Readings for Hist 102, Europe since 1815, Ch 4-5 / Wk 5

Contents

PART I – What is the significance of 1815?

• (1) The French Inspiration (REVIEW)
• (2) 1814-1815 – Conference in Vienna
• (3) The 100 Days – A Rude Interruption
• (4) Concerts & Holy Allies – The Vienna Order
• (5) Legacy of 1815 – A Century of Peace That Never Was

PART II – Episodes from 1815 to 1848

• (6) New Uprisings of the 1820s
  -> Spain and Latin America — The Italian States
  -> The Decembrists and the Rise of “National Russia”
• (7) Crisis of the Ottoman Empire
  -> The Greek World in the Late Ottoman Period
• (8) 1821: The Greek Challenge
• (9) A New French Empire?
  -> France in Haiti and Algeria
• (10) 1830-1831 — France, Belgium, Poland
  -> Managed Nationalism

(Part III – DRAFT – Do not read these sections yet)

• (11) 1840s: Hungry or Free?
  -> The Agony of Ireland
  -> Free Markets and Customs Unions
  -> Socialists and Feminists
• (Appendix A) Terminologies: Romantics, Liberals, Conservatives, Nationalists…
• (Appendix B) Chronology in Brief
• (Appendix C) Sources & Further Reading

Part I

What is the significance of 1815?

Source: Colin McEvedy, Penguin Atlas of Modern History (1986)

* 1 *
THE FRENCH INSPIRATION

REVIEW

As we read in Chapter 2 on “The French Revolution,” from 1792 to 1814 the old-regime powers of Europe formed a sequence of six Coalitions to fight in huge and increasingly total wars, first against Revolutionary France. In 1794, an internal coup against the Jacobin government ended the radical phase of the Revolution. But the Coalition wars continued, first against the French governments under the more conservative Directorate and Consulate (1794-1799) and then, in 1799, against the dictatorship of Napoleon and the French Empire he declared after 1803.

In each of the first five Wars of the Coalitions, France, at times with allies, was able to defeat or to force favorable truce terms on all of the old-regime powers, except for Britain, and the territories in Europe under French control or direct rule were expanded, until, by 1812, the new French imperial order under Napoleon stretched from Spain to Poland, and from Denmark to Italy (see 1812 map).

Millions in the countries defeated and occupied by French forces or their allies at first greeted French revolutionary ideals of civic equality (the equality of all citizens before the law), declarations of individual rights, and the Napoleonic reforms. Many were inspired by the institution of legal systems that were secular (non-religious), by ideas like popular sovereignty and rational administration of government, and by the meritocratic claim in which, at least theoretically, any man could rise up in the system based on his individual ability. (That story was of course different for women.)

• See Declaration of the Rights of Man – 1789

French ideals were often not put into practice when France actually ruled a foreign land. Or they were accompanied by corruptions, such as the appointment of Napoleon’s brothers and cousins as monarchs in Italy and Spain. Opposition and resistance to French rule was met with harsh measures. As a result, in most places, the differing levels of popularity at first enjoyed by the French tended to shrink, the longer the French were in charge.

In western Germany, many at first celebrated the French annexation of all lands west of the Rhine River. After the defeat of Prussia and Austria in 1806, many Germans greeted Napoleon’s reduction of the powerful Prussian Kingdom to a much smaller territory, his termination of the ancient military alliance led by Austria known as the “Holy Roman Empire,” and the reorganization of hundreds of German lands and city-states into a more open and (officially) liberal “Confederation of the Rhine.”

Napoleon and the French were even more popular in Poland. Recall that in 1796, the empires of Russia, Prussia, and Austria had completed the partition of Poland (the Polish-Lithuanian confederation of centuries past), dividing its remaining territories among them and causing Poland to disappear from the map. In 1808, under the terms of Napoleon’s truce with the Russian Empire, a Polish principality was revived, and allied with the French. Willing Poles provided a couple of hundred thousand soldiers and horsemen for the doomed Grande Armee that invaded Russia in 1812.

The wars turned against Napoleon. National uprisings against French rule broke out, starting in Spain. The largest came in the German lands in 1813. The German uprising was in part a pro-royalist or conservative upheaval; but many of the Germans who rose up against the French dreamed of creating a unified German nation with an elected parliament and universal rights of citizenship.

Just as Enlightenment ideals had inspired intellectuals across Europe, they attracted many who fought the French military as enemies in war. French nationalism stimulated the nationalism of other peoples, whether as a desirable model or as the work of an enemy that had to be copied if a nation was to survive.

The meritocratic practices of the revolutionary and Napoleonic militaries, which allowed commoners to rise to the rank of general, were inspirational to young officers of the middle military ranks on both sides. For a generation and more after 1815, young officers and veterans from both sides of the Napoleonic wars would lead or participate in revolutionary uprisings against the restored old regimes in their own countries.

One further example: Napoleonic France issued various orders to emancipate Jews, declaring them citizens with the same rights as Christians, freeing them from dress codes. For hundreds of years many countries (and smaller jurisdictions within countries) had required Jews to wear a yellow star when in public, or banished them altogether. Under French-Napoleonic rule, they could take up professions from which they had been barred by tradition and law. Such measures won loyalty in Jewish and other communities.

The disastrous 1812 invasion of Russia signaled the end. By March 1814, the Sixth Coalition prevailed over the remnants of Napoleon’s armies. Troops from Russia, Britain, Austria, Prussia, the smaller German lands, Spain, Portugal, and other countries occupied Paris. Napoleon surrendered in April 1814. The conservatives and royalists of Europe celebrated what they saw as a final victory against the French effort to destroy the rightful order of the continent.

The winners were reluctant to kill the deposed emperor, as this might reinforce the precedent of the French execution of King Louis XVI in 1793. Napoleon and a number of retainers and collaborators were sent into exile together, imprisoned securely (so it was believed) on the Mediterranean fortress island of Elba, west of the northern Italian coast.

In 1814 the Bourbon monarchy was restored in France under Louis XVIII (the 18th, a brother of the executed Louis who adopted the same name). Exiled French nobles returned to their old holdings in France, if these were still available. The new royalist state once again shifted taxation onto the peasantry and commoners, and directed payments to many of their former lords, this time as “reparations” for lost lands. For the most part, the nobles who had departed France and had therefore had their land taken and distributed among the peasants, or sold on the market, did not get these lands back.

Across the Atlantic, the Latin American independence wars set off by the revolutions and wars in Europe continued. In reading the following account of the post-1815 Restoration period, keep in mind that the revolutionary-nationalist wave in the Americas, which began with the independence of the United States in the 1770s, was still gaining in strength, even as the statesmen of the European old regimes met in Vienna.

* 2 *
1814-1815 – CONFERENCE IN VIENNA

A listing of leading delegates in Vienna (upper right corner) starts with the Duke of Wellington, who as a British general had dealt Napoleon some of his worst defeats. The list of course includes Metternich, head of the Austrian delegation (portrait, lower left). Not on this list but also present as a delegate for the Russian Empire: the Greek noble Ioannis Kapodistrias (portrait, lower right).

By late 1814, diplomatic representatives of the victorious Great Powers flocked with their servants and entourages to the Austrian imperial capital of Vienna, where they hoped to plan out a restoration of the former European order. The delegations came from Russia, Britain, Prussia, and many other kingdoms, large and small.

For months, the statesmen met informally in pairs and groups in the luxurious halls and apartments of the royal districts, enjoying the dinners, theaters, orchestras and musical quartets of the Austrian capital. Their host, so to speak, was the head of the Austrian delegation, the young nobleman and statesman, Klemens von Metternich — an arch-conservative. A fire-breather.

The diplomats representing the new Bourbon monarchy of France were equal participants in the negotiations. Generally speaking, the other delegations did not hold the restored France responsible for the Revolution or the Napoleonic wars. The enemy as they saw it had not been the French Kingdom, which was headed by a monarch and a noble class related to their own monarchs and noble classes. The enemy had been the commoner revolutionaries of France — and the idea of revolution generally.

One of the European great powers was absent. No representatives of the Muslim-led Ottoman Empire were invited to Vienna. Nevertheless, the Austrian Empire, long under the rule of the Habsburg dynasty, advocated that their traditional enemy of many centuries be left untouched, and even protected and preserved. The Ottoman Empire had grown increasingly unstable. If nationalities under Ottoman rule began to achieve independence, Austria feared this would set off uprisings in its own multi-national empire, which was home to communities of many of the same ethnicities and cultures found in Ottoman territories, like those of the Serbs and Wallachians (today’s Romanians).

The plan in Vienna was to draw a new map of Europe and put together a single grand peace treaty that would be signed by all of the delegates, once consensus among them had been achieved. For a time, however, the representatives of the powers clashed over their various revived territorial interests. New wars seemed possible, or even imminent, most of all between the two great powers led by German peoples, Prussia and Austria. (They differed over the status of Prussia’s traditional enemy, the Kingdom of Saxony. Prussia wanted a weak Saxony; Austria wanted it strong, as a counter to Prussia.)

Nevertheless, the delegates found their way to a rough understanding around the vision of a lasting “Concert” of all the Great Powers, a new version of the Old Regimes that would safeguard the privileges of nobility across Europe and prevent or stop future revolutions of the commoners. If this required peace between traditional enemies, so be it.

* 3 *
THE 100 DAYS

A RUDE INTERRUPTION

A French-language cartoon from 1815 depicts Napoleon intruding on the Vienna negotiations to disturb the diplomats by slashing their giant map of Europe with his sword. Hiding under the map is the Bourbon King Louis XVIII.

The Restoration’s victory party was interrupted, rudely, and their grand visions were insulted in the worst way. In March 1815, news arrived in Vienna that Napoleon and his retainers and personal guards had escaped the fortress in Elba, taken ships, and sailed to the French Mediterranean port of Marseilles, where the deposed emperor enjoyed a raucous greeting from the people. The Bourbons ordered the French military to arrest Napoleon, but entire French units instead defected to his side and swore fealty to their Emperor.

While in Elba, Napoleon had maintained contacts with his old officers and allies in France. He was also visited by some of his former antagonists, who were happy to talk with him about old times and, importantly, the latest news. He was aware that hundreds of thousands of French prisoners of war held by the Coalition powers had been released and were back in France. Most of his (living) veterans had been decommissioned, but he knew that they overwhelmingly remained loyal to him. Now he hoped to win one last roll of the military dice. Within days of his reentering France, the Bourbons fled and Napoleon was able to march back into Paris with the people cheering their restored French Emperor, at the head of new and growing Grande Armee.

The old-regime statesmen left Vienna in a hurry to help organize and lead a new War of the Seventh Coalition against France. Within a hundred days of Napoleon’s escape, France was surrounded by armies from several powers. Napoleon was defeated by Prussian and British troops at a battle near Waterloo, a village in Belgium. Forced to surrender a final time, he was exiled to a truly secure prison island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and kept there under a heavy guard, isolated, until his death in 1821.

Having survived this new scare, the diplomats of the powers got into their carriages and rode back to Vienna. The Vienna Congress was no longer a nostalgic reunion of the old nobility, just like the (imagined) old days when borders did not matter for them, when they knew and visited each other regardless of country, when the lower orders knew their place. Now they meant business.

They debated breaking up France into separate kingdoms, an idea that Metternich championed. In the end, the Bourbons were allowed to remain in power over the whole of France, minus Belgium (which had been joined to France during the wars). But France was forced to pay higher reparations for the Napoleonic wars. This meant the Bourbons would have to impose higher taxes on French commoners to pay the bills.

This outcome was thanks above all to the Russian Empire’s support for keeping an intact France. The Russian nobles — who generally spoke French with each other — saw a strong France as a counterweight to their most dangerous potential enemies, the Prussian Kingdom and the Austrian Empire.

The argument against Metternich’s plan to break up France was won by one of the Russian czar’s most able representatives in Vienna, Ioannis (John) Kapodistrias. He was a minor noble from the Greek island of Corfu in the Ionian Sea. (The Ionian islands never came under Ottoman rule, and by 1815 were under a British protectorate; see the 1815 map in the next section.)

The well-educated and refined Kapodistrias had spent much of his life as a diplomat for the Russian crown, and would soon serve Russia as its foreign minister for several years. He plays an important role in the following, as what I shall call the Founding Martyr of an independent Greek nation-state (section 8, below).

* 4 *
CONCERTS & HOLY ALLIES

THE VIENNA ORDER

In the end, the map of Europe enshrined in the 1815 Treaty of Vienna trashed the map of the Napoleonic Empire in 1812, but also shows some crucial differences from the map of old-regime Europe in 1789, starting with the absence of Poland.

After Napoleon’s defeat, the territories assigned by the French in 1808 to the allied Duchy of Warsaw (Poland) again came under the authority of Russia, Prussia, and Austria.

The Vienna Treaty recognized the Kingdom of Prussia’s return to territories it had lost during the wars, and endorsed Protestant Prussia’s further expansion into mostly Catholic lands in western Germany, including most of the rich and beautiful Rhine River valley (the Rhineland). Napoleon’s Confederation of the Rhine was dissolved in favor of a larger and very loose “German Confederation.” Formally, this included the German parts of the Habsburg Austrian Empire, as had been the case with the “Holy Roman Empire.” But there was no talk of reviving the latter, or of returning to the old map and system with hundreds of separate German lands.

During the early Coalition Wars, the forces of revolutionary France had occupied the Dutch Republic (the Netherlands) and put it under a friendly king, as a way of neutralizing it. The conservative royalists at Vienna in 1815 decided not to reverse this move. They retained the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and even agreed to put the former territory of Belgium under the rule of its long-time enemy, the Netherlands. (This would lead to a Belgian uprising; see section 11, below.)

PREHISTORY: THE NETHERLANDS AND BELGIUM

• Let’s take a historical detour to explain why the Vienna settlement endorsed the end of the Dutch Republic and the expansion of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to include Belgium. (In case they make things too complicated, detours into prehistory and previews will be italicized, so that you can skip them on first reading and return later.)
• After the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s, the overwhelming majority of the Dutch became Protestant, for the most part strict Calvinists. They didn’t have icons in church, they followed scripture rather than priests, and they believed hard work and accumulation of wealth were virtues. Art turned to portraits of real people.
• The Dutch Republic started in the late 1500s with a very long war for independence from the Catholic Austrian-Spanish emperors (the Habsburgs), who fought to hold these lands for 80 years, until 1648.
• The people in neighboring Belgium are Walloon speakers of French, and Flemish, who speak a variant of Dutch, but did not convert to Protestantism in the 1500s. They stayed Catholic. They remained part of the Habsburg-Austrian-Spanish empire and fought against Dutch independence. Belgium was eventually called the “Austrian Netherlands.”
• Succeeding in commerce and trade and growing ever richer already during the 80 years of their independence wars, the Dutch Republic became a naval and maritime power. The Dutch acquired an overseas empire that by the 1800s had mostly been lost to the British, but that most notably still included the “Spice Islands” (Indonesia).
• Amsterdam (a beautiful city!) became the most important financial center in the world, until its gradual displacement by London between the 1690s and the 1770s.
• In the 1600s and 1700s, the Dutch Republic fought and funded armies in wars against both France and Habsburg Spain and Austria, and also competed with and even fought naval wars with Britain over the control of sea routes, trade, and colonies. They had made powerful enemies, and the old regime diplomats in Vienna preferred to keep the Netherlands as a kingdom, rather than restore the Republic.
• Belgians were seen as having greeted the French Revolution. Belgium was annexed by France during the revolutionary years, and remained part of France until Napoleon’s defeat.

Among other territorial changes compared to the 1789 map, the 1815 map shows that the Vienna Congress recognized Russian authority over Finland (taken from Sweden during a side war in 1808), while Norway was taken from the Kingdom of Denmark (which had allied with the French) and folded into the Kingdom of Sweden.

The most important changes came in the political order, both within each country and internationally. We have already seen the nature of the domestic changes: the monarchical dynasties and old nobilities were back in charge, and the pre-revolutionary social orders were restored — as far as this was still possible.

Internationally, at least for the moment, the Great Powers understood that avoiding new revolutions and maintaining domestic stability meant they needed to cooperate diplomatically and avoid hostilities with each other. The final Treaty of Vienna signaled the start of an attempted new harmonious international order that the powers called the “Concert of Europe.”

If the Concert of Europe was supposed to play a classical symphony written in Vienna, in 1820, the monarchs of the three most conservative powers met to declare their own hard-core punk version, which they called the Holy Alliance. This name was meant to invoke the ideal of a reunited Christendom that could reconcile the sectarian divisions between Western Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and the Protestant sects. The Holy Alliance was supposed to unite all Christians against the threats of secular thinking, national revolution, and the Enlightenment in general. It included Catholic Austria, Lutheran-Calvinist Prussia, and Orthodox Russia. Along with Bourbon France, they pledged to send their troops anywhere in Europe on short notice, so as to crush in the cradle any new uprisings of commoners and aspiring nationalists.

Napoleonic decrees to emancipate Jews were partly but not always reversed. After Prussian rule over the Rhineland was restored and extended, laws barring Jews from practicing some professions were enforced. This prompted conversions to Christianity by many, including the lawyer Heinrich Marx, father of Karl Marx (1818-1883), the future philosopher of communism. Karl was baptized as a Lutheran at the age of six. The Marx family maintained a secular way of life, radical beliefs (for the time), and life-long admiration of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic order that had emancipated them.

*5*
LEGACY OF 1815

A CENTURY OF PEACE THAT NEVER WAS

There is a persistent and powerful myth, repeated even among serious historians who have produced great works of scholarship, that the Vienna settlement of 1815 set up an unprecedented “Century of Peace” in Europe, and that this endured until the surprising and unfortunate outbreak of the Great War in 1914 (World War I).

As we will see in coming weeks, belief in this myth demands we forget or ignore the literally hundreds of usually bloody wars that the European powers waged around the world throughout the nineteenth and the early twentieth before 1914 — or else, to say these European wars for colonies and empire shouldn’t be counted, because they were fought outside Europe, or (as imperialists might say) fought in the name of civilization.

More than this, starting by the 1850s as we will see, a number of major wars did take place between the Great Powers on the European continent itself, continuing into the early 1880s. Only after that did Europe again experience about three decades without wars among the major powers (at least, no wars within the territories of Europe itself), until 1914. It was only in this much later period, at the end of the 19th century, that British statesmen and intellectuals began to speak of a Pax Britannica (the “British Peace”), and the myth of a Century of Peace was born.

What is true, as we have seen, is that after the experience of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars — the biggest (if arguably not the costliest) wars in history until then — the exhausted ruling classes of Europe hoped to keep the peace amongst themselves so they could focus on fighting revolutionary currents from below. Napoleon’s failed comeback in 1815 reinforced for them the point that their own domestic power was insecure.

The European Restoration of the Old Regimes guided diplomacy for the next 33 years, until 1848. But from the beginning, the Concert of Europe proved unstable. Napoleon’s Hundred Days (section 3) are usually viewed as the end of his story. But they can be seen instead as the first in a new series of revolutionary uprisings. Beginning just five years after the Vienna agreement, the European monarchs and nobles faced rebellions and revolutionary fevers in a number of countries, and had to deal with peoples inside their own empires trying to escape their control (sections 6-10, below).

British statesmen, meanwhile, lost interest in Concerts and Alliances soon after the Vienna Treaty. They went back to their accustomed diplomatic strategy of avoiding permanent alliances with Continental powers. Their doctrine was to play the Continental powers off each other, so that no power would become dominant in Europe and pose a threat to the British home islands, as mighty France had done, or otherwise challenge Britain’s increasing colonial dominance around the world, as the little Dutch Republic had once done.

PREVIEW: BRITISH POLICY

• In the decades after 1815, while the British leaderships still sometimes viewed France as the biggest threat, their new obsession with a power they believed required containment became the massive Russian Empire. The British press often presented Russia as a threat to become the dominant Continental power. By the middle of the century, as Russia had expanded its territories ever further into Central Asia, British statesmen feared it might one day invade Britain’s most prized colonial possessions: those on the Indian subcontinent. A Russian move to threaten British India never came, and probably never could have, given that Russia and Central Asia are separated from the Indian subcontinent by the world’s highest mountain ranges. But this specter was enough to motivate generations of British foreign policy and diplomacy against Russia.

THE COMING FAILURE OF THE RESTORATION

Just as the Restoration order could never be the same as the Old Regimes before 1789, so too, after 1815, the original Enlightenment ideas of equality among all men and peoples increasingly transformed into variants: nationalist, liberal, and Romantic movements throughout the Continent. Generally these uprisings were led by frustrated members of the new middle classes — the rising urban professionals and business people, who were called “bourgeois” — or by the aforementioned idealistic military officers of the middle ranks. Or by poets and visionaries.

While most of the new uprisings were defeated, already by the late 1820s and 1830s the restored European old regimes would be forced to look for ways not just to crush, but when needed to appease and to manage the continuing rise of popular power and nationalist aspirations.

Ultimately, by the end of the period we are examining in this chapter, those efforts would fail. In 1848, finally, simultaneous and massive national revolutions broke out and established rule by parliaments in many countries at once, in France, Italy, the German lands, and various countries within the Austrian Empire. While these revolutions would almost all end in bloody defeats, they also ended the Restoration illusion that the European kingdoms could remain forever tied to the monarchical traditions of the past. Insofar as they had not already done so, after 1848 the states and major powers of Europe would plunge instead into the pursuit of economic modernization, often guided by forms of “nationalism from above,” nationalism in conservative form. (All this is a simplification but broadly true to the consensus of present-day historians; like most of what you’re reading in this course.)

The rest of this week’s chapter outlines the key political episodes of the story of how the Restoration of 1815 failed repeatedly to put down the emerging nations but endured — until finally, in 1848, it failed completely.

Part II

Episodes from 1815 to 1848

* 6 *
NEW UPRISINGS OF THE 1820s

SPAIN AND LATIN AMERICA
THE ITALIAN STATES
DECEMBRISTS AND THE RISE OF “NATIONAL RUSSIA”

THE SPANISH TRIENIO

In Spain, King Ferdinand VII (7th) was restored to the throne already in 1813, when French forces were forced out of Spain. Ferdinand was a son of the Bourbon dynasty, and thus related to the French King Louis XVIII (18th), who was restored in 1814. Both were believers in monarchical Absolutism, which made them unpopular with most of their people. Both preferred to ignore that even after the Restoration, their countries had constitutions that were supposed to limit their powers.

But what kind of Restoration was this in Spain, if the dozen or more independence struggles in Latin America should finally prevail? Spain was close to losing forever all of its enormous, almost 300-year-old mainland empire in the Americas. The Spanish Empire had begun in the 1520s and extended over a contiguous set of territories from the southern tip of South America all the way to Mexico, including California and today’s U.S. Southwest. (See the two maps below; the one on the left shows the Spanish Empire in 1800, still holding the same territories as it had claimed by the late 1500s.)

By 1819, on Ferdinand’s orders, Spain had raised a large new army. They gathered in the southern part of the country, around the Atlantic port city of Cadiz. Like almost any larger European army at the time, most of them were fresh recruits or conscripts from rural areas. They trained and prepared to ship out to the Americas, with a mission to topple independence governments and end the revolutions against Spanish rule. Had this plan gone ahead, we might reasonably expect most of them would have died of yellow fever, fallen in pointless battles, or defected to the other side.

Liberal-minded officers in this army, veterans of both sides in the Napoleonic wars, had a different plan. They conspired in their lodges and whispered in the ranks until, in January 1820, the lieutenant-colonel Rafael de Riego led the army away from Cadiz and marched on Madrid. The revolutionaries put the king under house arrest. A parliament was elected (the Cortes), with Riego’s party in the majority. Royalist uprisings were put down, but civil wars continued in several regions of the country, led by royalists and partisans of the Catholic Church. A liberal government was established and attempted to centralize state authority and pursue industrialization. All this was reminiscent of the French Revolution of 1789.

VICTORY OF FIRST-WAVE NATIONALISM IN THE AMERICAS

One earth-shaking consequence of the 1820 revolution in Spain is obvious. Any chance that Spain would reconquer its old colonies was gone. The mainland Spanish empire of 1800 (in green on the map on the left, with Portuguese Brazil in yellow) completed its transformation into independent nation-states (in purple on the map on the right, with Spain’s remaining holdings in the Caribbean still in green). It should be noted that the Latin American revolutions had all been led and started by Spanish creoles (people of Spanish descent born in the colonies), many of whom had already enjoyed relative privilege under the colonial order. But to defeat the royalist-loyalist side, those who favored independence made alliances with the indigenous, mestizo (mixed), and African-descended peoples of Latin America. Independence therefore meant the abolition of slavery and other traditional forms of bondage (not in in independent Brazil or in those places that Spain kept, like Cuba). Most of the new nations became republics with parliaments, but these often proved unstable, and subject to takeovers by semi-Napoleonic caudillos, as well as interventions from the powerful older Republic in North America, the United States.

1820 and 1821 saw similar risings, led by liberal military officers, in Portugal, the Kingdom of Naples (southern Italy), and the Kingdom of Piedmont (northwestern Italy). These were the first in a long series through the early 1830s, but they tended not to happen all at once but one at a time, sometimes in pairs:

Click to expand map:

PREVIEW: ITALY

• Piedmont, under the relatively liberal rule of the House of Savoy, was turning into the most economically advanced of the various kingdoms, city-states and principalities on the Italian peninsula. The kingdom was preserved after the 1821 uprising, which was led by liberal military officers; but over the decades it pursued industrial development and increasingly adopted liberal reforms from above. After 1848, Piedmont will become the state that leads the unification of all of the Italian lands into a single kingdom, just as Prussia will lead the unification of the German lands in the 1860s.

THE POWERS RESPOND

From the perspective of the Holy Alliance, the events in Spain, Portugal, and Italy were a signal to take action. Austria in particular organized expeditions drawn from its own forces and sent other aid to help the local royalists crush the uprisings in Naples and Piedmont. The uprisings in Italy and Portugal were soon subdued. Austria’s influence in the regions of Italy closest to it became dominant.

But the rule of the liberals in Spain would survive until 1823, and has gone down in history as the Liberal Trienio (the Three Liberal Years).

At an 1822 conference in the town of Verona (Italy), the five great European powers (Britain, France, Austria, Russia, Prussia) declared that Spain was a threat to all Europe. They sanctioned a French military intervention.

Louis XVIII had already called forth a volunteer “Army of Saint Louis” to invade Spain and rescue his cousin. (The name of the army referred not to Louis XVIII himself, but to a medieval French king who had been declared a saint of the Catholic Church.)

In early 1823, about 100,000 French soldiers crossed the Pyrennes mountains into Spain, joined with the Spanish royalists, marched on Madrid and defeated the liberal forces, dissolved the liberal government, restored King Ferdinand, and witnessed the execution by hanging of Rafael de Riego, ending the Three Liberal Years.

By then the five European Powers were worrying what to do about a new kind of challenge to their Restoration order — the revolution of Greeks against the Ottoman Empire that began in 1821.

Before turning to the complicated case of the Ottoman Empire and the Greeks, let us briefly tell the story of one more uprising of liberal military men inspired by the French enlightenment and revolution, this one in Russia in 1825.

RUSSIA AND THE DECEMBRISTS

In the Russian capital of St. Petersburg, Tsar Alexander I had reigned since “the assassination of his autocratic father in 1801” (the words quoted here are from historian John Merriman, 2010, Modern Europe, Chapter 15, pp. 591-592, pp. 27-28 in pdf).

On first taking power, Alexander had “surrounded himself with a committee of advisers who advocated reform and began his reign by granting amnesty to thousands of people condemned by his father, relaxing censorship, abolishing torture in judicial investigations, and allowing more Russians to travel abroad.” (Merriman, 591-592)

Map of Russia from the English edition of an atlas authored by M. Lavoisne, published in 1820. European Russia is in pink, Asian Russia in yellow, with the Ural Mountains as the dividing line. In 1820 the Russian empire does not yet include most of the territories in Central Asia it will take possession of in the course of the 1800s. (Note that on the right side, this map shows ridiculous distortions of the East Asian coast.)

On the role of class in Russian society, Merriman writes that “an enormous social, economic, and legal gulf separated the Russian aristocracy from the millions of destitute serfs bound to the lands of their lords. Most Russian nobles feared that any reform would threaten their prerogatives.”

By the 1820s, the overall population of the Russian Empire approached 50 million people. About 90 percent of them were peasants, of whom about 20 million people were serfs.

• Serfdom in Russia
  Serfdom in 19th-century Russia was not chattel slavery, but comparable in several ways. Long abolished in most parts of Europe, serfdom was the feudal institution of bonding generations of farm families to the land of given nobles, who were to be treated as the “fathers” of their serfs. Serfdom in modern Russia was not like the chattel slavery prevalent in the Americas, but comparable in some ways. Serfs were free to marry and start families as they chose, or as their own family elders determined they should. They were allowed to own local property, in the rare cases they could afford it, and to earn their own money, if they were hired. They had rights to bring complaints to court. But nobles did sometimes trade or sell serfs among themselves, forcing them to move. Serfs were required to labor for their noble’s manor. But they could maintain parcels of the noble’s lands for their own needs, as well as common lands for the collective use of their villages, such as for grazing. Usually they owned nothing and were not allowed to move, at least not legally. The exception was that nobles were expected to conscript young male serfs for the imperial military, and send them off to war. Nobles often borrowed money using the lives of their serfs as collateral. What held this order together above all was a faith, shared with the nobles, that this was the divine order of things, as God had intended it. Everyone went to church on Sundays.

Under pressure from the Russian nobles, and waging wars against both the Ottoman Empire (1806-1812) and France under Napoleon (1806-1807 and 1812-14), Alexander turned reactionary. As Merriman writes, in 1809 “he rejected a proposed constitution. Conservative elements regained power and introduced coercive measures. Universities and schools were closely monitored to root out liberals; study abroad was banned; and censorship was applied with ruthless efficiency.”

At the time, especially in a country as vast and underdeveloped as Russia, even the harshest of police states had difficulties keeping tabs on conspiracies against the state. Merriman describes two:

“But liberal reform had advocates in Russia, including some young nobles who had been educated in Western Europe (before foreign study was prohibited) and a handful of army officers who had lived in France during the allied military occupation after Napoleon’s fall. They were bitterly disappointed by Alexander’s reactionary turn. By 1820, two loosely linked conspiratorial ‘unions,’ as they were called, had been formed. The educated nobles of the Northern Union hoped that Russia might evolve toward British constitutionalism. The military officers of the Southern Union had a more radical goal: to kill the tsar and establish a republic.” (592)

Tsar Alexander I was not assassinated, like his father, but died of typhus after a 25-year reign, in December 1825. A brief succession struggle followed. Alexander had two brothers. The throne had been prepared for the younger of the two, Nicholas, who was known as even more reactionary than Alexander. Deeply religious, Nicholas “believed his power to govern came directly from God” (Merriman, p. 593).

Source: Many Europes (2009).

The liberal military men put their hopes in his elder brother, Constantine. They managed to muster about 3,000 people, mostly troops in rebellion, to rally in a central square in St. Petersburg. The armed crowd chanted Constantine’s name, hoping he would appear. Constantine didn’t emerge.

Nicholas had a loyal guard of about 10,000 troops at the ready, and ordered them to fire on the liberal protesters. Scattered uprisings of the two “unions,” who became known as the Decembrists, were soon suppressed, and many of the leaders were executed after summary proceedings, if they could not manage to flee to other countries.

About ninety years later, the leaders of the Russian Revolutions of 1917 would celebrate the Decembrists as heroes and precursors.

OFFICIAL RUSSIAN NATIONALITY

The government appointed by Nicholas I went on to proclaim a doctrine of ‘‘Official Nationality,” in which autocracy, Christian Orthodox religion, and official Russian nationality were seen as “the intertwined principles of the state” (Merriman, 593). Under Nicholas, the state made halting efforts at bureaucratic and military modernization, as one might expect given the competition with the other great powers. But all political reforms were taboo until his death, in 1855.

The nationality principle completed a major shift for a political order where, for most of the 1700s, the nobles had spoken French with each other. For several decades in the 1700s the emperors, including Empress Catherine the Great, came from German nobility. They learned proper Russian after assuming the throne. The western European kingdoms were considered the model of civilization for Russia to pursue. After the revolt of the Decembrists, the Russian imperial state adopted conservatism and Orthodoxy as its dominant doctrines.

NATIONALITIES OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE

At this time, the empire had many subject peoples, and their number was increasing along with Russia’s territory. This was a reason for the new emphasis on “Official Russian Nationality.” The Russian Empire was Christian Orthodox but held huge territories in eastern Europe, where the majority populations were Catholic populations lived. The empire was also continuing a southward expansion into Central Asia and the Caucusus (see the map of “Russian Expansion” at the end of this section).

At that time the majority of those living in the eastern European territories of the Russian Empire were peasants. Many might have rarely if ever traveled very far from their villages. Many Christians did not identify themselves as belonging to a larger ethnicity, but simply considered themselves as “the people from this place.” Those who did identify not only as Christians but also as part of a larger “nationality” might have described themselves as Polish, Finnish, Ruthenian, Galician, Lithuanian, Latvian, or members of other groups. These peoples were usually mixed with each other in the same territories, and they often intermarried. They spoke an endless variety of languages and dialects. Many of these languages were not found in print at that time.

Banned from most of Russia proper, Jews were a minority in many regions of Russian-held eastern Europe (known as “the Pale”). They numbered several million in all. They were subject to regular persecution by the state. Imperial and local laws forced Jews to live in villages separate from the Christians. Jews living in larger towns and cities, like Kiev and Lviv, were concentrated in their own neighborhoods. These were termed ghettos. City life made relations with the Christian populations more possible.

Perhaps the greatest mix of these many different peoples speaking different languages was found in the large regions to the north of the Black Sea. These regions were known as the Ukraine, which originally meant “the borderlands.” The northern coast of the Black Sea and the Crimean peninsula were also home to indigenous Tatars and long-standing Greek-speaking communities. Some of the latter played a key role in starting the Greek independence struggle, see next section.

Their lives may have been difficult but generally speaking, most of these eastern European peoples within the Russian Empire shared similar peasant cultures, generally lived at peace with each other, and often intermarried.

Over the course of the 1800s, Russia expanded further southward into Asia. Russians with “official nationality” settled as new elites and administrators in the territories of the Caucusus. Some of these territories were stripped from the Ottoman Empire. Violence was often involved in suppressing rebellions and resistance. The majorities in the different regions of the Caucusus were Georgian, Armenian, Azeri, Chechen, Dagestani, and others. Central Asia was home mostly to Muslim peoples speaking Turkic languages, like the Kazakhs, Uzbekhs, Tadjziks, Turkmens, Kyrghiz, and Mongols.

All that is to name only some of larger populations among the many peoples that came under the rule of the Russian Empire in the late 1700s and throughout the 1800s. Their presence as groups subordinate to the empire’s Russian center at St. Petersburg was a major reason for the tsar’s increased stress on “Official Russian Nationality.”

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CRISIS OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

ISTANBUL: Hagia Sophia (Saint Sophia), opened in Constantinople as an Orthodox cathedral in 537 under the Eastern Roman (Greek Byzantine) empire, was converted to a mosque after the Ottoman conquest in 1453. The surrounding wall and four minarets were added in the Ottoman period. Credit: Arild Vågen, via Wikimedia.

MANAGING THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

Seated in the great city of Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, the Sultan and his court, known as the Sublime Porte (Gate), reigned over a vast multi-national empire that included core territories in Asia Minor, the Balkan peninsula of Europe, and western Asia (Syria), as well as protectorates stretching along northern Africa, from Egypt to Algeria.

The core territories, those that could be administered more directly from Istanbul, were also the areas that had come under Ottoman rule earliest, and correspond roughly to the darker green shades on the following map, which shows the empire at its greatest extent, in 1683.

RELIGION AND MILLETS

With Islam as the majority religion, the Empire showed tolerance to Christians and Jews, who were considered worshippers of the same God, as long as they accepted Ottoman political authority. Rebels against the empire were treated harshly, which often extended to their relatives. But Christians and Jews were not forced to convert to Islam, or prevented from worshipping. Rather, they were taxed more than Muslims, in keeping with the teachings of the Koran. In most regions, they could own property, accumulate wealth, practice trades and professions, and even organize their own courts. For centuries, this had been a more tolerant religious order than those found in most of Christian Europe.

Millets. Subjects of the empire were also members of virtual nations known as millets. People were assigned to millets by their religion, not the territory they came from. A person belonged to a millet regardless of where in the Empire she or he lived. One could change millets by converting to a different religion.

The majority in the empire, which in 1815 had an overall population estimated at 30 million people, belonged to the Muslim millet.

About six million Orthodox Christians, whose communities were found mostly in the Balkans and parts of Asia Minor, belonged to the Greek Orthodox millet. This was frequently called the Rum (Roman) millet, reflecting the presumed ancestry of the Christians as Romans. These Greek Orthodox “Romans” included various ethnicities (Serbian, Bulgarian, Greek, Albanian, etc.), with a mix of languages and cultures.

Of course, this was still the early 19th century, so like in most of the rest of the world about 90% of the Ottoman Christians or “Romans” were farmers and peasants working the land and paying taxes to various authorities, as were 90% of the Muslim majority, as were 90% of Russians. They were busy farming for food, keeping livestock, cutting wood, carrying water, spinning cloth, making tools, and looking forward to the end of the week, a religious service, and a day of rest. They didn’t necessarily feel an allegiance to distant others with whom they shared a national identity.

Orthodoxy was also the religion of Russia, the Ottoman Empire’s traditional enemy, which claimed to be the protector of Orthodox Christians everywhere. The Russian tsardom and the Ottomans had waged several major wars since the late 1500s, most recently in 1806-1812.

The head of the Greek Orthodox Church, the archbishop of archbishops, was called the partriach, seated in Istanbul. In practice, his authority was over religious matters, and he otherwise ruled nothing. The sultans held the religious chiefs responsible for maintaining the political obedience of their millets. For example, the patriarch could be punished for an uprising by members of the Greek Orthodox millet, even if he had nothing to do with it.

There was an Armenian Orthodox millet, a Jewish millet, and, as long as the empire controlled territories in central Europe, a Catholic millet. All millets were fully subordinate to the Ottoman emperor, but each non-Muslim millet also had a supreme head of their church.

The colors on the following map seek to identify the regions in which particular millets made up a majority of the population. The key is in French, so Musulman=Muslim, Rum=”Roman” (Greek Orthodox), Juif=Jew, Catholique=Catholic. The map gives a big-picture view of the mix of populations in the empire. Christian Orthodox groups within Syria and Egypt (Coptic Christians) were also organized as millets.

AUTHORITY, TAX FARMING, DIVIDE AND RULE

The means by which the Ottoman Empire ruled over its diverse territories were complicated in many other ways. Over the centuries, a long history of conquests, expansions, and assimilations of different peoples and countries had given rise to many institutions and layers of rule. Arrangements designed to solve some crisis in the past would sooner or later prove obsolete or burdensome when a different crisis arose.

By the 19th century, these systems had begun to break down. There were many conflicting missions and much confusion between imperial institutions and regions. Istanbul was resistant to modernization — to adopt a French style of more efficient bureaucracies and centralized authorities — and in any case, such reforms were difficult against vested interests and given the empire’s relative economic decline.

The further one got from Istanbul, the more the Empire was a patch-work of different and overlapping jurisdictions. Protectorates like Algiers and Egypt and various other partially independent areas were ruled by Pashas or Deys or Beys who commanded their own militaries. Pashas sometimes rose up against Istanbul, and a few even tried to conquer the city and declare themselves Sultan.

All manner of bands and landlords held power over areas that they sought to tax. Istanbul often assigned taxation to “tax farmers.” These were local landlords or merchants who would pay the taxes for a region up-front to Istanbul, and then send out their own tax collectors and soldiers to raise the taxes from the people of the region themselves. This was a form of for-profit business. Tax farmers had to raise more from the people than they had paid to Istanbul. If they failed, it was an incentive to revolt against Istanbul.

The Sultan also controlled a special force of non-Muslim soldiers known as Janissaries. They were recruited as children from Christian families. They usually gave up their younger children voluntarily, since the Janissaries were a respected corps promising a secure career.

For peasant families who were poor, as many were, a son sent to the Janissary corps meant one less mouth to feed at home. The boys were trained until adulthood, and then used as loyal soldiers and as trusted bureaucrats around the empire. Janissaries were not allowed to marry or have families, so that their loyalty was exclusively to the Sultan.

By the 19th century this had broken down, and the Janissaries had become a separate group inside the Ottoman state, akin to a mafia, raising families and holding land, seeking more power, often corrupt, and ready to riot. But they remained passionately loyal to Ottoman tradition, and desired to crush anything they felt was a movement against its traditions.

It was with that justification that in 1804, a group of renegade Janissaries massacred local Serb leaders who had claimed autonomy for a region around Belgrade. Serbs hastily elected a liberal military veteran of various European wars, Karadorde (“Black George”), to lead them. Black George’s forces expelled the Janissaries, claimed independence for a small Serbia, and until 1813 prevailed against Istanbul’s official attempts to invade and pacify the region.

Compared to the simultaneous Coalition Wars, this was a footnote. This first independent Serbia received no aid from the European Christian powers, and little support from their peoples. The thought of a free Serbia didn’t awaken passions among intellectuals and artists in the European capitals. After the Ottomans returned, Karadorde fled to Austria, where he was arrested. Austria had its own Serbs on the other side of the Danube, and therefore did not support the declaration of an independent Serbia. Karadorde was handed over to more sympathetic Russia, where he ended up joining the Greek independence conspiracy (next section). He returned to Serbia in secret in 1817, only to be assassinated by a Serbian rival.

• The story of the first short-lived independent Serbia is told here because of the contrasts it presents to the Greek independence story, which began in 1814, soon after the Serbian state was re-occupied. Once they had restored their authority, the Ottomans did allow relative autonomy to Serbia as a province of the empire, but there was no full independence. (It’s on the 1815 map, at the top of this chapter.) What advantages did the coming Greek struggle enjoy, compared to that of the Serbians? Unlike the Serbian case, why did the European Christian powers eventually support the Greeks? Possible answers will be discussed below.

Janissaries were among the many ways the Sultans had invented to manage the peoples under their rule by the principle of divide and rule, to use members of one group to rule over another. Another was to appoint governors and administrators from one millet or ethnicity to manage territories populated by another millet or ethnicity. Members of the Phanariots, a set of prosperous and educated Greek families who lived in Istanbul, were favored for this function in the Balkans. Until just before the Greek Revolution of 1821, for example, the governor of the Ottoman province in Romania (Wallachia) had been a Greek prince named Ypsilantis (eep-see-LAN-tees). By then his son, Alexander, had become the chief conspirator among those who started the Greek Revolution.

The Janissaries and the Phanariots present two more examples of how institutions that once worked well for maintaining the Sultanate’s power and authority were breaking down in the late 1700s and early 1800s. But perhaps the most important part of its society over which Istanbul had largely lost control by the 1700s was that of commerce and trade between territories of the Empire and the Christian European world. This commerce was largely run by town-based merchant communities and ship-owners in the major Ottoman ports, like Smyrna and Salonika. Their orientation was not to serve the Sultan but to cater to their markets in Europe. Their interest was to minimize or evade taxes paid to the Empire. Most of the businesses engaged in the trade with Christian Europe were run by Ottoman Christians.

PREHISTORY: OTTOMAN EMPIRE

• The Ottoman Empire started its expansion about 400 years before our period, in the 1300s. This is not the place for a real history of it, but let us review a bare minimum that would have been familiar and important to educated people in the 1800s, both in the Ottoman Empire and in Christian Europe, and that would have influenced the thinking and decisions of actors at that time.
• Constantinople first became a big city when it was built as a new capital for the ancient Roman Empire, starting in the 300s. The capital moved there from Rome, and the empire was divided into western and eastern sections to ease administration. This was done under the Emperor Constantine, who also made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.
• The city’s location was highly defensible. Even more importantly, it allowed control of the most important passages from Asia to Europe, and from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea.
• By the 500s, the western parts of the Roman Empire broke up into the later kingdoms of Catholic western Europe. The eastern parts of the Roman Empire gradually morphed into a Greek Orthodox (Byzantine) empire under Constantinople.
• Islam arose out of Arabia in the 600s and 700s. Through conquest and conversion, Islamic caliphates spread across the formerly Roman-held territories of western Asia and northern Africa, establishing a sequence of new empires and civilizations.
• Over the centuries, Constantinople had withstood many sieges from would-be conquerors, Muslim and Christian, and from all directions. The Eastern Roman Empire grew weak, and sometimes reduced to just the capital city with its seemingly impregnable walls. But for 500 years, Constantinople was able to withstand sieges by various would-be conquerors, Muslim and Christian.
• Migrating from Central Asia, the Muslim Ottoman Turkish people finally took Constantinople in 1453. It became Istanbul, capital of the Ottoman Empire.
• From Istanbul, the Ottoman Empire expanded southward through conquests of Syria, Egypt, and northern Africa, northward to the northern coast of the Black Sea (Crimea/Ukraine), and north-westward into the European territories of the Balkan peninsula, all the way to the borders of its Catholic enemy, the Habsburg Austrian Empire (see the 1683 map of its greatest extent, above).
• By capturing the crossroads from Asia Minor to the Balkans, and from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, the Ottoman Empire, as long as it was strong, had achieved control over the main trade routes between Asia and Europe. Taxing trade made the Empire rich and powerful, and allowed its centuries of expansion.
• In the 350+ years after 1453, the Ottoman Empire created and instituted the many means of ruling over this empire, some of them described above.
• The positioning of the Ottoman Empire at the old crossroads of Asian-European trade created incentives for the western European powers to sail westward into the Atlantic and “discover” the New World, and to start trans-Atlantic colonization and trade, including the slave trade. European trade shifted to the oceans. A global trade system arose that bypassed the Ottoman Empire, reducing its revenues and contributing to its eventual decline.
• Among their many titles, the Ottoman Sultans claimed that of Emperor of Rome, since they had conquered the “Roman capital” of Constantinople. So if anyone ever asks you when the Roman Empire “really” ended — there is no one correct answer! — you might tell them it lasted until the end of World War I in 1918, when the Ottoman Empire was dissolved.

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THE GREEK WORLD IN THE LATE OTTOMAN PERIOD

On the map above, the big dots show the locations around Europe of Greek-speaking merchant centers in the late 1700s and early 1800s. These were found both inside and outside the Ottoman Empire.

The combined numbers of all of the Greek merchant communities outside the Ottoman Empire (in Paris, London, Vienna, Rome, Marseilles, Corsica, Alexandria, etc.) numbered no more than 50,000 to 100,000 people at most. Small in number compared to the cities they lived in, these communities were a diaspora — a “scattering” of a people who continue to identify with a former homeland. They were townspeople. The heads of household generally belonged to the educated middle classes as traders and professionals, like accountants, lawyers, and publishers. They tended to be well-traveled and often well-connected to the commerce and culture of the larger cities in which they lived and worked, as foreign subjects accepted by the wider community. For the most part, these families had lived their lives outside Greece and the Ottoman Empire for many generations, but they continued to speak Greek dialects and maintain what they understood as the true Greek culture. Their communities engaged in commerce around Europe and the Mediterranean, and were also well-networked with the Greek merchant communities in the Ottoman Empire.

A common belief among these diaspora Greeks was that one day, a new Greek nation-state might arise, possibly even retake the Byzantine capital of Constantinople. They often founded Philhellenic societies. These were groups and reading circles of educated European intellectuals, artists, and townspeople, non-Greeks who were enamored of the idea that ancient and Classical Greece had given birth to philosophy and democracy, and was the original source of European civilization — an ancient version of the modern Enlightenment. Philhellenes tended to be on the prosperous side. They met in pleasant surroundings to read and hear lectures and performances of Greek classics: Homer, Plato, the Athenian playwrights.

In 1814, during his time at the Vienna Congress, Kapodistrias started a Philhellenic Society in Vienna. In the same year, some lesser-known Greeks in Odessa started a conspiracy to stage a Greek Revolution. We will return to their story in the next section.

GREEKS IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

By contrast to the dots of the diaspora, the shaded areas on the map above show territories with the highest concentrations of populations that could be called Greek. Most of them were fundamentally different from the Greek diaspora communities. The shaded areas in Asia Minor, south of the Black Sea, and on the Greek peninsula, were all within the Ottoman Empire proper, in its core territories. In most of these places, Greeks were not majorities, but large minorities. Greeks living in the Ottoman Empire areas numbered about two million people.

As larger populations, most of them were peasants. As I’ve mentioned, a lot of them didn’t speak Greek, or think of themselves as Greek, but their religion was Greek Orthodox. They were therefore members of the Rum Millet, the “Roman” nation under the Ottoman order. There were also major Greek merchant and commercial communities in the Empire, above all in Smyrna and Salonika. These did a lot of business with Christian Europe, especially with the Greek diaspora communities in the European cities. But unlike the more distant diaspora communities, the Greek merchant centers in the Ottoman Empire tended not to entertain visions of a Greek revolution against the Sultanate. They were doing relatively well, compared to most Ottoman subjects (Greek or otherwise), and engaging in a revolution might not just ruin their livelihoods, but end their lives.

The shaded areas with many Greeks on the north coast of the Black Sea (with Odessa, Kherson, Mariupol and Taganrog) were in a former protectorate of the Ottoman Empire, the Tatar or Crimean Khanate. Greeks had lived on the northern Black Sea coast since ancient times, but most of this Greek population in the 1800s had arrived recently.

The Crimean Khanate on the north coast of the Black Sea had been annexed by Russia in the Russo-Ottoman War of 1768. Empress Catherine of Russia gave it the name of Novorossiya (New Russia). As part of the efforts to populate this territory with more Russians and other Orthodox Christians, she issued a call to the Greeks of the Ottoman Empire and Europe to immigrate to Novorossiya as permanent settlers. Many did, some as refugees from the same war. During the 1768 war, a Russian fleet had encouraged an uprising of Greeks against the Ottomans in the Peloponnese (labeled Morea on the above map), and then failed to support it, so that it was crushed.

The plan for the Greek Revolution of 1821 was born in this diaspora, in the town of Odessa. The next section tells the story.

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1821: THE GREEK CHALLENGE

Left: Portrait of Ioannis Kapodistrias. Right: Physical map of the mountainous Greek peninsula, at the southern end of the Balkans: a relatively small but jagged territory, with thousands of miles of coast and hundreds of islands to the east in the Aegean Sea, leading up (on the eastern edge of this map) to the adjoining coast of Asia Minor, a.k.a. Turkey).

In the year 1821, revolutionaries seeking an independent Greek state led revolts in Romania, southern Greece, and the Greek Aegean islands. To the troubled Ottoman Sultanate, this posed the threat that a new and hostile Christian nation-state would arise near the Ottoman capital, or possibly even occupy Istanbul with help from the European powers. The Greek Revolution of 1821 began with proclamations that all Orthodox Christian peoples on the European side of the Ottoman Empire constituted a single independent Greek nation. (Istanbul is on the European side.) The revolutionaries of 1821 also (falsely) claimed to have the support of Russia, the Ottomans’ powerful enemy. Even after the revolutionaries’ first plans were exposed as illusory, the revolt they started still threatened to strip the Sultanate of some of its core territories in the Greek peninsula and the Aegean Sea.

To the many intellectuals and Romantics in Christian Europe who fashioned themselves as Philhellenes (“Friends of the Greeks”), and to the Greek-speaking merchant communities scattered around European capitals and cities (the “diaspora,” from the Greek word for scattering), the revolts came as an inspiration to join the struggle for Greek independence — even to go to Greece and fight and die for it in person.

Among the statesmen and leaders of the five powers of the Concert of Europe (Britain, France, Russia, Austria, and Prussia), the Greek Revolution of 1821 was at first regarded as yet another troublesome national revolt inspired by French revolutionary ideals. But this revolt was also different, because it was waged by Christians against a Muslim empire, and because it took place in territories outside the Concert control. It was a struggle they could not crush and dared not support or reject.

What about the populations of up to two million Greek people who lived in several separate regions of the Ottoman Empire, mostly as large minorities? For most of them, the Greek Revolution was a brief promise of liberation that soon became a disaster. After initial failures, the Revolution took hold only in southern Greece and the Aegean islands.

To understand the significance of the Greek 1821 in European history, one needs to keep in mind each of these four different perspectives, meaning those of the Ottoman Empire; of the diaspora Greeks and Philhellenes living in Christian Europe; of the statesmen ruling over the great powers of the Concert of Europe; and of the variety of Greek-speaking people actually under Ottoman rule.

THE FRIENDLY ENTERPRISE: COMEDY OR TRAGEDY?

In 1814, in the Greek community of the prosperous “New Russian” town of Odessa on the Black Sea, three friends who weren’t doing very well in business as merchants agreed to start a conspiracy for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire.

The three young men had read classics of the French Enlightenment philosophers, and of a well-traveled Greek scholar from the Ottoman town of Smyrna, Adamantios Korais (1748-1833). Korais is considered the father of the “Greek Enlightenment.” His writings envisioned reviving the classical civilization of Athens, in a Greece liberated from Ottoman rule. Korais exchanged letters with Thomas Jefferson, in which the two expressed admiration for each other.

The three men in Odessa called their conspiracy the Friendly Enterprise, and organized it along Masonic lines. That meant they planned to maintain a structure of cells and levels insulated from each other. They invented secret signals with which members of the conspiracy could recognize each other. Members were not supposed to know the identities of other members who were not in their cell.

This plan for perfect secrecy was doomed from the start.

The conspirators approached the foreign minister of Russia, Ioannis Kapodistrias, and asked him to become the secret leader of the Greek independence conspiracy. Although he was sympathetic to the cause, Kapodistrias passed on the offer.

The leaders of the Greek Orthodox Church refused the conspiracy’s advances. They fundamentally opposed the idea of a revolt, and feared it would bring the wrath of the Ottoman Empire down on innocent Greeks and on the Orthodox Church itself.

The growing number of conspirators nevertheless let rumors fly. They claimed not only that Kapodistrias was planning a revolution for Greek independence, but that the ultimate leader of the conspiracy was Tsar Alexander II. They told all who would listen that Greece and Constantinople were about to be liberated by the Russian emperor himself.

The Friendly Enterprise did manage to recruit Alexander Ypsilantis, the son of an influential and rich Greek Ottoman family in Istanbul. Ypsilantis carried the title of prince. His father was the Ottoman governor of Wallachia (Romania). Alexander Ypsilantis agreed to become the leader of the Friendly Enterprise. He continued to suggest that he had Russian support. By 1819 or so, Greeks all over Odessa, other Greek diaspora communities, and in Istanbul were talking about the Friendly Enterprise. Most of them believed they were members, and that Tsar Alexander II was their secret leader.

So much for maintaining secrecy. The Ottoman secret police was busy compiling a long list of the “secret” members of the Friendly Enterprise.

Recruitment for the Friendly Enterprise went well in the Greek diaspora, but was ineffective with most Ottoman Greeks, except for one region: in the Morea (Peloponnese) and a number of nearby islands in the Aegean Sea, and in the independent islands in the Ionian Sea not under Ottoman rule (along the western coast of Greece and also near to the Peloponnese, see again the “Greek World” map).

Those who prepared the uprisings in the southernmost part of the Greek peninsula included clan leaders, veterans of the Napoleonic wars, and landlords and bandits and tax farmers. In these regions, the kind of Greeks who most identified as Greek were in the majority. Their ancestors had risen up against Ottoman rule more than once. The lands and islands were mountainous and rough, easy to defend. The islands and little port towns on the mainland maintained their own well-armed merchant navies.

In 1821, in Russia, near the border to Ottoman Wallachia (part of modern-day Romania), Ypsilantis gathered an “army” made up mostly of Greek students educated in European capitals. They numbered several hundred, and they prepared to invade and liberate Wallachia. What the conspiracy had failed to do was to inform the actual Wallachians in Romania of their plans. Ypsilantis nevertheless expected that the oppressed Christian peasants of Wallachia would see the invading Greek students and join them to overthrow Ottoman rule.

FEBRUARY 1821 – ROLLING OUT THE REVOLUTION

In February 1821, Ypsilantis and his supporters in various capitals proclaimed Greek independence and presented a constitution that declared all Christians living on the European side of the Ottoman Empire were Greek citizens. After winning independence, the Greek state would guarantee the equality and freedom of its citizens. All male citizens above the age of 25 would receive the vote, regardless of whether they owned any property.

As an idea, it was radically democratic for the time. It had little chance of winning support from the European powers — least of all from Russia, otherwise the one power most willing to support the creation of a Greek Orthodox kingdom. In the Austrian Empire, home to many people who would have qualified as Greek citizens, prime minister Metternich, the fire-breathing conservative of the Vienna Conference, issued an order banning all public discussion of the Greek cause in the press.

You will perhaps not be surprised to learn that the local people in Wallachia did not flock to join Ypsilantis’s invasion. They did not welcome the arrival of armed strangers who didn’t speak their language, but instead feared, fought, and fled from them. Ottoman military forces soon arrived and took up the pursuit of Ypsilantis. Within a couple of weeks his “army” were all dead or captured. Ypsilantis himself escaped to Austria, where he was imprisoned until a few months before his death, in 1828.

Before his defeat, Ypsilantis had sent false reports of victories to southern Greece. In late March, conspirators in various locations of the Peloponnese rose up as planned and declared Greek independence. Many of them continued to believe, for a month or more, that Ypsilantis and his growing army would soon swoop down from the north, with Russia at his back, to liberate all Greece.

Soon the revolt in southern Greece and the Aegean islands was all that was left of the Friendly Enterprise’s grand plans for a Greek Revolution. If any of the Greek revolutionary fighters in the Morea now considered surrender and a return to the status quo, the response of the Ottoman Empire in the meantime had made it clear that there would be no going back — that their slogan of “freedom or death” would be taken literally.

OTTOMANS STRIKE BACK

Things got ugly. Even as the Ypsilantis’s in Wallachia was extinguished, the Ottoman secret police rounded up all suspected members of the Friendly Enterprise in Istanbul and elsewhere around the empire. Many executions followed.

Although he had opposed the independence conspiracy, Patriarch Michael of the Orthodox Church was blamed for the uprising and hanged in Istanbul, his body displayed in public for days.

Sultan Mahmud II delivered a speech urging all loyal subjects of the empire to take up the sword and defend their nation against traitors. Many understood this as a call for Muslims to subdue rebellious Christians infidels, and for the beleaguered Turkish majority to assert themselves against the rebellions and insults of other peoples. With approval or assent from the capital, large mobs and groups of soldiers conducted horrible, semi-spontaneous massacres against Greek communities in Istanbul, in Smyrna, and around the Empire. They murdered many thousands of civilians who had not joined or known about the independence conspiracy, many of whom didn’t even think of themselves primarily as Greek.

In 1822, Istanbul feared that the strategic and large island of Chios, just off the coast of Asia Minor and home to many armed ships, might join the Greek independence struggle. There were no such plans among the people of Chios, but a revolutionary battalion from another island had landed there to declare the revolution. A large Ottoman army invaded the island and spent months massacring tens of thousands of Chian people indiscriminately, including women and children. Mass rapes were conducted. The survivors of the Greek population who did not escape Chios were all sold into slavery. The vast majority who fell victim, there and in the other massacres, had not participated in the uprising, and most had not desired to join it in the first place.

All this activated public outrage across Christian Europe and in the United States. The Chios massacre became a symbol of Ottoman barbarism and Greek suffering, and a subject of many literary and artistic treatments calling on the European powers to come to the aid of Greece.

• Recommended article: Nicolai von Eggers (2021), Delacroix’s Greek Revolution, Age of Revolutions.

Christians and European liberals organized for Greece. The ranks of the Philhellenes swelled. Many Philhellenes and young diaspora Greeks took off for the Peloponnese and the Aegean Islands to join the fight in person. They demanded that their governments intervene.

The European governments refused, however, seeing the revolution as the worst threat yet to the stability of the Vienna Order.

UNEXPECTED VICTORIES – BYRON TO THE RESCUE

Meanwhile, the revolutionary fighters in the Peloponnese and southern Greece, native to these regions, used guerilla tactics and surprise attacks to start defeating the armies of the Sultan, who numbered about 30,000 troops in the field. The Greek island merchant navies outmaneuvered and sank larger and clunkier Ottoman warships, often ramming them with smaller “fireships” full of explosives.

The revolutionaries committed their own atrocities, massacring an estimated 9,000 Turks and Jews, mostly civilians, in the Ottoman provincial capital at the Peloponnesian town of Tripoli.

A Greek provisional government was organized in the Peloponnese, headed by bourgeois Greeks from the diaspora. It was at odds with the revolution’s military leaders, locals and often ruffians who looked askance at the fancy European Greeks.

The provisional government petitioned the Christian European powers for aid. They were refused. Nevertheless, the Greek risings continued to defeat the Ottoman regular troops, and to hold the Morea, Attica (Athens), a southern region of the mainland, and many islands.

The provisional government invited Lord George Byron, the rich poet and Romantic radical, to Greece. He came. He used his own funds and borrowed from his friends to finance arms purchases. He moved into the fortress at Missolonghi, started paying salaries to the Greeks there, became an administrator, and even prepared to try his hand as a general in the field. His example became an inspiration to thousands of Europeans who admired his courage and willingness to give up a rich nobleman’s life for a just cause. (Of course some of his friends thought he had gone crazy.) Just before he was to lead men into battle, Byron caught a bad cold. As was still common in those times, his doctors helpfully applied bloodletting, draining him of what they thought was the bad blood causing the disease. Byron died in Missolonghi in April 1824.

ENTER THE ALBANIAN EGYPTIANS

Facing defeat in the Morea, the Sultan turned to his most powerful Pasha, Mehmet Ali (in English also spelled as Muhammad Ali, like the 20th-century boxer). Ali was the military ruler of Egypt. He was actually a successful Albanian general, whom the Sultan had appointed as his Egyptian governor. In Egypt, Ali had built himself a large navy and a capable army, copying modern European military tactics. Suspicions were widespread that he was planning to one day overthrow the Sultan, and put himself on the throne. (Ali did actually try to overthrow the Sultan, in 1831.)

Ali sent his son, Ibrahim Ali Pasha, to Greece as the commander of the Egyptian navy and army, with orders to completely destroy the Greek revolt. They captured key islands and bases on the mainland, and began to defeat the Greeks on land and at sea. By 1826, they controlled most of the Morea. The main Greek fortress at Missolonghi fell, after a long siege. More massacres and horrible atrocities followed. Then Ali’s forces took Athens, which was a collection of small villages amid the ruins of the classical city. It was only a matter of time before they took the Greek provisional capital at the town of Nafplio. They began to burn lands, kill livestock, uproot olive trees, and drive all the people from their lands. The Greek Revolution at best had a few months left before it would be completely extinguished.

THE TURNAROUND

With the defeat of the Greek Revolution approaching, the European statesmen and kings saw an opportunity. In 1821, they thought the revolution was a radical threat to European order. By 1825 and 1826, intervention to help the Greeks instead seemed like a way to painlessly take territory away from the Ottomans. They could set up a Greek Kingdom that would be fully obedient to the European powers: a client state.

In 1825, Paris and London allowed French and British banks to loan money to the Greek provisional government, so that they could purchase arms to keep the Greek struggle going after Byron’s sad demise.

By 1827, the governments of Russia, France and Britain agreed to dispatch a joint naval expedition to Greece, to demand that Ibrahim Pasha cease committing atrocities against civilians and depart the country. This has been called “the first humanitarian intervention.” One can argue that the claim is dubious, or that there were other motives in play for the “Triple Alliance,” but there is no doubt that great humanitarian crimes had been and were still being committed by the Ottoman forces, and that this had outraged large publics in Christian Europe.

The British-French-Russian fleet anchored near Ibrahim’s main base and navy on the Peloponnese in October 1828. They demanded a parlay: a negotiation.

Instead, someone on one side or the other thought they heard shots. Suddenly all the ships on both sides were firing their cannon. What is called the Battle of Navarino began.

Four hours later, as all of the ships of the Egyptian-Ottoman fleet hit the bottom of the sea, those of the Triple Alliance were almost untouched. An independent Greek nation-state, almost dead on the morning of October 20th, had been won by the evening.

BIRTH OF A KINGDOM

Ibrahim and his army now parlayed, and agreed to withdraw their soldiers from Greece. The Ottoman Sultanate was forced into negotiations with the three powers of Britain, Bourbon France, and Russia. In an 1830 treaty, signed in London, the Ottoman Empire recognized the independence of a small Greek Kingdom that included the Peloponnese, a strip of the mainland, and a few islands, with its future capital to be built in Athens.

After about 100,000 deaths in southern Greece during the war, and with a flow of Greek refugees coming in and Muslim refugees leaving it, and with the addition of many Albanians who had supported the Greek struggle, the new country numbered about 600,000 people.

More than twice as many Greeks were left in the Ottoman Empire. The massacres had stopped, but now the Ottoman Greeks were viewed as a potentially dangerous alien presence that might want to join the Greek Kingdom in the future.

The Triple Alliance agreed to appoint Kapodistrias as the first governor and head of state of the Greek kingdom. Meanwhile they deliberated over whom to choose as a king. The small Greek state was devastated by war. Its people were poor in the first place, and now they were cut off from all of their old commercial routes within the Ottoman Empire. Greece was unable to raise cash for payments on its huge debts to the British and French banks. It soon went into its first of several historic defaults on the national debt.

Kapodistrias struggled to create a competent administration and raise taxes to fund it and make debt payments. Taxation angered several of the Peloponnesian clan lords. Many of them had joined the Greek struggle and risked their lives partly in the hope they would no longer pay taxes or tributes to the Ottoman Empire. They didn’t want to pay taxes to Athens, either. One evening in September 1831, relatives of one of these clan leaders, men from a rough region called the Mani that had been the first to rise up 10 years earlier, appeared in Athens and shot Kapodistrias dead in the street, while he was walking home from work. He had been on the job no more than a year.

Lucky countries have leaders whom they later call “Founding Fathers.” The unlucky ones (most of them) get Founding Martyrs, like Kapodistrias.

For several months, a new civil war followed among the Greeks.

MANAGING THE GREEK KINGDOM

The statesmen of the Triple Alliance, Britain, France, and Russia, deliberated over what to do next. They wanted to find a reliable king whom they could install to rule Greece. Whoever this was, they did not want another Greek.

Before Kapodistrias was assassinated, the powers had settled on a member of the British royal family: the German noble, Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, who had married the British royal princess, Charlotte. When Leopold married her, Charlotte had been fifth in line to the British throne, at a time when the successors were much older and kept dying. It seemed she might become the Queen within a decade or two, and Leopold would be her King Consort. But she, too, died tragically in childbirth at the age of 21, in 1817. (The throne later went to her even younger cousin, Victoria, in 1837, who would hold it until 1903.)

Charlotte’s death generated great grief in the British public, and enormous sympathy for Leopold, or so it was according to the British press. Leopold was charismatic and popular in Britain. Today, we’d call him a celebrity. Now, 15 years after his beloved Charlotte’s death, the government in London offered to make him the first King of Greece.

Leopold refused.

The powers turned back to the German lands, their usual place to look for kings in situations like these. The king of Bavaria, Ludwig I (German for Louis), was a mad Philhellene who had fully supported the independence struggle. He had commissioned the building of classic Greek temples in Munich. These replicas were larger than the ruined originals.

Ludwig proposed that his second son, Otto, be made King of Greece. The powers agreed. In 1832, Otto, age 17, arrived in Athens, on his first visit to Greece, to take over his new country. Several thousand Bavarian soldiers and bureaucrats followed. Otto was installed as an absolutist monarch. He didn’t speak a word of Greek.

INVENTING A GREEK NATION

Most of Otto’s subjects didn’t speak Greek either, since there was no single living Greek language to speak. The largest number of people in the kingdom spoke an Albanian-Greek dialect, Arvanitika. The Bavarians worked with a handful of Greek liberal bourgeois intellectuals to create the dictionary and grammar for a “purified” official Greek language for the state. “Purified” was based on ancient Greek, according to a plan devised by Korais, the scholar who had first advanced Greek independence. It was supposed to be free of Latin and Turkish influences.

Most common Greeks never learned “purified” Greek, and almost no one spoke it at home, but it became the official state language of Greece until 1974. A Common Greek evolved alongside it, and became the language people actually spoke with each other. Those who understood “purified” showed their status as educated elites. Later, those who wrote poetry and literature in the “demotic” or common language were showing their love of the “real people” and dislike of the educated elites.

Most subjects of the new kingdom were also not really Philhellenes. The ancient Greek civilization meant little to them. But it meant everything to the country’s European sponsors, who were building the myth of Classical Greece as the origin of the modern European civilization.

What bound the new Greek people together was peasant tradition and Greek Orthodox religion. The nation established for them a glorified Greek Orthodoxy as the state religion, so as to unite them. The history taught to Greek children was rewritten into a myth about how the Greek Church, which in reality had opposed the Greek Revolution, had actually planned it, started it, and led it to victory. The Orthodox Church became the country’s most important institution, as far as the majority were concerned.

An Orthodox priest raises a flag as he declares Greek independence. Many local priests did join and helped to lead the revolution, like Germanos, the one depicted here. But this isn’t how the Greek Revolution happened.

All visible cultural remnants of the Ottoman period were expunged. A myth was invented that the Ottomans had suppressed Orthodox Christian religion altogether for more than 350 years, and that Greek children had only learned their religion at night, in “secret schools,” to which they were called in the dark by a lantern held by the teacher. (This is what I was taught in a Greek-American elementary school, when I was a child in New York City.)

The Hellenic past, that of the pagan Classical Greece, was reserved for a small minority of educated Greeks, and mainly for foreigners. The most important non-agricultural good that this bankrupt new country could sell to the Europeans was the myth of its ancient past.

That is why Athens had to be the new capital, and why archaeologists from German lands, France, Britain, and the United States would all be invited, over the next decades, to found large institutes in Athens, to dig up the ancient sites around the country at will, to take a few of the best pieces back to their own museums. Selling the ancient past would become a key element in what eventually arose as the country’s most reliable export industry, still growing today: tourism. (The sun, island beaches, and epic natural beauty of the country certainly helped.)

Always short of funds, the early Greek state scraped together the means to build large buildings in neo-Classical style that still stand in downtown Athens: a national library, a university named after Kapodistrias, a national archives, a national museum. These institutions were meant to define a nation that was still in the process of creation.

INVENTING GREEK DEMOCRACY – AND THE GRAND IDEA

Spiting King Otto’s absolutism, political parties formed. Each favored a different great power. The largest by far, predictably, was the pro-Russian party, followed by the pro-British and pro-French parties. The Greek liberal party was the smallest.

In 1843, tens of thousands marched on Otto’s huge palace in Athens, demanding a written constitution and an elected parliament. Otto was forced to accept a constitutional monarchy. Otto moved to a smaller mansion. His palace was turned into the building of the Greek parliament at Constitution Square, which it still is today.

In the 1850s, when Britain and France allied with the Ottomans and waged war against Russia to expel its armies from the Crimean peninsula, British naval forces occupied the port of Athens, at Pireus, to prevent Greece from supporting Russia in the war. Greek politics came under British hegemony for the next 90 years. Otto was finally deposed in the 1860s, and replaced by a Danish successor. But until after World War II, with some exceptions, the British usually called the political shots in Greece.

Domestically, the Greek Kingdom became a limited multi-party democracy. In international terms, it was a semi-colony — weak, much weaker than the Ottoman Empire, and dependent on Britain. And yet its politicians were desirous of expansion into the territories with Greek populations still held by the Ottomans. That was a national dream, a principle on which all of the Greek factions could agree. They called it the Grand Idea.

* 9 *
A NEW FRENCH EMPIRE?

FRANCE IN HAITI AND ALGERIA

HAITI. As we read in the chapter on the French Revolution: in 1792 the majority of enslaved Africans on the Caribbean island of St. Domingue allied with the Free Blacks living in the French sugar colony there to rise up in a massive revolution. They overthrew French rule. This later caused the revolutionary Jacobin government to abolish slavery in the French overseas colonies, in 1794. Revolutionary general Touissant L’Ouverture, a free-black man, was recognized as the governor of the colony.

In 1803, under the influence of former slaveowners who were helping to fund his wars in Europe, Napoleon reversed the abolition of slavery in the French colonies. He sent armies across the Atlantic to re-conquer St. Domingue. L’Ouverture was imprisoned but Napoleon’s expeditions were completely defeated in a bloody war with the islanders. They expelled all Europeans. The independent nation of Haiti was declared and established under the rule of its first emperor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a former slave.

“Attack and seizure of the Crête-à-Pierrot (4-24 March 24, 1802).”
Original illustration by Auguste Raffet, engraving by Ernst Hébert (1839).

Haiti stood as an inspiration to those who would fight slavery, and as a frightening warning to slaveholders everywhere, including those in the United States. During the independence wars against the Spanish Empire starting in 1808, Haiti provided important support to Latin American revolutionaries, like Simon Bolivar.

Now it is 1825. The Bourbon monarchy is back in power in France. Former slaveowners of the St. Domingue colony, still wealthy and influential, lobby the French monarchy to restore their lost “property” and punish those who took it from them. By “property,” they mean the human beings who freed themselves from bondage to them, whom they now hope to re-enslave.

Paris responds by sending a naval expedition to Haiti. Armed with powerful cannon and plentiful artillery, the French warships anchor off the coast near the capital, Port-au-Prince. Their captains send messengers to the leaders of the Haitian government. They threaten to firebomb and destroy the exposed city from the sea, without needing to invade the island or risk French soldiers. They promise to show no mercy to the Haitians and to destroy anything they rebuilt. If Port-au-Prince is not to be turned into ashes, the Haitian government must pay reparations to the former French slaveowners for the “property” they lost during the St. Domingue revolution.

The Haitian government is compelled to capitulate to the French threats. They agree to pay reparations in the amounts demanded by the former slaveowners.

These “reparations” must be paid in the French currency, the franc. Haiti has no franc. The government is therefore forced to a) start borrowing franc from French banks to pay the reparations demanded by the former French slaveholders, and b) start producing sugar and coffee for sale to French markets. This is the only way to earn the franc needed to pay off both debts — the first debt for “reparations,” and the second debt borrowed from the French banks to pay the reparations. Both of these debts come with interest, which compounds and increases the debts over time.

To pay off the dual debt, Haitian labor must be shifted from producing food for the people and building an infrastructure for the country to producing sugar and coffee to be shipped to France and sold in exchange for French franc. The franc are sent back to France to pay the debts. Haitian elites and government leaders allied with French interests profit from this business and grow rich themselves. They see to it that the majority of their people are dominated and continue to labor to produce sugar and coffee. The Haitian people suffer. It will take until 1948 to pay off the dual debt, and that is unfortunately not the end of Haiti’s suffering, still rooted in the old colonial order.

Starting in 1825, Haiti has been turned back into a French colony in fact, because its surplus wealth goes to France in an unequal exchange. Its people labor under coercion to produce wealth for French interests, without enjoying the rewards of their labor for themselves.

But France has not occupied Haiti, or declared it a colony. Formally, except for a period of occupation by the United States in 1915 to 1933, Haiti remains an independent country, down to this day.

• The history of “The Root of Haiti’s Misery” was recently brought back to public attention by a major historical investigation and report conducted by The New York Times (22 May 2022), archived in full at Portside.

Imperialism works by different means. The general idea, as it came to be understood in the course of the 19th century, was to create relations between two countries in which the surplus wealth of the colonized country is forcibly extracted by the colonizing power, and directed to the material benefit of interests based in the colonizing country. But there are different ways of doing this, direct and indirect. There are many ways to use force, threats, soldiers, occupations, puppet leaders and local allies among the colonized, bureaucracies, technology, economics, finance and debt, and cultural domination, to acquire the resources of a country on the cheap, to force it into exclusive economic relationships with the colonizers, and to get colonized people working to enrich the interests of others who might never step foot in their country.

The example of the threats employed by the French crown in 1825 to re-colonize Haiti, without ever occupying it or calling it a colony again, present an opposite extreme to the means employed by France in Algeria starting two years later, in 1827.

ALGERIA

Algeria is today the largest country in Africa, located on the northern Africa coast, to the south of France across the Mediterranean Sea.

The map shows the expansion of France in Algeria by decade, from the 1830s to the 1850s.
Source: Wikimedia. Since 1962, these have been the borders of the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria.

• The lands between the long coast and the high Atlas Mountains south of the coast are incredibly fertile. Further south from the mountains stretch the expanses of the Sahara Desert.
• The ancient people of Algeria are the Amazigh, called Berbers by Europeans. Since the Islamic conquests of the 700s, the people have been Muslim in religion and the majority have been Arabic, although there has been much mixing of the Arab and Berber populations.
• By the 1800s, the rich northern areas were organized politically as a semi-independent caliphate, the Deylik of Algiers, under a leader called the Dey. Algiers was a protectorate of the Ottoman Empire, to which it usually paid tribute.
• In 1805-1807, naval incursions by Britain and the United States largely ended the centuries-long practice of piracy by bands based in Algeria and elsewhere in northern Africa, who often enjoyed the Deys’ protection. For centuries they had raided European coasts (as far north as Ireland!) to capture people as slaves. This form of aggressive commerce had gone both ways, with European raiders also involved.

THE FLY-SWATTER

In the 1790s, during the first Wars of the Coalitions, Algiers twice provided large grain shipments to keep the French people and armies fed (once to Napoleon’s forces while he was in Egypt). These sales were arranged by merchants based in the port of Marseilles, who never paid the bills. In the 1820s, the merchants still owed to Algiers the unpaid debt for the grain. They claimed they could not pay because the French state still owed them an even greater debt.

In 1827, at a reception of diplomats in Algiers to celebrate the end of Ramadan, the Dey, Hussain, had a heated discussion about the debt with the French ambassador, Pierre Deval. They spoke Turkish with each other, while the other diplomats only understood Arabic or French. That means no one knew for sure what was said, just before the Dey suddenly slapped the Frenchman three times with a fly-swatter, and ordered him to leave Algiers.

By then the Bourbon crown had passed on to Charles X, yet another younger brother of Louis XVI. The Marseilles business community, represented by Deval’s brother, urged Charles to dispatch a fleet to blockade and invade Algiers, and to demand apologies and reparations for the fly-swatter insult. Charles X did so, and besieged the port city from the sea.

France’s military involvement escalated from there. In 1830, Charles’s forces captured Algiers. In July of that year, however, Charles was overthrown by a new French revolution (see Section 11) that installed a new king who allowed a parliament and a liberal government.

The July Monarchy, as the new French regime was known, sent ever larger armies to conquer the entire Deylik of Algiers. The liberals who set Algeria policy in the 1830s and 1840s believed in French expansion. They wanted to revive the old colonial empire. They dreamed of sending millions of settlers from France into fresh new territories, to multiply the nation’s population and power. They spoke with admiration of the United States’ expansion into the American west. The French politician who most famously advocated colonization of Algeria was Alexis de Tocqueville, author of a classic account of his travels in the United States, Democracy in America. As a member of parliament, Tocqueville also authored two reports to the government on his travels in Algeria.

Starting in 1831, the Sufi preacher Abd al-Qadir (Abdelkader) became the most prominent military leader of the Algerian resistance, uniting the tribes of the western Oran region under his command.

ABDELKADER AND THE FALL OF ALGERIA

An Islamic scholar, Abdelkader was also versed in European languages and philosophy, and won the respect of his French enemies, for example by making sure that the rights to life and safety of French prisoners were protected. The minority of French anti-imperialist politicians, who opposed the colonization of Algeria, came to regard Abdelkader as the rightful founding father of an Algerian nation that France was destroying. He was admired interntionally. A trio of American abolitionist and anti-colonialist lawyers who settled in Iowa in 1846 founded a town named in his honor; it is still called Elkader, Iowa (2021 population: 1,200). (Yes, there are ironies and contradictions in anti-colonialist white men settling in American Indian land and naming it after an Algerian independence fighter, but we’re doing European history here.)

Resistance in all Algerian regions was fierce and stubborn, and the armed insurgents had the protection of their own people. When French soldiers were killed, the French killed many more in response. French strategy descended into an endless horror of burning villages and crops, slaughtering all livestock, and indiscriminate massacres of civilians and prisoners that plausibly merits the description of genocide.

Abdelkader was forced to surrender in 1847 and imprisoned in a series of forts and castles in France. There he received visits from generals who had fought him, nobles and intellectuals, and even the Emperor Napoleon III (Louis Bonaparte, a nephew of the original Napoleon). Abdelkader and his entourage were allowed to leave for Syria. There he acted to stop a massacre of Christians in 1860, for which he received the French medal of honor and more worldwide acclaim.

FRANCE IN ALGERIA, HAITI & GREECE: COMPARISON

The French conquest of Algeria allegedly began with the fly-swatter slap of April 1827. It should be noted, first, that the story of this was far more important than the incident itself. This was not the first or last time that a cause for war was found in an incident that may not have happened as reported, and that in any case sounds minor and even ridiculous, compared to a war with its bloodshed, horrors, and death of innocents. Wars usually start because one or more sides want them to start, and the official justifications often sound trivial.

In October of the same year, another French fleet joined the international (British-Russian-French) intervention to save the Greek independence fighters, in the Battle of Navarino. It would seem contradictory that one of these actions was done in the name of rescuing an independent Greece, while in the other case, France paid enormous costs to prevent any hope of Algerian independence (until the 1950s).

A simple solution to the seeming contradiction in France’s actions regarding Greece and Algeria would be that it illustrates the conflict between imperialism and nationalism.

France was acting consistently in both Algeria and Greece, if the aim was not to liberate nations or protect human rights, but to strip the vulnerable Ottoman Empire of territory, and to bring new lands under the French sphere of influence — whether as a colony, like Algeria, or as a client state to the allied Great Powers, like the early Greek Kingdom.

Some might further argue that it is important that both cases involved Christians at war with Muslims. At the time this didn’t hurt as a justification for war, at least among committed Christians.

Algeria was annexed outright; it became part of France, which continued taking new territories in the desert until 1956 (see map, above).

To repeat, the direct conquest and colonial settlement of Algeria was opposite in means to the indirect subjugation of Haiti, where the French imposed “voluntary reparations” using threats (and later, bribes). But in both cases, the interests of the colonizers dominated.

For the first time since the loss of Quebec and Louisiana in 1763, France, having lost Napoleon’s bid to achieve dominance on the European Continent, was again acquiring major new colonies and dominions outside Europe, and seeking to build an overseas empire that could compete with the British. By 1914, France will have acquired a dozen further colonies covering most of northern West Africa, and, in South-East Asia, French Indochina (today’s Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia).

Notes on what happened in French-Algeria after the 1830s:

• It took until the mid-1850s to fully subdue Algerian resistance. In 1848 (even as the French kingdom was overthrown by revolution yet again) Algeria was annexed.
• Algeria was designated as domestic French territory, and divided into three departments administered directly by bureaucrats in Paris. From that time, Algerian matters were handled by the French Ministry of the Interior, and not the Colonial Ministry.
• People proved reluctant to move from France to French-Algeria as settlers, at least not in the numbers that the advocates of colonization had hoped. Paris turned to encouraging migration from Spain, Italy, Malta, and elsewhere, as long as they were “Europeans,” with a preference for Catholics.
• By 1914, more than one million French and European settlers had moved to French-Algeria. But it never turned into a French version of the American West, as architects of the invasions had envisioned in the 1830s.
• The European settlers in French-Algeria became full French citizens.
• Settlers owned most of the productive land and businesses in Algeria. This included many large plantations producing commodities for European markets.
• Settlers also held almost all of the administrative and professional jobs and all of the positions as teachers, lawyers, etc.
• The indigenous majority of more than six million Muslim Arabs and Berbers (as of 1914) were reduced to second-class and third-class subjects. They worked the plantations and other low-paying jobs, or were forced to stay outside the main communities and farm inferior lands for their own survival.
• Arabs and Berbers, although they were also technically French subjects, were barred from traveling to France without permission, which was rarely granted.
• During the Great War of 1914-1918 (World War I), native Algerians were recruited and drafted for service in the French military on the Western Front. Promises were made that this would lead to improved status for them when they returned home; for the most part, it didn’t.
• The leading anti-imperialist voice in the French parliament in the 1840s, Amédée Desjobert, an antagonist to Tocqueville, predicted in his many speeches before the parliament that, as each generation grew to maturity, France would be faced with renewed uprisings of the Algerian people, once every 20 to 30 years. He got that right.

* 10 *
1830-1831
FRANCE, BELGIUM, POLAND

MANAGED NATIONALISM

 Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830). Note the female image of liberty, the presence of the top-hatted bourgeois, and the heavily armed street urchin, neither of whom actually fought in the Revolution. (Merriman, p. 597)

[The following passages are from the textbook by
John Merriman, Modern Europe, 2010, ch. 15, pp. 593-598]

FRANCE
The Bourbon Restoration and the Revolution of 1830

In a contemporary French lampoon of the return of the Bourbons to the throne [in 1815], a majestic eagle—the symbol of Napoleon—sweeps out of the Tuileries Palace in Paris as a somewhat plump, unsightly duck waddles in, followed by its ungainly brood. The contrast between the image of Napoleon’s bold achievements and the stodgy and pious Restoration was sharp indeed. The Bourbons returned “in the baggage of the allies,” as it was said.

[Note: Merriman is much kinder to Louis XVIII than I have been.]

Upon the return of the Bourbons to power in May 1814, Louis XVIII promulgated a Charter that, in effect, made France a constitutional monarchy. The Charter recognized equality before the law and accepted the Napoleonic Civil Code. It established an assembly consisting of a Chamber of Deputies and a Chamber of Peers.

The king would name members (whose appointment would be for life and hereditary) of the Chamber of Peers, as well as ministers, who would be responsible only to him. The Chamber of Deputies would be elected in a complicated two-stage process, based on an extremely narrow electoral franchise [i.e., a very low percentage of men were allowed to vote, if they met a property qualification].

The restored Bourbon monarchy maintained the centralized state bureaucracy; recognized all Napoleonic titles, decorations, and even pensions; and promised that property purchased during the Revolution as “national” would remain in the hands of the new owners. Moreover, the Charter offered freedom of the press. The government could levy no taxes without the consent of the Assembly.

The Catholic Church would still be subject to Napoleon’s Concordat [the compromise Napoleon had made with the Church, under which it would be reconciled with the taking of French lands during the 1789 revolution but be free to operate again in France]. But it returned to its privileged position. Catholicism again became the official state religion, although the Napoleonic Code’s guarantee of the free practice of religion to Protestants and Jews was reaffirmed. The religious orders returned to France in force, and the observance of Sunday and Church holidays became obligatory. Ultra-royalists, or “Ultras,” the most fanatical royalist enemies of the Revolution, had after Waterloo launched the “White Terror,” so called because of the color of the Bourbon flag, against those who had supported Napoleon.

In the election for the Chamber of Deputies in August 1815, the Ultras easily defeated more moderate royalists sponsored by the government. Some of the Ultras referred contemptuously to Louis XVIII as “King Voltaire” because of his Charter, which they viewed as a compromise with the Revolution. They demanded that the “national property” be returned to its original owners. Louis XVIII dissolved the Ultra-dominated Chamber of Deputies in 1816, and new elections produced a somewhat more moderate Chamber.

In 1820, a madman assassinated Charles, the duke of Berry, the king’s nephew and the only member of the Bourbon family capable of producing an heir to the throne. France was plunged into mourning. The Ultras cried for revenge, accusing the liberals of being ultimately responsible for the assassination. The king dismissed the moderate government, restored more stringent censorship, and altered the electoral system to reduce the influence of bourgeois voters living in towns.

Soon, however, the church bells stopped their mournful cadence and rang out in joy. It turned out that the duke’s wife had been pregnant at the time of his death. Royalist France celebrated the birth of a male heir, “the miracle baby,” as he came to be called, the duke of Bordeaux (later known as the count of Chambord). Confident that God was with them, the Ultras, at least for the moment, retained the upper hand.

Upon Louis XVIII’s death in 1824, his reactionary brother, the count of Artois, took the throne as Charles X (ruled 1824-1830). Rumors spread that the pious king was going to allow the Catholic Church to collect the tithe, that is, require French subjects to pay 10 percent of their income to the Church. The Chamber of Deputies passed a law making sacrilege—any crime committed in a church—a capital offense. That no one was ever executed for such an offense did not diminish public outrage. The government financed the indemnification of those who had lost land during the Revolution by reducing the interest paid to holders of the national debt, most of whom were middle class.

Many in France retained an allegiance to Napoleon’s memory. Former Napoleonic soldiers, particularly those officers pensioned off on half pay, looked back on the imperial era as their halcyon days. In 1820-1821, some joined the Carbonari, a secret society named after its Italian equivalent, and plotted to overthrow the Restoration. Some merchants and manufacturers believed that the Restoration monarchy paid insufficient attention to commerce and industry, listening only to rural nobles.

Amid an economic crisis that had begun with the failure of the harvest the previous year, elections in 1827 increased liberal strength in the Chamber of Deputies. Two years later, Charles X threw caution to the wind, appointing as his premier the reactionary Prince Jules de Polignac (1780-1847), one of only two members of the Chamber of Deputies who had refused an oath of allegiance to the Charter granted by Louis XVIII.

The opposition to the government of Charles X received a boost from a new generation of romantic writers. In the preface to his controversial play Hernani (1830), the production of which caused a near riot outside the theater, Victor Hugo (1802-1885) clearly set liberalism and romanticism against the established order of the restored monarchy:

“Young people, have courage! However difficult they make our present, the future will be beautiful. Romanticism, so often badly defined, is . . . nothing less than liberalism in literature. . . . Literary liberty is the daughter of political liberty. That is the principle of this century, and it will prevail.”

In 1828, liberals formed an association to refuse to pay taxes in protest of the government’s policies and worked to ensure that all eligible to vote registered to do so. Benjamin Constant (1767-1830), a Swiss novelist, political essayist, and member of the French Chamber of Deputies, demanded that the electoral franchise be extended. He espoused a philosophy of liberalism based on a separation of powers and “a government of laws and not men” that would protect property and other freedoms from tyranny (he had both Napoleon and arbitrary monarchical rule in mind). In response to Charles’s bellicose speech opening the 1830 session of the Chamber, 221 deputies signed an address to the throne that attacked the government in no uncertain terms. When the king dissolved the Chamber, the liberal opposition won a majority in the new Chamber. In the meantime, Charles had sent an army to conquer Algeria, whose ruler was a vassal of the sultan of Turkey. But not even news of the capture of Algiers on July 9, 1830, could end vociferous opposition. The king and Polignac then settled on a move that they hoped would bring an end to the crisis. Instead, it brought revolution.

On July 26, 1830, Charles X promulgated the July Ordinances, shattering the principles of the Charter of 1814. He dissolved the newly elected Chamber of Deputies; disfranchised almost three-quarters of those currently eligible to vote; ordered new elections under the newly restricted franchise; and muzzled the press. Demonstrations on July 27 led to skirmishes with troops. Parisians blocked the capital’s narrow streets with barricades. Fired upon in the street and pelted by rocks and tiles thrown from rooftops, the king’s soldiers became increasingly demoralized.

Early on July 30, liberals put posters around Paris calling for Louis Philippe to be the new king. From the family of Orleans, the junior branch of the royal Bourbon family, Louis-Philippe, the duke of Orleans, had the reputation for being relatively liberal, having fought in the revolutionary armies. His father (known as Philippe Egalite) had in the National Assembly voted for the execution of Louis XVI. Louis-Philippe had expanded his horizons by drinking bourbon in Kentucky. Liberals offered the throne to Louis Philippe (ruled 1830-1848), who became “king of the French”—the title, rather than “king of France,” was intended to convey that the king’s authority came from the people. Charles X abdicated on August 2. Louis-Philippe agreed to a revised version of the Charter, and the tricolor flag of the Revolution replaced the white flag of the Bourbons.

Despite its revolutionary origins, the new liberal monarchy won relatively quick acceptance from the other European powers. Catholicism ceased to be the official religion of the state, although it remained the nominal religion of the vast majority of the population. The new Orleanist regime almost doubled the number of voters, but France was still far from being a republic. Many of those enfranchised by the revised Charter were drawn from the middle class. Lawyers and men of other professions significantly increased middle-class representation in the legislature. The government helped stimulate economic growth and industrial development by improving roads and implementing other policies that benefited manufacturers and merchants.

The rallying cry of Francois Guizot, historian and prime minister (1787-1874, prime minister 1840-1848), to the middle class was “Enrich yourselves!” Known as the “July Monarchy,” after the month of its founding, the Orleanist reign also came to be known and lampooned as “the bourgeois monarchy.”

The portly Louis-Philippe himself contributed to this image, surrounding himself with dark-suited businessmen and carrying an umbrella, that symbol of bourgeois preparedness. The Orleanist monarchy could claim neither the principle of monarchical legitimacy asserted by the Legitimists (supporters of Charles X’s Bourbon grandson) or that of popular sovereignty espoused by republicans. Legitimists launched several small, failed insurrections in western France.

In Paris, crowds of workers, disappointed by the government’s lack of attention to their demands, sacked the archbishop’s palace in 1831. Silk workers in Lyon rose up against their employers and the state in 1831 and 1834.

Following an uprising by republicans in Paris, the Chamber of Deputies passed a law in 1835 severely restricting the right to form associations, and the next year it passed another law again fettering the press.

Louis-Philippe survived an assassination attempt in 1835; a plot by a secret organization of revolutionaries, the “Society of the Seasons,” to overthrow him.

Attempts were made in 1836 and 1840 by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon’s nephew, to invade France with a few loyalists, rally support, and stage a coup d’etat. The cult of Napoleon, accentuated by the vogue for the literature of romanticism, served only to highlight what seemed to be the mediocrity of the July Monarchy.

[To capture some of Napoleon’s magic, in 1840 Louis-Philippe arranged for his bones to be brought back to Paris, where they were greeted with parades and great public acclaim. The bones were placed in a tomb that became a pilgrimage site. The yearning for his return only grew, and would take a much more consequential turn after 1848.]

The French Revolution of 1830 directly encouraged liberal and national movements in other countries. Liberal successes followed in Belgium and Switzerland, but not in Spain.

INDEPENDENCE FOR BELGIUM
(A CASE OF MANAGED NATIONALISM)

[The following passages are from the textbook by
John Merriman, Modern Europe, 2010, ch. 15, pp. 598-600]

The Dutch Netherlands had achieved independence from Spain in the seventeenth century. The Southern Netherlands was Belgium, largely Catholic, and divided between Flemish speakers in the north and French-speaking Walloons in the south (see Map 15.2). Brussels, the largest city in Belgium, lies within Flemish Belgium, but had many French speakers.

What Belgians called “Dutch arithmetic” left Belgium with fewer seats in the Dutch Estates-General than its population should have warranted. Catholics had to contribute to Protestant state schools and paid higher taxes.

In the late 1820s, Belgian liberals allied with Catholics against the Protestant Dutch government demanding that ministers be responsible to the Estates-General and taxes be reduced. Dutch King William I (1772-1843) granted only more press freedom.

Following the arrival of news from France of the July Revolution, the Brussels opera presented a production about an insurrection in Naples in 1648 against Spanish rule. So inspired, the audience left the theater to demonstrate against a government newspaper and other symbols of Dutch authority. Workers, suffering unemployment and high prices, put up barricades, and were soon joined by units of bourgeois militia from outside Brussels.

A half-hearted military attack floundered when inexperienced Dutch troops panicked as the ranks of the defenders swelled. After three more days of fighting, the Dutch troops withdrew to the north. The Dutch bombardment of Antwerp convinced more Flemish to support the rebels.

In early October 1830, a provisional government declared Belgium independent.

[Note: Having understood how the game was played by the Powers, the Belgian liberals knew to immediately make it clear they wanted a king.]

A Belgian Congress offered the throne to one of Louis-Philippe’s sons, but he was forced to decline because Britain would not tolerate such French influence in Belgium.

[Regarding the next paragraph: The Powers asked, “What to do now?” The British decided: “Let’s try Leopold again.” He had been reluctant about taking over the mess in Greece, but he was happy to rule over Belgium. The Belgian offer of the crown to him was designed to stay on the good side of the British.]

The Congress then offered the throne to a German prince, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg (who was a British subject, the widower of Princess Charlotte of England). Leopold was crowned King Leopold I (ruled 1831-1865) in July 1831. The European powers guaranteed Belgium’s independence, and when the Dutch took Antwerp in August 1831, French military intervention returned that city to the new nation. Belgium became a constitutional monarchy with a parliament of two houses, both elected by about one of every thirty males.

[From that point, having accepted an essentially British king, Belgium became a destination for infusions of capital from British banks and industrialists. Many British manufacturers opened factories there. Like the north of England, Belgium was also rich in coal. This combination resulted in its rapid industrialization; it was the second country to achieve this after Britain. To stay on everyone’s good side, Belgium also declared official neutrality in European conflicts, and kept out of European wars until the start of the Great War in 1914. In the chapter on imperialism, we will return to the Belgian acquisition of a colony in the Congo in the 1870s, and the great crimes committed there in the name of Leopold’s son, Leopold II.]

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THE 1840s: HUNGRY OR FREE?

FREE MARKETS & PROTECTION – THE AGONY OF IRELAND – SOCIALISTS

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ROMANTICS, LIBERALS, CONSERVATIVES

“Wanderer above the Sea of Fog,” painting by German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich, 1818.

The modern nation-state combines the idea of a people (a nation) who are, as a collective, the formal sovereigns of a state (a political order), which rules over a territory (a country) with exclusive legal authority. It is easy enough to understand that in the present, the lands of the world are divided between nation-states, which are territorially exclusive and have borders defined to the inch. Different legal jurisdictions exist within states, but the hierarchies between them are clearly defined by constitutions and laws.

This was not always the case. The empires and states we have been talking about in the early 1800s saw political and military power emanated from centers, frontiers and peripheral areas were inevitably fuzzy,

(Benedict Anderson, 1983, Imagined Communities, 1991 ed., p. 3: pdf p. 18)

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SOURCES & FURTHER READING