romania to France; if you knew how the Mol- do-Wallachians, without ever having set eyes on France, or on her flag, without ever having heard her voice, have learned, in a purely intuitive way, to know her, understand and love her, yes, love her as her own beloved sons do; if you only knew that, in our barbarity, seven hundred leagues away from France, separated from her by many different states and nations, we have transplanted France’s soul in our very midst; if you only knew the powerful attraction that France’s prestige exercises on our hearts; if you knew the cost in personal sacrifice of our pilgrimage to Paris; [. . .] if you knew all this, Monsieur, your heart would break.127 The deprivations, the poverty, illnesses and deaths that decimated the small Romanian community in Paris are all laid out by Brătianu in almost Micheletian prose: the Romanians’ graves in Parisian cemeter- ies, the occasional return of the exiles to their endlessly waiting parents back home, whose deaths turned them into involuntary “parricides”,

126 Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 126. 127 Ibid., 130. 60 dumitru brătianu are presented as sacrifices made willingly for the sake of consolidating the Franco-Romanian political, intellectual and spiritual alliance and thereby securing a future for their nation. The French government did not make any official statements as a result of the Romanian students’ plea either before or after the events of 1848. The petitioning, letters, and propaganda brochures remained for years to come mere messages in bottles thrown at sea by this small group of would-be revolutionaries, soon to be engulfed by the sweeping waves of European revolutions. Z In spite of the tensions and frustrations of the years 1846 to 1848, Constantin Rosetti somehow found the mental energy to clarify his emotional situation and focus on his disorganized personal life. Per- haps because he sensed difficult times lay ahead, he decided to finally propose to Marie Grant. He got feverishly involved in the marriage preparations and he ardently invited Marie, still in employment in Bucharest in the Odobescu family, to give her notice and join him in Vienna. After the less than passionate courtship of the early 1840s, it is surprising to eavesdrop on Rosetti’s intense declarations as a husband- to-be, but perhaps not so surprising to see to what extent he had found a mother-substitute in Marie: [. . .] for I am your son. You have given my life back to me, and my youth, and all the hope and lost illusions. I am your spiritual son: I was dead for the heavens and it was you, you alone, who cared enough to pick up this dead body that they wanted to bury and that you resuscitated with your breath just like God breathed life into the first day.128 The marriage took place on 31 August 1847 in Plymouth, where Marie’s widowed mother resided at the time.129 The couple decided to have their union blessed in a second ceremony officiated in the groom’s Eastern Orthodox religion. Even intimate, emotional events such as romance and marriage did not escape the touch of politics. “[. . .] I thought we should also get married in the Greek religion and this cannot be done in Paris, because there is only one Russian priest there,

128 “the first day” in English in the original, inC. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 29. 129 Cf. request addressed to the Foreign Office to forward Rosetti’s certificate of baptism to Plymouth, PRO/FO 786, No. 13, 10 August 1847; marriage certificate in the parish registers of East Stonehouse, Devon, 31 August 1847, Registration District East Stonehouse, no. 155. dumitru brătianu 61 and I think I would rather lose you than owe you to a Russian”, Rosetti wrote to his bride-to-be.130 The ceremony took place in Vienna, on 25 September 1847, in the Greek-Orthodox Church of St. George, with the fellow-forty-eighters Nicolae and Alexandru Golescu as witnesses. The Rosettis’ was going to be a long, dramatic, but devoted marriage, punctuated by heroic gestures and tragedy – the kind of union of man and woman that Michelet championed and was to celebrate in Légen- des démocratiques du nord, “Madame Rosetti” in 1853–55. Upon his return to Bucharest, Rosetti continued to receive the texts of Michelet’s and Quinet’s lectures in the post.131 It was a difficult time: the early months of his marriage to Marie proved a disappointment, mainly because of his frustration with lacking scope for political activity. Financial difficulties and the political confusion in Romania added to his emotional burden, as his Diary for that time suggests. He tried to derive encouragement from reading the texts of Michelet’s course with his wife and friends. “I feel totally discouraged because I am unable to write”, he noted on 20 February 1848, “although my wife has been sublime today: she was the woman according to Michelet: she encouraged me, she forced me to write, and promised me her support.”132 Only news of the revolution in France jolted him out of his lethargy. “[. . .] as I went home yesterday”, he wrote on 2 March 1848, “I was greeted by the news that France is a republic. I salute you from all my heart, sublime nation! Christ of nations! Oh! May the heavens grant that you will remember my own unfortunate nation!”133

130 Letter dated 24June/5 July 1847 in C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 28. ‘Greek’ was the term normally employed at the time to refer to the Eastern Orthodox rite in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. 131 Entries for February 1848 in Rosetti, Diary, 226 and 232–3. 132 Ibid., 233. 133 Ibid., 235. 1848 IN PARIS AND EUROPE

Le pur évangile a vaincu. La République que nous apportons au monde repose, avant tout, sur la divine égalité des coeurs. Quinet, Speech at the Collège de France, 1848134

La belle élite des jeunes Roumains que j’ai connus et même un peu patronnés par mes conseils à Paris, avant 1848, m’a laissé une prédilection cordiale pour cette brillante et grave jeunesse. Lamartine, 1861135 Some of the Romanian students and political émigrés took actual part in the fighting of February 1848 on Parisian barricades, alongside the Belgians, Irish, Poles, Hungarians, Piedmontese and others immigrant communities.136 One of them, the historian Nicolae Bălcescu, tore a piece of velvet upholstery off Louis Philippe’s throne at the Tuileries and enclosed it in a letter to a friend in Bucharest, with the comment: “Learn that this majestic nation has risen and the liberty of the world has been redeemed.”137 On the same day, 24 February, the ‘Moldo- Valaques’ put their library in Place Sorbonne at the disposal of the public as a clinic for the wounded, equipped with first-aid medication. They offered to their patron, Lamartine, now foreign minister, to organise a Romanian legion in support of the new republic.138 Disappointingly, the support of Lamartine, who ran foreign affairs until replaced by Jules Bastide on 12 May 1848, was to be very limited, reflecting both the contradictory nature of his own predilections – he was an inter-

134 Edgar Quinet, La République: Discours au Collège de France (Paris, 1848), 9. 135 La Voix de la Roumanie, ed. Ulysse de Marsillac, I, 3, 7 February 1861. 136 Among the documents from the Brătianu archives edited by Al. Cretzianu there is an invitation to “citoyen Ratianni Demetreat” [sic] to attend a meeting at the Ecole des Filles on rue Madame, on 12 March 1848, in view of forthcoming recruitment into the National Guard. 137 Nicolae Bălcescu to Vasile Alecsandri, Paris, 24 February 1848, reproduced in Nicolae Isar, Principatele române de la 1821 la 1848: Sub semnul renaşterii naţionale (Bucharest, 2004), 299. 138 A list of subscribers to a fund for the French wounded, including the Brătianu brothers and the Golescus, in Michelet, Correspondance, 5: 630–1, reproduced from Le Peuple Constituant of 22 March 1848. 1848 in paris and europe 63 nationalist, but also a pacifist – as well as the limitations and ambiguities of French international politics at the time. In the wake of the victorious French revolution, most immigrant communities – Hungarians, Piedmontese, Sardinians, Belgians, Swiss, Poles – hoped that the new republican regime might supply arms and logistical support for freedom fighters organized into ‘legions’ to return to their respective countries, overthrow authoritarian regimes or foreign domination there and fight for the unification and the independence of emergent nation-states. Their hopes were seconded in France by the extreme left, radicals and secret society conspirators – people such as Auguste Blanqui, the new Paris prefect Marc Caussi- dière, Armand Barbès, François-Vincent Raspail and public figures such as George Sand – who would have wanted the see the revolution exported to the rest of Europe. While, controversially, military incursions by legions of patriots into Belgium, the Rhine-land states and Savoy were tacitly allowed to happen and were even condoned by the more insubordinate civil servants of the new republic, and while a military intervention in Northern Italy was considered by Lamar- tine himself, the French foreign minister overtly maintained his pacifist, conciliatory stance, as illustrated in his well-knownManifesto to Europe (“Manifeste aux Pouvoirs”) of 4 March 1848. This circular, sent to the French diplomatic corps after consultation with the British ambassador, Lord Normanby, made it clear to a concerned Europe that republican France’s plans were peaceful and that she had no intention of exporting the revolution or of supporting insurrections abroad. It was an approach which perfectly coincided, in the late 1840s, with Lord Palmerston’s own ultimate preference for peace with powerful, authoritarian states at the expense of continental liberalism139 and of freedom-fighters’ nation-building efforts, especially in East-Central Europe, where such efforts would have alienated Russia and the Otto- man Porte. While proclaiming itself the “intellectual and cordial ally of popular rights and progress”, the new French republic – Lamartine’s Manifesto announced – would not consider pursuing “underhand or incendiary propagandism among neighbouring states”, but only the “pros- elytism of esteem and sympathy.” Lamartine was especially keen to allay Russian fears. To Pavel Kiseleff,140 a former Russian governor of

139 Steele, Palmerston and Liberalism, 18. 140 In Russian Pavel Dmitryievich Kisseliov. 64 1848 the Romanian Principalities and a bête noire of the Romanian forty- eighters, then chargé d’affaires in Paris, he offered assurances “that he had no intention of allowing France to become involved in war with Russia over the restoration of Polish independence.” Jules Bas- tide, Lamartine’s successor from mid-May onwards, was an equally resolute partisan of non-intervention. However, confusingly and vaguely enough, the French republic did not exclude the possibility of a military response “should conditions incompatible with peace be offered to the French people.” Switzerland and Italy were especially singled out as worthy of a more muscled support, if their nation-building efforts were to be challenged: Thus we declare without reserve, that if the hour for the reconstruction of any of the oppressed nations of Europe, or other parts of the world, should seem to have arrived, according to the decrees of Providence; if Switzerland, our faithful ally from the time of Francis I, should be restrained or menaced in the progressive movement she is carrying out, and which will impart new strength to the fasces of democratic governments; if the independent states of Italy should be invaded; if limits or obstacles should be imposed on their internal changes; if there should be any armed interference with their right of allying themselves together for the purpose of consolidating an Italian nation, – the French republic would think itself entitled to take up arms in defence of these legitimate movements towards the improvement and nationhood of states.141 Nevertheless, to hopeful delegations of foreign freedom fighters – Poles, English Chartists, Swiss, Irish, Romanians, Hungarians – Lamar- tine offered the French government’s “Platonic sympathy”,142 but little else. Not overtly, at least. While, on the surface, Lamartine’s desire to “conciliate foreign governments”, including Russia, appears as his main foreign policy objective, in practice his occasional choice of ambassadors with avowed republican and radical sympathies and his controversial appointment of “confidential agents” abroad, such as the Dr. Louis Mandl in Bucharest, suggest perhaps hidden depths to a diplomacy that was manifestly moderate. The question has sometimes been asked of Lamartine’s diplomatic practices: did it contain elements

141 For the entire text of the Manifesto, see Lamartine, History of the French Revolu- tion of 1848, (London, 1849), 3 sqq. 142 E. Tersen, Le Gouvernment provisoire et l’Europe (25 février–12 mai 1848) (Paris, 1948), quoted in Bénoni Jallaguier, Les idées politiques et sociales d’Alphonse de Lamar- tine (Ph.D. Thesis, Université de Montpellier, Faculté de droit, Année 1950–1951, 1954), 209. 1848 in paris and europe 65 of secret republican diplomacy, in-built ambiguity, downright confusion, or all three?143 Although his precise mandate remains largely unknown and he remains a shadowy figure, Louis Mandl was nevertheless authorized to write letters of recommendation for the members of the future Roma- nian provisional government, as he did, for example in June 1848, when he recommended the envoy Ion Ghica to the French ambassador in Constantinople, General Jacques Aupick.144 As will be seen on numerous occasions in the course of this narrative, the actions of the Roma- nian, Polish and Hungarian forty-eighters were often seconded, in the absence of the hoped-for high-level Western support for a “universal revolution”, by semi-official or downright occult networks of helpers, agents, disaffected republicans and exiled journalists, whose lives were often as precarious as those of the revolutionaries whom they were trying to help, and whose precise contribution remains largely unknown. It seems certain that the Romanian émigrés were unaware of the more perverse manoeuvrings in high political places, and of plans such as the one – advanced apparently by their patron Lamartine himself – which would have granted Austria dominion over the Danubian Prin- cipalities in exchange for territorial losses in Northern Italy. The Poles appear to have been equally oblivious that their liberal-constitutional aspirations were being sacrificed for the sake of preserving good relations or even of securing an alliance with the Tsar.145 While unable to obtain arms or military support from the new French republic, the Central and East-European émigrés lost no time in attempting to import at least the contagious ‘spirit of 1848’ into their own countries. As a result, most of Central and Eastern Europe was engulfed by the revolutionary wave. From Vienna, where she worked as a governess to the children of the Romanian Princess Alexandrina Cantacuzino, Athénaïs Mialaret wrote to her future husband, Jules Michelet: “Rather than making the slightest change to his Byzantine policies, the old Prince Metternich has preferred to resign.”146 In addition to popular unrest caused by a general European context of economic recession and deteriorating living standards in the late 1840s,

143 William Fortescue, Alphonse de Lamartine: A Political Biography (London, New York, 1983), 210. 144 See p. 79 below. 145 Fortescue, Alphonse de Lamartine, 228–9. 146 Athénaïs Mialaret to Jules Michelet, 24 March 1848, in Michelet, Correspon- dance, 5: 635. 66 1848 the old regimes had to face increasing demands for constitutionalism, wider popular participation in politics and civic freedoms such as freedom of speech and association. Italy and Germany had to contend also with pro-unification movements, while the nations of Habsburg – and Ottoman-controlled Central-East Europe fought for independence, national sovereignty and political solutions for their inter-ethnic conflicts. At the two extremes of Europe, only Britain and Russia escaped the revolutionary upheavals, the former largely through negotiation and reform, the latter through coercion and control.147 Having resigned in April 1845, Edgar Quinet had a lesser impact on his East-European audience between that year and 6 March 1848, when both he and Michelet were able to resume their courses after the fall of the July Monarchy. On that day, he gave a speech intended to be a celebration of a new beginning: the two chairs, his and Michelet’s, closed down by “royalty”, were returned to their rightful leaders by the “people”, he said. Their teachings were meant to create “new men” for a “new society”, a “Christian” republic founded on the “divine equality of hearts.” In contrast to the real-life non-interventionism of Lamar- tine and Bastide, in Quinet’s mystical vision a rejuvenated France was unafraid to take on its internationalist mission: Resuscitated France brings life to the world! [. . .] This nation knows that the work it has just accomplished was done for all nations, and she knows that her work is good. Peoples now watching us, from England, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Hungary, Moldavia, Portugal, the Slavic family, Russians (because you have men’s hearts and we know they are beating in phase with ours), we all have one and the same cause. Look! We have fought for you, too; let us share the joy of our victory with you.148

147 For recent accounts of the 1848 revolutions in English see: Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions, 1848–1851 (Cambridge University Press, 1984, 1995); R. J. W. Evans and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, eds., The Revolutions in Europe, 1848–49: from reform to reaction (Oxford University Press, 2000) and Dieter Dowe et al., eds., Europe in 1848 (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001). 148 Quinet, La République, 6. 1848–1849 BUCHAREST BETWEEN ST. PETERSBURG AND CONSTANTINOPLE149

The eyes of the people here are turned towards the British government for sympathy and assistance. They feel that they have been neglected by Europe . . . Colquhoun to Ponsonby, 25 May 1841150 In the wake of the February events, in early 1848 most Wallachian forty-eighters were back in Romania, channelling their now re-ignited revolutionary spirit via the activities of a “Committee for the liberation of the homeland” which had sprung from the already existing political and para-Masonic association “Justice-Brotherhood” (Dreptate-Frăţie), founded in 1843 in Bucharest. Soon, everybody was referring to the Committee (which comprised Rosetti, the Brătianus, the Golescus, and others) in short-hand as the “Revolutionary Committee”. The homes of the committee members were placed under surveillance by Prince Gheorghe Bibescu, who refused his support when Rosetti submitted his reformist project of national “renaissance” on the grounds that it was premature.151 Broadly speaking, the liberals’ strategy was based on working with Turkey against Russia’s growing interference and on hijacking the spirit of the Tanzimat – the imperial reform programme launched by Sultan Mahmud II in 1839 – to achieve reform in the Principalities. Although ultimate independence from the Ottoman Porte remained in the background of all nation-building projects from 1848 onwards, the immediate threat was perceived as coming from Russia’s increasingly tenacious expansionism in South-East Europe. Russia’s grip on the Danubian Principalities had been steadily growing since the landmark treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774, which established internationally her self-assumed role as protectress of the Christian Orthodox peoples

149 The following section does not provide a comprehensive narrative of the 1848 revolution in Wallachia. For a recent, serviceable and brief English-language account, see Lothar Maier, “The Revolution of 1848 in Moldavia and Wallachia”, inEurope in 1848, ed. Dowe et al., 186–209. 150 Florescu, The Struggle Against Russia, 179. 151 Bucur, C. A. Rosetti: mesianism, 49. 68 1848–1849 in the Ottoman Empire, while also granting her free navigation on the Black Sea and, through the Straits, into the Mediterranean. The growing strategic importance of the Principalities as a military out- post against both Constantinople and the Habsburg Empire and as a source of army supplies, Moldavia’s proximity to restive Poland and its availability as a haven for Polish refugees, the importance of Danu- bian navigation, were all crucial geopolitical considerations which led to further Russian inroads into Ottoman suzerainty and Romanian autonomy. The Treaty of Adrianople (1829) brought this process of integration within the Russian sphere of influence to a close. By that treaty, the Ottomans confirmed Greek and Serbian autonomy and granted Russia concessions in the Principalities which turned the provinces into virtual tsarist satellites.152 The Organic Statutes of 1831–1832, widely regarded today as Roma- nia’s earliest modern constitutional blueprints, were drawn up under Russian military occupation by a very competent administrator, Gen- eral Pavel Kiseleff, in order to ensure a better administration of the provinces, a faithful native aristocracy and, more generally, a less discontented population in what Russia hoped would be a stable buffer zone. The Statutes went some way towards a modernization of the juridical and political language in Romania, as well towards introducing a ‘pre-parliamentary’ system which reduced the prerogatives of the Prince, secularised law, until then almost exclusively administered by the church, and created ‘ministries’ with paid, accountable civil servants and more clearly defined roles. The Statutes remained, however, hybrid creations with many old regime features, such as maintaining the right of the ruling prince to dissolve the country’s assemblies, and almost completely ignoring civil liberties and rights. But they also made attempts towards a separation of powers, they recognised, at least in theory, the right of the Principalities to elect their rulers (until then nominated and recognised by the Porte), distinguished between the state treasury and the prince’s personal revenues and, generally speaking, reduced the amount of arbitrariness in the country’s political institutions.153 Yet, although it could be argued with hindsight that

152 David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, “Russian Foreign Policy: 1815–1917”, in The Cambridge History of Russia, ed. Maureen Perrie, Dominic Lieven and Ronald Suny, 3 vols. (2006), 2: 559. 153 For recent assessments of the Organic Statutes, see Ioan Stanomir, Naşterea Constituţiei: limbaj şi drept în Principate până la 1866 (Bucharest, 2004), Ch. 3: “Para- bucharest between st. petersburg and constantinople 69 having parallel, nearly identical sets of quasi-constitutional regulations in both Wallachia and Moldavia benefited the nation-building plans and the eventual unification of the Principalities, the humiliation of Russian interference and the merciless requisitioning and spoliation by the Russian administration during the frequent periods of military occupation – which the Statutes endorsed – backfired, resulting in the alienation of a considerable part of the progressive nobility and liberal intelligentsia. The Treaty of Unkiar Iskelesi (Hünkâr Iskelessi) (July 1833) between a weakening Porte and Russia and that of Münchengrätz (September 1833) between Russia and the Habsburg Empire finalised a process whereby the autocratic Eastern Powers encircled South-East Europe within a defence system which left the region at the mercy of Aus- tria and Russia until the Crimean War.154 In the Principalities, this led to permanent tensions between several centres of power and influence: the princes, the national assemblies, the Russian and other foreign consulates and a still inchoate and ineffectual civil society. To their credit, as already shown,155 the Wallachian boyar members of the General Assembly – including, as already mentioned, the father of the Brătianu brothers – protested when Russia insisted on the inclusion in the Statutes of the so-called ‘additional article’ which required the approval of both Russia and the Ottoman Empire before any constitutional changes could be made. As a consequence, the Assembly was dissolved twice before Russia secured the issue of a Turkish ferman forcing the acceptance of the offensive article in May 1838.156 With the Princes and the older, high-ranking boyars being perceived as little more than Russia’s executants in the Principalities, by 1848, as mentioned, Russophobia had gripped the disaffected younger nobles, the intellectuals and the new entrepreneurial classes, who all looked to the West for support. Arguably, the wide popular support that the revolutionary government was to enjoy during its brief tenure of power between June and September 1848 was at least partly due to promises of social reform doxul regulamentar”, 95–127, and Regulamentul Organic, ed. Vitcu and Bădărău, esp. 59–61. 154 For more on these treaties and on political developments leading to 1848, see the now classic study of Barbara Jelavich, Russia and the Formation of the Romanian National State, 1821–1878 (Cambridge University Press, 1984). 155 See p. 28 above. 156 Jelavich, Russia, 36–7. 70 1848–1849 rather than merely independence from foreign domination. ‘Feudal’, backward-looking provisions in the Organic Statutes had endorsed boyar control over land ownership and agricultural exports. However, by 1848, nobody seemed to remember that the Russian ‘President Plenipotentiary’ Pavel Kiseleff himself, an opponent of serfdom, had been overruled by the conservative, land-owning Romanian boyars in drafting these articles. Popular mythology enshrined the Statutes as emblems of Russian oppression rather than as expressions of native boyar power. They were to be burned publicly in the last days of the revolution of 1848 as Russian troops were about to occupy the country. Throughout the dramatic events which took place in France, Bucha- rest and elsewhere in Europe in the spring and summer of 1848, the British Consul in Bucharest, Robert Colquhoun, kept the Foreign Office informed in great detail of developments in the Principalities. Born in 1803 in Luss (Dumbartonshire), Robert Gilmour Colquhoun (of the Colquhoun lairds of Camstradden) was educated at Pembroke College, Oxford. He was appointed British Consul in the Danubian Principalities in 1834 and promoted to the rank of Consul-General in 1838, the year when the eighteen-year-old Effingham Grant, Marie Rosetti’s brother, joined his service. Colquhoun spent more than twenty years in Romania before being posted in Egypt in December 1858.157 It is, therefore, quite plausible to imagine that the close political, diplomatic and personal contacts he built in the Principalities over this long period of time must have led to a degree of affective involvement with the land and the people, an involvement which, as consul, he could not easily express or act upon. As will become apparent later, throughout his official posting in Bucharest, the consul had to tread a fine line between his government’s instructions and what might have been his personal choices. In spite of personal sympathies, however, he never seriously strayed from the official, accepted British policy of sustaining the Ottoman Porte and preventing the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, and his loyalty was duly rewarded both in Britain and at the Porte. In 1840 he received from the Sultan the decoration

157 William Fraser, The Chiefs of Colquhoun and their Country, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1869), 2: 243–56. [I am grateful to Dr. Jane Rendall from the University of York (UK) for this reference.] For a highly readable English-language account of Colquhoun’s involvement with the Romanian forty-eighters, see Florescu, The Struggle against Russia. bucharest between st. petersburg and constantinople 71

Nishin Iftichar, “First Class in Brilliants”, in acknowledgement of the “valuable service rendered to Turkey”.158 Colquhoun wrote about everything, from invasions of locusts, fires, earthquakes and cattle epidemics to the characters of the men in power and the intrigues and clashes of the foreign consuls in Bucha- rest. Although acutely aware of the decaying state of Romanian old- regime society, he was among those who believed that the immediate trigger for the intellectual and political unrest in Romania had been due to French influence. “The recent events which have taken place in France, have necessarily had some sort of Echo here, from the fact of a great number of the young Wallachians having received their education in Paris. (Many of them being Pupils of those Professors whose classes were suppressed a short time ago, such as Messieurs Michelet, Quinet etc.) and from the circumstance of Monsr Lamartine having received many of these young men, having promised to take a lively Interest in the affairs of the Principalities and having accepted the office of Patron of a Society of Moldo-Wallachians established in Paris”, he wrote to Lord Palmerston on 24 March 1848.159 The younger boyars in the country were particularly susceptible to the impact of the French “spirit”, the Consul wrote in another letter, singling out Constantin Rosetti and Ion Ghica as the rising men to watch as leaders of the “movement party” or “Liberal” Party, which, in Colquhoun’s estimation, had become a “numerous and very strong party.”160 Mr. Rosetti, a man of ardent mind but not very sound ideas, strictly honest and honorable, a poet of some merit in his country, a personal friend to many of the present heads of affairs in France, was eager for very vigorous measures. He had several interviews with the Prince, and in these he opened his mind freely, offered to point out to the Hospodar the numerous abuses of which his ministers and agents have for several years been guilty. He urged on the Prince the necessity of making immediate and large concessions to public opinion, such as liberty of the Press; the responsibility of the Ministers; the taking off from the peasant the very onerous burdens with which he is weighed down, and to throw those burdens on the boïars and mercantile classes, who are at present free from every sort of tax. He urged on the Prince the necessity for dismissing the present Chamber of Assembly, elected under such

158 Ibid., 243. 159 Maria Dogaru and Apostol Stan, eds., Documente privind revoluţia de la 1848 în Ţările Române, B. Ţara Românească, 12 martie 1848–21 aprilie 1850 (Bucharest, 1983), 1. 160 Letter to Lord Palmerston, 5 April 1848, in Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 2. 72 1848–1849

glaring breach of the Organic Règlement, and demanded that the elec- tive franchise so recently limited, by the simple misapplication or rather misinterpretation of the Règlement, should be extended to all persons possessed of landed property or houses. – The Prince to all these proposals replied evasively, declared he himself was at heart more of a true Wallachian Patriot than Mr Rosetti was, but that the moment was not favorable, nor was Wallachia in a condition to receive such institutions; and ended by urging Mr Rosetti to desist from holding at his house meetings of the discontented, which caused a feeling of uneasiness to exist throughout the City, highly injurious to public order. – Mr Rosetti disclaimed holding seditious meetings. He said the reunions at his and at two or three other houses were caused by the alarm created in their minds by measures of precaution which appeared to have been taken by the Prince himself and some of the most obnoxious of his Ministers, such as the removing at mid-day [of ] the Central Caisse and Hospital and Metropolitan funds from their usual place to the Public Treasury; the report that during several nights the Minister of the Interior, Mr Villara and the Aga of Police (both men thoroughly detested) had been removing from the City all their valuable property, money and papers.161 Colquhoun seems to have had closer affinities with Ion Ghica, whom he considered a “cool calculating man”, a pragmatist with whom, unlike with the excitable Rosetti, he could have reasoned discussions: In the many conversations I have had with him, I have always tried to bring him to view his Country in a light which I know to be unpopular here, but which I consider to be the only one which will be recognised by Her Majesty’s Government, namely as forming a part of the Otto- man Empire. [. . .] The Russian Consul General, Mr Kotzebue, requested the above two [i.e. Rosetti and Ghyka] and a few more of their party to call on him, and he then after asking what they required, told them that on the first appearance of any outbreak he would in four days have a corps of armée of occupation in the Provinces and thus they would bring on themselves the very evil which they, as patriotic Wallachians, so much dreaded, a Russian occupation; but he promised in the event of their desisting from any violent measure to use his endeavors to get the abuses, of which they complained, redressed by the Prince. For the moment the matters are quiet, but an anxious eye is still turned towards the North, and on Intelligence from it will depend the course which the Liberal Party here will take.162

161 Colquhoun to Palmerston, 6 April 1848, in 1848 la români, ed. Bodea, 1: 344–7. 162 Ibid., 346–7. Ion Ghica, whose name sometimes appears as Ghyka in foreign- language sources, was three times Prime Minister of Romania between 1866 and 1871 and was the Romanian Ambassador in London from 1881 to 1889. bucharest between st. petersburg and constantinople 73

Not only did Colquhoun emphasise the degree of Russian influence in the Principalities, but he also repeatedly pointed out to the British Foreign Secretary that the Romanians were far from acting in isolation in the Balkans and South-East Europe, and that the Principalities were a haven and transit point for Polish agitators. “There has been for some time past a constant passage of persons connexed with Poland through the Provinces, and last week seven persons of that nation who were residing here under a species of incognito left this for Moldavia and Gallicia”, he wrote on 6 April 1848.163 In neighbouring Moldavia, conspiratorial activities were at their height after the brutal repression of an elite-driven uprising in late March, which had turned from a limited coup against the Russian-sponsored prince Mihail Sturdza into a broader movement with liberal-constitutional aspirations. The uprising in fact involved nothing more than the presentation of a reform project by opposition liberal-oriented boyars to the prince. A fearful Sturdza, however, over-reacted, the army was sent, and the clashes resulted in an unspecified number of deaths and some 300 arrests. The rebellious boyars, including the leading Moldavian forty-eighter Mihail Kogălniceanu, as well as the future ruling Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza, fled to neighbouring Transylvania and Bukovina, where they formed a Revolutionary Committee in exile.164 Having decimated the liberal-reformist opposition, Prince Sturdza appealed for Russian troops to be stationed along the borders, thus initiating a chain of events which ended in the tsarist army intervening both in Wallachia and in Transylvania.165 The British Foreign Secretary’s instructions to his man in Bucharest were clear, and Colquhoun kept to their spirit consistently throughout the crisis of 1848–49:

163 Ibid., 347. One of these Polish agitators, Piotr Butkiewicz, estimated at 500 the number of Polish agents in Moldavia around 1848–49. See the entry on Butkiewicz in Daniela Buşă, ed, Călători străini despre Ţările Române în secolul al XIX-lea (Bucha- rest, 2009) new series, 5: 344. 164 For a short English-language account of events in 1848 Moldavia see Hitchins, The Romanians, 1774–1866, 237–8. 165 For a detailed account of the March 1848 events in Moldavia largely based on Russian consular reports, see Gheorghe Platon, “Revoluţia de la 1848 în Moldova. Noi puncte de reper şi referinţă,” in idem, De la constituirea naţiunii la marea unire: studii de istorie modernă, 6 vols. (Iaşi, 1995–2005) 5: 47–81. For the Moldavian Prince’s request for troops in a memoir to the Russian Chancellor Nesselrode, 6 April 1848, see idem, 62. 74 1848–1849

[. . .] I have to instruct you to take every opportunity of impressing upon the leading men with whom you may have opportunities of communicating that the present connection of Wallachia with the Porte affords to that Province as much practical independence as it could hope to enjoy permanently in any other way for Wallachia is not large enough nor strong enough to maintain its independence as a separate State, and it might probably not fare better under any other dominion than it now does under the easy supremacy of the Porte.166 Eyes were also turned towards Transylvania, where brewing rebellion against the Habsburg dynasty had also been encouraged by the French revolution of February. In the Hungarian Diet, a call for constitutional and national rights eloquently launched on 3 March 1848 by the radical tribune Lajos Kossuth had inflamed the youth and the reformists in Buda-Pest, unleashing a chain of events that gripped the Austrian Empire from the spring of 1848 to the autumn of 1849. Fol- lowing closely in the footsteps of the Magyars were the Poles, Serbs, Czechs, Romanians and the other ethnic minorities of the empire, whose degree of allegiance to the imperial dynastic principle varied, but who, at the same time, were wary of the “cultural-linguistic agenda of ‘Magyarization’ ” which the Hungarian separatist government had been sponsoring.167 The Wallachian government of Prince Bibescu was rightly suspicious of contacts with Transylvania and, as Colquhoun informed Lord Palmerston on 27 May, continued “to prevent the introduction into the Country of all Journals having any allusion to these parts. The Transylvanian Journal [Gazeta de Transilvania] (published in the Wallachian Language) which is one of the most free spoken of modern German Papers, has been excluded form the Country. It has lately had a series of very clever articles on the close relationship existing between these Provinces and Transylvania, and has repeatedly held out offers of fraternization. A Wallachian Paper which had transcribed some of these has been suppressed, which perhaps is unfair, as the Censorship is very severe and the Articles should have been stopped before going to Press. As the Editor, however, is known to have been of liberal principles he is considered as having been the victim of a guet à pens.”168

166 Palmerston to Colquhoun, 21 May 1848, in Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 9–10. 167 R. J. W. Evans, “1848–1849 in the Habsburg Monarchy”, in The Revolutions, ed. Evans and von Strandmann, 192. 168 Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 10. bucharest between st. petersburg and constantinople 75

The Transylvanian connection remained uppermost in the minds of the Wallachian government and of the Russian special envoy, General Alexander Osipovich Duhamel (Dyugamel), Tsar Nicholas’ own aide- de-camp, who urged the prince “to take the most stringent measures to prevent the Wallachians of this side of the Carpathians from going to Hermannstadt [today’s Sibiu] and Cronstadt [today’s Braşov], and to refuse admissions to the Journals of Transylvania, which most loudly urge the Wallachians here to fraternize and make common cause with their Brothers and co-religionists.”169 Duhamel’s memoirs, published posthumously in 1885, show that the Russian General’s appraisal of the situation in the Principalities could not have been more accurate. He was aware that the events about to unfold were predominantly directed against Russia as protecting power rather than against the suzerain Porte. “Not unnaturally, given the state of minds in the Prin- cipalities, the arrival of a representative of the autocratic tsar, sent there to protect law and order, was bound to be regarded with hostility”, he wrote. “Me, they started to malign both in prose and in verse [. . .]” He noted too the involvement of the French and British consulates which, he commented, had become real “foci of insurrection”.170 Duhamel made no secret of his preferred solution to the “Romanian question”. In a memoir to Chancellor Nesselrode of 1 October 1849 he proposed the incorporation of the two principalities into the Russian empire.171 In spite of Russian threats and British fears, both the national and the international networks were in place and ready for the unfolding of events which, by early June 1848, proved unstoppable. The June rebellion in Wallachia was peaceful, but brisk and determined. As the national militia, created largely by the Russian ‘president plenipotentiary’ Pavel Kiseleff in the 1830s,172 was not trustworthy from the revolutionaries’ viewpoint, steps were taken to organise a national guard along the French model. Its command was entrusted to General Gheorghe Magheru, a county governor in Oltenia (southern, or ‘Little’ Wallachia) and chief of the Wallachian irregular troops, formed mainly of free peasants and serfs. On 8 June, Ion Eliade Rădulescu, one of the leading forty-eighters (and Rosetti’s future enemy), wrote

169 Colquhoun to Palmerston, 29 May 1848, in Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 11. 170 Fragments of Duhamel’s Autobiography in Călători străini, ed. Buşă, 5: 228, 230. They were published originally in Russian as “Autobiografia A. O. Dugamela”, chapters 12–16, in Russkij Arkhiv 7 (1885): 370–404. 171 Călători străini, ed. Buşă, 5: 245. 172 See Regulamentul Organic, ed. Vitcu and Bădărău, 35–6. 76 1848–1849 to the General from the ‘national camp’ set up by the revolutionaries at Islaz: My dear Sir, The needs and interests of the nation have speeded up things above our heads. Had it not started now, the cause would have been lost. I am, therefore, writing to inform you that last night I arrived in Islaz and in the name of God, we are starting. At the same time, things will start in R. Vîlcii and Ploieşti. In Bucharest all is ready. More the 3,000 associates of ours are awaiting our signal. A man has been sent to Constantinople, another to Paris and others to other foreign cabinets. The agreed Procla- mation has been printed: it is the basis for the uprising. Myself, had I not left Bucharest, would have been arrested. Do not, therefore, blame me for the rush. Victory is assured; there is not one single man, one single boiar in Bucharest who rejects the principles of reform. The Turkish Commissar himself [Talaat Effendi], now in Bucharest, found that they are neither childish, nor harming to the Porte. The Prince will have to either accept it or not; should he accept, the cause will be won, if not, he falls, he loses his right to rule, for the happiness of the Romanians cannot be sacrificed for the interests of one man.173 The plan was for Magheru to lead his troops from Caracal, in Little Wallachia, where they were stationed, to the county seat, Craiova, where Eliade and other revolutionary leaders were going to converge, form a provisional government and issue the Proclamation to the nation. On 11 June Prince Bibescu’s government itself made an appeal to the same Magheru asking him to “crush” the “rebels” at Islaz, but the General had already made his choice.174 Memoirs by participants show that, even in those early days, the revolutionary movement was less monolithic than presented in the heroic narrative handed down to us by traditional historiography. For a few days in June 1848, Roma- nia had two would-be provisional governments, one in Oltenia and one in Bucharest, announcing the later tensions between the moderates led by Eliade Rădulescu (a group which included Christian Tell and Ştefan Golescu) and the radicals led by Rosetti and the Brătianus.175 The crowds gathering in Craiova and Bucharest were unaware of such divisions, however, and to them, the Proclamation appeared to be

173 1848 la români, ed. Bodea, 1: 532. 174 Alexandru Bălintescu and Horia Nestorescu-Bălceşti, eds., Arhiva Generalului Magheru: Catalog, (Rîmnicu Vîlcea, 1989), Doc. Inv. No. 2353. 175 Such memoirs were written, for example, by Nicolae Pleşoianu and A. Christofi. Cf. fragments from Pleşoianu’s text in 1848 la români, ed. Bodea, 3: 211–25. bucharest between st. petersburg and constantinople 77 issued by a cohesive government emanating from the will of a ‘sovereign’ nation united by a common cause: constitutionalism. The Proclamation, most certainly the outcome of collective author- ship, was read out to a large gathering of peasants and members of the militia at Islaz. It was headed with the words: “In the name of the Romanian people. Respect for property. Respect for persons” and called upon the Porte, France, Germany and England to “arbitrate” and support the Romanians in their demands for a constitutional, representative political regime and for national autonomy.176 The prospec- tive regime was a constitutional monarchy with a native prince elected for five years from all classes. The Proclamation also demanded the abolition of privileges and ranks, ministerial accountability, equal civil rights, equal political rights for “all compatriots of another faith”, the emancipation of the Jews and liberation of the Gypsy slaves, universal taxation, rights of assembly, the creation of a national guard and of a national bank; the nationalisation of monasteries’ assets, the abolition of labour services and distribution of land to the peasants, equal education for both sexes, the abolition of torture and of the death penalty; and the right to have a Romanian national appointed as diplomatic representative in the Ottoman capital. Crucially in a revolution largely initiated by intellectuals and journalists, the Proclamation demanded freedom of the press, a civic right which the forty-eighters were to defend for the rest of their active lives. “The freedom of the press can harm nobody except the sons of darkness”, read the article.177 The union of the two Romanian Principalities was kept out of the text of the Proclamation, but was voiced elsewhere, for instance in articles in Rosetti’s newspaper Pruncul român (The Romanian Infant) (13 July and 26 July 1848) and in Popolul suveran (The Sovereign People) of 19 July 1848, which urged the National Assembly to champion the necessity of the union. The Moldavian boyars – now refugees in Braşov (Transylvania) and Chernowitz (Bukovina) after their own unsuccess- ful attempt at mounting an insurrection – had also demanded national union in a document entitled Prinţipiile noastre pentru reformarea patriei (Our principles for the homeland’s reformation) of 12/24 May 1848 and in Dorinţele Partidei Naţionale din Moldova (Demands of

176 For the text of the Proclamation, see 1848 la români, ed. Bodea, 1: 533–41. 177 Drace-Francis, The Making of Modern Romanian Culture, 137. 78 1848–1849 the National Party of Moldavia) written in August.178 The circulation of the latter document remains unknown so far, but it is considered the “most comprehensive programme of the Romanian revolution of 1848.”179 The Moldavian reformers, now liberated from the constraints of real-life revolution, now appeared less reluctant to give free rein to their actual aspirations.180 A constituent assembly of 250 members was to elected by all voters above the age of twenty-one, irrespective of property qualifications or religion, but conditional on a “good reputation.”181 The assembly – never elected, due to the untimely end of the new democratic regime in September – was to debate the 21 articles of the Proclamation and write up a Constitution enshrining a new nation of “equal citizens”. The crowds assembled at Islaz were urged to keep the faith: Romanian brethren! Do not be afraid of unlawful intervention from outside, for gone are the times of coercion and might. But do maintain the order within. Enrol in the national guard to defend your rights and to form a crusade of all classes at home and a crusade of sister nations abroad. Gather under the banners of the fatherland. The three national colours are the rainbow of hope. The cross above them will remind Rus- sia that it is a Christian power. A cross will be erected on the border, and the Russian will not be able to trespass without first stepping over the cross, which he reveres. [. . .] Until now, Russia has maintained that it is the guarantor of our rights. We, in our appeal, are only asking for our rights and we protest in the chancelleries of the Sublime Porte, of France, Germany and England, against all invasion of our land which might endanger our common happiness and our independence.182 Like the Moldavian Principles and Demands, the Islaz Proclamation is a foundational document for modern Romania: it marked the beginning of a new approach to building the country’s political institutions and its constitutional set-up and altered the very language in which this new approach was framed: the Slavic terms ‘pravilă’ and ‘sloboze- nie’, for instance, gave way to the neo-Romance ‘law’ and ‘liberty’, and the word ‘censorship’ was used for the first time, choices, among many others, which attempted to initiate a cultural shift from an

178 Constantin Nuţu, Maria Totu, eds, Culegere de texte privind istoria modernă a României (1848–1878) (Bucharest, 1978), 263, 280, 284. For the Moldavian “Prin- ciples”, see also Platon, De la constituirea naţiunii, 5: 63. 179 Berindei, Revoluţia română, 172. 180 Stanomir, Naşterea Constituţiei, 236. 181 Berindei, Revoluţia română, 171. 182 1848 la români, ed. Bodea, 1: 540–1. bucharest between st. petersburg and constantinople 79 ancien régime, Slavic, ‘Eastern’ ethos to a ‘Western’-inspired political culture.183 For all intents and purposes, the Proclamation was meant to function as a pre-constitution and, in order to create a wide popular appeal among masses for whom the new concepts of ‘sovereignty’, ‘representatives’ and ‘deputies’ might have sounded arcane, the revolutionary leaders sent ‘propaganda commissars’ into provincial towns and villages to spread the message in a more accessible vocabulary. In moments of crisis during subsequent month, as will be seen, popular support for the provisional government was substantial, in spite of the fact that the social and economic stipulations of the Proclama- tion were never enacted. If it is true that “poetry and fine phrases [. . .] defeated the class struggle”184 in 1848, it may be equally true to say that the surge of enthusiasm which they generated carried the masses towards a new awareness of their power as a nation. The speeches, Rosetti’s newspaper Pruncul român and other media were crucial in creating the new language for the emerging national discourse.185 The text of the Proclamation itself was circulated at the time in Romanian, French and German and smuggled, undoubtedly at some risk, into Transylvania, where it was published in some the main intellectual centres of the Transylvanian Romanians, Blaj and Braşov.186 The would-be leaders of a new Romania sought international support from the early days of their insurrection. Lamartine’s confidential agent to Wallachia, Dr. Louis Mandl, recommended the envoy Ion Ghica to the French Ambassador in Constantinople, General Aupick, on 14 June. “Wallachia and Moldavia are currently Russian provinces’, Dr. Mandl wrote. “All the intelligent sections of the country are in revolt against this administration; they are ready to start a revolution, an enterprise which could meet with success if the threat of a Russian intervention were not constantly put forth. The ruling prince himself

183 For the impact on the Islaz Proclamation of the French Constitution of 1791 and the Belgian Constitution of 1831, see I. C. Filitti, Izvoarele constituţiei de la 1866 (Bucharest, 1934), 1–14, and Stanomir, Naşterea Constituţiei, chapter 5. 184 Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (London, 1986; first published 1977). 185 For the role of Rosetti’s paper and a catalogue of the Romanian periodicals around 1848 see Vasile Netea, “Presa română în timpul revoluţiei de la 1848” in Revoluţia de la 1848 în Ţările Române: culegere de studii, ed. N. Adăniloaie and Dan Berindei, (Bucharest, 1974), 145–83. Cf. also Drace-Francis, The Making of Modern Romanian Culture, 138–9. 186 Vlad Georgescu, Mémoires et projets de réforme dans les principautés roumaines, 1831–1848: répertoire et textes avec un supplément pour les années 1769–1830 (Bucha- rest, 1972), 154. The collection reproduces the text of the Proclamation in French, 144–54. 80 1848–1849 is said to incline towards reform, but is being prevented by Russia. The country’s national party has therefore decided to send a confidential envoy, Mr. Ghica (Jean) to Constantinople to effect an understanding with the Turkish Cabinet. He hopes that you, Monsieur le Général, will assist him in this enterprise with all the moral support that you will be able to offer.[. . .]”187 However, once in the Ottoman capital, the Wallachian envoy was offered what he described as the customary “brief and vaguely idyl- lic exposé of the pacific sentiments animating the government of the Republic and assurances that all the nations aspiring to an independent political life were entitled to expect the support of the French Republic.”188 This reflected both the essence of Lamartine’s Manifesto and the policy of non-intervention continued by his successor, Jules Bastide. Responding to an interpellation on the Romanian Principali- ties from the deputy Armand Lherbette189 in the Constituent Assembly on 5 June, Bastide (a former editor of Le National, and an acquaintance of the ‘Franco-Roumains’) said rather vaguely and, as will be seen, inconsequentially, that the French government “was not going to neglect any action meant to safeguard – in this respect, as in others – the security and honour of France, and the democratic principles that we represent.”190 Meanwhile, in Bucharest on 23 June (according to the Gregorian calendar), and before abdicating on 26 June and retreating to Tran- sylvania, Prince Gheorghe Bibescu was forced to sign the new ‘Con- stitution’ (i.e. the Islaz Proclamation) and formed a new government which included some of the main protagonists of this narrative: Rosetti, Nicolae and Ştefan Golescu, Nicolae Bălcescu, Gheorghe Magheru, the younger of the Brătianu brothers, Ion, and Ion Eliade Rădulescu.191 A collective oath to the new nation was sworn at a great public meeting

187 Letter to Vasile Alecsandri, London, February 1888, in Ion Ghica, Scrisori către Vasile Alecsandri (Bucharest, 1997), 219–20. Written in the 1870s, the letters were first published in a volume in 1885. 188 Ion Ghica, Amintiri din pribegia după 1848: noue scrisori către V. Alecsandri (Bucharest. 1889), 21. 189 Armand-Jacques Lherbette (deputy in the Constituante and the Legislative Assembly from 1831 to 1848) was a member of the dynastic left with republican sympathies, but he routinely voted with the conservatives. He left politics after the coup d’état of 1851. See entry in Vapereau, Dictionnaire universel des contemporains (Paris, 1858). 190 Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 27. 191 Marie Rosetti was, understandably, not a member of the Wallachian provisional government in 1848, as suggested by what is obviously a slip of the pen in Iván T. bucharest between st. petersburg and constantinople 81 in Bucharest on 27 June. On that day, forty-eighters and people met at Câmpia Libertăţii (Field of Liberty) for a ceremony of benediction of the flags. Rosetti’s friend and business associate Henric Winter- halder had brought over a press taken from their jointly-owned printing shop, which was now carried in procession on a chariot drawn by four horses draped in tri-colour ribbons.192 On top of the machine stood Winterhalder himself and a fellow-revolutionary waving a tri- colour flag, and next to them printers presenting people with fresh sheets of printed paper straight from the press: on them was a poem believed to be by Rosetti in which, significantly, he extolled the freedom of the press and the abolition of censorship, two objectives of the revolution.193 Decrees enshrining the new rights, regulations and laws as announced by the June Proclamation were rushed out in swift succes- sion. They established, among others, the abolition of boyar privilege, the abolition of censorship, the establishment of a national guard, the design of the new national tri-coloured (red, yellow, blue) flag,194 the abolition of corporal and capital punishment, and the liberation of political prisoners. Significantly, one of the new decrees provided for the equality and right to naturalization of Romanian residents of different religions, notably Semitic, a decree which made two notable forty-eighters and friends of Rosetti, the Austrian Henric Winterhalder and the Jewish-Hungarian painter Constantin David Rosenthal, rightful citizens of their adoptive land.195 The Viennese Winterhalder had arrived in Bucharest around 1828 and, despite the Russian occupation and a severe plague epidemic, had decided to stay. He had met Rosetti, Ion Brătianu and other forty-eighters during their military training in the Romanian capital, and would later join them in Parisian exile until 1857. He was to become one of modern Romania’s first economists. Rosenthal, who had been born in Pest, was already a relatively well- known artist in Hungary and Austria, but his promising career was

Berend’s History Derailed: Central and Eastern Europe in the long nineteenth century (University of California Press, 2003), 112. 192 For Henric Winterhalder and the “Rosetti-Winterhalder Establishment”, see Part Two, 119–20. 193 Bucur, C. A. Rosetti: mesianism, 52–3. 194 The tri-coloured flag can be seen in Marie Rosetti’s portrait by C. D. Rosenthal, 1850 (Fig. 2). 195 Decree no. 393, 2 August 1848, signed by the Foreign Minister I. Voinescu II and the Wallachian Lieutenancy (I. Eliade and Christian Tell), in 1848 la români, ed. Bodea, 1: 647 sqq. 82 1848–1849 to be cut short by an untimely death during a conspiratorial mission entrusted by Rosetti. The peasants were advised to keep labouring in the fields for the time being, but serfdom was de jure abolished and they were promised their own land within three months. Landowners were given assurances that their lands would not be nationalised, but that “plots of land” from the large estates were to be allocated to the peasants.196 It was one of a series of tactical delays in the government’s approach to the land question, which was ultimately left unresolved in 1848. Throughout these weeks of feverish activity, Rosetti’s new paper,Prun- cul român, full of exhortations to revolutionary fervour, was published regularly in an attempt to support the nation’s faith in a new Romania of citizens and brothers, united under the older, para-Masonic slogan “justice, brotherhood”.197 The Russian Consul Karl Efstafevich Kotsebu (Charles de Kotzebue) left Wallachia, protesting against the violation of the Organic Statutes to the Metropolitan Neophyte, the head of the Orthodox Church and a member of the provisional government. 40,000 Russian troops under the command of General Rűdiger had already been assembling along the river Prut (the natural frontier between Moldavia and Rus- sian Bessarabia), according to Colquhoun’s dispatch of 9 June.198 A counter-revolutionary coup led by the Russian-trained Commander- in-Chief of the militia, Colonel Ion Odobescu, Marie Rosetti’s former employer and minister for war in the provisional government, and his associate, Colonel Solomon,199 on 19 June/1 July (Julian and Gregorian calendars) was defused, leaving 7 dead and 18 wounded.200 Rosetti, in his quality of – surprisingly enough – Minister of the Police in the provisional government, mediated negotiations for the release of the two renegade officers, a fact which was later held against him by competing

196 Bucur, C. A. Rosetti: mesianim, 52–3. 197 The newspaper was to be continued asRomânul in 1857, when Rosetti was allowed to return to his country. Bucur, C. A. Rosetti: mesianism, 61. 198 Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 12. 199 Colonel Solomon resurfaced in 1853–4 when he helped the Russian and Austrian authorities in their pursuit and prosecution of Oltenian military and locals who resisted the Russian army before and during the Crimean War. See Part Two, p. 264, note 461. 200 The provisional government had to leave the capital on 19 June, but was reinstated by a popular insurgency. For further details on the counter-revolution of 19 June 1848 see Introduction in Anul 1848, 6: lix–lxi. bucharest between st. petersburg and constantinople 83 factions of the forty-eighters.201 The dead were buried with pomp after a public ceremony on 4 July and attempts were made to compensate the persons who had incurred material losses as a result of the troubles. The provisional government did all it could to preserve its image as the unsullied defender of the rule of law, as well as the repository of the symbolic values enshrined in the June Constitution. “Upwards of 20,000 persons were present – the ceremony passed off most quietly – the Archbishop officiating”, Colquhoun informed Lord Palmerston. “Mr. Eliade member of the Government after offering up a Prayer for the welfare of the Country addressed the People entreating them to forgive those who had been the cause of the Citizens’ Death; he urged them to maintain a dignified but quiet attitude, and dismissed them with a request that they would consider that Day as one of Mourn- ing for a Brother and so in fact the Day was observed.”202 This incident, and a previous, anonymous, attempt against the life of Prince Bibescu on 21 June, which the ‘Liberal Party’ publicly condemned, contributed to the state of tension, yet in spite of isolated incidents, there was no widespread violence or disorder, and therefore no justification for the – apparently imminent – occupation of the country by Turkish and Russian troops. Pending international recognition of the Wallachian provisional government, Colquhoun’s reports to the Foreign Office were unanimously positive as to the legality and order prevailing in the principality. The new ministers vowed not to use public money or become involved militarily in Transylva- nia until officially recognised. Nor did they accept salaries or other income from the state budget: “a sense of real chivalrous honor per- vades one or two of the Chiefs and so long as they maintain their Influence I have no fear of the movement being stained by any Act of violence”, Colquhoun assured Stratford Canning, the British ambassador in Constantinople.203 The only potential threat could come from the beleaguered first-class boyars:

201 Temporarily disgraced in June 1848, Colonel Odobescu was reinstated by the Russian-appointed Caimacam C. Cantacuzino as early as 28 September 1848, and later became General and War Minister. 202 Colquhoun to Palmerston, 4 July 1848, in Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 40–1 (the names ‘Eliade’ and ‘Heliade’ are interchangeable in the literature); see also relevant documents in idem, especially 33 and 51–2. See also Robert Colquhoun, Diary, ms. CCVI/4, the St Georges Collection, Romanian National Library, entry for 4 July 1848, 16. 203 Colquhoun to Stratford Canning, 29 June 1848, in Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 25. 84 1848–1849

The most perfect order reigns here, nor do I think this order will be deranged, unless any reaction should take place among the old Boiars (but these are few in number) who it is said send daily Messengers to the Russian Consul urging him to re-establish the old order of things and especially their long cherished Privileges, now struck at to the very root but the Peasantry are already informed of the advantages promised them; so are the Farmers, and the Merchants are almost without exception favourable to the new Constitution.204 Owing to machinations of the older boyars of the “reactionary party”, to use Colquhoun’s words, the provisional government did indeed retreat temporarily from the capital on 11 July: “The tricolored flags which floated in every Street disappeared, as did also the Cockades, and not a single National Guard was seen after 10 o’clock,” wrote Robert Colquhoun on that day. “– the City as it was [sic] before the 23rd Ulto and so matters will remain till we can learn of Prince Bibesco consent to return – a step I should consider it most unpolitick in him to adopt; but it will be difficult for him to resist the desire of power which is so strong in him [. . .].”205 In his text of 1855, “Madame Rosetti” – based on oral communications from the exiled Rosetti circle – Michelet shows, with his usual flair for melodramatic detail, how the crowds rallied in support of the beleaguered government after Marie tactically appeared in the streets of Bucharest on 12 July, holding her baby daughter – the symbol of the “infant republic”: It was a sublime moment of heroic fraternity, of a grave joy, not without a dark presage of things to come. The enemy was lying in wait. This woman offering her infant to the fatherland would have wanted to give out weapons, and she only had a banner – and a torn one at that – to give. She gave away the shreds to the crowd as one would throw flowers to martyrs.206 The provisional government was brought back to power under popular pressure on 13 July, which suggests that the support base of the revolutionary movement in Wallachia was comprehensive enough to justify Russian suspicion and British fears of a retaliatory Russian occupation. Colquhoun’s loyalties must have been severely tested. His personal sympathy for some of his Wallachian acquaintances and for

204 Colquhoun to Stratford Canning, 30 June 1848, in ibid., 28. 205 Ibid., 57. 206 Michelet, “Madame Rosetti”, in Légendes, 220. bucharest between st. petersburg and constantinople 85 their liberal-constitutional aspirations is reflected in his rather positive reports to the Foreign Office about the largely peaceful state of the province and the ambitious, if short-lived, achievements of the new ‘democracy’: [. . .] I think that on the subject of the Press, the Wallachians will endeav- our to obtain as extensive a Liberty as they can, the late Government was so vexatiously strict on this subject that it was one of the first grievances complained of – and with the example of Transylvania before them, they are desirous of participating in the advantages which a well conducted press holds on. Even during the last month of such great excitement, I do not believe that in the Five Journals which have sprung into existence, there have appeared as many articles which could really be made a ground of complaint – and it is curious to observe the eagerness for news among the lower classes, most of whom unable to read themselves, have readers who have their little assemblages in the evening and who quietly disperse after attentively listening to the contents of the Journals – formerly there were only two Journals, a German and a Wallachian [. . .].207 Colquhoun requested official recognition for the new Romanian régime from the Foreign Secretary, but he sent the dispatch via the postal service ran by the Russian consulate.208 Predictably, the letter was intercepted, and the Russian ambassador in London, Baron von Brunnow, notified. In a lengthy letter sent to Palmerston on 17 July, Brunnow rehearsed the well-known arguments about “Russia’s wish to keep order and the occupation being within treaty rights”. “Rus- sia could not allow the ‘Lamartines of Bucharest’ to carry out their activities in an area so close to its own frontier”, the Russian diplomat argued.209 Two days later Palmerston informed Brunnow that the British government had no intention of recognising an independent Wallachian government, as it still considered Wallachia to be under Turkish suzerainty. However, the British did eventually recognize the new Wallachian regime on 16 August, one day only after the Porte’s official recognition.210

207 Colquhoun to Stratford Canning, 20 July 1848, in Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 69. 208 The only two mail services available to foreign consulates in Bucharest were the Austrian and the Russian, a set-up which in practice led to the routine violation of diplomatic correspondence. Cf. Dan Berindei, Diplomaţia românească modernă (Bucharest, 1995), 61. 209 Ian W. Roberts, Nicholas I and the Russian Intervention in Hungary (London, 1991), 44. 210 Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 131, 133. 86 1848–1849

In spite of such encouraging signs, the days of the Wallachian revolution were numbered, as Russian troops were already stationed in the neighbouring province, Moldavia, where events had been less turbulent perhaps, but equally indicative of a desire for change among the Roma- nian population. The following excerpt from the same dispatch from Colquhoun to Stratford Canning suggests not only the state of ferment in both Danubian Principalities, but also the heightened atmosphere of conspiracy, the collaborative nature of the revolutionary project, as well as the fratricidal nature of the armed repression threatening it. The insurrection in Moldavia had been suppressed quite easily, but the province had continued to serve as a transit and meeting point of Wallachian, Polish, Moldavian and Transylvanian agitators, under the very nose of the gathering Russian and Turkish troops: “A Mr. Julius Harris bearer of an English Passport, called on me on the 18th [July]”, wrote Robert Colquhoun on 20 July, “he was he says born in Spain of English parents but I strongly suspect him of being one of the many Poles, who have for some months resided in Moldovia [sic] – he arrived from Romanou [sic] in Moldovia [sic] and returns to that district today – he tells me he saw the Russian Troops now quartered at Coppeau [sic] near Iassy, he describes them as most miserably ill accou- tred – many of them without shoes and shirts; a third of their number, he says are Poles, recently arrived from the Army of the Caucasus. There are 34 officers Poles among them, men in the last stage of distress – he also reports that there is now a large number of Polish refugees in the Moldavian mountains, amounting to upwards to a thousand, of whom nearly a half are armed with guns, the remainder have pikes and scythes, but that these continually receive small supplies of fire arms from the neighbouring Transylvanians. Mr. Harris reports the number of Troops at Coppeau at about 3 000 – those at Berlat [sic] 1 600, but with a Park of forty field pieces.”211 The notion that Polish agents and agitators had been active in the Prin- cipalities for some time was corroborated by the French consul in the Moldavian capital, Thions, who, on 19/31 July, reported to the foreign ministry in Paris that “It is in the intention of the Romanian Princi- palities to make their uprising coincide with that of the Poles of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, of Galicia, of Bukovina, Podolia, Volhynia and Bessarabia. It is also said that in the Russian army occupying the Principality of Moldavia, 7,500 Poles, among whom two generals, one colonel and a large number of officers, are in agreement with the leaders

211 Ibid., 70. bucharest between st. petersburg and constantinople 87 of the [Romanian] movement against the Russians. I have been informed that the Poles of Moldo-Wallachia are well-organised.”212 Aware of the inflammatory context, a cautious Colquhoun advised the presumed Pole Julius Harris to leave Wallachia immediately. An equally firm caution towards prudence was served by the Consul to his Wallachian acquaintances, whom he advised to steer clear of “associations of such a nature.”213 The Consul gave himself credit for having kept the members of the provisional government in Bucharest within the boundaries of loyalty to the suzerain power, the Porte: “I have the positive assurance of the most influential member of the Provisional Government, Mr. Rosetti, given me last night that no resistance would be made to the will of the Sultan, but that they hoped the [Turkish] Commissioner would listen calmly to their grievances and by his representations induce their Sovereign to grant them such Institutions as are addressed to the present age”, he wrote to Canning for the second time on 20 July.214 Only one day before, a document had been sent from St. Petersburg to foreign cabinets which, though meant to calm Great Power fears, must have sounded highly ominous to the embattled Wallachians. In a circular dated 19 July, Nesselrode, the Russian foreign minister, explained that the arrival of Russian troops in Moldavia was only a temporary measure, justified by the existing treaties, an argument which Lord Palmerston did not challenge throughout the remaining months in power of the Romanian revolutionary government.215 However, the Russian foreign minister’s statement that the Romanian revolutionaries were drawing on “an alleged nationality, the origins of which are lost in the darkness of centuries” and “the historical basis of which never existed” must have sent shivers down Moldo-Wallachian spines. Such views, which meant a rejection without appeal of the Romanians’ claims to unitary nationhood as the basis for a future, self-sufficient state were refuted by one of Moldavia’s leading historians and a forty- eighter himself, Mihail Kogălniceanu, in a well-known document of

212 Letter from the French consul in Moldavia, Thions, to Jules Bastide, the French foreign minister, 19/31 July, in Arhivele Naţionale ale României, Revoluţia română de la 1848 în context european, (Bucharest, 1998), 268. The surname ‘Thions’ refers to an individual as yet unidentified outside sources cited in the Romanian historiography of 1848. 213 Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 70. 214 Ibid., 71. 215 See Lord Palmerston’s response to Sir Dudley Stuart’s question in the House of Commons on 1 September 1848, see p. 95 below. 88 1848–1849

August 1848.216 However, debates on ethnicity, history and traditions proved academic in the face of de facto military occupation, and, whether or not the occupation of Wallachia itself was ever intended by Tsar Nicholas, or simply pushed above his head by his over-zealous aide General Duhamel, the country was eventually occupied by both Turkish and Russian troops. First to arrive were the Ottomans. The special envoy, Suleyman Pasha – the former Turkish ambassador in Paris – and the commander of the troops, General Omer Pasha, were initially received as friends and protectors upon their arrival in the Danubian port Giurgiu (Giur- gevo) in late July. It was a momentous occasion, and the Romanians hoped that the Ottomans would recognise and protect the new regime and the new constitutional gains against Russia. Constantin Rosenthal travelled to Giurgiu on his own initiative, without consulting with the provisional government, to welcome the Turkish envoys and offer his services. He flattered Omer Pasha by offering to paint his portrait in oil and make lithograph copies, claiming, perhaps truthfully, that he had been overwhelmed in Bucharest by commissions for the Ottoman General’s likeness. Nothing is known about the projected oil portrait, but the sketches were duly executed, as he wrote to Rosetti on 26 July from Giurgiu, and one published etching shows the Pasha in his military finery, what in real life would have been a blaze of golden frog- gings and decorations.217 The British Consul, Colquhoun, had travelled to Giurgiu as well, to observe and mediate the initial Ottoman-Wallachian negotiations prior to the Ottomans’ arrival in Bucharest. No effort was spared in trying to convey to the Ottomans the importance that the Romanians attached to this solemn occasion. Upon their arrival in the capital city, the Ottoman dignitaries were given a resplendent reception, and Rosenthal was again involved: the procession passed under a triumphal arch of his design, built as an eclectic mix of Moorish, Gothic and Romanic elements, adorned with crescents and topped by the effigy of the suzerain Sultan Abdülmecid. The evening ended with anal fresco

216 Maier, “The Revolution”, 201. The text in question was entitled “Dorinţele partidei naţionale” [The Demands of the National Party]. See p. 77 above. 217 The etching, first published anonymously in theIllustrierte Zeitung (Leipzig), 316, 21 July 1849, was attributed by Adrian Silvan Ionescu to Rosenthal. Cf. “Momen- tul 1848 în plastica documentaristă”, Revista istorică, new series, 10, 5–6 (1999): 501– 18. Cf. also letter from Rosenthal to Rosetti (n French and in Romanian translation), 26 July 1848 in 1848 la români, ed. Bodea, 2: 773–6. bucharest between st. petersburg and constantinople 89 festivity in one of the city’s most elegant quarters: as midnight closed, a firework display spelled out in sparkling lettering the words ‘Sultan’ and ‘Constitution’ above the heads of the jubilant crowds.218 As if responding to such subliminal messages, in early August 1848, Ottoman-Romanian negotiations seemed to proceed smoothly, as expected. The Sultan recognised the new constitution and, in exchange, demanded the appointment of a Lieutenancy to replace the provisional government. This was agreed on the evening of 4 August, at a major popular meeting in Bucharest, attended by 7,000 people, into whose hands the provisional government deposited their resignation. The crowds went to the residence of the Pasha’s Secretary, where, Colquhoun relates, “Turkish and National Airs were played and on Mr. Thinghir [the Secretary]’s appearing at the window, a shout was raised of ‘Vive le Sultan notre Auguste Souverain, Vive son Représen- tant Suleyman Pasha et Vive la Constitution.’ ”219 The newly elected Lieutenancy was composed of Nicolae Golescu, home minister, Ion Eliade Rădulescu, minister for ecclesiastic affairs and General Christian Tell, commander of the militia, and was officially recognised by the Porte on 15 August. On behalf of Britain, Colquhoun himself opened official diplomatic relations with the Wal- lachian government the following day. After his reception at the Pal- ace, the Consul was greeted by those assembled with cries of “Vive la Reine Victoria, vive l’Angleterre.”220

218 Silvan Ionescu, “Momentul 1848”, 508. 219 Colquhoun to Palmerston, 5 August 1848, in Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 114. 220 Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 131, 133. A TRANSYLVANIAN INTERLUDE

On 11 June 1848 Dumitru Brătianu had received his accreditation as diplomatic agent in troubled Austria-Hungary, as the first diplomatic representative of modern Romania.221 Until then, Romanian interests abroad had been represented by officials of the Ottoman suzerain power. He travelled via Vienna, where the situation was confused after the collapse of the interim government led by Karl Ludwig von Fic- quelmont, and reached Pest in late June. Since March, under popular pressure, the Habsburg monarchy appeared to have imploded. Vienna as the official centre of power in the Empire was now challenged by Central European “staging-points in the multilateral contestation” during the events of 1848–49:222 Milan, Buda-Pest,223 Prague, Lemberg, Cracow, Timişoara, Braşov, Blaj and Cluj – to mention just a few of the cities engulfed by the protests – were all bursting with revolutionary ferment, political and territorial demands and potential multi- ethnic strife. Only one element in the confusing political landscape of 1848–49 remained stable: the now beleaguered Habsburg dynasty and the principle of dynastic loyalty as the pivotal centre of an otherwise explosive multi-national conundrum. After March and especially after the enactment of the April Laws by the Hungarian Diet, the new Hungarian regime had been operating on the basis of a virtual, if brittle, parliamentary sovereignty and autonomy from Austria. A reformist Hungarian government led by Lajos Batthyány comprised the liberal István Széchenyi, the ‘romantic hero’ Lajos Kossuth and the ‘man of the future’, Ferenc Deák.224 Embedded within, and extending beyond, the complex network of constitutional, political, economic and military difficulties facing the empire was the thorny nationalities question. The ethnic dilemmas of the multi-national Austrian state would prove an obstacle to dialogue and a main cause of the defeat of the revolutions in Austria, Hun- gary, Transylvania and the Romanian Principalities. To summarise a

221 Anul 1848, 1: 515. Cf. also Iordache, Dumitru Brătianu, 90. 222 The Revolutions, ed. Evans and von Strandmann, 183. 223 Buda and Pest were still two separate, though contiguous, cities. They finally united in 1873 to form the present-day Hungarian capital, Budapest. 224 The Revolutions, ed. Evans and von Strandmann, 187. a transylvanian interlude 91 convoluted situation in simple terms, Croats, Serbs, Slovaks, Ruthenes and Romanians turned against a would-be centralist, unified Hun- garian state and “against a government which they perceived to be Magyar- and noble-dominated, its political benefits outweighed by a cultural-linguistic agenda of ‘Magyarization’ [. . .].”225 On the occasion of a first in a series of national meetings in the Transylvanian town Blaj, on April 30, five to six thousand Romanian peasants urged by some of their intellectual leaders, initially declared themselves ready to fight for their rights by constitutional, non-violent means.226 At the time, the union of Transylvania to Hungary, ultimately sought by the Hungarians, was still considered of minor importance, as the Roma- nians were trying primarily to obtain their recognition as a ‘nation’ within the Austrian Empire and the civil and political rights such a recognition would have entailed. However, as Hungarian pressures for Transylvania’s merger with Hungary mounted, at their national congress at Blaj on May 15–17, thirty thousand Romanians “proclaimed the independence of the Romanian nation and its full equality with the other nations of Transylvania and declared their intention of maintaining its rights by creating a new political system based upon liberal principles.”227 Both conservatives and liberals in the Magyar- dominated Transylvanian government united and persisted in their refusal to recognize the Romanians as a separate nation, and perceived the links between the Transylvanian and Wallachian intellectuals as an encouragement to separatism and to a ‘Greater Romania project’. Consequently the Transylvanian Diet, in which the Romanians were not represented, pronounced the union of Transylvania to Hungary on 30 May and Emperor Ferdinand, in refuge in Innsbruck, recognised the union on June 10. It was against the backdrop of a solid Austrian- Hungarian front on the issue of the Transylvanian Romanians that Dumitru Brătianu arrived in Pest to negotiate with the Hungarian leaders. His suggestions for a Romanian-Magyar defensive alliance against the Austrians and the Russians – who were then poised for military intervention against the insurrection – were initially waived aside by Lajos Batthyány, the leader of the separatist Hungarian government. A compromise subsequently proposed by the Hungarian side would

225 Idem, 192. 226 Keith Hitchins, A Nation Discovered: Romanian intellectuals in Transylvania and the idea of nation, 1700–1848 (Bucharest, 1999), 184 sqq. 227 Ibid., 192. 92 a transylvanian interlude have required the Romanians of Transylvania to unite with the Hun- garians against the rebellious Serbs and Croatians in the province. This proposal’s rejection by the Romanians opened the floodgates towards imminent, full-scale civil war, which would soon see Transylvania’s ethnic communities at each other’s throats.228

228 For a more extensive overview of the historical background to and the development of the events in Transylvania in 1848–49, see Part Two, p. 135 sqq. 1848: EPILOGUE

It is not the men who have failed the events, but time which has failed the men. A. Ubicini, 1849229 Disillusioned with the possibility of reaching an agreement with the Hungarians, Dumitru Brătianu left Pest in mid-June, travelling via Sibiu, where he met with the leaders of the Transylvanian Romanian action committee. On his return journey, on 30 June, in a letter to Paul Bataillard, an embattled Brătianu sent his regards to the “much- beloved” Michelet and Quinet. “Tell them of our revolution”, he urged Bataillard: The glory of the splendid Romanian revolution belongs to them. Let them continue to show their sympathy. Should they abandon us now when the struggle has just started, they would commit the most heinous crime, because they put the weapons in our hands; Romania knows it. They must demonstrate to the French the justness of our cause, which is also theirs, because it is holy. They have powerful means at their disposal: the university chair, the tribune, the press; and they have names that are dear to French and Romanians alike, names known and revered all over the world. We need energetic protests from France against any foreign intervention in our affairs and we need weapons, two or three superior officers expert in warfare, and above all, we need your hearts.230 However, the second French republic was now reeling in the aftermath of the violent June street movements in Paris, which marked the victory of moderate republicans and conservatives against workers, radicals and champions of the ‘social republic’. The pro-Romanian sympathizers were now largely sidelined, imprisoned or exiled, and the French government was even more cautious than before on the international arena. Indulging in adventurous gesticulation in foreign affairs, least of all over the Eastern Question, was not on Jules Bastide’s agenda. The Romanians may have won French republican hearts, but not French weapons and military expertise.

229 J. A. Ubicini, J. A. Ubicini, Mémoire justificatif de la révolution roumaine de 11/23 juin 1848, par les membres du gouvernment provisoire et délégués de l’émigration valaque, au nom du people (Paris, 1849), 26–7. 230 Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 26. 94 1848

In mid-August, Dumitru Brătianu took part in a Romanian delegation seeking further official endorsement of the Wallachian revolutionary constitution in the Ottoman capital. General Aupick, the French Ambassador in Constantinople, was, as on previous occasions, sympathetic to the Romanian cause, but his weakened authority in the Otto- man capital was pitted against the more significant status of Stratford Canning and that of the Russian Ambassador, Titoff. Aupick refused to engage France in official diplomatic correspondence with Bucharest and, when asked by the Porte whether the Sultan could rely on French support in the event of an armed conflict with Russia, answered that his instructions did not refer to such eventuality.231 In a private conversation with Ion Ghica, the confidential envoy of the Wallachian provisional government in Constantinople, Aupick said, referring to events in Paris after the June disturbances: “There is a civil war upon us, my poor Ghika; now there is nothing left to stop the Russians from entering your country.”232 Paul Bataillard, a trained archivist and anthropologist, had met and befriended the Romanians at the Collège de France and in the lodge ‘La Rose du Parfait Silence’ in the mid-1840s. He had become especially close to Alexandru G. Golescu (also known as Golescu ‘Negru’, to distinguish him from one of his Golescu cousins, nicknamed ‘Albu’).233 As envoy of the Wallachian government in Paris, Golescu-Negru often had his mail re-directed, for reasons of security, to Bataillard’s address at 2bis rue Jacob, and at La Jarrie, a property the Frenchman owned near La Rochelle and where he was staying in August 1848. Bataillard’s landlady was awed and clearly thrilled by the secrecy and the whiff of international conspiracy associated with her tenant. “We may receive, before our departure, the visit of Mr. Golesco, the Wallachian envoy to the French Republic”, she wrote to a friend on 18 August 1848. “He is keen to see Paul and thinks nothing of travelling a hundred leagues to spend one day with him. Our poor Jarrie is way too dilapidated to receive an ambassador, but he is an intimate friend of Paul’s and a very good lad, he says. All the epistles from Wallachia addressed to the Minister of Foreign Affairs [sic], etc., come here. These fat envelopes covered in stamps and postmarked in Bucharest produce an incredibly

231 Idem, 28. 232 Ghica, Amintiri, 33. 233 ‘Negru’ = black; ‘Albu’ = white. (Rom.). 1848: epilogue 95 powerful effect in our small town of Montfaucon and I am certain Paul now passes for a conspirator.”234 Bataillard’s help was indeed called upon in the last weeks of the doomed Romanian revolution. He had recently published articles in Le National deploring the lack of French diplomatic interest in the Eastern Question and especially in the manoeuvres of Russian troops on the Moldavian border. “The hatred against the Russian is smouldering in the heart of the Moldavians, as it is in the heart of the other Romanians”, he wrote in one of his contributions on 10 August, having received news of grain expropriations and other abuses committed in Moldavia by the Russian occupying troops.235 Amidst rumours of an imminent occupation of Wallachia by the Russian troops stationed in Moldavia, the Foreign Minister Ion (Jean) Voinescu II sent an official protest to Lord Palmerston via Colquhoun. Writing on behalf of the country and of the Princely Lieutenancy, “officially recognised by His Excellency Suleyman Pasha, Minister for Trade of the Sublime Porte and Extraordinary Envoy to the Principal- ity of Wallachia”, he expressed his gratitude for the “vivid sympathy” manifested by some British MPs for the Romanian cause. However, he wished to correct Lord Palmerston over a misconceived perception of Russia’s self-assumed mandate in the area, a perception which the Foreign Secretary had consistently upheld throughout the summer of 1848. In his response to Lord Dudley Stuart’s query of 1 September in the House of Commons regarding the presence of Russian troops in neighbouring Moldavia, Lord Palmerston had declared himself satisfied that “These Russian troops entered Moldavia, some time ago, at the request of the Hospodar, and without any orders from the Cabinet of St. Petersburgh.” [. . .] “I have had recent communications from St. Petersburgh, stating that the purpose for which it [ the Russian corps] is there is the maintenance or re-establishment of order, that its stay is only temporary, and that it will be withdrawn when the occasion has ceased”.236 However, Voinescu argued, as the Principalities had been allowed to maintain their autonomy under Turkish suzerainty and Russian protectorate, the military occupation violated “the very

234 Letter from the private collection of Bataillard’s daughters, in Olimpiu Boitoş, Paul Bataillard et la révolution roumaine de 1848: contribution à l’histoire des relations franco-roumaines, Extrait des Mélanges de l’Ecole Roumaine en France, 1929, 2: 39 (Paris, 1930). 235 Anul 1848, 3: 27 and 43–5. 236 Hansard, 3rd series, 101: 1 September 1848. 96 1848 foundations of European public law.” As the new government of Wallachia had been recognised by the Porte and by Britain, and as the events in Wallachia had not had any international ramifications, Voinescu was requesting an expression of Lord Palmerston’s public support for the provisional government’s programme of national “regeneration.”237 There is no record of a response from Palmerston, and the British approach to the Eastern Question did not change. The Romanian perception was then – as it remained on so many later occasions – that ‘the West’ had ‘abandoned’ Romania into the hands of Russia. After his futile diplomatic endeavours in Pest and Constantinople, upon his return to Bucharest, Brătianu found the capital city occupied by Turkish troops under the joint command of Suleyman Pasha and Omer Pasha. As already shown, the complex negotiations between the Porte’s representatives, the provisional government and the Wal- lachian, mostly conservative, notables had resulted in the compromise solution of appointing a Princely Lieutenancy made up of the moderate, pro-Turkish Eliade, moderate Christian Tell and liberal Nicolae Golescu. Although this step normalised relations with the Porte and with some of the European Powers, notably Austria and Britain, the moderate, sympathetic stance adopted by Suleyman Pasha seems to have been a purely personal position, not engaging the Porte officially. Under Russian pressure, the Porte reviewed its position with respect to the Principalities and the urbane Suleyman was replaced with the more hard-line Fuad Pasha, the Divan’s Amedci, secretary to the Great Vizier. “[. . .] Intelligence has reached us of the Porte having come into the views of Russia, in so far as almost to have disavowed the Acts of Suleyman Pasha, who is thought to have exceeded the strict line of his Instructions”, Colquhoun wrote to Palmerston on 6 September. “His Excellency Sir Stratford Canning writes me, that Fuad Effendi is charged with the Task of rectifying the errors of Suleyman and preventing any future departure from the course adopted by the Porte. That the Court of St. Petersburg required the punishment of Rebels, of all concerned in the revolutionary movement and a complete return to the late form of Government [. . .]”238

237 Letter from Jean Voinesco II, Foreign Secretary in the Wallachian Princely Lieu- tenancy, to Lord Palmerston, 22 Aug/3 Sept. 1848, forwarded by Robert Colquhoun, in Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 164–5. 238 Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 167. 1848: epilogue 97

In one final and futile gesture of defiance, on 18 September, the crowds in Bucharest publicly burned the Arhondologia (the list of noble ranks) and the Organic Statutes. It was a bonfire of ancien- regime political vanities, of the symbols of noble privilege and Russian control. The people’s “Deputation succeeded in gaining possession of the obnoxious Books, which were immediately placed on a Bier and carried to the Residence of the Metropolitan, accompanied by the Musick, playing Funeral Airs, the Tolling of the Church Bells [sic]”, Colquhoun, who disapproved of such open defiance, wrote to Palm- erston on 18 September. “The assemblage consisted of not less than 10,000 men. Arrived at the Metropolitan’s Residence, the Archbishop appeared on the Balcony in his Pontifical Robes and after pronouncing a Curse on the Books and an Anathema on all who should cooperate in restoring the old order of things, a Fire was kindled in the Court, and the Books burnt, and then the ashes scattered.”239 An address of the Metropolitan to the People of Wallachia read as follows: “I have cursed and anathematised both the Regulations, and those who will want to re-establish them or to govern the country according to their provisions. I am announcing this to the Christian people of Wallachia, whom I bless so that God may strengthen them in their faith in the Constitution, which comes to us from God, as it is in the spirit of the Gospel.”240 Rosetti’s newspaper, Pruncul român, meanwhile, tried to offer encouragement and boost public morale in equally religious tones: “The holy trinity ‘Liberty, justice and brotherhood’ is the strong breastplate that will protect us”, read one of his editorials.241 On 23 September Fuad Pasha’s troops occupied Bucharest amidst demonstrations of public protest: according to information obtained by the consul Colquhoun, thirty thousand unarmed peasants led by their village priests had awaited their arrival on the hills surrounding the capital city, which suggests a massive and constant popular support for the revolutionary government throughout the eventful months of June to September.242 Fuad dissolved the Princely Lieuten- ancy – the country’s legitimate government, recognised both by the Porte and by some of the Great Powers, including Britain – repealed all the laws promulgated between 11 June and 13 September 1848,

239 Ibid., 186–7. Dispatch to Lord Palmerston, 18 September 1848. 240 From Anul 1848, 4: 220–1. 241 11 September 1848, in Bucur, C. A. Rosetti: mesianism, 65. 242 Entry for 28 September 1848, in Colquhoun, Diary, 32. 98 1848 reinstated the Organic Statutes and appointed the compliant Constan- tin Cantacuzino as single Caimacam (Governor) of Wallachia. General Alexander Duhamel, the unanimously hated Russian special envoy, who had governed with an iron fist earlier in the year, was now also back in the humbled capital city, overseeing the re-occupation, “his court yard filled with Turkish Soldiers.”243 Details of pillage, disorder and of the bloody confrontations between Turkish troops and the Bucharest firemen, as well as depositions of participating Wallachian soldiers were duly sent by the British Consul to the Foreign Office.244 The British Consul allows himself an uncharacteristic show of emotion in the midst of the otherwise rather terse narrative of his diary for 1848. He was, he wrote, “very touched” by the outcome of the September Romanian-Turkish clash involving firemen defending the capital city, which had left around two hundred dead on each side.245 Very judiciously, the Consul observed in his message to Stratford Can- ning that the illegality and violence of the Turkish occupation would be seized upon by Russia and used to represent herself internationally as the restorer of order and defender of her Christian protégés against Turkish barbarity.246 Units from the 50,000-strong Russian troops stationed in Moldavia under the command of General Lüders crossed the border and occupied Bucharest on 15/27 September, without, as Colquhoun wrote, having been summoned either by the Porte, or by the new, admittedly pro-Russian, Wallachian government.247 In an attempt to help the Romanians, a 400-strong Polish legion, commanded by Faustyn Filanowicz, the long-time emissary of the Polish Democratic Society in the Romanian Principalities, opposed a futile resistance to the incoming Russians before being dispersed. Filanowicz sought refuge in Transyl- vania where, ironically, he was executed by the Hungarian authorities under the mistaken assumption that he was a Russian spy.248

243 Colquhoun to Stratford Canning, 28 September 1848, in Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 196. 244 Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 192–8. 245 Entry for 28 September 1848 in Colquhoun, Diary, 33. 246 Colquhoun to Stratford Canning, 29 September 1848 in Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 197–8. 247 Colquhoun to Stratford Canning, 6 October 1848, in ibid., 208. For the view according to which the Tsar had not wished to occupy Wallachia, but was pre-empted by General Duhamel, see Maier, “The Revolution”, 201. 248 Kisluk, Brothers from the North, 141. The activities of Polish agents in the Prin- cipalities is fairly well-documented. See, for instance, P. P. Panaitescu, Emigraţia 1848: epilogue 99

The British Consul was highly dismissive of the “character of the individuals” appointed in Cantacuzino’s new cabinet: men of “violent principles”, “needy place hunter[s]”, weak stooges of Russia. It was a government, he argued, most likely to compromise the interests of the Porte. To add insult to injury, a Russian, Colonel Garbatzki, was appointed as head of the Wallachian Militia and it was rumoured that the Russian Consul Kotzebue appointed new district governors accountable directly to himself.249 Z It is not the objective of this narrative to assess the chances of success of the 1848 revolution in Romania or weigh the causes of its eventual defeat. A support base made up simply of an enthusiastic, but largely weapon-less irregular army and loyal, but equally ill-equipped, crowds of peasants and artisans could in itself explain why a movement of intellectuals, even though nationally embraced, failed in the face of a joint foreign occupation. The repeated demands for foreign arms and military expertise by the leaders of the Romanian insurrection, as well as during the Hungarian revolution of 1849, show that the country was lacking the basic elements for resistance: a national, adequately equipped army and an independent foreign policy. In addition, the provisional government’s promises of social and land reform remained, in the circumstances, theoretical, a fact which must have de-mobilised some of their peasant followers. The government did convene, as promised, a ‘property commission’ to deal with the agrarian question, but it only met on 21 August and, after inconclusive debates, was dissolved on the 31, as the revolution itself was expiring.250 Unresolved, the ‘land question’ was going to haunt the former forty- eighters as they returned to power after exile and marginalisation in the late 1850s. Many members of the provisional government and other persons ‘compromised’ during the short-lived Romanian ‘republic’ took refuge

polonă şi revoluţia română de la 1848: studii şi documente (Bucharest, 1929), and more recently Romanian and Polish Peoples in East-Central Europe (17th–20th centuries), ed. Veniamin Ciobanu (Iaşi, 2003). 249 Colquhoun to Stratford Canning, 6 October 1848, in Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 209–10, 217. See also Colquhoun’s diary entry for 6 October 1848, 37. 250 Maier, “The Revolution”, 202–4. 100 1848 on the premises of the British consulate.251 They had, as Jules Michelet wrote a few years later, “been caught in the web of the horrible spider of the North.”252 Most were arrested, with the exception of Dumitru Brătianu, who managed to join Marie Rosetti and her new-born baby girl, Sophia Liberty, on the epic journey narrated by Michelet in his text of 1855, Légendes démocratiques du nord, “Madame Rosetti”.253 An imperial ferman confirmed that those arrested were to be sent into exile as a pre-emptive measure demanded by state security.254 On 21 September 1848 the Lieutenancy and the Turkish commissar issued a decree forbidding the return into Wallachia of the majority of those sentenced to exile and a circular was sent by the new foreign minister, Ioan Filipescu, to the border troops with a list of those thus proscribed.255 Russian diplomatic reports on the arrests denounced the Brătianu brothers as “hommes exaltés”, Constantin Rosetti as a “demagogue of the most dangerous sort” and Cesar Bolliac as a “furi- ous demagogue”.256 A petition was handed to the British Consul by eighteen of those arrested, asking for British protection and passports, as well as for an escort upon leaving the consulate. Lord Palmerston had previously sent express instructions to Colquhoun, advising him that no British Consul was authorised to issue passports and offer protection to foreign nationals.257 On this occasion, the consul took the liberty of issuing passports prior to consultation with the For- eign Secretary. “I considered this a Duty of Humanity and hope Your Excellency will not disapprobate [sic] of my conduct”, he pleaded in his dispatch of 13 October 1848.258 Colquhoun asked for assurances from Fuad Pasha regarding the safety of those arrested – to whom he referred explicitly as “political prisoners” – but his dragoman was refused permission to accompany the convoy, and the initial plan of

251 Colquhoun to Stratford Canning, 29 September 1848, in Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 197–8. 252 Michelet, “Madame Rosetti”, in Légendes, 222. 253 For a discussion of this text, see Part Two of this study, 234 sqq. 254 Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 32. 255 Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 206. 256 Revoluţia de la 1848 în Ţările Române: documente inedite din arhivele ruseşti, ed. Ion Varta (Chişinău, 1998), 469–70. 257 Palmerston to Colquhoun, 28 October 1848. The National Archives, PRO/FO 786/1212. 258 The National Archives, PRO/ FO 78/743, September to December 1848. The British vice-consuls in the Danubian ports of Galaţi and Brăila, J. Cunningham and Vincent Lloyd, also issued passports and safe-conducts to Moldavian forty-eighters wishing to escape to Vienna. See Florescu, The Struggle against Russia, 210–1. 1848: epilogue 101 escorting the prisoners for release in Transylvania was changed at the last minute: the new decision was for the men to be sent instead by steamer along the Danube to Orşova, and then, it was feared, into arrest in Constantinople. When, a short while after the arrests, Effingham Grant was sent to visit the sixteen prisoners, who included Rosetti, the poet and actor Constantin Aristia, Ştefan Golescu, C. Romanescu, the painter Con- stantin D. Rosenthal, Ion Brătianu, Cezar Bolliac, he found them held on two small Turkish gun boats on the Danube a little above the port of Vidin. They “were in a most wretched state”, Robert Colquhoun reported to Stratford Canning on 20 October. As the Russian Com- missioner in Bucharest had “openly expresse[d] his dissatisfaction at these persons having been allowed to escape”, the British Consul feared that Fuad Effendi might be pressurized into allowing them to be returned to Bucharest, and therefore delivered straight into Rus- sian hands.259 Throughout the early weeks of the forty-eighters’ exile, Colquhoun and Effingham Grant remained in constant contact with the prisoners, sending them letters and money from the families,260 as well as giving assurances to the anxious relatives left behind. Officially still a subject of the Habsburg empire, in spite of his newly obtained Romanian citizenship, Rosenthal was freed on orders of the Austrian consul in Giurgiu, despite his protests.261 Ultimately, the men were not taken to Constantinople, but upstream on the Danube before finally escaping near Semlin (today Zemun in Serbia)262 and making their own way to Paris and the other destinations of their exile. Accord- ing to Michelet’s later account in “Madame Rosetti”, it was Marie Rosetti, armed with a letter from the British consul, who secured the banished men’s final release by the Turks. Michelet’s highly romanti- cized narrative has her dressed in Romanian ethnic garb – as seen in

259 Colquhoun to Stratford Canning, Bucharest, 20 October 1848, annexed to a report of 10/22 October addressed to Lord Palmerston, in Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 225. 260 Cf. letter from Rosetti to Marie, from Vidin, dated 4/6 September 1848: “Write to Mons[ieur] Colquhoun and ask him to send the money that Golesco left with him in Semlin”. In C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 30. 261 Daniela Gui, “Rolul pictorilor din generaţia paşoptistă în orientarea picturii româneşti spre modernitate”, in Biografii paşoptiste, ed. Gelu Neamţu (Bucharest, 2006), 200. 262 Colquhoun to Sir Stratford Canning, 6 October 1848, in Documente ed. Dogaru and Stan, 207–8. Cf. also a manuscript account attributed to Rosetti, in the manuscript section of the B. A. R. (Library of the Romanian Academy), Ms. no. 61/1972. 102 1848

Rosenthal’s 1850 portrait – cradling her baby and following on foot along the banks as the prisoners’ barge sailed up the Danube. She was chaperoned by Dumitru Brătianu, who had somehow escaped arrest, and by Rosenthal, liberated by the Austrians. As a woman, a mother and a British national, she had the sentimental and material means to cajole, threaten and bribe her way onto the boat and the men’s way out of captivity. At one point, Michelet recounts, the Turks, those “old, fierce soldiers”, shared a meal with the mother and brought milk to the little girl. In the final episode of this dramatic escape, the Turkish guards, drunk on the wine she had offered, were challenged by the priest, mayor and villagers of Sfenitza (on Austrian territory), who managed to liberate the prisoners. It meant, however, leaping from the frying pan into the fire, as, having escaped the Ottomans and the Russians, the group found themselves under Austrian threat in a Tran- sylvania torn by civil war. Having forced an Austrian general at the border to sign their passports, they made their way on and past the border, dodging in-fighting Hungarians, Serbian and even confused Wallachians, who suspected them of being conservative boyars fleeing the revolution in Bucharest. By 1855, when Michelet wrote his account, relations between the Romanian exiles and the British Consul had cooled considerably. In spite of the logistic and diplomatic support Colquhoun had offered around 1848, British politics in the Balkans came under revisionist scrutiny in subsequent years. According to the updated narrative that Michelet’s Romanian informants wanted to put across in 1855, it was lack of political support from Britain which had led to the defeat of their national movement and had pushed their country into the arms of a weak Turkey and an increasingly strong Russia. France, too, had forfeited her republican internationalist mission by failing to arm the Romanians in their hour of need.263 In those times of acute crisis, Rosetti and his liberal-radical compeers saw East-European developments in all the black-and-white self-righteousness of a transparent historical teleology: their noble liberating and modernising mission should have been clear for all to see and should have been endorsed emphatically by forward-looking Great Power diplomacy and military aid. They had no time for the French Second Republic’s hesitant foreign policies or for Lord Palmerston’s careful tip-toeing around the Ottoman Porte,

263 Michelet, “Madame Rosetti”, in Légendes, 234–5. 1848: epilogue 103

Austria and Russia. For them, idealist and radical nation-builders, the “encouragement of continental liberalism” should have been a priority and as such, should have been placed before the preservation of Tur- key and certainly before peace with autocratic Austria and Russia.264 On behalf of his Romanian friends, Michelet’s text of 1855 thus settled scores by presenting the ‘truth’ of 1848 from the angle of the Rosetti circle and, in so doing, also established the cult of Marie Rosetti as ‘mother of the revolution’ and Romanian national heroine. Z In late September 1848, Bucharest was held in the grip of the joint Turkish-Russian occupation.265 The turncoat Metropolitan of Walla- chia, Neophyte, a former member of the revolutionary government, now had the opportunity to display the latest in a series of opportunistic reincarnations. As a member of the provisional government in June 1848, he had been the revolutionary prelate who blessed the flags of the revolt, only to become the apostate pillar of the restored old regime when the provisional 1848 government absconded briefly in July. A few days later he was back to his role as ‘red priest’, presided over the burning of the Organic Statutes in September 1848, only to make a final volte-face as arch-hierarch of the Russian-controlled government after the defeat of the revolution. The insurgency had barely expired when, on 27 September 1848, the Metropolitan addressed the Russian General Lüders and his incoming troops in the most effusive manner: Your Excellency, The spirit of delusion, disorder and anarchy which a few exalted minds have unfortunately imprinted on the affairs of this country in the last three months have upset the laws and the social regulations in their entirety. His Majesty the Emperor of all the Russias, and our most August Pro- tector, who of all times has given our country incessant proof of His paternal care, could not watch impassibly as the revolutionary movement drove Wallachia over the precipice [. . .]

264 Steele, Palmerston and Liberalism, 18–9. 265 The total number of Russian troops in the Principalities in 1848–9 fluctuated between 40,000 and 60,000, of which 25,000–40,000 were stationed in Wallachia. With an estimated army of 18,000–30,000 soldiers, the Turks were in a minority. Cf. Stan, Protectoratul Rusiei, 246. 104 1848

As we welcome you, General, in our midst we cannot fail to count ourselves blessed at this new sign of imperial favour and we beg Your Excellency, to kindly bear to His Imperial Majesty the message of deep gratitude with which the Romanian nation is imbued and which I have the honour of presenting to you.266 A Commission of enquiry into revolutionary activities was created by the two occupying powers on 18 November, and General Duhamel in person supervised the arrests and the prosecutions. A document found among his diplomatic papers listed 215 individuals arrested on various charges ranging from their role in the public burning of the Organic Regulations to armed opposition to the incoming Turkish army. The total number of those arrested – some of whom were not to be freed until early 1851 – was estimated at 10,000.267 The future Wallachian prince, Barbu Ştirbey, was to be influential in frustrating Duhamel’s vindictive zeal: only twelve of those arrested finally received prison and forced labour sentences in May 1849.268 Much of the British Consul’s official correspondence for the months of October and November 1848 was concerned with presenting the situation in Bucharest as a veritable reign of terror. Colquhoun appealed to Stratford Canning to ask for a cessation of the repressive measures taken by the Russians against ordinary citizens who had participated in the revolution, now that the main leaders were already in exile.269 Corporal punishment of suspects at the hands of Russian troops occasionally resulted in deaths, while domiciliary searches and arbitrary arrests, including of foreign nationals, took place as the impotent Ottoman authorities looked on. Colquhoun wrote to Lord Palmer- ston about “parties of Cossacks” making arrests “accompanied by acts of violence and brutality really intolerable.”270 The Russians claimed they were searching private residences following up on rumours of clandestinely returned revolutionaries, and Colquhoun was especially indignant when a British national was found to be among the three

266 Anul 1848, 4: 540. 267 Stan, Protectoratul Rusiei, 250. 268 For ‘Duhamel’s list’, see Marian Stroia, Între Levant şi Europa modernă: impact extern şi mentalitate tradiţională în spaţiul românesc (Bucharest, 2006), 187–95, quoting from Revoluţia de la 1848 în Ţările Române, ed. Varta. 269 Colquhoun to Stratford Canning, 27 October 1848, in Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 228–9. 270 Colquhoun to Stratford Canning, 27 October 1848; letter to Stratford Canning, 5 November 1848; letter to Lord Palmerston, 7 November 1848, in Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 232, 236–7, 240. 1848: epilogue 105 hundred people arrested, and when the house of the Belgian consul was ransacked by a “party of Cossacks”. The arrested British national, a certain Asprea, had been accused of circulating a pamphlet in which he criticized Tsar Nicholas.271 Schools throughout the country were closed as teachers suspected of revolutionary sympathies were arrested, villages were bereft of their ‘red’ priests, censorship was tight- ened, and so was the control of the Transylvanian-Wallachian borders.272 “Among the persons arrested are the two principal Spanish Jew Bankers Hillel and Halson – both have been liberated on the bail of the Caimacam – this little incident may serve to refute the assertion that the movement was merely the work of a few hotheaded young men, lately returned from Paris”, the consul explained to Lord Palmerston.273 In addition, the consul pointed out, Caimacam Cantacuzino himself and other notables now backed by the Russians had been involved in the revolution and could have been indicted as such with a great deal of justification.274 The capital city, Bucharest, now had to feed and maintain 21,000 Russian troops at an estimated cost of 900,000 piastres (£14,000) a month, the latest, as Colquhoun hilariously presented the situation to Stratford Canning, in a series of ‘natural’ disasters which had struck the country: fire, locusts, cattle epidemics and drought.275 “How this impoverished Country is to meet this exigency I know not. Hitherto the Turkish army has paid most punctually for all it has required and its conduct, in Camp at least, has been most orderly, offering a strange Contrast to the fearful excesses which are reported to me as having been committed by the Russians in Moldavia.”276 Even the conservative old boyars, some of whom had returned to Wallachia under Turk- ish and Russian escort, “glad as they are to see the Russians here, to protect them against the revolutionary Party, ask with much anxiety how long this state of things is to last.”277 The severity of the measures taken by the Russians to subdue the rebellious Wallachians was hardly exceptional. Tsar Nicholas I merely exported into Central-East Europe the repressive methods and heavy-handed approach which his regime

271 Entry for 10 November 1848 in Colquhoun, Diary, 48. 272 Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 226, 235–67. 273 Dispatches to Lord Palmerston, 5, 7 and 8 November 1848 in ibid., 241–2. 274 Colquhoun to Palmerston, 8 November 1848, in ibid., 242. 275 Ibid., 199. 276 Colquhoun to Palmerston, 1 October 1848, in ibid., 205. 277 Colquhoun to Palmerston, 10 October 1848 in ibid., 213. 106 1848 customarily used to deal with subversion and threats at home: censorship, surveillance, arrests, show trials and deportations were the usual response to allegations of political dissidence, as the contemporaneous affair of the Petrashevstky conspiracy demonstrated.278 After the Russo-Turkish occupation of Bucharest, the last pocket of resistance was in Little Wallachia, on the symbolically named Field of Trajan, where General Gheorghe Magheru, the commander of the irregular troops since 18 June, had assembled a considerable, but ill- equipped, army of over 12,000 pandours and peasants in a last-minute attempt to resist against the advance of the foreign troops.279 When Colquhoun wrote to Stratford Canning on 6 October about Magh- eru’s defiant stance among the ‘bold people’ of Oltenia, the traditional hot-bed of Romanian rebelliousness, he probably referred only to the regiments of Dorobantzi, former serfs enlisted in the district regiments. “He is reported to have 4,000 men well armed”, Colquhoun wrote, “in a country perfectly inaccessible to regular troops, to Cavalry and Artillery. At any other season, he might hold out, but with the prospect of five months winter before him, his obstinacy may entail greater evils on his unhappy Country.”280 Magheru did in fact consult with Colquhoun via an emissary on the most appropriate conduct he should adopt and, on 8 October, after talks with the Turkish commissars in Bucharest, who guaranteed the safety of the General and his followers, the British Consul dispatched his secretary, Effingham Grant, to Oltenia in an attempt to persuade Magheru to dismiss his troops, avoid bloodshed and inevitable defeat, and withdraw into Aus-

278 Dostoevsky himself, a member of the conspiracy, was tried and deported in 1849. See David Saunders, “A Pyrrhic Victory: The Russian Empire in 1848”, inThe Revolutions, ed. Evans and von Strandmann, 137. 279 Magheru had been appointed ‘Captain General’ of all the irregular troops of ‘dorobanţi’ and ‘pandours’ by a provisional government decree of 18 June 1848. Cf. Anul 1848, 1: 651. The ‘pandours’ (Rom. panduri, possibly from the Latin bande- rium) had been, since the eighteenth century in Wallachia, irregular troops of peasants exempt from taxes. Tudor Vladimirescu had famously led them in the Romanian- Greek uprising of 1821 and Magheru had been leading regiments of pandours successfully since 1828–9 against raids by Turkish brigands into Romanian territory. Cf. Apostol Stan and Constantin Vlăduţ, Gheorghe Magheru (Bucharest, 1969), 24–30. The figure 12,000 is proposed in Maier, “The Revolution”, 200. 280 1848 la români, ed. Bodea, 2: 886. Historically, Oltenia had had a tradition of quasi-autonomous local administration which had been abolished by the Organic Regulations of 1831. 1848: epilogue 107 tria.281 As he disbanded his troops, the General issued a farewell proclamation to the Romanians: Rest assured that the European powers, under whose protection you have placed your right to give yourselves new laws and to enjoy them in peace, will not allow a people to perish which, with the cross in their hands, with justice in their hearts and with hope in God, have risen for their rights. Time, God, our August Suzerain and the protection of the European powers will eventually help our just cause to triumph.282 Magheru went into exile, first in Trieste, then in Transylvania and finally in Vienna, where he made vain efforts to create a Romanian legion to fight alongside the Hungarians in Transylvania.283 He thus joined Rosetti, the Brătianu brothers, the Golescu brothers and their cousins, Eliade, and the other exiles, soon to be dispersed in all corners of the world, from Paris to the Middle East. Colquhoun appealed to Lord Palmerston on their behalf in a dispatch of 12 October: [. . .] I feel it a Duty to bear Testimony to the Disinterestedness of almost every one of these men, who, placed for a short period in power, offered to those acquainted with the general viciousness of the Character of the Boiars the unusual spectacle of a purity of Conduct above all doubt. Forced as they have been to leave their Country and become exiles on account of their late Political Acts, they have left it with barely the means of subsistence for two months – many of them without even that recourse and dependant on the others. I hope before many months have elapsed, that these persons will be allowed to return to their Country, and that, if the Porte have the means, as she professes to have the Will, she will admit into some Branches of the Administration, certain of these Individuals, who alone are capable of cleaning the System of some of its crying abuses but I suppose the Protecting Power, to judge at least from its recent Acts, will endeavor to check any thing like Amelioration, except such as may be proposed by itself, in its own views, and for its own purposes.284 In Bucharest, there were growing tensions between the Turkish Com- missar, Fuad Effendi, and the Russian envoy, General Duhamel. The

281 Ibid., 887. The text of Colquhoun’s letter to Magheru was published on 15 November 1848 in the Romanian-language Transylvanian periodical Foaie pentru minte, inimă şi literatură, no. 46. It is reproduced in Anul 1848, 4: 535–7. 282 General Gheorghe Magheru, Proclamation to the people of Wallachia, 28 Sep- tember 1848, in Anul 1848, 4: 580. 283 Cf. Magheru’s letter to Al. G. Golescu – Negru, 6 May 1849, in Fotino 2: 294–5. 284 Colquhoun to Palmerston, 6 October 1848, in Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 214–5. 108 1848

Porte made continuous, but largely futile, attempts to assert its right as suzerain power, repeatedly rejecting the strong measures proposed by Russia, such as dividing Bucharest into a Turkish and a Russian Authority, disarming the population – which would have deprived the peasants of their only defence against marauding wolves in winter – setting up an exceptional tribunal to deal with those involved in the 1848 disturbances, many of whom were now in exile, and confiscating their assets. Such measures were, Fuad Effendi protested to Duhamel, “in utter contempt of Legal Authority.”285 In spite of the bloodshed of September, when Fuad’s troops clashed with the defiant Bucharest firemen, the impression left by witness accounts was that, ultimately, the Ottoman military occupation appeared almost benign compared to the Russian repression, conducted by Duhamel with complete disregard for the Porte’s rights as suzerain power. The Russian envoy himself denounced the “mildness” of Fuad’s approach: he reported to Nesselrode that the Turkish envoy had facilitated and then turned a blind eye on the final escape of the fifteen arrested “demagogues” – Rosetti and his companions – while also issuing passports to other revolutionaries who found refuge in the Banat and Transylvania, instead of being duly arrested and tried by the exceptional tribunal set up by the Russians.286 The Romanian forty-eighters may have been unhappy with what they perceived as the low level of Western protest against the Russian occupation, but such protests were voiced, especially as Tsarist plans to use the troops in Wallachia for incursions into revolutionary Tran- sylvania and Hungary became increasingly evident. According to Le Constitutionnel of 1 December 1848, for instance, in Constantinople Stratford Canning and General Aupick handed notes of protest to the Russian ambassador against the continuing occupation of the Prin- cipalities.287 Such protests were going to intensify into 1849, but the Russian troops did not in effect leave the Romanian Principalities until after the defeat of the Hungarian revolution, to which they overwhelmingly contributed: its first units retreated on 7 March 1850, followed by the recall of both Duhamel and Fuad Pasha. As Fuad Effendi was

285 Such disputes were duly recorded in Colquhoun’s official correspondence. See, for instance, his dispatches of 24 November and 28 December 1848 to Stratford Can- ning, in Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 251–3, 270–1. 286 Stan, Protectoratul Rusiei, 249. 287 Idem, 255. 1848: epilogue 109 about to leave Wallachia upon termination of his mission, a grateful Extraordinary Administrative Assembly ordered for the sum of 13,000 imperial ducats from the state budget to be allocated by the Prince, in time-honoured fashion, to pay for gifts to the Turkish envoy and his retinue. From Constantinople, where he was authorized by the Sultan to accept the gift, Fuad wrote to the new Prince Barbu Ştirbey, informing him that the award was going to remind him of “a country for the fate of which I entertain the most sincere interest and of a Prince for whom I have most vivid feelings of friendship.”288 It is not known whether the Russian envoy Duhamel was similarly rewarded. Constantin Aricescu is a forty-eighter who does not feature prominently in the present story. During the events of 1848, he worked as secretary to Eliade Rădulescu and his group – ideological rivals to Rosetti and his camp – in order, as he explained, “to stop them from causing harm” and “to keep harmony among Heliad, Tell, Rosetti and Ion Brătianu.”289 He was, therefore, the man of the ‘middle road’, claiming, and perhaps actually possessing, the neutrality that such a position entails. Two decades after the events, he passed what appears to be a dispassionate judgement on the events and on the causes of failure in 1848. He quoted approvingly the assessment of another forty-eighter on the characters of the protagonists: while Heliad himself lacked “a heart and generous aspirations”, Rosetti and Ion Brătianu were “men of feeling, but not of reason as well.” Rosetti, “carried away by the inspirations of the heart, had wanted to make the Revolution into a sentimental epic; he believed that, with a few passionate speeches and proclamations, the opposition, and the hatred of the defeated party, would both melt into a long, brotherly embrace.”290 It is perhaps a slightly unfair criticism, although accurate in its appreciation of both Rosetti’s emotionalism and of the role of the written and spoken media in 1848. During the mutual recriminations hurled from all directions in the months and years that followed the defeat of the revolution and in retrospective assessments of the direction taken by events in 1848, much could – and was – judged, weighed and criticised: the membership of the provisional government in 1848, the appointments to key position in ministries and the civil service, the

288 Cf. relevant documents in Anul 1848, 6: 300–6. 289 Capii revoluţiunii române dela 1848 judecaţi prin propriele lor acte, ed. C. D. Aricescu, 1, Broşura 1 (Bucharest, 1866), 15. 290 Ibid., 13, quoting Nicolae Bălcescu. 110 1848 failure to keep promises made to peasants and the population at large with respect to property and civil rights, Rosetti’s clemency towards the traitor Colonel Odobescu (who organised the counter-revolutionary coup), the counter-productive disputes among factions and splinter groups, and many other factors. What, however, seems to remain the enduring impression of those feverish months of 1848, when, it has been said, history “failed to turn”, was the heightened emotional charge of the events, the drama and the melodrama of each stage of the revolutionary narrative, the irrepressible, almost fateful, quality of the “sentimental epic” in which these groups of young men and women were caught up. That passionate, idealistic faith in the ultimate perfectibility of human societies must count as one of the central legacies of the 1848 moment. In 1849, Jean Abdolonyme Ubicini, who had been the French-language secretary of the Wallachian provisional government, was hired by the exiled radicals to publicize their own views on the revolutionary events. In a memorable statement, they tried to dispel the sense of guilt and failure that had associated themselves to their movement: We have wished to prove to our friends as well as to our enemies that the liberal movement of 11 (23) June, was not smothered by its own excesses, as our accusers have tried to present it, and that, if Russia’s yoke is now weighing even more heavily on the neck of our unfortunate motherland, we do not deserve the accusation of having provoked it. [. . .] It is not the men who have failed the events, but time which has failed the men.291 Some of the most serious attacks against the radicals came from the moderate Ion Eliade-Rădulescu, whose account of the revolution, in French, was published in Paris in 1851.292 His view that Rosetti, Ion Brătianu and their coterie had been Russian agents who attempted to foment an insurrection and thus offer Russia a pretext for military intervention in 1848, gained some credibility in Romania following its adoption by one of the founders of professional historiography in Romania, A. D. Xenopol. In his work, The Russo-Turkish Wars and

291 ‘Ce ne sont pas les hommes qui ont manqué aux choses, c’est le temps qui a manqué aux hommes.’ Ubicini, Mémoire justificatif de la révolution roumaine, 26–7. 292 Mémoires sur l’histoire de la régénération roumaine ou sur les événements de 1848 accomplis en Valachie, par J. Héliade Radulesco, Paris: Librairie de la propagande démocratique et sociale européenne, 1851. 1848: epilogue 111 their Impact on the Romanian Lands, published in 1880, he upheld Eliade’s views, only to disavow them in 1893 in the sixth volume of The History of the Romanians in Trajan’s Dacia. In the light of the new sources which had surfaced in the intervening years, as well as of his correspondence with Jean Abdolonyme Ubicini, who had witnessed the events, Xenopol exonerated the radicals, although Eliade’s old accusations proved quite resilient and were occasionally revived in attacks by the conservative opponents of the Rosetti-Brătianu group.293 Much later, after the Crimean War, in a new wave of publicity sponsored by the Romanians before and during the Congress of Paris, Ubicini published another defence of the forty-eighters, in which he speculated rather darkly that what Romania had lacked in 1848 was a strong leader – most probably an allusion to Kossuth. As for the actual leaders of the Wallachian revolution, he said, “some lacked the heart for it, others lacked cold blood, and every one of them lacked decisive- ness.” In addition, he observed, “it would appear that Wallachia was destined to be an example of a rare occurrence in great political com- motions: that of a group of people conspiring towards a common aim, a group who succeeds in altering the face of a country, but from whose ranks no character was strong enough to subsume individual wills to his own. A dictatorship would have, if not saved it [the revolution], at least ensured it more popularity. But not one of them had in him the makings of a dictator.”294 Z During the hectic events of 1848, Rosetti did not write regularly in his diary. We do not have a day-by-day account of the 1848 events from the perspective of a major participant in the events. Late in 1848, as life resumed its more or less normal course, so did Rosetti’s diary entries. On 2 December, at the start of his life in Parisian exile, Rosetti summarized that momentous year in a frustratingly elliptic entry:

293 For the Eliade vs. the radicals debate, see Nicolae Isar, “Memoriile lui Ion Heliade-Rădulescu şi radicalii de la 1848 în perspectiva primelor sinteze critice”, Revista istorică 10, 5–6 (1999): 487–500. Reprinted in N. Isar, Din istoria generaţiei de la 1848: revoluţie, exil, destin istoric (Bucharest, 2006), 180–200. Cf. A. D. Xenopol, Resboaiele dintre Ruşi şi Turci şi înrâurirea lor asupra ţerilor române, 2 vols. (Iaşi, 1880), 2, and Istoria Românilor din Dacia Traiană, 6 vols. (Iaşi, 1888–1893), 6. 294 J. A. Ubicini, Provinces d’origine roumaine: Valachie, Moldavie, Bukovine, Tran- sylvanie, Bessarabie, in the series L’Univers pittoresque: histoire et description de tous les peuples, de leur religion, moeurs, coutumes, industries, etc (Paris, 1856), 195–6. 112 1848

“I became a father, I had a revolution, I was arrested. The revolution took me out of there. The fights within the government, our fall, our arrest, the voyage, and then the escape.”295 His return to Paris as an exile was low-key, but very much to his taste: “My shoemaker Hallegrain visited to congratulate me on having escaped slavery. And then he told me: ‘I have a favour to ask of you . . . please come with Madame prendre la soupe chez moi.’ How can one refuse the invitation of a man of the people, when it comes from the heart [?]”296

295 Rosetti, Diary, 247. 296 Ibid., 248. On Charlemagne Hallegrain’s involvement with the Romanian diaspora, see Part Two, p. 125 and passim. PART TWO

EXILE 1849–1855 Fig. 3: Constantin D. Rosenthal, Portrait of Marie Rosetti, undated (c. 1850) (Oil on synthetic slate) Reproduced by kind permission of the National Art Museum, Bucharest, Romania. 1849, PARIS: EARLY DAYS IN EXILE

[. . .] in the present state of things, within ten years, the whole of Europe may be Cossack or republican. Napoléon, Mémorial de Sainte Hélène1 Bitter exile is in store for them: endless, with an obscure outcome, like those long winter nights which envelop the day and end in no morning. Michelet, “Madame Rosetti”, 1855.2 By 1849 the leading Romanian forty-eighters were all among the 150 individuals sent into exile after the defeat of the short-lived ‘republic’.3 It is, admittedly, a modest figure compared to the 11,000 arrests and the 4,348 deportations to Algeria made after the June Days in Paris,4 but, on a different scale, the outcome was similar: the decapitation of the burgeoning Wallachian left and the postponement sine die of the tentative social reforms that the provisional government had envisaged. The defeat of the revolution and Wallachia’s occupation by foreign troops sent the leaders of ‘48 to the four corners of the world, where they were to remain for the next ten years. The radicals Rosetti, Alex- andru G. Golescu-Negru, Ion Brătianu, the moderate Ştefan Golescu and others were in Paris. After some time spent in Transylvania, the historian Nicolae Bălcescu settled mainly in Paris, but was to end his days in Palermo in 1852. Dumitru Brătianu was mainly based in London, although he remained engaged in a nomadic pan-European existence for the rest of his decade in exile. Alexandru C. Golescu- Albu, Gheorghe Magheru, Cezar Bolliac and others took refuge first in Transylvania and Austria, but ended up in Bursa in Asia Minor. Chris- tian Tell, Ion Eliade Rădulescu and Nicolae Golescu, of the moderate,

1 A much-misquoted passage from the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène. Suivi de Napo- léon dans l’exil; [Derniers moments de Napoléon] et de L’historique de la translation des restes mortels de l’empereur Napoléon aux Invalides. T. 2, par le comte de Las Cases; par M. M. O’Méara et Antomarchi (Paris: E. Bourdin, 1842), 454. 2 Michelet, Légendes, 234. 3 For this estimated figure, see Cornelia Bodea, “Lupta pentru Unire a revoluţionari- lor exilaţi de la 1848”, in Studii privind unirea Principatelor, ed. Andrei Oţetea (Bucha- rest, 1960), 140, quoted in Cojocariu, Partida naţională, 230. 4 Jean Garrigues, La France de 1848 à 1870 (Paris, 2000, 2nd edn. 2002), 23. 116 1849 pro-Turkish faction – and opponents of the radicals Rosetti and Brătianu – were in Constantinople. So was another moderate, Ion Ghica, soon to become Bey of Samos, a position in the Ottoman civil service which he retained until 1859.5 Still other Romanian exiles were in Semlin (today Zemun, in Serbia), on Austrian territory.6 The exiled Moldo-Wallachians were joined in 1849 by thousands of Hungarian and Polish refugees who were offered ‘political asylum’ in Turkey after the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution.7 Relatives and associates of the former revolutionaries had also been expelled from Wallachia by the Russian authorities and the new government they sponsored in Bucharest. Writing from Constantinople, where she was in the spring and summer of 1849, trying to obtain an audience with the British Ambassador Stratford Canning and plead in favour of her exiled sons and nephews, Zinca Golescu acknowledged the support she had received from Effingham Grant, and especially from the British Consul, Robert Colquhoun, who had offered her a temporary haven in his own home in Bucharest prior to her departure.8 “We Romanians ought to be ashamed that my mother should not find a single relative in her own country to offer her a roof for two days and that she should be forced to accept the hospitality of a foreigner!”, Zinca’s daughter, Ana, wrote from the family manor of Goleşti, in Little Wallachia, an enchanting home, located in what was then a rather marginal region, far from the social bustle and political intrigue of the capital city. It was there that the Golescu women were to be confined throughout the 1850s in what can only be described as semi-house arrest. They were shunned by most of their relatives, friends and by members of Bucharest high society, their peers in terms of rank, but keen to remain in the Russians’ good books.9 Zoe (Zinca) Golescu was the widow of a high-ranking boyar and writer who, although without ‘republican’ or ‘revolutionary’ aspira-

5 Cf. Documente privind Unirea Principatelor, 3: Corespondenţă politică (1855–9), ed. Cornelia Bodea (Bucharest, 1961–1984), xx. 6 The contacts between Romanians, Czechs and Slovaks during and after the events of 1848 have been studied by Lucian Boia in Relationships between Romanians, Czechs and Slovaks, 1848–1914 (Bucharest, 1977). For Polish-Romanian relations see Part One, p. 98, note 248. For Hungarian-Romanian contacts see note 69 below. 7 See p. 168 below. 8 Letter dated 23/11 May 1849, in Fotino 2: 308–9. 9 Letter from Ana Racoviţă to her exiled brothers in Paris, 18 October 1849, and letter from Catinca Rosetti to the same, 8/20 November 1849, in Fotino 2: 365 and 371–4. paris: early days in exile 117 tions himself, had been known for his progressive ideas on reform, education, public health and culture. He had insisted that his sons and nephews – all now in exile – should be educated in Western Europe and had personally undertaken a major voyage in 1826 in search of the most appropriate schools and tutors for them, at a time when education opportunities for East-Europeans in the West were rare. In spite of his ensuing fascination with the well-managed, prosperous, advanced West, the older Golescu, a land-owner and high official in Wallachia, had opted politically for the ‘Russian party’ in his country, largely because he entertained hopes of political advancement at a time when Russian protection seemed preferable to the Ottoman- sponsored regime of Prince Grigore Ghica.10 However, a shift in political culture happened very rapidly and, within less than twenty years, his four Swiss-educated, French-speaking sons11 lived in a country gripped by Russophobia and gradually drawn into the French political and cultural orbit. These young men, like many of their peers, ended up taking an ideological short-cut which turned them almost overnight from old-world landowners into full-blown liberals, revolutionaries and even radicals, and their influence on the younger women of the family was considerable. Opportunities for women’s education in early nineteenth-century Romanian were still limited: state schools were rare and only daughters of better-off families could be sent to private boarding schools, mainly in Vienna and Odessa, or were taught by French governesses at home. It would appear that the Golescu men had an important role in the education of the family’s younger female members. In a letter of January 1850, one Golescu niece, Zoe, writing from the family estate at Goleşti, gratefully acknowledged her own and her sisters’ early exposure to the example of their menfolk. “[. . .] it is you, all of you, who have educated us, you who have inspired us with such noble and generous feelings; it is you who have elevated us in our own eyes by showing us the place that a woman must take, by teaching us virtue and selflessness, by ennobling our hearts and by showing us which objects

10 For a detailed English-language study on the context of the older Golescu’s political choices, see Alex Drace-Francis, “Dinicu Golescu’s Account of My Travels (1826): Eurotopia as manifesto”, Journeys – The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing 6, 1–2 (2005): 24–53. Reprinted as Ch. 3 in Balkan Departures, ed. Wendy Bracewell & Alex Drace-Francis (Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2009). 11 Ştefan (b.1809), Nicolae (b.1810), Radu (b.1814) and Alexandru C. Golescu (‘Albu’, the White) (b. circa 1815). 118 1849 were worthy of our love. [. . .] What amazes me is that you should now be standing and admiring your own work, like Pygmalion, although unlike his work, yours is, I’m happy to say, animate and can respond to you with interest and vivacity.”12 Family solidarity and inter-generational connectedness were to constitute a major emotional lifeline for these embattled people throughout a decade of exile and hardship. Alongside the family matriarch, Zinca, the younger Golescu women – sisters, nieces and female cousins of the exiled men – provided some of the main channels of communication between the exiles and their country. A devoted villager from Goleşti, Ion – named ‘Geantă’, the ‘Bag’, from the large bag in which he carried the letters – was among the few people who kept the ladies of the manor in touch with the wider world. Apart from Effingham Grant, “[w]e have another Mercury to whom we could not be grateful enough for what he is doing for us”, wrote the niece Felicia on 29 May 1849, “and because he risks being found out and punished, we have decided that, should better times return, we are going to erect a statue representing him with a letter in one hand and a loaf of bread in the other, because he nourishes our souls as well as our bodies.”13 Felicia Racoviţă, then twenty-five, one of the “little revolutionaries”, as Nicolae Golescu called his nieces,14 was a very constant correspondent. She kept her exiled uncles informed of the latest high-society gossip as well as of the political changes and all the rumours that reached the tightly-knit community at Goleşti. Some two hundred people accused of involvement in the events of 1848 were still lan- guishing in prisons awaiting trial, and the Russians had sent couriers to Transylvania requesting the arrest by the Austrian authorities of all fugitive Wallachians caught. A younger member of the Golescu clan, Constantin Racoviţă, was caught in Transylvania, where he fought alongside the Hungarians, and was deported to Astrakhan in Siberia some time in 1849.15 He then vanished without trace, before resurfac- ing again a few months later.16 By January 1849, the Russian army of

12 3 January 1850, in Fotino 3: 8. 13 Letter from Felicia Racoviţă, 29 May 1849, in Fotino 2: 309–11. 14 Letter from Paris to their father Alexandru Racoviţă, 23 January/4 February 1849, in Fotino 2: 221. 15 Born at Goleşti in 1830, he was the grand-son of Zinca Golescu and brother of Zoe, the future Mrs. Effingham Grant. 16 Letter from Catinca Rosetti to her uncles from Constantinople, 24/12 September 1849, in Fotino 2: 348–9. paris: early days in exile 119 occupation had made itself sufficiently unwelcome in Wallachia for Felicia to be able to express her horror at hearing the names of the Tsar and Tsarina read out in prayers at the local church in Goleşti.17 The lives of the estranged former revolutionaries and their families remained financially precarious for the entire time they spent as expatriates: money was obtained primarily from home, from national and international subscriptions, from inheritances, loans, and the sale of family lands, houses and personal libraries. Zinca Golescu was aware of her exiled sons’ financial distress, as well as of their self-assumed role in helping young impoverished Romanians studying in Paris. She had an income of 800 ducats per year, but her daughter Ana Racoviţă, with only 500 ducats, needed support to pay for her own sons’ tuition in a boarding school in Bucharest run by the Frenchman Raoul de Pont- briand and his Romanian wife.18 Ana’s husband, Alexandru Racoviţă, a high-ranking district official in Little Wallachia, had been among the victims of purges made by the Russian envoy, General Duhamel, in the aftermath of the defeated revolution. Although by April 1850 it was made clear that a state pension was to be made available to him, he was too proud to apply for it, as Ana complained in her letter.19 By July of the same year, however, he had changed his mind, and obtained the promised pension, but the money was mainly earmarked to subsidise his sons’ studies in Paris. Cashflow intended for the exiled revolutionaries remained irregular and its transit from Bucharest to Paris and Asia Minor was beset with delays and perils. The correspondence between Zinca and her sons was often solely concerned with the sale of lands and with other complex financial arrangements, often mediated or guaranteed by Effingham Grant and the British consul, Robert Colquhoun. Constantin Rosetti’s main income came from the revenues of a company he, the son of nobility turned entrepreneur, had founded in 1846 in keeping with his faith in the need to encourage the rise of a commercial class in Romania as well as with his loathing for noble privilege. Before the events of 1848, the “Rosetti-Winterhalder Estab- lishment” had been run by Rosetti with his friend and associate Henric Winterhalder, with financial backing from his future brother-in-law, Effingham Grant. The establishment comprised a printing press, a

17 Fotino 2: 224. 18 Fotino 3: 135. 19 Ibid., 27. 120 1849 bookshop, a reading room, and a general store which sold Romanian wines and French champagne, paper, tinned food and cheeses, to the unspeakable horror of the Rosetti family, scandalised that their promising offspring had become a mere “shopkeeper”.20 The printing house was very productive in 1846–1847: the output included original Roma- nian works, but also translations from Alfieri, Molière, Dumas, George Sand, and Lamartine.21 The lending library was equally busy, offering a comprehensive and up-to-date list, ranging from Balzac, Dumas and George Sand to Walter Scott, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Mary Edgeworth and William Godwin.22 Henric Winterhalder was left in charge after the arrest and departure of the revolutionaries, and his role was crucial in ensuring the unimpeded circulation of income generated by the business, and largely destined to subsidise the exiles’ political activities. On 6 September 1848 the painter Constantin Rosenthal, Roset- ti’s devoted friend, had been paid 5,400 lei from the establishment’s returns as he started his propaganda activities in Central Europe.23 It was a considerable sum, given that the business registered losses in 1848 and 1849 and only started making a profit in 1851. For comparison, the profits recorded for April and May 1851 were of 223 and 330 lei respectively.24 In December 1848, Constantin Rosetti embarked on a life in exile which was to last until 1857. On 7 December, he was at a banquet at the Salle Valentin in Paris, listening to speeches by the republican radicals Pierre Leroux, Félix Pyat and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in the midst of a 2,000-strong audience. With his fellow-exiles, he re-established contacts with Quinet, Bataillard and Michelet. “The world is empty now that the Romanians are no longer in it”, the historian commented on the disappearance of the short-lived Romanian ‘republic’.25 Rosetti’s feelings and actions at that time seemed predicated to a considerable

20 Bucur, C. A. Rosetti: mesianism, 18. 21 Cf. C. A. Rosetti ca tipograf (Bucharest, 1903), 21–6. 22 Cf. Catalogue de livres français qui se donnent en lecture à la librairie de C. A. Rosetti & Winterhalder (Bucharest, 1846). 23 Bucur, C. A. Rosetti: mesianism, 48. Leu (pl. lei) was, and still is, the Romanian national currency. 24 Profit figures quoted in a letter from Winterhalder to Rosetti, 14 June 1851. It was intercepted and only survived in the archives of the Austrian Ministry of the Interior. For the full text, see Doc. 2 in Mihai-Ştefan Ceauşu and Dumitru Vitcu, “Romanian Emigration and the Epilogue of the 1848 Revolution”, Revue roumaine d’histoire 43, 1–4 (2004): 89–109. 25 Entry for 9 December 1848 in Rosetti, Diary, 250. paris: early days in exile 121 extent on the teachings and ideas of his mentor. Over the previous months he had tried to practise what Michelet called the “religion of the home”, where the holy trinity was man, woman, and child.26 He had tasted the happiness of early married life, but also its deep disap- pointments, as he came to suspect that his young wife was becoming from a brilliant, promising young woman, a boring, bored young wife trapped in the trivia of domestic life and motherhood and, as such, unworthy of his high expectations of heroic companionship in revolutionary exile. He was experiencing the dark side of the “religion of the home”, what Michelet, himself no stranger to the convoluted nature of human relationships and emotions, called marriage as a “supplice à deux”.27 Yet, by January 1849, once his family left for Plymouth (where Marie’s mother and sisters lived) and once his irritation with the crying baby and the petty chores of domesticity had diminished, he started missing what he had previously merely endured. The letters to Marie started to reflect a new-found tenderness and a new hope for their future life as a couple who had “survived a huge shipwreck”, by which he presumably meant both their personal crises and the failure of the 1848 revolution.28 He was also looking forward to the opening of the academic year at the Collège de France and to the lectures of the “apostle Michelet”, where he hoped his wife would join him upon her return from England. In his more studious moments, he read Louis Blanc’s Histoire de la Révolution and Louis Raybaud’s – nowadays obscure – satirical novel Jérôme Paturot à la recherche de la meilleure des républiques, from both of which he quoted copiously in letters to his wife.29 An old ally of the the Romanians, the Frenchman Jean Henri Abdolonyme Ubicini, an eye-witness to the events of June 1848 in Wallachia and former envoy to Constantinople of the Wallachian provisional government, helped the exiles launch their new life in France by publicizing an account of the revolutionary events in their own words. Romania “offers herself to the judgement of Europe”, Ubicini announced in the introduction to the Mémoire justificatif de la révo- lution roumaine de 11/23 juin 1848.30 Hoping to gain a sympathetic

26 Du Prêtre, de la femme, de la famille (Paris, 1845, 2nd edn.), 323. 27 Entry for 1 April 1844 in Michelet, Journal, ed. Paul Viallaneix (Paris, 1959), 1: 551. 28 Letter dated 15/16 January 1849, C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 40. 29 Letters dated 2 and 22 January 1849, in ibid., 1: 33, 44. 30 See Part One, p. 110. 122 1849

French audience, the exiled revolutionaries not only gave an account of the events in emotionally charged language, but also responded to the much-publicised Russian rationale for occupying the Principalities as explained in the Tsar’s manifesto of 19/31 July 1848. The revolution, the exiled revolutionaries countered, had not been the outcome of foreign “democratic and socialist propaganda” circulated in the Principalities to aid the creation of an independent “Daco-Romanian Kingdom”, as the Tsar had alleged, but a popular uprising and a “liberal movement” born of local political developments initiated on the day when the “Russian bayonets imposed the Organic Regulations.”31 The subsequent Russian occupation of their country was an act, they added in language of strikingly modern resonances, which “seriously affected the general security and the balance of power in Europe.”32 As the aftershocks of the revolution subsided, the Romanian diaspora in Paris started organising itself, renewing or making high- placed contacts, collecting information and searching for sympathetic newspapers and editors. In desperation, some even consulted – in vain – the increasingly trendy ‘magnétiseurs’, in the hope of gaining, via occult channels, some insight into their country’s future.33 The exiles established close links with Alexandre Ledru-Rollin and his democratic-socialist group in the Legislative Assembly, known as the ‘Montagne’.34 On 16 January 1849, Rosetti attended a meeting of the Montagne with his friend Dumitru Brătianu. He was hoping that, like Prince Adam Czartoryski’s circle in Paris, his own circle of exiled Romanian revolutionaries and republicans, too, might form a government in exile, albeit located differently on the political spectrum. When one member of the Assembly asked the Romanians if they had a mandate from their government, Ledru-Rollin retorted: “But they are the members of the provisional government”, “les anges déchus”, the fallen angels of the Romanian revolution, and offered to raise a motion in the Assembly on their behalf.35 In spite of their enthusiasm,

31 For the Organic Regulations, see Part One, p. 68 sqq. 32 Ubicini, Mémoire, 1–2, 30. 33 Rosetti, Diary, 253, and C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 32–3. 34 Born in Paris in 1807 in a well-to-do bourgeois family, Ledru-Rollin studied law and became Minister of the Interior in the French provisional government of 1848, where his main achievement was the promulgation of universal suffrage. Thereafter, as a deputy, he sided on the extreme left in the Legislative Assembly, alongside Raspail and Louis Blanc. See entry in Vapereau, Dictionnaire universel des contemporains, 3rd edn. (Paris, 1865). 35 Rosetti, Diary, 247. paris: early days in exile 123 the Romanian émigrés were deeply divided and failed to put together a jointly agreed platform as a basis for the proposed motion: their main dilemma was whether they should compromise on their principles and negotiate with Turkey or whether, as Rosetti believed, they should maintain an intransigent position, even at the risk of alienating both the suzerain power, the Porte, and the protecting power, Russia, and of having their exile extended as a reprisal. The less radical members of the diaspora were not prepared for high-risk strategies. Some had families, others had reputations to protect, and, as a result, they failed to agree on a statement in their meeting of 19 January, much to the disappointment of the ‘Jacobin’, sacrifice-prone Rosetti.36 “We are Romania’s worms”,37 he complained in his diary, in his customary and often alienatingly ruthless manner. Substantiating Stanislas Béllanger’s humorous depiction of the ‘great fear of Russia’ among the Roma- nian expatriates, Rosetti’s peers appeared subdued and afraid to meet and debate the fate of their occupied country even in Paris, far away from Russian and Ottoman direct interference. Most were doomed to remain part angels and part worms, the ambiguities and compromises of their political careers a handy target for their enemies. In the minutes of the National Assembly’s sessions there appear to be no records of an interpellation by Ledru-Rollin after 19 January 1849.38 Debates around the French republic’s foreign policies had in fact taken place on 8 January, when the Citoyen Eugène Beaune,39 a Montagnard deputy for the department of the Loire and a member of the foreign affairs committee, vigorously criticized the reserved foreign policy of the French government, especially with respect to Austria and Russia. In his view, France had betrayed what had been her three main foreign affairs pledges upon the installation of the republic: the liberation of Italy, support for a liberalizing Prussia and the reunification of Poland, her “assassinated sister.” The French government was equally guilty of inaction in the East:

36 C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 42. 37 Entry for 4 March 1849 in Rosetti, Diary, 266–7. 38 As is often the case in the sources used for this narrative, the dates appear to conflict, unless a second interpellation by Ledru-Rollin after 19 January was indeed planned, but never took place. Debates on foreign policy issues did take place on 8 January 1849, as recorded in the official minutes of the Assembly (see note 40). 39 He was to be among the less compromising of the ‘proscrits du Deux Décem- bre’, who refused the emperor’s offers of amnesty and died in Switzerland in 1880. Cf. Sylvie Aprile, Le siècle des exilés: bannis et proscrits de 1789 à la Commune (Paris, 2010), 240. 124 1849

One last and grave question. What measures have you taken against the invasion of Moldavia and Wallachia? (Renewed murmurs.) Constanti- nople is being threatened by the Russian camps in Bessarabia and the Crimea; do we have vessels in the Straits to ensure the integrity of the Ottoman Empire? Treaties are violated, but what will our policy be in the face of these faits accomplis? The great revolutionary movements of Central Europe lend themselves admirably well to Russia’s incessant plans. You must rememeber how she was stopped in 1828 at Adrianople by the demonstration of strength of Austria and England; you must be aware of the treaties of Unkiar Iskelessi and of London – Brunnow’s treaty – from which we were excluded, and which earned us so many glorious bulletins as a consequence. Then, our ships were recalled from Toulon for fear that their cannons might go off on their own. We were known to have been excluded from the concert of Europe, but Austria and England were watching; now that Austria prefers her share of the spoils to the opportunity of a war which would deprive her of her freedom of movement in the West, what counter-weight are we offering to stop the old policy known as the ‘balance of powers’ from falling into the abyss of the unknown? 40 Ledru-Rollin took part in the ensuing debates, strongly seconding his fellow-Montagnard and reminding Drouyn de Lhuys, the foreign minister, that Russia in all her actions was still defending the treaties of 1815, abrogated by the French revolution of 1848. Provocatively quoting Napoleon I’s famous dictum on the choice between a republican or a Cossack Europe, Ledru wondered aloud why the government did not seem to be alive to the danger posed by the alleged presence of the Russian navy in the Adriatic and of the 80,000-strong Russian army in Moldo-Wallachia, both allegations emphatically denied by de Lhuys and by the minister of the marine, Destutt De Tracy.41 In dramatic language which presented the current European situation as a clash between civilization and barbarity, Ledru-Rollin urged war in the face of an Assembly which resolutely stood behind the government in its pursuit of peace and appeasement: And as, in this immense demi-circle extending from the Adriatic to the Baltic sea, I see troops amassing, and as I tell myself that you have abandoned the friendly nations which have served as our vanguard, as I listen to the insolent provocations launched in the name of the shame-

40 Compte rendu des séances de l’Assemblée Nationale (Paris, 1849), 7 (1 January to 10 February 1849): 87, available online from Gallica, the digital library of the Biblio- thèque Nationale. 41 Ibid., 90–94. paris: early days in exile 125

ful treaties of 1815, I realize that I have no right to think of Napoleon’s words. But what are then those Croats, with their long red cloaks, who bathed in blood at Vienna, if not barbarians? What are those troops that invaded Moldo-Wallachia if not barbarians? And are they not barbarians, too, the Cossacks and their hetman, already camping along the German border? There can still be, therefore, a horrific conflict between ideals and barbarity, between light and darkness; how could I, therefore, not be moved by the prospect of a danger threatening not the republic, but civilization itself! No, no, you can no longer content yourselves with saying that you are negotiating, you must act. Otherwise, you risk betraying the nation.42 In spite of such fiery rhetoric, debates on 8 January predictably closed on calls from the more moderate benches in the Assembly to continue the diplomatic efforts rather than succumb to the appeals of the war- mongers and declare war on Russia. The Romanian exiles’ contacts were not limited to the men in power or the media movers. One of Rosetti’s contacts in Paris was the humble, but grandly named, Charlemagne Hallegrain, the owner of a shoe- making shop near the Louvre, the “magnificent man of the people” who happened to be his next-door neighbour when he first arrived – a broken, destitute exile – in Paris. Hallegrain, affectionately known in the Rosetti circle as the “wicked boot-maker”, made the family’s footwear during their financially difficult life in exile. More importantly, he played a covert political role, and his home was to become one of the focal meeting points for the exiles in years to come. Many years later, when Rosetti had already returned to his homeland, his paper Românul was still distributed in Paris from Hallegrain’s address. Conspiratorial correspondence sent from Bucharest to his home at no. 5 Rue de l’ancienne Comédie was often intercepted by the Aus- trian police.43 Marie Rosetti’s first months in exile must have been as unsettling as her husband’s: in a new world, with little financial support, she had a baby and an impatient husband with a rather gloomy outlook on life to attend to. At moments, only letter-writing buttressed the emotional support system that she and the expatriates had lost. Writing to her former pupil and now friend Alexandrina I. Ghica on 17 Febru- ary 1849, Marie put on a brave face and explained her rationale for

42 Ibid., 91. 43 Ceauşu and Vitcu, “Romanian emigration”, Doc. 1. 126 1849 marriage in hard times: “[. . .] I have much hope, which is why I suffer less than men do; they, in their imagination, always blacken even further the cloud suspended above their heads, while a woman, on the contrary, tries to catch a glimpse of the sun hidden behind it – this is why a man will suffer less if he marries –.”44

44 B. A. R., Manuscripts Section, Fonds C. A. Rosetti, S 11(1–6)/LXIII, Letter to Alexandrina I. Ghica, 17 February 1849, S 11(3)/LXIII. 1849 DUMITRU BRĂTIANU AND THE ENGLISH ‘PHILO-ROMANIANS’

We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow. Lord Palmerston, 1 March 184843 On 12 September 1848, Dumitru Brătianu had been appointed official Wallachian representative in Paris by the Princely Lieutenancy, only to see his new diplomatic career cut short by the premature death of the Romanian revolution. While Rosetti and some of his companions were arrested and were taken along the Danube on a Turkish barge, Brătianu evaded arrest and famously accompanied Marie Rosetti on her mission to save her husband and his associates. Finally, he joined the Romanian diaspora in Paris and embarked on a decade of political propaganda before resuming his political career in Romania in 1857. As hopes for French support finally faded in the aftermath of the elections of December 1848, which saw Louis Napoléon to the presidency of the republic, Brătianu left for London, where he became the envoy of the Romanians’ unofficial government-in-exile. Earlier Romanian appeals to British diplomacy had met with indifference at worst and with a vague benevolence at best. Lord Palmerston himself had been notably reserved with respect to the Romanians’ national and liberal- constitutional aspirations during the revolutionary movements in the Danubian Principalities and Hungary in 1848. Yet, given Britain’s strong position in Constantinople and interests in the Middle and Near East, the exiles felt that here was an opportunity to exploit and appointed Dumitru Brătianu as their ‘man in London.’ The pro-Romanian lobbying in Britain in 1848–50 had to hammer insistently at the ambiguities of a British foreign policy caught within the conflicting Canningite demands of respect for “public opinion at home, liberal-constitutional developments abroad, and, above all, Brit- ain’s vital interests.”44 Lord Palmerston himself appeared to wish to

43 Hansard, 3rd series, 97: 122. 44 George J. Billy, Palmerston’s Foreign Policy: 1848 (Peter Lang, 1993), 4. 128 1849 put in practice the Canningite principle that it was desirable to maintain “an influence both with the free, and the despot”,45 a principle which to the radicalised East-Europeans in London must have looked uncomfortably like opportunism. As already shown, Ion Câmpineanu’s attempts at finding diplomatic allies in London in 1839 had collapsed in the face of a British-Russian raprochement engineered largely by Palmerston and his Russian counterpart, Nesselrode, a policy which continued in the late 1840s. In the context of a rising Germany, what must have initially appeared like an ‘unnatural’ rapprochement with tsarist Russia – which at that moment appeared as a force of stability in Central Europe in the face of the revolutionary threat – made sense for Britain. In addition to strategic considerations, Palmer- ston’s approach to the European national projects appears to have been pragmatically selective: while nation-building projects in Italy – detrimental to arch-enemy Austria – were by and large acceptable, national aspirations in the Balkans, harmful to the Ottoman Porte, were not, although Palmerston could not have said so with impunity. In the 1840s Russia had improved her diplomatic image by making concessions of a nature to alleviate tensions and assure Britain of the tsar’s good-will. The Convention of 1841, signed by Turkey and the five great powers, had closed the Straits to foreign warships in times of peace and had, therefore, left Britain less anxious about the safety of her trade routes through the Eastern Mediterranean to the Levant and India. As a result of this inter-play of contradictory requirements, the constitutional and nationalist aspirations of the German liberals and of the embattled Polish, Hungarian and Romanian “revolution- ists” (Palmerston’s own term) were temporarily sacrificed in 1848–49 on the altar of European stability. It has been argued that, especially after 1846, Palmerston did not lack in “prudence when powerful states were involved. He put peace with them before the encouragement of Continental liberalism.”46 The court, Parliament and the public went along with appeasement, largely owing to Lord Palmerston’s personal charisma and to his management of the press, despite attacks by radicals and by disaffected MPs such as the Turcophile David Urquhart, a former diplomat in Constantinople, who famously accused the For-

45 Steele, Palmerston and Liberalism, 16. 46 Ibid., 18. dumitru brătianu and the english ‘philo-romanians’ 129 eign Secretary of being a Russian spy and never ceased denouncing “the malevolent and noxious influence of Russia.”47 The Polish, Hungarian and Italian émigrés enjoyed, if not the support of European cabinets, at least widespread popular sympathy in both France and Britain. Their diasporas were more numerous, and, if not more unified, at least better-organised than the Romanians’, and their representatives, Prince Adam Czartoryski, the poet Adam Mickiewicz, Lajos Kossuth and Giuseppe Mazzini, enjoyed popularity and often gained entry at the highest level in foreign chancelleries. In comparison, Constantin Rosetti, the Brătianu brothers and the Goles- cus, like their country, were unknown in the West, and consequently found that making key contacts in the right political and media circles was often a frustrating and financially costly affair. The existence of a ‘Romanian question’ as a sub-chapter of the Eastern Question was yet unacknowledged in Western diplomacy, and publicity campaigns were difficult to organize and subsidise. Yet, in spite of the fact that the threat posed by Russian policies in Eastern Europe and the Dan- ube area had not yet become a widespread concern in British political circles, Russia’s image amongst the public at large had gradually started to deteriorate from the 1830s onwards. In Britain, this shift in perceptions was due not only to the work of pro-Polish politicians such as Lord Dudley Coutts Stuart or the colourful Urquhart, but also to efforts by disaffected liberal and radical émigré Russians. In 1846 – a few years before Alexander Herzen’s fierce anti-tsarist campaign – Ivan Golovin published in London a lengthy study entitled Russia under the Autocrat Nicholas the First, in which he lambasted tsarist despotism and its negative impact both at home and abroad. Golovin, who came from an aristocratic family with a long tradition of state service and had been employed briefly under Chancellor Nesselrode before he ‘defected to the West’ in the late 1840s, could rightly claim that he presented Western readers with an insider’s views on the institutions and the political culture of tsarist Russia. He described Tsar Nicholas in no equivocal terms as “the declared enemy of liberty” and Russia as “a land of serfs and men in office.” “[T]he virtues which accompany or flow from liberty are unknown here”, Golovin announced in one of the book’s early chapters, in the certainty that the absence of this defining shibboleth of mid-nineteenth-century European political

47 The Times, Palmers’ full text online, 23 March 1848. See Part One, p. 27. 130 1849 culture would promptly disqualify Russia in the eyes of mid-Victorian liberals. Not only was the regime despotic and rapacious at home, he contended, but it also attempted to export “slavery” world-wide with the aid of its mighty and submissive army of willing recruits.48 In parallel with similar efforts by his peers in France, in London Dumitru Brătianu did not spare efforts to gain attention on behalf of his national project: he met and cultivated British politicians, MPs, journalists and other public figures likely to lend a sympathetic ear and a helping hand. Aware that, as the unofficial representative of a country which had fallen under Turkish and Russian control, he lacked a credible mandate, Brătianu nonetheless wrote to Lord Palmerston, then Foreign Secretary in the Russell government, on 6 December 1848, demanding an audience. On 8 December 1848 he was received by Palmerston, but, in spite of what the Romanian politician in exile perceived as mutual understanding, he did not obtain the hoped-for promise of diplomatic or military backing against Russia.49 Undeterred, on 16 January 1849, Brătianu followed up with a lengthy memorandum in which he inserted episodes from what, he emphasised, had been a “peaceful” revolution in Wallachia in 1848, invoking the Romanians’ resistance to the “illegal” occupation of the Principalities by Russian troops in September 1848. In Brătianu’s analysis, the Ottoman Porte was a weak instrument in the hands of an arrogant, duplicitous, yet militarily and economically weak Russia. Persistent diplomatic pressure on Russia was the only means to guarantee the European balance of power, he argued. Yet, if diplomacy failed, military intervention against Russia was not to be ruled out, as, in spite of her muscle- flexing, Russia was no more than an assemblage of Potemkin villages, Brătianu claimed. And even if Great Power intervention triggered a European war, the poor state of the tsar’s armies and finances were such that Russia was unlikely to put up a serious resistance. Although expressed via a semi-official channel, the Romanian demands were unambiguous: the withdrawal of the Russian troops, the abolition of the Organic Regulations, the reinstatement of the revolutionary constitution approved by Suleyman Pasha in August 1848, the establishment

48 Russia under the Autocrat Nicholas the First by Ivan Golovine, a Russian Subject (New York, London: Praeger Publishers, 1970; 1st edn. Paris, 1845; 2nd edn. London, 1846), 138, 162 and 200. Cf. also David Saunders, Russia in the Age of Reaction and Reform, 1801–81 (Pearson Education, 1992), 119. Golovin left Paris soon after the publication of his work and settled in Britain, where he was naturalised in 1846. 49 Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 134–6. dumitru brătianu and the english ‘philo-romanians’ 131 of direct diplomatic relations between Britain and Wallachia, a commercial treaty with Britain, the creation of a national army and, in the longer term, the Union of the Principalities. Turkish suzerainty was only briefly alluded to: Brătianu knew that this was a sensitive point in his dealings with Britain. In exchange for support in re-establishing legality both in the country’s constitutional arrangements, and in its international status, Brătianu continued, Wallachia offered a market for British exports, expertise and investments, rich natural resources, cheap labour, as well as a wide, unpopulated territory open to col- onization. As he did in his other memoirs and pamphlets, Brătianu appealed to Great Britain as the home of liberal constitutionalism and of a reformist spirit which had pre-empted revolutionary upheaval on British soil. The Lords were the “arbiters of the world”, he wrote flat- teringly, and, in addition – he reminded his recipient – there were major British interests at stake in South-East Europe and the Near East: British national dignity, trade, and peace in Europe.50 One of the earliest, if modest, achievements of the first phase of Brătianu’s campaign was the publication in 1849 of the pamphlet The Russians in Moldavia and Wallachia by William Lloyd Birkbeck, a friend of Dudley Stuart’s and the honorary secretary of the Association of the Friends of Poland. The pamphlet chiefly rehearsed for a wider audience Brătianu’s afore-mentioned views and the Romanians’ propaganda aims.51 Urged by Lord Dudley Stuart, in late February 1849 Brătianu published his own memorandum to Palmerston as Documents concerning the Question of the Danubian Principalities. Dedicated to the English Parliament, and circulated it among members of Parliament who had expressed an intention to support the pro-Romanian motion promised by Lord Dudley.52 It is an undisguised anti-tsarist pamphlet which focuses in detail on Russia’s encroachments and on what the Romanians perceived as her work of destruction in the Principalities both before and after the defeated revolution.53 General Duhamel, in

50 Ibid., 1: 182–4. 51 Trevor J. Hope, “Dumitru Brătianu and British public opinion regarding the unification of the Romanian Principalities (1848–1859)”, inAnglo-Romanian Relations after 1821, ed. Gh. Buzatu and Al. Pascu, special issue of Anuarul Institutului de istorie “A. D. Xenopol”, supplement 4 (Iaşi, 1983), 29. 52 D. Bratiano, Documents Concerning the Question of the Danubian Principalities dedicated to the English Parliament by D. Bratiano . . . (London 1849). A Romanian- language draft of this memorandum was found in the Brătianu archives, see Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 136–71. 53 Bratiano, Documents, 6. 132 1849 particular, as interim administrator of Wallachia, is singled out in the attack. He was, Brătianu narrates, “without pity. He commanded in Bucharest like a master, and a Russian master, to boot: from the day of his arrival, all the rights of the Wallachians were trampled on, all their laws violated; letters were unsealed; the import of foreign newspapers was forbidden; the press was suppressed; passports for travel abroas were refused, and many persons were even prevented from travelling in the interior of the country. Homes were no longer pro- tected, private meetings consisting of more than five persons were forbidden”, ran Brătianu’s catalogue of Russian iniquities.54 He reminds Lord Palmerston of the strategic position of the two provinces: “[. . .] your Lordship is well aware that a Russian army between the Danube and the Carpathian mountains, is, as it were, a fortress commanding the East and West: once in the Principalities, it is in the heart of the Ottoman Empire; and once mistress of the Carpathian mountains, it has its right wing in Germany and its left in Italy.”55 Around the same time, he wrote to Lord Palmerston requesting the Foreign Secretary’s intercession in Constantinople for the return of the exiled revolutionaries and the liberation of their sympathizers arrested by the Russians in Wallachia.56 On 22 March 1849, Brătianu was probably in attendance in the House of Commons when Lord Dudley Stuart raised the issue of the “illegal and arbitrary” Russian occupation of the Danubian Principali- ties and demanded the inspection of papers relating to Wallachia and Moldavia.57 He was supported by an unsurprising assortment of some of Parliament’s perpetual malcontents: the deputies John O’Connell (son of Daniel), Sir Henry Verney, the radical MP for Youghal, Thomas Chisholm Anstey, John Abel Smith, as well as David Urquhart. The motion was also seconded by Thomas Perronet Thompson, the radical MP for Bradford, whom Brătianu had recently visited as he campaigned for the motion. Although a pacifist and non-interventionist, Thompson believed in this case that Britain should join, preferably by diplomatic means, the “great struggle . . . between civilisation and

54 Ibid., 7. 55 Ibid., 17. 56 Memorandum dated 15 February 1849 in Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 175–6. 57 Ibid., 200, letter from Lord Dudley Stuart to D. Brătianu, promising to secure a seat in the Commons for him on the day. dumitru brătianu and the english ‘philo-romanians’ 133 freedom on one side, and barbarity and despotism on the other.”58 Responding to the rebels’ calls for anti-Russian protests, Disraeli, then MP for Buckinghamshire and rising star of the Tory party, was, however, of the opinion that the Tsar, who was “to be ranked among those most entitled to the respect of mankind”, had demonstrated “moderation and clemency” in his treatment of the Romanian provinces. This statement, as reported in The Times, prompted a satirical response from Punch on 31 March, in which reference was made to Russian acts of violence against civilians with which the British public was familiar: “We should like to have a Statistical Return of the number of persons who have stared, pulled off their spectacles, rubbed their eyes, and called the correctness of their vision in question, on reading this passage. Who flogged the Nuns of Minsk?59 Who had Pol- ish children carted off to Siberia? Mr. DISRAELI might at least have answered these common questions before pronouncing so extravagant a panegyric on NICHOLAS.”60 Responding to his opponents in the Commons on the same day, 22 March, Lord Palmerston declared himself satisfied by promises from St. Petersburg that Russia had no intention of violating the integrity of the Ottoman Empire and that the evacuation of the Russian troops from the Principalities was only a matter of time. In the meantime, Lord Dudley countered, the Romanians were forced to maintain at their own expense the 60,000-strong occupying troops. However, since Lord Palmerston had made it clear that he could not submit diplomatic correspondence to the Commons in a matter in which negotiations were pending, he reluctantly withdrew his motion.61 The occupation of the Danubian Principalities and the invasion of Hun- gary were, as has been suggested, the price Palmerston was prepared to pay “to see the stability and existing political balance of Central Europe preserved.”62 The Foreign Secretary did not believe that any number of small, weak buffer states in South-East Europe would be

58 Michael J. Turner, Independent Radicalism in Early Victorian Britain (Westport, Connecticut, 2004), 159. 59 This is a reference to Nicholas I’s persecution of the Ruthenian Catholic Church in the 1840s, which had led Daniel O’Connell to compare the Tsar to the Roman Emperor Nero. In his own country, Nicholas had been compared to Caligula by the Russian historian Sergei Solov’ev. Cf. Saunders, Russia, 119. 60 “Mr. Disraeli’s Model Monarch”, Punch, 31 March 1849. 61 Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 39 and 201, note; for the full text of the debate, see Hansard, 3rd series, 103: 1128–61, March 22, 1849. 62 Florescu, The Struggle Against Russia, 238. 134 1849 a better safeguard against Russian expansionism than a stable Habs- burg Empire and an enduring Porte. The Romanian émigrés were disappointed, but a small victory had been scored nevertheless: the Romanian Principalities had been placed on the map of international diplomacy.63 The heated exchange between Lord Dudley and Palmer- ston on 22 March over the Romanian question did not remain confined behind closed parliamentary doors. It was popularised in France by the anti-Russian Le Temps (24 March), and in Romanian-speaking territories by the newspaper Bucovina, published in Romanian and German and distributed as the organ of the Romanian national movement in the Austrian-controlled northern region of Bucovina.64 The long months of lobbying and waiting in the antechambers of the high and mighty in London must have taken their emotional toll on Brătianu. Against the encroachments of misanthropy, his friend Rosetti, writing from Paris, recommended activating the memory of friends, Henric Winterhalder (the friend and business associate who partly financed the Romanian diaspora), the younger Brătianu brother, Ion, and Constantin D. Rosenthal, the painter who had become one of the most devoted militants for the Romanian cause. Their remembered figures should be enough “to wipe away the ugliness of half mankind”, Rosetti encouraged his friend.65 But news from Romania, sent by Effingham Grant, were discouraging: General Duhamel, the Rus- sian envoy to Bucharest, who held the Principalities in his iron grip, was planning to further revise the dreaded and now fully reinstated Organic Regulations and thereby increase Russian influence in the country’s administration. Among other measures, he had appointed Russian officers to the command of the quarantine stations on the Danube, which effectively meant that the Russians controlled one of the country’s major borders, as well navigation on the river itself.66 In early 1849, it was not only the fate of Moldo-Wallachia that hung in the balance, but also that of Transylvania. Events in all three principalities became inextricably linked not only with each other, but also with concurrent events in Hungary and Austria. The next sec-

63 For the exchanges between Lord Dudley Stuart and Dumitru Brătianu, see Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 172–8. 64 Boitoş, Paul Bataillard et la révolution roumaine, 79. 65 Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 187. 66 Letter from C. A. Rosetti to D. Brătianu, 16 March 1849, in Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 190. Rosetti often enclosed Effingham Grant’s letters from Bucharest in his correspondence to Dumitru Brătianu. dumitru brătianu and the english ‘philo-romanians’ 135 tion is a brief outline of the historical background of the civil war in Transylvania. This involves a minor detour and a return back in time before resuming the story line at the point when the Wallachian exiles and their families became embroiled in the Transylvanian civil war of 1849. HUNGARIANS AND ROMANIANS IN 1849–185069

Before 1848 Hungary had been a kingdom under the Habsburg scep- ter, with its own Diet, a powerful nobility and enjoying a considerable amount of political autonomy. Under the impact of almost simultane- ous events in Paris, Italy and Vienna in the spring of 1848, Hungary, too, became involved in what was to become a pan-European quest for constitutionalism, civic liberties and, in many cases, national freedom. This set off a rapid chain of events which totally changed, if not the political regimes in East-Central Europe in the short term, at least people’s political behaviour and expectations. In the initial enthusiasm for change, Lajos Kossuth, a deputy in the lower house of the Hungar- ian Diet at Pozsony (today Bratislava, in Slovakia), assumed unofficial leadership of the Diet and, by extension, of Hungary, a position he would retain until the end of the revolutionary events in August- September 1849. His speech of 3 March 1848 practically inaugurated the Hungarian revolution. As the government of Chancellor Metter- nich collapsed in Vienna on 15 March under popular pressure, the State Conference was compelled to approve the formation of a new Hungarian government under Prime Minister Lajos Batthyáni, with the Habsburg Palatine Archduke Stephen as the Austrian emperor- king’s plenipotentiary in Hungary.70 On 11 April the new Hungarian Parliament promulgated the “April Laws” which, like the Proclama- tion of Islaz in neighbouring Wallachia, would operate effectively as a new constitution. According to its terms, Hungary would be a

69 This section is intended as a mere contextual guide to the main issues involved in the ethnic conflict in Transylvania, with an emphasis on Wallachian reactions to it. There is a vast literature on the history of Transylvania and on the Hungarian revolution of 1848–49 which, for obvious reasons, could not be covered here. For a comprehensive bibliography of Hungarian-Romanian relations in the mid-nineteenth century, see Béla Borsi-Kálmán, Hungarian Exiles and the Romanian National Move- ment, 1849–1867 (Boulder, Colorado, 1991), 149–51, note 3. Professor Keith Hitchins’ A Nation Discovered: Romanian intellectuals in Transylvania and the idea of nation, 1700–1848 (Bucharest, 1999) is an update of his earlier work on this topic and has a useful “Bibliographic Guide”, 221–7. 70 For an informative account of the 1848–49 events in Hungary, see István Deák, “The Revolution and the War of Independence, 1848–1849”, inA History of Hungary, ed. Peter F. Sugar, Péter Hanák and Tibor Frank (Indiana University Press, 1990, pb. 1994). hungarians and romanians in 1849–1850 137 constitutional hereditary monarchy, with a bicameral Parliament, co-existing in union with the other kingdoms and provinces of the Austrian crown. Also like the Islaz Proclamation, the “April Laws” enshrined civil liberties and limited noble privilege, making all citizens equal before the law. So were, too, all the religious denominations in the kingdom, with the exception of the Mosaic faith. One of the main setbacks of the new constitutional arrangement was the incipient dualism it instituted. The Hungarian leaders were uncertain whether Hungary should or could in the long term stay in the monarchy, and they oscillated between their need for Austrian support and their nationalist-separatist ambitions.71 Count István (Stephen) Széchenyi, the reformist Hungarian politician, had captured this conflict of identity amongst Habsburg subjects as early as the 1820s when he noted in his diary: “The fault of the Austrian Mon- archy and Hungary is that God in his wrath joined them together.”72 The second conundrum was Hungary’s nationality problem: the national minorities, Germans, Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthenes, Romanians, Serbs and Croats, had their own divisive national agendas, and the quest for a common cause with the Hungarians was to prove elusive. Essentially, the tension underlying the history of Austria and Hungary for the rest of the century was to be between the vision of a centralist, unified Hungarian nation-state and the reality of its multi-ethnic nature. Revolutionaries of all nationalities were going to be haunted and ultimately defeated by three broad categories of factors: the ambiguities of Hungary’s relations to the Habsburg monarchy (to which she should have been loyal under the terms of the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713), the relative conservatism of the peasant masses, who formed around 80 per cent of the population and who by and large were loyal to the Habsburg dynasty, and the alternative agendas of the national minorities. According to contemporary statistics, out of the Austrian Empire’s total population of 36 million, only under 17% were Austro-Germans. The Czechs and Slovaks formed 19%, the Magyars 14%, the Italians and Romanians 8% each, the Serbs 5% and the Croats 4%, to cite only

71 Istvan Deák, “The Revolution”, 216. 72 Quoted in R. J. W. Evans, “Széchenyi and Austria”, in History and Biography: essays in honour of Derek Beales, ed. T. C. W. Blanning and David Cannadine (Cam- bridge University Press, 1996), 114. 138 1849 the main ethnic groups.73 The Hungarian project of uniting Croa- tia, Slovenia and Transylvania to Hungary in an attempt to recreate the historic ‘kingdom of Saint Stephen’ came into collision with the nascent nation-building projects of the minorities. While the Hungar- ians, Germans, Czechs and Poles invoked their historic and dynastic rights to reconstitute their lost mediaeval kingdoms, the Romanians, Slovaks, Serbs, Ruthenians and, in part, the Croatians, resorted to the new democratic principle of popular sovereignty over territories which they now occupied in a majority.74 In May and June 1848, while the Hungarians were still optimistic about the possibility of effecting political and constitutional changes by reformist, lawful means, the first stirrings of ethnic unrest came to the fore: a Slovak National Congress, a Serbian Congress and a Roma- nian National Assembly convened within a few days of each other, demanding wide-ranging rights for their peasantries and ultimately autonomy for their regions. On 2 June, the Pan-Slavic Congress in Prague sounded an altogether more ominous note, which must have reminded the Hungarians of their main fears: the muted conflict dividing Slavs, Magyars and Germans in Central Europe, embedded within the more comprehensive cultural-political programmes of Illyrism, Pan-Slavism, Magyarism and Pan-Germanism. Whatever the historic and cultural origins of the Hungarians’ quest for supremacy in the monarchy, their strategies for promoting the Hungarian language and for prioritizing the employment of Magyar-speaking individuals even in regions where other ethnic groups were in a majority, had ended up alienating the other ethnic groups. Even reformist Magyar liberals such as István Széchenyi recognized the often fanatical nature of the measures championed by the Hungarians. “I for one know of no real Magyar who, though his hair may have grayed and experience and worldly wisdom may have furrowed his brow, would not, as a luna- tic whose idée fixe has been touched, disregard doctrines of fairness and even of justice when the affairs of our language and nationality are touched upon”, Széchenyi declared in a speech to the Hungarian

73 Figures from Lewis B. Namier, 1848. The Revolution of the Intellectuals (Lon- don, 1944), 125, cited by Teodor Pavel, “Revoluţia de la 1848: o şansă irosită de reconciliere în Europa central-răsăriteană” in Revoluţia de la 1848–1849 în Europa Centrală: perspectivă istorică şi istoriografică, ed. Camil Mureşan, Nicolae Bocşan and Ioan Bolovan (Cluj, 2000), 52. 74 Pavel, “Revoluţia de la 1848: o şansă irosită”, 54. hungarians and romanians in 1849–1850 139

Academy of Sciences – his own foundation – in 1842.75 Counter- productive intransigence on all sides was to have tragic consequences. Attempts at inter-ethnic cooperation against Austrian absolutism in 1848–49 were doomed by the build-up of mutual distrust as well by the separatist agendas of the various ethnic communities and by other, more obscure forces dividing classes and ethnic groups. Transylvania itself was a special case within the more general context of the Habsburg Empire. First conquered by the Hungarians in the eleventh century, it later became a semi-autonomous Hungarian province incorporated, at the same time as Hungary, into the Austrian Empire in 1699. It had a sizable population of ethnic Romanians living alongside Magyars, Saxons and Szecklers. By the mid-eighteenth century, the Romanians comprised more than fifty per cent of Tran- sylvania’s population.76 According to the census of 1850–51, the ethnic Romanians represented 59.4 per cent of the entire population, followed by the Magyars with 26 per cent and the Germans with 9.3 per cent.77 In spite of their sizeable numbers and their contribution to the economy, they were unrecognized as a nation, which deprived them of basic civil and political rights. One of the leading ethnic Romanian intellectuals in Transylvania, Timotei Cipariu, writing to one of his peers, commented on the disparity between the Roma- nians’ demographics and their political invisibility. Although Saxons, Szecklers and Hungarians were in proportion of one to three to the ethnic Romanians, the latter were totally unprepared for political participation, for the simple reason that they comprised mainly illiterate peasants and a few priests and deacons. “[W]e numerus sumus, nothing else”, he wrote wrily in the scholarly Latinate jargon used at the

75 Quoted in Robert A. Kann, The Multinational Empire: nationalism and national reform in the Habsburg Monarchy 1848–1918 (New York, 1964), 1: 109. 76 Borsi-Kálmán, Hungarian Exiles, 24. Cf. also statistics in Hitchins, A Nation Dis- covered, 15–6. 77 According to the Romanian General Gheorghe Magheru’s contemporaneous estimate, there were 1,486,000 Romanians in Transylvania, with a further 3,871,000 in the Banat, Bukovina and Hungary proper. See Magheru, letter dated 4 March 1849 from Baden (in French), in 1848 la români, ed. Bodea, 2: 1076–80. For the census of 1850–1, based on self-declared ethnicity, as opposed to later censuses which took language as a variable, see Ioan Bolovan, Transilvania între revoluţia de la 1848 şi unirea din 1918: contribuţii demografice (Cluj-Napoca, 2000), 196–9. See also Sorina Paula Bolovan and Ioan Bolovan, Transylvania in the Modern Era: demographic aspects (Cluj-Napoca, 2003), esp. 175 sqq. 140 1849 time by the Romanian Transylvanian intellectuals.78 The persecution to which Eastern Orthodoxy had traditionally been subjected in the empire was one of the reasons why the Romanian nobility had largely defected into the ranks of the Hungarian aristocracy, leaving their former religion to the peasants and the clerics. This turned the ethnic Romanians in Transylvania into a “truncated” society with no urban middle class to speak of and a nobility which, with few exceptions, had been thoroughly assimilated into the Hungarian nobility, and who, more crucially, by the mid-nineteenth century, thought of themselves as Hungarian.79 Some historians believe that this process of assimilation of the Romanian Transylvanian nobles into the Hungarian upper classes for economic, social and political reasons had a major influence on the growth of a strong Hungarian identity and on the ultimate identification of ‘nobility’ as a class concept with ‘Hungarian’ as a national concept.80 The assimilation also explains why the Romanian Transylvanians were left totally disenfranchised and outside the Unio Trio Nationum, which, established in 1437, was essentially a contract between the multi-ethnic (but in sentiment Hungarian) nobiles, the Natio Siculica (the Székelys or Szecklers) and the Natio Saxonica, a contract which remained the constitutional framework of Transyl- vanian political life well into the nineteenth century, encompassing 1848. Yet, while the Romanian peasant masses were left ouf of the political nation, and the nobility was practically non-existent, a new group emerged as the bearer of Romanian national aspirations: the Uniate clergy. The Uniate Church was created in 1700 via the acceptance by the Romanian Orthodox clergy in Transylvania of a union with the Church of Rome. The Diploma Leopoldium of 19 March 1701 gave the Romanian Orthodox clergy who accepted the union the same rights as the Roman Catholic clergy. The union did not involve significant changes in doctrine or ritual, but it gave the Uniate clergy a legal basis for challenging the state and opened up the higher education

78 Letter to George Bariţ, 10/15 March 1848, in Revoluţia de la 1848–1849 din Tran- silvania, ed. Ştefan Pascu and Victor Cheresteşiu (Bucharest, 1977–2007), 1 (2 March– 12 April 1848): 7. 79 Borsi-Kálmán, Hungarian Exiles, 25, lists families such as the Drágffys of Maramureş, the Maujláths from Făgăraş, and the Hunyadis from Hunedoara in Haţeg, many of whom played crucial roles in Hungarian history. 80 Zoltan I. Tóth, “A soknemzetiségű állam néhány kérdéséről az 1848 előtti Mag- yarországon”, in Dániel Csatári, ed., Magyarok és románok (Budapest, 1966), 79–106, quoted in Borsi-Kálmán, Hungarian Exiles, 25. hungarians and romanians in 1849–1850 141 institutions of the province to Romanian students.81 Better opportunities for education, training and self-assertion gradually led to the emergence of a class of dedicated Romanian scholars and ideologues devoted to their nation’s Latinity and aiming to obtain the recognition of a Natio Valachica in addition to the three accepted nationalities. However, they never fully emerged as a cohesive, well-organised group of political leaders. By the 1840s some of them had established close links with the Wallachian forty-eighters. A few had emigrated and became eminent professors at the Saint Sava College in Bucha- rest, Wallachia’s elite higher education institution, founded in 1818 by another Transylvanian, Gheorghe Lazăr. As mentioned before, most Wallachian forty-eighters, including Rosetti, the Brătianu brothers, and the Golescus, studied there.82 Exchanges, meetings and cooperation between the Transylvanian Romanians and their counterparts in the Danubian Principalities were factors which significantly contributed to the endorsement of a cohesive national identity throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the three main provinces. However, a sense of cultural national identity did not lead to a unitary political movement, a fact demonstrated by the conflicting and often perplexing loyalties of Romanians in Hungary, Transylvania, Banat and the Romanian Principalities in the 1840s and beyond. By 1848, the Romanians had two main blueprints for Transylvania’s future status: one was its co-existence with Hungary and the other kingdoms as part of a federalised and reformed Habsburg Empire, the other was as an independent state, possibly to be incorporated into a so- called ‘Danubian Confederation’, which, apart from Moldo-Wallachia, would have comprised Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Rumelia, in various permutations. A third objective, unification, largely remained a tacit aspiration, surviving in the collective memory of the dispersed nation, but hardly ever mentioned in documents likely to be made public. Many Romanians in Transylvania, the more conservative peasants in particular, believed that they could acquire expanded rights within a reformed Austrian empire and consequently many preferred siding with the Habsburgs against the virtually hegemonic Hungarians. This was largely a consequence of a residual “ ‘good emperor’ myth that the Transylvanian Romanian peasantry, as well as the clerics and

81 For the creation and role of the Uniate Church, see Hitchins, The Romanians, 1774–1866, 199–205, and the relevant bibliography, 324–5. Cf. note 69, p. 134 above. 82 See p. 22 above. 142 1849 intelligentsia of peasant and petty noble origin, in their heart of hearts, still subscribed to” owing largely to the Hungarians’ continued resistance to the Romanians’ demands for recognition.83 Others, including Romanian intellectuals such as Eftimie Murgu, a professor from the Banat and a deputy in the National Assembly at Pest, sided with the Hungarians against the imperial authorities – and implicitly against the Serbs, whose nation-building goals were otherwise identical to the Romanians. As a result of such divisions, Hungarian and Romanian historians have been locked ever since in often acrimonious debates about the nature of the national movements in Transylvania. On the Hungarian side, it has been argued that the Romanians obstructed Hungarian attempts at creating a common revolutionary front and, in so doing, became the “pawn of the enemey empire”, while Romanian historiography has often fore-grounded the Hungarian resistance to the Romanians’ demands for political rights.84 The multi-ethnic project of a ‘Danubian Confederation’ should have been based on an alliance of Hungarians and Romanians against both Austria and Russia, but the distrust between the two sides and the influence of hard-liners in both camps undermined all attempts at cooperation made in the build-up to 1848 and in the spring of that year.85 In mid-June 1848, the newly-elected Hungarian Parliament unilat- erally voted the union of Transylvania and Hungary, in spite of Roma- nian and Saxon protests. The Transylvanian Diet in Cluj, which had a Magyar majority, had already voted in favour of the union on 18/30 May. Despite the undeniably damaging intransigence and inflexibil- ity in both camps, there were attempts to reach a Romanian-Magyar agreement early on in 1848. The French provisional government itself made an attempt to help defuse the potential conflict. In May 1848, Lamartine’s confidential envoy, the Hungarian-born Louis (Lajos) Mandl, travelled to Pest and Bucharest, where he mediated meetings between the Hungarians and the Romanian provisional government,

83 Borsi-Kálmán, Hungarian Exiles, 41. 84 Alex Drace-Francis, “Cultural Currents and Political Choices: Romanian Intel- lectuals in the Banat to 1848”, Austrian History Yearbook 36 (2005): 65–93. Ostensi- bly a micro-historical study of the particular situation of the Banat region in 1848, Drace-Francis’ analysis has wider theoretical implications for the history of the 1848 revolutions in the Habsburg empire and for research into Central-East-European nationalism. 85 Borsi-Kálmán, Hungarian Exiles, 41. hungarians and romanians in 1849–1850 143 whom he found mostly sympathetic to the idea of a confederation.86 Even Lajos Kossuth, not chiefly remembered for his ability to compromise, was at this stage sympathetic to an alliance with the new regime established on 11 June in Bucharest.87 Other attempts at rapprochement were made in the autumn of 1848, when László Teleki, a liberal representative in the Transylvanian Diet, visited Paris and met with Alexandru G. Golescu and members of Prince Adam Czarto- ryski’s Polish government-in-exile.88 None of these attempts produced tangible results. One of the main difficulties at the negotiating table was the underlying conflict between the Hungarians’ “clear-cut sense of national identity” and the ethnic Romanians’ more convoluted, tri- partite – bourgeois Wallachian, intellectual Transylvanian and historical Moldavian – definitions of their own identity.89 In addition, the confederative projects were difficult to rationalize, as the meaning of ‘confederation’ was often ill-defined, ranging from a temporary, loose Central European alliance against Russia and Austria to a multinational state structure. Extended variants of the ‘confederative’ plan were also being considered, including ones which would have seen the creation of a confederate Mitteleuropa extending well beyond the confines of Austria and encompassing the Germans of Austria and Germany, the Poles, Hungarians and Italians, as well as the South Slavs and the Romanians. Confronted with the hard realities of state politics, such projects were bound to remain highly speculative con- structs, and even though the idea of a Central European confederation continued to be circulated for some time, its champions ultimately had to accept its utopian character. The appointment of Dumitru Brătianu as diplomatic representative in Pest in late June 1848 had been a follow-up on Mandl’s mediation, but, as already mentioned,90 Brătianu failed to form a united anti- Austrian and anti-Russian front in talks with the Hungarian Prime Minister, Count Lajos Batthyáni, mainly because an alliance with the Hungarians would have entailed a betrayal by the Romanians of the

86 Apostol Stan and Grigore Ploeşteanu, Utopia confederalismului paşoptist: între vis şi realitate (Bucharest, 2001), 35. For the appointment of Louis Mandl, see Part One, pp. 64–5. 87 For Romanian-Magyar-Austrian negotiations in the spring of 1848, see Stan and Ploeşteanu. Utopia, Chapter 2. 88 Ibid., 107–8. 89 Borsi-Kálmán, Hungarian Exiles, xv. 90 See Part One, pp. 90–2. 144 1849 embattled Croatians and Serbs.91 Alexandru G. Golescu-Negru in particular was convinced that the conflicting Hungarian and Roma- nian agendas over Transylvania created insurmountable obstacles. He largely blamed Hungarian intransigence. The Hungarian leaders “will never whole-heartedly support a free Romania, nor a free Serbia! They are aware of the danger of having a focal centre of Romanian or Serbian nationalism next to them”, he wrote to the historian Nicolae Bălcescu in July 1848.92 Although in principle recognizing the common political goals of Hungarians and Romanians, Lajos Kossuth refused indeed to see in the Transylvanian Romanians more than a Romanian-speaking ethnic group in the province, a position he made clear in the Hungar- ian Diet on 12 September.93 Official debates around plans for a confederative alliance with Aus- tria under the auspices of an emergent and assertive unified Germany, which the Romanian envoys presented to the Frankfurt Parliament, failed. As late as 26 September 1848, the Romanian National Assembly at Blaj was still appealing for Austrian protection to the Romanians in all three provinces, but in a private meeting with Alexandru G. Golescu in Vienna in August 1848, the Austrian minister of war, Theodore Baillet de Latour, had put an abrupt end to the Wallachians’ illusions: “Who are you? I do not recognize this provisional government of yours. Our cabinet recognizes Russia’s right to enter the territories of Moldavia and Wallachia.”94 The complex manoeuvring that such diplomatic missions entailed was rendered even more unmanageable after the defeat of the Wallachian revolution in September 1848, when they became semi-clandestine affairs planned more or less conspiratorially by envoys-in-exile, without proper consultation among the various factions and splinter groups. Contacts between the Transylvanians – represented by August Treboniu Laurian and Ioan Maiorescu – Nicolae Bălcescu and Alexandru G. Golescu, both as representatives of the Wallachian provisional government, Vay Miklós, the Magyar envoy in Transylvania,

91 According to Ambrus Miskoczy, Kossuth only learned about Brătianu’s visit to Pest as a delegate of the Wallachian revolution two years later. See Ambrus Miskoczy, “The Dialogue among Hungarian and Romanian Exiles in 1850–1851” inGeopolitics in the Danube Region: Hungarian reconciliation efforts, 1848–1998, ed. Ignac Romsics and Belà K. Király (Budapest, 1999), 103. 92 Stan and Ploeşteanu, Utopia, 62. 93 Borsi-Kálmán, Hungarian Exiles, 96, quoted in Stan and Ploeşteanu, Utopia, 88. 94 Stan and Ploeşteanu, Utopia, 71. hungarians and romanians in 1849–1850 145 and the imperial Field-Marshall Pfersmann, although initially promising, were doomed to failure.95 Crucially, Maiorescu’s public statements in favour of a ‘greater Romania’ project under a Habsburg prince collided with parallel Wallachian efforts, notably by Nicolae Bălcescu, to court the Ottoman Porte in favour of anti-Russian cooperation. Ioan Maiorescu’s first memorandum to the German Diet, which suggested the creation of a unified Romanian kingdom within Austria, encompassing the Danubian Principalities, Transylvania and Bucovina, led to Hungarian accusations of ‘Romanianism’ and ‘Pan-Dacianism’. He was subsequently forced to abandon such proposals before being arrested and then expelled by the Hungarian authorities, alongside the Wallachian émigrés.96 The final blow to Romanian aspirations towards creating a unified national entity under Austrian protection was the rejection by the imperial cabinet of the Transylvanian memorandum of Olmütz (in Bohemia) of 13/25 February 1849, in which the Romanians demanded political autonomy for all the Romanians in a federalised empire. In the wake of the new Austrian constitution of 20 February/4 March – the so-called ‘bestowed constitution’ – which recognized the existence of ‘ethnic branches’ (Volkstämme) equal before the law, rather than of nations as such, the most the Romanians could expect was the creation of ethnic Romanian communes and districts in Transylvania, Hungary and Bukovina.97 Although the constitution never came into effect due to the unresolved Hungarian crisis, its signals were clear to Hungar- ians, Romanians and other nationalities seeking secession from the empire. The Romanians’ divided foreign political objectives and their parallel wooing of Pest, Vienna and Constantinople, as well as the evident attempt of the Transylvanian Romanians to create the institutions of a nascent state in the province were, fr om the Hungarian viewpoint, elements in an already explosive ethnic and political equation. Throughout the troubled months of the Hungarian and Transylvanian revolutions, the Romanians in Transylvania effectively proceeded to create the institutions which they knew they needed in order to become

95 Ibid., 64. Cf. also Hitchins, A Nation Discovered, 194–214. 96 Stan and Ploeşteanu, Utopia, 90, 93, 97. For further details on the memorandum, see Anul 1848, 4: 358–9. Exiled from Transylvania, the Romanian militants were in Semlin (today Zemun, on the territory of Serbia) by November 1848. 97 Ibid., 103. 146 1849 a politically constituted nation: the popular assembly at Blaj, the first session of which took place on 3/15 May 1848, became the Romanian Diet, and the National Committee in Sibiu (Hermannstadt) acted as the Romanian government in Transylvania. The Blaj assembly of Sep- tember divided Transylvania into five Romanian prefectures.98 Unsur- prisingly, such aspirations towards state-building and a virtual alliance with the Austrians were construed as secessionist and treacherous by the Transylvanian authorities and, by the autumn of 1848, Hungarians and Romanians were effectively locked in civil war, with the heaviest bloodshed and human losses recorded in October in the Arad and Zarand counties.99 The conflict was multi-faceted: divisive agendas set Romanians not only against Hungarians, but also against Saxons and the Serbs of the Banat, presumed channels for Pan-Slavic projects. But the pervasive feeling among the Romanian population of Transylvania was anti-Magyar: the protocol of the Blaj assembly of 3–13 Septem- ber 1848, which rejected the province’s union with Hungary, spoke of “Hungarian terrorism” against Transylvania’s “citizens”, calling for a “mixed commission of Romanians, Hungarians, Saxons, peasants, citizens and scholars to be set up and to investigate and judge, pay damages for and punish all the depredations, robbing, persecutions, arrests, violence, killings and everything else which ensued from the terroristic system.”100 At the height of the inter-ethnic conflict, the Austrian General Anton Puchner entered Tranyslvania in mid-November 1848, and Kossuth appointed a veteran of the Polish insurrection, the General Józef Bem, as commander of the Hungarian forces in the province. General Bem and, later, the Polish General Henryk Dembiński – who were both subsequently to score significant victories against the invading Russian troops – had been sent initially by Czartoryski in an attempt to reinforce the multi-national anti-Russian front in Central Europe. Kos- suth and Bem radically re-organised the Hungarian army with ruthless efficiency, but the end result still reflected the kingdom’s multi-ethnic

98 Procese politice anti-româneşti care au zguduit Transilvania în toamna anului 1848, ed. Ioan Chindriş and Gelu Neamţu (Bucharest, 1995), 9. 99 Ibid., 8–9. 100 The protocols were published in the Transylvanian journalFoaie pentru minte, inimă şi literatură, no. 39, 27 September 1848. Cf. Culegere de texte, ed. Nuţu and Totu, 295–8. hungarians and romanians in 1849–1850 147 character.101 There were many Poles and Germans among the officers, and the honvéd battalions consisted of Polish revolutionaries, Slovak miners, Viennese students, Ruthenes and even Romanian peasants, although the majority were urban intellectuals and artisans.102 While Bem won resounding victories against the Austrians, securing the control of most of Transylvania and the Banat by April 1849, the parallel civil war between Romanians and Hungarians escalated and, according to Polish sources, the Romanians led by Avram Iancu mounted a “formidable” insurrection.103 Peace negotiations between Romanians and Hungarians at Abrud (Hung. Abrudbánya) during an armistice in May 1849 were ruined, according to another of Kossuth’s Generals, György Klapka, by the intervention of the Hungarian Major Imre Hat- váni. In violation of the armistice, Major Hatváni arrested the Roma- nian negotiators, triggering violent Romanian reprisals and ensuring that mutual distrust would poison bilateral relations for decades to come.104 The civil war sent waves of Transylvanian refugees across the border into Wallachia and, as the flux of immigration increased in late 1848 and early 1849, the Wallachian authorities in alliance with the occupying Russians granted right of asylum to all the Transylvanians who fled the lethal ethnic conflict between Romanians, Magyars and Szecklers in the troubled province.105 Ostensibly, the authorities invoked humanitarian reasons (“the love of mankind”), but allowing these people in and allocating them fixed residences and humanitarian supplies was

101 Nicolae Bălcescu believed that, by early July 1849, owing mainly to Bem’s recruitment strategy and to the loyalty he commanded, the Transylvanian forces were made up of two thirds foreigners, including 30,000 Romanians, and one third ethnic Hungarians. Stan and Ploeşteanu, Utopia, 109. 102 Deák, “The Revolution”, in A History of Hungary, ed. Sugar et al., 226. Ion Brătianu himself considered enrolling in General Bem’s army in Transylvania, while the Polish-born General resisted there against the Austrians and Russians in the first months of 1849. Lord Dudley Stuart wrote a letter of introduction for him dated 16 May 1849 recommending him to the General as a “Mr. I. Mariosse Boghos” (sic!). The letter was never used. Cf. Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 211–2. 103 Stan and Ploeşteanu, Utopia, 110. 104 Borsi-Kálmán, Hungarian Exiles, 137–8, summary of Kossuth-Klapka correspondence of circa 1863. 105 See, for instance two memos of 30 December 1848 from the Caimacam Con- stantin Cantacuzino to the Wallachian Ministry of the Interior regarding a public subscription for the new settlers, in Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 277–9. The Turkish Commissioner Fuad Effendi himself offered the sum of 1,000 golden ducats on behalf of the Sultan. Prince Cantacuzino asked for 750 lei to be allocated for this purpose from a special fund in the state budget. 148 1849 also obviously a handy way of keeping them under surveillance. Fear- ing that some of the refugees might re-ignite the Wallachians’ dormant revolutionary drive, in March 1849 the Wallachian Ministry of the Interior set up district and municipal commissions for the “investiga- tion of the Transylvanian refugees”, and on 4 August 1849 Bucharest police stepped up their surveillance of foreigners – notably of Hun- garians and Poles suspected of having participated in revolutionary movements in neighbouring countries. In fact, the Russian authorities had been interrogating refugees since at least late December 1848. Leaders of the ethnic Romanians in Transylvania, such as the scholar Simion Bărnuţiu, were also under surveillance, both by the Romanian, and by the Austrian authorities.106 The insurgents and dissenters used every available channel of communication between Moldo-Wallachia and Transylvania. On 8 March 1849, for instance, Bucharest police informed General Danilevski, the Russian commander of the city, that correspondence between militants in Transylvania and Wallachia was being facilitated by the driver of the Braşov post-haste.107 Amidst the turbulent events of early 1849, Rosetti and the other exiled Romanian forty-eighters were understandably concerned by worrying news from Transylvania and Moldavia. The Hungarians and Austrians confronted each other around Sibiu (Hermannstadt), where members of the the exiles’ families – mainly spouses and children – now lived, in exile themselves. Around 50,000 Russian troops had entered Moldavia equipped with large siege cannons, according to information obtained by Gheorghe Magheru. The former revolutionary general cryptically, but presciently, suggested in one of his letters that the Russians were en route for Transylvania to provide help to the Austrian army.108 Although the new Austrian Emperor, eighteen- year-old Francis Joseph, was not to make an official request for Rus- sian support ‘in the holy struggle against anarchy’ until 1 May 1849, the Austrian General Puchner had sought the support of occupying Russian troops in the Danubian Principalities as early as the winter of 1848. From there, under Field Marshal Ivan Paskievich, Russian forces finally entered Transylvania in mid-February, and engaged with

106 Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, xxvi–xxvii. 107 Ibid., xxiv. For a study of police surveillance and mail interception in the Hab- sburg empire, see Donald Emerson, Metternich and the Political Police: security and subversion in the Hapsburg monarchy (1815–1830), (The Hague, 1968). 108 Fotino 2: 230–3. hungarians and romanians in 1849–1850 149

General Bem’s multi-ethnic troops. The Hungarians were heavily outnumbered: they had only 170,000 troops against 200,000 Russians and 175,000 well-equipped Austrians under General Julius Haynau.109 Zinca Golescu, in exile with the other Romanian families in Her- mannstadt, commented in a letter to her sons in Paris on the Russians’ arrival. She deplored the “unreasonableness” of the Magyars, who, she said, had failed to join forces with their neighbours – notably the Romanians – against the “colossus of the North.” She enthused, however, over “the great, brave Hungarian nation”, and confessed to feeling uneasy at being surrounded at close quarters by “our beloved protectors”, the Russians.110 It might seem curious that the exiled families in Transylvania appear to have been unaware of – or at least unwilling to comment on – the Hungarian-Romanian clashes which had already claimed lives in late 1848. Was it lack of information, tactical silence or simply the effect of the self-hypnotic power of hope which kept them blissfully ignorant of the darker side of ethnic conflict? Even individuals in official capacities, such as Effingham Grant, were understandably sanguine about the heroic stature of the Hungarian freedom-fighters and, implicitly, still confident about the possibility of Romanian- Hungarian cooperation. In March 1849, the British Consul in Bucha- rest, Robert Colquhoun, dispatched his trusted secretary on a sensitive mission: he was to survey and report on the situation in Transylvania, where the war was escalating. According to the new Austrian constitution of 4 March, which abrogated some of the historic privileges of the Hungarian crown, Transylvania, alongside Croatia-Slavonia, the Military Border and the Vojvodina were detached from Hungary, a decision which strengthened the Hungarians’ decision to fight for that province, as well as for Hungary as a whole. On 18 March 1849, Grant wrote to Rosetti: I have witnessed an attack of the Russians against the Hungarians, not far from Hermanstadt [sic]; I have seen how the Hungarians triumphed over the Russians and was there when they entered the capital of Tran- sylvania and finally, the day after that, I was invited by an aide-de-camp of General Bem to honour His Excellency with a visit. I went, and, upon meeting him, I found the General to be all that my hopes had led me to expect of the hero of Ostrolenka. He is a charming and brave old man,

109 In A History of Hungary, ed. Sugar et al., 231, the date of the Russian army’s entry into Transylvania is given as mid-June 1849, as opposed to the Romanian sources’ mid-February. 110 Letter dated 16 February 1849, from Hermannstadt, in Fotino 2: 235–6. 150 1849

and a consummate soldier: he is the man to whom is mainly due the success of the Hungarian army in Transylvania. I was astonished by the moderation of his troops – but this worthy warrior knows full well that discipline is of the essence among irregular troops. What more can I tell you, my dear? I have seen the defender of nations – and I am proud. And one day, when we are going to be re-united in the cosy salon of your beloved countess,111 I am going to tell you of the subjects of the conversations I had for hours – but they vanished like minutes! – with the Idol of his soldiers, and now governor of Transylvania, Bem. As I left Hermanstadt (escorted, would you believe it, by one of Kossuth’s officers and six Hussards!) I learned that the kaiserlich troops were so demoralised at the news of Bem’s capture of Hermanstadt [sic] – which he did as they were looking for him – that they all, officers and soldiers, dispersed, and that Puchner (former Commander of Transylvania) took refuge in Wallachia with the débris of his army and the remains of the Russians – poor Russians!112 The favourable view of General Bem’s conduct of the campaign was shared by other correspondents from the exiles’ immediate circles, some of whom witnessed the Russo-Hungarian military confrontations. “It is not true that Bem massacred everybody”, wrote Ana Racoviţă to her brothers in Paris, “on the contrary, he behaved with a lot of moderation. Our mother was there in Sibiu when he entered the city; he caused no harm.”113 Contrary to the Eastern and Central European exiles’ expectations, the nature of the contextual diplomatic quid pro quo ensured that the Russian intervention in Transylvania and Hungary did not meet with a concert of disapproval from the Western powers. Russia approved of France’s successful intervention against the Roman republic in April 1849, and the tsar chose that particular moment for officially recognising Louis Napoléon’s still frail regime, a recognition used by the Prime Minister Odilon Barrot to silence Parisian protests against the Rus- sian intervention in Hungary. French ambassadors in Vienna and St. Petersburg received no instructions to protest. Alexis de Tocqueville, the French Minister for Foreign Affairs from 2 June to 31 October 1849, sent determined dispatches to French diplomatic staff: “Let us

111 Presumably a jocular reference to Marie Rosetti and to the Rosetti family titles. 112 Letter dated 18 March 1849, in Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu 1: 198. 113 Letter dated 13 May 1849, in Fotino 2: 300. hungarians and romanians in 1849–1850 151 not get involved in events happening at the other end of Europe, in the Principalities, in Poland or in Hungary.”114 In Britain itself there was a good deal of public support for the Hungarian cause, but this did not lead to military involvement. Chal- lenged on 21 July in the House of Commons, Palmerston defended the government’s policy of non-intervention. While declaring himself a “firm believer in constitutional forms of government”, Palmerston thought of Hungary as a part of the Austrian empire and of the Danu- bian Principalities as a part of the Ottoman empire, and was unwilling to go to war with either power. In addition, he made public his views on maintaining the status quo in Central Europe, declaring that “a united Austrian Empire was a European necessity, and the natural ally of England in the East”, and that a break-up of the empire would serve the interests of Russia. In private correspondence, he expressed hopes that the Russian troops would “settle the Hungarian problem as expeditiously as possible.”115 At the same time, the decidedly pro- Russian Duke of Wellington whole-heartedly and openly approved of the Russian intervention, while Lord Aberdeen, the former Tory For- eign Secretary, wrote to Princess Lieven, the estranged, but influential, wife of the former Russian ambassador in London, that he regarded the Tsar as “our anchor of safety in the West.”116 In Transylvania, the situation was becoming more confused and entangled, as the fighting now opposed not only the Hungarian army against the Austrian and Russian troops, but also, in the parallel civil war, the ethnic Romanians, Germans and Serbs against the Hungar- ians. They were pitted against each other – under the watchful eyes of the Russian troops – in what was a new, tragic twist in the ongoing saga of ethnic tensions and territorial, political and cultural disputes. In February 1849 representatives of the ethnic Romanians in Transyl- vania, Bukovina and Banat had submitted to the Austrian Emperor an eight-point petition demanding official authorisation for convening a Constituent Assembly of the Romanians, an elected Patriarch, the election of Romanian deputies to the Imperial Legislative Assembly and the recognition of Romanian as the official language in regions

114 Pippidi, “Tocqueville et les Moldo-Valaques”, 149, citing from Tocqueville’s Souvenirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 459. 115 Billy, Palmerston’s Foreign Policy, 136. For the entire text of Palmerston’s speech, see Kenneth Bourne, The Foreign Policy of Victorian England, 1830–1902 (Oxford University Press, 1970), 295–9. 116 Roberts, Nicholas I, 113–5. 152 1849 where the ethnic Romanians were a majority. Also, symbolically, they would have wanted the Emperor to include among his titles that of ‘Dux’ of the Romanians.117 On 15 March 1849 Magheru wrote from Vienna to Alexandru G. Golescu-Negru, exiled in Bursa, informing him that the Emperor had rejected the title proposed by the Romanian community, alongside with their other demands, and that Transyl- vania was now in the grip of the Russians who, Magheru says, “are interfering in the administration everywhere and have set up inquisi- tion tribunals as infamous as those that have destroyed the flower of the Polish youth.”118 Yet, in spite of the darkening European horizon, Magheru refused to give up hope: “[. . .] I believe that the atrocities committed nowadays, the infamies that are à l’ordre du jour will purify and cleanse Humanity, will accelerate its redemption! Christ sacrificed himself for the ideal of the most exalted truths! It may well be that humanity must have its martyrs before it can practise or achieve those truths, those verities which, from the domain of utopias must necessarily pass, in our time, into the domain of facts.”119 In early March 1849, rather than wait for the Russian troops to camp on her doorstep, Zinca Golescu chose to leave Transylvania and envisaged travelling to Orşova, in the Banat, and hence up the Danube to Vienna to see relatives, if her finances permitted. How- ever, by late March, as the Hungarians temporarily gained the upper hand against the Russian army in Transylvania, the situation seemed promising enough for her to return to the family home at Goleşti in Wallachia. There, however, she had to put up with visits by Romanian government officials and Russian military, searching for her son Radu, who had been reported to be in hiding there, but had, in fact, stayed behind in Transylvania.120 Three weeks later, Zinca herself was once again ordered to return to Transylvania, in the midst of new movements of Russian and Turkish troops in the Principalities. In the spring and summer of 1849, as the military balance still favoured the Hungarians, there were new attempts at re-engaging a Hungarian-Romanian dialogue. The new strategy widened the rift between the Wallachian exiles and the Romanians of Transylvania who, directly affected by the Hungarian policies in the province, were

117 Fotino 2: 239. 118 Ibid., 251. 119 Ibid., 255. 120 Ibid., 263. hungarians and romanians in 1849–1850 153 now firmly on the Austrian side. On 4/16 March 1849, from Baden, the exiled General Magheru sent a letter to Kossuth, who had taken refuge in Debrecen with the embattled National Defense Committee. In very strong terms and in the name of “the principle of nationalities”, Magheru condemned what he termed Hungary’s “terrorist Mag- yarising policy” towards the Romanian and the Slavic populations, a policy which had alienated these populations and weakened Hungary. He warned Kossuth that he would lose the war against Russia unless he appeased these wronged nations, whose demographics were not inconsiderable. He also invoked the danger of Russia’s pan-Slavic projects in Central Europe. In exchange for Hungarian diplomatic support in Constantinople, Magheru promised to form a Romanian ‘legion’ and join the war against the Russians.121 Kossuth did not follow up on Magheru’s injunctions. One incident in particular illustrates in an exceptionally effective way the sometimes vitriolic passions engaged in the ‘Russian question’, as well as the efforts spent in the polemical definition and re- definition of ethnic and national identities. Throughout the month of March 1849, Paul Bataillard and the Romanian exiles, whom he supported, were engaged in a vigorous exchange of views sparked by several contributions, written by an anonymous Russophile Romanian or even possibly by a Russian agent, and published in the Parisian legitimist newspaper L’Assemblée Nationale in reaction to appeals by the republican press demanding a Russian withdrawal. The articles, signed ‘X’, argued that the Romanians were ethnically Slavs and that the Moldo-Wallachian provinces had always been essentially Russian and could expect no better support than that offered by Russia. In fact, the author insisted, the population should willingly join the Serbs and the Russians in “la grande famille russe” with the blessing of the Great Powers, in much the same way that the Italians were being encouraged to unite at the time. The scale of the Romanian forty-eighters’ response was commensurate not only with the enormity of the claims made by someone who either ignored or waived aside basic linguistic and cultural facts, but also with the wide readership of L’Assemblée Nationale. Founded on 1st March 1848 by the Vicomte Adrien de Lavalette as a vehicle for the political views of groups close to the Bourbons, L’Assemblée Nationale had 20,000 buyers and subscribers

121 The letter, in French, in1848 la români, ed. Bodea, 2: 1076–80. 154 1849 within twenty days of its foundation and its articles were abundantly cited by the regional press.122 The issue of the Romanians’ Latin origins had been by now largely accepted, when not muddled by polemical agendas. Referring readers to linguistic and demographic statistics, the forty-eighters demolished suggestions of ethnic kinship between Romanians and Slavs, and asked for the withdrawal of the Russian troops. They warned that one day Russia would have to answer accusations that she “has used the power of the cross” (her self-proclaimed role as protecting power of the East-European Orthodox) to stifle the voice of a people.123 Paul Bataillard in his turn attacked the wholesale pro-Russian orientation of L’Assemblée Nationale. Bataillard was already a veteran among the philo-Romanians in Paris, a group which included several representatives of the press, mainly militant republicans such as Pascal Duprat, editor of the Revue Indépendante and future editor of La Libre Recherche (Brussels), Hyp- polite Desprez, editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes, and firebrand radicals such as the lawyer and Freemason Désiré Pilette, one of the editors of La Révolution démocratique et sociale – a publication sympathetic to Ledru-Rollin – and Charles Ferdinand Gambon, a Mon- tagnard deputy, Freemason and member of the Society of Friends of Democratic Poland.124 Such associations are indicative of the brand of republicanism towards which Rosetti and his group naturally gravitated: radicals, Montagnards, republican Freemasons, all champions of the democratic and social revolution, people who, like Gambon, were prepared to risk imprisonment and deportation for the sake of their political credo. In August of the previous year, 1848, as the Roma- nian revolution faltered, Bataillard’s articles in Le National had openly attacked the Russian occupation of the Principalities and deplored France’s indifference to the Eastern Question. In the new polemic launched in March 1849, Bataillard’s contributions were accepted by Le Temps, newly created on 1st March by the republican Xavier

122 Histoire générale de la presse française, ed. Claude Béllanger, Jacques Godechot, Pierre Guiral and Fernand Terrou (Paris, 1969), 2: 217. The journal, suspended in July 1857, re-emerged as Le Spectateur before being suppressed after Orsini’s attempt against Napoleon’s life on 14 January 1858. 123 N. Corivan, ed., Din activitatea emigranţilor români în Apus, 1853–7: scrisori şi memorii (Bucharest, 1931), esp. 4–5 and 11–12. 124 Vapereau, Dictionnaire universel des contemporains, 3rd edn. (Paris, 1865). For a more recent profile of Gambon, see Jean-Yves Mollier, “Charles Ferdinand Gambon et le culte de le révolution au XIXe siècle”, in La France démocratique: mélanges offerts à Maurice Agulhon, ed. Christophe Charle et al. (Paris, 1998), 199–205. hungarians and romanians in 1849–1850 155

Durrieu. His article “Empire Ottoman-Roumanie”, published on 3 March, was a frontal attack against the successive French republican ministries which had sacrificed foreign policy to “dynastic interests or to the principle of peace at all costs” and had, above all, criminally neglected the Eastern Question:125 “The East”, Bataillard wrote, “is, indeed, for France the battlefield where the war between absolutism and civilization is bound to be waged. The Tsar has understood this and his armies are already occupying the most favourable positions. Why has France, over the last year, left a free hand to Russia, thus enabling her, in spite of notes of protest from Lord Palm- erston and M. Drouyn de Lhuys, to occupy the Danubian provinces, to crush their inhabitants under monstrous taxes, to mass her troops along the Austrian frontiers and hence to go and bring the coup de grace to the Magyar nation? Because our statesmen have been unable to look beyond our frontiers, because they have not understood, in spite of warnings reiterated by the entire press, that two small provinces of the Ottoman Empire, Moldavia and Wallachia, could, under specific circumstances, suddenly become an issue of serious and dangerous consequence for the Europeran balance and for the safety of France herself.”126 While the revolutions of 1848 in Vienna, Berlin and Naples had been localized events with internal political agendas which had no international impact, Bataillard argued, perhaps slightly overstating his point, the parallel events in the Romanian Principalities – an attack on tsarism by a generation of youths “educated in our schools” – represented a conflict between liberalism and despotism and as such, could result in major ideological and political divisions on the European continent.127 In an article of 17 March 1849, Bataillard denounced L’Assemblée Nationale as the channel of the Russian chancellery and ridiculed claims published in that journal that “Bucharest is as Russian as Odessa” and that, in the event of war, “a Russian army, supported by the protestations of the Christian populations, heralded by crosses and banners, by priests and Greek bishops, would take only weeks to arrive on the Bosphorus” and launch an attack on the Porte.128 The Romanians themselves, having been denied a right of reply by L’Assemblée, counter-attacked in several issues of Le Temps, notably on

125 Boitoş, Paul Bataillard et la révolution roumaine, 47–8. The entire text of the article is reproduced on pp. 47–51. 126 Ibid., 49. 127 Ibid., 50. 128 Ibid., 60. 156 1849 the 7th and the 19th of March. They dismantled notions put forward by ‘Monsieur X.’, who described the Romanian revolution of 1848 as the “subversive” act of a few “anarchists”, rightfully put in their place by the armies of the Tsar, who restored “peace” and “order” in Wal- lachia at the request of the Sultan.129 The Russian issue continued to occupy the minds – and the pens – of the exiles through the month of March 1849 and beyond. On the 2nd, Zinca wrote to her son, Ştefan, about the huge difficulties in sending the sums of money on which the exiled forty-eighters depended for their daily existence and for funding projects in the Western capitals. The money, coming from their farmed-out lands, the sale of proper- ties and loans, also provided a major source for subsidising impoverished émigrés and young men of poorer families studying in Paris. “We were considered wretched fugitive outcasts, unworthy of credit”, she commented on her failure to secure a loan as she left Bucharest for Transylvania. Eventually, with some effort, she was able to send them money from savings she had made in Sibiu and from sums advanced by the administrators of the Golescu family lands back home.130 The Golescu women now feared that they were about to become double exiles: the Transylvanian authorities, under Russian pressure, gave foreigners notice to leave the territory as soon as possible. As he completed his official mission in the war-torn province, Effingham Grant himself escorted a group of Wallachian ladies across the border from Transylvania, an action which probably exceeded his diplomatic instructions.131 Some spouses and children of the exiled forty-eighters were brutally treated: the wives of General Gheorghe Magheru and of Cesar Bolliac, the editor of the periodical Espatriatul [The Expatriate], were arrested at Braşov by the Russian interim administration, Zinca reported, and had all their papers confiscated before being released three or four days later.132 Information received by Gheorghe Magheru from a Transylvanian eye-witness shows that a special Russo-Austrian commission of civil servants, police and military was created to trans-

129 Ibid., 66. One of the Romanians’ contributions to the exchange was later published separately as Lettre à Messieurs les Rédacteurs en chef de tous les journaux de la presse parisienne, . . ., par un membre du gouvernement provisoire de la principauté de Valachie en juin 1848 (Paris; Soye, 1850, 1851). 130 Fotino 2: 242–3. 131 Consul-General Colquhoun to Lord Stratford Canning, Bucharest, 16 March 1849, in Hansard, 1851 [1321], Correspondence respecting the affairs of Hungary, 1847–1849, 170. 132 2 March 1849, Fotino 2: 243. hungarians and romanians in 1849–1850 157 late and read the correspondence of those arrested.133 The harrassment of his wife and daughter by the Austrian and Russian officials was to continue throughout March and April, as reported by Le Temps on 5 May, on the basis of a correspondence from the Romanian capital: “A recent order by Duhamel incited general indignation. Madame Maghiero, the wife of the man who commanded our militia during the Revolution, sought refuge in Transylvania with an infant boy only a few months old and her young daughter. Deported by the Austri- ans, she thought she might return to her homeland, but the Cossacks arrested her at the border and kept her hostage in Rimnik for fifteen days, before escorting her back into Transylvania, on Duhamel’s orders.”134 Writing from Goleşti, the exiled men’s niece, Felicia, confirmed the evacuation on Russian orders of all the Wallachian families who had taken refuge in Transylvania, including Zinca and those of her sons and nephews who were still with her. The group had to make their way to Vienna. The young woman also confirmed the arrests of the wives of Eliade, Tell and Bolliac, commenting disparagingly on the Russians’ searches and confiscation of family and private papers: “They are treat- ing a revolution as though it were a mere plot; these are the Rus- sians for you.”135 Many decades later, Felicia’s letter, published in the splendid 1939 edition of the Golescu correspondence, still enclosed the pressed snowdrops she had sent to comfort her homesick uncles. Correspondence and packages between Bucharest and Paris made their way slowly and perilously across Central Europe, dodging Austrian interception and other accidents in transit. In Bucharest, Effingham Grant – at that time courting Zinca’s grand-daughter, Zoe Racoviţă – was in constant contact with all the exiled branches of the family. His position at the British consulate allowed him to facilitate the passage of letters and money between Goleşti, Transylvania, Paris and London, even though many letters were intercepted by the Aus- trian secret police.136 On his last visit at Goleşti, in March 1849, Zinca

133 Letter from Gheorghe Magheru to Al. G. Golescu-Negru from Vienna, 15 March 1849, in Fotino 2: 252. 134 Boitoş, Paul Bataillard et la révolution roumaine, 96. Cf. letter from Goleşti dated 23 February/11 March 1849, in Fotino 2: 263. 135 Letter from Goleşti dated 26 April 1849, in Fotino 2: 249. 136 For Austrian violation of the private and diplomatic correspondence of the Romanian exiles and of Effingham Grant, see Ceauşu and Vitcu, “Romanian Emigra- tion”, esp. Docs. 3, 4, and 5. The article cites documents from the papers of Alexander 158 1849 wrote, he brought English papers voicing protests against the Russian occupation of the Moldo-Wallachian Principalities. “[. . .] if England issues the slightest threat, we jump with joy” – Zinca commented ruefully on their situation – “if France grumbles a little, we are more than happy; thus we spend our time between tears and joy; in truth, we have been reduced to playing toddlers’ games. Poor Romanians! Who would have said, six months ago, when Suleyman Pasha approved and embraced our cause in such earnest, who would have thought that we would ever come to this. But this is the fate of weak nations and all we can do is wait for the good will of the foreign Powers.”137 The Golescu sister, Ana, confirmed Effingham Grant’s crucial role in facilitating the smooth transit of mail and money on the Goleşti- Bucharest-Paris route. “[. . .] the main difficulty is for our letters to reach Mr. Grant”, she wrote from the family estate in April 1849. “We owe much to this young man; had he been our brother, he could not have shown us greater friendship and sympathy. He even offered my mother money from his own purse, when they [i.e. the authorities] ordered her to leave without any money of her own; please write to him and thank him. Can you imagine that our mother was offered accommodation by Mr. Colquhoun when our own family wouldn’t offer her shelter.”138 In Wallachia the situation was far from improving, as Effingham Grant reported to Ştefan Golescu from Bucharest on 29 March 1849 in a letter in which he also enclosed an exchange bill for one hundred pound sterling, endorsed by the British consul – money sent by Zinca. Circumstances were “quite sad”, Grant wrote, “but who is to blame? Turkey, the European Powers, or everybody? Whoever it is, the situation is discouraging. There is no sign that the Russians intend to depart. On the contrary, their presence here is on the increase and this despite the protest notes of the French and English ministers to the Court of St. Petersburg. It is never good enough to simply say that the moment has arrived to put aside diplomacy and take up the sword. The slowness of the mail is fatal to the interests of everybody, except the Russians, who alone stand to gain from these delays. The Turks just talk, without taking any action: they are simply demand- von Bach, the Austrian Minister of the Interior from 1849 to 1859 (Allgemeine Ver- waltungs Archiv Wien, Nachlass Bach, 33). 137 Fotino 2: 244–5. 138 Letter dated April 1849, in ibid., 281. hungarians and romanians in 1849–1850 159 ing the evacuation of the Principalities by the Russians. In response, the latter are simply sending even more troops into these Provinces and they [i.e. the Turks] stand impassibly by and allow themselves to be affronted. Europe is watching on; they are all talking a lot in their Chambers of deputies and in their newspapers and, during this time, the Muscovite policies are gaining ground, and nobody is opposing it or shouting ‘Put a stop to this’. Indeed, one can either lose one’s mind or become Russian – both disagreeable options – but what else is there to be done?”139 According to Grant, many of those arrested in the aftermath of the revolution of 1848, including Rosetti’s friend and business associate, Winterhalder, whose role, as shown, was crucial in funding the diaspora, were still in prison. There was some glimmer of hope in news of a cabinet reshuffle in Constantinople: Suleyman Pasha, whose moderation and equanimity in September 1848 had earned him the Roma- nians’ respect, had been appointed Capoudan Pasha (Grand Admiral) and it was to be hoped that, if Turkey could obtain the support of some of the Great Powers, the Porte would be empowered to take a firmer stance against Russia. However, as crucial Western endorsement failed to materialize, Turkey was forced to sign the Russo- Turkish Convention of Balta Liman of 1 May 1849, a fresh blow to the Romanians’ hopes for an acceptable political solution in their country. Among other provisions, the Convention stipulated that the suzerain and the protecting powers were to appoint the ruling princes – previously elected by the national assemblies for life – for seven-year terms. The Organic Regulations were to remain in force, and the country’s occupation by Turkish and Russian forces was to continue with the purpose of maintaining public ‘order’. The existing national asemblies were dissolved and replaced with ad-hoc divans composed of boyars loyal to Russia and Turkey. The text of the treaty was signed by the Ottoman foreign minister Reshid Pasha and the Russian special envoy, Vladimir Titov, on behalf of the Sultan and the Tsar, who both declared themselves “animated by equal solicitude for the welfare of the Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia.”140

139 Ibid., 265. 140 The text of the Convention of Balta Liman was published by Ghica inAmintiri , 194–9. It is also available in French in Acte şi documente relative la istoria renaşterei României, ed. Dimitrie A. Sturdza, C. Colescu-Vartic, 11 vols. (Bucharest, 1889–1909), 1: 357. 160 1849

By placing the Danubian Principalities under the joint supervision of a Turkish and a Russian commissar, the convention practically endorsed an expansion of Russian intervention in the two provinces, for instance in allowing Russia to appoint ruling princes. “This new convention of May 1st”, wrote Effingham Grant to one of the Paris émigrés, “is a new step taken by the tenacious Muscovite towards one of the cherished aims of tsarist policies.” France should take a stand against “despotism”, he added, and “re-establish on solid bases the freedom of oppressed peoples by guaranteeing the rise of the spirit of democracy.”141 Protests against the Russian occupation of the Romanian Principali- ties and against the Convention addressed to the French and English cabinets were carried more emphatically than usual in the sympathetic French press. TheLettre au ministre des Affaires étrangères de France sur l’occupation des principautés danubiennes par la Russie142 is one of the more readily available such texts, but a fairly large number of the republican periodicals, such as Le National, La Démocratie pacifique, La Semaine, Le Proscrit, published contributions by the Romanian exiles or articles favourable to the Romanian and Eastern European cause.143 In the Journal des Débats of 17 and 18 May, the Romanians used the full force of their rhetoric to denounce the Convention of Balta Liman, which, by its Article 4, authorised the Porte and Russia to maintain between 25,000 and 35,000 troops each in the Principali- ties. General Aupick and Sir Stratford Canning came under attack for failing to support the Ottomans in their resistance to the tsar: “[. . .] they have failed to grasp the import of the Convention, and thus, Con- stantinople became a stage for the same comedy now being played out in Rome, Berlin, Vienna, St. Petersburg and Paris. Their duty should have been to prevent the conclusion of this act and to throw the treaty of 1841 in the face of Russia and of General Grabbe. They failed to do it, and this new act has now enshrined Russia’s right to substitute her influence on the Bosphorus to that of the European powers.”144

141 Letter from Bucharest to Ştefan Golescu in Paris, 17 May 1849, in Fotino 2: 305–7. 142 Paris: impr. De F. Malteste, 1849. 143 For further details on the Eastern European propaganda in the French press, see Marin Bucur, “Contexte şi afinităţi în perioada exilului”, extract fromStudii despre N. Bălcescu (Bucharest, 1969). 144 Boitoş, Paul Bataillard et la révolution roumaine, 102. hungarians and romanians in 1849–1850 161

In spite of their spirited protests, the philo-Romanians were finding that their position in France was becoming increasingly precarious. The republican movement was being gradually marginalised in the new political climate ushered in by the elections of December 1848 and Louis Napoléon’s victory. Concern over Russia’s actions in Central and Eastern Europe was not a foreign policy priority for the French cabinet and, consequently, the exiles’ protests against Russian abuses failed to find an audience. A memorandum sent to the French Legislative Assembly on 4 June and signed by “Jean Voinesco, C. A. Rosetti, Vasile Malinesco and D. Bratiano” on behalf of the members of the Romanian democratic committee in Paris, denounced in vigorous terms the tsar, who had “trampled on European public law.” In addition, the authors rehearsed one of the most popular propaganda themes in nineteenth-century Romanian historiography and one of the most cherished historical narratives of the Romanian collective memory: the theme of Romania, a small, embattled nation guard- ing the borders of civilized Europe, to which they superimposed the more ambitious theme of Romania as defender of civilisation at the gates of the Orient. They showed how the Convention “dealt a mortal blow, under the eyes of democratic Europe, to four million people, all that remains of the Romanian nation which, during the terrible wars between Mahometanism and Christianity, acted as a sentinel of Europe while also fighting for its independence, thus salvaging civilization and freedom at the same time. [. . .] In the name of four million of our brethren whose voices are being silenced by foreign bayonets, we wish to present our protest to you, citizen Representatives of the great nation which proclaimed herself the tutrix of all oppressed people. [. . .] Romania will live or die fighting for freedom. Still full of life and vigour, she cannot fail in the mission assigned her by Providence, that of implanting Western civilisation in the East and thereby arresting the invading march of despotism which, by pushing its frontiers further every day, is threatening to drag humanity back into the darkness of barbarity.”145 On 6 June, Edgar Quinet himself presented the text of the petition to the Legislative Assembly: “[. . .] you know better than anyone else the faith that they [the Romanians] have in your glorious revolution of February”, Quinet said, addressing the deputies. “[. . .] and the fact that

145 A l’Assemblée Législative de la République Française, 4 Juin 1849, Les membres du comité démocratique Roumain de Paris (Paris: E. Thunot imprimeur, 1849). 162 1849 they rose up in the East in the name of the immortal principles that you have proclaimed here.”146 In the new political context, however, both the petition and Quinet’s appeal seemed to belong to another world. The French military intervention against the insurgent Ital- ian republicans and the ensuing violent protests of 13 June 1849 in Paris practically put an end to the short-lived Second Republic. Ledru- Rollin and other radicals – and allies of the East-Europeans – were arrested, deported, or became exiles in their turn, marking the start of a determined state-sponsored programme for the marginalisation of the republican movement during what remained of the Second Repub- lic and subsequently during the Second Empire. The Romanian forty-eighters in Paris, meanwhile, saw their own exile extended indefinitely. On 12 May 1849, the new ruling prince of Russian-occupied Wallachia, Barbu Ştirbey, issued a list of suspect names with a stern reminder that all those who had been implicated in the events of 1848 and who “were bold enough to oppose resistance as the imperial army entered Bucharest to re-establish order” should not return to Romania before a court had decided that they were no longer a danger to the regime.147 Alarming – and often false – rumours reached the small expatriate community in Paris. Writing to a friend on 11 May 1849 from Paris, Marie mentioned that her husband had fallen ill and “had been spitting blood for three days” as they heard the news – soon to be denied – of Winterhalder’s death in a Bucharest prison. Apart from such moments of crisis, the small group of the Rosettis, the Brătianu brothers and Ion Voinescu had settled into a more or less predictable routine, the highlights of which were Michelet’s lectures, as Marie wrote: I only step out of the building to post a letter or go with Rosetti to Michelet’s lectures – which take place every Thursday; it is my festival day – yesterday it was a particularly beautiful festival! I wish I could paint the scene for you, but I am sadly unable to do so. Try to imagine that crowd of youths – the young are Europe’s last hope. Several carried a newspaper, and all had on the faces the imprint of the day’s news – Finally one of them, a tall, handsome young man, stood pale and trembling with a holy emotion, and read aloud what everybody already knew – The French had fought against the Romans – 400 republicans had died fighting against aRepublic – and the Student asked all those

146 Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 213. 147 Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 324–5. The proscription was confirmed by an Ottoman ferman of 6 June 1849. Cf. Anul 1848, 6: 260–1. hungarians and romanians in 1849–1850 163

present to sign a petition which he read, demanding ‘the prosecution of the President of the French Republic and of his ministers, who were all guilty of fratricidal treason’. Frenetic applause greeted this proposal – and they all started signing. ThenMichelet entered and, on that day, he surpassed himself in greatness – I would like to send you his speech – but he doesn’t have them printed and I do not take notes.148 In these early months of exile, a gloomy Rosetti refused to give up hope. Writing to a friend from Passy, in Paris, on 20 April 1849, he mentioned his illnesses, which, as usual with him, had led to reflections on his mortality. Nevertheless, he added, he was in no hurry to move to Père Lachaise, for two reasons at least: one, because he was married, and two, because he wanted to live long enough to see the Universal Republic established. “In spite of everything, I will live long enough at least to see Romania free of the Moskals,149 of the Turks, and of Heliad”,150 he quipped, alluding to growing political divisions among diaspora groups and, more specifically, to the personal enmity between himself and the moderate, pro-Turkish Ion Eliade Rădulescu. “The weakness of the Turks is deceptive;” he commented, “when they are weak they feed us to the Moskals, when they are strong, they want to swallow us themselves. I believe, however, in heavenly justice, and I think that in one or two months we will chase them all out of Romania, and we will proclaim the independent and social Romanian Republic.”151

148 Emphases in the original. B. A. R., Manuscripts Section, Fonds C. A. Rosetti, Letter from Marie Rosetti to Alexandrina I. Ghica, Paris, 11 May 1849, S 11(4)/ LXIII. 149 From the Russian, Polish and Ukrainian term meaning ‘ethnically Russian’, ‘Muscovite’. The term was routinely used in nineteenth-century Romania to designate the Russians, but is now a slightly derogatory archaism. 150 Letter from Constantin Rosetti to Ion Ghica, in Ghica, Amintiri, 64. 151 Ibid., 69. APRIL 1849 THE TRANSYLVANIAN DEBACLE

On 14 April 1849, the Hungarian Diet, having left the besieged Pest and now sitting in Debrecen instead, proclaimed the independence of Hungary. The Committee of National Defense was dissolved, and Kossuth was elected Governor of Hungary. Like the Romanians and the Poles, the Hungarians, too, entertained the illusion that help would eventually come from the great powers. In the meantime, in Constan- tinople and Pest, the historian and forty-eighter Nicolae Bălcescu had been pursuing his relentless, but ultimately frustrating, attempts at reaching an understanding between Romanians and Hungarians. He found General Bem, whom he met in Transylvania in May 1849, very open to the idea of coordinated military action by Hungarians, Poles and Romanians against Russia. In a letter to Kossuth, László Teleki, a liberal member of the Transylvanian Diet, voiced his fears that the forces of nationalism had become so powerful that not only Austria as an empire, but also the historic Hungary of Saint Stephen, were doomed. “The peoples are no longer satisfied only with liberty, equality and brotherhod. They want to live their own national lives”, Teleki wrote.152 On 18–19 May, he co-hosted with Prince Adam Czartoryski a meeting of East-Central European émigrés at the Prince’s Parisian residence at the Hotel Lambert. In attendance were Ferenc Pulszky, a member of Kossuth’s cabinet, Szarvadi Frigyes, the secretary of the Hungarian legation in Paris, Frantisek L. Rieger, a Czech deputy in Austria’s last general diet, as well as South-Slav and Romanian observ- ers. At a time when the Austrian Empire’s implosion seemed imminent, its likely successor, in the eyes of the participants, was a Danubian Confederation comprising a Hungary which would renounce its hegemonic self-assumed role, alongside Moldo-Wallachia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Croatia, a liberated Poland, and possibly Bohemia and Moravia. Hun- gary’s territorial integrity was to be maintained, but its constituent ethnic communities would gain autonomy while maintaining confederative links with the Hungarian kingdom with respect mainly to a common navy, infastructure and trade. The precise frontiers remained

152 Stan and Ploeşteanu, Utopia, 116. april 1849: the transylvanian debacle 165 to be discussed. In the new set-up, the Slovaks and Germans, who did not occupy a compact territory, would have had their own locally governed communes or adminitrative zones. Both Kossuth and the Hungarian Foreign Minister, Kázmér (Casimir) Batthiány, although in principle declaring themselves ready to make concessions to the nationalities, rejected the Hotel Lambert project, which would have led to the fragmentation of historic Hungary.153 In spite of this, and given that the alternative project of an Austrian-led confederation had failed to materialize, the Romanian émigrés in Paris decided to remain on the side of the Hungarians. Ion Ghica notably urged the leaders of the Transylvanian Romanians to cease military operations against the Magyars, offering for their consideration the prospect of a future, democratic Hungarian Diet in which the Slav and Romanian deputies would outnumber the Hungarians. Both Ion Ghica and Nicolae Bălcescu emerged from the tribulations of the early months of 1849 – which took place against the backdrop of a continuing Romanian insurgency in Transylvania – as the strongest proponents of an alliance with Hungary against Austria and Russia. They were in collision with Transylvanian leaders such as Simion Bărnuţiu, who still supported an alliance with the Austrians. There was some progress: in a meeting with Bălcescu on 29 May, Kossuth officially authorized the creation of a Romanian legion to be led by Generals Magheru and Tell, a plan which had General Bem’s support. The Hungarian leader declared himself ready to recognize the political, linguistic and confessional autonomy of the nationalities, maintaining the Magyar language only for diplomacy within an undivided historic Hungary. Bălcescu was enthusiastic: Kossuth was an “enlightened man, a very special man, un homme de bien”, he wrote.154 However, more often than not, the blueprints for future ethnic and political re-configurations in the area hung on vague promises made viva voce by exiled and harassed politicians and negotiators, under the menace of Austrian, Russian or Turkish arms, and as such they remained largely theoretical. Messages from both sides were mixed. At one time, the Hungarian Prime Minister Lajos Batthyáni even

153 Ibid., 117. 154 Nicolae Bălcescu, Opere, ed. G. Zane and E. Zane, 4 vols. (Bucharest, 1974– 1990), 4: 176. Similar arrangements were being negotiated by the South Slavs, notably by the Serbian leader Ilija Garašanin, in talks with General Mór Perczel and Count Gyula Andrássy, the Hungarian envoy in Constantinople. 166 1849 told Bălcescu that he would let Hungary die rather than commit suicide by recognizing more comprehensive rights to the nationalities.155 Throughout these – largely unofficial, or quasi-official – negotiations with representatives of the East-Central European émigré circles, many of the Hungarians leaders remained suspicious of presumed persistent Wallachian secret plans to create a ‘Daco-Romanian’ kingdom and, consequently, Kossuth’s commitment to his promises remained ambiguous. The paramount feeling remained one of visceral intransigence, distrust and hostility on both sides. The Hungarians had an “unspeakable hatred” for the Romanians, Bălcescu wrote to Ion Ghica on 1 July, while for Ferenc Pulszky, Brătianu was simply an “enemy” of the Hungarians.156 Learning of another violent Romanian rebellion against the Magyars in the Banat, Bălcescu commented, in recognition of the fact that the collapse of trust and the unwillingness to cooperate had led to the débâcle: “These two nations have dragged each other down into the grave.”157

155 Stan and Ploeşteanu, Utopia, 125. 156 Thomas Kabdebo,Diplomat in Exile: Francis Pulszky’s political activities in Eng- land, 1849–1860, (Boulder, Colorado, 1979), 68. 157 Stan and Ploeşteanu, Utopia, 126. JULY–AUGUST 1849

As the tide started to turn against the Hungarians and as Avram Iancu’s militia of Romanian peasants continued to resist in the Transylvanian mountains, the Hungarian government made a belated and ultimately futile attempt at concessions. On 14 July the Hungarian Diet in Szege- din voted a so-called ‘Pact of Pacification’, incorporating some of the proposals of the Hotel Lambert accord of 18–19 May concerning the nationalities. More comprehensively, on 28 July the Hungarian Diet gave extensive rights to all minorities, including the formerly excluded Jews. For a brief moment the plan conceived by Bălcescu for converting Iancu’s Romanian insurgent army into an ally of the Hungarians and the re-location of the anti-Russian campaign in Moldavia and Walla- chia, seemed attainable. But Kossuth’s aide, General Bem, failed in his attempt at organizing an anti-Russian uprising in Moldavia, which he entered in July. In spite of continuing Hungarian resistance in Tran- sylvania, he was finally defeated and withdrew to Little Wallachia and subsequently to Vidin, on the Danube, where he adopted Islam volun- tarily alongside several Hungarian and Polish superior officers. On 13 August 1849, Kossuth’s General Arthur Görgey also surrendered – to the Russians, rather than to the Austrians – at Világos (Rom. Şiria). The Austrian General Julius Haynau finished off the remainder of Hungarian resistance and had former Premier Lajos Batthyány, thirteen Hungarian generals and one hundred Magyar patriots executed, an unnecessarily gory epilogue which caused an outcry in Europe. The losses were considerable on both sides: 50,000 Hungarian soldiers and an equivalent numbers of Austrians had perished. The Russians lost only 543 men in combat, but cholera claimed no less than 11,028 Russian lives during the conflict. Tens of thousands of peasants of all nationalities died in the ethnic conflics in Hungary and Transylvania.158

158 These figures are quoted in Deák, “The Revolution”, 234. For a different statis- tic, see Micheal Clodfelter, ed., Warfare and Armed Conflicts: a statistical reference to casualty and other figures, 1500–2000 (Jefferson, North Carolina and London, 2002), 217–8, where Hungarian losses are estimated around 45,000 dead (cholera and disease casualties included), against 16,000 Austrians killed or wounded, 14,200 taken in capitivity and 41,000 dead from disease. Russian casualties were reported as 903 killed or dead from wounds, and 13,554 dead from disease. For further statistics, see also 168 1849

‘Blood tribunals’, summary executions, forced religious conversions, the destruction of churches, were all part of the arsenal of violence used in the Hungarian- Romanian-Saxon conflict of 1849. What has been termed the ‘trauma of Világos’ is believed to have influenced the future of all the peoples of East-Central Europe, and to have further confounded their complex interrelations.159 There were long-term political consequences, too, in terms of a shift in general European re-alignments. Although ostensibly the Russian military intervention had been successful, the tsar underestimated the long-term effects his invasion of Hungary would have on future international political faultlines. In the post-48 world, the “leftward movement in the west” and the “rightward movement in the east” only served to widen the gap between the reformist and constitutionalist regimes in Western Europe on the one hand and the increased authoritarianism in Russia and its satellites on the other, a gap with long-term repercussions in European politics.160 Turkey, including its dominions, the Romanian Principalities, offered a safe haven to thousands of Hungarian, Polish and Transyl- vanian refugees, whose extradition was sought by Russia on the basis of Article 2 of the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca of 1774, which forbade Turkey to grant asylum to enemies of Russia. Many of these refugees, however, including the Romanians, had foreign passports – some of them British – and a significant number converted to Islam in order to become exempt from the provision of Article 2. The French Consul in Bucharest Eugène Poujade alleged that many of the conversions had been the result of Ottoman coercion, yet the number of converts was far too high for this claim to be entirely accurate.161 General Bem himself and many of his 11,120 followers – soldiers and officers alike – converted to Islam and joined the Ottoman army. Kemal Karpat has shown that a large number of these converted refugees later settled in

Dan Berindei, Grigore Ploeşteanu, Mihai Sorin Rădulescu, “La violence et les Rou- mains aux XIXe et XXe siècles”, Revue roumaine d’histoire 34, 1–4 (2000): 174–5. 159 Borsi-Kálman, Hungarian Exiles, 90. 160 Saunders, Russia, 139–41. 161 Letters from Eugène Poujade to Tocqueville, dated 6, 23 and 25 October 1849, in Documente privitoare la istoria românilor, 1847–1851 (Hurmuzaki Collection) (Bucharest, 1876–1943), 18: 216, 222–3. Other converts to Islam included Prince Czartoryski’s agent, Michal Czajkovsky, who, under the name Sadyk Pasha, continued to have a major role amidst the East-Central European diasporas. july–august 1849 169 the Ottoman Empire and made a significant contribution to the mod- ernizing programme launched in the Tanzimat period.162 Debates around the fate of the Hungarian and Polish revolutionary leaders and military who surrendered to Turkey after the defeat of the Hungarian war of independence caused a great deal of international tension between September and December 1849. Russia and Austria demanded their extradition, and it would seem that in Britain, Queen Victoria herself and Lord Palmerston were inclined to favour this plan which, however, would have been contrary to popular sympathies. The Porte expected a show of strength from Britain and France to bolster her resistance to Russian and Austrian demands. Britain and France did send ships into Turkish waters, a decision which led to the temporary suspension of diplomatic relations between Turkey, Rus- sia and Austria. There were Austrian plots to recover hostages whom the authorities would have wanted brought to imperial justice. They involved the never carried-out kidnapping and arrest of Kossuth himself, interned in Kütahya in mainland Turkey. The conflict was only resolved on 25 December, when Russia and Turkey reached a compromise: the Poles on Russia’s ‘most wanted’ list were to be expelled from Ottoman territory, with the exception of those who were naturalized citizens of third countries. Those who had converted to Islam were interned at Aleppo, in Syria. The Hungarian refugees (including Kos- suth), though wanted by Austria, remained interned and under surveillance in Turkey. Diplomatic relations with Austria resumed only on 5 April 1850, when an Austrian delegation was allowed into Turkey and persuaded some 1,000 Hungarians to return home on promise of an amnesty and service in the Habsburg army.163 According to Austrian official statistics of the aftermath of the Austro-Russian victory in Hungary, between 1 November 1848 and the end of 1850, 4,628 ‘rebels’ were tried, about 500 condemned to death, of whom 120, including the former Prime Minister Batthyány, as shown, were actually executed. Russia itself, in spite of the tsar’s insistence that Austria should show leniency towards the Hungarians

162 See Kemal H. Karpat, “Kossuth in Turkey: the impact of Hungarian refugees in the Ottoman Empire, 1849–1851”, in idem, Studies on Ottoman Social and Political History: selected articles and essays (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 169–84. 163 Roberts, Nicholas I, 221–2. 170 1849 who had surrendered to the Russian army, dealt drastically with some 1,000 Poles who had initially escaped to Turkey.164 Z In a Parisian hotel, and separated again from his family, who were staying in Plymouth with Marie’s mother, Constantin Rosetti was waiting for news of the outcome of events in Hungary before deciding on his and his fellow exiles’ future: a defeat of the Hungarians meant that they would have to settle down in Paris with no hope of an early return to their country. He was still preoccupied with what he saw as failings in his young wife and pursued his educational messages to her. He extolled, in pure Michelet-ian style, the virtues of “Madame Gari- baldi”, who was “a hero”, as he wrote in a letter to Marie on 29 August 1849.165 “Our National does not mention this, but Mad. Garibaldi was in command of Gari[baldi]’s 4th division, when a courier came to tell him that the enemy had attacked the division. Unperturbed, he said: I have sympathy for any of my enemies who will have anything to do with my 4th division. And, in truth, soon afterwards, Mad. Garibaldi herself arrived, sword in hand, to present his victorious troops to him. They say she performed miracles of valour, bravery, and wisdom in spite of the advanced state of her pregnancy . . . I am telling you all this so that you, too, will love her as I do.”166 The episode was apocry- phal and Rosetti himself revised his account of it in a letter to Marie written much later, in Malta, in December 1853. But in 1848, carried away by the aura of heroism surrounding the protagonist, he narrated how Anita died in her husband’s arms, following a miscarriage she suffered as they fled after the fall of Rome.167 Rosetti’s interest in the story reflects his worries over Marie’s yet unfulfilled role in the Romanian diaspora’s activities and his dissatisfaction with the way in which she allowed herself to be entirely occupied by childcare and her domestic duties. Probably unknown to Rosetti himself, his private reference to Garibaldi participated in a broader, public discourse which was gradually turning the hero of the Risorgimento into a transnational revolutionary symbol.168 On a much more modest scale, as will be seen, the

164 Ibid., 211. 165 Anita Garibaldi (1821–1849), the wife of the Italian revolutionary leader. 166 C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 47. 167 Letter dated 3 December 1853, in ibid., 1: 71. 168 For the creation of a Garibaldi myth see Lucy Riall, Garibaldi: invention of a hero (Yale University Press, 2007). july–august 1849 171

Romanians were about to learn how to manipulate the new technolo- gies of print and publicity in order to present themselves in Europe and at home as the – perhaps only – legitimate counter-elite of their nascent state. However, for the Rosettis and their circle exile was just beginning. At long last, news reached them that the Hungarians had been defeated: “[. . .] for how much longer are we meant to suffer? For how many more years will we be weeping in our chains? I do not know, but I am certain this cannot last for more that 2–3–4 years. Happy those who will survive and who will take advantage of the intervening time to prepare themselves for that moment”, Rosetti wrote in his diary on 19 September, on the eve of the first anniversary of the defeat of the revolution in his own country, Wallachia.169

169 Rosetti, Diary, 286. SEPTEMBER 1849

By September 1849, the Hungarian and Polish leaders who had survived the armed conflicts of 1848–49 had joined the Romanian forty- eighters in exile. Nicolae Bălcescu, too, fleeing the Austrian and Russian authorities, arrived in Paris, in disguise, joining Rosetti, Ion Brătianu and Ion Voinescu II. Ion Ghica, as Wallachian agent in the Ottoman capital, was joined there by Eliade Rădulescu and other Romanians of the pro-Turkish faction. Lajos Kossuth was first interned in Bursa, in Asia Minor, and later in Kütahya, in mainland Turkey, with other Hungarian, Polish and Romanian revolutionaries, many of whom knew each other and had worked together in previous years. For quite a long time, Polish agents provocateurs had been actively promoting an anti-Russian uprising in the Principalities, thus giving Russia an extra argument in their rationale for invading the provinces. The pan- European interconnectedness of the events of 1848–49 is a dimension often overlooked in nation-centred accounts of the revolutions. The activities of the international networks of migrant agents, militants, and spies which criss-crossed Central Europe overlapped with the diplomatic efforts on the ‘surface’. To follow in any detail the comings and goings and the meetings of the Italian, Polish, Hungarian, and Romanian agents in the 1840s is a virtually impossible task: suf- fice it to say that, in and after 1848, Venice, Turin, Rome, Paris, the Frankfurt Parliament, Pest, Bucharest, Iaşi, Constantinople and Kü- tahya became the main centres of concerted diplomatic and clandestine efforts, aiming variously at overthrowing foreign occupation (whether Habsburg in Italy and Hungary or Ottoman in South-East Europe) and at launching the ultimately elusive ‘universal revolution’.170 Zinca Golescu was aware that, with the political situation in South- East Europe worsening, her sons’ liberation had become unlikely. The arrest and internment of Lajos Kossuth and of the Hungarian Generals Bem, Dembinsky, Mészáros, and Perczel marked, in the Wallachian

170 For further details on the Italian involvement in mediating a Central-European dialogue of Hungarians, South Slavs, Romanians and Poles, and on the occult activities of the revolutionary agents before and after 1848, see Raluca Tomi, “Romeni e italiani nel periodo dell’esilio rivoluzionario (settembre 1849–dicembre 1852). Affinità. Opinioni, Contatti,” in Annuario (Venice-Bucharest), 3 (2001): 205–21. september 1849 173 lady’s perception, the “end of freedom for the nationalities.”171 The Golescu women rejoiced, however, over the Porte’s refusal to submit to the Russian ultimatum to deliver the Hungarian and Polish refugees interned under Ottoman protection. This refusal, Zinca hoped prematurely, would trigger a European war, in spite of the dismal political situation in France, a country which, she commented, had “gone back- wards a hundred years.”172 In September 1849, Zinca Golescu herself was in Constantinople, under semi-arrest, on her way back from Bursa, where two of her sons, Radu and Alexandru, now lived in exile. Uncertain whether she would be allowed to re-enter Wallachia, she demanded to see the Grand Vizier Reshid Pasha Mustapha. An interview was granted but eventually never took place: the boyar lady was made to wait for three hours in the Vizier’s ante-chamber, watching foreign ministers go past, yet was never received.173 Eventually, Zinca and her niece, Catinca Rosetti, were allowed by the Ottoman authorities to leave Constantinople: they were also given letters of recommendation from the Ottoman For- eign Minister Ali Pasha to Omer Pasha, the governor of Bucharest, thus pre-empting Russian opposition to the ‘revolutionary’ women’s return. “In the Capital [i.e. Bucharest] the rumour is that mother and I have become mad and are wearing black to mourn the Constitution [of 1848]”, wrote Catinca to her uncles in mid-November 1849. “But we feel honoured to be thus calumnied [. . .].”174 However, the Russian authorities did find a way of showing their displeasure, by not allowing the women passage through Bucharest, where Zinca had business interests to attend to, and forcing them instead to retreat straight to the family’s manor at Goleşti. Effingham Grant continued to be a faithful ally to the beleaguered Golescu family. Zinca was full of praise: “He sends newspapers and, while I was away, it is through him that passed all my correspondence with my daughter, in secret, for without his help all those letters would have been intercepted. All the money, except the latest instalment, was transmitted by him and from now on he has taken charge of all the sums I am going to send to you and to your brothers in Bursa. He has offered to accommodate me under his roof whenever I passed through

171 Fotino 2: 341. 172 Ibid., 346 and 351. 173 3 September 1849, in ibid., 340. 174 8/20 November 1849, in ibid., 373. 174 1849

Bucharest. [. . .] If you see Mme Rosety [sic] tell her how much obliged I am to her worthy brother and that I congratulate her on having such a brother.”175 As political pariahs, the Golescu women recoiled from high society circles in Bucharest which, they thought, were replete with moral corruption and political opportunism. They were happy to withdraw at Goleşti and live in ‘republican’ austerity. Their cousin Hélène Bengesco was giving her son, Iancu, a “republican education”, reported Catinca Rosetti. “. . . all day he has the Marseillaise sung to him, the Carmagnole and Monsieur Guizot et ses amis, and the little one claps his hands and shouts encore; Bengesco is already seriously concerned about his son, who one day risks being compromised in the eyes of the Russians. In a word, you are going to have a nephew worthy of yourselves.”176

175 Ibid., 369; here also revenue received from family estates and sums of money sent to sons. 176 Ibid., 392. The boy was to die at a young age. DECEMBER 1849

While their families were being harassed back home, the exiles in Bursa and Paris continued their attempts to create a united anti- Russian front in order to co-ordinate their propaganda efforts in the West, in Central Europe, in Constantinople and in Asia Minor. As the Hungarian revolution had expired and, in Rosetti’s words,177 “death and tyranny rolled out their shroud over [European] society”, internal organization, agreement on a coherent political programme and efficient propaganda became the priorities of the Romanian diaspora, divided both ideologically and geographically. The sense of threat and marginalisation did produce a re-alignment of the moderate center (Ion Ghica, Nicolae Bălcescu, Gheorghe Magheru and Alexandru G. Golescu-Albu) and the radical left (Rosetti, the Brătianu brothers and Alexandru C. Golescu-Negru), leading to the relative isolation of the ‘conservative’ Eliade and Tell. A steering committee, made up of Dumitru Brătianu, Bălcescu, Ion Ghica, Magheru and Rosetti, was appointed on 2 December 1949. A Commission for Propaganda was also created around the same time.178 In early December 1849, Alexandru C. Golescu-Albu, the strategist of the Romanian diaspora interned in Asia Minor, addresed a collective letter to his two brothers, his cousin and his friend Dumitru Brătianu in Paris. “For the last fortnight or so we have been living in the company of the Hungarians and Poles – exiled, like us, here at Bursa – people who are probably going to be interned in a few days’ time at Kütahya, in the middle of Asia Minor, at the very heart of barbarity. With the Poles we have fraternised at first sight, if I may say so; with the Hungarians we have been less lucky, but we hope that we will shortly get closer to them and establish in our relations to them the same intimacy, the same ardent sympathy that we are cultivating daily – that is bursting forth daily, one might say – during our brief, and spied-upon, meetings with the dear, brave Poles.”179 The

177 Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 42; and letter from Rosetti to Dumitru Brătianu, 24 August 1849, in C.A. Rosetti: corespondență, ed. Marin Bucur (Bucharest, 1980), 218–9. 178 Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu 1: 43. 179 Fotino 2: 395. 176 1849 principal issue raised in these meetings was co-ordination across all of the ethnic diasporas, and the internal organisation of each community in part. As far as the Romanian community was concerned, Golescu- Albu had four main proposals, the first of which was the election of a three-member steering committee that would reflect all the political and regional orientations of Romanians everywhere (i.e the Danubian Principalities, Transylvania, Bessarabia and Bukovina). Secondly, he wished the Ottoman Porte to be reassured that seeking their country’s autonomy did not preclude the Romanians’ allegiance to the Ottoman suzerain authority, and he wanted this point to be included at the top of the organisation’s statutes. Thirdly, given the fact that Greek was the lingua franca in the Balkans and Asia Minor, he suggested editing a Greek-language newspaper of liberal orientation which could carry the programmes and the anti-Russian campaign of the Italian, Polish, Hungarian and Romanian democrats and would literally re-fashion “public opinion in the East, infested as it is today by the illusion of Russian omnipotence.” Fourthly, the captains of the many small Greek commercial vessels carrying Russia’s voice in the region, were to be instructed instead to gradually spread the message of the Christian peoples under Ottoman domination along the Danube and the Black Sea, into Asia Minor, the Adriatic and the Mediterranean. Therefore, Golescu believed, the main focus of the diaspora’s action should move from “enlightened” Paris and London, where information was easier to come by, over to Serbia, Bulgaria, the Danubian Principalities, Tur- key and Greece – that is, to an “Orient” still lost in “darkness” and still cut off from essential channels of communication.180 The year 1849 ended on a sobering note: the Hungarians and the Italians had been defeated, and the Romanians abroad were bracing themselves up for a long exile. On 28 December 1849, Hermione Asa- chi, the future wife of Edgar Quinet, wrote to Athénaïs Michelet, commenting on the public tribute paid by Michelet to his friend Auguste De Gerando Teleki in his lecture of the previous day at the Collège de France. De Gerando, married to the Hungarian Countess Emma Teleki, had fought alongside the Hungarians and had died, heart- broken, shortly after their defeat.181 Michelet’s salute to the fallen man symbolically closed a year of broken hopes for the temporarily

180 Ibid., 398. 181 Michelet, Correspondance, 6: 300. december 1849 177 defeated nations of Central and Eastern Europe. De Gerando’s portrait was to hang in the Dumesnils’ salon and to preside over gatherings of Michelet’s family, friends, disciples and exiled revolutionaries throughout the 1850s.182 Gathered for a New Year celebration in a Parisian home, the exiles’ first toast was for Romania. “I then suggested another toast to the memory of the firefighters”, Rosetti added in his diary entry for 1st January 1850, “and two hours after midnight I was back home, embracing my lovely little daughter, my sublime little daughter. Her name is Liberty, her name is Sophie. She was born wearing the shirt of happiness. I therefore hope – for sweet is hope – that this year will be a happy one.”183

182 Adèle and Alfred Dumesnil were Michelet’s daughter and son-in-law. 183 Rosetti, Diary, 289. The firefighters had fallen heroically in September 1848, fighting against the advancing Turkish troops in Bucharest. The “shirt of happiness” was an allusion to a poem Rosetti wrote in his youth. 1850 ‘LA ROUMANIE’

[. . .] quand la France pousse un cri de douleur ou de joie, l’humanité entière souffre ou se réjouit. Dumitru Brătianu to Jules Michelet, 10 March 1850184 After the defeat of the revolutions of 1848 in Central and East Europe, Paris became the adoptive city as well as a transit and meeting point for many of the exiled revolutionaries. The houses of the Michelets, Dumesnils, Alexander Herzen and Adam Mickiewicz were among the focal points of such meetings. The republican sculptor Auguste Pré- ault, a friend of Michelet’s, also received the exiles, facilitating encounters between the foreigners and the French artists and writers of the day, Courbet and Georges Sand among them.185 The Russians Mikhail Bakunin and Ivan Golovin, the Italian writer Niccolò Tommaseo – a former member of Daniele Manin’s provisional government in Venice – the Hungarian László Teleki, the Rosettis and their Franco- Romanian circles, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx and lesser-known Ger- man refugees, were among the expats whose paths intersected at that time in Paris. As the political climate veered towards reaction and conservatism in Europe, closer bonds of friendship, marriage and political sympathies now united the circles of Michelet, Quinet, Mickiewicz, Rosetti and Brătianu. On 12 March 1849, the widowed Michelet had married the much younger Athénaïs Mialaret, a former governess in the household of the Princess Alexandrina Cantacuzino in Vienna, a connection which brought him closer to the Romanian cause and its main expatriate champions in Paris. Edgar Quinet himself, widowed in March 1851, was to marry, on 21/2 July 1852, the Romanian Hermione Asachi.186 She was the well-educated daughter of the Mol- davian poet, editor and politician Gheorghe Asachi and a published

184 Michelet, Correspondance, 6: 356–7. 185 Letter of Adèle to Alfred Dumesnil, 1852, in Documente inedite din arhivele franceze privitoare la români în secolul al XIX–lea, ed. Marin Bucur (Bucharest, 1969), 205. Cf. also N. P. Smochină, “Sur les émigrés roumains à Paris de 1850 à 1856”, Mélanges de l’école roumaine en France, 11 (1933): 160. 186 ‘Asachi’ in Romanian, ‘Asaky’ in French-language sources. ‘la roumanie’ 179 author in her native country. Significantly, she was also the translator into Romanian of Silvio Pellico’s Doveri degli Uomini (On the duties of men, 1834). The choice of a Carbonaro, a liberal freedom-fighter who braved Austrian conservatism and repression, must have recommended her to Quinet.187 On 18 January 1850, responding to a congratulatory letter from Marie Rosetti, who had been attending his lectures at the Collège, Jules Michelet set the tone for the next stage of his life: retired from public life, he lived “like a monk”, he explained, but this seclusion enabled him to “get a better view, understanding and admiration, from our pale West, for your heroic East.”188 In her response, Marie defined presciently the shared experience which was going to unite Michelet, Quinet and the Romanian ‘proscrits’ over the next few years: the pain of exile and of the martyrdom of nations. “Pray, then, good monk”, she wrote, picking up on Michelet’s assumed persona, “and, as you touch one by one the rosary beads of nations in mourning, arrest your eye from time to time on a tiny one: la Roumanie.”189 To Constantin Rosetti, however, the lives of the East-European exiles in Paris must have seemed less than heroic. The year 1850 started with continuous in-fighting among the Moldo-Wallachian émigrés around issues of power and tactics. Rosetti was awakened from his despon- dency only by the occasional moment of grace. In mid-January the Rosettis were invited to a “splendid dinner” by their shoemaker, friend and political ally, Charlemagne Hallegrain. “In truth, it is the kindness in the heart of some people that will keep us from falling into misanthropy; it shows us that man could be good if his education were perfected”, Rosetti wrote.190 On 28 January 1850 Rosetti’s second child, a son, was born. “At seven in the evening my wife gave birth to an infant and the midwife announced the baby’s sex by saying: ‘un Romain’ [a Roman]. So, my beloved son, be a true Romanian. I may give you the name Charle- magne, because he is the patron of the day. [. . .] May you not repeat

187 Despre îndatoririle oamenilor (On the duties of men, Iaşi, 1843). Silvio Pel- lico was a Piedmontese poet (1789–1854), a Carbonaro, and a representative of the Risorgimento, imprisoned by the Habsburg authorities for his revolutionary activities, an experience which he narrated in I Miei Prigioni (1832; translated into English in 1853 as My Prisons). 188 “mieux le suivre des yeux, le comprendre, admirer, de ce pâle Occident, votre Orient héroïque”, in Michelet, Correspondance, 6: 322. 189 Ibid., 325. 190 Rosetti, Diary, 299. 180 1850 my mistakes, and may you have all the virtues of a Romanian, perfected through the morality and Christian faith of my mother Elena.”191 On February 1st, the child was baptized Mircea Charlemagne – in a civil ceremony, like other children in French republican circles – with Charlemagne Hallegrain and Ştefan Golescu as witnesses.192 The Rosettis’ marriage continued to be overshadowed by Constan- tin’s unrealistic expectations of his wife as a companion to his activities, an insatisfaction which underlied the couple’s early years together and was not to be resolved until around 1853–54. Rosetti felt ill throughout April and May 1850: it was most probably a psychosomatic condition triggered by his considerable domestic burdens, an agitated social life and the frustratingly ineffectual activities of the Romanian association in Paris. Adèle Dumesnil, Michelet’s daughter, who was attending the lectures at the Collège de France alongside her husband, Alfred, reported to Rosetti one day that the historian could not take his “tear- ful eyes” off his Romanian disciple’s ill-looking face. “I understand, dear Michelet, I understand what you were reading on my face and why you suffered!”, Rosetti noted in his diary with his characteristic flair for drama. “Eh! How could you not suffer to see citoyena , young still, and exiled, picking each of your words, and hoping that he might one day nourish his free compatriots with them; sitting next to him, you saw Death, laughing at all his plans, pains and efforts, ready to hurl him into the chaos of oblivion.”193 The musical soirées in the home of Alfred Dumesnil and his wife, Adèle, appear to have been a constant feature in the lives of the Roma- nian and Polish exiles and their soon-to-be-exiled Parisian friends, light-heartened occasions which enlivened a morose political context. Against music by Handel, Marcelli, Bach and Beethoven played by Adèle and her music master, the exchanges of ideas and friendship between these people thrown together by the tortuous events of mid-nineteenth-century European history acquired quasi-religious overtones, judging from Dumesnil’s exalted letters to his friend, Eugène Noël. “They are the simplest, the most innocent of people, the arch-pacifiers”, Dumesnil wrote on 18 March 1850. “To see them, to listen to them, one has a premonition of eternal beauty. It is reflected in their eyes, in their gestures, in their voices. All I would ask for

191 Rosetti, Diary, 291. 192 Later extract of certificate of baptism, 18/30 June 1855, at Biblioteca Naţională a României, St. Georges Collection, the Dinu V. Rosetti Archive, P. XLIII, Dossier 5. 193 Entry for 1 May 1850, Rosetti, Diary, 298. ‘la roumanie’ 181 would be to be able one day to speak of a few people I met in this life in whom I recognised the resplendence of this eternal beauty. So far, I have only been able to contemplate them in humility. Seeing them, I think of all those who died and whom I would like so much to have met, and the man standing in front of me is sanctified by the memories of these people. Mickiewicz has always intimidated me. He has suffered so much, I hardly dare speak to him. I am not worthy enough.”194 The portrait of the ‘honorary Hungarian’, the late Auguste De Gerando, presided over these informal gatherings where the dead and the living communed in a way that Michelet must have cherished. In spite of Rosetti’s misgivings about his wife’s shortcomings, a ‘legend’ was being forged in this small circle of friends and allies, as Dumesnil and Michelet listened to Marie’s account of the Wallachian revolution of 1848. Alfred Dumesnil became a zealous propagator of the Marie Rosetti story, shortly to be published by Michelet as the ‘legend of Madame Rosetti’: In September 1848, after the Wallachian revolution, the principal members of the provisional government were arrested by the Turks and incarcerated in a fortress; they were to be delivered to the Russians, i.e. sent to Siberia. Madame [Rosetti] obtained the permission to see her husband. How? Carrying in her arms her infant daughter who had just been born – the Turkish soldiers have such a respect for children, that the mother was often allowed to go for the sake of the child, the prisons opened their gates and Madame [Rosetti] was thus able to save her husband and seventeen of his friends destined to certain death. I was very happy to be able to tell this story to Mickiewicz the other day; I took him aside and pointed this heroic young woman to him. I shall always remember the evening at Mad. Quinet’s when the lady herself told us the story of this liberation; I saw her again later that evening. I told her in the presence of her husband and of those she had saved: “Madame, happy are you amongst women, you have earned a beauty that nothing can destroy, a beauty at the sight of which heroes are born.”[. . .] Thus went our evening; after the music, we had tea. Together at the same table, people from all the nations. I told myself: this is how all the souls who love and are meant to love each other will be united in eternity. What beautiful exchanges there will be in these meetings of souls, and how offertlessly they will be penetrated by the words of the psalm: enarant [sic] coeli gloriam Dei.195

194 Documente inedite, ed. Bucur, 29. 195 Ibid., 29–30. 182 1850

It must have been around this time that Marie sat for their friend Rosenthal’s iconic masterpiece, Revolutionary Romania. (See Fig. 2) Depicted in half profile, Marie appears in a graceful but defiant pose, dressed in an ethnic Romanian richly embroidered blouse, wearing a necklace of golden coins, an item of traditional peasant dress. Her left hand clutches a tricolour flag and her right fist is clenched round the handle of a dagger. In the background, and contrasting with her serene and composed expression, small figures engaged in battle appear sil- houetted against a dark, storm-ravaged sky, a reference to armed resistance in Bucharest in September 1848, and an illustration of how conflict should diminish in the face of an untroubled sense of right and justice. The painter’s signature, discovered under the bordering passepartout in the early 1970s, reads: “C. D. Rosenthal, l’émigration valaque, 1850”, as though the artist had wanted to make sure that the experience of shared revolutionary exile remained inscribed for posterity.196 In counter-point to the men’s fraternizing, a parallel community of their spouses was being built around more feminine concerns of health and child-rearing: births, breast-feeding and weaning, physical ailments and the perpetual, daily, dangers that threatened the body in the nineteenth century were written and sympathized about, uniting Minna Quinet, the historian’s first wife, Marie Rosetti, Paul Batail- lard’s first wife, Thérèse,197 Athénaïs Michelet and Adèle Dumesnil, against the backdrop of more intellectual and political concerns. They were all in the audience of Michelet’s lectures at the Collège de France on the day when the historian talked about “woman”, “this mysterious and difficult topic.”198 In spite of such glowing moments of intellectual and emotional con- viviality, these groups of people brought together by the hazards of history must have felt that the horizons darkened. The political context in France itself was not encouraging and news from Romania continued to be bad: two years on, former forty-eighters, still imprisoned after the defeat of the revolution, were either ill or dying, and their relatives were not allowed to visit.199

196 Dan Grigorescu, Trei pictori de la 1848 (Bucharest, 1973), 218–9. 197 The daughter of the French writer and salonnière Mélanie Waldor. 198 Minna Quinet, letter to Mme. Bataillard dated 27 April 1850, Arhivele Naţionale (The Romanian National Archives), Bucharest, Fonds Bataillard, Dossier 5/173, 7. 199 Rosetti, Diary, 305. APRIL–SEPTEMBER 1850

The young Golescu ‘republicans’, isolated at the family manor at Goleşti, killed their time with letter-writing, gardening and attempts at reforming village life: by personal example, the ladies of the manor inspired village women to wear Romanian national dress, similar to the garments worn by Marie Rosetti in Rosenthal’s portrait.200 Things elsewhere were equally slow-paced, but less leisurely. In June and July 1850, still in Bursa, Alexandru Golescu-Albu, continued to share his musings with the Parisian branch. His latest project was the creation of a secret society with a mission to unify the consciences of the divided and dispersed Romanians in all the provinces and to create an awareness of a common national destiny. His almost obsessive fretting over nation-building projects was due, Albu explained, to the special nature of their group’s exile in Asia Minor: while the Parisians could divert themselves from the thought of their “malheureuse patrie” with the distractions offered by an eventful political and public life, as well as with the entertainment offered by the big metropolis, the ‘Eastern’ group felt they were mere wanderers in a wild land, where they felt at odds with the native culture and mores. Their minds were occupied solely by “the painful image of our homeland, [. . .] the thought of an embattled Romania, poised against Tsarism, against the Magyars, the Serbs, the Saxons, against Austria and the incertitude of the future.[. . .] What could we interpose between our hearts and the misfortunes of our homeland to distract us for a while from their contemplation? Could that be nature? Nature here is undoubtedly beautiful, but it is inanimate; man here does not know how to embellish it with the work of his hands. Could it be intercourse with society? But society here is dead, ideas and feelings have no shrine and no adepts in the East, and if ideas and feelings live anywhere here, it is in the minds, in the hearts of the Poles, the Hungarians, the Romanians; these feelings are in the main expectation, pain, vague presentiments, and each of these nationalities [lives] separately with its own idols, with its passions, and its often conflicting dreams – sworn enemies to each other.”201

200 Letter from Catinca Rosetti to Ştefan Golescu, 11 April 1850, in Fotino 3: 29. 201 Ibid., 59. 184 1850

In the same letter, Golescu-Albu appealed to the Parisian branch for information on the precise timelines of the recent Magyar-Romanian hostilities in Transylvania. He was gathering the information on the request of the Poles in Bursa, he explained, in the awareness that “our interests and the events that took place in various parts of Romania are still too minor, too remote and of too little consequence for the political world to take an interest; the only certain manner of making ourselves heard is for Poland and Hungary to speak on our behalf as well as on their own.”202 Golescu-Albu continued to reflect on the failure of the European revolutions of 1848, and in particular of the Romanian revolution, in a lengthy letter from Bursa dated August–September 1850, a letter which has to be considered as one of the foundational texts of the Romanian diaspora in the 1850s. He identified the Wallachian provisional government’s mistakes in a few key areas. The decision not to send troops to confront the Russian forces deployed along the river Prut in Moldavia in early June 1848 had appeased a few “reactionary officers”, while alienating the rank-and-file, and the failure to enact legislation contrary to the interests of the 4,000 oligarchs (i.e. the landowning boyars) enriched by the people’s “sweat”, had alienated the two million peasants who had initially rallied round the revolutionary cause. As for General Odobescu (Marie Rosetti’s former employer, who had betrayed the revolutionaries, but was pardoned on Rosetti’s insistence), he should have been court-martialled within twenty-four hours of his betrayal and either executed or pardoned and sent straight to “the emperor of Russia with a kick in the derrière.”203 In addition – Albu believed – the Wallachian revolutionaries had failed to make it clear that they were fighting the revolution on behalf of all the Romanian provinces, not just of Wallachia: “[. . .] Transylva- nia, the Banat were in the same situation, they too were threatened by Pan-Slavism and were severely menaced by the Magyars. What have we done to help them against this double danger, to turn our pain to the profit of our brethren, to seal for ever in the minds of the communities the idea of the identity, of the confraternity of interests of the five provinces? Nothing, absolutely nothing!” The Wallachians had failed to grasp the complexities of imperial allegiances in the Austrian Empire: “[. . .] we should have known why some of the Transylvanians

202 Ibid., 62. 203 Ibid., 92. In French, and emphasized, in the original. april–september 1850 185 shouted “long live the Emperor of Austria” (just as we shouted long live our Suzerain the Sultan) while the enlightened from the Banat joined the Magyars against their Emperor, etc., etc., in short we should have learnt how to be of use to them and, in our fatal hour, we could have turned our defeat to some use by following the example of the Serbs on the other side of the Danube, more than twenty thousand of whom ran to help their brethren in Austria. Then we would not have made the grave mistake, to say the least – for which the main culprit is Eliad – the grave mistake of crossing our arms, singing glory to the Magyars and shame to the Transylvanians, and thus alienating the hearts of the same [Transylvanian] Romanians who, a few days earlier, had come to offer us their breasts, their love and all the faculties of their intelligence.”204 Equally harmful, in Golescu-Albu’s view, was the in-fighting among the émigrés and the tensions pitting even very small groups against each other: Alexandru G. Golescu-Negru and his friends (i.e. Rosetti, the Brătianus and others) were bitterly opposing Eliade and his allies as well as Ion Ghica’s more moderate faction in Constantinople.205 Albu’s advice to all of them was to look towards the more cohesive and disciplined Polish diaspora for a model of how to organize their own in the future.206 Ion Eliade Rădulescu had repeatedly denounced the more radical of the Romanian émigrés who would have wished their country to be rid of Ottoman suzerainty, at the same time as of Russian protection. On this, the White had the following to say: [. . .] it is not true, as Mr. Eliad claims in his latest letter, that the Roma- nians who are disengaging themselves from the idea of Turkish suzerainty are traitors, idiots, or deranged, bad patriots; may Mr. Eliade [sic] forgive me, but this manner of understanding the public good, of defining the true Wallachian, is incomplete, narrow, mistaken, and is more- over detrimental and dangerous in the highest degree for the country’s future; for while it is good for the Diaspora to abide firmly and deter- minedly by the principles of the revolution, by the party of the Porte

204 Ibid., 93–4. The “enlightened from the Banat” refers to Eftimie Murgu and his allies, who sought a rapprochement with the Hungarian provisional government in 1848–9. For the ethnic entanglements of 1848–49 in Transylvania, see above, 136 sqq. For further details on Romanian-Habsburg relations, see the comprehensive study of Liviu Maior, In the Empire. Habsburgs and Romanians: from dynastic loyalty to national identity (Cluj-Napoca, 2008). 205 Fotino 3: 96. 206 Ibid., 96 and 106. 186 1850

(as opposed to the Muscovite party), under the double banner of Suzer- ainty and autonomy, it is equally good, very good, that some, a few of you, should detach themselves from the crowd and form a new party, the party of the future (in opposition to us, the party of the present), the party of the disappointed who can no longer expect anything from Turkey (as opposed to ours, which still relies on this Power) a party therefore which, having lost al faith in the Turkish government, or in the English and the French, or any other government, should renounce all action, all attempt to influence cabinets, and should build its hopes on the future, on the eternal unity, on the public opinion of the masses. Such a party should engage in long-term action, setting its sights solely on a theoretical dream of a future Romania, irrespective of the difficulties that might arise in the present or of the parochial spirit which pre- vails in our countries, of the frictions, of governmental interests and of the multiple and varied obstacles in the politics of the moment.207 What Golescu-Albu had in mind in effect was the transformation of the radicals in Paris – people like Rosetti and the Brătianu brothers, far too radical for the conciliatory politics of the moment – into a pressure group mobilized to threaten and blackmail the Porte into listening to the voice of the Romanians in exchange for their recognition of Ottoman suzerainty. Albu’s championship of pressure politics and pluralism went as far as to suggest the parallel creation of a group of militants from Transylvania, Banat and Bukovina who would support the cause of Austrian suzerainty as a counter-weight to Russian expansionism. In his thinking, the inter-play of ‘independents’, pro-Turks and pro-Austrians would secure a leverage system for the Romanians’ nation-building blueprints.208 This system, Albu believed, was supposed to show to the European cabinets that “things have got to the point where the two empires (Turkey and Austria), equally weak, equally heterogeneous, are being threatened by the intrigues and the ambitions of the other (Russia), which Europe can hardly control, and even if it could, it [Europe] is in no position to prevent the havoc which Russia’s quiet advance, and the carrot and stick game she plays with the various nationalities, will cause in the two empires in question.” One way out of this situation, he argued, was for a strong Austria and an internationally-supported Turkey to isolate Russia internationally, thus guaranteeing the “European balance.”209

207 Ibid., 98. 208 Ibid., 100. 209 Ibid. april–september 1850 187

Golescu-Albu is unsparing in his judgement of the leaders of the Romanian diaspora, including himself, his brothers and cousins and the other members of the provisional government of 1848: “[. . .] we are men of the heart, of devotion, of morality and honesty; out of all those who have taken active part in the movement, who have conspired for the revolution, we are a small number who did this without any regard for personal interest or prejudice, who wanted a revolution for the people and by the people, for the good of the nation, who far from hoping for personal gain, denounced and risked everything they possessed as members of the privileged classes, by swearing on the abolition of titles and privileges, the rehabilitation of every man, and the inauguration of the reign of equality and fraternity among the Romanians.”210 Yet what this group of well-meaning idealists (Tell, Magheru, Brătianu, Voinescu, Albu himself, the other Golescus, and Rosetti) lacked were specialised, practical skills as well as a thorough understanding of what motivated the Romanians outside the two principalities.211 In addition, many were too radical and passionate to be able to form a firm, pragmatic, steering committee. Their role was in propaganda, in the press or as agents in the Balkans and the West. The only five qualifying for leadership were the more pragmatic Nico- lae Bălcescu, Alexandru Golescu-Negru, Ion Ghica, and the Transyl- vanians Ioan Maiorescu and Ion Ionescu dela Brad. They had been responsible for inserting into the 1848 constitution the most important, and unrealized, of the 21 articles: article 13 which stipulated the allocation of a minimum of around thirteen hectares of land to each peasant, thus turning the peasants into men of property, citizens and soldiers.212 While the entire East-European diaspora was organising itself, agonising over the mistakes of the past, and bracing itself up for the battles to come, the Romanian community rejoiced with the Golescu family over the forthcoming marriage of Zoe, Zinca’s grand-daughter, to Effingham Grant. The family matriarch herself announced the news to her exiled sons: “This young man has been a Godsend to us. In the disgrace that we now find ourselves in, so to speak, to see such a good party present himself and ask for our little one’s hand, demanding no dowry – he said that was no concern of his – is truly providential and

210 Ibid., 104. 211 Ibid., 105. 212 Ibid., 109. 188 1850 quite a novelty in our country. This young man is not wealthy – others in his place would have sought a big fortune and would have succeeded, for he has a good career ahead and not one of our rich young ladies would have said no to him. It is one more reason to respect this young man who only looked for a modest and good girl to be his wife, one whose only source of happiness in this world from now on will be to render her husband happy.” The family did intend, however, to offer a dowry to the bride-to-be, and were hoping to sell lands to raise the 4,000 ducats needed, which, as Zinca herself admitted, was nothing compared to “the enormous dowries demanded here.”213 The bride herself wrote to her uncles of her “awareness of my noble duties to come, which I want to fulfil to my heart’s content in order to make myself worthy of the sacred name I am going to have” as well as of the sadness at leaving her family. “Yet I would be unfair to Grant to be regretting my family so much; it is true I am forsaking a lot for him, but he too has given me everything, because he has given me his heart.”214 The marriage took place at Goleşti on 28 October 1850, and glasses of champagne were clinked in honour of the newly- weds and of the “beloved émigrés.”215 One of the Golescu brothers, Ştefan, had intended to defy the decree prohibiting the exiles’ return and travel from Paris incognito to attend his niece’s wedding, but had been prudently dissuaded by Zinca.216 In a letter to the same Ştefan, dated 24 October, the bride’s mother, Ana, voiced concerns about the possibility of Grant being posted far away, but otherwise the union appeared to be a happy one from its early days. By December 1850, Effingham Grant, who continued passing on money and letters between Goleşti and Paris, was reporting to his young wife’s exiled uncles that she was relishing her new role “in spite of being away from her family and married to an Englishman.” As for himself, he continued, “I can affirm most categorically that since our marriage I have been the happiest of mortals and that, irrespective of my political opinions (which the Republic of Goleşti regards as highly dubious), I can only rejoice at the Revolution which brought me this little Republican who with her love has placed me among the elect.”217

213 Letter dated 1 June 1850, in ibid., 39–40. 214 Ibid., 69. 215 Letter from Zinca to Ştefan Golescu, 6 November 1850, in ibid., 135. 216 Letter dated 16 July 1850, in ibid., 70–4. 217 Letter dated 20 December 1850 in ibid., 150. 1851 LONDON. MAZZINI’S EUROPEAN DEMOCRATIC COMMITTEE

And not only is England a safe place of refuge for every foreigner who, in his native land, has fallen a victim to civil discords, but she is, in fact, the last sanctuary, in Europe, open to the human mind itself. Louis Blanc, 1848. Historical Revelations218 With France’s international role as defender of civil and political liberties in free-fall, it was London’s turn to rise as a beacon of freedom for the world and a meeting point for exiled and persecuted political dissenters. The French authorities were becoming concerned that arrests, surveillance and intimidation at home drove French and foreign agitators away from France to London, which quickly acquired a reputation as an international centre for the activities of conspiratorial groups aiming to launch a pan-European revolution. A report of the Parisian prefect of police of August 1851 listed an Association of exiled French socialist democrats, a Socialist democratic committee of German refugees, a Hungarian democratic society, a section of the Polish Democratic Committee and an Italian national committee, all operating on British soil.219 In the summer of 1850, Giuseppe Mazzini, exiled in London, had formed the Central European Democratic Committee, an underground association bringing together some of the leading republicans, revolutionaries and radicals expelled from their countries by the defeat of the 1848 movements, people such as the former Montagnard Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, the Pole Albert Darász and the German professor of philosophy Arnold Ruge. Romanian moderates such as Ion Ghica and Nicolae Bălcescu were reluctant to join the Committee and risk appearing, in Ghica’s words, as the “anarchists and enemies of social order” feared by the Turkish and the European governments.220

218 Louis Blanc, 1848. Historical Revelations, inscribed to Lord Normanby (London, 1858), Preface, v–vi. 219 I. Tchernoff,Associations et sociétés secrètes sous la deuxième république, 1848– 1851 (Paris, 1905), 343, 373–6. 220 Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 44–5. 190 1851

Dumitru Brătianu, who had no such qualms, applied to join, in the firm belief that common action would be a step towards greater cohe- sion among the European and Central-European left and especially among the exiled revolutionaries. In April 1851 he arrived in London with a letter to Mazzini from Edgar Quinet and another to Ledru- Rollin from Michelet. “Mr. Bratiano aîné” was, Michelet wrote in his letter, “one of the founders of Wallachian liberty and his country’s foremost thinker.”221 The formal Wallachian offer of underground revolutionary collaboration was accepted by the Committee in mid-June and the Committee’s “Manifesto to the Romanians” welcomed their adoption into the great family of the peoples in preparation for the great battle between “the spirit of good and the spirit of evil” in the world.222 The Romanians responded on 11 September with a “Mani- festo to the European Committee”. “Forgotten, unknown by the peoples of the West (Occident), by our own blood brethren of the Latin family, misunderstood by the peoples of the East (Orient), harassed by our neighbours, alone we have walked erect throught the times and the numberless tempests that Asia kept hurling towards us.”223 The Romanians declared themselves ready to join “the holy crusade for democracy” and aim towards building a “Danubian confederation of equal nations”.224 Mazzini also negotiated an agreement between Hungarians and Romanians prior to Brătianu’s admission to the Committee: a pledge towards a peaceful solution to ethnic differences in Transylvania, guaranteed universal suffrage for all the ethnic minorities, as well as a truce pending victory and the start of a European Democratic Congress were among Mazzini’s conditions for admitting Hungarians and Romanians into the republican brotherhood.225 In his visionary enthusiasm, Mazzini obviously glossed over ethnic, geopolitical and diplomatic nuances and conundrums, an approach which partly justified Golescu-Albu’s criticism of the Italian leader.226 Nevertheless, the Romanians were pleased enough with their new international affiliation to send their “Manifesto” for publication to six major French

221 Ibid., 45. 222 Ibid., 46. 223 Smochină, “Sur les émigrés roumains à Paris”, 187–8. The entire text is reproduced by Smochină on pp. 187–93. 224 Ibid., 190. 225 Ibid. 226 See p. 197 below. london. mazzini’s european democratic committee 191 newspapers, among which La Presse, the anti-tsarist Le Siècle and Le National, and have it circulated among the circles of philo-Romanians and influential Parisians.227 “Romania is still alive and will shortly be free, united and strong”, Rosetti exulted in his Diary.228 He was especially pleased that La Presse, at that time hostile to Ledru-Rollin – a leader of the European Committee – promised to keep its pages open to Romanian propaganda.229 But, in spite of this new infusion of hope, the tensions which Mazzini hoped to bury under the general revolutionary enthusiasm refused to go away. The publication of the “Mani- festo” triggered an exchange of open letters between Daniel Ira’nyi, the former Secretary of the Public Salvation Committee in Pest, and Dumitru Brătianu. In a letter to La Presse, Ira’nyi claimed that, both before and after 1848, the ethnic Romanians, Slavs and Hungarians in Transylvania had enjoyed equal rights and that the ethnic civil war in the region had been lost not only due to Austrian machinations, but also – which was accurate – to the disputes among the ethnic communities. Responding in the same newspaper on 4 July 1851, Brătianu deployed his usual verbal arsenal and a wide range of documentary sources to refute Ira’nyi’s thesis, and showed that in his circular of 10 June 1849, which was destined to lead to a national conciliation in Transylvania, the former Hungarian Foreign Minister Casimir (Kázmér) Batthyani had spoken, rather counter-productively, of “the supremacy of the Hungarian element.” However, Brătianu conceded, it was time to move on. “Hungarians and South Slavs, our neighbours, the time has come”, he appealed in his response, “you must have become aware that the Danubian Confederation will be the main achievement of our time. Let us shake hands, brethren, over the tombs of our martyrs and let this great work be our common achievement.”230 The Confederation – he concluded – was meant to be an association of free nations with equal rights. Mazzini was not happy with this public exposure of animosities and, on 21 August, begged Brătianu to scale down his expostulations and send a memorandum to the Hungarians proposing a “truce in God”, postponing ethnic hostilities until the victorious end of the war against

227 The manifesto was published inLe National of 4 October 1851, 2 as “Le Mani- feste Roumain”. 228 Rosetti, Diary, 318. 229 Ibid., 317. 230 Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 48. 192 1851 despotism.231 Brătianu must have done so, because, on 11 September, he became officially a member of the Central Democratic Committee and left Paris, now an uncongenial place for a new colleague of Ledru- Rollin. In their “Manifesto”, which Brătianu took to London with him, the Romanians pledged their support for the Central Committee and, in principle, for the much-discussed but perpetually vaguely defined project of the Danubian Confederation, without, however, abandoning their own plans for the ultimate unification and the independence of the Principalities.232 In an attempt to bolster public opinion at home, Brătianu tried to popularise the work of the Committee in the Roma- nian Principalities: his appeals to the Romanians, printed on very thin paper, which made them easier to smuggle, were addressed equally to the inhabitants of the Principalities and to the Transylvanian Roma- nians serving in the Austrian army.233 The members of the Committee tried to keep a low profile in Lon- don, but their activities aroused the suspicions of the Great Powers. The French Foreign Minister, Count Walewski, sent a protest to Lord Palmerston, asking for measures to be taken against those “incorrigi- ble conspirators” and members of the “Comité Central Démagogique”, who were threatening European stability.234 His letter had a number of enclosures containing evidence of the threat posed by the refugees. One such document was a copy of the newspaper Le Proscrit, the first issue of which had appeared in Paris on 5 July 1851. Members of the editorial board included Mazzini and Ledru-Rollin, alongside well- known French republican militants such as Etienne Arago and Désiré Pilette, the Poles Albert Darász and Stanisław (Stanislas) Worcell (a Polish socialist and Michelet’s translator into English), Martin Ber- nard, one of the former leaders of the secret Société des Saisons and head of the association La Solidarité républicaine, and the Viennese General Ernest Haug. The first issue of theProscrit , subtitled “Journal de la République universelle”, carried an appeal for European unity from Mazzini: “European Democracy must constitute itself. Against

231 Ibid. 232 The Romanians’ “Manifesto” was published in the first issue of Rosetti’s short- lived newspaper Republica Română, in November 1851. See Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 49. For the illicit channels of distribution of the paper to Romanian territories, see letter dated 1 December 1851 from Ştefan Golescu (Paris) to a contact in Bucharest in Ceauşu and Vitcu, “Romanian Emigration”, Doc. 8. 233 Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 51. 234 The National Archives, PRO/FO 881/296, Memorandum of Count Walewski to Lord Palmerston, 29 October 1851, 1. london. mazzini’s european democratic committee 193 the league of corrupt and mendacious powers one must oppose, in all its reality and its power, the holy alliance of the peoples. We must lay together the first stone at the foundation of the temple on the frontispiece of which the future will inscribe the words: ‘God is God, and humanity is His prophet!’.” A “Universal Convention of all the oppressed peoples”, whose representatives had been brought together “in exile and persecution”, had to be created, with a mission to refash- ion the “map of future Europe.” Le Proscrit was suppressed after two issues by a law decree of 16 July 1850, but was revived as La Voix du Proscrit as the official organ of the Central European Committee, and under the editorship of an ‘old’ republican, Charles Delescluze, who was also exiled in London.235 The plan was for the creation of national committees which would each send a representative to London. On 8 December 1850, the Voix du Proscrit announced the affiliation of the Italian, Polish, German, and Young Austrian committees, as well as of the Dutch Democratic Association.236 Count Karl Ferdinand von Buol, at the time the Austrian envoy to London, joined his protest to that of Walewski, reminding Palmerston that when trouble had been brewing in Ireland in 1848, England had closed its borders to all American travellers as a precautionary measure. He requested the expulsion of the exiled revolutionaries from London, threatening otherwise to refuse applications for visas from British travellers to Austria. Similar protests from the Chevalier Bun- sen, the Prussian minister in London, from the Russian Foreign Minis- ter, Count Nesselrode, and from the Imperial Austrian Plenipotentiary in Frankfurt, Count Thun, were also enclosed with Walewski’s memo. However, Britain was not disposed to renege on her traditional hospitality to foreigners. In contrast to the strict surveillance foreigners were subjected to in Second Empire France, mid-Victorian Britain prided herself in her generally relaxed legislation regarding aliens, in the low budgets allocated to the secret services and in the Home Office’s reluctance to use spies. By 1850, Scotland Yard’s plainclothes detective branch comprised only 8 men.237 Between 1823 and the Aliens’ Bill of

235 The Committee’s main press organ in Britain wasThe English Republic and in Italy L’Italia del Popolo. Cf. Alvin R. Calman, Ledru-Rollin après 1848 et les proscrits français en Angleterre (Paris, 1921), 97. TheVoix du Proscrit later re-located to St. Amand, in the French Nord. 236 Count Walewski to Lord Palmerston, 29 October 1851, 2–3. 237 For more details, see Bernard Porter, Plots and Paranoia: a history of political espionage in Britain, 1790–1988 (London, 1989), 88–9. 194 1851

1905 no foreigner claiming political refugee status was refused entry in Britain or was expelled from Britain.238 One of the reasons for the softer attitude to refugees was simply that there were not enough foreigners in England to justify unduly harsh measures. The 1851 Census shows that there were 50,289 foreigners in England and Wales, which, in a total population of nearly 18 million, represented a percentage of only 0.28.239 The more relaxed British attitude had pragmatic justifications, too: avoidance of military engagement abroad on the one hand, reform and free-market capitalism at home, on the other, were supposed to make espionage unnecessary. In addition, espionage was believed to be morally corrosive, a danger to civil liberties as well as an unsavoury occupation for a ‘gentleman’. A Whiggish trust in British liberalism ensured that Britain did not feel unduly threatened by revolutionary aliens and that in fact most Britons at that time would regard receiving Continental ‘trouble-makers’ as a “mark of their national superiority over the Continent.”240 The socialist Louis Blanc, himself a refugee in England after 1848, was full of praise for the British way of dealing with foreign political militants: It will ever be to the glory of England, that, in the middle of the nineteenth century, she should have been the only impregnable asylum, in Europe, for the exile driven from his country by absolutism or usur- pation. The indomitable energy with which the English people have maintained the right of asylum is the more honourable, as they do not espouse the opinions of those they harbour, nor think either of counte- nancing their views or encouraging their hopes.241 After 1848 and after Louis Napoléon’s coup d’état of 1851, Britain received around 7,000 politically active continental refugees on its territory, but their surveillance remained low-key and discreet throughout the 1850s. The most severe known incident involved a decision in October 1855 to expel all the Jersey refugees, not from Britain however, but to other parts of the kingdom, sometimes not farther away than Guernsey. By 1859, Britain’s refugee problem petered out, partly because most of them had returned home, and partly because foreign

238 John Saville, “1848—Britain and Europe”, in Exiles from European Revolutions, ed. Sabine Freitag, 24. 239 “They were far greatly outnumbered by the 520,000 Irish in England and Wales, who did present social problems, and by the 130,000 Scots.” Bernard Porter, The Refu- gee Question in Mid-Victorian Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1979), 4. 240 Porter, Plots and Paranoia, 77. 241 Blanc, 1848. Historical Revelations, Preface, v–vi. london. mazzini’s european democratic committee 195 governments had lost hope that the British authorities might prove willing to extradite them.242 One of the few exceptions to this rather relaxed approach to asylum in the 1840s was the work of a ‘special branch’ of the General Post Office, the very existence of which was revealed to the British public owing to an incident of 1844 which involved the interception of the mail of Giuseppe Mazzini. The leader-to-be of the European Commit- tee had asked his correspondents to place poppy seeds in their letters, the absence of which upon opening the envelopes indicated tamper- ing. The radical MP Thomas Duncombe raised the issue in the House of Commons, and the ensuing public outcry, which involved sonorous names such as Thomas Carlyle, a friend of Mazzini’s, put an end to the General Post Office’s interference with foreigners’ correspondence, although not to its ‘home’ service.243 The émigrés’ correspondence continued to be opened by their own governments, however, or by the governments of states with interests in their respective countries. In 1853, Charles Dickens wrote in his popular newspaper Household Words that “[f]ew of their missives reach their destination without some curious little scissor marks about the seal, some suspicious little hot-water blisters about the wafers, hinting that glazed cocked hats, and jack-boots, and police spies have had something to do with their letters between their postage and their delivery.”244

242 Porter, Plots and Paranoia, 91–4. 243 Ibid., 76–80. 244 “Perfidious Patmos”, inHousehold Words, 12 March 1853, 155: 28. 1851 LONDON-BUCHAREST-PARIS

May your young homeland, born yesterday like yourself, innocent like yourself, the youngest-born among nations, the orphan and the foundling (so she was called by one of her sons); may Romania travel through the tempests and dock into the safe haven of Providence! Michelet, “Principautés danubiennes”245 Throughout 1850, Dumitru Brătianu kept up a steady correspondence with Jules Michelet. From London, where he was based in early 1850, he thought that the moment had arrived to launch another awareness and publicity campaign. Amidst the sense of guilt which had engulfed the French left, Brătianu added his own accusations. The events of 1849 had shown that France was no longer in the vanguard of Euro- pean revolutions and the former disciple had become a disillusioned, yet still faithful, equal who believed that he had earned the right to remonstrate with the Maître. “France is, one might say, the General Headquarters of Europe’s revolutionary forces”, he wrote on 10 March 1850 in the opening of a lengthy and impassioned letter, but France had forgotten her mission. He clearly relished his own angry rhetoric as he depicted the “new Byzantium”, a demoralised, police-state France under President Louis Napoléon, who sent reluctant armies into fratricidal battle: [. . .] wounded Europe is moaning in pain; and you, masters, lords of the world, owners of the universal suffrage – in the aftermath of a great revolution, they are dragging you at your place of execution without trial; they are arming you with the assassin’s weapons and making you march at night against a republic whom you call your sister and love from all your heart [i.e. Italy]; they have violated your constitution and have condemned to life imprisonment representatives of the people who have protested by legal means against this violation; they are incarcerating you, and insulting your religion; like wild beasts they are chasing you, and hunting you down at street corners; they are suspending your newspapers, they are smashing your printing presses, they are sending your

245 Michelet, Légendes, 280. london-bucharest-paris 197

journalists, in chains, on foot, from one corner of France to another; they are pillorying your most illustrious citizens and your friends like common highwaymen; in broad daylight, they are cutting down your holy trees of liberty, under your eyes they are taking away the wreaths that France has placed on the tombs of her martyrs, they are turning your brave gendarmes into vile spies and agents, they are violently snatching your children away from their teachers, forcing them into the arms of the Jesuits; they are depriving you with impunity of your most precious rights, of your most cherished liberties; they are ravishing your right to reunion, the municipal rights, the freedom of the press, the freedom of education; your cities and villages are moaning under the état de siège; the whole of France like the land of the Muscovites is run by the military and placed in illegality; – and all these crimes of which you are both instruments and victims, appear to leave all of you cold; nobody is troubled, you are all afraid of your own shadows, you are all silent, you are all running away, hiding, closing your eyes, hiding your faces.246 Yet the French remained the “elect people”, Brătianu continued, and the undefeated spirit of France will guide European nations towards the revolutions of the future which, far from being violent acts of destruction like the old revolutions, will simply be peaceful manifesta- tions of the people’s will, routine democratic acts, nothing more dangerous than joyful national holidays.247 As usual in his dealings with the intense and inflammatory Brătianu, Michelet preferred to respond briefly and cautiously, congratulating his former student on being a worthy “citizen” of a “young” nation such as Romania, rather than engaging more deeply with his unflat- tering political analysis of the current situation in France.248 Brătianu obviously needed to unburden his heart and, undiscouraged by his mentor’s brevity, followed up with at least one more letter of similar length and impetuousness. The target of his attacks was spelled out more clearly this time: the “men of the Montagne”, who had betrayed the French revolutionary ideals in June 1849. “What have you done to the soul of France?” Brătianu asked of the individuals whom he considered guilty of having abandoned not only the French people, but also the Poles and the Romanians, whose fight against the “colossus of the North” would have needed, beyond a symbolic emblem – an enduring French Republic – the support of French diplomacy. The people of “Messina, Palermo, Naples, Venice, Milan, Berlin, Prague,

246 Michelet, Correspondance, 6: 356–7. 247 Ibid., 360, 358. 248 Letter of 27 March 1850, in ibid., 380. 198 1851

Pest, Lemberg, Krakow, Bucharest”, who had been fighting against Austrian and Russian oppression, had been the victims of treacherous French party politics and petty power struggles. It was time for France to re-ignite the embers of revolution in Europe. Michelet must have been confounded both by the sheer length of the text and by the degree of Brătianu’s resentment, but he did reply, briefly and politely again, to thank him for the “best moral nourishment” he had had in a long time: he had read the letter “en famille”, with a “veritable religious feeling”, on 4 May, the anniversary of the proclamation of the first French Republic.249 Later in the year, we get another glimpse of the exchange between the two men. In a letter of 25 October 1850 (written from the Château de Langchêne, a resting home near Lyon), Brătianu wrote, presumably in response to the historian’s request for information for his preparatory work on what were to become ultimately the Légendes démocra- tiques du nord. In Western Europe Romania was an unknown, a “foundling”, Brătianu says, but “I would like to present her to you as I have always known her: perpetually radiant with beauty, perpetually torn apart, perpetually gored, and crowned with a martyr’s crown.” He paints a heroic portrait of the Romanians (“les Roumans”), descended from Rome, Dacia and Christianity, a noble people with egalitarian and democratic traditions going back a long time. In support of his impassioned account of Romanian exceptionalism, Brătianu gives a few examples: the death penalty had been abolished in the Romanian lands long before it had been in the West; the same form of address, the informal ‘tu’, was used for Prince and commoners; traditionally, the country had not known hereditary titles. He informed his mentor that republics had existed as early as the twelfth century in the area now occupied by the Danubian Principalities. This allegation may not have been an entirely invented tradition, and Brătianu had at least one illustrious source to draw on: the 1716 treatise Descriptio Moldaviae by Dimitrie Cantemir where the prince and scholar claims republican status for three ancient Moldavian territories.250 There followed a lengthy excursus into the role of the Romanians as anti-Muslim “sentinels” of

249 Letter of 7 May 1850, in ibid., 418 and 426. On the guilt of the French left and this exchange of letters, see the comments by Durandin, Révolution, 202–6. 250 Demetrii Cantemirii Principis Moldaviae Descriptio Antiqui et Hodierni Status Moldaviae, bilingual Latin-Romanian modern edition by Dan Sluşanschi (Bucharest 2006), part two, Ch. 16, 292–5. I am grateful to the distinguished Romanian mediae- valist Professor Şerban Papacostea for this reference. london-bucharest-paris 199 the West during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the whole of Europe was menaced by the Ottomans, a representation which became central to Romanian historiographic mythology. Brătianu suggested that fulfilment of this defence role should have been enough to earn them international recognition. Before concluding, Brătianu urged his master to place Romania alongside Hungary in his heart. “I know your affection for Hungary”, he added, rather ruefully.251 Michelet maintained steady channels of communication with the Romanian and the East-European disapora. His diary entries in late 1850 and early 1851 contain frustratingly brief, almost coded, references to his Romanian contacts, which suggests perhaps an awarenss of tightening censorship and surveillance. His joint entry for Thursday– Friday 1–2 January 1851 reads cryptically: “Visit of the Wallachian painter”, which could refer either to Marie Rosetti’s portraitist, the painter Rosenthal, or to another painter in exile, Ion Negulici.252 Z In early 1851, Nicolae Bălcescu, though severely disabled by the consumption which was to kill him in 1852 at the age of thirty-three, was actively engaged in a dialogue with the Hungarian national committee in Paris, which included László Teleki as chairman, the Generals György Klapka and János Czetz, as well as the former premier Bertalan Szemere and former minister of justice Sebö Vukovits (Vučković), men whose views Bălcescu found more congenial than Kossuth’s. He was tormented by memories of the nightmarish ethnic clashes of 1848–49: Magyars, Romanians and Slavs – he wrote – had met on the battlefield, “facing each other after 1,000 years of conflict, weapons in hand, as though nothing had changed since Arpad’s time.” His favoured plan for a “United States by the Danube”, submitted to the Hungarian committee in a memoir of 17 February, was a multi-national super-state extending from the Adriatic Sea to the Black Sea, a powerful ethnic conglomerate of twenty-two million people, in which Hungary would still occupy its undivided historic territory, as Kossuth wanted, but would be willing to recognize three distinct ethnic groupings within it: the Hungarians in one group, the Croats and Dalmatians, Slavs and Serbs of the Vojvodina in the second, and the Romanians of

251 Michelet, Correspondance, 5: 554–71; and Bucur, Jules Michelet şi revoluţionarii români, 110–29. 252 Michelet, Journal, 2: 181. 200 1851

Transylvania, Banat and Eastern Hungary in the third. This confed- eral conglomerate would be joined eventually by the two Danubian Principalities. The boundaries between counties or cantons were to be decided later, but in each of these regions, the ethnic groups would have enjoyed guarantees for the use of their language and faith and for autonomous administration. A Federal Assembly of 150 deputies representing equally Hungarians, Romanians and South-Slavs would have convened annually by rotation in the capitals of each national territory. This entity would also have had a three-member federal government appointed by the Assembly, and taxes would have been collected by the separate governments of each ethnic community.253 The plan did not meet with the approval of Kossuth, to whom Teleki submitted the project. Far from being politically dead, as Bălcescu appears to have believed at the time, Kossuth in Kütahya was still regarded as the only legitimate leader-in-exile of the Hungarian movement. In a letter from Bursa, dated March/April 1851, Golescu- Albu once more briefed his Parisian fellow-expatriates on the state of minds and of play among the Romanian, Hungarian and Polish émigrés in Kütahya and Bursa. Most, he believed, had had a chance to review the errors of 1848, apart from the Magyars, “[. . .] and Mr. Kossuth is the foremost among them; he is the living embodiment of a monstrous and obsolete aberration: the Magyars continue to speak and dream about a historic kingdom founded on conquest. Such stolid arrogance would not be much cause for alarm if Mr. Kossuth and his fanatic disciples and compatriots (for they all swear on the name of Kossuth) were isolated, had no influence whatsoever and were unable to engage in revolutionary activities. Unfortunately, this is not the case. First, England, in the person of Mr. Palmerston and a few eminent journalists, is protecting him; secondly, the entire European democratic press imagines that, because Kossuth has spoken convinc- ingly against Austrian despotism, he is a genuine democrat, a man who sincerely wishes liberty with equality, liberty for all, and equality for all. But such a view is utterly mistaken! Mr. Kossuth is the despot par excellence; [. . .] in addition, the Magyars have the intelligent and active support of the most determined of revolutionaries, of Mazzini; at least this is what we grasped from the comings and goings between Constantinople and Kütahya of a few Italians of the democratic party.

253 Stan and Ploeşteanu, Utopia, 143–50. For the full text of Bălcescu’s memorandum in the original French, see Bălcescu, Opere, 4: 359–62. london-bucharest-paris 201

That an unjust and eminently despotic policy such as the Magyars’ against the other nationalities should find support from a government, and a monarchic-aristocratic government at that, such as the English, is to be expected, and has nothing to surprise those who know their history; but for such a cause to find admirers and champions in a democracy, the democracy of 1848, is surprising in the highest degree, distressing and ominous.”254 Giuseppe Mazzini, indeed, had been known to support – in articles published starting with the 1830s and 1840s in the European press – the idea of Hungary as a bulwark against tsarism and pan-slavism and as the potential nucleus of a federation of free nations which would comprise Moldo-Wallachia, Bulgaria, Serbia and Bosnia.255 Golescu- Albu’s criticism of the Italian leader was perhaps too harsh. Mazzini’s blueprint for the future had less to do with the pragmatic minutiae of borders and territorial-political organization and more with a rather mystical vision of Central Europe as the moral template for a general rejuvenation of Europe. Golescu-Albu advised his Parisian brethren to have meetings with the leaders of the other national communities in Paris and put forward a few essential questions concerning the future of a democratic Europe: “Is liberty for all or just for a few, and should one regard some nations as nobles and others as commoners, or should one see a common humanity in the different nationalities?”256 In his view, the Hungarians were guilty of trying to resuscitate a defunct, decomposing empire at the expense of Slavs and Romanians. In the spring of 1851, Mazzini was in fact attempting to reconcile the diverg- ing viewpoints of Romanians, Poles and Hungarians, while also trying to persuade Kossuth to join the European Democratic Committee. On 19 April 1851, Kossuth enclosed in a letter the draft of his “Kütahya Constitution”, the official final version of which was to be publicised much later, in 1859, as the Projet de l’organisation politique de la Hon- grie. According to this plan, Hungary was going to become either a democratic republic or a constituional monarchy, but its historic territory would remain indivisible and consequently, as Kossuth himself explained in the accompanying letter to Mazzini: neither Transylva- nia, nor the Banat or Serbian Vojvodina could be detached from it.

254 Fotino 3: 210–1. 255 Raluca Tomi, “Romeni e italiani durante la rivoluzione del 1848–1849”, Annu- ario (Venice-Bucharest), 2 (2000): 57. 256 Fotino 3: 212. 202 1851

Hungary was to remain the main governing political entity within a Central-European confederation. Contemporaries tell of Mazzini protesting against the derogatory manner in which Kossuth used to refer to the Romanians simply as ‘ces messieurs’. In response to such protests, Kossuth was far from deferential to the Italian leader in exile: he agreed to refer thenceforth to the Romanians as a people ‘invented’ by Mazzini, thus brushing aside the Romanians’ claims to nationhood.257 Z In Romania, the post-revolutionary regime appeared to take gradual steps towards normalization in early 1851. Former revolutionaries held under arrest at the Monastery of Mărgineni had been liberated by decree by Prince Barbu Ştirbey in August 1850, and those held at the Monastery of Vintilă Vodă in March 1851.258 As the Russian troops started evacuating Wallachia in the spring of 1851, Rosetti and his exiled friends were approached via unofficial channels by members of the Romanian government. Winterhalder wrote that the government had promised a ministerial position for Rosetti if he returned. But in the exiled men’s view, in spite of the Russian army’s retreat, Prince Ştirbey and his cabinet remained vehicles of tsarist influence and control. Rosetti’s unwillingness to compromise was without appeal: he was not going to return to a “country where slavery, cowardice and ignorance reign supreme”, he pledged, asking his friend and business associate Winterhalder to pass on the message to interested parties at home. “[. . .] even if I am going to be impoverished like Job, and pay the price of solitude for my ideas, I shall not cease to work towards the creation of the Romanian Republic, one and undivided [. . .].”259 The firmness of this refusal to accept mercy from an abhorred regime was matched later by many of the ‘proscrits du deux décembre’, including Quinet, who refused the amnesty offered them in 1859 unless the Sec- ond Empire returned to the rule of law.260 The Rosettis’ third child, a boy called Ion, had just been born a few days earlier, an event greeted by Rosetti with characteristic panache: “Long live free Romania!” The child was registered at the localmairie ,

257 E. F. Richards, ed., Mazzini’s Letters to an English Family, 1855–1860, 2 vols. (New York, London, 1922), 2: 118. 258 Anul 1848, 6: 306–7. 259 Entry for 19 May 1851, in Rosetti, Diary, 309. 260 Aprile, Le siècle des exilés, 232–2. london-bucharest-paris 203 with Ion Brătianu and Alfred Dumesnil as witnesses. “[T]his is the true baptism”, Rosetti noted defiantly in his diary. “Baptism by the Church no longer makes sense nowadays.”261 The Wallachian government remained heavy-handed in its approach to civil liberties, and a weakly developed, inexperienced public lacked the forums for putting up an effective protest against surveillance, vio- lations of correspondence and other infringements. Although, by June 1851, the Russian military occupation of Wallachia had effectively ended, the Central European political scene was changing to the worst. The Austrian authorities were increasingly suspicious of travelling Romanians and opened the mail that passed between the Romanians in exile in Paris and London, those in Transylvania and their families and associates in Wallachia itself. Austrian postal ‘interception stations’ operated both within and outside the Monarchy itself, and as far as Italy.262 “I would like very much, my child”, Zinca wrote to her son Ştefan on 5 July, “to read what you have written on Turkish politi- cies in our countries, but I have grave doubts that you might be able to send it to me, as I believe a decision has been taken to prevent the import of such publications.”263 Effingham Grant himself was under surveillance by the Austrian authorities: from Sibiu, the governor of Transylvania, Karl zu Schwarzenberg, reported to the Austrian Min- ister of the Interior Alexander von Bach that he suspected Grant of facilitating the transit not only of letters but also of prohibited revolutionary literature, such as a Romanian translation of Mazzini’s manifesto.264 A few months before, Ion Brătianu, too, had tried his hand at conspiratorial activities in the Transylvanian city. The revolutionary pamphlets he had smuggled were transported across the province by friendly Austrian officials among imperial documents, in boxes bearing the imperial seal.265 Grant protested to the Austrian authorities against the opening of the letters and against what Zinca described as the violation of the families’ “most intimate confessions of the heart”, of their “hopes and faith in a better future”. Zinca advised her corre-

261 Entries for 17, 19 and 20 May 1851, in Rosetti, Diary, 308–10. 262 Emerson, Metternich and the Political Police, 44. 263 Fotino 3: 230. 264 Dispatch from Schwarzenberg to Bach, Sibiu, 2 November 1851, quoted in Tomi, “Romeni e Italiani nel periodo dell’esilio”, 219. Cf. also Ceauşu and Vitcu, “Romanian Emigration”, Doc. 1. 265 Dr. I. Fruma, Ion C. Brătianu la Sibiu (1850–1851) (Bucharest, 1938), 10. 204 1851 spondents to exert discretion and self-censorship in order to pre-empt the disclosure of their plans and projects.266 The mood was darkening in France, too, and Michelet, rehearsing themes for his essays on Poland, Russia and Romania, and exploring perceived historical parallels between Western and Eastern Europe, was pessimistic about the chances of freedom in either. “Isn’t the entire world a prison, in this universal triumph of Tsarism and Papism?” he mused in his diary on 15 April. He berated himself for not having investigated deeper and promised himself – in his characteristically cryptic diary style – to search for the roots of “evil” in the “false incarnation of God as Pope or Emperor-Pope” and for the roots of the “good” in “the true incarnation of God as a nation, as demonstrated by ‘the man-people (hero, saint, martyr).”267 He was already at work on what was to become “Principautés Danubiennes. Madame Rosetti (1848)”. On 8 March, he had received a visit from Marie Rosetti in person, and on the 9th he had started writing what he provisionally entitled the “Légende de la Roumanie”, completing it in a mere four days.268 In his diary entry for Tuesday, 1 April, he mentions having received the “story of Mme. Rosetti”, which probably refers to a text of Marie’s exploits of 1848 submitted by either his son-in-law, Alfred Dumesnil, or by a member of Rosetti’s circle. The “reactionary” forces were tightening their grip around the emi- gré revolutionaries in Paris and their contacts. “The police have already made searches at some of our people’s homes and had the impudence of confiscating papers that had nothing whatsoever to do with the affairs of the French Republic. You can guess to what purposes!” wrote Golescu-Negrul to his friend Paul Bataillard on 3 September, adding further dramatic details on the sacrifices made by the embattled revolutionaries: Currently we can expect anything. It is certain that some of us are going to be expelled. Bratiano [i.e. the younger Brătianu brother, Ion] has spent a month in the countryside; he is about to return, and it is probable that the police, who have used informants to learn where he was, will present him with an order to leave the territory of the République. We are ready for anything; no arbitrariness can surprise us any more.

266 Letter from Zinca to Ştefan Golescu, from Goleşti, 5 July 1851, in Fotino 3: 229–32. 267 Entry for Tuesday, 15 April 1851, in Michelet, Journal, 2: 157. 268 Ibid., 155–6. london-bucharest-paris 205

Poor Rosenthal was found hanging in prison at Pest! We have been assured that the government of Vienna chose an infamous assassination to get rid of an uncomfortable agent! He was arrested, we have been told, on the basis of a report sent by the Parisian police by telegraph. . .!269 When arrested in Pest on 20 July, Constantin Rosenthal had indeed been carrying propaganda and revolutionary literature sent from Paris by the exiles, and the imperial official records of the inquiry described him as a “Romanian envoy” and made reference to his links to the “Romanian leader” C. A. Rosetti.270 Rosetti felt subsequently responsible for his friend’s death, due either to assassination in custody, or to suicide, which the painter might have resorted to in order to avoid interrogation. An unopened letter he had sent to his friend was returned to him later, in February 1852, by the artist’s mother who wrote to say that she had never been able to retrieve her son’s body for a funeral.271 In a less dramatic way, Rosetti himself was being subjected to the unwelcome attentions of the French secret police. “Yesterday the police came and searched amongst all my papers”, Rosetti wrote in his diary on 9 August. “Nothing can be more revolting and more disgusting than such a search. When will humanity be able to live without being subjected to such profanations!”272 Golescu-Negru continued his correspondence from Paris with Paul Bataillard who, hidden away at the Chartreuse du Liget, a twelfth- century monastery in Touraine which he partly owned, pursued his research on ethnicity in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.273 Respond- ing to his friend’s offer of accommodation at the Chartreuse, Golescu explained, somewhat surprisingly, that the émigrés had to remain in the capital, “where there are fewer constraints on action and police vigilance less efficient. In fact, we hope that the recent measures taken against foreigners in Paris will not affect us. We have been assured that there is a decision to expel all those proven to be involved in politics. But we do not wish to believe that the president of the French Repub- lic will consent to debase himself to such an extent as to become the

269 Fotino 3: 241. 270 E. Gluck, “Date noi privind viaţa şi activitatea lui C. D. Rosenthal”, Studii şi cercetări de istoria artei, Seria artă plastică 33 (1986): 70–80. 271 Entry for 2 February 1852, in Rosetti, Diary, 330. 272 Ibid., 320. For police and political surveillance in Second Empire France, see below, p. 214 sqq. 273 Fotino 3: 244. 206 1851 gendarme of an invisible prince, himself the henchman of some low- rank agents of the Emperor Nicholas.”274 Golescu-Negru tried to believe that, contrary to rumours, the French secret police had had nothing to do with the death of the painter Rosenthal. If the worst came to the worst and the Romanians were to be expelled – he explained – they were prepared to retire to Switzer- land and continue their work there. “French in our minds and hearts”, Golescu explained, “we will consider our expulsion from France as a second exile; lacking a better alternative, we will live on the borders of this beautiful country, our second homeland, the shared homeland of all those who have a heart for new ideas. The men of the reaction are not mistaken when they say that the new men are not French, Ger- man or Italian, but simply brethren in demagogy; by that, they mean men who before everything else share a common homeland, a homeland of ideas. But this homeland is France, because it is in France that first germinated the new idea that is now inspiring millions of people. Let us hope that France will not prove to be a degenerate mother, that she will not strangle the infant in its cradle, that she is not going to renounce the honour of presiding over its future growth, because this is the source of her real grandeur, the rest is cosmetics and false beauty.”275 However, the Parisian police was uneasy about the presence of so many politically-minded refugees, and, although the Romanians were never expelled, the chicaneries continued. Rosetti was temporarily refused his residence papers by the police, as his wife wrote to Adèle Dumesnil, then at the family estate in Vascoeuil, near Rouen, on 8 October: “[. . .] Rose has been refused his residence permit on account of his antecedents and we live in Paris on the black market, if I may say so.’276 Both women found comfort in their correspondence and in exchanging news of their children and their sufferings as mothers and wives. There were occasional moments of light-heartedness: in Novem- ber Adèle sent the Rosettis a basket of fresh roses from Vascoeuil.

274 Ibid. Golescu’s “invisible prince” probably refers to the Wallachian ruling prince, Barbu Ştirbey. 275 Ibid., 245. In the mid-nineteenth century, the term demagogy had not yet acquired the derogatory meaning of today and was largely used to mean ‘democracy’, or rather discourses on democracy. 276 B. A. R., Manuscript section, Fonds C. A. Rosetti, s 9(1–10)/LXIII, item s 9(2)/ LXIII); cf also letter of 25 October 1851, s 9(3)/LXIII. [emphases in the original] “Rose” was Rosetti’s nickname used affectionately by his family and friends. london-bucharest-paris 207

In the meantime, the sympathetic French press continued to publicize the Romanian cause – and more generally the political situation in Central-East Europe. The precious budget of the Romanian Society was put to somewhat surprising use among press and political circles in Paris. “Ion Brătianu gave a bear skin to Maurice [sic; Paul Meurice] from the Evènement and bought dinner to two other journalists. He [P.M.] wrote two articles for our journal, which we have entitled Republica Română, articles which we have polished and cop- ied for him.”277 Republica Română was a Romanian-language newspaper started by the émigrés in Paris in November 1851 and printed by E. De Soye, one of the few publishers who had Cyrillic fonts. A small- format, seven by eleven centimetres, made it easier to smuggle into news-starved Romania, but publication was intermittent. The second issue was only published in 1853 in Brussels.278 Other publications of the Romanian diaspora had an equally precarious existence: România viitoare and Junimea română both ceased publication after one or two issues. The former had the marked imprint of the passionate editorship of Bălcescu, Dumitru Brătianu and Vasile Mălinescu and urged Romanians at home to wait for the expected European revolution and to keep the union of the Principalities firmly on their agenda.279 In early November, Golescu-Negru reported that the police visits had ceased and that the exiles were still in France. The exchange of letters between him and Bataillard, still away from Paris, became increasingly affectionate, as both men sustained each other in their efforts and aspirations in spite of the uncongenial atmosphere in France and elsewhere. “Only the vulgar and the ambitious push themselves without outside help”, Golescu encouraged an occasionally flagging Bataillard, “because personal interest augments in proportion with the obstacles. Really decent men, those who only aim towards the general good, always feel the need to be sustained, because they only have their own zeal for support, and zeal is nourished by faith which, as you know, grows stronger through the intercourse of the hearts. This is why we need to support each other.”280 In Paul Bataillard, Golescu-Negru had found his âme soeur in more ways than one. The two men had simi-

277 Rosetti, Diary, 322. 278 Dan Simonescu, Din istoria presei româneşti: Republica Română, Paris, 1851– Bruxelles, 1853 (Bucharest, 1931), 9. 279 Isar, Din istoria generaţiei de la 1848, 47–8. 280 Fotino 3: 253. 208 1851 lar views on ethnic relations in Central Europe, and particularly on Romanian-Hungarian relations in Transylvania. “While nobody saw clearly into the Magyar question”, Golescu wrote on 6 November 1851, “while everybody was in love with Magyarism, you alone could speak about it expertly to your political friends. They could not fail to be convinced by your authority on the matter, and now they too are converted! [. . .] The moment is critical: the ovations given to Kossuth are inflating the Magyars’ blind confidence in their star; they must be given a warning instead, to prevent them from misinterpreting these ovations as a sign of approval for policies which undermined their cause in 1848. At present, more than ever before, they must be led to recognise the truth and to submit themselves to the common good, without which there is no hope for the East.” The only way forward for Central and Eastern Europe, in Golescu’s view, remained a “republic and liberty for all” and the creation of a “United States of the Lower Danube.”281 Jules Michelet, whose course at the Collège de France had been suspended in March, joined the pro-Romanian campaign on the margins, without engaging in manifestly political agitation. On 7 November, while doing preparatory work for his Légendes démocratiques du nord, he asked Rosetti for information on the folklore of the river Danube: “As I shall be searching for the unity of the Danube, for its genius and its soul, I would like to capture from these tunes the plangent whis- pers of the great captive river. . .”282 Writing back, Rosetti explained that there was no significant folklore of the Danube in Romanian, as opposed to a rich body of representations of the forest and the mountains. Due to the country’s disruptive history of war and foreign occupations, the natives had traditionally withdrawn into the Carpathian mountains, leaving the southern plains depleted and, consequently, unmythologised. There was one song, without words, calledCum se bate Dunărea (The Danube ebbs and flows), the title of which provided Rosetti with a pretext for sending his mentor, rather abruptly, one of his typically radical analyses on the slim chances for the emergence of the Danubian confederation. “Allow me, cher Maître, to take this opportunity to remind you that if you want to build the United States of the Danube, a federation on the model of Switzerland or the United

281 Ibid., 254. 282 Letter of 7 November 1851, in Michelet, Correspondance, 6: 941. london-bucharest-paris 209

States, the only result will be a war of extermination.”283 The reason for this, according to Rosetti, were the tensions between the Romanians, the South-Slavs of the Habsburg empire and the Magyars. In addition, so Rosetti believed, Kossuth’s intransigence in dealing with the nationalities had facilitated a “restoration of the Austrian throne.” “I say this, and history has confirmed it, that, in spite of their 80 battles, for which we have the utmost respect, the entire history of the Magyars has been a story of iniquity towards the Slavs and the Romanians, and if you believe that you will obtain fraternity by flattering the Hungarians’ amour propre with the creation of an uneven and weak federation, like all the ones we have seen so far, if you believe that you will obtain fraternity by telling the Romanians and even the Slavs that, in their ignorance, they have restored the throne of Austria, whilst the Magyars have fought 80 battles for democracy and fraternity, you will on the one hand encourage the Magyars in their absolutist ideas, and on the other, you will add to the animosity that divides these three nations [. . .].”284 Rosetti would have favoured instead a looser alliance, rather than a federation of nations, as being more appropriate for that particular historical moment, and it was for that political structure that he would have asked for French sympathy and support. He signed: “your devoted pupil, C.A. Rosetti”. But Magyar-Romanian relations did not engage Michelet’s mind at the time: perhaps a little belatedly, he was entirely focused on Russia as the main threat to global peace and to European-ness. Ever since learning on 2 April that the exiled Mikhail Bakunin, who had taken part in the Slav Congress at Prague, had been arrested by the Austri- ans and delivered into the hands of his “Russian geolers”, as he noted in his diary, his efforts had been directed almost exclusively towards exposing the dangers of tsarist autocracy. Beginning with the eighteenth century, two schools of thought had emerged in connection with Russia’s place in the world. The negative one, drawing chiefly on Montesquieu, Rousseau and Diderot, saw Russia as a tabula rasa, a “land of absence”, with no middle class or civic freedoms. Echoing Ivan Golovin’s critical study on Russia pub-

283 C. A. Rosetti, Corespondenţă, ed. Bucur, 363; letter from the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris, Papiers Michelet, Correspondance X, A, 4744, f. 85–8. (It was dated 8 November 1851 by Le Guillou in Michelet, Correspondance, 6: 945–8.) 284 Ibid., 363. 210 1851 lished in 1845,285 Henri Martin in De la France, de son genie et de ses destinées (1847) and Saint-Marc Girardin in a few articles had spoken of Russia negatively as a political entity which did not conform to West-European norms of civilization, a nation, in fact, which hov- ered uneasily between Europe and Asia, unsure of its identiy, a view which became a cliché in subsequent historiography.286 In contrast, the positive school saw Tatar domination and tsarism as alien impositions which had deflected Russia from its natural ‘European path’, in the same way that the Romanians blamed the non-native Greek-Phanariot regimes for their country’s decline. In addition, between 1847 and 1858 the various editions of the multi-volume studies on Russia by Adam Mickiewicz, August von Haxthausen and Alexander Herzen popular- ized a representation of the old Slavic peasant commune, the mir, as a ‘democratic’ model which could provide “a way out of liberal-capitalist society”.287 In a similar vein, as shown, Brătianu had attempted in 1850 to establish the notion that Moldavia had had republican political structures in mediaeval times.288 Both instances drew on attempts by ostracized and exiled oppositions at ‘inventing’ democratic traditions apt to de-legitimize the absolutist regimes of the Russian tsar and the Ottoman sultan. Recent studies have largely discredited Haxthausen’s all-encompassing claims for the egalitarian nature of the mir.289 Nev- ertheless, in Michelet’s time, these claims were hugely influential both in Russia and in western Europe, and were eagerly adopted in socialist and anarchist circles as a conceptual basis for revolution and the re- distribution of land.

285 On Golovin, see pp. 129–30 above. 286 For the concept of “land of absence” and views of Russia in nineteenth-century France, see Ezequiel Adamovsky, “Euro-Orientalism and the Making of the Concept of Eastern Europe in France, 1810–1880”, Journal of Modern History, 77 (Sept. 2005): 591–628, as well as idem, Euro-Orientalism: liberal ideology and the image of Russia in France (c.1740–1880) (Oxford, 2006). 287 Adam Mickiewicz, Les Slaves (1849), 5 vols.; Baron August von Haxthausen, Studien über die inneren Zustände, das Volksleben, und insbesondere die ländlichen Einrifthungen Russlands (1847–52), 3 vols. (the first 2 vols. were translated immediately into French in 1847, the third volume followed soon after the German edition; an English edition was out in 1856); Aleksander Herzen, Du développement des idées révolutionnaires en Russie (published in French in 1851 and reprinted in 1853 and 1858). Cf. Adamovsky, Euro-Orientalism, 140–3. 288 See pp. 198–9 above. 289 T. K. Dennison and A. W. Carus, “The Invention of the Russian Rural Com- mune: Haxthausen and the Evidence”, Historical Journal 46, 3 (2003): 561–82. london-bucharest-paris 211

From 28 August to 22 October 1851, l’Evénement, l’Avènement du Peuple and Le Siècle published fragments of material later to be collected and published as the Légendes démocratiques du nord.290 Michelet’s pamphlets – for they were little more than topical, polemical essays – on the Polish eighteenth-century freedom-fighter Thadeusz Kosciuszko, on the ill-fated Russian Decembrists and on the defeated Romanian revolution of 1848, were raw attacks on the tsarist threat, in which one could easily recognize the input of the French historian’s émigré contacts. In a sweeping outline, he spoke unflatteringly of the “miserable decadence and degradation into which the Slavic spirit had declined in this great empire” from the time of the – much roman- ticized by Michelet – pre-Petrine peasant commune to the militaristic and bureaucratic destruction “machine” that Russia had become under Alexander I and Nicholas I.291 Based on the oral testimonies of Adam Mickiewicz and of his viscerally anti-tsarist Romanian sources, as well as on the writings of Peter Chaadaev and de Custine, Michelet’s account of Russia is unashamedly selective and passionately partisan. Russia was pre-eminently the murderess of Poland, a sterile place, an intellectual desert, an oppressing power which exports only “office desks, policemen, civil servants and army barracks” into the regions she occupies.292 Some time in November 1851, Michelet made the acquaintance of Alexander Herzen, who gradually tried to steer Michelet away from a hostile and unnuanced view of Russia towards a more intellectually refined approach, one which would have distinguished between the “humble Russian people” and its nefarious “Byzantine-German government.”293 However, the Légendes remained in all their variants – from the serialized fragments of 1851 to the complete volume of 1854 – a viscerally hostile anti-tsarist tract. In a

290 For the creative and textual history of this work, see Michelet, Légendes, Intro- duction by Michel Cadot, v–lix. For Michelet’s sources, including Herzen and Golovin, see Durandin, Révolution, 35–50. 291 Ch. VI of “Kosciuszko”, quoted by Michel Cadot, “Les amitiés polonaises, russes et roumaines de Michelet’ in Cahiers Romantiques 6: Michelet entre naissance et renaissance, ed. Simone Bernard-Griffiths (Université Blaise Pascal, 2001), 135. Cf. also Michelet, Légendes, “Les Martyrs de la Russie”, 110–5. 292 Cadot, quoting from Michelet’s preparatory notes, Introduction, Légendes, xxiii. 293 Herzen wrote a response to Michelet’s views in Le Peuple russe et le socialisme. Lettre à M. J. Michelet, par Iscander, a brochure published in Nice around 1 November 1851 and promptly banned in France. Michelet received a copy. Cf. Michelet, Légen- des, Introduction, xvi and lii. 212 1851 private letter to Herzen of 1855, Michelet declared himself ready to admit Russia in the big European family and accept that the mir was the “original molecule of the republic”, but this compromising stance was not apparent in Michelet’s public pronouncements. Even as late as 1871, his study La France devant l’Europe showed that he never changed his mind and that in his view Russia remained essentially “Asia bastardised by a German bureaucracy, where the two tyrannies of the Orient and of Europe are combined.”294 In 1863, a member of the philo-Romanian group, Elias Regnault, had excluded Russia from Europe altogether.295 Gradually, throughout the nineteenth century it was the anti-tsarist liberal tradition, to which Michelet belonged, which became hegemonic, and it was to this tradition that the Roma- nian émigrés appealed on behalf of their country. Z In Romania, the exiles’ families continued to provide whatever support they could to their faraway relatives. Throughout 1851, Zinca Golescu had been busy making enquiries for the sale of family lands in order to send more money to her sons.296 In spite of financial and political worries, ordinary life continued and made its own claims on the divided family’s attention: Zoe Grant had given birth to a little girl, named Anne-Marie Zoe, the names of both her grandmothers and of one great-grandmother. Improvements on the estate at Goleşti also continued apace: Zinca wrote to Ştefan asking him to send plant seeds from Paris: “monster pansies” was what she wanted for her garden in faraway Romania.297 The year 1851 ended on a melancholy note. In the same diary entry in which he reported the – not altogether unexpected – coup d’état in France, Rosetti made a bleak and brief summary of his life at that point: “Ill, physically weak. My wealth wasted almost in its entirety, with a wife and three children, with my country menaced by a Russo-French

294 Adamovsky, Euro-Orientalism, 163–4. 295 Regnault, La Question européenne improprement appelée polonaise, cited in Ada- movsky, “Euro-Orientalism”, 606. Elias Regnault (Georges Soulange Oliva) (1801– 1868), a former chef de cabinet of Ledru-Rollin, was the author notably of L’Histoire politique et sociale des Principautés Danubiennes (1855) (translated into Romanian in 1857). He was a member of the Radical Club in London, alongside Mazzini and Thomas Perronet Thompson. See Conclusions, p. 356. 296 Fotino 3: 256. 297 Ibid., 257. london-bucharest-paris 213 alliance; and I have no place, not even in a Romanian village, where I could possibly settle down. This is my position today.” As police continued to open the exiles’ mail, on 26 December Rosetti noted his intention of leaving an increasingly uncongenial Paris.298

298 5 December 1851, Rosetti, Diary, 323. 1852 NANTES-PARIS-BUCHAREST

Je me sens profondément éxilé en France. Jules Michelet, letter to Edgar Quinet, 8 September 1852299 The year 1852 had an ominous start. In the aftermath of the ‘Deux Décembre’, President Louis Napoléon assumed the title of ‘Prince- President’ on 1 January. January 6th saw the abolition of the ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’ slogan and official republican logo and the 9th the expulsion of sixty-six deputies of the people, including Victor Hugo, for reasons of “general security”. Aristocratic titles, abolished in 1848, were re-established on 24 January. Within less than a month, a battery of decrees put an end to the republican experiment initiated in 1848, demolished some of the most cherished symbols of the French Revo- lution and re-ignited the smouldering conflict between ancien régime nostalgia and popular aspirations to liberal democracy. Statistics offer a grim picture of purges, arrests and executions: during the martial law, declared after the coup d’état, 26,642 were arrested, “of whom 9,581 were deported to Algeria, 239 to Cayenne and 8,000 interned or placed under surveillance in France and another 1,600 were expelled from the national territory.”300 Surveillance of the activities and contacts of influential intellectuals of the opposition was stepped up. An 8th of March decree required an oath of allegiance to the new régime by all civil servants, officials, and state employees: a refusal to swear the oath led to dismissal or resignation. On 4 April, as Michelet was working on the sixth volume of his History of the Revolution, another decree made it impossible for professors to offer tuition or board to private pupils. Michelet, who thrived amidst a circle of young disciples, students and assistants, whom he often received at home, was directly

299 Michelet, Correspondance, 7: 206–7. 300 Roger Price, The French Second Empire: an anatomy of political power (Cam- bridge University Press, 2001), 146. Maurice Agulhon cites a total figure of 26,884 “arrested and charged”, of whom around 14 per cent were from the upper and middle classes. Cf. The Republican Experiment, 1848–1852 Cambridge University Press, 1983), Appendix, 196–7. On the scale of the repression in the immediate aftermath of the coup, see also Aprile, Le siècle des exilés, 103–5. nantes-paris-bucharest 215 affected. On 12 April Edgar Quinet, Jules Michelet and Adam Mickie- wicz were officially revoked from the Collège de France, and on 3 June Michelet refused to swear the required oath to the new régime. One of the main charges against Michelet was that his lectures had “given rise to the most scandalous scenes” and that his teaching was “of a nature to trouble the public peace.”301 Other decrees issued throughout the year 1852 placed printing and publishing activities under the direct authority of the Police Prefect and re-established political censorship. On 12 Juin, Michelet and his wife, Athénaïs, left a heavily policed Paris and moved to Nantes, where they joined the Rosettis, who had already relocated there in search of a cheaper, quieter place to live. 1852 was an equally bad year for republicans and revolutionaries elsewhere. Less fiery and radical than Dumitru Brătianu and the other members of the European Committee in London, the Golescu brothers and their cousin Alexandru G. Golescu-Negru believed that the time had come for a retrenchment of forces and a period of consolidation, fund-raising and propaganda, whether in Paris, London, Dresden, Vienna, Athens, Bursa, Kütahya or elsewhere in the Balkans or the Near East, where the Romanians shared their exile with the Hungar- ians and the Polish refugees. Ambitious travel plans included a fund- raising journey to America to be undertaken by Dumitru Brătianu and his fellow-committee member Ledru-Rollin. For this, Ştefan Golescu was ready to sell lands from the family estate, provided he could receive assurances of efficient budget management and eventual success, but the voyage never happened. The British consul Robert Colquhoun’s close ties with the exiles and involvement in the transmission of money and letters abroad at this critical time is hinted at in a letter from Alex- andru Golescu-Albu to his brother Ştefan.302 Golescu-Albu travelled to Greece, where he met with his brothers Radu and Nicolae. In his letters sent in transit he reported contacts with a number of Greek, Polish and Italian radicals who worked towards the independence of the South-East European peoples from both “the dying and inert Tur- key and the expansionist, despotic Russia” and towards the creation of the “Etats confédérés de l’Orient”.303 As a result, the Greek government

301 Arthur Mitzman, Michelet Historian: rebirth and romanticism in nineteenth- century France (Yale University Press, 1990), 324, note 5. 302 Fotino 1: 197; Fotino 3: 339–40. 303 Ibid., 3: 292. 216 1852 expelled or arrested the conspirators, an event which prompted the following reflections: For the last three and a half years, having left our country, we have been knocking on all the doors, those of the governments and those of the peoples, those of revolutionary committees and those of high diplomacy, the doors of the Poles, Italians, Germans, French, English and even Hungarians, we did not leave anyone out, we established contacts with everybody; in a word, Europe, its many Capitals and its various nationalities know us and we know them; but we did ignore one thing; only one corner of the globe still ignores us, as we ignore it; it is, however, the one closest to us and most interesting to us in many respects, and perhaps the one corner of the earth with which one day destiny will call us to identify ourselves. It is this small strip of land called Turkey in Europe, and it is made up of Bulgarians, Serbs, Macedonians, Albanians, Thessalians, and free Greeks. How is it that we have so completely lost it from view? And why this contempt and this negligence towards us from them? Could it be their ignorance, their stupidity or their fanaticism which have kept us away from them? But these should have been the very reasons for approaching and enlightening them, for showing them where their true interests and ours lie, for telling them that, if they persist in their errors and their fanaticism, we will all risk being crushed one day or another, being broken in this medley of religious prejudice, national antagonism, and obscure hatred which we have inherited from our past and which Russia has been exploiting so ably [. . .].304 1852 was also a year of personal losses among the expatriates. Rosetti and his wife lost their new-born son, Ion, who died of scarlet fever in February. In common with the babies of the Michelet-Dumesnil circles, the Rosetti infant, born in May 1851, had not been christened in church. But, like Athénaïs Michelet upon the death of her son, Lazare, in 1850, Marie Rosetti resorted to baptism in articulo mortis, as Rosetti noted tersely in his diary: “But can anyone find the words to comfort a mother who sees her son in death’s arms? She ran towards the deity, towards religion. Religion prevents humanity from progress- ing, but somehow soothes pain such as this. [. . .] She therefore asked to have her son baptized, and . . . I brought a Catholic priest to baptize her child. Ion Brătianu stood as witness”, Rosetti wrote tersely in his Diary, partly disengaging himself from involvement in the episode: her child.305

304 Ibid., 293–4. 305 14 February 1852, Rosetti, Diary, 331. nantes-paris-bucharest 217

On 24 May 1852, the Rosettis moved to the village of Douet, near Nantes, where life was less expensive than in Paris, and where they lived a simple, frugal life. They had received news that Winterhalder had been expelled from Wallachia by Prince Ştirbey’s hardline government and, therefore, business at the “Rosetti-Winterhalder Establish- ment” had come to a halt, cutting short their main source of subsidies in exile. Life was bleak, but at least, starting with 12 June, they also enjoyed the comforting presence of the Michelets, whom the aftermath of the coup d’état also exiled to Nantes. The Michelets settled in the La Haute-Forêt suburb of Nantes in an isolated villa built in the reign of Louis XV. The historian’s decision to leave Paris was greeted by friends, republicans and revolutionaries in exile: Edgar Quinet and Armand Lévy from Brussels, and Dumitru Brătianu from London, to mention only names of immediate interest for the present story, all sent messages of sympathy and support.306 Taking advantage of easy access to the Nantes archives, Michelet – one of the earliest modern historians to make substantial use of archival sources307 – re-immersed himself in the writing of volumes six and seven of his History of the Revolution and spent the next months taking his daily dose of “the black blood of the dead”, as he wrote in a letter: the Terror of 1793, on which he was focussing then, became a backdrop for constant reflection on the new terrors of imperial France and the realities of a Europe in search of itself.308 The historian had temporarily suspended his work on the Légendes démocratiques du nord, which he was to reprise in June 1853. The other members of the Franco-Romanian circles maintained a continuing correspondence, from the available remains of which it is possible to reconstruct their lives during this time. Under political pressure, Michelet’s son-in-law, Alfred Dumesnil, had been forced to take up private teaching in Alsace. From there, he wrote to Ion Brătianu on 10 July 1852, assuring him that he continued his work for the ‘Romanian cause’. He also mentions narrating the “Legend of Mme Rosetti”, Michelet’s work-in-progress, to the young daughters

306 Viallaneix, Michelet: les travaux et les jours, 377. 307 He had also been director of the French National Archives in Paris in the 1830s. 308 Letter from Michelet to Alfred Dumesnil, from Nantes, 23 August 1852, in Michelet, Correspondance, 7: 181. 218 1852 of the Kestners, the Alsatian republican family who had engaged him as tutor.309 Their new life in Nantes was initially difficult for the Rosettis. Find- ing cheap accommodation, dispensing with the services of unafford- able nannies and doing all their errands on foot because carriages were too expensive were some of Marie’s complaints in letters to her friend, Adèle Dumesnil.310 On their daughter Liberté’s birthday on 11 June 1852, the seriously impoverished Rosettis somehow managed to buy her a few presents, which she abandoned in a matter of minutes. Rosetti then decided to give his four-year-old daughter a much better, a symbolic present: “At ten, I took her to see Michelet, and asked him to bless her. He took her in his arms and gave her a kiss. Do not forget, my little girl, this kiss. It will make your good fortune.”311 Moving into a new, more salubrious house in Nantes, which they rented in June, and the congenial companionship of the Michelets, meant that Rosetti entered possibly the happiest, albeit short, period of his life, which he enjoyed, in spite of the hardships and anxiet- ies. With little money and no servants, Athénaïs Michelet and Marie Rosetti bore the brunt of domestic duties in difficult circumstances, while their husbands pursued their activities. While continuing work on the History of the Revolution, Michelet was engaged in an active correspondence with friends, allies, and disciples, including Dumitru Brătianu. Inspired by the hymn to the ‘Exile’ which closed Quinet’s Révolutions d’Italie (1848–1851), and although not strictly an engaged man of the left or a revolutionary, Michelet nevertheless asked Brătianu on 27 August 1852 to pass on his message of solidarity to all those who had opted for exile, for the “Cité de la conscience”: the real France was elsewhere, he wrote, it was with people such Ledru-Rollin, Pierre Leroux, Louis Blanc and Félix Pyat, all of whom were involved at the time with the work of Mazzini’s Democratic Committee in London. He thanked Brătianu for his unflagging and publicly expressed pro- French feelings at a time when France had lost her prestige in Europe: “You are defending France, whom everybody is now trampling under their feet! You are doing what I should have done, had I been able to leave. What kept me here? Hélas! It was France herself, the need to teach her her own revolutionary past, which everybody must know,

309 Letter from Alfred Dumesnil to Dumitru Bratiano, 10 July 1852, in ibid., 124. 310 Letter dated June/July 1852, in Documente inedite, ed. Bucur, 176. 311 18 June 1852, Rosetti, Diary, 337. nantes-paris-bucharest 219 and which is completely ignored.” The Second Empire was a historical aberration, Michelet wrote, a joke doomed “to collapse tomorrow in a huge peal of laughter. France herself will laugh at herself for having hoped . . . in the shadow of a shadow”, Michelet wrote, referring to the two Napoleons and the revival of the Bonapartist tradition. Recalling that he had been the first to “bless” his disciple, Brătianu, in the 1840s at the Collège de France, Michelet was grateful that his benediction had been “returned” to himself and to France. “I am sending you an affectionate embrace, dear son of my mind”, Michelet signs off, asking Brătianu to shake the hands of “our friends, Messrs. Ledru-Rollin, Mazzini, the true France.”312 In the not-too-distant past, Brătianu’s ebullient and opinionated letters had prompted benevolent, but terse responses from his busy mentor. Times had changed: the coup d’état and the political repression in France, the French betrayal of Italy (“oh, assassinated mother”), exile in Nantes, shared with the Rosettis, had been experiences which mellowed Michelet, who now wrote with a new-found tone of tender affection. This was no longer an uneven, a mentor-disciple relationship, but an equal communion of exiles, for whom friendship had become one of a few emotional solaces. From London, Brătianu was happy to encourage and comfort his mentor. Unlike Alexander Herzen, whose pessimistic views on the unstoppable decline of the West, and of France in particular, were without appeal,313 Brătianu was more sanguine about the future of France. It was a difference of political positioning: whereas Herzen believed that Russia was destined ultimately to rejuvenate and save a decadent West through socialism and communitarianism, the Roma- nians did not stray too far away from the mainstream traditions of French liberalism and republicanism. In addition, they still needed Great Power support to attain their nation-building goals, and it helped to remain positive and offer flattery. Talking of the coup d’état of 1851, he deplored the “victims of Bonapartist terror”, but believed that France, like a wounded man, will pick herself up and regain her former glory; he believed the Empire was the “last carnival” of the

312 Letter from Michelet to “Dimitri Bratiano” from Nantes, 27 August 1852, in Michelet, Correspondance, 7:191. 313 Herzen’s views were popularised in France and Britain via translations from his works such as: From the Other Shore (1847–1850), My Past and Thoughts (1852–1868), Le monde russe et la révolution (3 vols., 1860–62) and My Exile in Siberia (2 vols., 1855). Cf. comments in Durandin, Révolution, 219–72. 220 1852

“old world’ ”, he had faith that the “soul of Jeanne d’Arc” still survived in France’s “guts”. At the end of his letter, Brătianu acknowledged the change in their relationship and expressed his gratitude for being called “the son of your mind”.314 The coup d’état of December 1851, he wrote to Armand Lévy on the first anniversary of the event, had “united the hearts and fortified the common aspirations” of all the French ‘proscrits’.315 In Nantes, Michelet was anointed conscience leader of an international community-in-exile who waited for the regeneration of Europe. While Michelet, in his own words, felt “profoundly exiled” in his own country,316 other exiles were being re-united, even if only temporarily, with their homelands. In August 1852, Effingham Grant, who had joined the British consulate in Bucharest in 1838, was in Plymouth with his wife, Zoe, visiting his widowed mother. From there he wrote to Ştefan Golescu: “Ah! there is a feeling both painful and sweet when one returns to one’s country after a lengthy absence. Apart from those who paid their ultimate price to nature in the meantime and who were therefore absent on our arrival, time has been busy operating changes in those dear to us and has altered faces so familiar to us in our recollections. Upon my return, I failed to recognise almost everybody, everything was changed around me, even the city with its surrounding area, and I would undoubtedly have felt a stranger in my own country if the hearts that welcomed me had not remained the same, tender and affectionate and pounding with joy and gratitude for our return.” Grant mentions an impending meeting with Lord Russell at the For- eign Office, most probably to discuss matters relating to his post in Wallachia, his pay and his future: “It is certainly an incomparable joy to be a husband and a parent, but, alas, like most earthly joys, it is not perfect, because the anxiety one feels for the future of these trusting and care-free little creatures casts a shadow which often clouds the sky of our lives. But I have lived long enough in the East to be aware of my Allah Kerim317 and to know that one should never doubt that one’s reward will come sooner or later.”318

314 D. Brătianu, letter to Michelet, 7 November 1852, from London, in Michelet, Correspondance, &: 262–263. 315 Letter dated December 1852, in Ibid., 294–5. 316 See the epigraph to this section. 317 “Allah is merciful” in Arabic. 318 Letter from Plymouth dated 23 August 1852, in Fotino 3: 369–70. nantes-paris-bucharest 221

The series of human losses continued in late 1852, and the Roma- nian expatriates found that their circles of relatives and friends were diminishing relentlessly. In September the Golescus lost their twenty- year-old niece Alexandrina (Luţa), one of the ‘little republicans’ of Goleşti and their active correspondent. The separated family continued to meet furtively and briefly in various parts of the world, as the ban on the men’s return to Romania was not yet lifted: Zinca was finally able to travel to Vienna and Paris, and one of her sons, Nicolae, had to sell family jewellery in order to be able to travel from Athens, where he lived in exile at the time, and meet his mother and brothers. Finally, such were the convoluted routes of their nomadic life, they all met in Geneva.319 Geneva was known as a haven for French republicans after 1848 and for its rather relaxed attitude towards the activities of its significant international émigré community.320 In October 1852, Rosetti entertained fears of a joint attack by Rus- sia and Austria against Turkey, with Napoleon’s collusion.321 Michelet, too, was increasingly musing on the ‘Russian theme’, which was gaining momentum on the European political scene. Like Rosetti, he, too, had suspicions about Louis Napoléon’s occult ties with tsarist Russia. He believed that the French diplomatic agents in Constantinople were “engaged in Russian propaganda in the Ottoman empire” and that the Second Empire might ask for help from the “Cossacks” if the continuing economic crisis will lead to social unrest.322 In the course of 1852, another member of the ‘Franco-Romanian’ group added his contribution to the concert of attacks against Russian policies in South-East Europe, and especially in the Romanian Prin- cipalities. In his Souvenirs de voyages et d’études, Saint-Marc Girardin remembered a visit to Romania in the late 1830s, when he had found members of the élites au fait with current affairs and despairing of Western help against Russia. His impression had been that the Roma- nians dreamed of a more open society, where at least “they woud not have to fear deportation to Siberia if they spoke freely.” At the same time, the diplomatic quest for a political solution for the country had led to a veritable identity crisis: was salvation to come from France

319 Ibid., 203. 320 John M. Merriman, The Agony of the Republic: the repression of the left in revolutionary France, 1848–1851 (Yale University Press, 1978), 129–30. 321 17 October 1852, Rosetti, Diary, 342. 322 Letter to Victor Chauffour, 11 November 1852, in Michelet,Correspondance , 7: 270–1. 222 1852 and Western Europe, from the Ottoman Empire, the suzerain power, or from the protecting power, tsarist Russia?323 1852, a year of high drama for the exiles, both French and Roma- nian, ended with the saddening news of the death of yet another one of them, the historian Nicolae Bălcescu, who succumbed to consumption in Palermo on 28 November at the age of only thirty-three. In France, after a second plebiscite, the Second Empire was officially proclaimed on 2 December, exactly one year after the coup d’état. It was Marie Rosetti who, in Paris, summed up their individual and collective experiences on the very last day of 1852, in a letter to Ion, the younger Brătianu, whose affectionate nickname was Beppo: Oh 52–52! May the future, by sparing us of the misfortunes that you have afflicted us with, may the future preserve the love, the friendships that have helped us suffer all those misfortunes, and have sometimes even made us bless them – Oh, in spite of everything, in spite of everything, I love this fifity-two – It is love in the grave, but it is still love. I have lost my child, my faith and the power of prayer. Oh, yes, my little angel, in leaving this world, you left your mother three times alone – and yet I cannot curse the year that is about to die – and I wish to mourn for it with you, Beppo- You, saintly friend, who have identified yourself with everything that I have lost – I have lost my child – but you are looking after his small cot – your friendship is warming it up again – I have lost my child-like faith, but in you, my noble [illegible] and in your brother, I have found a Trinity which equals the one which I have lost – . . .324

323 Saint-Marc Girardin, Souvenirs de voyages, 284–298. Cf. Part One of the present study, p. 25. 324 S 36(1)/CCCLIX, Letter in French from Marie Rosetti to Ion Brătianu, 31 December 1852, B.A.R., Fonds I. C. Brătianu, S 36(1–20)/CCCLIX. 1853 NANTES-PARIS-LONDON

I will venture to state that, in the whole history of the intercourse of nations, acts so unjustifiable, so outrageous, so dangerous as those which have been committed within the last three months have never previously been committed in Europe. Sir Henry Austen Layard, Speech in the House of Commons, 22 July 1853325 L’ordre règne en Valachie. 27 November 1853 Messieurs les Cosaques326 If 1852 had been a year of deaths and losses, 1853 held the promise of births and new beginnings. Rosetti’s third son, Vintilă Jules Ştefan, was born in Nantes on 23 January. The witnesses to the registration of the birth were Jules Michelet and a Polish expatriate, Dr. Ignace de Kostozenwski, who had probably assisted the birth.327 Michelet announced the event to his son-in-law, Alfred Dumesnil: “We went there yesterday and Rosetti asked the doctor and myself to serve as witnesses for the declaration [of the birth] at the municipality. Which we did. As for the church and the baptism, I am not going to involve myself. Here, we are surrounded and crushed by the Church.”328 It is very likely that the Rosettis did not, in fact, opt for a church baptism for their child, unless Marie had been chastened by the christening in extremis of her late infant, Ion. Life in the village of Douet continued to have an idylically stoical quality about it: a Madame Edmond brought the milk, the residents ground their own coffee and fed the chicken – for whose subsequent

325 Sir A. Henry Layard, Autobiography and Letters from his childhood until his appointment as H. M. Ambassador at Madrid, ed. Sir Arthur Otway, 2 vols. (London, 1903), 1: 245. 326 See note 493 below. 327 The doctor’s name is an approximate reading, cf. Rosetti,Diary , 348, and Bi- blioteca Naţională, the St. Georges Collection, the Dinu V. Rosetti Archive, P XLIII, Dossier 5, certificate of baptism, 25 January 1853, Mairie de Saint-Sébastien, Nantes. 328 Letter from Michelet to Alfred Dumesnil, 26 January 1853, in Michelet, Cor- respondance, 7: 346–7. 224 1853 slaughter Rosetti felt guilty – and the courtyard was full of children.329 Separations were frequent: Maria often went to England to see her mother, Rosetti attended to business, friendships and to keeping up with contacts in Paris. His letters to Marie now brimmed with over- flowing emotions and urges to daily stoicism: “Let us love each other and all will be well. [. . .] we will endure everything heroically.”330 Both Rosetti and Michelet found the companionship of their wives a solace at this time of exile and disappointment, as did Edgar Quinet, who, in exile in Brussels, was sustained by his young Moldavian wife of a few months, Hermione. “I am happy for your happiness.” wrote Michelet to Quinet on 11 March 1853, “and grateful to Madame Quinet who has built a hearth for you in that alien land. A great part of your new glory will be for her to share. Behind a man’s grandest works is an accomplished woman, who offers repose to his heart and a companionship in harmony with his lofty aims. I have myself felt this vividly this winter in our accumulated tribulations, our new poverty, the servitude of our country, the death that surrounds us here, the stormy weather, a new ‘93. In her young heart, my wife has preserved the very soul of my country.”331 Rosetti returned briefly to Paris on 9 May 1853. His habitual circle of friends during that time in Paris included Dumitru Brătianu, Alfred Dumesnil, whose daughter Jeanne was very close to Marie Rosetti, Charlemagne Hallegrain, the shoemaker and fellow-conspirator, Paul Bataillard, Cezar Bolliac, Henric Winterhalder and his wife, and the young Constantin Racoviţă, the Golescus’ nephew, who, having survived deportation to Astrakhan in 1849, was now in Paris, too. Away from his wife and children, who stayed in Douet, Rosetti’s daily letters to Marie were passionate and tender: “I love you, beloved woman. I love you in the way you want to be loved. At this moment I feel my heart melting with love for you.”332 The tensions and turbulence of their early years together were now replaced by a calmer and more mature appreciation of each other. “I have found in you a treasure that I was not aware existed in ‘47.”333 Yet, ever the malcontent, he confessed that he would be willing to trade some of her passion and love in exchange

329 Letter dated 18 June 1853, in C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 56–7. 330 Ibid. 331 Letter from Michelet, Nantes, 11 March 1853, in Michelet, Correspondance, 7: 383–4. 332 Letter dated 18 May 1853, C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 51. 333 Letter dated 19 May 1853, in ibid. nantes-paris-london 225 for something “more spiritual”, for the realisation in practice of a very Michelet-ian idea: the participation of his wife in his work, a return to her more intellectually aware pre-marriage self. “I am not selfish, I am more ambitious than selfish, and examining myself in cold blood, I have found that I would even give a part of your love in order to see you admired by the world, and be able to tell myself: – my wife works by my side to enlighten the minds and ennoble the hearts of the Romanians.”334 Events accelerated on the European political scene in the early months of 1853, largely as a result of Russian initiatives in the Near East. Partly as an attempt to win over the French Catholics, Napo- leon III had decided to put pressure on Russia in support of the interests of Catholic monks at the Holy Places in Palestine and Jerusalem against those of Greek Orthodox monks, supported by Russia. In her turn, Austria was agitating on behalf of her own interests in Bosnia and Montenegro, where the Porte had sent troops to quell a rebellion. In the circumstances, Tsar Nicholas tried to make his voice heard by sending a tough-talking emissary, Prince Alexander Menshikov, to Constantinople in February 1853. Although Menshikov’s initial mandate ostensibly focused on the relatively minor Franco-Russian conflict over ecclesiastical custodial rights, once that issue was settled, Rus- sian demands soon escalated into a full-scale ultimatum: Menshikov requested a sened (an act with the legal force of a treaty) expanding certain articles in the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca of 1774 regarding the Russian protectorate over the Porte’s Christian subjects. Crucially, as far as the Romanians were concerned, Tsar Nicholas made it clear to the Porte that he intended to maintain the Russian protectorate over the Danubian Principalities and Serbia, and threatened a military occupation of these provinces if his demands were not met. The Menshikov mission, often described as a fine example of Oriental intrigue owing to the twists and turns of its unpredictable scenario, ended in late May with the Ottomans rejecting the Russian demands. It was a failure not only as a result of clashes of powerful personalities (Menshikov, Strat- ford Canning) and of a conflict of national prestige (Russian, Turkish, British), but also because the European powers found that the Russian demands of 1853 contravened both the spirit and the letter of European agreements over the Eastern Question concluded in 1841. Although

334 Ibid. 226 1853

Menshikov scaled down his demands in the face of Ottoman defiance and British opposition, Stratford Canning and the representatives of the other European powers continued to believe that the rights of protection and intervention sought by Russia over no fewer that twelve millions of the Sultan’s Christian subjects would have entailed Rus- sian involvement in the secular, not only the religious, affairs of the Porte and would have resulted in a disproportionate Russian influence in Constantinople. A battle of wills between Stratford Canning and Menshikov over a diplomatic technicality (whether the text enshring- ing Russian rights should be a full-blown sened or a mere gülhane), and a series of blunders, mis-timings and miscommunication between the four signatories of the 1841 Straits Convention, Britain, Russia, Austria and the Porte itself, finally combined to precipitate the Crimean War.335 In order to understand the role of the Danubian Principalities – powerless Ottoman dominions - in the Eastern Question, it is important to keep in mind their strategic location along the lower Danube and on the coast of the Black Sea. Russian threats to occupy them had traditionally proved effective means of intimidating the Porte, and in 1848–49 Russia had used them as launching pads in its conflicts with the Porte and in its offensives in Central Europe, notably in its attack on revolutionary Transylvania and Hungary. The naturally bellicose Dumitru Brătianu hoped that, in the ensuing game of Great Power brinkmanship after the Menshikov fiasco, the Russian occupation of his country and its consequent abuses, might provide an incentive for the Western powers to act.336 The Romanian exiles, as always, lived on rumours. In late May Rosetti received information from occult sources about the Russian army’s alleged crossing of the river Prut into Moldavia. The Golescus received letters from dispersed friends and relatives full of unverified rumours about a new revolution in Wallachia, and the imminent occupation

335 For a detailed discussion of the Menshikov mission, see Harold Temperley, England and the Near East: The Crimea (London, 1964), especially Ch. XII. For a more recent and colourful analysis see Allan Cunningham, “The Preliminaries of the Crimean War”, in Allan Cunningham, Eastern Questions in the Nineteenth Century, Collected Essays (London, 1993), ed. Edward Ingram, 2: 130–225. The complex pre- Crimean diplomacy, on the basis of Russian archival sources, is astutely analysed by David M. Goldfrank in “Policy traditions and the Menshikov mission of 1853”, in Imperial Russian Foreign Policy, ed. Hugh Ragsdale and V. N. Ponomarev (Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1993), 119–58. 336 Fotino 3: 205, 217. nantes-paris-london 227 of the country by Austrian troops, and possibly also by Russian and Turkish troops. In a letter written in June, Ştefan Golescu expressed the opinion that, given a choice, an Austrian occupation of the Prin- cipalities would have been preferable to Russian intervention and control.337 The Russian troops finally crossed the river Prut into Molda- via on 3 July, two years after the end of their previous occupation of the Romanian Principalities in the aftermath of the defeated revolutions. The Russians appointed their own officials, the Generals Budberg, Hal- cinski and Urusov, to chair the divans and the administrative councils in both provinces. Although this time the occupation only lasted until August 1854, it was fraught with the same difficulties – requisitioning of supplies and housing, further infringements of human and civic rights – which had previously caused friction between the Russian interim administration and the Romanian civilians.338 Short-lived peasant insurrections in the autumn of 1853 were easily suppressed.339 More than a year later, summing up the effects of the Russian occupation, the Daily News correspondent in Bucharest provided some statistics: 30,000 Russian troops were garrisoned in only 12,000 homes in Bucharest, creating over-crowding, economic waste and demoraliza- tion on a large scale. The Russian soldiers, the correspondent added unsparingly, were “greasy, filthy to the last degree, malodorous beyond description”, but they were so ill-equipped and badly paid that they became “submissive, uncomplaining, grateful brutes,” for whom the Romanian locals felt more compassion than hatred. As for their officers, they were “vastly more successful in the boudoir and the salon than they were in the battle-field”,340 a flippant comment meant perhaps to reassure a British public who, in the changed context of early October 1854, was anxiously awaiting the outcome of the assault on Sebastopol. As Great Powers armies appeared to be poised for war in the latter half of 1853, Nicolae Golescu and Dumitru Brătianu intensified their pro-Romanian publicity campaign in Britain, mainly with help from Lord Dudley Stuart and Sir Austen Layard. Layard, the renowned

337 Fotino 4: 12–3. 338 Barbara Jelavich, Russia and the Formation of the Romanian National State, 1821–1878 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 56. 339 Isar, Din istoria generaţiei de la 1848, 54. 340 “Letters from the Seat of War in the Principalities”, Daily News, 13 October 1854. For the newspaper’s correspondent in Bucharest during the Crimean War, see below, p. 278 sqq. 228 1853 archeologist, diplomat and liberal MP, was, like Dudley Stuart, already known in political circles for his consistently expressed anti-Russian positions. Despite coming from a country with an underveloped, censored press and little experience of pressure politics, the Romanians were remarkably quick in plugging into the British way of doing things. With help from their British allies, they consciously attempted to appeal to the moral earnestness of the mid-Victorians by presenting support for a small, oppressed nation as a loftier, more idealistic purpose than mere commercial self-interest. In its initial stages, the campaign did not seem as successful as the Romanians had anticipated. “Business here” Nicolae wrote from Manchester on 7 July 1853, “is flourishing. Should God come down from the heavens, he wouldn’t be able to convene a meeting”,341 he complained, probably rather unjustly, given that public opinion in Britain at that stage was already in a “quite extraordinarily febrile state” over the possibility of a European conflict.342 It is true, however, that some of the radicals and independents who had formerly been the Romanians’ main support base – people like Thomas Perronet Thompson, David Urquhart and members of the Peace Society – were now firmly in the anti-war camp. While briefing Sir Austen Layard for a motion in the Commons, Brătianu and Golescu also conducted an active campaign in Liverpool and Manchester, where, political ethics aside, they felt that they had to appeal to the enlightened self-interest of the British industrial and commercial classes. TheManchester Examiner of 9 July 1853 published a letter, written two days previously, in which Brătianu responded to the publication by The Times of 6 July of a manifesto issued by the Tsar on 26 June. Nicholas I had publicly justified the imminent Rus- sian occupation of the Romanian Principalities on religious and diplomatic grounds, as being a way of pressurizing the Ottoman Porte into respecting “the inviolability of the Orthodox (Provoslavnai) Church.” Having been denied a right of reply by The Times, in his Manchester Examiner response Brătianu wished to convey his gratitude to the good people of Manchester, who had supported his “cause”, as well as to express his hope that Britain would not simply stand by as the “barbarians of the north” trampled the sovereignty of two independent states and menaced European peace. “The French and English

341 Fotino 1: 206 and Fotino 4: 32. 342 Muriel E. Chamberlain, ‘Pax Britannica’? British Foreign Policy 1789–1914 (Longman, 1988), 106. nantes-paris-london 229 fleet ought to proceed at once upon Sebastopol and the mouths of the Danube, or else, to strike their colours, and salute the invader of these principalities as the master of the world” urged Brătianu. On the same day, Saturday 9th of July, The Times, still non- interventionist at the time, offered its readers a more analytical article, in which it unambiguously stated that a war against Russia was not warranted either by existing treaties, or by a supposed violation of vital British interests, which, the author believed, were non-existent in the area.343 Referring to the Romanian Principalities, the article also claimed that “the population of these provinces is much more allied to the Russian than to the Turkish, both in race and religion”, the type of cavalier opinion which the Romanians, as seen, had tried to correct throughout their years of campaigning. This time, Brătianu found refuge with the Daily News, which hosted his response on the 19th. “The inhabitants of the Principalities are descended from the Roman legions led into Dacia by Trajan”, Brătianu informed his British readers. “They call themselves Roumans, and their language, which much resembles Italian, is derived, like that language, from the Latin. Their origins, their recollections, their tendencies, everything attaches them to the nations of civilised Europe. To the Russians, on the contrary, they have no similitude: their nationality, race, language, historical traditions, and manners, all separate them from the Russians.” Apart from thus deftly dislocating Russia from the realms of European civilisation, Brătianu used the opportunity to look beyond the imminent war and ask for the Principalities to be placed under the collective protection of the Great Powers, an objective which was actually attained after the Crimean War. In a tense atmosphere which fed mainly on rumour, the other exiles were gripped by apprehension and even by anti-Western feelings as they sensed that, even should the war broke out, post-war arrangements were unlikely to satisfy their nation-building demands. In a letter of 10/15 July 1853 to his brother Ştefan, Alexandru Golescu-Albu, still in Geneva, was fulminating against the Western cabinets. In his understanding of behind-the-scenes diplomatic blueprints, plans were already afoot for the post-war creation of a new kingdom of Poland and a new kingdom of Hungary, the unification of the Slavs of Southern Austria and, possibly, the incorporation of the Danubian Principalities

343 For The Times and its shifts of opinion on the Crimean War, see Stephen Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain, 2 vols. (London, 1981), 1: 105–6. 230 1853 into the new Hungarian kingdom. He believed that such arrangements were not viable, because “we Romanians, Serbs, Saxons, we, the sacrificed, the entire Southern Europe, will rise to prevent this creation of the selfish and narrow-minded West. . . .” And he added: “The Hungar- ians are reverting to their old arrogance and to their cherished idea of an illegitimate, unjust, impossible, precarious Hungary, a Hungary where all the nationalities, including their own, would perish . . . We do not want to have to choose between one despotism and another . . . we want freedom for ourselves and for our neighbours. Ah! we will in the future come face to face with the Hungarians, guns pointing at each other, but we will reap the glory, because we will have justice on our side . . . The infamous Austria and the ignoble Russia will no longer be there to distort and defile our worthy and immortal cause!”344 The West, he believed, was guilty of failing to distinguish between a confederation of nationalities and a “fratricidal” Hungarian kingdom based on oppression, and was thus encouraging atavistic Hungarian political heresies, an argument which Rosetti had presented to Jules Michelet in late 1851. As for Turkey in Europe, Golescu-Albu believed, ensuring its survival was “as impossible as trying to resuscitate a corpse, for the dead are not of this world; in Europe the Turks are outnumbered by the Christian population in a proportion of five to one, and were overshadowed with regard to capacities, feelings, energy, consciousness and devotion.”345 What he had in mind, irrespective of whether the European war was to happen or not, was a crusade of the “aspiring nations”, of Romanians, Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Serbs, Bulgarians, Albanians, against Turkey, Russia and Austria alike. While the French had sent a fleet into the Mediterranean soon after the start of the Menshikov mission, the more cautious – and anti- Turkish – Lord Aberdeen waited until the occupation of the Danubian Principalities and the failure of the “Vienna Note” made prevarication no longer possible. The Vienna Note, agreed upon by the Great Powers in late July 1853 as a result of an offer from neutral Austria to mediate in the Franco-Turkish dispute, was essentially an ultimatum to Russia. It demanded inter alia a profession of Russo-Turkish goodwill and agreement, and guarantees for the protection of the Porte’s Christian subjects in the “letter and the spirit” of the treaties of Küçük Kay- narca (1774) and Adrianople (1829), which had previosuly regulated

344 Fotino 1: 208 and Fotino 4: 36–9. 345 Ibid., 4: 36. nantes-paris-london 231

Russo-Ottoman relations. Amidst naval manoeuvering, diplomatic skirmishes and wars of words, the planned motion on the Russian invasion of the Principalities was raised in the Commons on 16 August 1853. Briefed by Dumitru Brătianu346 and carried by the wave of growing anti-Russian feeling and militaristic tone of belligerent sections of the press, Austen Layard attacked both Russian duplicity and Lord Aberdeen’s policy of appeasement, and urged war, the only policy to pursue when Britain’s interests were at stake. “The Russian occupation of the Principalities is accepted, and Great Britain is regarded by the weaker states who look to her for support as helpless against Russian encroachments”, Layard said on that occasion, appealing to national pride.347 The Romanian Principalities should have been defended as “a barrier to Russia and a bulwark of freedom.”348 Richard Cobden, however, believed that the British people – even in Birmingham, he joked, where they manufactured muskets – did not wish to go to war over Turkey, a moribund “Mohameddan” empire which ruled over reluctant Christian populations, who had never been consulted over their own choice of government. He reminded those who invoked a Russian threat to British interests in the Middle East of the six million pound sterling loaned to Russia prior to its invasion of Hungary. “[. . .] Russia could not move an army across her own frontiers without coming to Europe for a loan”, Cobden commented derisively. There were echoes of Dumitru Brătianu’s 1849 memorandum to Lord Palm- erston in Cobden’s contention that tsarist Russia was “a mere collection of villages, without capital, without resources.”349 Cobden was consistent in his non-interventionist politics: as early as 1836, at the height of pro-Polish movements in Britain, he had maintained in his Russia by a Manchester Manufacturer that England should not go to war against Russia and, almost uniquely among English liberals, had dismissed the worthiness of the Polish cause.350 In 1850, the Romanian historian Nicolae Bălcescu had been severely disappointed by what he had interpreted as Cobden’s obdurately mercantile approach to

346 Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 53. 347 Layard, Autobiography and Letters, 246. 348 Daily News, 17 August 1853. 349 Ibid. For Brătianu’s memorandum, see pp. 130–1 above. 350 Peter Brock, “Polish Democrats and English Radicals 1832–1862: A Chapter in the History of Anglo-Polish Relations”, Journal of Modern History 25, 2 (1953): 144–5. 232 1853 international affairs.351 Cobden remained a pragmatic pacifist who never stopped believing that free trade was the surest guarantee of peace in Europe and that trade with Turkey was more important for Britain than trade with Russia. To Cobden’s pacifist remonstrances, a Palmerston newly converted to liberal internationalism answered with fiery rhetoric, rather than commercial statistics. He opposed the independent MP’s “mercenary” outlook to the lofty ideal of a rarefied, moral foreign policy, trusting that such rhetoric would not fail to inform the British people’s newly-found passion for foreign affairs: Why, sir, we went to war for the liberties of Europe, and not for the purpose of gaining so much per cent on our exports. (Cheers) We went to war, not for the purpose of increasing the export of our commodities, but in defense of the liberty and independence of nations [. . .]352 It was a far cry from Palmerston’s lukewarm ‘Balkan policies’ of the 1840s. Yet, as Britain was not yet officially at war with Russia, what could Palmerston mean by “we went to war”? 353 He probably referred to the general predisposition of the nation, to the army’s readiness and to the feeling that an actual war declaration was more or less a fore- gone conclusion. Cobden’s appeals to pacifism – though ultimately vindicated by the horrors of the Crimean War – were becoming increasingly isolated, as few people appeared willing to query Palm- erston’s statements or question the doubtful reality of “liberty and independence” in Ottoman-dominated South-Eastern Europe. The Romanians themselves were oblivious to the subtleties of the ongoing debate in mid-Victorian Britain around issues of free trade, morality, peace and war, issues which by 1852 had created a schism within the Radical movement itself.354 For them, a Britain finally willing to go to war against their arch-enemy was a friendly, congenial Britain. Bolstered by British diplomatic support, the Ottoman Grand Coun- cil rejected the Vienna Note on 17–18 August, demanding changes in the draft, as well as guarantees that the Russians would evacuate the Principalities and that the two provinces would henceforward enjoy

351 E. D. Tappe, “Nicolae Bălcescu’s Propaganda in England: his meetings with Cobden and Palmerston”, American Slavic and East European Review 13, 1 (Feb. 1954): 66–71. 352 Daily News, 17 August 1853. 353 War was to be officially declared on 28 March 1854. 354 Cf. G. R. Searle, Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Claren- don Press, 1998), 204. nantes-paris-london 233

Great Power protection against Russian threats.355 The Russians, too, rejected the Vienna Note on 7 September, thus opening up the path to hostilities, which broke out, as widely expected, in October. The initial bone of contention – the Franco-Russian-Ottoman clash over Catholic custodial rights at the Holy Places – was now almost forgotten. With hindsight, it struck many as a trivial pretext for launching a European war. The European-wide military engagement, when it finally happened, had far deeper roots: it was largely the outcome of Russo-Turkish tensions which had been building up since the revolutions of 1848–49 and the consequent refugee crisis.356 The main difference between the present war and the earlier (nine in total since 1676)357 localised Russo-Turkish conflicts was that this time the whole of Europe was dragged in. It was a conflict in which, it is well-known, Britain and France were to incur huge losses, but which, ironically – and quite surprisingly, given their status as non-belligerents – was going to benefit the Romanians.

355 Goldfrank, Origins, 205. 356 See pp. 168–9 above. 357 Goldfrank, Origins, 232. 1853 PARIS: “MADAME ROSETTI”

I am writing for those who are wandering, those who are suffering and waiting, I am writing for the shadows of men lurking amidst the melancholy of Paris and the fogs of London. I am sending them this reju- venating message from the homeland. Michelet, Légendes démocratiques du nord, 1853–4358 In the summer of 1853, in the new atmosphere of war-mongering and heighthened anti-Russian feeling, and braving the diktats of imperial censorship against the French opposition’s work, the republican Le Siècle serialised Michelet’s “Madame Rosetti. Révolution valaque en 1848” on 12, 13 and 14 July 1853. Around the same time, the Revue de Paris (led by the philo-Romanian Louis Ulbach) published fragments of Michelet’s History of the Revolution. Thus, Marie Rosetti’s name was embedded between the names of Charlotte Corday (15 July) and Dan- ton (15 August) in a symbolic revolutionary continuum across time and European borders. Michelet’s portrait of her was more than a cir- cumstantial deference to the Romanians’ need for and construction of their own symbolic, Marianne-like figure. One can read in it the accumulated experience of shared hardship and marginalisation, an experience which had cemented what otherwise would have been perhaps an unlikely alliance between the famous historian and the unknown exiled revolutionaries from the margins of Europe. Life with the Roset- tis in Nantes had added personal poignancy – and perhaps a hint of impossible romance between the historian and Marie – to what otherwise could have sounded like mere literary flattery: “No-one wears with more grace the rags of democratic poverty. No-one knows better than her how to soften poverty for those dear to her. Admirable in danger, she was no less admirable in the course of a lengthy exile, full of hardship, pain and deprivation. But who would not be oblivious to them by her side? Admirable mystery of modern solidarity! It is the closeness of a stranger, of an adoptive daughter of Romania, which

358 Michelet, Légendes, 211 and 238. paris: “madame rosetti” 235 brings the Romanian exile closer to his own homeland, to its living genius and its warm hearth.”359 Beyond the glorification of Marie as revolutionary heroine, Michelet attempted to gain public attention for the “unfortunate Romania”, the “sacrificed nation”, a country which, like Poland and Hungary, had in the course of history “defended and preserved” the West against the “Tartar deluge, the Turkish armies and the Russians.” But, while Poland and Hungary had “at least reaped the glory of their sufferings, and their names had resounded all over the world”, the “peoples of the Danube had hardly enjoyed any attention from Europe.”360 Now, Michelet wrote, Europe was about to witness a new “execution” of Romania by the occupying Russian armies.361 Addressing an international readership recently moved to tears by Harriet Beecher-Stowe’s Unce Tom’s Cabin, Michelet was unafraid to compare the Tsar’s treatment of his own subjects and the Russian protection of the Romanian Principalities with black slavery: “Charitable people, you who have just shed so many tender tears over the fate of the blacks, you sensitive souls, lady readers saddened by the fate of good old Uncle Tom, have you not saved one single tear for the white race? Do you not know that in Russia, in Romania, and across the entire East of Europe, there are sixty million people even more unfortunate than the blacks?”362 By channeling their appeal to the world on behalf of their nation, the Master was thus finally paying a debt of friendship to his Roma- nian disciples. Charles Alexandre, a republican deputy and Lamartine’s private secretary, wrote to Athénaïs Michelet on 23 July 1853, congratulating her husband on the publication of “Madame Rosetti”. “This fiery story inflames one’s heart and puts us all to shame, pale, nervous dreamers of the Orient that we are”,363 Alexandre wrote, alluding to the now obsolete romantic Orientalism of Lamartine’s generation. Emboldened by public declarations made by Napoleon III against Russia’s expansionist drive in South-East Europe and her occupation of the Romanian Principalities on 3 July, previously reluctant publishers now thought that the right moment had come to bring out Michelet’s ‘Wallachian’ writings in a single volume. The republican editor Bry

359 Michelet, Légendes, “Madame Rosetti”, 230. 360 Ibid., 212. 361 Ibid., 236. 362 Ibid., 236–7. 363 Michelet, Correspondance, 7: 467–8. 236 1853 agreed to publish “Madame Rosetti” in an illustrated edition – planned for 15 November – while Garnier was negotiating with Michelet the publication in a single volume of the Russian, Polish and Romanian ‘legends’.364 At the same time, an English-language translation of the “Légende de Kosciuszko” was being negotiated by Stanisław Worcell, the Polish socialist militant close to Mazzini and Ledru-Rollin and a member of the the Polish national committee in London. The text was rapidly translated and published as Poland and Russia. A Legend of Kosciuszko in the translation of William J. Linton, the Chartist who popularised Mazzini’s views in the English Republic and the Leader in the 1850s.365 On 17 August 1853, Jules Michelet wrote to Armand Lévy, congratulating him on the publication of his own pro-Romanian pamphlet, La Russie sur le Danube, which included a protest by the Romanians against the latest Russian occupation and an earlier exchange of letters between Dumitru Brătianu and Lord Dudley Stuart. Lévy’s plea for the Principalities was characteristically melodramatic: “You are succumbing, oh, Romania! And in vain are your sons raising their supplicant arms towards France; they, too, will learn to say: God is too aloft and France is too afar. [. . .] Black Russia’s flag is enveloping you like a shroud, but your own veil of flame, gold and pristine azure will protect you.”366 It was, Michelet said, a “masterpiece”: “I congratulate you, and am happy for your infallible success, which is also ours, the success of our great cause.” An exchange of letters between the two focused on publicizing the two writings in Eugène Pelletan’s Le Siècle, but it has been impossible so far to ascertain their reception and impact.367 Around the same time, Ion Brătianu, who was under arrest, pending his trial in the so-called ‘Hippodrome affair’, a plot to assassinate Emperor Napoleon, wrote an article entitled “Nationality” for the second issue of Rosetti’s newspaper, Republica Română. He had become the chief ideologue of the paper, which had been started in Brussels in November 1851.368 In the spirit of the period’s organicist theories,

364 Viallaneix, Michelet: les travaux, 382. 365 Letter to Jules Michelet, 21 July 1853, in Michelet, Correspondance, 7: 466–7. See Michelet’s reply, dated 11 August 1853, 499–500. 366 Armand Lévy, La Russie sur le Danube (Paris, 1853), 14. The ‘veil’ was an allusion to the Romanian tri-coloured flag. 367 Letter from Michelet to Armand Lévy, 17 August 1853, in Michelet, Correspon- dance, 7: 506–8. Cf. letter to Michelet from Armand Lévy, 24 August 1853, 514–15. 368 The first issue carried a comprehensive editorial by Ion Brătianu, in which he outlined the radicals’ nation-building programme based on the constitution of 1848. paris: “madame rosetti” 237 he argued that the principle of nationality was a natural category of social organization, not an arbitrary, derivative form to be tampered with in the world’s chancelleries. Hungarians, Romanians and Croats, he wrote, had all lost in their revolutions of 1848–49 because they had not respected each other’s rights as nations. Their in-fighting had delivered the revolution into the hands of their enemies. Brătianu paid tribute to Michelet by quoting one of his reflections on the divine source of nations: “do not destroy, do not suffocate a nation, for you will be breaking a string in the harp on which God plays His most harmonious chords.”369 One of the article’s central themes is a plea for a rapprochement between the nations of the gens Latina: Romania belonged culturally with France and Italy rather than with its non-Latin immediate neighbours and Germany. The piece was later serialised by Rosetti’s Românul from October to December 1857, when the exiles were back in Romania and were campaigning for the union of the Principalities. In its post-exile, sanitised version, the article was purged of its more explicit anti-Magyar touches, though not of its expressions of regret for 1848 as a missed opportunity.370 The word “revolution” was replaced by “reform” and the article’s insurrectionary appeal was generally toned down.371 In just four years, the former exiled radicals discovered the virtues of gradualism and decided to relinquish the ‘social and democratic republic’ for a more pramatic approach: the ‘démo-socs’ of 1848 became the moderates of post-Crimean Romania. Michelet’s correspondence with the Romanian exiles continued in the last months of 1853. In October Ion (Jean) Voinescu II, the former Wallachian foreign minister of 1848 and a prominent member of the group close to Rosetti, sent Michelet a copy of a recently

The entire text of the editorial, as well as “Naţionalitatea” were reproduced inDin scrierile şi cuvîntările lui Ion C. Brătianu, 1821–1891, ed. Vintilă I. C. Brătianu, C. Banu and G.D. Creangă, Partea I: 1848–1868 (Bucharest, 1903), 93–103 and 121–43. 369 Republica Română, Brussels, 2, 1853. It was later reproduced in Ion C. Brătianu, Acte şi cuvântări, ed. G. Marinescu and C. Grecescu (Bucharest, 1938), 1: 39–61, as well as in Din scrierile şi cuvântările lui Ion C. Brătianu, ed. Vintilă I. C. Brătianu et al., 121–43 (see previous note). 370 Cf. “Naţionalitatea”, in Din scrierile şi cuvântările lui Ion C. Brătianu, ed. Vintilă I. C. Brătianu et al., 122. 371 For comments on this shift see also Paul Cornea, “Studiu introductiv” in Gîn- direa românească în epoca paşoptistă (1830–1860), ed. Paul Cornea and Mihai Zamfir, 2 vols. (Bucharest, 1968–1969), 1: 25. 238 1853 published collection of his translations from Romanian folklore.372 In his covering letter, he reiterated the theme to which the forty-eighters returned again and again, and to which Michelet himself had alluded in his Légendes: the lack of international recognition for their country: “One of the most poignant sufferings in exile for us Romanians is to see how little our unfortunate homeland is known. [. . .] Her insurrection of 1821 has been ignominiously calumnied and her revolution of 1848, hélas!, which – without the brilliance of the Magyar revolution or the international echoes of the Italian revolution – was nonetheless equally sacred, has scarcely helped in making the name of Romanian less synonymous with “barbarian”. I, therefore, was in ecstasy to read your beautiful legend of our movement of 1848, and my heart was grateful to you, because a writing signed Michelet travels across the boundaries of time and space [. . .]; our gratitude and love for you will last as long as your immortal writings.”373 Jules Michelet’s correspondence in October 1853 focused on the immediate need to publish and circulate “Les Martyrs de la Russie” (serialised in l’Evénement, from 27 September to 17 October 1853) in French as well as in Italian. He regarded this piece as highly topical, now that the war appeared imminent, and he wanted the text distributed in the Near East, including in Constantinople. He asked his son-in-law, Alfred, who was in charge of his affairs in Paris, to talk about this possibility with the Rosettis.374 Work on “Les Martyrs” – as on Michelet’s other writings on Russia and Eastern Europe – was very much a collaborative effort, based on oral communications by the groups of exiles close to Michelet’s circle. As Michelet prepared to leave Nantes and settle in Italy, he asked Quinet to return the bor- rowed copy of “Les Martyrs de la Russie” with the “important corrections which the Poles and the Russians have made thereon”, in time for publication in the edition of the Légendes démocratiques du nord, which the editor Garnier planned for January 1854.375 Fears of

372 Littérature roumaine: les Doïnas, poésies moldaves de V. Alecsandri. Traduites par J. E. Voïnesco (Paris: Impr. De De Soye et Bauchet, 1853) (2nd edn., Paris: G. Cherbuliez, editeur, 1855). 373 Letter from J. Voinesco to Michelet, October 1853, in Michelet, Correspondance, 7: 569–70. 374 Letter from Michelet to Alfred Dumesnil, 7 October 1853, in ibid., 578–9. See also Michelet, Légendes, Introduction, liv. 375 Letter to Quinet, 23 Oct 1853, in Michelet, Correspondance, 7: 597–8. See also letter from Alfred Dumesnil to Michelet, 28 November 1853, in ibid., 623–4, which paris: “madame rosetti” 239 censorship still remained: Garnier told Armand Lévy that he would have ideally wanted to drop “démocratiques” from the title.376 Accord- ing to the contract signed with Garnier, Michelet was to receive twenty- five copies of the volume, while the editor agreed to send sixty review copies to French and foreign newspapers and pay for the book’s pro- motion.377 It was a major publicity operation, supposed to benefit both France and Romania. The fate of Romania was intimately linked, in Michelet’s thinking – as it was in the Romanians’ – to the resuscitation of France’s international role: “I live, at this moment, in the fear of seeing our poor Danubian provinces assassinated by France’s abandon; they are the only friends still on the side of France. How can she revive all those she has left to die, if she does not help?”378 In November 1853 there was talk of an English-language edition of the “Legend of Mme Rosetti”, as Marie wrote to Athénaïs Michelet, saying that she believed “the moment is propitious for a publication in England.”379 The project was not realized. It is difficult to assess the reception and impact of theLégendes outside the circles of the émigré revolutionaries and their close sympathizers. It would appear that, contrary to expectations and despite some unmistakably evocative writing, the book only received a small number of favourable reviews in the press. Its merit probably lies mainly in the propaganda value attached by the East-Central Euro- pean diasporas to a work which put Russian policies in their homelands in the public domain.380 Michelet’s fiercely reductionist reading of Russia, based on scant and biased sources, and especially his disparaging views on Russian literature were understandably criticized by one of the most outstanding of Russian émigrés, the writer Alexander refers to the amendments made by Rosetti and Golescu, especially on what he calls the Wallachian “Congress of Agriculture”, in fact the “Procesele verbale ale Comisiei Proprietăţii de la Bucureşti”, the minutes of the Commission for Property in Bucharest of 1848. 376 Letter of Adèle to Alfred Dumesnil, 11 January 1854, in Documente inedite, ed. Bucur, 240. 377 Letter from Alfred Dumesnil, 14 November 1853, in Michelet, Correspondance, 7: 614–5. 378 Letter from Edgar Quinet (in Brussels) to Jules Michelet, 25 October 1853, in ibid., 599–602. 379 Letter from Marie Rosetti to Athénaïs Michelet from Paris, 14 November 1853, in Michelet, Correspondance, 7: 641–2. 380 Cf. a discussion on reception in Légendes, Introduction by Michel Cadot, xlix–lvi. 240 1853

Herzen. However, the latter’s critique, Le peuple russe et le socialisme, as shown, circulated only outside France. William Linton, the English translator of “Kosciuszko”, and members of the Polish diaspora, too, were aware of the many factual errors and the limitations of a work for which Michelet was perhaps ill-prepared. However, as Michelet himself believed, the volume was not meant as an original contribution to historiography, but as a “popular manifesto”, written in the heat of the moment in order to create interest in events unfolding in a little-known corner of the world. The Légendes démocratiques du nord were finally published as a volume by Garnier on 21 January 1854381 and went into four editions between 1854 and 1899, with very minor changes, which suggests that the historian never radically revised his views on tsarist Russia and the Russian danger in South-East Europe.382 Interestingly, while in 1851 Michelet had been almost alone in France to publicly denounce the Russian threat so vigorously, by 1854 the collected volume of the Leg- ends came out amidst a deluge of cheap anti-Russian pamphlets, from which he distanced himself by making no public declarations on the matter.383 While every effort was being made to publicize the Romanian cause alongside Michelet’s Legends, Rosetti was on his way to Constanti- nople and the Balkans on an ultimately fruitless mission to arrange a Romanian military participation alongside the Ottoman troops in the Crimean War. Ion Brătianu, then in the midst of the ‘Hippo- drome affair’ trial, and the Rosetti children were all ill in Paris, with Marie Rosetti looking after them all. She appealed to the Michelets for encouragment. “[. . .] if I could only hear one of those forceful words that I have often heard M. Michelet pronounce; if I could see a tear of sympathy in your eyes, as I have often seen, I would have more hope for the future.”384 The Michelets themselves were living in Spartan frugality in exile in Genoa in the winter of 1853, with Michelet always

381 The first Romanian-language translation was published in the periodicalSteaua Dunării, 1860; Doamna Rosetti, the first Romanian publication of the text as a volume, in a translation by D. Munteanu-Râmnic, was published by Tipografia Neamul Româ- nesc (Vălenii de Munte, 1909), with a second edition in 1930, of which fragments were included in Radu Pantazi’s study C. A. Rosetti: gînditorul-omul (Bucharest, 1969). 382 Légendes, Introduction, lv. 383 Ibid., xli. 384 Ibid. paris: “madame rosetti” 241 ailing, and in need of sympathy himself. From his own exile in Brus- sels, Edgar Quinet wrote to show his friendship: “Oh! Wouldn’t I be proud if I only could make a good fire for both of you, and chop your wood! I assure you that I could pay you more than one service of this kind. What would you say if I made you dinner, or chocolat, or warm milk, or even – what I do best – eggs fried in butter!”385

385 Letter from Brussels, 19 November 1853, in Michelet, Correspondance, 7: 648–50. 1853–1854 PARIS: ION BRĂTIANU AND THE ‘HIPPODROME AFFAIR’

It is certain that agitation is being caused in France by a committee calling itself the Central European Committee in London, whose only aim is to set fire to Europe and it is certain that you are serving as an intermediary for this committee. Questioning of ‘Bratiano’, November 1853386 In mid-June 1853, amidst the feverish international lobbying preceding the Crimean War, Ion Brătianu (‘Beppo’ to his closest friends) was arrested and interrogated under accusation of involvement in a plot to kill Napoleon III. Adèle Dumesnil, familiar with his penchant for shady, dangerous activities, hoped that “they have not found anything at his home,” a suspicion which was to prove entirely founded. 387 The philo-Romanians closed ranks around their friend, but all attempts to liberate him, including the intercession of the Ottoman ambassador in Paris, failed. Asked to intervene on his behalf, Pierre-Jean de Béranger, the popular poet and chansonnier, close to Michelet and known as the champion of all good left-wing causes, declined, a refusal which Michelet deplored in a letter to Rosetti.388 Lamartine, the Romanian students’ former patron, declared himself equally unable to help: “compromised himself as a founder of the republic, a letter from him would be more harmful than not”,389 explained his secretary, Charles Alexandre, after the start of the court hearings. But, he added, he felt certain that Brătianu had “nothing in common with these men of darkness who kill. [. . .] it is not through assassination that one gains liberty.”390 Béranger’s and Lamartine’s reluctance to get involved was entirely justified by subsequent developments. On trial were not just the would-be ‘tyrannicides’, but the entire former republican regime, its protagonists, its allies and its ethos.

386 Albert Fermé, Les Conspirations sous le second empire: Complot de l’Hippodrome et de l’Opéra Comique (Paris, 1869), 73–4. 387 Letter to Alfred Dumesnil, 22 [June] 1853, in Documente inedite, ed. Bucur, 222. 388 Michelet, Correspondance, 7: 445. Cf. Bucur, Jules Michelet şi revoluţionarii, 164. 389 Charles Alexandre to Alfred Dumesnil, 11 November 1853, in Documente inedite, ed. Bucur, 226–7. 390 Ibid. paris: brĂtianu and the ‘hippodrome affair’ 243

The trial in the so-called ‘complots de l’Hippodrome et de l’Opéra- Comique’ opened at the Cour d’Assises de la Seine on 7 November 1853. There were twenty-seven young men in the dock, including “Bra- tiano”. Many were workers: mechanics, jewellers, tailors, shoemakers, bakers, and one railways employee from Strasbourg. Jules Allix was a teacher, Jean-Laurent Follot, a medical doctor, and Léon-Ferdinand Hippolyte Ribault de Laugadière, a medical student. Arthur Ranc and Sigismond Laflize were both law students, and the twenty-two-year- old Félix Martin, a Parisian student, was also the author of Guerre de Hongrie en 1848 et 1849,391 which suggests that he was part of the coterie of East and Central-European sympathizers close to émigré circles. Ribault de Laugadière and Ranc had both attended Michelet’s lectures at the Collège de France, so their connection with Brătianu is plausible.392 The only foreigner in the group, ‘Jean-Constantin Bratiano’ was presented as being thirty years of age, ‘propriétaire’, born in Bucharest, Wallachia, and residing in Paris, at no. 4, rue Mézières.393 The plots were described over-dramatically by the prosecution as the work of young men with “dark, sinister faces”, the work of the “union of arms and intelligences”, the workers and the students.394 However, the prosecution pointed out, the blame rested not with these people, mere executants, but with the steering bodies which had fomented the conspiracies from London, from Jersey and from within France itself: the European revolutionary committee, the ‘Club de la Révolution’ and the ‘Commune Révolutionnaire’, as well as the exiled ‘démocrates- socialistes’ residing in Jersey.395 The men in the dock were alleged to be members of secret societies such as the Société des Vertus, the Société des Saisons, the Deux Cents and the Cordon sanitaire – whose activities were illegal – and to have conspired against the life of Emperor Napoleon and against the government. The first attack had been planned for 7 June at the Hippodrome in the Bois de Boulogne, and, in case of failure, a second

391 Nantes: L. et A. Guéraud, 1850. 392 I. Tchernoff,Le Parti Républicain au coup d’état et sous le Second Empire (Paris, 1906), 227. 393 Fermé, Les Conspirations, 17–18. See also the Gazette des Tribunaux of 13 November 1853. Cf. also the account of the affair in Smochină, “Sur les émigrés roumains à Paris”, 172–85. The archives of the Cour d’Assises and the Tribunal Cor- rectionnel were destroyed during the Paris Commune. My own searches in French archives have not yielded new information. 394 Fermé, Les Conspirations, 24. 395 Ibid., 5, 26. 244 1853–1854 attempt was scheduled for 5 July at the Opéra Comique, both dates known to be on the Emperor’s social diary. The prosecution alleged that, to shouts of “Vive l’Empereur!”, the assassins had planned to run towards the imperial carriage, which was supposed to arrive without escort, kill Napoleon and then drag his dead body along the streets of Paris, after which they were to proclaim the “Red Republic”, with Louis Blanqui as dictator. The Hippodrome affair was not an isolated episode, but possibly the best-known of the conspiracies of the early years of the Second Empire, whether organised by republicans, secret societies or legitimists. From the so-called conspiracy of the secret society of the rue de la Reine- Blanche in September 1852 and the affair of the ‘machine infernale de Marseille’, to the affair of the ‘Commune révolutionnaire’ of July 1853, and the plot of Vincennes (also called of the ‘Ligne fédérale’) of August 1853, plots and subversive activites had constantly brewed under the glossy surface of a régime whose legitimacy was constantly questioned and contested. A wide range of conspiratorial, revolutionary, and republican vocabularies had evolved in the pamphlet literature which had accompanied all these attempts: Napoleon III was variously described as “a tyrant, a perjurer, an assassin of the civil liberties”. His government was a “government born by force [which] must perish by force”, as noted in the Appeal of 31 October 1852 by the “Proscrits démocrates-socialistes de France” of Jersey, the most famous of whom was the exiled Victor Hugo. “In the presence of M. Bonaparte and his Government, any citizen worthy of the name can only do one thing: cock his gun and wait for the right moment”, read the Appeal, co- signed by Hugo.396 Hugo, however, later distanced himself from any suggestion that he may have endorsed the emperor’s assassination or tyrannicide in general.397 A corresponding counter-vocabulary demonizing the enemies of the Second Empire had also been emerging: they were the “party of crime”, “les Jacques”, “the cannibals of 1851”, participants in “socialist orgies”, etc. This emotional, value-laden discourse, abundantly used and over-used on both sides, permeated the way in which Second Empire society as a whole assessed itself, and provided the language in which the trials of the enemies of the régime were invariably played out. If it is true that between 1820 and 1870 an “alternative society”

396 Ibid., 5–7. 397 Aprile, Le siècle des exilés, 202. paris: brĂtianu and the ‘hippodrome affair’ 245 functioned in France, challenging the official structures of the state, then it is fair to say that the Brătianus and their associates were at the very core of this “république clandestine” and that, even when evidence lacked, the instincts of their accusers were largely correct.398 Ion Brătianu was accused of posessing a clandestine printing press, on which were printed the incendiary bulletins of 20 May and 5 June 1853, calling people to action against the regime. On behalf of “all our persecuted, deported and executed friends”, and invoking the Trois glorieuses and the fall of the July Monarchy, the bulletin, entitled “Le Réveil du people”, called the citizens to arms (“Citizens, be at the ready!”), telling them it would only take two hours to overthrow the criminal regime of the Second Empire, and thus resume the “inter- rupted work of the revolution.”399 The acte d’accusation, read out on 7 November, was followed by biographical details of each of the accused. While “Jean-Constantin Bratiano” had not been seen at the sites of the planned assassination, nor was there evidence of his participation in secret society sessions,400 he was suspicious on account of his known associations. His brother, “Dimitri”, was a refugee in London and a member of the Central revolutionary committee, announced Mongis, the Avocat-Général. “Affili- ated to the Wallachian committee, with headquarters in Paris, he is deploying a major activity in an attempt to secretly print a revolutionary catechism destined to demoralise the soldiers and the peasants of Wallachia. He is also involved, whatever he might say to the contrary, in the political affairs of France. His opinions and connections place him in contact with the most influential members of the demagogic party, to the extent that, if a genuine link exists at all between the secret societies of Paris and those of London, no-one is better placed than Bratiano to serve as an intermediary. In effect, he has been reported to the government as a man as adaptable as he is violent, and, en somme, extremely dangerous.”401

398 Cf. Jeanne Gilmore, La République clandestine, 1818–1848 (Paris, 1997). For detailed information on the networks and ramifications of secret societies in nineteenth-century France, see I. Tchernoff,Associations et sociétés secrètes sous la deux- ième république, 1848–1851 (Paris, 1905). 399 Cour d’Assises de la Seine, Complots dits de l’Hippodrome et de l’Opéra-Comique, Novembre 1853, 15. Fermé, Les Conspirations, 37. 400 Fermé, Les Conspirations, 35–6. 401 Ibid., 36. 246 1853–1854

Although the printed appeals for the Emperor’s assassination were distributed in Paris by a certain Ruault couple, Brătianu was involved in their printing, the prosecution alleged. On 16 June a white wooden case had been seized at Brătianu’s address at 4 rue de Mézières by the police commissar of the Monnaie section, armed with a warrant from the Prefect. Brătianu denied ownership, but his initials were on seals placed at the ends of a paper ribbon tied around the case, which was found to contain fonts, a frame, and other printing accessories. Under minute questioning by the President of the Cour d’Assises, Brătianu denied involvement in the plot. “Do you deny having participated in political intrigue in France?” “Completely.” “Have you got a brother abroad?” “Yes.” “Is he a member of an organisation well-known for its odious publications?” “I am not responsible for his actions.” “It is certain that agitation is being caused in France by a committee calling itself the Central European Committee in London, whose only aim is to set fire to Europe and it is certain that you are serving as an intermediary for this committee.” “I am denying this completely.”402 Brătianu admitted that the printing press presented in court was found at his home, but he said it was not his, and refused to divulge the name of its presumed real owner. He admitted that the bulletin calling for “insurrection” was printed on that machine, but, he claimed, he had not been aware that the case contained printing materials when it was deposited at his address in his absence. Asked whether he admitted that the presence of the case was evidence of his involvement, Brătianu claimed that the conspirators would not have left incriminating evidence at his address, which was not safe, as he was “too well-known to the police.” Confronted with the fact that, when it was seized, the case contained pages still damp from recent printing, Brătianu countered self-confidently that those were mere speculations, adding that the seals with his initials on the case were unbroken.403 It was a self- perpetuating and virtually endless duel of words.

402 Questioning of ‘Bratiano’, in ibid., 73–4. 403 Ibid., 74–5. paris: brĂtianu and the ‘hippodrome affair’ 247

In the session of 11 November, Mongis, the Avocat-Général, delivered his réquisitoire, in which he focused on Ion Brătianu’s links with Britain: “this country, with which we have good political relations, is granting asylum to refugees of all nations, to the great detriment of France, of Europe, and also possibly to the great detriment of Eng- land herself.”404 In addition, Mongis pointed out, cases with contents such as the ones found, were not normally sent by mistake to innocent people.405 Ion Brătianu’s circle of friends in Paris had arranged for his defense to be entrusted to one of the most famous lawyers of the Second Empire, the ‘arch-defender’ of republican causes, Jules Favre. Born in 1809 in Lyon in a family of traders, Favre had emerged in the 1840s as the champion of the civil society and the rule of law against an oppressive state. An opponent of the coup d’état and an anti-sermentiste, he had left politics to devote himself to the law. Among the causes célèbres he had been involved in were the trial of a group of republicans and members of the Société des droits de l’homme after the insurrections in Lyon of 1831–34, and in 1838 he acquired notoriety for defending the husband of Flora Tristan, accused of an attempt on her life.406 He had also defended the journals Le Réforme, La Vraie République, Mickie- wicz’s Tribune des Peuples and Le Travail affranchi in July 1849, after their suspension by the Ministry of the Interior in the aftermath of the June protests in Paris.407 Notably, he was also to be the defender of Felice Orsini, another would-be ‘tyrannicide’, in 1858. Favre defended Brătianu with conviction and, in the last hearings of 15–16 November, the General Prosecutor Rouland reacted decisively to Favre’s “much too able” defence: We must reject what has been said about the Wallachian nobleman, about the leader for whom the Roumans [sic] are waiting! I admire the defense’s brilliant illusions, but I do not share them. Arthur Bra- tiano, [sic; i.e. Dumitru], brother of the accused, who is completely free,

404 Ibid., 141. 405 Ibid., 142. 406 Pierre Antoine Perrod, Jules Favre: avocat de la liberté (Lyon, 1988). One may wonder what made Perrod so dismissive of Ion Brătianu, who, he claims, was later appointed Prime Minister of Romania on the strength of the succès de scandale he had enjoyed in the Hippodrome affair: “Judges often issue honorary diplomas which open more doors than university degrees”, he claims inexplicably on p. 170. For possible reasons for this negative representation see Conclusions, p. 338. 407 For Favre’s biography and defense speeches, see Plaidoyers politiques et judiciaires, publiés par Mme. Vve Jules Favre, née Velten, 2 vols. (Paris, 1882). 248 1853–1854

and who could fly to Wallachia any time he wanted, prefers staying in London and writing up programmes for a socialist republic, alongside Kossuth and Ledru-Rollin. I cannnot see why the Roumans should be waiting for their liberating Messiah from the ranks of the Bratiano family. Rest assured, Messieurs, the emancipation of the Wallachians is not dependent on the acquittal of the accused. Me Jules Favre, whose imagination is rich, was wrong in borrowing from M. Michelet’s letter some singular expressions: “justice has been wronged, but Russia has been well served!” What does this mean? What are these sad calumnies? In demagogic pamphlets it is written that the Emperor lies supine at the feet of the Cossacks. But look! The Emperor is in Constantinople, his hand on the guard of France’s sword. – See our fleet turning the mouths of its cannons towards the Muscovite colossus. Look! Do you imagine that the Emperor cares for a Bratiano, when the honour and the interest of France are at stake?408 Addressing the jury, the Prosecutor pointed out to them that the plots had been the work of “adventurers and conmen”, of intellectuals who were responsible for “putting regicidal knives in the hands of the people, whom they had knowingly misled.”409 The choice was now, he warned, between joining the “moderating power” of the state or remaining “defenceless against evil” and “allowing oneself to be swept away by the revolutionary torrent.”410 Ion Brătianu stood centre stage in court in the high social and legal drama opposing the Second Empire and its opponents. On 16 November, a number of the accused, including Ion Brătianu, were found not guilty of involvement in the attempt to assassinate the Emperor, but were kept in detention pending a new case brought by the police correctionelle for membership of a secret society and, in Brătianu’s case, for possession of a clandestine printing press. The others, however, were variously sentenced to deportation, to detention of between five and ten years, or to eight years in exile.411 One of those acquitted, the republican Arthur Ranc was deported to Algeria after yet another assassination attempt against the emperor in 1855, in which he denied any involvement. He was later sentenced to death after his

408 Cour d’Assises de la Seine, Présidence de M. Zangiacomi, 9bre 1853, Complots dits de l’Hippodrome et de l’Opéra-Comique, Novembre 1853, 21–2, and Fermé, Les Conspirations, 196–7. As the texts of the Prosecutor’s summation differ slightly in the two publications, I have taken the liberty of collating them. They are practically identical in terms of content. 409 Complots dits de l’Hippodrome et de l’Opéra-Comique, 10. 410 Fermé, Les Conspirations, 202–3. 411 Complots dits de l’Hippodrome et de l’Opéra-Comique, 30–2. paris: brĂtianu and the ‘hippodrome affair’ 249 participation in the Commune, but he somehow escaped and returned to France in 1869. One of the few former proscrits to enjoy a significant political career after their return from exile, he became a highly respectable deputy for the Seine and the Rhone regions (1871–1885) as well as a writer. His memoirs, published posthumously in 1913, do not mention any of the other accused in the Hippodrome affair, which Ranc is obviously keen to downsize as a minor episode blown out of proportion by a frightened regime, which was probably the case.412 His political career is suggestive for the republican milieux in which Ion Brătianu and his peers moved in the 1850s, as well as for the kind of political convictions which sustained them throughout their own later post-exile lives. Their alleged involvement in the “assassination plots” of their early years in Parisian exile was more often than not constructed by the authorities on the basis of the company they kept rather than on the actual threat these posed to the regime. “Br. has some violent enemies who work vigorously against him, maybe some compatriots”, commented Adèle Dumesnil.413 In a twist of the plot, at the new hearing of 10 January 1854, one of the lawyers, Me Hubbard, the defense of the accused Commes in the initial trial, was placed in the dock himself, accused of complicity with his client as a fellow-member of the same secret society.414 Jules Favre took up the defense again, in the name of “Justice” which, he contended, risked being hijacked by “false considerations of utility or of political expediency.”415 He also found he had to defend Brătianu against attacks on his character, attitudes and even ethnic origin. Addressing the prosecution, he said: “You seem to use the designa- tion ‘noble Wallachian’ in derision! Yes, he was born in a patrician family, in the midst of a nation whose history, mores, aspirations and misfortunes render her akin to France. He is a noble Romanian and, as noblesse oblige, all the energy, courage, devotion and fortune that he possesses, he has employed for the liberation of his country and the emancipation of his compatriots.”416 But neither Favre’s able use of double-entendre (noble, nobleman), nor his recourse to the theme of Romania as France’s ‘younger sister’ could help Brătianu’s defence.

412 Souvenirs, correspondence, 1831–1908 (Paris, 1913). 413 Letter from Adèle to Alfred Dumesnil, 11 January 1854, in Documente inedite, ed. Bucur, 240. 414 Fermé, Les Conspirations, 209. 415 Plaidoyers politiques, 412. 416 Ibid., 415–6. 250 1853–1854

By their own admission, the accused knew each other, and the printing press had been indeed found at Brătianu’s address. While membership of a secret society could not be proved, Brătianu, Ribault de Laugadière, Hubbard, and Furet were found guilty of possession of a clandestine printing press. One of the other accused, already found guilty of involvement in conspiracy, declared that, as they did not recognize the current government, they also refused to recognise the authority of that tribunal. The defense lawyers also protested against the judgement, invoking legal technicalities, but the court dismisseed them all and passed the final sentence on 16 January: a number of the accused, among whom Brătianu, were found guilty of belonging to secret societies and were sentenced to three years in prison and a fine of 500 Francs. In addition, all were to be “deprived of civic rights for five years.”417 Ion Brătianu served only a few days of his term at the prison of the Sainte Pélagie, known to be the prison of choice for political prisoners. Undoubtedly owing to lobbying from his French friends, he was allowed to complete his sentence at the clinic of a Dr. Blanche in Passy, where he resided until 9 July 1856.418 Brătianu’s trial is interesting not only for the high drama, the judi- cial rhetoric deployed on all sides, and the suggestive cross-section of the French society present in the dock, but also for the insights it allows into the kind of state the Second Empire had created. George Sand famously quipped that, after the coup d’état of 1851, half of France informed on the other half and, even if this is just a bon mot, it suggests at least the scale of the ‘culture of denunciation’ which had emerged, written evidence for which was largely destroyed in 1870–71.419 As early as July 1832, a decree had made it obligatory for landlords in Paris to keep registers with the names and professions of their lodgers. After the coup d’état of 1851, the Parisian police system was re-organised by the new prefect, Pierre Pietri, into a very efficient surveillance machine which kept a watchful eye on natives and foreigners alike and compiled, probably for the first time in police history, criminal records of suspects. The increasing use of anonymous informers, paid 500–600 francs monthly, not only encouraged people to report on each other, but also ensured that the police personnel as

417 Fermé, Les Conspirations, 211. 418 Smochină, “Sur les émigrés roumains à Paris”, 182. 419 Howard C. Payne, The Police State of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (University of Washington Press, 1966), 252. paris: brĂtianu and the ‘hippodrome affair’ 251 such remained uninvolved and retained a benevolent, protective, ‘civic’ image, as the prefect had intended.420 Mail was opened both legally by authorised bodies, and behind closed doors by the so-called cabinet noir, the location and organisation of which remain elusive.421 Once convicted, political prisoners faced severe sentences, among which were ‘deportation’ and ‘transportation’ (i.e. deportation without trial), mainly to penitential colonies in places like Algeria and Guyana, for periods ranging from five to ten years, which was the sentence passed on many in the ‘Hippodrome affair’.422 Brătianu, Rosetti and their associates, French and East-European alike, must have been in the attention of the one hundred and twenty men appointed by Pietri to the Services de sureté: their correspondence contains many references to the interception of their mail and to stalk- ing by police agents.423 But, in contrast to the public furore triggered by the interception of Mazzini’s mail in 1844 in London, the foreigners’ surveillance by the Paris police did not form the object of press protests or motions in the Assemblée.

420 Maryvonne Bernard, “La réorganisation de la police sous le Second Empire (1851–1858): des bras infatigables”, in Maintien de l’ordre et polices, 121, 133. 421 Payne, The Police State, 270. 422 Faure, “A la recherche des réfugiés”, 13–4. Faure’s article is also informative on the new language and codes of political deportation, in which, for example, “Algérie moins” meant simple deportation, while “Algérie plus” meant deportation and con- finement in a fortress-prison. 423 Pierre Piétri later lost his post as prefect after Orsini’s assassination attempt on Emperor Napoleon of 14 January 1858, when it was judged that his repressive measures had been too moderate for the scale of the opposition to the regime. Maryvonne Bernard, “La réorganisation”, 134. 1853 PARIS-GALLIPOLI-CONSTANTINOPLE: ROSETTI’S WAR

Que veux-tu, chère amie! Quand la réalité est triste il faut vivre dans le monde des rêves! Letter from Rosetti to Marie, Marseille, 26 Novem- ber 1853424 As diplomatic efforts were failing in the Russo-Turkish conflict over custody of churches in the Holy Land and the protection of the Porte’s Eastern Orthodox subjects, English and French steamers were sent to the Black Sea in June 1853 and stood anchored at Besika Bay awaiting the outcome of negotations. In August 1853, Lord Aberdeen decided to dispatch the British Maltese fleet towards Constantinople, ostensibly to protect the westerners in the Ottoman capital in case of armed conflict. Throughout the last months of 1853, appeals to the Otto- man Porte to grant an amnesty to the Romanian exiles of 1848 and enlist their help on the anti-Russian front remained without response from Constantinople. Gheorghe Magheru, the exiled general, whose financial situation prevented him from leaving Vienna, wrote to the Grand Vezir Reshid Pasha, asking for an amnesty of the Romanian forty-eighters, who had always been, he pointed out, faithful to their “legitimate Suzerain” and who would continue to support Turkey. He feared that their continuing absence would lead many Romanians at home to believe the rumours spread by the Russian agents that the exiles had sold out to the Russian cause and had forsaken their occupied country.425 Opinions among the exiles regarding the possible participation of the Romanians in the hostilities were divided: some worried that enrolling in the Ottoman army might appear politically incorrect to those who believed that the Turks should withdraw from Europe altogether. The idea of a Romanian ‘legion’ engaged on the battlefield in the Crimea was not unique among the East-European diaspora groups. Prince Czartoryski’s agent, Mihal Czajkovsky, who had converted to Islam under the name Sadyk Pasha, was authorized by a Turkish ferman of

424 C. A. Rosetti to M. Rosetti, ed. Bucur, 1: 64. 425 Fotino 1: 211. paris-gallipoli-constantinople 253

October 1853 to form a so-called battalion of “Ottoman Cossacks” operating within the Ottoman army, but commanded by Polish officers.426 The international battalion’s seven hundred volunteers included mostly Poles, but also Cossacks from the Dobrudja, Bursa and the Don, Bulgarians, Romanians, Jews, Armenians and Serbs.427 Another close associate of Prince Czartoryski, Wladislaw Zamoyski, also created a Polish legion which enjoyed financial and logistic support from both Britain and France. A Romanian legion as such, however, was bound to remain an illusion, although individual Romanian participants were allowed to enrol in the Turkish troops aligned by the Danube. Gheorghe Magheru himself, Christian Tell, and Dimitrie Kretzulescu, a former forty-eighter close to Ion Ghica, enlisted in Omer Pasha’s army, but they were only a handful of isolated beneficiaries of concessions granted to exiled Romanians and to Romanian officers who had joined the Ottoman army previously.428 “The Turks do not want us”, Rosetti reflected bitterly in hisDiary , as he embarked in Marseilles with Dumitru Brătianu and Golescu-Albu, bound for Gallipoli, in an attempt to make the Romanians’ wishes heard above the noise of diplomatic misunderstandings and the din of weapons. Before he left for Turkey, Dumitru Brătianu had been entrusted by Mazzini with one last, sensitive mission: meeting Lajos Kossuth in a last-ditch attempt, on the eve of a major European conflict, to make Romanians and Hungarians shake hands and put a troubled past behind them. Kossuth, who, in Brătianu’s eyes, was an intrac- table dictator, was not formally a member of the Central Democratic Committee. The two men met in Mazzini’s small room in London and a cautious agreement was reached: if the Hungarians and Romanians of the Austrian Empire were going to be given arms and a chance to fight against the Russians and the Austrians in the imminent war, the two leaders pledged themselves to urge the volunteers to join forces in the common action, although each side was to combat under its own flag. At the end of the hostilities, the Transylvanians were to vote in a referendum to decide whether they were to merge with Hungary

426 Stan and Ploeşteanu, Utopia, 164. 427 Cf. Raluca Tomi, “Dimitrie Kretzulescu voluntar în Războiul Crimeii – mărturii inedite”, in Războiul Crimeii – 150 de ani de la încheiere, ed. Adrian Silvan Ionescu (Brăila, 2006), 183–96, 186. 428 Fotino 1: 211, and Fotino 4: 57. Cf. Tomi, “Dimitrie Kretzulescu”, in Războiul Crimeii, ed. Silvan Ionescu, 183–96. 254 1853 or not.429 At least temporarily, Kossuth thus showed a willingness to compromise towards a less hardline project than his own outline of 1851, the “Kütahya Constitution”, which would have kept Transylva- nia within Hungary without a right of appeal. Rosetti, Alexandru Golescu-Albu, his brother Ştefan, and Dumitru Brătianu left France on 22 November 1853, travelling (on a convoluted route, due to missed connections) via Lyon, to Marseilles, Malta, Gal- lipoli, with the final destination Belgrade, where they hoped to meet the liberal-minded local governor Fuad Mehmed Pasha and discuss the fate of the Principalities and their participation in the war. The flamboyant Brătianu, travelling under the name ‘Dascal’ (meaning ‘teacher’ in Greek and in Romanian), wore blue-tinted spectacles and carried a daguerreotype, which he later lost before he had a chance to use it. As they stopped in Lyon on their first evening, they wrote a joint letter to Marie and her children, Liby (also known affectionately as ‘Biche’), Mircea and Vintilă, then in Paris, under the protection of Radu Golescu and other exiles. “Vive Madame Marie Rosetti. Ma sainte Marie à moi”, Golescu-Albu penned at the end of the message.430 En route, Rosetti wrote tender letters to Marie, read Spinoza and Alfred Dumesnil’s L’Art italien, and fretted over the imprisonment of Ion Brătianu, ‘Beppo’, at the Sainte Pélagie, and over the general situation in South-East Europe. The group travelled from Marseilles to Malta on the Vectis on 27 November: the sea was rough, the weather bad, and consequently the passage, according to Ştefan Golescu, turned out to be worse than “Austrian prisons”.431 As they arrived in Malta on 1 December, they learned that, in spite of all their planning, they had missed the last boat to Corfu, which was their destination as initially planned. The six days’ wait meant that Rosetti had the leisure to reflect on the events of recent years and months and, more importantly, on the state of his marriage, and sent his musings accompanied by Maltese pressed flowers, to Marie. In a revealing letter of 2 December, he confessed to her a personal dilemma that had haunted him in that period and which had a great deal to do with a more general European debate regarding marriage: should a woman be treated as an equal companion to the man, and

429 For Kossuth’s address to the “brave Romanian patriots of Moldo-Wallachia” of 6 December 1853, see Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 56. 430 C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 59. 431 Ibid., 66. paris-gallipoli-constantinople 255 be associated to man’s work, as Michelet recommended, or should she remain a “child-woman”, supported by her man, and allowed to live in a more traditional ‘woman’s sphere’? However, whatever doubts he may have had about his marriage and the role of Marie as a wife, Rosetti was keen to publicise her role in the events of 1848 and pursued the plan of having a translation of Michelet’s “Principautés Danubi- ennes. Madame Rosetti” published in England. To that effect, he gave instructions to Marie, advising her to borrow money from her brother Effingham for the project which, however, was not to be realised.432 A former political ally of Mazzini’s, whom they met in Malta, advised them against travelling from Corfu to Scutari on land, as they intended, such was the danger posed by brigands: “One is assassinated at the first glimpse of a shiny golden button”, Rosetti and his friends were told.433 Following this advice, the travellers embarked on the old and slow Eurotas on 6 December, bound for Gallipoli. Four hundred and fifty Turkish soldiers joined them at Smyrna on 11 December, en route to the Crimea, accompanied by a noisy band of acrobats and dancers, who enlivened the monotonous crossing. The news was that Christian Tell and his family had received permission and funding from the Turkish government to leave Constantinople for Gallipoli, as Tell had been granted permission to fight alongside the Ottoman troops.434 Having reached Gallipoli on 15 December, Rosetti and Dumitru Brătianu would have liked to travel on to the Ottoman capital, but Golescu-Negru wrote from Constantinople, where he lived in exile, suggesting that their arrival would not be welcome there: neither England, whose cabinet was still trying to obtain a peaceful solution, nor the Porte would have wanted two Wallachian radicals on their territory at a time when a diplomatic compromise was still being sought. It was a question of image. The Golescus (brothers and cousin) and Christian Tell believed that the presence of ‘radicals’ such as Brătianu

432 Ibid., 70. See above, p. 239. 433 C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 74. The name of this personage appears in Bucur’s notes as ‘Giacomo Manzoni’, presented as a former finance minister of Mazzi- ni’s. It has been impossible to identify him outside this source. Rosetti’s contact in Malta was, in fact, Mazzini’s political ally Emilio Scaluras, whose name was transcribed as ‘Scabiras’ and ‘Subirras’ in Rosetti’s edited correspondence. Cf. letter dated 25 December 1853 in Documente şi manuscrise literare, ed. Paul Cornea and Elena Piru, 2 vols. (Bucharest, 1969), 2: 263. 434 C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 77. 256 1853 and Rosetti in the very midst of the conflict was likely to send the wrong message to the Porte and to friendly Western cabinets.435 In Constantinople itself, according to Golescu-Negru, the Roma- nian cause was being undermined by the moderate branch of the diaspora led by Ion Eliade Rădulescu, the bête noire of the Romanian radical emigration. The fez-wearing self-styled Heliad Bey had suggested carving up the Romanian lands into Turkish pashalıks and was apparently encouraging Ottoman and Western suspicions of the radical exiles as firebrands hell-bent to “set fire to the four corners of Europe.”436 The British Ambassador Stratford Canning was opposed to an amnesty being granted to the Romanian exiles, whom he, too, suspected of radicalism and subversion. The command of a small Wallachian unit allowed to fight if hostilities ensued was given instead to a conservative, Grigore Mihai Sturdza, the son of a former ruling prince of Moldavia, who, as an officer in the Moldavian army, had joined the Turkish army after 1848 and now had the rank of Gen- eral under the name Muhlis Pasha.437 As Rosetti reported to Marie on 19 December, the former general Magheru, who was closer to the radical forty-eighters, had been summoned by the Turks to Constantino- ple, and had joined the Wallachian unit under Sturdza’s command.438 In the face of Turkish and English resistance, and outdone by the pro-Turkish faction of Heliad Bey, Rosetti doubted for a while that he might be able to reach Belgrade and meet Fuad Effendi as planned. “[. . .] I shall probably return to Paris, because the others, who are now there [in Constantinople] are following the Turco-diplomatic line, at which I am totally useless” he wrote to Marie.439 However, with the help of a shipping agent in Gallipoli, for whom they had letters of recommendation from their connections in Malta, Rosetti, Ştefan Golescu and Brătianu managed to obtain teskerés (laissez-passers) for Belgrade, in spite of the discouraging news that last-minute negotiations were under way to reach an armistice, which would have been

435 Fotino 1: 213. 436 Fotino 1: 212, and Fotino 4: 60. Suspicions of Eliade’s intrigues are endorsed in the memoirs of Dimitrie Kretzulescu, a Romanian officer who served in the Crimean War in Sadyk Pasha’s batallion. Cf. Tomi, “Dimitrie Kretzulescu”, 186. 437 Grigore Mihai Sturdza (1821–1901), from one of Romania’s main ruling families, completed mathematical and military studies in Paris and Berlin, and later became a Conservative senator and deputy in unified Romania. Cf.C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 81, note 4. 438 Ibid., 80. 439 Ibid. paris-gallipoli-constantinople 257 the end of the Romanian bid for a Russian military defeat and a post- war settlement. “We started on our journey on the 22 [December]”, Rosetti wrote to Marie, “at 8 in the morning, five men and six horses: there we were, the three of us, a swarthy guide, a kavas,440 a dorobanţ441 or grenadier, and a horse carrying the luggage. We were not unlike the famous knight of the sad countenance when he left his household and, riding his old Rossinanta [sic], left to bring succour to the poor. Our story is much like his, and our horses – not to mention our appear- ances – are not unlike that of the knight and his beast.’442 After a difficult journey, on 26 December they were in Adrianople, the grateful recipients of the largesse and hospitality of the Wiltshires, two English brothers for whom they had recommendations from the shipping agent in Gallipoli. Travelling in the harsh Balkan winter was arduous, and, on horseback, with their strange dress and provisions, they offered quite a sight to the locals: sometimes they were taken for English couriers, and, generally, they looked so business-like and important that Turkish station-masters offered them free meals, while native inn-keepers along the route charged them triple their normal prices.443

440 Tk. kavas = official courier-interpreter. 441 A soldier in the Romanian district regiments. 442 C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 82. 443 Letter to Marie, 14 January 1854, in ibid., 92. JANUARY–FEBRUARY 1854 LONDON

Without the Russian monster was checked in his dishonest and aggressive practices, the liberty of the world was in jeopardy. Mr. Whitworth, Sheffield Town Hall, 9 January 1854444 If Mr. Cobden’s advice had been taken, where, let us ask, would have been the nationality of Moldavia and Wallachia? London Examiner, 29 July 1854 Dumitru Brătianu must be credited for almost single-handedly forging a small lobby of philo-Romanians in the period 1849 to 1859, when he resided, with occasional interruptions, in Britain.445 Although the actual impact of his lobbying there is sometimes questioned,446 it is perhaps worth remembering that, as an exiled Romanian, he worked in almost complete isolation and in defiance of some very well-entrenched foreign policy trends. As Russian troops massed yet again along the Mol- davian border in the summer of 1853, Brătianu wrote to Lord Dudley Stuart, asking him to raise the issue of the neutrality of the Principali- ties in the House of Commons. Brătianu set out to flatter his hosts’ pride in their political traditions and institutions, as he wrote that, in his view, Britain was the one European power capable of “understanding the cry for liberty and truth amongst other peoples.”447 Both Lord Dudley Stuart and other Britons favourably inclined to the Romanian cause had to tread a cautious line between the traditional British policy of defending Ottoman integrity and the rising tide of anti-Russian feeling. Sadly, Dudley Stuart was to die in Stockholm in September

444 London Examiner, 14 January 1854. 445 Hope, “Dumitru Brătianu and British public opinion”, 27–52. 446 Cojocariu, Partida Naţională, 237. 447 Hope, “Dumitru Brătianu and British public opinion”, 31. The “Correspondence of Dumitru Brătiano and Lord Dudley C. Stuart, M.P., on the Danubian Principalities in 1853” is in the Forster Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Pamphlet Moldavia and Wallachia No. 388. This exchange was published in French by Armand Lévy in La Russie sur le Danube. See p. 236 above. london 259

1854 as he lobbied for Poland, his chief cause, and the small circle of British philo-Romanians lost a determined, vocal member. In December 1853 France and Britain sent ships into the Black Sea, but the Tsar refused to withdraw his troops from the territories of the Danubian Principalities, and recalled his ambassadors from Paris and London, a gesture which amounted to a declaration of war. In Bucharest, Effingham Grant was left in charge of the British Consulate during the absence of Consul-General Robert Colquhoun, who travelled on a fact-finding mission to Bosnia, Serbia and Herzegovina.448 In early January 1854, Grant was already reporting Russian troubles in Wallachia to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Clarendon: the Russians had required the incorporation of the entire Wallachian Militia of 10,000 men into the various Russian regiments now poised for war, and the Wallachian Prince, Barbu Ştirbey, although nominally Russia’s man in the province, was threatening his resignation.449 During the conflict, units from the Wallachian and Moldavian armies were indeed often pressurized into joining the occupying Russian troops against the Ottoman Porte. Officers and soldiers who refused were arrested, subjected to molestation and even deported, while horses, weapons and equipment were often requisitioned, never to be returned.450 Also according to intelligence obtained by Grant, the Russians were raising troops of so-called ‘Crusaders’, ethnic Greeks, Moldo-Wallachians, Albanians, Serbs and Bulgarians, who, wearing white shakos with the cross of St. George on them, were to act as agents provocateurs and incite risings among the Orthodox Christians in South-East Europe in suport of their co-religionists “oppressed” by the Turks.451 At the Golescu family manor in southern Romania, searches which produced

448 PRO/FO 78/945, Turkey (Wallachia), to and from Mr. Colquhoun and Mr. Grant, diplomatic, October to December 1853, dispatch from Bucharest, 20 November 1853; 8 December 1853, Memorandum of instructions for Mr. Grant. 449 PRO/FO 78/1010, Dispatch from E. Grant to Lord Clarendon, 2 January 1854. 450 Horia Vladimir Şerbănescu, “Participarea unor unităţi româneşti la operaţiuni militare în timpul Războiului Crimeii (1853–1855)”, in Războiul Crimeii, ed. Silvan Ionescu, 163–72. Some of these incidents were reported in the European and the British press. Cf. for instance “The Russians and the Moldavian Militia”, in theDaily News of 15 September 1854. 451 PRO/FO 78/1010, Dispatch from Effingham Grant to Lord Clarendon, 11 Janu- ary 1854, 34. See also ms. letter of the exiled revolutionary N. Pleşoianu, probably dated 1855, in which he accuses the conservative, first-class Wallachian boyars of having helped recruit in 1854 into the Russian so-called “Greek-Slavonic” Legion, Biblioteca Naţională, P. CCCLXXI, Dossier 13. 260 january–february 1854 no incriminating evidence resulted, however, in a new arrest for the young Constantin Racoviţă, no stranger to Russian attention. In the absence of new justifications for his arrest, the Russians revived old accusations relating to his participation in the events of 1848–49, and he was taken to Hotin fortress in Bessarabia and from there to Kiev, where he was detained in military barracks for a few months without a trial before being released.452 In Britain, popular meetings – some with a massive attendance – were being organized around the country to debate the state of international affairs and the opportuneness or not of going to war with Russia. More importantly, at stake was also a new concept of foreign affairs, the conduct of which, people felt, was not to be left solely in the hands of politicians, but had to be debated in the press and subjected to popular scrutiny. On 4 January, in Chester, speaking in front of two thousand people, a Mr. Temple, probably a local notable, denounced the “shuffling game of diplomacy” and appealed to the “politics of patriotism”,453 the very spirit of which the Romanians had been trying to enlist on their side: It is high time that we should have a voice in our management of foreign affairs, because unfortunately as it appears to me, and I speak it with great humility, this country has hitherto had her foreign affairs arranged and carried out in not what is called a straightforward old-English manner. (Cheers.)454 The message was clear: Britain was morally obliged to go to war: If Austria and Sweden and some others do not feel with us, let them keep from us; but give me those nations who really have at heart the progress of free governments in Europe. Give me France (cheers); America (cheers); give me Hungary (cheers); give me Poland (cheers); and I care not who are the despots who link themselves together to stop that progress. We shall then, as the old kingdom of England, which has at all times raised her flag for the protection of freedom, rally round the flag and say we care nothing for all the nations and despots, and we will tell those in this country, whatever position they occupy, that the people

452 Letter from Zinca Golescu to Ştefan Golescu, 22 January 1854, in Fotino 4: 64 and letter from the same to her other sons, Nicolae and Alexandru, 14 February 1854, in Fotino 4: 76. 453 Cf. the title of Jonathan Parry’s study The Politics of Patriotism: English liberalism, national identity and Europe, 1830–1886 (Cambridge University Press, 2006). 454 London Examiner of 14 January 1854. london 261

of England will not tolerate for one moment any countenance to that which increases the fettering of the freedom of Europe, of which I firmly believe Russia is at present the greatest bane. (Cheers.)455 A politically savvy Mr. Johnes, Judge of the County Court of the North West Wales district, present at the meeting in Chester, linked the events of 1853–54 to the betrayal of the ideals of “clemency”, “humanity” and freedom, sacrificed to Russia in 1848–49, proving that, perhaps, ordinary people had a more encompassing attention span than usually given credit for. He concluded by saying that: It is not merely by a common interest or by ancient treaties that we are bound to support the Sovereign of the Turkish Empire. We are bound to do so by honour and good faith. You will probably recollect that when pressed by Russia and Austria to surrender the Polish and Hungarian refugees, that Sovereign appealed to England and France, and those nations pledged themselves to protect him from the consequences of his refusal to violate the laws of hospitality. Now these aggressions of Russia are, undoubtedly, consequences of his firmness in defending the refugees [. . .].456 Similar gatherings were being organized around the country, and similar messages were being sent to those in power by a nation rallying round a new sense of national pride grounded in what were supposed to be traditional English moral values. At Sheffield Town Hall one hundred “true-hearted Englishmen” gathered on 9 January 1854 to hear their Alderman, Mr. Car, ask for a joint Anglo-French action against the “wanton and aggressive war” launched by the Tsar: Could we, as Englishmen, sit calmly by and see one of the most vain and ambitious men that ever lived upon this earth walk into the Principali- ties of the Turkish dominions, take possession of them, threaten them, and exercise some of the most cruel and cowardly acts towards them that could possibly be? (Shame.)457 Today, some of these vox-pop statements may sound naïve or sentimental, others unexpectedly well-informed. What they all had in common was the passionate adherence of representative cross-sections of the nation to a set of moral values which – people increasingly felt – should underscore politics, and the enthusiastic adoption of a

455 Ibid. 456 Ibid. 457 “Resistance to Russia”, in the London Examiner, 14 January 1854. 262 january–february 1854 new notion of popular participation in the making of world history. The masses were becoming increasingly adept at challenging the wield- ers of power. The weight of public opinion in pushing the agenda for war in 1853–4 is still a matter of debate, but a Britain on the warpath was what Brătianu and his lobby wanted to see. JANUARY 1854 SERBIA

On Saturday, 14 January 1854, the day on which the Examiner published the calls to arms of the citizens of Chester and Sheffield, the peripatetic Rosetti, Ştefan Golescu and Dumitru Brătianu finally arrived in Belgrade, hoping that war would be declared, enabling them to go to the Danubian port Vidin and organise their contribution to the military conflict. They still hoped to be able to organise a corps of Romanian volunteers and advance against the occupying Russian troops in Wallachia.458 While the Serbians, fearing Russian reprisals, were not particularly pleased to have three Romanian revolutionaries in their midst, a helping hand was extended to them by Charles Arène, a French teacher and former resident of Wallachia, who introduced himself as a “compatriot” and who offered to facilitate the nomads’ correspondence and the circulation of propaganda material. On 20 January, Rosetti asked Marie to request 1,000 copies of his newspaper Republica Română, published in Brussels, and send it to Arène in Belgrade. Rosetti’s study “Rusia” (Russia) had been published in the latest issue, no. 2 of 1853, and he was probably hoping to circulate it and agitate the spirits once back on Romanian territory.459 The text was an exhortation to fellow-exiles to continue to resist Russian pressures, and to all Romanians to uphold their basic right to express their demands in the face of the “chief of despotism” who, in his fear, was capable of everything, including “stopping the electric telegraph and spying on the very dreams of people.”460 The Russian and Aus- trian authorities were policing the entire Danubian region in cooperation with the Oltenian regional and county officials, who in their turn liaised with the central authorities in Bucharest and had enlisted the services of an indeterminate number of informers. Those arrested included priests, peasants and members of the border guards who had opposed armed resistance to the advancing Russian troops. One of

458 Letters of 19 and 20 January 1854 from Belgrade, in C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 94–6. 459 Ibid., 94, 97, and 98, note 4. 460 C. A. Rosetti, “Rusia”, reproduced in Antologia gîndirii româneşti, Secolele XV–XIX, ed. C. I. Gulian, Part I (Bucharest, 1967), 420–4, 422. 264 january 1854 those suspected of anti-Russian action, a major Burileanu, inspector of the dorobanţi, committed suicide before he could be arrested and tried.461 Passing through the Serbian village Milanowitz on 25 January, Rosetti stopped on the banks of the Danube to wash his face and have a drink of what to him was the water of a sacred, symbolic river, the river about which he had written not so long before to Michelet.462 He was astounded by the pro-Russian feelings which, he believed, pre- dominated among the general population of Serbia: “The French have not forgotten Moscow, and the Russians know the route to Paris. Woe to Napoleon”, a defiant Serbian local told him. One explanation for this, Rosetti believed, was that the occupying Turks had done nothing to ingratiate themselves to the native Balkan populations. In contrast, the Russians had consistently sent money and emissaries, while also having cultural prestige and religion on their side among the South Slavs, mused Rosetti bitterly in a letter to his wife. He felt, however, that the Serbian government did not share their people’s bias.463 At Vidin, the exiles from Paris were reunited with fellow-exiles from Bursa. The rumours of a mysterious Romanian corps of 1,200 soldiers advancing towards Little Wallachia (Oltenia, General Magheru’s territory) proved unfounded. The approximately 25,000 (in Rosetti’s estimation) Turkish troops occupied precarious positions around the town of Calafat and were reluctant to attack the 30,000 or so Russian troops secure in their fortified positions encircling them. The Roma- nian would-be volunteers had been promised 3,000 guns by the Turks, but, given the distribution of enemy armies on the ground, they did not have enough men or suitable positions to deploy them. They had the support of the Pasha of Vidin, the sympathetic, ‘revolutionary’ Sami Pasha.464 Sami, an ally of the former rebel Pasha of Egypt Mehmet Ali,

461 A number of archival documents on Russian and Austrian repression in Oltenia in 1853–54 have been published by Paul-Emanoil Barbu in Acţiuni sociale şi politice româneşti în anii 1853–1854: documente (Bucharest, 2003), esp. 120–139. My reference is to docs. 81, 102, 104. One of the central government officials overseeing the arrests and prosecutions was none other than the now reinstated polcovnic Ioan Solomon, one of the organisers of the anti-revolutionary putsch in 1848. See Part One, p. 82. 462 C .A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 100. 463 Ibid., 102, 110. 464 Abdurrahman Sami Paşa, governor (Walis) of Vidin from 1852 to 1855, was born in Greece. He became Turkey’s first Minister for Education in 1857. In his correspondence, Rosetti refers to him as ‘Samil’ Pasha. serbia 265 was, Rosetti wrote, a ‘fellow-exile’, but his benevolence was continu- ously offset by the hostile attitude of Ahmed, the Pasha of Calafat.465 In Semlin (Zemun), the three Golescu brothers lobbied with the powerful Omer Pasha, the mushir of Roumelia, and the former commander of the Turkish troops of occupation in Wallachia after 1848, who gave them a warm reception. The ambitious and mercurial Croatian- born Pasha even gave one of his famous Arab pure-breed horses to Christian Tell as a general’s gift to another. But his attitude changed inexplicably only days later. Although Ştefan Golescu had only asked to be enlisted as a simple soldier under General Tell’s command, the price to be paid proved too high. Omer Pasha demanded in the first instance an open reconciliation of the ‘radicals’ with the ‘moderate’ Ion Eliade Rădulescu, a further sign to the Golescus that Heliad Bey had been busy intriguing behind their backs in Constantinople. When the Pasha asked of Golescu to retract everything he had written against Austria, saying that the Porte needed Austria’s benevolent neutrality, Ştefan Golescu explained that he was not seeking a political role in the aftermath of the conflict and was ready to become an exile again rather than withdraw what he had written about the “perfidious and dangerous Austria.”466 Omer Pasha ended his dialogue with the Romanian envoys on 8 March 1854 with a letter in which he demanded that the Wallachians leave Semlin immediately. It is unclear whether this was solely the outcome of a clash of egos, or whether it was also due to back-stage intrigues by a power-hungry Eliade, allied to the son of the former Moldavian Prince, and possibly new ‘pretender’, Grigore Mihail Sturdza, as the Golescus surmised.467 Most probably, the disappointing outcome of the negotiations was also the result of the consistently sustained Turkish and British position over the Romanian participation in the Crimean conflict, which they considered undesirable. A prey to frustration, Rosetti fulminated in his letters to Marie against the depletion of the Wallachian state budget by the occupying armies and against senseless acts of cruelty to which civilians were subjected by the Russian troops. In addition, he had been informed that the Russians often kidnapped unarmed Romanian peasants and enrolled them forcibly into their own troops.468 Several letters to Marie

465 C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 107. 466 Fotino 1: 217; Fotino 4: 93. 467 Fotino 4: 92–7. 468 C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 106. 266 january 1854 recounted acts of futile heroism, such as the opposition of the Roma- nian villagers of Pristol who, armed solely with wooden sticks, chased away a regiment of Cossacks, only to be massacred by returning Rus- sian troops. Karl Marx confirmed one of Rosetti’s accounts of an anti- Russian uprising in Oltenia by 400 plăieşi (border guards), who ended up being disarmed and disbanded by the hostile Ahmed, the Pasha of Calafat.469 Rosetti asked Marie to write up a note on the incident with Ion Brătianu’s help and send it to La Presse, where she had been an occasional contributor recently. In 1861, Rosetti’s Românul carried a text by Ion Brătianu, written in 1854, where the Romanians are presented as long-time enemies of Russia, their oppressor, and “representatives of the Western world” in South-East Europe. Turkey was urged to arm and allow thirty to forty thousand combat-ready Romanians to take part in the war. One can presume that this is the text commissioned by Rosetti.470 In a conversation with the Romanian exiles, the sympathetic Sami Pasha confessed his scepticism as to Turkey’s ability to “save herself ”, unless she decided to encourage the active, belligerent co-operation of the “peoples.” “Gentlemen, you must arouse Transylvania and foment revolutions elsewhere, too”, was his advice, as reported by a delighted Rosetti on 4 February 1854.471 However, by 15 February the situation was still stagnant, and the recall of Sami Pasha, the “Lion of Vidin” – who had obviously overstepped his brief – was a new blow to hopes of a military engagement nurtured by the Romanians. Rosetti was worried that the burden of maintaining the Ottoman army and the inevitable abuses, caused especially by the Turkish irregular troops, were going to turn the populations of the southern Balkans against the Turks, whom they were in fact supposed to actively support in an anti-Russian campaign.472 Nothing changed over the next three weeks, and on 4 March, Rosetti complained to his wife that they were still ‘burning their hands on the kitchen stove rather than in the Russians’

469 Karl Marx, Însemnări despre români (Bucharest, 1964), 163 and C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 103–6 and note 7. Marx’s source could well have been one of Rosetti’s articles. 470 “Despre rolul Românilor din Principate în războiul actual” (1854) in Ion C. Brătianu, Acte şi cuvântări, ed. Marinescu and Grecescu, 1: 59, 62. 471 C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 108. 472 Ibid., 110. serbia 267 fire’ and that he felt guilty for not being able to do more for “Her” (his code for Romania, the forbidden homeland).473 Letters – written half in code and often using conspiratorial names – between the three exiles, now stuck in Vidin, and their relatives and friends in Paris and elsewhere continued to be transmitted mainly via the French and British consular services in Serbia and via their contact Charles Arène. Thomas De Grenier Fonblanque, the British Consul- General in Serbia, is frequently cited in Rosetti’s letters to his wife in this period as one of the main contact names to be used by the diaspora for sending correspondence, threatened otherwise by Aus- trian interception.474 Thomas Fonblanque’s brother was the better- known Albany Fonblanque, editor of the London Examiner, which welcomed pro-Romanian contributions in the 1850s. Another figure in the exiled Romanians’ support networks at the time was the highly colourful Ange Pechméja, a writer and one of the ‘proscrits du 2 Décembre’. A former journalist at Adam Mickiewicz’s La Tribune des peuples, Pechméja had for one brief moment in 1849 fallen foul of the Wallachian exiled revolutionaries when he had insinuated in one of his – otherwise sympathetic – articles that Suleyman Pasha’s favours had been bought during their brief tenure of power.475 Pechméja himself had to find refuge in Turkey after Louis Napoléon’s coup and later found employment as interpreter during the Crimean War. Fluent in Turkish, Arabic and Persian, the future editor of the newspaper Le Républicain du Lot (1872) was the dragoman of the Pasha of Vidin when Rosetti campaigned there.476 New allies were added to the list of helpers in the Danubian campaign. Cryptically referred to in Rosetti’s letters to Marie as “three English newspaper correspondents”, they were Joseph Archer Crowe, correspondent for the Illustrated London

473 Ibid., 118. 474 Erroneously transcribed as ‘Foublanc’ or ‘Foublanqe’, he was not correctly identified by Marin Bucur in his edition of the Rosetti correspondence. See C .A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 62, note 2. 475 Smochină, “Sur les émigrés roumains à Paris”, 162–3. 476 C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 114 and 115–6, note 9. After the double election of Prince Cuza in 1858, Ange Pechméja settled in Bucharest, working as a translator and civil servant in the Foreign Ministry. He was the first translator of Baudelaire into Romanian. His main work, the esoteric L’Oeuf de Kneph, was first published in Bucharest, in La Voix de la Roumanie 4, 2–4; 6–8; 11–5 (1863–64) and afterwards in a separate volume, L’oeuf de Kneph. Histoire secrète du zéro (Bucharest, 1864). Upon his return to France in 1870, he founded the newspaper Le Républicain du Lot. Cf. D. Popovici, Cercetări de literatură română (Sibiu, 1944), Ch. “Studii franco-române”, 107–65. 268 january 1854

News during the Crimean war, the French artist Constantine Guys, working for the same publication and, presumably, Edwin Lawrence Godkin from the Daily News, the liberal paper launched by Dickens in 1946. They became part of the exiles’ social circle during their stay in Vidin and, like Pechméja, Arène and the Pasha, furtively facilitated the passage of letters.477 The above list of names suggests that the exiles’ pan-European solidarity networks were based on sub-groups connected via close family, liberal, republican and Masonic ties which have been under-studied in the historiography and often remain obscure.478 While Rosetti and his associates were campaigning in the Balkans, the younger Brătianu brother, Ion, was still fighting a war of his own as his trial in the Hippodrome affair continued in Paris.479 News of the sentence passed on him in January 1854 reached Rosetti in early Feb- ruary, as he was waiting for a decision regarding the participation of the Romanian corps in the Crimean War.480 As Rosetti and his group continued to wait in frustrating inaction at Vidin in early March 1854, the ‘Franco-Roumains’ in Paris were trying to agitate on behalf of the Romanian cause and the Eastern Question. Rosetti had access to some of the French newspapers, including La Presse, which the Pasha of Vidin subscribed to, and asked Marie and Ion Brătianu to pass on his congratulations to Jean Abdolonyme Ubicini for his recent study “La Question de l’Orient devant l’Europe”, in which he outlined for French readers the complex causes of the Crimean War and the price paid by the Romanians in the conflict. “[. . .] shake his hand firmly for me and tell him that, should I become king of the Romanians, I will grant him 28 rations of grain”, Rosetti joked.481

477 The journalists were not identified as such by Marin Bucur in his edition of the Rosettis’ correspondence. Cf. letters from Rosetti to Marie, 4 and 10 March 1854, in C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 118, 123. For their presence in Vidin in the spring of 1854, see Eric D. Tappe, “E. E. and J. A. Crowe and the Rumanian Union: some unpublished letters of 1857”, Slavonic and East European Review 41, 96 (Dec. 1962): 135–43. For E. L. Godkin, see below, p. 278. 478 In 1851 the Romanians in Paris were reported to attend meetings of the lodge “La Fraternité des peuples”, a name which suggests a strong internationalist emphasis, but further information on the contacts they established there is still lacking. Cf. Calendrier maçonnique, Paris, 1851, 282 and Revue maçonnique de la France et de l’étranger (Paris, 1 December 1856), 3 cited in Smochină, “Sur les émigrés roumains à Paris”, 193–4, note 3. 479 See above, p. 242 sqq. 480 Letter from Rosetti to Marie, 5 March 1854, in C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 119. The final decision in the ‘affaire Bratiano’ was passed in June 1856, see Part Three, pp. 314–5. 481 Ibid., 121. serbia 269

On 21 March, writing from Vidin to Ion Brătianu, Rosetti admitted defeat in his campaign to obtain arms and permission to fight alongside the Turks. “Should you see our Romanians, how ready they are to fight, how magnificent they look and how much they suffer, you would either run amok or do something mad. I have been tempted constantly. But what can one do! There are no weapons; and the enemies are the Turks, the Moskals, the Germans, the French and the English, and everybody else [. . .].” Neutral Austria, interested in maintaining a buffer zone against Russia in the Ottoman Balkans, had been observing closely the Russo-Turkish conflict and the ensuing Russian occupation of the Principalities. By the autumn of 1853, some 200,000 Austrian troops had been quietly positioned along the exposed Russian western flank and, had it not been for the competing agendas of Britain and France, the conflict might have ended without escalating into a war. Amidst growing fears of an Austrian occupation of Wallachia, a defeatist Rosetti advised his friends to abandon all hope in diplomacy.482 The Romanians had ample grounds for believing themselves to be surrounded by enemies on all sides. Since July 1853, Drouyn de Lhuys had been urging Austria to wrest control of the Romanian Principalities from Russia, and even some of the Romanian notables and émigrés had appealed for an Austrian occupation, according to the Austrian consul in Bucharest, baron von Laurin.483 As perpetual “bargaining counters” in the Eastern Question, the Principalities were caught up once again between their weakening Ottoman suzerain, the aspiring Russians and the often ‘duplicitous’ and opportunistic Allies.484 The blueprints for their future were varied and conflicting: Stratford and Colquhoun pursued a traditional pro-Ottoman policy of keeping the Principalities under the sovereignty of an inviolable Ottoman Empire, although Lord John Russell would have encouraged their virtual independence. In addition, both Lord Palmerston and Napo- leon III occasionally played with the idea of awarding them to Austria as compensation for her voluntary renunciation of Lombardy-Venetia. Other possible scenarios included leaving them under Russian control

482 Arhivele Naţionale, Bucharest, Fonds Brătianu, Inv. (Pressmark) 1286, Dossiers 210, 212. 483 Paul W. Schroeder, Austria, Great Britain, and the Crimean War. The Destruc- tion of the European Concert (Cornell University Press, 1972), 206 and 471, note 30. The reference here is to letters addressed to Laurin in May–June 1854. 484 The phrase “bargainign counters” in ibid. 270 january 1854 or under Ottoman military occupation.485 The Austrian Foreign Min- ister Count Buol’s approach to the Principalities, it has been argued, was chiefly in line with his essentially defensive, pre-emptive foreign policy, although he often collided with the more hawkish elements in the Austrian military who would have preferred, and later attempted to apply, more invasive plans in the area.486 In this reading of Austrian defensiveness, émigré activities were a major factor: in Buol’s view, an Austrian occupation of the provinces was chiefly intended to neutral- ize both the restlessness of Polish and Hungarian elements in Omer Pasha’s army and the conspiracies fomented by the exiled radicals outside Romanian borders, but with the tacit support of the British and French consuls there.487 The “Holy War”, as Ştefan Golescu called the Crimean conflict, did finally break out.488 Russia and Turkey had officially been at war since mid-October 1853. After much prevarication, the Aberdeen cabinet gave in to pressure from both a public which had grown fiercely anti- Russian, and from a press which sounded increasingly jingoistic and militaristic. In France, ordinary people were rather apathetic during the pre-war negotiations and even after the sinking of the Ottoman fleet by the Russians at Sinope on 30 November 1853. French public opinion continued to be highly divided on the subject, although business and political circles were by and large mostly hostile to a military engagement and an abhorred Anglo-French alliance. In France, anti-English sentiment was often more powerful than anti-Russian attitudes, largely due to a vigorous anti-British campaign mounted by legitimist-Orléanist groups.489 The publication of Anglo-Franco- Russian diplomatic documents from the months leading to the war declaration, which showed that every possible means of avoiding war had been attempted, went some way towards creating a mildly pro- war current of opinion.490 Napoleon III himself appears to have been

485 Ibid., 231. Cf. also Ch. 9: “The Desperate Gamble”. 486 See the analysis by Paul W. Schroeder, “Austria and the Danubian Principalities, 1853–1856”, Central European History 2, 3 (Sept. 1969): 216–36. Count Karl Ferdi- nand von Buol-Schauenstein was the Austrian envoy to St. Petersburg and London (1851–1852) before becoming Foreign Minister, a post he held from 1852 to 1859. 487 Schroeder, Austria, 211. 488 For a brief and cogently written account of the run-up to the Crimean War, see Chamberlain, ‘Pax Britannica’?, Ch. 7. 489 Lynn M. Case, French Opinion on War and Diplomacy during the Second Empire (New York, 1972), 15–25. 490 Ibid., 25. serbia 271 a pacifist and a cosmopolitan European, not easily pushed into war by the pressure of public opinion. But he also had a sense of mission in foreign affairs and dreamed of recapturing the grandeur that France had lost in 1815: France’s diplomatic and military visibility in a major European war was a means of reclaiming that glory. It was amidst this rather confused atmosphere that France and Britain declared war on Russia on 27 and 28 March 1854 respectively. The Romanians had high expectations of the war. Dumitru Brătianu was not wide of the mark when he wrote that “Providence has brought it about for the express benefit of the Romanians, in order to provide them with an occasion to acquaint Europe with their struggles, their rights, their need for independence, to help them regain their due place in the great family of civilised peoples.”491 Armed conflicts are known to inspire interest in the languages and cultures of troubled war zones, and the Crimean War was no exception. The conflict marked possibly the earliest, ephemeral, blossoming of British cultural interest in the Danubian Principalities. The first elementary English grammar of the Romanian language appeared in 1854 in Suggestions for the Assistance of Officers in Learning the Languages of the Seat of War in the East by the distinguished Oxonian philologist Friedrich Max Müller. It was a basic outline rather than a manual, but it had at least the merit of stressing the Romance origin of the Wallachian language, one point on the emigrés’ publicity agenda. The language itself had been “brought into notoriety by the fate of the unfortunate Wallachians, who have had to bear the first shock of the war, between their protectors on either side”, as Müller insightfully noted.492 In France the ongoing Russian occupation of the Romanian Prin- cipalities became the target of attacks, often in highly popular media such as the satirical Le Charivari and in spin-offs by its contributors. The two-volumeMessieurs les Cosaques, a compilation of sketches by Taxile Delord, Clément Carraguel and Louis Huart, was presented as “A charivaric, comical and above all truthful account of the high deeds of the Russians in the East.”493 One sketch in the collection was set in the residential hotel in Bucharest of Prince Mikhail Dmitriyevich

491 Letter CXLVII in Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 52. 492 Max Müller, Suggestions for the Assistance of Officers in learning the Languages of the Seat of War in the East (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1854), 38. 493 Messieurs les Cosaques: Relation charivarique, comique et surtout véridique des hauts faits des Russes en Orient, par M. M. Taxile Delord, Clément Carraguel et Louis Huart (100 vignettes par Cham.), 2 vols. (Paris, 1854–1855). 272 january 1854

Gorchakov,494 the commanding general of the occupying Russian troops, where groups of people suspected of subversion were brought in for trial. A new group of people is brought forward. It comprises a dozen of boyars. “Goulatromboff ?” “Your Highness?” “Read the act of accusation against these gentlemen.” “This is very simple, Your Highness. Warned by a Cossack guard, I surprised these gentlemen conversing round a table.” “Were they conspiring?” “They were reading a French newspaper, theCharivari .” “This is as much as saying they were conspiring. You are aware, gentlemen, that the circulation and consequently the reading of French journals is absolutely forbidden. I could have you shot or hanged, but, as I respect the privileges of the nobility, I am content simply with sending you to Siberia. You are going to read the Charivari at Tobolsk. Bon voyage, messieurs, bon voyage!”495 Like most caricatures, this one, too, had a basis in fact. As a Russian officer during the Polish rebellion of 1830–1, governor of Warsaw in 1846 and chief-of-staff during the Russian intervention in Hungary in 1848–49, Prince Mikhail Gorchakov had earned a well-deserved reputation as the tsar’s strong man in Eastern Europe, and his control of the Principalities was characteristically brutal. In mid-November 1853, the Earl of Clarendon expressed concerns over reports that Prince Gorchakov had threatened to have all Moldo-Wallachians who “spoke disrespectfully of Russia” hanged without trial.496

494 Prince Mikhail Dmitryievich Gorchakov (1793–1861) was related to Aleksander Gorchakov, Russia’s Foreign Minister from 1856 to 1882. 495 Messieurs les Cosaques, 145. 496 Letter from the Earl of Clarendon to the Earl of Westmoreland, 16 November 1853, in House of Commons Parliamentary Papers online, 1854, Turkey. Correspondence respecting the rights and privileges of the Latin and Greek churches in Turkey, 644. THE CRIMEAN WAR

As a result of the declaration of war, on 6 April, Effingham Grant, still in charge at the British Consulate in Colquhoun’s absence, informed the Foreign Secretary, Lord Clarendon, that the Russians had requested the departure of all Western consuls from Bucharest within eight days. Grant intended to leave with his entire family.497 The Foreign Office gave him permission to leave his post and instructed him to leave the British subjects in the country under the protection of the Belgian consul.498 It is not known if and for how long Grant may have left the country. On 4 April, tired of waiting pointlessly in Vidin, Rosetti had decided to visit Constantinople, against the advice of his friends and the wishes of his enemies. He intended to meet up there with the moderate Ion Ghica, Bey of Samos and Romanian envoy at the Porte, who had good connections among the foreign diplomatic corps in the Ottoman capital, and enjoyed the support of Stratford Canning.499 However, Ghica had already left for Samos when Rosetti arrived and consequently, without letters of introduction, Rosetti was unable to obtain entry into the complex diplomatic networks of Constantinople. Stratford Can- ning, who was opposed to the project of an eventual union of the Romanian Principalities, tried to persuade General Magheru that the much hoped-for ferman whereby the Porte would declare its support for Romanian autonomy and the union would be premature in the context of Austrian resistance to such radical goals.500 The visit was, however, an opportunity for Rosetti to renew friendships and connections with Polish émigré revolutionaries, such as General Józef Wysocki, the former commander of the Polish legion in Hungary, and others, who were then living in Constantinople, awaiting, like the Romanians, the outcome of the diplomatic manoeuvering going on behind closed doors.501 However, Rosetti, an impatient man of action,

497 PRO/FO 78/1010, 102. 498 PRO/FO 78/1010, Draft letter to Mr. Grant, 23 May 1854. Robert Colquhoun returned to Bucharest on 29 August 1854. 499 C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 126, 148. 500 Letter from Rosetti, 18 April 1854, in ibid., 127. 501 Letter of 18 April 1854, in ibid., 129. 274 1855–1856 had lost faith in diplomacy, especially in the light of his failed crusade in the Balkans: “Yes, I think that everything is over for us”, he wrote to his wife on 25 April, “I think that we will not obtain anything, that our suffering has been entirely in vain, and that soon the best thing left for me to do will be to return to my beloved hearth and cry in your arms over yet another wasted opportunity to do something for our beloved Patrie.”502 The failure of Rosetti’s mission was sealed a few days later. His friend and philo-Romanian Amédée Jérôme Langlois, a former republican journalist for Proudhon’s Ami du Peuple, then living in exile in Con- stantinople, met the visiting Prince Jérôme Napoléon and asked to serve in the still non-existent Romanian legion. He was told that Omer Pasha, the commander of the Turkish troops stationed on the Danube since 22 August 1853, was opposed to the creation of such a legion, claiming that the country did not have the resources for it and that the Russians would take revenge for its creation by thrashing the country with their swords. Rosetti surmised that Omer Pasha coveted the governorship of Wallachia in the time-honoured fashion of Ottoman dignitaries seeking lucrative positions in that region.503 On the morning of 10 May 1854, Rosetti put on a new shirt – freshly- laundered and sent from Paris by Marie (“one of the shirts you have touched”) and dressed up for the much-awaited appointment with Jérôme Napoléon, mediated by Langlois. But, at the last minute, the Prince made his excuses, saying he could not receive the Romanian delegation as “he had correspondence to attend to.”504 Rosetti’s desperation reached new heights as he saw himself reduced to inaction once more and he wrote to Marie: “[. . .] I play cards with [Ştefan] Golescu, in the same way that we used to play on the Turkish boat. And we smile as we think of you and imagine what you would say if you saw how we are spending our time in exile, we, the soldiers of the Romanian liberation.”505 Rosetti spent his melancholy in letters to his wife and to his six-year-old daughter, Liby, for whose benefit he

502 Ibid., 130; I have taken the liberty of correcting slightly Bucur’s reading of this passage. 503 Letter of 5 May 1854, in ibid., 131 and 132, note 3. During the Phanariot period (1711–1822), dragomans and dignitaries from leading families in Constantinople were the only individuals who could aspire to the thrones of Wallachia and Moldavia. 504 C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 134. 505 Ibid., 136. The Turkish boat is a reference to the vessel which first took the revolutionaries from Wallachia into exile after the failure of the revolution of 1848. the crimean war 275 imagined a fairy-tale ending for their country’s troubles: “And we are going to chase the Emperors away, and you are going to be very good, and you will come into your father’s arms, and we will all be happy in the arms of our beloved Romania.”506 On 5 June Rosetti was finally granted a brief meeting with Jérôme Napoléon: “he received us well, but [. . .] the only thing we obtained was a princely sigh.”507 Rosetti’s reflections on a reproach often addressed to the Romanians turned into attacks not only against the ‘uncomprehending West’, but also against the power struggles amidst the diaspora: Foreigners, not knowing our people, and seeing that we did not show any signs of life either when the Russians first entered our country or later, must tell themselves “they are very weak, or else they are dead”. Expecting no strong support from us, they are unwilling to attempt anything on our behalf. Add to this that they must in truth be disgusted to see – apart from our incomprehensible inaction – a fistful of men tear- ing each other apart and intriguing to become Prince. Thus Sturza, thus Ghica, thus Eliade, not to mention the Ştirbeis, the Bibescos and company. “Arise, manifest yourselves”, I was told the other day by a military who acts as St. Arnaud’s factotum. “But give us some weapons!” “I am, alas, unable to help”, he said. “If you are the enemies of the Russians, if your people want their independence, they must manifest themselves to us, and force us, if I may say so, into recognizing them. Then, yes, we will be able to intervene, speak on your behalf, give you weapons”, etc., etc.508 Rosetti’s last hope, that French troops might enter Romania, and that he, and his family from Paris, would join them, was dashed. He wrote to Marie on 10 July from Constantinople, asking her not to proceed with the plan of returning to Bucharest, as planned in the initial wave of optimism at the outbreak of the war. He was right: in Romania, the commanders of the Russian occupying forces were being urged from St. Petersburg to “be very severe” against the “disobedient” and “anarchical” Wallachians.509 On 14 June, a diplomatic decision had been, in fact, taken in the crisis triggered by the Russian occupation of the Principalities: the

506 Biblioteca Naţională, the Saint-Georges Collection, P. CCCLXX, Dossier 10, ms. letter of 30 May 1854. 507 C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 139. 508 Letter dated 24 June 1854, in C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 141. Jacques Leroy de Saint Arnaud (1801–1854), French general close to Napoleon III, commanded the French army in the Crimean War and died of cholera on 29 September 1854. 509 Dispatch from Nesselrode to Baron Budberg, 23 June 1854, as reported in the Daily News, 23 July 1854. 276 1855–1856

Turco-Austrian convention of Boyacı Köy stipulated the retreat of the tsarist troops from the Romanian Principalities – which started on 13 August – and their joint occupation by Ottoman and Austrian forces. From Constantinople, Ştefan Golescu sent a copy of the treaty to Marie Rosetti on 25 June 1854 for publication in La Presse and the Le Siècle with a protest by the Romanians against Austrian interference.510 “This unfortunate Turkey has completely lost grip on herself ”, Ştefan complained.511 These developments closed the borders of their homeland once more for the exiles, who had briefly dared to hope that they might be allowed to resume a legitimate political life at home. Rosetti had dreamed of political success as an offering to Marie, who had finally gained revolutionary status after their years in shared exile. “Ah, the beauty of appearing like a hero in front of your beloved, of the one who received your name, who gave all that she had, who lost herself, one might say, who merged with one’s self! Do you now understand the shame that I feel to have to come in your presence after an absence of eight months, during which I have achieved nothing?”, he wrote from Constantinople on 2 July. Envisaging the possibility of Marie’s return to Bucharest, Rosetti commented: “I know that, upon your return to the country, instead of your homeland’s liberty and your husband’s glory, you will find the Austrians and your husband’s shame.’512 On 4 July 1854, Dumitru Brătianu addressed a memorandum to the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Clarendon, in which the Romanian diaspora protested against the Austrian occupation, which took effect in mid-August. Conservative Austria’s involvement in the Eastern crisis was not to everybody’s taste in Britain. Liberal opinion blamed the government for accepting the support of “the tyranical gaoler of Italy and Hungary and the spoliator of Poland”, which meant that Brit- ain slid “down from the high, and noble, and impregnable position of a champion armed for truth, justice, and principle, to become a mere slash buckler doing the selfish work of dynasties instead of the noble duty of people.”513 Reservations about putative Austrian intentions in the Balkans were expressed by Sir Austen Layard in a min-

510 Fotino 4: 116. 511 Ibid. 512 Documente, ed. Cornea and Piru, 349–35. 513 Daily News, 25 July 1854, a commentary on debates in the House of Commons on the previous day. the crimean war 277 isterial meeting in London on 17 July. Prince Adam Czartoryski and his agent, Count Wladislaw Zamoyski, protested against the occupation, blaming the French and the British for “appointing” Austria as their gendarme in East-Central Europe.514 On 2 December 1854 the convention of Boyacı Köy was to be reinforced by an Anglo-Austro- French agreement which guaranteed Austria’s possessions in Italy for the duration of the war and promised military support in the event of a Russian attack. Austria was granted the right to “protect” the Danu- bian Principalities and was bound to cooperate with the Allies in all matters related to them.515 For the Romanians, the decision meant simply the realization of older Austrian expansionist plans in South-East Europe and the replacement of one foreign occupation with another. Among modern historians, Paul W. Schroeder has read the situation differently. He argued a long time ago that, far from being merely the manifestation of Habsburg greed, the Austrian occupation had a broader European scope and strategic significance, and was largely the outcome of French diplomatic overtures rather than of a hawkish Austrian initiative. It allowed the European allies to break down a diplomatic deadlock, clearing the way for mobilization and eventual success in the Crimean campaign.516

514 Stan and Ploeşteanu, Utopia, 166. Such were the ambiguous quid pro quos of Central-European politics, Prince Czartoryski himself was no stranger to previous plans for ‘awarding’ the Principalities to Austria. Cf. Tomi, “ ‘Europa naţionalităţilor’ între revoluţie şi război: cazul românilor şi italienilor”, in Războiul Crimeii, ed. Silvan Ionescu, 68. 515 Paul Cernovodeanu, Relaţiile comerciale româno-engleze în contextul politicii orientale a Marii Britanii, 1803–1878 (Cluj-Napoca, 1986), 169–70. 516 Schroeder, Austria, 400. See p. 270 above. THE DAILY NEWS AND THE ROMANIAN PRINCIPALITIES

Oh England! Oh my country. E. L. Godkin, Scutari 12 May 1854517 On the ground, the residents of Wallachia were less concerned with the broader geopolitical significance of the event. Like most military occupations of a foreign territory, the Austrian occupation had its excesses, and these were ably foregrounded in their reports by the British diplomats, journalists and military stationed in the Principalities at the time. The liberalDaily News, started by Charles Dickens in 1846, was one of the earliest British newspapers to send correspondents to the Eastern “seat of war”. The special correspondent who sent unsigned dispatches from Bucharest between September 1853 and September 1855 was the twenty-three-year-old Edwin Lawrence Godkin, the future founder of the National. He had come to the attention of the paper’s editor, Frederick Knight Hunt, with the publication in 1853 of a History of Hungary and the Magyars,518 which earned him his new position as foreign correspondent in an area compatible with his interests. Godkin’s anti-Austrian History was not perhaps the best guarantee of unbiased journalism, and the young republican Irishman’s reports resonated with the deep-seated hostility to Austria shared by liberal sections of his readership in Britain. His reports, colourful, passionate and highly personal, were in the journalistic tradition of ‘views’ rather than ‘news’,519 and his engaged approach to history- in-the-making must have endeared him to the equally subjective Romanian exiles. There is a strong probability that he met members of the Romanian diaspora, given that he followed Omer Pasha’s army throughout the campaign and was present at all the memorable sites of the Crimean War from late 1853 to late 1855, at the very time when

517 Ogden Rollo, ed., The Life and Letters of E. L. Godkin, 2 vols. (London, 1907) 1: 26. 518 The History of Hungary and the Magyars from the Earliest Period to the Close of the Late War (London, 1853) was published in America in 1853 and had a second English edition in 1856. 519 Mark Hampton, Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950 (University of Illinois Press, 2004), 38. the daily news and the romanian principalities 279 the Romanian ‘conspirators’ were also present in the Lower Danube region.520 Godkin, the “people’s correspondent”, captured the emotional high drama of the “people’s war”, as The Times called the Crimean conflict in one of its editorials.521 On 7 September 1854 he witnessed a joint review of the Turkish and Wallachian troops in Bucharest by Omer Pasha and the Austrian General Johann Coronini and his report left no-one in any doubt about which side he was on: I remarked that the Turks present formed but a very small portion of the army which is at present here ; in fact, none but those who are well dressed were brought on the ground. The uniform of the greater part of these poor fellows is so terribly dilapidated that they would cut but a very sorry figure beside the Austrians and Wallachians, so that some picking and choosing had to be resorted to. I never felt so much hearty pity for any body of men in my life. There was their elite assembled on the roadside to add fresh eclat to the triumphal entry of the troops of another nation into the capital which their valor had wrested from the enemy; they, tattered, torn, war-worn the Austrians, the vanquished of a hundred fields, all brilliance, insolence, and assumption; they, broiling in tents outside on a dusty plain the Austrians about to take possession of the best houses in the town. The whole affair was a fresh insult to the Turks. This is the real state of the case, however it may be disguised. The men who defended Arab Tabia, who have covered the banks of the Dan- ube with their graves, who fought side by side with Butler and Arnold, and Burke and Maynell, were hiding their rags in their tents while the best-beaten, oftenest-thrashed troops in the world, were taking possession of Turkish conquests with drums beating and colors flying. It was the saddest commentary on modern diplomacy I ever saw; and when I heard their band strike up the Austrian national air, and saw the veter- ans of Silistria, Oltenitza, Csitate, and Giurgevo present arms to General Count Coronini, who rode past, glancing unutterable pride, I felt thoroughly disgusted.522 His subsequent reports on the Austrian occupation itself contain a mix of high politics, eyewitness information, gossip, anecdote and psycho-history, adding to the open forum created in Britain by the new brand of journalism forged during the Crimean War.523 Here are a few excerpts:

520 See p. 267 sqq. above. 521 The Times, 5 May 1854, 8. 522 The Life and Letters of E. L. Godkin, ed. Rollo, 1: 68–70. 523 See Stefanie Markovits, “Rushing Into Print: “Participatory Journalism” During the Crimean War”, Victorian Studies 50, 4 (Summer 2008): 559–86. 280 1855–1856

Forced labour, then, forced supply of provisions, both paid for in depre- ciated paper-money, free quartering of troops, in addition of course to the injury done to trade and commerce – such were the evils entailed on the Wallachs by the presence of the Russians; and certainly two or three in addition, such as the robbery of the public treasury. With the exception of this last, they suffer at this moment from the Austrians, who are come to restore the “benedictions [sic] de la paix”, all that they suffered from the Russians, who came as conquerors for the purpose of carrying on war. [. . .] I know a case in which one man with one small room, a wife, and four children, has three soldiers quartered on him. I know another in which a man who has two small rooms, a wife and large family, has seven Croats. A shopkeeper here has sixty men in his house, forming the band of a regiment of infantry. [. . .] Can a man carry on business who has sixty musicians lodging in his house practicing on every variety of instrument, from the shawm to the cornet-à-piston, from morning till night? Can a poor clerk go to his work with a light heart who has left seven Croat soldiers on the same room with his wife and children? [. . .] Did the occurrences which take place now every day before my eyes happen in an English town, I am thoroughly certain that every man who dwelt in it would rise out, with the first weapon which presented itself, and rid his household of a nuisance which nothing but centuries of misfortune, and long familiarity with foreign tyranny, could render tolerable for one hour.524 [. . .] Your readers will do well to ask themselves if these things are done here, where the Austrians are not yet completely masters of the situation, what takes place at Venice and Milan, and in Hungary, where the people can look for succor or redress nowhere but to Heaven!525 There was nothing subliminal about these colourful accounts: they were clearly intended to encourage anti-Austrian opinion at home, and proved effective. ADaily News reader from London was prompted to observe that the “frightful picture” of the Austrian occupation of the Principalities will “enable this very unimaginative English nation to realize something of what is now passing in those countries . . .”526 The daily oppression and miseries of the military occupation were compounded by the political intrigues which opposed the Russian, Turk- ish, and Austrian ‘parties’ among the Romanian boyars, the Ottoman

524 “Letters from the Seat of War in the Principalities”, in the Daily News, 13 Octo- ber 1854. 525 Correspondence from Bucharest, 26 November 1854, in The Life and Letters of E. L. Godkin, ed. Rollo, 82–4. 526 Daily News, 14 October 1854, “The Austrians in Bucharest”. the daily news and the romanian principalities 281

Porte, the Austrian command and the Western diplomats in Bucha- rest, each vying to promote their interests and their candidates to the Wallachian assemblies and other seats of power.527 In addition, the ‘special correspondent in Bucharest’ reported, the Ottomans were coerced into delivering political refugees and suspects into Austrian hands, to be sent to Vienna and tried on trumped-up charges: the Ottomans “have purchased Austrian support by concessions which they are conscious are disgraceful to them.”528 The moderate liberal Ion Bălăceanu, close to Ion Ghica, also left accounts of Austrian ran- dom acts of violence and abuses in the Principalities in his private correspondence.529 The British Consul Robert Colquhoun’s dispatches to the Foreign Office described the Austrian occupation as “unnecessary, immensely unpopular, brutal, despotic and financially ruinous”, but, according to Paul W. Schroeder, his reports were grossly exaggerated and based on “unverified rumour.”530 The Austrian troops remained stationed in the Principalities until 1857, and it is a matter of debate whether the occupation was com- parable to or worse than the Ottoman or Russian occupations previously. It left bitter memories amongst the Romanians themselves, confirming the views of those who had always opposed the idea of an Austrian protectorate as an alternative to a Hungarian-dominated Danubian Confederation.531 Such views, however, may have been the result of a foreign political choice and of the interplay of diplomatic interests rather than reflections of a particularly violent military occupation. Francophilia was still predominant. A year later, during the peace negotiations, Ion Brătianu was to publish a memoir addressed to none other than his supposed former assassination target, Emperor Napoleon. His Mémoire sur l’Empire d’Autriche dans la Question d’Orient532 exposed the danger of a strong Germany in the midst of

527 For further details on the diplomatic intrigues in Austrian-occupied Bucharest see Trevor J. Hope, “Sir Stephen Bartlett Lakeman (Mazar Pasha) as military gover- nor of Bucharest at the commencement of the Austrian occupation of the Danubian Principalities in 1854”, Revue roumaine d’histoire 16, 1 (1977): 25–41. 528 “What the Austrians are doing in Wallachia”, Daily News, 6 September 1854. 529 See, for instance, letters (in French) nos. 29 and 40 (March and June 1856) in Documente privind Unirea Principatelor, ed. Bodea, 3: 76, 96. 530 Schroeder, Austria, 211. 531 Borsi-Kálmán, Hungarian Exiles, 44 and 82, note 267. See letters nos. 29 and 40 (February-June 1856) in Documente privind Unirea Principatelor, ed. Bodea, 3: 76, 96. 532 Mémoire sur l’Empire d’Autriche dans la question d’Orient, par J.-C. Bratiano (Paris: Impr. De J. Voisvenel, 1855). It was serialised in Romanian translation in 282 1855–1856

Europe and the negative impact of an Austro-Russian alliance on Cen- tral and East-European national projects. France is exhorted to base its Eastern policy on the triad “nationality, civilization, liberty” and support the union of the resource-rich Romanian Principalities. The new state would be a willing French economic colony and a channel of French influence in the region. In spite of an unfortunate history, Brătianu announces bombastically, the capital of “Eastern civilization” is Bucharest rather than Athens or Constantinople.533 By 29 July 1854, as the Romanian participation in the hostilities had not materialized, Rosetti had made his mind up to return to Paris and resume his life in exile.534 Another son, Horia, was born there in June 1855. The Golescu brothers, too, left Constantinople and Bursa and returned to Paris, to be reunited with their mother Zinca and their niece Felicia Racoviţă for the rest of the fall and winter of 1854–55. They tried to soothe their bruised hearts and bodies by taking the waters at Enghien, where Alexandru-Albu – they complained – supervised their treatment as ruthlessly as a commander in the Crimean War.535 Plans for the creation of a Romanian military unit to take part in the war had not been totally abandoned, in spite of failed attempts in Constantinople. Dumitru Brătianu kept writing to Lord Palmerston and to Lord Panmure, the war minister, advancing enthusiastic and unrealistic proposals for creating a corps of 100,000 Romanians to fight alongside the allied troops, but the response was evasive. In mid- September, the Foreign Office wrote to the British Consul in Bucha- rest, enquiring over the truth of accusations made by Count Buol, the Austrian envoy in London, that Wallachian refugees had returned to the country and were active clandestinely. Colquhoun confirmed that, according to his information, a number of “agitators”, notably Rosetti and Nicolae Golescu, had returned and attempted to “excite the peasants against the Proprietary class.” The consul was instructed to report such incidents to the Turkish authorities and to inform them that “in the opinion of this govr. it is very desirable that such agitation should not be permitted to interfere with the reestablishment

Rosetti’s Românul in May 1860. Cf. Din scrierile şi cuvântările lui Ion C. Brătianu, ed. Vintilă I. C. Brătianu et al., 149–81. 533 Brătianu, “Memoriu asupra Imperiului Austriei în Cestiunea Orientului”, in Din scrierile şi cuvântările lui Ion C. Brătianu, ed. Vintilă I. C. Brătianu et al., 180–1. 534 C.A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 149–50, and 152. 535 Fotino 4: 123–4. the daily news and the romanian principalities 283 of order and tranquillity in Wallachia.”536 Rosetti’s clandestine return to Bucharest in September 1854 is not documented outside this diplomatic exchange and may well have been based on rumour. Dimi- trie Brătianu, however, was reported to be hiding in Bucharest in the last months of 1854. Information as to the nature of his activities is lacking, but one can easily guess. On Austria’s ‘most wanted’ list, he attempted to flee the city disguised as the servant of theIllustrated London News reporter Joseph Archer Crowe, and when that failed, he must have found another exit route. 537 Austrian fears were justified. Italian radical agitators enrolled in the Turkish army were known to be operating in the region, spreading Mazzini’s calls for concomitant national insurrections in Italy, Cen- tral and Eastern Europe. From London, Mazzini himself orchestrated and financed attempts to send agents provocateurs into Austrian- controlled territories, including Wallachia.538 One of these agents, Felice Orsini, later Emperor Napoleon’s would-be assassin, was arrested by the Austrian authorities in Transylvania. As a result, the Austrians stepped up their controls at the borders and surveillance in the Principalities.539 In France, as well as in Britain, the government’s lack of support for the Romanians was deplored in left-wing and republican circles: “[. . .] Would you judge France by those who are governing her today and who represent her abroad?” Etienne Vacherot, a leading republican, wrote to Marie Rosetti on 2 November 1854. “You have your misfortunes, but we have our infamies! No Frenchman with his heart in the right place would dare raise his head today in Europe, who believed so strongly in us and whom we have so ignominiously betrayed. On your side, as on ours, the patrie is in the heart of good citizens, of generous patriots. The country of Rosetti, of the Bratianos and of so many others whom you know better than me, is now more than ever worthy of esteem and of sympathy. Poor Romania! Poor Europe! I will not add poor France. She has what she deserves.”540

536 PRO/FO 78/1010, Draft of a dispatch from the Foreign Office to Robert Colquhoun, 13 September 1854, 18–9. 537 Tappe, “E. E. and J. A. Crowe and the Rumanian Union”, 137, quoting from Joseph A. Crowe, Reminiscences of Thirty-Five Years of My Life (London, 1895). 538 Letter from Mazzini to Emilie Ashurst, dated c. 1853, in Mazzini’s Letters to an English Family, ed. Richards, 278. 539 Tomi, “ ‘Europa naţionalităţilor’ ”, 71. 540 Letter from E. Vacherot to Marie Rosetti, 2 November 1854, B. A. R., Fonds C. A. Rosetti, S 37/LXIII. 284 1855–1856

Hope for the future, the letter concluded, lay in the underground survival of liberal, republican France. Accusations of lethargy and inaction among the Romanian militants made in less sympathetic circles drew venom from the pen of Golescu-Albu. “[. . .]it is now seven years”, he wrote in December 1854 in a private letter, “since the country has been occupied almost without interruption by foreign armies; each of these occupations has displaced people, sending them into exile. And this nation is blamed for inaction? For not being bold and for not complaining? People did complain, but nobody listened to them, because the English and French consuls, especially the French, were careful to discourage them so many times. Are you aware that Mr. Béclard in Bucharest is spending his days and parts of his nights playing cards with Mr. Playano and losing up to 1,000 ducats in one single evening? One may wonder where this money comes from, for he himself is a bourgeois and his pay is barely sufficient to cover his expenses as a consul. Such is the moral quality of the foreign consuls appointed in our country at such a critical time. This only proves one thing: that they want to be nice to Austria.”541

541 Fotino 1: 223, Fotino 4: 135. Louis-Philippe Béclard had been appointed Consul General of France in Bucharest in November 1854 and later married the daughter of the Romanian Conservative leader, Barbu Catargiu. Alexandru Plagino was the son- in-law of Barbu Ştirbey, ruling Prince of Wallachia, and at that time State Secretary of Wallachia. Cf. Fotino 4: 135, notes 1–2. THE END OF THE WAR AND THE PEACE CONFERENCE

Public opinion in Britain, which had previously clamoured for war, eventually turned against the government once the weaknesses of a campaign conducted, as never before, under the eyes of war reporters and photographers, became apparent.542 A motion for an enquiry into the conduct of the war put forward in the Commons in January 1855 by the radical John Arthur Roebuck, brought down the Aberdeen cabinet and, ironically enough, opened the way for the hawkish Palmer- ston.543 There was no major change in the conduct of the war but, after the fall of Sebastopol in September 1855, Palmerston was arguably able to negotiate and secure a more satisfactory peace than the more diffi- dent, morally scrupulous and pro-Russian Lord Aberdeen would have produced.544 In December, neutral Austria threatened to join the war if Russia would not agree to an armistice. The destruction by British forces of the Russian fleet at Sweaborg in the Baltic forced the new Tsar Alexander II545 to conclude an armistice in February 1856. Casualties on all belligerent sides were enormous: 473,835 Russians,546 between 80,000 and 95,000 Frenchmen, between 20,000 and 25,000 British, between 200,000 and 400,000 Ottomans and some 2,000 Ital- ians lost their lives. Loss on such a scale made the Crimean war the deadliest European war in the period from 1815 to 1914.547 The peace negotiations, which had started in November 1854, were initially based on the relatively modest agenda of the Four-Point Vienna Note: Russia would give up her special claims over the Romanian Principalities and Serbia, navigation on the Danube would be free, the Straits Convention of 1841 would be revised and Russia would renounce her self-assumed protectorate of the Ottoman Empire’s Orthodox Christian subjects.

542 Chamberlain, ‘Pax Britannica?’, 108. 543 Ibid., 109. 544 J. B. Conacher, Britain and the Crimea, 1855–56 (London, 1987), 227. 545 Nicholas I had died after a short illness on 18 February/2 March 1855. 546 Ian Fletcher and Natalia Ishchenko, The Crimean War: a clash of empires (Staplehurst: Spellmont, 2004), 531. 547 Goldfrank, Origins of the Crimean War, 289–90. These figures are corroborated in Fletcher and Ishchenko, The Crimean War,531–2, except for Ottoman deaths, which this source situates between 30,000 and 45,000. All the figures cited include those killed in action and deaths from disease. 286 1855–1856

The Treaty of Paris, a pan-European treaty of “peace and friendship”,548 signed on 30 March 1856, ultimately expanded some of these points. Two very important articles (7 and 8) enshrined the integrity of the Ottoman Empire and the admission of Turkey into the ‘concert of Europe’ which, in practice, meant that the Porte was to take part as an equal member in negotiating future differences between the contracting powers.549 In exchange, by Article 9 the Porte agreed to guarantee the rights of its Christian subjects, thus meeting Russia’s initial demands, as presented by Menhshikov in Constantinople. Military arsenals in the Black Sea were eliminated and the entire pontic area was closed to warships, with the exception of a limited number of Russian and Turkish light vessels anchored there for the protection of the coasts. A temporary European commission was appointed for two years to oversee the free navigation along the Danube, pending the creation of a permanent overseeing body.550 The final treaty also provided for the cession by Russia of three southern counties of Bessarabia, which it had incorporated in 1812, and which now re-joined Romania.551 The Danubian Principalities were placed under the collective guarantee of the seven European Powers, but none of the guarantor powers were granted exclusive protection rights and none was to have any right of interference in the internal affairs of the provinces (Art. 22). The Congress did not meet the Romanian demands for the unification of the Principalities and for the country’s independence under a hereditary foreign prince. However, it did pronounce in favour of the creation of representative assemblies (the so-called ad-hoc divans) and stipulated the organization of referenda on the future of the nation, a loophole which the Romanians were quick to exploit in 1858–1859. Ironically, the Romanians, who had been denied military participation in the war, obtained more from the peace treaties than the Poles, who had been allowed to fight, but whose country was not even mentioned during the peace negotiations. It is difficult to estimate to what extent this outcome had been achieved through skilful manipulation of the

548 Traité de paix et d’amitié entre la France, l’Autriche, le Royaume-Uni de la Grande-Bretagne, la Prusse, la Russie, la Sardaigne et la Turquie conclu et signé au Congrés de Paris le 30 Mars 1856 (Paris: au Dépôt Géographique, 32, rue Mazarine). 549 Goldfrank, Origins of the Crimean War, 203. For the importance of this early ‘European integration’ of Turkey see Fikret Adanir, “Turkey’s Entry into the Concert of Europe”, European Review 13, 3 (2005): 395–417. 550 Cernovodeanu, Relaţiile comerciale româno-engleze, 186. 551 Chamberlain, ‘Pax Britannica’?, 110. the end of the war and the peace conference 287 media and insistent lobbying by the Romanian diaspora. Whether it was a triumph of media manipulation or diplomatic astuteness, or both, the Congress of Paris finally placed the ‘Romanian Question’ firmly on the Great Powers’ agenda. Assessments – both at the time and later – of the outcome of the war vary. It had been a drawn-out, paradoxical war: what was supposed to remain a localized conflict to be resolved by diplomatic means turned out to be a major European military engagement which left over half a million dead as well as a complex and volatile international legacy. The discourses around it on all sides were full of panache, crusader spirit and bombast, but the fighting – on several fronts, the Baltic regions, the Black Sea, Turkey and Transcaucasia – exposed major flaws in logistics, equipment and tactic in all belligerent camps. When peace was finally concluded in 1856, it left some of the Allies, notably Britain, with little to show in terms of concrete war spoils. Russia’s expected “rollback” from Europe – Palmerston’s objective – failed in the medium and longer term: the Russian-supported Persian offensive against Afghanistan starting with 1864 triggered a chain-reaction, leading to a concentration of British forces in India at the expense of the Black Sea region, enabling Russia to reaffirm its influence there in the 1860s and 1870s.552 In Britain, there were those who believed that heavy military loss was made worse by relative loss of face in the international arena: the peace conference was held in Paris, rather than London, as Palmerston had hoped, a confirmation in European eyes that, in spite of Britain’s sacrifices, Russia’s defeat was more a French than a British victory. Much was made later, not least in Romania, of Napoleon III’s “visionary” plan for “regenerating Europe on the basis of nationalitiesm”,553 but the Emperor may in fact have been more of a pragmatist than is sometimes accepted. Letters to the Duc de Persigny, the French ambassador in London, sent in November 1856, show that the Roma- nian nation-builders enjoyed the French Emperor’s support almost by default, as a pre-emptive strike against Russia and Turkey. Respond- ing to criticism that his advocacy of the would-be union of Romania

552 For shifts on the international arena after the war, see W. E. Mosse, The Rise and Fall of the Crimean System, 1855–1871 (London, 1963). For the long-term political, ideological and economic impact of the Crimean War, see Goldfrank, Origins of the Crimean War, esp. Ch. 19: “The Strange Sequel”. 553 See Theodore Zeldin’s assessment inFrance 1848–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), vol. 1: “Ambition, Love and Politics”, 558–9. 288 1855–1856 inevitably led to the dismemberment of the Ottoman Porte, he made his views on Turkey clear by declaring that he had made the war in order to pre-empt the Russian domination in the eastern Mediterra- nean, not in order “to sustain blindly the stupid, immoral, barbarious and pagan government of the Turks [. . .] The dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire is the least of my concerns, as long as it does not profit the Russians.”554 In France there was almost unanimous exultation not so much for the terms of the treaty as such, but for the return to peace and for what was perceived as France’s newly recaptured world-power status after decades of international marginalisation. In Grenoble, for instance, according to a report by the Procureur Général, people rejoiced over the fact the “the emperor became the arbiter of the destinies of the world and that his greatness becomes France’s greatness.”555 Such views were echoed nationally. Z The Rosettis celebrated New Year toasting champagne glasses at their new Parisian home at 92 bis, rue de l’Ouest, surrounded by faithful friends: Ion Brătianu, Winterhalder and his wife, the Dumesnils, Con- stantin Cantacuzino and his wife, as well as Father Josaphat, the priest who had christened little Sophia Liberty in June 1848, on the day when the revolution started in Romania.556

554 Eric Anceau, Napoléon III: un Saint-Simon à cheval (Paris, 2008), 288. 555 Case, French Opinion, 48–9. 556 Entry for 2 January 1856, Rosetti, Diary, 351. PART THREE

THE RETURN OF THE EXILES 1856–1857

A REPUBLICAN FUNERAL

Avec une prudente energie, on peut beaucoup. Armand Lévy to Alfred Dumesnil, 13 January 18561 On 13 January 1856, Ion (Jean) Voinescu II, the former Romanian foreign minister in the 1848 provisional government and leading forty-eighter, who had died in exile in Pau on 31 December aged only forty-seven, was buried at the Père Lachaise. The ceremony occasioned another symbolic graveside gathering of European republicans, left- wing militants and exiled champions of national causes, among whom Daniele Manin, the exiled former president of the Venetian republic, the historian Henri Martin, the pro-Romanian writer Elias Regnault, radical republican and author of L’Histoire politique et sociale des Prin- cipautés Danubiennes (1855), and others. The funeral orations were delivered by Constantin Rosetti and Jean Abdolonyme Ubicini, the former French-language secretary of the Wallachian provisional government in 1848 and a long-standing ally of the Romanians. Ubicini spoke about the pain of life and the poignancy of death in exile, bound to be experienced even by people like the Romanians, for whom France was almost a second home: I, too, walked in the dust of this exiled man’s native country, of the land to which he was no longer able to return – and which you, Messieurs, are going to see again – this Romania, as beautiful as it is unfortunate, like the river that nourishes her border. Whoever drinks of that water cannot leave; whoever is violently snatched from that land, must die. I have known and loved this distant sister of my country, exiled into barbarian realms, like the Roman poet2 whose legend she has preserved; beyond the Carpathians, she is perpetuating the spirit and traditions of France. I have witnessed her martyrdom, and, having dreamed for one moment of her triumph, I then counted her tears and her wounds; at the same time, I have seen all her reserves of energy, of patience in the face of adversity, of devotion and above all, of faith.3

1 Documente inedite, ed. Bucur, 271. 2 A reference to the Roman poet Ovid, exiled in 8 ad at Tomi (today Constanţa, on Romania’s Black Sea coast). 3 Biblioteca Naţională, the Saint-Georges Collection, P. CCVI, Dossier 1, Diverse (Miscellanea). 292 1856

The Romanian exiles, divided by competing interests and loyalties, were united once more by the death of a friend and fellow militant. Voi- nescu’s burial was also part of an already established trend in France for turning the funerals of prominent republicans into affirmations of solidarity meant both to reinforce republican unity and act as gestures of political defiance against the established order. On 13 March 1853, Ion Brătianu had paid his respects at the funeral of Madame Raspail, wife of the leading republican, a “veritable republican and socialist event”, attended by some three thousand mourners.4 In Britain, too, the funerals of revolutionary and republican exiles were occasions for large gatherings. 1,200 exiles, including Mazzini and Dumitru Brătianu, had attended the funeral of the Pole Albert Darász, a leader of the Central European Committee, at Highgate Cemetery on 22 Sep- tember 1852.5

4 Letter from Adèle to Alfred Dumesnil, 14 March 1853, in Documente inedite, ed. Bucur, 266–7. 5 Calman, Ledru-Rollin après 1848, 164. 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 consular 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 Bucharest.9 After the Crimean War, 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 moderate 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 conspiracy. 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 Moldavia an area of around 5,000 square kilometres in southern Bessarabia – the province Russia had annexed in 1812 – which, crucially, left her without access to the Danube and was going to sour relations with the new, united Romania 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 Ottoman Empire, 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 Transylvania), 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 publications, 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. the ad-hoc assemblies 295

Stanley’s collection of Romanian poetry on his desk during the negotiations over the Principalities in 1856.12 In early 1856, Armand Lévy was in Bucharest, liaising between the exiled Romanians in Paris and the partisans of the union back home. He introduced himself as the representative of “Grant Libraire in Bucharest” – one arm of the “Rosetti-Grant Establishment” – and, among other projects, was busy collecting subscriptions for the publication of Quinet’s complete works. The early volumes of Quinet’sOeu- vres complètes were subsidized by, among others, Alfred Dumesnil, Ştefan Golescu and Princess Marie Cantacuzino, the wife of the unionist Alexandru Cantacuzino, a fellow-exile of Rosetti and his circle.13 In the war of words opposing unionists and anti-unionists in both Princi- palities, there was a strong awareness of the power of cultural symbols on both sides. Writing to Alfred Dumesnil, Michelet’s son-in-law, Lévy attempted to mediate yet another act of symbolic political militancy: a projected sculpture of the fifteenth-century Moldavian Prince Stephen the Great, perceived as a defender of European Christendom against the Turks. It was to be commissioned from Auguste Préault, the non- conformist sculptor, a member of Michelet’s circle and the creator of Mickiewicz’s funeral monument in Montmorency. Ironically, the idea of the monument had been launched by the anti- unionist governor (caimacam) of Moldavia, Theodor Balş, who had hoped to strengthen his camp’s position with this offering to the Moldavians’ exclusive sense of regional pride at the expense of the wider agenda of a pan- Romanian nationalism. But the project was hijacked by the Wallachian unionists and their French backers: “Urge him [Préault] to do this as a helping hand to Wallachia,” Lévy asked Dumesnil. “This monument, planned with a separatist aim, will end up strengthening the unionist cause. It is a cause which is gaining momentum here.”14 The statue was to be based on the design of the Moldavian polymath Gheorghe

12 Rouman Anthology, or Selection of Rouman Poetry Ancient and Modern (Hert- ford, 1856). E. D. Tappe quoted in Drace-Francis, The Making of Modern Romanian Culture, 161, 232. The Hon. Henry Stanley was secretary to Sir Henry Bulwer on his mission in the Romanian Principalities from July 1856 to May 1858. Cf. Muriel E. Chamberlain, “Stanley, Henry Edward John, third Baron Stanley of Alderley and second Baron Eddisbury (1827–1903)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, Oxford University Press, Sept. 2004 (http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/ 36246, accessed 19 Sept 2010). 13 Breazu, 360. 14 Letter from Armand Lévy to Alfred Dumesnil from Bucharest, 13 January 1856, in Documente inedite, ed. Bucur, 271. 296 1856

Asachi, Quinet’s father-in-law, who was an anti-unionist, a position which he appears to have maintained to his death, and which raises questions about the actual ‘momentum’ of the cause, especially in Moldavia. The project was not realised at that stage due to governor Balş’s death in 1857. It was revived much later, on the basis of Asachi’s sketches of 1856, and the monument, by the French sculptor Emman- uel Frémiet, was finally inaugurated in the Moldavian capital, Iaşi, in 1883. It still stands in one of the city’s plazas. Links with Edgar Quinet, then living in exile in Brussels with his wife, Hermione, were particularly close at this time. Alexandru Golescu- Negru, who made secret visits to Veytaux in January 1856, managed to smuggle the documentation for the studies which the historian intended as a fulfilment of a pledge made to his Romanian students at the Collège de France in the 1840s. The liberal-OrléanistRevue des Deux Mondes in particular, under François Buloz, was sympathetic to the Romanian cause and, being overtly a literary, non-political publication, now appeared unafraid to publish works by a proscrit in a Second Empire France where governmental censors were still a feared force.15 The first instalment of Quinet’s contributions (“Les titres de nationalité” and “La renaissance de la Roumanie”) appeared in the Revue on 15 January 1856, and the second (“Les Roumains – leur histoire et leurs princes” and “De la réorganisation des provinces danubiennes”) on 1 March.16 These fragments formed the basis forLes Roumains,17 an essay which covers the history of the Romanians from Roman times to the Congress of Paris and summarizes the themes which the exiles had been at pains to present in various forms to their Western audiences: the Latin origin of their people, the provinces’ semi-autonomous status within the Ottoman world and the country’s historic entitlement to a unified nation-state. In his chapter on the Romanian language, Quinet voiced a complaint which echoed the Romanians’ own and which served to distance them even further from Russia: the “barbarian” Cyrillic script, which the Romanians had to use from the sixteenth until the mid-nineteenth century, had occulted the Latin “indigenous genius” of their culture, turning them into a

15 For censorship of the press under the July Monarchy and the Second Empire, see Christophe Charle, Le Siècle de la presse (1830–1939) (Paris, 2004). 16 Fotino 4: 143, note 2. 17 Les Roumains was included in volume 6 of Quinet’s Oeuvres complètes, ed. Alfred Dumesnil (Paris: Pagnerre, 1857) and is available in a recent edition published by Editions Kryos, Paris, 2008, used here. the ad-hoc assemblies 297 people stifled and ghettoized “by an alphabet.”18 It was time for the sis- terhood of Latin nations to reclaim their long-lost sister, and for modern linguistics to reap the scientific rewards of this rediscovery, which put long-held theories into a different perspective.19 In the political sphere, the consequences of small nations (Moldavia, Wallachia) being sacrificed by irresponsible empires (Russia, Austria, Turkey) were lik- ened by Quinet to the descent into barbarity of areas such as ancient Carthage, Gaul and Egypt, which the Romans had suppressed without consideration for their strategic importance. The Roman Empire, Qui- net warned, declined precisely because it had been incautious enough to destroy its own outposts against the barbarian world. Similarly, he argued, Turkey had to realise that it was better to have Romania on its side as a vital, prosperous, united nation rather than as a corpse, a political and economic liability.20 Les Roumains, which was published in French before the Treaty of Paris, was published in Romanian as Românii Principatelor Dunărene by Quinet’s father-in-law, Asachi, at his own printing house in Iaşi in the same year, 1856. It was an ambiguous gesture from the old poet, journalist and politician, whose hostility to the union of the Princi- palities is now being re-examined by Romanian historians as part of a wider re-assessment of Moldavian separatism. The idea of the union was forcefully presented by the Moldo-Wallachian exiles, radicals and future members of the ‘national party’ as the only path guaranteed to take the provinces to socio-economic progress and international recognition as a nation, yet Moldavian reservations are only now beginning to be recognised. Moldavians such as Asachi feared that losing their capital, Iaşi, and their independent institutions through centrali- sation would lead to marginalisation and economic decline, and they manifested their anti-Wallachian opposition throughout the 1850s and 1860s. Was the ‘union’ pushed above the Moldavians’ heads by media-savvy coteries of hot-head nationalists, radicals and ‘Jacobins’? Was Moldavian separatism the sign of conservative parochialism or of healthy, forward-looking regionalism? Could the project have evolved differently, say, in the form of a decentralised confederation? Is nineteenth-century Moldavian separatism a myth conveniently revived

18 Quinet, Les Roumains (Kryos, Paris, 2008), 77. 19 Ibid., Ch. “La Langue Roumaine”, passim. 20 Ibid., 169. 298 1856 today for obscure purposes? Only further research will shed light on this largely forgotten conflict.21 At the time, the Guarantor Powers were presented with reports which tipped the balance overwhelmingly in favour of the union. The issue of ‘what to do with the Romanian Principalities’ was indeed one of the bones of contention at the Congress of Paris, which opened on 25 February 1856. Almost one month before the opening of the proceedings, on 2 February, Dumitru Brătianu wrote to Lord Clarendon, presenting him with the emerging blueprint for the future Romania: a unified, independent kingdom, broadly modelled on liberal-constitutional Belgium. Short of this, union was the only acceptable, if minimal, solution: an autonomous, unified Romania which would remain under Ottoman suzerainty, but the suzerain power’s only prerogative would be to approve the appointment of the ruling prince and to collect its due tribute. A travel permit was arranged for Dumitru Brătianu to travel from London with Lord Clarendon’s retinue. Some of Brătianu’s radical colleagues in the European Central Committee were less than pleased with this new moderate, ‘diplomatic’ stance, although Mazzini realised that compromise might work better for Romania and gave him his blessing: “Romania is now in exceptional circumstances, and in such circumstances, she might gain something through diplomacy; it is your duty to try”, he urged Brătianu.22 The Romanian representative was busy in Paris. Clarendon introduced him to Walewski, the French Chairman of the Congress, and facilitated meetings with Lord Cowley, the second minister representing Britain, and with Baron de Bourqueney, the second French plenipotentiary minister, who privately was not in favour of the union, but publicly had to present Napoleon’s pro-union position. Both Walewski and Clarendon spoke in favour of the union in the session of 8 March, yet the Treaty, signed on 18/30 March 1856, contained no stipulation specifically mentioning the union. It did place, however, the Danubian Principalities under joint European protection and granted them the right to a national army and an autonomous foreign policy. It was decided to convene, in each principality, so-called Ad-hoc Divans (Assemblies), comprising

21 Recent contributions to the subject of Moldavian separatism in: Gheorghe Gabriel Cărăbuş, “Asachi – un separatist avant la lettre”, Codrul Cosminului 10 (2004): 185– 206 (online open access) and Adrian Cioflâncă, “Political debates before the union of the Romanian Principalities: between nationalism and parochialism”, Revue roumaine d’histoire 43, 1–4 (2004): 111–39. 22 Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 63. the ad-hoc assemblies 299 representatives of all classes, including the peasantry, to express the will of the nation over the union. At the same time, a European Com- mission was assigned the task of compiling and presenting a report on the future of the Principalities based on its own findings in the field, as well as on the referenda effected via the consultative assemblies. The Commission comprised Talleyrand-Périgord, representing France, Savfet Effendi, the benevolent, rather self-effaced Ottoman envoy, the Chevalier Raffaelo Benzi from Piedmont, who was pro- Romanian, the Austrian Liehmann von Palmrode, who maintained a fiercely anti-union position, the Prussian Baron von Richthofen, and the Russian envoy Konstantin Basily, both of whom were regarded by the Romanians as reasonable and accommodating. Britain was represented by an experienced diplomat, Sir Henry Bulwer Lytton, soon to become Stratford Canning’s successor in Constantinople. The issue of the choice of a prince for Romania created new divisions among the émigrés. A native prince did not appear as a plausible option given the country’s factionalism and clientelar politics. A French, English or Piedmontese prince would have been Golescu-Albu’s preferred choice, but, as this would have encountered the opposition of Austria, Russia and Prussia, he suggested a Belgian prince, who would have ensured a much-needed neutrality. Albu’s anti-Austrian stance became more virulent during the proceedings of the Congress. Aus- tria, “this slut”, was “our fiercest enemy” and “more perfidious than Russia”, he vituperated in his private correspondence upon learning of rumours that, amidst convoluted Great Power negotiations, Aus- tria was making advances to Prussia, suggesting a joint German colo- nisation of the Principalities and of the coasts of Asia Minor.23 The Austrian representative was also busy intriguing against the union of the Principalities in the Ottoman capital, where the anti-union camp, led by Stratford Canning, appeared to be gaining ground.24 Golescu- Albu commented thus on the new pro-Austrian orientation of the Porte: “Poor Turks! Yesterday, they thought, moved and acted as the Russians dictated; today, they think, move and act as the Austrians dictate . . . What was the use of this war, which cost the West three bil- lion Francs and the lives of 150,000 brave? Did they have to die for the beautiful eyes of Austria?”25 Henceforward, he argued, the unionist

23 Fotino 4: 172, 140–1. 24 Ibid., 1: 227. 25 Ibid., 4: 140. 300 1856 propaganda had to be targeted towards enlightening the Ottomans as to their true interests in the Balkans. Golescu-Albu urged his cousin Negru to sit down and write “one of those short, meaningful, straightforward memoirs, which aim right at the target!” Bowing to what he thought were his cousin’s superior intellectual abilities, he imagined what he would do if similarly gifted: “The things I would do! I would launch ships, I would raise mountains, I would topple Austria, I would save my homeland!”26

26 Ibid., 140–2. JULY 1856

In mid-July, Rosetti was in the spa village Mont-Dore, not far from Clermont (Puy-de-Dôme), a place famous for its Roman baths and health springs. He was staying in a hotel with his six-year-old son, Mircea, who needed medical care, which involved baths and “aspirations” (vapour treatment) for his asthma.27 In spite of his concern for the boy and the constant care he had to provide and which drained him, Rosetti continued to oversee from afar the activities of the exiles’ ‘propaganda machine’. In May 1856, Rosetti had created a ‘chancellery’ in charge of correspondence with the Principalities – from the territory of which the exiles were still banned – and with fund-raising and propaganda abroad. The outcomes of this campaign included, apart from Regnault’s and Ubicini’s above-mentioned publications, Edmond Texier’s Appel au Congrès en faveur des Roumains, as well as Ion Brătianu’s Mémoire sur l’empire d’Autriche dans la Question d’Orient, all published in 1856, around the time of the Congress. These, with other publications and exchanges of letters, were to be circulated to French journalists and publishers, as well as sent to Bucha- rest and Iaşi, with money collected by the “office for correspondence and propaganda.”28 On 29 June 1856, Rosetti wrote to Ion Filipescu, who had been allowed to return to Bucharest, asking him to prompt the Romanian pro-union militants to express the ‘national will’ on the international arena by writing to Walewski, Talleyrand, Napoleon, Clarendon, Palm- erston, and Queen Victoria: [. . .] it is known and accepted by everybody that a nation who dares not manifest itself is a nation which is not yet ripe for liberty. The Western powers cannot do anything for us unless forced by us; but even if they could, they would not, unless we give them palpable evidence that we want and we deserve to be a nation. They need to have a nation on the Danube, not a powerless Kingdom. [. . .] Walewski, the English papers, the Débats, Le Pays, the Journal de l’Empire, La Patrie, Le Constitutionnel,

27 Mircea Rosetti died in 1882, at the age of only 32. He was outlived by both his parents. 28 C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti 1: 164. 302 july 1856

Le Siècle, everybody, every journal is urging you incessantly to do so: Tout dépend de vous-même [sic].29 Louis Ulbach, of the left-wing Revue de Paris, did invite contributions from sympathetic analysts and members of the Franco-Romanian circles. Paul Bataillard sent his study “La Moldo-Valachie dans la manifestation de ses efforts et de ses voeux.”30 Like Michelet’s Legends a few years earlier, and like Quinet’s more recent Les Roumains, this text, based on oral contributions from Romanian sources, was clearly a vehicle for the unionist political objectives of the Rosetti-Brătianu left-wing group. Armed with the latest issues of the Moldavian unionist newspapers Zimbrul31 and Steaua Dunării, supplied by the group, Bataillard wrote an impassioned protest against the control, censorship and military occupation which Turkey, Russia and Austria imposed on the two provinces, in connivance with the two ruling princes and the conservative elites. Rosetti and his peers’ epic journey to the Balkans in the winter of 1853 earned a reference, as did the opportunity missed by Turkey to arm the Romanians during the Crimean War. Austrian abuses, such as the recent interception by border police of couriers bearing memoranda from the Romanians to Walewski in preparation for debates in Congress were specifically singled out.32 Bataillard’s text was also an appeal for the return of the exiled forty-eighters at a time when the exiles themselves felt under pressure to obtain visas and return home in time for the vital debates and decision-making facing the nation. “On the absence or the return of these men depends a people’s descent into discouragement or rebirth into hope”, Bataillard wrote in support of the exiles, who used his text to present themselves

29 Ibid., 219. 30 Published in the review’s issue of 1 July 1856, 32: 416–56. Al. G. Golescu-Albu provided much of Bataillard’s documentation, as shown in Fotino 1: 226. Cf. also Fotino 4: 145, note 1. Paul Bataillard’s contribution to the pro-union movement has been credited in Romanian historiography: e.g. Nicolae Iorga, “Un colaborator francez al Unirii Principatelor: Paul Bataillard”, Analele Academiei Române, Memori- ile Secţiunii Istorice, 3rd series, mem. 7 (3 February 1923): 1–14, and Olimpiu Boitoş, Paul Bataillard et la révolution roumaine de 1848. Contribution à l’histoire des relations franco-roumaines (Extrait des “Mélanges de l’École Roumaine en France.”, Paris, 1930). 31 Zimbru = bison or aurochs, the ancient heraldic emblem of Moldavia. Both publications, a focal point for pro-union groups, were suppressed by the Moldavian law of the press of September 1856. Steaua Dunării continued as l’Etoile du Danube in Paris from 22 November/4 December 1856. See Documente privind unirea Principatelor, ed. Bodea, 3: xviii–xix. 32 Bataillard, “La Moldo-Valachie”, 433. july 1856 303 as the Romanians’ sole legitimate representatives, recognized internationally in 1848.33 Rosetti himself signed in the Revue de Paris from July 1856 to January 1857 as “correspondant pour la Roumanie.” This time, the main target of his by now notoriously ruthless pen was no longer Russia, but Austria and Prince Ştirbey’s “Austro-Wallachian” government. In the aftermath of the Congress, France was the one great power from whom the Romanians expected support for the re- entry of their nation into European history: France must immediately restore the Romanians into all their rights to autonomy, she must open the doors of their homes to the exiled patriots, she must force the caimacams to change their ministers and their Austro-Russian administrators, and grant freedom of the press and of association to a country which needs such indispensable freedoms at a time when it is called upon to debate maturely and freely on the institutions it needs to create. Above all, France must watch over elections to assemblies of the nation’s representatives and ensure that they comply with all the pre-conditions required by the Treaty of Paris.34 Robert Colquhoun’s now open and unequivocal support for the anti- union camp must have felt like a personal betrayal to Rosetti. Britain, he wrote, “has joined the enemies of the Romanians.” Only Thouvenel in Constantinople had remained ‘faithful’ and kept up the pressures for the return of the exiles and the departure of the Austrians.35 In France, the Romanian émigrés were now confident of enjoying political support in the highest political circles. The cabinet, Napoleon III himself, newspapers close to the government, as well as Louis Béclard, the French consul in Bucharest, previously much-maligned by Golescu-Albu, all came out openly in favour of the union, as the exiles were reporting to each other. Lucien Bonaparte, Prince of Canino, and his son, Pierre Bonaparte, were among the names circulated as possible candidates to the throne of the future unified state.36 There remained however, one major obstacle: predictably, the British cabinet was against a French candidate, as well as, more broadly, against the union itself.37 In Con- stantinople, Stratford Canning was indeed busy outlining the British

33 Ibid., 418. 34 Marin Bucur, “C. A. Rosetti – ‘Le correspondant pour la Roumanie’ de la ‘Revue de Paris’ (1856)”, Revue roumaine d’histoire 22, 1 (1983): 68, citing from the Revue de Paris, 1 September 1856: 457–8. 35 Ibid., 69. 36 Fotino 4: 155. 37 Ibid., 161, and 155. 304 july 1856 anti-union view to a harassed Ottoman government, undercutting the parallel pro-union efforts of the French ambassador, Thouvenel. At least once, in private, Stratford admitted that the union would be to the benefit of the two Principalities, yet publicly, in the heated atmosphere in Constantinople, he remained a vigorous anti-unionist.38

38 Cf. Stratford, letter to Colquhoun, 16 February 1856, quoted in T. W. Riker, “The Concert of Europe and Moldavia in 1857”,English Historical Review 42 (166) (1927): 232. 6 OCTOBER: THE BRIGHTON MEETING

I feel sure that these Princ.[ipalities] will bring us to grief. Lord Cowley to Clarendon, 8 June 185539 Both before and during the Congress, questions and motions were put forth in the House of Commons and in the Lords requesting the Aus- trian evacuation of the Principalities and permission for the refugees to return. Austen Henry Layard, who had met Dumitru Brătianu in 1853, Arthur Otway, the MP for Stafford at the time, and John Roebuck, the radical independent MP for Sheffield, were the ones who usually initiated debates on these and related issues. The anti-Russian Whig, Lord Clanricarde, and Lord Lyndhurst, the law reformer, seconded them in the upper house. However, a shift in Russia’s attitude to the union placed the propagandists in a difficult position. In what appeared to be a well-calculated strategic move, Russia decided to join France in supporting the Romanian liberals’ unionist agenda, and British politicians consequently withdrew their support, unwilling to associate Britain to a policy co-sponsored by the tsar and by a nation recently defeated in a major European conflict, in which so many British lives had been lost. Layard, who had been hugely influential in liaising with the Turks and in introducing Brătianu into British liberal circles, gradually distanced himself, presumably because his own business interests in the Near East made it difficult for him to sustain a cause which would have diminished the Ottoman Empire. When he lost his Aylesbury seat in the 1857 general elections, his support for Brătianu effectively ended. After the abdication of the old-regime ruling prince of Wallachia, Barbu Ştirbey, on 7 July 1856, the public pronouncements in favour of the union became increasingly outspoken. Alexandru Dimitrie Ghica, a former ruling prince, was appointed caimacam (governor). Nicolae Golescu believed that he was favourable to the return of the exiles as well as to the unionist cause. His brother, Ştefan, believed exactly the opposite, especially given the caimacam’s close relations to

39 Lord Cowley to Clarendon, quoted in John M. Knapp, Behind the Diplomatic Curtain: Adolphe de Bourqueney and French foreign policy, 1816–1869 (University of Akron Press, 2001), 244. 306 1856 the anti-unionist British Consul, Robert Colquhoun, who, as shown, was now a nemesis of his former protégés.40 Rosetti and the radicals had distanced themselves from the consul, and Effingham Grant had already left his post as consular secretary in 1855 to devote himself entirely to his real estate business. In the face of British opposition to the union, Dumitru Brătianu reverted to his former subversive tactics, and once again cultivated radical networks contacted via the European Democratic Central Committee. For British reformers and radicals, forming links with foreign republicans and freedom-fighters in exile was a way of putting into practice one of their cherished political convictions, namely that “efforts to extend freedom and rights at home and on the continent were [. . .] interdependent” and that undermining reaction and despotism in the world was a way of ensuring a better international climate for reforms at home.41 This alliance of forces led directly to an episode which represented the peak of the exiles’ propaganda campaign in Britain: the Brighton meeting of 6 October 1856, a symbolic gathering of British sympathisers aiming to “propagate a feeling in favour of the union of the two principalities.”42 Brighton was chosen partly because Arnold Ruge, a collaborator of Marx and German representative in Mazzini’s European Committee, who had been a British national since 1855, had settled there with his wife, and partly because of its strong radical tradition as well as its proximity to London.43 The local liberal- radical alliance, comprising the lawyer Montagu David Scott, the parliamentary Liberal candidate for East Sussex, John George Dodson, as well as another prominent local figure, William Coningham, future MP for Brighton, offered their support in organising the meeting. For Coningham, siding with the pro-union movement must have held added piquancy as a means of settling a recent score with the pro- Turkish, anti-unionist David Urquhart. The men had been co-founders of the “Association for the protection of Turkey and other countries from partition” in 1854, but had fallen out over matters relating to the association’s funding. To the great delight of the press, there had been an argument, the threat of a duel and a day in court, but the

40 Fotino 1: 231, 233, and Fotino 4: 164. 41 Turner, Independent Radicalism, 95. 42 “The Danubian Principalities”,Daily News, 18 October 1856. 43 Hope, “Dumitru Brătianu”, 35. 6 october: the brighton meeting 307 affair petered out when Coningham withdrew from the association.44 Arnold Ruge enthusiastically advertised the meeting in the local press throughout the summer of 1856. TheBrighton Herald of 27 September carried a highly sympathetic appeal, meant to mobilise the English public, a public which, by then, had become quite expert in using the ever-expanding opportunities for pressurizing its political class: Therefore, to keep the English Government in the right line, the English people must advocate now the union of Moldavia and Wallachia, and not go to sleep upon the laurels of the last war, whilst the fruit of it is lost by shuffling, intrigues and deceit. The Union of the Roumanish [sic] nation is the most important of all the conditions of peace; it is at the same time the best guarantee of its lasting. Never has Russia attacked the Turks by sea, always by the way of the Principalities. Unite them, and you stop up that road against the northern disturber of the peace of Europe.45 In the final days prior to the meeting, Brătianu, Ruge and his wife, Agnes, left no detail to chance: the Romanian tri-coloured flag – sent by Brătianu – and the Union Jack were both hoisted on the neo-classical façade of the imposing Brighton Town Hall. Some papers reported significant numbers in the audience, given the general lack of public concern for the affairs of little-known corners of Europe, but there are no figures to indicate how full the Town Hall’s capacious meeting room actually was. Apart from the above-mentioned speakers, the radical MP for Birmingham, William Scholefield, and the journalist Horace St. John, political editorialist for the Daily Telegraph, were also present. In the audience was Alexandru Dimitrie Ghica, Wallachia’s new governor. Other invited personalities, including Lord Brougham, William Gladstone and John Roebuck, sent apologies and, in the latter’s case, a very sympathetic letter to Arnold Ruge, published in The Brighton Gazette of 9 October. Its tone was calculated to appeal to the British patriotism of the Palmerston era: It is my earnest wish that the influence of England may be used in support of freedom and good government in the Principalities, and I am delighted to find that the public are beginning to take an interest in the destinies of these hitherto unfortunate countries. They might be made a means of checking the despotism which is supported by Russia,

44 Cf. for instance “The duel that was not fought” in theBristol Mercury of 27 January 1855. 45 Hope, “Dumitru Brătianu”, 35. 308 1856

Austria and Turkey. An independent and free people placed between their Empires, would, if supported by England, greatly aid the advance of civilization in the East, and go far to check the ambition of Russia and Austria. The only hope of justice to the Principalities is in England, every other nation that has any influence upon their well-being is an enemy of freedom and liberal institutions.46 In the face of British reluctance to endorse the pro-unification volte- face of Russia, Ruge had argued in an earlier article of 4 October that the new Russian position was nothing more than a strategic ruse destined to create in Britain precisely that political reserve and caution. His argument that the Austrians and the Russians were the real common enemies of the Ottomans and the Romanians and that a strong, unified Romanian state under a hereditary prince was in Turkey’s best interests, was to be reiterated by Brătianu himself over the coming months.47 Towards the end of the Brighton meeting, the lawyer Montagu Scott moved a resolution asking the British government to commit itself to the union of the five million Romanians, a union already agreed on in principle by Lord Clarendon at the Congress of Paris. He was cheered when he declared that Britain had not fought in the Crimean War to see one tyranny replaced by another in the Principalities. John George Dodson, the future Liberal MP for East Sussex and later Lord Monk- Bretton, who had visited the Principalities on his way to the Crimea, and had lectured widely on these “Neo-Latin” countries – the term he used to distinguish these Romance-language areas from the Slavic sea surrounding them – seconded the motion. He uttered a lengthy and highly acclaimed speech in which, prophetically, he championed not simply the project of union between Wallachia and Moldavia – in the downscaled variant demanded lately by Brătianu and Rosetti – but also the inclusion of the nearly one million Romanians in Bessara- bia, as well as those of Transylvania and Bukovina. This represented a much wider agenda, ultimately aiming at the creation of a Greater Romania, only to emerge after World War I.48 According to the Brighton Gazette, the Brighton meeting was brought to a close by an unscheduled speaker, a Mr. Matthews, mechanic and

46 Ibid., 38. 47 Ibid., 36–7. 48 Ibid., 39–40. Dodson’s speech was published in the Brighton Gazette of 9 October 1856. 6 october: the brighton meeting 309

Chartist, who declared himself pleased that “Brighton had the honour of being the first town to express itself on this subject, which robbed the government of the excuse that there was no popular movement to support the Romanians.”49 The proceedings ended joyfully with three cheers for the union of Wallachia and Moldavia. Within a week, every national newspaper in Britain had carried copious reports of the meeting, largely based on the Brighton Gazette. Informed by Brătianu, Rosetti, still in Paris, wrote glowingly on 10 October to Ion Filipescu in Bucharest, in his customary mix of Romanian and French: [. . .] England has turned again in our favour; and we hope that, aided by public opinion, we will bring back the Cabinet into supporting the Union and recalling Mr. Colquhoun, who is constantly sending reports that are not only against the Union, but also against us. Last Monday, we had in Brighton a large meeting at the hôtel de ville. All day long, the Romanian flag flew on thehôtel de ville and in the evening the city was festooned with tri-coloured lights. There were many good speeches, and four enthusiastic hurrahs for the Union, and the assembly voted unanimously for a petition to be sent to the Queen demanding the Union. Day by day, England warms to the idea of Union, and we are certain of being able to organise three more, larger, meetings in Liverpool, Manchester and London. Now, brother, you should kindly sit and write a memoir addressed to each of the three allied powers: F[rance], Eng[land] and Sard[inia], protesting against all the injustices done to us over the last six months and to demand the Union, [. . .].50 Yet, the press in Britain was not as overwhelmingly positive on the subject of the union as the Romanians wished to believe. Even newspapers of a liberal orientation such as the Liverpool Mercury carried negative assessments of the prospects for unification in Romania, a further proof that Russia’s support for the unification had harmed the unionist cause. “Without denying that there is a certain plausibility in the notion of uniting provinces which, in race, religion, language, and social habits, have so much in common as Moldavia and Wallachia”, ran the paper’s editorial of 1 October 1856, “we will say at once that we view with extreme distrust any scheme on such a subject which labours under the double disadvantage of being urged by Russia and opposed by the Porte.” Having brushed aside the Romanians’ claims as a cultural nation, the anonymous analyst expressed fears that a putative

49 Ibid., 40. 50 C. A. Rosetti, Corespondenţă, ed. Bucur, 222. Emphases in the original. 310 1856 independent kingdom of Romania would become a “most convenient focus for Russian intrigue and a comparatively safe and easy prize for Russian cupidity”, forgetting that, as Ottoman-controlled separate provinces, the Principalities had been precisely that. If they read this article, Rosetti and his friends must have been puzzled and chagrined to learn that what the author termed the “unionist party” in the Princi- palities without further distinctions, was “indebted to Russian instiga- tion for much of its zeal in the cause of a pseudo-nationality.”51 The projected further meetings never took place. The promoters of Romanian unification collided head-on with the Urquhartites and the related public foreign affairs committees, which disapproved of any threats to Ottoman territorial integrity and of any appearance of collusion with Russia. The Newcastle Committee for Investigating the Action of Diplomacy, chaired by the Urquhartite George Crawshay, an ironmaster from Newcastle and a personal friend of David Urquhart, wrote an open letter in which he accused “the genteel democrats of Brighton” of encouraging the separatist tendencies of the Ottoman dominions, thereby “doing their best to hand the trade of the Dan- ube over to Russia.” The letter was published on 18 October 1856 in Urquhart’s Free Press, the weekly mouthpiece of the foreign affairs committees, themselves created in 1854–55 by David Urquhart, with funding from Crawshay and from James Grant, the editor of The Lon- don Morning Advertiser.52 The attack triggered a three-month-long public exchange between Horace St. John, William Scholefield, Arnold Ruge, and Dumitru Brătianu on the one hand, and the Urquhartites on the other, an exchange in which British interests on the Danube and in the Near East were vehemently debated.53 Brătianu, Rosetti and the other Romanian radicals, alongside the other expatriate nationalists, must have been bemused by some of Urquhart’s wilder claims which turned them from freedom-fighters into allies of Russia’s anti-Turkish

51 “The New Eastern Difficulties”,Liverpool Mercury, 1 October 1856. For similar views, cf. “The Danubian Principalities”,Daily News, 18 October 1856. The anti-union shift marked a change of tone in otherwise sympathetic periodicals. 52 Hope, “Dumitru Brătianu”, 41–2. 53 For a fairly recent assessment of Urquhart’s political career and controversial opinions, see Miles Taylor, “The old radicalism and the new: David Urquhart and the politics of opposition, 1832–1867”, in Currents of Radicalism: popular radicalism, organised labour and party politics in Britain, 1850–1914, ed. Eugenio F. Biagini and Alastair J. Reid (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 23–43. 6 october: the brighton meeting 311 policies.54 Urquhart, who may have regretted his youthful military contribution to the achievement of Greek independence, was now wary of policies which might have further weakened Ottoman power. His reputation among the Romanians was mixed. Many were baffled by his views, but for pro-Ottoman moderates such as Ion Ghica, he was an “apostle of the union of the Principalities”. In the Free Press of 1 December 1855 he had a published a blueprint constitution for the Principalities, in which he advocated a union of the two provinces in the person of jointly elected prince and advanced some interesting ideas about a streamlined administration. However, more controversially, he also spoke of the appointment of an Ottoman general as head of the Romanian army and of a total integration of the country within Ottoman imperial structures.55 In an open letter published in the Daily News of 18 October and the Times of the 25th, Dumitru Brătianu invoked the ancient treaties concluded by the Romanians and the Turks which guaranteed the rights and immunities of the Principalities as semi-autonomous provinces. He attempted to defuse the conflict with the pro-Turkish faction, by explaining that the union was not a plan directed against the suzerain Ottoman Porte: We desire the union because we are one people, homogeneous, identical as no other people in the world are or can be; because we have the same origin, root, language, and religion, the same traditions and history; [. . .] We especially desire the union because it already exists in our hearts, because we have the conscience of our common destinies and of our identical mission.56 Brătianu concluded, rather disingenuously, by assuring his British readers that a united Romania would wish to “live in good friendship with the Turks.”57 On 5 December 1856, Dumitru Brătianu wrote directly to Lord Palmerston, further arguing against British fears that a united Romania might become a Russian puppet state. The British

54 Sheffield Free Press, 246 (15 September 1855): 5, quoted in Gregory Claeys, “Mazzini, Kossuth, and British Radicalism, 1848–1854”, Journal of British Studies 28 (July 1989): 254. Cf. also Geoffrey Nash,From Empire to Orient: travellers to the Mid- dle East, 1830–1926 (London, 2005), Ch. 2: “David Urquhart and the Patronage of the East”, 62. 55 Bodea, “David Urquhart”, 51–5. The Constitution was reprinted inThe question is Mr. Urquhart a tory or a radical? answered by his constitution for the Danubian Principalities (Sheffield: I. Ironside, 1856): 4–10. 56 Hope, “Dumitru Brătianu”, 44. 57 Ibid. 312 1856 government continued to hesitate. The French pro-union stance, publicised in the Moniteur of 5 February 1857, only served to further alien- ate the British from the cause of a unified Romania. France was not supposed to make unilateral public judgements on the matter.58 The campaign to win ‘the hearts’ of the British commercial classes in the North was also losing ground. In spite of press propaganda, the hostile campaign launched by Crawshay’s Newcastle Committee on foreign affairs dashed any hope of further meetings in the North. Although “the radical strongholds of the industrial north” had traditionally supported the Hungarian, Polish and Italian national causes, they now appeared unwilling to do the same for the Romanians, whose cause was likely to undermine British trade interests on the Danube and in the Near East, fears nurtured copiously by the Free Press.59

58 Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu 1: 68. 59 Hope, “Dumitru Brătianu”, 45. 1857

[. . .] I can see the great difficulties that we have to overcome, but I keep hoping, I believe in our success. Rosetti, letter to Marie, 15 August 185760 Pressure for the exiles’ return prior to the elections for the ad-hoc assemblies continued to mount in the winter of 1856–57. The return from Paris, London and Asia Minor of the exiled revolutionaries had constantly been on the agenda of their sympathisers and campaigners in the West in the 1850s. The Moldavian liberal-oriented Prince Grig- ore Ghica had authorised the return of the Moldavian exiles as early as 1855. The less radical of the Wallachians had been allowed back by Prince Ştirbey around the same time, but even under the more relaxed governorship of the caimacam Alexandru Dimitrie Ghica, entry was still refused to the ‘reds’, who had become an electoral hazard.61 As shown, Rosetti, the Golescus, the Brătianus had largely contributed to their own elevation to mythical status by endorsing and distribut- ing the texts of Michelet, Bataillard and other supporters, and were now being talked about at home as the legendary leaders of 1848, the only men of real political stature likely to become the rallying point of the new national consciousness. Arthur Otway had raised the issue of their return in the Commons as early as 18 July 1856. The intercession of Lord Palmerston and Stratford Canning in Constantinople did not produce any tangible results.62 Dumitru Brătianu pressed the point on Clarendon and Walewski in memoranda sent on 6 February 1857. A few days later, on Clarendon’s demand, Brătianu supplied a list with the names of the exiles and other relevant information. In March the issue was raised again in the Commons by the same Otway, eliciting firm promises from Palmerston. Whether as a result of British pressures or not, the much-awaited Ottoman visas were finally stamped on the exiles’ passports in April 1857. In May 1857 Alexandru Golescu- Albu was finally at home in Bucharest, urging his friends still abroad to encourage the formation of philo-Romanian committees, modelled

60 C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti 1: 204. 61 Cojocariu, Partida naţională, 237–8. 62 Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu 1: 69. 314 1857 on the philo-Hellenic committees, and lobby for the exiles’ return in time for the coming elections.63 While the Wallachians still fought for return visas in early 1857, the Moldavian pro-union activists were campaigning at home in their newly formed unionist committee, against the not inconsiderable opposition of anti-union government officials and conservative land-owners. Similarly to Marie Rosetti’s case, being a foreign national was found to be an advantage, and the British and French consuls in the Moldavian ports Galaţi and Brăila lent their support: Andrei V. Ionescu, an important merchant and leading member of the unionist committee, was granted a ‘British subject patent’, which enabled him to carry and transmit correspondence and pro-union manifestoes which would have been intercepted otherwise.64 On 15 April 1857 Marie and Rosetti had separated at St. Quentin, in north-east France, on their separate ways towards the same ultimate destination: Bucharest, Wallachia. She and the children travelled via Budapest, and further on, probably via Belgrade. Clues from the Rosettis’ correspondence suggest that Charles Arène was still in the picture, at his old post at the French consulate in Belgrade. Whether, after their acquaintance in 1854, they had had further contacts remains unknown, but in 1857 he still facilitated the passage of the exiles’ letters through Belgrade. Rosetti himself returned for a while to Paris, awaiting the official announcement of the exiles’ amnesty or at least the authorization for the return and the issuing of appropriate travel documents. In his last days in Paris, he said his good-byes to Michelet, Bataillard, Ubicini, as well as to the shoemaker and fellow-conspirator Hallegrain.65 Marie arrived in Bucharest in early May and, setting up home temporarily with her brother Effingham, started a vociferous campaign to obtain re-entry visas for the returning exiles. Having obtained Aus- trian transit visas, Rosetti and Dumitru Brătianu left Paris shortly afterwards, leaving the younger Brătianu, Ion, behind, presumably as strategic back-up. A few words should be said on the epilogue of the court saga involving the younger Brătianu, who had been sentenced to three years’ imprisonment on 16 January 1854 for his role in the ‘Hippodrome’ plot against Napoleon III. On 10 June 1856, the

63 Fotino 4: 201. 64 Cojocariu, Partida Naţională, 254. 65 Letter of 20 April 1857, in C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti 1: 169–70. 1857 315

Garde des Sceaux had recommended the suspension of the remainder of his sentence. “It was his nationality and opinions widespread in his country rather than an instinct for disorder which prompted him to associate himself with the men of the demagogical party, who exploited for their own interests the inexperience and the exalted sentiments of Bratiano”, the rationale for the decision read. His “conven- able” attitude and the “sincere regrets which he keeps professing” now recommended Ion Brătianu for pardon in the eyes of French law.66 The recommendation was followed up by the Parquet de la Cour Impériale de Paris, whose representative added his own geographically confused contextualisation of the ‘Bratiano case’: “The Moldo-Wallachians, because they dream of a Roumelia [sic!] or a Romania free from the Turks and the Russians, feel duty-bound in France to be of the party so foolishly called the party of progress and liberty, hence their more or less direct association with the pèle-mèle of demagogic agitators [. . .].”67 Pardon was finally granted on 1 July 1856. The future Liberal Prime Minister of Romania was now free to put his turbulent youth behind and start his political career in his troubled country, but his past as a – largely innocuous – conspirator and anarchist would continue to haunt him.68 The governor of Wallachia, Alexandru Dimitrie Ghica, and the Aus- trian authorities were reluctant to grant the necessary re-entry visas. Marie, as a British national, was instructed to drop names (e.g. Clar- endon) and issue threats: if denied entry, the exiles, Rosetti indicated, were going to return to London and Paris and “will have at least the satisfaction of exposing to the eyes of Europe the chicaneries that an empire such as Turkey employs in dealing with poor exiles, and of showing how the Treaty of Paris is applied in Romania. Tell them that the rumour here is that this is the personal victory of the Austrian consul. Tell them, in addition, that the nation will never believe that it has gained freedom of speech as long as those devoted to the country are still in exile.”69 Clarendon did intervene and was successful in putting pressure on the Austrian authorities, who finally issued the visas.

66 Arhivele Naţionale, Bucharest, Fonds Brătianu, Dossier 596, Memorandum No. 3676 s. 56 of the Ministère de la Justice, Direction Criminelle, 2e Bureau. 67 Arhivele Naţionale, Bucharest, Fonds Brătianu, Dossier 596, the Parquet de la Cour Impériale de Paris, Memorandum to the Garde des Sceaux, 30 June 1856. 68 Ibid., Ministère de la Justice, Direction des Affaires Criminelles et des Grâces, 2e Bureau, Secrétariat Général, Registre S. 56, Nr. 3676, 20 June 1856. 69 C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti 1: 171. 316 1857

In the end, it was the Wallachian governor who mounted the strongest resistance to the exiles’ return.70 “You must not be afraid of using strong words”, Rosetti advised his wife. “You must demand above all that they at least state on whose authority it was that we were sent into exile, and who now opposes our return; they must not be allowed to evade a direct question. Who was responsible for sending us into exile? [. . .] there was no ferman to this effect, and who is preventing us from returning, when Turkey herself has now issued us with passports for the Principalities?!”71 Finally, by June the amnesty of the exiled revolutionaries became official. “I am mad with happiness at the thought of seeing you all back in our beloved homeland”, Zinca Golescu wrote to her sons.72 However, on arrival at Turnu-Severin, on the Danube, with Turk- ish and Austrian visas stamped in their passports, Brătianu, Rosetti, Nicolae and Ştefan Golescu learned that the customs had not received instructions to allow them in. They lingered in the port of Ruschuk from early May to 7 July 1857, while Marie, their friends and allies campaigned for their safe return. Zinca sent packets of tobacco, home- made jams, tea, a game of chess and pillows.73 Given his radical credentials, Dumitru Brătianu’s return was fiercely opposed by the British Consul, Colquhoun, as well as by the Austrians and Turks.74 By now, in Romania itself, the four had acquired martyr status and their return was being demanded en masse. The group’s almost uncanny ability to mobilize the masses was going to remain a constant in their subsequent political careers. The town of Piteşti, home territory to Dumitru Brătianu, even made a gift of a house to its famous son to enable him to be entered on the electoral registers as a propertied candidate for the Ad-hoc Divans. It was just another in a long series of very frustrating, unproductive episodes in the exiles’ lives. The caimacam was still unwilling to allow them in, in spite of a petition signed by thousands and presented to him on 8 June 1857 by a delegation led by his own nephew, which he declined to receive. The petition read:

70 Letter of 9 May 1857, in ibid., 172–3. 71 Ibid., 174. Emphases in the original. 72 Fotino 4: 204. 73 Ibid., 1: 236. 74 Ibid., 4: 198. 1857 317

They [the Romanians] come to ask from Your Highness to allow the return of the Exiles, as a precondition for putting the past behind them, as a sign that they all think of the common good and are ready to leave aside all party spirit. They [the exiles] have endured eight years of exile; their families are suffering and we are the interpreters before Your High- ness of their pain and wishes. In support of this demand we declare that: whatever else could be said of their acts, nobody will deny that they have not been entirely inspired by their love of the country; the Treaty of Paris has fulfilled many of the aims for which they suffered; these are all encompassed by the art. V of the Treaty which granted freedom to all, especially as solemn promises were made before the Congress that the country would be consulted freely, in a spirit of unbiased justice. In order to fulfil her new mission, our Homeland needs the enlightened patriotism of all her sons. One single exception would be regarded as a bad omen. Let therefore our exiled brethren return.75 The European Commission in Bucharest in its turn received a petition on 29 June, which invoked similar legal arguments. The temporary character of the initial Ottoman ferman of 1848 which had sent the forty-eighters into exile and the fact that the exiles had never been tried and convicted meant that they had retained their full rights as Romanian citizens and were therefore entitled to take part in the country’s general elections.76 As the campaign continued, Rosetti wrote to Marie on 17 June, summarizing their nine years in exile. He reminisced fondly of the morning when his daughter was born and the revolution started: Embrace tenderly that beloved child who is now nine years old; tell her that I count her years by the years of my exile; that her birth marked the birth of an entire people; that the skies clouded over afterwards, but that the dawn must keep its promise and fulfil the hope it heralded. Consequently, she is duty bound more than anyone else to become a woman.77 Finally, in early July 1857, the “martyrs for the Romanian nationality” were allowed to re-enter their native land.78 By 10 July, the remaining exiles had returned from Paris, Constantinople and other locations.

75 From the memorial volume Lui C. A. Rosetti (1816–1916) la o sută de ani de la naşterea sa, Volum comemorativ închinat de “Democraţia”, Revista cercului de studii PNL (3rd edn., Bucharest, June 1916), 278–80. 76 Ibid., 280. 77 C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti 1: 186. 78 Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu 1: 69–70. 318 1857

Downplaying the men’s symbolic capital, in its issue of 16 July, the Moldavian newspaper l’Etoile du Danube caricatured Ottoman and Great Power fears over their return: “Here it is, then, this elite legion of the Romanians of Wallachia, comprising only some twelve persons, yet able to inspire such terror in Turkey!”79 Western and Ottoman caution vis-a-vis this small of group of exiles was, however, commensurate to the disproportionate influence that this “general staff of the revolution”80 exercised on public opinion at home. Marie Rosetti described the men’s triumphal arrival in the Danubian port Giurgiu in a letter to a friend in Paris. As they touched the soil of their homeland for the first time in nearly ten years, they were welcomed by delegations of merchants, students, priests, peasants, and schoolchildren, who covered their carriages in flowers. Zinca Golescu herself, “that noble and sublime mother”, welcomed her sons at the Field of Liberty (Câmpia Libertăţii) in Bucharest, one of the most symbolic sites of the revolution of 1848, where a tri-coloured banner had been hoisted to mark the occasion.81 Marie was pregnant again and, as the Rosettis had no home of their own yet, she was staying with their friends, the Cantacuzinos, at their estate at Rîfov, not far from the capital city. Writing to her from Bucharest a few days after his return, Rosetti told her: What pleased me most was that I was so warmly greeted in the streets by the men of the people. I was also told that the merchants are considering electing me as their staroste [elder]. Others insist on giving me a house in Bucharest because they say that I stand a good chance of being elected [to the Ad-hoc Assemblies] – which would mean a lot, although I am tempted to refuse for several reasons.82 Rosetti was gradually re-gaining possession of his life. He and his brother-in-law, Effingham Grant, agreed – regretfully – to dissolve their business partnership on 27 July: Rosetti remained sole owner of the former “Rosetti-Grant Establishment” pending payment of outstanding debts to Grant. “So here I am, the owner of a bookshop, a printer, journalist and deputy in spe . . .”, he wrote to his wife.83 He

79 From the memorial volume Lui C. A. Rosetti, 282. 80 The phrase was used in private correspondence by the moderate liberal Ion Bălăceanu. Quoted in Documente privind Unirea Principatelor, ed. Bodea, 3: xx. 81 Letter dated 5 August 1857, in Lui C. A. Rosetti, 281. 82 Letter of 10 July 1857, in C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti 1: 198. 83 Ibid., 201. 1857 319 did not eventually reject the merchants’ offer and was indeed elected elder of the merchants’ guild as well as deputy for Bucharest in the Ad-hoc Divan on behalf of the National Party on 5 August 1857. His newspaper Românul, which he resumed on 21 August, was to become the main channel of the party, the nucleus of the future Romanian Liberal Party. He was looking for a family home and was hopeful for the future: “[. . .] even back in ’47 I could not have looked for a home for us with more ardour and love than I am now! And I am going to find one!”, he promised his wife.84

84 Letter dated 21 August 1857, in ibid., 202. THE ELECTIONS

The British envoy to Wallachia, Sir Henry Bulwer Lytton, appointed to the European Commission on 23 July 1856, was a former secretary of embassy in Constantinople and Paris and minister-plenipotentiary in Madrid and Washington. As he took up his new post, he brought with him diplomatic finesse and experience. French-educated and with a flamboyant character, he had a liberal orientation and, as suggested by his support for the Belgians against the Dutch in 1830, was potentially sympathetic to the cause of ‘oppressed’ nations. It was a profile likely to inspire confidence in Romanian political circles and, as a result, Bul- wer Lytton and his wife, Georgiana, did establish cordial relations with a number of high-society families in Bucharest. He did support the cause of the exiles’ repatriation, but was, at the same time, a defender of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire.85 According to his instructions from the Foreign Office, the commissioner was to follow “a strictly impartial course” in attempting to “accommodate the true interests of the Danubian Principalities with the rights of the Sultan.”86 Bulwer, who was personally inclined to think that the dangers posed by the union were exaggerated, was warned by the Foreign Secretary, Lord Clarendon, that an independent, unified Romania would lead to its annexation by the Russian empire.87 Under pressure, Bulwer prepared a report, commissioned by Clarendon, in which he tiptoed uncomfortably around what was, he knew, the pet cause of his Romanian liberal hosts. “While union under a foreign prince would create an effective barrier against foreign intervention”, Bulwer wrote on 15 April 1857, “such an innovation would be too much like a betrayal of Turkey to be desirable at the present time, and, in short, the disadvantages of Union would overbalance the advantages.”88 Yet, faced with realities in situ, he reported back to the Foreign Office on 4 September 1857 that “almost every man in the Principality is or says he is in favour of

85 Fotino 4: 170. 86 Documente privind Unirea Principatelor, ed. Valentina Costake, Beatrice Mari- nescu and Valeriu Stan, vol. 7: Corespondenţă diplomatică engleză (1856–1859) (Bucharest, 1984), 110. 87 Ibid., 111. 88 T. W. Riker, The Making of Roumania (Oxford University Press, 1931), 87. the elections 321 uniting the two Principalities under a Foreign Prince.”89 In effect, in October 1857 the Ad-hoc Assemblies of Bucharest and Iaşi adopted a common programme on behalf of the entire nation, asking for the union of Wallachia and Moldavia into an autonomous, neutral state under a foreign ruler. Bulwer sent the Foreign Office two memoirs on the question of the union: a Report on the Danubian Principalities and a Project of Form of Government. The seventy-eight-page report in its final form was registered at the Foreign Office much later, on 5 June 1858, and the second memoir was published separately on 1 July 1858.90 In the Report, Bulwer grappled rather awkwardly with the fact that the Principalities had presented the European Commis- sion with a joint programme, making it difficult for the European powers to consider them separately, as would have been his choice. At the same time, Bulwer recognised that union without independence under a ruler appointed by the Sultan, who would have retained the right to veto his appointee’s policies, would have been “odious and unjust” to the Romanians.91 Bulwer found the joint election of a native prince – the solution ultimately adopted in effect by the Romanians in January 1859 – equally problematic, given the factious nature and instability of the Romanian political scene. Irrespective of Romanian expectations and in parallel with Bul- wer’s uneasy reflections on the matter, France and England had in fact already agreed by the Pact of Osborne of 9 August 1857 on allowing in principle a loose administrative union of Moldavia and Wallachia, a union conceived differently by the two powers. While France did not preclude an eventual full union, as suggested by a letter of the French foreign minister, Count Walewski, to the French ambassador in Vienna, de Bourqueney, Britain stopped short of such radical plans, and adhered strictly to its position of 1856: the Principalities were to have separate princes and governments, and were only to be treated as a loose federation in matters of common interest.92

89 Fotino 4: 567. 90 Valeriu Stan, “La réorganisation des Principautés Roumaines au milieu du XIXe siècle vue par Sir Henry L. Bulwer”, Revue roumaine d’histoire 31, 3–4 (1992): 215–33. Bulwer’s report and his “Project of Form of Government” are held at the National Archives in London under PRO/FO 97/416, FO 881/797 and PRO/FO 881/694. Stratford Canning’s memoirs are held under the pressmarks PRO/FO 78/1093 and 78/1258. 91 Ibid., 219. 92 Ibid., 222, notes 26 to 30. Cf. There is no written record of the Osborne Pact itself. For the complex diplomatic transactions at the time of the pact, see T. W. Riker, 322 1857

Bulwer’s rather convoluted project was never presented to the next session of the Congress of Paris, which opened on 22 May 1858. According to the British representative at the Congress, Lord Cowley, “no scheme, short of granting union, would satisfy the Principalities, and he did not believe that Great Britain should take the responsibility of backing anything that proved so unpopular as to be probably unworkable.”93 The position adopted ultimately by Britain with respect to the Principalities was shaped by two memoirs on the issue, dated 2 December 1855 and 23 March 1857 respectively, by the British ambassador in Constantinople, Stratford Canning, who was consistently and deeply hostile to the idea of union, but who, nevertheless, was ready to accept the compromise solution of a “uniformity of institutions” in the place of full union.94 Most sources indicate overwhelming support for the union in both Principalities and among all social classes, including a far from politically apathetic peasantry.95 Elections for the Moldavian Assem- bly in mid-August 1857, rigged by the anti-unionist authorities, were annulled and a second ballot overwhelmingly returned candidates of the pro-union National Party. The press exerted its power once more: it was Kogălniceanu’s paper l’Etoile du Danube which exposed the electoral fraud, seriously irritating the anti-union British government.96 It would appear that Stratford Canning himself was no stranger to the affair.97 In Wallachia, all the ‘men of 1848’ were elected to the Ad-Hoc Assembly on 21 September/3 October 1857. Nicolae Golescu was Vice-President, while Dumitru Brătianu, Rosetti and Ştefan Golescu were among the Assembly’s secretaries. The overwhelming presence in the Assembly of radicals and of former forty-eighters could not fail

“The Concert of Europe and Moldavia in 1857”,English Historical Review 42 (166) (1927): 227–44. Cf. also Harold Temperley, “The Union of Romania in the private letters of Palmerston, Clarendon and Cowley, 1855–1857”, and idem, “Four documents on the future of Roumania by Henry Stanley, D. Brătianu, Lord Palmerston and Albert, Prince Consort, 1855–1857”, Revue historique du sud-est européen 14, 7–9 (1937): 218–40 and 241–2. 93 Riker, The Making of Roumania, 8, 161. 94 Stan, “La réorganisation”, 221. 95 Cojocariu, Partida Naţională, 270. 96 Pericle Martinescu, Costache Negri (Bucharest, 1966), 161–4 quoted in Drace- Francis, The Making of Modern Romanian Culture, 171. 97 Beatrice Marinescu, “La position des diplomates et émissaires britanniques envers le mouvement unioniste des Principautés”, Revue roumaine d’histoire 11, 2 (1972): 278. the elections 323 to attract criticism from members of the European Commission. In the Commission’s session of 29 October, the Austrian Commissioner Liehmann von Palmrode declared that he thought it was his duty to remind his colleagues that, of the nine members of the Wallachian ‘Divan’, whose crucial mission it was to draw up a memorandum for the future organisation of the Romanian state, seven had been forty- eighters, and therefore, hardly Austria’s favourite choice. Dumitru Brătianu, especially, who had garnered the greatest number of votes, was singled out by the Austrian diplomat as particularly unsuitable for his new position. As Mazzini’s collaborator, he had co-signed “several proclamations and other incendiary writings with the avowed objective of turning Europe upside down . . .”, Liehmann complained.98 This time, the Austrian protest carried no weight and the appointments were allowed to stand. Despite the official Russian policy of support for the Romanian union, the Russian commissar Konstantin Basily was nevertheless equally worried by the weight of the forty-eighters and radicals in the Assembly: “These exalted men already have a considerable majority, for they have been able to attract in their orbit deputies from the cities and from rural communes”, he reported to the Russian Foreign Minister, Aleksander Gorchakov, on 6/28 October 1857.99 In late 1857, Nicolae Golescu and Dumitru Brătianu were back in Paris and London, this time no longer as exiles, but as the official envoys of their emerging nation. As the general elections of 1857 removed from the political arena a number of parliamentarians such as Austin Layard, John Forster, Arthur Otway and Thomas Milner- Gibson, all of whom had been supportive of Brătianu’s campaign, the relay was passed on to new ‘philo-Romanians’, William Gladstone in particular, who had already corresponded with Brătianu in 1856.100 On 10 September 1857, not yet in office, he wrote to Lord Aberdeen to protest against what he thought was by now an outdated pro-Ottoman bias in British foreign policies.101 Brătianu had kept up with his contacts in Britain, Evan Eyre Crowe, the former editor of the liberal Daily News, and Joseph Archer Crowe, who had covered the military operations on the lower Danube for The Illustrated London News in the

98 Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu 1: 73. 99 Marian Stroia, “Rusia şi românii de la Războiul Crimeii la Unirea Principatelor: sinteza unei atitudini”, in Războiul Crimeii, ed. Silvan Ionescu, 88. 100 See letter dated 5 August 1856 in Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu 2: 128. 101 John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (London, 1905–7), 637. 324 1857 summer of 1854.102 After the Congress of Paris, Eyre Evans Crowe had been commissioned by Dumitru Brătianu to travel to Bucharest and assess the wishes of the Romanian nation as the ad-hoc assemblies convened to elect candidates and organise elections in both Walla- chia and Moldavia. It was to an already converted Evans Crowe, on a visit to Constantinople in late August 1856, that Ştefan Golescu had made an exposé of all the reasons why France and Britain should support a unified state on the Danube: the French spirit could intellectually colonise it and English ships would bring the benefits of free trade and navigation.103 These were not new arguments and today, the exiles’ overlapping pamphlets, articles and private letters on this subject sound repetitive and slightly obsessive. Yet, this insistence was due to the exiles’ feeling that nothing could be taken for granted in a hostile environment. In addition, they appear to have believed that repetition was bound to shift that recently-discovered entity, public opinion, which, in turn, would directly influence decision-making in the Cabinet. It was an endearingly optimistic view of the mechanics of lobbying in the early days when ‘public opinion’ appeared easier to define than in subsequent ages. Eyre Evans Crowe and his son chose not to publish in the popular dailies, but in two of the most influential of the Whig and radical quarterly periodicals: the Westminster Review and the Edinburgh Review.104 The two unsigned articles, ostensibly reviews of works on Romania published in 1856 by Vasile Boerescu, Paul Bataillard and Cesar Bolliac, were in fact brief expositions on why “the Roumans should have the sympathy of Englishmen” and outlined the national party’s main demand: union under a foreign prince.105 Eyre Evans Crowe’s Edinburgh Review article also attempted to reassure a Brit- ish audience little inclined towards revolution by downplaying the radicalism of Romania’s would-be leaders (i.e. Rosetti and his allies): prosperity and political stability, he argued, would soon tame the reds and reconcile them to the status quo.106 Of the two, Joseph Archer’s

102 For their contacts with the exiles in Vidin in early 1854, see Part Two, p. 267 and p. 283. 103 Fotino 4: 148–9, 168. 104 Ellis Archer Wasson, “The Whigs and the Press, 1800–50”,Parliamentary His- tory 25, Part 1, (2006): 71–2. 105 “The Danubian Principalities”,Westminster Review (April 1857): 9, in the British Periodicals Collection II online database. 106 “Roumania”, Edinburgh Review (April 1857): 430, in the British Periodicals Col- lection I online database. the elections 325 piece in the Westminster Review was the more analytical, as well as less mindful of diplomatic kow-towing: “Turkish imbecility” was the chief cause why the Principalities were still an under-developed vassal, with an inferior infrastructure, an unfair tax system, no banks and no army, instead of a strong, modern state. The younger Crowe recorded in his Reminiscences that his piece “created some sensation” and served to make him even more “obnoxious” to Palmerston.107

107 Joseph Archer Crowe, Reminiscences of Thirty-Five Years of My Life . . ., (London, 1895), 138. Cf. also Eric D. Tappe, “E. E. and J. A. Crowe and the Rumanian Union: some unpublished letters of 1857”, Slavonic and East European Review 41, 96 (Dec. 1962): 138, 141. 1858 THE CONGRESS OF PARIS AND THE UNION OF THE PRINCIPALITIES

Debates in the Wallachian and Moldavian Ad-hoc assemblies, where for the first time in Romanian history the peasants were represented, were often locked in cross-class conflicts over future reforms and legislation.108 Deemed to have evolved into sources of political and social disorder, these bodies were dissolved by the Porte in January 1858, but the report resulting from the referenda they had overseen was approved and signed by the European Commission in March–April.109 Dumitru Brătianu infused fresh funding and new energy into his campaigning. On 4 May 1858, Gladstone delivered an hour-long speech in Parliament, urging a motion in support of the union of the Danu- bian Principalities and the creation of a viable buffer state as a barrier against Russian expansionism: I say the union of the Principalities is the ardent desire of the people of those territories. I am anxious to make good that proposition, because, although it is not conclusive upon the question, yet I speak in the British House of Commons – I speak in that assembly to which I will not say alone, but to which almost alone, every lover of liberty in the world has now to look for the vindication of his rights – and implore the House of Commons to do full justice to the wishes, to the rights and interests of these people, if those interests be compatible with justice and the welfare of Europe.110 In addition, Gladstone invoked the pledge made at the Congress of Paris by both Count Walewski, the French foreign minister, and by the Earl of Clarendon as foreign secretary, for the wishes of the Roma- nians to be respected, a pledge which was now causing considerable embarrassment to Britain. Lord Cecil, MP for Stamford, John Roebuck and Lord John Russell, among others, supported Gladstone’s motion which, however, was opposed by the parliamentary heavy-weights

108 Peasant delegates had about one fifth of seats in each assembly. For peasant demands, see Hitchins, The Romanians, 1774–1866, 289–91. 109 Dan Berindei, Epoca Unirii (Bucharest, 2000), 67. 110 For the full text of Gladstone’s speech, see Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series, 110, 4 May 1858. Cf. Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu 2: 220–2. the congress of paris 327

Benjamin Disraeli, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and by Lord Palmerston himself. As deliberations at the Congress of Paris were still in progress, the House was urged to do nothing that could be seen to influence them. Gladstone’s motion was defeated. “Made my motion on the Principalities”, he noted in his diary. “Lost by 292:114 and with it goes another broken promise to a people.”111 Replying to letters from Romanians expressing gratitude for his efforts on their behalf, Glad- stone wrote to Brătianu on 14 July 1858: “I am well convinced that the cause which we pleaded was a just one and I trust it may yet please Providence to prosper it.”112 The blueprint agreed upon at the Convention of Paris on 19 August 1858 has been described as a “clumsy piece of machinery.”113 It left the Principalities formally under Ottoman suzerainty, without specifically granting them the right to unite, but provided them with a broad autonomy, which allowed them to pursue their own policies without Ottoman interference. It also called for elections – by indirect, restricted suffrage – to assemblies meant to nominate candidates to the thrones of Wallachia and Moldavia, to be elected for life. Crucially, the Congress also stipulated the creation of a joint legislative body, the Central Commission, which was to convene at Focşani, on the border between the two provinces, to debate matters of common interest, such as customs, and joint postal and telegraphic services. The Commission was to include eight Wallachians and eight Moldavians, half of whom were appointed by the princes, and half by the assemblies. Noble ranks and privileges were abolished and citizens were declared equal before the law, a vindication of the principles of 1848. There were heated and protracted debates around the name to be given to the new state. The choice fell on the cumbersome “United Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia”, which suggests both the hybrid nature of the new creation and the promise of future union. The Convention maintained property qualifications, and franchise was therefore restricted to wealthy landowners and the upper middle class. In Bucharest, for example, only 308 individuals out of a general population of around 120,000 had voting rights, and the electoral

111 The Gladstone Diaries, ed. H. C. G. Matthew (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1978), 5: 295. 112 Full text in Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu 2: 222–3. 113 Riker, The Making of Roumania, 178. For further details, see Leonid Boicu, Diplomaţia europeană şi triumful cauzei române (1856–1859) (Iaşi, 1978), esp. Ch. 3: “O soluţie hibridă”. 328 1858 campaign became a fierce battle for every single vote which could be obtained, via protest and contestation if necessary.114 The campaign had hardly started in November 1858, when Dumitru Brătianu travelled to Turin and Paris, where he had meetings with Count Cavour, the Sardinian Prime Minister, and with Napoleon III. Talks focused on Austria’s sphere of influence in East-Central Europe, and Brătianu assured Cavour that the Wallachians were ready to support their fellow Romanians in the Banat, Bukovina and Transylvania should they take up arms against Austria. Succumbing to the famous Bonapartist charisma, Brătianu mused on his past dealings with the Emperor during his exile: “It’s a good think I did not meet him when I was busy conspiring against him, or he might have won me over!”115 Throughout these momentous months of electoral agitation, the Romanian radicals remained locked in an intense power struggle with the moderates and the conservatives. Ion Brătianu and Rosetti in particular were constantly attacked by the conservative opposition as the most provocative of the radicals, as the démo-socs of Romanian politics, around whom rallied the protests and claims of peasants and artisans.116 The Romanian union saga did ultimately end with the elections of 24 January 1859 which famously led to the de facto union of the two provinces. The technical ruse employed by the Romanians overtly complied with the requirements of the Paris Convention: Wal- lachia and Moldavia held separate elections, but they chose to elect the same ruling prince in the person of the Colonel Alexandru Ioan Cuza.117 The Romanian liberals had “spoiled” the “agreeable calcula- tion” of Vienna and Istanbul, commented the Daily News rather jubi- lantly on 1 February. 118 The Austrian foreign minister, Count Buol, received the news with the abrasive comment that the double election was the result of machinations by the “party of disorder and anarchy”, the party led by the exiled men whose return to Romania he had fiercely opposed.119 There was a minor crisis when Austria and Turkey temporarily withdrew their consuls from a country whose will to union they would eventually be compelled to accept.

114 Berindei, Epoca Unirii, 77. 115 Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu 1: 78. Cf. also Berindei, Epoca Unirii, 77. 116 For the electoral battles and complex manoeuvrings of 1857–59, see esp. Berin- dei, Epoca Unirii, Chs. 4–5. 117 The union would be formally recognized by the powers in 1861. 118 Daily News, 1 February 1859, “Turkey”. 119 Berindei, Epoca Unirii, 95. the congress of paris 329

Dumitru Brătianu became the Wallachian Foreign Minister in the new government led by his fellow forty-eighter Ion Filipescu. The outspoken Brătianu was finally able to give a retroactive thumbs-down to the ancien régime. The man who, as an exile, had been subjected to various forms of surveillance in Paris, London and Bucharest, was influential in promoting one of the first decisions taken by the new government: the suppression of censorship. However, his work at the Foreign Ministry was cut short by the new prince, who, giving in to the suspicions of the new assembly vis-à-vis the “men of ‘48”, took over the foreign minister’s portfolio himself. The forty-eighters’ relations with the new prince started on a wrong footing and were never going to be cordial, especially as Cuza became increasingly, at least in the eyes of the radicals, from “people’s prince” a Bonapartist autocrat with little time for political pluralism. After the fall of the Nicolae Golescu cabinet in July 1860, none of the forty-eighters and former exiles ever held another political function during Cuza’s increasingly authoritarian personal reign. The coup which led to the prince’s down- fall on 11 February 1866 was largely the work of the “red sect”, Rosetti, Brătianu and their political allies, who believed that Cuza had outlived his initial role. To a significant extent, his election had been intended simply to provide the technicality on which union would eventually be achieved. Characteristically, but quite disingenuously, Rosetti referred to the coup as the “revolution of 11 February.”120

120 Bucur, C. A. Rosetti: mesianism, 240. W. E. Mosse has also accredited a reading of the coup as revolution in “England, Russia and the Rumanian Revolution of 1866”, Slavonic and East European Review 39, 92 (Dec., 1960): 73–94.

EPILOGUE

AFTER EXILE

. . . the port is far away, and we are still in exile. Rosetti, letter to Jules Michelet, 2 November 18631 Back from exile in 1857, Constantin Rosetti took part in all the major political battles of the day in Romania’s emerging modern state, in which both political institutions and political behaviours had to be constructed afresh. He became one of the founders of the National Liberal Party in 1875 and, while ostensibly resigned to living in a monarchy, remained passionately engaged with his youthful dream of a ‘social Republic’.2 Not temperamentally attuned to the political pragmatism demanded by the state-building processes, he never gained a prominent political place, although he occupied ministerial positions in the various Liberal governments of the 1870s and 1880s and remained a vigorous journalistic voice for the opposition. Românul, the paper he had started in Paris, became the chief press organ of the Liberal Party, rallying the faithful in difficult times. Although circulation never exceeded 2–3,000 copies, the paper was hugely influential and became a bête noire of the Conservative party whose own Timpul [The Time] lagged behind both in print-runs and impact.3 Rosetti remained equally active in freemasonry and in the 1860s still signed off his editorials in the paper with the old Masonic salutations of 1848: “dreptate şi frăţie”, “salutare şi frăţie”, justice and brotherhood, greet- ings and brotherhood.4 Rosetti continued his activities as a publisher and entrepreneur. Soon after his return to Romania, he initiated the Mutualist Society of the Printers of Romania, later called the “Gutenberg Society”, promoting a cause which had always been dear to his heart. He was often directly involved in fund-raising for the society, as well in defending

1 Bucur, Jules Michelet şi revoluţionarii români, 235. 2 For the rationale given by Rosetti for supporting constitutional monarchy see Paul E. Michelson, Romanian Politics 1859–1871: from Prince Cuza to Prince Carol (Iaşi, Oxford, Portland, 1998), 41. 3 Drace-Francis, The Making of Modern Romanian Culture, 172. 4 Bucur, C. A. Rosetti: mesianism, 355. 334 epilogue the freedom of the press.5 His anti-governmental articles and his pug- nacious attitude led to his arrest in 1863 and to the suspension of Românul between 1864 and 1866. The ruling Prince, Alexandru Ioan Cuza, was “never a very enthusiastic advocate of a free press”, according to Paul E. Michelson’s understatement.6 In a lecture delivered in Paris shortly after Rosetti’s death in 1885, his republican and freemason friend Louis Ulbach, no stranger to censorship himself, narrated how, when the paper was suppressed, its resourceful director started sending subscribers blank pages with only the paper’s title, “Românul”, printed on the masthead. Ulbach commented suggestively that there could have been nothing more threatening to the regime than “this silent newspaper biding its time.”7 But while the political press was being muzzled, Marie and Constantin Rosetti wrote and published jointly the short-lived Mama şi copilul [The Mother and Child] a sentimental educational periodical, which had originated at Marie’s initiative as Romania’s first periodical on social and family themes.8 Significantly, it had Marie’s name on the frontispiece as director of the publication.9 Rosetti’s politics was not without contradictions. A republican, he nevertheless took part in organizing a plebiscite for the monarchy as Minister for Education and Church Affairs in 1866.10 He remained, nevertheless, a bit of a ‘Jacobin’ to the end of his life and never wan- dered too far off his self-assumed role of ‘nation’s martyr’. His political fundamentalism alienated many, as it had done during exile. It is easy to dismiss Rosetti as a slightly neurotic, volatile and inconsistent public figure, and even his chief modern editor and biographer, Marin Bucur, found a tone of gentle mockery hard to resist.11 Long before Bucur, Nicolae Iorga had perhaps captured Rosetti’s true nature and

5 For further details see Valeriu Stan, “C. A. Rosetti, mărturii inedite”, Revista istorică, new series, 2, 5–6 (1991): 313–21. 6 Michelson, Romanian Politics 1859–1871, 70. 7 Louis Ulbach, “C.-A. Rosetti”, Revue politique et littéraire, 2 (11 July 1885): 46–54, 51. (later reprinted as C. A. Rosetti, Paris: Société des deux Revues, 1885). Ulbach had been the director of the Revue de Paris between 1853 and the journal’s suppression in 1858. 8 Bucur, C. A. Rosetti: mesianism, 207. 9 Mama si copilulu, Diariu de duminică, 1 (4 July 1865). 10 Bucur, C. A. Rosetti: mesianism, 239. 11 See mainly Bucur’s previously cited C. A. Rosetti: mesianism şi donquijotism revoluţionar (Bucharest, 1970). after exile 335 his brand of emotional politics more accurately when he called him “a vigorous sectarian and noble poet of politics.”12 Rosetti never totally left behind the old adventurous ways of doing politics which he and his peers had sometimes indulged in during exile. In June 1864, Rosetti was arrested and questioned for his involvement the so-called “Frigyesy Affair”. The Hungarian radical émigré Gusz- táv Frigyesy, an envoy of Mazzini and friend of Garibaldi’s, had been campaigning on Romanian territory for the creation of a regiment of volunteers to be used in an attack against Austria or Russia. The attack was to be coordinated with Mazzini’s parallel military operations in the Veneto area. The interrogation revealed Frigyesy’s contacts with Rosetti, who, owing to his connections in high places, had facilitated the issuing of a passport under a false identity for him. The conspirators were granted an amnesty by Prince Cuza in July 1864, but the incident shows to what extent Rosetti remained essentially an opposition figure and a bit of an adventurer intent on challenging the established regime with the pen and the sword.13 In 1870 Rosetti went into a second, voluntary, ‘exile’ in France during the Franco-Prussian war, at a time when he opposed Prince Carol of Hohenzollern’s personal regime.14 Whilst in Romania there was short-lived and easily suppressed republican agitation, in France Rosetti fought on the republican side and deplored the war as an assault on republicanism and democracy in letters to Marie.15 Yet, as an eye-witness, he was critical of the Paris Commune in action.16 His and his peers’ instinctive and lovingly nurtured francophilia must have been sorely tested from the 1860s onwards when, with the arrival of a Hohenzollern prince, Romania entered the German political orbit at the expense of the fading French and Napoleonic sphere of influence. 17

12 Nicolae Iorga, Oameni care au fost, 2: 226–8, quoted in Vasile Netea, C. A. Rosetti (Bucharest, 1970), 392. 13 V. Stan, “C. A. Rosetti, mărturii inedite”, 314. Major Frigyesy later had the command of a Hungarian legion in Garibaldi’s army in the war of 1866. Cf. Lajos Lukács, Chapters on the Hungarian Emigration, 1849–1867 (Budapest, 1995), 168. 14 Carol of Hohenzollern was called to the Romanian throne after the abdication of Prince Cuza in 1866. 15 C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, Introduction, 1: 7. 16 Alexandru Mamina, “O definire a liberalilor radicali în contextul războiului franco- prusac din 1870–1871,” SMIMod 13 (1999): 158. 17 For Romania’s shift in alliances see the brief but informative article “Rumanian Unity” by Paul E. Michelson in William E. Echard, ed., Historical Dictionary of the French Second Empire, 1852–1870 (Westport, Connecticut, 1985), 582–4. For the 336 epilogue

Rosetti’s correspondence with his wife after their return maintained the warm, affectionate tone which was to a large extent almost an outcome of shared hardship and exile, after the rather passionless courtship of the 1840s. It also reveals an active and dedicated public man doubled by a family man partly defeated by financial difficulties and parental disappointment. Sophia Liberty (Liby), the little girl born on the day revolution started in 1848, lacked any intellectual calling, and remained whimsical and demanding, defying Rosetti’s hopes that his children would never need material “wealth, because I will give them moral and intellectual riches.”18 Two of the Rosetti sons, Vintilă and Horia, were big spenders and equally disinclined to study, while a third, Mircea, had a chronic condition which required constant care and died young, ahead of his parents.19 The memory of their French mentors gradually dimmed, but endured. In 1863, still under Cuza’s reign, Rosetti wrote to Michelet to apologise for not having written earlier. In his confession at that time there are echoes of Michelet’s own self-perception as an internal exile in Napoleon III’s France: [. . .] it is six years now since we arrived in our Patrie, which you rendered back to us, and yet we have not sent one sign of life, not even a letter to tell you: Maîtres, we have arrived into a safe port, we need your help to start building. [. . .] Hélas! This is because the port is far away, and we are still in exile.20 Rosetti would have liked to surround himself with kindred spirits as well as reward the people who had showed solidarity with the exiled Romanians in the fateful decade of their European wanderings. His rather extravagant plans of 1866 to have Quinet installed as Romanian Minister for Education and Bataillard as head of the National Archives in Bucharest remained unrealized.21 However, the old allies were symbolically rewarded with an honorary Romanian citizenship. On 4 July 1866, Michelet, Quinet, Ubicini, Bataillard, Saint-Marc Girardin, Gladstone, Layard and Roebuck became citizens of a nation which they had helped into being.22 wider context of the post-Crimean international system, see W. E. Mosse, The Euro- pean Powers and the German Question, 1848–1871 (New York, 1969). 18 Entry for 16 August 1849, in Rosetti, Diary, 284. 19 C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, Introduction, 1: 8. 20 Rosetti to Michelet, Bucharest, 2 November 1863, in Bucur, Jules Michelet şi revoluţionarii români, 235. 21 Letter to Bataillard, 4 June 1866, in Bucur, C. A. Rosetti: mesianism, 54–5. 22 T.-G. Djuvara, Edgar Quinet, philoroumain, 60. after exile 337

In later life, Vintilă and Horia Rosetti attracted their aging but untamed father into the extremist-anarchist circles they frequented in Italy, an orientation which contributed to the estrangement between Rossetti and Brătianu as well as to fresh attacks against the ‘red’ Rosetti in the conservative press.23 Rosetti died in 1885 and was outlived by Marie by eight years. She never emerged from the ‘shadow’ of her better-known husband. Today still, her fame rests on her role as revolutionary muse (in Rosenthal’s portrait), ‘follower’24 to her exiled husband and devoted mother. Yet, while her symbolic capital has been recognised and streets and high schools in Romania bear her name, her actual life after 1859 remains largely uncharted and she deserves a new appraisal. A recent study of nineteenth-century Romanian women awards her only one modest entry, and, to my knowledge, there is only one short modern biography of her.25 Such are the hazards of access to often elusive Romanian-language sources, a recent essay on Euro- pean women’s participation in the revolutions of 1848 omits Marie Rosetti altogether, but mentions Ana Ipătescu, who had a symbolic, but ultimately minor, role in the events of 19 June when she rallied the Bucharest crowds in support of the provisional government.26 Like Marie Rosetti, Hermione Quinet (née Asachi), who survived her husband by twenty-five years, needs to be rescued from an unde- served posthumous fate as merely a “veuve abusive”, heavy-handed editor and fierce gatekeeper of Quinet’s work.27 Ion C. Brătianu rose to the highest echelons of power in the new Romania created by the Congress of Paris in 1856. A key founder of the National Liberal Party, and a more pragmatic man than Rosetti and than his own brother, Dumitru, he steered the party and the country through the tumultuous years which saw the independence in 1877 and the creation of the Kingdom of Romania in 1881. Despite

23 C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, Introduction, 1: 9. 24 “Suiveuse”, Nancy L. Green’s term quoted in Sylvie Aprile’s overview of French women who followed their proscrit husbands in exile, in Le siècle des exilés, 165. 25 Alin Ciupală, Femeia în societatea românească a secolului al XIX-lea: între public şi privat (Bucharest, 2003), 69. Elisabeta Ioniţă, Maria Rosetti (Bucharest, 1979). 26 Gabriella Hauch, “Did Women Have a Revolution? Gender Battles in the Euro- pean Revolution of 1848/49”, in 1848: A European Revolution? International Ideas and National Memories of 1848, ed. Axel Körner (London, 2000). C. D. Rosenthal is mentioned once in the collection, but Rosetti, the Brătianus or the other Moldo- Wallachian leaders are not. 27 She died in 1900. 338 epilogue

ultimately divergent political paths, the Rosetti and the Brătianu households were close. When he became prime minister of Romania, Ion Brătianu had no home of his own in the capital city Bucharest, only a property in the village Florica, the only estate left to him after the sale and estrangement of the family lands. Rosetti often put his friend up in Bucharest to enable him to attend to state affairs. Brătianu reciprocated by accommodating the never financially comfortable and frequently homeless Rosettis at Florica, where Rosetti was happy to work in the vineyard. The entrepreneurial premier produced wine commercially on his estate. Like Rosetti, Ion Brătianu remained a ‘closet’ republican, but forged a working relationship with King Carol, and was a key player in negotiations which placed Romania within a Mitteleuropean system of political alliances in the face of a British and French relative withdrawal from the Balkans. His foreign political choices – especially a rapprochement with former ‘arch-enemy’ Russia in the anti-Ottoman war of independence of 1877 – were often criticized, as were his authoritarianism, the iron discipline he tried to impose on his party and the often unorthodox manner in which he promoted and enacted new legislation. His equally controversial handling of the rights of the Jew- ish community in Romania in the 1860s and 1870s was easy to exploit politically and did not ingratiate him with political circles abroad.28 On 21 March 1867, as Minister of the Interior, Brătianu adopted a ‘law on vagrancy’ aimed at preventing impoverished Jews from settling in Moldavian towns and villages. Owing largely to migration from Austrian-occupied Galicia, Moldavia had a 300,000-strong Jew- ish community. In the capital, Iaşi, out of 50,000 inhabitants, 30,000 were Jewish. Additional measures promoted by Brătianu in order to prevent Jews from leasing lands and public inns were presented by the liberals as initiatives designed to encourage native trade and indus- try at the expense of migrants, who were often foreign nationals. The Moldavian middle-class entrepreneurs were often unhappy with what they perceived as Brătianu’s “moderation” in this matter, while Great Power representatives complained about the “fanaticism” of his anti- Jewish measures. Ghosts of conspiracies past were revived as political weapons for present-day crises. The largely farcical ‘Hippodrome Affair’ was brought up whenever it was deemed convenient to keep

28 This may partly explain the dismissive tone of Pierre Antoine Perrod inJules Favre: avocat de la liberté (Lyon, 1988). See Part Two, note 406. after exile 339 the Romanian government, and especially Ion Brătianu, in line. “Men whose chief abilities lie in leading revolutions and overthrowing governments are never good at governing”, complained the French minister for education on an official visit to Bucharest on 10 July 1867, and Prince Carol duly accepted Brătianu’s resignation on the 28th. In June 1868 a reinstated Brătianu had to sign a protocol for the return and compensation of the expelled Jewish groups.29 Old friendships forged in exile fell victim to the controversies engen- dered by the Jewish question in late nineteenth-century Romania. Armand Lévy, who was catholic, but of Jewish extraction, campaigned vigorously alongside the former forty-eighter Adolphe Crémieux for the rights of the Jewish communities in South-Eastern Europe and the Middle East from the 1860s onwards. The Romanian discrimi- natory legislation was a source of disappointment for the erstwhile French friend of the liberals now in power. This was compounded by an attempt on Lévy’s life by a Romanian right-wing fanatic in 1885, followed by Prime Minister Brătianu’s decision to have him expelled from the Romanian territory.30 In Romania itself, Brătianu’s involvement in the ‘Hippodrome’ plot was perhaps not taken as seriously as in France, but was often used for polemical purposes. In Conservative attacks against Liberal ministries in the 1880s, he was often referred to as “the famous conspirator of the Opéra Comique and the Hippodrome” and a “friend of the sympathetic escargots of Mr. Jules Allix.”31 The allusion was to the ‘snail telegraphy’ proposed by the eccentric Allix, a member of the Hippo- drome plot who also took part in the Paris Commune later, and was often described as slightly, though innocuously, deranged.32 This was

29 Apostol Stan, “Începutul liberalismului şi constituirea Partidului Naţional Lib- eral”, in Istoria Partidului Naţional Liberal, ed. Şerban Rădulescu-Zoner (Bucharest, 2000), 26, 32–3. 30 Carol Iancu, “Races et nationalités en Roumanie: le problème juif à travers les documents diplomatiques français (1866–1880)”, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 27, 3 (Jul.–Sep. 1980): 391–407. On the understudied Lévy, see also Pawel Korzek, review of Jerzy Borejsza’s The Secretary of Adam Mickiewicz (in Polish) (Warsaw, 1969), Annales. Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 3 (1972, mai-juin): 779–83. 31 Mihai Eminescu, the Romanian late Romantic poet, publicist and editor-in-chief of Timpul [The Times], the Conservative periodical, in “Noi am fost aciia care am imputat . . .”, Timpul, 20 November 1880, in M. Eminescu, Opere, 11, edited by Dimi- trie Vatamaniuc (Bucharest, 1984). Online open access at www.eminescu.petar.ro, no pagination [accessed on 19 September 2010]. 32 Maxime du Camp, Les Convulsions de Paris, (Paris, 1883), 2: 245. Ernest Alfred Vizetelly, My Days of Adventure: the fall of France (1870–71) (London, 1914), 134–5. 340 epilogue little more than character assassination meant to discredit Brătianu by associating him with a group of people who were all, it was implied, out of their minds. In 1880 the tables were turned against the former anarchist and conspirator, now Prime Minister, at a time when newly-independent Romania was uneasily trapped between the Central Powers and its former anti-Ottoman ally of 1877, Russia. As he left the Senate on the evening of 3 December, he was attacked by a knife-wielding man, quickly outmanoeuvred by the prompt reflexes of one of Brătianu’s fellow-politicians. The would-be assassin was alleged to have acted in collusion with a minor Moldavian political group called the Party of National Democracy, which championed a Romanian-Russian alliance and was rumoured to have links with the Russian secret police.33 The small party, led by Grigore Mihai Sturdza, dissolved itself in the aftermath of the assassination attempt, and the attacker was sentenced to hard labour.34 The unhurt, but shaken, Prime Minister received unanimous public expressions of support from friends and foes alike and was presumably left to ponder – in his mature years – the uses of political assassination. The Romanian National Liberal Party, officially created in 1875 under Ion Brătianu’s leadership, is today widely credited with creating the political and financial institutions of Romania as a modern state. It founded the National Bank and the country’s main credit and industrial structures, with a support base which included members of the intelligentsia, lower middle classes and lower land-holding gentry.35 This was not dissimilar to developments in what has been termed the ‘sectarian’ West-European liberalism in the period, but in Romania, and perhaps in Eastern Europe more generally, this close nexus of economic control, status-orientation and privilege was established over a

33 Ion Bulei, Conservatori şi conservatorism în România (Bucharest, 2000), 21, note *. 34 Grigore Mihai Sturdza (1821–1901), from one of Romania’s ruling families, completed mathematical and military studies in Paris and Berlin, and served in the Ottoman army after 1848 under the name Muhlis Pasha. He later became a Conservative senator and deputy in unified Romania. Cf.C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti 1: 81, note 4. 35 Victoria F. Brown, “The Adaptation of Western Political Theory in a Peripheral State: the Case of Romanian Liberalism”, in Romania between East and West: historical essays in memory of Constantin C. Giurescu. ed. Stephen A. Fischer-Galaţi et al. (Boulder, Colorado, 1982), 269–301, 284. Brown’s essay is an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the Romanian liberals’ economic practices in the period, as well as of the kinship and differences between West- and East-European liberalism. after exile 341 much shorter period of time and against a backdrop of comparative economic backwardness. In addition to such ‘short-cuts to capitalism’, the way in which the Romanian Liberal Party cut itself off from the peasants and the industrial workers, its espousal of extreme practices of capitalist self-sufficiency and protectionism which deprived the country of much-needed foreign capital, as well as the increasingly resented “collusion between entrepreneurs and politicians”36 exposed it to attacks by Liberal and Conservative opponents alike, and led to endemic political instability. By 1882, over a period of five or six years, there had been twenty cabinet reshuffles, alliances and divisions amongst dissident splinter groups, as well as more or less shady negotiations and uneasy deals with the Conservatives. Ion Brătianu became highly adept at such political manoeuvrings, which ended up alienating some his closest allies, including his own brother, Dumitru, whose rather puritanical moral rectitude was not attuned to the demands of the new political pragmatism. The elder Brătianu may have lost his forty-eighter’s beard, but had remained to a large extent a romantic revolutionary with a Manichean view of public life, a man of virtue who preferred a stoical, impoverished lifestyle rather than succumb to the new Liberal Political-entrepreneurial call of ‘Enrichissez-vous’. In his portrait of Ion Brătianu, R. W. Seton-Watson referred to the irreconcilable temperamental differences between the erstwhile forty- eighters formerly united in exile: “He himself was a man of high character and wide sympathies, but he considered that the somewhat doctrinaire ideals of his brother Dimitrie and their old associate C. A. Rosetti were ill adapted to the iron age upon which Romania was entering [. . .]”37 The deterioration of youthful alliances was perhaps a sad epilogue to the ‘heroic’ epic of friendship in revolution and exile which had united these men during their youth, but which fell victim to the confrontational spirit of party politics. The old solidarities gradually collapsed in the 1880s under the strain of disagreements over governance, elections, constitutional reform, social, economic and national policies. The issue of suffrage proved central to these divisions. In 1883 Con- stantin A. Rosetti proposed a widening of the electorate through the introduction of a single electoral college composed of all individuals

36 Ibid., 288. 37 R. W. Seton-Watson, A History of the Romanians from Roman Times to the Com- pletion of Unity (London, 1934), 355, quoted in Brown, “The Adaptation”, 287. 342 epilogue who could read and write, but his motion was turned down by Par- liament.38 The Liberal Party’s endless foot-dragging in this matter ultimately led to the departure of both Rosetti and the elder Brătianu. In 1885, the dissident Liberal group led by Dumitru Brătianu concluded a rather unnatural merger with the Conservative opposition led by Lascăr Catargiu and Gh. Vernescu. Two leading Liberals, and former forty-eighters, Rosetti and Mihail Kogălniceau, also joined the newly created united opposition to Ion C. Brătianu’s governing party.39 Under constant hammering by the opposition, Ion Brătianu’s cabinet resigned on 19 March 1888, to be replaced by a Conservative government. In 1890 the Brătianu brothers negotiated a reunification of the Liberals in parallel with a personal reconciliation which healed some, though not all, of the rifts in old family ties and friendships. Ion Brătianu died on 4 May 1891. Dumitru succeeded him briefly as leader of the liberals before his own death on 8/20 June 1892. In Rosetti’s old newspaper, Românul of 10/22 June, the now widowed Marie reflected on their old friendship and wondered sadly: “He was a dreamer, but will his beautiful dreams ever be realised?”40 Zinca Golescu died in 1879, in the same year as her son Ştefan, having outlived two other sons, Alexandru (Albu) and Nicolae, as well as some of her grand-children. Her support for the Romanian diaspora in the 1850s made her an emblematic female figure in modern Romania, and the manor at Goleşti became a genuine site of national memory. The Golescu brothers and cousins were influential in securing a positive outcome for the plebiscite which brought Carol of Hohenzollern to the throne of Romania in 1866 and strengthened the country’s still shaky union. It was at the manor of Goleşti that the new prince spent his first night when he arrived – incognito, for fear of Austrian opposition – accompanied by Ion Brătianu, to take up the throne of his new, troubled kingdom. He subsequently gallantly commissioned a copy of a portrait of his seventy-four-year-old hostess as a young woman and placed it on a wall in his new mountain residence at Castle Peleş as a tribute to this mater patriae.41 The Golescu brothers and some of their

38 Daniel Barbu, “Hainele cele noi ale statului. Liberalismul românesc între două revoluţii: 1848–1917”, Xenopoliana 13, 1–4 (2005): 65. 39 Anastasie Iordache, Dumitru Brătianu: diplomatul, doctrinarul liberal şi omul politic (Bucharest, 2003), 322. 40 Ibid., 343. 41 Ioana Pârvulescu, În intimitatea secolului 19 (Bucharest, 2005), 115. after exile 343 cousins, including Alexandru G. Golescu (Negru), were all active in the 1860s in various ministerial, parliamentary and diplomatic positions. It may have been due to their experience of surveillance and persecution in exile that the former forty-eighters remained remarkably impassioned defenders of civic freedoms, and in particular of the freedom of the press and of correspondence. As Minister of the Interior in 1867 Ştefan Golescu sent a circular to the country’s prefects demanding a strict observance of the confidentiality of private correspondence and the free distribution of the press in the provinces.42 The penalty for opening private correspondence was up to one year’s imprisonment. He may have had in mind his mother Zinca’s past protests against the violation of the “most intimate confessions of the heart” when the Austrian secret police opened their letters in 1851.43 Ştefan and Nico- lae led short-lived cabinets in 1860 and 1861, and promoted full independence from Ottoman domination, but their active political lives practically ended after 1870–71, before independence was realized.44 The long years of exile and their country’s turbulent history had taken a toll on the health of the Golescu men who died, all unmarried and all prematurely aged, between 1873 and 1882. The new political realities in the United Romanian Principalities created an ultimately unbridgeable rift between the anti-unionist British Consul in Bucharest, Robert Colquhoun, and his erstwhile Romanian protégés. It was perhaps in recognition of the fact that he was now out of step with the new country that he was recalled from his post after twenty-four years in service and transferred to Egypt in 1858. In 1865 he retired after a distinguished career in diplomacy. Earl Russell accepted his resignation, but wrote to say that he had recommended to the Queen that he be granted the honour of Knight-Commander of the Order of the Bath. “I have the satisfaction of acquainting you that you leave office in possession of the respect and confidence of Her Majesty’s Government”, the Prime Minister wrote on 31 August 1865.45 Colquhoun retired to his estate at Fincastle (Perthshire), where he died in 1870.

42 Anastasie Iordache, Revoluţionarii Goleşti (Bucharest, 2002), 332. 43 See Part Two, p. 203. 44 For a complete list of their ministerial positions, see the Introduction to the present study, p. 12. 45 Fraser, The Chiefs of Colquhoun, 2: 244–5. 344 epilogue

Z It has become almost commonplace today to say that the revolutions of 1848 in Europe should not be judged on what they accomplished, but on what they promised, that they were “the turning point when history failed to turn” or that they marked the “end of romanticism”. While it is possibly true that their defeat led to a shattering of hopes and illusions among the European left, the events also marked a watershed in terms of the expectations it created. The increased efforts towards a widening of the franchise and the model of an active citizenry unafraid to challenge the state led to at least one important consequence: the comprehensive politicization of European societies.46 For all the contradictions and the controversial aspects of their post-exile careers, the generation of Rosetti and the Brătianus has to be credited with introducing this new political culture into Romania, a culture which encouraged political participation and the people’s right to confront their political class. It was to a large extent a lesson they owed to their mentor, Michelet, himself a victim of an intrusive, over-controlling state. His message to his Romanian disciples had been a liberal one: the individual had the civic right to reflect on and place checks on the power of the state, he had a right and a duty to “think politics over.”47 In what follows, I shall summarize a few of the themes which have emerged from the interactions of the texts used as sources in this account.

46 Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Dieter Langewiesche, “The European Revolution of 1848”, in Europe in 1848, ed. Dowe et al., 6. 47 Bénichou, Le Temps des prophètes, 42. THE USES OF THE PRESS

Communication was crucial in the Romanians forty-eighters’ life in 1848 and in exile. Letters from and to the families left behind, open letters to the press, postal services and couriers provided much-needed conduits of information and emotional support. Even picaresque episodes such as the colourful ‘Hippodrome affair’ of 1851 were built around a printing press and a printed manifesto.48 On 27 June 1848, when the Romanians met at the Field of Liberty in Bucharest to see their revolutionary banners blessed, the four horses draped in tri- coloured ribbons and carrying Henric Winterhalder’s printing-press must have been an arresting sight.49 It was also prophetic. Not only for the increasing powers of the press across Europe in the century, but also for the main connection between the Romanian soon-to-be émigrés and their transnational support networks: the power of the written word, whether in their intercepted private correspondence or in Românul, the Daily News and the Revue des Deux Mondes. The historian Nicolae Bălcescu was presumably speaking for an entire generation when he wrote in 1846 that “hope for the future civilization lies” not in the “spirit of conquest” as in Napoleon’s time, but in the “communication of ideas amongst nations, which is one of the benefits of commercial relations between peoples.”50 In 1848, in exile, and later in government and in opposition, the Romanian radicals made freedom of the press one of their main causes and mounted a spirited defence whenever it was threatened. In a recent study, Alex Drace-Francis has demonstrated the rather paradoxical centrality of print in the nation-building processes of what was a traditional society where, as late as 1899, rural illiteracy levels were situated around 85 per cent.51 The events of 1848 in Wallachia and the resilience of

48 See Part Two, p. 242 sqq. 49 See Part One, p. 81. 50 Review of Louis Aimé-Martin’s L’Education des mères de famille in Foaie pentru minte, inimă şi literatură, 4–5 (1846) reproduced in Antologia gîndirii româneşti, Secolele XV–XIX, ed. C. I. Gulian (Bucharest, 1967), Part I, 269. Foaie pentru minte was the supplement of Gazeta de Transilvania. See Part One of the present study, p. 74. 51 Such illiteracy rates place the Romanian Principalities in the same group as Egypt and Turkey rather than Central-European countries. Drace-Francis, The Making of Modern Romanian Culture, 41 sqq. 346 epilogue

Rosetti’s newspaper Românul show that communicating via the print media became as important in Romania as elsewhere in Europe. The forty-eighters found that “[e]diting a journal was considered at least as patriotic as leading the National Guard or acting as chief representatives of the Wallachians to the Sublime Porte: this was as much a ‘Revolution of the Intellectuals’ as any other in Europe that year.”52 There is evidence which shows that, when propaganda commissars carried copies of the paper or printed copies of governmental documents into the countryside in 1848, it was less the meaning of the texts that mattered as the mere sight of printed pages, which never failed to impress the peasants.53 Recognition by the state of the challenge to its authority from written communication was reflected in the surveillance, heavy censorship and other limitations imposed on the mail and the press in mid-nineteenth century, notably in France and Austria. In Britain attitudes to the print media evolved in the opposite direction: by mid-century, the repeal of the stamp duty and other ‘taxes on knowledge’ had created an expanded newspaper market and a widening readership, as reflected in the eighty-five million newspapers sold in 1851.54 The power of the press to actually shape public opinion and determine policy was a matter of intense debate in the mid-nineteenth-century, as historians of the press have shown.55 The specific weight of public opinion in foreign affairs is notoriously difficult to assess and often remains elusive. Yet, what ultimately matters is the importance that people themselves at the time attached to the press and to public communication in general. The Romanians lived in exile in Paris and London in a period widely seen as the heyday of newspaper influence and, as seen, they quickly grasped the opportunities offered by increased circulation and expanding readership. For a long time, exile made it impossible to put into practice Michelet’s suggestion that a generation of talkers should be replaced by men of action.56 The exiled men’s political activities essentially consisted in a war of words and what may appear as a futile

52 Ibid., 138. 53 Ibid., 139. 54 Hampton, Visions of the Press, 28. 55 For the situation in Victorian Britain, see, for example, Aled Jones, Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth-Century England (Ashgate, 1996), 87–97 and passim, as well as Hampton, Visions of the Press, esp. 26–39. 56 See Introduction, p. 9. the uses of the press 347 expenditure of energy and passion in texts, counter-texts and inter- texts. One may be tempted to speculate on whether all the lobbying and the pamphleteering in which the Romanian diaspora engaged in the 1850s did actually have an impact on the vital decisions negotiated at the Congress of Paris in 1856. However, this may be less important for understanding that generation of Romanian politicians than the fact that they were determined not to remain “inarticulate onlookers” to processes which affected the future of their nation.57 Exiled from a country in which they had no voice and inheritors of a system in which decision-making was the prerogative of Russia and the Otto- man Porte, they used the press in France and Britain in order to wage their battle from abroad. Their plight was echoed by the experience in exile of Quinet, Ledru-Rollin, and the other republicans who used the print media to oppose the Second Empire and Emperor Napoleon from afar.58 Before and at the time of the Congress, the Rosetti-Brătianu group managed to ‘hire’ some of the most brilliant pens in France, almost monopolising the French liberal, republican and left-wing press to channel their pro-union message. TheRevue des Deux Mondes, for example, which published Quinet’s Les Roumains in 1856, had a print- run of only around 12,000 in the mid-century, but its audience was the educated, Orléanist liberal intelligentsia and the paper’s authority was commensurate with this group’s power to influence opinion.59 Explaining Romania and the Romanians to this section of the French intellectuals was clearly regarded by the exiles as worth their while (and their money), which shows that fashioning public opinion via the written word was now seen as a politically efficient tool. The other opposition newspapers which offered support to the Romanians in the 1850s, the moderate republican Siècle and the radical Presse, had significant circulations, which ranged in 1857 between 30,000 and 40,000 copies daily. They were highly influential in endorsing the democratic, nationalistic and anti-clerical opinions which tied in with the Roma- nians’ nation-building propaganda at the time.60

57 Riker, “The Concert of Europe and Moldavia in 1857”, 229. 58 The exile “quits his country to flee repression – whether it is death or imprisonment – but also to gain freedom of expression and wage from abroad the battle against the regime that oppressed him [. . .].” Aprile, Le siècle des exilés, 8. 59 Charle, Le Siècle de la presse, 96, 107. 60 Irene Collins, The Government and the Newspaper Press in France, 1814–1881 (Oxford University Press, 1959), 139. 348 epilogue

In Britain, the Daily News, arguably one of the most independent of the dailies and constantly supportive of the Romanian cause, had daily sales of over 5,000 copies by the mid-1850s.61 The Wallachian radicals have sometimes come under attack for paying foreign journalists who wrote ‘friendly’ articles or placed material in the press – hence the term ‘hire’ used above – but they made no secret of this practice and their correspondence abounds in references to the actual sums collected for this purpose. Eyre Evans Crowe, for instance, was paid a significant sum of £40 out of a monthly propaganda budget of £60 for placing supportive articles in The Post in 1856.62 Information on the rates of pay of freelance journalists and correspondents in mid- Victorian Britain appears to be hard to come by,63 but the work was presumably precarious and, in any case, our own modern rules of professional journalistic conduct do not necessarily apply to that period.64 The sums paid serve to show that the exiles were under considerable pressure to secure the subscriptions and donations required for publicity, but we should not necessarily presume that this was a murky ‘cash for influence’ case. It is self-evident that the growing number and increasing circulation of newspapers contributed to the afore-mentioned politicization of society, broke down geographical and social boundaries and internationalized politics in an unprecedented way. The new speed in communication created a single European space of information which united West and East and helped internationalize issues, ideologies and movements.65 In spite of censorship, surveillance and the interception of mail, as shown in preceding chapters, the Romanian forty- eighters became adept at smuggling and disseminating information across great distances, from London and Paris to Bucharest, Habsburg Transylvania, Belgrade, Constantinople and the Middle East. The exiles’ main journalistic objectives were fourfold. Firstly, they felt that they had to publicize their own account of the events of 1848

61 This came second only to the Times, which dominated the market. Bob Clarke, From Grub Street to Fleet Street: an illustrated history of English newspapers to 1899 (Ashgate, 2004), 230. 62 Radu R. Florescu, “The Rumanian Principalities and the Origins of the Crimean War”, Slavonic and East European Review 43, 100 (Dec., 1964): 62 note 53. For the activities of Eyre Crowe in support of the Romanians, see Part Three, pp. 323–25. 63 This suspicion was confirmed to me by Professor Brian Maidment, a specialist in Victorian printed media. 64 Cf. the objections raised in Mihai Cojocariu, Partida Naţională, 233–6. 65 Haupt and Langewiesche, “The European Revolution of 1848”, 3. the uses of the press 349 and justify ‘their revolution’. They had to tiptoe uneasily around the issue of Ottoman suzerainty and the ultimate goal of unification, and they had to dispel West-European disquiet over their presumed ‘com- munistic’ or anarchistic intentions. As shown, social and land reform were gradually relinquished in favour of an emphasis on nation- and elite-building. Secondly, they needed to establish the correct ethnic affiliation of their nation, often mistakenly believed in the West to be Slavic. This was closely linked to the anti-tsarist press campaign which they supported and fed with inputs into the written work of Jules Michelet, Armand Lévy, Paul Bataillard, and David Urquhart, for example. Thirdly, they wanted to legitimize themselves as the government-in- waiting of the future Romania. They had a remarkably strong generational sense of mission from very early on. Addressing the Romanian students in Paris in November 1848, just as the forty-eighters embarked on their decade in exile, Dumitru Brătianu spoke about the need to build on their common awareness of being “the founders of Romania’s renaissance.”66 In the fourth place, especially during and after the Crimean War, they adroitly placed their political blueprint for the future Romania into the public domain. Ridding their country of Ottoman control, Russian protectorate and Austrian interference became the over-riding goal of their propaganda in the West. This involved campaigning and supporting an allied war against Russia in 1853–4 which collided with the peaceful internationalism of the Cobdenites and the Manchester School, yet produced, as shown, paradoxically positive results. After exile, in the new post-Crimean Romania, the liberal-radical group continued to defend the freedom of the press. In 1859, when the conservatives proposed a motion in favour of further restrictions on the press in the Wallachian Assembly of Deputies, Ion Brătianu objected, saying that one could not “treat a people as one would treat a schoolgirl whose innocent mind has to be shielded from reading this book or that book.”67 This position was vindicated in 1862 with Prince Cuza’s Law Concerning the Freedom of the Press.68

66 1848 la români, ed. Bodea, 1: 329. 67 Românul, 24 February 1859, reproduced in Ion C. Brătianu, Acte şi cuvîntări, ed. G. Marinescu, and C. Grecescu (Bucharest, 1938), 1, Part 1: 257–62. 68 Drace-Francis, The Making of Modern Romanian Culture, 116–7. THE ‘PEOPLE QUESTION’

In 1847 the East-Central Europeans attending Michelet’s lectures at the Collège de France heard their mentor’s uneasy reflections on the unhealthy divorce between the “privilégiés du loisir, du savoir” and “les hommes du travail”, between the intellectual elites and the workers.69 Around the same time, Rosetti described himself as the defender of the villagers and of the small artisans against the “ghosts of the feudal past.”70 Ledru-Rollin steered the French provisional government towards adopting universal suffrage in 1848. The Romanian provisional government of 1848 steered clear of universal suffrage, but prac- tised a type of plebiscitary and ritualistic politics which secured it wide popular support throughout the events of 1848–9 and even beyond. Moldo-Wallachian pamphlets at the time imported and disseminated French theories of the contractual nation and the ‘sovereignty of the people’, yet, as shown, in practice the electorate remained limited and universal suffrage was only adopted in 1918.71 The June Days in Paris and the aborted work of the Property Commission in Bucharest in August 1848 are only two examples of how the ‘people’ was ‘betrayed’ by its intellectual leaders in that crucial year of European history. The historian and radical forty-eighter Nicolae Bălcescu condemned the failure of the provisional government to deliver on its promise of making the Romanian serfs not only free men but also property-owners. “The revolution of 1848 was a revolution for the people, not a revolution by the people”, he wrote in 1851. The initially enthusiastic people who embraced the cause were subsequently betrayed by a “weak government” of “burghers and educated young men”.72 In spite of this, the level of popular support for the revolution was constantly high,

69 Cf. Part One, p. 47. 70 Ibid. 71 For comparison, Greece adopted universal male suffrage in 1844, France, Swit- zerland and Germany in 1848, and Romania, Italy, the UK and Poland in 1918. See Serge Noiret, “Electoral Systems” in Europe Since 1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of War and Reconstruction, ed. John Merriman and Jay Winter (Detroit, 2006), 2: 953–6. For Nicoale Bălcescu’s reflections on popular sovereignty, see Stanomir,Naşterea constituţiei, 223–30. 72 “Trecutul si prezentul”, Junimea română 1 (Paris, 1851), reproduced in Antologia gîndirii româneşti, ed. Gulian, 283–4. Cf. Durandin, Révolution, 144. the ‘people question’ 351 even though statistics are patchy and a great number of sources speak merely of “many” people, “crowds” and “significant numbers” of participants. Numbers of peasant delegates – three per village – arriving in the capital, Bucharest, ahead of the arrival of the Ottoman envoys in July 1848 ranged between “a few hundreds” and 12,000–15,000, according to widely disparate contemporary estimates.73 The tsarist commissioner Alexander Duhamel estimated in January 1849 that “the peasants . . . enthusiastically embraced the cause of the revolution; most probably, around ninety per cent of the population is now in sympathy with the artisans of the troubles and the disorders.”74 Other witnesses speak of a crowd of some 40,000 people who reinstated the provisional government after the Odobescu-Solomon anti-revolutionary conspiracy.75 How could such support be explained? Did printed and spoken propaganda work better in Bucharest than in Paris? Or were the crowds in Wallachia more supine and easier to manipulate? Was the failure of the Property Commission due to lack of political will or to the pressures of Russian and Ottoman military intervention? Those were days of heady enthusiasm, and the peasant delegates arrived in the capital city with tri-coloured banners and talking of the “constitution.” Yet issues of franchise as well as of peasant dues and land ownership remained unsolved in the longer term, even after the former exiles had come to power. Although, as seen, peasants had their own representatives in the consultative assemblies of 1857, the Paris Convention of 19 August 1858 imposed a heavily restricted franchise. Only “a few thousand persons, mainly large landowners and the upper middle class”, had the right to vote.76 The Constitution of 1866 was also based on income and as a result, only some 20,000 individual out of 5 million could vote, a restrictive system which could not fail to have a negative impact on land legislation.77 The land law of 1864, which made peasants legal owners of their lands, failed to pre-empt the fragmentation of plots through inheritance and the gradual deteri-

73 Apostol Stan, Revoluţia de la 1848 în Ţara Românească: boieri şi ţărani (Bucha- rest, 1998), 109, 137–39. 74 Revoluţia de la 1848 în Ţările Române: documente inedite din arhivele ruseşti, ed. Ion Varta (Chişinău, 1998), 478, quoted in Marian Stroia, Între Levant şi Europa modernă: impact extern şi mentalitate tradiţională în spaţiul românesc (Bucharest, 2006), 194. 75 Berindei, Revoluţia română, 169. Cf. Part One of the present study, p. 82. 76 Hitchins, The Romanians, 1774–1855, 293. 77 Paul E. Michelson, “Romanian Liberalism, 1800–1947: definition, periodization and a research agenda”, Xenopoliana 13, 1–4 (2005): 10. See note 91 below. 352 epilogue oration of peasant lives. In addition, the inadequacy of the agricultural contracts of 1866–1872 was blamed for establishing a system often described as “neo-serfdom.”78 The violent peasant uprising of 1907 was going to be the culmination of peasant unrest in nineteenth-century Romania.

78 For further details see Henry L. Roberts, Rumania: political problems of an agrarian state (Hamden, Connecticut, 1969), esp. 8–21. THE USES OF EXILE

In his correspondence, Rosetti often amuses himself with classical allu- sions to his experience of exile: he becomes Ulysses to Marie’s Calypso and to Ion Brătianu’s Telemachus in letters to Marie.79 Rosetti’s and his peers’ letters also abound in moments of despair, mourning for premature deaths caused by exile and indignation over the inevitable political divisions and squabbles of the diaspora. However, their texts remain short and pragmatic, the emotional effusions curbed and the verbal interchanges channelled towards organizational and strategic matters rather than towards theorizing or lamenting exile. The memoirs, life narratives and fiction of the revolution of 1848 in Romania have not yet formed the object of a dedicated study similar to Sylvie Aprile’s study of the literature of exile in Second Empire France.80 Aprile found out that, in the life narratives of the French proscrits, exile was often presented, not surprisingly, as a form of social death, a space of absence, stillness, suspension of action and confusion of identities. Her findings suggest that the exiled French republicans, whether in the Channel Islands, Switzerland, Belgium or Britain, tended to congregate with groups of co-nationals and that an ‘internationalism of exile’ did not exist. Without going into a detailed comparison of the two considerably different types of exile (the Wal- lachian exile of 1848 vs. the French proscrits of 1852), it would appear that, in spite of similar economic pressures and social isolation, the Wallachians placed a greater emphasis on the transnational solidarities afforded by cosmopolitan Paris, and, to a lesser extent for their group, by London. Creating and maintaining transnational networks appear as some of the central concerns of these texts, from which exile often emerges as a cohesive force: while it separated individuals from their countries, it also created new forms of internationalist

79 Letters dated 25 and 26 November 1853 in C. A. Rosetti to M. Rosetti 1: 63–4. 80 Aprile, Le siècle des exilés, esp. Ch. 9: “Politiques de l’exil”, 179–206. Such a study would have to include, for example, Souvenirs et impressions d’un proscrit, par J. Héli- ade Radulesco (Paris: Impr. de Prève, 1850), as well as the partly published memoirs of Nicolae Pleşoianu and A. Christofi. Undoubtedly, the archives hold more such ms. texts. See Part One, p. 76, note 175. For Transylvania, see Nicolae Bocşan and Rudolf Gräf, eds., Revoluţia de la 1848 în Munţii Apuseni: memorialistică (Cluj, 2003). 354 epilogue solidarity which brought together people as diverse as the Greek-born Sami Pasha of Vidin, Michelet, Quinet, the Romanians Brătianu and Rosetti, the Guernsey-born Marie Rosetti, Mazzini, Arnold Ruge and lesser known republicans such as Ange Pechméja. The support they offered each other was often of a very practical nature and may have involved no more than humble tasks such as circulating money and letters, providing accommodation and food, or dropping names, but such support was crucial. Exilic solidarities and the growth of print culture often came together. There are many examples in the preceding chapters which show how the printed word linked centres of exile such as Jersey, London, Brus- sels, Veytaux, Geneva, Bursa and Kütahya, turning them into a “common home for the European left.”81 This somewhat contradicts some of the conclusions of Sylvie Aprile who, in the afore-mentioned study, argued that there was significant distrust between the East-Central European and French diasporas in mid-nineteenth-century Europe and that strictly national agendas collided with the ideal of left-wing, republican and revolutionary internationalism.82 Even though macro- historical projects such as a pan-European insurrection, a “répub- lique universelle” and the Saint-Simonian “United States of Europe” remained theoretical, there were pockets of transnational resistance to authoritarian states which could be quite effective on a smaller scale, as the Romanian case study outlined in this narrative has suggested. The shared experience of exile made the more reflective of this cosmopolitan group realize that individual and national identities are fluctuating entities which can be given or constructed, assumed or relinquished, inverted or reinforced. When he left France for a voluntary exile which lasted eighteen years, Quinet travelled with a false passport bearing an assumed Romanian name, “Groubesko”, and in the company of an old Romanian friend of his wife’s.83 “We are all Romanians”, he seemed to say, all united in this common experience of being thrown beyond one’s national borders and having to invent a new self. The correspondence between Jules Michelet and Dumitru Brătianu and the shared life in Nantes of the Rosettis and the Michelets also led to a realization on both sides that the helpers could turn overnight into social pariahs and that, instead of a ‘French-

81 Victor Hugo to Alexander Herzen, July 1855, in Durandin, Révolution, 258. 82 Aprile, Le siècle des exilés, 170–4. 83 Durandin, Révolution, 209. the uses of exile 355 ness’ or a ‘Romanian-ness’ which could be taken away randomly by a princely decree, there was a supra-national identity available to the exile as a space of reflection on what it means to be a ‘European’, a man of the ‘left’ or a ‘republican’. Like Quinet and Hugo, when offered a chance to return to his homeland, Rosetti opted for voluntary exile rather than for compromise with a corrupt regime. In a text entitled “Russia”, written in France in 1853, he encouraged those who shared that refusal: “Tyranny, spoliations, confiscations, prisons, exiles, assassinations, we are stronger than all of these!”84 There was dignity and strength in exile, as shown in the many testimonies of the French proscrits who refused offers of pardon and amnesties. Exile could be a positive educational, existential and political experience, claimed Victor Hugo: “proscription strengthens the ideas, cleanses the parties and aggrandizes the men. Let us then rejoice in our pain, for we are the soldiers of progress and the servants of an idea.”85 The East-Central European exiles in Paris and London were mainly the recipients of support from sympathetic individuals and groups, but these exchanges could work both ways. As shown, mid-nineteenth- century ‘Russophobic’ opinion in Western Europe was significantly strengthened by the exiles from the ‘East’. Trans-national contacts could also have paradoxical side effects. In Britain, for example, the presence of continental refugees and especially the impact of the very popular Hungarian leader, Lajos Kossuth (starting with his highly publicized visit in 1851), led to a shift in radical and Chartist attitudes to European revolutionary movements and to foreign affairs in general. A link was formed in the thinking of many between the defence of local government and domestic freedom(s) on the one hand, and support for democratic movements abroad on the other. But while this endorsed British working-class and left-wing sympathy for the continental freedom-fighters and encouraged greater awareness of foreign affairs, it also paradoxically strengthened the case for reform rather than revolution at home. Gregory Claeys has argued that Mazzini’s and

84 Antologia gîndirii româneşti, ed. Gulian, Part I, 422. The text was published in Rosetti’s newspaper Republica Română, no. 2 of 1853. See Rosetti’s request for that issue of the paper to be smuggled into Wallachia in Part Two of the present study, p. 257. 85 Aprile, Le siècle des exilés, 152. 356 epilogue

Kossuth’s anti-socialist views tempered the radicalism of the Chartists, thus helping “the cause of stability and consensus in Britain.”86 The Moldo-Wallachians became quite adept at building close-knit pressure groups in European exile by cultivating every form of sociability available to them. The Collège de France is one example, and so is the Radical Club in London, which in 1838 included Mazzini, Thomas Milner Gibson, Thomas Perronet Thompson and the philo- Romanian Elias Regnault among its members.87 As shown, they were all connected to the Romanian cause. Mazzini’s European Democratic Committee may appear like a cell of hot-headed guerrilla leaders and spies, but it also provided a neutral space where ‘enemy’ groups such as the Romanians and the Hungarians could air their grievances. Such national and pan-European solidarity networks were based on sub- groups connected via close family, liberal, republican and Masonic ties which have been under-studied in the historiography and often remain obscure. Their members tried everything from insurrection and secret society plots, to open diplomacy and lobbying, and ended up creating a “form of international revolutionary solidarity”,88 which is perhaps their most important legacy.

86 Gregory Claeys, “Mazzini, Kossuth, and British Radicalism, 1848–1854”, Journal of British Studies 28 (July 1989): 225–61. 87 D. J. Rowe, ed., “The Radical Club, and other papers”, inLondon Radicalism 1830– 1843: A selection of the papers of Francis Place (1970), 71. URL: http://www.britishistory. ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=39491 (Date accessed: 27 September 2010). 88 Durandin, Révolution, 128. LIBERALISM IN ROMANIA

In 1848–49, Rosetti, the Brătianu brothers, the Golescus, and their associates did not use the word ‘liberal’ to define their political orientation.89 Neither did they have a crystallized doctrine or polished political platforms. TheIslaz Proclamation, an over-ambitious radical- liberal program, was, as seen, soon engulfed and overtaken by events, surviving as a constitutional blueprint for better, quieter times. ‘Forty- eightism’ (paşoptism), the closest the radicals came to an ideology in the 1840s, was a mixed, experimental bag of ideas on constitutionalism, representation and sovereignty in which its promoters were searching for the political repertoire of a new age.90 As seen, exile and marginalisation led them to abandon reflection on the pragmatics of government and law and to concentrate on national propaganda and elite-building. For a decade they could bask in their self-assumed role of golden revolutionary youth grooming itself for power in the future Romania. As shown, many of the intra-group solidarities established by the Moldo-Wallachians in exile were negatively affected by political realities at home once the former exiles assumed power. However, the Wallachian radicals proved enormously resilient and dominated Romanian political life throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Their reputation in Communist times was unanimously positive: it was the time when streets in Bucharest received the names of Rosetti, Quinet and Michelet. A critical approach to Romanian liberalism emerged after 1989 and is still to a significant extent work in progress.91 In 2005, an important issue of Xenopoliana, the journal of the “A. D. Xenopol” Academic Foundation in Iaşi, launched a well-argued and polemical appeal for

89 The British Consul Robert Colquhoun had, however, referred to them as ‘liberals’ in one of his dispatches to the Foreign Office. See Part One, 70. 90 For an overview of ‘forty-eightism’, see Gîndirea românească în epoca paşoptistă (1830–1860), ed. Paul Cornea and Mihai Zamfir (Bucharest, 1968–1969), 1, “Studiu introductiv”. 91 Recent contributions include: Apostol Stan and Mircea Iosa, Liberalismul politic în România de la origini până la 1918 (Bucharest, 1996) and Şerban Rădulescu-Zoner, ed., Istoria Partidului Naţional Liberal (Bucharest, 2000). 358 epilogue a wide-ranging research project on liberalism and the liberals.92 There are many conundrums to solve. Did they create the institutions of a modern democracy or an authoritarian regime backed by a party oligarchy?93 Did they oppose universal suffrage because they believed the masses were not ready for it, or because they feared that Prince Cuza might manipulate it to install an authoritarian, personal regime? Did they continue to be the champions of the ‘people’, as they claimed in 1848, or did they succumb to one of the essential contradictions of liberalism, that between individual ‘freedom’ and mass ‘democracy’? What was the Liberals’ role in blocking the creation of trade unions and in disenfranchising the peasants in the 1866 Constitution? How did their liberalism tie in with their protectionist economic projects which ultimately retarded growth, or with the intrusive state which “created abundant new opportunities for corruption and governmental misdeeds”?94 Why did the erstwhile friends of Rosenthal and Win- terhalder and the emancipators of Romania’s Jewish population in 1848 promote anti-Jewish legislation in the 1860s?

92 Xenopoliana – Buletinul Fundaţiei Academice “A. D. Xenopol” (Iaşi) 13, 1–4 (2005), a special issue entitled “Liberalismul românesc: tendinţe, structuri, persona- lităţi”, ed. Liviu Brătescu and Ovidiu Buruiană. The issue includes an English-language bibliographic and research summary in the afore-mentioned essay by Michelson, “Romanian Liberalism, 1800–1947”, 3–19, alongside important Romanian-language contributions. 93 Daniel Barbu and Cristian Preda, “Building the State from the Roof Down”, in Liberty and the Search for Identity: liberal nationalisms and the legacy of empires, ed. Ivàn Zoltán Dénes (Budapest, 2006), 372, 375. 94 Michelson, Conflict and Crisis, 111. CONCLUSIONS

Increasing newspaper print-runs, intrepid couriers, stereotype printing and even the introduction of the telegraph or the creation of the Reuters agency in 1851 would probably not have been as effective as they were in the Romanians’ ten-year exile without one essential, but largely imponderable dimension: the solidarity networks in which they became embedded. The intense Rosetti frequently glossed in his diary over the idea that friendship and love were weapons against the arbitrariness of political power, the discontents of modern life and, ultimately, against death.95 Marital, social, republican, radical, anarchist or Masonic, it was friendship and companionship which fed the survival mechanisms of Rosetti and his fellow-exiles during a crucial decade of political repression. It was a sense of generational, moral and intellectual solidarity that united individuals as diverse as the French republicans, the Italian anarchists, the British radicals, and the East-Central European liberals of mid-nineteenth century Europe. Alfred Dumesnil recognized the power of this connection when he wrote to Ion Brătianu in July 1852, assuring him that he continued to work for the “Romanian cause”. The least he could do was, he wrote, to “leave behind a monument to our friendship, which is going to tell our children how much we have loved each other and how sincerely we have done so. This is all we have got, but it will haunt the future.”96 It is this sense of generational mission and of the small, individual life playing itself out on history’s big arena that this narrative has attempted to capture. This is very much in the spirit of Jules Michelet’s own “intimate method” which highlighted individual actors’ representations of events as ‘mirrors of the age’. “Tacit saw only himself in Rome, but it was the real Rome”, he wrote in his diary on 27 October 1834.97 In other words, what an English radical or Char- tist from Manchester thought of the Romanian Principalities in the 1850s, or what the Romanians themselves thought about the Russian

95 Entry for 9 April 1846, in Rosetti, Diary, 133, and passim. 96 Letter from Alfred Dumesnil to Dumitru Bratiano, 10 July 1852, in Michelet, Correspondance, ed. Le Guillou, 7: 124. 97 Quoted in Viallaneix, “Postface”, Cours au Collège de France, 2: 721. Cf. also my Introduction, p. 13. 360 conclusions or Austrian ‘Eastern’ policies or about Magyar hegemony can say as much about their age as diplomatic quid pro quos or ideological con- structs. If historical and political biography needs to be rehabilitated, as Lucy Riall has argued recently, it will have to be on the basis of a recognition that it is legitimate to seek historical ‘truths’ by juxtapos- ing “the life lived with the life imagined”.98 The personal texts used in this account reflect the ways in which exile and contact with France and Britain contributed to the self-fashioning of the forty-eighters into a liberal elite and a government-in-waiting. They foreground the reflections, emotions and prejudices of Romania’s first generation of Liberal politicians as young men in a hurry, forced to choose between multiple nation-building projects and “multiple selves”99 under the pressure of events. There were choices to be made between the initial idealism of the socially inclusive Proclamation of Islaz (1848) and a pared-down project which sacrificed the social to the political. Both in exile and after 1857, other sacrifices were made: Michelet’s lessons on the union of workers and students, the vision of a class-less society, the land reform, an extended suffrage, the ‘social republic’, all were jettisoned temporarily as so much ballast in the heady flight towards national union and freedom from foreign domination. These issues all came back with a vengeance when the former exiles assumed political power, and some of the less savoury political choices they made then often altered their youthful solidarities. The women in the Romanian-French ‘circle of friends’ were sensitive to the portent of major, if still vague, political upheavals in the latter part of the nineteenth century. “No-one can know the future”, Marie Rosetti wrote to Adèle Dumesnil in September 1850, “but I have a sweet vision that in the future our destinies will be further inter- twined, that the great events which are about to bring joy to the world in general, will also bring joy into our small, individual lives; your joys and mine will come from the same source.”100 My group portrait of the forty-eighters as young men has captured them in this brief moment of romantic solidarity and faith and as such it may be blamed for its occasional lapses into involuntary ‘hero worship’. The word ‘heroic’

98 Lucy Riall, “The Shallow End of History? The Substance and Future of Political Biography,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 40, 3 (Winter 2010): 394. I am grateful to Alex Drace-Francis for bringing this article to my attention. 99 Ibid., 381. 100 Marie Rosetti to Adèle Dumesnil, Paris, 18 September 1850, in Documente inedite, ed. Bucur, 73. (the entire letter is on pp. 73–4). conclusions 361 seems appropriate in more ways than one. Irrespective of the power struggles and intrigues of that fateful decade, most of the members of the liberal group, moderates and radicals alike, shared an expectation that the heroic image of the Romanian past which they had disseminated in the Western media deserved a no less heroic future. Living in the age of the modern press, they quickly grasped the fact that the construction of this future depended to a great extent on the ways in which they handled ‘communication’: with their own party and peers, with the opposition and with the emerging civil society. Their exilic interactions with the French and British press and with an often hostile public opinion confirmed their already entrenched belief that using the press was central to modern political practices. One can read their handling of the press in two ways: either as an expression of their attachment to the core liberal values of freedom of speech and opinion or, more negatively, as their readiness to manipulate the public discourse and create a “culture of discourse” for its own sake, removed from the institutional and legal realities of the political nation. Future research will undoubtedly chart their journey from “soldiers of progress” to “professionals of modernization.”101

101 Victor Hugo, cited on p. 355 above, and Barbu, “Hainele cele noi ale statului”, 57.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Unpublished Documents

Arhivele Naţionale (The Romanian National Archives), Bucharest Fonds Bataillard, Dossier 5/173; Fonds Brătianu, Inv. (Pressmark) 1286, Dossiers 210, 212; Dossier 596: Parquet de la Cour Impériale de Paris, Memoir to the Garde des Sceaux, 30 June 1856; Ministère de la Justice, Direction des Affaires Criminelles et des Grâces, 2e Bureau, Secrétariat Général, Registre S. 56 Nr. 3676, 20 June 1856; Dossier 596, Memo No. 3676 s. 56 of the Ministère de la Justice, Direction Criminelle, 2e Bureau

The National Archives, London (PRO/FO: Public Record Office, Foreign Office files) FO 78 (Turkey, the Principalities): FO 78/697: Wallachia and Moldavia: Consul General Colquhoun, Consuls Gardner, Cunningham, Consular, 1847 FO 78/742: Wallachia: Consul General Colquhoun, Diplomatic, Drafts, 1848 Jan.– Aug. FO 78/743: Wallachia: Consul General Colquhoun, Diplomatic, Drafts, 1848 Sept.– Dec. FO 78/945: Wallachia: Mr. Colquhoun and Mr. Grant, Diplomatic, 1853 Oct.–Dec. FO 78/1010: Wallachia: Mr. Colquhoun and Mr. Grant, Diplomatic, 1854 Jan.–Sept. FO 78/1093: Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, 1855 Dec. 1–20. FO 78/1258: From Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, 1857 March 14–25. FO 198/12. General Report of the European Commission in the Principalities. FO 881/296, Memorandum of Count Walewski to Lord Palmerston, 29 October 1851.

Biblioteca Academiei Române (B.A.R., the Library of the Romanian Academy), Manuscripts Section Ms. no. 61/1972: A. Rosetti, ms. notes Fonds C. A. Rosetti: s 11(1–6)/LXIII s 37/LXIII. Fonds I. C. Brătianu, s 36(1–20)/CCCLIX.

Biblioteca Naţională (The National Library, Bucharest, Romania) St. Georges Collection: Packet CCVI, Dossier 1, Diverse (Miscellanea) Dossier 7, I, Paris 1842–48; Packet CCVI, Dossier 4: Robert Colquhoun, Diary, ms. Archive Dinu V. Rosetti, Packet XLIII, Dossier 5 Packet CCCLXX, Dossier 10 Packet CCCLXXI, Dossier 13. 364 bibliography

II. Published Documents

A l’Assemblée Législative de la République Française, 4 Juin 1849, Les membres du comité démocratique Roumain de Paris. Paris: E. Thunot imprimeur, 1849. Anul 1848 în Principatele române. Acte şi documente publicate cu ajutorul Comitetului pentru rădicarea monumentului lui Ion C. Brătianu. 6 vols. Bucharest: 1902–1910. Arhivele Naţionale ale României. Revoluţia română de la 1848 în context European. Bucharest, 1998. Catalogue de livres français qui se donnent en lecture à la librairie de C. A. Rosetti & Winterhalder. Bucharest, 1846. Compte rendu des séances de l’Assemblée Nationale, 7, 1 January to 10 February 1849. Paris, 1849. Documente privind unirea Principatelor, 5 vols. (vols. 4–5 were not published): Vol. 1: Documente interne (1854–1857), edited by Dan Berindei. Bucharest: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România, 1961. Vol. 2: Rapoartele consulatului Austriei din Iaşi (1856–1859), edited by Dan Berin- dei. Bucharest: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România, 1959. Vol. 3: Corespondenţă politică (1855–1859), edited by Cornelia Bodea. Bucharest: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România, 1963. Vol. 6: Corespondenţă diplomatică franceză (1856–1859), edited by Grigore Chiriţă, Valentina Costake, and Emilia Poştăriţă. Bucharest: Direcţia Generală a Arhivelor Statului, 1980. Vol. 7: Corespondenţă diplomatică engleză (1856–1859) edited by Valentina Costake, Beatrice Marinescu and Valeriu Stan. Bucharest: Direcţia generală a Arhivelor Statului, 1984. Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series, vols. 97, 150. Lettre à Messieurs les Rédacteurs en chef de tous les journaux de la presse parisienne, . . ., par un membre du gouvernement provisoire de la principauté de Valachie en juin 1848. Paris: Soye, 1850, 1851. Lui I. C. Brătianu 1821–1921, Din scrierile şi cuvântările lui I. C. Brătianu: Lupta pentru redeşteptarea naţională. Pagini de istorie contemporană, I, 1821–1866, Bucha- rest: Imprimeriile Independenţa, 1921. Adăniloaie, N. and Dan Berindei, eds. Revoluţia de la 1848 în Ţările Române: Culegere de studii. Bucharest: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România, 1974. Barbu, Paul-Emanoil, ed. Acţiuni sociale şi politice româneşti în anii 1853–1854: documente. Bucharest: Editura Academiei Române, 2003. Bălintescu, Alexandru and Horia Nestorescu-Bălceşti, eds. Arhiva Generalului Magheru: Catalog. Rîmnicu Vîlcea: Oficiul judeţean pentru patrimoniul cultural naţional, 1989. Blanc, Louis. 1848. Historical Revelations, inscribed to Lord Normanby. London: Chap- man and Hall, 1858. Bocşan, Nicolae and Rudolf Gräf, eds. Revoluţia de la 1848 în Munţii Apuseni: memorialistică. Cluj: Presa Universitară Clujeană, 2003. Bodea, Cornelia, ed. 1848 la români: o istorie în date şi mărturii, 3 vols. Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedică, 1982–1998. —— ed. Faţa secretă a mişcării paşoptiste române: unitatea naţională. Bucharest: Edi- tura Academiei Române/Editura Nestor, 2004. Bratiano, D. Documents Concerning the Question of the Danubian Principalities dedicated to the English Parliament by D. Bratiano . . . London, 1849. Brătianu, Ion. “Despre rolul Românilor din Principate în războiul actual” (1854) in Marinescu, G. and C. Grecescu, eds. Ion C. Brătianu, Acte şi cuvântări, 1, Partea 1 (Iunie 1848–Decemvrie 1859). Bucharest: Cartea Românească, 1938, 57–93. Brătianu, Vintilă I. C., C. Banu and G. D. Creangă, eds. Din scrierile şi cuvîntările lui Ion C. Brătianu, 1821–1891, Partea I: 1848–1868. Bucharest: Inst. de arte grafice “Carl GÖbl”, 1903. bibliography 365

Bucur, Marin, ed. Documente inedite din arhivele franceze privitoare la români în secolul al XIX-lea. Bucharest: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România, 1969. —— ed. Jules Michelet şi revoluţionarii români în documente şi scrisori de epocă (1846– 1874). Cluj Napoca: Editura Dacia, 1982. Buşă, Daniela, ed. Călători străini despre Ţările Române în secolul al XIX-lea, new series, 5 (1847–1851). Bucharest: Editura Academiei Române, 2009. Cantemir, Dimitrie, Demetrii Cantemirii Principis Moldaviae Descriptio Antiqui et Hodierni Status Moldaviae, bilingual Latin-Romanian modern edition by Dan Sluşanschi. Bucharest: Institutul Cultural Român, 2006. Cornea, Paul and Elena Piru, eds. Documente şi manuscrise literare, 2 vols. Bucharest: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România, 1969. Cour d’Assises de la Seine, Complots dits de l’Hippodrome et de l’Opéra-Comique, Novembre 1853. Cretzianu, Al, ed. Din arhiva lui Dumitru Brătianu: acte şi scrisori din perioada 1840– 1870, 2 vols. Bucharest: Imprimeriile independenţa, 1933–1934. Crowe, Joseph Archer. Reminiscences of Thirty-Five Years of My Life . . ., London: John Murray, 1895. Dogaru, Maria and Apostol Stan, eds. Documente privind revoluţia din 1848 în ţările române: B. Ţara Românească, 12 martie 1848–21 aprilie 1850. Bucharest: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România, 1983. Gallois, Etienne, ed. Jules Michelet. Notes recueillies à son Cours au Collège de France en 1838–39. Paris: Librairie Académique, Paris, 1877. Ghica, Ion. Scrisori către Vasile Alecsandri. Bucharest: Editura Fundaţiei Culturale Române, 1997. (first published 1884) —— Amintiri din pribegia după 1848: noue scrisori către V. Alecsandri. Bucharest: Editura Librariei Socecu & Comp., 1889. Girardin, Saint-Marc. Souvenirs de voyages et d’études. 2 vols. Paris: Amyot, 1852. Gulian, C. I. Acad., ed. Antologia gîndirii româneşti, Secolele XV–XIX, Partea I. Bucha- rest: Editura Politică, 1967. Hurmuzaki, Eudoxiu de, Baron. Documente privitoare la istoria românilor culese de . . . 22 vols., Bucharest, 1876–1943; Supplement I, 6 vols., Bucharest, 1886–95; Supple- ment II, 3 vols., Bucharest, 1893–1900; New series, 4 vols., Bucharest: 1959–74. (Hurmuzaki Collection) Layard, Sir Henry A. Autobiography and Letters from his childhood until his appointment as H. M. Ambassador at Madrid, edited by Sir Arthur Otway, 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1903. Lévy, Armand. La Russie sur le Danube. Paris: G. Sandré, 1854. Littérature roumaine: Les Doïnas, poésies moldaves de V. Alecsandri. Traduites par J. E. Voïnesco. Précedées d’une introduction par M. Georges Bell et augmentées de trois nouvelles pièces et de deux morceaux en prose. 2nd ed. Paris: Joël Cherbuliez, editeur, 1855. Messieurs les Cosaques: Relation charivarique, comique et surtout véridique des hauts faits des Russes en Orient, par MM. Taxile Delord, Clément Carraguel et Louis Huart (100 vignettes par Cham.), 2 vols. Paris: V. Lecou Editeur, 1854–1855. Michelet, Jules. L’Histoire Universelle. Hachette, Paris, 1834. —— Du Prêtre, de la femme, de la famille. Paris, 1845, 2nd ed. —— L’Etudiant: Cours de 1847–1848, 2nd ed. Paris: Calman Lévy, Editeur, 1877. —— Journal, edited by Paul Viallaneix, 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. —— Légendes démocratiques du nord: “Madame Rosetti”, edited by Michel Cadot. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968. (A more recent edition was published as Jules Michelet, Les Principautés Danubiennes, Editions Kryos, Paris, 2008) —— Bible de l’Humanité: Une année au Collège de France, in vol. 1 of Oeuvres com- plètes, edited by Paul Viallaneix, 14 vols. Paris: Flammarion, 1971–1987. —— Correspondance générale, edited by Louis Le Guillou, 12 vols. Paris: Editions Honoré Champion, 1994–2001. 366 bibliography

—— Cours au Collège de France, edited by Paul Viallaneix, 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1995. Müller, Max. Suggestions for the Assistance of Officers in learning the Languages of the Seat of War in the East. London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1854. Nuţu, Constantin and Maria Totu, eds. Culegere de texte privind istoria modernă a României (1848–1878). Bucharest: University of Bucharest, 1978. Pascu, Ştefan and Victor Cheresteşiu, eds. Revoluţia de la 1848–1849 din Transilvania. Bucharest: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România, 8 vols., 1977–2007. Quinet, Edgar. La République: Discours au Collège de France. Paris, 1848. Richards, E. F., ed. Mazzini’s Letters to an English Family, 1855–1860, 2 vols. New York, London: John Lane, 1922. Rollo, Ogden, ed. The Life and Letters of E. L. Godkin, 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1907. Rosetti, C. A., Jurnalul meu, edited by Marin Bucur. Cluj-Napoca: Editura Dacia, 1974. —— Corespondenţă: documente literare, edited by Marin Bucur. Bucharest: Minerva, 1980. C. A. Rosetti către Maria Rosetti: corespondenţă, 2 vols. (1846–1871), edited by Marin Bucur. Bucharest: Editura Minerva, 1988–1998. Sturdza, Dimitrie A. and C. Colescu-Vartic, eds. Acte şi documente relative la istoria renaşterei României. 11 vols. Bucharest: Göbl, 1889–1909. Ubicini, Jean Abdolonyme. Mémoire justificatif de la révolution roumaine de 11/23 juin 1848, par les membres du gouvernment provisoire et délégués de l’émigration valaque, au nom du people. Paris: Imprimerie de Cosson, 1849. —— Provinces d’origine roumaine: Valachie, Moldavie, Bukovine, Transylvanie, Bessar- abie, in the series L’Univers pittoresque: Histoire et description de tous les peuples, de leur religion, moeurs, coutumes, industries, etc. Paris: Firmin Didot frères, 1856. Ulbach, Louis. “C.- A. Rosetti.” Revue politique et littéraire 2 (11 July 1885): 46–54. Vaillant, J. A. La Romanie; ou, Histoire, langue, littérature, orographie, statistique, des peoples de la langue d’or, ardaliens, vallaques et moldaves, résumés sous le nom de Romans, 3 vols. Paris, 1844. Varta, Ion, ed. Revoluţia de la 1848 în Ţările Române: Documente inedite din arhivele ruseşti. Chişinău: Editura ARC, 1998. Vitcu, Dumitru and Gabriel Bădărău, eds. Regulamentul Organic al Moldovei. Iaşi: Junimea, 2004 (text and introductory study). Vizetelly, Ernest Alfred. My Days of Adventure: the fall of France (1870–71). London: Chatto and Windus, 1914.

III. Secondary Sources

***, C. A. Rosetti ca tipograf. Omagiu din partea Institutului de Arte Grafice ‘Carol Göbl’,. . ., cu ocasiunea desvelirii monumentului seu în dziua de 20 Aprilie 1903 (Bucharest, 1903). Lui C. A. Rosetti (1816–1916) la o sută de ani de la naşterea sa. Volum comemorativ închinat de “Democraţia”, Revista cercului de studii PNL, June 1916, 3rd ed. Bucharest, June 1916. Annuaire du Collège de France 1981–82. Paris, 1982. Maintien de l’ordre et polices en France et en Europe au XIXe siècle, published by the Société d’Histoire de la Révolution de 1848 et des Révolutions du XIXe siècle. Paris, 1987. Achim, Viorel. The Roma in Romanian History. Budapest: Central European Univer- sity Press, 2004. Translated from the Romanian by Richard Davies. (First published as Ţiganii în istoria României. Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedică, 1998). bibliography 367

Adamovsky, Ezequiel. Euro-Orientalism: liberal ideology and the image of Russia in France (c. 1740–1880). Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006. Adanir, Fikret. “Turkey’s Entry into the Concert of Europe.” European Review 13, 3 (2005): 395–417. Anceau, Eric. Napoléon III: un Saint-Simon à cheval. Paris: Tallandier, 2008. Aprile, Sylvie, Le siècle des exilés: bannis et proscrits de 1789 à la Commune. Paris: CNRS Editions, 2010. Aricescu, C. D. ed. Capii revoluţiunii române dela 1848 judecaţi prin propriele lor acte, 1, Broşura 1. Bucharest: Typographia Stephan Rassidescu, 1866. Barbu, Daniel and Cristian Preda. “Building the State from the Roof Down.” In Liberty and the Search for Identity: Liberal Nationalisms and the Legacy of Empires, edited by Ivàn Zoltán Dénes. Budapest: Central European University, 2006, 367–97. Bălăceanu, Ion. Amintiri politice şi diplomatice 1848–1903, edited by Georgeta Filitti. Bucharest: Editura Cavaliotti, 2002. (translated from the French) Bălcescu, Nicolae, Opere, 4 vols., edited by G. Zane and E. Zane. Bucharest: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste Române, 1974–1990. Béllanger, Claude, Jacques Godechot, Pierre Guiral and Fernand Terrou, eds. Histoire générale de la presse française. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969. Béllanger, Stanislas. “Les Principautés Danubiennes.” Revue du XIXe siècle 1, 1 (avril– oct. 1854): 336–345. Ben-Amos, Avner. Funerals, Politics and Memory in Modern France, 1789–1996. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Bénichou, Paul. Le Temps des prophètes: Doctrines de l’age romantique. Paris: Gal- limard, 1977. Berend, Iván T. History Derailed: Central and Eastern Europe in the long nineteenth century. Berkeley, London: University of California Press, 2003. Berindei, Dan. Diplomaţia românească modernă. Bucharest: Editura Albatros, 1995. —— Revoluţia română din 1848–1849: Consideraţii şi reflecţii. Cluj-Napoca: Fundaţia culturală română/Centrul de studii transilvane, 1997. Berindei, Dan, Grigore Ploeşteanu and Mihai Sorin Rădulescu. “La violence et les Roumains aux XIXe et XXe siècles.” Revue roumaine d’histoire 39, 1–4 (2000): 169–87. Billy, George J. Palmerston’s Foreign Policy: 1848. New York: Peter Lang, American University Studies, Series IX, History, 120, 1993. Bodea, Cornelia. “Cîteva ecouri ale propagandei unioniste în Apus între 1856–1857,” extract from Omagiu lui P. Constantinescu-Iaşi cu prilejul împlinirii a 70 de ani, edited by E. Condurachi, 497–503. Bucharest: Editura Academiei Republicii Popu- lare Române, 1965. —— The Romanians’ Struggle for Unification, 1834–1849. Translated from the Roma- nian by Liliana Teodoreanu. Bucharest: Publishing House of the Academy of the Socialist Republic of Romania, 1970. —— “David Urquhart, Principatele şi mişcarea naţională română.” In Unirea Prin- cipatelor şi puterile europene. Bucharest: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste Române, 1984, 30–55. Boia, Lucian. Romania: Borderland of Europe. Translated into English by James Brown. London: Reaktion Books, 2001. —— Napoleon III cel neiubit. Bucharest: Humanitas, 2008. First published in French as Napoléon III le mal-aimé. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2008. Boicu, Leonid. Diplomaţia europeană şi triumful cauzei române (1856–1859). Iaşi: Junimea, 1979. Boitoş, Olimpiu. Paul Bataillard et la révolution roumaine de 1848: contribution à l’histoire des relations franco-roumaines. Extrait des Mélanges de l’Ecole Roumaine en France (2, 1929), Paris, 1930. 368 bibliography

—— Raporturile românilor cu Ledru-Rollin şi radicalii francezi în epoca revoluţiei de la 1848. Bucharest: Cartea Românească, Aşezămîntul cultural Ion C. Brătianu, 1940. Bolovan, Ioan. Transilvania între revoluţia de la 1848 şi unirea din 1918: contribuţii demografice. Cluj-Napoca: Centrul de studii transilvane, Fundaţia culturală română, 2000. Bolovan, Sorina Paula, and Ioan Bolovan. Transylvania in the Modern Era: demographic aspects. Translated from the Romanian by Cristina Caroline Paul. Cluj- Napoca: Center for Transylvanian Studies, 2003. Borsi-Kálmán, Béla. Hungarian Exiles and the Romanian National Movement, 1849– 1867. Boulder, Colorado: Atlantic Studies on Society and Change, 67, Social Science Monographs, distr. by Columbia University Press, 1991. Bourne, Kenneth. The Foreign Policy of Victorian England, 1830–1902. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970. Breazu, Jean. Edgar Quinet et les roumains, in Mélanges de l’école roumaine en France. Paris, 1927. —— Michelet şi românii: studii de literatură comparată. Cluj, 1935. Brock, Peter. “Polish Democrats and English Radicals 1832–1862: A Chapter in the History of Anglo-Polish Relations.” Journal of Modern History 25, 2 (1953): 139–56. Brown, Victoria F. “The Adaptation of Western Political Theory in a Peripheral State: the Case of Romanian Liberalism.” In Romania between East and West: historical essays in memory of Constantin C. Giurescu, edited by Stephen A. Fischer-Galaţi, R. Florescu and George R. Ursul, 269–301. Boulder, Colorado: East European Mono- graphs vol. 103, distributed by Columbia University Press, NY, 1982. Bucur, Marin. “Contexte şi afinităţi în perioada exilului.” Extract fromStudii despre N. Bălcescu, edited by B. Cazacu. Bucharest: Societatea de Ştiinţe Filologice din Republica Socialistă România, 1969. —— C. A. Rosetti: mesianism şi donquijotism revoluţionar. Bucharest: Editura Minerva, 1970. —— “La «Revue des Deux Mondes» et la cause roumaine en 1856.” Revue roumaine d’histoire 18, 4 (1979): 749–759. —— “C. A. Rosetti – «Le correspondant pour la Roumanie» de la «Revue de Paris» (1856).” Revue roumaine d’histoire 22, 1 (1983): 59–70. Bulei, Ion. Conservatori şi conservatorism în România. Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedică, 2000. Cadot, Michel. “Les amitiés polonaises, russes et roumaines de Michelet.” In Cahiers Romantiques 6: Michelet entre naissance et renaissance, edited by Simone Bernard- Griffiths. Clermont Ferrand: Université Blaise Pascal, 2001, 131–48. Calman, Alvin R. Ledru-Rollin après 1848 et les proscrits français en Angleterre. Paris: F. Rieder & Cie, éditeurs, 1921. Case, Lynn M. French Opinion on War and Diplomacy during the Second Empire. New York: Octagon Books, 1972. Cărăbuş, Gheorghe Gabriel. “Asachi – un separatist avant la lettre.” Codrul Cosminului (Suceava: “Ştefan cel Mare” University) 10 (2004): 185–206 (online open access) Ceauşu, Mihai-Ştefan and Dumitru Vitcu. “Romanian Emigration and the Epilogue of the 1848 Revolution.” Revue roumaine d’histoire 43, 1–4 (2004): 89–109. Cernovodeanu, Paul. Relaţiile comerciale româno-engleze în contextul politicii orientale a Marii Britanii, 1803–1878. Cluj-Napoca: Editura Dacia, 1986. Chamberlain, Muriel A. ‘Pax Britannica’? British Foreign Policy 1789–1914. London: Longman, Studies in Modern History, 1988. Charle, Christophe, Jacqueline Lalouette, Michel Pigenet et Anne-Marie Sohn, eds. La France démocratique: combats, mentalités, symboles. Mélanges offerts à Maurice Agulhon. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1998. Charle, Christophe. Le Siècle de la presse, 1830–1939. Paris: Seuil, L’Univers historique, 2004. bibliography 369

Chindriş, Ioan and Gelu Neamţu, eds. Procese politice anti-româneşti care au zguduit Transilvania în toamna anului 1848. Bucharest: Viitorul românesc, 1995. Ciobanu, Veniamin, ed. Romanian and Polish Peoples in East-Central Europe (17th– 20th centuries). Translated by Emilian Chiosa a. o. Iaşi: Junimea, 2003. Cioflâncă, Adrian. “Political debates before the union of the Romanian Principalities: between nationalism and parochialism.” Revue roumaine d’histoire 43, 1–4 (2004): 111–39. Ciupală, Alin. Femeia în societatea românească a secolului al XIX-lea: între public şi privat. Bucharest: Editura Meridiane, 2003. Claeys, Gregory. “Mazzini, Kossuth, and British Radicalism, 1848–1854.” Journal of British Studies 28 (July 1989): 225–61. Clarke, Bob. From Grub Street to Fleet Street: an illustrated history of English newspapers to 1899. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Cliveti, Gheorghe. “Geneza şi instituirea garanţiei colective a puterilor semnatare ale Tratatului de la Paris (1856) asupra Principatelor Române.” Anuarul Institutului de istorie şi arheologie “A. D. Xenopol”, Part 1, 20 (1983): 175–89 and Part 2, 22 (1985): 511–22. Codarcea, Cristina. “Le caractère de l’état valaque – quelques considérations.” In Pouvoirs et mentalités, edited by Laurenţiu Vlad. Bucharest: Editura Babel, Studia Politica, 1999, 71–87. Cojocariu, Mihai. Partida naţională şi constituirea statului român (1856–1859). Iaşi: Editura Universităţii “Al. I. Cuza”, 1995. Collins, Irene. The Government and the Newspaper Press in France, 1814–1881. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959. Cornea, Paul and Mihai Zamfir, eds.Gîndirea românească în epoca paşoptistă (1830– 1860), 2 vols. Bucharest: Editura pentru literatură, 1968–1969 (Introductory study and selection of documents) Clodfelter, Micheal, ed. Warfare and Armed Conflicts: a statistical reference to casualty and other figures, 1500–2000. Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers, 2002. Conacher, J. B. Britain and the Crimea, 1855–56. London: Macmillan Press, 1987. Corivan, N., ed. Din activitatea emigranţilor români în Apus, 1853–1857: Scrisori şi memorii. Bucharest: Cartea Românească, 1931. Dallier, G. La Police des étrangers à Paris et dans le département de la Seine. Thèse pour le doctorat. Paris: Université de Paris, Faculté de droit, 1914. Dennison, T. K. and A. W. Carus. “The Invention of the Russian Rural Commune: Haxthausen and the Evidence.” Historical Journal 46, 3 (2003): 561–82. Desprez, Hippolyte. Les Peuples de l’Autriche et de la Turquie: Histoire contemporaine des Illyriens, des Magyars, des Roumains et des Polonais, 2 vols. Paris: 1850. Djuvara, T.-G. Edgar Quinet, philoroumain. Paris, Belin Frères, 1906. Dowe, Dieter, Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, Dieter Langewiesche and Jonathan Sperber, eds. Europe in 1848: revolution and reform. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001. (first published in German, 1998) Drace-Francis, Alex. “Dinicu Golescu’s Account of My Travels (1826): Eurotopia as manifesto.” Journeys – The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing 6, nos. 1–2 (2005): 24–53. (Reprinted in Bracewell, Wendy and Alex Drace-Francis, eds., Balkan Departures. Oxford – New York: Berghahn Books, 2009) —— “Cultural Currents and Political Choices: Romanian Intellectuals in the Banat to 1848.” Austrian History Yearbook 36 (2005): 65–93. —— The Making of Modern Romanian Culture: Literacy and the development of national identity. London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2006. Du Camp, Maxime. Les Convulsions de Paris, 4 vols. Paris, 1883. Durandin, Catherine. Révolution à la française ou à la russe. Paris: Presses Universi- taires de France, 1989. 370 bibliography

Echard, William E., ed. Historical Dictionary of the French Second Empire, 1852–1870. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1985. Emerson, Donald. Metternich and the Political Police: security and subversion in the Hapsburg monarchy (1815–1830). The Hague: Martins Nijhoff, 1968. Evans, R. J. W. “Széchenyi and Austria”. In History and Biography: essays in honour of Derek Beales, edited by T. C. W. Blanning and David Cannadine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 113–41. Evans, R. J. W. and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, eds. The Revolutions in Europe, 1848–1849. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, pb. 2002. Fauquet, Eric. Michelet ou la gloire du professeur d’histoire. Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1990. Faure, Alain. “A la recherche des réfugiés et des prisonniers politiques.” In Maintien de l’ordre et polices en France et en Europe au XIXe siècle, published by the Société d’Histoire de la Révolution de 1848 et des Révolutions du XIXe siècle, 9–18. Paris, 1987. Favre, Jules. Plaidoyers politiques et judiciaires, publiés par Mme Vve Jules Favre, née Velten, 2 vols. Paris: E. Plon, 1882. Fermé, Albert. Les Conspirations sous le second empire: Complot de l’hippodrome et de l’Opéra Comique. Paris: A La Librairie de la Renaissance, 1869. Fletcher, Ian and Natalia Ishchenko. The Crimean War: A clash of empires. Spellmont, Staplehurst, Great Britain, 2004. Florescu, Radu R. The Struggle against Russia in the Romanian Principalities, 1821– 1854. Iaşi: The Center for Romanian Studies, 1997. (first published Munich, 1962) —— “R. G. Colquhoun, Ion Câmpineanu and the Pro-Western Opposition in Wal- lachia, 1834–1840.” Slavonic and East European Review 41, 97 (1963): 403–19. —— “The Rumanian Principalities and the Origins of the Crimean War.” Slavonic and East European Review 43, 100 (Dec., 1964): 46–67. Fortescue, William. Alphonse de Lamartine: A political biography. London: Croom Helm, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1983. Fotino, George. Din vremea renaşterii naţionale a Ţării Româneşti: Boierii Goleşti. 4 vols. Bucharest: Aşezămîntul Cultural Ion C. Brătianu, Imprimeria naţională, 1939. Fraser, William. The Chiefs of Colquhoun and their Country. 2 vols. Edinburgh: Sir James Colquhoun of Colquhoun and Luss Baronet, 1869. Freitag, Sabine, ed. Exiles from European Revolutions: refugees in mid-Victorian Brit- ain. New York, Oxford: Berghahn, 2002. Fruma, I., Dr. Ion C. Brătianu la Sibiu (1850–1851). Bucharest: Imprimeriile independenţa, 1938. Garrigues, Jean. La France de 1848 à 1870. Paris: Armand Colin, 2000. (2nd edn. 2002) Georgescu, Vlad. Mémoires et projets de réforme dans les principautés roumaines, 1831–1848: répertoire et textes avec un supplément pour les années 1769–1830. Bucharest: Association internationale d’études du sud-est européen, 5, 1972. Gerbod, Paul. “Des étrangers à Paris au XIXe siècle.” Ethnologie française 25 (Octobre– Décembre 1995): 569–79. Gilmore, Jeanne. La République clandestine, 1818–1848. Paris: Aubier, 1997. Gleason, John Howes. The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain. Cambridge: Har- vard University Press, 1950. Gluck, E. “Date noi privind viaţa şi activitatea lui C. D. Rosenthal.” Studii şi cercetări de istoria artei, Seria artă plastică 33 (1986): 70–80. Goffman, Daniel.The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: New Approaches to European History, 2002. Goldfrank, David M. The Origins of the Crimean War. London: Longman, 1994. Grigorescu, Dan. Trei pictori de la 1848. Bucharest: Editura Meridiane, 1973. bibliography 371

Hampton, Mark. Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Hitchins, Keith. The Romanians, 1774–1866. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. —— A Nation Discovered: Romanian intellectuals in Transylvania and the idea of nation, 1700–1848. Bucharest: The Encyclopedic Publishing House/The Romanian Cultural Foundation, 1999. Hope, Trevor J. “Sir Stephen Bartlett Lakeman (Mazar Pasha) as military governor of Bucharest at the commencement of the Austrian occupation of the Danubian Principalities in 1854.” Revue roumaine d’histoire 16, 1 (1977): 25–41. —— “Dumitru Brătianu and British public opinion regarding the unification of the Romanian Principalities (1848–1859).” In Anglo-Romanian Relations after 1821, edited by Gh. Buzatu and Al. Pascu, Anuarul Institutului de istorie “A. D. Xenopol”, Iaşi, supplement 4 (1983): 27–52. Huett, Lorna. “Among the Unknown Public: Household Words, All the Year Round and the Mass-Market Weekly Periodical in the Mid-Nineteenth Century.” Victorian Periodicals Review 38, 1 (Spring 2005): 61–82. Iancu, Carol. “Races et nationalités en Roumanie: le problème juif à travers les documents diplomatiques français (1866–1880).” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 27, 3 (Jul.–Sep. 1980): 391–407. Ingram, Edward, ed. Allan Cunningham, Eastern Questions in the Nineteenth Century, Collected Essays: volume two. London: Frank Cass, 1993. Ioniţă, Elisabeta. Maria Rosetti. Bucharest: Editura Militară, 1979. Iordache, Anastasie. Revoluţionarii Goleşti. Bucharest: Editura Mica Valahie, 2002. —— Dumitru Brătianu: diplomatul, doctrinarul liberal şi omul politic. Bucharest: Pai- deia, 2003. Iorga, Nicolae. “Un colaborator francez al Unirii Principatelor: Paul Bataillard.” Analele Academiei Române, Memoriile Secţiunii Istorice, 3rd series, mem. 7 (3 February 1923): 1–14. Isar, Nicolae. “Memoriile lui Ion Heliade-Rădulescu şi radicalii de la 1848 în perspectiva primelor sinteze critice.” Revista istorică 10, 5–6 (1999): 487–500. —— Principatele române de la 1821 la 1848. Sub semnul renaşterii naţionale. Bucha- rest: Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti, 2004. —— Din istoria generaţiei de la 1848: revoluţie, exil, destin istoric. Bucharest: Editura Universitară, 2006. Jallaguier, Bénoni. Les idées politiques et sociales d’Alphonse de Lamartine, Ph.D. The- sis, Université de Montpellier, Faculté de droit, Année 1950–1951, 1954. Jelavich, Barbara. Russia and the Formation of the Romanian National State, 1821– 1878. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Jianu, Angela. “Women, Fashion and Europeanization in the Romanian Principalities, 1750–1830.” In Women in the Ottoman Balkans: gender, culture and history, edited by Amila Buturović and Irvin Cemil Schick, London: I. B. Tauris, 2007, 201–30. Jones, Aled. Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth-Century England. Ash- gate: Aldershot, England, 1996. Kabdebo, Thomas.Diplomat in Exile: Francis Pulszky’s political activities in England, 1849–1860. Boulder, Co: East European Quarterly, 1979. Kann, Robert A. The Multinational Empire: nationalism and national reform in the Habsburg Monarchy 1848–1918, 2 vols. New York: Octagon Books, 1964. Karpat, Kemal H. Studies on Ottoman Social and Political History: selected articles and essays. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Kisluk, Eugene J. Brothers from the North: the Polish Democratic Society and the Euro- pean revolutions of 1848–1849. Boulder, Co: East European Monographs, 2005. Knapp, John M. Behind the Diplomatic Curtain: Adolphe de Bourqueney and French foreign policy, 1816–1869. Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 2001. 372 bibliography

Körner, Axel, ed. 1848: A European Revolution? International ideas and national memories of 1848. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Koss, Stephen. The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain, 2 vols. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981. Kramer, Lloyd S. Threshold of a New World: intellectuals and the exile experience in Paris, 1830–1848. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 1988. Lamartine, Alphonse de. History of the French Revolution of 1848. London, 1849. Laurent, Frank. “Penser l’Europe avec l’histoire. La notion de civilisation européenne sous la Restauration et la monarchie de Juillet.” Romantisme: Revue du dix-neuvième siècle, 29, 104 (1999): 53–68. Lukács, Lajos. Chapters on the Hungarian Emigration, 1849–1867. Budapest: Aka- démiai Kiadó, 1995. Maior, Liviu. In the Empire. Habsburgs and Romanians: from dynastic loyalty to national identity. Cluj-Napoca: Romanian Academy, Center for Transylvanian Studies, 2008. Mamina, Alexandru. “O definire a liberalilor radicali în contextul războiului franco- prusac din 1870–1871.” Studii şi materiale de istorie modernă 13 (1999): 143–64. Marinescu, Beatrice. “La position des diplomates et émissaires britanniques envers le mouvement unioniste des Principautés.” Revue roumaine d’histoire 11, 2 (1972): 265–79. Markovits, Stefanie. “Rushing Into Print: «Participatory Journalism» During the Crimean War.” Victorian Studies 50, 4 (Summer 2008): 559–86. Marcu, Alexandru. Conspiratori şi conspiraţii în epoca renaşterii politice, 1848–1877. Bucharest, Cartea Românească, 2000. (first published 1930) Marino, Adrian, ed. Revenirea în Europa: idei şi controverse româneşti 1990–1995. Craiova: Aius, 1996. Marx, Karl. Însemnări despre români. Bucharest: Editura Academiei, 1964. Foot, M. R. D. and H. C. G. Matthew, eds. The Gladstone Diaries, 14 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968–1994. Merriman, John M. The Agony of the Republic: the repression of the left in revolutionary France, 1848–1851. New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1978. Mme. Michelet [Athénaïs Michelet]. La Mort et les funérailles de Michelet. Paris: San- doz et Fischbacher, 1876. Michelson, Paul E. “Rumanian Unity.” In Historical Dictionary of the French Second Empire, edited by William E. Echard. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1985. —— Conflict and crisis: Romanian political development 1861–1871. New York, Lon- don: Garland, 1987. —— Romanian Politics 1859–1871: From Prince Cuza to Prince Carol. Iaşi, Oxford, Portland: The Center for Romanian Studies, 1998. Mitzman, Arthur. Michelet Historian: rebirth and romanticism in nineteenth-century France. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Mitzman, Arthur. “Les amis d’Alfred Dumesnil : sociabilité juvénile et frater- nité révolutionnaire à la veille de 1848. Ethnologie et histoire des amitiés juvé- niles masculines.” Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle, 6 (1990), without pagination. URL: http://rh19.revues.org/index48.html. (Accessed on 30 September 2010). Monas, Sidney. The Third Section: police and society in Russia under Nicholas I. Harvard University Press, 1961. Morley, John. The Life of William Ewart Gladstone. London: Macmillan, 1905–7. Mureşan, Camil, Nicolae Bocşan and Ioan Bolovan, eds. Revoluţia de la 1848–1849 în Europa Centrală: perspectivă istorică şi istoriografică. Cluj-Napoca: Presa Universitară Clujeană, 2000. Nash, Geoffrey.From Empire to Orient: travellers to the Middle East, 1830–1926. Lon- don: I. B. Tauris, 2005. bibliography 373

Neamţu, Gelu, ed. Biografii paşoptiste. Bucharest: Editura Academiei Române, 2006. Netea, Vasile. C. A. Rosetti. Bucharest: Editura Ştiinţifică, 1970. —— “Presa română în timpul revoluţiei de la 1848.” In Revoluţia de la 1848 în Ţările Române: Culegere de studii, edited by N. Adăniloaie and Dan Berindei, Bucharest: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste Române, 1974, 145–83. Panaite, Viorel. The Ottoman Law of War and Peace: The Ottoman Empire and tribute payers. Boulder, Co: East European Monographs, 563, 2000. Panaitescu, P. P. Emigraţia polonă şi revoluţia română de la 1848: Studii şi documente. Bucharest, 1929. Pantazi, Radu. C. A. Rosetti: gînditorul-omul. Bucharest: Editura Politică, 1969. Parry, Jonathan. The Politics of Patriotism: English liberalism, national identity and Europe, 1830–1886. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Payne, Howard C. The Police State of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966. Pârvulescu, Ioana. În intimitatea secolului 19. Bucharest: Humanitas, 2005. Perrie, Maureen, Dominic Lieven and Ronald Suny, eds. The Cambridge History of Russia, 3 vols., 2006 Perrod, Pierre Antoine. Jules Favre: avocat de la liberté. Lyon: La Manufacture, 1988. Pippidi, Andrei. “Originea familiei Rosetti şi confirmarea unei mărturii a lui Neculce.” Anuarul Institutului de istorie şi arheologie “A. D. Xenopol” 20 (1983): 275–80. —— “Tocqueville ministre et les Moldo-Valaques.” Revue roumaine d’histoire, 32, 1–2 (1993): 147–53. Platon, Gheorghe and Veniamin Ciobanu, eds. Idées politiques et mentalités, en Pologne et en Roumanie entre l’Orient et l’Occident (XVIIIe–XXe siècles). Cluj-Napoca: Presses Universitaires de Cluj, 2002. Platon, Gheorghe. De la constituirea naţiunii la marea unire: studii de istorie modernă, 6 vols. Iaşi: Editura Universităţii “Al. I. Cuza”, 1995–2005. Popovici, D. Cercetări de literatură română. Sibiu: Cartea Românească din Cluj, 1944. Porter, Bernard. The Refugee Question in Mid-Victorian Politics. Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1979. —— Plots and Paranoia: A history of political espionage in Britain, 1790–1988. Lon- don: Unwyn Hyman, 1989. Ragsdale, Hugh and V. N. Ponomarev, eds. Imperial Russian Foreign Policy. Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1993. Rădulescu, Mihai, Sorin. Elita liberală românească, 1866–1900. Bucharest: Editura ALL, 1998. Rădulescu-Zoner, Şerban, ed. Istoria Partidului Naţional Liberal. Bucharest: Editura BIC ALL, 2000. Renauld, Georges. Adolphe Crémieux: homme d’état français, juif et franc-maçon: le combat pour la République. Paris: Detrad-aVs, 2002. Riall, Lucy. “The Shallow End of History? The Substance and Future of Political Biog- raphy.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 40, 3 (Winter 2010): 375–97. Riker, T. W. The Making of Roumania. A Study of an international problem, 1856– 1866. London: Oxford University Press, 1931. —— “The Concert of Europe and Moldavia in 1857.”English Historical Review 42, 166 (Apr. 1927): 227–44. Roberts, Henry L. Rumania: political problems of an agrarian state. Hamden, Conn: Archon Books, 1969. (first published 1951) Roberts, Ian W. Nicholas I and the Russian Intervention in Hungary. London: Mac- millan/SSEES, 1991. Roman, Andreia. Le Populisme quarante-huitard. Bucharest: Les Editions de la Fonda- tion Culturelle Roumaine, 1999. 374 bibliography

Romsics, Ignac and Belà K Király, eds. Geopolitics in the Danube Region: Hungarian reconciliation efforts, 1848–1998. Translated from the Hungarian by Nóra Arató. Budapest: Central European University Press, 1999. Rosetti, Radu. Familia Rosetti, 2 vols. Bucharest: Imprimeria Naţională, 1938–1940. Rowe, D. J., ed. “The Radical Club, and other papers.” InLondon Radicalism 1830– 1843: A selection of the papers of Francis Place (1970): 119–34. URL: http://www .british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=39491 (Date accessed: 27 September 2010) Saunders, David. Russia in the Age of Reaction and Reform, 1801–1881. London: Long- man, 1992. Schroeder, Paul W. Austria, Great Britain, and the Crimean War. The Destruction of the European Concert. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 1972. Searle, G. R. Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. London: Faber and Faber, 1986. (first published 1977) Silvan Ionescu, Adrian. “Momentul 1848 în plastica documentaristă.” Revista istorică, new series, 10, 5–6 (1999): 501–18. ——, ed. Războiul Crimeii: 150 de ani de la încheiere. Brăila: Muzeul Brăilei, Editura Istros, 2006. Simonescu, Dan. Din istoria presei româneşti: Republica Română, Paris, 1851 – Brux- elles, 1853. Bucharest: Cartea Românească, 1931. Smochină, N. P. “Sur les émigrés roumains à Paris de 1850 à 1856.” Mélanges de l’école roumaine en France 11 (1933): 155–203. Sperber, Jonathan. The European Revolutions, 1848–1851. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, 1995. Stan, Apostol and Constantin Vlăduţ. Gheorghe Magheru. Bucharest: Editura Ştiinţifică, 1969. Stan, Apostol. “Călătoria pe Dunăre a revoluţionarilor exilaţi de la 1848: însemnări inedite de C. A. Rosetti.” Studii: revistă de istorie 26, 3 (1973): 525–30. —— Ion C. Brătianu: un promotor al liberalismului în România. Bucharest: Editura Globus, 1993. Stan, Apostol and Mircea Iosa. Liberalismul politic în România de la origini până la 1918. Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedică, 1996. Stan, Apostol. Protectoratul Rusiei asupra Principatelor Române, 1774–1856. Bucha- rest: Saeculum I. O., 1999. Stan, Apostol and Grigore Ploeşteanu. Utopia confederalismului paşoptist: între vis şi realitate. Bucharest: Ed. Vestala, 2001. Stan, Valeriu. “C. A. Rosetti, mărturii inedite.” Revista istorică, new series, 2, 5–6 (1991): 313–21. —— “La réorganisation des Principautés Roumaines au milieu du XIXe siècle vue par Sir Henry L. Bulwer.” Revue roumaine d’histoire 31, 3–4 (1992): 215–33. Stanomir, Ioan. Naşterea Constituţiei: limbaj şi drept în Principate până la 1866. Bucharest: Nemira, 2004. Steele, E. D. Palmerston and Liberalism, 1855–1865. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1991. Stroia, Marian. Între Levant şi Europa modernă: impact extern şi mentalitate tradiţională în spaţiul românesc (1774–1848). Bucharest: Editura Semne, 2006. Sugar, Peter F., Péter Hanák and Tibor Frank, eds. A History of Hungary. Indiana University Press, 1990 (Pb. 1994) Tappe, E. D. “Nicolae Bălcescu’s Propaganda in England: his meetings with Cobden and Palmerston.” American Slavic and East European Review 13, 1 (Feb. 1954): 66–71. bibliography 375

—— “E. E. and J. A. Crowe and the Rumanian Union: some unpublished letters of 1857.” Slavonic and East European Review 41, 96 (Dec. 1962): 135–43. Taylor, Miles. “The old radicalism and the new: David Urquhart and the politics of opposition, 1832–1867.” In Currents of Radicalism: popular radicalism, organised labour and party politics in Britain, 1850–1914, edited by Eugenio F. Biagini and Alastair J. Reid. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 23–43. Tchernoff, J.Associations et sociétés secrètes sous la deuxième république, 1848–1851. Paris: Felix Alcan, Editeur, 1905. —— Le Parti Républicain au coup d’état et sous le Second Empire. Paris: Pédone, 1906. Temperley, Harold. “The Union of Romania in the private letters of Palmerston, Clarendon and Cowley, 1855–1857.” Revue historique du sud-est européen 14, 7–9 (1937): 218–40. —— “Four documents on the future of Roumania by Henry Stanley, D. Brătianu, Lord Palmerston and Albert, Prince Consort, 1855–1857.” Revue historique du sud-est européen 14, 7–9 (1937): 241–2. Tomi, Raluca. “Romeni e italiani nel periodo dell’esilio rivoluzionario (settembre 1849–dicembre 1852). Affinita. Opinioni. Contatti.”Annuario , Venice-Bucharest, 3 (2001): 205–21. —— “Romeni e italiani durante la rivoluzione del 1848–1849.” Annuario, Venice- Bucharest, 2 (2002): 155–74. —— “«Europa naţionalităţilor» între revoluţie şi război: cazul românilor şi italienilor.” In Războiul Crimeii: 150 de ani de la încheiere, edited by Adrian Silvan Ionescu. Brăila: Muzeul Brăilei, Editura Istros, 2006, 57–76. Turner, Michael J. Independent Radicalism in Mid-Victorian Britain. Westport, Con- necticut: Praeger, 2004. Vapereau, G. Dictionnaire universel des contemporains, Paris: L. Hachette, 1858, 1865. Viallaneix, Paul. La Voie royale. Essai sur l’idée du peuple dans l’oeuvre de Michelet. Paris: Flammarion, 1971. —— Michelet: les travaux et les jours, 1798–1874. Paris: Gallimard, 1998. Wasson, Ellis Archer. “The Whigs and the Press, 1800–50.”Parliamentary History 25, Part 1 (2006): 68–87. Weisser, Henry. “Chartist Internationalism, 1845–1848.” Historical Journal 14, 1 (Mar. 1971): 49–66. Xenopoliana – Buletinul Fundaţiei Academice “A. D. Xenopol” (Iaşi), XIII, nos. 1–4 (2005), a special issue entitled “Liberalismul românesc: tendinţe, structuri, personalităţi”, edited by Liviu Brătescu and Ovidiu Buruiană. Zane, G. Bălcescu: opera, omul, epoca. Bucharest: Editura Eminescu, 1973.

INDEX

Ad-hoc Assemblies: Great Power protests with Jules Michelet, 54, 196–9; as against election of former forty- envoy to Transylvania in 1848, 90–2; eighters to, 322–3; peasants as envoy to London, 127, 130; represented in, 326. See Ad-hoc memorandum to Lord Palmerston Divans (1849), 130–1; Documents concerning Ad-hoc Divans, 286, 298, 316. See the Question of the Danubian Ad-Hoc Assemblies Principalities. Dedicated to the English Arène, Charles: support given to Parliament (1849), 131–2; as member Romanian forty-eighters by, 267, of Mazzini’s Central European 314 Democratic Committee, 190–2; Asachi (Asaky), Gheorghe: and exchange of open letters with Daniel publication of Edgar Quinet’s Les Ira’nyi, 191; outline of Romanian Roumains in Romanian, 297; and history in correspondence to Jules Moldavian separatism, 297–8 Michelet, 198–9; attempt to create Asachi (Asaky), Hermione, 176; Romanian legion in the Crimean marriage to Edgar Quinet, 178, 337. War, 254–7, 263–7; and pro- See Quinet, Hermione Romanian campaigns in London, 258, Austrian monarchy: postal ‘interception 282, 298, 301, 305–12; role in stations’ in the, 203–4; and ‘Brighton meeting’, 306–10; as occupation of Wallachia (1854–57), Foreign Minister of the Romanian 276, 278; and opposition to the return Principalities (1859), 329. See also of Romanian exiles, 293. See also Crimean War; Rosetti, Constantin Boyacı Köy, Turco-Austrian Brătianu, Ion (Beppo): studies in Paris, Convention of, and Godkin, Edwin 52; and Freemasonry, 53; involvement Lawrence in ‘Hippodrome Affair’, 236; trial in ‘Hippodrome Affair’, 242–50, Bataillard, Paul: as ‘philo-Romanian’, 314–5, 339–40; article ‘Naţionalitatea’ 94–5, 207–8; friendship with (1853), 236–7; Mémoire sur l’Empire Alexandru Golescu-Negru, 94–5; d’Autriche dans la Question d’Orient pro-Romanian publications of, 153–6; (1855), 281–2; founder of Romanian “La Moldo-Valachie dans la National Liberal Party (1875), 337; manifestation de ses efforts et de ses controversial policies as Prime voeux” (1856), 302–3. See also French Minister, 338–9; assassination attempt press against (1880), 340; and Romanian Bălcescu, Nicolae: as mediator in liberalism, 340–2. See also Favre, Romanian-Hungarian conflict in Jules; ‘Hippodrome Affair’; Paris, Transylvania, 164–70, 199–200; and Romanian newspapers in project of ‘Danubian Confederation’ Britain: hospitality to European refugees rejected by Kossuth, 199–200 in, 193–5; Louis Blanc on hospitality Birkbeck, William Lloyd: The Russians to refugees in, 194 in Moldavia and Wallachia (London, British press: and the Romanian cause, 1849), 131 228–9, 348, and passim Boyacı Köy, Turco-Austrian Bulwer Lytton, Sir Henry: as British Convention of, 276; Western protests Commissioner to Wallachia (1856), against, 276–7 320; Report on the Danubian Brătianu, Dumitru: family background Principalities (1856, 1858), 321; of, 51; studies in Paris, 51–2; and Project of Form of Government (1856, Freemasonry, 53; correspondence 1858), 321 378 index

Câmpineanu, Ion: opposition to Russia and, 260–2; Austrian role in, 269–70; and arrest of, 28, 30 Suggestions for the Assistance of Canning, Sir Stratford (Viscount Officers in Learning the Languages Stratford de Redcliffe): opposition to of the Seat of War in the East (1854) Romanian exiles’ return, 256; (Müller, Max), 271; Messieurs les opposition to the union of the Cosaques (Paris, 1854–5), 271–2; and Romanian Principalities, 293, 294, Austrian occupation of Wallachia, 303–4; role in the union of the 276; end and outcomes of, 285–8. See Romanian Principalities, 322 also Boyacı Köy, Turco-Austrian Cobden, Richard: non-interventionism Convention of; Godkin, Edwin of (1853), 231–2; Russia by a Lawrence Manchester Manufacturer (1836), Crowe, Evan Eyre: “Roumania” (1857), 231 324 Collège de France: Romanian students Crowe, Joseph Archer: support for the at, 9, 39, 180, 182, 243, 350; history Romanian cause during the Crimean of, 43; lectures of Jules Michelet War, 267–8, 283; “The Danubian at, 43–50, 162–3; political agitation Principalities” (1857), 324 at, 162–3; suspension of Michelet’s course at, 208; revocation of Michelet, Duhamel (Dyugamel), Alexander Mickiewicz and Quinet from, 215 Osipovich, General: as Russian special Colquhoun, Robert G.: connection envoy to the Romanian Principalities, to the Grant family, 19; education 75, 98, 104, 108 of, 70; becomes Consul-General in Dumesnil, Adèle: and Romanian Bucharest, 70–1; support to exiled diaspora in Paris, 175–6, 178, 180 Wallachian forty-eighters, 8, 116, 119, Dumesnil, Alfred: and Romanian 158, 215; assessment of Constantin diaspora in Paris, 175–6, 178, 180 Rosetti, 71; instructions from Lord Palmerston (1848), 74; on censorship Eliade Rădulescu, Ion, 7; role in the of the press in the Romanian Wallachian Revolution of, 1848, 75–6, Principalities, 74; positive assessments 80, 89, 96, 109; as member of the of Wallachian revolution of 1848, Wallachian provisional government 84–5, 107; recognizes Wallachian (1848), 80, 83: and tensions with provisional government in 1848, Wallachian radicals, 76, 109, 111, 163, 89; on Russian influence in the 176, 185, 256, 265, 275; Mémoires sur Romanian Principalities, 73, 99; and l’histoire de la regénération roumaine diplomatic protection to Wallachian ou sur les évènements de 1848 revolutionaries, 100–1; on Russian accomplis en Valachie (Paris, 1851), occupation after the Wallachian 110–11; pro-Ottoman stance of, 256; revolution of 1848, 104–5; opposition Souvenirs et impressions d’un proscrit to the union of the Romanian (Paris, 1850), 353 Principalities, 293, 303; transfer to Exile: and political alignments of Egypt, 1858, 343; death of, 343 Romanian forty-eighters, 175; Congress of Paris (1856): and the Hungarian, Polish and Romanian Romanian Principalities, 298–300 refugees in (Turkey, 1849), 175–6; Congress of Paris (1858): and the union Romanian refugees in (Bursa, Asia of the Romanian Principalities, 327–8 Minor), 183; and diplomatic Crimean War, the: prelude to, 225–33; pressures for the return of the role of Romanian Principalities in, Wallachian forty-eighters, 313–18; 226, 259; Daily News correspondent international solidarities in, 353–6, in Bucharest during the, 227, 268; 359. See also Turkey Polish legions in, 252–3; attempt to create a Romanian legion in, 254–7, Favre, Jules: and defense of Ion Brătianu 263–7; military campaigns in, 259, in ‘Hippodrome Affair’, 247 270–1, 285; public opinion in Britain Fonblanque, Albany, 267 index 379

Fonblanque, Thomas De Grenier: correspondence of intercepted by facilitates correspondence of Austrian authorities, 203–4. See also Romanian exiles, 267 Racoviţă, Constantin France: as second homeland for Golescu, Nicolae, 8, 12, 61; as member Romanians, 10–11, 32 and passim of Wallachian Provisional French press, the: and the Romanian Government (1848), 80; 89, 96, exile Principalities, 153–6, 191, 347; in Bursa, 115; pro-Romanian protests against Russian occupation of campaign in Britain, 227–8, 323; 282; Romanian Principalities in, 160. See election to Ad-hoc Assembly (1857), also Bataillard, Paul 322; as Romanian Prime Minister (1860), 329; 343. See also Golescu Ghica, Ion: as mediator in Romanian- family; Golescu brothers Hungarian conflict in Transylvania, Golescu, Ştefan, 8, 12, 76; as member 164–70 of Wallachian Provisional Girardin, Saint-Marc: Souvenirs de Government (1848), 80: 101, 215, voyages et d’études (1852), 25–6; 254; and attempt to create Romanian 221–2 legion in the Crimean War, 263, 265, Gladstone, William: and support for the 270, 316; 276, 295; election to Ad-hoc Romanian cause, 323, 326–7 Assembly (1857), 322; 324. See also Godkin, Edwin Lawrence: Golescu family; Golescu brothers correspondent for the Daily News Golescu, Zoe (Zinca): family during the Crimean War, 268, 278; background of, 116–7; exile in History of Hungary and the Magyars Transylvania (1849), 149–50; role in (1853), 278; reporting on the Austrian financing the Romanian diaspora, 8, occupation of Wallachia, 279–81. 156; death of, 342. See also Golescu See also Boyacı Köy, Turco-Austrian family Convention of; Crimean War Golovin, Ivan: Russia under the Autocrat Golescu, Alexandru C. (Albu): Nicholas the First (London, 1846), assessment of the Wallachian 129–30 revolution of 1848, 184, 187; Gorchakov, Mikhail Dmitryievich assessment of Wallachian role in the (1793–1861): as commander of Transylvanian revolution of 1848–49, Russian troops in Bucharest, 271–2 184–5; proposals for the organization Grant, Effingham: birth of, 19; as of the Romanian diaspora, 185–7; secretary at British Consulate in views on Louis Kossuth in private Bucharest, 8, 19–20, 259, 273, 306; correspondence of, 200–1; criticism of as business associate of Constantin Hungarian ethnic policies in private Rosetti, 22, 119, 318; and support correspondence of, 229–30; on the to Romanian forty-eighters, 8, 101, Romanians being ‘abandoned’ by the 116, 119, 157–8, 173, 188, 203; Great Powers, 284 engagement and marriage to Zoe Golescu, Alexandru G. (Negru): Racoviţă, 187–8 criticism of Hungarian ethnic policies in private correspondence of, 144; Hallegrain, Charlemagne: and correspondence with Paul Bataillard, ‘philo-Romanian’ activities in Paris, 204–5, 207; proposals for organization 112, 125 of Romanian diaspora, 215–6; 256, Herzen, Alexander: positive views on 343. See also Bataillard, Paul Russia’s role in history, 210–11, 219; Golescu brothers, the: education of, 8, exchanges with Jules Michelet, 211–2, 117; ministerial roles of, 342–3. 219, 240 Golescu family, the: house arrest of ‘Hippodrome Affair’, the: amidst (1848–9), 116–19; roles of women in, conspiracies against the Second 117–8; harassment by Ottoman and Empire, 244–5. See also Brătianu, Ion Russian authorities (1848–9), 173; and Favre, Jules. republicanism of, 174, 188; private 380 index

Kogălniceanu, Mihail, 6, 73; ‘Dorinţele Michelet, Athénaïs: and the Romanian partidei naţionale’, 87–8; and diaspora in Paris, 42 and passim newspaper L’Etoile du Danube, 322 Michelet, Jules: lectures at the Collège Kossuth, Lajos: as leader of the de France, 43–50, 162–3; admiration Hungarian revolution of 1848–9, 74, for Marie Rosetti, 41, 84, 101–3, 136; and the Romanians of 234–5; and the ‘philo-Romanians’, Transylvania, 144; exile in Turkey, 56–8; Légendes démocratiques du 172; Projet de l’organisation politique nord. “Madame Rosetti” (1853–5), 61, de la Hongrie (1859), 201–2; meeting 101–3; account of arrest and escape of with Dumitru Brătianu, 253; the Wallachian forty-eighters, 101–3; ‘Kütahya Constitution’, 254; views on correspondence with Dumitru the Romanians in private Brătianu, 51–6, 218–9; “Principautés correspondence of, 202; impact in danubiennes. Madame Rosetti (1848)” Britain: 355 serialized in Le Siècle (1853), 204, 234–6; correspondence with Lamartine, Alphonse de: as patron of Constantin Rosetti, 208–9; revocation the Society of Romanian Students in from the Collège de France (1852), Paris, 41, 59, 71; as 215; “Les Martyrs de la Russie” Foreign Minister in 1848, 63–5; (1853), 238. See also Légendes Manifesto to Europe, 63–4 démocratiques du nord. “Madame Layard, Sir Austen Henry: support for Rosetti” the Romanian cause, 227–8, 231, 305; Moldavia: separatist movement in, motion in support of the Romanian 297–8. See also Asachi, Gheorghe Principalities (1853), 231 Ledru-Rollin, Alexandre: Wallachian Organic Statutes, the (1831–32), 68–70; revolutionaries and, 122–25; exile of, and the ‘additional article’, 28, 42, 162 52, 69; public burning of (1848), 97, Légendes démocratiques du nord. 103–4 “Madame Rosetti” (1853–5) Osborne, Pact of (1857): and the union (Michelet), 17–8, 61, 101–3; sources of the Romanian Principalities, 321 for, 211–2; publication and impact of, 238–40. See also Michelet, Jules Palmerston, Lord (Temple, Henry John, Lévy, Armand: La Russie sur le Danube third Viscount Palmerston): and the (1853), 236; role in the Wallachian Wallachian revolution of 1848, 87, unionist movement, 295; and the 127; and the East-Central European ‘Jewish Question’ in Romania (1885), revolutions of 1848, 128, 133–4; 339 support for Russian intervention in Liberalism: in nineteenth-century Hungary and Transylvania (1848), Romania, 357–8; 360 151. See also Brătianu, Dumitru; London: as a place of exile for European Colquhoun, Robert G. republicans and anarchists, 189. See Paris: foreigners in, 33; Poles in, 36–7; also Mazzini, Giuseppe Romanians in, 37–8, 41–2; as place of exile, 178; police searches at Mazzini, Giuseppe: and the activities Romanian exiles’ homes in, 204–6; of the Central European Democratic Romanian newspapers in, 125, 207, 236 Committee (London, 1850), 189, Paşoptism: as programme of the 218; and the Romanian members of Romanian forty-eighters, 358. See also the Central European Democratic under Liberalism Committee, 190; and newspaper Le Pechméja, Ange: and support for Proscrit (Paris, 1851), 192–3; mail of Romanian cause, 267; L’oeuf de opened by the British General Post Kneph. Histoire secrète du zéro Office, 195; and support for (Bucharest, 1864), 267 anti-Austrian activities in Wallachia, Press, the: the Romanian forty-eigthers’ 283 uses of 345–9; 361. See also French press; British press index 381

Quinet, Edgar: the Romanians in Paris Party, 333; role in “Frigyesy Affair” and, 57–8, 66; defense of Romanian (1864), 335; death of, 337 Principalities (1849), 161–2; marriage Rosetti, Marie: birth of, 18; marriage to to Hermione Asachi, 178; revocation Constantin Rosetti, 60; from the Collège de France (1852), correspondence with Jules Michelet, 215; Les Roumains (1856), 296–7; 179; ‘legend’ of, 181–2, 234; editor of exile, 354 Mama şi copilul (1865), 334, 337. See Quinet, Hermione: the Romanian also Michelet, Jules; Rosenthal, diaspora in Paris and, 42; marriage Constantin Daniel to Edgar Quinet, 178–9; translator of Rosetti, Mircea Charlemagne: birth of, Silvio Pellico’s On the Duties of Men, 180; illness of, 336 179. See also Asachi, Hermione Rosetti, Sophia Liberté (Liby): birth of as narrated by Jules Michelet, 17–8, Racoviţă, Constantin: arrests and 336. See also Légendes démocratiques deportation of by Russians, 118, 224, du nord. “Madame Rosetti” 260. See also Golescu family Rosetti, Vintilă Jules Ştefan: birth of Revolutions of 1848, the: in Wallachia, (1853), 223 67, 75–89, 93–112; the failure of the “Rosetti-Winterhalder Establishment”, Property Commission in, 350–1; the: role of in financing exile, 119–20. popular support for, 351; the Islaz See also Winterhalder, Henric; Grant, Proclamation and, 76–9, 357, 360; Effingham in Moldavia, 77–8, 86; Polish agents Russia: influence of in the Romanian in the Romanian Principalities and, Principalities, 24, 26, 69, 73, 159–60; 86–7, 98, 172; in Hungary, 136–9, perceptions of in the West, 30, 38–9, 164–70; in Transylvania, 90–2, 129–30, 209–10; intervention of in 139–53, 164–70. See also Hungary and Transylvania (1849), Transylvania 148–51; and refugee crisis (1849), Romanian (Danubian) Principalities: 169–70; and occupation of Wallachia history of, 3–6. See also Congress of during Crimean War (1853–54), Paris; Crimean War 227, 276; opposition to the return of Rosenthal, Constantin Daniel: and the the Romanian exiles, 293. See also Wallachian revolution of 1848, 81–2, Golovin, Ivan; Herzen, Alexander 88; portrait of Marie Rosetti as Revolutionary Romania (1850), 182; Saint Sava College, the (Bucharest): role death presumed suicide, 205 of Transylvanian professors at, 141 Rosetti, Constantin: family and Sami, Pasha of Vidin: sympathetic to background of, 20–1; education of, the Romanian cause during Crimean 21–2; and Freemasonry, 40; War, 264–5, 266 admiration for Anita Garibaldi, 170; Stuart, Lord Dudley Coutts: and Poland, marriage of, 60, 121; Pruncul român, 29–30; and protests against Russian 77, 82, 97; Românul (Paris, occupation of the Romanian Bucharest), 125, 237, 333–4, 346; Principalities, 95, 132–4; support republicanism of, 163, 180, 334, for the Romanian cause, 227–8, 258; rejection of amnesty (1851), 202; death of, 258–9 death of new-born son (1852), 216; sharing exile with Jules Michelet Transylvania: status of Romanians in, (Nantes, 1852), 217–19, 223–4; 139–41; Romanian-Hungarian Republica română (Paris), 236, 263; tensions in, 141–50, 151–3, 164–70; attempt to create Romanian legion in ethnic conflict in, 146–50, 151–3, the Crimean War, 254, 263–75; 164–70; refugees from in Wallachia, reflections on marriage, 254–5; as 147–8; Russian intervention in (1849), deputy in Ad-hoc Divan (1857), 319; 148–9; Wallachian exiles in, 149–50; role in coup d’état of 1866, 329; as Hungarian-Romanian negotiations founder of the Romanian Liberal over (1849), 164–70 382 index

Turkey: and Convention of Balta-Liman Voinescu II, Ion (Jean): as Foreign (1 May 1849), 159–6; and political Minister of Wallachia (1848), 81, asylum to Hungarian, Polish and 95–6; protest against Russian Romanian refugees (1849), 168–70, occupation of Moldavia, 95–6; 172–3; Hungarian, Polish and correspondence with Jules Michelet Romanian refugees in (1849), 175–6 (1853), 237–8; funeral of, 291–2. See also Ubicini, Jean Abdolonyme Ubicini, Jean Abdolonyme: assessment of Wallachian Revolution of 1848, Wallachia: historical background, 3–6. 110–1; Mémoire justificatif de la See also Romanian (Danubian) révolution roumaine de 11/23 juin Principalities 1848, 93, 110, 121–2; “La Question de Winterhalder, Henric: role in the l’Orient devant l’Europe” (1854), 268; Wallachian Revolution of 1848, 8–9, funeral oration at the death of Ion 81; role in financing the Romanian (Jean) Voinescu II, 291; “Provinces diaspora, 119–20, 134; arrest of, 159; d’origine roumaine” (1856), 294 rumoured death of, 162; Urquhart, David: and opposition to expulsion from Wallachia, 217. See Russia, 30, 128–9; England, France, also “Rosetti-Winterhalder Russia, and Turkey (1834), 31; and Establishment”, the opposition to the union of the Romanian Principalities, 306, 310