Abstract
This article tracks how political and intellectual leaders from south-eastern Europe used the concept of civilization, or a particular type of ‘civilization-speak’, from the end of the eighteenth century through the mid-nineteenth century. It compares and contrasts how they employed civilization-speak in different linguistic milieus – French, Modern Greek, and Romanian – and how they deployed it to further changing political aims during a period of political upheaval in the Balkans. It traces how civilization-speak served initially as a tool for extracting support from west European, especially French, patrons, and was later refashioned into a rhetorical instrument of nationalism. This study places the intellectual and political history of south-eastern Europe during the era in a pan-European context and adds nuance to discussions about the development of nationalism in the region.
In 1837, Simeon Marcovici, the director of Sfântul Sava, one of the most prestigious educational institutions in the Danubian Principalities, gave a speech to mark the end of the academic year. A few months later, the text of Marcovici’s talk, Civilizaţia (Civilization) ran in The National Museum (Muzeul naţional), a Romanian-language literary journal. For members of Marcovici’s audience, this might have been the first time they had heard the term civilization, at least in their own language. A neologism borrowed from French, the word was not yet common in Romanian print. 1 Consequently, in his didactic lecture, Marcovici had to explain its meaning. He did so by offering his audience an historical overview of European civilization. He then argued that the spread of education would hasten civilization’s advance in Wallachia and Moldova.
Marcovici’s discussion of civilization as developing in stages and the emphasis he placed on the legacies of Classical Antiquity and Christianity were far from original. Many of these ideas had gained widespread currency in west European idioms like French – a language Marcovici read fluently. 2 Moreover, throughout the early nineteenth-century, south-eastern European leaders had routinely relied on the language of civilization, or ‘civilization-speak’, to drum up material and political support from west European, particularly French, allies. Like Marcovici, moreover, these Balkan notables stressed the role of education in achieving broader political aims. Marcovici’s take on civilization would have been mediated through these texts. Furthermore, many of the contemporary authors who capitalized on the language of civilization in their work were personal acquaintances of Marcovici’s or travelled in similar intellectual and social circles.
What set Marcovici’s use of civilization apart was his intended audience. Whereas other South-east European leaders had mobilized civilization-speak to enter into dialogue with foreign benefactors, Marcovici used it to incite and excite a domestic audience in the Balkans. While previous Balkan writers had employed civilization-speak to describe a pan-European ethos, Marcovici relied on it to articulate an early Romanian nationalist agenda. In other words, Marcovici reconfigured a discursive device that Balkan notables had consistently used to communicate their membership in a shared European culture into a rhetorical tool that highlighted national particularism.
This article traces out how south-east European leaders exploited civilization-speak in different linguistic milieus – French, Modern Greek, and Romanian –as well as in a variety of political contexts. In the early nineteenth-century Balkans, social status and religion served as the primary markers of difference. National identities had yet to develop fully – although over the course of the period discussed here, they certainly began to take shape. At the beginning of this period, the Orthodox Christian elite, which relied on Greek as a lingua franca for both commerce and culture, moved across the Ottoman Empire and its vassal states in pursuit of educational, economic, and administrative opportunities. Many shared a long-term political vision for the region that centred on the notion of a resurrected Byzantium or an Orthodox commonwealth.
As the Danubian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldova were never fully incorporated into the Ottoman Empire, Orthodox elites based there enjoyed a relatively high degree of economic, political, and intellectual freedom. Bucharest and Iaşi developed into two of the most significant centres of Hellenophone public life. This status quo only changed after the Greek War of Independence broke out in 1821, a shift that will be discussed in greater detail below.
Balkan figures – such as Marcovici – who were raised or who studied in the Principalities prior to 1821, would have completed their education in Greek – possibly, as in Marcovici’s case, at one of the two Princely Academies. They would have also been thoroughly integrated into a mobile, polyglot milieu – a cultural, political, and social universe that underwent a drastic reconfiguration after the Greek War of Independence. To provide a full view of how south-east European leaders’ use of civilization-speak evolved over time, and in response to the rapidly altering political context, this article examines texts that linked politics and education in French, Modern Greek, and Romanian. 3 It focuses on documents produced between 1800 and 1840, offering a glimpse of the way continental discourses and regional events fashioned and transformed Balkan writers’ ideas.
The present article is not intended as an exhaustive study of the transmission and dissemination of French, or West European, thought in the Balkans – a subject with a long and rich historiography. While researchers today have much to learn from this literature, many of these studies bear the imprint of their authors’ political contexts. Moreover, a great number of these works are marked by the persistence of methodological nationalism in the historiography of the region. Finally, much of this scholarship focuses uniquely on the reception of west European ideas and offers little analysis of the value transnational relations held for actors outside of the region. 4 This article intervenes in this literature by offering a series of vignettes that build on, update, and bring this scholarship more squarely into a transnational discussion of early nineteenth-century Europe by considering what was at stake for south-east European and French figures and organizations on the local, regional, and continental levels. It accomplishes this by charting how Balkan leaders deployed certain rhetorical strategies at the beginning of the period to secure foreign support for regional political and educational goals; and how, in a changing political context, they employed many of the same notions to cultivate local enthusiasm for their projects and nationalist visions. In essence, it tracks the transformation of cosmopolitan civilization-speak into a far more localized form of ‘nation-speak’. 5
Civilization-Speak: A European Language
Balkan leaders mobilized civilization-speak throughout the early nineteenth century to garner west European aid for a variety of projects – from philanthropic support for orphanages to foreign intervention in the Greek War of Independence. It was especially prevalent in pleas to assist with educational endeavours. Such solicitations generally worked with an understanding of civilization as evolving in progressive stages, laid particular emphasis on the place of Hellenic Antiquity and Christianity in the development of European culture, and identified western Europe as the most advanced part of the continent. The language of civilization provided Balkan luminaries with a rhetorical strategy, one they could use to argue that Orthodox Christians in south-eastern Europe belonged to the same historical/cultural tradition as their would-be patrons. It also allowed them to flatter potential backers, as it recognized them as culturally, economically, and technologically superior. Civilization-speak had little purchase in debates and discussions among Balkan elites, however. Accordingly, it was above all a means of engaging those outside the region.
Adamantios Korais’s Report on the Present State of Greek Civilization provided Balkan writers with an early model of how to use civilization-speak to spark foreign interest in south-east European affairs. Korais wrote this 1803 speech at the invitation of the Parisian Société des Observateurs de l’homme (Society for the Observers of Man) (SOH), an ephemeral organization that met between 1799 and 1804. His lecture was one of only two presentations at the SOH that was immediately published. 6 Soon after, Korais put together a translation that introduced Hellenophone audiences to the term civilization, which he rendered as politismos [πολιτισμός]. 7
In analyses of the Report, Korais scholars have seldom given much consideration to the venue where he first presented his lecture. They ignore how Korais painstakingly crafted his speech for an elite French public, instead stressing the place the text later came to occupy in the modern Greek canon. 8 These assessments overlook both how Korais’s use of the civilization trope revealed his keen understanding of the way French political, cultural, and scientific discourses intersected at the turn of the nineteenth century and how shocking the stress he placed on the Hellenic past would have been to a contemporary south-east European audience.
Written on the heels of Bonaparte’s defeat in Egypt, the underlying impetus for Korais’s speech was to discourage French territorial ambitions in south-eastern Europe while encouraging French philanthropy in the same region. 9 To advance these goals, Korais presented a particular account of civilization. He began by soft-soaping his listeners, referring to France as the most enlightened nation in Europe. Korais further claimed that during the French Revolution, Orthodox clergymen travelled en masse to France ‘to learn in Paris in order to instruct their compatriots upon their return’. 10 Moreover, he proclaimed the Encyclopédie represented the most advanced expression of civilization, and light emanating from its pages reflected across Europe. 11 Such remarks not only massaged his audience’s sense of national pride, but also displaced traditional centres of Balkan culture, like Mount Athos and the Danubian Principalities, making Paris the focal point of the Orthodox cultural universe.
This was only half the story, however. Korais was quick to inform his audience that modern Greeks saw the French, and the rest of ‘enlightened Europe’, as ‘mere debtors’ who owed their civilization to the ancient Greeks. 12 France had reaped the benefits of the ancient Hellenes’ arts and sciences, Korais asserted, now modern Greeks could profit from the teachings of the enlightenment and the French Revolution. Korais subsequently called on his Parisian audience to support the ‘return’ of civilization to Greece. Listing efforts on the ground to build schools and translate west European texts into modern Greek, he encouraged his French public to contribute to these endeavours as a means of acquitting the debt they owed the Greeks. 13
Korais’s argument had value in his Parisian context. He gave this lecture at the height of the neoclassical period in France. His French auditors moved in a cultural milieu saturated with imagery, architectural models, and political concepts plucked from the history of the ancient world. The affluent scientists, administrators, and philosophers listening to Korais most likely had studied ancient Greek in school. One historian has suggested that even Korais’s membership in the SOH may have had symbolic value – the society’s token Greek. 14 Consequently, it made perfect sense for Korais to punctuate his description of contemporary Greece with abundant references and comparisons to the heroes of Antiquity and draw an unequivocal connection between the ancient Hellenes and the modern Greeks. 15
Speaking to a French audience in 1803, furthermore, Korais’s insistence on Hellenic Antiquity served an additional purpose given the immediate French political context. After Bonaparte’s failure in Egypt, French administrators and scholars’ enthusiasm for and confidence in their abilities to ‘return’ civilization to the Egyptians waned. Dismayed by the economic conditions and cultural dissonance they discovered on the ground, many French notables, like the cartographer, engineer, and archaeologist Edme-François Jomard, began to doubt there was a direct link between the builders of the pyramids and present-day Muslim Egyptians. More generally, French politicians and intellectuals started to question the assumption that all peoples could be civilized. 16 Korais’s audience and intellectual circles included a number of Egyptologists and experts associated with the scientific commission in Egypt. 17 Thus, by accentuating the Hellenic past and downplaying the role of Egypt (and Rome) in the development of European civilization, Korais distanced his representation of modern Greece from the French experience in Egypt. The subtext was that the French had a duty to aid, rather than colonize, Orthodox Christians in south-eastern Europe. At the same time, Korais’s line of reasoning also served to reinforce a train of thought that equated European identity with the ancient Greek past. 18
This was an effective tactic for addressing a French audience. Korais’s use of civilization and Hellenic Antiquity capitalized on the cultural sensibilities of his French auditors, while working to dissuade them of any colonial ambitious they may have harboured. It further reinforced West European, particularly French, claims of cultural supremacy. In the following decades, it proved to be a rationale Balkan and French public figures could mobilize to advance their own agenda when dealing with one another. 19
It was not, however, a rhetorical strategy that had been much used in inter-Balkan debates and discussions. First, the word civilization, with the same meaning as its French equivalent, only slowly made inroads into modern Greek discourse. It initially appeared in Korais’s 1804 translation of his Report – a text Korais rendered into modern Greek in hopes of promoting west European cultural models and encouraging Hellenophone investment in education. Yet, the term politismos also carried an older signification, one that referred to the ability of a community to live harmoniously together. Only later in the nineteenth century did the word’s new meaning become its primary definition. 20
Second, unlike when Korais addressed a foreign audience, Balkan writers engaging with one another were not attempting to seek out foreign attention or assistance. Consequently, they were not confined to discussing plans, projects, and aspirations in terms that flattered potential west European patrons. While notables writing about a variety of issues, including education, sometimes paid homage to, or drew comparisons with, the ‘wise French’, or ‘enlightened Europe’, 21 they had little incentive to shore up their benefactors’ status.
Finally, appeals to the notion of civilization, even a civilization built on the ruins of Hellenic Antiquity, did not carry the same weight with Hellenophone and French-speaking audiences. For Orthodox elites in south-eastern Europe and the diaspora, Byzantium, not Athens or Sparta, served as the historical-cultural reference point – one that allowed them to stress their Christian faith and obscured what many Orthodox leaders viewed as an undignified pagan past. It also permitted them to perpetuate a sense of community throughout the Orthodox world in spite of linguistic and cultural differences. 22 Consequently, they tended to describe themselves not as Greeks, or Hellenes, in internal discourses, but as Romaios, or Romans, highlighting a historical link to Byzantium, a model Orthodox Empire. 23 In sum, Antiquity was a tool that could be used to drum up west European support and to gain legitimacy for various causes, but it had far less symbolic value for regional identities and debates.
A comparison of how the French Journal of Education (Journal d’éducation) and the Greek-language periodical Hermes the Scholar (Ὲρμής ὀ Λόγιος) treated the proliferation of mutual-method, or Lancastrian, schools in south-eastern Europe provides a useful example. An important link among Greek-speaking Orthodox communities across Europe and in the Ottoman Empire, the Vienna-based Hermes ran from 1811 to 1821. Some historians have claimed the idea for the periodical came from Korais himself. Early on, its publication was made possible thanks to the support of the Greco-Dacian Society of Bucharest, an association that sought to ‘restore’ enlightenment in the Balkans. Several of this organization’s members, including Korais and Ioannis Kapodistrias (an Ionian aristocrat in the service of Tsar Alexander I and the future first governor of Greece), later joined the Parisian Société pour l’instruction élémentaire (Society for Elementary Instruction) (SIE), which produced the Journal of Education. 24 Contrasting the language used in the two journals is especially informative as mutual-method education arrived in and spread throughout the region due in large part to a series of Franco-Balkan partnerships. Each group had a vested interest in this endeavour, and each employed audience-specific language in different fora to discuss these projects. How contributors to the two reviews discussed these schools underlines their disparate aims and highlights Balkan leaders’ ability to tailor their presentations to appeal to different readerships.
Civilization’s Limits
Nicolae Rosetti-Roznovanu, a Moldovan boyar, established the first Lancastrian schools in the Balkans in Iaşi in 1820. 25 He had discovered this approach to popular elementary education during a trip to Paris the previous year when he visited the SIE 26 and its model school. 27 Impressed by the technique, Rosetti-Roznovanu promptly hired Yorgos Cleoboulos, a Hellenophone graduate of the SIE’s teacher-training course, to translate the association’s materials into modern Greek and serve an instructor in Iaşi. Though the institution was short lived – the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence forced Rosetti-Roznovanu and Cleoboulos to flee to Russia – in its few months of operation hundreds of children began to receive a rudimentary education. More importantly, Cleoboulos trained dozens of teachers, who, armed with the SIE’s technique and Cleoboulos’s translation of the French organization’s materials, fanned out across south-eastern Europe and created a loose network of schools. 28
The Journal of Education, the SIE’s monthly, took a keen interest in Rosetti-Roznovanu’s school, the instructors trained there, and the development of elementary instruction in south-east Europe more broadly. Authors writing for the journal systematically used civilization-speak to describe these endeavours. For example, an 1820 piece praised Rosetti-Roznovanu as ‘[an] example to the most civilized of nations’, thanks to whom ‘[…] a grateful Europe would return instruction to its cradle’. 29 The school, moreover, would ‘[permit] the Parisian society to contribute to the restoration of enlightenment and civilization in the regions that had once been their source and hearth’. Time after time, members of the SIE produced reports on south-eastern European schools discussing how education would enable ‘the children of modern Greece to retake their place in civilization’. 30
The SIE had good reason to rely on the language of civilization. From its inception, the French organization sought to promote the mutual method not just in France, but across Europe and around the world as well. By exporting their technique, the association’s members could argue that it was reproducible and universally applicable, thereby strengthening their campaign for its adoption in France. 31 They could also use its replication abroad as evidence of the organization’s, and by extension France’s, role as a centre for pedagogical and scientific innovation and of civilization more broadly. 32 In pursuit of these aims, French members particularly prized their Balkan allies. After all, if the descendants of the ancient Hellenes, the very people who had given birth to European civilization, saw their project as an effective tool for restoring enlightenment to the region, it must have value. 33
The SIE’s foreign recruits understood how crucial it was for the organization to portray itself as a centre for the dissemination of the mutual method. Consequently, civilization-speak permeated their correspondence with members of the association. Rosetti-Roznovanu, for example, wrote a letter to Jomard in 1820 contrasting France ‘that wonderful country a model of civilization’ to semi-barbaric Moldova. Jomard replied, ‘Your letter from the second of August could not have agreed with me more, not only because of the excellent news it contained concerning the propagation of schools, but also because of the memories you have safe-kept of France and its inhabitants’. 34 Other missives, often reproduced in the Journal of Education, also identified French superiority in terms of the country’s advanced degree of civilization and enlightenment. If letter writers failed to include this sort of language, editors at the French periodical worked it into accompanying commentaries. 35
At the same time, when Balkan leaders considered mutual-method education in letters and articles intended for one another, they almost never used civilization-speak. Hermes the Scholar tracked the progress of mutual-method schools in south-eastern Europe as zealously as the Journal of Education. Beginning in 1819, its contributors enthusiastically reported on Rosetti-Roznovanu’s school in Iaşi, the teachers trained there, and the classrooms they went on to run across the Orthodox lands. Commentaries on the pedagogical approach also appeared. These articles often recognized the SIE’s role in introducing the technique in the region and offered analyses of the method that differed little from those in the Journal of Education. 36
Articles in Hermes focused on how the mutual method would benefit the patria (πατρίδα) or the omogenis (oμογɛνɛίς) – a term that denotes ethnic Greeks today, but at the time could refer to the Orthodox community as a whole. In an 1820 text, for example, Cleoboulos, the instructor at Rosetti-Roznovanu’s school, compared the approach to older techniques. He noted the new method would allow the youth of ‘our patria’ to study more efficiently. 37 In the same issue, another observer noted: ‘[…] teachers and pupils of the old school, beholding the good results of the mutual method, were moved by their sense of honour to transfer it out of love for the patria’. The author continued: ‘[…] and because of this all of the children in our omogenis will have a small hand in teaching [and] somehow trigger the rise of education among members of our society’. 38 The concept of civilization never appeared in these texts.
It was not that contributors to the two journals were unaware of one another. In 1820, for instance, Hermes reprinted a text originally published in the Journal of Education. The French-language periodical included at least one reference to an article in the Hellenophone Review. Moreover, some individuals may have even drafted pieces for both publications, and there appears to have been some overlap among the periodicals’ subscribers. 39 Yet the bulk of the two journals’ audiences, as well as their respective authors’ political aspirations, were distinct. Again, Hermes’s writers were not after foreign support or attention, but instead sought to excite the interest of local notables in this new instructional technology. More importantly, civilization did not mean much, if anything, to them. They did not see these new schools as a means of restoring the glories of ancient Greece to south-eastern Europe, but instead as a method for modernizing the Orthodox community in the Balkans. 40
Hermes ceased publication in 1821 as the Greek War of Independence got under way. Between 1820 and 1824, however, several printing presses became operational on the Aegean Islands and the Greek peninsula; and a number of new Hellenophone periodicals began to circulate. 41 Like writers in Hermes, authors contributing to these publications were intensely concerned with education and carefully monitored the spread of mutual-method schools in the lands occupied by the Greek insurgents. While they did not discuss instruction in terms of civilization, they introduced a concept into educational discourses that had largely been absent from the pages of Hermes – ethnos or nation (έθνος).
Until the War of Independence, the modern concept of nation did not necessarily capture regional realities or best express south-east European leaders’ ambitions. As their written works and correspondence suggest, regional notables often considered themselves part of a broad, pan-Balkan Orthodox patria. 42 They tended to be multi-lingual and geographically mobile. Their economic and political interests and status often depended on the Ottoman state. When they were critical of the Porte, they mainly advocated incrementalism – hoping to wrest control of the Empire slowly away from the Ottomans and create a resurrected Byzantium under Orthodox leadership. Even radical writers, such as Rhigas Feraios, envisioned an uprising that would sweep across the whole of south-eastern Europe and lead to the formation of an Orthodox commonwealth. 43 The war and the establishment of a small Greek state, as opposed to the complete dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, effectively rendered many of these plans and ambitions moot.
Thus, as Hellenophone authors continued to produce articles and write letters about the mutual method, they simultaneously had to contextualize its value within a new set of political coordinates. For example, in a note to the revolutionary administration, an Athens-based mutual method teacher requested a government salary. He described teaching ‘[…] innocent, studious children, some of whom are orphans without fathers, as they shed their blood for the Greek patria!’ The instructor assured his correspondent that he deserved an income, because he ‘did so much for and contributed so much to the tormented nation’. 44 Yorgos Gennadios, a prominent educator, wrote to the Athens News in 1825 about an invitation from Michalis Soutzos to tour a new school. Despite worrying about an outbreak of disease along the route, Gennadios went, motivated by Soutzos’s unwavering dedication to ‘the greater good of the whole nation’. 45 Other articles presented histories and appraisals of the mutual method, extolling its virtues as an economic, efficient, and modern approach to instruction and describing it as beneficial to the nation and the new state. 46 None of these authors employed civilization-speak, and few discussed the omogenis or a broader Orthodox community. This was a departure from texts published in both Hermes and the Journal of Education. 47
The mutual method occupied the minds of Greek administrators and the pages of Greek-language journals into the late 1820s and early 1830s, especially once Kapodistrias assumed the governorship in 1827 and made education a state priority. 48 To create a functioning school system, Kapodistrias and his administration had to encourage both foreign material investment in Greek schools and local interest in instruction. 49 Kapodistrias’s letters to philanthropists in France, Switzerland, England, and elsewhere in western Europe, mobilized the idea of civilization. 50 For example, in a note about schools to the Swiss Philhellenic Committee, Kapodistrias mentioned his correspondents’ ability to help bring to Greece ‘morals, arts and sciences, germs of a real civilization’. 51 Similarly, he responded to a proposition to create a school for Greek children in England by saying he had no doubt that a sojourn abroad for the brightest and best Greek students ‘[…] will be invaluable to the progress of civilization in Greece’. 52
Dealing specifically with the SIE, Kapodistrias often let Francophone philhellenes in the service of the Greek state take the lead, notably Louis-André Gosse and Henri Dutrône. 53 On behalf of Kapodistrias’s administration, these men crafted dispatches about the progress of popular instruction and drafted requests for aid addressed to the SIE and other French philanthropic organizations. They infused their reports with civilization-speak. For example, Dutrône wrote that his work in Greece allowed him to ‘pay the modern Greeks the debt that we contracted with their ancestors when they left [us] the germ of our civilization and riches’. 54 In response to these missives the SIE, often in partnership with west European Philhellenic Committees, sent a steady stream of supplies to Greece. 55
While Kapodistrias and his colleagues used civilization-speak to appeal to west European patrons, they turned to the concept of the nation to solidify local enthusiasm in their programmes. In a decree on mutual method schools, for example, Kapodistrias noted: ‘there is no doubt that we shall quickly see perfected, as we wish, the desired project [the spread of mutual method education], which for us and for our nation shall be a reward, as great as your time and dedication to the nation’.
56
To the instructors of mutual method schools he wrote: We were delighted to give our recognition to our distinguished fellow citizens who contributed to [the mutual-method schools’] organization, to the instructors, who in the midst of the greatest privations, knew how to make these establishments prosper, and to the students who are already the measure of all that the patria has the right to expect of them.
57
In short, by the time Kapodistrias was assassinated in 1831, arguments about the benefits of mutual-method instruction, and education more generally, framed in terms of their advantages for the nation, had become commonplace. This shift also touched Balkan elites with an interest in education outside of Greece. Many of the officials working under Kapodistrias and the authors publishing in the new Greek-language reviews had emigrated from the Danubian Principalities to Greece. 59 During the 1810s and 1820s, these notables had often written about instruction for publications like Hermes in terms of bettering a patria – broadly defined to include Orthodox communities throughout the Balkans – or the omogenis. In the late 1820s and 1830s, south-eastern European figures who remained in the Principalities increasingly realized that they would not soon enjoy the same sort of independence as their contemporaries in the new Greek state did. Consequently, they too began to rethink the relationship between politics and education and to formulate programmes and proposals in terms of national goals. It was in this moment that Marcovici brought the concepts of nation and civilization into conversation with one another, articulating an early Romanian nationalist agenda.
From European Civilization to Romanian Nation
Marcovici received his initial training at Bucharest’s Princely Academy. There he studied under professors involved with the Greco-Dacian Society and with Hermes. Many of his teachers and classmates at the Hellenophone institution were Balkan elites committed to the betterment of the Orthodox community in south-eastern Europe as a whole. 60 In 1820, he and several other Academy graduates won a scholarship from the Wallachian Efforia Şcoala, essentially a school board comprised of local notables, to study abroad first in Pisa and later in Paris. 61
The men who sat on the Efforia Şcoala, many of whom were involved with the Academy, anticipated the introduction of modern administrative and commercial practices in the Balkans. Consequently, they hoped to update and expand educational offerings in the Principality. They expected the scholarship students to study a range of subjects in order to assist with curricular revisions upon their return as well as romance languages so they could devise Romanian-language courses of instruction. Members of the largely Hellenophone Efforia Şcoala did not foresee this latter endeavour as a ‘nationalizing’ project. Rather, having identified a dearth of educational opportunities as an impediment to progress, they saw this as a practical solution to a regional problem. 62
The Greek War of Independence erupted shortly after Marcovici and his colleagues left for Western Europe. In addition, a conflict between one of the Greek force’s commanders, Alexandros Ypsilantis, and the leader of a more localized peasant revolt, Tudor Vladimirescu came to a head in the Principalities. This clash ended in Ypsilantis ordering Vladimirescu’s assassination and contributed to the quick Ottoman victory in this theatre. As a result, the Porte removed the Phanariot princes from the Principalities thrones. An overhaul of the local administration and a brief, but intense, moment of anti-Phanariot sentiment followed. 63 The newly reconstituted Efforia Şcoala opted to continue financing Marcovici and the other scholarship students’ education abroad. By the time they returned to Wallachia in 1825, the new administration had merged a Romanian-language course established in 1818 with the Academy, creating the college of Sfântul Sava. Marcovici and the other surviving fellows took up teaching positions at this institution. 64
Like many other faculty members at this prestigious school, 65 Marcovici also held a number of administrative posts over the course of his career. Notably, from 1831–32, he helped write the educational provisions in the Organic Regulations, 66 and contributed to Wallachia’s 1833 Educational Code. 67 In addition, Marcovici played an active role in the cultural life of the Principalities, publishing a wide range of works – from translations to textbooks and from essays to travel narratives. These writings, which often discussed the value of education, routinely appeared in the growing number of Romanian-language periodicals produced in the Principalities. Among these texts was Marcovici’s 1837 Civilizaţia speech. 68
In this lecture, Marcovici set out to explain the concept of civilization. The history of civilization he presented stressed the role of Christianity, ‘civilization’s most solid forerunner’, and the heritage of Antiquity. 69 Marcovici spoke about these themes in ways that would have been familiar to Korais’s audience at the SOH and the philhellenes who corresponded with Kapodistrias. For instance, he remarked: ‘Homer, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, and Demosthenes, how great their genius was, they laid out a literature that, as a step toward perfection, greatly aided other civilizations and immense gratitude for which is the duty of all humanity!’ 70 Again, in terms of its basic outline, Marcovici’s take on civilization was not particularly novel. 71
What distinguished Marcovici’s talk was not how he conceptualized civilization, but how he subtly adjusted the trope for a particular audience and to express specific political aims. Initially, Marcovici gave his speech to celebrate the end of the 1836–37 academic year. Students and faculty from Sfântul Sava would have assembled at the event. Wallachian administrators and Bucharest notables probably also attended. An expanding Romanian-language readership gained access to Marcovici’s lecture when The National Museum published the text later that year. In other words, Marcovici did not draft this address for an audience of potential foreign patrons. Instead, he wrote his lecture for a growing Romanian-language reading public in the Principalities. This marked a departure from earlier Balkan writers and politicians who had almost never referenced civilization in articles, speeches, or letters designed for regional consumption. 72
Marcovici’s discussion of civilization shows he was keenly aware of his audience and fine-tuned his presentation to appeal specifically to them. For example, exploring the legacies of Antiquity in his speech, Marcovici paid the ancient Greeks their due, but he accentuated the role of Rome, ‘that colossus of nations’, in the development of European civilization. Marcovici began this section of his lecture by remarking that the Romans had, ‘outdone all the most important [contemporary] nations’. Subscribing to an essentially linear and cumulative view of civilization as progress, Marcovici made a case for Roman (versus Hellenic) superiority by claiming that the Romans had improved upon ancient Greek political institutions, arts, and sciences. 73
Balkan writers who deployed civilization-speak in the 1810s and 1820s did so to capitalize on west European intellectual trends that located the origins of European civilization in Hellenic Antiquity. Conjuring up the Greek past even made sense for notables in the Principalities like Rosetti-Roznovanu, who understood themselves as part of a broad south-east European community – a community that relied on modern Greek as its lingua franca. As discussed above, after the Greek War of Independence, a historical narrative linking the new state to ancient Greece continued to have purchase in exchanges between Greek officials and their west European benefactors. It also slowly started to gain currency in internal Greek discourses. Any value it had for Orthodox elites in the Principalities, however, quickly eroded. Thus, while on the surface the stress Marcovici placed on Rome may seem like a superficial variation, it points to this significant shift in the region’s political and cultural landscape.
The accent Marcovici placed on Rome, moreover, offered his Romanian-speaking audience an alternative to the post-Byzantine cultural identity that had permeated their cultural milieu. 74 He held the Romans up as a model and noted, for instance, ‘among [the Romans] we see the meeting of the most awe-inspiring virtue, the most sublime patriotism, the most disinterested contempt for luxury, wealth, and the glories of vanity’. 75 Deviating from earlier Balkan writers’ characterizations, in Marcovici’s analysis Rome remained a pertinent example for contemporary society. This position would have seemed fairly provocative, since many contemporary south-east European notables objected to narratives that linked their culture to the ancient past, claiming it de-emphasized their Christian faith and morality. 76 Few would have been inclined to describe the Romans, or the Hellenes, as a template for modern moral virtue. Yet, Marcovici did just that, remarking that contemporary peoples, albeit not always successfully, imitated the ancients.
In dialogue with their West European patrons, Balkan notables had used civilization-speak through the 1820s (and beyond) to invoke a cultural debt the ‘civilized’ nations of Europe supposedly owed the heirs of Antiquity. This discursive relationship allowed them to trade legitimacy – in the form of recognition of west European superiority – for material goods and technical support, i.e. money, military aid, supplies for schools, etc. Marcovici also appealed to the language of debt and inheritance. He explained that during the Renaissance ‘The new nations of Europe suddenly enriched by the knowledge of the Greeks and Romans did not need to return to the beginning of humanity, which had been discovered at great pains through trial and error over the course of centuries; but on the basis of this precious inheritance, advance[ed] with great strides […]’. 77 Like Korais speaking before the SOH, Marcovici further insisted that South-east Europeans could profit not only from the legacies of the ancient world, but also from contemporary west European knowledge.
There was, however, a key difference between the discussion of cultural debt Marcovici and Korais offered. Marcovici did not exploit this idea to cultivate foreign benefactors; instead, he employed it to outline a model for his public. Marcovici’s point was straightforward: his audience could hasten the progress of civilization in the Principalities simply by embracing the transmission of west European knowledge through education. To bolster his argument, he drew his readers’ attention to the rapid development of the Americas, ‘the still young daughter[s] of old Europe’, that ‘in only three centuries became capable of giving [Europe] lessons and models’. 78 Marcovici implied that the Principalities’ degree of civilization could be similarly advanced.
Finally, Marcovici employed civilization to call for union between Wallachia and Moldova. After listing the princes who had united the Principalities during the Middle Ages, he reflected on the progress civilization had already made ‘among us’. Marcovici announced that civilization’s advance had begun in the patria in 1822 when ‘native’ princes regained the thrones of both Principalities. The heightened autonomy guaranteed under the Treaty of Adrianople (1829) and the Romanian-language educational programmes ensured by the Organic Regulations also constituted important steps. 79 Marcovici punctuated this chronology by referencing treaties, individuals, and laws relevant to the histories of both Wallachia and Moldova. Concluding his speech, Marcovici asked God to speed civilization’s momentum in the region, musing that ‘through enlightenment and civilization, love and union would develop between brothers’. 80 This statement, especially as it came at the end of Marcovici’s history of the Principalities, was provocative – implicitly demanding political union between Moldova and Wallachia. Marcovici proposed this union could be achieved via the spread of civilization.
In short, Marcovici had transformed civilization-speak into a form of nation-speak. He used the concept of civilization to stress the notion of Roman-Romanian historical continuity, to underline the value of education and modern learning, and to push for union between the Principalities. Marcovici appropriated many of the elements earlier Balkan writers had linked to the concept – the heritage of classical antiquity, the value of Christian morality, the utility of modern instruction. Yet, this was a new way of employing civilization, one that accounted for Marcovici’s audience and responded to his political context.
Audience, Context, Civilization
Marcovici’s speech marked a turning point in terms of how Balkan leaders deployed civilization-speak. Civilization had given notables like Korais, Rosetti-Roznovanu, and Kapodistrias a tool to extract aid from foreign patrons, as the concept simultaneously flattered their west European benefactors and allowed them to assert that a cultural debt had come due. At the same time, through at least the late 1830s, appeals to civilization had marginal value at best in internal Balkan debates. In discussions among themselves, Balkan leaders had little incentive to further notions of west European cultural supremacy. Furthermore, for Orthodox Christians in south-eastern Europe, Antiquity, one of civilization’s central pillars, did not serve as the same sort of cultural touchstone, and they instead looked to Byzantium for historical models of community, culture, and politics.
Marcovici’s rhetorical move can be understood, in large measure, as a reaction to the evolving political context in south-eastern Europe. After the conclusion of the Greek War of Independence in 1829 and the Great Powers’ recognition of the Greek state in 1832, the possibility of the pan-Balkan Orthodox Empire that many of Marcovici’s mentors and contemporaries had once championed grew exponentially more unlikely. Yet, Balkan leaders beyond Greece’s borders remained dissatisfied with the political status quo. By bundling the idea of civilization with a narrative of the Romanians’ Roman origins, Marcovici gave his audience an alternative. Addressing Romanian-speakers, civilization let Marcovici outline an ethno-linguistic identity that distinguished his intended audience from the citizens of the Greek state and call for union between the Principalities. Inserting the concept of civilization in Romanian-language fora, Marcovici reconfigured it as an instrument of nationalism, or a type of nation-speak.
Though initially confined to elite discussions, many of the ideas Marcovici expressed in his lecture – including the concept of civilization – gained popularity in Wallachia and Moldova during the following decade. By the end of the 1840s, politicians, educators, and writers like Nicolae Bălcescu and C. A. Rosetti – men who studied under Marcovici at Sfântul Sava – helped popularize the sort of nationalist agenda Marcovici’s speech suggested. They too emphasized the importance of education and learning and began to agitate more aggressively for union between the Principalities. Members of this cohort often articulated their political and cultural positions through the prism of civilization. Many of them participated in the 1848 revolution in Wallachia, a movement that called for independence and union with Moldova. 81
The forty-eighters’ generation – like later cohorts of Romanian politicians and intellectuals – mobilized civilization as a rhetorical tool not only to gather international, but also to build domestic, support for their political ambitions. In histories, pamphlets, essays, and other texts they deployed the notion of civilization in tandem with a narrative of Roman-Romanian continuity to assert a certain type of legitimacy on the European stage. In many ways, this was an unsurprising strategy, since Balkan leaders had already successfully employed a similar one to win recognition for Greek independence. It also suggests that pre-existing European discourses and developing political realities shaped, and even limited, the language Romanian nationalist leaders used when crafting their ideological positions and political agendas.
In sum, Marcovici’s speech, along with the letters, articles, and decrees Balkan writers authored throughout the period, reveal how south-east European notables availed themselves of various rhetorical tools when addressing different audiences. These texts highlight how the same leaders adapted to a shifting political landscape and repurposed discursive devices to suit changing political goals. In Marcovici’s case, he reworked a concept that had previously expressed the notion of a shared European culture to assert a sense of national particularism and a programme of self-determination.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the other contributors to this issue – Maria Bucur, Evguenia Davidova, Evdoxios Doxiadis, Theodora Dragostinova, and Thomas Gallant – for both their comments and feedback on this article, specifically, and their collegiality and intellectual comradery, generally. I owe an additional debt of gratitude to audience members at the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University where I presented a version of this text, especially to Molly Greene and Christina Koulouri for their questions and comments. Harry Liebershon and Dorothee Schneider lent me the house where I drafted this piece. Elizabeth Nelson, Georgios Makris, Elena Popa, and Erin Corber each offered suggestions and help with copyediting and diacritics, though all remaining infelicities are my own errors. Finally, a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies made the research for this article possible.