This innovative study of French liberalism in the post-Napoleonic period illuminates the formation of nationhood in Greece and Romania. Alex Tipei employs the concept of “civilization-speak” (a sort of proto mission civilisatrice) to analyze the cross-continental flow of ideas. The author argues that a cohort of moderate French liberals and their Balkan counterparts employed civilization-speak to impose their model of modernity on southeastern Europe. This peaceful form of conquest, motivated by humanitarianism and the belief in technological progress, encouraged self-reliance and provided the key elements of national identity through a process of adaptation. Tragically, the civilization-speak strategy, in the end, also provided a dress rehearsal for more brutal attempts to conquer and dominate during the era of New Imperialism to follow.
After the post-1789 upheavals, conservative values made a comeback in the European core, while the principles of liberalism reached the periphery. Drawing mainly on published materials, Tipei features numerous historical characters (some famous, others less celebrated) to uncover the circuit of interactions between Paris, Bucharest, and Athens. Figures such as Joseph-Marie Degérando, Benjamin Constant, and Germain de Staël actively shaped public opinion, and their dedication to reform in the post-Napoleonic epoch helped reshape French society along liberal lines. Tipei reveals how their conceptualization of civilization as an organic entity that guaranteed economic growth and political modernization became an instrument to elevate the Balkan peoples’ standing on a political, moral, and cultural plane.
The book opens with Adamantios Korais, the Parisian émigré and champion of modern Greece as a descendent of ancient Hellenism. Korais’s notion of scientific and moral progress coalesced with the ideas of French liberals who looked back to classical antiquity as a model. Chapter 1 explores Napoleon Bonaparte’s failed Egyptian campaign, which involved Europeans in the transmission of ideas to the Levant, while casting doubt that all people might be civilized. Restoration-era France was a hotbed of social reform programs. Chapters 2–3 survey how intellectuals like Francois Guizot, Abbé Gaultier, and Jean-Baptiste Say realized that French supremacy could be reasserted through philanthropy and that the Balkans served as an ideal counterweight to the American colonies.
The civilization-speak approach brought French intellectuals into the milieus of the Danubian principalities (vassal states of the Ottoman Empire), while Balkan luminaries sought connections in France. For example, Nicolae Rosetti-Roznovanu (a Moldavian boyar) traveled to Paris and learned of the mutual method of elementary education. Returning home, he partnered with Yorgos Kleovoulos (a Hellenophone based in Plovdiv) to establish a “Moldavian” (Romanian-language) teacher-training school in Iaşi. This pedagogical precedent paved the way for administrative reforms by the Rosetti-Roznovanus and other families embedded in local politics and economic interests. Tipei makes it clear that the agendas of these Balkan influencers aimed at enhancing their own personal standing and did not constitute nationalist programs.
Hellenophone elite employed alternative conduits, such as the Greek-language periodical Hermes the Scholar, to monitor the Orthodox world. Tipei’s discussion of the Greek crisis of 1821 places Rhigas Feraios, a polyglot visionary and poet, into perspective, while providing snapshots of the Greek revolutionary press. The writings of Dominique Dufour de Pradt (deemed here as a liberal) are featured for their construction of Greece as the “spearhead of ‘barbarianism’ on the Continent” (145–46).
The book’s second half sketches liberal reforms and education in Greece, Wallachia, and Moldavia during the 1830s and 40s. The exposure to civilization-speak gave the Balkan elites, and their French collaborators, the instruments to modernize the region, promote new identities, and participate in the process of imperialism. The ninth and final chapter surveys French politics and how a younger cohort of French figures turned away from soft power as a method to enhance France’s prestige in the world.
Unintended Nations uncovers the intersection of cosmopolitan intellectuals, domestic politics, and the shaping of national identities in Greece and Romania, while predicating the far more ambitious geopolitical efforts of France later in the century. The book is especially valuable for its transcontinental perspective: rarely have scholars addressed two Balkan countries through the prism of an outside great power. Brilliantly conceived, the concept of civilization-speak is grounded in scientific and secular knowledge. Nevertheless, faith in God is embedded in the writings of these Francophiles, and the author may have considered Eastern Orthodoxy’s role in their cultural crusade. After all, a good portion of “Greek” and “Romanian” society would have considered the book’s heroes to be heretics.
