Abstract
Reviewed by: Antonio D’Alessandri, Roma Tre University, Italy
In recent years, nineteenth-century political exiles have attracted the attention of many European historians. However, today’s Romanian scholars have largely been ignoring them, even though some people exiled after the 1848 Revolution subsequently played a key role in the development of the Danubian national state. Since 1989 Romanian historiography has been more preoccupied with studying the communist regime. This new book by Angela Jianu finally fills this gap and places this important page of Romanian history in an appropriate European and transnational framework.
Previously, the story of the Forty-Eighters had long been one of the favourite subjects of Romanian historiography, from the pioneering researches of the interwar period (encouraged by the favourable political and cultural relations between Bucharest and Paris, where most of the Romanian expatriates had lived) up to the end of the communist era. As Jianu remarks in the conclusion of the book, the reputation of the 1848 generation was unanimously positive after 1945; even before the national-communist turn of the sixties, when Ceauşescu’s Communist Party claimed the legacy of the Romanian ‘Risorgimento’ for itself. This was a time when the streets and squares of many cities were named after the formerly exiled politicians of the new independent Romania.
Jianu has realized the need for a large work of synthesis, which not only removes the ideological gloss from the story of revolutionary exile but, at the same time, provides a reference work for international historiography, thereby enriching the study of those global struggles for freedom which, as Maurizio Isabella put it in Risorgimento in Exile (2009), characterized the middle of the nineteenth century.
The book is divided into three parts. The first section deals with the political education (in France) of the future revolutionaries and their engagement in the events of 1848. The second part analyses the years of exile (1849–1855). Finally, the third part deals with the exiles’ return to their homeland and their involvement in the struggles for the unification of the two Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, made possible by the changed political context after the Russian defeat in the Crimean War.
Although the experience of exile itself is the main subject of Angela Jianu’s work, the years before and after this phase are also analysed in depth.
The account of the years before the 1848 revolution in Wallachia is crucial in order to understand how young students from good families were able to maintain contact and to create a network of friendly ties with some of the most important political and cultural figures in France in the July Monarchy period, such as Jules Michelet and Edgar Quinet.
These relationships had a double effect: firstly, they allowed the young Romanians (especially Dumitru Brătianu, Constantin A. Rosetti and Ion C. Brătianu) to elaborate a specific idea of their own homeland, nationality and citizenship. They could feel themselves to be part of a future Universal Republic they were engaged in creating. Secondly, those friendships and personal relationships created a protective network for the exiles during the hard years they spent away from their country.
The story of these interpersonal and family networks (see the case of the Golescu family) is one of the most interesting aspects of Jianu’s work. She has not merely summarized the results of the best historiography, but has also been able to narrate, thanks to an extensive analysis of correspondence and memoirs, the personal dramas, the daily struggles, the joys and sorrows of lives in the service of politics and the realization of an ideal. This may be the first time in the study of a traditional theme of Romanian historiography that both the emotions of the characters as expressed in their writings, and the social aspects of their individual and collective stories have been fully analysed.
It must be said that a large part of the narrative is dedicated to the radical wing of the fragmented world of the Romanian diaspora: Rosetti and the outstanding figure of his wife, the British Mary Grant, the Brătianu brothers, seen mainly (but not only) in their relationships with the Michelet and Quinet families. There are also frequent references to the five Golescu (four brothers and their cousin) and the various female figures of their family, above all their mother, Zoe, a true pillar of support for the difficult lives of expatriates.
In addition to highlighting the fragmentation, rivalry, and jealousy among the different figures of the nineteenth-century Romanian exile (aspects often neglected by the specialized historiography), the book also deals with its polycentrism. Using original documents from the British archives, Jianu describes many of the contacts and links of the exiles in London; from Lord Palmerston to the Central Democratic European Committee of Giuseppe Mazzini. She also examines the network of relationships with other groups of political exiles: from the collaboration with the Poles to the difficult and often controversial relations with the Hungarians.
Far from being an exhausted subject, political exile from Central and Eastern Europe before and after the revolutions of 1848–49 is now enjoying a new wave of interest and attention thanks to the revival of studies and research on this topic.
Jianu’s book restores Romanians to their correct place in the international democratic movement which radically changed the face of contemporary Europe, heralded the end of ancien régime societies and laid the basis for the spiritual and political renewal of the entire continent.