French “influence” has been a perennial theme in the historiography of France and even more so in that of the Balkans. In 1898, for example, the Sorbonne-educated Romanian historian Pompiliu Eliade published On French Influence on the Public Spirit in Romania—a text still cited by historians today. Since then, the literature on Greece, the Danubian principalities, and Southeastern Europe more generally, including classic studies by Douglas Dakin, John Campbell, and Alexandru Zub, has relied on the concept.Footnote 1 Historians’ dependence on the term “influence” extends beyond Europe's periphery; scholars interested in relations between France and pseudo-colonial spaces, like Argentina, as well as rival powers, like Great Britain and the United States, pepper their interventions with the term.Footnote 2
Despite its widespread use, the notion of French “influence,” and of “influence” more broadly, is problematic. The art historian Paula Lee Young points out that the concept has given the writing of history an “internal” coherence and a false sense of cohesion. Highlighting the nebulous nature of the word, Young traces its history from the influence of the stars on human fortunes to the diagnosis of influenza, an infection characterized by an indistinct set of symptoms.Footnote 3 Following Young, then, the notion of French “influence” in current historiography can be likened to a vague set of effects: the appearance of French Enlightenment texts in the libraries of upper-class Orthodox Christians in Moldova, the introduction of French neologisms in modern Greek, or the adoption of didactic methods imported from France. The causes of these effects, however, are rarely analyzed, accentuating the sense of a unidirectional narrative where the force of “French influence” did its work on weak Southeastern Europeans, while Western Europeans remained immune to Balkan discourses, politics, and culture.
To extend the metaphor, notions of “influence” in the historical literature are as unspecific as the miasma theory of disease, which sought the origins of cholera and other epidemics in unknown gasses emanating from rotting matter. Diseases, according to this view, were literally in the air; they came from everywhere—the atmosphere, the architecture, the sewers, streets, cesspools, and swamps—and nowhere in particular all at once. To explain illnesses and outbreaks, we no longer use the miasma theory of disease. In the late nineteenth century, scientists discovered that germs communicated the plague and other ailments. Microbes were the mechanisms that allowed disease to spread. In a manner that parallels the transformation that proponents of germ theory enacted on medicine, I argue that the mechanisms for transmitting “influence” need to be isolated and analyzed.Footnote 4 I am thus advocating for a more rigorous study of the historically specific efforts of French individuals and organizations who cultivated relationships with those abroad in order to export technologies, practices, and ideas. In doing so, I aim to return agency to individual actors in France and show how Southeastern European leaders played an active and essential role in these relationships. My approach critiques the concept of “influence” as it glosses over what Frenchmen did to exert it and overlooks their dependence on someone or something to “influence.”
Framed in another analytical vocabulary: without a periphery there can be no “center.”Footnote 5 Taking apart the notion of “influence” also allows us, then, to reimagine how actors in a cultural, political, and/or economic center negotiated the transmission of ideas, programs, and discourses with partners on the margins—in this case in the Balkans. While the relationships that emerged between French individuals and organizations and their allies in Southeastern Europe were not equal in terms of power dynamics, they did have a reciprocal character. Understanding the ways Balkan leaders could set, or at least tweak, the terms of these interactions and the extent to which their French counterparts counted on these exchanges to advance their own agendas points to a means of reassessing Eastern–Western European relations more broadly, especially narratives of dependency and backwardness. In short, it lets us rethink the ways the center and periphery interact with one another.Footnote 6
By examining the initiatives of the Société pour l'instruction élémentaire (Society for Elementary Instruction) (SIE) to introduce a particular technology in the Balkans, the Lancastrian system for elementary education,Footnote 7 I model a concrete strategy for rethinking the notion of French “influence.” During the post-Napoleonic era, French liberals used the SIE to further their political program at home and, simultaneously, reaffirm France's place as a civilizational center. Liberals in the SIE directly contrasted their endeavors with Napoleon's failed attempt to conquer Europe by force. I maintain that the SIE's endeavors are best understood as an international “development” project meant to “win the hearts and minds” of Southeastern Europeans. Conceiving of the SIE this way, I expose one aspect of a broader and little-studied history of soft power or cultural colonialism:Footnote 8 the relationships that members of the SIE cultivated with individuals and institutions in the lands that now make up modern Greece and in the Danubian principalities of Moldova and Wallachia (parts of present-day Romania).Footnote 9
The engagement of social and economic leaders in the Balkans with Lancastrian schools and the emergence of French “influence” in the region coincided with a monumental political shift. In 1815, no Greek state existed; rather today's Greece was part of the multiethnic, multilingual, and multireligious Ottoman Empire. At the same time, as vassal states of the Ottoman Porte, the principalities offered Orthodox Christian elites in Southeastern Europe a degree of economic, political, and intellectual liberty; consequently their capitals—Bucharest and Iaşi—became two of the most important centers of hellenophone public life.Footnote 10 This political and cultural landscape changed dramatically as a result of the Greek War of Independence that began in 1821. By the end of the conflict in 1832, an independent Greek state had been established and the principalities had gained greater autonomy. Throughout this period, a number of notables viewed popular education as an instrument of modernization. Consequently, they allied with the SIE and actively labored to disseminate Lancastrian schools in the region. Here I discuss what was at stake for these reformers in their local contexts. Thus my analysis reveals a cross-continental network of individuals who came together to advance specific, local goals, rather than a monolithic France that exerted “influence” on a Southeastern European periphery.
* * *
Following Napoleon's defeat in 1815, moderate liberals identified a number of problems in French society. First, they believed that the French working classes and peasantry were woefully undereducated, uncivilized even. They blamed crime, poverty, and disease on the poor's lack of instruction. Second, they hoped to solidify both the constitutional monarchy established by the Charter of 1814 and their own political party's position in France, goals that became all the more pressing after a major Liberal electoral loss in 1820. Finally, they sought to reaffirm France's position in Europe. With France militarily and diplomatically weakened by the Napoleonic Wars, they turned to the idea of France as a cultural superpower.
French Liberals found a solution to all three of their concerns in the Lancastrian system, an educational technique that a group of philanthropists first encountered in London at the British and Foreign School Society.Footnote 11 Designed to educate vast numbers of lower-class children at a minimal cost, it allowed one teacher to instruct hundreds, even thousands, of pupils, by employing more advanced students as monitors, communal charts instead of books, and sandpits and chalkboards in place of pens and paper. Students could begin their schooling at several times during the year and complete it at their own pace. The first to teach reading and writing concurrently, Lancastrian schools saved teachers’ and pupils’ time by reinforcing passive skills with active ones. These schools did not offer the kind of advanced training available to upper- and middle-class children, only a rudimentary understanding of reading, writing, and arithmetic. They also provided them with a moral education and taught boys and girls practical skills like drafting and agricultural techniques, needlework and knitting. Social reformers claimed that this sort of education would produce better workers and moral citizens, while reducing crime and poverty rates.Footnote 12
Impressed with the apparent economy and efficiency of the British establishment, Alexandre de Laborde, the Abbé Gaultier, Jean-Baptiste Say, and Edme-François Jomard returned to France in 1815 determined to create their own association, the SIE. A number of politically active French figures, including François Guizot, Joseph-Marie Degérando, and Marc-Antoine Jullien de Paris, joined them in their efforts. As they intended for the SIE to serve as a center for the scientific study of pedagogy, they recruited experts in education, asking them to revise or “perfect” the British technique. Since they also planned for the organization to encourage the dissemination of Lancastrian system in France, they trained teachers, opened a model school in Paris, and began publishing a periodical, the Journal d’éducation, that contained both scientific information and social and political commentary. The association, which relied on subscriptions, targeted regional notables, specialists in the field of education, and politicians from across France as members, as well as journalists and publishers who could explain their innovations to a wider audience.Footnote 13
The SIE functioned as the organizational hub of a network, one that closely collaborated with other groups, like the Société pour la morale chrétienne (Society for Christian Morality) and the Société Royale des prisons (Royal Society of Prisons).Footnote 14 Individuals in this network built schools across France, wrote about the success of the mutual method, and gave speeches in the Legislative Chamber. During its three first years of existence, the association's membership swelled and hundreds of Frenchmen and -women, mostly from Paris, paid the twenty-franc subscription fee. At its height, nearly three thousand people belonged to the SIE. Its encouragement, moreover, led to the founding of hundreds of schools.Footnote 15
With a membership overwhelmingly comprisingf moderate liberals, the SIE enjoyed governmental support until the 1820 elections swept the Liberals out of office. The Ultraroyalistes, who came to prominence in that year, along with other conservatives, particularly members of the Catholic association, the Congrégation, vehemently opposed the SIE's monitorial schools first on pedagogical, and later on political, cultural, and religious, grounds.Footnote 16 These critics often claimed that écoles mutuelles failed to instill a sense of respect for position, age, or social class in children, since pupils assumed leadership roles in the classroom, teaching one another. In theory, though not always in practice, children earned these positions through their ability and merit.Footnote 17 The liberal SIE and its members saw this social and political education as the embodiment of the 1814 Charter. In 1820, for instance, Pauline Guizot wrote, “mutual instruction is the constitutional regime introduced in education.”Footnote 18 Indeed, conforming to the liberal political program, these schools were meant to encourage a limited meritocracy.Footnote 19
Conservatives also characterized the monitorial system as a symptom of the left's Anglomania, a hot topic in the Parisian political press of the day.Footnote 20 They argued that Lancastrian schools constituted the invasion of not just foreign, but especially Protestant, practices in a realm traditionally controlled by the Catholic Church—an accusation rendered all the more plausible by the disproportionate number of Protestants on the SIE's board.Footnote 21 Moreover, monitorial establishments directly competed for enrollments with Catholic charitable schools, especially those run by the Frères des écoles chrétiennes, a teaching order dedicated to the poor.Footnote 22 The withdrawal of governmental support in 1821, coupled with the conservatives’ and the Church's opposition, led to a dramatic decrease in the number of French Lancastrian schools. Whereas, in 1821, 1,500 écoles mutuelles operated across the country, on the eve of the Liberals’ return to the Legislature in 1828, only 258 remained functional.Footnote 23
Even when the number of monitorial schools declined, liberals continued to use them as part of a public-opinion campaign. In the Journal d’éducation, members of the SIE alleged that the administration and Church's hostility to their program was proof of a disinterest in France's social problems. Their schools, they assured readers, would civilize the country's urban and rural poor.Footnote 24 Members of the SIE thus mobilized discussions of their educational program to critique their political rivals. Funding schools through private philanthropy, moreover, furnished the organization with hard evidence that supported the viability and reproducibility of their project, and the Journal d’éducation routinely offered data on the number of pupils educated in mutual-method establishments, the speed at which children completed their course of study, and the low costs associated with their schools.Footnote 25
As ambitious as the SIE's domestic agenda was, its members had equally far-reaching international goals. Embedded in the society's charter was a mandate to bring inexpensive, lower-class education on the “French” model to the rest of the world.Footnote 26 Members of the SIE juxtaposed their foreign objectives with Napoleon's European campaigns, referring to their initiatives as a form of peaceful conquest that would allow France to develop pliable diplomatic and trade partners across the continent.Footnote 27 Their projects bore a striking number of similarities to twentieth-century developmental programs.
For example, US President Harry Truman's 1949 inaugural address encapsulated a twentieth-century discourse on development that became an increasingly prominent feature of American and Western European foreign policy following World War II. In it, Truman laid out his vision for America's role in the postwar era: “For the first time in history humanity possesses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of [underdeveloped] peoples.” And as the United States “is pre-eminent among nations in the development of industrial and scientific techniques . . . we must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.”Footnote 28 Scholars of developmental theory have depicted the type of rhetoric Truman and his contemporaries used, as well as the kinds of program they executed, as a distinctly twentieth-century phenomenon.Footnote 29 Yet the language at the heart of such developmental discourses can also be found at the core of the SIE's initiatives in the early nineteenth century. For instance, speaking at the organization's 1823 general assembly, one member of the SIE expressed an analogous view of France and its place in the world following an era of extended bloodshed: “France has enjoyed, in recent centuries, a noble and precious prerogative which it owes as much to its institutions, its customs, its language, as to its geographic position: it is the natural center of communication for the civilized world.” The speaker continued: “It is in its bosom that numerous and diverse relations, from various parts of the globe, meet and join together, with the object of [furthering] the sciences, the arts, and all the great interests of humanity; as it is also on its happy soil that, by a coincidence as universal as it is constant, foreigners from every country meet and come together.”Footnote 30
Truman linked the need for US leadership to the world wars and a desire for peace and stability:
It may be [the United States’] lot to experience, and in large measure to bring about, a major turning point in the long history of the human race. The first half of this century has been marked by unprecedented and brutal attacks on the rights of man, and by the two most frightful wars in history. The supreme need of our time is for men to learn to live together in peace and harmony . . .Footnote 31
Likewise, the SIE identified its historical moment as a turning point, one that required France to do no less than promote “development” globally: “It is above all since the Restoration, since the return of a general peace, that our fatherland has been particularly called upon to exercise this wonderful privilege, and [France] has found in this double circumstance [of peace and of being a “civilizational center”] a means of guaranteeing [its position], while encouraging development.”Footnote 32
Finally, both Truman and members of the SIE posited that the juncture of history, technology, and science had created opportunities for new types of interaction between peoples, one that precluded war and conquest.Footnote 33 In Truman's words, “The old imperialism—exploitation for foreign profit—has no place in our plans. What we envisage is a program of development . . . Greater production is the key to prosperity and peace. And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous application of modern scientific and technological knowledge.”Footnote 34 Or, in the SIE's uncannily similar text: “Honorable and peaceful influence, far superior to the material, and too often violent, power that is the fruit of conquest, or the result of politics!” The author continued: “Consequently, we see forming among us over the course of the last few years, as if through a tacit and communal treaty between different peoples, several types of [scientific] establishments conceived in this spirit, which we can consider as a sort of not just European, but universal meeting place destined to fertilize the exchange of all useful information.”Footnote 35 Thus the aftermath of war, faith in science and progress, and a political imperative to assert their respective countries’ international positions pushed both the SIE and twentieth-century US policymakers to turn to development as an alternative to conquest.
Yet the SIE's aims, like those of the later American officials and organizations, were far from altruistic. The SIE publicly described its endeavors as a form of cultural domination and a means of exercising “influence.”Footnote 36 The Journal of Education reported in 1821, for example, “History often tells us about conquests that could not be maintained, which are no more than glorious memories, followed at times by bitter regrets. Conquests of intelligence, the spoils of victories won over ignorance and prejudice are not as easily lost; something more than their memory always remains.”Footnote 37 In short, the SIE conceived of its developmental program as an instrument of soft power. In the long term, its foreign ventures would not only bring it recognition, but also help facilitate France's economic and strategic relationships around the world.
Like development programs in the twentieth century, civilizational programs in the nineteenth century focused on specific issues—education, health, crime—and stressed the exportation of particular technologies as a panacea for social ills. The SIE's mutual schools were one such technology.Footnote 38 Their invention (or “innovation” in France) stemmed from the identification of a problem—the need for working-class education.Footnote 39 Like many technologies, mutual schools incorporated a “hardware component” (charts, manuals, etc.) and a “software component” (a set of ideas, programs), in this case the notion of a Franco-centric civilization and the ideology of progress that gave the schools a purpose. To legitimize their claims to France's scientific superiority through the dissemination of the mutual method abroad, French liberals needed to forge relationships with local elites. These individuals would help import their programs and campaign to win popular support for these projects, for instance by erecting schools and coaxing families into enrolling their children in them.Footnote 40
To organize these allies into a cohesive network, the SIE created a committee on foreign schools in 1818. A report in the Journal d’éducation summarized its aims:
the most real glory, and at the same time the most solid, which France enjoys is due to its culture of sciences and arts; to the activity of its industry a leader in all that it produces; these are the titles that accord [France] the admiration of the civilized world and the influence it enjoys. To preserve this influence, [France] must spread, through its own initiative, its language and its commerce to every nation.Footnote 41
Since mutual-method schools would transmit French civilization, the author concluded, they were important tools in this process.Footnote 42 This initiative was part of a broader liberal program of cultural or soft colonialism. As Benjamin Constant, a member of the SIE, argued in a pamphlet urging French intervention in the Greek War of Independence, for instance, “A generous and Christian comportment [on the part of Frenchmen] would open French commerce up to a rich and prosperous career: the opposite comportment would deliver this career to [France's] rivals.” To do this, however, France absolutely had to establish “relations of affection and gratitude with Greece.”Footnote 43 The schools, like military aid, were intended to encourage sentiments of appreciation that French patrons could convert into strategic and economic gains.
In their global pursuit of these relationships, members of the SIE especially prized those with hellenophones in Southeastern Europe. Authors writing for the Journal d’éducation conceptualized links between France and Greece in a specific manner. For instance, an 1816 article noted that “for some time [Greece] has made efforts to rise from the barbarism into which it saw itself plunged, that allowed only a few glimmers of the heritage it was robbed of [to shine through], the precious debris of which the peoples of the Occident have gathered.”Footnote 44 For members of the SIE, French civilization was a continuation of that of the ancients. They portrayed ancient Greece (and Rome) as “eternal examples for the universe,” and characterized lending support to the Greeks as an obligation.Footnote 45
In an 1825 report, for example, Edward Blaquière wrote, “I know that millions of Christians, in the Orient, are stretching out their arms towards Europe to ask for help; these Christians are the descendants of the men who transmitted their civilization and arts to us.” He continued, “The duty of the Christian world to Greece is so pressing and evident that it has no need to be explained.”Footnote 46 And Henri Dutrône, a member of the SIE, who traveled to Greece in 1828, explained in a letter to the Parisian organization that by working on public instruction in Greece he was “paying a debt to the modern Greeks that their ancestors contracted with us when they left us the sciences, arts, in a word the seed of our civilization and of our riches.”Footnote 47
Hellenophone notables addressing French audiences had offered similar analyses of Franco-Greek relations. Adamantios Korais, the so-called father of Greek nationalism, for instance, presented his Report on the Present State of Greek Civilization in 1803. His lecture, pronounced before the Société des observateurs de l'homme (Society of Observers of Man), an organization that key members of the SIE had once belonged to,Footnote 48 drew on an understanding of civilization as an intellectual tradition that began with the philosophy of antiquity and culminated in the Encyclopédie. The narrative that Korais sketched out flattered his French listeners, identifying their country as the most advanced in Europe. Yet in the story that Korais told, the French were simple debtors who owed their civilization to the ancients and, by extension, to their modern descendants. Korais marshaled this discursive strategy to encourage French philanthropy in Southeastern Europe, especially in support of educational endeavors.Footnote 49
Greek-speaking notables and members of the SIE could both harness the rhetorical power of this historical–cultural circuit—ancient Greece had left France its sciences, arts, and technologies; now France would return the favor. For Balkan leaders, emphasizing this cultural debt justified appeals for material aid. For French members of the organization, providing assistance to the Greeks lent their projects weight. The SIE's members rationalized that since the ancient Greeks had once been the most advanced people in Europe, their modern descendants would only import the most cutting-edge technologies as they attempted to rebuild their civilization. The SIE could offer this as proof not only of the validity of their reform program, but also of France's standing as cultural superpower.
Prominent figures from the Balkans and the hellenophone diaspora, including Korais, joined the SIE. Early on, the organization also recruited Ioannis Kapodistrias,Footnote 50 the future first governor of an independent Greece.Footnote 51 In their dealings with French members of the SIE, Southeastern European leaders often evoked the cultural debt France presumably owed Greece.Footnote 52 However, unlike their French counterparts, bolstering France's international standing and the liberals’ domestic political agenda did not motivate these individuals’ involvement with the organization. Rather, people like Korais and Kapodistrias saw an opportunity to prepare Orthodox Christians in Southeastern Europe for greater independence from the Ottoman Porte. Their proposals and programs responded to actual and anticipated economic, political, and social change in the Balkans.Footnote 53 Trade with Western Europe was expanding. The Russo-Turkish Wars of the preceeding decades, the Serbian uprising that began in 1804, and the Napoleonic Wars had created a space in which Balkan intellectual and economic leaders began to question the status quo.Footnote 54 These events had also pushed them to look beyond Russia for political and economic patronage.Footnote 55 Many Southeastern European notables viewed education as the key to modernizing the region. Among them was Nicolae Rosetti-Roznovanu, a Moldovan boyar from a politically active family, and the diffusion of the Lancastrian system in Southeastern Europe began with a trip he took to Paris in 1818.
In the French capital, Rosetti-Roznovanu had access to a network. His father, Iordache, often conducted business at the Russian court and in Bessarabia (the modern-day Republic of Moldova, then part of the Russian Empire). Iordache's political and economic exploits brought him into contact with Kapodistrias. Both hellenophone aristocrats shared an intense interest in modernizing their native regions—the Ionian islands and the Principality of Moldova respectively—as well as in safeguarding the rights of Orthodox Christians in Southeastern Europe. Though their proposals and pleas often fell on deaf ears, both men routinely solicited support from Russian officials, including the tsar, to further their agendas.Footnote 56 Nicolae Rosetti-Roznovanu also embraced this vision of a more modern and independent Southeastern Europe. However, like many Orthodox figures in the early nineteenth century, the younger Rosetti-Roznovanu began to look to the West for models of improvement and help implementing them.Footnote 57
Nicolae consequently conceived of his 1818 trip, which took him to Vienna, London, and Paris, as an “educational” voyage. He planned to learn through observation about institutions and practices that might encourage economic development and political reform in Southeastern Europe. In France, to get a firsthand look at libraries, universities, and learned societies, he reached out to Greek-speaking notables. His family connections put him in touch with Augostino Kapodistrias, Ioannis's brother, and Nicholas Manos, an Ottoman chargé d'affaires whose family was part of the hellenophone elite in the Danubian principalities.Footnote 58 These men moved in social and intellectual circles that include not only Southeastern European luminaries like Korais, but also a number of liberal French thinkers and politicians. It was through this network that Rosetti-Roznovanu formed friendships with men like Jomard, Jullien de Paris, and Degérando, who invited him to spend time at the institutions and organizations they led, including the SIE. Among other activities, Rosetti-Roznovanu toured the SIE's model school.Footnote 59
Impressed by the mutual method, Rosetti-Roznovanu decided to take action. He hired Yorgos Cleobolos, a hellenophone graduate of the SIE's teacher-training course originally from Philippoupolis (modern-day Plovdiv).Footnote 60 Cleobolos had already begun a translation of the association's charts into modern Greek and now Rosetti-Roznovanu offered to pay him for his labors and provided him with employment as an instructor in Iaşi. Rosetti-Roznovanu returned to Moldova a few months later, leaving Cleobolos to complete the translation under the SIE's auspices. Rosetti-Roznovanu's financial agent in Paris would dole out Cleobolos's salary, see to printing the charts, and purchase type pieces to facilitate their reproduction.Footnote 61 Cleobolos presented his work to the SIE for review in fall 1819. The Journal d’éducation immediately published a report praising his translation and announcing the return of civilization to Greece. As soon as the charts were printed, at Rosetti-Roznovanu's expense, Cleobolos set off for Iaşi with the French organization's blessing.Footnote 62
During the months following Cleobolos's departure, the SIE's correspondence with Rosetti-Roznovanu and the Journal d’éducation’s coverage of his project in Moldova demonstrated the association's intense interest in exporting its schools to Southeastern Europe. Authors in the Journal d’éducation heaped effusive praise on Rosetti-Roznovanu, proclaiming, for instance, “Moldova and Greece have received, thanks to the care of M. de Roznovano, the benefits of mutual instruction.”Footnote 63 And in the same issue, “Mutual instruction is being established in this moment in Moldova . . . Rosetti-Roznovano has served as an example to the most civilized of nations.”Footnote 64 Yet, in reality, Rosetti-Roznovanu had put off writing to the French organization while he waited for Cleobolos to arrive in Iaşi and readied the school. Worried letters from the SIE's board to Rosetti-Roznovanu attest to just how much importance the association attached to the introduction of monitorial schools in Southeastern Europe.Footnote 65
In March 1820, Rosetti-Roznovanu finally responded to the SIE. He apologized for his lack of communication and boasted that his school had enrolled over one hundred pupils. Moreover, dozens of students were taking Cleobolos's teacher-training course. Rosetti-Roznovanu also announced that he had decided to look into a “Moldovan” translation of the charts.Footnote 66 His letter underlined how Lancastrian schools would broadly help return enlightenment to the region. He further noted, “How wonderful if in this way we can become the center for instruction in these countries, and thus be destined to annually present the Paris Society a tribute of homages and gratitude that the successively formed institutions shall owe to it.”Footnote 67 His French correspondents shared this goal. One letter to Rosetti-Roznovanu noted, “It is indeed glorious for our society to see this Greece, to which Europe owes its enlightenment and civilization, come in turn to enlighten itself in France, and to take from [France] the models and process that will return to the Greeks the goods we have received from them.”Footnote 68 Members of the SIE additionally proposed presenting Rosetti-Roznovanu and Cleobolos with medals to honor their contribution to the spread of mutual-method instruction in the Balkans.Footnote 69
The SIE's members had a stake in portraying interactions between their organization and Rosetti-Roznovanu in this manner. The SIE did not seek to form equal partnerships, but hierarchical relationships, with its associates. They needed their allies to publicly credit them with a preeminent role in the transmission of the mutual method, since such recognition would strengthen their claims of special scientific knowledge. In other words, as the SIE sought to become a center for educational reform and science, its members needed a periphery (Rosetti-Roznovanu and others) to acknowledge them as such. Thus, somewhat counterintuitively, members of the SIE depended on their Balkan partners—they relied on them to self-identify as less advanced and publicly reaffirm the French organization's centrality.
The Iaşi school was short-lived. Rosetti-Roznovanu and Cleobolos fled to Odessa when the Greek War of Independence broke out in Moldova in early 1821. Yet their efforts made a mark on the development of education in the region. The school set a precedent for Lancastrian instruction in the Danubian principalities and, by the war's end, monitorial schools operated in both Moldova and Wallachia. Having completed the brief course, graduates of Cleobolos's teacher-training program departed the Moldovan capital with new skills, materials, and a small sum of money to establish their own schools. Instructors quickly set out across Ottoman territories in Europe and Anatolia, as well as the southern extremities of the Russian Empire. In a matter of months Cleobolos's students had established schools in places across the peninsula, including Hydra, Sifnos, and Patmos.Footnote 70 On Chios, Korais recruited Frenchmen and locals trained in France as teachers. Lord Guilford, founder of the University of the Ionians, studied the charts before opening a school on Corfu. In short, Cleobolos's charts were introduced at least as far north as Odessa, as far south as the Crete, and as far east as Anatolia.Footnote 71
The Greek War of Independence resulted in the establishment of an independent Greece, formally recognized by the Treaty of London in 1831, but already under Kapodistrias's leadership in 1827. It also brought dramatic political changes to the Danubian principalities. After the conflict, the Sultan only named “indigenous” princes to the principalities’ thrones.Footnote 72 Many of the hellenophone and multilingual families that had formed Moldova and Wallachia's political and cultural leadership immigrated to the new Greek state. Others, including the Rosetti-Roznovanus, remained in the principalities helping to construct a more modern administration, initially as a Russian protectorate (and later in the century as a united, independent state). In the decades following the war, modern bureaucracies, legal codes, and school systems began to develop in Greece and the principalities. During the period, Lancastrian schools flourished across the Balkans.
State-led initiatives played a large part in the proliferation of these schools in Southeastern Europe. As governor, the establishment of an educational system was among Kapodistrias's top priorities.Footnote 73 The Journal d’éducation seized upon the election of Kapodistrias, one of its foreign members, and his educational agenda as an occasion to stress the importance of the SIE's international engagements. “Our foreign relations are doubly precious to us, as they offer us an occasion to give, and to receive,” Degérando declared in a report from May 1828. Referring to Greece's newfound autonomy, he added, “This year they have gained a sentimental extension.” Reminding readers that Kapodistrias had joined the SIE in 1815, Degérando noted that one of this “restorer of Greece's” first acts as governor had been to name a commission on public instruction and to issue a decree mandating that public and church schools employ the mutual method. Kapodistrias, a man of “noble character” and “sophisticated views,” understood that “instruction is the first and fundamental condition on which the future of this country with such a rich and glorious history hinges.”Footnote 74 Degérando then explained that all of the material aid the SIE had sent to Greece over the course of the last thirteen years had been destroyed in the war. Consequently, the foreign-relations committee would gift the Greek administration with several books on the mutual method, back issues of the Journal d’éducation, and a collection of didactic texts the SIE had awarded prizes to over the years.Footnote 75 A month later, the SIE's board reported that it was considering translating books and printing charts in modern Greek to send with future shipments of supplies. Kapodistrias wrote to encourage this project in October 1828.Footnote 76
The same month, the Journal of Education began publishing letters from Dutrône, a French member of the SIE living in Greece. During part of his sojourn in Southeastern Europe, Dutrône served as Kapodistrias's personal secretary.Footnote 77 Among other duties, Kapodistrias tasked him with authoring a report for the commission on public instruction, an assignment that required Dutrône to survey the country's schools. Dutrône informed the SIE that out of the sixteen schools he had visited thus far, eight employed the mutual method. While Dutrône was doing everything in his power to advance not only monitorial instruction but also the general state of education in Greece—going as far as to provide young men with free French lessons—he told the SIE that he and Kapodistrias lacked the resources to create a modern school system on their own. Dutrône insisted the SIE would have to offer material and technical support.Footnote 78
Dutrône had a pivotal role in the network that linked the SIE to Kapodistrias. His correspondence kept the organization abreast of developments in Greece and often contained newspaper clippings from the Abeille grecque (Greek Bee), a French-language journal published on the island of Hydra. As Kapodistrias's secretary he served as a liaison between the governor and the association, often lobbying one on behalf of the other. He also acted as a trusted agent of the SIE, confirming receipt of goods and drafting requests for supplies.Footnote 79 As the association was deeply concerned with the uniform application of its method, Dutrône's letters permitted the SIE to assess if its mandates were being followed on the other side of the continent. Without meticulous mimicry of its technique, the organization would be at pains to make a convincing argument not only for its role in the propagation of this educational technology, but also for the reproducibility of its approach.Footnote 80 The SIE's anxiety about maintaining the integrity of its pedagogical technology was also evident when it dealt directly with the Greek governor.
Kapodistrias solicited aid from the SIE. To ensure support, he played to the organization's interest in keeping its approach intact. In 1830 five sets of Lancastrian charts existed in modern Greek, including a translation of those used by the British and Foreign School Society. In Greece, these charts were known as the English method, whereas the SIE's were referred to as the French method.Footnote 81 As they tried to cobble together an educational system, the Greek administration did not initially differentiate between them. However, in an attempt to shore up the SIE's support, Kapodistrias took several steps to institutionalize the French method. First, he publicly declared his preference for the SIE's approach and granted it government sanction. Kapodistrias also signed a decree ordering a translation of the SIE-approved manual for monitorial schools by Jacques Sarazin. In the proclamation, Kapodistrias asked teachers to zealously follow the method described in the manual, remarking that the French technique had produced fantastic results and formed good, educated citizens and Christians.Footnote 82
The dissemination of Sarazin's manual was an important element of the SIE's program. By following it, at least in principle, each day, students in France and Greece would study the same subjects at the same time since Sarazin included a detailed class schedule. They would sit in identical classrooms as the manual laid out a floor plan and gave exhaustive instructions concerning the dimensions and placement of each piece of furniture. Sarazin also specified a system of punishments and rewards, precautions to be taken with regard to hygiene, and regulations on dress and behavior. In short, the manual imposed a uniform application of the SIE's technology.Footnote 83
Kapodistrias's decision to enshrine the use of this manual in law, however, was not one he reached on his own. In a letter to the SIE, Kapodistrias noted that he had ordered the translation of Sarazin's manual “in accordance with the society's wishes,” which Dutrône had conveyed to him. Dutrône, he continued, would oversee both the rendering of the text into modern Greek and its publication. Kapodistrias then asked for help. Outlining plans for a significant expansion of the school system, he wrote, “I hope to have organized, in short order, at least 150 schools, which will each enroll 150 to 200 pupils.” He continued, “I have charged Dr. Gosse [a member of the SIE] with the purchase of 6,000 chalkboards, chalk and some other objects; but if, with the grace of God and your assistance, the number of mutual-method schools reaches the projections indicated above, this small provision will be depleted in no time.”Footnote 84 Thus, in his letter, Kapodistrias thanked the SIE for their aid (and asked for more), emphasized the important tasks he had delegated to French members of the organization like Dutrône, and offered assurances that, through their reliance on Sarazin's manual, Greek schools would conform to the French model.
Kapodistrias had given the SIE exactly what it was after—recognition as a scientific center for popular education and a guarantee that Greek schoolteachers would practice the technique according to the organization's dictates. These were political, rather than pedagogical, decisions, and Kapodistrias's instincts proved keen—the SIE, in association with the Parisian Philhellenic Committee, financed a reprinting of Cleobolos's charts that year. The Greek government did not have the funds to procure the materials on its own.Footnote 85 Kapodistrias made up for this want of resources by assenting to a public exchange with the French organization that confirmed the superiority of its techniques and taking steps to formally safeguard the unity of its method.
Kapodistrias was assassinated in October 1831. His brother Augustino and then a series of governmental committees briefly succeeded him. In 1832, the European powers under the Convention of London named the Bavarian king Othon (Otto) to the throne. Othon's regents brought sweeping reforms to secondary and postsecondary education based on German models. By contrast, they left the elementary education system Kapodistrias had organized largely intact.Footnote 86 In Greece, monitorial schools remained the cornerstone of primary education through the end of the nineteenth century, and the SIE's charts were reissued on several occasions.Footnote 87
In the Danubian principalities, centralized school systems began to take shape in 1832. Since Rosetti-Roznovanu and Cleobolos's flight to Odessa, educators in Wallachia and Moldova had produced at least two sets of Romanian-language charts based on Cleobolos's modern Greek rendering.Footnote 88 The new state systems absorbed the patchwork of schools that already utilized these materials. Between 1832 and 1848, forty-eight mutual schools operated in Wallachia and Moldova. During the 1838–9 academic year, 32,521 students attended primary school in Wallachia; in 1846–7 the number rose to 48,545.Footnote 89 As in Greece, the mutual method remained the primary mode of popular instruction well into the nineteenth century.Footnote 90
These schools were part of a program of modernization set in motion by Pavel Kiselyov, the plenipotentiary president of the Wallachian and Moldovan divans under the Russian protectorate. Kiselyov, a contemporary of Kapodistrias at the Russian court, used language that resembled that of the Greek governor and of SIE to discuss the value of education. For instance, commenting on the new school system, he wrote, “Finally, the mass of pupils will be instructed in a manner that will form men useful to the country, given its present level of civilization,” and that the mutual method represented “the progress of civilization in the country.”Footnote 91
Kiselyov's reforms were less ambitious than Kapodistrias's. The Organic Regulations, the de facto constitutions he put in place,Footnote 92 mandated the establishment of a school not in every village—as Kapodistrias had planned in Greece—but simply in the seat of each judeţ, or county.Footnote 93 The relative modesty of this program made it easier to ensure that each school received proper funding. This, in turn, meant that administrators and educators in Wallachia and Moldova were less dependent on sources of foreign aid, like the SIE, than their counterparts in Greece.
Nonetheless, the SIE closely monitored the spread of Lancastrian education in the principalities.Footnote 94 Following the creation of a normal, or teacher-training, school in Bucharest in 1828, for instance, the Journal d’éducation announced, “The method of mutual instruction has been welcomed with the greatest enthusiasm in [Wallachia]. The poor classes send their children to institutions where this method of instruction has been adopted; and the progress of this country's youth, which had been gripped by the most profound ignorance, is just as remarkable as that of the Peloponnese.”Footnote 95 A narrative that traced the origins of monitorial schools in the principalities to Rosetti-Roznovanu's establishment, and the assistance the SIE had offered him, was often part of the Journal of Education’s reports on Wallachia and Moldova.Footnote 96 Thus even when the SIE had little direct involvement with the proliferation of mutual-method schools, it crafted a story that linked the organization to new institutions and placed it at the hub of a network. In the Journal d’éducation’s own words, the SIE's role in this network was to exercise its “influence” as an organization and as a body that represented France abroad.Footnote 97
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Yet the SIE did not exert influence and it was not a vague infection that brought monitorial schools to Southeastern Europe. To assume so equates to taking the SIE's proclamations at face value without considering what the organization stood to gain from its international endeavors or how they fit into a broader political agenda. The association had a vested interest in furthering the mutual method abroad, as its representatives claimed that helping educational reformers in the Balkans would render local populations more amenable to French economic and diplomatic aims in the region. Again, they saw their efforts as a form of peaceful conquest—one that they contended had more potential staying power than Napoleon's attempt to take Europe by force. Like contemporary development projects, the SIE's foreign dealings amounted to a program of soft power.
Just as importantly, the exportation of their pedagogical technology let members of the SIE construct arguments in support of their domestic agenda. The SIE used the introduction of the mutual method abroad to prove that their approach could be effectively reproduced. They then mobilized this evidence, and the organization's international prestige, in domestic disputes over education. These debates had broader political ramifications, and they permitted the liberals in the SIE to critique their conservative rivals, whom they painted as fundamentally disinterested in the well-being of the French people and the state of French civilization. The organization's Southeastern European adventures in particular furnished members of the SIE with a powerful argument. After all, if the descendants of the ancient Hellenes turned to the association to help modernize the Balkans and, even with limited funds, successfully implemented the SIE's technology, surely the organization was capable of similarly advancing civilization among France's working classes.
To shore up its position, the SIE lobbied, bartered, and even bullied its allies to advance its project and preserve the integrity of its pedagogical technology. For example, if the Greek government would take pains to safeguard its methods, the organization would pay for charts. When there was no deal to be made, when Southeastern Europeans enacted reforms without the organization's support, as in the case of the principalities under Kiselyov, the association often constructed a narrative that nonetheless reaffirmed its preeminence.
For Balkan leaders the mutual method presented an opportunity to pursue their own goals. They saw these schools as means of modernizing the region, initially in anticipation of the social, economic, and political change they forecasted, and later in response to a shifting map and balance of power in the region. When they lacked the resources to implement their plans, they could appeal to the SIE for help. They understood, however, that the organization's assistance came with strings attached. The real cost of the charts, trained teachers, and other materials the French association provided was acknowledgment of the SIE's central role in the dissemination of the mutual method.
Thus both parties depended on one another. Southeastern European reformers required material aid and the SIE supplied it. The French organization needed outside acknowledgment of its claims to scientific authority as this allowed its members to style the association and, by extension, France as a civilizational center. By attributing the appearance of this technique in the region to the French organization and following its mandates, educational reformers, like Rosetti-Roznovanu and Kapodistrias, bolstered the SIE's claims to superiority and centrality. In other words, they permitted the SIE to transform them into a periphery. Acknowledging the Parisian association as a center was a small price to pay for concrete support—aid that Southeastern European leaders wagered would profoundly transform the region. Consequently, they expressly and tacitly acquiesced to this unequal relationship not out of reverence for the French organization, but because they could use it for their own advantage.
Mutual-method schools gained a foothold in Southeastern Europe through this network of self-interested individuals and organizations. The dissemination of this pedagogical technique is just one instance of the many technologies, discourses, and programs that spread across Europe as the result such interactions. By isolating particular examples like it, we can map out these networks and investigate what motivated people to participate in them. In doing so, we can simultaneously challenge the image of a monolithic France that simply “influenced” others, explore the agency actors across the continent exercised and how their specific aims shaped these relationships, and consider how the center and periphery depend on one another.
