A Circle of Friends. Romanian Revolutionaries and Political Exile, 1840-1859

A Circle of Friends
Balkan Studies Library
Editor-in-Chief
Zoran Milutinović, University College London
Editorial Board
Gordon N. Bardos, Columbia University
Alex Drace-Francis, University of Liverpool
Jasna Dragović-Soso, Goldsmiths, University of London
Christian Voss, Humboldt University, Berlin
Advisory Board
Marie-Janine Calic, University of Munich
Lenard J. Cohen, Simon Fraser University
Radmila Gorup, Columbia University
Robert M. Hayden, University of Pittsburgh
Robert Hodel, Hamburg University
Anna Krasteva, New Bulgarian University
Galin Tihanov, The University of Manchester
Maria Todorova, University of Illinois
Andrew Wachtel, Northwestern University
VOLUME 3
A Circle of Friends
Romanian Revolutionaries and
Political Exile, 1840–1859
By
Angela Jianu
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2011
On the cover: The Constitution, Bucharest, 11 June 1848. Copy after a watercolor
by Costake Petrescu, undated. Reproduced by kind permission of the Museum
of National History, Bucharest, Romania. The text on the flag reads: “Justice,
Brotherhood”, the slogan of the Romanian revolutionaries.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jianu, Angela.
A circle of friends : Romanian revolutionaries and political exile, 1840–1859 / by
Angela Jianu.
p. cm. — (Balkan studies library, ISSN 1877-6272 ; v. 3)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-18779-5 (hbk. : acid-free paper) 1. Revolutionaries—Romania—
History—19th century. 2. Revolutionaries—Romania—Biography. 3. Exiles—
Romania—Biography. 4. Exiles—Europe—Biography. 5. Romania—History—
1821–1859—Biography. 6. Romania—History—Revolution, 1848. 7. Romania—
Politics and government—1821–1866. 8. Europe—Politics and government—
1848–1871. 9. Transnationalism—Political aspects—Europe—History—19th century.
10. Nation-building—Europe—History—19th century. I. Title.
DR244.J53 2011
949.8’016—dc22
2011000134
ISSN 1877-6272
ISBN 978 90 04 18779 5
Copyright 2011 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

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Fees are subject to change.
For my parents,
Magdalena and Nicolae Jianu
CONTENTS
List of Figures ..................................................................................... ix

List of Abbreviations ......................................................................... xi
Acknowledgements ............................................................................ xiii
Introduction ........................................................................................ 1
PART ONE
STUDENTS AND REVOLUTIONARIES

1844–1848
Jules Michelet, “Madame Rosetti”, 1855 ......................................... 17

1837–1841: Early Diplomatic Ventures .......................................... 28
1844–1848: The Collège de France: Sociability and Protest ....... 33
Jules Michelet and ‘Les Franco-Roumains’: Dumitru Brătianu ... 51
1848 in Paris and Europe ................................................................. 62
1848–1849: Bucharest between St. Petersburg and
Constantinople ............................................................................... 67
A Transylvanian Interlude ................................................................ 90
1848: Epilogue .................................................................................... 93
PART TWO
EXILE
1849–1855
1849, Paris: Early Days in Exile ....................................................... 115

1849: Dumitru Brătianu and the English ‘philo-Romanians’ ..... 127
Hungarians and Romanians in 1849–1850 .................................... 136
April 1849: The Transylvanian Debacle ......................................... 164
July–August 1849 ............................................................................... 167
September 1849 .................................................................................. 172
December 1849 .................................................................................. 175
1850: ‘La Roumanie’ .......................................................................... 178
April–September 1850 ....................................................................... 183
viii contents
1851: London. Mazzini’s European Democratic Committee ...... 189

1851: London-Bucharest-Paris ......................................................... 196
1852: Nantes-Paris-Bucharest .......................................................... 214
1853: Nantes-Paris-London .............................................................. 223
1853: Paris: “Madame Rosetti” ........................................................ 234
1853–1854: Paris: Ion Brătianu and the ‘Hippodrome Affair’ ... 242
1853: Paris-Gallipoli-Constantinople: Rosetti’s War .................... 252
January–February 1854: London ..................................................... 258
January 1854: Serbia .......................................................................... 263
The Crimean War .............................................................................. 273
The Daily News and the Romanian Principalities ........................ 278
The End of the War and the Peace Conference ............................ 285
PART THREE
THE RETURN OF THE EXILES

1856–1857
A Republican Funeral ....................................................................... 291

The Ad-hoc Assemblies and the European Commissioners ....... 293
July 1856 .............................................................................................. 301
6 October: The Brighton Meeting ................................................... 305
1857 ...................................................................................................... 313
The Elections ...................................................................................... 320
1858: The Congress of Paris and the Union of the
Principalities ................................................................................... 326
EPILOGUE
After Exile ........................................................................................... 333

The Uses of the Press ........................................................................ 345
The ‘People Question’ ........................................................................ 350
The Uses of Exile ................................................................................ 353
Liberalism in Romania ...................................................................... 357
Conclusions ......................................................................................... 359
Bibliography ........................................................................................ 363

Index .................................................................................................... 377
LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 1: Map of the Romanian Principalities, Transylvania and

the Ottoman Empire showing the main locations of the
Moldo-Wallachian revolutionaries in exile, c. 1848–1858 ...... xv
Fig. 2: Marie Rosetti as Revolutionary Romania by Constantin
D. Rosenthal, c. 1850. Reproduced by kind permission of
the National Art Museum, Bucharest, Romania ...................... 16
Fig. 3: Constantin D. Rosenthal, Portrait of Marie Rosetti,
undated (c. 1850) (Oil on synthetic slate) Reproduced by
kind permission of the National Art Museum, Bucharest,
Romania .......................................................................................... 114
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
B. A. R. = Biblioteca Academiei Române (The Library of the

Romanian Academy)
EARSR = Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România
FO = Foreign Office
PRO = Public Records Office (National Archives, London)
SMIMod = Studii şi materiale de istorie modernă (an annual pub-
lication of the Romanian Academy, Bucharest)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank staff at a number of research and academic librar-

ies who have invariably responded with great solicitude to my requests.
In Bucharest, the librarians in the manuscript sections of the Library of
the Romanian Academy (B. A. R.) and the National Library have been
most helpful. Staff at the National Archives in Bucharest were equally
supportive. I also enjoyed the support of library staff at the “Nicolae
Iorga” Historical Research Institute in Bucharest.
In Britain, I was fortunate to have access to the major repositories of
the British Library, the School of Slavonic and East European Studies
Library, as well as of the university libraries at Huddersfield, York, and
Warwick. Searches at the National Archives in Kew were a constant
source of pleasant surprises.
In Paris, I was privileged to be able to enjoy a few happy weeks at
the Bibliothèque Nationale and to bask in the special atmosphere of
Jules Michelet’s great city.
I wish to express my gratitude to a number of historians and research-
ers who were generous with their time, advice and other kindnesses.
At the “Nicolae Iorga” Historical Research Institute, Violeta Barbu,
Anca Popescu, and Raluca Tomi were always ready with suggestions,
photocopies and encouragement. Lia Brad-Chisacof at the Institute of
South-East European Studies in Bucharest kindly supplied photocopies
of much-needed material, apart from sustaining an occasionally flag-
ging morale.
Karen Offen and Jane Rendall, my former PhD supervisor at the
University of York (UK), read Part One of the manuscript and made a
number of useful corrections and judicious suggestions.
I am particularly grateful to Alex Drace-Francis and an anonymous
reviewer for their attentive and sympathetic close reading of the manu-
script. I have greatly benefited from Dr. Drace-Francis’ knowledge of
Romanian history and historiography, as well as from the comprehen-
siveness of his bibliographic lists. If I could not follow up on all of their
suggestions, it is entirely my responsibility.
Ivo Romein, the Balkans Studies Library series editor at Brill, patiently
waited for the manuscript to be delivered and kindly offered his support
in commissioning the map and obtaining permissions for the illustra-
tions. I shall miss his cheering e-mail messages from Leiden.
xiv acknowledgements
Mirjam Elbers at Brill patiently prepared the text for publication and
put up with delays. I wish to thank Zoran Milutinović, the editor-in-
chief of the Balkan Studies Library at Brill, for supporting this project
and for giving a ‘home’ to the Romanian nineteenth-century exiles.
Work on this book would have been nearly impossible to carry out
without support from my own ‘circle of friends’. Anca Popescu welcomed
me in her home and shared with me her knowledge of Ottoman history
and the delights of Balkan cuisine. Violeta Barbu and Daniel Barbu are
models of scholarly dedication and elegant hospitality. In Iaşi, Ruxandra
Ciulu responded promptly with scans of a hard-to-find issue of Xeno-
poliana. Paul Bembridge, currently a research fellow at the University
of Exeter, has shared with me his love of the English language and his
vast knowledge of the ‘occult arts’.
I also wish to send a nod to Alan Wakeman, the man from ‘the old
country’.
My mother has made it all possible. It is to her and to my late father
that this book is affectionately dedicated.
Fig. 1: Map of the Romanian Principalities, Transylvania and the Ottoman
Empire showing the main locations of the Moldo-Wallachian revolutionaries
in exile, c. 1848–1858.
INTRODUCTION
[. . .] a monument to our friendship, which is going

to tell our children how much we have loved each
other and how sincerely we have done so. This is all
we have got, but it will haunt the future.
Alfred Dumesnil to Ion Brătianu, 10 July 18521
On 18 May 1876, more than two years after his death, the remains of
Jules Michelet were exhumed from his tomb at Hyères (department
of Var) and transported to Paris to be re-interred, with due pomp
and circumstance, at the cemetery of Père Lachaise, the venue of so
many of the historian’s walks and musings on death, memory and
history. Michelet, the arch-Parisian, and perhaps the most inspiring
nineteenth-century historian of the great city, had once called Père
Lachaise “this immense history of the nineteenth century assembled
in one place.”2 The choice of such a symbolically-charged burial place
for him appears with hindsight as more than appropriate, but at the
time, it was a cause of family disputes and legal battles. To be able to
turn her husband’s funeral from a private event into a public, political
one, Athénaïs Michelet defied not only the wishes of Michelet’s inheri-
tors (notably of Alfred Dumesnil, his son-in-law), but also Michelet’s
own, as they were inscribed in his testament of 1 February 1872, in
which he requested to be buried with the least ceremony in the nearest
cemetery, and the money thus saved to be donated to the poor.3 The
tribunal civil de la Seine, however, where the matter was adjudicated,
decided in favour of the widow, and Michelet’s remains left Toulon on
17 May, to be deposed overnight at his last Parisian address, at 76, rue
d’Assas (formerly rue de l’Ouest).
The next morning, as the funeral cortège was about to depart,
Mme. Michelet was joined in her carriage by Michelet’s two trustees
and by Marie Rosetti, an old friend of the Michelets and the wife of
1
Jules Michelet, Correspondance générale, ed. Louis Le Guillou, 12 vols. (Paris,
1994–2001), 7: 124.
2
Michelet, entry for 13 April 1842, in idem, Journal, ed. Paul Viallaneix, 2 vols.
(Paris, 1959), 1: 395.
3
Paul Viallaneix, Michelet, les travaux et les jours, 1798–1874 (Paris, 1998), 543.
2 introduction
a leading Romanian liberal.4 The huge cortège comprised intellectual

peers and disciples, representatives of the Collège de France, students,
and members of Italian, Romanian and Polish delegations, represent-
atives of the ‘unfortunate’ nations whose loyal patron Michelet had
been. Wearing buttonholes of yellow and red everlasting flowers –
the civic funeral symbol preferred in republican circles – the crowd
assembled at the Père Lachaise for one of the greatest of the repub-
lican funerals of a major Second Empire public figure. Alongside the
four orators, the historians François Mignet and Ernest Bersot from
the Institut, and Edouard Laboulaye and Ernest Havet from the Col-
lège de France, who spoke about Michelet’s heritage as a historian, a
republican and a man of honour, the historian’s role as spokesman
for the smaller nations of Central and Eastern Europe was invoked by
George Cantacuzino,5 Athénaïs’s former Romanian pupil and now a
law student in Paris.6
Thus, owing to an act of loving betrayal by his widow, Michelet’s
funeral became a public event laden with rich republican and anti-
clerical symbolism, attended by thousands, watched by the police,
a funerary ceremony which, along with the other funerals of major
republicans, was partly subversive and partly integrative.7 It was inte-
grative in the sense that it brought together not only the workmen and
the students, as Michelet had always wished, but also the republicans
of the old guard, who had suffered marginalisation and exile in the
Second Empire, the new republicans poised for power in the 1870s,
and the French left. Joined with them in mourning were representa-
tives of the still consolidating Central-East-European left.
Financed by national and international subscriptions, a classically-
inspired monument by the sculptor Antonin Mercié was erected on
Michelet’s tomb on 14 July 1882, also under the supervision of his
ever-watchful widow. Above an effigy of their dead infant son, Lazare,
lies the toga-draped figure of Michelet himself, mourned by the veiled
figure of bereaved History. “May God allow me to be reunited with
my dearly departed. Let Him receive my soul, replete with gratitude
for so much good, for so many years of labour, for so many works
4
Ibid., 544.
5
The name appears as Georges Cantacuzène in French-language sources.
6
Viallaneix, Les Travaux, 545. For the entire account of the funeral see Mme.
Michelet, La Mort et les funérailles de Michelet (Paris, 1876).
7
Avner Ben-Amos, Funerals, Politics and Memory in Modern France, 1789–1996
(Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. 127.
introduction 3
and so many friends”, runs the inscription at the bottom of the tomb,
an excerpt from Michelet’s diary. On one side, carved on a column
are the names of the countries which subscribed to the monument.
Among them were Greece, Poland, Hungary, Romania. Every element
in the monument, from its classical design to the mythological allegory
and the inscriptions, suggest that the historian was symbolically placed
in a republican continuum that went from the ancient Roman repub-
lic to the dreamt-of pan-European confraternity of the ‘république
universelle.’ Work and friendship had sustained Michelet in times of
personal and political uncertainty: it was this stoical message that he
had passed on to his circle of friends in Paris, many of whom were
strangers in exile, young people with a mission, grappling with the
huge task of not only writing about nations, but of actually building
them. It was not so much a doctrine that Michelet had taught them,
but a model of humanity.
The Events
The present narrative refers to the Romanian (or Danubian Princi-

palities) of Wallachia and Moldavia as they were politically consti-
tuted until their unification in 1862 and their transformation into the
Kingdom of Romania in 1881. By the fifteenth century, both Wallachia
and Moldavia came under Ottoman control and were administered
according to the principles of the dar al-‘ahd (‘abode of the covenant’)
which guaranteed their autonomy in exchange for a regime of mate-
rial obligations.8 The Principalities retained their own administration,
political structures, religion and, until the eighteenth century, their
own native princes. These were replaced by Greeks from the Phanar
quarter in Constantinople from the early eighteenth century until 1822.
Under the so-called Phanariot regimes, ruling princes were nothing
more than top civil servants in the Ottoman state hierarchy, while
continuing to behave as sovereigns by divine right at home. It was
not until after the Crimean War, when the Principalities were placed
under the guarantee of the European powers, that the princes started
to disengage themselves from both Ottoman and Russian tutelage.
8
For the ‘dar-al-‘ahd’ system see Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early
Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2002), 46. For a Romanian perspective on Ottoman
administration in the provinces, see Viorel Panaite, The Ottoman Law of War and
Peace: the Ottoman Empire and tribute payers (Boulder, Colorado, 2000).
4 introduction
In both principalities, the Prince was aided by a twelve-member

(occasionally eight-member) Council (‘Sfatul domnesc’, called ‘Divan’
from the seventeenth century onwards) which comprised only boyars
of the first class9 as well as the Metropolitan and a number of bish-
ops. Membership in the Council was through direct appointment by
the Prince. Family relations, matrimonial arrangements and client
interests were all of paramount importance in the appointments, and
Princes frequently ran the danger of being taken hostage by difficult-
to-manoeuvre group interests and of being caught between the iron
grip of the Porte on the one hand and the ambitions of the scheming
boyars on the other. In addition to the Council, a second body of priv-
ileged social groups was associated to government, albeit infrequently:
the Country – or National – Assembly (‘Adunarea ţării’), called up at
irregular intervals to be consulted on fiscal matters or constitutional
changes. Regarded by some historians as an assembly of the estates, or
even as a representative body operating within a régime de notables, it
may have been in fact simply a way for the Prince to widen decision-
making to include boyars who were not members of the Divan, pro-
vincial landowners, as well as members of the clergy and the military.10
Like its Russian counterpart, the ‘Zemskij sobor’, the Assembly had no
clear-cut composition or attributes and, under the double assault of
the central power and the Ottoman suzerain power, its power declined
in the seventeenth century.
In addition to Ottoman suzerainty, and especially after the Russo-
Turkish treaty of Küçük Kaynarca of 1774, Russia imposed a protec-
torate over the Principalities which de facto remained in place until
the Crimean War. Starting with the eighteenth century, another great
power became increasingly involved with the history of the Roma-
nian Principalities: Austria. Contesting their Ottoman-appointed ruler
and appealing to one great power or another (Russia, Austria, Turkey,
France and Britain) for the preservation of the principalities’ semi-
autonomy and of their own rights as a class became the Romanian
elites’ main political objective and dominated Romanian political life
up to the revolution of 1848 and its aftermath.
9
There were three classes of boyars.
10
For a more detailed discussion of the Country Assembly and the Wallachian state
in the seventeenth century, see Cristina Codarcea, “Le caractère de l’état valaque –
quelques considérations,” in Pouvoirs et mentalités, ed. Laurenţiu Vlad (Bucharest,
1999), 71–87.
introduction 5
The early nineteenth century in Romanian history was a crucial

period during which a small but influential group of reformist nobles
and intellectuals addressed concepts such as the nation, the ethnic
unity and the shared traditions of the Romanians in the various prov-
inces they inhabited, rejecting the Ottoman, Russian and South-East
European developmental models and steering their emergent nation
towards the Western, and more specifically the French, model. France
as a political template was a natural choice: although in the early mod-
ern period the Romanians evolved in a Slavonic cultural context, which
meant that even their Romance language was written in Cyrillic up to
the 1850s, they retained a strong connection to their Latin origins and
an equally strong attraction to ‘fellow-Latins’ in Western Europe.11 The
diplomatic and theoretical contributions of this small elite group pre-
pared the ground for landmarks such as the abolition of the Ottoman
commercial monopoly in 1829, the union of the Principalities in 1861,
the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in 1866 and eventually
for national independence in 1877.
Up to the new regime created after the Crimean War, the domestic
and foreign policies of the Romanian Principalities were forged at the
intersection of several centres of power and influence: the Greek and
native oligarchy, the suzerain and protecting powers and their respec-
tive consular representatives in the country, and the European concert,
increasingly concerned over the integrity of the Ottoman Empire and
the expansion of Russia’s sphere of influence. In the two Principalities,
the oligarchs retained their almost absolute control over administra-
tion and economic management. A creeping tension started to build
up between the first-class boyars of the Divan and national assemblies,
politically conservative and generally oriented towards Russia, and the
second-class boyars and younger intellectuals, of a liberal or radical
orientation, who were employed in the provincial administration. The
latter largely favoured Turkish over Russian control, and steered their
country towards the French sphere of influence.
There were considerable differences between Moldavia and Walla-
chia in terms of patterns of land-ownership and boyar-peasant rela-
tions. The feudal seigneurial system was much stronger in Moldavia,
possibly due to the influence of the Polish model, while the connection
to the land was weaker among Wallachian boyars, which explains why
11
See note 25 below.
6 introduction
they turned to capitalist forms of entrepreneurship and to civil service

as their main source of income and status. In addition, for complex
reasons, by the early nineteenth century, class divides (for instance
between the boyar and the merchant, or ‘middle’, class) were much
more blurred in Wallachia and crossing these boundaries in both
directions was easier to accomplish than in the more segregated and
class-conscious Moldavian society. The contrast between Wallachia’s
more ‘democratic’ ethos and Moldavia’s more ‘aristocratic’ culture
might explain why many Wallachian boyars of the generation born in
the first two decades of the nineteenth century12 – people such as the
Rosettis, the Brătianus, the Golescus, the ‘heroes’ of the 1848 saga –
became quite quickly disengaged from the traditions and conventions
of their class and embraced radical politics with surprising readiness.
My narrative focuses on the Wallachian Romanians, rather than on
the Moldavians: at this stage, the Wallachians – students in Paris in
the 1840s and exiles after 1848 – appear to have been more actively
engaged on the international stage and, owing to skilful handling of
the written word, their interactions with French and British political
and intellectual circles have left more tangible trails.13 It is not unusual
for historians in the two academic centres, Bucharest and Iaşi, to dis-
pute – more or less explicitly – the pre-eminence of one province over
the other in the nineteenth-century nation-building effort.14 In some
accounts, Moldavia is seen as the ‘sacrificed’ province, the victim of
political quid pro quos largely engineered by the ‘exalted’ Wallachian
radicals in the 1850s. This regional ‘rivalry’ is not addressed in this
book.
This narrative is not an archive-driven, revisionist or ‘definitive’
account of the revolutions of 1848 in Romania. It is not so much a
12
They were born between 1809 (Ştefan Golescu) and 1821 (Ion C. Brătianu).
13
For a serviceable summary of the state of the Romanian Principalities in the first
half of the nineteenth century, and of the interplay of Greek, Russian and French
cultural influences., see Béla Borsi-Kálmán, Hungarian Exiles and the Romanian
National Movement, 1849–1867 (Boulder, Colorado, 1991), especially chapter one. Cf.
also Keith Hitchins, The Romanians, 1774–1866 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), esp.
chapter 3: “The Spirit of the Times, 1774–1829”.
14
Mihai Cojocariu’s Partida naţională şi constituirea statului român (1856–1859)
(Iaşi, 1995) is a case in point. While not averse to the occasional disparaging aside on
the Wallachians’ contribution to the events of 1848 and the 1850s, Cojocariu offers
detailed information on the turbulent political life of both provinces in the years and
months leading to the double election of Prince Cuza in 1859. In particular, it has the
merit of highlighting the role played by the eminent Moldavian politician and histo-
rian Mihail Kogălniceanu in creating the blueprint for a new democratic culture.
introduction 7
study of ‘hard facts’ as one of subjective perceptions of facts seen from

the often emotional, biased, self-congratulatory or self-deprecating
perspective of direct participants in the events. Its thematic focus is
on the bonds and affinities which united the Wallachian exiles of 1848
both with each other and with their French, English, Scottish, Polish,
Hungarian and Italian peers, and on the experience of exile which
created inter-related groups of marginalised intellectuals in Europe
between 1848 and 1859. Likewise, the thorny question of ethnic rela-
tions in Transylvania and the Austrian Empire is only contextual and
viewed here from the often very unreasonable and emotionally charged
angle of individuals on the Romanian and Hungarian sides. From this
perspective, words such as ‘Magyar terrorism’ and accusations of eth-
nic hatred hurled privately or publicly from all sides in the heated
dialogue should come as no shock to modern multicultural sensibili-
ties. Likewise, ‘Russophobia’ is a term that might offend today, yet it
should be remembered that not only was it the creation of a classic
study written at the height of the Cold War by a Western historian,15
but that it also reflects the passionate personal reaction of individu-
als living well before the age of political correctness. The channels of
anti-tsarist opinions were dissidents for whom Russian ‘protection’ in
the nineteenth century often meant arrest, deportation, surveillance,
expropriation and exile. It is, therefore, a political and emotional, not
an ethnic, category.
The People
In Romania, the main leaders of the revolution of 1848 belonged to

the nobility and the gentry. Some came from the country’s oldest and
most prominent native boyar families of the first class, such as the
Filipescu, Cretzulescu, Golescu, Ghica and Voinescu families. The
Rosettis, although Italians from Constantinople originally, had been
thoroughly integrated into native boyardom by the time Constantin
Rosetti was born in 1816. The Brătianu brothers,16 Dumitru and Ion,
Christian Tell, Ion Eliade Rădulescu, General Gheorghe Magheru, and
15
John Howes Gleason, The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain (Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1950).
16
For their origins and background, see Part One, 51 sqq.
8 introduction
others belonged to the country gentry, but came from equally well-
established families.17
Through his marriage to the Guernsey-born Marie Grant, Rosetti
formed a close association with her brother, Effingham Grant, the sec-
retary at the British consulate in Bucharest, and with the latter’s supe-
rior, Robert G. Colquhoun, the British Consul-General in Wallachia.
Research for this study has revealed for the first time the genealogical
ties uniting the two Scotsmen, Grant and Colquhoun, who both played
central roles in the events of 1848 in Romania. They were constant
allies of the beleaguered revolutionaries in 1848–49, providing laissez-
passers and facilitating the correspondence of the exiles with the fami-
lies back home. In addition, the consul’s dispatches to the Foreign
Office, as well as his manuscript diary for 1848, held at the National
Library of Romania, contain a rich, and only partly exploited so far,
mine of information on the events and the people involved in them.
The Golescu brothers and their cousins belonged to a formidable
clan in which women played a major role. The matriarch, Zoe (Zinca)
Golescu, born around 1792, was the “brave maman”, as she described
herself in a letter of 1839,18 a “model for the mothers of future societ-
ies”, as Rosetti believed.19 A mother at the age of thirteen, in time she
became the focal point of an entire microcosm comprising her four
sons, one daughter, nieces, nephews and grandchildren. Widowed by
1830, she was the one who administered and sold lands, made loans
and sent much-needed money, petitioned for the liberation of her
exiled relatives, nurtured, consoled and comforted. The careers of her
Western-educated sons, Ştefan, Nicolae, Radu and Alexandru, are
perhaps the best epitome for the transformation of Romanian elite
landowners into citizens and into what her son, Alexandru, called the
“wild patriots” and the “sans-culotte republicans” of the new genera-
tion of 1848.20
To these native elite groups were added two prominent participants
in the events who were not Romanian-born. Henric Winterhalder had
17
Mihai Sorin Rădulescu, Elita liberală românească, 1866–1900 (Bucharest, 1998),
147. The name ‘Eliade’ also appears variously as ‘Heliade’ and ‘Eliad’ in Romanian-
and French-language sources.
18
George Fotino, Din vremea renaşterii naţionale a Ţării Româneşti: boierii Goleşti,
4 vols. (Bucharest, 1939), 1: 6. (Hereafter the four volumes will be cited as Fotino 1,
2, 3 and 4.)
19
Postscript to a letter from Effingham Grant to Ştefan Golescu, 27 October 1852,
in Fotino 3: 390.
20
Fotino 2: 15–8, 34.
introduction 9
arrived in Bucharest from Vienna at the age of twenty in 1828, and

became a close friend and business associate of Rosetti’s. Although not
academically-trained, he had a keen business sense, and later worked
in journalism and contributed to the newspaper Românul [The Roma-
nian], edited by Rosetti in exile in Paris. Constantin D. Rosenthal was
a Hungarian-born Jewish painter, who participated in the 1848 events
and who paid the ultimate price in an Austrian prison for his close
involvement in conspiratorial revolutionary activities in Hungary.
The French allies and associates of the exiled Romanian revolutionar-
ies belonged to circles of students and intellectuals revolving round the
historians Jules Michelet and Edgar Quinet at the Collège de France,
where most of the Romanians attended lectures in the 1840s. In addi-
tion, through their marriages, the two French historians formed close
links with groups of Romanians and other East- and Central-European
expatriates in Paris. Michelet, in particular, had a powerful impact on
this small, but active group of expatriate students who were seduced
by his ideas on the “heroism of the mind”,21 on the people as the main
agent of historical change, on a “social God”,22 and especially by his
visionary concept of history-making (and history-writing) as resur-
rection. As if prompted by Michelet’s idea that a generation of talkers
should be replaced by a generation of action,23 these people were going
to become the first modern revolutionaries of East-Central Europe,
and later its generals, ministers, writers, civil servants, bankers and
engineers, the new intelligentsia of a young Europe with liberal and
democratic aspirations. Coming from areas whose nation-building
projects were being crushed at the intersection of the great Eastern
Empires (Austrian, Ottoman, Russian), the young men and women
who listened to Michelet must have responded strongly to his impas-
sioned warning that “violating the national being becomes the greatest
of crimes.”24 On the French side, championing and disseminating such
ideas went hand in hand with France’s notion of itself as an inspira-
tional force and an example, as “la France universelle”, whose cultural
21
Jules Michelet, Cours au Collège de France, ed. Paul Viallaneix, 2 vols. (Paris,
1995), 2, “Postface”, 720.
22
Jules Michelet, L’Histoire universelle (Paris, 1834), 98.
23
Bible de l’Humanité: une année au Collège de France, in Jules Michelet, Oeuvres
complètes, ed. Paul Viallaneix, 14 vols. (Paris: Flammarion, 1971–1987), 1: 565.
24
“Le crime de violer la personnalité nationale devient le plus grands des crimes.”
Marin Bucur, ed., Jules Michelet şi revoluţionarii români în documente şi scrisori de
epocă (1846–1874) (Cluj Napoca, 1982), 16, quoting from Michelet’s Histoire de la
révolution française.
10 introduction
and political patronage in Europe was and had to remain unparalleled.

The East-Europeans responded to such missionary zeal by embrac-
ing an all-encompassing political Francophilia based on the hope that
whatever was being accomplished in France would eventually benefit
all nations, large and small, and that France would provide the moral
and possibly even the military support for the changes.
Francophilia had been a prominent feature of elite culture in the
Romanian Principalities starting with the late eighteenth century,
largely as a result of the country’s ethnic and linguistic Latin origins,
which the Romanians were keen to foreground as a counter-weight
to pan-slavism and Russian expansionism.25 The attraction was rein-
forced in the 1840s when the Romanians living in Paris had direct
contact with the great nation and its political accomplishments. The
kinship was so strongly felt on the Romanian side that it was no mere
rhetoric to claim that “Romanians have two homelands: the land
where they were born and France.”26 Most forty-eighters featuring in
this narrative, including Constantin and Marie Rosetti, corresponded
in French, which they found more comfortable than a still unwieldy,
hybrid, transitional Romanian. Visiting Frenchmen found Wallachia
quaintly and endearingly reminiscent of France. Hippolyte Desprez, a
pro-Romanian journalist who was to make an important contribution
to the Romanian exiles’ propaganda in Paris in the 1850s, was favour-
ably impressed by Bucharest when he visited in 1847:
25
There are two classic studies on French influence in Romania: 1. Pompiliu
Eliade’s De l’influence française sur l’esprit public en Roumanie (Paris, 1898), published
in Romanian in 1982 (Bucharest: Editura Univers) and re-edited in 2000 (Bucharest:
Editura Humanitas) as Influenţa franceză asupra spiritului public în România, and
2. John C. Campbell, French Influence and the Rise of Roumanian Nationalism (New
York: Arno Press, 1971). More recent contributions include: Dan Berindei, “Diffusion
des ‘idées françaises’ dans les pays roumains et l’impact de la Révolution de 1789” in
the miscellaneous volume 1789 Weltwirkung einer grossen Revolution (Berlin, 1989)
and the same material in Romanian in Dan Berindei, Românii şi Europa: istorie, soci-
etate, cultură, vol. 1: Secolele XVIII–XIX (Bucharest: Ed. Museion, 1991). An older,
but still useful study is Germaine Lebel’s France et les Principautés Danubiennes du
XVIe siècle à la chute de Napoléon (Paris: Publications de la Faculté des Lettres d’Alger.
ser. 2. no. 271955). Also relevant is the study by Al. Zub, Reflections on the Impact
of the French Revolution: 1789, de Tocqueville, and Romanian culture (Iaşi, Portland:
Center for Romanian Studies, 2000). For a short summary, see Lucian Boia, Roma-
nia: borderland of Europe (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), “From the Balkans to the
West”, 81–7.
26
Letter from Ion Brătianu and Constantin Rosetti to Edgar Quinet, 26 June 1848,
quoted in T.-G. Djuvara, Edgar Quinet philoroumain (Paris: 1906), 20.
introduction 11
[. . .] apart from the Oriental usage of offering pipes, sweetmeats and

sherbet to anybody who visits, the salons of Bucharest do not differ in
any respect from ours. Our newspapers and books are on display on all
the tables; when one does not sing some aria from our operas, one reads
aloud our vaudevilles in the evening; our politics is being debated with
passion; everybody knows the names of our politicians, who, however,
are far from returning the favour. No matter how obscure we are, we
are received there with fraternal eagerness and soon we are made to feel
as if en famille. There is no occasion or reason to remind ourselves that
in Bucharest we are in a vassal country of the Ottoman Porte. In truth,
there are no signs there of the Porte’s power: no crescent, no minarets,
no trace of Turks. But there is a tri-colour flag which, emblazoned with
the Romanian eagle carrying the cross in its beak, is carried by the bat-
talions of a militia trained in European-style discipline.27
If one of the features of a modern society is the transformation of ‘sub-
jects’ into ‘citizens’, then what impressed Desprez most was the rapid
pace at which Europeanization had turned Romania into a modern
nation and its members from “men fallen below the Greeks of the
Bas-Empire” into “Romanian patriots.”28
The Texts
It would have been impossible to tell this story without some splendid
editions of the journals and correspondence of the 1848 protagonists
in Romania and France alike. I am indebted to the late Marin Bucur,
in particular, for his editions of Rosetti’s works, diary and especially
the two volumes of the Romanian politician’s correspondence with his
wife, Marie.29 The Rosettis’ correspondence was pursued with occa-
sional lapses from 1846 to 1883, a period during which the spouses
were separated for a total of over twenty years. The letters were later
dispersed, fragmented, or donated to libraries by their various own-
ers in fits and starts. Even pages belonging to the same letter were
chaotically placed under different shelf-marks in archives, Bucur
27
Hippolyte Desprez, Les Peuples de l’Autriche et de la Turquie: histoire contem-
poraine des Illyriens, des Magyars, des Roumains et des Polonais, 2 vols. (Paris, 1850),
1: 111–2.
28
Ibid., 113.
29
Marin Bucur, ed., C. A. Rosetti către Maria Rosetti, Corespondenţă, 2 vols.
(Bucharest, 1988–1998) (Hereafter C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti). Fragments from the
Rosettis’ correspondence had been previously published in Documente şi manuscrise
literare, ed. Paul Cornea and Elena Piru, 2 vols. (Bucharest, 1969), 2: 245–351.
12 introduction
revealed as he told the troubled ‘biography’ of this correspondence in

the introduction to his edition. Some of Bucur’s work, notably his edi-
tion of the exchange of letters between Jules Michelet and the Roma-
nian forty-eighters,30 was incorporated into the monumental edition
of Jules Michelet’s correspondence, edited by Louis Le Guillou31 who,
revealingly, recounts how, working under a Communist regime in the
1970s, Bucur had to be careful to tone down some of the revolutionar-
ies’ less acceptable anti-Russian outbursts.
The overlapping texts of the Romanian exiles and of their French
mentors and friends constitutes a veritable “database” of the century,
to use Le Guillou’s description of Michelet’s letters,32 and it forms the
source base of the present study. It may be objected that my selection
of primary texts has favoured the radical Rosetti-Brătianu-Golescu
group, and that too little attention has been paid to the memoirs and
testimonies of some of their more moderate peers, people like Ion
Eliade Rădulescu or Ion Ghica, for instance, who did not share the
radicals’ more extreme political views. However, I have tried to incor-
porate opinions and attitudes critical of the ‘Rosetti group’ whenever
possible. My emphasis has been on the international friendships and
alliances that these men and women forged in exile rather than on the
confrontational and factional aspects of party propaganda strategies
and purely national politics. My focus on this group is also justified
by their cohesiveness as the radical left-wing group in the revolution,
by the abundance and availability of their correspondence, as well
as by their future careers as founders of the Liberal Party and their sig-
nificant contribution to building the institutions of modern Romania.
Ion C. Brătianu was prime minister of Romania between July 1876 and
April 1881 and between June 1881 and March 1888. His older brother,
Dumitru, was briefly prime minister from April to June 1881. Nicolae
Golescu occupied the same position from May to November 1868, his
brother Ştefan between August 1867 and April 1868, and their cousin
Alexandru G. Golescu between 2 February and 19 April 1870. The mod-
erate Ion Ghica was prime minister in 1866–1867 and in 1870–1871.
All of them occupied major ministerial positions between 1866 and
the 1880s. Constantin Rosetti, for example, was minister for religious
affairs and education from May to July 1866, as well as minister of the
30
Idem, Jules Michelet şi revoluţionarii români (1846–1874) (Cluj Napoca, 1982).
31
Michelet, Correspondance générale, ed. Le Guillou, 12 vols. (Paris, 1994–2001).
32
Ibid., Préface, 7.
introduction 13
interior from May to November 1878 and from June 1881 to Janu-
ary 1882, apart from pursuing an active career in journalism.33 Their
post-1848 political careers were often controversial amidst a national
history which remained turbulent, but, for better or for worse, they
were there at a crucial time taking crucial, and not always savoury,
decisions. Their legacy needs further explorations and clarifications.
The initial impetus for this group biography was a wish to break
the narrative silence which has left the Romanian forty-eigthters out
of most older and recent accounts of 1848 accessible to Western aca-
demic and non-academic audiences.34 I hope that, by favouring a
narrative rather than an issue-driven approach, and by founding my
account on the group’s diaries and correspondence, I do justice to the
ways the protagonists themselves attempted to present themselves to
their Western audiences of the mid-nineteenth century. In addition, a
life-narrative approach corresponds to Jules Michelet’s own preference
for ‘biographising history’ and hopefully restores the flesh and blood
of the group’s shared experience of exile in France and Britain.35 It is
not an easy story to tell and much has been left out either by design
or accidentally. The narrative has had to tread carefully and selectively
amongst events, people, overlapping time-lines and conflicting data to
present the reader with what I hope is a fairly manageable account. If
this makes for a meandering story-line, I hope that this meandering
captures the messiness of human experience in turbulent and uncer-
tain times.
33
For the full list of their posts, see Mihai Sorin Rădulescu, Elita liberală românească,
155–60. Rădulescu has shown that Romanian politics between 1866 and 1914 was
dominated by members of the boyar class of a liberal orientation. See ibid., 145–7
and idem, “Observaţii despre elita politică românească. 1866–1914”, Xenopoliana, 4,
1–4 (Iaşi, 1996): 113–20.
34
There is no separate chapter on the Romanian Principalities in, for example,
R. J. W. Evans and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, eds., The Revolutions in Europe
1848–1849: from reform to reaction (Oxford University Press, 2000). The short chapter
by Lothar Maier on the Moldo-Wallachian revolutions in Europe in 1848, ed. Dowe,
Dieter, et al. (Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2001, 186–209) is an overview of
the main issues, while Axel Körner’s edited volume 1848: A European Revolution?
International ideas and national memories of 1848 (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2000) contains a fleeting reference to C. D. Rosenthal. On the topic of exile, Sabine
Freitag’s edited volume Exiles from European Revolutions: refugees in mid-Victorian
Britain (Oxford, New York: Berghahn, 2002) does not mention Brătianu’s work in
Britain and his links to Mazzini.
35
“biographiser l’histoire”, in Viallaneix, “Postface”, Cours au Collège de France, 2:
719. Jacques le Goff, “Michelet et le Moyen Age, aujourd’hui” in Michelet, Oeuvres
complètes, 4: 60. On history and biography see Epilogue, 359–60.
14 introduction
Notes on the text
The name ‘Romania’ to designate the territories of the two Principali-

ties was not used officially before 1862. The names used in the period
studied (1840–1859) were ‘Valahia’ and ‘Muntenia’ for Wallachia and
‘Moldova’ for Moldavia. The term ‘Moldo-Wallachia’ was used as well,
especially by French speakers. I have used ‘Romanian Principalities’
and ‘Danubian Principalities’ interchangeably.
Place names and names of persons follow in general the Romanian
spelling. Thus, I have used ‘Mavrocordat’ rather than the transliterated
Greek ‘Maurokordhátos’. But I have used, for instance, ‘Bucharest’,
‘Wallachia’ and ‘Moldavia’, as they have been traditionally used by
English-language speakers. The capital of Moldavia is designated by its
name ‘Iaşi’ rather than by the Frenchified version ‘Jassy’. Place names
in Transylvania are given, where possible, in their Romanian, Hungar-
ian and German variants, according to the imperial dividing lines and
boundary delineations of the time.
All translations from the Romanian and French are mine, unless
otherwise specified.
I have generally followed my sources in giving many dates both in
the ‘new style’, based on the Gregorian calendar, and in the ‘old-style’
Julian calendar, which was twelve days ahead. This was done solely
with the purpose of easing the task of anyone wishing to follow-up on
documents, given that there are often inconsistencies in the way they
are cited in the literature.
References to National Archives (PRO) pressmarks are provided
only for unpublished documents.
PART ONE
STUDENTS AND REVOLUTIONARIES

1844–1848
Fig. 2: Marie Rosetti as Revolutionary Romania by Constantin D. Rosenthal,
c. 1850. Reproduced by kind permission of the National Art Museum, Bucha-
rest, Romania.
JULES MICHELET
“MADAME ROSETTI”, 1855
It was the 18th of June 1848. Madame Rosetti was in labour, giving birth
to her first child. Her husband waited, fretting anxiously by her bedside;
he kept looking at his watch. His wife knew why: according to plan, at six
o’clock the revolution was to start.
Rosetti was to accompany two friends of his, whose role was to arouse the
nation. The country was demanding him. His wife’s cries kept him there.
No less impatient with the delay than he was, she desperately wanted him
to be free. And he was. The child was born at last! “Thank God! . . . Embrace
her and go!” were her first words; she smiled happily, although the first kiss
she received as a mother was a farewell kiss.
Stuck in her bed, at that moment of trouble, motionless and helpless, she
endured much suffering and kept silent. She was not alone, and could
not even follow her husband’s steps in her mind. Her room was open to
visitors; compassionate women friends of hers came by out of curiosity,
looking, observing. This room, this flat were – there was no doubt about
it – the real centre of the revolutionary movement, this was France in
Bucharest, the France of the February days. The actions of Paris, the burn-
ing speeches, had had their echoes in Rosetti’s salon. The birth itself, the
infant’s cot, were terrifying omens: this child, this little Liby who appeared
so innocent – was she not to be feared? Was she not the revolution?
Tyranny kept its vigilant eye on Madame Rosetti, a spy in her room who
did not leave her for one single moment. At the birth of her first child,
when this young woman would have needed a mother’s care and embrace,
a stranger was proffering her services only to denounce her. There was not
one single motion, one single moan that was not noted: now and again a
woman would sneak out of the room and went to tell the Princesse what
she had witnessed or what she surmised.
The revolution broke out in Bucharest on the 23rd of June, on the eve
of the very day when the revolution of Paris perished in a bloodbath –
perished, taking with it much else! The re-emerging liberties of all the
nations of Europe suffered a deadly blow in the aftermath of this defeat!1
1
Excerpts from Jules Michelet, “Madame Rosetti”, in Légendes démocratiques du
nord, ed. Michel Cadot (Paris, 1968), 216–7 (hereafter Légendes). A digitized facsimile
of the 1854 edition can be downloaded from Gallica, the digital library of the Biblio-
thèque Nationale de France. A recent edition was published by Editions Kryos (Paris)
in 2008.
18 michelet “madame rosetti”
These fragments on the revolution of 1848 in Bucharest, the future

capital of the unified Romania, show Jules Michelet at his florid best in
their heightened intensity and their rather heavy-handed insistence on
the symbolic value of individual human actions. Written in 1851–53,
they encompass some of the French historian’s chief concerns and
showcase some of his techniques as a historian: the interest in small,
emerging nations, the concept of Paris and France as revolutionary
guides to the world, the idea of an European interconnectedness of
events, as well as the symbolically charged use of a mother figure and
a birth to capture a vision of the ‘république universelle’ being painfully
born under the watchful eye of absolutism. By mid-1848, police pres-
ence and surveillance of suspects’ homes had increased in Bucharest in
the aftermath of turbulent events in neighbouring Moldavia, and the
regime of Prince Gheorghe Bibescu,2 who ruled in Wallachia as Russia’s
candidate, took precautions against the imminent outbreak of an
uprising. Such was the state of alert in the country, the Prince’s wife –
to whom Michelet’s account refers – had been allocated a personal
guard of no fewer than two hundred soldiers. The fact that Liby, the
newly-born girl, was baptised Sophia Liberté by her parents, Maria and
Constantin Rosetti, was symbolic of their – and their chronicler’s –
romantic hope for a new wisdom and freedom in a world which did
not look promising to democrats, republicans and liberals. Liby was
baptised by the priest Ion Snagoveanu, who was close to Romanian
revolutionary circles and later became the Archimandrite Josaphat,
founder of the Romanian church in Paris. At the ceremony, the priest
was wearing a tri-coloured sash and the infant’s smock was adorned
with a tri-coloured cockade.3
Marie Rosetti was born Marie Grant on 14 September 1819 in the
parish of St. Peter Port in Guernsey.4 Her parents were Lieutenant
Edward Effingham Grant and Marie Le Lacheur,5 a local woman from
an old Guernsey family of Huguenot descent whom he had married in
1817 in the Town Church, the same church in which Marie and her
2
Through a son from his first marriage, Prince Gheorghe Bibescu (ruled 1842–1848)
was the grandfather of the French writer of Romanian origin Anna de Noailles.
3
From a later testimony of Henric Winterhalder in Rosetti’s newspaper, Românul
(27 January 1887): 67.
4
Although she is officially known as Maria Rosetti in Romania, I am using ‘Marie’,
the name used by C. A. Rosetti himself in their life-long correspondence, written
entirely in French.
5
‘Le Lacheur’ rather than ‘Levasseur’, as the name has been transcribed in all
Romanian-language secondary sources so far.
michelet “madame rosetti” 19
four younger siblings were to be baptised. A Scotsman whose family

originally came from Edinburgh,6 Marie’s father was born in Markyate
in Hertfordshire in 1795, but his family resettled in Antigua and
St. Vincent, in the Caribbean, where they became involved in the sugar
trade. At the age of seventeen he became Lieutenant in the 8th West
India Regiment of Foot, with headquarters in Trinidad, and later he
joined the Royal African Corps, where he served from 1819 to 1832.
Frustratingly, very few records of the family’s life in Guernsey have
emerged so far: we do not know how Marie spent her childhood or
where she was educated. We catch up with Marie and her widowed
mother in 1847, when the latter lived at East Stonehouse, near Plym-
outh, and gave her consent to her daughter’s marriage to the Roma-
nian nobleman and future revolutionary, Constantin A. Rosetti, which
took place there on 31 August of that year.
It is generally accepted in Romanian accounts of the Rosetti fam-
ily that Constantin met Marie around 1844 in the household of the
Odobescu family in Bucharest, where she worked as a governess. This
employment was probably secured for her by her brother Effingham,7
who was, throughout the 1840s, secretary to Robert G. Colquhoun,
the British Consul General in the Romanian (then Wallachian) capital
city.8 The Grants and the Colquhouns were related through Sir James
Grant (b. 1679), who had married an heiress, Anne Colquhoun, on
condition he took her name. One of Marie’s uncles was a George
Colquhoun Grant who became Treasurer of St. Vincent in Antigua.
This familial and diplomatic connection might explain the circum-
stances which led to Effingham Grant’s appointment in Bucharest in
1838. The British Consul held him in high regard and never lost an
opportunity to recommend him to the Foreign Office. On one such
occasion, he described him as a reliable young man “who joins to a
6
Recent genealogical research by Dinah Bott from the Priaulx Library in Guernsey
(St. Peter Port) confirms older assumptions that Edward Effingham Grant was related
to the Grants of Carron, a Scottish clan from Grantown on Spey, whose coat of arms
was later incorporated into the Rosetti family’s heraldic insignia. For recent contri-
butions by Romanian genealogists, see Rădulescu, Elita liberală românească, 97–8. I
am grateful to Dinah Bott for the new information she communicated to me. Cf. the
entry “Maria Rosetti. From St. Peter Port to the revolution”, on the website of the
Priaulx Library.
7
Effingham Grant was born in Guernsey on 10 December 1820. I am grateful to
Jean Vidamour from the Priaulx Library (Guernsey) for locating the birth and mar-
riage records of the Grants.
8
For Robert Colquhoun’s background, see p. 70 below.
thorough knowledge of Office Routine, a perfect knowledge of French,

Italian, German and Wallachian Languages.”9 By 1846, eight years into
his post, he had gained the consul’s confidence to such an extent that
the latter asked for Lord Palmerston’s authorisation to place Grant, his
secretary, rather than Vincent Lloyd, the Vice-Consul, whom he did
not trust, in charge of the consulate during his forthcoming six-month
leave of absence.10 Effingham Grant appears to have remained to a large
extent the éminence grise of the British consulate in Bucharest and
as such, was to play a crucial role both as spokesman for the British
Consul liaising with Constantin Rosetti and his fellow-revolutionaries
in 1848, and, on a more personal level, securing passports and safe
passage to the members of the provisional government imprisoned
by the Ottoman military after the defeat of the movement of 1848.
In addition, his business partnership with Rosetti and his subsequent
marriage to Zoe Racoviţă, a young girl from the Golescu family, one
of Wallachia’s oldest and most distinguished families, made him a
prominent member of the country’s liberal and entrepreneurial elite.
Marie Grant’s employer, Colonel Ioan Odobescu, likewise, was to
be one of the main actors in the 1848 drama, first as member of the
provisional government and later as ‘traitor’ to the cause, and engaged
in an ambiguous political game with Constantin Rosetti. Marie’s work
as the governess of Odobescu’s children and her brother’s diplomatic
position placed them both at the very centre of Wallachian political
intrigues and of British-Romanian relations, and their involvement
and role in the events of 1848 and beyond will be examined later.
In 1844, when he met Marie, Constantin Rosetti was still the rather
dissipated scion of two of the most important families in the land.
Through his father, the high-ranking boyar Alexandru Rosetti, born
in Constantinople, he came from a family which claimed descent from
Italian forebears settled in Wallachia in the sixteenth or seventeenth
century.11 Aristocratic titles had been granted to them quite recently
9
Private letter to John Bidwell, under-secretary for foreign affairs, Bucharest,
18 May 1847. (The National Archives, PRO/FO 78/697).
10
Dispatch from the Foreign Office to R. G. Colquhoun, 21 August 1846. (The
National Archives, PRO/FO 786/12).
11
For the Rosetti genealogy, see entry “Familia Rosetti” in Radu Rosetti, Familia
Rosetti, 2 vols. (Bucharest, 1938), 1. For more recent contributions, see Andrei
Pippidi, “Originea familiei Rosetti şi confirmarea unei mărturii a lui Neculce”, Anuarul
Institutului de istorie şi arheologie A. D. Xenopol, 20 (1983): 275–80, and Rădulescu,
Elita liberală românească, 97–8.
for services to the Austrian empire,12 and Rosetti’s father was an influ-
ential land-owner and civil servant in Ottoman-dominated Wallachia,
although he was to remain a rather dim figure in Constantin’s per-
sonal family mythology. Here, the dominant image was to remain,
for the rest of his life, that of his mother, Elena, née Obedeanu, from
an old boyar family of Little Wallachia (Oltenia), in Romania’s south.
Their son did not make much of aristocratic affiliations. A rebel with
egalitarian instincts from his early youth, Rosetti was a nobleman who
opposed noble privilege all his life and who renounced his family titles,
lands and Gypsy slaves in order to live out and prove his commitment
to the republican and the liberal cause.13 He described himself as the
defender of the villagers and of the small artisans against the “ghosts
of the feudal past.”14
Born on 2 June 1816 in Bucharest, Constantin Rosetti spent the
years 1845 to 1848 intermittently in Paris, where he became one of a
group of friends at the centre of a vociferous and faction-ridden cote-
rie of East- and Central-European students who planned to re-design
radically the political culture of their nascent states. Foreign travel
and studies abroad had not been widely available to the Romanians
in the decades prior to the 1840s, and Rosetti’s was the first genera-
tion of elite young men enabled by a relative political thaw and, in
some cases, by family wealth, to choose Paris, the cultural and political
capital of the nineteenth-century, as their place of life apprenticeship.
The French option was dictated both by Romania’s Latin linguistic
heritage – unique in South-East-Europe – and by personal connec-
tions and friendships forged previously with French diplomatic per-
sonnel, secretaries and other domestic staff engaged by the country’s
wealthy families. Constantin Rosetti, largely taught at home in his early
years, was a fluent French speaker, like everybody else in his genera-
tion, but, more unusually for that time, also had an English-language
tutor, a certain Bernhardt Stolţ, who, among other duties, helped him
translate the more difficult passages of Byron’s Manfred. Rosetti pub-
lished the entire text in 1843 at the publishing and printing house he
12
The title ‘Count of Rosetti’ was granted to Rosetti’s great-grandfather, Nicolae,
by the Emperor Charles VI in 1733. Cf. Biblioteca Naţională, the St. Georges Collec-
tion, Archive Dinu V. Rosetti, P. XLIII, Dossier 5, copy of document dated Vienna,
17 February 1842.
13
Marin Bucur, C. A. Rosetti: mesianism şi donquijotism revoluţionar (Bucharest,
1970), 6.
14
C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 6, 11.
co-owned and co-administered with his friend Henric Winterhalter

and his future brother-in-law, Effingham Grant, of which more later.15
Rosetti probably only completed one year of studies at the Saint
Sava National College, the country’s foremost higher education insti-
tution, in 1832. Apart from natives such as Eufrosin Poteca, Simeon
Marcovici and Petrache Poenaru, the great ‘conscience-moulders’ of
the time, teaching staff included the French professor and Freemason
J. A. Vaillant, the author of La Romanie (1844), one of the earliest
monographs devoted to Romania in French.16 Rosetti enjoyed early
successes as a poet and used his skills to translate into Romanian the
works of Béranger and Lamartine, future acquaintances in Paris, as
well as poetry by Victor Hugo. His diary entries for 15 November 1844
and January 1845 mention readings, sometimes in the company of
friends, from Lamennais’ Paroles d’un croyant and from the works of
Théodore Jouffroy, which shows that he was completely synchronised
with the Parisian world of ideas of his time as well as with its protago-
nists, in whose circles he was soon to mingle.17 Rosetti’s tormented
psyche must have been particularly attuned to the ideas of Jouffroy,
the theorist of “the anxiety of the human soul confronted to the issue
of man’s destiny.”18
Well-read, the young Rosetti was not, however, academically-
oriented, and remained rebellious and pleasure-loving, with a darker
Byronic side – a psychological profile which made him a brooding,
fretful and exalted Romantic man of action rather than an introspec-
15
Bucur, C. A. Rosetti: mesianism, 10. On Rosetti’s early successes as a poet, see
ibid., 24–47. His poetic output was commented on favourably in, among other works
in French, Desprez, Les Peuples d’Autriche et de la Turquie, 1, chapter 3; Stanislas
Béllanger, “Les Principautés Danubiennes”, Revue du XIX-e siècle, 1, 1 (Paris, avril–
oct. 1854): 336–45; J. A. Vaillant, La Romanie (Paris, 1844), 3.
16
Bucur, C. A. Rosetti: mesianism, 10–16. Vaillant was also the founder in Iaşi, the
Moldavian capital, of the para-Masonic secret society “The Sons of Trajan’s Colony”.
For the significant role of the Saint Sava College in the education of political personnel
in early and mid-nineteenth-century Romania, see Alex Drace-Francis, The Making of
Modern Romanian Culture: literacy and the development of national identity (London,
2006), 102–3.
17
Paroles d’un croyant were published in Romanian as Cuvintele unui credincios
(Bucharest, 1848), and in the Transylvanian periodical, published in Braşov, Foaie
pentru minte, inimă şi literatură, 11, 1848. The latter was the cultural supplement of
Gazeta de Transilvania [The Transylvanian Gazette], at the time subjected to Austrian
and Russian censorship. Cf. p. 74 below.
18
Théodore Simon Jouffroy, Mélanges philosophiques (Paris, 1833), quoted in
Paul Bénichou, Le Temps des prophètes: doctrines de l’age romantique (Paris, 1977),
29–32.
tive Romantic poet. His escapades as a young man were such that his
despairing mother is said to have caught a severe cold in church as
she prayed for her wayward son.19 She died on 13 December 1844,
a date which became a major watershed in Rosetti’s life: from then
onwards, he changed the dating system in his personal Diary so that
entries were (confusingly for readers and historians) headed by the
number of days and years since his mother’s death rather than by the
actual chronological dates. She and his brother Dimitrie, who com-
mitted suicide in 1842 at the age of thirty-nine, as a consequence of
a love thwarted by social conventions, became the beloved ‘ghosts’
which presided over Rosetti’s long and troubled life, and to whom
he addressed his meditations, prayers and requests for forgiveness in
times of crisis. By 1845, he was already a man with a heavy emotional
heritage and often prone to an indefinable ‘mal du siècle’, that vague
melancholy and disenchantment that posterity associated with the
nineteenth century. The death of Sofia, a consumptive young woman
whom he loved, made him exclaim in November 1844: ‘God, death has
made me understand thee’.20 But far from being a serene acceptation
of mortality, his ‘understanding’ of death underscored a quintessential
‘unfairness’ of divinity and a fear of failure and loss through death that
accompanied him throughout his life. It was a mixture of fascination
and revulsion with death not unlike that of his future mentor, the
historian Jules Michelet.
However, beyond Rosetti’s sense of personal loss lay a more compre-
hensive world-weariness and in particular a dissatisfaction with what
he perceived as the dysfunctional public life of his home country, Wal-
lachia. In a diary entry for 4 December 1844, he deplored what must
have been one of the earliest modern instances of an East-European
brain drain: Wallachia, in his view then, was a country depleted of its
young men, who went abroad to seek better rewards for their talents
rather than, in Rosetti’s words, have to play whist and dance the waltz,
lie, be servile and commit the “thousand atrocities” demanded of those
who wanted to attain a “position in society.”21 While, it might be
said, the corruption of youth and the servitude demanded of aspiring
social climbers are universals, Wallachian society had in addition been
19
Entry for 11 December 1844 in C. A. Rosetti, Jurnalul meu (henceforth Rosetti,
Diary), ed. Marin Bucur (Cluj-Napoca, 1974), 48.
20
Entry for 30 November 1844 in ibid., 36.
21
Entry for 4 December 1844 in ibid., 40.
plagued for decades by tensions between its old high-ranking ‘boyars’

who detained all the top offices, and the so-called ‘new’ boyars, former
commoners with recent titles who either remained stuck at the bot-
tom of the social ladder or found it impossible to rise within ossified
political structures which remained largely venal and corrupt.22 That
a meritocratic ethos was difficult to establish was corroborated by the
British Consul, Robert Colquhoun, who informed Lord Palmerston on
14 February 1848 that:
Of all the young men of talent or character hardly one is employed; the
object of this is evident, were these men in service, they must advance
in Rank, and once having attained a grade sufficient to qualify them to
enter the first class of Boyars, these men may become dangerous as an
opposition. All favors and ranks are therefore conferred on persons who
may be styled in Truth parvenus, ready and willing for any service which
may be required of them.23
Furthermore, constant Russian political interference and repeated
military occupation had only complicated and worsened local cir-
cumstances. Russia administered the Principalities directly between
1806–1812 and 1828–1834, but even outside these periods, whenever
native princes were appointed, they were chosen largely on the basis of
their allegiance to Russia. The Russian consuls secured and maintained
positions of great influence and authority and intrigued incessantly,
thus keeping a firm grip on the administration of the Principalities
until the eve of the Crimean War. The letters of the Golescu fam-
ily reveal the impact of the Russian informal sphere of influence on
Romania’s social life and the parallel deterioration of Russia’s image
among a population which did not fail to tire of an exploitative alli-
ance between Tsarist Russia and the native landowning oligarchy. The
appointment in 1834 of Prince Alexandru Dimitrie Ghica as Russia’s
candidate resulted in social tensions and financial difficulties, and in
an intensification of censorship and fear throughout the rest of his
reign, which ended in 1842, when he was deposed. The correspondents
complained that, although the Prince was essentially of good faith, he
22
Neagu Djuvara has suggested that, between 1771 and 1848, political power
in Romania was concentrated in the hands of around ten old native families, most
notably the Filipescu, Văcărescu, Ghika (Romanianised Albanians), Racoviţă, Ştirbei,
Kreţulescu, Brâncoveanu, Golescu, Grădişteanu and Bălăceanu families. See his “Les
grands boïars ont-ils constitué dans las principautés roumaines une véritable oli-
garchie institutionnelle et héréditaire?,” Südostforschungen, 46 (1987): 49–50.
23
The National Archives, PRO/FO 78/742, Jan. to Aug. 1848.
was ineffectual and failed to improve the country’s administration,

curb corruption and put an end to the endemic venality of offices.24
In addition, the Prince was caught up between the demands of an
increasingly hostile ‘national party’ – the emerging liberal patriots
and future nation-builders of modern Romania, of whom Rosetti was
one – and the complex diplomatic games opposing the Russian consul
Petru de Rűckmann (P. I. Rickman), the new and ambitious French
consul, Adolphe Billecocq, and the British consul, Robert Colquhoun,
as spokespersons for their respective countries. In September 1849,
the French Consul in Bucharest Pierre-Eugène Poujade was disingen-
uously bemused by the diffusion of power in the Principalities, which
became even more blatant under joint Ottoman-Russian occupation:
“Who is in fact governing? Is it the Prince, the Ottoman commissioner
or the Russian commissioner?”25
Foreign – Ottoman, but especially Russian – interference could
often be overplayed by a native oligarchy keen to preserve its privi-
leges and distract attention from its own venal misadministration of
the country, but the limitations imposed by Turkish suzerainty and
Russian protection were real. Russian troops had occupied the two
provinces between 1806 and 1812, as well as from 1828 to 1834: requi-
sitioning, censorship and the imposition of Russian-modelled military
and political structures had alienated considerable sections of the elites
and of the general population.26 As a consequence, owing to a mix
of justified grievances as well as of manipulated perceptions, by the
mid-1830s, Romania was in the increasingly firm grip of acute Russo-
phobia. When he visited the country in 1836, the liberal professor
and journalist Saint-Marc Girardin27 found the boyars well-informed
on European politics, but sceptical that Russia might withdraw from
24
Fotino 1: 34–5. Cf. also Fotino 2, letters nos. 5, 6, 8, 9, 13.
25
Andrei Pippidi, “Tocqueville ministre et les Moldo-Valaques”, Revue roumaine
d’histoire 32, 1–2 (1993): 150.
26
Cf. Dumitru Vitcu and Gabriel Bădărău, eds, Regulamentul Organic al Moldovei
(Iaşi, 2004), esp. 18–20. The classic study of Russo-Romanian relations in the nine-
teenth century is Barbara Jelavich’s Russia and the Formation of the Romanian
National State, 1821–1878 (Cambridge University Press, 1984). See also Apostol Stan,
Protectoratul Rusiei asupra Principatelor Române, 1774–1856 (Bucharest, 1999).
27
Marc Girardin, self-styled ‘Saint-Marc’ (b. 1801–d. 1873), combined a life-long
career in teaching French literature with journalism (at the Journal des Débats and the
Revue des Deux Mondes) and politics. Faithful to the dynasty of Louis Philippe, and
elected deputy in 1848, he was a liberal anti-republican. He was tutor of Greek to some
of the Romanian forty-eighters in Paris, such as Ion Bălăceanu. See entry “Saint-Marc
Girardin” in G. Vapereau, Dictionnaire universel des contemporains (Paris, 1865).
South-East Europe or that the West might offer diplomatic and mili-
tary support against tsarism.28 The memoirs of his travels include an
often-quoted conversation with an older boyar on political aspirations
and morale in the Principalities:
“As for me”, the old notable explained, “I am not entirely certain who
we are. Are we Turks? Are we Russians? We are said to be vassals of
Turkey and protégés of Russia. Is there anything left there to make us
Wallachians and Moldavians? It is now more than a hundred years since
we have been attempting to escape the Turks, and attempt in which we
have demanded the support of the Russians. That hope made patriots of
us all. Now that we have relinquished that illusion, there is no love lost
between us and the Russians. On the day when they, too, become our
masters, we will do with them as we have done with the Turks: we shall
wait for someone else’s help. We, therefore, always lie in wait, always
suspended.”29
More than anything else – and presaging later developments in East-
ern Europe – the boyar dreamed of free speech (“one does not want
to fear deportation in Siberia for expressing one’s opinions”),30 but was
aware that freedom could only be attained with Western support. His
reflections also suggest an identity crisis in a political context where
enforced political allegiances undercut a growing sense of ‘Romanian-
ness’ in the Moldo-Wallachian provinces.
In spite of – or perhaps because of – the country being still in the
grip of ancien régime political structures and ‘Byzantine-Phanariot’
mores, and being located at the junction of ‘evil empires’, the under-
ground rumblings and stirrings of a new spirit of critical opposition to
the past were beginning to be felt, especially during the 1830s. In that
decade, an embryonic ‘national’ party emerged and revolution started
to appear a distinct possibility.31 Although the activities of the new
patriots were not confined to secret society meetings or symbolic ges-
tures such as setting subversive texts to the tune of the Marseillaise, in
a polity under surveillance, they involved a great deal of secret diplo-
28
Saint-Marc Girardin, Souvenirs de voyages et d’études, 2 vols. (Paris, 1852),
1: 247.
29
Ibid., 284.
30
Ibid., 290.
31
Ion Ghica, letter to D. Brătianu, early 1841, in Din arhiva lui Dumitru Brătianu:
acte şi scrisori din perioada 1840–1870, ed. Al. Cretzianu, 2 vols. (Bucharest, 1933),
1: 109–10. (Hereafter Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu.) For an English-language account of
this process, see Hitchins, The Romanians, 1774–1866, 168–72.
macy. Significantly, their protest was not directed so much against old-
regime structures as against foreign domination: Turkish suzerainty
and especially the Russian protectorate, officially established by the
Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca of 1774, and reinforced after each Russo-
Turkish conflict.
1837–1841
EARLY DIPLOMATIC VENTURES
On 20 July 1837, a number of deputies in the National Assembly of

Wallachia, among whom the elder Brătianu – father to two of this
book’s protagonists – rejected what they regarded as an infamous
‘additional article’ of the Russian-sponsored Organic Statutes (1831–
32). The article required the Wallachian assembly to seek Russian and
Ottoman authorisation for any change to the Statutes, the country’s
earliest modern and highly controversial quasi-constitutional charter.32
One of the rebel deputies, Ion Câmpineanu, an early champion of
the unification of the two Principalities and of independence from
Turkey, visited Paris and, more unusually for a Romanian in 1839,
London, where he worked closely with the Polish émigrés to arouse
concern over Russian expansionism in Western chancelleries. He met
Lord Palmerston himself, and was given well-meaning reassurances
that “the moment is not far when Europe will decide to take measures
against Russia’s actions in the East and at that point his memoranda
and reports will be given serious consideration.”33 Unfortunately for
Câmpineanu’s objectives, his visit to London could not have come at
a worse time. 1839 marked a shift in British political attitudes to Rus-
sia, from an often vaguely-defined distrust to a more positive, prag-
matic cultivation of relations with the Eastern empire in the interests
of the European balance of power. Anglo-Russian clashes of interest
in Central Asia, especially in Afghanistan, and the Near Eastern crisis
provoked by the rebel Pasha of Egypt, Mehmet Ali, had persuaded the
Foreign Secretary and the Whig cabinet that the only way to contain
Russia and pre-empt the growth of her influence in Constantinople,
32
These documents are also known in the historical literature as the Organic Reg-
ulations or as the Règlement Organique. See Ioan C. Filitti, Domniile române sub
Regulamentul Organic 1834–1848 (Bucharest, 1915) and Vitcu and Bădărău, eds,
Regulamentul Organic al Moldovei (text and introductory study). For the Wallachian
protest against the additional article, see Radu R. Florescu, The Struggle against Russia
in the Romanian Principalities, 1821–1854 (Iaşí, 1997; 1st edn. 1962, Munich), 184–5
and idem, “R. G. Colquhoun, Ion Câmpineanu and the Pro-Western Opposition in
Wallachia, 1834–1840”, Slavonic and East European Review, 41, 97 (1963): 403–19.
33
Ion Ghica, “Ion Câmpineanu”, a speech delivered at the Romanian Academy, 28
March 1880, quoted in Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 11.
early diplomatic ventures 29
was by co-opting her into international agreements regarding the sta-

tus of the Ottoman Empire. This political re-alignment was to result
in the Straits Convention signed in London in July 1841. In spite of
a great deal of opposition both in Parliament and in the press, and
excluding France from the proceedings, Britain, Russia, Prussia and
Austria agreed by that treaty to safeguard the integrity of the Otto-
man Empire against the Pasha’s expansionist ambitions in Syria and,
crucially, to have the Straits closed to foreign warships in times of
peace. Contrary to most expectations, this strategy of containment was
to bear fruit in the following months and usher in a period of Anglo-
Russian entente which was to last up to the Crimean War.34 It also
illustrated Palmerston’s cornerstone belief that too much liberalism in
foreign affairs was not necessarily a good thing and that a great power
such as Britain should maintain “an influence both with the free, and
the despot.”35
In spite of attacks in the press and extravagant accusations from
circles close to the colourful Turcophile diplomat, MP and bête noire
of Victorian politics, David Urquhart, that he was a “Russian spy”, in
the longer term Palmerston could and did take credit for limiting Rus-
sian influence in Constantinople by placing the ‘Sick Man of Europe’
under the joint protection of the five great powers and thus giving
European Turkey a new lease of life.36 Unfortunately for the Romanian
deputy, in the new circumstances created in 1839–1841, concern for
Turkish and Russian policies in the Balkans and South-East Europe
was momentarily frozen in Britain. Pro-Turkish, pro-Polish and anti-
Russian MPs and politicians such as David Urquhart, Lord Ponsonby,
Lord Dudley Stuart, Sir Henry Bulwer Lytton, continued to maintain
a low-key, but steady, pressure on the cabinet. However, their efforts
were not going to bear visible fruit until the 1850s and in the aftermath
of the Crimean War.
Lord Dudley Coutts Stuart earned his liberal political credentials
in the 1830s by joining forces with the supporters of the Reform Bill
and by defending the cause of dismembered Poland and the rights
of the Polish refugees in Britain. He was involved in the activities of
34
John Howes Gleason, The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1950), Ch. 9: “The Near Eastern Crisis, 1839–1841”.
35
E. D. Steele, Palmerston and Liberalism, 1855–1865 (Cambridge University Press,
1991), 16.
36
Gleason, The Genesis of Russophobia, 267.
30 1837–1841
the London Literary Association of the Friends of Poland from its

inception in 1832 to his death in 1854. He, along with Sir Stratford
Canning, Joseph Hume, Robert Fergusson and others, believed that
Russian expansion in the Middle East threatened British interests in
the region, a stance which earned them some formidable opponents,
among whom Richard Cobden, who accused them of unjustified war-
mongering. Although Lord Dudley lost his parliamentary seat for
Arundel in 1837, he continued his pro-Polish activities and resumed a
sustained parliamentary campaign in 1847, as the new MP for Maryle-
bone. When he died in November 1854, he was still actively involved
with the Polish cause and, more generally, with the cause of the threat-
ened Central-East European nations.37
Assessing the impact of public opinion in history is never an easy
matter. The extent to which a handful of East-Central European
expatriates and British radicals were likely to influence political deci-
sion-making and create, via largely extra-parliamentary activities, an
anti-Russian current of opinion is debatable. The emergence of signifi-
cant anti-Russian attitudes in Britain prior to the Crimean War and
the 1860s has been disputed, amidst claims that British mid-nineteenth
century ‘Russophobia’ – to use a term made famous in the 1950s – was
to a large extent the post-hoc outcome of Cold-War apprehensions.38
However, it would appear that as early as the 1840s, David Urquhart’s
contacts among the Romanian and Polish expatriates had a role in
supplying him with a repertoire of anti-tsarist imagery which the anti-
establishment Scot put into circulation in his periodical The Portfolio
between 1836 and 1844.39 Urquhart’s hostility to tsarist Russia was,
however, coupled with a liberal anti-interventionism which was con-
trary to his Wallachian friends’ objectives.
In 1834, while on one his para-diplomatic trips to Turkey and the
Middle East, David Urquhart, whose undeniable first-hand knowledge
of the Ottoman Empire had made him a strong Ottoman supporter,
sent back home a pamphlet, co-written with his friend, Lord Pon-
37
For further information see Krzysztof Marchlewicz, “Stuart, Lord Dudley Coutts
(1803–1854)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, Oxford Uni-
versity Press, Sept. 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/26701, accessed 20
Sept 2010].
38
Jonathan Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: English liberalism, national identity
and Europe, 1830–1886 (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 211–2.
39
Radu R. Florescu, “The Rumanian Principalities and the Origins of the Crimean
War”, Slavonic and East European Review, 43, 100 (Dec. 1964): 52.
early diplomatic ventures 31
sonby, then the British ambassador at the Porte. In their text, Eng-
land, France, Russia, and Turkey, they claimed that Russia was still
pursuing her objective – unattained in 1829 and 1833 – of acquiring
Constantinople and the Straits, and as such continued to be a threat
to stability in the area. The pamphlet received favourable reviews and
went through five editions.40 At the other end of the spectrum of opin-
ions on Russia, in March 1836, Lord Durham, British ambassador at
St. Petersburg, compiled an estimate of Russian power and policies in
which he concluded that “[t]he power of Russia has been greatly exag-
gerated”, being more of a defensive kind and making a Russian attack
on other European powers highly unlikely. Palmerston considered it
one of “the ablest and clearest documents ever received at the Foreign
Office,”41 and as such adopted it as one of the theoretical bases for
his choice of a policy of appeasement rather than intervention. Lord
Durham’s analysis of Russia’s relative weakness coincided to a large
extent with what the Romanian Dumitru Brătianu would later attempt
to convey in his memorandum to Lord Palmerston of 16 January 1849,
although his was the opposite aim of encouraging a military interven-
tion against a weak and uncompetitive Russia.42
In the context of Palmerston’s conciliatory stance towards Rus-
sia, Ion Câmpineanu’s courting of British diplomacy in 1839 was an
entirely premature exercise. Frustrated with his lack of success in Lon-
don, he started on his return journey via Austria and Transylvania
in early 1840, aware that a ferman for his arrest and deportation had
already been issued in Bucharest. In spite of protests from the British
Consul, Colquhoun, and from Lord Palmerston himself, Câmpineanu
was arrested by the Austrian police, deported and sentenced to exile
in a sixteenth-century Wallachian monastery, to be released, a broken,
disillusioned man, only in 1841.43 “If the Western governments want
us to be Russian, I prefer persecution . . .”, he wrote to friends who had
entreated him not to return.44 His contacts in Britain, among whom
40
There is evidence that some of Urquhart’s works, notably his Turkey and its
Resources (1833), were being read in the 1830s and 1840s in the Romanian Principali-
ties and in Turkey in French, German and Turkish translations. See Cornelia Bodea,
“David Urquhart, Principatele şi mişcarea naţională română”, in Unirea Principatelor
şi puterile europene (Bucharest, 1984), 30–55.
41
Gleason, The Genesis of Russophobia, 172–3.
42
See Part Two, 128–9.
43
The Monastery of Plumbuita.
44
For a re-assessment of the role of this ‘forgotten man’ of Romanian history, see
Radu R. Florescu, “Câmpineanu and the pro-Western opposition”, in The Struggle
32 1837–1841
Lord Dudley Stuart and David Urquhart himself, were to play crucial
roles in maintaining a British interest in the Danubian Principalities
after 1848, but the main legacy of his movement was the inspiration
and encouragement it offered to the increasing radicalisation of the
Wallachian opposition.45
Political Anglophilia was a short-lived affair for many East and Cen-
tral Europeans in the 1830s and early 1840s. As the Wallachian régime
toughened up against its ‘dissidents’, it was not England that offered a
political model and a safe haven to disaffected Romanians and other
East-Europeans, but France. The intellectual and political prestige of
France was such in the 1840s, the Rosetti and his peers were soon
to seek intellectual and political capital in the only place that could
offer it to the emerging political class of a small nation in search of a
new identity: Paris. The Romanians Constantin and Marie Rosetti, the
Brătianu and the Golescu brothers, among many others, were to find
themselves for over ten years – first as émigrés and students, then as
exiles – at the centre of a very fractious and vociferous East-Central
European diaspora.
against Russia, 179–98. For published contemporary sources on Câmpineanu and his
mission, see also Faţa secretă a mişcării paşoptiste române: unitatea naţională (Bucha-
rest, 2004), ed. Cornelia Bodea, esp. 347–488.
45
For further political agitation in pre-1848 Romania, cf. also the more overtly
revolutionary movement of Dumitru Filipescu of 1840, a bolder push towards liber-
alism in Romania. See G. Zane, Le movement révolutionnaire de 1849: prélude de la
révolution roumaine de 1848 (Bucharest, 1964) and idem, Bălcescu. Opera, omul, epoca
(Bucharest: Editura Eminescu, 1973), 162–3.
1844–1848
THE COLLÈGE DE FRANCE: SOCIABILITY AND PROTEST
Le monde est un Sahara qui n’a qu’une oasis: Paris!

Stanislas Béllanger
“Le Moldo-Valaque”, 184446
In the generous legislative élan following the French Revolution, the
Assemblée Constituante voted a law proclaiming the absolute equality
of French nationals and foreigners, only to regret this step towards
universal fraternity when France started to fill quickly with refugees
and spies. Subsequent legislation consequently hardened throughout
the Directoire and the Consulate, ultimately establishing the principles
of modern surveillance of foreigners by the state with the Law of 12
messidor, year VIII (1 July 1800), which placed foreigners under the
direct control of the Prefect of Paris. Thereafter, it was the Prefecture
which issued passports and residence permits as well as arrest and
deportation orders against those believed to pose a threat to the state.
Laws of 3 December 1849 and 2 February 1852 further refined the
criteria for naturalisation as well as for the expulsion of undesirable
aliens.47 Yet, in spite of increasingly strict control, the foreigners kept
arriving in Paris throughout the nineteenth century, both as visitors
and as refugees. The Prefecture statistics for 1836 show 3,884 landlords
offering 53,000 beds to foreign visitors in Paris. The number of logeurs
catering for foreigners grew to 5,183 five years later, which suggest the
steady increase in demand for accommodation as well as the growing
reputation of France as a cultural beacon and terre d’asile.48
To foreigners, mid-nineteenth-century Paris offered the combined
attractions of a rapidly growing metropolis with its cultural and enter-
tainment venues, its urban amenities, reputable institutions of higher
education, and its restless, politically savvy masses, hardened by the
revolutionary experiences of 1789 and 1830. Paris had a “quasi-mythic
46
Stanislas Béllanger, “Le Moldo-Valaque”, in Les Etrangers à Paris, ed. Louis
Desnoyers et al., (Paris, 1846), 61.
47
G. Dallier, La Police des étrangers à Paris et dans le département de la Seine, Thèse
pour le doctorat, (Paris: Université de Paris, Faculté de droit, 1914), 18–24.
48
Paul Gerbod, “Des étrangers à Paris au XIXe siècle”, Ethnologie française, 25
(1995, Octobre–Décembre): 569–79.
34 1844–1848
quality for persons who felt overwhelmed by the constraints, contra-

dictions, and inequalities in their native societies.”49 For many Ger-
man, Russian, Italian and East-European exiles, in spite of the relative
conservatism of Louis Philippe’s régime, Paris retained its “highly
charged significance” as the “refuge for displaced radicals and hence
as the enemy of conservative regimes everywhere.”50 Germans such as
Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx, who were fleeing Metternich’s repres-
sive policies, and Poles such as the poet Adam Mickiewicz, seeking
refuge from Russia’s heavy-handed intervention in fractured Poland,
found themselves in Paris, where, in their eyes at least, political con-
trol and censorship were comparatively less aggressive. And although,
in reality, ‘revolutionary’ France posed a lesser danger to old-regime
Europe than some of these radicals hoped, Paris’s reputation as a den
of republicans, conspirators and spies and as a school of liberal politics
remained intact in the collective European imagination. But subjective
representations of liberalism and freedom varied widely according to
the émigrés’ background and country of origins. Thus, for instance the
Russian literary critic Pavel Vasylievich Annenkov (b. 1813), a moder-
ate liberal who lived in Paris between 1841 and 1843, had only words
of praise for Louis-Philippe, the “distinguished bourgeois king”, and
believed that France had a more liberal régime in the 1840s than at
any time before or after:
Out of fear of being reputed an egotistical “bourgeois” bereft of the
faculty for understanding popular aspirations and the hidden miseries
of the working classes, few people could bring themselves to give full
voice to all they felt about the Paris of the 1840s. It is an undeniable
fact, however, that travellers to Paris at the time came in contact with a
city of irreproachable manners and customs, distinguished, as a natural
outcome of the constitutional order, by an ease of social intercourse,
by the possibility for any foreigner of finding appreciation and sympa-
thetic response for any serious opinion or initiative, and finally, an integ-
rity, relatively speaking, in all transactions between private parties. All
this, as we know, immediately vanished with the advent of the Second
Empire. To verify this brief sketch, it is sufficient to draw a comparison
between it and what the city of Paris became after the loss of the July
Constitution.51
49
Lloyd S. Kramer, Threshold of a New World: intellectuals and the exile experience
in Paris, 1830–1848 (Cornell University Press, 1988), 7.
50
Idem, 18.
51
P. V. Annenkov, The Extraordinary Decade (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1968), 73, quoted
in Kramer, Threshold, 37.
the collÈge de france 35
Visitors from England and America, with a different set of political

references and expectations, had less positive views of Louis Philippe’s
France. The Scottish journalist James Grant, for instance, visiting Paris
in 1843, was galled by the military and police presence on the streets
and in public places. He describes France in the 1840s as a police state
where informers were ubiquitous and where even minor criticisms of
the régime uttered in private gatherings ended up in the Prefecture’s
files or led to arrests. Many foreigners felt harassed by constant pass-
port controls and police surveillance. “The sum of the matter is this”,
he concluded, “that France, though nominally a free country, is not so
in reality. In all that constitutes true freedom, England is incompara-
bly before it.”52
The difference in emphasis between Annenkov’s perceptions and
Grant’s could not be clearer. The Russian visitor, a moderate aristocrat
with little appetite for radical politics, chose to focus on the advantages
that polished French manners and easy intellectual and friendly inter-
course between natives and foreigners could present for the latter’s
activities and endeavours in the face of a relatively hostile political
environment. As we shall see, it was precisely this aspect of their life
in France that to the Romanian émigrés was a prominent facet of their
experience of expatriation and later of exile. But, unlike Annenkov,
many harboured dreams of barricades and of French support for a
radical re-construction of their own society.
Statistics show that Paris was already a densely populated city in
the 1830s and 1840s: between 1831 and 1846 its population rose from
785,862 to 1,053,897, an increase of 34 percent. Some studies have
attributed “at least 88 percent of the city’s new population in the July
Monarchy period directly to immigration”, both from the provinces
and from abroad.53 By the end of 1847 there were approximately
850,000 foreigners in France, 174,000 of whom were concentrated in
Paris and the department of the Seine, amounting to 13 percent of
the general population, and making Paris a restless, congested and
potentially volatile cosmopolitan metropolis. However, these figures
are in all probability lower than the actual numbers, as censuses only
52
James Grant, Paris and its People (London, 1844), vol. 1, 177, quoted in Kramer,
Threshold, 39. For a comprehensive comparative survey of foreigners’ perceptions of
July Monarchy Paris, see ibid., Ch. 1, “The Capital of Europe”.
53
Charles H. Pouthas, La population française pendant la première moitié du XIX
siècle (Paris, 1956), 148, quoted in Kramer, Threshold, 23.
36 1844–1848
recorded foreigners residing in hotels and chambres garnies, excluding

those living in private residences as well as travellers in transit.54
As far as political refugees proper were concerned, the French
authorities granted right of entry to 15,000 of them in 1846.55 They
were obliged to live in special centres called dépots and were given a
subsidy (solde) which was increasingly used as an effective means of
blackmail and control.56 The foreigners, whether legal or illegal immi-
grants and political refugees, were mostly Germans, English, Belgians,
Italians, Russians and Poles. The Polish expatriate community, for
instance, grew from 150 individuals in early 1831 to 4,000 by 1846
in the department of the Seine, an increase which reflected worsen-
ing political conditions in their partitioned country, and in Eastern
Europe more generally, as much as the growing attraction of Paris as
a hotbed of increasingly radicalised politics.57 In 1839, out of 13,502
illegal immigrants in France, three quarters were Poles.58 By 1851,
there were 9,338 Poles in France. The case of Polish immigrants to
nineteenth-century France is probably the best documented amongst
the East-Europeans, and these figures are cited here mainly to suggest the
scale of East-European immigration and the precarious lifestyle of the
refugees, caught between the initial French largesse and the subse-
quent fears of and measures against political insurgency. The example
of the Poles is illustrative also because they became a cause célèbre
among the students of Paris, owing largely to the plight of their dis-
membered country and to the presence and propaganda of charismatic
Poles such as the leader of the Polish moderate, monarchic would-be
government-in-exile, Prince Adam Czartoryski, and the poet Adam
Mickiewicz, Michelet’s colleague at the Collège de France.
The Poles, like all the other ethnic communities, created self-
support structures ranging from charitable institutions such as the
54
Kramer, Threshold, 24–5. Statistics of foreigners in nineteenth-century Paris vary,
however. According to Gerbod, “Des étrangers”, 572, the first census of foreigners was
collected in 1851, showing 62,241 foreigners in Paris, which amounted to 6.2 per cent
of the Parisian population.
55
Gerbod, “Des étrangers”, 576.
56
Alain Faure, “A la recherche des réfugiés et des prisonniers politiques”, in Main-
tien de l’ordre et polices en France et en Europe au XIX e siècle, published by the Société
d’Histoire de la Révolution de 1848 et des Révolutions du XIXe siècle (Paris, 1987),
9–18.
57
The immigration figures quoted by Kramer, Threshold, 26–7, are based on French
police bulletins and statistics calculated by Jacques Grandjonc, “Éléments statistiques
pour une étude de l’immigration étrangère en France de 1830 à 1851”, Archiv für
Sozialgeschichte 15 (1975): 211–300.
58
Faure, “A la recherche”, 10.
Institut Saint-Casimir, founded in 1846 to welcome homeless, aged

or orphaned Poles, to ostensibly political organisations such as the
increasingly radical Polish Democratic Society (the Société démocra-
tique polonaise), established in 1832, and its rival, Prince Adam Czar-
toryski’s circle of the Polish political right based at the Hotel Lambert
in Paris, which became one of the main, if largely ineffectual, centres
of East-European political and conspiratorial activities.59 Yet, in spite
of the popular sympathy for the Polish cause, the French authorities
became increasingly suspicious of such activities, especially around
the time of the 1848–49 revolutionary events, when surveillance and
deportations increased. La Tribune des Peuples, a Parisian daily co-
ordinated by Adam Mickiewicz, ceased publication on 10 November
1849 after arrests of staff caused by the paper’s public support for the
republican demonstrations of 13 June in Paris.60 Most Polish refugees
lost their pensions, while members of the Polish Democratic Society,
including leading figures in its Committee, such as Stanisław Worcell
and Albert Darász, were expelled from France and settled in London,
where they eventually gravitated towards Mazzini, Ledru-Rollin and
the European Democratic Committee.61
There are no accurate statistics for other East Europeans in 1840s
Paris, but as far as the Romanians are concerned, they were compara-
tively few in number. According to Stanislas Béllanger, the author of
a witty ‘physiology’ of the expatriate Moldo-Wallachians in Paris, the
number of Romanians living in Paris rose from 8 or 10 individuals in
1830 to around 50 in 1844.62 One of the Romanian forty-eighters in
Paris estimated the number of his fellow-countrymen in the French
59
Gerbod, “Des étrangers à Paris”, 570; Slawomir Kalembka, “Les émigrés polonais,
victimes de la répression politique (1848–1870)”, in Maintien de l’ordre et polices,
305–14. For the Hotel Lambert see also Małgorzata Willaume, “Les agents balkaniques
de l’Hotel Lambert de 1838 à 1849 – portrait de groupe” in Idées politiques et men-
talités, en Pologne et en Roumanie entre l’Orient et l’Occident (XVIII e–XX e siècles), ed.
Gheorghe Platon and Veniamin Ciobanu (Cluj, 2002), 87–99.
60
Kalembka, “Les émigrés polonais”, 310–2. La Tribune des Peuples had a sizeable
subscription list of 7,000 and regularly championed the cause of Poland and of other
East-European nations against Russian encroachments.
61
For a very informative account of the activities of the Polish Democratic Society
and its interactions with the Hungarian, Italian, German and Romanian revolution-
ary movements, see Eugene J. Kisluk, Brothers from the North: The Polish Democratic
Society and the European revolutions of 1848–1849 (Boulder, Colorado, 2005). For the
Romanian involvement with Mazzini’s European Committee, see Part Two, 189 sqq.
62
Stanislas Béllanger, “Le Moldo-Valaque”, in Desnoyers et al., Les Etrangers à
Paris, 60.
38 1844–1848
capital to be around 100 in the early 1840s.63 They were 299 in 1861.64
Unlike the more numerous Poles, the Romanians, who did not have
refugee status, were less-well organised and received no allocations,
relying on family money or personal incomes. Students in the 1840s,
exiles after the defeat of the revolution of 1848 in the Romanian Princi-
palities, this small group of men and women forged strong friendships,
as well as intellectual and political alliances across the very mainstream
of Parisian political and intellectual life. In the eyes of French observ-
ers, their anti-Russian stance was a particularly prominent feature.
“When a Moldo-Wallachian arrives in Paris”, Béllanger wrote, “his
first concern is to put as great a distance as possible between himself
and the Russian embassy; when he goes out, he checks to see that he
is not followed by an officially appointed agent; when he speaks, he
always keeps his voice down to a whisper.”65 A young boyar couple
visiting Paris had been known to flee in horror upon first learning
that the roller coaster at the Grande Chaumière was called a montagne
russe, Béllanger quipped.66
While the general public might have been bemused by such extreme –
even though anecdotally relayed – feelings, the ‘Russian question’,
notably Russia’s role in European civilisation, was not an unknown
in French intellectual debates. A negative image of Russia had been
advanced, for instance, by the Marquis Astolphe de Custine, whose
very popular four-volume study La Russie en 1839 ran through five
French-language editions within sixteen years of its publication in
1843. The book, banned in Russia itself, showed that not only the
Poles and other satellite nations suffered, but that Russians, too, were
oppressed at home by a despotic police state and an ignorant church.
It caused considerable damage to Russia’s image abroad, in spite of
propaganda counter-offensives mounted by agents of the notorious
Third Section of the Russian political police.67
But not everybody was of the de Custine school of thought. To refer
only to periods closer to 1848 and to figures whom the Romanians in
63
Ion Bălăceanu, Amintiri politice şi diplomatice 1848–1903, ed. Georgeta Filitti
(Bucharest, 2002) (translated from the French), 17.
64
Jacques-Olivier Boudon, Paris: capitale religieuse sous le Second Empire (Paris,
2001), 164.
65
Béllanger, “Le Moldo-Valaque”, 78.
66
Ibid., 79.
67
Sidney Monas, The Third Section: police and society in Russia under Nicholas I
(Harvard University Press, 1961), 230–3.
Paris knew, the Russian issue had been the object of reflections by, for
example, Théodore Jouffroy, a historian and thinker known to Con-
stantin Rosetti. Because, Jouffroy argued, religion and tradition were
major components of civilisation, by sheer virtue of being Christian,
Russia was European and the Ottoman Empire was not. The Russians
“are indeed behind us”, he contended in an essay of 1826, “but they
are following in our footsteps.” On this basis, for instance, he justified
Russian expansionism in Central Asia as a Christian crusade against
the infidel.68 While admitting that Russia was ‘barbarous’, Victor Hugo,
too, preferred an expansion of the Russian empire at the expense of the
Ottoman, according to the principle that some ‘barbarians’ are prefer-
able to others. “Let Russia’s civilizing mission direct its beam towards
Asia,” Hugo urged in Le Rhin in 1841, “and shed upon it whatever
light she possesses and, once the Ottoman Empire has crumbled – a
grand providential act which is going to save civilization – let her enter
Europe via Constantinople. France, re-established in all her glory, will
look sympathetically as the Greek cross will replace the crescent on
the ancient Byzantine dome of the Hagia Sophia. After the Turks, the
Russians will only be one step away from us.”69
Imbued with French culture and armed with an emphatic sense of
their own ‘European-ness’, despite coming from what some believed
was the periphery of Europe, Constantin Rosetti and his friends were
impervious to any conception of Russia’s Christian civilising mission –
an idea which they would have found ludicrous. They sought the
politically and intellectually congenial milieux in which to highlight
the plight of an Eastern Europe left at the mercy of an ailing Otto-
man Porte and an aggressive Tsarist foreign policy. Unsurprisingly, in
Paris as in London, they were bound to be attracted into the orbit of
republican, independent and radical circles and sometimes to embrace
extreme or questionable forms of contention. It was while attending
courses at the Collège de France and frequenting the famous profes-
sors who taught there in the 1840s, Jules Michelet and Edgar Quinet,
68
Théodore Jouffroy, “De l’état actuel de l’humanité”, 1826, in Mélanges philoso-
phiques (1833), (Genève, 1983), 102–3, quoted in Franck Laurent, “Penser l’Europe
avec l’histoire. La notion de civilisation européenne sous la Restauration et la monar-
chie de Juillet”, Romantisme – Revue du dix-neuvième siècle, 29, 104 (1999): 65.
69
Victor Hugo, “Le Rhin” (1841), in Oeuvres complètes, Voyages (Paris, 1985), 430,
quoted in Laurent, “Penser l’Europe”, 65. On representations of Russia in the West,
see also Part Two of the present study, 209 sqq.
40 1844–1848
as well as the equally controversial Adam Mickiewicz, that these young

men were able to stir up a debate around such issues.
Although the overwhelming majority of Romania’s future liberal
elite studied in Paris, many of them, Rosetti included, never obtained
a degree. They were often more happily engaged in scrutinising French
political experience and institutions than they were in their own stud-
ies, and many ended up in the streets and on the barricades of Febru-
ary 1848.70 In Paris in 1845, Constantin Rosetti’s own life remained
undisciplined and unfocused, judging from his tortured, self-loathing
Diary confessions. He was initiated into Freemasonry on the recom-
mendation of his old college professor from Bucharest, J. A. Vaillant,
who had been expelled from the Romanian Principalities for alleged
conspiratorial activities against the regime, and was now a member
of the lodge ‘La Rose du Parfait Silence’. It was one of the most res-
olutely republican lodges in Paris and endured as a safe haven for
embattled republicans throughout difficult times under the Second
Empire. Membership of the lodge included the lawyer Désiré Pilette,
co-founder with Louis Blanc of the Journal des Ecoles, the economist
and free-trade activist Frédéric Bastiat, the lawyer Odilon Barrot, a
future Prime Minister under Louis Napoleon, who was also the presi-
dent of the secret society ‘Aide-toi le Ciel t’aidera’, and a future close
friend of the Romanian émigré groups, the anthropologist Paul Batail-
lard. Rosetti’s attendance seems to have been regular and his promo-
tion in the Masonic cursus honorum rapid. He attended and presided
over the initiation of many of his Parisian friends, French and Roma-
nian alike. Apart from his close associate Constantin David Rosenthal,
the pre-eminent artist of the 1848 Romanian revolution, new initiates
included the Brătianu brothers, Dumitru and Ion, both of whom were
to become members of the Romanian provisional government in 1848
and share Rosetti’s subsequent exile in Paris.71
A passionate man, Constantin Rosetti was acutely aware of ‘the
feminine’, and felt in perpetual need of a woman’s consoling pres-
ence. Although he had already met Marie Grant, she was left behind in
70
Cf. the memoirs of the Moldavian forty-eighter Vasile Mălinescu relayed by Ira-
clie Porumbescu in 1848 la români: o istorie în date şi mărturii, ed. Cornelia Bodea
(Bucharest, 1998), 3: 45–52.
71
Rosetti, Diary, 57, 72. Cf. also the commemorative volume Lui C. A. Rosetti la o
sută de ani de la naşterea sa, 3rd edn., (Bucharest, 1916), 5. A membership list of the
lodge ‘La Rose du Parfait Silence’ survived in the Brătianu archives. See Dan Berindei,
Revoluţia română din 1848–1849: consideraţii şi reflecţii (Cluj-Napoca, 1997), 78–85.
Bucharest pining for him, while he continued his romantic and erotic
entanglements both in France and in Romania, at the age of twenty-
nine and thirty still unable to decide whether he could or wanted to
settle down or not. Marie Grant was a petite and striking dark-haired
beauty, according to the later depiction of her in Légendes démocra-
tiques du nord by a visibly smitten Michelet, who believed she might
have had a Provençale origin on her mother’s side.72 Yet, in spite of
her obvious charm, captured in the two known portraits by Rosenthal
(see Figs. 2 and 3), Rosetti was slow to respond. His Diary and the
early correspondence with Marie shed light on a singularly passion-
less love and on a protracted, unenthusiastic courtship. In the Diary
entries for 1845 and 1846, amidst observations on La Nouvelle Héloise
and George Sand’s Lélia, he often refers to the twenty-seven-year old
Marie unflatteringly as “the Grant woman”, reserving his more roman-
tic effusions for the idealised, deceased Sofia and for the unnamed,
married woman whom social conventions prevented him from loving.
Tormenting though the absence of a woman was in his emotionally
needy life, love and marriage were not his priority at the time. Marie
Grant had to wait.
Like the Poles and other émigré communities in Paris, the Roma-
nians built associative structures intended to offer both emotional sup-
port to vulnerable young men away from home and financial support to
talented sons of impecunious families sent to study abroad. In Decem-
ber 1845 Rosetti was appointed cashier of the Society of Romanian
Students in Paris, established a few weeks earlier under the patron-
age of Alphonse de Lamartine. Lamartine, whose Voyage en Orient of
1831 – the result of a long sojourn in the Middle East – had presented
a view of a decadent Porte suffocating vital Christian nations, seemed
an ideal choice for the honorary position of patron. The forty-eighter
and moderate liberal Ion Bălăceanu related later in his memoirs that,
having called on Lamartine in the 1840s with a delegation of fellow
students to plead in favour of the Principalities, the poet encouraged
them warmly as they departed, saying: “As a Slavic nation, you have a
great future ahead of you!”73 Such an exhortation, well-meant though
it was and launched on the spur of the moment, must have sounded
disheartening to young men of the only Latin nation in South-East
Europe. Their propaganda efforts focused precisely on dispelling any
72
Michelet, “Madame Rosetti”, in Légendes, 229–30.
73
Bălăceanu, Amintiri politice, 17.
42 1844–1848
misconception that the Westerners might have had about the Roma-
nians’ supposed Slavic origin, a fictional origin which, if misused, was
likely to serve as an ethnic and cultural basis for the Russian protec-
torate. Nevertheless, the students chose to ignore the poet-politician’s
initial confusion and continued to cultivate Lamartine both before and
after 1848 in the hope of gaining an official channel for the defence of
their embattled country.
Rosetti noted in his diary how pleased and honoured he felt to be
entrusted with the humble, yet essential, task of managing the Soci-
ety’s precarious budget.74 He and his better-off companions offered
loans from their private incomes in order to bring over to Paris and
support young Romanians whom they personally selected, and they
canvassed among the Romanian diaspora to obtain donations into the
associations’ coffers. His 1846 appeal contained a particularly poignant
message to women: “Women! You, who were the last at the feet of
the cross and the first to gather at the grave, you, who bestow laurels
onto heroes and myrrh onto martyrs; [. . .] you who have always been
the sacrifice rather than the executioner, and who excel over men by
the superiority of your feelings. Women and spouses! [. . .] Women
and mothers! In the name of your sufferings, we appeal to you to
support and help the Society of Romanian Students.”75 Throughout
1845 and 1846, members of rich expatriate families such as the Can-
tacuzino, Mavrocordat and Balş, were all coaxed into donating. It was
a small world built on encounters and coincidences that were little
short of the miraculous for the tightly-knit Romanian community.
The young French woman working as a governess for the Romanian
Princess Alexandrina Cantacuzino was Athénaïs Mialaret, the future
(second) wife of Jules Michelet.76 Frequenting the Cantacuzinos in the
same period was Hermione Asachi (Asaky), the daughter of a promi-
nent Moldavian poet, polymath and politician, and destined to be the
74
Rosetti, Diary, 64.
75
Apel la înfiinţarea Societăţii studenţilor români (Paris, 1846), quoted in ***,
C. A. Rosetti ca tipograf. Omagiu din partea Institutului de Arte Grafice ‘Carol Göbl’,
cu ocasiunea desvelirii monumentului seu în dziua de 20 Aprilie 1903 (Bucharest,
1903), 13.
76
Princess Alexandrina Cantacuzino, née Creţulescu (1810–1894) was the wife of
Grigore Iordache Cantacuzino, one of the boyars who protested in 1837 in the Wal-
lachian Assembly against the introduction of the ‘additional article’ in the Organic
Statutes, as demanded by Russia. See pp. 26–7 above. Cf. Michelet, Correspondance,
5: 635–7. She is not to be confused with Alexandrina Gr. Cantacuzino (b. 1881), the
leading feminist who founded the National Council of Women in 1921.
second wife of Edgar Quinet. The personal connections being thus

forged in the early 1840s were to sustain these groups of people
throughout the various forms of exile and persecution they were to
suffer after the defeat of the 1848 revolutions in Wallachia and the
French coup d’état of December 1851.
Jules Michelet’s lectures at the Collège de France were not only a
source of intellectual inspiration for wide, cosmopolitan audiences of
young men and women from all over Europe, but also the occasion
for noisy and emotional displays of republican and national feeling,
regarded with caution by the authorities and hotly debated in the
press. Michelet had been the titular holder of the ‘chaire d’histoire et
de morale’ at the Collège since 1838 and was at the height of his career
both as a historian, as a teacher of history and as a politically engaged
intellectual in a climate of ideas that was brewing with passions and
tensions around 1846–47. Also since 1838, he had been a member of
the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, established by the
Convention in 1795, but he never accepted membership of the French
Academy. Such affiliations suggest an independent spirit, embedded
in the Revolutionary tradition and wary of association with the July
Monarchy.
The Collège de France was unlike any of the higher education insti-
tutions of France at the time. It had its origins in the institution of the
‘lecteurs royaux’ established by François I in 1530 as a symbol of trium-
phant reason against the scholasticism of the Sorbonne.77 Throughout
its history it retained its respect for the spirit of free exploration initi-
ated by the Renaissance, combining freedom with flexibility, and was
one of the few institutions of the Ancien Régime spared by the French
Revolution.78 In the words of Ernest Renan, by the mid-nineteenth-
century the Collège had become “a shelter open to all those who were
not comfortable in the bosom of their motherland . . .”79
The atmosphere at Michelet’s lectures at the Collège was electri-
fying, if not downright chaotic. On the re-opening of his course on
21 December 1842 after the holidays, three to four hundred people filled
the corridors hoping to be allowed in the auditorium.80 On 29 Janu-
ary 1846, one day after the publication of his study, Du peuple, the
77
Eric Fauquet, Michelet ou la gloire du professeur d’histoire (Paris, 1990), 235.
78
Annuaire du Collège de France 1981–82 (Paris, 1982), 7.
79
Questions contemporaines, 148, quoted in Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 14.
80
Fauquet, Michelet ou la gloire, 288.
44 1844–1848
professor himself had to ask the school administrator to remove the

police from the street, suggesting that the presence of ladies in the
audience was in itself a guarantee of order. One of his students, and
later a member of the Franco-Romanian coterie, Eugene Noël, wrote
this account in a letter to his parents:
In spite of the rain pouring in bucketfuls, the queue had formed at the
gates of the Collège de France starting with 8 in the morning. The day
before, we had reinforced the gates with iron so that people could no
longer bring them down. They were only opened to the crowds at a
quarter to one, one quarter of an hour only until the commencement
of the lecture. We arrived, Alfred [Dumesnil, student and son-in-law
of Michelet] and myself, with M. Michelet, but only M. Michelet could
pass; we had to be escorted by two very strong men, both porters at the
Collège, and even so it was quite a big affair.
You cannot imagine the thunder of applause that welcomed the pro-
fessor. When calm was restored, an amazing silence fell on that vast
crowd, and M. Michelet could finally speak. He said he was going to
treat of a subject on which everybody would agree, that he was going
to talk to us about the fatherland, a topic which enjoyed unanimity in
France; and, again, there was universal applause. [. . .]
There was not the slightest hint of trouble and I do not think one
could imagine a more admirable audience. When the lecture was over,
everybody lingered in the court and along the rue Saint-Jacques for
more than half an hour in the rain, waiting to greet M. Michelet as he
departed.81
Jules Michelet was an inspired speaker and his body of published and
unpublished work was already vast: according to a self-assessment,
between 1827 and 1847 he published twenty volumes and gave twenty
series of lectures. However, he had earned his notoriety mainly through
the war he had been waging in the early 1840s against the church’s grip
on education and especially against the Jesuits. Des Jésuites, published
on 20 July 1843,82 was a volume based on the joint course delivered
by Michelet and Edgar Quinet that year, in which they asserted the
supremacy of academic and intellectual independence in the face of
what they believed was the stultifying control over schools, minds and
hearts of the notorious religious order. By July 1844, the book had
spawned more than one hundred works by other authors both against
81
Michelet, Cours au Collège de France, 2: 108–9.
82
There were four reprints in 1843 and further editions in 1844, 1845, 1860 and
1875.
and for the ideas expressed by the two anti-clerical professors.83 Des
Jésuites, with Du Prêtre (published in January 1845) Le Peuple (Janu-
ary 1845), L’Histoire de la Révolution (the first two volumes, 1847–48)
and his lectures of 1848 were, in Michelet’s own words, his “livres
de combat”,84 and they did earn him fame – and notoriety – both in
France and abroad. His English translator Charles Cocks informed
him that he had had to beat two others to have his own translation of
Le Peuple published before theirs, and that the Prêtre was already in
its third English edition by March 1846.85
France in the 1840s was a place where the issue of academic freedom
was not taken lightly. Academics and intellectuals aired their views in
the press, and ideas voiced in amphitheatres were hotly debated by a
wider public, even though they may only have reached a literate ‘bour-
geois’ audience. Far from being purely ‘academic’, ideas mattered in
a vital sense and floated in the air of the times, ready to be picked by
an increasingly politicised nation and become part of the repertoire of
political contestation. In the case of Michelet, it was more a case of a
civic model of emotional engagement with politics which trickled out
of the amphitheatre and into the street. When Michelet’s Du Prêtre
was published, hostile critiques of it were published in the Revue des
Deux Mondes, marking a re-orientation of a publication previously
favourable to both Michelet and Quinet. The Minister of Education,
the Comte de Salvandy, openly sought a public denunciation of the two
historians by the academic staff of the Collège de France, and, although
they did not oblige, Du Prêtre was promptly placed on the censors’
lists. This scandalous aura appealed to Michelet’s young, rebellious
audience. In April 1845, just as the Chamber of peers debated the ‘Du
Prêtre affair’, Michelet received a standing ovation from his students,
an episode duly reported by the republican periodical Le National on
20 April.86 His colleague, Edgar Quinet, however, chose to resign.
Michelet’s charisma and his passionately expressed political solidar-
ity, combined with the national and international succès de scandale of
83
Fauquet, Michelet ou la gloire, 288–9.
84
Lecture of 1 April 1848 in Michelet, Cours au Collège de France, 2: 287.
85
Letter of 23 March 1846 in Michelet, Correspondance, 5:80. Le Peuple was
reviewed in 1846 in Gazeta de Transilvania, the Romanian-language periodical soon
to be censored by the Russian and Austrian authorities, alarmed at the extent of the
pan-Romanian cooperation of 1848. Catherine Durandin, Révolution à la française ou
à la russe (Paris, 1989), 99. See also p. 74 below.
86
Michelet, Cours au Collège de France, 2: 13.
46 1844–1848
his writings to captivate almost without reserve at least one section of

French intellectual circles: the students. Among them, the more polit-
ically-oriented of the East-Europeans must have felt that they were not
only under the guidance of a militant, polemical historian, unafraid to
take on the established order and established ideas, but also that this
was a public voice that they could ‘hire’ to speak on their behalf on the
international arena.
The texts, notes and synopses of some of Michelet’s lectures from
the 1830s and 1840s have survived partly because devoted students
such as Alfred Dumesnil, Michelet’s future son-in-law, and Etienne
Gallois took notes, and partly because the embattled historian himself
took the precaution of publishing his courses as he sensed that his
chair was being threatened.87 Having lectured in 1838–9 on medieval
institutions and art and on the role of women in medieval times, in the
years 1846 through to 1848 the Master tackled topics that could not fail
to interest the small group of Rosetti and his fellow-countrymen. The
lectures contained an inflaming promise of a renaissance of the world,
embedded in a fervent, if rather rambling, discourse punctuated by key
words such as esprit nouveau, foi nouvelle, sacrifice, révolution morale.
Michelet was, of course, thinking primarily of what he perceived as
the slumbering, stagnant France of the July Monarchy, a country that
needed a civic and spiritual rejuvenation through a return to the spirit
of the unfinished and seriously flawed Revolution of 1789. However,
his vision of the greatness of nations encompassed the smaller nations,
those that appeared destined to remain passive and silent in world
affairs. They, according to Michelet, were not necessarily to be judged
according to a ‘quota system’ of what they contributed to world his-
tory. “Each of these nations”, he wrote, rehearsing Fichtean notions,
“represents a superior excellence, a high mark of the human soul.”88
For the East Europeans, who came from small or oppressed nations,
it was a seductive and empowering suggestion.
87
Jules Michelet, Notes recueillies à son Cours au Collège de France en 1838–39, ed.
Etienne Gallois (Paris: Librairie Académique, 1877); Michelet, L’Etudiant: Cours de
1847–1848, 2nd edn. (Paris: Calman Lévy, Editeur,1877). (The first edition was pub-
lished in Paris by Chamerot, Libraire-Editeur, in 1848 under the title Cours professé
au Collège de France par J. Michelet, 1847–48 and contained the same material in a
different order).
88
Paul Viallaneix, La Voie royale. Essai sur l’idée du peuple dans l’oeuvre de Michelet
(Paris, 1971), quoted in Jules Michelet şi revoluţionarii români, ed. Bucur, 17.
Nations, great or small, are indestructible, Michelet believed: “Those

who torture nations, those who wrench those cries from the depth
of their immortal souls, are in effect the revealers and founders of
the nations which they attempt to destroy”, he declared in his lecture
of 5 February 1846.89 As the Polish crisis deepened in the aftermath
of a liberal insurgency which hung in the balance, Michelet did not
hesitate to turn his lecture of 15 March 1846 into a public appeal on
behalf of the Poles. According to Alfred Dumesnil, who was there, the
audience on that day was more numerous than usual, and when the
gates opened, a collection of funds was quickly organized to cries of
“Vive la Pologne!” and the money deposited on the Professor’s desk.
Michelet inflected his ideas on nationality towards a collective prayer,
by appealing to a sense of international solidarity among his students:
“I pray God for the victory of a people whom we all are holding in our
thoughts”, he told his audience. “For where are our souls, Messieurs?
On the Seine? No, it is on the Vistula. Well! Should this great people
who is now stirring and of whom we have had no recent news, should
this people not obtain the victory for whom we have been praying, we
will not deem its cause any less legitimate and holy; it is holy because
it is eternal, it is a cause that will ultimately triumph one day in the
future.”90 On the same day, as if to show that the distance between
the seminar room and the street was minimal, as the Master wished,
a group of students led by Michelet’s seventeen-year-old son, Charles,
went to the offices of the radical journal La Réforme bearing their sub-
scription for Poland. It was an episode characteristic of the spontane-
ous, yet elaborate, mise-en-scène organizing itself around Michelet’s
lectures in that period.
The theme of small, oppressed, but indestructible, nations was closely
linked in Michelet’s thinking with France’s role in the world, a theme
to which he returned in the short-lived euphoria of the early days of
the Second Republic. As he resumed his course on 6 March 1848, after
a brief suspension of the course, Michelet spoke about revolutionary
France’s world mission in his Allocution aux écoles.
89
Michelet, Cours au Collège de France, 2: 117.
90
Letter to Eugène Noël, 15 March 1846, in Michelet, Cours au Collège de France,
2: 109.
48 1844–1848
France is charged with the mission of giving peace to the world – he

said – the only peace that endures, that of liberty.
Feared at this moment all over the world, let her take her seat among
the nations, as an armed mediatrix who does not, however, impose the
silence of terror onto the world, but on the contrary, who gives a voice
to all the silent nations.
France cannot abstain. Nothing in the world is alien to her. She finds
and recognizes herself, as a thinking force and a tradition, in remote
nations . . . And they, they look on her and recognize themselves in her.
[. . .] No, we must have unity in the world, there is no denying this, free
unity, holy unity, the unity of souls and hearts.
And as a sign of this unity, here is this vacant chair! . . . It is the seat of
Poland, the seat of our beloved and great Mickiewicz [. . .]. But Poland,
what is Poland? She is the most generic representative of universal suf-
fering. In her, I see the people who suffer [. . .] 91
Poland was not the only international cause that Michelet embraced.
He was equally interested in developments in Hungary and cultivated
the friendship of August de Gerando, who, married to the Hungarian
countess Emma Teleki, participated in the doomed Magyar revolution
of 1848–9 and died in disappointment shortly afterwards. Michelet also
pointed to “starving” Ireland, to “illiberal” Germany and to Italy, “sus-
pended between life and death”, as being equally deserving of French
solidarity. Rosetti in his diary declared himself not a little jealous of
Poland’s and Hungary’s prominence in the French élan of internation-
alist sympathy, and later, as will be seen, also engaged in epistolary
exchanges with the historian on the thorny question of Magyar-
Romanian relations. But Romania’s place in French minds had yet to
be earned. Michelet’s Romanian students were only starting to make
themselves and their country’s cause known to their Master. Both he
and they were to endure political defeat and the deprivation of exile
before they could meet on a common ground of political thinking and
emotional connectedness.
Rosetti and his companions had started their ideological appren-
ticeship as Michelet developed and delivered his social philosophy
in his lectures of late 1847, the main theme of which was France’s,
and implicitly the world’s, need for “social renovation.” There was,
he believed, a divide between the “privilégiés du loisir, du savoir” (i.e.
91
Michelet, L’Etudiant, 277–8. Mickiewicz’s course had been suspended in April
1844.
the intellectuals) and “les hommes du travail”,92 and this rift had to be
healed. Going to the people was not perhaps a novel idea world-wide,
but uttered by a charismatic teacher to his large community of young
intellectual disciples in a place like Paris, it gained renewed force, and
was particularly relevant to the young men and women who were to
import such ideas to Central and Eastern Europe. It was the intellectu-
als’ mission, Michelet preached, to blur social divisions and to create a
‘moral unity’ in the nation and in the world.93 The cheap, sensationalist
literature and drama available to the working masses, he said, were
inadequate vehicles of moral unity. What was needed instead was a
“crusade of men meeting men”, a “grand mouvement social”, an “élan
du coeur.”94 In his second lecture, entitled “The young man and the
people”, he developed the theme which represented the moral foun-
dation of his course: the idea of the young man as “mediator within
the city” and principal agent of social reconstruction. Months later,
in his concluding lecture of 1 April 1848, he returned to this theme
and presented to his audience the enthralling vision of “l’alliance des
écoles et du peuple”, the alliance of students and workers. 95 In order to
achieve this cultural revolution, young men were supposed to follow
a stoical path of disciplined self-denial. “[. . .] you are going to achieve
this through work, through voluntary sacrifice day by day, through the
exercise of the effectual virtues, “les vertus efficaces”, he had advised his
listeners in a lecture on the painter Géricault in 1846.96
In the incendiary days of pre- and post-1848 Paris, such messages
of cross-class empathy and the noisy displays of student enthusiasm
they occasioned were a threat to the regime and the course was sus-
pended from 2 January 1848 to 6 March 1848. “From Mickiewicz to
Quinet and from Quinet to myself, it is a coup d’État en trois coups”,
he declared presciently in an open letter published by Le National on
4 January.97 On 6 January, around 1,500 of Michelet’s students and
supporters gathered in front of his home on Rue des Postes to show
92
Inaugural lecture of 16 December 1847 in ibid., 12.
93
Ibid., 14–5.
94
Ibid., 26.
95
Ibid., 285, 287.
96
Jules Michelet, Géricault (Caen, 1991), 58–9.
97
Viallaneix, Michelet: les travaux et les jours, 324. Adam Mickiewciz, who held the
Chair of Slavic languages and literatures, which he had inaugurated in 1840, had been
suspended in 1844, while Quinet, holder of the Chair of languages and literatures of
Southern Europe, had resigned from the Collège in 1845.
50 1844–1848
their support. The next day, the historian addressed them at the start
of the lecture which inaugurated the new course – no longer delivered
in the auditorium, but published in instalments. He denounced the
representatives of the “parti-prêtre” and their “political and religious
Jesuitism”, for whom the idea of social unity was anathema and who
had finally manoeuvred to have his course suspended.98
98
Michelet, L’Etudiant, 85.
JULES MICHELET AND ‘LES FRANCO-ROUMAINS’:
DUMITRU BRĂTIANU
[. . .] le vent qui vient de France se fait sentir de loin.

Brătianu, Letter to Jules Michelet
1 March 184699
Monsieur,
Upon my arrival in France, you were the first man I encountered (Le
Peuple had just been published); I then had long hours of conversations
with you and I felt, as I always do after our meetings, younger, stronger,
better. As I am a foreigner, it should be easy for you to guess which was
the passage from your book which arrested my attention most and which
encourages me to take the liberty of writing to you; it is where you speak
about the feelings foreigners have for France. That passage surprised me
to the highest degree while at the same time giving me the measure of
the excellence of all your reflections on the world and on France.100
This was the opening gambit of Dumitru Brătianu’s first letter to
Jules Michelet sent from Dijon on 1 March 1846. It was the first of a
series of epistolary exchanges between an ebullient and verbose young
Brătianu and a cautiously encouraging Michelet, an exchange which
later became one of the channels for the emerging Franco-Romanian
alliance.
Born in 1818, Dumitru Brătianu came from a family of boyars from
Oltenia (Little Wallachia in southern Romania), a region reputed for
its people’s independence of mind and political restiveness. His father
had a seat in the Principality’s National Assembly from November
1831 up to his death in 1844. In spite of his top position, he was one of
the few older boyars to discard the customary Oriental-style clothes of
his class for ‘European’ ones, a choice which, in that conservative cli-
mate, had the significance of a subversive pro-Western gesture.101 He
was also, as already mentioned, one of a group of rebel deputies who
99
Idem, Correspondance, 5: 66.
100
Ibid., 64.
101
For the link between fashions and Westernization in old-regime Romania,
see my study “Women, Fashion and Europeanization. The Romanian Principalities,
1750–1830” in Women in the Ottoman Balkans: gender, culture and history, ed. Amila
Buturović and Irvin Cemil Schick (London, 2007), 201–30.
52 dumitru brătianu
protested against the inclusion of the Russian-sponsored ‘additional

article’ in the country’s constitutional chart.102 The family was rea-
sonably wealthy and, after studies at Saint Sava College in Bucharest,
in 1835 the young Dumitru was sent to Paris to study law, with an
allowance of 500 imperial gold ducats from his father.103 On Sundays,
he attended meetings of the Moldo-Wallachian students at the Pension
Ducolombier on the Rue St. Hyacinthe.104 On 20 August 1839 Dumitru
Brătianu and his fellow-Romanians Ion Ghica and Alexandru G.
Golescu founded the ‘Society for the education of the Romanian
people’ (Societatea pentru învăţătura poporului român). Part of their
funding was used to send Armand Carrel’s Le National – where Ion
Ghica, a future forty-eighter, was a regular contributor – and other
French publications to readers in Romania.105
In 1841, Dumitru was joined in Paris by his younger brother, Ion,
who became equally active in propaganda activities, although osten-
sibly he was there to pursue military training and forge a career in
the army. Ion lost no time in making contacts and his network of
friends and acquaintances quickly expanded across the political spec-
trum, from Odilon Barrot and the editors of Le National, to Paul
Meurice, the writer and editor of l’Evénement, to the diplomat and
deputy Edouard Drouyn de Lhuys,106 and others who, like their British
counterparts, Lord Dudley Stuart and David Urquhart, were to make
important contributions to Romanian propaganda in the 1850s.107
In the same year, 1841, Dumitru obtained his degree in law at the
University of Paris, with a dissertation on property – a topic which
was to engage the minds of his friends and associates in Paris as future
102
See p. 28 above.
103
Biblioteca Naţională, Ms., the Saint-Georges Collection, Packet CCVI, Dossier
no. 7, I, Paris 1842–48.
104
Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu. 1: 9.
105
Ibid., 10.
106
Edouard Drouyn de Lhuys, b. 1805, diplomat and politician. He was a reform-
ist member of the Constituante and of the Legislative Assembly. As foreign minister
in the first cabinet after the election of Louis Napoléon as president on 20 December
1848, he supported the president and was favourable to sending French troops against
the Italian republicans, but he successfully negotiated the withdrawal of troops on
15 September 1864. In 1849 he was French ambassador in London. After the Crimean
War he took part in the Vienna conference, but resigned afterwards both from the
ministry and from the Senate, where he returned in 1865. He received the Légion
d’honneur in 1853. Cf. entry in G. Vapereau, Dictionnaire des contemporains (Paris,
1865).
107
Biblioteca Naţională, ms., the Saint-Georges Collection, Packet CCVI. Dossier
no. 7, I, Paris, 1842–48.
dumitru brătianu 53
members of the 1848 provisional government and as future liberal

legislators after 1859. Brătianu’s planned doctorate in law was never
to be completed, however, owing to the fast pace of changes engulf-
ing the whole of Europe in 1848 and to his increasing involvement in
political activism.108 In Wallachia in the 1840s, as already mentioned,
the Ottoman- and Russian-sponsored government had created an effi-
cient police state which was stifling the voices of the emerging liberal,
nationalist opposition. “The state of everything here is to be pitied. Even
insects suffer . . .”,109 Rosetti noted in his diary on 24 September 1846
during a visit to his home country. Brătianu and his fellow-expatriates
in Paris did not spare efforts to mobilize public opinion on behalf of
the Romanian Principalities in their bid for independence from Otto-
man suzerainty and especially from the increasingly resented Russian
influence. When the new Prince Gheorghe Bibescu was appointed in
Wallachia in December 1842, Dumitru wasted no time in denouncing
him in the Parisian press as Russia’s man.110
Dumitru Brătianu also formed links with lesser-known figures
from the liberal, republican and radical opposition groups in France,
such as Désiré Pilette, a republican lawyer and fellow Freemason, co-
founder with Louis Blanc of the newspaper Les Ecoles and a co-editor
of La Réforme. By 1846, Pilette had become 1er surveillant of the
lodge ‘La Rose du Parfait Silence’, members of which, as already men-
tioned, included Constantin Rosetti, as one of the secretaries, the two
Brătianu brothers, Dumitru and Ion, and another friend and forty-
eighter, Alexandru Cretzianu.111 In spite of the theoretical interdic-
tion for Freemasons to involve themselves in politics, French lodges
became increasingly politicized during the July Monarchy and the Sec-
ond Republic, their members contributing prominently to the politi-
cal agitation of the pre-1848 period. From amongst the members of
the provisional government in 1848, for instance, only Lamartine and
the Montagnard Ledru-Rollin had no Masonic connections. When
a delegation of the Grand Orient de France, in full Masonic regalia,
was received by the French provisional government at the Hôtel de
Ville on 6 March 1848, offering the new regime the support of the
108
Anastasie Iordache, Dumitru Brătianu: diplomatul, doctrinarul liberal şí omul
politic (Bucharest, 2003), 907–59.
109
Rosetti, Diary, 186.
110
Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 14.
111
Ibid., 115, note 3. See p. 40 above.
forty thousand members of lodges nationwide, Adolphe Crémieux, the

new Minister for Justice, a Montagnard and a Mason himself, thanked
them, saying: “While it is true that Freemasonry has no direct politi-
cal objectives, high politics, the politics of humanity, has always been
close to the heart of the Masonic lodges.”112 Subsequently, the Grand
Orient de France allied itself openly and actively to the new regime
to such an extent that in the following decades it was customary for
the republican, liberal regime to be quasi-identified with Freemasonry
in the popular perceptions of the period. However, a law of 19 June
1849 decreed the closure of all secret societies, and surveillance of the
Masonic lodges continued well into the 1850s. In spite of this, in the
latter part of the nineteenth century, the Grand Orient evolved steadily
towards an increasingly engaged anti-clerical republicanism.113 It is
easy to see why the occult connections formed within the lodges could
evolve into cosmopolitan political alliances of republicans and radicals
biding their time for the changes to come. The Romanian students’
and émigrés’ Masonic affiliation was certainly more – or less – than
a youthful quest for spiritual and mystical enlightenment or a fasci-
nation with arcane ancient rituals: it was a form of sociability which
channelled their republican convictions and their participation in the
“politics of humanity” invoked by Crémieux.114
Dumitru Brătianu’s first letter to Michelet, the opening sentences of
which opened this section, and the correspondence that followed, were
part of an increasingly cohesive campaign by the Romanian expatriates
in the period 1846–1848 to win the voices of France’s élite intellectu-
als and journalists for the cause of the emerging Romanian nation. It
would perhaps be cynical to suspect the young disciple’s rather dithy-
rambic message of being simply a flattering, attention-seeking exercise:
the admiration must have been genuine. But, tuning into the Master’s
key ideas as well as into his phobias, Brătianu (signing himself ‘Dimi-
tri Bratiano’, as he was known to French speakers) did write what
Michelet wanted to hear: a hymn to France and to her global cultural-
112
Bulletin du Grand Orient de France, 4 (1848): 66–8.
113
Histoire des Franc-Maçons en France (Toulouse, 1981), ed. Daniel Ligou, 219–39.
For earlier links between Freemasonry and republicanism, see Margaret C. Jacob,
The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (London, 1981),
passim.
114
In the 1860s Adolphe Crémieux, who was Jewish, was to visit Romania to sup-
port legislation favourable to the country’s Jewish community. See my Conclusions,
p. 339. On Crémieux, see Georges Renauld, Adolphe Crémieux: homme d’état français,
juif et franc-maçon: le combat pour la République (Paris, 2002).
political mission. Having travelled to England, Germany and Italy, the

young man found them lacking in grandeur and intellectual range:
England was a commercialised “Anti-Christ”, he wrote, Germany was
without spirit, Italy was a desert. Conversely, France, imitated world-
wide even by those who claimed to despise her, was a “religion”, a new
“holy land”, the land of the Revolution when, “for the first time, God
showed Himself to man in all His greatness.”115
This flattering letter earned Brătianu an invitation to see the Mas-
ter. Michelet also requested his permission to read out parts of the
text in the amphitheatre of the Collège de France, without necessarily
mentioning the sender’s name. “I shall remain for ever obliged to you
for what you said about France”, the historian wrote on 23 March
1846, explaining that the letter had been hijacked for fifteen days by
his daughter, Adèle, and by his son-in-law, Alfred Dumesnil, which
explained the belated reply.116 This exchange is almost a case study
for the heightened emotionalism of the period’s correspondence, not
only between family members, but between members of groups shar-
ing political and intellectual goals. It is characteristic in the letters of,
say, Michelet, Quinet, Victor Hugo, and their networks of republican
allies, disciples, families and friends. There are abundant expressions
of brotherly and sisterly love between men and women alike, and also
abundant amounts of tears unashamedly shed as each party receives
news from the other. It was an emotional connection that was to prove
life-savingly essential in the years after the revolution of 1848 and the
coup d’état of 1851, when these networks found themselves uprooted
and dispersed by exile, arrests and marginalisation. Brătianu’s warm
reply encompasses the historian’s family in an imagined and desired
community of political friendship:
24 March 1846
Monsieur,
My letter or rather, the state of my soul, which you read in it, made you
shed tears, and I am not surprised; you are possessed of such an affec-
tionate heart! I also shed abundant tears reading yours, but they were
tears of joy. And for this I am grateful to you, Monsieur, and to Madame
your daughter and Monsieur your son-in-law, because such moments of
joy are rare in my life.
115
Michelet, Correspondance, 5: 64–70.
116
Ibid., 80–1.
I beg you to do whatever you will please with my letter, and with my
name and with my person. I shall always be proud to walk with my head
held high under your banner.117
Michelet’s son-in-law, Alfred Dumesnil, had arrived in Paris in 1837
from Rouen, accompanied by his mother, Adèle, the estranged wife of
a merchant from that city. Mother and son attended Jules Michelet’s
lectures at the Collège de France, and, after meeting the historian,
they became practically part of his household. The widowed Michelet
formed a close attachment to the intense, intellectual, Adèle Dumes-
nil, which only ended upon her death from cancer in 1842. The intel-
lectually gifted Alfred became an adopted son, partly overshadowing
Michelet’s less brilliant own son, Charles, and married the historian’s
daughter, Adèle, on 3 August 1843.118
In Paris, Alfred Dumesnil became part of an informal network of
young people including, among others, the writer Eugène Noël, the
soon to become famous Gustave Flaubert, both friends from Rouen,
and Charles-Louis Chassin, a philo-Hungarian who translated the
work of the Hungarian national poet Sandor Petöfi and was subse-
quently the biographer of Edgar Quinet. They all frequented the tiny
fraction of the radical republican bourgeoisie of the July Monarchy.
They shared youth, idealism and, unusually for a younger generation,
a complete adherence to their elders’ ideas, in this case the liberal,
anti-clerical-ideas circulated in the circles of their mentors, Michelet
and Quinet. They also developed in their letters and writings a
“romantic, gothic, lachrymose, narcissistic style” tinged with revolu-
tionary touches. Their emphasis on emotion, art, nature, the connect-
edness of man and woman, of adult and child was shared by the older
saint-simonians and fourièristes, as well as by popular writers such as
Eugène Sue, George Sand, Hugo, Vigny and Michelet.119 These young
men of the republican bourgeoisie passed this heritage on, while at the
same time building among themselves a cult of friendship, nurtured
117
Ibid., 81.
118
It is such emotionally convoluted relationships that have made Jules Michelet
a particularly attractive subject for psycho-biographies, and Arthur Mitzman has
explored them with gusto. See, for instance, his Michelet Historian: rebirth and roman-
ticism in nineteenth-century France (Yale University Press, 1990).
119
Arthur Mitzman, “Les amis d’Alfred Dumesnil: sociabilité juvénile et fraternité
révolutionnaire à la veille de 1848”, in 1848 – Révolutions et mutations au XIX e siècle,
Bulletin de la Société d’histoire de la révolution de 1848 et des révolutions du XIX e
siècle (1990), 68.
by Michelet’s description of the “fédérations provinciales”, based on

the “mystique of revolutionary brotherhood”.120 Although the social
group in which they belonged – the students of the ‘lycées’ and the
royal colleges – amounted, according to some calculations, to approx-
imately only two percent of the educated French population of the
July Monarchy, their role as transmitters of a republican heritage
should not be underestimated, in spite of their often unimpressive
political careers. (Both Alfred Dumesnil and Eugène Noël failed to be
elected to the Assemblée Nationale after February 1848.)121 It would
appear that their close-knit community of young ‘social romantics’
imploded after the collapse of the republican dream of 1848 and the
second marriage of Michelet to the much younger Athénaïs Mialaret.
However, although some sense of generational solidarity was lost, they
continued an almost subterranean work and developed their themes
within academia and the press and, not least, continued to build the
cosmopolitan republican networks into which they co-opted, among
other people, the East-European students of Jules Michelet.
Another young member of the group was Armand Lévy (b. 1827),
a law student who frequented Michelet’s lectures in 1847–1849. He
worked for the Journal des écoles, for Ledru-Rollin’s La Réforme and
joined Georges Sand, Barbès and Pierre Leroux among the contribu-
tors of La Vraie République, connections for which he was to be placed
under surveillance after the dramatic events of 13 June 1848 in Paris,
which resulted in the arrest and deportation of thousands of radical
republicans.122 After a brief self-imposed exile in London, upon his
return to Paris he joined the entourage of Adam Mickiewicz, whose
secretary and translator he became. In the 1850s, as will be shown
later in this account, he was to become an important member of the
Franco-Romanian coterie and to contribute in a major way to their
propaganda.
Although Edgar Quinet had resigned, as shown, from the College de
France in 1845, the Romanians were understandably keen to include
him among their circle of supporters. On 1 January 1847, led by their
friend Paul Bataillard – the anthropologist and future historian of the
Central European Gypsies – they visited Quinet at home and presented
120
Ibid., 70.
121
Ibid., 68.
122
N. P. Smochină, “Sur les émigrés roumains à Paris de 1850 à 1856”, Mélanges de
l’école roumaine en France, 11 (1933): 155–203, 168.
him with a collective letter with all their signatures. “. . . Unaware of

what I might have done to deserve this precious tribute, I must see
in it an earnest appeal addressed to me on behalf of the Moldo-
Wallachian nation”, Quinet responded, adding:
You possess everything that confers immortal rights, a tradition, an
awakening literature, a language of your own – related to ours . . . You are
surrounded, submerged by powerful enemies . . . But there exists some-
thing more powerful, more invincible, more indestructible than all the
souls on earth . . . it is the heroic spirit of nationality . . . if it propagates,
nothing will overpower you.123
Both Michelet and Quinet were going to fulfil their promises of sup-
port in the 1850s, in the intense years around the Crimean War and
the Congress of Paris.
Brătianu was not content simply with seeking the adherence of
republicans in Paris, and courted, rather indiscriminately, personali-
ties of widely contrasting political persuasions, with less than tangible
results. In March 1847 he sent Count Charles Montalembert, one of
the chief liberal Catholics of the day, known for his Polish sympathies,
a number of what can only be termed ‘propaganda’ books, among
which La Roumanie (1844) by the journalist, Freemason and one-time
professor in Bucharest, J. A. Vaillant. Keen to publicize his country’s
enlightened humanitarian credentials, he proudly informed Mon-
talembert of the decree voted by the Wallachian National Assembly on
11 February 1847 regarding the liberation of the Gypsy slaves, large
numbers of whom were still the property of the Church, the mon-
asteries and other public institutions.124 Montalembert, who had
passionately defended the rights of the Poles to independent nation-
hood in 1846,125 replied on 10 March 1847, saying, politely and vac-
uously: “[. . .] I am filled with deep sympathy for the cause of the
Moldo-Wallachians, for the independence and dignity of these pic-
turesque provinces, so intimately connected to the dignity and inde-
123
Speech as reported by Paul Bataillard in Anul 1848 în Principatele române,
6 vols. (Bucharest, 1902–1910), 1: 42–3.
124
A number of private individuals from the boyar class, including Rosetti himself,
had already emancipated their own Gypsy slaves, not unproblematically, given the
economic co-dependence that had evolved between landowners and slaves. For the
status of Gypsies in nineteenth-century Romania, see chiefly Viorel Achim, The Roma
in Romanian History (Budapest, 2004).
125
Montalembert, Discussion sur les affaires de Pologne, Chambre des Députés.
14 March 1846, Chambre des Pairs, 18–19 March 1846, in Durandin, Révolution,
101–3, 132–3.
pendence of civilized Europe.”126 This reply, civil though it was, was,

however, much less than the promise of a public defence of the Roma-
nian cause, which Brătianu was seeking.
Also in 1847, the founding members of the Society of Romanian
Students in Paris, created in 1845 under the patronage of Lamartine,
sent a message, probably penned by Dumitru Brătianu, to their patron,
the deputy and future member of the French provisional government
in 1848. Ostensibly they wrote to request official permission for hold-
ing meetings in the building of the Romanian library in Paris, in Place
Sorbonne, but the message was in fact a thinly disguised piece of
political publicity. The Romanians expected nothing less than a public
expression of support from the French government. Wishing to be
seen to spare the Ottoman suzerain’s sensibilities, they argued rather
convolutedly that, should the French government put forth such dec-
larations of support for the subjects of an Ottoman dominion, the
Ottoman ambassador in Paris could not fail to see in them a mark
of respect for the Porte itself. In addition, they hoped that, as one
day France was going to be more familiar with the Moldo-Wallachian
nation, she would welcome her little-known Latin relative into the sis-
terhood of civilized European nations:
Oh, Monsieur! If only man could penetrate the mystery enveloping the
Romanian nationality; then you would see the secret links, the provi-
dential links connecting Romania to France; if you knew how the Mol-
do-Wallachians, without ever having set eyes on France, or on her flag,
without ever having heard her voice, have learned, in a purely intuitive
way, to know her, understand and love her, yes, love her as her own
beloved sons do; if you only knew that, in our barbarity, seven hundred
leagues away from France, separated from her by many different states
and nations, we have transplanted France’s soul in our very midst; if you
only knew the powerful attraction that France’s prestige exercises on our
hearts; if you knew the cost in personal sacrifice of our pilgrimage to
Paris; [. . .] if you knew all this, Monsieur, your heart would break.127
The deprivations, the poverty, illnesses and deaths that decimated the
small Romanian community in Paris are all laid out by Brătianu in
almost Micheletian prose: the Romanians’ graves in Parisian cemeter-
ies, the occasional return of the exiles to their endlessly waiting parents
back home, whose deaths turned them into involuntary “parricides”,
126
127
Ibid., 130.
are presented as sacrifices made willingly for the sake of consolidating

the Franco-Romanian political, intellectual and spiritual alliance and
thereby securing a future for their nation.
The French government did not make any official statements as a
result of the Romanian students’ plea either before or after the events
of 1848. The petitioning, letters, and propaganda brochures remained
for years to come mere messages in bottles thrown at sea by this small
group of would-be revolutionaries, soon to be engulfed by the sweep-
ing waves of European revolutions.
Z
In spite of the tensions and frustrations of the years 1846 to 1848,
Constantin Rosetti somehow found the mental energy to clarify his
emotional situation and focus on his disorganized personal life. Per-
haps because he sensed difficult times lay ahead, he decided to finally
propose to Marie Grant. He got feverishly involved in the marriage
preparations and he ardently invited Marie, still in employment in
Bucharest in the Odobescu family, to give her notice and join him in
Vienna. After the less than passionate courtship of the early 1840s, it is
surprising to eavesdrop on Rosetti’s intense declarations as a husband-
to-be, but perhaps not so surprising to see to what extent he had found
a mother-substitute in Marie:
[. . .] for I am your son. You have given my life back to me, and my
youth, and all the hope and lost illusions. I am your spiritual son: I was
dead for the heavens and it was you, you alone, who cared enough to
pick up this dead body that they wanted to bury and that you resusci-
tated with your breath just like God breathed life into the first day.128
The marriage took place on 31 August 1847 in Plymouth, where Marie’s
widowed mother resided at the time.129 The couple decided to have
their union blessed in a second ceremony officiated in the groom’s
Eastern Orthodox religion. Even intimate, emotional events such as
romance and marriage did not escape the touch of politics. “[. . .] I
thought we should also get married in the Greek religion and this can-
not be done in Paris, because there is only one Russian priest there,
128
“the first day” in English in the original, in C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 29.
129
Cf. request addressed to the Foreign Office to forward Rosetti’s certificate of
baptism to Plymouth, PRO/FO 786, No. 13, 10 August 1847; marriage certificate in
the parish registers of East Stonehouse, Devon, 31 August 1847, Registration District
East Stonehouse, no. 155.
and I think I would rather lose you than owe you to a Russian”, Rosetti
wrote to his bride-to-be.130 The ceremony took place in Vienna, on
25 September 1847, in the Greek-Orthodox Church of St. George, with
the fellow-forty-eighters Nicolae and Alexandru Golescu as witnesses.
The Rosettis’ was going to be a long, dramatic, but devoted marriage,
punctuated by heroic gestures and tragedy – the kind of union of man
and woman that Michelet championed and was to celebrate in Légen-
des démocratiques du nord, “Madame Rosetti” in 1853–55.
Upon his return to Bucharest, Rosetti continued to receive the texts
of Michelet’s and Quinet’s lectures in the post.131 It was a difficult time:
the early months of his marriage to Marie proved a disappointment,
mainly because of his frustration with lacking scope for political activ-
ity. Financial difficulties and the political confusion in Romania added
to his emotional burden, as his Diary for that time suggests. He tried to
derive encouragement from reading the texts of Michelet’s course with
his wife and friends. “I feel totally discouraged because I am unable to
write”, he noted on 20 February 1848, “although my wife has been sub-
lime today: she was the woman according to Michelet: she encouraged
me, she forced me to write, and promised me her support.”132 Only
news of the revolution in France jolted him out of his lethargy. “[. . .]
as I went home yesterday”, he wrote on 2 March 1848, “I was greeted
by the news that France is a republic. I salute you from all my heart,
sublime nation! Christ of nations! Oh! May the heavens grant that you
will remember my own unfortunate nation!”133
130
Letter dated 24June/5 July 1847 in C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 28. ‘Greek’
was the term normally employed at the time to refer to the Eastern Orthodox rite in
the Balkans and Eastern Europe.
131
Entries for February 1848 in Rosetti, Diary, 226 and 232–3.
132
Ibid., 233.
133
Ibid., 235.
1848 IN PARIS AND EUROPE
Le pur évangile a vaincu. La République que nous

apportons au monde repose, avant tout, sur la divine
égalité des coeurs.
Quinet, Speech at the Collège de France, 1848134
La belle élite des jeunes Roumains que j’ai connus

et même un peu patronnés par mes conseils à Paris,
avant 1848, m’a laissé une prédilection cordiale pour
cette brillante et grave jeunesse.
Lamartine, 1861135
Some of the Romanian students and political émigrés took actual part
in the fighting of February 1848 on Parisian barricades, alongside the
Belgians, Irish, Poles, Hungarians, Piedmontese and others immigrant
communities.136 One of them, the historian Nicolae Bălcescu, tore a
piece of velvet upholstery off Louis Philippe’s throne at the Tuileries
and enclosed it in a letter to a friend in Bucharest, with the comment:
“Learn that this majestic nation has risen and the liberty of the world
has been redeemed.”137 On the same day, 24 February, the ‘Moldo-
Valaques’ put their library in Place Sorbonne at the disposal of the public
as a clinic for the wounded, equipped with first-aid medication. They
offered to their patron, Lamartine, now foreign minister, to organise
a Romanian legion in support of the new republic.138 Disappointingly,
the support of Lamartine, who ran foreign affairs until replaced by
Jules Bastide on 12 May 1848, was to be very limited, reflecting both
the contradictory nature of his own predilections – he was an inter-
134
Edgar Quinet, La République: Discours au Collège de France (Paris, 1848), 9.
135
La Voix de la Roumanie, ed. Ulysse de Marsillac, I, 3, 7 February 1861.
136
Among the documents from the Brătianu archives edited by Al. Cretzianu there
is an invitation to “citoyen Ratianni Demetreat” [sic] to attend a meeting at the Ecole
des Filles on rue Madame, on 12 March 1848, in view of forthcoming recruitment
into the National Guard.
137
Nicolae Bălcescu to Vasile Alecsandri, Paris, 24 February 1848, reproduced in
Nicolae Isar, Principatele române de la 1821 la 1848: Sub semnul renaşterii naţionale
(Bucharest, 2004), 299.
138
A list of subscribers to a fund for the French wounded, including the Brătianu
brothers and the Golescus, in Michelet, Correspondance, 5: 630–1, reproduced from
Le Peuple Constituant of 22 March 1848.
1848 in paris and europe 63
nationalist, but also a pacifist – as well as the limitations and ambigui-

ties of French international politics at the time.
In the wake of the victorious French revolution, most immigrant
communities – Hungarians, Piedmontese, Sardinians, Belgians, Swiss,
Poles – hoped that the new republican regime might supply arms
and logistical support for freedom fighters organized into ‘legions’ to
return to their respective countries, overthrow authoritarian regimes
or foreign domination there and fight for the unification and the
independence of emergent nation-states. Their hopes were seconded
in France by the extreme left, radicals and secret society conspirators –
people such as Auguste Blanqui, the new Paris prefect Marc Caussi-
dière, Armand Barbès, François-Vincent Raspail and public figures
such as George Sand – who would have wanted the see the revolu-
tion exported to the rest of Europe. While, controversially, military
incursions by legions of patriots into Belgium, the Rhine-land states
and Savoy were tacitly allowed to happen and were even condoned by
the more insubordinate civil servants of the new republic, and while
a military intervention in Northern Italy was considered by Lamar-
tine himself, the French foreign minister overtly maintained his paci-
fist, conciliatory stance, as illustrated in his well-known Manifesto to
Europe (“Manifeste aux Pouvoirs”) of 4 March 1848. This circular,
sent to the French diplomatic corps after consultation with the British
ambassador, Lord Normanby, made it clear to a concerned Europe that
republican France’s plans were peaceful and that she had no intention
of exporting the revolution or of supporting insurrections abroad. It
was an approach which perfectly coincided, in the late 1840s, with
Lord Palmerston’s own ultimate preference for peace with powerful,
authoritarian states at the expense of continental liberalism139 and of
freedom-fighters’ nation-building efforts, especially in East-Central
Europe, where such efforts would have alienated Russia and the Otto-
man Porte.
While proclaiming itself the “intellectual and cordial ally of popular
rights and progress”, the new French republic – Lamartine’s Manifesto
announced – would not consider pursuing “underhand or incendi-
ary propagandism among neighbouring states”, but only the “pros-
elytism of esteem and sympathy.” Lamartine was especially keen to
allay Russian fears. To Pavel Kiseleff,140 a former Russian governor of
139
Steele, Palmerston and Liberalism, 18.
140
In Russian Pavel Dmitryievich Kisseliov.
64 1848
the Romanian Principalities and a bête noire of the Romanian forty-

eighters, then chargé d’affaires in Paris, he offered assurances “that
he had no intention of allowing France to become involved in war
with Russia over the restoration of Polish independence.” Jules Bas-
tide, Lamartine’s successor from mid-May onwards, was an equally
resolute partisan of non-intervention.
However, confusingly and vaguely enough, the French republic did
not exclude the possibility of a military response “should conditions
incompatible with peace be offered to the French people.” Switzerland
and Italy were especially singled out as worthy of a more muscled sup-
port, if their nation-building efforts were to be challenged:
Thus we declare without reserve, that if the hour for the reconstruction
of any of the oppressed nations of Europe, or other parts of the world,
should seem to have arrived, according to the decrees of Providence;
if Switzerland, our faithful ally from the time of Francis I, should be
restrained or menaced in the progressive movement she is carrying out,
and which will impart new strength to the fasces of democratic govern-
ments; if the independent states of Italy should be invaded; if limits or
obstacles should be imposed on their internal changes; if there should
be any armed interference with their right of allying themselves together
for the purpose of consolidating an Italian nation, – the French republic
would think itself entitled to take up arms in defence of these legitimate
movements towards the improvement and nationhood of states.141
Nevertheless, to hopeful delegations of foreign freedom fighters –
Poles, English Chartists, Swiss, Irish, Romanians, Hungarians – Lamar-
tine offered the French government’s “Platonic sympathy”,142 but little
else. Not overtly, at least. While, on the surface, Lamartine’s desire
to “conciliate foreign governments”, including Russia, appears as his
main foreign policy objective, in practice his occasional choice of
ambassadors with avowed republican and radical sympathies and his
controversial appointment of “confidential agents” abroad, such as the
Dr. Louis Mandl in Bucharest, suggest perhaps hidden depths to a
diplomacy that was manifestly moderate. The question has sometimes
been asked of Lamartine’s diplomatic practices: did it contain elements
141
For the entire text of the Manifesto, see Lamartine, History of the French Revolu-
tion of 1848, (London, 1849), 3 sqq.
142
E. Tersen, Le Gouvernment provisoire et l’Europe (25 février–12 mai 1848) (Paris,
1948), quoted in Bénoni Jallaguier, Les idées politiques et sociales d’Alphonse de Lamar-
tine (Ph.D. Thesis, Université de Montpellier, Faculté de droit, Année 1950–1951,
1954), 209.
1848 in paris and europe 65
of secret republican diplomacy, in-built ambiguity, downright confu-

sion, or all three?143
Although his precise mandate remains largely unknown and he
remains a shadowy figure, Louis Mandl was nevertheless authorized to
write letters of recommendation for the members of the future Roma-
nian provisional government, as he did, for example in June 1848, when
he recommended the envoy Ion Ghica to the French ambassador in
Constantinople, General Jacques Aupick.144 As will be seen on numer-
ous occasions in the course of this narrative, the actions of the Roma-
nian, Polish and Hungarian forty-eighters were often seconded, in the
absence of the hoped-for high-level Western support for a “universal
revolution”, by semi-official or downright occult networks of helpers,
agents, disaffected republicans and exiled journalists, whose lives were
often as precarious as those of the revolutionaries whom they were try-
ing to help, and whose precise contribution remains largely unknown.
It seems certain that the Romanian émigrés were unaware of the more
perverse manoeuvrings in high political places, and of plans such as
the one – advanced apparently by their patron Lamartine himself –
which would have granted Austria dominion over the Danubian Prin-
cipalities in exchange for territorial losses in Northern Italy. The Poles
appear to have been equally oblivious that their liberal-constitutional
aspirations were being sacrificed for the sake of preserving good rela-
tions or even of securing an alliance with the Tsar.145
While unable to obtain arms or military support from the new
French republic, the Central and East-European émigrés lost no time
in attempting to import at least the contagious ‘spirit of 1848’ into their
own countries. As a result, most of Central and Eastern Europe was
engulfed by the revolutionary wave. From Vienna, where she worked
as a governess to the children of the Romanian Princess Alexandrina
Cantacuzino, Athénaïs Mialaret wrote to her future husband, Jules
Michelet: “Rather than making the slightest change to his Byzantine
policies, the old Prince Metternich has preferred to resign.”146 In addi-
tion to popular unrest caused by a general European context of eco-
nomic recession and deteriorating living standards in the late 1840s,
143
William Fortescue, Alphonse de Lamartine: A Political Biography (London, New
York, 1983), 210.
144
See p. 79 below.
145
Fortescue, Alphonse de Lamartine, 228–9.
146
Athénaïs Mialaret to Jules Michelet, 24 March 1848, in Michelet, Correspon-
dance, 5: 635.
66 1848
the old regimes had to face increasing demands for constitutionalism,

wider popular participation in politics and civic freedoms such as free-
dom of speech and association. Italy and Germany had to contend also
with pro-unification movements, while the nations of Habsburg – and
Ottoman-controlled Central-East Europe fought for independence,
national sovereignty and political solutions for their inter-ethnic con-
flicts. At the two extremes of Europe, only Britain and Russia escaped
the revolutionary upheavals, the former largely through negotiation
and reform, the latter through coercion and control.147
Having resigned in April 1845, Edgar Quinet had a lesser impact
on his East-European audience between that year and 6 March 1848,
when both he and Michelet were able to resume their courses after the
fall of the July Monarchy. On that day, he gave a speech intended to
be a celebration of a new beginning: the two chairs, his and Michelet’s,
closed down by “royalty”, were returned to their rightful leaders by the
“people”, he said. Their teachings were meant to create “new men” for
a “new society”, a “Christian” republic founded on the “divine equality
of hearts.” In contrast to the real-life non-interventionism of Lamar-
tine and Bastide, in Quinet’s mystical vision a rejuvenated France was
unafraid to take on its internationalist mission:
Resuscitated France brings life to the world! [. . .] This nation knows
that the work it has just accomplished was done for all nations, and she
knows that her work is good. Peoples now watching us, from England,
Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Hungary, Moldavia, Portugal, the Slavic
family, Russians (because you have men’s hearts and we know they
are beating in phase with ours), we all have one and the same cause.
Look! We have fought for you, too; let us share the joy of our victory
with you.148
147
For recent accounts of the 1848 revolutions in English see: Jonathan Sperber,
The European Revolutions, 1848–1851 (Cambridge University Press, 1984, 1995);
R. J. W. Evans and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, eds., The Revolutions in Europe,
1848–49: from reform to reaction (Oxford University Press, 2000) and Dieter Dowe
et al., eds., Europe in 1848 (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001).
148
Quinet, La République, 6.
1848–1849
BUCHAREST BETWEEN ST. PETERSBURG
AND CONSTANTINOPLE149
The eyes of the people here are turned towards the

British government for sympathy and assistance.
They feel that they have been neglected by Europe . . .
Colquhoun to Ponsonby, 25 May 1841150
In the wake of the February events, in early 1848 most Wallachian
forty-eighters were back in Romania, channelling their now re-ignited
revolutionary spirit via the activities of a “Committee for the liberation
of the homeland” which had sprung from the already existing political
and para-Masonic association “Justice-Brotherhood” (Dreptate-Frăţie),
founded in 1843 in Bucharest. Soon, everybody was referring to the
Committee (which comprised Rosetti, the Brătianus, the Golescus, and
others) in short-hand as the “Revolutionary Committee”. The homes
of the committee members were placed under surveillance by Prince
Gheorghe Bibescu, who refused his support when Rosetti submitted
his reformist project of national “renaissance” on the grounds that it
was premature.151
Broadly speaking, the liberals’ strategy was based on working with
Turkey against Russia’s growing interference and on hijacking the
spirit of the Tanzimat – the imperial reform programme launched by
Sultan Mahmud II in 1839 – to achieve reform in the Principalities.
Although ultimate independence from the Ottoman Porte remained in
the background of all nation-building projects from 1848 onwards, the
immediate threat was perceived as coming from Russia’s increasingly
tenacious expansionism in South-East Europe. Russia’s grip on the
Danubian Principalities had been steadily growing since the landmark
treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774, which established internationally
her self-assumed role as protectress of the Christian Orthodox peoples
149
The following section does not provide a comprehensive narrative of the 1848
revolution in Wallachia. For a recent, serviceable and brief English-language account,
see Lothar Maier, “The Revolution of 1848 in Moldavia and Wallachia”, in Europe in
1848, ed. Dowe et al., 186–209.
150
Florescu, The Struggle Against Russia, 179.
151
Bucur, C. A. Rosetti: mesianism, 49.
68 1848–1849
in the Ottoman Empire, while also granting her free navigation on

the Black Sea and, through the Straits, into the Mediterranean. The
growing strategic importance of the Principalities as a military out-
post against both Constantinople and the Habsburg Empire and as a
source of army supplies, Moldavia’s proximity to restive Poland and
its availability as a haven for Polish refugees, the importance of Danu-
bian navigation, were all crucial geopolitical considerations which led
to further Russian inroads into Ottoman suzerainty and Romanian
autonomy. The Treaty of Adrianople (1829) brought this process of
integration within the Russian sphere of influence to a close. By that
treaty, the Ottomans confirmed Greek and Serbian autonomy and
granted Russia concessions in the Principalities which turned the
provinces into virtual tsarist satellites.152
The Organic Statutes of 1831–1832, widely regarded today as Roma-
nia’s earliest modern constitutional blueprints, were drawn up under
Russian military occupation by a very competent administrator, Gen-
eral Pavel Kiseleff, in order to ensure a better administration of the
provinces, a faithful native aristocracy and, more generally, a less dis-
contented population in what Russia hoped would be a stable buffer
zone. The Statutes went some way towards a modernization of the
juridical and political language in Romania, as well towards introduc-
ing a ‘pre-parliamentary’ system which reduced the prerogatives of the
Prince, secularised law, until then almost exclusively administered by
the church, and created ‘ministries’ with paid, accountable civil ser-
vants and more clearly defined roles. The Statutes remained, however,
hybrid creations with many old regime features, such as maintaining
the right of the ruling prince to dissolve the country’s assemblies, and
almost completely ignoring civil liberties and rights. But they also
made attempts towards a separation of powers, they recognised, at
least in theory, the right of the Principalities to elect their rulers (until
then nominated and recognised by the Porte), distinguished between
the state treasury and the prince’s personal revenues and, generally
speaking, reduced the amount of arbitrariness in the country’s politi-
cal institutions.153 Yet, although it could be argued with hindsight that
152
David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, “Russian Foreign Policy: 1815–1917”,
in The Cambridge History of Russia, ed. Maureen Perrie, Dominic Lieven and Ronald
Suny, 3 vols. (2006), 2: 559.
153
For recent assessments of the Organic Statutes, see Ioan Stanomir, Naşterea
Constituţiei: limbaj şi drept în Principate până la 1866 (Bucharest, 2004), Ch. 3: “Para-
bucharest between st. petersburg and constantinople 69
having parallel, nearly identical sets of quasi-constitutional regulations

in both Wallachia and Moldavia benefited the nation-building plans
and the eventual unification of the Principalities, the humiliation of
Russian interference and the merciless requisitioning and spoliation
by the Russian administration during the frequent periods of military
occupation – which the Statutes endorsed – backfired, resulting in the
alienation of a considerable part of the progressive nobility and liberal
intelligentsia.
The Treaty of Unkiar Iskelesi (Hünkâr Iskelessi) (July 1833) between
a weakening Porte and Russia and that of Münchengrätz (September
1833) between Russia and the Habsburg Empire finalised a process
whereby the autocratic Eastern Powers encircled South-East Europe
within a defence system which left the region at the mercy of Aus-
tria and Russia until the Crimean War.154 In the Principalities, this led
to permanent tensions between several centres of power and influ-
ence: the princes, the national assemblies, the Russian and other for-
eign consulates and a still inchoate and ineffectual civil society. To
their credit, as already shown,155 the Wallachian boyar members of the
General Assembly – including, as already mentioned, the father of the
Brătianu brothers – protested when Russia insisted on the inclusion
in the Statutes of the so-called ‘additional article’ which required the
approval of both Russia and the Ottoman Empire before any consti-
tutional changes could be made. As a consequence, the Assembly was
dissolved twice before Russia secured the issue of a Turkish ferman
forcing the acceptance of the offensive article in May 1838.156 With
the Princes and the older, high-ranking boyars being perceived as little
more than Russia’s executants in the Principalities, by 1848, as men-
tioned, Russophobia had gripped the disaffected younger nobles, the
intellectuals and the new entrepreneurial classes, who all looked to the
West for support.
Arguably, the wide popular support that the revolutionary govern-
ment was to enjoy during its brief tenure of power between June and
September 1848 was at least partly due to promises of social reform
doxul regulamentar”, 95–127, and Regulamentul Organic, ed. Vitcu and Bădărău, esp.
59–61.
154
For more on these treaties and on political developments leading to 1848, see
the now classic study of Barbara Jelavich, Russia and the Formation of the Romanian
National State, 1821–1878 (Cambridge University Press, 1984).
155
See p. 28 above.
156
Jelavich, Russia, 36–7.
70 1848–1849
rather than merely independence from foreign domination. ‘Feudal’,

backward-looking provisions in the Organic Statutes had endorsed
boyar control over land ownership and agricultural exports. However,
by 1848, nobody seemed to remember that the Russian ‘President
Plenipotentiary’ Pavel Kiseleff himself, an opponent of serfdom, had
been overruled by the conservative, land-owning Romanian boyars in
drafting these articles. Popular mythology enshrined the Statutes as
emblems of Russian oppression rather than as expressions of native
boyar power. They were to be burned publicly in the last days of
the revolution of 1848 as Russian troops were about to occupy the
country.
Throughout the dramatic events which took place in France, Bucha-
rest and elsewhere in Europe in the spring and summer of 1848, the
British Consul in Bucharest, Robert Colquhoun, kept the Foreign
Office informed in great detail of developments in the Principalities.
Born in 1803 in Luss (Dumbartonshire), Robert Gilmour Colquhoun
(of the Colquhoun lairds of Camstradden) was educated at Pembroke
College, Oxford. He was appointed British Consul in the Danubian
Principalities in 1834 and promoted to the rank of Consul-General
in 1838, the year when the eighteen-year-old Effingham Grant, Marie
Rosetti’s brother, joined his service. Colquhoun spent more than
twenty years in Romania before being posted in Egypt in December
1858.157 It is, therefore, quite plausible to imagine that the close politi-
cal, diplomatic and personal contacts he built in the Principalities over
this long period of time must have led to a degree of affective involve-
ment with the land and the people, an involvement which, as consul,
he could not easily express or act upon. As will become apparent later,
throughout his official posting in Bucharest, the consul had to tread a
fine line between his government’s instructions and what might have
been his personal choices. In spite of personal sympathies, however,
he never seriously strayed from the official, accepted British policy
of sustaining the Ottoman Porte and preventing the break-up of the
Ottoman Empire, and his loyalty was duly rewarded both in Britain
and at the Porte. In 1840 he received from the Sultan the decoration
157
William Fraser, The Chiefs of Colquhoun and their Country, 2 vols. (Edinburgh,
1869), 2: 243–56. [I am grateful to Dr. Jane Rendall from the University of York (UK)
for this reference.] For a highly readable English-language account of Colquhoun’s
involvement with the Romanian forty-eighters, see Florescu, The Struggle against
Russia.
Nishin Iftichar, “First Class in Brilliants”, in acknowledgement of the

“valuable service rendered to Turkey”.158
Colquhoun wrote about everything, from invasions of locusts, fires,
earthquakes and cattle epidemics to the characters of the men in
power and the intrigues and clashes of the foreign consuls in Bucha-
rest. Although acutely aware of the decaying state of Romanian old-
regime society, he was among those who believed that the immediate
trigger for the intellectual and political unrest in Romania had been
due to French influence. “The recent events which have taken place
in France, have necessarily had some sort of Echo here, from the fact
of a great number of the young Wallachians having received their
education in Paris. (Many of them being Pupils of those Professors
whose classes were suppressed a short time ago, such as Messieurs
Michelet, Quinet etc.) and from the circumstance of Monsr Lamartine
having received many of these young men, having promised to take a
lively Interest in the affairs of the Principalities and having accepted
the office of Patron of a Society of Moldo-Wallachians established in
Paris”, he wrote to Lord Palmerston on 24 March 1848.159 The younger
boyars in the country were particularly susceptible to the impact of
the French “spirit”, the Consul wrote in another letter, singling out
Constantin Rosetti and Ion Ghica as the rising men to watch as lead-
ers of the “movement party” or “Liberal” Party, which, in Colquhoun’s
estimation, had become a “numerous and very strong party.”160
Mr. Rosetti, a man of ardent mind but not very sound ideas, strictly
honest and honorable, a poet of some merit in his country, a personal
friend to many of the present heads of affairs in France, was eager for
very vigorous measures. He had several interviews with the Prince, and
in these he opened his mind freely, offered to point out to the Hospodar
the numerous abuses of which his ministers and agents have for sev-
eral years been guilty. He urged on the Prince the necessity of making
immediate and large concessions to public opinion, such as liberty of
the Press; the responsibility of the Ministers; the taking off from the
peasant the very onerous burdens with which he is weighed down, and
to throw those burdens on the boïars and mercantile classes, who are at
present free from every sort of tax. He urged on the Prince the necessity
for dismissing the present Chamber of Assembly, elected under such
158
Ibid., 243.
159
Maria Dogaru and Apostol Stan, eds., Documente privind revoluţia de la 1848
în Ţările Române, B. Ţara Românească, 12 martie 1848–21 aprilie 1850 (Bucharest,
1983), 1.
160
Letter to Lord Palmerston, 5 April 1848, in Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 2.
72 1848–1849
glaring breach of the Organic Règlement, and demanded that the elec-
tive franchise so recently limited, by the simple misapplication or rather
misinterpretation of the Règlement, should be extended to all persons
possessed of landed property or houses. – The Prince to all these pro-
posals replied evasively, declared he himself was at heart more of a true
Wallachian Patriot than Mr Rosetti was, but that the moment was not
favorable, nor was Wallachia in a condition to receive such institutions;
and ended by urging Mr Rosetti to desist from holding at his house
meetings of the discontented, which caused a feeling of uneasiness to
exist throughout the City, highly injurious to public order. – Mr Rosetti
disclaimed holding seditious meetings. He said the reunions at his and
at two or three other houses were caused by the alarm created in their
minds by measures of precaution which appeared to have been taken
by the Prince himself and some of the most obnoxious of his Ministers,
such as the removing at mid-day [of ] the Central Caisse and Hospital
and Metropolitan funds from their usual place to the Public Treasury;
the report that during several nights the Minister of the Interior, Mr
Villara and the Aga of Police (both men thoroughly detested) had been
removing from the City all their valuable property, money and papers.161
Colquhoun seems to have had closer affinities with Ion Ghica, whom
he considered a “cool calculating man”, a pragmatist with whom,
unlike with the excitable Rosetti, he could have reasoned discussions:
In the many conversations I have had with him, I have always tried to
bring him to view his Country in a light which I know to be unpopular
here, but which I consider to be the only one which will be recognised
by Her Majesty’s Government, namely as forming a part of the Otto-
man Empire. [. . .] The Russian Consul General, Mr Kotzebue, requested
the above two [i.e. Rosetti and Ghyka] and a few more of their party
to call on him, and he then after asking what they required, told them
that on the first appearance of any outbreak he would in four days have
a corps of armée of occupation in the Provinces and thus they would
bring on themselves the very evil which they, as patriotic Wallachians,
so much dreaded, a Russian occupation; but he promised in the event
of their desisting from any violent measure to use his endeavors to get
the abuses, of which they complained, redressed by the Prince. For the
moment the matters are quiet, but an anxious eye is still turned towards
the North, and on Intelligence from it will depend the course which the
Liberal Party here will take.162
161
Colquhoun to Palmerston, 6 April 1848, in 1848 la români, ed. Bodea, 1:
344–7.
162
Ibid., 346–7. Ion Ghica, whose name sometimes appears as Ghyka in foreign-
language sources, was three times Prime Minister of Romania between 1866 and 1871
and was the Romanian Ambassador in London from 1881 to 1889.
Not only did Colquhoun emphasise the degree of Russian influence

in the Principalities, but he also repeatedly pointed out to the British
Foreign Secretary that the Romanians were far from acting in isola-
tion in the Balkans and South-East Europe, and that the Principalities
were a haven and transit point for Polish agitators. “There has been for
some time past a constant passage of persons connexed with Poland
through the Provinces, and last week seven persons of that nation who
were residing here under a species of incognito left this for Moldavia
and Gallicia”, he wrote on 6 April 1848.163 In neighbouring Moldavia,
conspiratorial activities were at their height after the brutal repression
of an elite-driven uprising in late March, which had turned from a
limited coup against the Russian-sponsored prince Mihail Sturdza into
a broader movement with liberal-constitutional aspirations. The upris-
ing in fact involved nothing more than the presentation of a reform
project by opposition liberal-oriented boyars to the prince. A fearful
Sturdza, however, over-reacted, the army was sent, and the clashes
resulted in an unspecified number of deaths and some 300 arrests.
The rebellious boyars, including the leading Moldavian forty-eighter
Mihail Kogălniceanu, as well as the future ruling Prince Alexandru
Ioan Cuza, fled to neighbouring Transylvania and Bukovina, where
they formed a Revolutionary Committee in exile.164 Having decimated
the liberal-reformist opposition, Prince Sturdza appealed for Russian
troops to be stationed along the borders, thus initiating a chain of
events which ended in the tsarist army intervening both in Wallachia
and in Transylvania.165
The British Foreign Secretary’s instructions to his man in Bucharest
were clear, and Colquhoun kept to their spirit consistently throughout
the crisis of 1848–49:
163
Ibid., 347. One of these Polish agitators, Piotr Butkiewicz, estimated at 500 the
number of Polish agents in Moldavia around 1848–49. See the entry on Butkiewicz in
Daniela Buşă, ed, Călători străini despre Ţările Române în secolul al XIX-lea (Bucha-
rest, 2009) new series, 5: 344.
164
For a short English-language account of events in 1848 Moldavia see Hitchins,
The Romanians, 1774–1866, 237–8.
165
For a detailed account of the March 1848 events in Moldavia largely based on
Russian consular reports, see Gheorghe Platon, “Revoluţia de la 1848 în Moldova. Noi
puncte de reper şi referinţă,” in idem, De la constituirea naţiunii la marea unire: stu-
dii de istorie modernă, 6 vols. (Iaşi, 1995–2005) 5: 47–81. For the Moldavian Prince’s
request for troops in a memoir to the Russian Chancellor Nesselrode, 6 April 1848,
see idem, 62.
74 1848–1849
[. . .] I have to instruct you to take every opportunity of impressing upon

the leading men with whom you may have opportunities of communi-
cating that the present connection of Wallachia with the Porte affords
to that Province as much practical independence as it could hope to
enjoy permanently in any other way for Wallachia is not large enough
nor strong enough to maintain its independence as a separate State, and
it might probably not fare better under any other dominion than it now
does under the easy supremacy of the Porte.166
Eyes were also turned towards Transylvania, where brewing rebel-
lion against the Habsburg dynasty had also been encouraged by the
French revolution of February. In the Hungarian Diet, a call for con-
stitutional and national rights eloquently launched on 3 March 1848
by the radical tribune Lajos Kossuth had inflamed the youth and the
reformists in Buda-Pest, unleashing a chain of events that gripped the
Austrian Empire from the spring of 1848 to the autumn of 1849. Fol-
lowing closely in the footsteps of the Magyars were the Poles, Serbs,
Czechs, Romanians and the other ethnic minorities of the empire,
whose degree of allegiance to the imperial dynastic principle varied,
but who, at the same time, were wary of the “cultural-linguistic agenda
of ‘Magyarization’ ” which the Hungarian separatist government had
been sponsoring.167
The Wallachian government of Prince Bibescu was rightly suspi-
cious of contacts with Transylvania and, as Colquhoun informed Lord
Palmerston on 27 May, continued “to prevent the introduction into
the Country of all Journals having any allusion to these parts. The
Transylvanian Journal [Gazeta de Transilvania] (published in the
Wallachian Language) which is one of the most free spoken of mod-
ern German Papers, has been excluded form the Country. It has lately
had a series of very clever articles on the close relationship existing
between these Provinces and Transylvania, and has repeatedly held
out offers of fraternization. A Wallachian Paper which had transcribed
some of these has been suppressed, which perhaps is unfair, as the
Censorship is very severe and the Articles should have been stopped
before going to Press. As the Editor, however, is known to have been
of liberal principles he is considered as having been the victim of a
guet à pens.”168
166
Palmerston to Colquhoun, 21 May 1848, in Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan,
9–10.
167
R. J. W. Evans, “1848–1849 in the Habsburg Monarchy”, in The Revolutions, ed.
Evans and von Strandmann, 192.
168
Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 10.
The Transylvanian connection remained uppermost in the minds of

the Wallachian government and of the Russian special envoy, General
Alexander Osipovich Duhamel (Dyugamel), Tsar Nicholas’ own aide-
de-camp, who urged the prince “to take the most stringent measures
to prevent the Wallachians of this side of the Carpathians from going
to Hermannstadt [today’s Sibiu] and Cronstadt [today’s Braşov], and to
refuse admissions to the Journals of Transylvania, which most loudly
urge the Wallachians here to fraternize and make common cause with
their Brothers and co-religionists.”169 Duhamel’s memoirs, published
posthumously in 1885, show that the Russian General’s appraisal of
the situation in the Principalities could not have been more accurate.
He was aware that the events about to unfold were predominantly
directed against Russia as protecting power rather than against the
suzerain Porte. “Not unnaturally, given the state of minds in the Prin-
cipalities, the arrival of a representative of the autocratic tsar, sent there
to protect law and order, was bound to be regarded with hostility”, he
wrote. “Me, they started to malign both in prose and in verse [. . .]” He
noted too the involvement of the French and British consulates which,
he commented, had become real “foci of insurrection”.170 Duhamel
made no secret of his preferred solution to the “Romanian question”.
In a memoir to Chancellor Nesselrode of 1 October 1849 he proposed
the incorporation of the two principalities into the Russian empire.171
In spite of Russian threats and British fears, both the national and
the international networks were in place and ready for the unfold-
ing of events which, by early June 1848, proved unstoppable. The
June rebellion in Wallachia was peaceful, but brisk and determined.
As the national militia, created largely by the Russian ‘president
plenipotentiary’ Pavel Kiseleff in the 1830s,172 was not trustworthy
from the revolutionaries’ viewpoint, steps were taken to organise a
national guard along the French model. Its command was entrusted to
General Gheorghe Magheru, a county governor in Oltenia (southern, or
‘Little’ Wallachia) and chief of the Wallachian irregular troops, formed
mainly of free peasants and serfs. On 8 June, Ion Eliade Rădulescu,
one of the leading forty-eighters (and Rosetti’s future enemy), wrote
169
Colquhoun to Palmerston, 29 May 1848, in Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan,
11.
170
Fragments of Duhamel’s Autobiography in Călători străini, ed. Buşă, 5: 228, 230.
They were published originally in Russian as “Autobiografia A. O. Dugamela”, chap-
ters 12–16, in Russkij Arkhiv 7 (1885): 370–404.
171
Călători străini, ed. Buşă, 5: 245.
172
See Regulamentul Organic, ed. Vitcu and Bădărău, 35–6.
76 1848–1849
to the General from the ‘national camp’ set up by the revolutionaries

at Islaz:
My dear Sir,
The needs and interests of the nation have speeded up things above our
heads. Had it not started now, the cause would have been lost. I am,
therefore, writing to inform you that last night I arrived in Islaz and in
the name of God, we are starting. At the same time, things will start in
R. Vîlcii and Ploieşti. In Bucharest all is ready. More the 3,000 associates
of ours are awaiting our signal. A man has been sent to Constantinople,
another to Paris and others to other foreign cabinets. The agreed Procla-
mation has been printed: it is the basis for the uprising. Myself, had I not
left Bucharest, would have been arrested. Do not, therefore, blame me
for the rush. Victory is assured; there is not one single man, one single
boiar in Bucharest who rejects the principles of reform. The Turkish
Commissar himself [Talaat Effendi], now in Bucharest, found that they
are neither childish, nor harming to the Porte. The Prince will have to
either accept it or not; should he accept, the cause will be won, if not,
he falls, he loses his right to rule, for the happiness of the Romanians
cannot be sacrificed for the interests of one man.173
The plan was for Magheru to lead his troops from Caracal, in Little
Wallachia, where they were stationed, to the county seat, Craiova,
where Eliade and other revolutionary leaders were going to converge,
form a provisional government and issue the Proclamation to the
nation. On 11 June Prince Bibescu’s government itself made an appeal
to the same Magheru asking him to “crush” the “rebels” at Islaz, but
the General had already made his choice.174 Memoirs by participants
show that, even in those early days, the revolutionary movement was
less monolithic than presented in the heroic narrative handed down to
us by traditional historiography. For a few days in June 1848, Roma-
nia had two would-be provisional governments, one in Oltenia and
one in Bucharest, announcing the later tensions between the moder-
ates led by Eliade Rădulescu (a group which included Christian Tell
and Ştefan Golescu) and the radicals led by Rosetti and the Brătianus.175
The crowds gathering in Craiova and Bucharest were unaware of such
divisions, however, and to them, the Proclamation appeared to be
173
1848 la români, ed. Bodea, 1: 532.
174
Alexandru Bălintescu and Horia Nestorescu-Bălceşti, eds., Arhiva Generalului
Magheru: Catalog, (Rîmnicu Vîlcea, 1989), Doc. Inv. No. 2353.
175
Such memoirs were written, for example, by Nicolae Pleşoianu and A. Christofi.
Cf. fragments from Pleşoianu’s text in 1848 la români, ed. Bodea, 3: 211–25.
issued by a cohesive government emanating from the will of a ‘sover-

eign’ nation united by a common cause: constitutionalism.
The Proclamation, most certainly the outcome of collective author-
ship, was read out to a large gathering of peasants and members of
the militia at Islaz. It was headed with the words: “In the name of
the Romanian people. Respect for property. Respect for persons” and
called upon the Porte, France, Germany and England to “arbitrate”
and support the Romanians in their demands for a constitutional, rep-
resentative political regime and for national autonomy.176 The prospec-
tive regime was a constitutional monarchy with a native prince elected
for five years from all classes. The Proclamation also demanded the
abolition of privileges and ranks, ministerial accountability, equal civil
rights, equal political rights for “all compatriots of another faith”, the
emancipation of the Jews and liberation of the Gypsy slaves, universal
taxation, rights of assembly, the creation of a national guard and of a
national bank; the nationalisation of monasteries’ assets, the abolition
of labour services and distribution of land to the peasants, equal edu-
cation for both sexes, the abolition of torture and of the death penalty;
and the right to have a Romanian national appointed as diplomatic
representative in the Ottoman capital. Crucially in a revolution largely
initiated by intellectuals and journalists, the Proclamation demanded
freedom of the press, a civic right which the forty-eighters were to
defend for the rest of their active lives. “The freedom of the press can
harm nobody except the sons of darkness”, read the article.177
The union of the two Romanian Principalities was kept out of the
text of the Proclamation, but was voiced elsewhere, for instance in arti-
cles in Rosetti’s newspaper Pruncul român (The Romanian Infant) (13
July and 26 July 1848) and in Popolul suveran (The Sovereign People)
of 19 July 1848, which urged the National Assembly to champion the
necessity of the union. The Moldavian boyars – now refugees in Braşov
(Transylvania) and Chernowitz (Bukovina) after their own unsuccess-
ful attempt at mounting an insurrection – had also demanded national
union in a document entitled Prinţipiile noastre pentru reformarea
patriei (Our principles for the homeland’s reformation) of 12/24 May
1848 and in Dorinţele Partidei Naţionale din Moldova (Demands of
176
For the text of the Proclamation, see 1848 la români, ed. Bodea, 1: 533–41.
177
Drace-Francis, The Making of Modern Romanian Culture, 137.
78 1848–1849
the National Party of Moldavia) written in August.178 The circulation

of the latter document remains unknown so far, but it is considered
the “most comprehensive programme of the Romanian revolution of
1848.”179 The Moldavian reformers, now liberated from the constraints
of real-life revolution, now appeared less reluctant to give free rein to
their actual aspirations.180
A constituent assembly of 250 members was to elected by all voters
above the age of twenty-one, irrespective of property qualifications or
religion, but conditional on a “good reputation.”181 The assembly –
never elected, due to the untimely end of the new democratic regime
in September – was to debate the 21 articles of the Proclamation and
write up a Constitution enshrining a new nation of “equal citizens”.
The crowds assembled at Islaz were urged to keep the faith:
Romanian brethren! Do not be afraid of unlawful intervention from
outside, for gone are the times of coercion and might. But do maintain
the order within. Enrol in the national guard to defend your rights and
to form a crusade of all classes at home and a crusade of sister nations
abroad. Gather under the banners of the fatherland. The three national
colours are the rainbow of hope. The cross above them will remind Rus-
sia that it is a Christian power. A cross will be erected on the border,
and the Russian will not be able to trespass without first stepping over
the cross, which he reveres. [. . .] Until now, Russia has maintained that
it is the guarantor of our rights. We, in our appeal, are only asking for
our rights and we protest in the chancelleries of the Sublime Porte, of
France, Germany and England, against all invasion of our land which
might endanger our common happiness and our independence.182
Like the Moldavian Principles and Demands, the Islaz Proclamation is
a foundational document for modern Romania: it marked the begin-
ning of a new approach to building the country’s political institutions
and its constitutional set-up and altered the very language in which
this new approach was framed: the Slavic terms ‘pravilă’ and ‘sloboze-
nie’, for instance, gave way to the neo-Romance ‘law’ and ‘liberty’,
and the word ‘censorship’ was used for the first time, choices, among
many others, which attempted to initiate a cultural shift from an
178
Constantin Nuţu, Maria Totu, eds, Culegere de texte privind istoria modernă
a României (1848–1878) (Bucharest, 1978), 263, 280, 284. For the Moldavian “Prin-
ciples”, see also Platon, De la constituirea naţiunii, 5: 63.
179
Berindei, Revoluţia română, 172.
180
Stanomir, Naşterea Constituţiei, 236.
181
Berindei, Revoluţia română, 171.
182
1848 la români, ed. Bodea, 1: 540–1.
ancien régime, Slavic, ‘Eastern’ ethos to a ‘Western’-inspired political

culture.183 For all intents and purposes, the Proclamation was meant
to function as a pre-constitution and, in order to create a wide popu-
lar appeal among masses for whom the new concepts of ‘sovereignty’,
‘representatives’ and ‘deputies’ might have sounded arcane, the revo-
lutionary leaders sent ‘propaganda commissars’ into provincial towns
and villages to spread the message in a more accessible vocabulary. In
moments of crisis during subsequent month, as will be seen, popular
support for the provisional government was substantial, in spite of
the fact that the social and economic stipulations of the Proclama-
tion were never enacted. If it is true that “poetry and fine phrases [. . .]
defeated the class struggle”184 in 1848, it may be equally true to say
that the surge of enthusiasm which they generated carried the masses
towards a new awareness of their power as a nation. The speeches,
Rosetti’s newspaper Pruncul român and other media were crucial in
creating the new language for the emerging national discourse.185 The
text of the Proclamation itself was circulated at the time in Romanian,
French and German and smuggled, undoubtedly at some risk, into
Transylvania, where it was published in some the main intellectual
centres of the Transylvanian Romanians, Blaj and Braşov.186
The would-be leaders of a new Romania sought international sup-
port from the early days of their insurrection. Lamartine’s confidential
agent to Wallachia, Dr. Louis Mandl, recommended the envoy Ion
Ghica to the French Ambassador in Constantinople, General Aupick,
on 14 June. “Wallachia and Moldavia are currently Russian provinces’,
Dr. Mandl wrote. “All the intelligent sections of the country are in
revolt against this administration; they are ready to start a revolution,
an enterprise which could meet with success if the threat of a Russian
intervention were not constantly put forth. The ruling prince himself
183
For the impact on the Islaz Proclamation of the French Constitution of 1791
and the Belgian Constitution of 1831, see I. C. Filitti, Izvoarele constituţiei de la 1866
(Bucharest, 1934), 1–14, and Stanomir, Naşterea Constituţiei, chapter 5.
184
Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (London, 1986; first published 1977).
185
For the role of Rosetti’s paper and a catalogue of the Romanian periodicals
around 1848 see Vasile Netea, “Presa română în timpul revoluţiei de la 1848” in
Revoluţia de la 1848 în Ţările Române: culegere de studii, ed. N. Adăniloaie and Dan
Berindei, (Bucharest, 1974), 145–83. Cf. also Drace-Francis, The Making of Modern
Romanian Culture, 138–9.
186
Vlad Georgescu, Mémoires et projets de réforme dans les principautés roumaines,
1831–1848: répertoire et textes avec un supplément pour les années 1769–1830 (Bucha-
rest, 1972), 154. The collection reproduces the text of the Proclamation in French,
144–54.
80 1848–1849
is said to incline towards reform, but is being prevented by Russia. The

country’s national party has therefore decided to send a confidential
envoy, Mr. Ghica (Jean) to Constantinople to effect an understanding
with the Turkish Cabinet. He hopes that you, Monsieur le Général,
will assist him in this enterprise with all the moral support that you
will be able to offer.[. . .]”187
However, once in the Ottoman capital, the Wallachian envoy was
offered what he described as the customary “brief and vaguely idyl-
lic exposé of the pacific sentiments animating the government of the
Republic and assurances that all the nations aspiring to an indepen-
dent political life were entitled to expect the support of the French
Republic.”188 This reflected both the essence of Lamartine’s Manifesto
and the policy of non-intervention continued by his successor, Jules
Bastide. Responding to an interpellation on the Romanian Principali-
ties from the deputy Armand Lherbette189 in the Constituent Assembly
on 5 June, Bastide (a former editor of Le National, and an acquain-
tance of the ‘Franco-Roumains’) said rather vaguely and, as will be
seen, inconsequentially, that the French government “was not going to
neglect any action meant to safeguard – in this respect, as in others –
the security and honour of France, and the democratic principles that
we represent.”190
Meanwhile, in Bucharest on 23 June (according to the Gregorian
calendar), and before abdicating on 26 June and retreating to Tran-
sylvania, Prince Gheorghe Bibescu was forced to sign the new ‘Con-
stitution’ (i.e. the Islaz Proclamation) and formed a new government
which included some of the main protagonists of this narrative: Rosetti,
Nicolae and Ştefan Golescu, Nicolae Bălcescu, Gheorghe Magheru, the
younger of the Brătianu brothers, Ion, and Ion Eliade Rădulescu.191 A
collective oath to the new nation was sworn at a great public meeting
187
Letter to Vasile Alecsandri, London, February 1888, in Ion Ghica, Scrisori către
Vasile Alecsandri (Bucharest, 1997), 219–20. Written in the 1870s, the letters were first
published in a volume in 1885.
188
Ion Ghica, Amintiri din pribegia după 1848: noue scrisori către V. Alecsandri
(Bucharest. 1889), 21.
189
Armand-Jacques Lherbette (deputy in the Constituante and the Legislative
Assembly from 1831 to 1848) was a member of the dynastic left with republican sym-
pathies, but he routinely voted with the conservatives. He left politics after the coup
d’état of 1851. See entry in Vapereau, Dictionnaire universel des contemporains (Paris,
1858).
190
191
Marie Rosetti was, understandably, not a member of the Wallachian provisional
government in 1848, as suggested by what is obviously a slip of the pen in Iván T.
in Bucharest on 27 June. On that day, forty-eighters and people met

at Câmpia Libertăţii (Field of Liberty) for a ceremony of benediction
of the flags. Rosetti’s friend and business associate Henric Winter-
halder had brought over a press taken from their jointly-owned print-
ing shop, which was now carried in procession on a chariot drawn by
four horses draped in tri-colour ribbons.192 On top of the machine
stood Winterhalder himself and a fellow-revolutionary waving a tri-
colour flag, and next to them printers presenting people with fresh
sheets of printed paper straight from the press: on them was a poem
believed to be by Rosetti in which, significantly, he extolled the free-
dom of the press and the abolition of censorship, two objectives of the
revolution.193
Decrees enshrining the new rights, regulations and laws as an-
nounced by the June Proclamation were rushed out in swift succes-
sion. They established, among others, the abolition of boyar privilege,
the abolition of censorship, the establishment of a national guard, the
design of the new national tri-coloured (red, yellow, blue) flag,194 the
abolition of corporal and capital punishment, and the liberation of
political prisoners. Significantly, one of the new decrees provided for
the equality and right to naturalization of Romanian residents of dif-
ferent religions, notably Semitic, a decree which made two notable
forty-eighters and friends of Rosetti, the Austrian Henric Winterhalder
and the Jewish-Hungarian painter Constantin David Rosenthal, right-
ful citizens of their adoptive land.195 The Viennese Winterhalder had
arrived in Bucharest around 1828 and, despite the Russian occupation
and a severe plague epidemic, had decided to stay. He had met Rosetti,
Ion Brătianu and other forty-eighters during their military training in
the Romanian capital, and would later join them in Parisian exile until
1857. He was to become one of modern Romania’s first economists.
Rosenthal, who had been born in Pest, was already a relatively well-
known artist in Hungary and Austria, but his promising career was
Berend’s History Derailed: Central and Eastern Europe in the long nineteenth century
(University of California Press, 2003), 112.
192
For Henric Winterhalder and the “Rosetti-Winterhalder Establishment”, see
Part Two, 119–20.
193
Bucur, C. A. Rosetti: mesianism, 52–3.
194
The tri-coloured flag can be seen in Marie Rosetti’s portrait by C. D. Rosenthal,
1850 (Fig. 2).
195
Decree no. 393, 2 August 1848, signed by the Foreign Minister I. Voinescu II
and the Wallachian Lieutenancy (I. Eliade and Christian Tell), in 1848 la români, ed.
Bodea, 1: 647 sqq.
82 1848–1849
to be cut short by an untimely death during a conspiratorial mission

entrusted by Rosetti.
The peasants were advised to keep labouring in the fields for the
time being, but serfdom was de jure abolished and they were promised
their own land within three months. Landowners were given assur-
ances that their lands would not be nationalised, but that “plots of
land” from the large estates were to be allocated to the peasants.196 It
was one of a series of tactical delays in the government’s approach
to the land question, which was ultimately left unresolved in 1848.
Throughout these weeks of feverish activity, Rosetti’s new paper, Prun-
cul român, full of exhortations to revolutionary fervour, was published
regularly in an attempt to support the nation’s faith in a new Romania
of citizens and brothers, united under the older, para-Masonic slogan
“justice, brotherhood”.197
The Russian Consul Karl Efstafevich Kotsebu (Charles de Kotzebue)
left Wallachia, protesting against the violation of the Organic Statutes
to the Metropolitan Neophyte, the head of the Orthodox Church
and a member of the provisional government. 40,000 Russian troops
under the command of General Rűdiger had already been assembling
along the river Prut (the natural frontier between Moldavia and Rus-
sian Bessarabia), according to Colquhoun’s dispatch of 9 June.198 A
counter-revolutionary coup led by the Russian-trained Commander-
in-Chief of the militia, Colonel Ion Odobescu, Marie Rosetti’s former
employer and minister for war in the provisional government, and his
associate, Colonel Solomon,199 on 19 June/1 July (Julian and Gregorian
calendars) was defused, leaving 7 dead and 18 wounded.200 Rosetti, in
his quality of – surprisingly enough – Minister of the Police in the pro-
visional government, mediated negotiations for the release of the two
renegade officers, a fact which was later held against him by competing
196
Bucur, C. A. Rosetti: mesianim, 52–3.
197
The newspaper was to be continued as Românul in 1857, when Rosetti was
allowed to return to his country. Bucur, C. A. Rosetti: mesianism, 61.
198
199
Colonel Solomon resurfaced in 1853–4 when he helped the Russian and Austrian
authorities in their pursuit and prosecution of Oltenian military and locals who resisted
the Russian army before and during the Crimean War. See Part Two, p. 264, note 461.
200
The provisional government had to leave the capital on 19 June, but was rein-
stated by a popular insurgency. For further details on the counter-revolution of 19
June 1848 see Introduction in Anul 1848, 6: lix–lxi.
factions of the forty-eighters.201 The dead were buried with pomp after
a public ceremony on 4 July and attempts were made to compensate
the persons who had incurred material losses as a result of the trou-
bles. The provisional government did all it could to preserve its image
as the unsullied defender of the rule of law, as well as the repository of
the symbolic values enshrined in the June Constitution.
“Upwards of 20,000 persons were present – the ceremony passed off
most quietly – the Archbishop officiating”, Colquhoun informed Lord
Palmerston. “Mr. Eliade member of the Government after offering up
a Prayer for the welfare of the Country addressed the People entreating
them to forgive those who had been the cause of the Citizens’ Death;
he urged them to maintain a dignified but quiet attitude, and dismissed
them with a request that they would consider that Day as one of Mourn-
ing for a Brother and so in fact the Day was observed.”202
This incident, and a previous, anonymous, attempt against the life
of Prince Bibescu on 21 June, which the ‘Liberal Party’ publicly con-
demned, contributed to the state of tension, yet in spite of isolated
incidents, there was no widespread violence or disorder, and there-
fore no justification for the – apparently imminent – occupation of
the country by Turkish and Russian troops. Pending international
recognition of the Wallachian provisional government, Colquhoun’s
reports to the Foreign Office were unanimously positive as to the legal-
ity and order prevailing in the principality. The new ministers vowed
not to use public money or become involved militarily in Transylva-
nia until officially recognised. Nor did they accept salaries or other
income from the state budget: “a sense of real chivalrous honor per-
vades one or two of the Chiefs and so long as they maintain their
Influence I have no fear of the movement being stained by any Act of
violence”, Colquhoun assured Stratford Canning, the British ambas-
sador in Constantinople.203 The only potential threat could come from
the beleaguered first-class boyars:
201
Temporarily disgraced in June 1848, Colonel Odobescu was reinstated by the
Russian-appointed Caimacam C. Cantacuzino as early as 28 September 1848, and later
became General and War Minister.
202
Colquhoun to Palmerston, 4 July 1848, in Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan,
40–1 (the names ‘Eliade’ and ‘Heliade’ are interchangeable in the literature); see also
relevant documents in idem, especially 33 and 51–2. See also Robert Colquhoun,
Diary, ms. CCVI/4, the St Georges Collection, Romanian National Library, entry for
4 July 1848, 16.
203
Colquhoun to Stratford Canning, 29 June 1848, in Documente, ed. Dogaru and
Stan, 25.
84 1848–1849
The most perfect order reigns here, nor do I think this order will be
deranged, unless any reaction should take place among the old Boiars
(but these are few in number) who it is said send daily Messengers to
the Russian Consul urging him to re-establish the old order of things
and especially their long cherished Privileges, now struck at to the very
root but the Peasantry are already informed of the advantages promised
them; so are the Farmers, and the Merchants are almost without excep-
tion favourable to the new Constitution.204
Owing to machinations of the older boyars of the “reactionary party”,
to use Colquhoun’s words, the provisional government did indeed
retreat temporarily from the capital on 11 July:
“The tricolored flags which floated in every Street disappeared, as did
also the Cockades, and not a single National Guard was seen after 10
o’clock,” wrote Robert Colquhoun on that day. “– the City as it was
[sic] before the 23rd Ulto and so matters will remain till we can learn
of Prince Bibesco consent to return – a step I should consider it most
unpolitick in him to adopt; but it will be difficult for him to resist the
desire of power which is so strong in him [. . .].”205
In his text of 1855, “Madame Rosetti” – based on oral communica-
tions from the exiled Rosetti circle – Michelet shows, with his usual
flair for melodramatic detail, how the crowds rallied in support of the
beleaguered government after Marie tactically appeared in the streets
of Bucharest on 12 July, holding her baby daughter – the symbol of
the “infant republic”:
It was a sublime moment of heroic fraternity, of a grave joy, not with-
out a dark presage of things to come. The enemy was lying in wait. This
woman offering her infant to the fatherland would have wanted to give
out weapons, and she only had a banner – and a torn one at that – to
give. She gave away the shreds to the crowd as one would throw flowers
to martyrs.206
The provisional government was brought back to power under popu-
lar pressure on 13 July, which suggests that the support base of the
revolutionary movement in Wallachia was comprehensive enough
to justify Russian suspicion and British fears of a retaliatory Russian
occupation. Colquhoun’s loyalties must have been severely tested. His
personal sympathy for some of his Wallachian acquaintances and for
204
Colquhoun to Stratford Canning, 30 June 1848, in ibid., 28.
205
Ibid., 57.
206
Michelet, “Madame Rosetti”, in Légendes, 220.
their liberal-constitutional aspirations is reflected in his rather positive

reports to the Foreign Office about the largely peaceful state of the
province and the ambitious, if short-lived, achievements of the new
‘democracy’:
[. . .] I think that on the subject of the Press, the Wallachians will endeav-
our to obtain as extensive a Liberty as they can, the late Government was
so vexatiously strict on this subject that it was one of the first grievances
complained of – and with the example of Transylvania before them, they
are desirous of participating in the advantages which a well conducted
press holds on. Even during the last month of such great excitement,
I do not believe that in the Five Journals which have sprung into
existence, there have appeared as many articles which could really be
made a ground of complaint – and it is curious to observe the eager-
ness for news among the lower classes, most of whom unable to read
themselves, have readers who have their little assemblages in the evening
and who quietly disperse after attentively listening to the contents of
the Journals – formerly there were only two Journals, a German and a
Wallachian [. . .].207
Colquhoun requested official recognition for the new Romanian
régime from the Foreign Secretary, but he sent the dispatch via the
postal service ran by the Russian consulate.208 Predictably, the letter
was intercepted, and the Russian ambassador in London, Baron von
Brunnow, notified. In a lengthy letter sent to Palmerston on 17 July,
Brunnow rehearsed the well-known arguments about “Russia’s wish
to keep order and the occupation being within treaty rights”. “Rus-
sia could not allow the ‘Lamartines of Bucharest’ to carry out their
activities in an area so close to its own frontier”, the Russian diplo-
mat argued.209 Two days later Palmerston informed Brunnow that the
British government had no intention of recognising an independent
Wallachian government, as it still considered Wallachia to be under
Turkish suzerainty. However, the British did eventually recognize the
new Wallachian regime on 16 August, one day only after the Porte’s
official recognition.210
207
Colquhoun to Stratford Canning, 20 July 1848, in Documente, ed. Dogaru and
Stan, 69.
208
The only two mail services available to foreign consulates in Bucharest were
the Austrian and the Russian, a set-up which in practice led to the routine violation
of diplomatic correspondence. Cf. Dan Berindei, Diplomaţia românească modernă
(Bucharest, 1995), 61.
209
Ian W. Roberts, Nicholas I and the Russian Intervention in Hungary (London,
1991), 44.
210
Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 131, 133.
86 1848–1849
In spite of such encouraging signs, the days of the Wallachian revo-

lution were numbered, as Russian troops were already stationed in the
neighbouring province, Moldavia, where events had been less turbulent
perhaps, but equally indicative of a desire for change among the Roma-
nian population. The following excerpt from the same dispatch from
Colquhoun to Stratford Canning suggests not only the state of ferment
in both Danubian Principalities, but also the heightened atmosphere
of conspiracy, the collaborative nature of the revolutionary project, as
well as the fratricidal nature of the armed repression threatening it.
The insurrection in Moldavia had been suppressed quite easily, but
the province had continued to serve as a transit and meeting point of
Wallachian, Polish, Moldavian and Transylvanian agitators, under the
very nose of the gathering Russian and Turkish troops:
“A Mr. Julius Harris bearer of an English Passport, called on me on the
18th [July]”, wrote Robert Colquhoun on 20 July, “he was he says born
in Spain of English parents but I strongly suspect him of being one of
the many Poles, who have for some months resided in Moldovia [sic] –
he arrived from Romanou [sic] in Moldovia [sic] and returns to that
district today – he tells me he saw the Russian Troops now quartered at
Coppeau [sic] near Iassy, he describes them as most miserably ill accou-
tred – many of them without shoes and shirts; a third of their number,
he says are Poles, recently arrived from the Army of the Caucasus. There
are 34 officers Poles among them, men in the last stage of distress – he
also reports that there is now a large number of Polish refugees in the
Moldavian mountains, amounting to upwards to a thousand, of whom
nearly a half are armed with guns, the remainder have pikes and scythes,
but that these continually receive small supplies of fire arms from the
neighbouring Transylvanians. Mr. Harris reports the number of Troops
at Coppeau at about 3 000 – those at Berlat [sic] 1 600, but with a Park
of forty field pieces.”211
The notion that Polish agents and agitators had been active in the Prin-
cipalities for some time was corroborated by the French consul in the
Moldavian capital, Thions, who, on 19/31 July, reported to the foreign
ministry in Paris that “It is in the intention of the Romanian Princi-
palities to make their uprising coincide with that of the Poles of the
Grand Duchy of Warsaw, of Galicia, of Bukovina, Podolia, Volhynia
and Bessarabia. It is also said that in the Russian army occupying the
Principality of Moldavia, 7,500 Poles, among whom two generals, one
colonel and a large number of officers, are in agreement with the leaders
211
Ibid., 70.
of the [Romanian] movement against the Russians. I have been

informed that the Poles of Moldo-Wallachia are well-organised.”212
Aware of the inflammatory context, a cautious Colquhoun advised
the presumed Pole Julius Harris to leave Wallachia immediately. An
equally firm caution towards prudence was served by the Consul to his
Wallachian acquaintances, whom he advised to steer clear of “associa-
tions of such a nature.”213 The Consul gave himself credit for having
kept the members of the provisional government in Bucharest within
the boundaries of loyalty to the suzerain power, the Porte: “I have the
positive assurance of the most influential member of the Provisional
Government, Mr. Rosetti, given me last night that no resistance would
be made to the will of the Sultan, but that they hoped the [Turkish]
Commissioner would listen calmly to their grievances and by his rep-
resentations induce their Sovereign to grant them such Institutions as
are addressed to the present age”, he wrote to Canning for the second
time on 20 July.214
Only one day before, a document had been sent from St. Petersburg
to foreign cabinets which, though meant to calm Great Power fears,
must have sounded highly ominous to the embattled Wallachians.
In a circular dated 19 July, Nesselrode, the Russian foreign minister,
explained that the arrival of Russian troops in Moldavia was only a tem-
porary measure, justified by the existing treaties, an argument which
Lord Palmerston did not challenge throughout the remaining months
in power of the Romanian revolutionary government.215 However, the
Russian foreign minister’s statement that the Romanian revolutionar-
ies were drawing on “an alleged nationality, the origins of which are
lost in the darkness of centuries” and “the historical basis of which
never existed” must have sent shivers down Moldo-Wallachian spines.
Such views, which meant a rejection without appeal of the Romanians’
claims to unitary nationhood as the basis for a future, self-sufficient
state were refuted by one of Moldavia’s leading historians and a forty-
eighter himself, Mihail Kogălniceanu, in a well-known document of
212
Letter from the French consul in Moldavia, Thions, to Jules Bastide, the French
foreign minister, 19/31 July, in Arhivele Naţionale ale României, Revoluţia română de
la 1848 în context european, (Bucharest, 1998), 268. The surname ‘Thions’ refers to an
individual as yet unidentified outside sources cited in the Romanian historiography
of 1848.
213
214
Ibid., 71.
215
See Lord Palmerston’s response to Sir Dudley Stuart’s question in the House of
Commons on 1 September 1848, see p. 95 below.
88 1848–1849
August 1848.216 However, debates on ethnicity, history and traditions

proved academic in the face of de facto military occupation, and,
whether or not the occupation of Wallachia itself was ever intended
by Tsar Nicholas, or simply pushed above his head by his over-zealous
aide General Duhamel, the country was eventually occupied by both
Turkish and Russian troops.
First to arrive were the Ottomans. The special envoy, Suleyman
Pasha – the former Turkish ambassador in Paris – and the commander
of the troops, General Omer Pasha, were initially received as friends
and protectors upon their arrival in the Danubian port Giurgiu (Giur-
gevo) in late July. It was a momentous occasion, and the Romanians
hoped that the Ottomans would recognise and protect the new regime
and the new constitutional gains against Russia. Constantin Rosenthal
travelled to Giurgiu on his own initiative, without consulting with the
provisional government, to welcome the Turkish envoys and offer his
services. He flattered Omer Pasha by offering to paint his portrait in
oil and make lithograph copies, claiming, perhaps truthfully, that he
had been overwhelmed in Bucharest by commissions for the Ottoman
General’s likeness. Nothing is known about the projected oil portrait,
but the sketches were duly executed, as he wrote to Rosetti on 26 July
from Giurgiu, and one published etching shows the Pasha in his mili-
tary finery, what in real life would have been a blaze of golden frog-
gings and decorations.217
The British Consul, Colquhoun, had travelled to Giurgiu as well,
to observe and mediate the initial Ottoman-Wallachian negotiations
prior to the Ottomans’ arrival in Bucharest. No effort was spared in
trying to convey to the Ottomans the importance that the Romanians
attached to this solemn occasion. Upon their arrival in the capital
city, the Ottoman dignitaries were given a resplendent reception, and
Rosenthal was again involved: the procession passed under a trium-
phal arch of his design, built as an eclectic mix of Moorish, Gothic and
Romanic elements, adorned with crescents and topped by the effigy of
the suzerain Sultan Abdülmecid. The evening ended with an al fresco
216
Maier, “The Revolution”, 201. The text in question was entitled “Dorinţele parti-
dei naţionale” [The Demands of the National Party]. See p. 77 above.
217
The etching, first published anonymously in the Illustrierte Zeitung (Leipzig),
316, 21 July 1849, was attributed by Adrian Silvan Ionescu to Rosenthal. Cf. “Momen-
tul 1848 în plastica documentaristă”, Revista istorică, new series, 10, 5–6 (1999): 501–
18. Cf. also letter from Rosenthal to Rosetti (n French and in Romanian translation),
26 July 1848 in 1848 la români, ed. Bodea, 2: 773–6.
festivity in one of the city’s most elegant quarters: as midnight closed,

a firework display spelled out in sparkling lettering the words ‘Sultan’
and ‘Constitution’ above the heads of the jubilant crowds.218
As if responding to such subliminal messages, in early August
1848, Ottoman-Romanian negotiations seemed to proceed smoothly,
as expected. The Sultan recognised the new constitution and, in
exchange, demanded the appointment of a Lieutenancy to replace the
provisional government. This was agreed on the evening of 4 August,
at a major popular meeting in Bucharest, attended by 7,000 people,
into whose hands the provisional government deposited their resigna-
tion. The crowds went to the residence of the Pasha’s Secretary, where,
Colquhoun relates, “Turkish and National Airs were played and on
Mr. Thinghir [the Secretary]’s appearing at the window, a shout was
raised of ‘Vive le Sultan notre Auguste Souverain, Vive son Représen-
tant Suleyman Pasha et Vive la Constitution.’ ”219
The newly elected Lieutenancy was composed of Nicolae Golescu,
home minister, Ion Eliade Rădulescu, minister for ecclesiastic affairs
and General Christian Tell, commander of the militia, and was offi-
cially recognised by the Porte on 15 August. On behalf of Britain,
Colquhoun himself opened official diplomatic relations with the Wal-
lachian government the following day. After his reception at the Pal-
ace, the Consul was greeted by those assembled with cries of “Vive la
Reine Victoria, vive l’Angleterre.”220
218
Silvan Ionescu, “Momentul 1848”, 508.
219
Colquhoun to Palmerston, 5 August 1848, in Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan,
114.
220
Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 131, 133.
A TRANSYLVANIAN INTERLUDE
On 11 June 1848 Dumitru Brătianu had received his accreditation as

diplomatic agent in troubled Austria-Hungary, as the first diplomatic
representative of modern Romania.221 Until then, Romanian interests
abroad had been represented by officials of the Ottoman suzerain
power. He travelled via Vienna, where the situation was confused after
the collapse of the interim government led by Karl Ludwig von Fic-
quelmont, and reached Pest in late June. Since March, under popular
pressure, the Habsburg monarchy appeared to have imploded. Vienna
as the official centre of power in the Empire was now challenged by
Central European “staging-points in the multilateral contestation”
during the events of 1848–49:222 Milan, Buda-Pest,223 Prague, Lemberg,
Cracow, Timişoara, Braşov, Blaj and Cluj – to mention just a few of
the cities engulfed by the protests – were all bursting with revolu-
tionary ferment, political and territorial demands and potential multi-
ethnic strife. Only one element in the confusing political landscape of
1848–49 remained stable: the now beleaguered Habsburg dynasty and
the principle of dynastic loyalty as the pivotal centre of an otherwise
explosive multi-national conundrum.
After March and especially after the enactment of the April Laws
by the Hungarian Diet, the new Hungarian regime had been operat-
ing on the basis of a virtual, if brittle, parliamentary sovereignty and
autonomy from Austria. A reformist Hungarian government led by
Lajos Batthyány comprised the liberal István Széchenyi, the ‘roman-
tic hero’ Lajos Kossuth and the ‘man of the future’, Ferenc Deák.224
Embedded within, and extending beyond, the complex network of
constitutional, political, economic and military difficulties facing the
empire was the thorny nationalities question. The ethnic dilemmas of
the multi-national Austrian state would prove an obstacle to dialogue
and a main cause of the defeat of the revolutions in Austria, Hun-
gary, Transylvania and the Romanian Principalities. To summarise a
221
Anul 1848, 1: 515. Cf. also Iordache, Dumitru Brătianu, 90.
222
The Revolutions, ed. Evans and von Strandmann, 183.
223
Buda and Pest were still two separate, though contiguous, cities. They finally
united in 1873 to form the present-day Hungarian capital, Budapest.
224
The Revolutions, ed. Evans and von Strandmann, 187.
a transylvanian interlude 91
convoluted situation in simple terms, Croats, Serbs, Slovaks, Ruthenes

and Romanians turned against a would-be centralist, unified Hun-
garian state and “against a government which they perceived to be
Magyar- and noble-dominated, its political benefits outweighed by a
cultural-linguistic agenda of ‘Magyarization’ [. . .].”225 On the occasion
of a first in a series of national meetings in the Transylvanian town
Blaj, on April 30, five to six thousand Romanian peasants urged by
some of their intellectual leaders, initially declared themselves ready
to fight for their rights by constitutional, non-violent means.226 At the
time, the union of Transylvania to Hungary, ultimately sought by the
Hungarians, was still considered of minor importance, as the Roma-
nians were trying primarily to obtain their recognition as a ‘nation’
within the Austrian Empire and the civil and political rights such a
recognition would have entailed. However, as Hungarian pressures for
Transylvania’s merger with Hungary mounted, at their national con-
gress at Blaj on May 15–17, thirty thousand Romanians “proclaimed
the independence of the Romanian nation and its full equality with
the other nations of Transylvania and declared their intention of
maintaining its rights by creating a new political system based upon
liberal principles.”227 Both conservatives and liberals in the Magyar-
dominated Transylvanian government united and persisted in their
refusal to recognize the Romanians as a separate nation, and perceived
the links between the Transylvanian and Wallachian intellectuals as
an encouragement to separatism and to a ‘Greater Romania project’.
Consequently the Transylvanian Diet, in which the Romanians were
not represented, pronounced the union of Transylvania to Hungary on
30 May and Emperor Ferdinand, in refuge in Innsbruck, recognised
the union on June 10. It was against the backdrop of a solid Austrian-
Hungarian front on the issue of the Transylvanian Romanians that
Dumitru Brătianu arrived in Pest to negotiate with the Hungarian lead-
ers. His suggestions for a Romanian-Magyar defensive alliance against
the Austrians and the Russians – who were then poised for military
intervention against the insurrection – were initially waived aside by
Lajos Batthyány, the leader of the separatist Hungarian government.
A compromise subsequently proposed by the Hungarian side would
225
Idem, 192.
226
Keith Hitchins, A Nation Discovered: Romanian intellectuals in Transylvania
and the idea of nation, 1700–1848 (Bucharest, 1999), 184 sqq.
227
Ibid., 192.
92 a transylvanian interlude
have required the Romanians of Transylvania to unite with the Hun-

garians against the rebellious Serbs and Croatians in the province. This
proposal’s rejection by the Romanians opened the floodgates towards
imminent, full-scale civil war, which would soon see Transylvania’s
ethnic communities at each other’s throats.228
228
For a more extensive overview of the historical background to and the develop-
ment of the events in Transylvania in 1848–49, see Part Two, p. 135 sqq.
1848: EPILOGUE
It is not the men who have failed the events, but time
which has failed the men.
A. Ubicini, 1849229
Disillusioned with the possibility of reaching an agreement with the
Hungarians, Dumitru Brătianu left Pest in mid-June, travelling via
Sibiu, where he met with the leaders of the Transylvanian Romanian
action committee. On his return journey, on 30 June, in a letter to
Paul Bataillard, an embattled Brătianu sent his regards to the “much-
beloved” Michelet and Quinet. “Tell them of our revolution”, he urged
Bataillard:
The glory of the splendid Romanian revolution belongs to them. Let
them continue to show their sympathy. Should they abandon us now
when the struggle has just started, they would commit the most heinous
crime, because they put the weapons in our hands; Romania knows it.
They must demonstrate to the French the justness of our cause, which
is also theirs, because it is holy. They have powerful means at their dis-
posal: the university chair, the tribune, the press; and they have names
that are dear to French and Romanians alike, names known and revered
all over the world. We need energetic protests from France against any
foreign intervention in our affairs and we need weapons, two or three
superior officers expert in warfare, and above all, we need your hearts.230
However, the second French republic was now reeling in the after-
math of the violent June street movements in Paris, which marked
the victory of moderate republicans and conservatives against work-
ers, radicals and champions of the ‘social republic’. The pro-Romanian
sympathizers were now largely sidelined, imprisoned or exiled, and
the French government was even more cautious than before on the
international arena. Indulging in adventurous gesticulation in foreign
affairs, least of all over the Eastern Question, was not on Jules Bastide’s
agenda. The Romanians may have won French republican hearts, but
not French weapons and military expertise.
229
J. A. Ubicini, J. A. Ubicini, Mémoire justificatif de la révolution roumaine de 11/23
juin 1848, par les membres du gouvernment provisoire et délégués de l’émigration
valaque, au nom du people (Paris, 1849), 26–7.
230
94 1848
In mid-August, Dumitru Brătianu took part in a Romanian delega-

tion seeking further official endorsement of the Wallachian revolution-
ary constitution in the Ottoman capital. General Aupick, the French
Ambassador in Constantinople, was, as on previous occasions, sympa-
thetic to the Romanian cause, but his weakened authority in the Otto-
man capital was pitted against the more significant status of Stratford
Canning and that of the Russian Ambassador, Titoff. Aupick refused
to engage France in official diplomatic correspondence with Bucharest
and, when asked by the Porte whether the Sultan could rely on French
support in the event of an armed conflict with Russia, answered that
his instructions did not refer to such eventuality.231 In a private con-
versation with Ion Ghica, the confidential envoy of the Wallachian
provisional government in Constantinople, Aupick said, referring to
events in Paris after the June disturbances: “There is a civil war upon
us, my poor Ghika; now there is nothing left to stop the Russians from
entering your country.”232
Paul Bataillard, a trained archivist and anthropologist, had met and
befriended the Romanians at the Collège de France and in the lodge
‘La Rose du Parfait Silence’ in the mid-1840s. He had become espe-
cially close to Alexandru G. Golescu (also known as Golescu ‘Negru’, to
distinguish him from one of his Golescu cousins, nicknamed ‘Albu’).233
As envoy of the Wallachian government in Paris, Golescu-Negru often
had his mail re-directed, for reasons of security, to Bataillard’s address
at 2bis rue Jacob, and at La Jarrie, a property the Frenchman owned
near La Rochelle and where he was staying in August 1848. Bataillard’s
landlady was awed and clearly thrilled by the secrecy and the whiff of
international conspiracy associated with her tenant. “We may receive,
before our departure, the visit of Mr. Golesco, the Wallachian envoy
to the French Republic”, she wrote to a friend on 18 August 1848. “He
is keen to see Paul and thinks nothing of travelling a hundred leagues
to spend one day with him. Our poor Jarrie is way too dilapidated to
receive an ambassador, but he is an intimate friend of Paul’s and a
very good lad, he says. All the epistles from Wallachia addressed to the
Minister of Foreign Affairs [sic], etc., come here. These fat envelopes
covered in stamps and postmarked in Bucharest produce an incredibly
231
Idem, 28.
232
Ghica, Amintiri, 33.
233
‘Negru’ = black; ‘Albu’ = white. (Rom.).
1848: epilogue 95
powerful effect in our small town of Montfaucon and I am certain Paul

now passes for a conspirator.”234
Bataillard’s help was indeed called upon in the last weeks of the
doomed Romanian revolution. He had recently published articles in
Le National deploring the lack of French diplomatic interest in the
Eastern Question and especially in the manoeuvres of Russian troops
on the Moldavian border. “The hatred against the Russian is smoul-
dering in the heart of the Moldavians, as it is in the heart of the other
Romanians”, he wrote in one of his contributions on 10 August, hav-
ing received news of grain expropriations and other abuses committed
in Moldavia by the Russian occupying troops.235
Amidst rumours of an imminent occupation of Wallachia by the
Russian troops stationed in Moldavia, the Foreign Minister Ion (Jean)
Voinescu II sent an official protest to Lord Palmerston via Colquhoun.
Writing on behalf of the country and of the Princely Lieutenancy,
“officially recognised by His Excellency Suleyman Pasha, Minister for
Trade of the Sublime Porte and Extraordinary Envoy to the Principal-
ity of Wallachia”, he expressed his gratitude for the “vivid sympathy”
manifested by some British MPs for the Romanian cause. However,
he wished to correct Lord Palmerston over a misconceived perception
of Russia’s self-assumed mandate in the area, a perception which the
Foreign Secretary had consistently upheld throughout the summer of
1848. In his response to Lord Dudley Stuart’s query of 1 September in
the House of Commons regarding the presence of Russian troops in
neighbouring Moldavia, Lord Palmerston had declared himself satis-
fied that “These Russian troops entered Moldavia, some time ago, at
the request of the Hospodar, and without any orders from the Cabinet
of St. Petersburgh.” [. . .] “I have had recent communications from St.
Petersburgh, stating that the purpose for which it [ the Russian corps]
is there is the maintenance or re-establishment of order, that its stay
is only temporary, and that it will be withdrawn when the occasion
has ceased”.236 However, Voinescu argued, as the Principalities had
been allowed to maintain their autonomy under Turkish suzerainty
and Russian protectorate, the military occupation violated “the very
234
Letter from the private collection of Bataillard’s daughters, in Olimpiu Boitoş,
Paul Bataillard et la révolution roumaine de 1848: contribution à l’histoire des relations
franco-roumaines, Extrait des Mélanges de l’Ecole Roumaine en France, 1929, 2: 39
(Paris, 1930).
235
Anul 1848, 3: 27 and 43–5.
236
Hansard, 3rd series, 101: 1 September 1848.
96 1848
foundations of European public law.” As the new government of

Wallachia had been recognised by the Porte and by Britain, and as
the events in Wallachia had not had any international ramifications,
Voinescu was requesting an expression of Lord Palmerston’s pub-
lic support for the provisional government’s programme of national
“regeneration.”237 There is no record of a response from Palmerston,
and the British approach to the Eastern Question did not change. The
Romanian perception was then – as it remained on so many later
occasions – that ‘the West’ had ‘abandoned’ Romania into the hands
of Russia.
After his futile diplomatic endeavours in Pest and Constantinople,
upon his return to Bucharest, Brătianu found the capital city occu-
pied by Turkish troops under the joint command of Suleyman Pasha
and Omer Pasha. As already shown, the complex negotiations between
the Porte’s representatives, the provisional government and the Wal-
lachian, mostly conservative, notables had resulted in the compromise
solution of appointing a Princely Lieutenancy made up of the moder-
ate, pro-Turkish Eliade, moderate Christian Tell and liberal Nicolae
Golescu. Although this step normalised relations with the Porte and
with some of the European Powers, notably Austria and Britain, the
moderate, sympathetic stance adopted by Suleyman Pasha seems to
have been a purely personal position, not engaging the Porte officially.
Under Russian pressure, the Porte reviewed its position with respect
to the Principalities and the urbane Suleyman was replaced with the
more hard-line Fuad Pasha, the Divan’s Amedci, secretary to the Great
Vizier. “[. . .] Intelligence has reached us of the Porte having come into
the views of Russia, in so far as almost to have disavowed the Acts of
Suleyman Pasha, who is thought to have exceeded the strict line of
his Instructions”, Colquhoun wrote to Palmerston on 6 September.
“His Excellency Sir Stratford Canning writes me, that Fuad Effendi is
charged with the Task of rectifying the errors of Suleyman and pre-
venting any future departure from the course adopted by the Porte.
That the Court of St. Petersburg required the punishment of Rebels,
of all concerned in the revolutionary movement and a complete return
to the late form of Government [. . .]”238
237
Letter from Jean Voinesco II, Foreign Secretary in the Wallachian Princely Lieu-
tenancy, to Lord Palmerston, 22 Aug/3 Sept. 1848, forwarded by Robert Colquhoun,
in Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 164–5.
238
1848: epilogue 97
In one final and futile gesture of defiance, on 18 September, the

crowds in Bucharest publicly burned the Arhondologia (the list of
noble ranks) and the Organic Statutes. It was a bonfire of ancien-
regime political vanities, of the symbols of noble privilege and Russian
control. The people’s “Deputation succeeded in gaining possession of
the obnoxious Books, which were immediately placed on a Bier and
carried to the Residence of the Metropolitan, accompanied by the
Musick, playing Funeral Airs, the Tolling of the Church Bells [sic]”,
Colquhoun, who disapproved of such open defiance, wrote to Palm-
erston on 18 September. “The assemblage consisted of not less than
10,000 men. Arrived at the Metropolitan’s Residence, the Archbishop
appeared on the Balcony in his Pontifical Robes and after pronouncing
a Curse on the Books and an Anathema on all who should cooperate
in restoring the old order of things, a Fire was kindled in the Court,
and the Books burnt, and then the ashes scattered.”239 An address of
the Metropolitan to the People of Wallachia read as follows: “I have
cursed and anathematised both the Regulations, and those who will
want to re-establish them or to govern the country according to their
provisions. I am announcing this to the Christian people of Wallachia,
whom I bless so that God may strengthen them in their faith in the
Constitution, which comes to us from God, as it is in the spirit of
the Gospel.”240 Rosetti’s newspaper, Pruncul român, meanwhile, tried
to offer encouragement and boost public morale in equally religious
tones: “The holy trinity ‘Liberty, justice and brotherhood’ is the strong
breastplate that will protect us”, read one of his editorials.241
On 23 September Fuad Pasha’s troops occupied Bucharest amidst
demonstrations of public protest: according to information obtained
by the consul Colquhoun, thirty thousand unarmed peasants led by
their village priests had awaited their arrival on the hills surround-
ing the capital city, which suggests a massive and constant popular
support for the revolutionary government throughout the eventful
months of June to September.242 Fuad dissolved the Princely Lieuten-
ancy – the country’s legitimate government, recognised both by the
Porte and by some of the Great Powers, including Britain – repealed
all the laws promulgated between 11 June and 13 September 1848,
239
Ibid., 186–7. Dispatch to Lord Palmerston, 18 September 1848.
240
From Anul 1848, 4: 220–1.
241
11 September 1848, in Bucur, C. A. Rosetti: mesianism, 65.
242
Entry for 28 September 1848, in Colquhoun, Diary, 32.
98 1848
reinstated the Organic Statutes and appointed the compliant Constan-

tin Cantacuzino as single Caimacam (Governor) of Wallachia. General
Alexander Duhamel, the unanimously hated Russian special envoy,
who had governed with an iron fist earlier in the year, was now also
back in the humbled capital city, overseeing the re-occupation, “his
court yard filled with Turkish Soldiers.”243 Details of pillage, disorder
and of the bloody confrontations between Turkish troops and the
Bucharest firemen, as well as depositions of participating Wallachian
soldiers were duly sent by the British Consul to the Foreign Office.244
The British Consul allows himself an uncharacteristic show of emo-
tion in the midst of the otherwise rather terse narrative of his diary
for 1848. He was, he wrote, “very touched” by the outcome of the
September Romanian-Turkish clash involving firemen defending the
capital city, which had left around two hundred dead on each side.245
Very judiciously, the Consul observed in his message to Stratford Can-
ning that the illegality and violence of the Turkish occupation would
be seized upon by Russia and used to represent herself internationally
as the restorer of order and defender of her Christian protégés against
Turkish barbarity.246
Units from the 50,000-strong Russian troops stationed in Moldavia
under the command of General Lüders crossed the border and occu-
pied Bucharest on 15/27 September, without, as Colquhoun wrote,
having been summoned either by the Porte, or by the new, admit-
tedly pro-Russian, Wallachian government.247 In an attempt to help
the Romanians, a 400-strong Polish legion, commanded by Faustyn
Filanowicz, the long-time emissary of the Polish Democratic Society in
the Romanian Principalities, opposed a futile resistance to the incoming
Russians before being dispersed. Filanowicz sought refuge in Transyl-
vania where, ironically, he was executed by the Hungarian authorities
under the mistaken assumption that he was a Russian spy.248
243
Colquhoun to Stratford Canning, 28 September 1848, in Documente, ed. Dogaru
and Stan, 196.
244
Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 192–8.
245
Entry for 28 September 1848 in Colquhoun, Diary, 33.
246
Colquhoun to Stratford Canning, 29 September 1848 in Documente, ed. Dogaru
and Stan, 197–8.
247
Colquhoun to Stratford Canning, 6 October 1848, in ibid., 208. For the view
according to which the Tsar had not wished to occupy Wallachia, but was pre-empted
by General Duhamel, see Maier, “The Revolution”, 201.
248
Kisluk, Brothers from the North, 141. The activities of Polish agents in the Prin-
cipalities is fairly well-documented. See, for instance, P. P. Panaitescu, Emigraţia
1848: epilogue 99
The British Consul was highly dismissive of the “character of the

individuals” appointed in Cantacuzino’s new cabinet: men of “violent
principles”, “needy place hunter[s]”, weak stooges of Russia. It was a
government, he argued, most likely to compromise the interests of
the Porte. To add insult to injury, a Russian, Colonel Garbatzki, was
appointed as head of the Wallachian Militia and it was rumoured
that the Russian Consul Kotzebue appointed new district governors
accountable directly to himself.249
Z
It is not the objective of this narrative to assess the chances of success
of the 1848 revolution in Romania or weigh the causes of its even-
tual defeat. A support base made up simply of an enthusiastic, but
largely weapon-less irregular army and loyal, but equally ill-equipped,
crowds of peasants and artisans could in itself explain why a move-
ment of intellectuals, even though nationally embraced, failed in the
face of a joint foreign occupation. The repeated demands for foreign
arms and military expertise by the leaders of the Romanian insurrec-
tion, as well as during the Hungarian revolution of 1849, show that
the country was lacking the basic elements for resistance: a national,
adequately equipped army and an independent foreign policy. In addi-
tion, the provisional government’s promises of social and land reform
remained, in the circumstances, theoretical, a fact which must have
de-mobilised some of their peasant followers. The government did
convene, as promised, a ‘property commission’ to deal with the agrar-
ian question, but it only met on 21 August and, after inconclusive
debates, was dissolved on the 31, as the revolution itself was expiring.250
Unresolved, the ‘land question’ was going to haunt the former forty-
eighters as they returned to power after exile and marginalisation in
the late 1850s.
Many members of the provisional government and other persons
‘compromised’ during the short-lived Romanian ‘republic’ took refuge
polonă şi revoluţia română de la 1848: studii şi documente (Bucharest, 1929), and more
recently Romanian and Polish Peoples in East-Central Europe (17th–20th centuries),
ed. Veniamin Ciobanu (Iaşi, 2003).
249
Colquhoun to Stratford Canning, 6 October 1848, in Documente, ed. Dogaru
and Stan, 209–10, 217. See also Colquhoun’s diary entry for 6 October 1848, 37.
250
Maier, “The Revolution”, 202–4.
100 1848
on the premises of the British consulate.251 They had, as Jules Michelet

wrote a few years later, “been caught in the web of the horrible spider
of the North.”252 Most were arrested, with the exception of Dumitru
Brătianu, who managed to join Marie Rosetti and her new-born baby
girl, Sophia Liberty, on the epic journey narrated by Michelet in his
text of 1855, Légendes démocratiques du nord, “Madame Rosetti”.253
An imperial ferman confirmed that those arrested were to be sent into
exile as a pre-emptive measure demanded by state security.254 On 21
September 1848 the Lieutenancy and the Turkish commissar issued a
decree forbidding the return into Wallachia of the majority of those
sentenced to exile and a circular was sent by the new foreign min-
ister, Ioan Filipescu, to the border troops with a list of those thus
proscribed.255 Russian diplomatic reports on the arrests denounced
the Brătianu brothers as “hommes exaltés”, Constantin Rosetti as a
“demagogue of the most dangerous sort” and Cesar Bolliac as a “furi-
ous demagogue”.256 A petition was handed to the British Consul by
eighteen of those arrested, asking for British protection and passports,
as well as for an escort upon leaving the consulate. Lord Palmerston
had previously sent express instructions to Colquhoun, advising him
that no British Consul was authorised to issue passports and offer
protection to foreign nationals.257 On this occasion, the consul took
the liberty of issuing passports prior to consultation with the For-
eign Secretary. “I considered this a Duty of Humanity and hope Your
Excellency will not disapprobate [sic] of my conduct”, he pleaded in
his dispatch of 13 October 1848.258 Colquhoun asked for assurances
from Fuad Pasha regarding the safety of those arrested – to whom
he referred explicitly as “political prisoners” – but his dragoman was
refused permission to accompany the convoy, and the initial plan of
251
Colquhoun to Stratford Canning, 29 September 1848, in Documente, ed. Dogaru
and Stan, 197–8.
252
Michelet, “Madame Rosetti”, in Légendes, 222.
253
For a discussion of this text, see Part Two of this study, 234 sqq.
254
255
256
Revoluţia de la 1848 în Ţările Române: documente inedite din arhivele ruseşti, ed.
Ion Varta (Chişinău, 1998), 469–70.
257
Palmerston to Colquhoun, 28 October 1848. The National Archives, PRO/FO
786/1212.
258
The National Archives, PRO/ FO 78/743, September to December 1848. The
British vice-consuls in the Danubian ports of Galaţi and Brăila, J. Cunningham and
Vincent Lloyd, also issued passports and safe-conducts to Moldavian forty-eighters
wishing to escape to Vienna. See Florescu, The Struggle against Russia, 210–1.
1848: epilogue 101
escorting the prisoners for release in Transylvania was changed at the

last minute: the new decision was for the men to be sent instead by
steamer along the Danube to Orşova, and then, it was feared, into
arrest in Constantinople.
When, a short while after the arrests, Effingham Grant was sent to
visit the sixteen prisoners, who included Rosetti, the poet and actor
Constantin Aristia, Ştefan Golescu, C. Romanescu, the painter Con-
stantin D. Rosenthal, Ion Brătianu, Cezar Bolliac, he found them held
on two small Turkish gun boats on the Danube a little above the port
of Vidin. They “were in a most wretched state”, Robert Colquhoun
reported to Stratford Canning on 20 October. As the Russian Com-
missioner in Bucharest had “openly expresse[d] his dissatisfaction
at these persons having been allowed to escape”, the British Consul
feared that Fuad Effendi might be pressurized into allowing them to
be returned to Bucharest, and therefore delivered straight into Rus-
sian hands.259 Throughout the early weeks of the forty-eighters’ exile,
Colquhoun and Effingham Grant remained in constant contact with
the prisoners, sending them letters and money from the families,260 as
well as giving assurances to the anxious relatives left behind. Officially
still a subject of the Habsburg empire, in spite of his newly obtained
Romanian citizenship, Rosenthal was freed on orders of the Austrian
consul in Giurgiu, despite his protests.261 Ultimately, the men were not
taken to Constantinople, but upstream on the Danube before finally
escaping near Semlin (today Zemun in Serbia)262 and making their
own way to Paris and the other destinations of their exile. Accord-
ing to Michelet’s later account in “Madame Rosetti”, it was Marie
Rosetti, armed with a letter from the British consul, who secured the
banished men’s final release by the Turks. Michelet’s highly romanti-
cized narrative has her dressed in Romanian ethnic garb – as seen in
259
Colquhoun to Stratford Canning, Bucharest, 20 October 1848, annexed to a
report of 10/22 October addressed to Lord Palmerston, in Documente, ed. Dogaru
and Stan, 225.
260
Cf. letter from Rosetti to Marie, from Vidin, dated 4/6 September 1848: “Write
to Mons[ieur] Colquhoun and ask him to send the money that Golesco left with him
in Semlin”. In C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 30.
261
Daniela Gui, “Rolul pictorilor din generaţia paşoptistă în orientarea picturii
româneşti spre modernitate”, in Biografii paşoptiste, ed. Gelu Neamţu (Bucharest,
2006), 200.
262
Colquhoun to Sir Stratford Canning, 6 October 1848, in Documente ed. Dogaru
and Stan, 207–8. Cf. also a manuscript account attributed to Rosetti, in the manuscript
section of the B. A. R. (Library of the Romanian Academy), Ms. no. 61/1972.
102 1848
Rosenthal’s 1850 portrait – cradling her baby and following on foot

along the banks as the prisoners’ barge sailed up the Danube. She was
chaperoned by Dumitru Brătianu, who had somehow escaped arrest,
and by Rosenthal, liberated by the Austrians. As a woman, a mother
and a British national, she had the sentimental and material means to
cajole, threaten and bribe her way onto the boat and the men’s way
out of captivity. At one point, Michelet recounts, the Turks, those “old,
fierce soldiers”, shared a meal with the mother and brought milk to
the little girl. In the final episode of this dramatic escape, the Turkish
guards, drunk on the wine she had offered, were challenged by the
priest, mayor and villagers of Sfenitza (on Austrian territory), who
managed to liberate the prisoners. It meant, however, leaping from
the frying pan into the fire, as, having escaped the Ottomans and the
Russians, the group found themselves under Austrian threat in a Tran-
sylvania torn by civil war. Having forced an Austrian general at the
border to sign their passports, they made their way on and past the
border, dodging in-fighting Hungarians, Serbian and even confused
Wallachians, who suspected them of being conservative boyars fleeing
the revolution in Bucharest.
By 1855, when Michelet wrote his account, relations between the
Romanian exiles and the British Consul had cooled considerably. In
spite of the logistic and diplomatic support Colquhoun had offered
around 1848, British politics in the Balkans came under revisionist
scrutiny in subsequent years. According to the updated narrative that
Michelet’s Romanian informants wanted to put across in 1855, it was
lack of political support from Britain which had led to the defeat of
their national movement and had pushed their country into the arms
of a weak Turkey and an increasingly strong Russia. France, too, had
forfeited her republican internationalist mission by failing to arm the
Romanians in their hour of need.263 In those times of acute crisis, Rosetti
and his liberal-radical compeers saw East-European developments in
all the black-and-white self-righteousness of a transparent historical
teleology: their noble liberating and modernising mission should have
been clear for all to see and should have been endorsed emphatically
by forward-looking Great Power diplomacy and military aid. They had
no time for the French Second Republic’s hesitant foreign policies or
for Lord Palmerston’s careful tip-toeing around the Ottoman Porte,
263
Michelet, “Madame Rosetti”, in Légendes, 234–5.
1848: epilogue 103
Austria and Russia. For them, idealist and radical nation-builders, the
“encouragement of continental liberalism” should have been a priority
and as such, should have been placed before the preservation of Tur-
key and certainly before peace with autocratic Austria and Russia.264
On behalf of his Romanian friends, Michelet’s text of 1855 thus
settled scores by presenting the ‘truth’ of 1848 from the angle of the
Rosetti circle and, in so doing, also established the cult of Marie Rosetti
as ‘mother of the revolution’ and Romanian national heroine.
Z
In late September 1848, Bucharest was held in the grip of the joint
Turkish-Russian occupation.265 The turncoat Metropolitan of Walla-
chia, Neophyte, a former member of the revolutionary government,
now had the opportunity to display the latest in a series of opportu-
nistic reincarnations. As a member of the provisional government in
June 1848, he had been the revolutionary prelate who blessed the flags
of the revolt, only to become the apostate pillar of the restored old
regime when the provisional 1848 government absconded briefly in
July. A few days later he was back to his role as ‘red priest’, presided
over the burning of the Organic Statutes in September 1848, only to
make a final volte-face as arch-hierarch of the Russian-controlled gov-
ernment after the defeat of the revolution. The insurgency had barely
expired when, on 27 September 1848, the Metropolitan addressed the
Russian General Lüders and his incoming troops in the most effusive
manner:
Your Excellency,
The spirit of delusion, disorder and anarchy which a few exalted minds
have unfortunately imprinted on the affairs of this country in the last
three months have upset the laws and the social regulations in their
entirety.
His Majesty the Emperor of all the Russias, and our most August Pro-
tector, who of all times has given our country incessant proof of His
paternal care, could not watch impassibly as the revolutionary move-
ment drove Wallachia over the precipice [. . .]
264
Steele, Palmerston and Liberalism, 18–9.
265
The total number of Russian troops in the Principalities in 1848–9 fluctuated
between 40,000 and 60,000, of which 25,000–40,000 were stationed in Wallachia. With
an estimated army of 18,000–30,000 soldiers, the Turks were in a minority. Cf. Stan,
Protectoratul Rusiei, 246.
104 1848
As we welcome you, General, in our midst we cannot fail to count

ourselves blessed at this new sign of imperial favour and we beg Your
Excellency, to kindly bear to His Imperial Majesty the message of deep
gratitude with which the Romanian nation is imbued and which I have
the honour of presenting to you.266
A Commission of enquiry into revolutionary activities was created by
the two occupying powers on 18 November, and General Duhamel in
person supervised the arrests and the prosecutions. A document found
among his diplomatic papers listed 215 individuals arrested on various
charges ranging from their role in the public burning of the Organic
Regulations to armed opposition to the incoming Turkish army. The
total number of those arrested – some of whom were not to be freed
until early 1851 – was estimated at 10,000.267 The future Wallachian
prince, Barbu Ştirbey, was to be influential in frustrating Duhamel’s
vindictive zeal: only twelve of those arrested finally received prison
and forced labour sentences in May 1849.268
Much of the British Consul’s official correspondence for the months
of October and November 1848 was concerned with presenting the sit-
uation in Bucharest as a veritable reign of terror. Colquhoun appealed
to Stratford Canning to ask for a cessation of the repressive measures
taken by the Russians against ordinary citizens who had participated
in the revolution, now that the main leaders were already in exile.269
Corporal punishment of suspects at the hands of Russian troops occa-
sionally resulted in deaths, while domiciliary searches and arbitrary
arrests, including of foreign nationals, took place as the impotent
Ottoman authorities looked on. Colquhoun wrote to Lord Palmer-
ston about “parties of Cossacks” making arrests “accompanied by acts
of violence and brutality really intolerable.”270 The Russians claimed
they were searching private residences following up on rumours of
clandestinely returned revolutionaries, and Colquhoun was especially
indignant when a British national was found to be among the three
266
Anul 1848, 4: 540.
267
Stan, Protectoratul Rusiei, 250.
268
For ‘Duhamel’s list’, see Marian Stroia, Între Levant şi Europa modernă: impact
extern şi mentalitate tradiţională în spaţiul românesc (Bucharest, 2006), 187–95, quot-
ing from Revoluţia de la 1848 în Ţările Române, ed. Varta.
269
Colquhoun to Stratford Canning, 27 October 1848, in Documente, ed. Dogaru
and Stan, 228–9.
270
Colquhoun to Stratford Canning, 27 October 1848; letter to Stratford Canning,
5 November 1848; letter to Lord Palmerston, 7 November 1848, in Documente, ed.
Dogaru and Stan, 232, 236–7, 240.
1848: epilogue 105
hundred people arrested, and when the house of the Belgian consul
was ransacked by a “party of Cossacks”. The arrested British national,
a certain Asprea, had been accused of circulating a pamphlet in
which he criticized Tsar Nicholas.271 Schools throughout the country
were closed as teachers suspected of revolutionary sympathies were
arrested, villages were bereft of their ‘red’ priests, censorship was tight-
ened, and so was the control of the Transylvanian-Wallachian bor-
ders.272 “Among the persons arrested are the two principal Spanish Jew
Bankers Hillel and Halson – both have been liberated on the bail of the
Caimacam – this little incident may serve to refute the assertion that
the movement was merely the work of a few hotheaded young men,
lately returned from Paris”, the consul explained to Lord Palmerston.273
In addition, the consul pointed out, Caimacam Cantacuzino himself
and other notables now backed by the Russians had been involved in
the revolution and could have been indicted as such with a great deal
of justification.274
The capital city, Bucharest, now had to feed and maintain 21,000
Russian troops at an estimated cost of 900,000 piastres (£14,000) a
month, the latest, as Colquhoun hilariously presented the situation to
Stratford Canning, in a series of ‘natural’ disasters which had struck
the country: fire, locusts, cattle epidemics and drought.275 “How this
impoverished Country is to meet this exigency I know not. Hitherto
the Turkish army has paid most punctually for all it has required and
its conduct, in Camp at least, has been most orderly, offering a strange
Contrast to the fearful excesses which are reported to me as having
been committed by the Russians in Moldavia.”276 Even the conserva-
tive old boyars, some of whom had returned to Wallachia under Turk-
ish and Russian escort, “glad as they are to see the Russians here, to
protect them against the revolutionary Party, ask with much anxiety
how long this state of things is to last.”277 The severity of the measures
taken by the Russians to subdue the rebellious Wallachians was hardly
exceptional. Tsar Nicholas I merely exported into Central-East Europe
the repressive methods and heavy-handed approach which his regime
271
Entry for 10 November 1848 in Colquhoun, Diary, 48.
272
Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 226, 235–67.
273
Dispatches to Lord Palmerston, 5, 7 and 8 November 1848 in ibid., 241–2.
274
Colquhoun to Palmerston, 8 November 1848, in ibid., 242.
275
Ibid., 199.
276
Colquhoun to Palmerston, 1 October 1848, in ibid., 205.
277
Colquhoun to Palmerston, 10 October 1848 in ibid., 213.
106 1848
customarily used to deal with subversion and threats at home: censor-

ship, surveillance, arrests, show trials and deportations were the usual
response to allegations of political dissidence, as the contemporaneous
affair of the Petrashevstky conspiracy demonstrated.278
After the Russo-Turkish occupation of Bucharest, the last pocket
of resistance was in Little Wallachia, on the symbolically named Field
of Trajan, where General Gheorghe Magheru, the commander of the
irregular troops since 18 June, had assembled a considerable, but ill-
equipped, army of over 12,000 pandours and peasants in a last-minute
attempt to resist against the advance of the foreign troops.279 When
Colquhoun wrote to Stratford Canning on 6 October about Magh-
eru’s defiant stance among the ‘bold people’ of Oltenia, the traditional
hot-bed of Romanian rebelliousness, he probably referred only to the
regiments of Dorobantzi, former serfs enlisted in the district regi-
ments. “He is reported to have 4,000 men well armed”, Colquhoun
wrote, “in a country perfectly inaccessible to regular troops, to Cavalry
and Artillery. At any other season, he might hold out, but with the
prospect of five months winter before him, his obstinacy may entail
greater evils on his unhappy Country.”280 Magheru did in fact consult
with Colquhoun via an emissary on the most appropriate conduct he
should adopt and, on 8 October, after talks with the Turkish com-
missars in Bucharest, who guaranteed the safety of the General and
his followers, the British Consul dispatched his secretary, Effingham
Grant, to Oltenia in an attempt to persuade Magheru to dismiss his
troops, avoid bloodshed and inevitable defeat, and withdraw into Aus-
278
Dostoevsky himself, a member of the conspiracy, was tried and deported in
1849. See David Saunders, “A Pyrrhic Victory: The Russian Empire in 1848”, in The
Revolutions, ed. Evans and von Strandmann, 137.
279
Magheru had been appointed ‘Captain General’ of all the irregular troops of
‘dorobanţi’ and ‘pandours’ by a provisional government decree of 18 June 1848.
Cf. Anul 1848, 1: 651. The ‘pandours’ (Rom. panduri, possibly from the Latin bande-
rium) had been, since the eighteenth century in Wallachia, irregular troops of peasants
exempt from taxes. Tudor Vladimirescu had famously led them in the Romanian-
Greek uprising of 1821 and Magheru had been leading regiments of pandours suc-
cessfully since 1828–9 against raids by Turkish brigands into Romanian territory.
Cf. Apostol Stan and Constantin Vlăduţ, Gheorghe Magheru (Bucharest, 1969), 24–30.
The figure 12,000 is proposed in Maier, “The Revolution”, 200.
280
1848 la români, ed. Bodea, 2: 886. Historically, Oltenia had had a tradition of
quasi-autonomous local administration which had been abolished by the Organic
Regulations of 1831.
1848: epilogue 107
tria.281 As he disbanded his troops, the General issued a farewell proc-

lamation to the Romanians:
Rest assured that the European powers, under whose protection you
have placed your right to give yourselves new laws and to enjoy them
in peace, will not allow a people to perish which, with the cross in their
hands, with justice in their hearts and with hope in God, have risen for
their rights. Time, God, our August Suzerain and the protection of the
European powers will eventually help our just cause to triumph.282
Magheru went into exile, first in Trieste, then in Transylvania and
finally in Vienna, where he made vain efforts to create a Romanian
legion to fight alongside the Hungarians in Transylvania.283 He thus
joined Rosetti, the Brătianu brothers, the Golescu brothers and their
cousins, Eliade, and the other exiles, soon to be dispersed in all corners
of the world, from Paris to the Middle East. Colquhoun appealed to
Lord Palmerston on their behalf in a dispatch of 12 October:
[. . .] I feel it a Duty to bear Testimony to the Disinterestedness of almost
every one of these men, who, placed for a short period in power, offered
to those acquainted with the general viciousness of the Character of the
Boiars the unusual spectacle of a purity of Conduct above all doubt.
Forced as they have been to leave their Country and become exiles
on account of their late Political Acts, they have left it with barely the
means of subsistence for two months – many of them without even that
recourse and dependant on the others. I hope before many months have
elapsed, that these persons will be allowed to return to their Country,
and that, if the Porte have the means, as she professes to have the Will,
she will admit into some Branches of the Administration, certain of
these Individuals, who alone are capable of cleaning the System of some
of its crying abuses but I suppose the Protecting Power, to judge at least
from its recent Acts, will endeavor to check any thing like Amelioration,
except such as may be proposed by itself, in its own views, and for its
own purposes.284
In Bucharest, there were growing tensions between the Turkish Com-
missar, Fuad Effendi, and the Russian envoy, General Duhamel. The
281
Ibid., 887. The text of Colquhoun’s letter to Magheru was published on 15
November 1848 in the Romanian-language Transylvanian periodical Foaie pentru
minte, inimă şi literatură, no. 46. It is reproduced in Anul 1848, 4: 535–7.
282
General Gheorghe Magheru, Proclamation to the people of Wallachia, 28 Sep-
tember 1848, in Anul 1848, 4: 580.
283
Cf. Magheru’s letter to Al. G. Golescu – Negru, 6 May 1849, in Fotino 2: 294–5.
284
Colquhoun to Palmerston, 6 October 1848, in Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan,
214–5.
108 1848
Porte made continuous, but largely futile, attempts to assert its right
as suzerain power, repeatedly rejecting the strong measures proposed
by Russia, such as dividing Bucharest into a Turkish and a Russian
Authority, disarming the population – which would have deprived the
peasants of their only defence against marauding wolves in winter –
setting up an exceptional tribunal to deal with those involved in the
1848 disturbances, many of whom were now in exile, and confiscating
their assets. Such measures were, Fuad Effendi protested to Duhamel,
“in utter contempt of Legal Authority.”285 In spite of the bloodshed
of September, when Fuad’s troops clashed with the defiant Bucharest
firemen, the impression left by witness accounts was that, ultimately,
the Ottoman military occupation appeared almost benign compared
to the Russian repression, conducted by Duhamel with complete dis-
regard for the Porte’s rights as suzerain power. The Russian envoy
himself denounced the “mildness” of Fuad’s approach: he reported to
Nesselrode that the Turkish envoy had facilitated and then turned a
blind eye on the final escape of the fifteen arrested “demagogues” –
Rosetti and his companions – while also issuing passports to other rev-
olutionaries who found refuge in the Banat and Transylvania, instead
of being duly arrested and tried by the exceptional tribunal set up by
the Russians.286
The Romanian forty-eighters may have been unhappy with what
they perceived as the low level of Western protest against the Russian
occupation, but such protests were voiced, especially as Tsarist plans
to use the troops in Wallachia for incursions into revolutionary Tran-
sylvania and Hungary became increasingly evident. According to Le
Constitutionnel of 1 December 1848, for instance, in Constantinople
Stratford Canning and General Aupick handed notes of protest to the
Russian ambassador against the continuing occupation of the Prin-
cipalities.287 Such protests were going to intensify into 1849, but the
Russian troops did not in effect leave the Romanian Principalities until
after the defeat of the Hungarian revolution, to which they overwhelm-
ingly contributed: its first units retreated on 7 March 1850, followed
by the recall of both Duhamel and Fuad Pasha. As Fuad Effendi was
285
Such disputes were duly recorded in Colquhoun’s official correspondence. See,
for instance, his dispatches of 24 November and 28 December 1848 to Stratford Can-
ning, in Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 251–3, 270–1.
286
Stan, Protectoratul Rusiei, 249.
287
Idem, 255.
1848: epilogue 109
about to leave Wallachia upon termination of his mission, a grateful

Extraordinary Administrative Assembly ordered for the sum of 13,000
imperial ducats from the state budget to be allocated by the Prince, in
time-honoured fashion, to pay for gifts to the Turkish envoy and his
retinue. From Constantinople, where he was authorized by the Sultan
to accept the gift, Fuad wrote to the new Prince Barbu Ştirbey, inform-
ing him that the award was going to remind him of “a country for
the fate of which I entertain the most sincere interest and of a Prince
for whom I have most vivid feelings of friendship.”288 It is not known
whether the Russian envoy Duhamel was similarly rewarded.
Constantin Aricescu is a forty-eighter who does not feature prom-
inently in the present story. During the events of 1848, he worked
as secretary to Eliade Rădulescu and his group – ideological rivals to
Rosetti and his camp – in order, as he explained, “to stop them from
causing harm” and “to keep harmony among Heliad, Tell, Rosetti and
Ion Brătianu.”289 He was, therefore, the man of the ‘middle road’, claim-
ing, and perhaps actually possessing, the neutrality that such a position
entails. Two decades after the events, he passed what appears to be a
dispassionate judgement on the events and on the causes of failure in
1848. He quoted approvingly the assessment of another forty-eighter
on the characters of the protagonists: while Heliad himself lacked “a
heart and generous aspirations”, Rosetti and Ion Brătianu were “men
of feeling, but not of reason as well.” Rosetti, “carried away by the
inspirations of the heart, had wanted to make the Revolution into a
sentimental epic; he believed that, with a few passionate speeches and
proclamations, the opposition, and the hatred of the defeated party,
would both melt into a long, brotherly embrace.”290
It is perhaps a slightly unfair criticism, although accurate in its
appreciation of both Rosetti’s emotionalism and of the role of the
written and spoken media in 1848. During the mutual recriminations
hurled from all directions in the months and years that followed the
defeat of the revolution and in retrospective assessments of the direc-
tion taken by events in 1848, much could – and was – judged, weighed
and criticised: the membership of the provisional government in 1848,
the appointments to key position in ministries and the civil service, the
288
Cf. relevant documents in Anul 1848, 6: 300–6.
289
Capii revoluţiunii române dela 1848 judecaţi prin propriele lor acte, ed. C. D.
Aricescu, 1, Broşura 1 (Bucharest, 1866), 15.
290
Ibid., 13, quoting Nicolae Bălcescu.
110 1848
failure to keep promises made to peasants and the population at large

with respect to property and civil rights, Rosetti’s clemency towards
the traitor Colonel Odobescu (who organised the counter-revolution-
ary coup), the counter-productive disputes among factions and splin-
ter groups, and many other factors.
What, however, seems to remain the enduring impression of those
feverish months of 1848, when, it has been said, history “failed to
turn”, was the heightened emotional charge of the events, the drama
and the melodrama of each stage of the revolutionary narrative, the
irrepressible, almost fateful, quality of the “sentimental epic” in which
these groups of young men and women were caught up. That pas-
sionate, idealistic faith in the ultimate perfectibility of human societies
must count as one of the central legacies of the 1848 moment. In 1849,
Jean Abdolonyme Ubicini, who had been the French-language secre-
tary of the Wallachian provisional government, was hired by the exiled
radicals to publicize their own views on the revolutionary events. In a
memorable statement, they tried to dispel the sense of guilt and failure
that had associated themselves to their movement:
We have wished to prove to our friends as well as to our enemies that
the liberal movement of 11 (23) June, was not smothered by its own
excesses, as our accusers have tried to present it, and that, if Russia’s
yoke is now weighing even more heavily on the neck of our unfortunate
motherland, we do not deserve the accusation of having provoked it.
[. . .] It is not the men who have failed the events, but time which has
failed the men.291
Some of the most serious attacks against the radicals came from the
moderate Ion Eliade-Rădulescu, whose account of the revolution, in
French, was published in Paris in 1851.292 His view that Rosetti, Ion
Brătianu and their coterie had been Russian agents who attempted
to foment an insurrection and thus offer Russia a pretext for military
intervention in 1848, gained some credibility in Romania following
its adoption by one of the founders of professional historiography in
Romania, A. D. Xenopol. In his work, The Russo-Turkish Wars and
291
‘Ce ne sont pas les hommes qui ont manqué aux choses, c’est le temps qui a
manqué aux hommes.’ Ubicini, Mémoire justificatif de la révolution roumaine, 26–7.
292
Mémoires sur l’histoire de la régénération roumaine ou sur les événements de
1848 accomplis en Valachie, par J. Héliade Radulesco, Paris: Librairie de la propagande
démocratique et sociale européenne, 1851.
1848: epilogue 111
their Impact on the Romanian Lands, published in 1880, he upheld

Eliade’s views, only to disavow them in 1893 in the sixth volume of
The History of the Romanians in Trajan’s Dacia. In the light of the
new sources which had surfaced in the intervening years, as well as
of his correspondence with Jean Abdolonyme Ubicini, who had wit-
nessed the events, Xenopol exonerated the radicals, although Eliade’s
old accusations proved quite resilient and were occasionally revived in
attacks by the conservative opponents of the Rosetti-Brătianu group.293
Much later, after the Crimean War, in a new wave of publicity
sponsored by the Romanians before and during the Congress of Paris,
Ubicini published another defence of the forty-eighters, in which he
speculated rather darkly that what Romania had lacked in 1848 was a
strong leader – most probably an allusion to Kossuth. As for the actual
leaders of the Wallachian revolution, he said, “some lacked the heart
for it, others lacked cold blood, and every one of them lacked decisive-
ness.” In addition, he observed, “it would appear that Wallachia was
destined to be an example of a rare occurrence in great political com-
motions: that of a group of people conspiring towards a common aim,
a group who succeeds in altering the face of a country, but from whose
ranks no character was strong enough to subsume individual wills to
his own. A dictatorship would have, if not saved it [the revolution], at
least ensured it more popularity. But not one of them had in him the
makings of a dictator.”294
Z
During the hectic events of 1848, Rosetti did not write regularly in
his diary. We do not have a day-by-day account of the 1848 events
from the perspective of a major participant in the events. Late in 1848,
as life resumed its more or less normal course, so did Rosetti’s diary
entries. On 2 December, at the start of his life in Parisian exile, Rosetti
summarized that momentous year in a frustratingly elliptic entry:
293
For the Eliade vs. the radicals debate, see Nicolae Isar, “Memoriile lui Ion
Heliade-Rădulescu şi radicalii de la 1848 în perspectiva primelor sinteze critice”,
Revista istorică 10, 5–6 (1999): 487–500. Reprinted in N. Isar, Din istoria generaţiei de
la 1848: revoluţie, exil, destin istoric (Bucharest, 2006), 180–200. Cf. A. D. Xenopol,
Resboaiele dintre Ruşi şi Turci şi înrâurirea lor asupra ţerilor române, 2 vols. (Iaşi,
1880), 2, and Istoria Românilor din Dacia Traiană, 6 vols. (Iaşi, 1888–1893), 6.
294
J. A. Ubicini, Provinces d’origine roumaine: Valachie, Moldavie, Bukovine, Tran-
sylvanie, Bessarabie, in the series L’Univers pittoresque: histoire et description de tous
les peuples, de leur religion, moeurs, coutumes, industries, etc (Paris, 1856), 195–6.
112 1848
“I became a father, I had a revolution, I was arrested. The revolu-

tion took me out of there. The fights within the government, our fall,
our arrest, the voyage, and then the escape.”295 His return to Paris
as an exile was low-key, but very much to his taste: “My shoemaker
Hallegrain visited to congratulate me on having escaped slavery. And
then he told me: ‘I have a favour to ask of you . . . please come with
Madame prendre la soupe chez moi.’ How can one refuse the invitation
of a man of the people, when it comes from the heart [?]”296
295
296
Ibid., 248. On Charlemagne Hallegrain’s involvement with the Romanian
diaspora, see Part Two, p. 125 and passim.
PART TWO
EXILE
1849–1855
Fig. 3: Constantin D. Rosenthal, Portrait of Marie Rosetti, undated (c. 1850)
(Oil on synthetic slate) Reproduced by kind permission of the National Art
Museum, Bucharest, Romania.
1849, PARIS: EARLY DAYS IN EXILE
[. . .] in the present state of things, within ten years,

the whole of Europe may be Cossack or republican.
Napoléon, Mémorial de Sainte Hélène1
Bitter exile is in store for them: endless, with an
obscure outcome, like those long winter nights which
envelop the day and end in no morning.
Michelet, “Madame Rosetti”, 1855.2
By 1849 the leading Romanian forty-eighters were all among the 150
individuals sent into exile after the defeat of the short-lived ‘republic’.3
It is, admittedly, a modest figure compared to the 11,000 arrests and
the 4,348 deportations to Algeria made after the June Days in Paris,4
but, on a different scale, the outcome was similar: the decapitation
of the burgeoning Wallachian left and the postponement sine die
of the tentative social reforms that the provisional government had
envisaged.
The defeat of the revolution and Wallachia’s occupation by foreign
troops sent the leaders of ‘48 to the four corners of the world, where
they were to remain for the next ten years. The radicals Rosetti, Alex-
andru G. Golescu-Negru, Ion Brătianu, the moderate Ştefan Golescu
and others were in Paris. After some time spent in Transylvania, the
historian Nicolae Bălcescu settled mainly in Paris, but was to end
his days in Palermo in 1852. Dumitru Brătianu was mainly based in
London, although he remained engaged in a nomadic pan-European
existence for the rest of his decade in exile. Alexandru C. Golescu-
Albu, Gheorghe Magheru, Cezar Bolliac and others took refuge first in
Transylvania and Austria, but ended up in Bursa in Asia Minor. Chris-
tian Tell, Ion Eliade Rădulescu and Nicolae Golescu, of the moderate,
1
A much-misquoted passage from the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène. Suivi de Napo-
léon dans l’exil; [Derniers moments de Napoléon] et de L’historique de la translation
des restes mortels de l’empereur Napoléon aux Invalides. T. 2, par le comte de Las
Cases; par M. M. O’Méara et Antomarchi (Paris: E. Bourdin, 1842), 454.
2
Michelet, Légendes, 234.
3
For this estimated figure, see Cornelia Bodea, “Lupta pentru Unire a revoluţionari-
lor exilaţi de la 1848”, in Studii privind unirea Principatelor, ed. Andrei Oţetea (Bucha-
rest, 1960), 140, quoted in Cojocariu, Partida naţională, 230.
4
Jean Garrigues, La France de 1848 à 1870 (Paris, 2000, 2nd edn. 2002), 23.
116 1849
pro-Turkish faction – and opponents of the radicals Rosetti and

Brătianu – were in Constantinople. So was another moderate, Ion
Ghica, soon to become Bey of Samos, a position in the Ottoman civil
service which he retained until 1859.5 Still other Romanian exiles were
in Semlin (today Zemun, in Serbia), on Austrian territory.6 The exiled
Moldo-Wallachians were joined in 1849 by thousands of Hungarian
and Polish refugees who were offered ‘political asylum’ in Turkey after
the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution.7
Relatives and associates of the former revolutionaries had also been
expelled from Wallachia by the Russian authorities and the new gov-
ernment they sponsored in Bucharest. Writing from Constantinople,
where she was in the spring and summer of 1849, trying to obtain an
audience with the British Ambassador Stratford Canning and plead in
favour of her exiled sons and nephews, Zinca Golescu acknowledged
the support she had received from Effingham Grant, and especially
from the British Consul, Robert Colquhoun, who had offered her a
temporary haven in his own home in Bucharest prior to her depar-
ture.8 “We Romanians ought to be ashamed that my mother should
not find a single relative in her own country to offer her a roof for
two days and that she should be forced to accept the hospitality of a
foreigner!”, Zinca’s daughter, Ana, wrote from the family manor of
Goleşti, in Little Wallachia, an enchanting home, located in what was
then a rather marginal region, far from the social bustle and political
intrigue of the capital city. It was there that the Golescu women were
to be confined throughout the 1850s in what can only be described
as semi-house arrest. They were shunned by most of their relatives,
friends and by members of Bucharest high society, their peers in terms
of rank, but keen to remain in the Russians’ good books.9
Zoe (Zinca) Golescu was the widow of a high-ranking boyar and
writer who, although without ‘republican’ or ‘revolutionary’ aspira-
5
Cf. Documente privind Unirea Principatelor, 3: Corespondenţă politică (1855–9),
ed. Cornelia Bodea (Bucharest, 1961–1984), xx.
6
The contacts between Romanians, Czechs and Slovaks during and after the events
of 1848 have been studied by Lucian Boia in Relationships between Romanians, Czechs
and Slovaks, 1848–1914 (Bucharest, 1977). For Polish-Romanian relations see Part
One, p. 98, note 248. For Hungarian-Romanian contacts see note 69 below.
7
See p. 168 below.
8
Letter dated 23/11 May 1849, in Fotino 2: 308–9.
9
Letter from Ana Racoviţă to her exiled brothers in Paris, 18 October 1849, and
letter from Catinca Rosetti to the same, 8/20 November 1849, in Fotino 2: 365 and
371–4.
paris: early days in exile 117
tions himself, had been known for his progressive ideas on reform,
education, public health and culture. He had insisted that his sons and
nephews – all now in exile – should be educated in Western Europe
and had personally undertaken a major voyage in 1826 in search of
the most appropriate schools and tutors for them, at a time when
education opportunities for East-Europeans in the West were rare. In
spite of his ensuing fascination with the well-managed, prosperous,
advanced West, the older Golescu, a land-owner and high official in
Wallachia, had opted politically for the ‘Russian party’ in his coun-
try, largely because he entertained hopes of political advancement at
a time when Russian protection seemed preferable to the Ottoman-
sponsored regime of Prince Grigore Ghica.10 However, a shift in politi-
cal culture happened very rapidly and, within less than twenty years,
his four Swiss-educated, French-speaking sons11 lived in a country
gripped by Russophobia and gradually drawn into the French politi-
cal and cultural orbit.
These young men, like many of their peers, ended up taking an ideo-
logical short-cut which turned them almost overnight from old-world
landowners into full-blown liberals, revolutionaries and even radicals,
and their influence on the younger women of the family was consider-
able. Opportunities for women’s education in early nineteenth-century
Romanian were still limited: state schools were rare and only daugh-
ters of better-off families could be sent to private boarding schools,
mainly in Vienna and Odessa, or were taught by French governesses
at home. It would appear that the Golescu men had an important role
in the education of the family’s younger female members. In a letter of
January 1850, one Golescu niece, Zoe, writing from the family estate at
Goleşti, gratefully acknowledged her own and her sisters’ early expo-
sure to the example of their menfolk. “[. . .] it is you, all of you, who
have educated us, you who have inspired us with such noble and gen-
erous feelings; it is you who have elevated us in our own eyes by show-
ing us the place that a woman must take, by teaching us virtue and
selflessness, by ennobling our hearts and by showing us which objects
10
For a detailed English-language study on the context of the older Golescu’s polit-
ical choices, see Alex Drace-Francis, “Dinicu Golescu’s Account of My Travels (1826):
Eurotopia as manifesto”, Journeys – The International Journal of Travel and Travel
Writing 6, 1–2 (2005): 24–53. Reprinted as Ch. 3 in Balkan Departures, ed. Wendy
Bracewell & Alex Drace-Francis (Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2009).
11
Ştefan (b.1809), Nicolae (b.1810), Radu (b.1814) and Alexandru C. Golescu
(‘Albu’, the White) (b. circa 1815).
118 1849
were worthy of our love. [. . .] What amazes me is that you should now
be standing and admiring your own work, like Pygmalion, although
unlike his work, yours is, I’m happy to say, animate and can respond
to you with interest and vivacity.”12
Family solidarity and inter-generational connectedness were to con-
stitute a major emotional lifeline for these embattled people throughout
a decade of exile and hardship. Alongside the family matriarch, Zinca,
the younger Golescu women – sisters, nieces and female cousins of the
exiled men – provided some of the main channels of communication
between the exiles and their country. A devoted villager from Goleşti,
Ion – named ‘Geantă’, the ‘Bag’, from the large bag in which he car-
ried the letters – was among the few people who kept the ladies of the
manor in touch with the wider world. Apart from Effingham Grant,
“[w]e have another Mercury to whom we could not be grateful enough
for what he is doing for us”, wrote the niece Felicia on 29 May 1849,
“and because he risks being found out and punished, we have decided
that, should better times return, we are going to erect a statue repre-
senting him with a letter in one hand and a loaf of bread in the other,
because he nourishes our souls as well as our bodies.”13
Felicia Racoviţă, then twenty-five, one of the “little revolutionaries”,
as Nicolae Golescu called his nieces,14 was a very constant correspon-
dent. She kept her exiled uncles informed of the latest high-society
gossip as well as of the political changes and all the rumours that
reached the tightly-knit community at Goleşti. Some two hundred
people accused of involvement in the events of 1848 were still lan-
guishing in prisons awaiting trial, and the Russians had sent couriers
to Transylvania requesting the arrest by the Austrian authorities of all
fugitive Wallachians caught. A younger member of the Golescu clan,
Constantin Racoviţă, was caught in Transylvania, where he fought
alongside the Hungarians, and was deported to Astrakhan in Siberia
some time in 1849.15 He then vanished without trace, before resurfac-
ing again a few months later.16 By January 1849, the Russian army of
12
3 January 1850, in Fotino 3: 8.
13
Letter from Felicia Racoviţă, 29 May 1849, in Fotino 2: 309–11.
14
Letter from Paris to their father Alexandru Racoviţă, 23 January/4 February 1849,
in Fotino 2: 221.
15
Born at Goleşti in 1830, he was the grand-son of Zinca Golescu and brother of
Zoe, the future Mrs. Effingham Grant.
16
Letter from Catinca Rosetti to her uncles from Constantinople, 24/12 September
1849, in Fotino 2: 348–9.
occupation had made itself sufficiently unwelcome in Wallachia for

Felicia to be able to express her horror at hearing the names of the
Tsar and Tsarina read out in prayers at the local church in Goleşti.17
The lives of the estranged former revolutionaries and their families
remained financially precarious for the entire time they spent as expa-
triates: money was obtained primarily from home, from national and
international subscriptions, from inheritances, loans, and the sale of
family lands, houses and personal libraries. Zinca Golescu was aware
of her exiled sons’ financial distress, as well as of their self-assumed role
in helping young impoverished Romanians studying in Paris. She had
an income of 800 ducats per year, but her daughter Ana Racoviţă, with
only 500 ducats, needed support to pay for her own sons’ tuition in a
boarding school in Bucharest run by the Frenchman Raoul de Pont-
briand and his Romanian wife.18 Ana’s husband, Alexandru Racoviţă,
a high-ranking district official in Little Wallachia, had been among the
victims of purges made by the Russian envoy, General Duhamel, in the
aftermath of the defeated revolution. Although by April 1850 it was
made clear that a state pension was to be made available to him, he
was too proud to apply for it, as Ana complained in her letter.19 By July
of the same year, however, he had changed his mind, and obtained the
promised pension, but the money was mainly earmarked to subsidise
his sons’ studies in Paris. Cashflow intended for the exiled revolu-
tionaries remained irregular and its transit from Bucharest to Paris
and Asia Minor was beset with delays and perils. The correspondence
between Zinca and her sons was often solely concerned with the sale
of lands and with other complex financial arrangements, often medi-
ated or guaranteed by Effingham Grant and the British consul, Robert
Colquhoun.
Constantin Rosetti’s main income came from the revenues of a
company he, the son of nobility turned entrepreneur, had founded
in 1846 in keeping with his faith in the need to encourage the rise of
a commercial class in Romania as well as with his loathing for noble
privilege. Before the events of 1848, the “Rosetti-Winterhalder Estab-
lishment” had been run by Rosetti with his friend and associate Henric
Winterhalder, with financial backing from his future brother-in-law,
Effingham Grant. The establishment comprised a printing press, a
17
Fotino 2: 224.
18
Fotino 3: 135.
19
Ibid., 27.
120 1849
bookshop, a reading room, and a general store which sold Romanian

wines and French champagne, paper, tinned food and cheeses, to the
unspeakable horror of the Rosetti family, scandalised that their prom-
ising offspring had become a mere “shopkeeper”.20 The printing house
was very productive in 1846–1847: the output included original Roma-
nian works, but also translations from Alfieri, Molière, Dumas, George
Sand, and Lamartine.21 The lending library was equally busy, offering
a comprehensive and up-to-date list, ranging from Balzac, Dumas and
George Sand to Walter Scott, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Mary Edgeworth
and William Godwin.22 Henric Winterhalder was left in charge after
the arrest and departure of the revolutionaries, and his role was crucial
in ensuring the unimpeded circulation of income generated by the
business, and largely destined to subsidise the exiles’ political activi-
ties. On 6 September 1848 the painter Constantin Rosenthal, Roset-
ti’s devoted friend, had been paid 5,400 lei from the establishment’s
returns as he started his propaganda activities in Central Europe.23 It
was a considerable sum, given that the business registered losses in
1848 and 1849 and only started making a profit in 1851. For compari-
son, the profits recorded for April and May 1851 were of 223 and 330
lei respectively.24
In December 1848, Constantin Rosetti embarked on a life in exile
which was to last until 1857. On 7 December, he was at a banquet at the
Salle Valentin in Paris, listening to speeches by the republican radicals
Pierre Leroux, Félix Pyat and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in the midst of
a 2,000-strong audience. With his fellow-exiles, he re-established con-
tacts with Quinet, Bataillard and Michelet. “The world is empty now
that the Romanians are no longer in it”, the historian commented on
the disappearance of the short-lived Romanian ‘republic’.25 Rosetti’s
feelings and actions at that time seemed predicated to a considerable
20
21
Cf. C. A. Rosetti ca tipograf (Bucharest, 1903), 21–6.
22
Cf. Catalogue de livres français qui se donnent en lecture à la librairie de C. A.
Rosetti & Winterhalder (Bucharest, 1846).
23
Bucur, C. A. Rosetti: mesianism, 48. Leu (pl. lei) was, and still is, the Romanian
national currency.
24
Profit figures quoted in a letter from Winterhalder to Rosetti, 14 June 1851. It
was intercepted and only survived in the archives of the Austrian Ministry of the
Interior. For the full text, see Doc. 2 in Mihai-Ştefan Ceauşu and Dumitru Vitcu,
“Romanian Emigration and the Epilogue of the 1848 Revolution”, Revue roumaine
d’histoire 43, 1–4 (2004): 89–109.
25
Entry for 9 December 1848 in Rosetti, Diary, 250.
extent on the teachings and ideas of his mentor. Over the previous
months he had tried to practise what Michelet called the “religion of
the home”, where the holy trinity was man, woman, and child.26 He
had tasted the happiness of early married life, but also its deep disap-
pointments, as he came to suspect that his young wife was becoming
from a brilliant, promising young woman, a boring, bored young wife
trapped in the trivia of domestic life and motherhood and, as such,
unworthy of his high expectations of heroic companionship in revolu-
tionary exile. He was experiencing the dark side of the “religion of the
home”, what Michelet, himself no stranger to the convoluted nature
of human relationships and emotions, called marriage as a “supplice
à deux”.27 Yet, by January 1849, once his family left for Plymouth
(where Marie’s mother and sisters lived) and once his irritation with
the crying baby and the petty chores of domesticity had diminished,
he started missing what he had previously merely endured. The letters
to Marie started to reflect a new-found tenderness and a new hope for
their future life as a couple who had “survived a huge shipwreck”, by
which he presumably meant both their personal crises and the failure
of the 1848 revolution.28 He was also looking forward to the open-
ing of the academic year at the Collège de France and to the lectures
of the “apostle Michelet”, where he hoped his wife would join him
upon her return from England. In his more studious moments, he
read Louis Blanc’s Histoire de la Révolution and Louis Raybaud’s –
nowadays obscure – satirical novel Jérôme Paturot à la recherche de la
meilleure des républiques, from both of which he quoted copiously in
letters to his wife.29
An old ally of the the Romanians, the Frenchman Jean Henri
Abdolonyme Ubicini, an eye-witness to the events of June 1848 in
Wallachia and former envoy to Constantinople of the Wallachian pro-
visional government, helped the exiles launch their new life in France
by publicizing an account of the revolutionary events in their own
words. Romania “offers herself to the judgement of Europe”, Ubicini
announced in the introduction to the Mémoire justificatif de la révo-
lution roumaine de 11/23 juin 1848.30 Hoping to gain a sympathetic
26
Du Prêtre, de la femme, de la famille (Paris, 1845, 2nd edn.), 323.
27
Entry for 1 April 1844 in Michelet, Journal, ed. Paul Viallaneix (Paris, 1959),
1: 551.
28
Letter dated 15/16 January 1849, C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 40.
29
Letters dated 2 and 22 January 1849, in ibid., 1: 33, 44.
30
See Part One, p. 110.
122 1849
French audience, the exiled revolutionaries not only gave an account

of the events in emotionally charged language, but also responded to
the much-publicised Russian rationale for occupying the Principalities
as explained in the Tsar’s manifesto of 19/31 July 1848. The revolu-
tion, the exiled revolutionaries countered, had not been the outcome
of foreign “democratic and socialist propaganda” circulated in the
Principalities to aid the creation of an independent “Daco-Romanian
Kingdom”, as the Tsar had alleged, but a popular uprising and a “lib-
eral movement” born of local political developments initiated on the
day when the “Russian bayonets imposed the Organic Regulations.”31
The subsequent Russian occupation of their country was an act, they
added in language of strikingly modern resonances, which “seriously
affected the general security and the balance of power in Europe.”32
As the aftershocks of the revolution subsided, the Romanian
diaspora in Paris started organising itself, renewing or making high-
placed contacts, collecting information and searching for sympathetic
newspapers and editors. In desperation, some even consulted – in
vain – the increasingly trendy ‘magnétiseurs’, in the hope of gain-
ing, via occult channels, some insight into their country’s future.33
The exiles established close links with Alexandre Ledru-Rollin and
his democratic-socialist group in the Legislative Assembly, known as
the ‘Montagne’.34 On 16 January 1849, Rosetti attended a meeting of
the Montagne with his friend Dumitru Brătianu. He was hoping that,
like Prince Adam Czartoryski’s circle in Paris, his own circle of exiled
Romanian revolutionaries and republicans, too, might form a gov-
ernment in exile, albeit located differently on the political spectrum.
When one member of the Assembly asked the Romanians if they had
a mandate from their government, Ledru-Rollin retorted: “But they
are the members of the provisional government”, “les anges déchus”,
the fallen angels of the Romanian revolution, and offered to raise a
motion in the Assembly on their behalf.35 In spite of their enthusiasm,
31
For the Organic Regulations, see Part One, p. 68 sqq.
32
Ubicini, Mémoire, 1–2, 30.
33
Rosetti, Diary, 253, and C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 32–3.
34
Born in Paris in 1807 in a well-to-do bourgeois family, Ledru-Rollin studied law
and became Minister of the Interior in the French provisional government of 1848,
where his main achievement was the promulgation of universal suffrage. Thereafter, as
a deputy, he sided on the extreme left in the Legislative Assembly, alongside Raspail
and Louis Blanc. See entry in Vapereau, Dictionnaire universel des contemporains, 3rd
edn. (Paris, 1865).
35
the Romanian émigrés were deeply divided and failed to put together
a jointly agreed platform as a basis for the proposed motion: their
main dilemma was whether they should compromise on their prin-
ciples and negotiate with Turkey or whether, as Rosetti believed, they
should maintain an intransigent position, even at the risk of alienating
both the suzerain power, the Porte, and the protecting power, Russia,
and of having their exile extended as a reprisal. The less radical mem-
bers of the diaspora were not prepared for high-risk strategies. Some
had families, others had reputations to protect, and, as a result, they
failed to agree on a statement in their meeting of 19 January, much to
the disappointment of the ‘Jacobin’, sacrifice-prone Rosetti.36 “We are
Romania’s worms”,37 he complained in his diary, in his customary and
often alienatingly ruthless manner. Substantiating Stanislas Béllanger’s
humorous depiction of the ‘great fear of Russia’ among the Roma-
nian expatriates, Rosetti’s peers appeared subdued and afraid to meet
and debate the fate of their occupied country even in Paris, far away
from Russian and Ottoman direct interference. Most were doomed to
remain part angels and part worms, the ambiguities and compromises
of their political careers a handy target for their enemies.
In the minutes of the National Assembly’s sessions there appear to
be no records of an interpellation by Ledru-Rollin after 19 January
1849.38 Debates around the French republic’s foreign policies had in
fact taken place on 8 January, when the Citoyen Eugène Beaune,39 a
Montagnard deputy for the department of the Loire and a member of
the foreign affairs committee, vigorously criticized the reserved foreign
policy of the French government, especially with respect to Austria
and Russia. In his view, France had betrayed what had been her three
main foreign affairs pledges upon the installation of the republic: the
liberation of Italy, support for a liberalizing Prussia and the reunifica-
tion of Poland, her “assassinated sister.” The French government was
equally guilty of inaction in the East:
36
C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 42.
37
Entry for 4 March 1849 in Rosetti, Diary, 266–7.
38
As is often the case in the sources used for this narrative, the dates appear to
conflict, unless a second interpellation by Ledru-Rollin after 19 January was indeed
planned, but never took place. Debates on foreign policy issues did take place on
8 January 1849, as recorded in the official minutes of the Assembly (see note 40).
39
He was to be among the less compromising of the ‘proscrits du Deux Décem-
bre’, who refused the emperor’s offers of amnesty and died in Switzerland in 1880.
Cf. Sylvie Aprile, Le siècle des exilés: bannis et proscrits de 1789 à la Commune (Paris,
2010), 240.
124 1849
One last and grave question. What measures have you taken against the
invasion of Moldavia and Wallachia? (Renewed murmurs.) Constanti-
nople is being threatened by the Russian camps in Bessarabia and the
Crimea; do we have vessels in the Straits to ensure the integrity of the
Ottoman Empire? Treaties are violated, but what will our policy be in
the face of these faits accomplis? The great revolutionary movements
of Central Europe lend themselves admirably well to Russia’s incessant
plans. You must rememeber how she was stopped in 1828 at Adrianople
by the demonstration of strength of Austria and England; you must be
aware of the treaties of Unkiar Iskelessi and of London – Brunnow’s
treaty – from which we were excluded, and which earned us so many
glorious bulletins as a consequence. Then, our ships were recalled from
Toulon for fear that their cannons might go off on their own. We were
known to have been excluded from the concert of Europe, but Austria
and England were watching; now that Austria prefers her share of the
spoils to the opportunity of a war which would deprive her of her free-
dom of movement in the West, what counter-weight are we offering to
stop the old policy known as the ‘balance of powers’ from falling into
the abyss of the unknown? 40
Ledru-Rollin took part in the ensuing debates, strongly seconding his
fellow-Montagnard and reminding Drouyn de Lhuys, the foreign min-
ister, that Russia in all her actions was still defending the treaties of
1815, abrogated by the French revolution of 1848. Provocatively quot-
ing Napoleon I’s famous dictum on the choice between a republican
or a Cossack Europe, Ledru wondered aloud why the government did
not seem to be alive to the danger posed by the alleged presence of the
Russian navy in the Adriatic and of the 80,000-strong Russian army
in Moldo-Wallachia, both allegations emphatically denied by de Lhuys
and by the minister of the marine, Destutt De Tracy.41 In dramatic
language which presented the current European situation as a clash
between civilization and barbarity, Ledru-Rollin urged war in the face
of an Assembly which resolutely stood behind the government in its
pursuit of peace and appeasement:
And as, in this immense demi-circle extending from the Adriatic to
the Baltic sea, I see troops amassing, and as I tell myself that you have
abandoned the friendly nations which have served as our vanguard, as
I listen to the insolent provocations launched in the name of the shame-
40
Compte rendu des séances de l’Assemblée Nationale (Paris, 1849), 7 (1 January to
10 February 1849): 87, available online from Gallica, the digital library of the Biblio-
thèque Nationale.
41
Ibid., 90–94.
ful treaties of 1815, I realize that I have no right to think of Napoleon’s

words. But what are then those Croats, with their long red cloaks, who
bathed in blood at Vienna, if not barbarians? What are those troops that
invaded Moldo-Wallachia if not barbarians? And are they not barbar-
ians, too, the Cossacks and their hetman, already camping along the
German border? There can still be, therefore, a horrific conflict between
ideals and barbarity, between light and darkness; how could I, therefore,
not be moved by the prospect of a danger threatening not the repub-
lic, but civilization itself! No, no, you can no longer content yourselves
with saying that you are negotiating, you must act. Otherwise, you risk
betraying the nation.42
In spite of such fiery rhetoric, debates on 8 January predictably closed
on calls from the more moderate benches in the Assembly to continue
the diplomatic efforts rather than succumb to the appeals of the war-
mongers and declare war on Russia.
The Romanian exiles’ contacts were not limited to the men in power
or the media movers. One of Rosetti’s contacts in Paris was the hum-
ble, but grandly named, Charlemagne Hallegrain, the owner of a shoe-
making shop near the Louvre, the “magnificent man of the people”
who happened to be his next-door neighbour when he first arrived –
a broken, destitute exile – in Paris. Hallegrain, affectionately known
in the Rosetti circle as the “wicked boot-maker”, made the family’s
footwear during their financially difficult life in exile. More impor-
tantly, he played a covert political role, and his home was to become
one of the focal meeting points for the exiles in years to come. Many
years later, when Rosetti had already returned to his homeland, his
paper Românul was still distributed in Paris from Hallegrain’s address.
Conspiratorial correspondence sent from Bucharest to his home at
no. 5 Rue de l’ancienne Comédie was often intercepted by the Aus-
trian police.43
Marie Rosetti’s first months in exile must have been as unsettling
as her husband’s: in a new world, with little financial support, she had
a baby and an impatient husband with a rather gloomy outlook on
life to attend to. At moments, only letter-writing buttressed the emo-
tional support system that she and the expatriates had lost. Writing to
her former pupil and now friend Alexandrina I. Ghica on 17 Febru-
ary 1849, Marie put on a brave face and explained her rationale for
42
Ibid., 91.
43
Ceauşu and Vitcu, “Romanian emigration”, Doc. 1.
126 1849
marriage in hard times: “[. . .] I have much hope, which is why I suf-
fer less than men do; they, in their imagination, always blacken even
further the cloud suspended above their heads, while a woman, on the
contrary, tries to catch a glimpse of the sun hidden behind it – this is
why a man will suffer less if he marries –.”44
44
B. A. R., Manuscripts Section, Fonds C. A. Rosetti, S 11(1–6)/LXIII, Letter to
Alexandrina I. Ghica, 17 February 1849, S 11(3)/LXIII.
1849
DUMITRU BRĂTIANU AND THE ENGLISH
‘PHILO-ROMANIANS’
We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual

enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and
those interests it is our duty to follow.
Lord Palmerston, 1 March 184843
On 12 September 1848, Dumitru Brătianu had been appointed official
Wallachian representative in Paris by the Princely Lieutenancy, only
to see his new diplomatic career cut short by the premature death of
the Romanian revolution. While Rosetti and some of his companions
were arrested and were taken along the Danube on a Turkish barge,
Brătianu evaded arrest and famously accompanied Marie Rosetti on
her mission to save her husband and his associates. Finally, he joined
the Romanian diaspora in Paris and embarked on a decade of political
propaganda before resuming his political career in Romania in 1857.
As hopes for French support finally faded in the aftermath of the elec-
tions of December 1848, which saw Louis Napoléon to the presidency
of the republic, Brătianu left for London, where he became the envoy
of the Romanians’ unofficial government-in-exile. Earlier Romanian
appeals to British diplomacy had met with indifference at worst and
with a vague benevolence at best. Lord Palmerston himself had been
notably reserved with respect to the Romanians’ national and liberal-
constitutional aspirations during the revolutionary movements in the
Danubian Principalities and Hungary in 1848. Yet, given Britain’s
strong position in Constantinople and interests in the Middle and
Near East, the exiles felt that here was an opportunity to exploit and
appointed Dumitru Brătianu as their ‘man in London.’
The pro-Romanian lobbying in Britain in 1848–50 had to hammer
insistently at the ambiguities of a British foreign policy caught within
the conflicting Canningite demands of respect for “public opinion at
home, liberal-constitutional developments abroad, and, above all, Brit-
ain’s vital interests.”44 Lord Palmerston himself appeared to wish to
43
Hansard, 3rd series, 97: 122.
44
George J. Billy, Palmerston’s Foreign Policy: 1848 (Peter Lang, 1993), 4.
128 1849
put in practice the Canningite principle that it was desirable to main-

tain “an influence both with the free, and the despot”,45 a principle
which to the radicalised East-Europeans in London must have looked
uncomfortably like opportunism. As already shown, Ion Câmpineanu’s
attempts at finding diplomatic allies in London in 1839 had collapsed
in the face of a British-Russian raprochement engineered largely by
Palmerston and his Russian counterpart, Nesselrode, a policy which
continued in the late 1840s. In the context of a rising Germany, what
must have initially appeared like an ‘unnatural’ rapprochement with
tsarist Russia – which at that moment appeared as a force of stabil-
ity in Central Europe in the face of the revolutionary threat – made
sense for Britain. In addition to strategic considerations, Palmer-
ston’s approach to the European national projects appears to have
been pragmatically selective: while nation-building projects in Italy –
detrimental to arch-enemy Austria – were by and large acceptable,
national aspirations in the Balkans, harmful to the Ottoman Porte,
were not, although Palmerston could not have said so with impunity.
In the 1840s Russia had improved her diplomatic image by making
concessions of a nature to alleviate tensions and assure Britain of the
tsar’s good-will. The Convention of 1841, signed by Turkey and the
five great powers, had closed the Straits to foreign warships in times
of peace and had, therefore, left Britain less anxious about the safety
of her trade routes through the Eastern Mediterranean to the Levant
and India. As a result of this inter-play of contradictory requirements,
the constitutional and nationalist aspirations of the German liberals
and of the embattled Polish, Hungarian and Romanian “revolution-
ists” (Palmerston’s own term) were temporarily sacrificed in 1848–49
on the altar of European stability. It has been argued that, especially
after 1846, Palmerston did not lack in “prudence when powerful states
were involved. He put peace with them before the encouragement of
Continental liberalism.”46 The court, Parliament and the public went
along with appeasement, largely owing to Lord Palmerston’s personal
charisma and to his management of the press, despite attacks by radi-
cals and by disaffected MPs such as the Turcophile David Urquhart,
a former diplomat in Constantinople, who famously accused the For-
45
Steele, Palmerston and Liberalism, 16.
46
Ibid., 18.
dumitru brătianu and the english ‘philo-romanians’ 129
eign Secretary of being a Russian spy and never ceased denouncing

“the malevolent and noxious influence of Russia.”47
The Polish, Hungarian and Italian émigrés enjoyed, if not the sup-
port of European cabinets, at least widespread popular sympathy in
both France and Britain. Their diasporas were more numerous, and,
if not more unified, at least better-organised than the Romanians’,
and their representatives, Prince Adam Czartoryski, the poet Adam
Mickiewicz, Lajos Kossuth and Giuseppe Mazzini, enjoyed popularity
and often gained entry at the highest level in foreign chancelleries. In
comparison, Constantin Rosetti, the Brătianu brothers and the Goles-
cus, like their country, were unknown in the West, and consequently
found that making key contacts in the right political and media circles
was often a frustrating and financially costly affair. The existence of
a ‘Romanian question’ as a sub-chapter of the Eastern Question was
yet unacknowledged in Western diplomacy, and publicity campaigns
were difficult to organize and subsidise. Yet, in spite of the fact that
the threat posed by Russian policies in Eastern Europe and the Dan-
ube area had not yet become a widespread concern in British politi-
cal circles, Russia’s image amongst the public at large had gradually
started to deteriorate from the 1830s onwards. In Britain, this shift
in perceptions was due not only to the work of pro-Polish politicians
such as Lord Dudley Coutts Stuart or the colourful Urquhart, but also
to efforts by disaffected liberal and radical émigré Russians. In 1846 – a
few years before Alexander Herzen’s fierce anti-tsarist campaign – Ivan
Golovin published in London a lengthy study entitled Russia under
the Autocrat Nicholas the First, in which he lambasted tsarist despo-
tism and its negative impact both at home and abroad. Golovin, who
came from an aristocratic family with a long tradition of state service
and had been employed briefly under Chancellor Nesselrode before
he ‘defected to the West’ in the late 1840s, could rightly claim that he
presented Western readers with an insider’s views on the institutions
and the political culture of tsarist Russia. He described Tsar Nicholas
in no equivocal terms as “the declared enemy of liberty” and Russia
as “a land of serfs and men in office.” “[T]he virtues which accom-
pany or flow from liberty are unknown here”, Golovin announced in
one of the book’s early chapters, in the certainty that the absence of
this defining shibboleth of mid-nineteenth-century European political
47
The Times, Palmers’ full text online, 23 March 1848. See Part One, p. 27.
130 1849
culture would promptly disqualify Russia in the eyes of mid-Victorian

liberals. Not only was the regime despotic and rapacious at home, he
contended, but it also attempted to export “slavery” world-wide with
the aid of its mighty and submissive army of willing recruits.48
In parallel with similar efforts by his peers in France, in London
Dumitru Brătianu did not spare efforts to gain attention on behalf of
his national project: he met and cultivated British politicians, MPs,
journalists and other public figures likely to lend a sympathetic ear and
a helping hand. Aware that, as the unofficial representative of a coun-
try which had fallen under Turkish and Russian control, he lacked
a credible mandate, Brătianu nonetheless wrote to Lord Palmerston,
then Foreign Secretary in the Russell government, on 6 December
1848, demanding an audience. On 8 December 1848 he was received
by Palmerston, but, in spite of what the Romanian politician in exile
perceived as mutual understanding, he did not obtain the hoped-for
promise of diplomatic or military backing against Russia.49 Undeterred,
on 16 January 1849, Brătianu followed up with a lengthy memorandum
in which he inserted episodes from what, he emphasised, had been a
“peaceful” revolution in Wallachia in 1848, invoking the Romanians’
resistance to the “illegal” occupation of the Principalities by Russian
troops in September 1848. In Brătianu’s analysis, the Ottoman Porte
was a weak instrument in the hands of an arrogant, duplicitous, yet
militarily and economically weak Russia. Persistent diplomatic pres-
sure on Russia was the only means to guarantee the European balance
of power, he argued. Yet, if diplomacy failed, military intervention
against Russia was not to be ruled out, as, in spite of her muscle-
flexing, Russia was no more than an assemblage of Potemkin villages,
Brătianu claimed. And even if Great Power intervention triggered a
European war, the poor state of the tsar’s armies and finances were
such that Russia was unlikely to put up a serious resistance. Although
expressed via a semi-official channel, the Romanian demands were
unambiguous: the withdrawal of the Russian troops, the abolition of
the Organic Regulations, the reinstatement of the revolutionary consti-
tution approved by Suleyman Pasha in August 1848, the establishment
48
Russia under the Autocrat Nicholas the First by Ivan Golovine, a Russian Subject
(New York, London: Praeger Publishers, 1970; 1st edn. Paris, 1845; 2nd edn. London,
1846), 138, 162 and 200. Cf. also David Saunders, Russia in the Age of Reaction and
Reform, 1801–81 (Pearson Education, 1992), 119. Golovin left Paris soon after the
publication of his work and settled in Britain, where he was naturalised in 1846.
49
Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 134–6.
of direct diplomatic relations between Britain and Wallachia, a com-

mercial treaty with Britain, the creation of a national army and, in the
longer term, the Union of the Principalities. Turkish suzerainty was
only briefly alluded to: Brătianu knew that this was a sensitive point
in his dealings with Britain. In exchange for support in re-establishing
legality both in the country’s constitutional arrangements, and in its
international status, Brătianu continued, Wallachia offered a market
for British exports, expertise and investments, rich natural resources,
cheap labour, as well as a wide, unpopulated territory open to col-
onization. As he did in his other memoirs and pamphlets, Brătianu
appealed to Great Britain as the home of liberal constitutionalism and
of a reformist spirit which had pre-empted revolutionary upheaval on
British soil. The Lords were the “arbiters of the world”, he wrote flat-
teringly, and, in addition – he reminded his recipient – there were
major British interests at stake in South-East Europe and the Near
East: British national dignity, trade, and peace in Europe.50
One of the earliest, if modest, achievements of the first phase of
Brătianu’s campaign was the publication in 1849 of the pamphlet The
Russians in Moldavia and Wallachia by William Lloyd Birkbeck, a
friend of Dudley Stuart’s and the honorary secretary of the Association
of the Friends of Poland. The pamphlet chiefly rehearsed for a wider
audience Brătianu’s afore-mentioned views and the Romanians’ pro-
paganda aims.51 Urged by Lord Dudley Stuart, in late February 1849
Brătianu published his own memorandum to Palmerston as Documents
concerning the Question of the Danubian Principalities. Dedicated to the
English Parliament, and circulated it among members of Parliament
who had expressed an intention to support the pro-Romanian motion
promised by Lord Dudley.52 It is an undisguised anti-tsarist pamphlet
which focuses in detail on Russia’s encroachments and on what the
Romanians perceived as her work of destruction in the Principalities
both before and after the defeated revolution.53 General Duhamel, in
50
Ibid., 1: 182–4.
51
Trevor J. Hope, “Dumitru Brătianu and British public opinion regarding the uni-
fication of the Romanian Principalities (1848–1859)”, in Anglo-Romanian Relations
after 1821, ed. Gh. Buzatu and Al. Pascu, special issue of Anuarul Institutului de istorie
“A. D. Xenopol”, supplement 4 (Iaşi, 1983), 29.
52
D. Bratiano, Documents Concerning the Question of the Danubian Principalities
dedicated to the English Parliament by D. Bratiano . . . (London 1849). A Romanian-
language draft of this memorandum was found in the Brătianu archives, see Din
arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 136–71.
53
Bratiano, Documents, 6.
132 1849
particular, as interim administrator of Wallachia, is singled out in the

attack. He was, Brătianu narrates, “without pity. He commanded in
Bucharest like a master, and a Russian master, to boot: from the day
of his arrival, all the rights of the Wallachians were trampled on, all
their laws violated; letters were unsealed; the import of foreign news-
papers was forbidden; the press was suppressed; passports for travel
abroas were refused, and many persons were even prevented from
travelling in the interior of the country. Homes were no longer pro-
tected, private meetings consisting of more than five persons were for-
bidden”, ran Brătianu’s catalogue of Russian iniquities.54 He reminds
Lord Palmerston of the strategic position of the two provinces: “[. . .]
your Lordship is well aware that a Russian army between the Danube
and the Carpathian mountains, is, as it were, a fortress commanding
the East and West: once in the Principalities, it is in the heart of the
Ottoman Empire; and once mistress of the Carpathian mountains, it
has its right wing in Germany and its left in Italy.”55 Around the same
time, he wrote to Lord Palmerston requesting the Foreign Secretary’s
intercession in Constantinople for the return of the exiled revolution-
aries and the liberation of their sympathizers arrested by the Russians
in Wallachia.56
On 22 March 1849, Brătianu was probably in attendance in the
House of Commons when Lord Dudley Stuart raised the issue of the
“illegal and arbitrary” Russian occupation of the Danubian Principali-
ties and demanded the inspection of papers relating to Wallachia and
Moldavia.57 He was supported by an unsurprising assortment of some
of Parliament’s perpetual malcontents: the deputies John O’Connell
(son of Daniel), Sir Henry Verney, the radical MP for Youghal, Thomas
Chisholm Anstey, John Abel Smith, as well as David Urquhart. The
motion was also seconded by Thomas Perronet Thompson, the radi-
cal MP for Bradford, whom Brătianu had recently visited as he cam-
paigned for the motion. Although a pacifist and non-interventionist,
Thompson believed in this case that Britain should join, preferably
by diplomatic means, the “great struggle . . . between civilisation and
54
Ibid., 7.
55
Ibid., 17.
56
Memorandum dated 15 February 1849 in Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 175–6.
57
Ibid., 200, letter from Lord Dudley Stuart to D. Brătianu, promising to secure a
seat in the Commons for him on the day.
freedom on one side, and barbarity and despotism on the other.”58

Responding to the rebels’ calls for anti-Russian protests, Disraeli, then
MP for Buckinghamshire and rising star of the Tory party, was, how-
ever, of the opinion that the Tsar, who was “to be ranked among those
most entitled to the respect of mankind”, had demonstrated “modera-
tion and clemency” in his treatment of the Romanian provinces. This
statement, as reported in The Times, prompted a satirical response
from Punch on 31 March, in which reference was made to Russian
acts of violence against civilians with which the British public was
familiar: “We should like to have a Statistical Return of the number
of persons who have stared, pulled off their spectacles, rubbed their
eyes, and called the correctness of their vision in question, on read-
ing this passage. Who flogged the Nuns of Minsk?59 Who had Pol-
ish children carted off to Siberia? Mr. DISRAELI might at least have
answered these common questions before pronouncing so extravagant
a panegyric on NICHOLAS.”60
Responding to his opponents in the Commons on the same day, 22
March, Lord Palmerston declared himself satisfied by promises from
St. Petersburg that Russia had no intention of violating the integrity
of the Ottoman Empire and that the evacuation of the Russian troops
from the Principalities was only a matter of time. In the meantime,
Lord Dudley countered, the Romanians were forced to maintain at
their own expense the 60,000-strong occupying troops. However,
since Lord Palmerston had made it clear that he could not submit
diplomatic correspondence to the Commons in a matter in which
negotiations were pending, he reluctantly withdrew his motion.61 The
occupation of the Danubian Principalities and the invasion of Hun-
gary were, as has been suggested, the price Palmerston was prepared
to pay “to see the stability and existing political balance of Central
Europe preserved.”62 The Foreign Secretary did not believe that any
number of small, weak buffer states in South-East Europe would be
58
Michael J. Turner, Independent Radicalism in Early Victorian Britain (Westport,
Connecticut, 2004), 159.
59
This is a reference to Nicholas I’s persecution of the Ruthenian Catholic Church
in the 1840s, which had led Daniel O’Connell to compare the Tsar to the Roman
Emperor Nero. In his own country, Nicholas had been compared to Caligula by the
Russian historian Sergei Solov’ev. Cf. Saunders, Russia, 119.
60
“Mr. Disraeli’s Model Monarch”, Punch, 31 March 1849.
61
Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 39 and 201, note; for the full text of the debate, see
Hansard, 3rd series, 103: 1128–61, March 22, 1849.
62
Florescu, The Struggle Against Russia, 238.
134 1849
a better safeguard against Russian expansionism than a stable Habs-

burg Empire and an enduring Porte. The Romanian émigrés were
disappointed, but a small victory had been scored nevertheless: the
Romanian Principalities had been placed on the map of international
diplomacy.63 The heated exchange between Lord Dudley and Palmer-
ston on 22 March over the Romanian question did not remain con-
fined behind closed parliamentary doors. It was popularised in France
by the anti-Russian Le Temps (24 March), and in Romanian-speaking
territories by the newspaper Bucovina, published in Romanian and
German and distributed as the organ of the Romanian national move-
ment in the Austrian-controlled northern region of Bucovina.64
The long months of lobbying and waiting in the antechambers of
the high and mighty in London must have taken their emotional toll
on Brătianu. Against the encroachments of misanthropy, his friend
Rosetti, writing from Paris, recommended activating the memory of
friends, Henric Winterhalder (the friend and business associate who
partly financed the Romanian diaspora), the younger Brătianu brother,
Ion, and Constantin D. Rosenthal, the painter who had become one of
the most devoted militants for the Romanian cause. Their remembered
figures should be enough “to wipe away the ugliness of half man-
kind”, Rosetti encouraged his friend.65 But news from Romania, sent
by Effingham Grant, were discouraging: General Duhamel, the Rus-
sian envoy to Bucharest, who held the Principalities in his iron grip,
was planning to further revise the dreaded and now fully reinstated
Organic Regulations and thereby increase Russian influence in the
country’s administration. Among other measures, he had appointed
Russian officers to the command of the quarantine stations on the
Danube, which effectively meant that the Russians controlled one of
the country’s major borders, as well navigation on the river itself.66
In early 1849, it was not only the fate of Moldo-Wallachia that
hung in the balance, but also that of Transylvania. Events in all three
principalities became inextricably linked not only with each other, but
also with concurrent events in Hungary and Austria. The next sec-
63
For the exchanges between Lord Dudley Stuart and Dumitru Brătianu, see Din
arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 172–8.
64
Boitoş, Paul Bataillard et la révolution roumaine, 79.
65
66
Letter from C. A. Rosetti to D. Brătianu, 16 March 1849, in Din arhiva lui
D. Brătianu, 1: 190. Rosetti often enclosed Effingham Grant’s letters from Bucharest
in his correspondence to Dumitru Brătianu.
tion is a brief outline of the historical background of the civil war in

Transylvania. This involves a minor detour and a return back in time
before resuming the story line at the point when the Wallachian exiles
and their families became embroiled in the Transylvanian civil war
of 1849.
HUNGARIANS AND ROMANIANS IN 1849–185069
Before 1848 Hungary had been a kingdom under the Habsburg scep-
ter, with its own Diet, a powerful nobility and enjoying a considerable
amount of political autonomy. Under the impact of almost simultane-
ous events in Paris, Italy and Vienna in the spring of 1848, Hungary,
too, became involved in what was to become a pan-European quest
for constitutionalism, civic liberties and, in many cases, national free-
dom. This set off a rapid chain of events which totally changed, if not
the political regimes in East-Central Europe in the short term, at least
people’s political behaviour and expectations. In the initial enthusiasm
for change, Lajos Kossuth, a deputy in the lower house of the Hungar-
ian Diet at Pozsony (today Bratislava, in Slovakia), assumed unofficial
leadership of the Diet and, by extension, of Hungary, a position he
would retain until the end of the revolutionary events in August-
September 1849. His speech of 3 March 1848 practically inaugurated
the Hungarian revolution. As the government of Chancellor Metter-
nich collapsed in Vienna on 15 March under popular pressure, the
State Conference was compelled to approve the formation of a new
Hungarian government under Prime Minister Lajos Batthyáni, with
the Habsburg Palatine Archduke Stephen as the Austrian emperor-
king’s plenipotentiary in Hungary.70 On 11 April the new Hungarian
Parliament promulgated the “April Laws” which, like the Proclama-
tion of Islaz in neighbouring Wallachia, would operate effectively
as a new constitution. According to its terms, Hungary would be a
69
This section is intended as a mere contextual guide to the main issues involved
in the ethnic conflict in Transylvania, with an emphasis on Wallachian reactions to
it. There is a vast literature on the history of Transylvania and on the Hungarian
revolution of 1848–49 which, for obvious reasons, could not be covered here. For a
comprehensive bibliography of Hungarian-Romanian relations in the mid-nineteenth
century, see Béla Borsi-Kálmán, Hungarian Exiles and the Romanian National Move-
ment, 1849–1867 (Boulder, Colorado, 1991), 149–51, note 3. Professor Keith Hitchins’
A Nation Discovered: Romanian intellectuals in Transylvania and the idea of nation,
1700–1848 (Bucharest, 1999) is an update of his earlier work on this topic and has a
useful “Bibliographic Guide”, 221–7.
70
For an informative account of the 1848–49 events in Hungary, see István Deák,
“The Revolution and the War of Independence, 1848–1849”, in A History of Hungary,
ed. Peter F. Sugar, Péter Hanák and Tibor Frank (Indiana University Press, 1990,
pb. 1994).
hungarians and romanians in 1849–1850 137
constitutional hereditary monarchy, with a bicameral Parliament,

co-existing in union with the other kingdoms and provinces of the
Austrian crown. Also like the Islaz Proclamation, the “April Laws”
enshrined civil liberties and limited noble privilege, making all citizens
equal before the law. So were, too, all the religious denominations in
the kingdom, with the exception of the Mosaic faith.
One of the main setbacks of the new constitutional arrangement
was the incipient dualism it instituted. The Hungarian leaders were
uncertain whether Hungary should or could in the long term stay in
the monarchy, and they oscillated between their need for Austrian
support and their nationalist-separatist ambitions.71 Count István
(Stephen) Széchenyi, the reformist Hungarian politician, had cap-
tured this conflict of identity amongst Habsburg subjects as early as
the 1820s when he noted in his diary: “The fault of the Austrian Mon-
archy and Hungary is that God in his wrath joined them together.”72
The second conundrum was Hungary’s nationality problem: the
national minorities, Germans, Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthenes, Romanians,
Serbs and Croats, had their own divisive national agendas, and the
quest for a common cause with the Hungarians was to prove elusive.
Essentially, the tension underlying the history of Austria and Hungary
for the rest of the century was to be between the vision of a central-
ist, unified Hungarian nation-state and the reality of its multi-ethnic
nature. Revolutionaries of all nationalities were going to be haunted
and ultimately defeated by three broad categories of factors: the ambi-
guities of Hungary’s relations to the Habsburg monarchy (to which
she should have been loyal under the terms of the Pragmatic Sanction
of 1713), the relative conservatism of the peasant masses, who formed
around 80 per cent of the population and who by and large were loyal
to the Habsburg dynasty, and the alternative agendas of the national
minorities.
According to contemporary statistics, out of the Austrian Empire’s
total population of 36 million, only under 17% were Austro-Germans.
The Czechs and Slovaks formed 19%, the Magyars 14%, the Italians
and Romanians 8% each, the Serbs 5% and the Croats 4%, to cite only
71
Istvan Deák, “The Revolution”, 216.
72
Quoted in R. J. W. Evans, “Széchenyi and Austria”, in History and Biography:
essays in honour of Derek Beales, ed. T. C. W. Blanning and David Cannadine (Cam-
bridge University Press, 1996), 114.
138 1849
the main ethnic groups.73 The Hungarian project of uniting Croa-

tia, Slovenia and Transylvania to Hungary in an attempt to recreate
the historic ‘kingdom of Saint Stephen’ came into collision with the
nascent nation-building projects of the minorities. While the Hungar-
ians, Germans, Czechs and Poles invoked their historic and dynastic
rights to reconstitute their lost mediaeval kingdoms, the Romanians,
Slovaks, Serbs, Ruthenians and, in part, the Croatians, resorted to the
new democratic principle of popular sovereignty over territories which
they now occupied in a majority.74
In May and June 1848, while the Hungarians were still optimistic
about the possibility of effecting political and constitutional changes
by reformist, lawful means, the first stirrings of ethnic unrest came to
the fore: a Slovak National Congress, a Serbian Congress and a Roma-
nian National Assembly convened within a few days of each other,
demanding wide-ranging rights for their peasantries and ultimately
autonomy for their regions. On 2 June, the Pan-Slavic Congress in
Prague sounded an altogether more ominous note, which must have
reminded the Hungarians of their main fears: the muted conflict divid-
ing Slavs, Magyars and Germans in Central Europe, embedded within
the more comprehensive cultural-political programmes of Illyrism,
Pan-Slavism, Magyarism and Pan-Germanism. Whatever the historic
and cultural origins of the Hungarians’ quest for supremacy in the
monarchy, their strategies for promoting the Hungarian language and
for prioritizing the employment of Magyar-speaking individuals even
in regions where other ethnic groups were in a majority, had ended
up alienating the other ethnic groups. Even reformist Magyar liberals
such as István Széchenyi recognized the often fanatical nature of the
measures championed by the Hungarians. “I for one know of no real
Magyar who, though his hair may have grayed and experience and
worldly wisdom may have furrowed his brow, would not, as a luna-
tic whose idée fixe has been touched, disregard doctrines of fairness
and even of justice when the affairs of our language and nationality
are touched upon”, Széchenyi declared in a speech to the Hungarian
73
Figures from Lewis B. Namier, 1848. The Revolution of the Intellectuals (Lon-
don, 1944), 125, cited by Teodor Pavel, “Revoluţia de la 1848: o şansă irosită de
reconciliere în Europa central-răsăriteană” in Revoluţia de la 1848–1849 în Europa
Centrală: perspectivă istorică şi istoriografică, ed. Camil Mureşan, Nicolae Bocşan and
Ioan Bolovan (Cluj, 2000), 52.
74
Pavel, “Revoluţia de la 1848: o şansă irosită”, 54.
Academy of Sciences – his own foundation – in 1842.75 Counter-

productive intransigence on all sides was to have tragic consequences.
Attempts at inter-ethnic cooperation against Austrian absolutism in
1848–49 were doomed by the build-up of mutual distrust as well by
the separatist agendas of the various ethnic communities and by other,
more obscure forces dividing classes and ethnic groups.
Transylvania itself was a special case within the more general con-
text of the Habsburg Empire. First conquered by the Hungarians in
the eleventh century, it later became a semi-autonomous Hungarian
province incorporated, at the same time as Hungary, into the Austrian
Empire in 1699. It had a sizable population of ethnic Romanians liv-
ing alongside Magyars, Saxons and Szecklers. By the mid-eighteenth
century, the Romanians comprised more than fifty per cent of Tran-
sylvania’s population.76 According to the census of 1850–51, the eth-
nic Romanians represented 59.4 per cent of the entire population,
followed by the Magyars with 26 per cent and the Germans with 9.3
per cent.77 In spite of their sizeable numbers and their contribution
to the economy, they were unrecognized as a nation, which deprived
them of basic civil and political rights. One of the leading ethnic
Romanian intellectuals in Transylvania, Timotei Cipariu, writing to
one of his peers, commented on the disparity between the Roma-
nians’ demographics and their political invisibility. Although Saxons,
Szecklers and Hungarians were in proportion of one to three to the
ethnic Romanians, the latter were totally unprepared for political par-
ticipation, for the simple reason that they comprised mainly illiterate
peasants and a few priests and deacons. “[W]e numerus sumus, noth-
ing else”, he wrote wrily in the scholarly Latinate jargon used at the
75
Quoted in Robert A. Kann, The Multinational Empire: nationalism and national
reform in the Habsburg Monarchy 1848–1918 (New York, 1964), 1: 109.
76
Borsi-Kálmán, Hungarian Exiles, 24. Cf. also statistics in Hitchins, A Nation Dis-
covered, 15–6.
77
According to the Romanian General Gheorghe Magheru’s contemporaneous
estimate, there were 1,486,000 Romanians in Transylvania, with a further 3,871,000
in the Banat, Bukovina and Hungary proper. See Magheru, letter dated 4 March 1849
from Baden (in French), in 1848 la români, ed. Bodea, 2: 1076–80. For the census of
1850–1, based on self-declared ethnicity, as opposed to later censuses which took lan-
guage as a variable, see Ioan Bolovan, Transilvania între revoluţia de la 1848 şi unirea
din 1918: contribuţii demografice (Cluj-Napoca, 2000), 196–9. See also Sorina Paula
Bolovan and Ioan Bolovan, Transylvania in the Modern Era: demographic aspects
(Cluj-Napoca, 2003), esp. 175 sqq.
140 1849
time by the Romanian Transylvanian intellectuals.78 The persecution

to which Eastern Orthodoxy had traditionally been subjected in the
empire was one of the reasons why the Romanian nobility had largely
defected into the ranks of the Hungarian aristocracy, leaving their for-
mer religion to the peasants and the clerics. This turned the ethnic
Romanians in Transylvania into a “truncated” society with no urban
middle class to speak of and a nobility which, with few exceptions, had
been thoroughly assimilated into the Hungarian nobility, and who,
more crucially, by the mid-nineteenth century, thought of themselves
as Hungarian.79 Some historians believe that this process of assimila-
tion of the Romanian Transylvanian nobles into the Hungarian upper
classes for economic, social and political reasons had a major influ-
ence on the growth of a strong Hungarian identity and on the ulti-
mate identification of ‘nobility’ as a class concept with ‘Hungarian’ as
a national concept.80 The assimilation also explains why the Romanian
Transylvanians were left totally disenfranchised and outside the Unio
Trio Nationum, which, established in 1437, was essentially a contract
between the multi-ethnic (but in sentiment Hungarian) nobiles, the
Natio Siculica (the Székelys or Szecklers) and the Natio Saxonica, a
contract which remained the constitutional framework of Transyl-
vanian political life well into the nineteenth century, encompassing
1848. Yet, while the Romanian peasant masses were left ouf of the
political nation, and the nobility was practically non-existent, a new
group emerged as the bearer of Romanian national aspirations: the
Uniate clergy. The Uniate Church was created in 1700 via the accep-
tance by the Romanian Orthodox clergy in Transylvania of a union
with the Church of Rome. The Diploma Leopoldium of 19 March 1701
gave the Romanian Orthodox clergy who accepted the union the same
rights as the Roman Catholic clergy. The union did not involve signifi-
cant changes in doctrine or ritual, but it gave the Uniate clergy a legal
basis for challenging the state and opened up the higher education
78
Letter to George Bariţ, 10/15 March 1848, in Revoluţia de la 1848–1849 din Tran-
silvania, ed. Ştefan Pascu and Victor Cheresteşiu (Bucharest, 1977–2007), 1 (2 March–
12 April 1848): 7.
79
Borsi-Kálmán, Hungarian Exiles, 25, lists families such as the Drágffys of
Maramureş, the Maujláths from Făgăraş, and the Hunyadis from Hunedoara in Haţeg,
many of whom played crucial roles in Hungarian history.
80
Zoltan I. Tóth, “A soknemzetiségű állam néhány kérdéséről az 1848 előtti Mag-
yarországon”, in Dániel Csatári, ed., Magyarok és románok (Budapest, 1966), 79–106,
quoted in Borsi-Kálmán, Hungarian Exiles, 25.
institutions of the province to Romanian students.81 Better opportu-

nities for education, training and self-assertion gradually led to the
emergence of a class of dedicated Romanian scholars and ideologues
devoted to their nation’s Latinity and aiming to obtain the recogni-
tion of a Natio Valachica in addition to the three accepted nationali-
ties. However, they never fully emerged as a cohesive, well-organised
group of political leaders. By the 1840s some of them had established
close links with the Wallachian forty-eighters. A few had emigrated
and became eminent professors at the Saint Sava College in Bucha-
rest, Wallachia’s elite higher education institution, founded in 1818 by
another Transylvanian, Gheorghe Lazăr. As mentioned before, most
Wallachian forty-eighters, including Rosetti, the Brătianu brothers,
and the Golescus, studied there.82 Exchanges, meetings and coopera-
tion between the Transylvanian Romanians and their counterparts in
the Danubian Principalities were factors which significantly contrib-
uted to the endorsement of a cohesive national identity throughout
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the three main provinces.
However, a sense of cultural national identity did not lead to a unitary
political movement, a fact demonstrated by the conflicting and often
perplexing loyalties of Romanians in Hungary, Transylvania, Banat
and the Romanian Principalities in the 1840s and beyond.
By 1848, the Romanians had two main blueprints for Transylvania’s
future status: one was its co-existence with Hungary and the other
kingdoms as part of a federalised and reformed Habsburg Empire, the
other was as an independent state, possibly to be incorporated into a so-
called ‘Danubian Confederation’, which, apart from Moldo-Wallachia,
would have comprised Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Rumelia, in
various permutations. A third objective, unification, largely remained
a tacit aspiration, surviving in the collective memory of the dispersed
nation, but hardly ever mentioned in documents likely to be made
public. Many Romanians in Transylvania, the more conservative peas-
ants in particular, believed that they could acquire expanded rights
within a reformed Austrian empire and consequently many preferred
siding with the Habsburgs against the virtually hegemonic Hungarians.
This was largely a consequence of a residual “ ‘good emperor’ myth
that the Transylvanian Romanian peasantry, as well as the clerics and
81
For the creation and role of the Uniate Church, see Hitchins, The Romanians,
1774–1866, 199–205, and the relevant bibliography, 324–5. Cf. note 69, p. 134 above.
82
See p. 22 above.
142 1849
intelligentsia of peasant and petty noble origin, in their heart of hearts,

still subscribed to” owing largely to the Hungarians’ continued resis-
tance to the Romanians’ demands for recognition.83 Others, including
Romanian intellectuals such as Eftimie Murgu, a professor from the
Banat and a deputy in the National Assembly at Pest, sided with the
Hungarians against the imperial authorities – and implicitly against
the Serbs, whose nation-building goals were otherwise identical to the
Romanians. As a result of such divisions, Hungarian and Romanian
historians have been locked ever since in often acrimonious debates
about the nature of the national movements in Transylvania. On the
Hungarian side, it has been argued that the Romanians obstructed
Hungarian attempts at creating a common revolutionary front and, in
so doing, became the “pawn of the enemey empire”, while Romanian
historiography has often fore-grounded the Hungarian resistance to
the Romanians’ demands for political rights.84 The multi-ethnic proj-
ect of a ‘Danubian Confederation’ should have been based on an alli-
ance of Hungarians and Romanians against both Austria and Russia,
but the distrust between the two sides and the influence of hard-liners
in both camps undermined all attempts at cooperation made in the
build-up to 1848 and in the spring of that year.85
In mid-June 1848, the newly-elected Hungarian Parliament unilat-
erally voted the union of Transylvania and Hungary, in spite of Roma-
nian and Saxon protests. The Transylvanian Diet in Cluj, which had a
Magyar majority, had already voted in favour of the union on 18/30
May. Despite the undeniably damaging intransigence and inflexibil-
ity in both camps, there were attempts to reach a Romanian-Magyar
agreement early on in 1848. The French provisional government itself
made an attempt to help defuse the potential conflict. In May 1848,
Lamartine’s confidential envoy, the Hungarian-born Louis (Lajos)
Mandl, travelled to Pest and Bucharest, where he mediated meetings
between the Hungarians and the Romanian provisional government,
83
Borsi-Kálmán, Hungarian Exiles, 41.
84
Alex Drace-Francis, “Cultural Currents and Political Choices: Romanian Intel-
lectuals in the Banat to 1848”, Austrian History Yearbook 36 (2005): 65–93. Ostensi-
bly a micro-historical study of the particular situation of the Banat region in 1848,
Drace-Francis’ analysis has wider theoretical implications for the history of the 1848
revolutions in the Habsburg empire and for research into Central-East-European
nationalism.
85
Borsi-Kálmán, Hungarian Exiles, 41.
whom he found mostly sympathetic to the idea of a confederation.86

Even Lajos Kossuth, not chiefly remembered for his ability to com-
promise, was at this stage sympathetic to an alliance with the new
regime established on 11 June in Bucharest.87 Other attempts at rap-
prochement were made in the autumn of 1848, when László Teleki,
a liberal representative in the Transylvanian Diet, visited Paris and
met with Alexandru G. Golescu and members of Prince Adam Czarto-
ryski’s Polish government-in-exile.88 None of these attempts produced
tangible results. One of the main difficulties at the negotiating table
was the underlying conflict between the Hungarians’ “clear-cut sense
of national identity” and the ethnic Romanians’ more convoluted, tri-
partite – bourgeois Wallachian, intellectual Transylvanian and histori-
cal Moldavian – definitions of their own identity.89 In addition, the
confederative projects were difficult to rationalize, as the meaning of
‘confederation’ was often ill-defined, ranging from a temporary, loose
Central European alliance against Russia and Austria to a multina-
tional state structure. Extended variants of the ‘confederative’ plan
were also being considered, including ones which would have seen
the creation of a confederate Mitteleuropa extending well beyond the
confines of Austria and encompassing the Germans of Austria and
Germany, the Poles, Hungarians and Italians, as well as the South
Slavs and the Romanians. Confronted with the hard realities of state
politics, such projects were bound to remain highly speculative con-
structs, and even though the idea of a Central European confederation
continued to be circulated for some time, its champions ultimately had
to accept its utopian character.
The appointment of Dumitru Brătianu as diplomatic representative
in Pest in late June 1848 had been a follow-up on Mandl’s mediation,
but, as already mentioned,90 Brătianu failed to form a united anti-
Austrian and anti-Russian front in talks with the Hungarian Prime
Minister, Count Lajos Batthyáni, mainly because an alliance with the
Hungarians would have entailed a betrayal by the Romanians of the
86
Apostol Stan and Grigore Ploeşteanu, Utopia confederalismului paşoptist: între
vis şi realitate (Bucharest, 2001), 35. For the appointment of Louis Mandl, see Part
One, pp. 64–5.
87
For Romanian-Magyar-Austrian negotiations in the spring of 1848, see Stan and
Ploeşteanu. Utopia, Chapter 2.
88
Ibid., 107–8.
89
Borsi-Kálmán, Hungarian Exiles, xv.
90
See Part One, pp. 90–2.
144 1849
embattled Croatians and Serbs.91 Alexandru G. Golescu-Negru in

particular was convinced that the conflicting Hungarian and Roma-
nian agendas over Transylvania created insurmountable obstacles. He
largely blamed Hungarian intransigence. The Hungarian leaders “will
never whole-heartedly support a free Romania, nor a free Serbia! They
are aware of the danger of having a focal centre of Romanian or Serbian
nationalism next to them”, he wrote to the historian Nicolae Bălcescu
in July 1848.92 Although in principle recognizing the common political
goals of Hungarians and Romanians, Lajos Kossuth refused indeed to
see in the Transylvanian Romanians more than a Romanian-speaking
ethnic group in the province, a position he made clear in the Hungar-
ian Diet on 12 September.93
Official debates around plans for a confederative alliance with Aus-
tria under the auspices of an emergent and assertive unified Germany,
which the Romanian envoys presented to the Frankfurt Parliament,
failed. As late as 26 September 1848, the Romanian National Assembly
at Blaj was still appealing for Austrian protection to the Romanians
in all three provinces, but in a private meeting with Alexandru G.
Golescu in Vienna in August 1848, the Austrian minister of war,
Theodore Baillet de Latour, had put an abrupt end to the Wallachians’
illusions: “Who are you? I do not recognize this provisional govern-
ment of yours. Our cabinet recognizes Russia’s right to enter the ter-
ritories of Moldavia and Wallachia.”94
The complex manoeuvring that such diplomatic missions entailed was
rendered even more unmanageable after the defeat of the Wallachian
revolution in September 1848, when they became semi-clandestine
affairs planned more or less conspiratorially by envoys-in-exile,
without proper consultation among the various factions and splin-
ter groups. Contacts between the Transylvanians – represented by
August Treboniu Laurian and Ioan Maiorescu – Nicolae Bălcescu and
Alexandru G. Golescu, both as representatives of the Wallachian pro-
visional government, Vay Miklós, the Magyar envoy in Transylvania,
91
According to Ambrus Miskoczy, Kossuth only learned about Brătianu’s visit to
Pest as a delegate of the Wallachian revolution two years later. See Ambrus Miskoczy,
“The Dialogue among Hungarian and Romanian Exiles in 1850–1851” in Geopolitics
in the Danube Region: Hungarian reconciliation efforts, 1848–1998, ed. Ignac Romsics
and Belà K. Király (Budapest, 1999), 103.
92
Stan and Ploeşteanu, Utopia, 62.
93
Borsi-Kálmán, Hungarian Exiles, 96, quoted in Stan and Ploeşteanu, Utopia, 88.
94
and the imperial Field-Marshall Pfersmann, although initially promis-

ing, were doomed to failure.95 Crucially, Maiorescu’s public statements
in favour of a ‘greater Romania’ project under a Habsburg prince col-
lided with parallel Wallachian efforts, notably by Nicolae Bălcescu, to
court the Ottoman Porte in favour of anti-Russian cooperation. Ioan
Maiorescu’s first memorandum to the German Diet, which suggested
the creation of a unified Romanian kingdom within Austria, encom-
passing the Danubian Principalities, Transylvania and Bucovina, led
to Hungarian accusations of ‘Romanianism’ and ‘Pan-Dacianism’.
He was subsequently forced to abandon such proposals before being
arrested and then expelled by the Hungarian authorities, alongside the
Wallachian émigrés.96
The final blow to Romanian aspirations towards creating a unified
national entity under Austrian protection was the rejection by the
imperial cabinet of the Transylvanian memorandum of Olmütz (in
Bohemia) of 13/25 February 1849, in which the Romanians demanded
political autonomy for all the Romanians in a federalised empire. In
the wake of the new Austrian constitution of 20 February/4 March –
the so-called ‘bestowed constitution’ – which recognized the existence
of ‘ethnic branches’ (Volkstämme) equal before the law, rather than of
nations as such, the most the Romanians could expect was the creation
of ethnic Romanian communes and districts in Transylvania, Hungary
and Bukovina.97 Although the constitution never came into effect due
to the unresolved Hungarian crisis, its signals were clear to Hungar-
ians, Romanians and other nationalities seeking secession from the
empire.
The Romanians’ divided foreign political objectives and their paral-
lel wooing of Pest, Vienna and Constantinople, as well as the evident
attempt of the Transylvanian Romanians to create the institutions
of a nascent state in the province were, fr om the Hungarian view-
point, elements in an already explosive ethnic and political equation.
Throughout the troubled months of the Hungarian and Transylvanian
revolutions, the Romanians in Transylvania effectively proceeded to
create the institutions which they knew they needed in order to become
95
Ibid., 64. Cf. also Hitchins, A Nation Discovered, 194–214.
96
Stan and Ploeşteanu, Utopia, 90, 93, 97. For further details on the memorandum,
see Anul 1848, 4: 358–9. Exiled from Transylvania, the Romanian militants were in
Semlin (today Zemun, on the territory of Serbia) by November 1848.
97
Ibid., 103.
146 1849
a politically constituted nation: the popular assembly at Blaj, the first

session of which took place on 3/15 May 1848, became the Romanian
Diet, and the National Committee in Sibiu (Hermannstadt) acted as
the Romanian government in Transylvania. The Blaj assembly of Sep-
tember divided Transylvania into five Romanian prefectures.98 Unsur-
prisingly, such aspirations towards state-building and a virtual alliance
with the Austrians were construed as secessionist and treacherous by
the Transylvanian authorities and, by the autumn of 1848, Hungarians
and Romanians were effectively locked in civil war, with the heaviest
bloodshed and human losses recorded in October in the Arad and
Zarand counties.99 The conflict was multi-faceted: divisive agendas set
Romanians not only against Hungarians, but also against Saxons and
the Serbs of the Banat, presumed channels for Pan-Slavic projects. But
the pervasive feeling among the Romanian population of Transylvania
was anti-Magyar: the protocol of the Blaj assembly of 3–13 Septem-
ber 1848, which rejected the province’s union with Hungary, spoke
of “Hungarian terrorism” against Transylvania’s “citizens”, calling for
a “mixed commission of Romanians, Hungarians, Saxons, peasants,
citizens and scholars to be set up and to investigate and judge, pay
damages for and punish all the depredations, robbing, persecutions,
arrests, violence, killings and everything else which ensued from the
terroristic system.”100
At the height of the inter-ethnic conflict, the Austrian General Anton
Puchner entered Tranyslvania in mid-November 1848, and Kossuth
appointed a veteran of the Polish insurrection, the General Józef Bem,
as commander of the Hungarian forces in the province. General Bem
and, later, the Polish General Henryk Dembiński – who were both
subsequently to score significant victories against the invading Russian
troops – had been sent initially by Czartoryski in an attempt to rein-
force the multi-national anti-Russian front in Central Europe. Kos-
suth and Bem radically re-organised the Hungarian army with ruthless
efficiency, but the end result still reflected the kingdom’s multi-ethnic
98
Procese politice anti-româneşti care au zguduit Transilvania în toamna anului
1848, ed. Ioan Chindriş and Gelu Neamţu (Bucharest, 1995), 9.
99
Ibid., 8–9.
100
The protocols were published in the Transylvanian journal Foaie pentru minte,
inimă şi literatură, no. 39, 27 September 1848. Cf. Culegere de texte, ed. Nuţu and
Totu, 295–8.
character.101 There were many Poles and Germans among the officers,
and the honvéd battalions consisted of Polish revolutionaries, Slovak
miners, Viennese students, Ruthenes and even Romanian peasants,
although the majority were urban intellectuals and artisans.102 While
Bem won resounding victories against the Austrians, securing the con-
trol of most of Transylvania and the Banat by April 1849, the parallel
civil war between Romanians and Hungarians escalated and, accord-
ing to Polish sources, the Romanians led by Avram Iancu mounted a
“formidable” insurrection.103 Peace negotiations between Romanians
and Hungarians at Abrud (Hung. Abrudbánya) during an armistice
in May 1849 were ruined, according to another of Kossuth’s Generals,
György Klapka, by the intervention of the Hungarian Major Imre Hat-
váni. In violation of the armistice, Major Hatváni arrested the Roma-
nian negotiators, triggering violent Romanian reprisals and ensuring
that mutual distrust would poison bilateral relations for decades
to come.104
The civil war sent waves of Transylvanian refugees across the border
into Wallachia and, as the flux of immigration increased in late 1848
and early 1849, the Wallachian authorities in alliance with the occupy-
ing Russians granted right of asylum to all the Transylvanians who fled
the lethal ethnic conflict between Romanians, Magyars and Szecklers in
the troubled province.105 Ostensibly, the authorities invoked humani-
tarian reasons (“the love of mankind”), but allowing these people in
and allocating them fixed residences and humanitarian supplies was
101
Nicolae Bălcescu believed that, by early July 1849, owing mainly to Bem’s
recruitment strategy and to the loyalty he commanded, the Transylvanian forces were
made up of two thirds foreigners, including 30,000 Romanians, and one third ethnic
Hungarians. Stan and Ploeşteanu, Utopia, 109.
102
Deák, “The Revolution”, in A History of Hungary, ed. Sugar et al., 226. Ion
Brătianu himself considered enrolling in General Bem’s army in Transylvania, while
the Polish-born General resisted there against the Austrians and Russians in the first
months of 1849. Lord Dudley Stuart wrote a letter of introduction for him dated 16
May 1849 recommending him to the General as a “Mr. I. Mariosse Boghos” (sic!). The
letter was never used. Cf. Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 211–2.
103
104
Borsi-Kálmán, Hungarian Exiles, 137–8, summary of Kossuth-Klapka corre-
spondence of circa 1863.
105
See, for instance two memos of 30 December 1848 from the Caimacam Con-
stantin Cantacuzino to the Wallachian Ministry of the Interior regarding a public
subscription for the new settlers, in Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 277–9. The
Turkish Commissioner Fuad Effendi himself offered the sum of 1,000 golden ducats
on behalf of the Sultan. Prince Cantacuzino asked for 750 lei to be allocated for this
purpose from a special fund in the state budget.
148 1849
also obviously a handy way of keeping them under surveillance. Fear-

ing that some of the refugees might re-ignite the Wallachians’ dormant
revolutionary drive, in March 1849 the Wallachian Ministry of the
Interior set up district and municipal commissions for the “investiga-
tion of the Transylvanian refugees”, and on 4 August 1849 Bucharest
police stepped up their surveillance of foreigners – notably of Hun-
garians and Poles suspected of having participated in revolutionary
movements in neighbouring countries. In fact, the Russian authori-
ties had been interrogating refugees since at least late December 1848.
Leaders of the ethnic Romanians in Transylvania, such as the scholar
Simion Bărnuţiu, were also under surveillance, both by the Romanian,
and by the Austrian authorities.106 The insurgents and dissenters used
every available channel of communication between Moldo-Wallachia
and Transylvania. On 8 March 1849, for instance, Bucharest police
informed General Danilevski, the Russian commander of the city, that
correspondence between militants in Transylvania and Wallachia was
being facilitated by the driver of the Braşov post-haste.107
Amidst the turbulent events of early 1849, Rosetti and the other
exiled Romanian forty-eighters were understandably concerned by
worrying news from Transylvania and Moldavia. The Hungarians
and Austrians confronted each other around Sibiu (Hermannstadt),
where members of the the exiles’ families – mainly spouses and chil-
dren – now lived, in exile themselves. Around 50,000 Russian troops
had entered Moldavia equipped with large siege cannons, according to
information obtained by Gheorghe Magheru. The former revolution-
ary general cryptically, but presciently, suggested in one of his letters
that the Russians were en route for Transylvania to provide help to
the Austrian army.108 Although the new Austrian Emperor, eighteen-
year-old Francis Joseph, was not to make an official request for Rus-
sian support ‘in the holy struggle against anarchy’ until 1 May 1849,
the Austrian General Puchner had sought the support of occupying
Russian troops in the Danubian Principalities as early as the winter
of 1848. From there, under Field Marshal Ivan Paskievich, Russian
forces finally entered Transylvania in mid-February, and engaged with
106
Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, xxvi–xxvii.
107
Ibid., xxiv. For a study of police surveillance and mail interception in the Hab-
sburg empire, see Donald Emerson, Metternich and the Political Police: security and
subversion in the Hapsburg monarchy (1815–1830), (The Hague, 1968).
108
Fotino 2: 230–3.
General Bem’s multi-ethnic troops. The Hungarians were heavily out-

numbered: they had only 170,000 troops against 200,000 Russians and
175,000 well-equipped Austrians under General Julius Haynau.109
Zinca Golescu, in exile with the other Romanian families in Her-
mannstadt, commented in a letter to her sons in Paris on the Russians’
arrival. She deplored the “unreasonableness” of the Magyars, who,
she said, had failed to join forces with their neighbours – notably the
Romanians – against the “colossus of the North.” She enthused, how-
ever, over “the great, brave Hungarian nation”, and confessed to feeling
uneasy at being surrounded at close quarters by “our beloved protec-
tors”, the Russians.110 It might seem curious that the exiled families in
Transylvania appear to have been unaware of – or at least unwilling
to comment on – the Hungarian-Romanian clashes which had already
claimed lives in late 1848. Was it lack of information, tactical silence or
simply the effect of the self-hypnotic power of hope which kept them
blissfully ignorant of the darker side of ethnic conflict? Even individu-
als in official capacities, such as Effingham Grant, were understandably
sanguine about the heroic stature of the Hungarian freedom-fighters
and, implicitly, still confident about the possibility of Romanian-
Hungarian cooperation. In March 1849, the British Consul in Bucha-
rest, Robert Colquhoun, dispatched his trusted secretary on a sensitive
mission: he was to survey and report on the situation in Transylvania,
where the war was escalating. According to the new Austrian consti-
tution of 4 March, which abrogated some of the historic privileges of
the Hungarian crown, Transylvania, alongside Croatia-Slavonia, the
Military Border and the Vojvodina were detached from Hungary, a
decision which strengthened the Hungarians’ decision to fight for that
province, as well as for Hungary as a whole. On 18 March 1849, Grant
wrote to Rosetti:
I have witnessed an attack of the Russians against the Hungarians, not
far from Hermanstadt [sic]; I have seen how the Hungarians triumphed
over the Russians and was there when they entered the capital of Tran-
sylvania and finally, the day after that, I was invited by an aide-de-camp
of General Bem to honour His Excellency with a visit. I went, and, upon
meeting him, I found the General to be all that my hopes had led me to
expect of the hero of Ostrolenka. He is a charming and brave old man,
109
In A History of Hungary, ed. Sugar et al., 231, the date of the Russian army’s
entry into Transylvania is given as mid-June 1849, as opposed to the Romanian
sources’ mid-February.
110
Letter dated 16 February 1849, from Hermannstadt, in Fotino 2: 235–6.
150 1849
and a consummate soldier: he is the man to whom is mainly due the

success of the Hungarian army in Transylvania. I was astonished by the
moderation of his troops – but this worthy warrior knows full well that
discipline is of the essence among irregular troops. What more can I tell
you, my dear? I have seen the defender of nations – and I am proud.
And one day, when we are going to be re-united in the cosy salon of
your beloved countess,111 I am going to tell you of the subjects of the
conversations I had for hours – but they vanished like minutes! – with
the Idol of his soldiers, and now governor of Transylvania, Bem. As
I left Hermanstadt (escorted, would you believe it, by one of Kossuth’s
officers and six Hussards!) I learned that the kaiserlich troops were so
demoralised at the news of Bem’s capture of Hermanstadt [sic] – which
he did as they were looking for him – that they all, officers and soldiers,
dispersed, and that Puchner (former Commander of Transylvania) took
refuge in Wallachia with the débris of his army and the remains of the
Russians – poor Russians!112
The favourable view of General Bem’s conduct of the campaign was
shared by other correspondents from the exiles’ immediate circles,
some of whom witnessed the Russo-Hungarian military confron-
tations. “It is not true that Bem massacred everybody”, wrote Ana
Racoviţă to her brothers in Paris, “on the contrary, he behaved with a
lot of moderation. Our mother was there in Sibiu when he entered the
city; he caused no harm.”113
Contrary to the Eastern and Central European exiles’ expectations,
the nature of the contextual diplomatic quid pro quo ensured that the
Russian intervention in Transylvania and Hungary did not meet with
a concert of disapproval from the Western powers. Russia approved of
France’s successful intervention against the Roman republic in April
1849, and the tsar chose that particular moment for officially recognis-
ing Louis Napoléon’s still frail regime, a recognition used by the Prime
Minister Odilon Barrot to silence Parisian protests against the Rus-
sian intervention in Hungary. French ambassadors in Vienna and St.
Petersburg received no instructions to protest. Alexis de Tocqueville,
the French Minister for Foreign Affairs from 2 June to 31 October
1849, sent determined dispatches to French diplomatic staff: “Let us
111
Presumably a jocular reference to Marie Rosetti and to the Rosetti family titles.
112
Letter dated 18 March 1849, in Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu 1: 198.
113
Letter dated 13 May 1849, in Fotino 2: 300.
not get involved in events happening at the other end of Europe, in

the Principalities, in Poland or in Hungary.”114
In Britain itself there was a good deal of public support for the
Hungarian cause, but this did not lead to military involvement. Chal-
lenged on 21 July in the House of Commons, Palmerston defended
the government’s policy of non-intervention. While declaring himself
a “firm believer in constitutional forms of government”, Palmerston
thought of Hungary as a part of the Austrian empire and of the Danu-
bian Principalities as a part of the Ottoman empire, and was unwill-
ing to go to war with either power. In addition, he made public his
views on maintaining the status quo in Central Europe, declaring that
“a united Austrian Empire was a European necessity, and the natural
ally of England in the East”, and that a break-up of the empire would
serve the interests of Russia. In private correspondence, he expressed
hopes that the Russian troops would “settle the Hungarian problem
as expeditiously as possible.”115 At the same time, the decidedly pro-
Russian Duke of Wellington whole-heartedly and openly approved of
the Russian intervention, while Lord Aberdeen, the former Tory For-
eign Secretary, wrote to Princess Lieven, the estranged, but influential,
wife of the former Russian ambassador in London, that he regarded
the Tsar as “our anchor of safety in the West.”116
In Transylvania, the situation was becoming more confused and
entangled, as the fighting now opposed not only the Hungarian army
against the Austrian and Russian troops, but also, in the parallel civil
war, the ethnic Romanians, Germans and Serbs against the Hungar-
ians. They were pitted against each other – under the watchful eyes of
the Russian troops – in what was a new, tragic twist in the ongoing
saga of ethnic tensions and territorial, political and cultural disputes.
In February 1849 representatives of the ethnic Romanians in Transyl-
vania, Bukovina and Banat had submitted to the Austrian Emperor
an eight-point petition demanding official authorisation for convening
a Constituent Assembly of the Romanians, an elected Patriarch, the
election of Romanian deputies to the Imperial Legislative Assembly
and the recognition of Romanian as the official language in regions
114
Pippidi, “Tocqueville et les Moldo-Valaques”, 149, citing from Tocqueville’s
Souvenirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 459.
115
Billy, Palmerston’s Foreign Policy, 136. For the entire text of Palmerston’s speech,
see Kenneth Bourne, The Foreign Policy of Victorian England, 1830–1902 (Oxford
University Press, 1970), 295–9.
116
Roberts, Nicholas I, 113–5.
152 1849
where the ethnic Romanians were a majority. Also, symbolically, they

would have wanted the Emperor to include among his titles that of
‘Dux’ of the Romanians.117 On 15 March 1849 Magheru wrote from
Vienna to Alexandru G. Golescu-Negru, exiled in Bursa, informing
him that the Emperor had rejected the title proposed by the Romanian
community, alongside with their other demands, and that Transyl-
vania was now in the grip of the Russians who, Magheru says, “are
interfering in the administration everywhere and have set up inquisi-
tion tribunals as infamous as those that have destroyed the flower of
the Polish youth.”118 Yet, in spite of the darkening European horizon,
Magheru refused to give up hope: “[. . .] I believe that the atrocities
committed nowadays, the infamies that are à l’ordre du jour will purify
and cleanse Humanity, will accelerate its redemption! Christ sacrificed
himself for the ideal of the most exalted truths! It may well be that
humanity must have its martyrs before it can practise or achieve those
truths, those verities which, from the domain of utopias must neces-
sarily pass, in our time, into the domain of facts.”119
In early March 1849, rather than wait for the Russian troops to
camp on her doorstep, Zinca Golescu chose to leave Transylvania
and envisaged travelling to Orşova, in the Banat, and hence up the
Danube to Vienna to see relatives, if her finances permitted. How-
ever, by late March, as the Hungarians temporarily gained the upper
hand against the Russian army in Transylvania, the situation seemed
promising enough for her to return to the family home at Goleşti in
Wallachia. There, however, she had to put up with visits by Romanian
government officials and Russian military, searching for her son Radu,
who had been reported to be in hiding there, but had, in fact, stayed
behind in Transylvania.120 Three weeks later, Zinca herself was once
again ordered to return to Transylvania, in the midst of new move-
ments of Russian and Turkish troops in the Principalities.
In the spring and summer of 1849, as the military balance still
favoured the Hungarians, there were new attempts at re-engaging
a Hungarian-Romanian dialogue. The new strategy widened the rift
between the Wallachian exiles and the Romanians of Transylvania
who, directly affected by the Hungarian policies in the province, were
117
Fotino 2: 239.
118
Ibid., 251.
119
Ibid., 255.
120
Ibid., 263.
now firmly on the Austrian side. On 4/16 March 1849, from Baden,
the exiled General Magheru sent a letter to Kossuth, who had taken
refuge in Debrecen with the embattled National Defense Committee.
In very strong terms and in the name of “the principle of nationali-
ties”, Magheru condemned what he termed Hungary’s “terrorist Mag-
yarising policy” towards the Romanian and the Slavic populations, a
policy which had alienated these populations and weakened Hungary.
He warned Kossuth that he would lose the war against Russia unless
he appeased these wronged nations, whose demographics were not
inconsiderable. He also invoked the danger of Russia’s pan-Slavic proj-
ects in Central Europe. In exchange for Hungarian diplomatic support
in Constantinople, Magheru promised to form a Romanian ‘legion’
and join the war against the Russians.121 Kossuth did not follow up on
Magheru’s injunctions.
One incident in particular illustrates in an exceptionally effective
way the sometimes vitriolic passions engaged in the ‘Russian ques-
tion’, as well as the efforts spent in the polemical definition and re-
definition of ethnic and national identities. Throughout the month
of March 1849, Paul Bataillard and the Romanian exiles, whom he
supported, were engaged in a vigorous exchange of views sparked by
several contributions, written by an anonymous Russophile Romanian
or even possibly by a Russian agent, and published in the Parisian
legitimist newspaper L’Assemblée Nationale in reaction to appeals by
the republican press demanding a Russian withdrawal. The articles,
signed ‘X’, argued that the Romanians were ethnically Slavs and that
the Moldo-Wallachian provinces had always been essentially Russian
and could expect no better support than that offered by Russia. In fact,
the author insisted, the population should willingly join the Serbs and
the Russians in “la grande famille russe” with the blessing of the Great
Powers, in much the same way that the Italians were being encour-
aged to unite at the time. The scale of the Romanian forty-eighters’
response was commensurate not only with the enormity of the claims
made by someone who either ignored or waived aside basic linguistic
and cultural facts, but also with the wide readership of L’Assemblée
Nationale. Founded on 1st March 1848 by the Vicomte Adrien de
Lavalette as a vehicle for the political views of groups close to the
Bourbons, L’Assemblée Nationale had 20,000 buyers and subscribers
121
The letter, in French, in 1848 la români, ed. Bodea, 2: 1076–80.
154 1849
within twenty days of its foundation and its articles were abundantly
cited by the regional press.122 The issue of the Romanians’ Latin origins
had been by now largely accepted, when not muddled by polemical
agendas. Referring readers to linguistic and demographic statistics,
the forty-eighters demolished suggestions of ethnic kinship between
Romanians and Slavs, and asked for the withdrawal of the Russian
troops. They warned that one day Russia would have to answer accusa-
tions that she “has used the power of the cross” (her self-proclaimed
role as protecting power of the East-European Orthodox) to stifle the
voice of a people.123 Paul Bataillard in his turn attacked the wholesale
pro-Russian orientation of L’Assemblée Nationale.
Bataillard was already a veteran among the philo-Romanians in
Paris, a group which included several representatives of the press,
mainly militant republicans such as Pascal Duprat, editor of the Revue
Indépendante and future editor of La Libre Recherche (Brussels), Hyp-
polite Desprez, editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes, and firebrand
radicals such as the lawyer and Freemason Désiré Pilette, one of the
editors of La Révolution démocratique et sociale – a publication sym-
pathetic to Ledru-Rollin – and Charles Ferdinand Gambon, a Mon-
tagnard deputy, Freemason and member of the Society of Friends of
Democratic Poland.124 Such associations are indicative of the brand of
republicanism towards which Rosetti and his group naturally gravi-
tated: radicals, Montagnards, republican Freemasons, all champions of
the democratic and social revolution, people who, like Gambon, were
prepared to risk imprisonment and deportation for the sake of their
political credo. In August of the previous year, 1848, as the Roma-
nian revolution faltered, Bataillard’s articles in Le National had openly
attacked the Russian occupation of the Principalities and deplored
France’s indifference to the Eastern Question. In the new polemic
launched in March 1849, Bataillard’s contributions were accepted
by Le Temps, newly created on 1st March by the republican Xavier
122
Histoire générale de la presse française, ed. Claude Béllanger, Jacques Godechot,
Pierre Guiral and Fernand Terrou (Paris, 1969), 2: 217. The journal, suspended in
July 1857, re-emerged as Le Spectateur before being suppressed after Orsini’s attempt
against Napoleon’s life on 14 January 1858.
123
N. Corivan, ed., Din activitatea emigranţilor români în Apus, 1853–7: scrisori şi
memorii (Bucharest, 1931), esp. 4–5 and 11–12.
124
Vapereau, Dictionnaire universel des contemporains, 3rd edn. (Paris, 1865). For
a more recent profile of Gambon, see Jean-Yves Mollier, “Charles Ferdinand Gambon
et le culte de le révolution au XIXe siècle”, in La France démocratique: mélanges offerts
à Maurice Agulhon, ed. Christophe Charle et al. (Paris, 1998), 199–205.
Durrieu. His article “Empire Ottoman-Roumanie”, published on 3

March, was a frontal attack against the successive French republican
ministries which had sacrificed foreign policy to “dynastic interests
or to the principle of peace at all costs” and had, above all, criminally
neglected the Eastern Question:125
“The East”, Bataillard wrote, “is, indeed, for France the battlefield where
the war between absolutism and civilization is bound to be waged. The
Tsar has understood this and his armies are already occupying the most
favourable positions. Why has France, over the last year, left a free hand
to Russia, thus enabling her, in spite of notes of protest from Lord Palm-
erston and M. Drouyn de Lhuys, to occupy the Danubian provinces, to
crush their inhabitants under monstrous taxes, to mass her troops along
the Austrian frontiers and hence to go and bring the coup de grace to the
Magyar nation? Because our statesmen have been unable to look beyond
our frontiers, because they have not understood, in spite of warnings
reiterated by the entire press, that two small provinces of the Ottoman
Empire, Moldavia and Wallachia, could, under specific circumstances,
suddenly become an issue of serious and dangerous consequence for the
Europeran balance and for the safety of France herself.”126
While the revolutions of 1848 in Vienna, Berlin and Naples had been
localized events with internal political agendas which had no inter-
national impact, Bataillard argued, perhaps slightly overstating his
point, the parallel events in the Romanian Principalities – an attack on
tsarism by a generation of youths “educated in our schools” – repre-
sented a conflict between liberalism and despotism and as such, could
result in major ideological and political divisions on the European
continent.127 In an article of 17 March 1849, Bataillard denounced
L’Assemblée Nationale as the channel of the Russian chancellery and
ridiculed claims published in that journal that “Bucharest is as Russian
as Odessa” and that, in the event of war, “a Russian army, supported
by the protestations of the Christian populations, heralded by crosses
and banners, by priests and Greek bishops, would take only weeks to
arrive on the Bosphorus” and launch an attack on the Porte.128
The Romanians themselves, having been denied a right of reply by
L’Assemblée, counter-attacked in several issues of Le Temps, notably on
125
Boitoş, Paul Bataillard et la révolution roumaine, 47–8. The entire text of the
article is reproduced on pp. 47–51.
126
Ibid., 49.
127
Ibid., 50.
128
Ibid., 60.
156 1849
the 7th and the 19th of March. They dismantled notions put forward
by ‘Monsieur X.’, who described the Romanian revolution of 1848 as
the “subversive” act of a few “anarchists”, rightfully put in their place
by the armies of the Tsar, who restored “peace” and “order” in Wal-
lachia at the request of the Sultan.129
The Russian issue continued to occupy the minds – and the pens –
of the exiles through the month of March 1849 and beyond. On the
2nd, Zinca wrote to her son, Ştefan, about the huge difficulties in send-
ing the sums of money on which the exiled forty-eighters depended for
their daily existence and for funding projects in the Western capitals.
The money, coming from their farmed-out lands, the sale of proper-
ties and loans, also provided a major source for subsidising impov-
erished émigrés and young men of poorer families studying in Paris.
“We were considered wretched fugitive outcasts, unworthy of credit”,
she commented on her failure to secure a loan as she left Bucharest for
Transylvania. Eventually, with some effort, she was able to send them
money from savings she had made in Sibiu and from sums advanced
by the administrators of the Golescu family lands back home.130
The Golescu women now feared that they were about to become
double exiles: the Transylvanian authorities, under Russian pressure,
gave foreigners notice to leave the territory as soon as possible. As
he completed his official mission in the war-torn province, Effingham
Grant himself escorted a group of Wallachian ladies across the border
from Transylvania, an action which probably exceeded his diplomatic
instructions.131 Some spouses and children of the exiled forty-eighters
were brutally treated: the wives of General Gheorghe Magheru and of
Cesar Bolliac, the editor of the periodical Espatriatul [The Expatriate],
were arrested at Braşov by the Russian interim administration, Zinca
reported, and had all their papers confiscated before being released
three or four days later.132 Information received by Gheorghe Magheru
from a Transylvanian eye-witness shows that a special Russo-Austrian
commission of civil servants, police and military was created to trans-
129
Ibid., 66. One of the Romanians’ contributions to the exchange was later pub-
lished separately as Lettre à Messieurs les Rédacteurs en chef de tous les journaux de la
presse parisienne, . . ., par un membre du gouvernement provisoire de la principauté de
Valachie en juin 1848 (Paris; Soye, 1850, 1851).
130
Fotino 2: 242–3.
131
Consul-General Colquhoun to Lord Stratford Canning, Bucharest, 16 March
1849, in Hansard, 1851 [1321], Correspondence respecting the affairs of Hungary,
1847–1849, 170.
132
2 March 1849, Fotino 2: 243.
late and read the correspondence of those arrested.133 The harrassment

of his wife and daughter by the Austrian and Russian officials was to
continue throughout March and April, as reported by Le Temps on
5 May, on the basis of a correspondence from the Romanian capital:
“A recent order by Duhamel incited general indignation. Madame
Maghiero, the wife of the man who commanded our militia during
the Revolution, sought refuge in Transylvania with an infant boy only
a few months old and her young daughter. Deported by the Austri-
ans, she thought she might return to her homeland, but the Cossacks
arrested her at the border and kept her hostage in Rimnik for fifteen
days, before escorting her back into Transylvania, on Duhamel’s
orders.”134
Writing from Goleşti, the exiled men’s niece, Felicia, confirmed the
evacuation on Russian orders of all the Wallachian families who had
taken refuge in Transylvania, including Zinca and those of her sons
and nephews who were still with her. The group had to make their way
to Vienna. The young woman also confirmed the arrests of the wives
of Eliade, Tell and Bolliac, commenting disparagingly on the Russians’
searches and confiscation of family and private papers: “They are treat-
ing a revolution as though it were a mere plot; these are the Rus-
sians for you.”135 Many decades later, Felicia’s letter, published in the
splendid 1939 edition of the Golescu correspondence, still enclosed the
pressed snowdrops she had sent to comfort her homesick uncles.
Correspondence and packages between Bucharest and Paris made
their way slowly and perilously across Central Europe, dodging
Austrian interception and other accidents in transit. In Bucharest,
Effingham Grant – at that time courting Zinca’s grand-daughter, Zoe
Racoviţă – was in constant contact with all the exiled branches of the
family. His position at the British consulate allowed him to facilitate
the passage of letters and money between Goleşti, Transylvania, Paris
and London, even though many letters were intercepted by the Aus-
trian secret police.136 On his last visit at Goleşti, in March 1849, Zinca
133
Letter from Gheorghe Magheru to Al. G. Golescu-Negru from Vienna, 15 March
1849, in Fotino 2: 252.
134
Boitoş, Paul Bataillard et la révolution roumaine, 96. Cf. letter from Goleşti
dated 23 February/11 March 1849, in Fotino 2: 263.
135
Letter from Goleşti dated 26 April 1849, in Fotino 2: 249.
136
For Austrian violation of the private and diplomatic correspondence of the
Romanian exiles and of Effingham Grant, see Ceauşu and Vitcu, “Romanian Emigra-
tion”, esp. Docs. 3, 4, and 5. The article cites documents from the papers of Alexander
158 1849
wrote, he brought English papers voicing protests against the Russian

occupation of the Moldo-Wallachian Principalities. “[. . .] if England
issues the slightest threat, we jump with joy” – Zinca commented rue-
fully on their situation – “if France grumbles a little, we are more than
happy; thus we spend our time between tears and joy; in truth, we
have been reduced to playing toddlers’ games. Poor Romanians! Who
would have said, six months ago, when Suleyman Pasha approved and
embraced our cause in such earnest, who would have thought that we
would ever come to this. But this is the fate of weak nations and all we
can do is wait for the good will of the foreign Powers.”137
The Golescu sister, Ana, confirmed Effingham Grant’s crucial role
in facilitating the smooth transit of mail and money on the Goleşti-
Bucharest-Paris route. “[. . .] the main difficulty is for our letters to
reach Mr. Grant”, she wrote from the family estate in April 1849. “We
owe much to this young man; had he been our brother, he could not
have shown us greater friendship and sympathy. He even offered my
mother money from his own purse, when they [i.e. the authorities]
ordered her to leave without any money of her own; please write to
him and thank him. Can you imagine that our mother was offered
accommodation by Mr. Colquhoun when our own family wouldn’t
offer her shelter.”138
In Wallachia the situation was far from improving, as Effingham
Grant reported to Ştefan Golescu from Bucharest on 29 March 1849
in a letter in which he also enclosed an exchange bill for one hun-
dred pound sterling, endorsed by the British consul – money sent by
Zinca. Circumstances were “quite sad”, Grant wrote, “but who is to
blame? Turkey, the European Powers, or everybody? Whoever it is,
the situation is discouraging. There is no sign that the Russians intend
to depart. On the contrary, their presence here is on the increase and
this despite the protest notes of the French and English ministers to
the Court of St. Petersburg. It is never good enough to simply say
that the moment has arrived to put aside diplomacy and take up the
sword. The slowness of the mail is fatal to the interests of everybody,
except the Russians, who alone stand to gain from these delays. The
Turks just talk, without taking any action: they are simply demand-
von Bach, the Austrian Minister of the Interior from 1849 to 1859 (Allgemeine Ver-
waltungs Archiv Wien, Nachlass Bach, 33).
137
Fotino 2: 244–5.
138
Letter dated April 1849, in ibid., 281.
ing the evacuation of the Principalities by the Russians. In response,

the latter are simply sending even more troops into these Provinces
and they [i.e. the Turks] stand impassibly by and allow themselves to
be affronted. Europe is watching on; they are all talking a lot in their
Chambers of deputies and in their newspapers and, during this time,
the Muscovite policies are gaining ground, and nobody is opposing it
or shouting ‘Put a stop to this’. Indeed, one can either lose one’s mind
or become Russian – both disagreeable options – but what else is there
to be done?”139
According to Grant, many of those arrested in the aftermath of
the revolution of 1848, including Rosetti’s friend and business associ-
ate, Winterhalder, whose role, as shown, was crucial in funding the
diaspora, were still in prison. There was some glimmer of hope in news
of a cabinet reshuffle in Constantinople: Suleyman Pasha, whose mod-
eration and equanimity in September 1848 had earned him the Roma-
nians’ respect, had been appointed Capoudan Pasha (Grand Admiral)
and it was to be hoped that, if Turkey could obtain the support of
some of the Great Powers, the Porte would be empowered to take a
firmer stance against Russia. However, as crucial Western endorse-
ment failed to materialize, Turkey was forced to sign the Russo-
Turkish Convention of Balta Liman of 1 May 1849, a fresh blow to the
Romanians’ hopes for an acceptable political solution in their country.
Among other provisions, the Convention stipulated that the suzer-
ain and the protecting powers were to appoint the ruling princes –
previously elected by the national assemblies for life – for seven-year
terms. The Organic Regulations were to remain in force, and the
country’s occupation by Turkish and Russian forces was to continue
with the purpose of maintaining public ‘order’. The existing national
asemblies were dissolved and replaced with ad-hoc divans composed
of boyars loyal to Russia and Turkey. The text of the treaty was signed
by the Ottoman foreign minister Reshid Pasha and the Russian special
envoy, Vladimir Titov, on behalf of the Sultan and the Tsar, who both
declared themselves “animated by equal solicitude for the welfare of
the Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia.”140
139
Ibid., 265.
140
The text of the Convention of Balta Liman was published by Ghica in Amintiri,
194–9. It is also available in French in Acte şi documente relative la istoria renaşterei
României, ed. Dimitrie A. Sturdza, C. Colescu-Vartic, 11 vols. (Bucharest, 1889–1909),
1: 357.
160 1849
By placing the Danubian Principalities under the joint supervision

of a Turkish and a Russian commissar, the convention practically
endorsed an expansion of Russian intervention in the two provinces,
for instance in allowing Russia to appoint ruling princes. “This new
convention of May 1st”, wrote Effingham Grant to one of the Paris
émigrés, “is a new step taken by the tenacious Muscovite towards one
of the cherished aims of tsarist policies.” France should take a stand
against “despotism”, he added, and “re-establish on solid bases the
freedom of oppressed peoples by guaranteeing the rise of the spirit of
democracy.”141
Protests against the Russian occupation of the Romanian Principali-
ties and against the Convention addressed to the French and English
cabinets were carried more emphatically than usual in the sympathetic
French press. The Lettre au ministre des Affaires étrangères de France
sur l’occupation des principautés danubiennes par la Russie142 is one of
the more readily available such texts, but a fairly large number of the
republican periodicals, such as Le National, La Démocratie pacifique,
La Semaine, Le Proscrit, published contributions by the Romanian
exiles or articles favourable to the Romanian and Eastern European
cause.143 In the Journal des Débats of 17 and 18 May, the Romanians
used the full force of their rhetoric to denounce the Convention of
Balta Liman, which, by its Article 4, authorised the Porte and Russia
to maintain between 25,000 and 35,000 troops each in the Principali-
ties. General Aupick and Sir Stratford Canning came under attack for
failing to support the Ottomans in their resistance to the tsar: “[. . .]
they have failed to grasp the import of the Convention, and thus, Con-
stantinople became a stage for the same comedy now being played out
in Rome, Berlin, Vienna, St. Petersburg and Paris. Their duty should
have been to prevent the conclusion of this act and to throw the treaty
of 1841 in the face of Russia and of General Grabbe. They failed to do
it, and this new act has now enshrined Russia’s right to substitute her
influence on the Bosphorus to that of the European powers.”144
141
Letter from Bucharest to Ştefan Golescu in Paris, 17 May 1849, in Fotino 2:
305–7.
142
Paris: impr. De F. Malteste, 1849.
143
For further details on the Eastern European propaganda in the French press, see
Marin Bucur, “Contexte şi afinităţi în perioada exilului”, extract from Studii despre
N. Bălcescu (Bucharest, 1969).
144
Boitoş, Paul Bataillard et la révolution roumaine, 102.
In spite of their spirited protests, the philo-Romanians were find-

ing that their position in France was becoming increasingly precari-
ous. The republican movement was being gradually marginalised in
the new political climate ushered in by the elections of December
1848 and Louis Napoléon’s victory. Concern over Russia’s actions in
Central and Eastern Europe was not a foreign policy priority for the
French cabinet and, consequently, the exiles’ protests against Russian
abuses failed to find an audience. A memorandum sent to the French
Legislative Assembly on 4 June and signed by “Jean Voinesco, C. A.
Rosetti, Vasile Malinesco and D. Bratiano” on behalf of the members
of the Romanian democratic committee in Paris, denounced in vigor-
ous terms the tsar, who had “trampled on European public law.” In
addition, the authors rehearsed one of the most popular propaganda
themes in nineteenth-century Romanian historiography and one of
the most cherished historical narratives of the Romanian collective
memory: the theme of Romania, a small, embattled nation guard-
ing the borders of civilized Europe, to which they superimposed the
more ambitious theme of Romania as defender of civilisation at the
gates of the Orient. They showed how the Convention “dealt a mortal
blow, under the eyes of democratic Europe, to four million people,
all that remains of the Romanian nation which, during the terrible
wars between Mahometanism and Christianity, acted as a sentinel of
Europe while also fighting for its independence, thus salvaging civili-
zation and freedom at the same time. [. . .] In the name of four million
of our brethren whose voices are being silenced by foreign bayonets,
we wish to present our protest to you, citizen Representatives of the
great nation which proclaimed herself the tutrix of all oppressed peo-
ple. [. . .] Romania will live or die fighting for freedom. Still full of life
and vigour, she cannot fail in the mission assigned her by Providence,
that of implanting Western civilisation in the East and thereby arrest-
ing the invading march of despotism which, by pushing its frontiers
further every day, is threatening to drag humanity back into the dark-
ness of barbarity.”145
On 6 June, Edgar Quinet himself presented the text of the petition
to the Legislative Assembly: “[. . .] you know better than anyone else
the faith that they [the Romanians] have in your glorious revolution of
February”, Quinet said, addressing the deputies. “[. . .] and the fact that
145
A l’Assemblée Législative de la République Française, 4 Juin 1849, Les membres
du comité démocratique Roumain de Paris (Paris: E. Thunot imprimeur, 1849).
162 1849
they rose up in the East in the name of the immortal principles that
you have proclaimed here.”146 In the new political context, however,
both the petition and Quinet’s appeal seemed to belong to another
world. The French military intervention against the insurgent Ital-
ian republicans and the ensuing violent protests of 13 June 1849 in
Paris practically put an end to the short-lived Second Republic. Ledru-
Rollin and other radicals – and allies of the East-Europeans – were
arrested, deported, or became exiles in their turn, marking the start of
a determined state-sponsored programme for the marginalisation of
the republican movement during what remained of the Second Repub-
lic and subsequently during the Second Empire.
The Romanian forty-eighters in Paris, meanwhile, saw their own
exile extended indefinitely. On 12 May 1849, the new ruling prince
of Russian-occupied Wallachia, Barbu Ştirbey, issued a list of suspect
names with a stern reminder that all those who had been implicated
in the events of 1848 and who “were bold enough to oppose resis-
tance as the imperial army entered Bucharest to re-establish order”
should not return to Romania before a court had decided that they
were no longer a danger to the regime.147 Alarming – and often false –
rumours reached the small expatriate community in Paris. Writing
to a friend on 11 May 1849 from Paris, Marie mentioned that her
husband had fallen ill and “had been spitting blood for three days” as
they heard the news – soon to be denied – of Winterhalder’s death in a
Bucharest prison. Apart from such moments of crisis, the small group
of the Rosettis, the Brătianu brothers and Ion Voinescu had settled
into a more or less predictable routine, the highlights of which were
Michelet’s lectures, as Marie wrote:
I only step out of the building to post a letter or go with Rosetti to
Michelet’s lectures – which take place every Thursday; it is my festival
day – yesterday it was a particularly beautiful festival! I wish I could
paint the scene for you, but I am sadly unable to do so. Try to imag-
ine that crowd of youths – the young are Europe’s last hope. Several
carried a newspaper, and all had on the faces the imprint of the day’s
news – Finally one of them, a tall, handsome young man, stood pale and
trembling with a holy emotion, and read aloud what everybody already
knew – The French had fought against the Romans – 400 republicans
had died fighting against a Republic – and the Student asked all those
146
147
Documente, ed. Dogaru and Stan, 324–5. The proscription was confirmed by an
Ottoman ferman of 6 June 1849. Cf. Anul 1848, 6: 260–1.
present to sign a petition which he read, demanding ‘the prosecu-

tion of the President of the French Republic and of his ministers, who
were all guilty of fratricidal treason’. Frenetic applause greeted this pro-
posal – and they all started signing. Then Michelet entered and, on that
day, he surpassed himself in greatness – I would like to send you his
speech – but he doesn’t have them printed and I do not take notes.148
In these early months of exile, a gloomy Rosetti refused to give up
hope. Writing to a friend from Passy, in Paris, on 20 April 1849, he
mentioned his illnesses, which, as usual with him, had led to reflec-
tions on his mortality. Nevertheless, he added, he was in no hurry to
move to Père Lachaise, for two reasons at least: one, because he was
married, and two, because he wanted to live long enough to see the
Universal Republic established. “In spite of everything, I will live long
enough at least to see Romania free of the Moskals,149 of the Turks,
and of Heliad”,150 he quipped, alluding to growing political divisions
among diaspora groups and, more specifically, to the personal enmity
between himself and the moderate, pro-Turkish Ion Eliade Rădulescu.
“The weakness of the Turks is deceptive;” he commented, “when they
are weak they feed us to the Moskals, when they are strong, they
want to swallow us themselves. I believe, however, in heavenly justice,
and I think that in one or two months we will chase them all out of
Romania, and we will proclaim the independent and social Romanian
Republic.”151
148
Emphases in the original. B. A. R., Manuscripts Section, Fonds C. A. Rosetti,
Letter from Marie Rosetti to Alexandrina I. Ghica, Paris, 11 May 1849, S 11(4)/
LXIII.
149
From the Russian, Polish and Ukrainian term meaning ‘ethnically Russian’,
‘Muscovite’. The term was routinely used in nineteenth-century Romania to designate
the Russians, but is now a slightly derogatory archaism.
150
Letter from Constantin Rosetti to Ion Ghica, in Ghica, Amintiri, 64.
151
Ibid., 69.
APRIL 1849
THE TRANSYLVANIAN DEBACLE
On 14 April 1849, the Hungarian Diet, having left the besieged Pest
and now sitting in Debrecen instead, proclaimed the independence
of Hungary. The Committee of National Defense was dissolved, and
Kossuth was elected Governor of Hungary. Like the Romanians and
the Poles, the Hungarians, too, entertained the illusion that help would
eventually come from the great powers. In the meantime, in Constan-
tinople and Pest, the historian and forty-eighter Nicolae Bălcescu had
been pursuing his relentless, but ultimately frustrating, attempts at
reaching an understanding between Romanians and Hungarians. He
found General Bem, whom he met in Transylvania in May 1849, very
open to the idea of coordinated military action by Hungarians, Poles
and Romanians against Russia. In a letter to Kossuth, László Teleki,
a liberal member of the Transylvanian Diet, voiced his fears that the
forces of nationalism had become so powerful that not only Austria
as an empire, but also the historic Hungary of Saint Stephen, were
doomed. “The peoples are no longer satisfied only with liberty, equal-
ity and brotherhod. They want to live their own national lives”, Teleki
wrote.152 On 18–19 May, he co-hosted with Prince Adam Czartoryski
a meeting of East-Central European émigrés at the Prince’s Parisian
residence at the Hotel Lambert. In attendance were Ferenc Pulszky,
a member of Kossuth’s cabinet, Szarvadi Frigyes, the secretary of the
Hungarian legation in Paris, Frantisek L. Rieger, a Czech deputy in
Austria’s last general diet, as well as South-Slav and Romanian observ-
ers. At a time when the Austrian Empire’s implosion seemed immi-
nent, its likely successor, in the eyes of the participants, was a Danubian
Confederation comprising a Hungary which would renounce its hege-
monic self-assumed role, alongside Moldo-Wallachia, Serbia, Bulgaria,
Croatia, a liberated Poland, and possibly Bohemia and Moravia. Hun-
gary’s territorial integrity was to be maintained, but its constituent
ethnic communities would gain autonomy while maintaining confed-
erative links with the Hungarian kingdom with respect mainly to a
common navy, infastructure and trade. The precise frontiers remained
152
april 1849: the transylvanian debacle 165
to be discussed. In the new set-up, the Slovaks and Germans, who

did not occupy a compact territory, would have had their own locally
governed communes or adminitrative zones. Both Kossuth and the
Hungarian Foreign Minister, Kázmér (Casimir) Batthiány, although
in principle declaring themselves ready to make concessions to the
nationalities, rejected the Hotel Lambert project, which would have
led to the fragmentation of historic Hungary.153 In spite of this, and
given that the alternative project of an Austrian-led confederation had
failed to materialize, the Romanian émigrés in Paris decided to remain
on the side of the Hungarians. Ion Ghica notably urged the leaders
of the Transylvanian Romanians to cease military operations against
the Magyars, offering for their consideration the prospect of a future,
democratic Hungarian Diet in which the Slav and Romanian depu-
ties would outnumber the Hungarians. Both Ion Ghica and Nicolae
Bălcescu emerged from the tribulations of the early months of 1849 –
which took place against the backdrop of a continuing Romanian
insurgency in Transylvania – as the strongest proponents of an alli-
ance with Hungary against Austria and Russia. They were in colli-
sion with Transylvanian leaders such as Simion Bărnuţiu, who still
supported an alliance with the Austrians. There was some progress:
in a meeting with Bălcescu on 29 May, Kossuth officially authorized
the creation of a Romanian legion to be led by Generals Magheru
and Tell, a plan which had General Bem’s support. The Hungarian
leader declared himself ready to recognize the political, linguistic and
confessional autonomy of the nationalities, maintaining the Magyar
language only for diplomacy within an undivided historic Hungary.
Bălcescu was enthusiastic: Kossuth was an “enlightened man, a very
special man, un homme de bien”, he wrote.154
However, more often than not, the blueprints for future ethnic and
political re-configurations in the area hung on vague promises made
viva voce by exiled and harassed politicians and negotiators, under
the menace of Austrian, Russian or Turkish arms, and as such they
remained largely theoretical. Messages from both sides were mixed.
At one time, the Hungarian Prime Minister Lajos Batthyáni even
153
Ibid., 117.
154
Nicolae Bălcescu, Opere, ed. G. Zane and E. Zane, 4 vols. (Bucharest, 1974–
1990), 4: 176. Similar arrangements were being negotiated by the South Slavs, notably
by the Serbian leader Ilija Garašanin, in talks with General Mór Perczel and Count
Gyula Andrássy, the Hungarian envoy in Constantinople.
166 1849
told Bălcescu that he would let Hungary die rather than commit sui-
cide by recognizing more comprehensive rights to the nationalities.155
Throughout these – largely unofficial, or quasi-official – negotiations
with representatives of the East-Central European émigré circles, many
of the Hungarians leaders remained suspicious of presumed persis-
tent Wallachian secret plans to create a ‘Daco-Romanian’ kingdom
and, consequently, Kossuth’s commitment to his promises remained
ambiguous. The paramount feeling remained one of visceral intran-
sigence, distrust and hostility on both sides. The Hungarians had an
“unspeakable hatred” for the Romanians, Bălcescu wrote to Ion Ghica
on 1 July, while for Ferenc Pulszky, Brătianu was simply an “enemy”
of the Hungarians.156 Learning of another violent Romanian rebellion
against the Magyars in the Banat, Bălcescu commented, in recognition
of the fact that the collapse of trust and the unwillingness to cooperate
had led to the débâcle: “These two nations have dragged each other
down into the grave.”157
155
156
Thomas Kabdebo, Diplomat in Exile: Francis Pulszky’s political activities in Eng-
land, 1849–1860, (Boulder, Colorado, 1979), 68.
157
JULY–AUGUST 1849
As the tide started to turn against the Hungarians and as Avram Iancu’s
militia of Romanian peasants continued to resist in the Transylvanian
mountains, the Hungarian government made a belated and ultimately
futile attempt at concessions. On 14 July the Hungarian Diet in Szege-
din voted a so-called ‘Pact of Pacification’, incorporating some of the
proposals of the Hotel Lambert accord of 18–19 May concerning the
nationalities. More comprehensively, on 28 July the Hungarian Diet
gave extensive rights to all minorities, including the formerly excluded
Jews. For a brief moment the plan conceived by Bălcescu for converting
Iancu’s Romanian insurgent army into an ally of the Hungarians and
the re-location of the anti-Russian campaign in Moldavia and Walla-
chia, seemed attainable. But Kossuth’s aide, General Bem, failed in his
attempt at organizing an anti-Russian uprising in Moldavia, which he
entered in July. In spite of continuing Hungarian resistance in Tran-
sylvania, he was finally defeated and withdrew to Little Wallachia and
subsequently to Vidin, on the Danube, where he adopted Islam volun-
tarily alongside several Hungarian and Polish superior officers. On 13
August 1849, Kossuth’s General Arthur Görgey also surrendered – to
the Russians, rather than to the Austrians – at Világos (Rom. Şiria).
The Austrian General Julius Haynau finished off the remainder of
Hungarian resistance and had former Premier Lajos Batthyány, thir-
teen Hungarian generals and one hundred Magyar patriots executed,
an unnecessarily gory epilogue which caused an outcry in Europe.
The losses were considerable on both sides: 50,000 Hungarian soldiers
and an equivalent numbers of Austrians had perished. The Russians
lost only 543 men in combat, but cholera claimed no less than 11,028
Russian lives during the conflict. Tens of thousands of peasants of all
nationalities died in the ethnic conflics in Hungary and Transylvania.158
158
These figures are quoted in Deák, “The Revolution”, 234. For a different statis-
tic, see Micheal Clodfelter, ed., Warfare and Armed Conflicts: a statistical reference to
casualty and other figures, 1500–2000 (Jefferson, North Carolina and London, 2002),
217–8, where Hungarian losses are estimated around 45,000 dead (cholera and dis-
ease casualties included), against 16,000 Austrians killed or wounded, 14,200 taken in
capitivity and 41,000 dead from disease. Russian casualties were reported as 903 killed
or dead from wounds, and 13,554 dead from disease. For further statistics, see also
168 1849
‘Blood tribunals’, summary executions, forced religious conversions,

the destruction of churches, were all part of the arsenal of violence
used in the Hungarian-Romanian-Saxon conflict of 1849. What has
been termed the ‘trauma of Világos’ is believed to have influenced
the future of all the peoples of East-Central Europe, and to have fur-
ther confounded their complex interrelations.159 There were long-term
political consequences, too, in terms of a shift in general European
re-alignments. Although ostensibly the Russian military intervention
had been successful, the tsar underestimated the long-term effects
his invasion of Hungary would have on future international political
faultlines. In the post-48 world, the “leftward movement in the west”
and the “rightward movement in the east” only served to widen the
gap between the reformist and constitutionalist regimes in Western
Europe on the one hand and the increased authoritarianism in Russia
and its satellites on the other, a gap with long-term repercussions in
European politics.160
Turkey, including its dominions, the Romanian Principalities,
offered a safe haven to thousands of Hungarian, Polish and Transyl-
vanian refugees, whose extradition was sought by Russia on the basis
of Article 2 of the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca of 1774, which forbade
Turkey to grant asylum to enemies of Russia. Many of these refugees,
however, including the Romanians, had foreign passports – some of
them British – and a significant number converted to Islam in order
to become exempt from the provision of Article 2. The French Consul
in Bucharest Eugène Poujade alleged that many of the conversions
had been the result of Ottoman coercion, yet the number of converts
was far too high for this claim to be entirely accurate.161 General Bem
himself and many of his 11,120 followers – soldiers and officers alike –
converted to Islam and joined the Ottoman army. Kemal Karpat has
shown that a large number of these converted refugees later settled in
Dan Berindei, Grigore Ploeşteanu, Mihai Sorin Rădulescu, “La violence et les Rou-
mains aux XIXe et XXe siècles”, Revue roumaine d’histoire 34, 1–4 (2000): 174–5.
159
Borsi-Kálman, Hungarian Exiles, 90.
160
Saunders, Russia, 139–41.
161
Letters from Eugène Poujade to Tocqueville, dated 6, 23 and 25 October 1849,
in Documente privitoare la istoria românilor, 1847–1851 (Hurmuzaki Collection)
(Bucharest, 1876–1943), 18: 216, 222–3. Other converts to Islam included Prince
Czartoryski’s agent, Michal Czajkovsky, who, under the name Sadyk Pasha, continued
to have a major role amidst the East-Central European diasporas.
july–august 1849 169
the Ottoman Empire and made a significant contribution to the mod-

ernizing programme launched in the Tanzimat period.162
Debates around the fate of the Hungarian and Polish revolutionary
leaders and military who surrendered to Turkey after the defeat of the
Hungarian war of independence caused a great deal of international
tension between September and December 1849. Russia and Austria
demanded their extradition, and it would seem that in Britain, Queen
Victoria herself and Lord Palmerston were inclined to favour this plan
which, however, would have been contrary to popular sympathies.
The Porte expected a show of strength from Britain and France to
bolster her resistance to Russian and Austrian demands. Britain and
France did send ships into Turkish waters, a decision which led to the
temporary suspension of diplomatic relations between Turkey, Rus-
sia and Austria. There were Austrian plots to recover hostages whom
the authorities would have wanted brought to imperial justice. They
involved the never carried-out kidnapping and arrest of Kossuth him-
self, interned in Kütahya in mainland Turkey. The conflict was only
resolved on 25 December, when Russia and Turkey reached a compro-
mise: the Poles on Russia’s ‘most wanted’ list were to be expelled from
Ottoman territory, with the exception of those who were naturalized
citizens of third countries. Those who had converted to Islam were
interned at Aleppo, in Syria. The Hungarian refugees (including Kos-
suth), though wanted by Austria, remained interned and under sur-
veillance in Turkey. Diplomatic relations with Austria resumed only
on 5 April 1850, when an Austrian delegation was allowed into Turkey
and persuaded some 1,000 Hungarians to return home on promise of
an amnesty and service in the Habsburg army.163
According to Austrian official statistics of the aftermath of the
Austro-Russian victory in Hungary, between 1 November 1848 and
the end of 1850, 4,628 ‘rebels’ were tried, about 500 condemned to
death, of whom 120, including the former Prime Minister Batthyány,
as shown, were actually executed. Russia itself, in spite of the tsar’s
insistence that Austria should show leniency towards the Hungarians
162
See Kemal H. Karpat, “Kossuth in Turkey: the impact of Hungarian refugees in
the Ottoman Empire, 1849–1851”, in idem, Studies on Ottoman Social and Political
History: selected articles and essays (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 169–84.
163
Roberts, Nicholas I, 221–2.
170 1849
who had surrendered to the Russian army, dealt drastically with some
1,000 Poles who had initially escaped to Turkey.164
Z
In a Parisian hotel, and separated again from his family, who were
staying in Plymouth with Marie’s mother, Constantin Rosetti was
waiting for news of the outcome of events in Hungary before deciding
on his and his fellow exiles’ future: a defeat of the Hungarians meant
that they would have to settle down in Paris with no hope of an early
return to their country. He was still preoccupied with what he saw as
failings in his young wife and pursued his educational messages to her.
He extolled, in pure Michelet-ian style, the virtues of “Madame Gari-
baldi”, who was “a hero”, as he wrote in a letter to Marie on 29 August
1849.165 “Our National does not mention this, but Mad. Garibaldi was
in command of Gari[baldi]’s 4th division, when a courier came to tell
him that the enemy had attacked the division. Unperturbed, he said:
I have sympathy for any of my enemies who will have anything to do
with my 4th division. And, in truth, soon afterwards, Mad. Garibaldi
herself arrived, sword in hand, to present his victorious troops to him.
They say she performed miracles of valour, bravery, and wisdom in
spite of the advanced state of her pregnancy . . . I am telling you all
this so that you, too, will love her as I do.”166 The episode was apocry-
phal and Rosetti himself revised his account of it in a letter to Marie
written much later, in Malta, in December 1853. But in 1848, carried
away by the aura of heroism surrounding the protagonist, he narrated
how Anita died in her husband’s arms, following a miscarriage she suf-
fered as they fled after the fall of Rome.167 Rosetti’s interest in the story
reflects his worries over Marie’s yet unfulfilled role in the Romanian
diaspora’s activities and his dissatisfaction with the way in which she
allowed herself to be entirely occupied by childcare and her domestic
duties. Probably unknown to Rosetti himself, his private reference to
Garibaldi participated in a broader, public discourse which was gradu-
ally turning the hero of the Risorgimento into a transnational revolu-
tionary symbol.168 On a much more modest scale, as will be seen, the
164
Ibid., 211.
165
Anita Garibaldi (1821–1849), the wife of the Italian revolutionary leader.
166
167
Letter dated 3 December 1853, in ibid., 1: 71.
168
For the creation of a Garibaldi myth see Lucy Riall, Garibaldi: invention of a hero
(Yale University Press, 2007).
july–august 1849 171
Romanians were about to learn how to manipulate the new technolo-

gies of print and publicity in order to present themselves in Europe
and at home as the – perhaps only – legitimate counter-elite of their
nascent state.
However, for the Rosettis and their circle exile was just begin-
ning. At long last, news reached them that the Hungarians had been
defeated: “[. . .] for how much longer are we meant to suffer? For how
many more years will we be weeping in our chains? I do not know, but
I am certain this cannot last for more that 2–3–4 years. Happy those
who will survive and who will take advantage of the intervening time
to prepare themselves for that moment”, Rosetti wrote in his diary on
19 September, on the eve of the first anniversary of the defeat of the
revolution in his own country, Wallachia.169
169
SEPTEMBER 1849
By September 1849, the Hungarian and Polish leaders who had sur-
vived the armed conflicts of 1848–49 had joined the Romanian forty-
eighters in exile. Nicolae Bălcescu, too, fleeing the Austrian and Russian
authorities, arrived in Paris, in disguise, joining Rosetti, Ion Brătianu
and Ion Voinescu II. Ion Ghica, as Wallachian agent in the Ottoman
capital, was joined there by Eliade Rădulescu and other Romanians
of the pro-Turkish faction. Lajos Kossuth was first interned in Bursa,
in Asia Minor, and later in Kütahya, in mainland Turkey, with other
Hungarian, Polish and Romanian revolutionaries, many of whom
knew each other and had worked together in previous years. For quite
a long time, Polish agents provocateurs had been actively promoting
an anti-Russian uprising in the Principalities, thus giving Russia an
extra argument in their rationale for invading the provinces. The pan-
European interconnectedness of the events of 1848–49 is a dimension
often overlooked in nation-centred accounts of the revolutions. The
activities of the international networks of migrant agents, militants,
and spies which criss-crossed Central Europe overlapped with the
diplomatic efforts on the ‘surface’. To follow in any detail the com-
ings and goings and the meetings of the Italian, Polish, Hungarian,
and Romanian agents in the 1840s is a virtually impossible task: suf-
fice it to say that, in and after 1848, Venice, Turin, Rome, Paris, the
Frankfurt Parliament, Pest, Bucharest, Iaşi, Constantinople and Kü-
tahya became the main centres of concerted diplomatic and clandestine
efforts, aiming variously at overthrowing foreign occupation (whether
Habsburg in Italy and Hungary or Ottoman in South-East Europe)
and at launching the ultimately elusive ‘universal revolution’.170
Zinca Golescu was aware that, with the political situation in South-
East Europe worsening, her sons’ liberation had become unlikely. The
arrest and internment of Lajos Kossuth and of the Hungarian Generals
Bem, Dembinsky, Mészáros, and Perczel marked, in the Wallachian
170
For further details on the Italian involvement in mediating a Central-European
dialogue of Hungarians, South Slavs, Romanians and Poles, and on the occult activi-
ties of the revolutionary agents before and after 1848, see Raluca Tomi, “Romeni e ital-
iani nel periodo dell’esilio rivoluzionario (settembre 1849–dicembre 1852). Affinità.
Opinioni, Contatti,” in Annuario (Venice-Bucharest), 3 (2001): 205–21.
september 1849 173
lady’s perception, the “end of freedom for the nationalities.”171 The

Golescu women rejoiced, however, over the Porte’s refusal to submit
to the Russian ultimatum to deliver the Hungarian and Polish refugees
interned under Ottoman protection. This refusal, Zinca hoped prema-
turely, would trigger a European war, in spite of the dismal political
situation in France, a country which, she commented, had “gone back-
wards a hundred years.”172
In September 1849, Zinca Golescu herself was in Constantinople,
under semi-arrest, on her way back from Bursa, where two of her sons,
Radu and Alexandru, now lived in exile. Uncertain whether she would
be allowed to re-enter Wallachia, she demanded to see the Grand
Vizier Reshid Pasha Mustapha. An interview was granted but eventu-
ally never took place: the boyar lady was made to wait for three hours
in the Vizier’s ante-chamber, watching foreign ministers go past, yet
was never received.173 Eventually, Zinca and her niece, Catinca Rosetti,
were allowed by the Ottoman authorities to leave Constantinople: they
were also given letters of recommendation from the Ottoman For-
eign Minister Ali Pasha to Omer Pasha, the governor of Bucharest,
thus pre-empting Russian opposition to the ‘revolutionary’ women’s
return. “In the Capital [i.e. Bucharest] the rumour is that mother and
I have become mad and are wearing black to mourn the Constitution
[of 1848]”, wrote Catinca to her uncles in mid-November 1849. “But
we feel honoured to be thus calumnied [. . .].”174 However, the Russian
authorities did find a way of showing their displeasure, by not allow-
ing the women passage through Bucharest, where Zinca had business
interests to attend to, and forcing them instead to retreat straight to
the family’s manor at Goleşti.
Effingham Grant continued to be a faithful ally to the beleaguered
Golescu family. Zinca was full of praise: “He sends newspapers and,
while I was away, it is through him that passed all my correspondence
with my daughter, in secret, for without his help all those letters would
have been intercepted. All the money, except the latest instalment, was
transmitted by him and from now on he has taken charge of all the
sums I am going to send to you and to your brothers in Bursa. He has
offered to accommodate me under his roof whenever I passed through
171
Fotino 2: 341.
172
Ibid., 346 and 351.
173
3 September 1849, in ibid., 340.
174
8/20 November 1849, in ibid., 373.
174 1849
Bucharest. [. . .] If you see Mme Rosety [sic] tell her how much obliged
I am to her worthy brother and that I congratulate her on having such
a brother.”175
As political pariahs, the Golescu women recoiled from high society
circles in Bucharest which, they thought, were replete with moral cor-
ruption and political opportunism. They were happy to withdraw at
Goleşti and live in ‘republican’ austerity. Their cousin Hélène Bengesco
was giving her son, Iancu, a “republican education”, reported Catinca
Rosetti. “. . . all day he has the Marseillaise sung to him, the Carmagnole
and Monsieur Guizot et ses amis, and the little one claps his hands and
shouts encore; Bengesco is already seriously concerned about his son,
who one day risks being compromised in the eyes of the Russians. In
a word, you are going to have a nephew worthy of yourselves.”176
175
Ibid., 369; here also revenue received from family estates and sums of money
sent to sons.
176
Ibid., 392. The boy was to die at a young age.
DECEMBER 1849
While their families were being harassed back home, the exiles in
Bursa and Paris continued their attempts to create a united anti-
Russian front in order to co-ordinate their propaganda efforts in the
West, in Central Europe, in Constantinople and in Asia Minor. As the
Hungarian revolution had expired and, in Rosetti’s words,177 “death
and tyranny rolled out their shroud over [European] society”, inter-
nal organization, agreement on a coherent political programme and
efficient propaganda became the priorities of the Romanian diaspora,
divided both ideologically and geographically. The sense of threat and
marginalisation did produce a re-alignment of the moderate center
(Ion Ghica, Nicolae Bălcescu, Gheorghe Magheru and Alexandru G.
Golescu-Albu) and the radical left (Rosetti, the Brătianu brothers
and Alexandru C. Golescu-Negru), leading to the relative isolation
of the ‘conservative’ Eliade and Tell. A steering committee, made up
of Dumitru Brătianu, Bălcescu, Ion Ghica, Magheru and Rosetti, was
appointed on 2 December 1949. A Commission for Propaganda was
also created around the same time.178
In early December 1849, Alexandru C. Golescu-Albu, the strategist
of the Romanian diaspora interned in Asia Minor, addresed a col-
lective letter to his two brothers, his cousin and his friend Dumitru
Brătianu in Paris. “For the last fortnight or so we have been living in
the company of the Hungarians and Poles – exiled, like us, here at
Bursa – people who are probably going to be interned in a few days’
time at Kütahya, in the middle of Asia Minor, at the very heart of
barbarity. With the Poles we have fraternised at first sight, if I may
say so; with the Hungarians we have been less lucky, but we hope
that we will shortly get closer to them and establish in our relations
to them the same intimacy, the same ardent sympathy that we are
cultivating daily – that is bursting forth daily, one might say – during
our brief, and spied-upon, meetings with the dear, brave Poles.”179 The
177
Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 42; and letter from Rosetti to Dumitru Brătianu,
24 August 1849, in C.A. Rosetti: corespondență, ed. Marin Bucur (Bucharest, 1980),
218–9.
178
Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu 1: 43.
179
Fotino 2: 395.
176 1849
principal issue raised in these meetings was co-ordination across all of

the ethnic diasporas, and the internal organisation of each community
in part. As far as the Romanian community was concerned, Golescu-
Albu had four main proposals, the first of which was the election of
a three-member steering committee that would reflect all the political
and regional orientations of Romanians everywhere (i.e the Danubian
Principalities, Transylvania, Bessarabia and Bukovina). Secondly, he
wished the Ottoman Porte to be reassured that seeking their country’s
autonomy did not preclude the Romanians’ allegiance to the Ottoman
suzerain authority, and he wanted this point to be included at the top
of the organisation’s statutes. Thirdly, given the fact that Greek was
the lingua franca in the Balkans and Asia Minor, he suggested editing
a Greek-language newspaper of liberal orientation which could carry
the programmes and the anti-Russian campaign of the Italian, Polish,
Hungarian and Romanian democrats and would literally re-fashion
“public opinion in the East, infested as it is today by the illusion of
Russian omnipotence.” Fourthly, the captains of the many small Greek
commercial vessels carrying Russia’s voice in the region, were to be
instructed instead to gradually spread the message of the Christian
peoples under Ottoman domination along the Danube and the Black
Sea, into Asia Minor, the Adriatic and the Mediterranean. Therefore,
Golescu believed, the main focus of the diaspora’s action should move
from “enlightened” Paris and London, where information was easier
to come by, over to Serbia, Bulgaria, the Danubian Principalities, Tur-
key and Greece – that is, to an “Orient” still lost in “darkness” and still
cut off from essential channels of communication.180
The year 1849 ended on a sobering note: the Hungarians and the
Italians had been defeated, and the Romanians abroad were bracing
themselves up for a long exile. On 28 December 1849, Hermione Asa-
chi, the future wife of Edgar Quinet, wrote to Athénaïs Michelet, com-
menting on the public tribute paid by Michelet to his friend Auguste
De Gerando Teleki in his lecture of the previous day at the Collège
de France. De Gerando, married to the Hungarian Countess Emma
Teleki, had fought alongside the Hungarians and had died, heart-
broken, shortly after their defeat.181 Michelet’s salute to the fallen
man symbolically closed a year of broken hopes for the temporarily
180
Ibid., 398.
181
Michelet, Correspondance, 6: 300.
december 1849 177
defeated nations of Central and Eastern Europe. De Gerando’s por-

trait was to hang in the Dumesnils’ salon and to preside over gather-
ings of Michelet’s family, friends, disciples and exiled revolutionaries
throughout the 1850s.182
Gathered for a New Year celebration in a Parisian home, the
exiles’ first toast was for Romania. “I then suggested another toast to
the memory of the firefighters”, Rosetti added in his diary entry for
1st January 1850, “and two hours after midnight I was back home,
embracing my lovely little daughter, my sublime little daughter. Her
name is Liberty, her name is Sophie. She was born wearing the shirt
of happiness. I therefore hope – for sweet is hope – that this year will
be a happy one.”183
182
Adèle and Alfred Dumesnil were Michelet’s daughter and son-in-law.
183
Rosetti, Diary, 289. The firefighters had fallen heroically in September 1848,
fighting against the advancing Turkish troops in Bucharest. The “shirt of happiness”
was an allusion to a poem Rosetti wrote in his youth.
1850
‘LA ROUMANIE’
[. . .] quand la France pousse un cri de douleur ou de

joie, l’humanité entière souffre ou se réjouit.
Dumitru Brătianu to Jules Michelet, 10 March
1850184
After the defeat of the revolutions of 1848 in Central and East Europe,
Paris became the adoptive city as well as a transit and meeting point
for many of the exiled revolutionaries. The houses of the Michelets,
Dumesnils, Alexander Herzen and Adam Mickiewicz were among the
focal points of such meetings. The republican sculptor Auguste Pré-
ault, a friend of Michelet’s, also received the exiles, facilitating encoun-
ters between the foreigners and the French artists and writers of the
day, Courbet and Georges Sand among them.185 The Russians Mikhail
Bakunin and Ivan Golovin, the Italian writer Niccolò Tommaseo –
a former member of Daniele Manin’s provisional government in
Venice – the Hungarian László Teleki, the Rosettis and their Franco-
Romanian circles, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx and lesser-known Ger-
man refugees, were among the expats whose paths intersected at that
time in Paris. As the political climate veered towards reaction and con-
servatism in Europe, closer bonds of friendship, marriage and political
sympathies now united the circles of Michelet, Quinet, Mickiewicz,
Rosetti and Brătianu. On 12 March 1849, the widowed Michelet had
married the much younger Athénaïs Mialaret, a former governess in
the household of the Princess Alexandrina Cantacuzino in Vienna,
a connection which brought him closer to the Romanian cause and
its main expatriate champions in Paris. Edgar Quinet himself, wid-
owed in March 1851, was to marry, on 21/2 July 1852, the Romanian
Hermione Asachi.186 She was the well-educated daughter of the Mol-
davian poet, editor and politician Gheorghe Asachi and a published
184
185
Letter of Adèle to Alfred Dumesnil, 1852, in Documente inedite din arhivele
franceze privitoare la români în secolul al XIX–lea, ed. Marin Bucur (Bucharest, 1969),
205. Cf. also N. P. Smochină, “Sur les émigrés roumains à Paris de 1850 à 1856”,
Mélanges de l’école roumaine en France, 11 (1933): 160.
186
‘Asachi’ in Romanian, ‘Asaky’ in French-language sources.
‘la roumanie’ 179
author in her native country. Significantly, she was also the translator
into Romanian of Silvio Pellico’s Doveri degli Uomini (On the duties
of men, 1834). The choice of a Carbonaro, a liberal freedom-fighter
who braved Austrian conservatism and repression, must have recom-
mended her to Quinet.187
On 18 January 1850, responding to a congratulatory letter from
Marie Rosetti, who had been attending his lectures at the Collège, Jules
Michelet set the tone for the next stage of his life: retired from public
life, he lived “like a monk”, he explained, but this seclusion enabled
him to “get a better view, understanding and admiration, from our
pale West, for your heroic East.”188 In her response, Marie defined
presciently the shared experience which was going to unite Michelet,
Quinet and the Romanian ‘proscrits’ over the next few years: the pain
of exile and of the martyrdom of nations. “Pray, then, good monk”,
she wrote, picking up on Michelet’s assumed persona, “and, as you
touch one by one the rosary beads of nations in mourning, arrest your
eye from time to time on a tiny one: la Roumanie.”189
To Constantin Rosetti, however, the lives of the East-European exiles
in Paris must have seemed less than heroic. The year 1850 started with
continuous in-fighting among the Moldo-Wallachian émigrés around
issues of power and tactics. Rosetti was awakened from his despon-
dency only by the occasional moment of grace. In mid-January the
Rosettis were invited to a “splendid dinner” by their shoemaker, friend
and political ally, Charlemagne Hallegrain. “In truth, it is the kindness
in the heart of some people that will keep us from falling into mis-
anthropy; it shows us that man could be good if his education were
perfected”, Rosetti wrote.190
On 28 January 1850 Rosetti’s second child, a son, was born. “At
seven in the evening my wife gave birth to an infant and the midwife
announced the baby’s sex by saying: ‘un Romain’ [a Roman]. So, my
beloved son, be a true Romanian. I may give you the name Charle-
magne, because he is the patron of the day. [. . .] May you not repeat
187
Despre îndatoririle oamenilor (On the duties of men, Iaşi, 1843). Silvio Pel-
lico was a Piedmontese poet (1789–1854), a Carbonaro, and a representative of the
Risorgimento, imprisoned by the Habsburg authorities for his revolutionary activities,
an experience which he narrated in I Miei Prigioni (1832; translated into English in
1853 as My Prisons).
188
“mieux le suivre des yeux, le comprendre, admirer, de ce pâle Occident, votre
Orient héroïque”, in Michelet, Correspondance, 6: 322.
189
Ibid., 325.
190
180 1850
my mistakes, and may you have all the virtues of a Romanian, per-
fected through the morality and Christian faith of my mother Elena.”191
On February 1st, the child was baptized Mircea Charlemagne – in a
civil ceremony, like other children in French republican circles – with
Charlemagne Hallegrain and Ştefan Golescu as witnesses.192
The Rosettis’ marriage continued to be overshadowed by Constan-
tin’s unrealistic expectations of his wife as a companion to his activities,
an insatisfaction which underlied the couple’s early years together and
was not to be resolved until around 1853–54. Rosetti felt ill throughout
April and May 1850: it was most probably a psychosomatic condition
triggered by his considerable domestic burdens, an agitated social life
and the frustratingly ineffectual activities of the Romanian association
in Paris. Adèle Dumesnil, Michelet’s daughter, who was attending
the lectures at the Collège de France alongside her husband, Alfred,
reported to Rosetti one day that the historian could not take his “tear-
ful eyes” off his Romanian disciple’s ill-looking face. “I understand,
dear Michelet, I understand what you were reading on my face and
why you suffered!”, Rosetti noted in his diary with his characteristic
flair for drama. “Eh! How could you not suffer to see a citoyen, young
still, and exiled, picking each of your words, and hoping that he might
one day nourish his free compatriots with them; sitting next to him,
you saw Death, laughing at all his plans, pains and efforts, ready to
hurl him into the chaos of oblivion.”193
The musical soirées in the home of Alfred Dumesnil and his wife,
Adèle, appear to have been a constant feature in the lives of the Roma-
nian and Polish exiles and their soon-to-be-exiled Parisian friends,
light-heartened occasions which enlivened a morose political con-
text. Against music by Handel, Marcelli, Bach and Beethoven played
by Adèle and her music master, the exchanges of ideas and friend-
ship between these people thrown together by the tortuous events of
mid-nineteenth-century European history acquired quasi-religious
overtones, judging from Dumesnil’s exalted letters to his friend,
Eugène Noël. “They are the simplest, the most innocent of people, the
arch-pacifiers”, Dumesnil wrote on 18 March 1850. “To see them, to
listen to them, one has a premonition of eternal beauty. It is reflected
in their eyes, in their gestures, in their voices. All I would ask for
191
192
Later extract of certificate of baptism, 18/30 June 1855, at Biblioteca Naţională a
României, St. Georges Collection, the Dinu V. Rosetti Archive, P. XLIII, Dossier 5.
193
Entry for 1 May 1850, Rosetti, Diary, 298.
‘la roumanie’ 181
would be to be able one day to speak of a few people I met in this

life in whom I recognised the resplendence of this eternal beauty. So
far, I have only been able to contemplate them in humility. Seeing
them, I think of all those who died and whom I would like so much
to have met, and the man standing in front of me is sanctified by the
memories of these people. Mickiewicz has always intimidated me. He
has suffered so much, I hardly dare speak to him. I am not worthy
enough.”194
The portrait of the ‘honorary Hungarian’, the late Auguste De
Gerando, presided over these informal gatherings where the dead and
the living communed in a way that Michelet must have cherished. In
spite of Rosetti’s misgivings about his wife’s shortcomings, a ‘legend’
was being forged in this small circle of friends and allies, as Dumesnil
and Michelet listened to Marie’s account of the Wallachian revolution
of 1848. Alfred Dumesnil became a zealous propagator of the Marie
Rosetti story, shortly to be published by Michelet as the ‘legend of
Madame Rosetti’:
In September 1848, after the Wallachian revolution, the principal mem-
bers of the provisional government were arrested by the Turks and
incarcerated in a fortress; they were to be delivered to the Russians, i.e.
sent to Siberia. Madame [Rosetti] obtained the permission to see her
husband. How? Carrying in her arms her infant daughter who had just
been born – the Turkish soldiers have such a respect for children, that
the mother was often allowed to go for the sake of the child, the prisons
opened their gates and Madame [Rosetti] was thus able to save her hus-
band and seventeen of his friends destined to certain death.
I was very happy to be able to tell this story to Mickiewicz the other
day; I took him aside and pointed this heroic young woman to him.
I shall always remember the evening at Mad. Quinet’s when the lady
herself told us the story of this liberation; I saw her again later that eve-
ning. I told her in the presence of her husband and of those she had
saved: “Madame, happy are you amongst women, you have earned a
beauty that nothing can destroy, a beauty at the sight of which heroes are
born.”[. . .] Thus went our evening; after the music, we had tea. Together
at the same table, people from all the nations. I told myself: this is how
all the souls who love and are meant to love each other will be united
in eternity. What beautiful exchanges there will be in these meetings of
souls, and how offertlessly they will be penetrated by the words of the
psalm: enarant [sic] coeli gloriam Dei.195
194
Documente inedite, ed. Bucur, 29.
195
Ibid., 29–30.
182 1850
It must have been around this time that Marie sat for their friend
Rosenthal’s iconic masterpiece, Revolutionary Romania. (See Fig. 2)
Depicted in half profile, Marie appears in a graceful but defiant pose,
dressed in an ethnic Romanian richly embroidered blouse, wearing a
necklace of golden coins, an item of traditional peasant dress. Her left
hand clutches a tricolour flag and her right fist is clenched round the
handle of a dagger. In the background, and contrasting with her serene
and composed expression, small figures engaged in battle appear sil-
houetted against a dark, storm-ravaged sky, a reference to armed
resistance in Bucharest in September 1848, and an illustration of how
conflict should diminish in the face of an untroubled sense of right
and justice. The painter’s signature, discovered under the bordering
passepartout in the early 1970s, reads: “C. D. Rosenthal, l’émigration
valaque, 1850”, as though the artist had wanted to make sure that
the experience of shared revolutionary exile remained inscribed for
posterity.196
In counter-point to the men’s fraternizing, a parallel community
of their spouses was being built around more feminine concerns of
health and child-rearing: births, breast-feeding and weaning, physical
ailments and the perpetual, daily, dangers that threatened the body in
the nineteenth century were written and sympathized about, uniting
Minna Quinet, the historian’s first wife, Marie Rosetti, Paul Batail-
lard’s first wife, Thérèse,197 Athénaïs Michelet and Adèle Dumesnil,
against the backdrop of more intellectual and political concerns. They
were all in the audience of Michelet’s lectures at the Collège de France
on the day when the historian talked about “woman”, “this mysterious
and difficult topic.”198
In spite of such glowing moments of intellectual and emotional con-
viviality, these groups of people brought together by the hazards of
history must have felt that the horizons darkened. The political context
in France itself was not encouraging and news from Romania contin-
ued to be bad: two years on, former forty-eighters, still imprisoned
after the defeat of the revolution, were either ill or dying, and their
relatives were not allowed to visit.199
196
Dan Grigorescu, Trei pictori de la 1848 (Bucharest, 1973), 218–9.
197
The daughter of the French writer and salonnière Mélanie Waldor.
198
Minna Quinet, letter to Mme. Bataillard dated 27 April 1850, Arhivele Naţionale
(The Romanian National Archives), Bucharest, Fonds Bataillard, Dossier 5/173, 7.
199
APRIL–SEPTEMBER 1850
The young Golescu ‘republicans’, isolated at the family manor at

Goleşti, killed their time with letter-writing, gardening and attempts
at reforming village life: by personal example, the ladies of the manor
inspired village women to wear Romanian national dress, similar to
the garments worn by Marie Rosetti in Rosenthal’s portrait.200 Things
elsewhere were equally slow-paced, but less leisurely. In June and
July 1850, still in Bursa, Alexandru Golescu-Albu, continued to share
his musings with the Parisian branch. His latest project was the cre-
ation of a secret society with a mission to unify the consciences of the
divided and dispersed Romanians in all the provinces and to create an
awareness of a common national destiny. His almost obsessive fretting
over nation-building projects was due, Albu explained, to the special
nature of their group’s exile in Asia Minor: while the Parisians could
divert themselves from the thought of their “malheureuse patrie” with
the distractions offered by an eventful political and public life, as well
as with the entertainment offered by the big metropolis, the ‘Eastern’
group felt they were mere wanderers in a wild land, where they felt at
odds with the native culture and mores. Their minds were occupied
solely by “the painful image of our homeland, [. . .] the thought of an
embattled Romania, poised against Tsarism, against the Magyars, the
Serbs, the Saxons, against Austria and the incertitude of the future.[. . .]
What could we interpose between our hearts and the misfortunes of
our homeland to distract us for a while from their contemplation?
Could that be nature? Nature here is undoubtedly beautiful, but it is
inanimate; man here does not know how to embellish it with the work
of his hands. Could it be intercourse with society? But society here
is dead, ideas and feelings have no shrine and no adepts in the East,
and if ideas and feelings live anywhere here, it is in the minds, in the
hearts of the Poles, the Hungarians, the Romanians; these feelings are
in the main expectation, pain, vague presentiments, and each of these
nationalities [lives] separately with its own idols, with its passions, and
its often conflicting dreams – sworn enemies to each other.”201
200
Letter from Catinca Rosetti to Ştefan Golescu, 11 April 1850, in Fotino 3: 29.
201
Ibid., 59.
184 1850
In the same letter, Golescu-Albu appealed to the Parisian branch for

information on the precise timelines of the recent Magyar-Romanian
hostilities in Transylvania. He was gathering the information on the
request of the Poles in Bursa, he explained, in the awareness that “our
interests and the events that took place in various parts of Romania
are still too minor, too remote and of too little consequence for the
political world to take an interest; the only certain manner of making
ourselves heard is for Poland and Hungary to speak on our behalf as
well as on their own.”202
Golescu-Albu continued to reflect on the failure of the European
revolutions of 1848, and in particular of the Romanian revolution,
in a lengthy letter from Bursa dated August–September 1850, a let-
ter which has to be considered as one of the foundational texts of the
Romanian diaspora in the 1850s. He identified the Wallachian provi-
sional government’s mistakes in a few key areas. The decision not to
send troops to confront the Russian forces deployed along the river
Prut in Moldavia in early June 1848 had appeased a few “reactionary
officers”, while alienating the rank-and-file, and the failure to enact
legislation contrary to the interests of the 4,000 oligarchs (i.e. the land-
owning boyars) enriched by the people’s “sweat”, had alienated the
two million peasants who had initially rallied round the revolution-
ary cause. As for General Odobescu (Marie Rosetti’s former employer,
who had betrayed the revolutionaries, but was pardoned on Rosetti’s
insistence), he should have been court-martialled within twenty-four
hours of his betrayal and either executed or pardoned and sent straight
to “the emperor of Russia with a kick in the derrière.”203
In addition – Albu believed – the Wallachian revolutionaries had
failed to make it clear that they were fighting the revolution on behalf
of all the Romanian provinces, not just of Wallachia: “[. . .] Transylva-
nia, the Banat were in the same situation, they too were threatened by
Pan-Slavism and were severely menaced by the Magyars. What have
we done to help them against this double danger, to turn our pain to
the profit of our brethren, to seal for ever in the minds of the com-
munities the idea of the identity, of the confraternity of interests of
the five provinces? Nothing, absolutely nothing!” The Wallachians had
failed to grasp the complexities of imperial allegiances in the Austrian
Empire: “[. . .] we should have known why some of the Transylvanians
202
Ibid., 62.
203
Ibid., 92. In French, and emphasized, in the original.
april–september 1850 185
shouted “long live the Emperor of Austria” (just as we shouted long

live our Suzerain the Sultan) while the enlightened from the Banat
joined the Magyars against their Emperor, etc., etc., in short we should
have learnt how to be of use to them and, in our fatal hour, we could
have turned our defeat to some use by following the example of the
Serbs on the other side of the Danube, more than twenty thousand of
whom ran to help their brethren in Austria. Then we would not have
made the grave mistake, to say the least – for which the main culprit
is Eliad – the grave mistake of crossing our arms, singing glory to
the Magyars and shame to the Transylvanians, and thus alienating the
hearts of the same [Transylvanian] Romanians who, a few days earlier,
had come to offer us their breasts, their love and all the faculties of
their intelligence.”204
Equally harmful, in Golescu-Albu’s view, was the in-fighting among
the émigrés and the tensions pitting even very small groups against
each other: Alexandru G. Golescu-Negru and his friends (i.e. Rosetti,
the Brătianus and others) were bitterly opposing Eliade and his allies
as well as Ion Ghica’s more moderate faction in Constantinople.205
Albu’s advice to all of them was to look towards the more cohesive
and disciplined Polish diaspora for a model of how to organize their
own in the future.206
Ion Eliade Rădulescu had repeatedly denounced the more radical of
the Romanian émigrés who would have wished their country to be rid
of Ottoman suzerainty, at the same time as of Russian protection. On
this, the White had the following to say:
[. . .] it is not true, as Mr. Eliad claims in his latest letter, that the Roma-
nians who are disengaging themselves from the idea of Turkish suzer-
ainty are traitors, idiots, or deranged, bad patriots; may Mr. Eliade [sic]
forgive me, but this manner of understanding the public good, of defin-
ing the true Wallachian, is incomplete, narrow, mistaken, and is more-
over detrimental and dangerous in the highest degree for the country’s
future; for while it is good for the Diaspora to abide firmly and deter-
minedly by the principles of the revolution, by the party of the Porte
204
Ibid., 93–4. The “enlightened from the Banat” refers to Eftimie Murgu and his
allies, who sought a rapprochement with the Hungarian provisional government in
1848–9. For the ethnic entanglements of 1848–49 in Transylvania, see above, 136 sqq.
For further details on Romanian-Habsburg relations, see the comprehensive study
of Liviu Maior, In the Empire. Habsburgs and Romanians: from dynastic loyalty to
national identity (Cluj-Napoca, 2008).
205
Fotino 3: 96.
206
Ibid., 96 and 106.
186 1850
(as opposed to the Muscovite party), under the double banner of Suzer-
ainty and autonomy, it is equally good, very good, that some, a few of
you, should detach themselves from the crowd and form a new party,
the party of the future (in opposition to us, the party of the present),
the party of the disappointed who can no longer expect anything from
Turkey (as opposed to ours, which still relies on this Power) a party
therefore which, having lost al faith in the Turkish government, or in
the English and the French, or any other government, should renounce
all action, all attempt to influence cabinets, and should build its hopes
on the future, on the eternal unity, on the public opinion of the masses.
Such a party should engage in long-term action, setting its sights solely
on a theoretical dream of a future Romania, irrespective of the difficul-
ties that might arise in the present or of the parochial spirit which pre-
vails in our countries, of the frictions, of governmental interests and of
the multiple and varied obstacles in the politics of the moment.207
What Golescu-Albu had in mind in effect was the transformation of
the radicals in Paris – people like Rosetti and the Brătianu brothers, far
too radical for the conciliatory politics of the moment – into a pres-
sure group mobilized to threaten and blackmail the Porte into listen-
ing to the voice of the Romanians in exchange for their recognition
of Ottoman suzerainty. Albu’s championship of pressure politics and
pluralism went as far as to suggest the parallel creation of a group of
militants from Transylvania, Banat and Bukovina who would support
the cause of Austrian suzerainty as a counter-weight to Russian expan-
sionism. In his thinking, the inter-play of ‘independents’, pro-Turks
and pro-Austrians would secure a leverage system for the Romanians’
nation-building blueprints.208 This system, Albu believed, was supposed
to show to the European cabinets that “things have got to the point
where the two empires (Turkey and Austria), equally weak, equally
heterogeneous, are being threatened by the intrigues and the ambi-
tions of the other (Russia), which Europe can hardly control, and even
if it could, it [Europe] is in no position to prevent the havoc which
Russia’s quiet advance, and the carrot and stick game she plays with
the various nationalities, will cause in the two empires in question.”
One way out of this situation, he argued, was for a strong Austria and
an internationally-supported Turkey to isolate Russia internationally,
thus guaranteeing the “European balance.”209
207
Ibid., 98.
208
Ibid., 100.
209
Ibid.
april–september 1850 187
Golescu-Albu is unsparing in his judgement of the leaders of the

Romanian diaspora, including himself, his brothers and cousins and
the other members of the provisional government of 1848: “[. . .] we
are men of the heart, of devotion, of morality and honesty; out of all
those who have taken active part in the movement, who have con-
spired for the revolution, we are a small number who did this without
any regard for personal interest or prejudice, who wanted a revolu-
tion for the people and by the people, for the good of the nation, who
far from hoping for personal gain, denounced and risked everything
they possessed as members of the privileged classes, by swearing on
the abolition of titles and privileges, the rehabilitation of every man,
and the inauguration of the reign of equality and fraternity among
the Romanians.”210 Yet what this group of well-meaning idealists (Tell,
Magheru, Brătianu, Voinescu, Albu himself, the other Golescus, and
Rosetti) lacked were specialised, practical skills as well as a thorough
understanding of what motivated the Romanians outside the two prin-
cipalities.211 In addition, many were too radical and passionate to be
able to form a firm, pragmatic, steering committee. Their role was in
propaganda, in the press or as agents in the Balkans and the West.
The only five qualifying for leadership were the more pragmatic Nico-
lae Bălcescu, Alexandru Golescu-Negru, Ion Ghica, and the Transyl-
vanians Ioan Maiorescu and Ion Ionescu dela Brad. They had been
responsible for inserting into the 1848 constitution the most impor-
tant, and unrealized, of the 21 articles: article 13 which stipulated the
allocation of a minimum of around thirteen hectares of land to each
peasant, thus turning the peasants into men of property, citizens and
soldiers.212
While the entire East-European diaspora was organising itself,
agonising over the mistakes of the past, and bracing itself up for the
battles to come, the Romanian community rejoiced with the Golescu
family over the forthcoming marriage of Zoe, Zinca’s grand-daughter,
to Effingham Grant. The family matriarch herself announced the news
to her exiled sons: “This young man has been a Godsend to us. In the
disgrace that we now find ourselves in, so to speak, to see such a good
party present himself and ask for our little one’s hand, demanding no
dowry – he said that was no concern of his – is truly providential and
210
Ibid., 104.
211
Ibid., 105.
212
Ibid., 109.
188 1850
quite a novelty in our country. This young man is not wealthy – others
in his place would have sought a big fortune and would have suc-
ceeded, for he has a good career ahead and not one of our rich young
ladies would have said no to him. It is one more reason to respect this
young man who only looked for a modest and good girl to be his wife,
one whose only source of happiness in this world from now on will
be to render her husband happy.” The family did intend, however, to
offer a dowry to the bride-to-be, and were hoping to sell lands to raise
the 4,000 ducats needed, which, as Zinca herself admitted, was nothing
compared to “the enormous dowries demanded here.”213
The bride herself wrote to her uncles of her “awareness of my noble
duties to come, which I want to fulfil to my heart’s content in order
to make myself worthy of the sacred name I am going to have” as
well as of the sadness at leaving her family. “Yet I would be unfair to
Grant to be regretting my family so much; it is true I am forsaking a
lot for him, but he too has given me everything, because he has given
me his heart.”214 The marriage took place at Goleşti on 28 October
1850, and glasses of champagne were clinked in honour of the newly-
weds and of the “beloved émigrés.”215 One of the Golescu brothers,
Ştefan, had intended to defy the decree prohibiting the exiles’ return
and travel from Paris incognito to attend his niece’s wedding, but had
been prudently dissuaded by Zinca.216 In a letter to the same Ştefan,
dated 24 October, the bride’s mother, Ana, voiced concerns about the
possibility of Grant being posted far away, but otherwise the union
appeared to be a happy one from its early days. By December 1850,
Effingham Grant, who continued passing on money and letters between
Goleşti and Paris, was reporting to his young wife’s exiled uncles that
she was relishing her new role “in spite of being away from her family
and married to an Englishman.” As for himself, he continued, “I can
affirm most categorically that since our marriage I have been the hap-
piest of mortals and that, irrespective of my political opinions (which
the Republic of Goleşti regards as highly dubious), I can only rejoice
at the Revolution which brought me this little Republican who with
her love has placed me among the elect.”217
213
Letter dated 1 June 1850, in ibid., 39–40.
214
Ibid., 69.
215
Letter from Zinca to Ştefan Golescu, 6 November 1850, in ibid., 135.
216
Letter dated 16 July 1850, in ibid., 70–4.
217
Letter dated 20 December 1850 in ibid., 150.
1851
LONDON. MAZZINI’S EUROPEAN
DEMOCRATIC COMMITTEE
And not only is England a safe place of refuge for every

foreigner who, in his native land, has fallen a victim
to civil discords, but she is, in fact, the last sanctuary,
in Europe, open to the human mind itself.
Louis Blanc, 1848. Historical Revelations218
With France’s international role as defender of civil and political lib-
erties in free-fall, it was London’s turn to rise as a beacon of freedom
for the world and a meeting point for exiled and persecuted politi-
cal dissenters. The French authorities were becoming concerned that
arrests, surveillance and intimidation at home drove French and for-
eign agitators away from France to London, which quickly acquired a
reputation as an international centre for the activities of conspirato-
rial groups aiming to launch a pan-European revolution. A report of
the Parisian prefect of police of August 1851 listed an Association of
exiled French socialist democrats, a Socialist democratic committee
of German refugees, a Hungarian democratic society, a section of the
Polish Democratic Committee and an Italian national committee, all
operating on British soil.219
In the summer of 1850, Giuseppe Mazzini, exiled in London, had
formed the Central European Democratic Committee, an under-
ground association bringing together some of the leading republi-
cans, revolutionaries and radicals expelled from their countries by the
defeat of the 1848 movements, people such as the former Montagnard
Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, the Pole Albert Darász and the German pro-
fessor of philosophy Arnold Ruge. Romanian moderates such as Ion
Ghica and Nicolae Bălcescu were reluctant to join the Committee and
risk appearing, in Ghica’s words, as the “anarchists and enemies of
social order” feared by the Turkish and the European governments.220
218
Louis Blanc, 1848. Historical Revelations, inscribed to Lord Normanby (London,
1858), Preface, v–vi.
219
I. Tchernoff, Associations et sociétés secrètes sous la deuxième république, 1848–
1851 (Paris, 1905), 343, 373–6.
220
Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 44–5.
190 1851
Dumitru Brătianu, who had no such qualms, applied to join, in the

firm belief that common action would be a step towards greater cohe-
sion among the European and Central-European left and especially
among the exiled revolutionaries. In April 1851 he arrived in London
with a letter to Mazzini from Edgar Quinet and another to Ledru-
Rollin from Michelet. “Mr. Bratiano aîné” was, Michelet wrote in his
letter, “one of the founders of Wallachian liberty and his country’s
foremost thinker.”221 The formal Wallachian offer of underground rev-
olutionary collaboration was accepted by the Committee in mid-June
and the Committee’s “Manifesto to the Romanians” welcomed their
adoption into the great family of the peoples in preparation for the
great battle between “the spirit of good and the spirit of evil” in the
world.222 The Romanians responded on 11 September with a “Mani-
festo to the European Committee”. “Forgotten, unknown by the peo-
ples of the West (Occident), by our own blood brethren of the Latin
family, misunderstood by the peoples of the East (Orient), harassed by
our neighbours, alone we have walked erect throught the times and
the numberless tempests that Asia kept hurling towards us.”223 The
Romanians declared themselves ready to join “the holy crusade for
democracy” and aim towards building a “Danubian confederation of
equal nations”.224
Mazzini also negotiated an agreement between Hungarians and
Romanians prior to Brătianu’s admission to the Committee: a pledge
towards a peaceful solution to ethnic differences in Transylvania,
guaranteed universal suffrage for all the ethnic minorities, as well
as a truce pending victory and the start of a European Democratic
Congress were among Mazzini’s conditions for admitting Hungarians
and Romanians into the republican brotherhood.225 In his visionary
enthusiasm, Mazzini obviously glossed over ethnic, geopolitical and
diplomatic nuances and conundrums, an approach which partly justi-
fied Golescu-Albu’s criticism of the Italian leader.226 Nevertheless, the
Romanians were pleased enough with their new international affili-
ation to send their “Manifesto” for publication to six major French
221
Ibid., 45.
222
Ibid., 46.
223
Smochină, “Sur les émigrés roumains à Paris”, 187–8. The entire text is repro-
duced by Smochină on pp. 187–93.
224
Ibid., 190.
225
Ibid.
226
See p. 197 below.
london. mazzini’s european democratic committee 191
newspapers, among which La Presse, the anti-tsarist Le Siècle and Le

National, and have it circulated among the circles of philo-Romanians
and influential Parisians.227 “Romania is still alive and will shortly be
free, united and strong”, Rosetti exulted in his Diary.228 He was espe-
cially pleased that La Presse, at that time hostile to Ledru-Rollin – a
leader of the European Committee – promised to keep its pages open
to Romanian propaganda.229 But, in spite of this new infusion of hope,
the tensions which Mazzini hoped to bury under the general revolu-
tionary enthusiasm refused to go away. The publication of the “Mani-
festo” triggered an exchange of open letters between Daniel Ira’nyi,
the former Secretary of the Public Salvation Committee in Pest, and
Dumitru Brătianu. In a letter to La Presse, Ira’nyi claimed that, both
before and after 1848, the ethnic Romanians, Slavs and Hungarians in
Transylvania had enjoyed equal rights and that the ethnic civil war in
the region had been lost not only due to Austrian machinations, but
also – which was accurate – to the disputes among the ethnic com-
munities. Responding in the same newspaper on 4 July 1851, Brătianu
deployed his usual verbal arsenal and a wide range of documentary
sources to refute Ira’nyi’s thesis, and showed that in his circular of
10 June 1849, which was destined to lead to a national conciliation
in Transylvania, the former Hungarian Foreign Minister Casimir
(Kázmér) Batthyani had spoken, rather counter-productively, of “the
supremacy of the Hungarian element.” However, Brătianu conceded,
it was time to move on. “Hungarians and South Slavs, our neigh-
bours, the time has come”, he appealed in his response, “you must
have become aware that the Danubian Confederation will be the main
achievement of our time. Let us shake hands, brethren, over the tombs
of our martyrs and let this great work be our common achievement.”230
The Confederation – he concluded – was meant to be an association
of free nations with equal rights.
Mazzini was not happy with this public exposure of animosities and,
on 21 August, begged Brătianu to scale down his expostulations and
send a memorandum to the Hungarians proposing a “truce in God”,
postponing ethnic hostilities until the victorious end of the war against
227
The manifesto was published in Le National of 4 October 1851, 2 as “Le Mani-
feste Roumain”.
228
229
Ibid., 317.
230
192 1851
despotism.231 Brătianu must have done so, because, on 11 September,

he became officially a member of the Central Democratic Committee
and left Paris, now an uncongenial place for a new colleague of Ledru-
Rollin. In their “Manifesto”, which Brătianu took to London with him,
the Romanians pledged their support for the Central Committee and,
in principle, for the much-discussed but perpetually vaguely defined
project of the Danubian Confederation, without, however, abandoning
their own plans for the ultimate unification and the independence of
the Principalities.232 In an attempt to bolster public opinion at home,
Brătianu tried to popularise the work of the Committee in the Roma-
nian Principalities: his appeals to the Romanians, printed on very thin
paper, which made them easier to smuggle, were addressed equally to
the inhabitants of the Principalities and to the Transylvanian Roma-
nians serving in the Austrian army.233
The members of the Committee tried to keep a low profile in Lon-
don, but their activities aroused the suspicions of the Great Powers.
The French Foreign Minister, Count Walewski, sent a protest to Lord
Palmerston, asking for measures to be taken against those “incorrigi-
ble conspirators” and members of the “Comité Central Démagogique”,
who were threatening European stability.234 His letter had a number
of enclosures containing evidence of the threat posed by the refugees.
One such document was a copy of the newspaper Le Proscrit, the first
issue of which had appeared in Paris on 5 July 1851. Members of the
editorial board included Mazzini and Ledru-Rollin, alongside well-
known French republican militants such as Etienne Arago and Désiré
Pilette, the Poles Albert Darász and Stanisław (Stanislas) Worcell (a
Polish socialist and Michelet’s translator into English), Martin Ber-
nard, one of the former leaders of the secret Société des Saisons and
head of the association La Solidarité républicaine, and the Viennese
General Ernest Haug. The first issue of the Proscrit, subtitled “Journal
de la République universelle”, carried an appeal for European unity
from Mazzini: “European Democracy must constitute itself. Against
231
Ibid.
232
The Romanians’ “Manifesto” was published in the first issue of Rosetti’s short-
lived newspaper Republica Română, in November 1851. See Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu,
1: 49. For the illicit channels of distribution of the paper to Romanian territories, see
letter dated 1 December 1851 from Ştefan Golescu (Paris) to a contact in Bucharest
in Ceauşu and Vitcu, “Romanian Emigration”, Doc. 8.
233
234
The National Archives, PRO/FO 881/296, Memorandum of Count Walewski to
Lord Palmerston, 29 October 1851, 1.
the league of corrupt and mendacious powers one must oppose, in

all its reality and its power, the holy alliance of the peoples. We must
lay together the first stone at the foundation of the temple on the
frontispiece of which the future will inscribe the words: ‘God is God,
and humanity is His prophet!’.” A “Universal Convention of all the
oppressed peoples”, whose representatives had been brought together
“in exile and persecution”, had to be created, with a mission to refash-
ion the “map of future Europe.” Le Proscrit was suppressed after two
issues by a law decree of 16 July 1850, but was revived as La Voix du
Proscrit as the official organ of the Central European Committee, and
under the editorship of an ‘old’ republican, Charles Delescluze, who
was also exiled in London.235 The plan was for the creation of national
committees which would each send a representative to London. On
8 December 1850, the Voix du Proscrit announced the affiliation of the
Italian, Polish, German, and Young Austrian committees, as well as of
the Dutch Democratic Association.236
Count Karl Ferdinand von Buol, at the time the Austrian envoy to
London, joined his protest to that of Walewski, reminding Palmerston
that when trouble had been brewing in Ireland in 1848, England had
closed its borders to all American travellers as a precautionary mea-
sure. He requested the expulsion of the exiled revolutionaries from
London, threatening otherwise to refuse applications for visas from
British travellers to Austria. Similar protests from the Chevalier Bun-
sen, the Prussian minister in London, from the Russian Foreign Minis-
ter, Count Nesselrode, and from the Imperial Austrian Plenipotentiary
in Frankfurt, Count Thun, were also enclosed with Walewski’s memo.
However, Britain was not disposed to renege on her traditional hospi-
tality to foreigners. In contrast to the strict surveillance foreigners were
subjected to in Second Empire France, mid-Victorian Britain prided
herself in her generally relaxed legislation regarding aliens, in the
low budgets allocated to the secret services and in the Home Office’s
reluctance to use spies. By 1850, Scotland Yard’s plainclothes detective
branch comprised only 8 men.237 Between 1823 and the Aliens’ Bill of
235
The Committee’s main press organ in Britain was The English Republic and
in Italy L’Italia del Popolo. Cf. Alvin R. Calman, Ledru-Rollin après 1848 et les pro-
scrits français en Angleterre (Paris, 1921), 97. The Voix du Proscrit later re-located to
St. Amand, in the French Nord.
236
Count Walewski to Lord Palmerston, 29 October 1851, 2–3.
237
For more details, see Bernard Porter, Plots and Paranoia: a history of political
espionage in Britain, 1790–1988 (London, 1989), 88–9.
194 1851
1905 no foreigner claiming political refugee status was refused entry

in Britain or was expelled from Britain.238
One of the reasons for the softer attitude to refugees was simply that
there were not enough foreigners in England to justify unduly harsh
measures. The 1851 Census shows that there were 50,289 foreigners in
England and Wales, which, in a total population of nearly 18 million,
represented a percentage of only 0.28.239 The more relaxed British atti-
tude had pragmatic justifications, too: avoidance of military engage-
ment abroad on the one hand, reform and free-market capitalism at
home, on the other, were supposed to make espionage unnecessary. In
addition, espionage was believed to be morally corrosive, a danger to
civil liberties as well as an unsavoury occupation for a ‘gentleman’. A
Whiggish trust in British liberalism ensured that Britain did not feel
unduly threatened by revolutionary aliens and that in fact most Britons
at that time would regard receiving Continental ‘trouble-makers’ as a
“mark of their national superiority over the Continent.”240 The socialist
Louis Blanc, himself a refugee in England after 1848, was full of praise
for the British way of dealing with foreign political militants:
It will ever be to the glory of England, that, in the middle of the nine-
teenth century, she should have been the only impregnable asylum, in
Europe, for the exile driven from his country by absolutism or usur-
pation. The indomitable energy with which the English people have
maintained the right of asylum is the more honourable, as they do not
espouse the opinions of those they harbour, nor think either of counte-
nancing their views or encouraging their hopes.241
After 1848 and after Louis Napoléon’s coup d’état of 1851, Britain
received around 7,000 politically active continental refugees on its ter-
ritory, but their surveillance remained low-key and discreet through-
out the 1850s. The most severe known incident involved a decision in
October 1855 to expel all the Jersey refugees, not from Britain how-
ever, but to other parts of the kingdom, sometimes not farther away
than Guernsey. By 1859, Britain’s refugee problem petered out, partly
because most of them had returned home, and partly because foreign
238
John Saville, “1848—Britain and Europe”, in Exiles from European Revolutions,
ed. Sabine Freitag, 24.
239
“They were far greatly outnumbered by the 520,000 Irish in England and Wales,
who did present social problems, and by the 130,000 Scots.” Bernard Porter, The Refu-
gee Question in Mid-Victorian Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1979), 4.
240
Porter, Plots and Paranoia, 77.
241
Blanc, 1848. Historical Revelations, Preface, v–vi.
governments had lost hope that the British authorities might prove
willing to extradite them.242
One of the few exceptions to this rather relaxed approach to asylum
in the 1840s was the work of a ‘special branch’ of the General Post
Office, the very existence of which was revealed to the British public
owing to an incident of 1844 which involved the interception of the
mail of Giuseppe Mazzini. The leader-to-be of the European Commit-
tee had asked his correspondents to place poppy seeds in their letters,
the absence of which upon opening the envelopes indicated tamper-
ing. The radical MP Thomas Duncombe raised the issue in the House
of Commons, and the ensuing public outcry, which involved sonorous
names such as Thomas Carlyle, a friend of Mazzini’s, put an end to
the General Post Office’s interference with foreigners’ correspondence,
although not to its ‘home’ service.243 The émigrés’ correspondence
continued to be opened by their own governments, however, or by
the governments of states with interests in their respective countries.
In 1853, Charles Dickens wrote in his popular newspaper Household
Words that “[f]ew of their missives reach their destination without
some curious little scissor marks about the seal, some suspicious little
hot-water blisters about the wafers, hinting that glazed cocked hats,
and jack-boots, and police spies have had something to do with their
letters between their postage and their delivery.”244
242
Porter, Plots and Paranoia, 91–4.
243
Ibid., 76–80.
244
“Perfidious Patmos”, in Household Words, 12 March 1853, 155: 28.
1851
LONDON-BUCHAREST-PARIS
May your young homeland, born yesterday like

yourself, innocent like yourself, the youngest-born
among nations, the orphan and the foundling (so she
was called by one of her sons); may Romania travel
through the tempests and dock into the safe haven of
Providence!
Michelet, “Principautés danubiennes”245
Throughout 1850, Dumitru Brătianu kept up a steady correspondence
with Jules Michelet. From London, where he was based in early 1850,
he thought that the moment had arrived to launch another awareness
and publicity campaign. Amidst the sense of guilt which had engulfed
the French left, Brătianu added his own accusations. The events of
1849 had shown that France was no longer in the vanguard of Euro-
pean revolutions and the former disciple had become a disillusioned,
yet still faithful, equal who believed that he had earned the right to
remonstrate with the Maître. “France is, one might say, the General
Headquarters of Europe’s revolutionary forces”, he wrote on 10 March
1850 in the opening of a lengthy and impassioned letter, but France
had forgotten her mission. He clearly relished his own angry rheto-
ric as he depicted the “new Byzantium”, a demoralised, police-state
France under President Louis Napoléon, who sent reluctant armies
into fratricidal battle:
[. . .] wounded Europe is moaning in pain; and you, masters, lords of the
world, owners of the universal suffrage – in the aftermath of a great rev-
olution, they are dragging you at your place of execution without trial;
they are arming you with the assassin’s weapons and making you march
at night against a republic whom you call your sister and love from all
your heart [i.e. Italy]; they have violated your constitution and have con-
demned to life imprisonment representatives of the people who have
protested by legal means against this violation; they are incarcerating
you, and insulting your religion; like wild beasts they are chasing you,
and hunting you down at street corners; they are suspending your news-
papers, they are smashing your printing presses, they are sending your
245
Michelet, Légendes, 280.
london-bucharest-paris 197
journalists, in chains, on foot, from one corner of France to another;

they are pillorying your most illustrious citizens and your friends like
common highwaymen; in broad daylight, they are cutting down your
holy trees of liberty, under your eyes they are taking away the wreaths
that France has placed on the tombs of her martyrs, they are turn-
ing your brave gendarmes into vile spies and agents, they are violently
snatching your children away from their teachers, forcing them into the
arms of the Jesuits; they are depriving you with impunity of your most
precious rights, of your most cherished liberties; they are ravishing your
right to reunion, the municipal rights, the freedom of the press, the free-
dom of education; your cities and villages are moaning under the état de
siège; the whole of France like the land of the Muscovites is run by the
military and placed in illegality; – and all these crimes of which you are
both instruments and victims, appear to leave all of you cold; nobody is
troubled, you are all afraid of your own shadows, you are all silent, you
are all running away, hiding, closing your eyes, hiding your faces.246
Yet the French remained the “elect people”, Brătianu continued, and
the undefeated spirit of France will guide European nations towards
the revolutions of the future which, far from being violent acts of
destruction like the old revolutions, will simply be peaceful manifesta-
tions of the people’s will, routine democratic acts, nothing more dan-
gerous than joyful national holidays.247
As usual in his dealings with the intense and inflammatory Brătianu,
Michelet preferred to respond briefly and cautiously, congratulating
his former student on being a worthy “citizen” of a “young” nation
such as Romania, rather than engaging more deeply with his unflat-
tering political analysis of the current situation in France.248 Brătianu
obviously needed to unburden his heart and, undiscouraged by his
mentor’s brevity, followed up with at least one more letter of similar
length and impetuousness. The target of his attacks was spelled out
more clearly this time: the “men of the Montagne”, who had betrayed
the French revolutionary ideals in June 1849. “What have you done to
the soul of France?” Brătianu asked of the individuals whom he con-
sidered guilty of having abandoned not only the French people, but
also the Poles and the Romanians, whose fight against the “colossus
of the North” would have needed, beyond a symbolic emblem – an
enduring French Republic – the support of French diplomacy. The
people of “Messina, Palermo, Naples, Venice, Milan, Berlin, Prague,
246
247
Ibid., 360, 358.
248
Letter of 27 March 1850, in ibid., 380.
198 1851
Pest, Lemberg, Krakow, Bucharest”, who had been fighting against

Austrian and Russian oppression, had been the victims of treacher-
ous French party politics and petty power struggles. It was time for
France to re-ignite the embers of revolution in Europe. Michelet must
have been confounded both by the sheer length of the text and by the
degree of Brătianu’s resentment, but he did reply, briefly and politely
again, to thank him for the “best moral nourishment” he had had in
a long time: he had read the letter “en famille”, with a “veritable reli-
gious feeling”, on 4 May, the anniversary of the proclamation of the
first French Republic.249
Later in the year, we get another glimpse of the exchange between
the two men. In a letter of 25 October 1850 (written from the Château
de Langchêne, a resting home near Lyon), Brătianu wrote, presumably
in response to the historian’s request for information for his prepara-
tory work on what were to become ultimately the Légendes démocra-
tiques du nord. In Western Europe Romania was an unknown, a
“foundling”, Brătianu says, but “I would like to present her to you as
I have always known her: perpetually radiant with beauty, perpetually
torn apart, perpetually gored, and crowned with a martyr’s crown.” He
paints a heroic portrait of the Romanians (“les Roumans”), descended
from Rome, Dacia and Christianity, a noble people with egalitarian
and democratic traditions going back a long time. In support of his
impassioned account of Romanian exceptionalism, Brătianu gives a
few examples: the death penalty had been abolished in the Romanian
lands long before it had been in the West; the same form of address,
the informal ‘tu’, was used for Prince and commoners; traditionally,
the country had not known hereditary titles. He informed his mentor
that republics had existed as early as the twelfth century in the area
now occupied by the Danubian Principalities. This allegation may not
have been an entirely invented tradition, and Brătianu had at least one
illustrious source to draw on: the 1716 treatise Descriptio Moldaviae by
Dimitrie Cantemir where the prince and scholar claims republican sta-
tus for three ancient Moldavian territories.250 There followed a lengthy
excursus into the role of the Romanians as anti-Muslim “sentinels” of
249
Letter of 7 May 1850, in ibid., 418 and 426. On the guilt of the French left and
this exchange of letters, see the comments by Durandin, Révolution, 202–6.
250
Demetrii Cantemirii Principis Moldaviae Descriptio Antiqui et Hodierni Status
Moldaviae, bilingual Latin-Romanian modern edition by Dan Sluşanschi (Bucharest
2006), part two, Ch. 16, 292–5. I am grateful to the distinguished Romanian mediae-
valist Professor Şerban Papacostea for this reference.
the West during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the whole
of Europe was menaced by the Ottomans, a representation which
became central to Romanian historiographic mythology. Brătianu sug-
gested that fulfilment of this defence role should have been enough
to earn them international recognition. Before concluding, Brătianu
urged his master to place Romania alongside Hungary in his heart. “I
know your affection for Hungary”, he added, rather ruefully.251
Michelet maintained steady channels of communication with the
Romanian and the East-European disapora. His diary entries in late
1850 and early 1851 contain frustratingly brief, almost coded, refer-
ences to his Romanian contacts, which suggests perhaps an awarenss of
tightening censorship and surveillance. His joint entry for Thursday–
Friday 1–2 January 1851 reads cryptically: “Visit of the Wallachian
painter”, which could refer either to Marie Rosetti’s portraitist, the
painter Rosenthal, or to another painter in exile, Ion Negulici.252
Z
In early 1851, Nicolae Bălcescu, though severely disabled by the con-
sumption which was to kill him in 1852 at the age of thirty-three, was
actively engaged in a dialogue with the Hungarian national commit-
tee in Paris, which included László Teleki as chairman, the Generals
György Klapka and János Czetz, as well as the former premier Bertalan
Szemere and former minister of justice Sebö Vukovits (Vučković), men
whose views Bălcescu found more congenial than Kossuth’s. He was
tormented by memories of the nightmarish ethnic clashes of 1848–49:
Magyars, Romanians and Slavs – he wrote – had met on the battlefield,
“facing each other after 1,000 years of conflict, weapons in hand, as
though nothing had changed since Arpad’s time.” His favoured plan
for a “United States by the Danube”, submitted to the Hungarian com-
mittee in a memoir of 17 February, was a multi-national super-state
extending from the Adriatic Sea to the Black Sea, a powerful ethnic
conglomerate of twenty-two million people, in which Hungary would
still occupy its undivided historic territory, as Kossuth wanted, but
would be willing to recognize three distinct ethnic groupings within
it: the Hungarians in one group, the Croats and Dalmatians, Slavs
and Serbs of the Vojvodina in the second, and the Romanians of
251
Michelet, Correspondance, 5: 554–71; and Bucur, Jules Michelet şi revoluţionarii
români, 110–29.
252
Michelet, Journal, 2: 181.
200 1851
Transylvania, Banat and Eastern Hungary in the third. This confed-

eral conglomerate would be joined eventually by the two Danubian
Principalities. The boundaries between counties or cantons were to be
decided later, but in each of these regions, the ethnic groups would
have enjoyed guarantees for the use of their language and faith and
for autonomous administration. A Federal Assembly of 150 deputies
representing equally Hungarians, Romanians and South-Slavs would
have convened annually by rotation in the capitals of each national
territory. This entity would also have had a three-member federal gov-
ernment appointed by the Assembly, and taxes would have been col-
lected by the separate governments of each ethnic community.253
The plan did not meet with the approval of Kossuth, to whom
Teleki submitted the project. Far from being politically dead, as
Bălcescu appears to have believed at the time, Kossuth in Kütahya was
still regarded as the only legitimate leader-in-exile of the Hungarian
movement. In a letter from Bursa, dated March/April 1851, Golescu-
Albu once more briefed his Parisian fellow-expatriates on the state
of minds and of play among the Romanian, Hungarian and Polish
émigrés in Kütahya and Bursa. Most, he believed, had had a chance
to review the errors of 1848, apart from the Magyars, “[. . .] and Mr.
Kossuth is the foremost among them; he is the living embodiment of
a monstrous and obsolete aberration: the Magyars continue to speak
and dream about a historic kingdom founded on conquest. Such stolid
arrogance would not be much cause for alarm if Mr. Kossuth and
his fanatic disciples and compatriots (for they all swear on the name
of Kossuth) were isolated, had no influence whatsoever and were
unable to engage in revolutionary activities. Unfortunately, this is not
the case. First, England, in the person of Mr. Palmerston and a few
eminent journalists, is protecting him; secondly, the entire European
democratic press imagines that, because Kossuth has spoken convinc-
ingly against Austrian despotism, he is a genuine democrat, a man
who sincerely wishes liberty with equality, liberty for all, and equality
for all. But such a view is utterly mistaken! Mr. Kossuth is the despot
par excellence; [. . .] in addition, the Magyars have the intelligent and
active support of the most determined of revolutionaries, of Mazzini;
at least this is what we grasped from the comings and goings between
Constantinople and Kütahya of a few Italians of the democratic party.
253
Stan and Ploeşteanu, Utopia, 143–50. For the full text of Bălcescu’s memoran-
dum in the original French, see Bălcescu, Opere, 4: 359–62.
That an unjust and eminently despotic policy such as the Magyars’

against the other nationalities should find support from a government,
and a monarchic-aristocratic government at that, such as the English,
is to be expected, and has nothing to surprise those who know their
history; but for such a cause to find admirers and champions in a
democracy, the democracy of 1848, is surprising in the highest degree,
distressing and ominous.”254
Giuseppe Mazzini, indeed, had been known to support – in articles
published starting with the 1830s and 1840s in the European press –
the idea of Hungary as a bulwark against tsarism and pan-slavism and
as the potential nucleus of a federation of free nations which would
comprise Moldo-Wallachia, Bulgaria, Serbia and Bosnia.255 Golescu-
Albu’s criticism of the Italian leader was perhaps too harsh. Mazzini’s
blueprint for the future had less to do with the pragmatic minutiae of
borders and territorial-political organization and more with a rather
mystical vision of Central Europe as the moral template for a general
rejuvenation of Europe. Golescu-Albu advised his Parisian brethren to
have meetings with the leaders of the other national communities in
Paris and put forward a few essential questions concerning the future
of a democratic Europe: “Is liberty for all or just for a few, and should
one regard some nations as nobles and others as commoners, or should
one see a common humanity in the different nationalities?”256 In his
view, the Hungarians were guilty of trying to resuscitate a defunct,
decomposing empire at the expense of Slavs and Romanians. In the
spring of 1851, Mazzini was in fact attempting to reconcile the diverg-
ing viewpoints of Romanians, Poles and Hungarians, while also trying
to persuade Kossuth to join the European Democratic Committee. On
19 April 1851, Kossuth enclosed in a letter the draft of his “Kütahya
Constitution”, the official final version of which was to be publicised
much later, in 1859, as the Projet de l’organisation politique de la Hon-
grie. According to this plan, Hungary was going to become either a
democratic republic or a constituional monarchy, but its historic ter-
ritory would remain indivisible and consequently, as Kossuth himself
explained in the accompanying letter to Mazzini: neither Transylva-
nia, nor the Banat or Serbian Vojvodina could be detached from it.
254
Fotino 3: 210–1.
255
Raluca Tomi, “Romeni e italiani durante la rivoluzione del 1848–1849”, Annu-
ario (Venice-Bucharest), 2 (2000): 57.
256
Fotino 3: 212.
202 1851
Hungary was to remain the main governing political entity within a

Central-European confederation. Contemporaries tell of Mazzini pro-
testing against the derogatory manner in which Kossuth used to refer
to the Romanians simply as ‘ces messieurs’. In response to such pro-
tests, Kossuth was far from deferential to the Italian leader in exile: he
agreed to refer thenceforth to the Romanians as a people ‘invented’ by
Mazzini, thus brushing aside the Romanians’ claims to nationhood.257
Z
In Romania, the post-revolutionary regime appeared to take gradual
steps towards normalization in early 1851. Former revolutionaries
held under arrest at the Monastery of Mărgineni had been liberated
by decree by Prince Barbu Ştirbey in August 1850, and those held at
the Monastery of Vintilă Vodă in March 1851.258 As the Russian troops
started evacuating Wallachia in the spring of 1851, Rosetti and his
exiled friends were approached via unofficial channels by members of
the Romanian government. Winterhalder wrote that the government
had promised a ministerial position for Rosetti if he returned. But in
the exiled men’s view, in spite of the Russian army’s retreat, Prince
Ştirbey and his cabinet remained vehicles of tsarist influence and con-
trol. Rosetti’s unwillingness to compromise was without appeal: he
was not going to return to a “country where slavery, cowardice and
ignorance reign supreme”, he pledged, asking his friend and business
associate Winterhalder to pass on the message to interested parties at
home. “[. . .] even if I am going to be impoverished like Job, and pay
the price of solitude for my ideas, I shall not cease to work towards the
creation of the Romanian Republic, one and undivided [. . .].”259 The
firmness of this refusal to accept mercy from an abhorred regime was
matched later by many of the ‘proscrits du deux décembre’, including
Quinet, who refused the amnesty offered them in 1859 unless the Sec-
ond Empire returned to the rule of law.260
The Rosettis’ third child, a boy called Ion, had just been born a few
days earlier, an event greeted by Rosetti with characteristic panache:
“Long live free Romania!” The child was registered at the local mairie,
257
E. F. Richards, ed., Mazzini’s Letters to an English Family, 1855–1860, 2 vols.
(New York, London, 1922), 2: 118.
258
Anul 1848, 6: 306–7.
259
Entry for 19 May 1851, in Rosetti, Diary, 309.
260
Aprile, Le siècle des exilés, 232–2.
with Ion Brătianu and Alfred Dumesnil as witnesses. “[T]his is the

true baptism”, Rosetti noted defiantly in his diary. “Baptism by the
Church no longer makes sense nowadays.”261
The Wallachian government remained heavy-handed in its approach
to civil liberties, and a weakly developed, inexperienced public lacked
the forums for putting up an effective protest against surveillance, vio-
lations of correspondence and other infringements. Although, by June
1851, the Russian military occupation of Wallachia had effectively
ended, the Central European political scene was changing to the worst.
The Austrian authorities were increasingly suspicious of travelling
Romanians and opened the mail that passed between the Romanians
in exile in Paris and London, those in Transylvania and their families
and associates in Wallachia itself. Austrian postal ‘interception sta-
tions’ operated both within and outside the Monarchy itself, and as
far as Italy.262 “I would like very much, my child”, Zinca wrote to her
son Ştefan on 5 July, “to read what you have written on Turkish politi-
cies in our countries, but I have grave doubts that you might be able
to send it to me, as I believe a decision has been taken to prevent the
import of such publications.”263 Effingham Grant himself was under
surveillance by the Austrian authorities: from Sibiu, the governor of
Transylvania, Karl zu Schwarzenberg, reported to the Austrian Min-
ister of the Interior Alexander von Bach that he suspected Grant of
facilitating the transit not only of letters but also of prohibited revolu-
tionary literature, such as a Romanian translation of Mazzini’s mani-
festo.264 A few months before, Ion Brătianu, too, had tried his hand at
conspiratorial activities in the Transylvanian city. The revolutionary
pamphlets he had smuggled were transported across the province by
friendly Austrian officials among imperial documents, in boxes bear-
ing the imperial seal.265 Grant protested to the Austrian authorities
against the opening of the letters and against what Zinca described as
the violation of the families’ “most intimate confessions of the heart”,
of their “hopes and faith in a better future”. Zinca advised her corre-
261
Entries for 17, 19 and 20 May 1851, in Rosetti, Diary, 308–10.
262
Emerson, Metternich and the Political Police, 44.
263
Fotino 3: 230.
264
Dispatch from Schwarzenberg to Bach, Sibiu, 2 November 1851, quoted in Tomi,
“Romeni e Italiani nel periodo dell’esilio”, 219. Cf. also Ceauşu and Vitcu, “Romanian
Emigration”, Doc. 1.
265
Dr. I. Fruma, Ion C. Brătianu la Sibiu (1850–1851) (Bucharest, 1938), 10.
204 1851
spondents to exert discretion and self-censorship in order to pre-empt

the disclosure of their plans and projects.266
The mood was darkening in France, too, and Michelet, rehearsing
themes for his essays on Poland, Russia and Romania, and exploring
perceived historical parallels between Western and Eastern Europe,
was pessimistic about the chances of freedom in either. “Isn’t the entire
world a prison, in this universal triumph of Tsarism and Papism?” he
mused in his diary on 15 April. He berated himself for not having
investigated deeper and promised himself – in his characteristically
cryptic diary style – to search for the roots of “evil” in the “false incar-
nation of God as Pope or Emperor-Pope” and for the roots of the
“good” in “the true incarnation of God as a nation, as demonstrated
by ‘the man-people (hero, saint, martyr).”267 He was already at work
on what was to become “Principautés Danubiennes. Madame Rosetti
(1848)”. On 8 March, he had received a visit from Marie Rosetti in
person, and on the 9th he had started writing what he provisionally
entitled the “Légende de la Roumanie”, completing it in a mere four
days.268 In his diary entry for Tuesday, 1 April, he mentions having
received the “story of Mme. Rosetti”, which probably refers to a text
of Marie’s exploits of 1848 submitted by either his son-in-law, Alfred
Dumesnil, or by a member of Rosetti’s circle.
The “reactionary” forces were tightening their grip around the emi-
gré revolutionaries in Paris and their contacts. “The police have already
made searches at some of our people’s homes and had the impudence
of confiscating papers that had nothing whatsoever to do with the
affairs of the French Republic. You can guess to what purposes!” wrote
Golescu-Negrul to his friend Paul Bataillard on 3 September, add-
ing further dramatic details on the sacrifices made by the embattled
revolutionaries:
Currently we can expect anything. It is certain that some of us are going
to be expelled. Bratiano [i.e. the younger Brătianu brother, Ion] has spent
a month in the countryside; he is about to return, and it is probable that
the police, who have used informants to learn where he was, will present
him with an order to leave the territory of the République. We are ready
for anything; no arbitrariness can surprise us any more.
266
Letter from Zinca to Ştefan Golescu, from Goleşti, 5 July 1851, in Fotino 3:
229–32.
267
Entry for Tuesday, 15 April 1851, in Michelet, Journal, 2: 157.
268
Ibid., 155–6.
Poor Rosenthal was found hanging in prison at Pest! We have been

assured that the government of Vienna chose an infamous assassination
to get rid of an uncomfortable agent! He was arrested, we have been told,
on the basis of a report sent by the Parisian police by telegraph. . .!269
When arrested in Pest on 20 July, Constantin Rosenthal had indeed
been carrying propaganda and revolutionary literature sent from Paris
by the exiles, and the imperial official records of the inquiry described
him as a “Romanian envoy” and made reference to his links to the
“Romanian leader” C. A. Rosetti.270 Rosetti felt subsequently respon-
sible for his friend’s death, due either to assassination in custody,
or to suicide, which the painter might have resorted to in order to
avoid interrogation. An unopened letter he had sent to his friend was
returned to him later, in February 1852, by the artist’s mother who
wrote to say that she had never been able to retrieve her son’s body
for a funeral.271
In a less dramatic way, Rosetti himself was being subjected to the
unwelcome attentions of the French secret police. “Yesterday the police
came and searched amongst all my papers”, Rosetti wrote in his diary
on 9 August. “Nothing can be more revolting and more disgusting
than such a search. When will humanity be able to live without being
subjected to such profanations!”272
Golescu-Negru continued his correspondence from Paris with Paul
Bataillard who, hidden away at the Chartreuse du Liget, a twelfth-
century monastery in Touraine which he partly owned, pursued his
research on ethnicity in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.273 Respond-
ing to his friend’s offer of accommodation at the Chartreuse, Golescu
explained, somewhat surprisingly, that the émigrés had to remain in
the capital, “where there are fewer constraints on action and police
vigilance less efficient. In fact, we hope that the recent measures taken
against foreigners in Paris will not affect us. We have been assured that
there is a decision to expel all those proven to be involved in politics.
But we do not wish to believe that the president of the French Repub-
lic will consent to debase himself to such an extent as to become the
269
Fotino 3: 241.
270
E. Gluck, “Date noi privind viaţa şi activitatea lui C. D. Rosenthal”, Studii şi
cercetări de istoria artei, Seria artă plastică 33 (1986): 70–80.
271
Entry for 2 February 1852, in Rosetti, Diary, 330.
272
Ibid., 320. For police and political surveillance in Second Empire France, see
below, p. 214 sqq.
273
Fotino 3: 244.
206 1851
gendarme of an invisible prince, himself the henchman of some low-

rank agents of the Emperor Nicholas.”274
Golescu-Negru tried to believe that, contrary to rumours, the French
secret police had had nothing to do with the death of the painter
Rosenthal. If the worst came to the worst and the Romanians were to
be expelled – he explained – they were prepared to retire to Switzer-
land and continue their work there. “French in our minds and hearts”,
Golescu explained, “we will consider our expulsion from France as a
second exile; lacking a better alternative, we will live on the borders of
this beautiful country, our second homeland, the shared homeland of
all those who have a heart for new ideas. The men of the reaction are
not mistaken when they say that the new men are not French, Ger-
man or Italian, but simply brethren in demagogy; by that, they mean
men who before everything else share a common homeland, a home-
land of ideas. But this homeland is France, because it is in France that
first germinated the new idea that is now inspiring millions of people.
Let us hope that France will not prove to be a degenerate mother,
that she will not strangle the infant in its cradle, that she is not going
to renounce the honour of presiding over its future growth, because
this is the source of her real grandeur, the rest is cosmetics and false
beauty.”275
However, the Parisian police was uneasy about the presence of
so many politically-minded refugees, and, although the Romanians
were never expelled, the chicaneries continued. Rosetti was tempo-
rarily refused his residence papers by the police, as his wife wrote to
Adèle Dumesnil, then at the family estate in Vascoeuil, near Rouen, on
8 October: “[. . .] Rose has been refused his residence permit on account
of his antecedents and we live in Paris on the black market, if I may
say so.’276 Both women found comfort in their correspondence and in
exchanging news of their children and their sufferings as mothers and
wives. There were occasional moments of light-heartedness: in Novem-
ber Adèle sent the Rosettis a basket of fresh roses from Vascoeuil.
274
Ibid. Golescu’s “invisible prince” probably refers to the Wallachian ruling prince,
Barbu Ştirbey.
275
Ibid., 245. In the mid-nineteenth century, the term demagogy had not yet
acquired the derogatory meaning of today and was largely used to mean ‘democracy’,
or rather discourses on democracy.
276
B. A. R., Manuscript section, Fonds C. A. Rosetti, s 9(1–10)/LXIII, item s 9(2)/
LXIII); cf also letter of 25 October 1851, s 9(3)/LXIII. [emphases in the original]
“Rose” was Rosetti’s nickname used affectionately by his family and friends.
In the meantime, the sympathetic French press continued to pub-

licize the Romanian cause – and more generally the political situa-
tion in Central-East Europe. The precious budget of the Romanian
Society was put to somewhat surprising use among press and political
circles in Paris. “Ion Brătianu gave a bear skin to Maurice [sic; Paul
Meurice] from the Evènement and bought dinner to two other jour-
nalists. He [P.M.] wrote two articles for our journal, which we have
entitled Republica Română, articles which we have polished and cop-
ied for him.”277 Republica Română was a Romanian-language newspa-
per started by the émigrés in Paris in November 1851 and printed by
E. De Soye, one of the few publishers who had Cyrillic fonts. A small-
format, seven by eleven centimetres, made it easier to smuggle into
news-starved Romania, but publication was intermittent. The second
issue was only published in 1853 in Brussels.278 Other publications of
the Romanian diaspora had an equally precarious existence: România
viitoare and Junimea română both ceased publication after one or two
issues. The former had the marked imprint of the passionate editor-
ship of Bălcescu, Dumitru Brătianu and Vasile Mălinescu and urged
Romanians at home to wait for the expected European revolution and
to keep the union of the Principalities firmly on their agenda.279
In early November, Golescu-Negru reported that the police visits
had ceased and that the exiles were still in France. The exchange of let-
ters between him and Bataillard, still away from Paris, became increas-
ingly affectionate, as both men sustained each other in their efforts and
aspirations in spite of the uncongenial atmosphere in France and else-
where. “Only the vulgar and the ambitious push themselves without
outside help”, Golescu encouraged an occasionally flagging Bataillard,
“because personal interest augments in proportion with the obstacles.
Really decent men, those who only aim towards the general good,
always feel the need to be sustained, because they only have their own
zeal for support, and zeal is nourished by faith which, as you know,
grows stronger through the intercourse of the hearts. This is why we
need to support each other.”280 In Paul Bataillard, Golescu-Negru had
found his âme soeur in more ways than one. The two men had simi-
277
278
Dan Simonescu, Din istoria presei româneşti: Republica Română, Paris, 1851–
Bruxelles, 1853 (Bucharest, 1931), 9.
279
Isar, Din istoria generaţiei de la 1848, 47–8.
280
Fotino 3: 253.
208 1851
lar views on ethnic relations in Central Europe, and particularly on

Romanian-Hungarian relations in Transylvania. “While nobody saw
clearly into the Magyar question”, Golescu wrote on 6 November
1851, “while everybody was in love with Magyarism, you alone could
speak about it expertly to your political friends. They could not fail to
be convinced by your authority on the matter, and now they too are
converted! [. . .] The moment is critical: the ovations given to Kossuth
are inflating the Magyars’ blind confidence in their star; they must be
given a warning instead, to prevent them from misinterpreting these
ovations as a sign of approval for policies which undermined their
cause in 1848. At present, more than ever before, they must be led to
recognise the truth and to submit themselves to the common good,
without which there is no hope for the East.” The only way forward for
Central and Eastern Europe, in Golescu’s view, remained a “republic
and liberty for all” and the creation of a “United States of the Lower
Danube.”281
Jules Michelet, whose course at the Collège de France had been sus-
pended in March, joined the pro-Romanian campaign on the margins,
without engaging in manifestly political agitation. On 7 November,
while doing preparatory work for his Légendes démocratiques du nord,
he asked Rosetti for information on the folklore of the river Danube:
“As I shall be searching for the unity of the Danube, for its genius and
its soul, I would like to capture from these tunes the plangent whis-
pers of the great captive river. . .”282 Writing back, Rosetti explained
that there was no significant folklore of the Danube in Romanian, as
opposed to a rich body of representations of the forest and the moun-
tains. Due to the country’s disruptive history of war and foreign occu-
pations, the natives had traditionally withdrawn into the Carpathian
mountains, leaving the southern plains depleted and, consequently,
unmythologised. There was one song, without words, called Cum se
bate Dunărea (The Danube ebbs and flows), the title of which provided
Rosetti with a pretext for sending his mentor, rather abruptly, one of
his typically radical analyses on the slim chances for the emergence
of the Danubian confederation. “Allow me, cher Maître, to take this
opportunity to remind you that if you want to build the United States
of the Danube, a federation on the model of Switzerland or the United
281
Ibid., 254.
282
Letter of 7 November 1851, in Michelet, Correspondance, 6: 941.
States, the only result will be a war of extermination.”283 The reason for
this, according to Rosetti, were the tensions between the Romanians,
the South-Slavs of the Habsburg empire and the Magyars. In addition,
so Rosetti believed, Kossuth’s intransigence in dealing with the nation-
alities had facilitated a “restoration of the Austrian throne.” “I say this,
and history has confirmed it, that, in spite of their 80 battles, for which
we have the utmost respect, the entire history of the Magyars has been
a story of iniquity towards the Slavs and the Romanians, and if you
believe that you will obtain fraternity by flattering the Hungarians’
amour propre with the creation of an uneven and weak federation, like
all the ones we have seen so far, if you believe that you will obtain fra-
ternity by telling the Romanians and even the Slavs that, in their igno-
rance, they have restored the throne of Austria, whilst the Magyars
have fought 80 battles for democracy and fraternity, you will on the
one hand encourage the Magyars in their absolutist ideas, and on the
other, you will add to the animosity that divides these three nations
[. . .].”284 Rosetti would have favoured instead a looser alliance, rather
than a federation of nations, as being more appropriate for that par-
ticular historical moment, and it was for that political structure that he
would have asked for French sympathy and support. He signed: “your
devoted pupil, C.A. Rosetti”.
But Magyar-Romanian relations did not engage Michelet’s mind at
the time: perhaps a little belatedly, he was entirely focused on Russia
as the main threat to global peace and to European-ness. Ever since
learning on 2 April that the exiled Mikhail Bakunin, who had taken
part in the Slav Congress at Prague, had been arrested by the Austri-
ans and delivered into the hands of his “Russian geolers”, as he noted
in his diary, his efforts had been directed almost exclusively towards
exposing the dangers of tsarist autocracy.
Beginning with the eighteenth century, two schools of thought had
emerged in connection with Russia’s place in the world. The nega-
tive one, drawing chiefly on Montesquieu, Rousseau and Diderot, saw
Russia as a tabula rasa, a “land of absence”, with no middle class or
civic freedoms. Echoing Ivan Golovin’s critical study on Russia pub-
283
C. A. Rosetti, Corespondenţă, ed. Bucur, 363; letter from the Bibliothèque histo-
rique de la ville de Paris, Papiers Michelet, Correspondance X, A, 4744, f. 85–8. (It was
dated 8 November 1851 by Le Guillou in Michelet, Correspondance, 6: 945–8.)
284
Ibid., 363.
210 1851
lished in 1845,285 Henri Martin in De la France, de son genie et de ses

destinées (1847) and Saint-Marc Girardin in a few articles had spoken
of Russia negatively as a political entity which did not conform to
West-European norms of civilization, a nation, in fact, which hov-
ered uneasily between Europe and Asia, unsure of its identiy, a view
which became a cliché in subsequent historiography.286 In contrast, the
positive school saw Tatar domination and tsarism as alien impositions
which had deflected Russia from its natural ‘European path’, in the
same way that the Romanians blamed the non-native Greek-Phanariot
regimes for their country’s decline. In addition, between 1847 and 1858
the various editions of the multi-volume studies on Russia by Adam
Mickiewicz, August von Haxthausen and Alexander Herzen popular-
ized a representation of the old Slavic peasant commune, the mir, as a
‘democratic’ model which could provide “a way out of liberal-capital-
ist society”.287 In a similar vein, as shown, Brătianu had attempted in
1850 to establish the notion that Moldavia had had republican political
structures in mediaeval times.288 Both instances drew on attempts by
ostracized and exiled oppositions at ‘inventing’ democratic traditions
apt to de-legitimize the absolutist regimes of the Russian tsar and the
Ottoman sultan. Recent studies have largely discredited Haxthausen’s
all-encompassing claims for the egalitarian nature of the mir.289 Nev-
ertheless, in Michelet’s time, these claims were hugely influential both
in Russia and in western Europe, and were eagerly adopted in socialist
and anarchist circles as a conceptual basis for revolution and the re-
distribution of land.
285
On Golovin, see pp. 129–30 above.
286
For the concept of “land of absence” and views of Russia in nineteenth-century
France, see Ezequiel Adamovsky, “Euro-Orientalism and the Making of the Concept
of Eastern Europe in France, 1810–1880”, Journal of Modern History, 77 (Sept. 2005):
591–628, as well as idem, Euro-Orientalism: liberal ideology and the image of Russia
in France (c.1740–1880) (Oxford, 2006).
287
Adam Mickiewicz, Les Slaves (1849), 5 vols.; Baron August von Haxthausen,
Studien über die inneren Zustände, das Volksleben, und insbesondere die ländlichen
Einrifthungen Russlands (1847–52), 3 vols. (the first 2 vols. were translated immedi-
ately into French in 1847, the third volume followed soon after the German edition;
an English edition was out in 1856); Aleksander Herzen, Du développement des idées
révolutionnaires en Russie (published in French in 1851 and reprinted in 1853 and
1858). Cf. Adamovsky, Euro-Orientalism, 140–3.
288
See pp. 198–9 above.
289
T. K. Dennison and A. W. Carus, “The Invention of the Russian Rural Com-
mune: Haxthausen and the Evidence”, Historical Journal 46, 3 (2003): 561–82.
From 28 August to 22 October 1851, l’Evénement, l’Avènement

du Peuple and Le Siècle published fragments of material later to be
collected and published as the Légendes démocratiques du nord.290
Michelet’s pamphlets – for they were little more than topical, polemi-
cal essays – on the Polish eighteenth-century freedom-fighter Thadeusz
Kosciuszko, on the ill-fated Russian Decembrists and on the defeated
Romanian revolution of 1848, were raw attacks on the tsarist threat,
in which one could easily recognize the input of the French historian’s
émigré contacts. In a sweeping outline, he spoke unflatteringly of the
“miserable decadence and degradation into which the Slavic spirit had
declined in this great empire” from the time of the – much roman-
ticized by Michelet – pre-Petrine peasant commune to the militaris-
tic and bureaucratic destruction “machine” that Russia had become
under Alexander I and Nicholas I.291 Based on the oral testimonies
of Adam Mickiewicz and of his viscerally anti-tsarist Romanian
sources, as well as on the writings of Peter Chaadaev and de Custine,
Michelet’s account of Russia is unashamedly selective and passionately
partisan. Russia was pre-eminently the murderess of Poland, a sterile
place, an intellectual desert, an oppressing power which exports only
“office desks, policemen, civil servants and army barracks” into the
regions she occupies.292 Some time in November 1851, Michelet made
the acquaintance of Alexander Herzen, who gradually tried to steer
Michelet away from a hostile and unnuanced view of Russia towards
a more intellectually refined approach, one which would have dis-
tinguished between the “humble Russian people” and its nefarious
“Byzantine-German government.”293 However, the Légendes remained
in all their variants – from the serialized fragments of 1851 to the
complete volume of 1854 – a viscerally hostile anti-tsarist tract. In a
290
For the creative and textual history of this work, see Michelet, Légendes, Intro-
duction by Michel Cadot, v–lix. For Michelet’s sources, including Herzen and Golovin,
see Durandin, Révolution, 35–50.
291
Ch. VI of “Kosciuszko”, quoted by Michel Cadot, “Les amitiés polonaises,
russes et roumaines de Michelet’ in Cahiers Romantiques 6: Michelet entre naissance
et renaissance, ed. Simone Bernard-Griffiths (Université Blaise Pascal, 2001), 135. Cf.
also Michelet, Légendes, “Les Martyrs de la Russie”, 110–5.
292
Cadot, quoting from Michelet’s preparatory notes, Introduction, Légendes,
xxiii.
293
Herzen wrote a response to Michelet’s views in Le Peuple russe et le socialisme.
Lettre à M. J. Michelet, par Iscander, a brochure published in Nice around 1 November
1851 and promptly banned in France. Michelet received a copy. Cf. Michelet, Légen-
des, Introduction, xvi and lii.
212 1851
private letter to Herzen of 1855, Michelet declared himself ready to

admit Russia in the big European family and accept that the mir was
the “original molecule of the republic”, but this compromising stance
was not apparent in Michelet’s public pronouncements. Even as late
as 1871, his study La France devant l’Europe showed that he never
changed his mind and that in his view Russia remained essentially
“Asia bastardised by a German bureaucracy, where the two tyrannies
of the Orient and of Europe are combined.”294 In 1863, a member of
the philo-Romanian group, Elias Regnault, had excluded Russia from
Europe altogether.295 Gradually, throughout the nineteenth century
it was the anti-tsarist liberal tradition, to which Michelet belonged,
which became hegemonic, and it was to this tradition that the Roma-
nian émigrés appealed on behalf of their country.
Z
In Romania, the exiles’ families continued to provide whatever sup-
port they could to their faraway relatives. Throughout 1851, Zinca
Golescu had been busy making enquiries for the sale of family lands
in order to send more money to her sons.296 In spite of financial and
political worries, ordinary life continued and made its own claims on
the divided family’s attention: Zoe Grant had given birth to a little girl,
named Anne-Marie Zoe, the names of both her grandmothers and of
one great-grandmother. Improvements on the estate at Goleşti also
continued apace: Zinca wrote to Ştefan asking him to send plant seeds
from Paris: “monster pansies” was what she wanted for her garden in
faraway Romania.297
The year 1851 ended on a melancholy note. In the same diary entry
in which he reported the – not altogether unexpected – coup d’état in
France, Rosetti made a bleak and brief summary of his life at that point:
“Ill, physically weak. My wealth wasted almost in its entirety, with a
wife and three children, with my country menaced by a Russo-French
294
Adamovsky, Euro-Orientalism, 163–4.
295
Regnault, La Question européenne improprement appelée polonaise, cited in Ada-
movsky, “Euro-Orientalism”, 606. Elias Regnault (Georges Soulange Oliva) (1801–
1868), a former chef de cabinet of Ledru-Rollin, was the author notably of L’Histoire
politique et sociale des Principautés Danubiennes (1855) (translated into Romanian
in 1857). He was a member of the Radical Club in London, alongside Mazzini and
Thomas Perronet Thompson. See Conclusions, p. 356.
296
Fotino 3: 256.
297
Ibid., 257.
alliance; and I have no place, not even in a Romanian village, where

I could possibly settle down. This is my position today.” As police
continued to open the exiles’ mail, on 26 December Rosetti noted his
intention of leaving an increasingly uncongenial Paris.298
298
5 December 1851, Rosetti, Diary, 323.
1852
NANTES-PARIS-BUCHAREST
Je me sens profondément éxilé en France.

Jules Michelet, letter to Edgar Quinet,
8 September 1852299
The year 1852 had an ominous start. In the aftermath of the ‘Deux
Décembre’, President Louis Napoléon assumed the title of ‘Prince-
President’ on 1 January. January 6th saw the abolition of the ‘Liberté,
Egalité, Fraternité’ slogan and official republican logo and the 9th the
expulsion of sixty-six deputies of the people, including Victor Hugo,
for reasons of “general security”. Aristocratic titles, abolished in 1848,
were re-established on 24 January. Within less than a month, a battery
of decrees put an end to the republican experiment initiated in 1848,
demolished some of the most cherished symbols of the French Revo-
lution and re-ignited the smouldering conflict between ancien régime
nostalgia and popular aspirations to liberal democracy. Statistics offer
a grim picture of purges, arrests and executions: during the martial
law, declared after the coup d’état, 26,642 were arrested, “of whom
9,581 were deported to Algeria, 239 to Cayenne and 8,000 interned or
placed under surveillance in France and another 1,600 were expelled
from the national territory.”300 Surveillance of the activities and con-
tacts of influential intellectuals of the opposition was stepped up. An
8th of March decree required an oath of allegiance to the new régime
by all civil servants, officials, and state employees: a refusal to swear
the oath led to dismissal or resignation. On 4 April, as Michelet was
working on the sixth volume of his History of the Revolution, another
decree made it impossible for professors to offer tuition or board to
private pupils. Michelet, who thrived amidst a circle of young disciples,
students and assistants, whom he often received at home, was directly
299
300
Roger Price, The French Second Empire: an anatomy of political power (Cam-
bridge University Press, 2001), 146. Maurice Agulhon cites a total figure of 26,884
“arrested and charged”, of whom around 14 per cent were from the upper and middle
classes. Cf. The Republican Experiment, 1848–1852 Cambridge University Press, 1983),
Appendix, 196–7. On the scale of the repression in the immediate aftermath of the
coup, see also Aprile, Le siècle des exilés, 103–5.
nantes-paris-bucharest 215
affected. On 12 April Edgar Quinet, Jules Michelet and Adam Mickie-

wicz were officially revoked from the Collège de France, and on 3 June
Michelet refused to swear the required oath to the new régime. One of
the main charges against Michelet was that his lectures had “given rise
to the most scandalous scenes” and that his teaching was “of a nature
to trouble the public peace.”301 Other decrees issued throughout the
year 1852 placed printing and publishing activities under the direct
authority of the Police Prefect and re-established political censorship.
On 12 Juin, Michelet and his wife, Athénaïs, left a heavily policed Paris
and moved to Nantes, where they joined the Rosettis, who had already
relocated there in search of a cheaper, quieter place to live.
1852 was an equally bad year for republicans and revolutionaries
elsewhere. Less fiery and radical than Dumitru Brătianu and the other
members of the European Committee in London, the Golescu brothers
and their cousin Alexandru G. Golescu-Negru believed that the time
had come for a retrenchment of forces and a period of consolidation,
fund-raising and propaganda, whether in Paris, London, Dresden,
Vienna, Athens, Bursa, Kütahya or elsewhere in the Balkans or the
Near East, where the Romanians shared their exile with the Hungar-
ians and the Polish refugees. Ambitious travel plans included a fund-
raising journey to America to be undertaken by Dumitru Brătianu and
his fellow-committee member Ledru-Rollin. For this, Ştefan Golescu
was ready to sell lands from the family estate, provided he could receive
assurances of efficient budget management and eventual success, but
the voyage never happened. The British consul Robert Colquhoun’s
close ties with the exiles and involvement in the transmission of money
and letters abroad at this critical time is hinted at in a letter from Alex-
andru Golescu-Albu to his brother Ştefan.302 Golescu-Albu travelled
to Greece, where he met with his brothers Radu and Nicolae. In his
letters sent in transit he reported contacts with a number of Greek,
Polish and Italian radicals who worked towards the independence of
the South-East European peoples from both “the dying and inert Tur-
key and the expansionist, despotic Russia” and towards the creation of
the “Etats confédérés de l’Orient”.303 As a result, the Greek government
301
Arthur Mitzman, Michelet Historian: rebirth and romanticism in nineteenth-
century France (Yale University Press, 1990), 324, note 5.
302
Fotino 1: 197; Fotino 3: 339–40.
303
Ibid., 3: 292.
216 1852
expelled or arrested the conspirators, an event which prompted the

following reflections:
For the last three and a half years, having left our country, we have
been knocking on all the doors, those of the governments and those of
the peoples, those of revolutionary committees and those of high diplo-
macy, the doors of the Poles, Italians, Germans, French, English and
even Hungarians, we did not leave anyone out, we established contacts
with everybody; in a word, Europe, its many Capitals and its various
nationalities know us and we know them; but we did ignore one thing;
only one corner of the globe still ignores us, as we ignore it; it is, how-
ever, the one closest to us and most interesting to us in many respects,
and perhaps the one corner of the earth with which one day destiny will
call us to identify ourselves. It is this small strip of land called Turkey in
Europe, and it is made up of Bulgarians, Serbs, Macedonians, Albanians,
Thessalians, and free Greeks. How is it that we have so completely lost
it from view? And why this contempt and this negligence towards us
from them? Could it be their ignorance, their stupidity or their fanati-
cism which have kept us away from them? But these should have been
the very reasons for approaching and enlightening them, for showing
them where their true interests and ours lie, for telling them that, if they
persist in their errors and their fanaticism, we will all risk being crushed
one day or another, being broken in this medley of religious prejudice,
national antagonism, and obscure hatred which we have inherited from
our past and which Russia has been exploiting so ably [. . .].304
1852 was also a year of personal losses among the expatriates. Rosetti
and his wife lost their new-born son, Ion, who died of scarlet fever
in February. In common with the babies of the Michelet-Dumesnil
circles, the Rosetti infant, born in May 1851, had not been christened
in church. But, like Athénaïs Michelet upon the death of her son,
Lazare, in 1850, Marie Rosetti resorted to baptism in articulo mortis,
as Rosetti noted tersely in his diary: “But can anyone find the words to
comfort a mother who sees her son in death’s arms? She ran towards
the deity, towards religion. Religion prevents humanity from progress-
ing, but somehow soothes pain such as this. [. . .] She therefore asked
to have her son baptized, and . . . I brought a Catholic priest to baptize
her child. Ion Brătianu stood as witness”, Rosetti wrote tersely in his
Diary, partly disengaging himself from involvement in the episode:
her child.305
304
Ibid., 293–4.
305
14 February 1852, Rosetti, Diary, 331.
On 24 May 1852, the Rosettis moved to the village of Douet, near

Nantes, where life was less expensive than in Paris, and where they
lived a simple, frugal life. They had received news that Winterhalder
had been expelled from Wallachia by Prince Ştirbey’s hardline govern-
ment and, therefore, business at the “Rosetti-Winterhalder Establish-
ment” had come to a halt, cutting short their main source of subsidies
in exile. Life was bleak, but at least, starting with 12 June, they also
enjoyed the comforting presence of the Michelets, whom the after-
math of the coup d’état also exiled to Nantes.
The Michelets settled in the La Haute-Forêt suburb of Nantes in an
isolated villa built in the reign of Louis XV. The historian’s decision
to leave Paris was greeted by friends, republicans and revolutionaries
in exile: Edgar Quinet and Armand Lévy from Brussels, and Dumitru
Brătianu from London, to mention only names of immediate inter-
est for the present story, all sent messages of sympathy and support.306
Taking advantage of easy access to the Nantes archives, Michelet – one
of the earliest modern historians to make substantial use of archival
sources307 – re-immersed himself in the writing of volumes six and
seven of his History of the Revolution and spent the next months tak-
ing his daily dose of “the black blood of the dead”, as he wrote in a
letter: the Terror of 1793, on which he was focussing then, became a
backdrop for constant reflection on the new terrors of imperial France
and the realities of a Europe in search of itself.308 The historian had
temporarily suspended his work on the Légendes démocratiques du
nord, which he was to reprise in June 1853.
The other members of the Franco-Romanian circles maintained a
continuing correspondence, from the available remains of which it
is possible to reconstruct their lives during this time. Under politi-
cal pressure, Michelet’s son-in-law, Alfred Dumesnil, had been forced
to take up private teaching in Alsace. From there, he wrote to Ion
Brătianu on 10 July 1852, assuring him that he continued his work
for the ‘Romanian cause’. He also mentions narrating the “Legend of
Mme Rosetti”, Michelet’s work-in-progress, to the young daughters
306
Viallaneix, Michelet: les travaux et les jours, 377.
307
He had also been director of the French National Archives in Paris in the
1830s.
308
Letter from Michelet to Alfred Dumesnil, from Nantes, 23 August 1852, in
Michelet, Correspondance, 7: 181.
218 1852
of the Kestners, the Alsatian republican family who had engaged him
as tutor.309
Their new life in Nantes was initially difficult for the Rosettis. Find-
ing cheap accommodation, dispensing with the services of unafford-
able nannies and doing all their errands on foot because carriages
were too expensive were some of Marie’s complaints in letters to her
friend, Adèle Dumesnil.310 On their daughter Liberté’s birthday on
11 June 1852, the seriously impoverished Rosettis somehow managed
to buy her a few presents, which she abandoned in a matter of min-
utes. Rosetti then decided to give his four-year-old daughter a much
better, a symbolic present: “At ten, I took her to see Michelet, and
asked him to bless her. He took her in his arms and gave her a kiss. Do
not forget, my little girl, this kiss. It will make your good fortune.”311
Moving into a new, more salubrious house in Nantes, which they
rented in June, and the congenial companionship of the Michelets,
meant that Rosetti entered possibly the happiest, albeit short, period
of his life, which he enjoyed, in spite of the hardships and anxiet-
ies. With little money and no servants, Athénaïs Michelet and Marie
Rosetti bore the brunt of domestic duties in difficult circumstances,
while their husbands pursued their activities. While continuing work
on the History of the Revolution, Michelet was engaged in an active
correspondence with friends, allies, and disciples, including Dumitru
Brătianu. Inspired by the hymn to the ‘Exile’ which closed Quinet’s
Révolutions d’Italie (1848–1851), and although not strictly an engaged
man of the left or a revolutionary, Michelet nevertheless asked Brătianu
on 27 August 1852 to pass on his message of solidarity to all those who
had opted for exile, for the “Cité de la conscience”: the real France
was elsewhere, he wrote, it was with people such Ledru-Rollin, Pierre
Leroux, Louis Blanc and Félix Pyat, all of whom were involved at the
time with the work of Mazzini’s Democratic Committee in London.
He thanked Brătianu for his unflagging and publicly expressed pro-
French feelings at a time when France had lost her prestige in Europe:
“You are defending France, whom everybody is now trampling under
their feet! You are doing what I should have done, had I been able to
leave. What kept me here? Hélas! It was France herself, the need to
teach her her own revolutionary past, which everybody must know,
309
Letter from Alfred Dumesnil to Dumitru Bratiano, 10 July 1852, in ibid., 124.
310
Letter dated June/July 1852, in Documente inedite, ed. Bucur, 176.
311
18 June 1852, Rosetti, Diary, 337.
and which is completely ignored.” The Second Empire was a historical

aberration, Michelet wrote, a joke doomed “to collapse tomorrow in
a huge peal of laughter. France herself will laugh at herself for having
hoped . . . in the shadow of a shadow”, Michelet wrote, referring to the
two Napoleons and the revival of the Bonapartist tradition. Recalling
that he had been the first to “bless” his disciple, Brătianu, in the 1840s
at the Collège de France, Michelet was grateful that his benediction
had been “returned” to himself and to France. “I am sending you an
affectionate embrace, dear son of my mind”, Michelet signs off, ask-
ing Brătianu to shake the hands of “our friends, Messrs. Ledru-Rollin,
Mazzini, the true France.”312
In the not-too-distant past, Brătianu’s ebullient and opinionated let-
ters had prompted benevolent, but terse responses from his busy men-
tor. Times had changed: the coup d’état and the political repression
in France, the French betrayal of Italy (“oh, assassinated mother”),
exile in Nantes, shared with the Rosettis, had been experiences which
mellowed Michelet, who now wrote with a new-found tone of tender
affection. This was no longer an uneven, a mentor-disciple relation-
ship, but an equal communion of exiles, for whom friendship had
become one of a few emotional solaces.
From London, Brătianu was happy to encourage and comfort his
mentor. Unlike Alexander Herzen, whose pessimistic views on the
unstoppable decline of the West, and of France in particular, were
without appeal,313 Brătianu was more sanguine about the future of
France. It was a difference of political positioning: whereas Herzen
believed that Russia was destined ultimately to rejuvenate and save a
decadent West through socialism and communitarianism, the Roma-
nians did not stray too far away from the mainstream traditions of
French liberalism and republicanism. In addition, they still needed
Great Power support to attain their nation-building goals, and it
helped to remain positive and offer flattery. Talking of the coup d’état
of 1851, he deplored the “victims of Bonapartist terror”, but believed
that France, like a wounded man, will pick herself up and regain her
former glory; he believed the Empire was the “last carnival” of the
312
Letter from Michelet to “Dimitri Bratiano” from Nantes, 27 August 1852, in
Michelet, Correspondance, 7:191.
313
Herzen’s views were popularised in France and Britain via translations from his
works such as: From the Other Shore (1847–1850), My Past and Thoughts (1852–1868),
Le monde russe et la révolution (3 vols., 1860–62) and My Exile in Siberia (2 vols.,
1855). Cf. comments in Durandin, Révolution, 219–72.
220 1852
“old world’ ”, he had faith that the “soul of Jeanne d’Arc” still sur-
vived in France’s “guts”. At the end of his letter, Brătianu acknowl-
edged the change in their relationship and expressed his gratitude for
being called “the son of your mind”.314 The coup d’état of December
1851, he wrote to Armand Lévy on the first anniversary of the event,
had “united the hearts and fortified the common aspirations” of all
the French ‘proscrits’.315 In Nantes, Michelet was anointed conscience
leader of an international community-in-exile who waited for the
regeneration of Europe.
While Michelet, in his own words, felt “profoundly exiled” in his
own country,316 other exiles were being re-united, even if only tempo-
rarily, with their homelands. In August 1852, Effingham Grant, who
had joined the British consulate in Bucharest in 1838, was in Plymouth
with his wife, Zoe, visiting his widowed mother. From there he wrote
to Ştefan Golescu: “Ah! there is a feeling both painful and sweet when
one returns to one’s country after a lengthy absence. Apart from those
who paid their ultimate price to nature in the meantime and who were
therefore absent on our arrival, time has been busy operating changes
in those dear to us and has altered faces so familiar to us in our rec-
ollections. Upon my return, I failed to recognise almost everybody,
everything was changed around me, even the city with its surrounding
area, and I would undoubtedly have felt a stranger in my own country
if the hearts that welcomed me had not remained the same, tender
and affectionate and pounding with joy and gratitude for our return.”
Grant mentions an impending meeting with Lord Russell at the For-
eign Office, most probably to discuss matters relating to his post in
Wallachia, his pay and his future: “It is certainly an incomparable joy
to be a husband and a parent, but, alas, like most earthly joys, it is not
perfect, because the anxiety one feels for the future of these trusting
and care-free little creatures casts a shadow which often clouds the sky
of our lives. But I have lived long enough in the East to be aware of
my Allah Kerim317 and to know that one should never doubt that one’s
reward will come sooner or later.”318
314
D. Brătianu, letter to Michelet, 7 November 1852, from London, in Michelet,
Correspondance, &: 262–263.
315
Letter dated December 1852, in Ibid., 294–5.
316
See the epigraph to this section.
317
“Allah is merciful” in Arabic.
318
Letter from Plymouth dated 23 August 1852, in Fotino 3: 369–70.
The series of human losses continued in late 1852, and the Roma-
nian expatriates found that their circles of relatives and friends were
diminishing relentlessly. In September the Golescus lost their twenty-
year-old niece Alexandrina (Luţa), one of the ‘little republicans’ of
Goleşti and their active correspondent. The separated family contin-
ued to meet furtively and briefly in various parts of the world, as the
ban on the men’s return to Romania was not yet lifted: Zinca was
finally able to travel to Vienna and Paris, and one of her sons, Nicolae,
had to sell family jewellery in order to be able to travel from Athens,
where he lived in exile at the time, and meet his mother and brothers.
Finally, such were the convoluted routes of their nomadic life, they all
met in Geneva.319 Geneva was known as a haven for French republi-
cans after 1848 and for its rather relaxed attitude towards the activities
of its significant international émigré community.320
In October 1852, Rosetti entertained fears of a joint attack by Rus-
sia and Austria against Turkey, with Napoleon’s collusion.321 Michelet,
too, was increasingly musing on the ‘Russian theme’, which was gain-
ing momentum on the European political scene. Like Rosetti, he, too,
had suspicions about Louis Napoléon’s occult ties with tsarist Russia.
He believed that the French diplomatic agents in Constantinople were
“engaged in Russian propaganda in the Ottoman empire” and that the
Second Empire might ask for help from the “Cossacks” if the continu-
ing economic crisis will lead to social unrest.322
In the course of 1852, another member of the ‘Franco-Romanian’
group added his contribution to the concert of attacks against Russian
policies in South-East Europe, and especially in the Romanian Prin-
cipalities. In his Souvenirs de voyages et d’études, Saint-Marc Girardin
remembered a visit to Romania in the late 1830s, when he had found
members of the élites au fait with current affairs and despairing of
Western help against Russia. His impression had been that the Roma-
nians dreamed of a more open society, where at least “they woud not
have to fear deportation to Siberia if they spoke freely.” At the same
time, the diplomatic quest for a political solution for the country had
led to a veritable identity crisis: was salvation to come from France
319
Ibid., 203.
320
John M. Merriman, The Agony of the Republic: the repression of the left in revo-
lutionary France, 1848–1851 (Yale University Press, 1978), 129–30.
321
17 October 1852, Rosetti, Diary, 342.
322
Letter to Victor Chauffour, 11 November 1852, in Michelet, Correspondance,
7: 270–1.
222 1852
and Western Europe, from the Ottoman Empire, the suzerain power,
or from the protecting power, tsarist Russia?323
1852, a year of high drama for the exiles, both French and Roma-
nian, ended with the saddening news of the death of yet another one of
them, the historian Nicolae Bălcescu, who succumbed to consumption
in Palermo on 28 November at the age of only thirty-three. In France,
after a second plebiscite, the Second Empire was officially proclaimed
on 2 December, exactly one year after the coup d’état. It was Marie
Rosetti who, in Paris, summed up their individual and collective expe-
riences on the very last day of 1852, in a letter to Ion, the younger
Brătianu, whose affectionate nickname was Beppo:
Oh 52–52! May the future, by sparing us of the misfortunes that you
have afflicted us with, may the future preserve the love, the friendships
that have helped us suffer all those misfortunes, and have sometimes
even made us bless them – Oh, in spite of everything, in spite of every-
thing, I love this fifity-two – It is love in the grave, but it is still love. I
have lost my child, my faith and the power of prayer. Oh, yes, my little
angel, in leaving this world, you left your mother three times alone – and
yet I cannot curse the year that is about to die – and I wish to mourn for
it with you, Beppo- You, saintly friend, who have identified yourself with
everything that I have lost – I have lost my child – but you are looking
after his small cot – your friendship is warming it up again – I have lost
my child-like faith, but in you, my noble [illegible] and in your brother,
I have found a Trinity which equals the one which I have lost – . . .324
323
Saint-Marc Girardin, Souvenirs de voyages, 284–298. Cf. Part One of the present
study, p. 25.
324
S 36(1)/CCCLIX, Letter in French from Marie Rosetti to Ion Brătianu,
31 December 1852, B.A.R., Fonds I. C. Brătianu, S 36(1–20)/CCCLIX.
1853
NANTES-PARIS-LONDON
I will venture to state that, in the whole history of

the intercourse of nations, acts so unjustifiable, so
outrageous, so dangerous as those which have been
committed within the last three months have never
previously been committed in Europe.
Sir Henry Austen Layard, Speech in the House of
Commons, 22 July 1853325
L’ordre règne en Valachie.
27 November 1853
Messieurs les Cosaques326
If 1852 had been a year of deaths and losses, 1853 held the promise
of births and new beginnings. Rosetti’s third son, Vintilă Jules Ştefan,
was born in Nantes on 23 January. The witnesses to the registration
of the birth were Jules Michelet and a Polish expatriate, Dr. Ignace
de Kostozenwski, who had probably assisted the birth.327 Michelet
announced the event to his son-in-law, Alfred Dumesnil: “We went
there yesterday and Rosetti asked the doctor and myself to serve as
witnesses for the declaration [of the birth] at the municipality. Which
we did. As for the church and the baptism, I am not going to involve
myself. Here, we are surrounded and crushed by the Church.”328 It is
very likely that the Rosettis did not, in fact, opt for a church baptism
for their child, unless Marie had been chastened by the christening in
extremis of her late infant, Ion.
Life in the village of Douet continued to have an idylically stoical
quality about it: a Madame Edmond brought the milk, the residents
ground their own coffee and fed the chicken – for whose subsequent
325
Sir A. Henry Layard, Autobiography and Letters from his childhood until his
appointment as H. M. Ambassador at Madrid, ed. Sir Arthur Otway, 2 vols. (London,
1903), 1: 245.
326
See note 493 below.
327
The doctor’s name is an approximate reading, cf. Rosetti, Diary, 348, and Bi-
blioteca Naţională, the St. Georges Collection, the Dinu V. Rosetti Archive, P XLIII,
Dossier 5, certificate of baptism, 25 January 1853, Mairie de Saint-Sébastien, Nantes.
328
Letter from Michelet to Alfred Dumesnil, 26 January 1853, in Michelet, Cor-
respondance, 7: 346–7.
224 1853
slaughter Rosetti felt guilty – and the courtyard was full of children.329
Separations were frequent: Maria often went to England to see her
mother, Rosetti attended to business, friendships and to keeping up
with contacts in Paris. His letters to Marie now brimmed with over-
flowing emotions and urges to daily stoicism: “Let us love each other
and all will be well. [. . .] we will endure everything heroically.”330 Both
Rosetti and Michelet found the companionship of their wives a solace
at this time of exile and disappointment, as did Edgar Quinet, who, in
exile in Brussels, was sustained by his young Moldavian wife of a few
months, Hermione. “I am happy for your happiness.” wrote Michelet
to Quinet on 11 March 1853, “and grateful to Madame Quinet who
has built a hearth for you in that alien land. A great part of your new
glory will be for her to share. Behind a man’s grandest works is an
accomplished woman, who offers repose to his heart and a compan-
ionship in harmony with his lofty aims. I have myself felt this vividly
this winter in our accumulated tribulations, our new poverty, the ser-
vitude of our country, the death that surrounds us here, the stormy
weather, a new ‘93. In her young heart, my wife has preserved the very
soul of my country.”331
Rosetti returned briefly to Paris on 9 May 1853. His habitual circle
of friends during that time in Paris included Dumitru Brătianu, Alfred
Dumesnil, whose daughter Jeanne was very close to Marie Rosetti,
Charlemagne Hallegrain, the shoemaker and fellow-conspirator, Paul
Bataillard, Cezar Bolliac, Henric Winterhalder and his wife, and the
young Constantin Racoviţă, the Golescus’ nephew, who, having sur-
vived deportation to Astrakhan in 1849, was now in Paris, too. Away
from his wife and children, who stayed in Douet, Rosetti’s daily letters
to Marie were passionate and tender: “I love you, beloved woman.
I love you in the way you want to be loved. At this moment I feel my
heart melting with love for you.”332 The tensions and turbulence of their
early years together were now replaced by a calmer and more mature
appreciation of each other. “I have found in you a treasure that I was
not aware existed in ‘47.”333 Yet, ever the malcontent, he confessed that
he would be willing to trade some of her passion and love in exchange
329
Letter dated 18 June 1853, in C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 56–7.
330
Ibid.
331
Letter from Michelet, Nantes, 11 March 1853, in Michelet, Correspondance, 7:
383–4.
332
Letter dated 18 May 1853, C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 51.
333
Letter dated 19 May 1853, in ibid.
nantes-paris-london 225
for something “more spiritual”, for the realisation in practice of a very

Michelet-ian idea: the participation of his wife in his work, a return
to her more intellectually aware pre-marriage self. “I am not selfish,
I am more ambitious than selfish, and examining myself in cold blood,
I have found that I would even give a part of your love in order to
see you admired by the world, and be able to tell myself: – my wife
works by my side to enlighten the minds and ennoble the hearts of
the Romanians.”334
Events accelerated on the European political scene in the early
months of 1853, largely as a result of Russian initiatives in the Near
East. Partly as an attempt to win over the French Catholics, Napo-
leon III had decided to put pressure on Russia in support of the inter-
ests of Catholic monks at the Holy Places in Palestine and Jerusalem
against those of Greek Orthodox monks, supported by Russia. In her
turn, Austria was agitating on behalf of her own interests in Bosnia
and Montenegro, where the Porte had sent troops to quell a rebel-
lion. In the circumstances, Tsar Nicholas tried to make his voice heard
by sending a tough-talking emissary, Prince Alexander Menshikov, to
Constantinople in February 1853. Although Menshikov’s initial man-
date ostensibly focused on the relatively minor Franco-Russian conflict
over ecclesiastical custodial rights, once that issue was settled, Rus-
sian demands soon escalated into a full-scale ultimatum: Menshikov
requested a sened (an act with the legal force of a treaty) expanding
certain articles in the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca of 1774 regarding the
Russian protectorate over the Porte’s Christian subjects. Crucially, as
far as the Romanians were concerned, Tsar Nicholas made it clear to
the Porte that he intended to maintain the Russian protectorate over
the Danubian Principalities and Serbia, and threatened a military occu-
pation of these provinces if his demands were not met. The Menshikov
mission, often described as a fine example of Oriental intrigue owing
to the twists and turns of its unpredictable scenario, ended in late May
with the Ottomans rejecting the Russian demands. It was a failure not
only as a result of clashes of powerful personalities (Menshikov, Strat-
ford Canning) and of a conflict of national prestige (Russian, Turkish,
British), but also because the European powers found that the Russian
demands of 1853 contravened both the spirit and the letter of European
agreements over the Eastern Question concluded in 1841. Although
334
Ibid.
226 1853
Menshikov scaled down his demands in the face of Ottoman defiance

and British opposition, Stratford Canning and the representatives of
the other European powers continued to believe that the rights of pro-
tection and intervention sought by Russia over no fewer that twelve
millions of the Sultan’s Christian subjects would have entailed Rus-
sian involvement in the secular, not only the religious, affairs of the
Porte and would have resulted in a disproportionate Russian influence
in Constantinople. A battle of wills between Stratford Canning and
Menshikov over a diplomatic technicality (whether the text enshring-
ing Russian rights should be a full-blown sened or a mere gülhane),
and a series of blunders, mis-timings and miscommunication between
the four signatories of the 1841 Straits Convention, Britain, Russia,
Austria and the Porte itself, finally combined to precipitate the Crimean
War.335
In order to understand the role of the Danubian Principalities –
powerless Ottoman dominions - in the Eastern Question, it is impor-
tant to keep in mind their strategic location along the lower Danube
and on the coast of the Black Sea. Russian threats to occupy them had
traditionally proved effective means of intimidating the Porte, and in
1848–49 Russia had used them as launching pads in its conflicts with
the Porte and in its offensives in Central Europe, notably in its attack
on revolutionary Transylvania and Hungary. The naturally bellicose
Dumitru Brătianu hoped that, in the ensuing game of Great Power
brinkmanship after the Menshikov fiasco, the Russian occupation of
his country and its consequent abuses, might provide an incentive for
the Western powers to act.336
The Romanian exiles, as always, lived on rumours. In late May Rosetti
received information from occult sources about the Russian army’s
alleged crossing of the river Prut into Moldavia. The Golescus received
letters from dispersed friends and relatives full of unverified rumours
about a new revolution in Wallachia, and the imminent occupation
335
For a detailed discussion of the Menshikov mission, see Harold Temperley,
England and the Near East: The Crimea (London, 1964), especially Ch. XII. For a
more recent and colourful analysis see Allan Cunningham, “The Preliminaries of the
Crimean War”, in Allan Cunningham, Eastern Questions in the Nineteenth Century,
Collected Essays (London, 1993), ed. Edward Ingram, 2: 130–225. The complex pre-
Crimean diplomacy, on the basis of Russian archival sources, is astutely analysed by
David M. Goldfrank in “Policy traditions and the Menshikov mission of 1853”, in
Imperial Russian Foreign Policy, ed. Hugh Ragsdale and V. N. Ponomarev (Woodrow
Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1993), 119–58.
336
Fotino 3: 205, 217.
of the country by Austrian troops, and possibly also by Russian and

Turkish troops. In a letter written in June, Ştefan Golescu expressed
the opinion that, given a choice, an Austrian occupation of the Prin-
cipalities would have been preferable to Russian intervention and
control.337 The Russian troops finally crossed the river Prut into Molda-
via on 3 July, two years after the end of their previous occupation of the
Romanian Principalities in the aftermath of the defeated revolutions.
The Russians appointed their own officials, the Generals Budberg, Hal-
cinski and Urusov, to chair the divans and the administrative councils
in both provinces. Although this time the occupation only lasted until
August 1854, it was fraught with the same difficulties – requisitioning
of supplies and housing, further infringements of human and civic
rights – which had previously caused friction between the Russian
interim administration and the Romanian civilians.338 Short-lived
peasant insurrections in the autumn of 1853 were easily suppressed.339
More than a year later, summing up the effects of the Russian occupa-
tion, the Daily News correspondent in Bucharest provided some sta-
tistics: 30,000 Russian troops were garrisoned in only 12,000 homes in
Bucharest, creating over-crowding, economic waste and demoraliza-
tion on a large scale. The Russian soldiers, the correspondent added
unsparingly, were “greasy, filthy to the last degree, malodorous beyond
description”, but they were so ill-equipped and badly paid that they
became “submissive, uncomplaining, grateful brutes,” for whom the
Romanian locals felt more compassion than hatred. As for their offi-
cers, they were “vastly more successful in the boudoir and the salon
than they were in the battle-field”,340 a flippant comment meant per-
haps to reassure a British public who, in the changed context of early
October 1854, was anxiously awaiting the outcome of the assault on
Sebastopol.
As Great Powers armies appeared to be poised for war in the latter
half of 1853, Nicolae Golescu and Dumitru Brătianu intensified their
pro-Romanian publicity campaign in Britain, mainly with help from
Lord Dudley Stuart and Sir Austen Layard. Layard, the renowned
337
Fotino 4: 12–3.
338
Barbara Jelavich, Russia and the Formation of the Romanian National State,
1821–1878 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 56.
339
Isar, Din istoria generaţiei de la 1848, 54.
340
“Letters from the Seat of War in the Principalities”, Daily News, 13 October
1854. For the newspaper’s correspondent in Bucharest during the Crimean War, see
below, p. 278 sqq.
228 1853
archeologist, diplomat and liberal MP, was, like Dudley Stuart, already
known in political circles for his consistently expressed anti-Russian
positions. Despite coming from a country with an underveloped, cen-
sored press and little experience of pressure politics, the Romanians
were remarkably quick in plugging into the British way of doing things.
With help from their British allies, they consciously attempted to appeal
to the moral earnestness of the mid-Victorians by presenting support
for a small, oppressed nation as a loftier, more idealistic purpose than
mere commercial self-interest. In its initial stages, the campaign did
not seem as successful as the Romanians had anticipated. “Business
here” Nicolae wrote from Manchester on 7 July 1853, “is flourishing.
Should God come down from the heavens, he wouldn’t be able to
convene a meeting”,341 he complained, probably rather unjustly, given
that public opinion in Britain at that stage was already in a “quite
extraordinarily febrile state” over the possibility of a European con-
flict.342 It is true, however, that some of the radicals and independents
who had formerly been the Romanians’ main support base – people
like Thomas Perronet Thompson, David Urquhart and members of the
Peace Society – were now firmly in the anti-war camp.
While briefing Sir Austen Layard for a motion in the Commons,
Brătianu and Golescu also conducted an active campaign in Liverpool
and Manchester, where, political ethics aside, they felt that they had
to appeal to the enlightened self-interest of the British industrial and
commercial classes. The Manchester Examiner of 9 July 1853 published
a letter, written two days previously, in which Brătianu responded to
the publication by The Times of 6 July of a manifesto issued by the
Tsar on 26 June. Nicholas I had publicly justified the imminent Rus-
sian occupation of the Romanian Principalities on religious and diplo-
matic grounds, as being a way of pressurizing the Ottoman Porte into
respecting “the inviolability of the Orthodox (Provoslavnai) Church.”
Having been denied a right of reply by The Times, in his Manchester
Examiner response Brătianu wished to convey his gratitude to the
good people of Manchester, who had supported his “cause”, as well
as to express his hope that Britain would not simply stand by as the
“barbarians of the north” trampled the sovereignty of two indepen-
dent states and menaced European peace. “The French and English
341
Fotino 1: 206 and Fotino 4: 32.
342
Muriel E. Chamberlain, ‘Pax Britannica’? British Foreign Policy 1789–1914
(Longman, 1988), 106.
fleet ought to proceed at once upon Sebastopol and the mouths of the
Danube, or else, to strike their colours, and salute the invader of these
principalities as the master of the world” urged Brătianu.
On the same day, Saturday 9th of July, The Times, still non-
interventionist at the time, offered its readers a more analytical article,
in which it unambiguously stated that a war against Russia was not
warranted either by existing treaties, or by a supposed violation of
vital British interests, which, the author believed, were non-existent
in the area.343 Referring to the Romanian Principalities, the article also
claimed that “the population of these provinces is much more allied
to the Russian than to the Turkish, both in race and religion”, the type
of cavalier opinion which the Romanians, as seen, had tried to cor-
rect throughout their years of campaigning. This time, Brătianu found
refuge with the Daily News, which hosted his response on the 19th.
“The inhabitants of the Principalities are descended from the Roman
legions led into Dacia by Trajan”, Brătianu informed his British read-
ers. “They call themselves Roumans, and their language, which much
resembles Italian, is derived, like that language, from the Latin. Their
origins, their recollections, their tendencies, everything attaches them
to the nations of civilised Europe. To the Russians, on the contrary,
they have no similitude: their nationality, race, language, historical
traditions, and manners, all separate them from the Russians.” Apart
from thus deftly dislocating Russia from the realms of European civili-
sation, Brătianu used the opportunity to look beyond the imminent
war and ask for the Principalities to be placed under the collective pro-
tection of the Great Powers, an objective which was actually attained
after the Crimean War.
In a tense atmosphere which fed mainly on rumour, the other exiles
were gripped by apprehension and even by anti-Western feelings as
they sensed that, even should the war broke out, post-war arrange-
ments were unlikely to satisfy their nation-building demands. In a let-
ter of 10/15 July 1853 to his brother Ştefan, Alexandru Golescu-Albu,
still in Geneva, was fulminating against the Western cabinets. In his
understanding of behind-the-scenes diplomatic blueprints, plans were
already afoot for the post-war creation of a new kingdom of Poland and
a new kingdom of Hungary, the unification of the Slavs of Southern
Austria and, possibly, the incorporation of the Danubian Principalities
343
For The Times and its shifts of opinion on the Crimean War, see Stephen Koss,
The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain, 2 vols. (London, 1981), 1: 105–6.
230 1853
into the new Hungarian kingdom. He believed that such arrangements

were not viable, because “we Romanians, Serbs, Saxons, we, the sacri-
ficed, the entire Southern Europe, will rise to prevent this creation of
the selfish and narrow-minded West. . . .” And he added: “The Hungar-
ians are reverting to their old arrogance and to their cherished idea
of an illegitimate, unjust, impossible, precarious Hungary, a Hungary
where all the nationalities, including their own, would perish . . . We do
not want to have to choose between one despotism and another . . . we
want freedom for ourselves and for our neighbours. Ah! we will in
the future come face to face with the Hungarians, guns pointing at
each other, but we will reap the glory, because we will have justice on
our side . . . The infamous Austria and the ignoble Russia will no longer
be there to distort and defile our worthy and immortal cause!”344 The
West, he believed, was guilty of failing to distinguish between a confed-
eration of nationalities and a “fratricidal” Hungarian kingdom based
on oppression, and was thus encouraging atavistic Hungarian political
heresies, an argument which Rosetti had presented to Jules Michelet
in late 1851. As for Turkey in Europe, Golescu-Albu believed, ensur-
ing its survival was “as impossible as trying to resuscitate a corpse, for
the dead are not of this world; in Europe the Turks are outnumbered
by the Christian population in a proportion of five to one, and were
overshadowed with regard to capacities, feelings, energy, conscious-
ness and devotion.”345 What he had in mind, irrespective of whether
the European war was to happen or not, was a crusade of the “aspiring
nations”, of Romanians, Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Serbs, Bulgarians,
Albanians, against Turkey, Russia and Austria alike.
While the French had sent a fleet into the Mediterranean soon after
the start of the Menshikov mission, the more cautious – and anti-
Turkish – Lord Aberdeen waited until the occupation of the Danubian
Principalities and the failure of the “Vienna Note” made prevarication
no longer possible. The Vienna Note, agreed upon by the Great Powers
in late July 1853 as a result of an offer from neutral Austria to mediate
in the Franco-Turkish dispute, was essentially an ultimatum to Russia.
It demanded inter alia a profession of Russo-Turkish goodwill and
agreement, and guarantees for the protection of the Porte’s Christian
subjects in the “letter and the spirit” of the treaties of Küçük Kay-
narca (1774) and Adrianople (1829), which had previosuly regulated
344
Fotino 1: 208 and Fotino 4: 36–9.
345
Ibid., 4: 36.
Russo-Ottoman relations. Amidst naval manoeuvering, diplomatic

skirmishes and wars of words, the planned motion on the Russian
invasion of the Principalities was raised in the Commons on 16 August
1853. Briefed by Dumitru Brătianu346 and carried by the wave of grow-
ing anti-Russian feeling and militaristic tone of belligerent sections of
the press, Austen Layard attacked both Russian duplicity and Lord
Aberdeen’s policy of appeasement, and urged war, the only policy to
pursue when Britain’s interests were at stake. “The Russian occupation
of the Principalities is accepted, and Great Britain is regarded by the
weaker states who look to her for support as helpless against Russian
encroachments”, Layard said on that occasion, appealing to national
pride.347 The Romanian Principalities should have been defended as
“a barrier to Russia and a bulwark of freedom.”348 Richard Cobden,
however, believed that the British people – even in Birmingham, he
joked, where they manufactured muskets – did not wish to go to war
over Turkey, a moribund “Mohameddan” empire which ruled over
reluctant Christian populations, who had never been consulted over
their own choice of government. He reminded those who invoked a
Russian threat to British interests in the Middle East of the six mil-
lion pound sterling loaned to Russia prior to its invasion of Hungary.
“[. . .] Russia could not move an army across her own frontiers without
coming to Europe for a loan”, Cobden commented derisively. There
were echoes of Dumitru Brătianu’s 1849 memorandum to Lord Palm-
erston in Cobden’s contention that tsarist Russia was “a mere collec-
tion of villages, without capital, without resources.”349 Cobden was
consistent in his non-interventionist politics: as early as 1836, at the
height of pro-Polish movements in Britain, he had maintained in his
Russia by a Manchester Manufacturer that England should not go to
war against Russia and, almost uniquely among English liberals, had
dismissed the worthiness of the Polish cause.350 In 1850, the Romanian
historian Nicolae Bălcescu had been severely disappointed by what
he had interpreted as Cobden’s obdurately mercantile approach to
346
347
Layard, Autobiography and Letters, 246.
348
Daily News, 17 August 1853.
349
Ibid. For Brătianu’s memorandum, see pp. 130–1 above.
350
Peter Brock, “Polish Democrats and English Radicals 1832–1862: A Chapter
in the History of Anglo-Polish Relations”, Journal of Modern History 25, 2 (1953):
144–5.
232 1853
international affairs.351 Cobden remained a pragmatic pacifist who

never stopped believing that free trade was the surest guarantee of
peace in Europe and that trade with Turkey was more important for
Britain than trade with Russia. To Cobden’s pacifist remonstrances,
a Palmerston newly converted to liberal internationalism answered
with fiery rhetoric, rather than commercial statistics. He opposed the
independent MP’s “mercenary” outlook to the lofty ideal of a rarefied,
moral foreign policy, trusting that such rhetoric would not fail to
inform the British people’s newly-found passion for foreign affairs:
Why, sir, we went to war for the liberties of Europe, and not for the
purpose of gaining so much per cent on our exports. (Cheers) We went
to war, not for the purpose of increasing the export of our commodities,
but in defense of the liberty and independence of nations [. . .]352
It was a far cry from Palmerston’s lukewarm ‘Balkan policies’ of the
1840s. Yet, as Britain was not yet officially at war with Russia, what
could Palmerston mean by “we went to war”? 353 He probably referred
to the general predisposition of the nation, to the army’s readiness and
to the feeling that an actual war declaration was more or less a fore-
gone conclusion. Cobden’s appeals to pacifism – though ultimately
vindicated by the horrors of the Crimean War – were becoming
increasingly isolated, as few people appeared willing to query Palm-
erston’s statements or question the doubtful reality of “liberty and
independence” in Ottoman-dominated South-Eastern Europe. The
Romanians themselves were oblivious to the subtleties of the ongoing
debate in mid-Victorian Britain around issues of free trade, morality,
peace and war, issues which by 1852 had created a schism within the
Radical movement itself.354 For them, a Britain finally willing to go to
war against their arch-enemy was a friendly, congenial Britain.
Bolstered by British diplomatic support, the Ottoman Grand Coun-
cil rejected the Vienna Note on 17–18 August, demanding changes in
the draft, as well as guarantees that the Russians would evacuate the
Principalities and that the two provinces would henceforward enjoy
351
E. D. Tappe, “Nicolae Bălcescu’s Propaganda in England: his meetings with
Cobden and Palmerston”, American Slavic and East European Review 13, 1 (Feb.
1954): 66–71.
352
Daily News, 17 August 1853.
353
War was to be officially declared on 28 March 1854.
354
Cf. G. R. Searle, Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1998), 204.
Great Power protection against Russian threats.355 The Russians, too,

rejected the Vienna Note on 7 September, thus opening up the path
to hostilities, which broke out, as widely expected, in October. The
initial bone of contention – the Franco-Russian-Ottoman clash over
Catholic custodial rights at the Holy Places – was now almost forgot-
ten. With hindsight, it struck many as a trivial pretext for launching
a European war. The European-wide military engagement, when it
finally happened, had far deeper roots: it was largely the outcome of
Russo-Turkish tensions which had been building up since the revolu-
tions of 1848–49 and the consequent refugee crisis.356 The main dif-
ference between the present war and the earlier (nine in total since
1676)357 localised Russo-Turkish conflicts was that this time the whole
of Europe was dragged in. It was a conflict in which, it is well-known,
Britain and France were to incur huge losses, but which, ironically – and
quite surprisingly, given their status as non-belligerents – was going to
benefit the Romanians.
355
Goldfrank, Origins, 205.
356
See pp. 168–9 above.
357
Goldfrank, Origins, 232.
1853
PARIS: “MADAME ROSETTI”
I am writing for those who are wandering, those who

are suffering and waiting, I am writing for the shad-
ows of men lurking amidst the melancholy of Paris
and the fogs of London. I am sending them this reju-
venating message from the homeland.
Michelet, Légendes démocratiques du nord, 1853–4358
In the summer of 1853, in the new atmosphere of war-mongering and
heighthened anti-Russian feeling, and braving the diktats of imperial
censorship against the French opposition’s work, the republican Le
Siècle serialised Michelet’s “Madame Rosetti. Révolution valaque en
1848” on 12, 13 and 14 July 1853. Around the same time, the Revue de
Paris (led by the philo-Romanian Louis Ulbach) published fragments
of Michelet’s History of the Revolution. Thus, Marie Rosetti’s name was
embedded between the names of Charlotte Corday (15 July) and Dan-
ton (15 August) in a symbolic revolutionary continuum across time
and European borders. Michelet’s portrait of her was more than a cir-
cumstantial deference to the Romanians’ need for and construction of
their own symbolic, Marianne-like figure. One can read in it the accu-
mulated experience of shared hardship and marginalisation, an expe-
rience which had cemented what otherwise would have been perhaps
an unlikely alliance between the famous historian and the unknown
exiled revolutionaries from the margins of Europe. Life with the Roset-
tis in Nantes had added personal poignancy – and perhaps a hint of
impossible romance between the historian and Marie – to what oth-
erwise could have sounded like mere literary flattery: “No-one wears
with more grace the rags of democratic poverty. No-one knows better
than her how to soften poverty for those dear to her. Admirable in
danger, she was no less admirable in the course of a lengthy exile, full
of hardship, pain and deprivation. But who would not be oblivious to
them by her side? Admirable mystery of modern solidarity! It is the
closeness of a stranger, of an adoptive daughter of Romania, which
358
Michelet, Légendes, 211 and 238.
paris: “madame rosetti” 235
brings the Romanian exile closer to his own homeland, to its living
genius and its warm hearth.”359
Beyond the glorification of Marie as revolutionary heroine, Michelet
attempted to gain public attention for the “unfortunate Romania”, the
“sacrificed nation”, a country which, like Poland and Hungary, had
in the course of history “defended and preserved” the West against
the “Tartar deluge, the Turkish armies and the Russians.” But, while
Poland and Hungary had “at least reaped the glory of their sufferings,
and their names had resounded all over the world”, the “peoples of
the Danube had hardly enjoyed any attention from Europe.”360 Now,
Michelet wrote, Europe was about to witness a new “execution” of
Romania by the occupying Russian armies.361 Addressing an interna-
tional readership recently moved to tears by Harriet Beecher-Stowe’s
Unce Tom’s Cabin, Michelet was unafraid to compare the Tsar’s treat-
ment of his own subjects and the Russian protection of the Romanian
Principalities with black slavery: “Charitable people, you who have just
shed so many tender tears over the fate of the blacks, you sensitive
souls, lady readers saddened by the fate of good old Uncle Tom, have
you not saved one single tear for the white race? Do you not know that
in Russia, in Romania, and across the entire East of Europe, there are
sixty million people even more unfortunate than the blacks?”362
By channeling their appeal to the world on behalf of their nation,
the Master was thus finally paying a debt of friendship to his Roma-
nian disciples. Charles Alexandre, a republican deputy and Lamartine’s
private secretary, wrote to Athénaïs Michelet on 23 July 1853, congrat-
ulating her husband on the publication of “Madame Rosetti”. “This
fiery story inflames one’s heart and puts us all to shame, pale, nervous
dreamers of the Orient that we are”,363 Alexandre wrote, alluding to
the now obsolete romantic Orientalism of Lamartine’s generation.
Emboldened by public declarations made by Napoleon III against
Russia’s expansionist drive in South-East Europe and her occupation of
the Romanian Principalities on 3 July, previously reluctant publishers
now thought that the right moment had come to bring out Michelet’s
‘Wallachian’ writings in a single volume. The republican editor Bry
359
Michelet, Légendes, “Madame Rosetti”, 230.
360
Ibid., 212.
361
Ibid., 236.
362
Ibid., 236–7.
363
236 1853
agreed to publish “Madame Rosetti” in an illustrated edition – planned

for 15 November – while Garnier was negotiating with Michelet the
publication in a single volume of the Russian, Polish and Romanian
‘legends’.364 At the same time, an English-language translation of the
“Légende de Kosciuszko” was being negotiated by Stanisław Worcell,
the Polish socialist militant close to Mazzini and Ledru-Rollin and a
member of the the Polish national committee in London. The text was
rapidly translated and published as Poland and Russia. A Legend of
Kosciuszko in the translation of William J. Linton, the Chartist who
popularised Mazzini’s views in the English Republic and the Leader in
the 1850s.365
On 17 August 1853, Jules Michelet wrote to Armand Lévy, congrat-
ulating him on the publication of his own pro-Romanian pamphlet,
La Russie sur le Danube, which included a protest by the Romanians
against the latest Russian occupation and an earlier exchange of letters
between Dumitru Brătianu and Lord Dudley Stuart. Lévy’s plea for the
Principalities was characteristically melodramatic: “You are succumb-
ing, oh, Romania! And in vain are your sons raising their supplicant
arms towards France; they, too, will learn to say: God is too aloft and
France is too afar. [. . .] Black Russia’s flag is enveloping you like a
shroud, but your own veil of flame, gold and pristine azure will protect
you.”366 It was, Michelet said, a “masterpiece”: “I congratulate you, and
am happy for your infallible success, which is also ours, the success of
our great cause.” An exchange of letters between the two focused on
publicizing the two writings in Eugène Pelletan’s Le Siècle, but it has
been impossible so far to ascertain their reception and impact.367
Around the same time, Ion Brătianu, who was under arrest, pend-
ing his trial in the so-called ‘Hippodrome affair’, a plot to assassinate
Emperor Napoleon, wrote an article entitled “Nationality” for the sec-
ond issue of Rosetti’s newspaper, Republica Română. He had become
the chief ideologue of the paper, which had been started in Brussels
in November 1851.368 In the spirit of the period’s organicist theories,
364
Viallaneix, Michelet: les travaux, 382.
365
Letter to Jules Michelet, 21 July 1853, in Michelet, Correspondance, 7: 466–7. See
Michelet’s reply, dated 11 August 1853, 499–500.
366
Armand Lévy, La Russie sur le Danube (Paris, 1853), 14. The ‘veil’ was an allu-
sion to the Romanian tri-coloured flag.
367
Letter from Michelet to Armand Lévy, 17 August 1853, in Michelet, Correspon-
dance, 7: 506–8. Cf. letter to Michelet from Armand Lévy, 24 August 1853, 514–15.
368
The first issue carried a comprehensive editorial by Ion Brătianu, in which he
outlined the radicals’ nation-building programme based on the constitution of 1848.
he argued that the principle of nationality was a natural category of

social organization, not an arbitrary, derivative form to be tampered
with in the world’s chancelleries. Hungarians, Romanians and Croats,
he wrote, had all lost in their revolutions of 1848–49 because they
had not respected each other’s rights as nations. Their in-fighting had
delivered the revolution into the hands of their enemies. Brătianu paid
tribute to Michelet by quoting one of his reflections on the divine
source of nations: “do not destroy, do not suffocate a nation, for you
will be breaking a string in the harp on which God plays His most
harmonious chords.”369 One of the article’s central themes is a plea
for a rapprochement between the nations of the gens Latina: Romania
belonged culturally with France and Italy rather than with its non-Latin
immediate neighbours and Germany. The piece was later serialised by
Rosetti’s Românul from October to December 1857, when the exiles
were back in Romania and were campaigning for the union of the
Principalities. In its post-exile, sanitised version, the article was purged
of its more explicit anti-Magyar touches, though not of its expressions
of regret for 1848 as a missed opportunity.370 The word “revolution”
was replaced by “reform” and the article’s insurrectionary appeal was
generally toned down.371 In just four years, the former exiled radicals
discovered the virtues of gradualism and decided to relinquish the
‘social and democratic republic’ for a more pramatic approach: the
‘démo-socs’ of 1848 became the moderates of post-Crimean Romania.
Michelet’s correspondence with the Romanian exiles continued
in the last months of 1853. In October Ion (Jean) Voinescu II, the
former Wallachian foreign minister of 1848 and a prominent mem-
ber of the group close to Rosetti, sent Michelet a copy of a recently
The entire text of the editorial, as well as “Naţionalitatea” were reproduced in Din scri-
erile şi cuvîntările lui Ion C. Brătianu, 1821–1891, ed. Vintilă I. C. Brătianu, C. Banu
and G.D. Creangă, Partea I: 1848–1868 (Bucharest, 1903), 93–103 and 121–43.
369
Republica Română, Brussels, 2, 1853. It was later reproduced in Ion C. Brătianu,
Acte şi cuvântări, ed. G. Marinescu and C. Grecescu (Bucharest, 1938), 1: 39–61, as
well as in Din scrierile şi cuvântările lui Ion C. Brătianu, ed. Vintilă I. C. Brătianu
et al., 121–43 (see previous note).
370
Cf. “Naţionalitatea”, in Din scrierile şi cuvântările lui Ion C. Brătianu, ed. Vintilă
I. C. Brătianu et al., 122.
371
For comments on this shift see also Paul Cornea, “Studiu introductiv” in Gîn-
direa românească în epoca paşoptistă (1830–1860), ed. Paul Cornea and Mihai Zamfir,
2 vols. (Bucharest, 1968–1969), 1: 25.
238 1853
published collection of his translations from Romanian folklore.372 In

his covering letter, he reiterated the theme to which the forty-eighters
returned again and again, and to which Michelet himself had alluded
in his Légendes: the lack of international recognition for their country:
“One of the most poignant sufferings in exile for us Romanians is to
see how little our unfortunate homeland is known. [. . .] Her insurrec-
tion of 1821 has been ignominiously calumnied and her revolution of
1848, hélas!, which – without the brilliance of the Magyar revolution
or the international echoes of the Italian revolution – was nonetheless
equally sacred, has scarcely helped in making the name of Romanian
less synonymous with “barbarian”. I, therefore, was in ecstasy to read
your beautiful legend of our movement of 1848, and my heart was
grateful to you, because a writing signed Michelet travels across the
boundaries of time and space [. . .]; our gratitude and love for you will
last as long as your immortal writings.”373
Jules Michelet’s correspondence in October 1853 focused on the
immediate need to publish and circulate “Les Martyrs de la Russie”
(serialised in l’Evénement, from 27 September to 17 October 1853) in
French as well as in Italian. He regarded this piece as highly topical,
now that the war appeared imminent, and he wanted the text dis-
tributed in the Near East, including in Constantinople. He asked his
son-in-law, Alfred, who was in charge of his affairs in Paris, to talk
about this possibility with the Rosettis.374 Work on “Les Martyrs” –
as on Michelet’s other writings on Russia and Eastern Europe – was
very much a collaborative effort, based on oral communications by
the groups of exiles close to Michelet’s circle. As Michelet prepared
to leave Nantes and settle in Italy, he asked Quinet to return the bor-
rowed copy of “Les Martyrs de la Russie” with the “important cor-
rections which the Poles and the Russians have made thereon”, in
time for publication in the edition of the Légendes démocratiques du
nord, which the editor Garnier planned for January 1854.375 Fears of
372
Littérature roumaine: les Doïnas, poésies moldaves de V. Alecsandri. Traduites
par J. E. Voïnesco (Paris: Impr. De De Soye et Bauchet, 1853) (2nd edn., Paris:
G. Cherbuliez, editeur, 1855).
373
Letter from J. Voinesco to Michelet, October 1853, in Michelet, Correspondance,
7: 569–70.
374
Letter from Michelet to Alfred Dumesnil, 7 October 1853, in ibid., 578–9. See
also Michelet, Légendes, Introduction, liv.
375
Letter to Quinet, 23 Oct 1853, in Michelet, Correspondance, 7: 597–8. See also
letter from Alfred Dumesnil to Michelet, 28 November 1853, in ibid., 623–4, which
censorship still remained: Garnier told Armand Lévy that he would

have ideally wanted to drop “démocratiques” from the title.376 Accord-
ing to the contract signed with Garnier, Michelet was to receive twenty-
five copies of the volume, while the editor agreed to send sixty review
copies to French and foreign newspapers and pay for the book’s pro-
motion.377 It was a major publicity operation, supposed to benefit both
France and Romania. The fate of Romania was intimately linked, in
Michelet’s thinking – as it was in the Romanians’ – to the resuscitation
of France’s international role: “I live, at this moment, in the fear of see-
ing our poor Danubian provinces assassinated by France’s abandon;
they are the only friends still on the side of France. How can she revive
all those she has left to die, if she does not help?”378 In November 1853
there was talk of an English-language edition of the “Legend of Mme
Rosetti”, as Marie wrote to Athénaïs Michelet, saying that she believed
“the moment is propitious for a publication in England.”379 The project
was not realized.
It is difficult to assess the reception and impact of the Légendes
outside the circles of the émigré revolutionaries and their close sym-
pathizers. It would appear that, contrary to expectations and despite
some unmistakably evocative writing, the book only received a small
number of favourable reviews in the press. Its merit probably lies
mainly in the propaganda value attached by the East-Central Euro-
pean diasporas to a work which put Russian policies in their home-
lands in the public domain.380 Michelet’s fiercely reductionist reading
of Russia, based on scant and biased sources, and especially his dis-
paraging views on Russian literature were understandably criticized by
one of the most outstanding of Russian émigrés, the writer Alexander
refers to the amendments made by Rosetti and Golescu, especially on what he calls
the Wallachian “Congress of Agriculture”, in fact the “Procesele verbale ale Comisiei
Proprietăţii de la Bucureşti”, the minutes of the Commission for Property in Bucharest
of 1848.
376
Letter of Adèle to Alfred Dumesnil, 11 January 1854, in Documente inedite, ed.
Bucur, 240.
377
Letter from Alfred Dumesnil, 14 November 1853, in Michelet, Correspondance,
7: 614–5.
378
Letter from Edgar Quinet (in Brussels) to Jules Michelet, 25 October 1853, in
ibid., 599–602.
379
Letter from Marie Rosetti to Athénaïs Michelet from Paris, 14 November 1853,
in Michelet, Correspondance, 7: 641–2.
380
Cf. a discussion on reception in Légendes, Introduction by Michel Cadot,
xlix–lvi.
240 1853
Herzen. However, the latter’s critique, Le peuple russe et le socialisme,

as shown, circulated only outside France. William Linton, the English
translator of “Kosciuszko”, and members of the Polish diaspora, too,
were aware of the many factual errors and the limitations of a work
for which Michelet was perhaps ill-prepared. However, as Michelet
himself believed, the volume was not meant as an original contribu-
tion to historiography, but as a “popular manifesto”, written in the
heat of the moment in order to create interest in events unfolding in
a little-known corner of the world.
The Légendes démocratiques du nord were finally published as a vol-
ume by Garnier on 21 January 1854381 and went into four editions
between 1854 and 1899, with very minor changes, which suggests that
the historian never radically revised his views on tsarist Russia and the
Russian danger in South-East Europe.382 Interestingly, while in 1851
Michelet had been almost alone in France to publicly denounce the
Russian threat so vigorously, by 1854 the collected volume of the Leg-
ends came out amidst a deluge of cheap anti-Russian pamphlets, from
which he distanced himself by making no public declarations on the
matter.383
While every effort was being made to publicize the Romanian cause
alongside Michelet’s Legends, Rosetti was on his way to Constanti-
nople and the Balkans on an ultimately fruitless mission to arrange
a Romanian military participation alongside the Ottoman troops in
the Crimean War. Ion Brătianu, then in the midst of the ‘Hippo-
drome affair’ trial, and the Rosetti children were all ill in Paris, with
Marie Rosetti looking after them all. She appealed to the Michelets for
encouragment. “[. . .] if I could only hear one of those forceful words
that I have often heard M. Michelet pronounce; if I could see a tear of
sympathy in your eyes, as I have often seen, I would have more hope
for the future.”384 The Michelets themselves were living in Spartan
frugality in exile in Genoa in the winter of 1853, with Michelet always
381
The first Romanian-language translation was published in the periodical Steaua
Dunării, 1860; Doamna Rosetti, the first Romanian publication of the text as a volume,
in a translation by D. Munteanu-Râmnic, was published by Tipografia Neamul Româ-
nesc (Vălenii de Munte, 1909), with a second edition in 1930, of which fragments were
included in Radu Pantazi’s study C. A. Rosetti: gînditorul-omul (Bucharest, 1969).
382
Légendes, Introduction, lv.
383
Ibid., xli.
384
Ibid.
ailing, and in need of sympathy himself. From his own exile in Brus-
sels, Edgar Quinet wrote to show his friendship: “Oh! Wouldn’t I be
proud if I only could make a good fire for both of you, and chop your
wood! I assure you that I could pay you more than one service of this
kind. What would you say if I made you dinner, or chocolat, or warm
milk, or even – what I do best – eggs fried in butter!”385
385
Letter from Brussels, 19 November 1853, in Michelet, Correspondance, 7: 648–50.
1853–1854
PARIS: ION BRĂTIANU AND THE ‘HIPPODROME AFFAIR’
It is certain that agitation is being caused in France

by a committee calling itself the Central European
Committee in London, whose only aim is to set fire
to Europe and it is certain that you are serving as an
intermediary for this committee.
Questioning of ‘Bratiano’, November 1853386
In mid-June 1853, amidst the feverish international lobbying preced-
ing the Crimean War, Ion Brătianu (‘Beppo’ to his closest friends) was
arrested and interrogated under accusation of involvement in a plot
to kill Napoleon III. Adèle Dumesnil, familiar with his penchant for
shady, dangerous activities, hoped that “they have not found anything
at his home,” a suspicion which was to prove entirely founded.387 The
philo-Romanians closed ranks around their friend, but all attempts to
liberate him, including the intercession of the Ottoman ambassador in
Paris, failed. Asked to intervene on his behalf, Pierre-Jean de Béranger,
the popular poet and chansonnier, close to Michelet and known as
the champion of all good left-wing causes, declined, a refusal which
Michelet deplored in a letter to Rosetti.388 Lamartine, the Romanian
students’ former patron, declared himself equally unable to help:
“compromised himself as a founder of the republic, a letter from him
would be more harmful than not”,389 explained his secretary, Charles
Alexandre, after the start of the court hearings. But, he added, he felt
certain that Brătianu had “nothing in common with these men of
darkness who kill. [. . .] it is not through assassination that one gains
liberty.”390 Béranger’s and Lamartine’s reluctance to get involved was
entirely justified by subsequent developments. On trial were not just
the would-be ‘tyrannicides’, but the entire former republican regime,
its protagonists, its allies and its ethos.
386
Albert Fermé, Les Conspirations sous le second empire: Complot de l’Hippodrome
et de l’Opéra Comique (Paris, 1869), 73–4.
387
Letter to Alfred Dumesnil, 22 [June] 1853, in Documente inedite, ed. Bucur, 222.
388
Michelet, Correspondance, 7: 445. Cf. Bucur, Jules Michelet şi revoluţionarii, 164.
389
Charles Alexandre to Alfred Dumesnil, 11 November 1853, in Documente
inedite, ed. Bucur, 226–7.
390
Ibid.
paris: brĂtianu and the ‘hippodrome affair’ 243
The trial in the so-called ‘complots de l’Hippodrome et de l’Opéra-

Comique’ opened at the Cour d’Assises de la Seine on 7 November
1853. There were twenty-seven young men in the dock, including “Bra-
tiano”. Many were workers: mechanics, jewellers, tailors, shoemakers,
bakers, and one railways employee from Strasbourg. Jules Allix was a
teacher, Jean-Laurent Follot, a medical doctor, and Léon-Ferdinand
Hippolyte Ribault de Laugadière, a medical student. Arthur Ranc and
Sigismond Laflize were both law students, and the twenty-two-year-
old Félix Martin, a Parisian student, was also the author of Guerre
de Hongrie en 1848 et 1849,391 which suggests that he was part of the
coterie of East and Central-European sympathizers close to émigré
circles. Ribault de Laugadière and Ranc had both attended Michelet’s
lectures at the Collège de France, so their connection with Brătianu
is plausible.392 The only foreigner in the group, ‘Jean-Constantin
Bratiano’ was presented as being thirty years of age, ‘propriétaire’, born
in Bucharest, Wallachia, and residing in Paris, at no. 4, rue Mézières.393
The plots were described over-dramatically by the prosecution as the
work of young men with “dark, sinister faces”, the work of the “union
of arms and intelligences”, the workers and the students.394 However,
the prosecution pointed out, the blame rested not with these people,
mere executants, but with the steering bodies which had fomented the
conspiracies from London, from Jersey and from within France itself:
the European revolutionary committee, the ‘Club de la Révolution’
and the ‘Commune Révolutionnaire’, as well as the exiled ‘démocrates-
socialistes’ residing in Jersey.395
The men in the dock were alleged to be members of secret societ-
ies such as the Société des Vertus, the Société des Saisons, the Deux
Cents and the Cordon sanitaire – whose activities were illegal – and
to have conspired against the life of Emperor Napoleon and against
the government. The first attack had been planned for 7 June at the
Hippodrome in the Bois de Boulogne, and, in case of failure, a second
391
Nantes: L. et A. Guéraud, 1850.
392
I. Tchernoff, Le Parti Républicain au coup d’état et sous le Second Empire (Paris,
1906), 227.
393
Fermé, Les Conspirations, 17–18. See also the Gazette des Tribunaux of 13
November 1853. Cf. also the account of the affair in Smochină, “Sur les émigrés rou-
mains à Paris”, 172–85. The archives of the Cour d’Assises and the Tribunal Cor-
rectionnel were destroyed during the Paris Commune. My own searches in French
archives have not yielded new information.
394
Fermé, Les Conspirations, 24.
395
Ibid., 5, 26.
244 1853–1854
attempt was scheduled for 5 July at the Opéra Comique, both dates
known to be on the Emperor’s social diary. The prosecution alleged
that, to shouts of “Vive l’Empereur!”, the assassins had planned to run
towards the imperial carriage, which was supposed to arrive without
escort, kill Napoleon and then drag his dead body along the streets
of Paris, after which they were to proclaim the “Red Republic”, with
Louis Blanqui as dictator.
The Hippodrome affair was not an isolated episode, but possibly the
best-known of the conspiracies of the early years of the Second Empire,
whether organised by republicans, secret societies or legitimists. From
the so-called conspiracy of the secret society of the rue de la Reine-
Blanche in September 1852 and the affair of the ‘machine infernale
de Marseille’, to the affair of the ‘Commune révolutionnaire’ of July
1853, and the plot of Vincennes (also called of the ‘Ligne fédérale’)
of August 1853, plots and subversive activites had constantly brewed
under the glossy surface of a régime whose legitimacy was constantly
questioned and contested. A wide range of conspiratorial, revolution-
ary, and republican vocabularies had evolved in the pamphlet literature
which had accompanied all these attempts: Napoleon III was variously
described as “a tyrant, a perjurer, an assassin of the civil liberties”. His
government was a “government born by force [which] must perish by
force”, as noted in the Appeal of 31 October 1852 by the “Proscrits
démocrates-socialistes de France” of Jersey, the most famous of whom
was the exiled Victor Hugo. “In the presence of M. Bonaparte and his
Government, any citizen worthy of the name can only do one thing:
cock his gun and wait for the right moment”, read the Appeal, co-
signed by Hugo.396 Hugo, however, later distanced himself from any
suggestion that he may have endorsed the emperor’s assassination or
tyrannicide in general.397
A corresponding counter-vocabulary demonizing the enemies of
the Second Empire had also been emerging: they were the “party of
crime”, “les Jacques”, “the cannibals of 1851”, participants in “socialist
orgies”, etc. This emotional, value-laden discourse, abundantly used
and over-used on both sides, permeated the way in which Second
Empire society as a whole assessed itself, and provided the language
in which the trials of the enemies of the régime were invariably played
out. If it is true that between 1820 and 1870 an “alternative society”
396
Ibid., 5–7.
397
Aprile, Le siècle des exilés, 202.
functioned in France, challenging the official structures of the state,

then it is fair to say that the Brătianus and their associates were at the
very core of this “république clandestine” and that, even when evidence
lacked, the instincts of their accusers were largely correct.398
Ion Brătianu was accused of posessing a clandestine printing press,
on which were printed the incendiary bulletins of 20 May and 5 June
1853, calling people to action against the regime. On behalf of “all our
persecuted, deported and executed friends”, and invoking the Trois
glorieuses and the fall of the July Monarchy, the bulletin, entitled “Le
Réveil du people”, called the citizens to arms (“Citizens, be at the
ready!”), telling them it would only take two hours to overthrow the
criminal regime of the Second Empire, and thus resume the “inter-
rupted work of the revolution.”399
The acte d’accusation, read out on 7 November, was followed by
biographical details of each of the accused. While “Jean-Constantin
Bratiano” had not been seen at the sites of the planned assassination,
nor was there evidence of his participation in secret society sessions,400
he was suspicious on account of his known associations. His brother,
“Dimitri”, was a refugee in London and a member of the Central revo-
lutionary committee, announced Mongis, the Avocat-Général. “Affili-
ated to the Wallachian committee, with headquarters in Paris, he is
deploying a major activity in an attempt to secretly print a revolution-
ary catechism destined to demoralise the soldiers and the peasants of
Wallachia. He is also involved, whatever he might say to the contrary,
in the political affairs of France. His opinions and connections place
him in contact with the most influential members of the demagogic
party, to the extent that, if a genuine link exists at all between the secret
societies of Paris and those of London, no-one is better placed than
Bratiano to serve as an intermediary. In effect, he has been reported to
the government as a man as adaptable as he is violent, and, en somme,
extremely dangerous.”401
398
Cf. Jeanne Gilmore, La République clandestine, 1818–1848 (Paris, 1997). For
detailed information on the networks and ramifications of secret societies in nine-
teenth-century France, see I. Tchernoff, Associations et sociétés secrètes sous la deux-
ième république, 1848–1851 (Paris, 1905).
399
Cour d’Assises de la Seine, Complots dits de l’Hippodrome et de l’Opéra-Comique,
Novembre 1853, 15. Fermé, Les Conspirations, 37.
400
Fermé, Les Conspirations, 35–6.
401
Ibid., 36.
246 1853–1854
Although the printed appeals for the Emperor’s assassination were

distributed in Paris by a certain Ruault couple, Brătianu was involved
in their printing, the prosecution alleged. On 16 June a white wooden
case had been seized at Brătianu’s address at 4 rue de Mézières by the
police commissar of the Monnaie section, armed with a warrant from
the Prefect. Brătianu denied ownership, but his initials were on seals
placed at the ends of a paper ribbon tied around the case, which was
found to contain fonts, a frame, and other printing accessories.
Under minute questioning by the President of the Cour d’Assises,
Brătianu denied involvement in the plot.
“Do you deny having participated in political intrigue in France?”
“Completely.”
“Have you got a brother abroad?”
“Yes.”
“Is he a member of an organisation well-known for its odious publica-
tions?”
“I am not responsible for his actions.”
“It is certain that agitation is being caused in France by a committee
calling itself the Central European Committee in London, whose only
aim is to set fire to Europe and it is certain that you are serving as an
intermediary for this committee.”
“I am denying this completely.”402
Brătianu admitted that the printing press presented in court was found
at his home, but he said it was not his, and refused to divulge the name
of its presumed real owner. He admitted that the bulletin calling for
“insurrection” was printed on that machine, but, he claimed, he had
not been aware that the case contained printing materials when it was
deposited at his address in his absence. Asked whether he admitted
that the presence of the case was evidence of his involvement, Brătianu
claimed that the conspirators would not have left incriminating evi-
dence at his address, which was not safe, as he was “too well-known
to the police.” Confronted with the fact that, when it was seized, the
case contained pages still damp from recent printing, Brătianu coun-
tered self-confidently that those were mere speculations, adding that
the seals with his initials on the case were unbroken.403 It was a self-
perpetuating and virtually endless duel of words.
402
Questioning of ‘Bratiano’, in ibid., 73–4.
403
Ibid., 74–5.
In the session of 11 November, Mongis, the Avocat-Général, deliv-

ered his réquisitoire, in which he focused on Ion Brătianu’s links with
Britain: “this country, with which we have good political relations, is
granting asylum to refugees of all nations, to the great detriment of
France, of Europe, and also possibly to the great detriment of Eng-
land herself.”404 In addition, Mongis pointed out, cases with contents
such as the ones found, were not normally sent by mistake to innocent
people.405
Ion Brătianu’s circle of friends in Paris had arranged for his defense
to be entrusted to one of the most famous lawyers of the Second Empire,
the ‘arch-defender’ of republican causes, Jules Favre. Born in 1809 in
Lyon in a family of traders, Favre had emerged in the 1840s as the
champion of the civil society and the rule of law against an oppressive
state. An opponent of the coup d’état and an anti-sermentiste, he had
left politics to devote himself to the law. Among the causes célèbres
he had been involved in were the trial of a group of republicans and
members of the Société des droits de l’homme after the insurrections in
Lyon of 1831–34, and in 1838 he acquired notoriety for defending the
husband of Flora Tristan, accused of an attempt on her life.406 He had
also defended the journals Le Réforme, La Vraie République, Mickie-
wicz’s Tribune des Peuples and Le Travail affranchi in July 1849, after
their suspension by the Ministry of the Interior in the aftermath of
the June protests in Paris.407 Notably, he was also to be the defender of
Felice Orsini, another would-be ‘tyrannicide’, in 1858.
Favre defended Brătianu with conviction and, in the last hearings of
15–16 November, the General Prosecutor Rouland reacted decisively
to Favre’s “much too able” defence:
We must reject what has been said about the Wallachian nobleman,
about the leader for whom the Roumans [sic] are waiting! I admire
the defense’s brilliant illusions, but I do not share them. Arthur Bra-
tiano, [sic; i.e. Dumitru], brother of the accused, who is completely free,
404
Ibid., 141.
405
Ibid., 142.
406
Pierre Antoine Perrod, Jules Favre: avocat de la liberté (Lyon, 1988). One may
wonder what made Perrod so dismissive of Ion Brătianu, who, he claims, was later
appointed Prime Minister of Romania on the strength of the succès de scandale he had
enjoyed in the Hippodrome affair: “Judges often issue honorary diplomas which open
more doors than university degrees”, he claims inexplicably on p. 170. For possible
reasons for this negative representation see Conclusions, p. 338.
407
For Favre’s biography and defense speeches, see Plaidoyers politiques et judici-
aires, publiés par Mme. Vve Jules Favre, née Velten, 2 vols. (Paris, 1882).
248 1853–1854
and who could fly to Wallachia any time he wanted, prefers staying in
London and writing up programmes for a socialist republic, alongside
Kossuth and Ledru-Rollin. I cannnot see why the Roumans should be
waiting for their liberating Messiah from the ranks of the Bratiano fam-
ily. Rest assured, Messieurs, the emancipation of the Wallachians is not
dependent on the acquittal of the accused. Me Jules Favre, whose imagi-
nation is rich, was wrong in borrowing from M. Michelet’s letter some
singular expressions: “justice has been wronged, but Russia has been well
served!” What does this mean? What are these sad calumnies? In dema-
gogic pamphlets it is written that the Emperor lies supine at the feet of
the Cossacks. But look! The Emperor is in Constantinople, his hand on
the guard of France’s sword. – See our fleet turning the mouths of its
cannons towards the Muscovite colossus. Look! Do you imagine that
the Emperor cares for a Bratiano, when the honour and the interest of
France are at stake?408
Addressing the jury, the Prosecutor pointed out to them that the
plots had been the work of “adventurers and conmen”, of intellectu-
als who were responsible for “putting regicidal knives in the hands
of the people, whom they had knowingly misled.”409 The choice was
now, he warned, between joining the “moderating power” of the state
or remaining “defenceless against evil” and “allowing oneself to be
swept away by the revolutionary torrent.”410 Ion Brătianu stood centre
stage in court in the high social and legal drama opposing the Second
Empire and its opponents.
On 16 November, a number of the accused, including Ion Brătianu,
were found not guilty of involvement in the attempt to assassinate
the Emperor, but were kept in detention pending a new case brought
by the police correctionelle for membership of a secret society and, in
Brătianu’s case, for possession of a clandestine printing press. The oth-
ers, however, were variously sentenced to deportation, to detention of
between five and ten years, or to eight years in exile.411 One of those
acquitted, the republican Arthur Ranc was deported to Algeria after yet
another assassination attempt against the emperor in 1855, in which
he denied any involvement. He was later sentenced to death after his
408
Cour d’Assises de la Seine, Présidence de M. Zangiacomi, 9bre 1853, Complots
dits de l’Hippodrome et de l’Opéra-Comique, Novembre 1853, 21–2, and Fermé, Les
Conspirations, 196–7. As the texts of the Prosecutor’s summation differ slightly in
the two publications, I have taken the liberty of collating them. They are practically
identical in terms of content.
409
Complots dits de l’Hippodrome et de l’Opéra-Comique, 10.
410
Fermé, Les Conspirations, 202–3.
411
Complots dits de l’Hippodrome et de l’Opéra-Comique, 30–2.
participation in the Commune, but he somehow escaped and returned

to France in 1869. One of the few former proscrits to enjoy a signifi-
cant political career after their return from exile, he became a highly
respectable deputy for the Seine and the Rhone regions (1871–1885)
as well as a writer. His memoirs, published posthumously in 1913, do
not mention any of the other accused in the Hippodrome affair, which
Ranc is obviously keen to downsize as a minor episode blown out of
proportion by a frightened regime, which was probably the case.412 His
political career is suggestive for the republican milieux in which Ion
Brătianu and his peers moved in the 1850s, as well as for the kind
of political convictions which sustained them throughout their own
later post-exile lives. Their alleged involvement in the “assassination
plots” of their early years in Parisian exile was more often than not
constructed by the authorities on the basis of the company they kept
rather than on the actual threat these posed to the regime. “Br. has
some violent enemies who work vigorously against him, maybe some
compatriots”, commented Adèle Dumesnil.413
In a twist of the plot, at the new hearing of 10 January 1854, one
of the lawyers, Me Hubbard, the defense of the accused Commes in
the initial trial, was placed in the dock himself, accused of complicity
with his client as a fellow-member of the same secret society.414 Jules
Favre took up the defense again, in the name of “Justice” which, he
contended, risked being hijacked by “false considerations of utility or
of political expediency.”415 He also found he had to defend Brătianu
against attacks on his character, attitudes and even ethnic origin.
Addressing the prosecution, he said: “You seem to use the designa-
tion ‘noble Wallachian’ in derision! Yes, he was born in a patrician
family, in the midst of a nation whose history, mores, aspirations and
misfortunes render her akin to France. He is a noble Romanian and,
as noblesse oblige, all the energy, courage, devotion and fortune that
he possesses, he has employed for the liberation of his country and
the emancipation of his compatriots.”416 But neither Favre’s able use
of double-entendre (noble, nobleman), nor his recourse to the theme
of Romania as France’s ‘younger sister’ could help Brătianu’s defence.
412
Souvenirs, correspondence, 1831–1908 (Paris, 1913).
413
Letter from Adèle to Alfred Dumesnil, 11 January 1854, in Documente inedite,
ed. Bucur, 240.
414
415
Plaidoyers politiques, 412.
416
Ibid., 415–6.
250 1853–1854
By their own admission, the accused knew each other, and the print-
ing press had been indeed found at Brătianu’s address. While mem-
bership of a secret society could not be proved, Brătianu, Ribault de
Laugadière, Hubbard, and Furet were found guilty of possession of a
clandestine printing press. One of the other accused, already found
guilty of involvement in conspiracy, declared that, as they did not
recognize the current government, they also refused to recognise the
authority of that tribunal. The defense lawyers also protested against
the judgement, invoking legal technicalities, but the court dismisseed
them all and passed the final sentence on 16 January: a number of
the accused, among whom Brătianu, were found guilty of belonging
to secret societies and were sentenced to three years in prison and a
fine of 500 Francs. In addition, all were to be “deprived of civic rights
for five years.”417 Ion Brătianu served only a few days of his term at
the prison of the Sainte Pélagie, known to be the prison of choice for
political prisoners. Undoubtedly owing to lobbying from his French
friends, he was allowed to complete his sentence at the clinic of a
Dr. Blanche in Passy, where he resided until 9 July 1856.418
Brătianu’s trial is interesting not only for the high drama, the judi-
cial rhetoric deployed on all sides, and the suggestive cross-section
of the French society present in the dock, but also for the insights it
allows into the kind of state the Second Empire had created. George
Sand famously quipped that, after the coup d’état of 1851, half of
France informed on the other half and, even if this is just a bon mot,
it suggests at least the scale of the ‘culture of denunciation’ which
had emerged, written evidence for which was largely destroyed in
1870–71.419 As early as July 1832, a decree had made it obligatory for
landlords in Paris to keep registers with the names and professions of
their lodgers. After the coup d’état of 1851, the Parisian police system
was re-organised by the new prefect, Pierre Pietri, into a very efficient
surveillance machine which kept a watchful eye on natives and for-
eigners alike and compiled, probably for the first time in police his-
tory, criminal records of suspects. The increasing use of anonymous
informers, paid 500–600 francs monthly, not only encouraged people
to report on each other, but also ensured that the police personnel as
417
418
Smochină, “Sur les émigrés roumains à Paris”, 182.
419
Howard C. Payne, The Police State of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (University of
Washington Press, 1966), 252.
such remained uninvolved and retained a benevolent, protective, ‘civic’

image, as the prefect had intended.420 Mail was opened both legally by
authorised bodies, and behind closed doors by the so-called cabinet
noir, the location and organisation of which remain elusive.421 Once
convicted, political prisoners faced severe sentences, among which
were ‘deportation’ and ‘transportation’ (i.e. deportation without trial),
mainly to penitential colonies in places like Algeria and Guyana, for
periods ranging from five to ten years, which was the sentence passed
on many in the ‘Hippodrome affair’.422
Brătianu, Rosetti and their associates, French and East-European
alike, must have been in the attention of the one hundred and twenty
men appointed by Pietri to the Services de sureté: their correspondence
contains many references to the interception of their mail and to stalk-
ing by police agents.423 But, in contrast to the public furore triggered
by the interception of Mazzini’s mail in 1844 in London, the foreign-
ers’ surveillance by the Paris police did not form the object of press
protests or motions in the Assemblée.
420
Maryvonne Bernard, “La réorganisation de la police sous le Second Empire
(1851–1858): des bras infatigables”, in Maintien de l’ordre et polices, 121, 133.
421
Payne, The Police State, 270.
422
Faure, “A la recherche des réfugiés”, 13–4. Faure’s article is also informative on
the new language and codes of political deportation, in which, for example, “Algérie
moins” meant simple deportation, while “Algérie plus” meant deportation and con-
finement in a fortress-prison.
423
Pierre Piétri later lost his post as prefect after Orsini’s assassination attempt on
Emperor Napoleon of 14 January 1858, when it was judged that his repressive mea-
sures had been too moderate for the scale of the opposition to the regime. Maryvonne
Bernard, “La réorganisation”, 134.
1853
PARIS-GALLIPOLI-CONSTANTINOPLE: ROSETTI’S WAR
Que veux-tu, chère amie! Quand la réalité est triste il

faut vivre dans le monde des rêves!
Letter from Rosetti to Marie, Marseille, 26 Novem-
ber 1853424
As diplomatic efforts were failing in the Russo-Turkish conflict over
custody of churches in the Holy Land and the protection of the Porte’s
Eastern Orthodox subjects, English and French steamers were sent to
the Black Sea in June 1853 and stood anchored at Besika Bay awaiting
the outcome of negotations. In August 1853, Lord Aberdeen decided
to dispatch the British Maltese fleet towards Constantinople, ostensi-
bly to protect the westerners in the Ottoman capital in case of armed
conflict. Throughout the last months of 1853, appeals to the Otto-
man Porte to grant an amnesty to the Romanian exiles of 1848 and
enlist their help on the anti-Russian front remained without response
from Constantinople. Gheorghe Magheru, the exiled general, whose
financial situation prevented him from leaving Vienna, wrote to the
Grand Vezir Reshid Pasha, asking for an amnesty of the Romanian
forty-eighters, who had always been, he pointed out, faithful to their
“legitimate Suzerain” and who would continue to support Turkey. He
feared that their continuing absence would lead many Romanians at
home to believe the rumours spread by the Russian agents that the
exiles had sold out to the Russian cause and had forsaken their occu-
pied country.425
Opinions among the exiles regarding the possible participation of the
Romanians in the hostilities were divided: some worried that enrolling
in the Ottoman army might appear politically incorrect to those who
believed that the Turks should withdraw from Europe altogether. The
idea of a Romanian ‘legion’ engaged on the battlefield in the Crimea
was not unique among the East-European diaspora groups. Prince
Czartoryski’s agent, Mihal Czajkovsky, who had converted to Islam
under the name Sadyk Pasha, was authorized by a Turkish ferman of
424
C. A. Rosetti to M. Rosetti, ed. Bucur, 1: 64.
425
Fotino 1: 211.
paris-gallipoli-constantinople 253
October 1853 to form a so-called battalion of “Ottoman Cossacks”

operating within the Ottoman army, but commanded by Polish offi-
cers.426 The international battalion’s seven hundred volunteers included
mostly Poles, but also Cossacks from the Dobrudja, Bursa and the Don,
Bulgarians, Romanians, Jews, Armenians and Serbs.427 Another close
associate of Prince Czartoryski, Wladislaw Zamoyski, also created a
Polish legion which enjoyed financial and logistic support from both
Britain and France. A Romanian legion as such, however, was bound
to remain an illusion, although individual Romanian participants
were allowed to enrol in the Turkish troops aligned by the Danube.
Gheorghe Magheru himself, Christian Tell, and Dimitrie Kretzulescu,
a former forty-eighter close to Ion Ghica, enlisted in Omer Pasha’s
army, but they were only a handful of isolated beneficiaries of conces-
sions granted to exiled Romanians and to Romanian officers who had
joined the Ottoman army previously.428 “The Turks do not want us”,
Rosetti reflected bitterly in his Diary, as he embarked in Marseilles
with Dumitru Brătianu and Golescu-Albu, bound for Gallipoli, in an
attempt to make the Romanians’ wishes heard above the noise of dip-
lomatic misunderstandings and the din of weapons.
Before he left for Turkey, Dumitru Brătianu had been entrusted
by Mazzini with one last, sensitive mission: meeting Lajos Kossuth
in a last-ditch attempt, on the eve of a major European conflict, to
make Romanians and Hungarians shake hands and put a troubled
past behind them. Kossuth, who, in Brătianu’s eyes, was an intrac-
table dictator, was not formally a member of the Central Democratic
Committee. The two men met in Mazzini’s small room in London and
a cautious agreement was reached: if the Hungarians and Romanians
of the Austrian Empire were going to be given arms and a chance to
fight against the Russians and the Austrians in the imminent war, the
two leaders pledged themselves to urge the volunteers to join forces
in the common action, although each side was to combat under its
own flag. At the end of the hostilities, the Transylvanians were to vote
in a referendum to decide whether they were to merge with Hungary
426
427
Cf. Raluca Tomi, “Dimitrie Kretzulescu voluntar în Războiul Crimeii – mărturii
inedite”, in Războiul Crimeii – 150 de ani de la încheiere, ed. Adrian Silvan Ionescu
(Brăila, 2006), 183–96, 186.
428
Fotino 1: 211, and Fotino 4: 57. Cf. Tomi, “Dimitrie Kretzulescu”, in Războiul
Crimeii, ed. Silvan Ionescu, 183–96.
254 1853
or not.429 At least temporarily, Kossuth thus showed a willingness to

compromise towards a less hardline project than his own outline of
1851, the “Kütahya Constitution”, which would have kept Transylva-
nia within Hungary without a right of appeal.
Rosetti, Alexandru Golescu-Albu, his brother Ştefan, and Dumitru
Brătianu left France on 22 November 1853, travelling (on a convoluted
route, due to missed connections) via Lyon, to Marseilles, Malta, Gal-
lipoli, with the final destination Belgrade, where they hoped to meet
the liberal-minded local governor Fuad Mehmed Pasha and discuss
the fate of the Principalities and their participation in the war. The
flamboyant Brătianu, travelling under the name ‘Dascal’ (meaning
‘teacher’ in Greek and in Romanian), wore blue-tinted spectacles and
carried a daguerreotype, which he later lost before he had a chance
to use it. As they stopped in Lyon on their first evening, they wrote a
joint letter to Marie and her children, Liby (also known affectionately
as ‘Biche’), Mircea and Vintilă, then in Paris, under the protection of
Radu Golescu and other exiles. “Vive Madame Marie Rosetti. Ma sainte
Marie à moi”, Golescu-Albu penned at the end of the message.430 En
route, Rosetti wrote tender letters to Marie, read Spinoza and Alfred
Dumesnil’s L’Art italien, and fretted over the imprisonment of Ion
Brătianu, ‘Beppo’, at the Sainte Pélagie, and over the general situation
in South-East Europe. The group travelled from Marseilles to Malta on
the Vectis on 27 November: the sea was rough, the weather bad, and
consequently the passage, according to Ştefan Golescu, turned out to
be worse than “Austrian prisons”.431
As they arrived in Malta on 1 December, they learned that, in spite
of all their planning, they had missed the last boat to Corfu, which
was their destination as initially planned. The six days’ wait meant
that Rosetti had the leisure to reflect on the events of recent years
and months and, more importantly, on the state of his marriage, and
sent his musings accompanied by Maltese pressed flowers, to Marie.
In a revealing letter of 2 December, he confessed to her a personal
dilemma that had haunted him in that period and which had a great
deal to do with a more general European debate regarding marriage:
should a woman be treated as an equal companion to the man, and
429
For Kossuth’s address to the “brave Romanian patriots of Moldo-Wallachia” of
6 December 1853, see Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 56.
430
431
Ibid., 66.
be associated to man’s work, as Michelet recommended, or should she

remain a “child-woman”, supported by her man, and allowed to live
in a more traditional ‘woman’s sphere’? However, whatever doubts
he may have had about his marriage and the role of Marie as a wife,
Rosetti was keen to publicise her role in the events of 1848 and pursued
the plan of having a translation of Michelet’s “Principautés Danubi-
ennes. Madame Rosetti” published in England. To that effect, he gave
instructions to Marie, advising her to borrow money from her brother
Effingham for the project which, however, was not to be realised.432
A former political ally of Mazzini’s, whom they met in Malta,
advised them against travelling from Corfu to Scutari on land, as they
intended, such was the danger posed by brigands: “One is assassinated
at the first glimpse of a shiny golden button”, Rosetti and his friends
were told.433 Following this advice, the travellers embarked on the old
and slow Eurotas on 6 December, bound for Gallipoli. Four hundred
and fifty Turkish soldiers joined them at Smyrna on 11 December, en
route to the Crimea, accompanied by a noisy band of acrobats and
dancers, who enlivened the monotonous crossing. The news was that
Christian Tell and his family had received permission and funding
from the Turkish government to leave Constantinople for Gallipoli,
as Tell had been granted permission to fight alongside the Ottoman
troops.434 Having reached Gallipoli on 15 December, Rosetti and
Dumitru Brătianu would have liked to travel on to the Ottoman capi-
tal, but Golescu-Negru wrote from Constantinople, where he lived in
exile, suggesting that their arrival would not be welcome there: neither
England, whose cabinet was still trying to obtain a peaceful solution,
nor the Porte would have wanted two Wallachian radicals on their ter-
ritory at a time when a diplomatic compromise was still being sought.
It was a question of image. The Golescus (brothers and cousin) and
Christian Tell believed that the presence of ‘radicals’ such as Brătianu
432
Ibid., 70. See above, p. 239.
433
C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 74. The name of this personage appears in
Bucur’s notes as ‘Giacomo Manzoni’, presented as a former finance minister of Mazzi-
ni’s. It has been impossible to identify him outside this source. Rosetti’s contact in
Malta was, in fact, Mazzini’s political ally Emilio Scaluras, whose name was tran-
scribed as ‘Scabiras’ and ‘Subirras’ in Rosetti’s edited correspondence. Cf. letter dated
25 December 1853 in Documente şi manuscrise literare, ed. Paul Cornea and Elena
Piru, 2 vols. (Bucharest, 1969), 2: 263.
434
256 1853
and Rosetti in the very midst of the conflict was likely to send the
wrong message to the Porte and to friendly Western cabinets.435
In Constantinople itself, according to Golescu-Negru, the Roma-
nian cause was being undermined by the moderate branch of the
diaspora led by Ion Eliade Rădulescu, the bête noire of the Romanian
radical emigration. The fez-wearing self-styled Heliad Bey had sug-
gested carving up the Romanian lands into Turkish pashalıks and
was apparently encouraging Ottoman and Western suspicions of the
radical exiles as firebrands hell-bent to “set fire to the four corners of
Europe.”436 The British Ambassador Stratford Canning was opposed
to an amnesty being granted to the Romanian exiles, whom he, too,
suspected of radicalism and subversion. The command of a small
Wallachian unit allowed to fight if hostilities ensued was given instead
to a conservative, Grigore Mihai Sturdza, the son of a former ruling
prince of Moldavia, who, as an officer in the Moldavian army, had
joined the Turkish army after 1848 and now had the rank of Gen-
eral under the name Muhlis Pasha.437 As Rosetti reported to Marie on
19 December, the former general Magheru, who was closer to the radi-
cal forty-eighters, had been summoned by the Turks to Constantino-
ple, and had joined the Wallachian unit under Sturdza’s command.438
In the face of Turkish and English resistance, and outdone by the
pro-Turkish faction of Heliad Bey, Rosetti doubted for a while that he
might be able to reach Belgrade and meet Fuad Effendi as planned.
“[. . .] I shall probably return to Paris, because the others, who are now
there [in Constantinople] are following the Turco-diplomatic line,
at which I am totally useless” he wrote to Marie.439 However, with
the help of a shipping agent in Gallipoli, for whom they had letters
of recommendation from their connections in Malta, Rosetti, Ştefan
Golescu and Brătianu managed to obtain teskerés (laissez-passers) for
Belgrade, in spite of the discouraging news that last-minute negotia-
tions were under way to reach an armistice, which would have been
435
Fotino 1: 213.
436
Fotino 1: 212, and Fotino 4: 60. Suspicions of Eliade’s intrigues are endorsed in
the memoirs of Dimitrie Kretzulescu, a Romanian officer who served in the Crimean
War in Sadyk Pasha’s batallion. Cf. Tomi, “Dimitrie Kretzulescu”, 186.
437
Grigore Mihai Sturdza (1821–1901), from one of Romania’s main ruling families,
completed mathematical and military studies in Paris and Berlin, and later became a
Conservative senator and deputy in unified Romania. Cf. C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti,
1: 81, note 4.
438
Ibid., 80.
439
Ibid.
the end of the Romanian bid for a Russian military defeat and a post-
war settlement. “We started on our journey on the 22 [December]”,
Rosetti wrote to Marie, “at 8 in the morning, five men and six horses:
there we were, the three of us, a swarthy guide, a kavas,440 a dorobanţ441
or grenadier, and a horse carrying the luggage. We were not unlike the
famous knight of the sad countenance when he left his household and,
riding his old Rossinanta [sic], left to bring succour to the poor. Our
story is much like his, and our horses – not to mention our appear-
ances – are not unlike that of the knight and his beast.’442
After a difficult journey, on 26 December they were in Adrianople,
the grateful recipients of the largesse and hospitality of the Wiltshires,
two English brothers for whom they had recommendations from the
shipping agent in Gallipoli. Travelling in the harsh Balkan winter was
arduous, and, on horseback, with their strange dress and provisions,
they offered quite a sight to the locals: sometimes they were taken
for English couriers, and, generally, they looked so business-like and
important that Turkish station-masters offered them free meals, while
native inn-keepers along the route charged them triple their normal
prices.443
440
Tk. kavas = official courier-interpreter.
441
A soldier in the Romanian district regiments.
442
443
Letter to Marie, 14 January 1854, in ibid., 92.
JANUARY–FEBRUARY 1854
LONDON
Without the Russian monster was checked in his

dishonest and aggressive practices, the liberty of the
world was in jeopardy.
Mr. Whitworth, Sheffield Town Hall, 9 January
1854444
If Mr. Cobden’s advice had been taken, where, let
us ask, would have been the nationality of Moldavia
and Wallachia?
London Examiner, 29 July 1854
Dumitru Brătianu must be credited for almost single-handedly forging
a small lobby of philo-Romanians in the period 1849 to 1859, when he
resided, with occasional interruptions, in Britain.445 Although the actual
impact of his lobbying there is sometimes questioned,446 it is perhaps
worth remembering that, as an exiled Romanian, he worked in almost
complete isolation and in defiance of some very well-entrenched for-
eign policy trends. As Russian troops massed yet again along the Mol-
davian border in the summer of 1853, Brătianu wrote to Lord Dudley
Stuart, asking him to raise the issue of the neutrality of the Principali-
ties in the House of Commons. Brătianu set out to flatter his hosts’
pride in their political traditions and institutions, as he wrote that, in
his view, Britain was the one European power capable of “understand-
ing the cry for liberty and truth amongst other peoples.”447 Both Lord
Dudley Stuart and other Britons favourably inclined to the Romanian
cause had to tread a cautious line between the traditional British pol-
icy of defending Ottoman integrity and the rising tide of anti-Russian
feeling. Sadly, Dudley Stuart was to die in Stockholm in September
444
London Examiner, 14 January 1854.
445
Hope, “Dumitru Brătianu and British public opinion”, 27–52.
446
Cojocariu, Partida Naţională, 237.
447
Hope, “Dumitru Brătianu and British public opinion”, 31. The “Correspondence
of Dumitru Brătiano and Lord Dudley C. Stuart, M.P., on the Danubian Principalities
in 1853” is in the Forster Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Pamphlet
Moldavia and Wallachia No. 388. This exchange was published in French by Armand
Lévy in La Russie sur le Danube. See p. 236 above.
london 259
1854 as he lobbied for Poland, his chief cause, and the small circle of
British philo-Romanians lost a determined, vocal member.
In December 1853 France and Britain sent ships into the Black Sea,
but the Tsar refused to withdraw his troops from the territories of
the Danubian Principalities, and recalled his ambassadors from Paris
and London, a gesture which amounted to a declaration of war. In
Bucharest, Effingham Grant was left in charge of the British Consulate
during the absence of Consul-General Robert Colquhoun, who trav-
elled on a fact-finding mission to Bosnia, Serbia and Herzegovina.448 In
early January 1854, Grant was already reporting Russian troubles in
Wallachia to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Clarendon: the Russians had
required the incorporation of the entire Wallachian Militia of 10,000
men into the various Russian regiments now poised for war, and the
Wallachian Prince, Barbu Ştirbey, although nominally Russia’s man
in the province, was threatening his resignation.449 During the con-
flict, units from the Wallachian and Moldavian armies were indeed
often pressurized into joining the occupying Russian troops against
the Ottoman Porte. Officers and soldiers who refused were arrested,
subjected to molestation and even deported, while horses, weapons
and equipment were often requisitioned, never to be returned.450 Also
according to intelligence obtained by Grant, the Russians were rais-
ing troops of so-called ‘Crusaders’, ethnic Greeks, Moldo-Wallachians,
Albanians, Serbs and Bulgarians, who, wearing white shakos with the
cross of St. George on them, were to act as agents provocateurs and
incite risings among the Orthodox Christians in South-East Europe
in suport of their co-religionists “oppressed” by the Turks.451 At the
Golescu family manor in southern Romania, searches which produced
448
PRO/FO 78/945, Turkey (Wallachia), to and from Mr. Colquhoun and Mr.
Grant, diplomatic, October to December 1853, dispatch from Bucharest, 20 November
1853; 8 December 1853, Memorandum of instructions for Mr. Grant.
449
PRO/FO 78/1010, Dispatch from E. Grant to Lord Clarendon, 2 January 1854.
450
Horia Vladimir Şerbănescu, “Participarea unor unităţi româneşti la operaţiuni
militare în timpul Războiului Crimeii (1853–1855)”, in Războiul Crimeii, ed. Silvan
Ionescu, 163–72. Some of these incidents were reported in the European and the
British press. Cf. for instance “The Russians and the Moldavian Militia”, in the Daily
News of 15 September 1854.
451
PRO/FO 78/1010, Dispatch from Effingham Grant to Lord Clarendon, 11 Janu-
ary 1854, 34. See also ms. letter of the exiled revolutionary N. Pleşoianu, probably
dated 1855, in which he accuses the conservative, first-class Wallachian boyars of
having helped recruit in 1854 into the Russian so-called “Greek-Slavonic” Legion,
Biblioteca Naţională, P. CCCLXXI, Dossier 13.
260 january–february 1854
no incriminating evidence resulted, however, in a new arrest for the

young Constantin Racoviţă, no stranger to Russian attention. In the
absence of new justifications for his arrest, the Russians revived old
accusations relating to his participation in the events of 1848–49, and
he was taken to Hotin fortress in Bessarabia and from there to Kiev,
where he was detained in military barracks for a few months without
a trial before being released.452
In Britain, popular meetings – some with a massive attendance –
were being organized around the country to debate the state of inter-
national affairs and the opportuneness or not of going to war with
Russia. More importantly, at stake was also a new concept of foreign
affairs, the conduct of which, people felt, was not to be left solely in the
hands of politicians, but had to be debated in the press and subjected
to popular scrutiny. On 4 January, in Chester, speaking in front of two
thousand people, a Mr. Temple, probably a local notable, denounced
the “shuffling game of diplomacy” and appealed to the “politics of
patriotism”,453 the very spirit of which the Romanians had been trying
to enlist on their side:
It is high time that we should have a voice in our management of foreign
affairs, because unfortunately as it appears to me, and I speak it with
great humility, this country has hitherto had her foreign affairs arranged
and carried out in not what is called a straightforward old-English man-
ner. (Cheers.)454
The message was clear: Britain was morally obliged to go to war:
If Austria and Sweden and some others do not feel with us, let them keep
from us; but give me those nations who really have at heart the prog-
ress of free governments in Europe. Give me France (cheers); America
(cheers); give me Hungary (cheers); give me Poland (cheers); and I care
not who are the despots who link themselves together to stop that prog-
ress. We shall then, as the old kingdom of England, which has at all
times raised her flag for the protection of freedom, rally round the flag
and say we care nothing for all the nations and despots, and we will tell
those in this country, whatever position they occupy, that the people
452
Letter from Zinca Golescu to Ştefan Golescu, 22 January 1854, in Fotino 4: 64
and letter from the same to her other sons, Nicolae and Alexandru, 14 February 1854,
in Fotino 4: 76.
453
Cf. the title of Jonathan Parry’s study The Politics of Patriotism: English liberal-
ism, national identity and Europe, 1830–1886 (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
454
London Examiner of 14 January 1854.
london 261
of England will not tolerate for one moment any countenance to that
which increases the fettering of the freedom of Europe, of which I firmly
believe Russia is at present the greatest bane. (Cheers.)455
A politically savvy Mr. Johnes, Judge of the County Court of the North
West Wales district, present at the meeting in Chester, linked the
events of 1853–54 to the betrayal of the ideals of “clemency”, “human-
ity” and freedom, sacrificed to Russia in 1848–49, proving that, per-
haps, ordinary people had a more encompassing attention span than
usually given credit for. He concluded by saying that:
It is not merely by a common interest or by ancient treaties that we are
bound to support the Sovereign of the Turkish Empire. We are bound to
do so by honour and good faith. You will probably recollect that when
pressed by Russia and Austria to surrender the Polish and Hungarian
refugees, that Sovereign appealed to England and France, and those
nations pledged themselves to protect him from the consequences of
his refusal to violate the laws of hospitality. Now these aggressions of
Russia are, undoubtedly, consequences of his firmness in defending the
refugees [. . .].456
Similar gatherings were being organized around the country, and sim-
ilar messages were being sent to those in power by a nation rallying
round a new sense of national pride grounded in what were supposed
to be traditional English moral values. At Sheffield Town Hall one
hundred “true-hearted Englishmen” gathered on 9 January 1854 to
hear their Alderman, Mr. Car, ask for a joint Anglo-French action
against the “wanton and aggressive war” launched by the Tsar:
Could we, as Englishmen, sit calmly by and see one of the most vain and
ambitious men that ever lived upon this earth walk into the Principali-
ties of the Turkish dominions, take possession of them, threaten them,
and exercise some of the most cruel and cowardly acts towards them that
could possibly be? (Shame.)457
Today, some of these vox-pop statements may sound naïve or sen-
timental, others unexpectedly well-informed. What they all had in
common was the passionate adherence of representative cross-sections
of the nation to a set of moral values which – people increasingly
felt – should underscore politics, and the enthusiastic adoption of a
455
Ibid.
456
Ibid.
457
“Resistance to Russia”, in the London Examiner, 14 January 1854.
262 january–february 1854
new notion of popular participation in the making of world history.

The masses were becoming increasingly adept at challenging the wield-
ers of power. The weight of public opinion in pushing the agenda for
war in 1853–4 is still a matter of debate, but a Britain on the warpath
was what Brătianu and his lobby wanted to see.
JANUARY 1854
SERBIA
On Saturday, 14 January 1854, the day on which the Examiner pub-

lished the calls to arms of the citizens of Chester and Sheffield, the
peripatetic Rosetti, Ştefan Golescu and Dumitru Brătianu finally
arrived in Belgrade, hoping that war would be declared, enabling them
to go to the Danubian port Vidin and organise their contribution to
the military conflict. They still hoped to be able to organise a corps
of Romanian volunteers and advance against the occupying Russian
troops in Wallachia.458 While the Serbians, fearing Russian reprisals,
were not particularly pleased to have three Romanian revolutionaries
in their midst, a helping hand was extended to them by Charles Arène,
a French teacher and former resident of Wallachia, who introduced
himself as a “compatriot” and who offered to facilitate the nomads’
correspondence and the circulation of propaganda material. On
20 January, Rosetti asked Marie to request 1,000 copies of his news-
paper Republica Română, published in Brussels, and send it to Arène
in Belgrade. Rosetti’s study “Rusia” (Russia) had been published in
the latest issue, no. 2 of 1853, and he was probably hoping to circu-
late it and agitate the spirits once back on Romanian territory.459 The
text was an exhortation to fellow-exiles to continue to resist Russian
pressures, and to all Romanians to uphold their basic right to express
their demands in the face of the “chief of despotism” who, in his fear,
was capable of everything, including “stopping the electric telegraph
and spying on the very dreams of people.”460 The Russian and Aus-
trian authorities were policing the entire Danubian region in coop-
eration with the Oltenian regional and county officials, who in their
turn liaised with the central authorities in Bucharest and had enlisted
the services of an indeterminate number of informers. Those arrested
included priests, peasants and members of the border guards who had
opposed armed resistance to the advancing Russian troops. One of
458
Letters of 19 and 20 January 1854 from Belgrade, in C. A. Rosetti către
M. Rosetti, 1: 94–6.
459
Ibid., 94, 97, and 98, note 4.
460
C. A. Rosetti, “Rusia”, reproduced in Antologia gîndirii româneşti, Secolele
XV–XIX, ed. C. I. Gulian, Part I (Bucharest, 1967), 420–4, 422.
264 january 1854
those suspected of anti-Russian action, a major Burileanu, inspector

of the dorobanţi, committed suicide before he could be arrested and
tried.461
Passing through the Serbian village Milanowitz on 25 January,
Rosetti stopped on the banks of the Danube to wash his face and have
a drink of what to him was the water of a sacred, symbolic river, the
river about which he had written not so long before to Michelet.462 He
was astounded by the pro-Russian feelings which, he believed, pre-
dominated among the general population of Serbia: “The French have
not forgotten Moscow, and the Russians know the route to Paris. Woe
to Napoleon”, a defiant Serbian local told him. One explanation for
this, Rosetti believed, was that the occupying Turks had done nothing
to ingratiate themselves to the native Balkan populations. In contrast,
the Russians had consistently sent money and emissaries, while also
having cultural prestige and religion on their side among the South
Slavs, mused Rosetti bitterly in a letter to his wife. He felt, however,
that the Serbian government did not share their people’s bias.463
At Vidin, the exiles from Paris were reunited with fellow-exiles from
Bursa. The rumours of a mysterious Romanian corps of 1,200 soldiers
advancing towards Little Wallachia (Oltenia, General Magheru’s ter-
ritory) proved unfounded. The approximately 25,000 (in Rosetti’s
estimation) Turkish troops occupied precarious positions around the
town of Calafat and were reluctant to attack the 30,000 or so Russian
troops secure in their fortified positions encircling them. The Roma-
nian would-be volunteers had been promised 3,000 guns by the Turks,
but, given the distribution of enemy armies on the ground, they did not
have enough men or suitable positions to deploy them. They had the
support of the Pasha of Vidin, the sympathetic, ‘revolutionary’ Sami
Pasha.464 Sami, an ally of the former rebel Pasha of Egypt Mehmet Ali,
461
A number of archival documents on Russian and Austrian repression in Oltenia
in 1853–54 have been published by Paul-Emanoil Barbu in Acţiuni sociale şi politice
româneşti în anii 1853–1854: documente (Bucharest, 2003), esp. 120–139. My reference
is to docs. 81, 102, 104. One of the central government officials overseeing the arrests
and prosecutions was none other than the now reinstated polcovnic Ioan Solomon,
one of the organisers of the anti-revolutionary putsch in 1848. See Part One, p. 82.
462
C .A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 100.
463
Ibid., 102, 110.
464
Abdurrahman Sami Paşa, governor (Walis) of Vidin from 1852 to 1855, was
born in Greece. He became Turkey’s first Minister for Education in 1857. In his cor-
respondence, Rosetti refers to him as ‘Samil’ Pasha.
serbia 265
was, Rosetti wrote, a ‘fellow-exile’, but his benevolence was continu-

ously offset by the hostile attitude of Ahmed, the Pasha of Calafat.465
In Semlin (Zemun), the three Golescu brothers lobbied with the pow-
erful Omer Pasha, the mushir of Roumelia, and the former commander
of the Turkish troops of occupation in Wallachia after 1848, who
gave them a warm reception. The ambitious and mercurial Croatian-
born Pasha even gave one of his famous Arab pure-breed horses to
Christian Tell as a general’s gift to another. But his attitude changed
inexplicably only days later. Although Ştefan Golescu had only asked
to be enlisted as a simple soldier under General Tell’s command, the
price to be paid proved too high. Omer Pasha demanded in the first
instance an open reconciliation of the ‘radicals’ with the ‘moderate’
Ion Eliade Rădulescu, a further sign to the Golescus that Heliad Bey
had been busy intriguing behind their backs in Constantinople. When
the Pasha asked of Golescu to retract everything he had written against
Austria, saying that the Porte needed Austria’s benevolent neutrality,
Ştefan Golescu explained that he was not seeking a political role in the
aftermath of the conflict and was ready to become an exile again rather
than withdraw what he had written about the “perfidious and danger-
ous Austria.”466 Omer Pasha ended his dialogue with the Romanian
envoys on 8 March 1854 with a letter in which he demanded that the
Wallachians leave Semlin immediately. It is unclear whether this was
solely the outcome of a clash of egos, or whether it was also due to
back-stage intrigues by a power-hungry Eliade, allied to the son of the
former Moldavian Prince, and possibly new ‘pretender’, Grigore Mihail
Sturdza, as the Golescus surmised.467 Most probably, the disappointing
outcome of the negotiations was also the result of the consistently sus-
tained Turkish and British position over the Romanian participation
in the Crimean conflict, which they considered undesirable.
A prey to frustration, Rosetti fulminated in his letters to Marie
against the depletion of the Wallachian state budget by the occupying
armies and against senseless acts of cruelty to which civilians were
subjected by the Russian troops. In addition, he had been informed
that the Russians often kidnapped unarmed Romanian peasants and
enrolled them forcibly into their own troops.468 Several letters to Marie
465
466
Fotino 1: 217; Fotino 4: 93.
467
Fotino 4: 92–7.
468
266 january 1854
recounted acts of futile heroism, such as the opposition of the Roma-

nian villagers of Pristol who, armed solely with wooden sticks, chased
away a regiment of Cossacks, only to be massacred by returning Rus-
sian troops. Karl Marx confirmed one of Rosetti’s accounts of an anti-
Russian uprising in Oltenia by 400 plăieşi (border guards), who ended
up being disarmed and disbanded by the hostile Ahmed, the Pasha of
Calafat.469 Rosetti asked Marie to write up a note on the incident with
Ion Brătianu’s help and send it to La Presse, where she had been an
occasional contributor recently. In 1861, Rosetti’s Românul carried a
text by Ion Brătianu, written in 1854, where the Romanians are pre-
sented as long-time enemies of Russia, their oppressor, and “represen-
tatives of the Western world” in South-East Europe. Turkey was urged
to arm and allow thirty to forty thousand combat-ready Romanians to
take part in the war. One can presume that this is the text commis-
sioned by Rosetti.470
In a conversation with the Romanian exiles, the sympathetic Sami
Pasha confessed his scepticism as to Turkey’s ability to “save herself ”,
unless she decided to encourage the active, belligerent co-operation of
the “peoples.” “Gentlemen, you must arouse Transylvania and foment
revolutions elsewhere, too”, was his advice, as reported by a delighted
Rosetti on 4 February 1854.471 However, by 15 February the situation
was still stagnant, and the recall of Sami Pasha, the “Lion of Vidin” –
who had obviously overstepped his brief – was a new blow to hopes
of a military engagement nurtured by the Romanians. Rosetti was
worried that the burden of maintaining the Ottoman army and the
inevitable abuses, caused especially by the Turkish irregular troops,
were going to turn the populations of the southern Balkans against
the Turks, whom they were in fact supposed to actively support in an
anti-Russian campaign.472 Nothing changed over the next three weeks,
and on 4 March, Rosetti complained to his wife that they were still
‘burning their hands on the kitchen stove rather than in the Russians’
469
Karl Marx, Însemnări despre români (Bucharest, 1964), 163 and C. A. Rosetti
către M. Rosetti, 1: 103–6 and note 7. Marx’s source could well have been one of
Rosetti’s articles.
470
“Despre rolul Românilor din Principate în războiul actual” (1854) in Ion C.
Brătianu, Acte şi cuvântări, ed. Marinescu and Grecescu, 1: 59, 62.
471
472
Ibid., 110.
serbia 267
fire’ and that he felt guilty for not being able to do more for “Her” (his
code for Romania, the forbidden homeland).473
Letters – written half in code and often using conspiratorial names –
between the three exiles, now stuck in Vidin, and their relatives and
friends in Paris and elsewhere continued to be transmitted mainly via
the French and British consular services in Serbia and via their contact
Charles Arène. Thomas De Grenier Fonblanque, the British Consul-
General in Serbia, is frequently cited in Rosetti’s letters to his wife
in this period as one of the main contact names to be used by the
diaspora for sending correspondence, threatened otherwise by Aus-
trian interception.474 Thomas Fonblanque’s brother was the better-
known Albany Fonblanque, editor of the London Examiner, which
welcomed pro-Romanian contributions in the 1850s. Another fig-
ure in the exiled Romanians’ support networks at the time was the
highly colourful Ange Pechméja, a writer and one of the ‘proscrits du
2 Décembre’. A former journalist at Adam Mickiewicz’s La Tribune des
peuples, Pechméja had for one brief moment in 1849 fallen foul of the
Wallachian exiled revolutionaries when he had insinuated in one of
his – otherwise sympathetic – articles that Suleyman Pasha’s favours
had been bought during their brief tenure of power.475 Pechméja him-
self had to find refuge in Turkey after Louis Napoléon’s coup and later
found employment as interpreter during the Crimean War. Fluent in
Turkish, Arabic and Persian, the future editor of the newspaper Le
Républicain du Lot (1872) was the dragoman of the Pasha of Vidin
when Rosetti campaigned there.476 New allies were added to the list of
helpers in the Danubian campaign. Cryptically referred to in Rosetti’s
letters to Marie as “three English newspaper correspondents”, they
were Joseph Archer Crowe, correspondent for the Illustrated London
473
Ibid., 118.
474
Erroneously transcribed as ‘Foublanc’ or ‘Foublanqe’, he was not correctly iden-
tified by Marin Bucur in his edition of the Rosetti correspondence. See C .A. Rosetti
către M. Rosetti, 1: 62, note 2.
475
Smochină, “Sur les émigrés roumains à Paris”, 162–3.
476
C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 114 and 115–6, note 9. After the double election
of Prince Cuza in 1858, Ange Pechméja settled in Bucharest, working as a translator
and civil servant in the Foreign Ministry. He was the first translator of Baudelaire
into Romanian. His main work, the esoteric L’Oeuf de Kneph, was first published in
Bucharest, in La Voix de la Roumanie 4, 2–4; 6–8; 11–5 (1863–64) and afterwards
in a separate volume, L’oeuf de Kneph. Histoire secrète du zéro (Bucharest, 1864). Upon
his return to France in 1870, he founded the newspaper Le Républicain du Lot. Cf.
D. Popovici, Cercetări de literatură română (Sibiu, 1944), Ch. “Studii franco-române”,
107–65.
268 january 1854
News during the Crimean war, the French artist Constantine Guys,
working for the same publication and, presumably, Edwin Lawrence
Godkin from the Daily News, the liberal paper launched by Dickens
in 1946. They became part of the exiles’ social circle during their stay
in Vidin and, like Pechméja, Arène and the Pasha, furtively facilitated
the passage of letters.477 The above list of names suggests that the exiles’
pan-European solidarity networks were based on sub-groups connected
via close family, liberal, republican and Masonic ties which have been
under-studied in the historiography and often remain obscure.478
While Rosetti and his associates were campaigning in the Balkans,
the younger Brătianu brother, Ion, was still fighting a war of his own
as his trial in the Hippodrome affair continued in Paris.479 News of the
sentence passed on him in January 1854 reached Rosetti in early Feb-
ruary, as he was waiting for a decision regarding the participation of
the Romanian corps in the Crimean War.480 As Rosetti and his group
continued to wait in frustrating inaction at Vidin in early March 1854,
the ‘Franco-Roumains’ in Paris were trying to agitate on behalf of the
Romanian cause and the Eastern Question. Rosetti had access to some
of the French newspapers, including La Presse, which the Pasha of
Vidin subscribed to, and asked Marie and Ion Brătianu to pass on
his congratulations to Jean Abdolonyme Ubicini for his recent study
“La Question de l’Orient devant l’Europe”, in which he outlined for
French readers the complex causes of the Crimean War and the price
paid by the Romanians in the conflict. “[. . .] shake his hand firmly for
me and tell him that, should I become king of the Romanians, I will
grant him 28 rations of grain”, Rosetti joked.481
477
The journalists were not identified as such by Marin Bucur in his edition of the
Rosettis’ correspondence. Cf. letters from Rosetti to Marie, 4 and 10 March 1854, in
C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 118, 123. For their presence in Vidin in the spring
of 1854, see Eric D. Tappe, “E. E. and J. A. Crowe and the Rumanian Union: some
unpublished letters of 1857”, Slavonic and East European Review 41, 96 (Dec. 1962):
135–43. For E. L. Godkin, see below, p. 278.
478
In 1851 the Romanians in Paris were reported to attend meetings of the lodge
“La Fraternité des peuples”, a name which suggests a strong internationalist empha-
sis, but further information on the contacts they established there is still lacking. Cf.
Calendrier maçonnique, Paris, 1851, 282 and Revue maçonnique de la France et de
l’étranger (Paris, 1 December 1856), 3 cited in Smochină, “Sur les émigrés roumains
à Paris”, 193–4, note 3.
479
See above, p. 242 sqq.
480
Letter from Rosetti to Marie, 5 March 1854, in C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti,
1: 119. The final decision in the ‘affaire Bratiano’ was passed in June 1856, see Part
Three, pp. 314–5.
481
Ibid., 121.
serbia 269
On 21 March, writing from Vidin to Ion Brătianu, Rosetti admitted

defeat in his campaign to obtain arms and permission to fight along-
side the Turks. “Should you see our Romanians, how ready they are to
fight, how magnificent they look and how much they suffer, you would
either run amok or do something mad. I have been tempted constantly.
But what can one do! There are no weapons; and the enemies are the
Turks, the Moskals, the Germans, the French and the English, and
everybody else [. . .].” Neutral Austria, interested in maintaining a buf-
fer zone against Russia in the Ottoman Balkans, had been observing
closely the Russo-Turkish conflict and the ensuing Russian occupation
of the Principalities. By the autumn of 1853, some 200,000 Austrian
troops had been quietly positioned along the exposed Russian west-
ern flank and, had it not been for the competing agendas of Britain
and France, the conflict might have ended without escalating into a
war. Amidst growing fears of an Austrian occupation of Wallachia,
a defeatist Rosetti advised his friends to abandon all hope in diplo-
macy.482 The Romanians had ample grounds for believing themselves
to be surrounded by enemies on all sides. Since July 1853, Drouyn
de Lhuys had been urging Austria to wrest control of the Romanian
Principalities from Russia, and even some of the Romanian notables
and émigrés had appealed for an Austrian occupation, according to
the Austrian consul in Bucharest, baron von Laurin.483 As perpetual
“bargaining counters” in the Eastern Question, the Principalities were
caught up once again between their weakening Ottoman suzerain, the
aspiring Russians and the often ‘duplicitous’ and opportunistic Allies.484
The blueprints for their future were varied and conflicting: Stratford
and Colquhoun pursued a traditional pro-Ottoman policy of keep-
ing the Principalities under the sovereignty of an inviolable Ottoman
Empire, although Lord John Russell would have encouraged their
virtual independence. In addition, both Lord Palmerston and Napo-
leon III occasionally played with the idea of awarding them to Austria
as compensation for her voluntary renunciation of Lombardy-Venetia.
Other possible scenarios included leaving them under Russian control
482
Arhivele Naţionale, Bucharest, Fonds Brătianu, Inv. (Pressmark) 1286, Dossiers
210, 212.
483
Paul W. Schroeder, Austria, Great Britain, and the Crimean War. The Destruc-
tion of the European Concert (Cornell University Press, 1972), 206 and 471, note 30.
The reference here is to letters addressed to Laurin in May–June 1854.
484
The phrase “bargainign counters” in ibid.
270 january 1854
or under Ottoman military occupation.485 The Austrian Foreign Min-

ister Count Buol’s approach to the Principalities, it has been argued,
was chiefly in line with his essentially defensive, pre-emptive foreign
policy, although he often collided with the more hawkish elements in
the Austrian military who would have preferred, and later attempted
to apply, more invasive plans in the area.486 In this reading of Austrian
defensiveness, émigré activities were a major factor: in Buol’s view, an
Austrian occupation of the provinces was chiefly intended to neutral-
ize both the restlessness of Polish and Hungarian elements in Omer
Pasha’s army and the conspiracies fomented by the exiled radicals out-
side Romanian borders, but with the tacit support of the British and
French consuls there.487
The “Holy War”, as Ştefan Golescu called the Crimean conflict, did
finally break out.488 Russia and Turkey had officially been at war since
mid-October 1853. After much prevarication, the Aberdeen cabinet
gave in to pressure from both a public which had grown fiercely anti-
Russian, and from a press which sounded increasingly jingoistic and
militaristic. In France, ordinary people were rather apathetic during
the pre-war negotiations and even after the sinking of the Ottoman
fleet by the Russians at Sinope on 30 November 1853. French public
opinion continued to be highly divided on the subject, although busi-
ness and political circles were by and large mostly hostile to a mili-
tary engagement and an abhorred Anglo-French alliance. In France,
anti-English sentiment was often more powerful than anti-Russian
attitudes, largely due to a vigorous anti-British campaign mounted
by legitimist-Orléanist groups.489 The publication of Anglo-Franco-
Russian diplomatic documents from the months leading to the war
declaration, which showed that every possible means of avoiding war
had been attempted, went some way towards creating a mildly pro-
war current of opinion.490 Napoleon III himself appears to have been
485
Ibid., 231. Cf. also Ch. 9: “The Desperate Gamble”.
486
See the analysis by Paul W. Schroeder, “Austria and the Danubian Principalities,
1853–1856”, Central European History 2, 3 (Sept. 1969): 216–36. Count Karl Ferdi-
nand von Buol-Schauenstein was the Austrian envoy to St. Petersburg and London
(1851–1852) before becoming Foreign Minister, a post he held from 1852 to 1859.
487
Schroeder, Austria, 211.
488
For a brief and cogently written account of the run-up to the Crimean War, see
Chamberlain, ‘Pax Britannica’?, Ch. 7.
489
Lynn M. Case, French Opinion on War and Diplomacy during the Second Empire
(New York, 1972), 15–25.
490
Ibid., 25.
serbia 271
a pacifist and a cosmopolitan European, not easily pushed into war by

the pressure of public opinion. But he also had a sense of mission in
foreign affairs and dreamed of recapturing the grandeur that France
had lost in 1815: France’s diplomatic and military visibility in a major
European war was a means of reclaiming that glory. It was amidst this
rather confused atmosphere that France and Britain declared war on
Russia on 27 and 28 March 1854 respectively.
The Romanians had high expectations of the war. Dumitru Brătianu
was not wide of the mark when he wrote that “Providence has brought
it about for the express benefit of the Romanians, in order to provide
them with an occasion to acquaint Europe with their struggles, their
rights, their need for independence, to help them regain their due place
in the great family of civilised peoples.”491 Armed conflicts are known
to inspire interest in the languages and cultures of troubled war zones,
and the Crimean War was no exception. The conflict marked possibly
the earliest, ephemeral, blossoming of British cultural interest in the
Danubian Principalities. The first elementary English grammar of the
Romanian language appeared in 1854 in Suggestions for the Assistance
of Officers in Learning the Languages of the Seat of War in the East by
the distinguished Oxonian philologist Friedrich Max Müller. It was
a basic outline rather than a manual, but it had at least the merit of
stressing the Romance origin of the Wallachian language, one point on
the emigrés’ publicity agenda. The language itself had been “brought
into notoriety by the fate of the unfortunate Wallachians, who have
had to bear the first shock of the war, between their protectors on
either side”, as Müller insightfully noted.492
In France the ongoing Russian occupation of the Romanian Prin-
cipalities became the target of attacks, often in highly popular media
such as the satirical Le Charivari and in spin-offs by its contributors.
The two-volume Messieurs les Cosaques, a compilation of sketches by
Taxile Delord, Clément Carraguel and Louis Huart, was presented as
“A charivaric, comical and above all truthful account of the high deeds
of the Russians in the East.”493 One sketch in the collection was set
in the residential hotel in Bucharest of Prince Mikhail Dmitriyevich
491
Letter CXLVII in Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu, 1: 52.
492
Max Müller, Suggestions for the Assistance of Officers in learning the Languages of
the Seat of War in the East (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1854), 38.
493
Messieurs les Cosaques: Relation charivarique, comique et surtout véridique des
hauts faits des Russes en Orient, par M. M. Taxile Delord, Clément Carraguel et Louis
Huart (100 vignettes par Cham.), 2 vols. (Paris, 1854–1855).
272 january 1854
Gorchakov,494 the commanding general of the occupying Russian

troops, where groups of people suspected of subversion were brought
in for trial.
A new group of people is brought forward. It comprises a dozen of
boyars.
“Goulatromboff ?”
“Your Highness?”
“Read the act of accusation against these gentlemen.”
“This is very simple, Your Highness. Warned by a Cossack guard, I sur-
prised these gentlemen conversing round a table.”
“Were they conspiring?”
“They were reading a French newspaper, the Charivari.”
“This is as much as saying they were conspiring. You are aware, gentle-
men, that the circulation and consequently the reading of French jour-
nals is absolutely forbidden. I could have you shot or hanged, but, as I
respect the privileges of the nobility, I am content simply with sending
you to Siberia. You are going to read the Charivari at Tobolsk. Bon voy-
age, messieurs, bon voyage!”495
Like most caricatures, this one, too, had a basis in fact. As a Russian
officer during the Polish rebellion of 1830–1, governor of Warsaw in
1846 and chief-of-staff during the Russian intervention in Hungary in
1848–49, Prince Mikhail Gorchakov had earned a well-deserved repu-
tation as the tsar’s strong man in Eastern Europe, and his control of
the Principalities was characteristically brutal. In mid-November 1853,
the Earl of Clarendon expressed concerns over reports that Prince
Gorchakov had threatened to have all Moldo-Wallachians who “spoke
disrespectfully of Russia” hanged without trial.496
494
Prince Mikhail Dmitryievich Gorchakov (1793–1861) was related to Aleksander
Gorchakov, Russia’s Foreign Minister from 1856 to 1882.
495
Messieurs les Cosaques, 145.
496
Letter from the Earl of Clarendon to the Earl of Westmoreland, 16 November
1853, in House of Commons Parliamentary Papers online, 1854, Turkey. Correspondence
respecting the rights and privileges of the Latin and Greek churches in Turkey, 644.
THE CRIMEAN WAR
As a result of the declaration of war, on 6 April, Effingham Grant, still

in charge at the British Consulate in Colquhoun’s absence, informed
the Foreign Secretary, Lord Clarendon, that the Russians had requested
the departure of all Western consuls from Bucharest within eight days.
Grant intended to leave with his entire family.497 The Foreign Office
gave him permission to leave his post and instructed him to leave the
British subjects in the country under the protection of the Belgian
consul.498 It is not known if and for how long Grant may have left the
country.
On 4 April, tired of waiting pointlessly in Vidin, Rosetti had decided
to visit Constantinople, against the advice of his friends and the wishes
of his enemies. He intended to meet up there with the moderate Ion
Ghica, Bey of Samos and Romanian envoy at the Porte, who had good
connections among the foreign diplomatic corps in the Ottoman capi-
tal, and enjoyed the support of Stratford Canning.499 However, Ghica
had already left for Samos when Rosetti arrived and consequently,
without letters of introduction, Rosetti was unable to obtain entry into
the complex diplomatic networks of Constantinople. Stratford Can-
ning, who was opposed to the project of an eventual union of the
Romanian Principalities, tried to persuade General Magheru that the
much hoped-for ferman whereby the Porte would declare its support
for Romanian autonomy and the union would be premature in the
context of Austrian resistance to such radical goals.500 The visit was,
however, an opportunity for Rosetti to renew friendships and con-
nections with Polish émigré revolutionaries, such as General Józef
Wysocki, the former commander of the Polish legion in Hungary,
and others, who were then living in Constantinople, awaiting, like the
Romanians, the outcome of the diplomatic manoeuvering going on
behind closed doors.501 However, Rosetti, an impatient man of action,
497
PRO/FO 78/1010, 102.
498
PRO/FO 78/1010, Draft letter to Mr. Grant, 23 May 1854. Robert Colquhoun
returned to Bucharest on 29 August 1854.
499
C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 126, 148.
500
Letter from Rosetti, 18 April 1854, in ibid., 127.
501
Letter of 18 April 1854, in ibid., 129.
274 1855–1856
had lost faith in diplomacy, especially in the light of his failed crusade
in the Balkans:
“Yes, I think that everything is over for us”, he wrote to his wife on
25 April, “I think that we will not obtain anything, that our suffering has
been entirely in vain, and that soon the best thing left for me to do will
be to return to my beloved hearth and cry in your arms over yet another
wasted opportunity to do something for our beloved Patrie.”502
The failure of Rosetti’s mission was sealed a few days later. His friend
and philo-Romanian Amédée Jérôme Langlois, a former republican
journalist for Proudhon’s Ami du Peuple, then living in exile in Con-
stantinople, met the visiting Prince Jérôme Napoléon and asked to
serve in the still non-existent Romanian legion. He was told that Omer
Pasha, the commander of the Turkish troops stationed on the Danube
since 22 August 1853, was opposed to the creation of such a legion,
claiming that the country did not have the resources for it and that the
Russians would take revenge for its creation by thrashing the coun-
try with their swords. Rosetti surmised that Omer Pasha coveted the
governorship of Wallachia in the time-honoured fashion of Ottoman
dignitaries seeking lucrative positions in that region.503
On the morning of 10 May 1854, Rosetti put on a new shirt – freshly-
laundered and sent from Paris by Marie (“one of the shirts you have
touched”) and dressed up for the much-awaited appointment with
Jérôme Napoléon, mediated by Langlois. But, at the last minute, the
Prince made his excuses, saying he could not receive the Romanian
delegation as “he had correspondence to attend to.”504 Rosetti’s des-
peration reached new heights as he saw himself reduced to inaction
once more and he wrote to Marie: “[. . .] I play cards with [Ştefan]
Golescu, in the same way that we used to play on the Turkish boat.
And we smile as we think of you and imagine what you would say if
you saw how we are spending our time in exile, we, the soldiers of
the Romanian liberation.”505 Rosetti spent his melancholy in letters to
his wife and to his six-year-old daughter, Liby, for whose benefit he
502
Ibid., 130; I have taken the liberty of correcting slightly Bucur’s reading of this
passage.
503
Letter of 5 May 1854, in ibid., 131 and 132, note 3. During the Phanariot period
(1711–1822), dragomans and dignitaries from leading families in Constantinople were
the only individuals who could aspire to the thrones of Wallachia and Moldavia.
504
505
Ibid., 136. The Turkish boat is a reference to the vessel which first took the revo-
lutionaries from Wallachia into exile after the failure of the revolution of 1848.
the crimean war 275
imagined a fairy-tale ending for their country’s troubles: “And we are

going to chase the Emperors away, and you are going to be very good,
and you will come into your father’s arms, and we will all be happy
in the arms of our beloved Romania.”506 On 5 June Rosetti was finally
granted a brief meeting with Jérôme Napoléon: “he received us well,
but [. . .] the only thing we obtained was a princely sigh.”507
Rosetti’s reflections on a reproach often addressed to the Romanians
turned into attacks not only against the ‘uncomprehending West’, but
also against the power struggles amidst the diaspora:
Foreigners, not knowing our people, and seeing that we did not show
any signs of life either when the Russians first entered our country or
later, must tell themselves “they are very weak, or else they are dead”.
Expecting no strong support from us, they are unwilling to attempt any-
thing on our behalf. Add to this that they must in truth be disgusted to
see – apart from our incomprehensible inaction – a fistful of men tear-
ing each other apart and intriguing to become Prince. Thus Sturza, thus
Ghica, thus Eliade, not to mention the Ştirbeis, the Bibescos and com-
pany. “Arise, manifest yourselves”, I was told the other day by a military
who acts as St. Arnaud’s factotum. “But give us some weapons!” “I am,
alas, unable to help”, he said. “If you are the enemies of the Russians, if
your people want their independence, they must manifest themselves to
us, and force us, if I may say so, into recognizing them. Then, yes, we will
be able to intervene, speak on your behalf, give you weapons”, etc., etc.508
Rosetti’s last hope, that French troops might enter Romania, and that
he, and his family from Paris, would join them, was dashed. He wrote
to Marie on 10 July from Constantinople, asking her not to proceed
with the plan of returning to Bucharest, as planned in the initial wave
of optimism at the outbreak of the war. He was right: in Romania,
the commanders of the Russian occupying forces were being urged
from St. Petersburg to “be very severe” against the “disobedient” and
“anarchical” Wallachians.509
On 14 June, a diplomatic decision had been, in fact, taken in the
crisis triggered by the Russian occupation of the Principalities: the
506
Biblioteca Naţională, the Saint-Georges Collection, P. CCCLXX, Dossier 10, ms.
letter of 30 May 1854.
507
508
Letter dated 24 June 1854, in C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 141. Jacques Leroy
de Saint Arnaud (1801–1854), French general close to Napoleon III, commanded the
French army in the Crimean War and died of cholera on 29 September 1854.
509
Dispatch from Nesselrode to Baron Budberg, 23 June 1854, as reported in the
Daily News, 23 July 1854.
276 1855–1856
Turco-Austrian convention of Boyacı Köy stipulated the retreat of

the tsarist troops from the Romanian Principalities – which started
on 13 August – and their joint occupation by Ottoman and Austrian
forces. From Constantinople, Ştefan Golescu sent a copy of the treaty
to Marie Rosetti on 25 June 1854 for publication in La Presse and
the Le Siècle with a protest by the Romanians against Austrian inter-
ference.510 “This unfortunate Turkey has completely lost grip on her-
self ”, Ştefan complained.511 These developments closed the borders of
their homeland once more for the exiles, who had briefly dared to
hope that they might be allowed to resume a legitimate political life
at home. Rosetti had dreamed of political success as an offering to
Marie, who had finally gained revolutionary status after their years in
shared exile. “Ah, the beauty of appearing like a hero in front of your
beloved, of the one who received your name, who gave all that she had,
who lost herself, one might say, who merged with one’s self! Do you
now understand the shame that I feel to have to come in your pres-
ence after an absence of eight months, during which I have achieved
nothing?”, he wrote from Constantinople on 2 July. Envisaging the
possibility of Marie’s return to Bucharest, Rosetti commented: “I know
that, upon your return to the country, instead of your homeland’s lib-
erty and your husband’s glory, you will find the Austrians and your
husband’s shame.’512
On 4 July 1854, Dumitru Brătianu addressed a memorandum to
the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Clarendon, in which the Romanian
diaspora protested against the Austrian occupation, which took effect
in mid-August. Conservative Austria’s involvement in the Eastern cri-
sis was not to everybody’s taste in Britain. Liberal opinion blamed the
government for accepting the support of “the tyranical gaoler of Italy
and Hungary and the spoliator of Poland”, which meant that Brit-
ain slid “down from the high, and noble, and impregnable position
of a champion armed for truth, justice, and principle, to become a
mere slash buckler doing the selfish work of dynasties instead of the
noble duty of people.”513 Reservations about putative Austrian inten-
tions in the Balkans were expressed by Sir Austen Layard in a min-
510
Fotino 4: 116.
511
Ibid.
512
Documente, ed. Cornea and Piru, 349–35.
513
Daily News, 25 July 1854, a commentary on debates in the House of Commons
on the previous day.
the crimean war 277
isterial meeting in London on 17 July. Prince Adam Czartoryski and

his agent, Count Wladislaw Zamoyski, protested against the occupa-
tion, blaming the French and the British for “appointing” Austria as
their gendarme in East-Central Europe.514 On 2 December 1854 the
convention of Boyacı Köy was to be reinforced by an Anglo-Austro-
French agreement which guaranteed Austria’s possessions in Italy for
the duration of the war and promised military support in the event of
a Russian attack. Austria was granted the right to “protect” the Danu-
bian Principalities and was bound to cooperate with the Allies in all
matters related to them.515 For the Romanians, the decision meant sim-
ply the realization of older Austrian expansionist plans in South-East
Europe and the replacement of one foreign occupation with another.
Among modern historians, Paul W. Schroeder has read the situation
differently. He argued a long time ago that, far from being merely
the manifestation of Habsburg greed, the Austrian occupation had a
broader European scope and strategic significance, and was largely
the outcome of French diplomatic overtures rather than of a hawk-
ish Austrian initiative. It allowed the European allies to break down
a diplomatic deadlock, clearing the way for mobilization and eventual
success in the Crimean campaign.516
514
Stan and Ploeşteanu, Utopia, 166. Such were the ambiguous quid pro quos of
Central-European politics, Prince Czartoryski himself was no stranger to previous
plans for ‘awarding’ the Principalities to Austria. Cf. Tomi, “ ‘Europa naţionalităţilor’
între revoluţie şi război: cazul românilor şi italienilor”, in Războiul Crimeii, ed. Silvan
Ionescu, 68.
515
Paul Cernovodeanu, Relaţiile comerciale româno-engleze în contextul politicii
orientale a Marii Britanii, 1803–1878 (Cluj-Napoca, 1986), 169–70.
516
Schroeder, Austria, 400. See p. 270 above.
THE DAILY NEWS AND THE ROMANIAN PRINCIPALITIES
Oh England! Oh my country.
E. L. Godkin, Scutari
12 May 1854517
On the ground, the residents of Wallachia were less concerned with the
broader geopolitical significance of the event. Like most military occu-
pations of a foreign territory, the Austrian occupation had its excesses,
and these were ably foregrounded in their reports by the British dip-
lomats, journalists and military stationed in the Principalities at the
time. The liberal Daily News, started by Charles Dickens in 1846, was
one of the earliest British newspapers to send correspondents to the
Eastern “seat of war”. The special correspondent who sent unsigned
dispatches from Bucharest between September 1853 and September
1855 was the twenty-three-year-old Edwin Lawrence Godkin, the
future founder of the National. He had come to the attention of the
paper’s editor, Frederick Knight Hunt, with the publication in 1853 of
a History of Hungary and the Magyars,518 which earned him his new
position as foreign correspondent in an area compatible with his inter-
ests. Godkin’s anti-Austrian History was not perhaps the best guar-
antee of unbiased journalism, and the young republican Irishman’s
reports resonated with the deep-seated hostility to Austria shared by
liberal sections of his readership in Britain. His reports, colourful,
passionate and highly personal, were in the journalistic tradition of
‘views’ rather than ‘news’,519 and his engaged approach to history-
in-the-making must have endeared him to the equally subjective
Romanian exiles. There is a strong probability that he met members
of the Romanian diaspora, given that he followed Omer Pasha’s army
throughout the campaign and was present at all the memorable sites
of the Crimean War from late 1853 to late 1855, at the very time when
517
Ogden Rollo, ed., The Life and Letters of E. L. Godkin, 2 vols. (London, 1907)
1: 26.
518
The History of Hungary and the Magyars from the Earliest Period to the Close
of the Late War (London, 1853) was published in America in 1853 and had a second
English edition in 1856.
519
Mark Hampton, Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950 (University of Illinois
Press, 2004), 38.
the daily news and the romanian principalities 279
the Romanian ‘conspirators’ were also present in the Lower Danube

region.520
Godkin, the “people’s correspondent”, captured the emotional high
drama of the “people’s war”, as The Times called the Crimean conflict
in one of its editorials.521 On 7 September 1854 he witnessed a joint
review of the Turkish and Wallachian troops in Bucharest by Omer
Pasha and the Austrian General Johann Coronini and his report left
no-one in any doubt about which side he was on:
I remarked that the Turks present formed but a very small portion of
the army which is at present here ; in fact, none but those who are well
dressed were brought on the ground. The uniform of the greater part
of these poor fellows is so terribly dilapidated that they would cut but
a very sorry figure beside the Austrians and Wallachians, so that some
picking and choosing had to be resorted to. I never felt so much hearty
pity for any body of men in my life. There was their elite assembled on
the roadside to add fresh eclat to the triumphal entry of the troops of
another nation into the capital which their valor had wrested from the
enemy; they, tattered, torn, war-worn the Austrians, the vanquished of
a hundred fields, all brilliance, insolence, and assumption; they, broiling
in tents outside on a dusty plain the Austrians about to take possession
of the best houses in the town. The whole affair was a fresh insult to the
Turks. This is the real state of the case, however it may be disguised. The
men who defended Arab Tabia, who have covered the banks of the Dan-
ube with their graves, who fought side by side with Butler and Arnold,
and Burke and Maynell, were hiding their rags in their tents while the
best-beaten, oftenest-thrashed troops in the world, were taking posses-
sion of Turkish conquests with drums beating and colors flying. It was
the saddest commentary on modern diplomacy I ever saw; and when I
heard their band strike up the Austrian national air, and saw the veter-
ans of Silistria, Oltenitza, Csitate, and Giurgevo present arms to General
Count Coronini, who rode past, glancing unutterable pride, I felt thor-
oughly disgusted.522
His subsequent reports on the Austrian occupation itself contain a
mix of high politics, eyewitness information, gossip, anecdote and
psycho-history, adding to the open forum created in Britain by the
new brand of journalism forged during the Crimean War.523 Here are
a few excerpts:
520
See p. 267 sqq. above.
521
The Times, 5 May 1854, 8.
522
The Life and Letters of E. L. Godkin, ed. Rollo, 1: 68–70.
523
See Stefanie Markovits, “Rushing Into Print: “Participatory Journalism” During
the Crimean War”, Victorian Studies 50, 4 (Summer 2008): 559–86.
280 1855–1856
Forced labour, then, forced supply of provisions, both paid for in depre-
ciated paper-money, free quartering of troops, in addition of course to
the injury done to trade and commerce – such were the evils entailed
on the Wallachs by the presence of the Russians; and certainly two or
three in addition, such as the robbery of the public treasury. With the
exception of this last, they suffer at this moment from the Austrians,
who are come to restore the “benedictions [sic] de la paix”, all that they
suffered from the Russians, who came as conquerors for the purpose of
carrying on war.
[. . .]
I know a case in which one man with one small room, a wife, and
four children, has three soldiers quartered on him. I know another in
which a man who has two small rooms, a wife and large family, has
seven Croats. A shopkeeper here has sixty men in his house, forming
the band of a regiment of infantry. [. . .] Can a man carry on business
who has sixty musicians lodging in his house practicing on every variety
of instrument, from the shawm to the cornet-à-piston, from morning
till night? Can a poor clerk go to his work with a light heart who has
left seven Croat soldiers on the same room with his wife and children?
[. . .] Did the occurrences which take place now every day before my
eyes happen in an English town, I am thoroughly certain that every man
who dwelt in it would rise out, with the first weapon which presented
itself, and rid his household of a nuisance which nothing but centuries
of misfortune, and long familiarity with foreign tyranny, could render
tolerable for one hour.524
[. . .] Your readers will do well to ask themselves if these things are
done here, where the Austrians are not yet completely masters of the
situation, what takes place at Venice and Milan, and in Hungary, where
the people can look for succor or redress nowhere but to Heaven!525
There was nothing subliminal about these colourful accounts: they
were clearly intended to encourage anti-Austrian opinion at home,
and proved effective. A Daily News reader from London was prompted
to observe that the “frightful picture” of the Austrian occupation of the
Principalities will “enable this very unimaginative English nation to
realize something of what is now passing in those countries . . .”526 The
daily oppression and miseries of the military occupation were com-
pounded by the political intrigues which opposed the Russian, Turk-
ish, and Austrian ‘parties’ among the Romanian boyars, the Ottoman
524
“Letters from the Seat of War in the Principalities”, in the Daily News, 13 Octo-
ber 1854.
525
Correspondence from Bucharest, 26 November 1854, in The Life and Letters of
E. L. Godkin, ed. Rollo, 82–4.
526
Daily News, 14 October 1854, “The Austrians in Bucharest”.
Porte, the Austrian command and the Western diplomats in Bucha-

rest, each vying to promote their interests and their candidates to the
Wallachian assemblies and other seats of power.527 In addition, the
‘special correspondent in Bucharest’ reported, the Ottomans were
coerced into delivering political refugees and suspects into Austrian
hands, to be sent to Vienna and tried on trumped-up charges: the
Ottomans “have purchased Austrian support by concessions which
they are conscious are disgraceful to them.”528 The moderate liberal
Ion Bălăceanu, close to Ion Ghica, also left accounts of Austrian ran-
dom acts of violence and abuses in the Principalities in his private cor-
respondence.529 The British Consul Robert Colquhoun’s dispatches to
the Foreign Office described the Austrian occupation as “unnecessary,
immensely unpopular, brutal, despotic and financially ruinous”, but,
according to Paul W. Schroeder, his reports were grossly exaggerated
and based on “unverified rumour.”530
The Austrian troops remained stationed in the Principalities until
1857, and it is a matter of debate whether the occupation was com-
parable to or worse than the Ottoman or Russian occupations pre-
viously. It left bitter memories amongst the Romanians themselves,
confirming the views of those who had always opposed the idea of
an Austrian protectorate as an alternative to a Hungarian-dominated
Danubian Confederation.531 Such views, however, may have been the
result of a foreign political choice and of the interplay of diplomatic
interests rather than reflections of a particularly violent military occu-
pation. Francophilia was still predominant. A year later, during the
peace negotiations, Ion Brătianu was to publish a memoir addressed
to none other than his supposed former assassination target, Emperor
Napoleon. His Mémoire sur l’Empire d’Autriche dans la Question
d’Orient532 exposed the danger of a strong Germany in the midst of
527
For further details on the diplomatic intrigues in Austrian-occupied Bucharest
see Trevor J. Hope, “Sir Stephen Bartlett Lakeman (Mazar Pasha) as military gover-
nor of Bucharest at the commencement of the Austrian occupation of the Danubian
Principalities in 1854”, Revue roumaine d’histoire 16, 1 (1977): 25–41.
528
“What the Austrians are doing in Wallachia”, Daily News, 6 September 1854.
529
See, for instance, letters (in French) nos. 29 and 40 (March and June 1856) in
Documente privind Unirea Principatelor, ed. Bodea, 3: 76, 96.
530
531
Borsi-Kálmán, Hungarian Exiles, 44 and 82, note 267. See letters nos. 29 and
40 (February-June 1856) in Documente privind Unirea Principatelor, ed. Bodea, 3:
76, 96.
532
Mémoire sur l’Empire d’Autriche dans la question d’Orient, par J.-C. Bratiano
(Paris: Impr. De J. Voisvenel, 1855). It was serialised in Romanian translation in
282 1855–1856
Europe and the negative impact of an Austro-Russian alliance on Cen-

tral and East-European national projects. France is exhorted to base
its Eastern policy on the triad “nationality, civilization, liberty” and
support the union of the resource-rich Romanian Principalities. The
new state would be a willing French economic colony and a channel
of French influence in the region. In spite of an unfortunate history,
Brătianu announces bombastically, the capital of “Eastern civilization”
is Bucharest rather than Athens or Constantinople.533
By 29 July 1854, as the Romanian participation in the hostilities had
not materialized, Rosetti had made his mind up to return to Paris and
resume his life in exile.534 Another son, Horia, was born there in June
1855. The Golescu brothers, too, left Constantinople and Bursa and
returned to Paris, to be reunited with their mother Zinca and their
niece Felicia Racoviţă for the rest of the fall and winter of 1854–55. They
tried to soothe their bruised hearts and bodies by taking the waters at
Enghien, where Alexandru-Albu – they complained – supervised their
treatment as ruthlessly as a commander in the Crimean War.535
Plans for the creation of a Romanian military unit to take part in
the war had not been totally abandoned, in spite of failed attempts in
Constantinople. Dumitru Brătianu kept writing to Lord Palmerston
and to Lord Panmure, the war minister, advancing enthusiastic and
unrealistic proposals for creating a corps of 100,000 Romanians to
fight alongside the allied troops, but the response was evasive. In mid-
September, the Foreign Office wrote to the British Consul in Bucha-
rest, enquiring over the truth of accusations made by Count Buol, the
Austrian envoy in London, that Wallachian refugees had returned
to the country and were active clandestinely. Colquhoun confirmed
that, according to his information, a number of “agitators”, notably
Rosetti and Nicolae Golescu, had returned and attempted to “excite
the peasants against the Proprietary class.” The consul was instructed
to report such incidents to the Turkish authorities and to inform them
that “in the opinion of this govr. it is very desirable that such agi-
tation should not be permitted to interfere with the reestablishment
Rosetti’s Românul in May 1860. Cf. Din scrierile şi cuvântările lui Ion C. Brătianu, ed.
Vintilă I. C. Brătianu et al., 149–81.
533
Brătianu, “Memoriu asupra Imperiului Austriei în Cestiunea Orientului”, in Din
scrierile şi cuvântările lui Ion C. Brătianu, ed. Vintilă I. C. Brătianu et al., 180–1.
534
C.A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, 1: 149–50, and 152.
535
Fotino 4: 123–4.
of order and tranquillity in Wallachia.”536 Rosetti’s clandestine return

to Bucharest in September 1854 is not documented outside this dip-
lomatic exchange and may well have been based on rumour. Dimi-
trie Brătianu, however, was reported to be hiding in Bucharest in the
last months of 1854. Information as to the nature of his activities is
lacking, but one can easily guess. On Austria’s ‘most wanted’ list, he
attempted to flee the city disguised as the servant of the Illustrated
London News reporter Joseph Archer Crowe, and when that failed, he
must have found another exit route. 537
Austrian fears were justified. Italian radical agitators enrolled in the
Turkish army were known to be operating in the region, spreading
Mazzini’s calls for concomitant national insurrections in Italy, Cen-
tral and Eastern Europe. From London, Mazzini himself orchestrated
and financed attempts to send agents provocateurs into Austrian-
controlled territories, including Wallachia.538 One of these agents, Felice
Orsini, later Emperor Napoleon’s would-be assassin, was arrested
by the Austrian authorities in Transylvania. As a result, the Austrians
stepped up their controls at the borders and surveillance in the
Principalities.539
In France, as well as in Britain, the government’s lack of support for
the Romanians was deplored in left-wing and republican circles:
“[. . .] Would you judge France by those who are governing her today
and who represent her abroad?” Etienne Vacherot, a leading republican,
wrote to Marie Rosetti on 2 November 1854. “You have your misfor-
tunes, but we have our infamies! No Frenchman with his heart in the
right place would dare raise his head today in Europe, who believed so
strongly in us and whom we have so ignominiously betrayed. On your
side, as on ours, the patrie is in the heart of good citizens, of generous
patriots. The country of Rosetti, of the Bratianos and of so many oth-
ers whom you know better than me, is now more than ever worthy of
esteem and of sympathy. Poor Romania! Poor Europe! I will not add
poor France. She has what she deserves.”540
536
PRO/FO 78/1010, Draft of a dispatch from the Foreign Office to Robert
Colquhoun, 13 September 1854, 18–9.
537
Tappe, “E. E. and J. A. Crowe and the Rumanian Union”, 137, quoting from
Joseph A. Crowe, Reminiscences of Thirty-Five Years of My Life (London, 1895).
538
Letter from Mazzini to Emilie Ashurst, dated c. 1853, in Mazzini’s Letters to an
English Family, ed. Richards, 278.
539
Tomi, “ ‘Europa naţionalităţilor’ ”, 71.
540
Letter from E. Vacherot to Marie Rosetti, 2 November 1854, B. A. R., Fonds
C. A. Rosetti, S 37/LXIII.
284 1855–1856
Hope for the future, the letter concluded, lay in the underground sur-
vival of liberal, republican France.
Accusations of lethargy and inaction among the Romanian mili-
tants made in less sympathetic circles drew venom from the pen of
Golescu-Albu. “[. . .]it is now seven years”, he wrote in December
1854 in a private letter, “since the country has been occupied almost
without interruption by foreign armies; each of these occupations has
displaced people, sending them into exile. And this nation is blamed
for inaction? For not being bold and for not complaining? People
did complain, but nobody listened to them, because the English and
French consuls, especially the French, were careful to discourage them
so many times. Are you aware that Mr. Béclard in Bucharest is spend-
ing his days and parts of his nights playing cards with Mr. Playano
and losing up to 1,000 ducats in one single evening? One may wonder
where this money comes from, for he himself is a bourgeois and his
pay is barely sufficient to cover his expenses as a consul. Such is the
moral quality of the foreign consuls appointed in our country at such
a critical time. This only proves one thing: that they want to be nice
to Austria.”541
541
Fotino 1: 223, Fotino 4: 135. Louis-Philippe Béclard had been appointed Consul
General of France in Bucharest in November 1854 and later married the daughter of
the Romanian Conservative leader, Barbu Catargiu. Alexandru Plagino was the son-
in-law of Barbu Ştirbey, ruling Prince of Wallachia, and at that time State Secretary
of Wallachia. Cf. Fotino 4: 135, notes 1–2.
THE END OF THE WAR AND THE PEACE CONFERENCE
Public opinion in Britain, which had previously clamoured for war,

eventually turned against the government once the weaknesses of a
campaign conducted, as never before, under the eyes of war reporters
and photographers, became apparent.542 A motion for an enquiry into
the conduct of the war put forward in the Commons in January 1855
by the radical John Arthur Roebuck, brought down the Aberdeen cabi-
net and, ironically enough, opened the way for the hawkish Palmer-
ston.543 There was no major change in the conduct of the war but, after
the fall of Sebastopol in September 1855, Palmerston was arguably able
to negotiate and secure a more satisfactory peace than the more diffi-
dent, morally scrupulous and pro-Russian Lord Aberdeen would have
produced.544 In December, neutral Austria threatened to join the war
if Russia would not agree to an armistice. The destruction by British
forces of the Russian fleet at Sweaborg in the Baltic forced the new
Tsar Alexander II545 to conclude an armistice in February 1856.
Casualties on all belligerent sides were enormous: 473,835 Russians,546
between 80,000 and 95,000 Frenchmen, between 20,000 and 25,000
British, between 200,000 and 400,000 Ottomans and some 2,000 Ital-
ians lost their lives. Loss on such a scale made the Crimean war the
deadliest European war in the period from 1815 to 1914.547 The peace
negotiations, which had started in November 1854, were initially based
on the relatively modest agenda of the Four-Point Vienna Note: Russia
would give up her special claims over the Romanian Principalities and
Serbia, navigation on the Danube would be free, the Straits Convention
of 1841 would be revised and Russia would renounce her self-assumed
protectorate of the Ottoman Empire’s Orthodox Christian subjects.
542
Chamberlain, ‘Pax Britannica?’, 108.
543
Ibid., 109.
544
J. B. Conacher, Britain and the Crimea, 1855–56 (London, 1987), 227.
545
Nicholas I had died after a short illness on 18 February/2 March 1855.
546
Ian Fletcher and Natalia Ishchenko, The Crimean War: a clash of empires
(Staplehurst: Spellmont, 2004), 531.
547
Goldfrank, Origins of the Crimean War, 289–90. These figures are corroborated
in Fletcher and Ishchenko, The Crimean War, 531–2, except for Ottoman deaths,
which this source situates between 30,000 and 45,000. All the figures cited include
those killed in action and deaths from disease.
286 1855–1856
The Treaty of Paris, a pan-European treaty of “peace and friendship”,548

signed on 30 March 1856, ultimately expanded some of these points.
Two very important articles (7 and 8) enshrined the integrity of the
Ottoman Empire and the admission of Turkey into the ‘concert of
Europe’ which, in practice, meant that the Porte was to take part as an
equal member in negotiating future differences between the contracting
powers.549 In exchange, by Article 9 the Porte agreed to guarantee the
rights of its Christian subjects, thus meeting Russia’s initial demands,
as presented by Menhshikov in Constantinople. Military arsenals in
the Black Sea were eliminated and the entire pontic area was closed
to warships, with the exception of a limited number of Russian and
Turkish light vessels anchored there for the protection of the coasts.
A temporary European commission was appointed for two years to
oversee the free navigation along the Danube, pending the creation of
a permanent overseeing body.550 The final treaty also provided for the
cession by Russia of three southern counties of Bessarabia, which it
had incorporated in 1812, and which now re-joined Romania.551
The Danubian Principalities were placed under the collective guar-
antee of the seven European Powers, but none of the guarantor powers
were granted exclusive protection rights and none was to have any
right of interference in the internal affairs of the provinces (Art. 22).
The Congress did not meet the Romanian demands for the unifica-
tion of the Principalities and for the country’s independence under a
hereditary foreign prince. However, it did pronounce in favour of the
creation of representative assemblies (the so-called ad-hoc divans) and
stipulated the organization of referenda on the future of the nation, a
loophole which the Romanians were quick to exploit in 1858–1859.
Ironically, the Romanians, who had been denied military participation
in the war, obtained more from the peace treaties than the Poles, who
had been allowed to fight, but whose country was not even mentioned
during the peace negotiations. It is difficult to estimate to what extent
this outcome had been achieved through skilful manipulation of the
548
Traité de paix et d’amitié entre la France, l’Autriche, le Royaume-Uni de la
Grande-Bretagne, la Prusse, la Russie, la Sardaigne et la Turquie conclu et signé au
Congrés de Paris le 30 Mars 1856 (Paris: au Dépôt Géographique, 32, rue Mazarine).
549
Goldfrank, Origins of the Crimean War, 203. For the importance of this early
‘European integration’ of Turkey see Fikret Adanir, “Turkey’s Entry into the Concert
of Europe”, European Review 13, 3 (2005): 395–417.
550
Cernovodeanu, Relaţiile comerciale româno-engleze, 186.
551
Chamberlain, ‘Pax Britannica’?, 110.
the end of the war and the peace conference 287
media and insistent lobbying by the Romanian diaspora. Whether it

was a triumph of media manipulation or diplomatic astuteness, or
both, the Congress of Paris finally placed the ‘Romanian Question’
firmly on the Great Powers’ agenda.
Assessments – both at the time and later – of the outcome of the war
vary. It had been a drawn-out, paradoxical war: what was supposed to
remain a localized conflict to be resolved by diplomatic means turned
out to be a major European military engagement which left over half
a million dead as well as a complex and volatile international legacy.
The discourses around it on all sides were full of panache, crusader
spirit and bombast, but the fighting – on several fronts, the Baltic
regions, the Black Sea, Turkey and Transcaucasia – exposed major
flaws in logistics, equipment and tactic in all belligerent camps. When
peace was finally concluded in 1856, it left some of the Allies, notably
Britain, with little to show in terms of concrete war spoils. Russia’s
expected “rollback” from Europe – Palmerston’s objective – failed in
the medium and longer term: the Russian-supported Persian offen-
sive against Afghanistan starting with 1864 triggered a chain-reaction,
leading to a concentration of British forces in India at the expense of
the Black Sea region, enabling Russia to reaffirm its influence there in
the 1860s and 1870s.552 In Britain, there were those who believed that
heavy military loss was made worse by relative loss of face in the inter-
national arena: the peace conference was held in Paris, rather than
London, as Palmerston had hoped, a confirmation in European eyes
that, in spite of Britain’s sacrifices, Russia’s defeat was more a French
than a British victory.
Much was made later, not least in Romania, of Napoleon III’s “vision-
ary” plan for “regenerating Europe on the basis of nationalitiesm”,553
but the Emperor may in fact have been more of a pragmatist than
is sometimes accepted. Letters to the Duc de Persigny, the French
ambassador in London, sent in November 1856, show that the Roma-
nian nation-builders enjoyed the French Emperor’s support almost by
default, as a pre-emptive strike against Russia and Turkey. Respond-
ing to criticism that his advocacy of the would-be union of Romania
552
For shifts on the international arena after the war, see W. E. Mosse, The Rise and
Fall of the Crimean System, 1855–1871 (London, 1963). For the long-term political,
ideological and economic impact of the Crimean War, see Goldfrank, Origins of the
Crimean War, esp. Ch. 19: “The Strange Sequel”.
553
See Theodore Zeldin’s assessment in France 1848–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1973), vol. 1: “Ambition, Love and Politics”, 558–9.
288 1855–1856
inevitably led to the dismemberment of the Ottoman Porte, he made

his views on Turkey clear by declaring that he had made the war in
order to pre-empt the Russian domination in the eastern Mediterra-
nean, not in order “to sustain blindly the stupid, immoral, barbarious
and pagan government of the Turks [. . .] The dismemberment of the
Ottoman Empire is the least of my concerns, as long as it does not
profit the Russians.”554
In France there was almost unanimous exultation not so much for
the terms of the treaty as such, but for the return to peace and for what
was perceived as France’s newly recaptured world-power status after
decades of international marginalisation. In Grenoble, for instance,
according to a report by the Procureur Général, people rejoiced over
the fact the “the emperor became the arbiter of the destinies of the
world and that his greatness becomes France’s greatness.”555 Such
views were echoed nationally.
Z
The Rosettis celebrated New Year toasting champagne glasses at their
new Parisian home at 92 bis, rue de l’Ouest, surrounded by faithful
friends: Ion Brătianu, Winterhalder and his wife, the Dumesnils, Con-
stantin Cantacuzino and his wife, as well as Father Josaphat, the priest
who had christened little Sophia Liberty in June 1848, on the day when
the revolution started in Romania.556
554
Eric Anceau, Napoléon III: un Saint-Simon à cheval (Paris, 2008), 288.
555
Case, French Opinion, 48–9.
556
Entry for 2 January 1856, Rosetti, Diary, 351.
PART THREE
THE RETURN OF THE EXILES

1856–1857
A REPUBLICAN FUNERAL
Avec une prudente energie, on peut beaucoup.

Armand Lévy to Alfred Dumesnil,
13 January 18561
On 13 January 1856, Ion (Jean) Voinescu II, the former Romanian
foreign minister in the 1848 provisional government and leading
forty-eighter, who had died in exile in Pau on 31 December aged only
forty-seven, was buried at the Père Lachaise. The ceremony occasioned
another symbolic graveside gathering of European republicans, left-
wing militants and exiled champions of national causes, among whom
Daniele Manin, the exiled former president of the Venetian republic,
the historian Henri Martin, the pro-Romanian writer Elias Regnault,
radical republican and author of L’Histoire politique et sociale des Prin-
cipautés Danubiennes (1855), and others. The funeral orations were
delivered by Constantin Rosetti and Jean Abdolonyme Ubicini, the
former French-language secretary of the Wallachian provisional gov-
ernment in 1848 and a long-standing ally of the Romanians. Ubicini
spoke about the pain of life and the poignancy of death in exile, bound
to be experienced even by people like the Romanians, for whom France
was almost a second home:
I, too, walked in the dust of this exiled man’s native country, of the land
to which he was no longer able to return – and which you, Messieurs, are
going to see again – this Romania, as beautiful as it is unfortunate, like
the river that nourishes her border. Whoever drinks of that water can-
not leave; whoever is violently snatched from that land, must die. I have
known and loved this distant sister of my country, exiled into barbarian
realms, like the Roman poet2 whose legend she has preserved; beyond
the Carpathians, she is perpetuating the spirit and traditions of France. I
have witnessed her martyrdom, and, having dreamed for one moment of
her triumph, I then counted her tears and her wounds; at the same time,
I have seen all her reserves of energy, of patience in the face of adversity,
of devotion and above all, of faith.3
1
Documente inedite, ed. Bucur, 271.
2
A reference to the Roman poet Ovid, exiled in 8 ad at Tomi (today Constanţa,
on Romania’s Black Sea coast).
3
Biblioteca Naţională, the Saint-Georges Collection, P. CCVI, Dossier 1, Diverse
(Miscellanea).
292 1856
The Romanian exiles, divided by competing interests and loyalties, were

united once more by the death of a friend and fellow militant. Voi-
nescu’s burial was also part of an already established trend in France
for turning the funerals of prominent republicans into affirmations of
solidarity meant both to reinforce republican unity and act as gestures
of political defiance against the established order. On 13 March 1853,
Ion Brătianu had paid his respects at the funeral of Madame Raspail,
wife of the leading republican, a “veritable republican and socialist
event”, attended by some three thousand mourners.4 In Britain, too,
the funerals of revolutionary and republican exiles were occasions
for large gatherings. 1,200 exiles, including Mazzini and Dumitru
Brătianu, had attended the funeral of the Pole Albert Darász, a leader
of the Central European Committee, at Highgate Cemetery on 22 Sep-
tember 1852.5
4
Letter from Adèle to Alfred Dumesnil, 14 March 1853, in Documente inedite, ed.
Bucur, 266–7.
5
Calman, Ledru-Rollin après 1848, 164.
THE AD-HOC ASSEMBLIES AND THE
EUROPEAN COMMISSIONERS
No part of the world is more deserving of the serious

consideration of great European Powers than these
Principalities; on none, perhaps, do more important
consequences depend.
Sir Henry Bulwer Lytton to the Foreign Secretary,
Lord Malmesbury, 27 July 18586
During the last months of the war, in 1855–56, and in the post-war
period, the Romanian question had acquired more prominence as an
issue in its own right, but remained entangled within anti-Russian
and anti-Austrian positions in the European political arena. Articles
and memoirs from all Moldo-Wallachian camps – radical, moderate,
conservative – were being circulated in the press or sent directly to the
French foreign ministry and the British cabinet.7
In the Principalities themselves, a pro-unification campaign was
gaining strength, with the blessing of the French and Russian con-
sular agents there, and to the great irritation of the Austrians.8 Austria
and Turkey worked together in trying to undermine the unification
movement, while Britain hesitated, although in practice both Stratford
Canning and Colquhoun were against unification and were agitating
against it in Constantinople and Bucharest.9
After the Crimean War, Austria, jointly with Russia, continued to
oppose the return of the Romanian exiled former revolutionaries to
their homes, a return which, it was suspected, was likely to supply the
embattled Principalities with an important group of liberal-oriented
politicians and a left-wing counterweight to the conservative and mod-
erate factions on the ground. After the war, émigrés of a radical persua-
sion such as Rosetti and the Brătianu brothers started to come round
6
The National Archives, London, PRO/FO 198/12. General Report of the European
Commission in the Principalities.
7
N. Corivan analysed some of these memoirs in Din activitatea emigranţilor români
în Apus, esp. Ch. 2: “Memoriile anonime şi memoriile străine”. For the originals of
some of these memoirs, cf. Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Paris, Turquie, Mém. et
Doc., vol. 54, as cited by Corivan.
8
9
Ibid., 391.
294 1856
to the more moderate positions of those in the diaspora who believed

in diplomatic efforts rather than in armed insurgency and occult con-
spiracy. The underground activities of Mazzini’s Central European
Committee were now seen to belong to the pre-Crimean era, and open
lobbying was the order of the day once again. The Vienna Conference
(March–June 1855) had abolished the Russian protectorate over the
Romanian Principalities. Russia was required to cede to Moldavia an
area of around 5,000 square kilometres in southern Bessarabia – the
province Russia had annexed in 1812 – which, crucially, left her with-
out access to the Danube and was going to sour relations with the
new, united Romania of 1859. The next stage in the negotiations, held
in Constantinople, concluded with the protocol of 11 February 1856,
which left the two Principalities as separate entities under Ottoman
suzerainty. Largely engineered by Stratford Canning, this document
emphasised once more Britain’s support for the inviolability of the
Ottoman Empire, attempting to pre-empt initiatives calling for the
union of the Romanian territories.
A series of publications by pro-Romanians had been circulating
before and during the Paris peace negotiations of 1855–6, popular-
ising the Principalities, their history and culture, and sending both
implicit and explicit unionist messages. Ubicini had been particularly
active: in 1855 he edited Ballades et chants populaires de la Roumanie,
which he published in the Revue d’Orient, and in 1856 his study “Prov-
inces d’origine roumaine” was included in a propaganda monograph
which he co-edited for the publishers Firmin Didot.10 The Romanian
Cezar Bolliac’s Topographie de la Roumanie11 attempted to bolster the
unionist project by emphasising the territorial extent of the ancient
Dacian ‘Empire’ (which had covered the two Romanian Provinces and
Transylvania), and the shared Latinity of the Romanians in all three
regions, ideas which, as shown, were far from being endorsed by the
Hungarians. One may question the political impact of such publica-
tions, but there are suggestions that they were read and may have
been quite effective in shaping the thinking of politicians at the time
of the Congress. Lord Palmerston is said to have had a copy of Henry
10
Provinces danubiennes et roumaines, ed. Ubicini and Chopin (Paris, 1856).
11
Paris: Just. Rouvier Libraire-éditeur, 1856.
the ad-hoc assemblies 295
Stanley’s collection of Romanian poetry on his desk during the nego-

tiations over the Principalities in 1856.12
In early 1856, Armand Lévy was in Bucharest, liaising between
the exiled Romanians in Paris and the partisans of the union back
home. He introduced himself as the representative of “Grant Libraire
in Bucharest” – one arm of the “Rosetti-Grant Establishment” – and,
among other projects, was busy collecting subscriptions for the publi-
cation of Quinet’s complete works. The early volumes of Quinet’s Oeu-
vres complètes were subsidized by, among others, Alfred Dumesnil,
Ştefan Golescu and Princess Marie Cantacuzino, the wife of the union-
ist Alexandru Cantacuzino, a fellow-exile of Rosetti and his circle.13 In
the war of words opposing unionists and anti-unionists in both Princi-
palities, there was a strong awareness of the power of cultural symbols
on both sides. Writing to Alfred Dumesnil, Michelet’s son-in-law, Lévy
attempted to mediate yet another act of symbolic political militancy: a
projected sculpture of the fifteenth-century Moldavian Prince Stephen
the Great, perceived as a defender of European Christendom against
the Turks. It was to be commissioned from Auguste Préault, the non-
conformist sculptor, a member of Michelet’s circle and the creator of
Mickiewicz’s funeral monument in Montmorency. Ironically, the idea
of the monument had been launched by the anti-unionist governor
(caimacam) of Moldavia, Theodor Balş, who had hoped to strengthen
his camp’s position with this offering to the Moldavians’ exclusive
sense of regional pride at the expense of the wider agenda of a pan-
Romanian nationalism. But the project was hijacked by the Wallachian
unionists and their French backers: “Urge him [Préault] to do this as a
helping hand to Wallachia,” Lévy asked Dumesnil. “This monument,
planned with a separatist aim, will end up strengthening the unionist
cause. It is a cause which is gaining momentum here.”14 The statue
was to be based on the design of the Moldavian polymath Gheorghe
12
Rouman Anthology, or Selection of Rouman Poetry Ancient and Modern (Hert-
ford, 1856). E. D. Tappe quoted in Drace-Francis, The Making of Modern Romanian
Culture, 161, 232. The Hon. Henry Stanley was secretary to Sir Henry Bulwer on his
mission in the Romanian Principalities from July 1856 to May 1858. Cf. Muriel E.
Chamberlain, “Stanley, Henry Edward John, third Baron Stanley of Alderley and sec-
ond Baron Eddisbury (1827–1903)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online
edition, Oxford University Press, Sept. 2004 (http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/
36246, accessed 19 Sept 2010).
13
Breazu, 360.
14
Letter from Armand Lévy to Alfred Dumesnil from Bucharest, 13 January 1856,
in Documente inedite, ed. Bucur, 271.
296 1856
Asachi, Quinet’s father-in-law, who was an anti-unionist, a position

which he appears to have maintained to his death, and which raises
questions about the actual ‘momentum’ of the cause, especially in
Moldavia. The project was not realised at that stage due to governor
Balş’s death in 1857. It was revived much later, on the basis of Asachi’s
sketches of 1856, and the monument, by the French sculptor Emman-
uel Frémiet, was finally inaugurated in the Moldavian capital, Iaşi, in
1883. It still stands in one of the city’s plazas.
Links with Edgar Quinet, then living in exile in Brussels with his wife,
Hermione, were particularly close at this time. Alexandru Golescu-
Negru, who made secret visits to Veytaux in January 1856, managed
to smuggle the documentation for the studies which the historian
intended as a fulfilment of a pledge made to his Romanian students
at the Collège de France in the 1840s. The liberal-Orléanist Revue des
Deux Mondes in particular, under François Buloz, was sympathetic to
the Romanian cause and, being overtly a literary, non-political pub-
lication, now appeared unafraid to publish works by a proscrit in a
Second Empire France where governmental censors were still a feared
force.15 The first instalment of Quinet’s contributions (“Les titres de
nationalité” and “La renaissance de la Roumanie”) appeared in the
Revue on 15 January 1856, and the second (“Les Roumains – leur his-
toire et leurs princes” and “De la réorganisation des provinces dan-
ubiennes”) on 1 March.16 These fragments formed the basis for Les
Roumains,17 an essay which covers the history of the Romanians from
Roman times to the Congress of Paris and summarizes the themes
which the exiles had been at pains to present in various forms to their
Western audiences: the Latin origin of their people, the provinces’
semi-autonomous status within the Ottoman world and the country’s
historic entitlement to a unified nation-state. In his chapter on the
Romanian language, Quinet voiced a complaint which echoed the
Romanians’ own and which served to distance them even further from
Russia: the “barbarian” Cyrillic script, which the Romanians had to
use from the sixteenth until the mid-nineteenth century, had occulted
the Latin “indigenous genius” of their culture, turning them into a
15
For censorship of the press under the July Monarchy and the Second Empire, see
Christophe Charle, Le Siècle de la presse (1830–1939) (Paris, 2004).
16
Fotino 4: 143, note 2.
17
Les Roumains was included in volume 6 of Quinet’s Oeuvres complètes, ed. Alfred
Dumesnil (Paris: Pagnerre, 1857) and is available in a recent edition published by
Editions Kryos, Paris, 2008, used here.
people stifled and ghettoized “by an alphabet.”18 It was time for the sis-
terhood of Latin nations to reclaim their long-lost sister, and for mod-
ern linguistics to reap the scientific rewards of this rediscovery, which
put long-held theories into a different perspective.19 In the political
sphere, the consequences of small nations (Moldavia, Wallachia) being
sacrificed by irresponsible empires (Russia, Austria, Turkey) were lik-
ened by Quinet to the descent into barbarity of areas such as ancient
Carthage, Gaul and Egypt, which the Romans had suppressed without
consideration for their strategic importance. The Roman Empire, Qui-
net warned, declined precisely because it had been incautious enough
to destroy its own outposts against the barbarian world. Similarly, he
argued, Turkey had to realise that it was better to have Romania on
its side as a vital, prosperous, united nation rather than as a corpse, a
political and economic liability.20
Les Roumains, which was published in French before the Treaty of
Paris, was published in Romanian as Românii Principatelor Dunărene
by Quinet’s father-in-law, Asachi, at his own printing house in Iaşi in
the same year, 1856. It was an ambiguous gesture from the old poet,
journalist and politician, whose hostility to the union of the Princi-
palities is now being re-examined by Romanian historians as part of
a wider re-assessment of Moldavian separatism. The idea of the union
was forcefully presented by the Moldo-Wallachian exiles, radicals and
future members of the ‘national party’ as the only path guaranteed to
take the provinces to socio-economic progress and international rec-
ognition as a nation, yet Moldavian reservations are only now begin-
ning to be recognised. Moldavians such as Asachi feared that losing
their capital, Iaşi, and their independent institutions through centrali-
sation would lead to marginalisation and economic decline, and they
manifested their anti-Wallachian opposition throughout the 1850s
and 1860s. Was the ‘union’ pushed above the Moldavians’ heads by
media-savvy coteries of hot-head nationalists, radicals and ‘Jacobins’?
Was Moldavian separatism the sign of conservative parochialism or of
healthy, forward-looking regionalism? Could the project have evolved
differently, say, in the form of a decentralised confederation? Is nine-
teenth-century Moldavian separatism a myth conveniently revived
18
Quinet, Les Roumains (Kryos, Paris, 2008), 77.
19
Ibid., Ch. “La Langue Roumaine”, passim.
20
Ibid., 169.
298 1856
today for obscure purposes? Only further research will shed light on
this largely forgotten conflict.21
At the time, the Guarantor Powers were presented with reports
which tipped the balance overwhelmingly in favour of the union. The
issue of ‘what to do with the Romanian Principalities’ was indeed one
of the bones of contention at the Congress of Paris, which opened on
25 February 1856. Almost one month before the opening of the pro-
ceedings, on 2 February, Dumitru Brătianu wrote to Lord Clarendon,
presenting him with the emerging blueprint for the future Romania: a
unified, independent kingdom, broadly modelled on liberal-constitu-
tional Belgium. Short of this, union was the only acceptable, if minimal,
solution: an autonomous, unified Romania which would remain under
Ottoman suzerainty, but the suzerain power’s only prerogative would
be to approve the appointment of the ruling prince and to collect its
due tribute. A travel permit was arranged for Dumitru Brătianu to
travel from London with Lord Clarendon’s retinue. Some of Brătianu’s
radical colleagues in the European Central Committee were less than
pleased with this new moderate, ‘diplomatic’ stance, although Mazzini
realised that compromise might work better for Romania and gave
him his blessing: “Romania is now in exceptional circumstances, and
in such circumstances, she might gain something through diplomacy;
it is your duty to try”, he urged Brătianu.22 The Romanian representa-
tive was busy in Paris. Clarendon introduced him to Walewski, the
French Chairman of the Congress, and facilitated meetings with Lord
Cowley, the second minister representing Britain, and with Baron de
Bourqueney, the second French plenipotentiary minister, who pri-
vately was not in favour of the union, but publicly had to present
Napoleon’s pro-union position. Both Walewski and Clarendon spoke
in favour of the union in the session of 8 March, yet the Treaty, signed
on 18/30 March 1856, contained no stipulation specifically mention-
ing the union. It did place, however, the Danubian Principalities under
joint European protection and granted them the right to a national
army and an autonomous foreign policy. It was decided to convene,
in each principality, so-called Ad-hoc Divans (Assemblies), comprising
21
Recent contributions to the subject of Moldavian separatism in: Gheorghe Gabriel
Cărăbuş, “Asachi – un separatist avant la lettre”, Codrul Cosminului 10 (2004): 185–
206 (online open access) and Adrian Cioflâncă, “Political debates before the union of
the Romanian Principalities: between nationalism and parochialism”, Revue roumaine
d’histoire 43, 1–4 (2004): 111–39.
22
representatives of all classes, including the peasantry, to express the

will of the nation over the union. At the same time, a European Com-
mission was assigned the task of compiling and presenting a report
on the future of the Principalities based on its own findings in the
field, as well as on the referenda effected via the consultative assem-
blies. The Commission comprised Talleyrand-Périgord, representing
France, Savfet Effendi, the benevolent, rather self-effaced Ottoman
envoy, the Chevalier Raffaelo Benzi from Piedmont, who was pro-
Romanian, the Austrian Liehmann von Palmrode, who maintained a
fiercely anti-union position, the Prussian Baron von Richthofen, and
the Russian envoy Konstantin Basily, both of whom were regarded by
the Romanians as reasonable and accommodating. Britain was repre-
sented by an experienced diplomat, Sir Henry Bulwer Lytton, soon to
become Stratford Canning’s successor in Constantinople.
The issue of the choice of a prince for Romania created new divi-
sions among the émigrés. A native prince did not appear as a plausible
option given the country’s factionalism and clientelar politics. A French,
English or Piedmontese prince would have been Golescu-Albu’s pre-
ferred choice, but, as this would have encountered the opposition of
Austria, Russia and Prussia, he suggested a Belgian prince, who would
have ensured a much-needed neutrality. Albu’s anti-Austrian stance
became more virulent during the proceedings of the Congress. Aus-
tria, “this slut”, was “our fiercest enemy” and “more perfidious than
Russia”, he vituperated in his private correspondence upon learning
of rumours that, amidst convoluted Great Power negotiations, Aus-
tria was making advances to Prussia, suggesting a joint German colo-
nisation of the Principalities and of the coasts of Asia Minor.23 The
Austrian representative was also busy intriguing against the union of
the Principalities in the Ottoman capital, where the anti-union camp,
led by Stratford Canning, appeared to be gaining ground.24 Golescu-
Albu commented thus on the new pro-Austrian orientation of the
Porte: “Poor Turks! Yesterday, they thought, moved and acted as the
Russians dictated; today, they think, move and act as the Austrians
dictate . . . What was the use of this war, which cost the West three bil-
lion Francs and the lives of 150,000 brave? Did they have to die for
the beautiful eyes of Austria?”25 Henceforward, he argued, the unionist
23
Fotino 4: 172, 140–1.
24
Ibid., 1: 227.
25
Ibid., 4: 140.
300 1856
propaganda had to be targeted towards enlightening the Ottomans as

to their true interests in the Balkans. Golescu-Albu urged his cousin
Negru to sit down and write “one of those short, meaningful, straight-
forward memoirs, which aim right at the target!” Bowing to what he
thought were his cousin’s superior intellectual abilities, he imagined
what he would do if similarly gifted: “The things I would do! I would
launch ships, I would raise mountains, I would topple Austria, I would
save my homeland!”26
26
Ibid., 140–2.
JULY 1856
In mid-July, Rosetti was in the spa village Mont-Dore, not far from
Clermont (Puy-de-Dôme), a place famous for its Roman baths and
health springs. He was staying in a hotel with his six-year-old son,
Mircea, who needed medical care, which involved baths and “aspira-
tions” (vapour treatment) for his asthma.27 In spite of his concern for
the boy and the constant care he had to provide and which drained
him, Rosetti continued to oversee from afar the activities of the exiles’
‘propaganda machine’. In May 1856, Rosetti had created a ‘chancel-
lery’ in charge of correspondence with the Principalities – from the
territory of which the exiles were still banned – and with fund-raising
and propaganda abroad. The outcomes of this campaign included,
apart from Regnault’s and Ubicini’s above-mentioned publications,
Edmond Texier’s Appel au Congrès en faveur des Roumains, as well
as Ion Brătianu’s Mémoire sur l’empire d’Autriche dans la Question
d’Orient, all published in 1856, around the time of the Congress.
These, with other publications and exchanges of letters, were to be cir-
culated to French journalists and publishers, as well as sent to Bucha-
rest and Iaşi, with money collected by the “office for correspondence
and propaganda.”28
On 29 June 1856, Rosetti wrote to Ion Filipescu, who had been
allowed to return to Bucharest, asking him to prompt the Romanian
pro-union militants to express the ‘national will’ on the international
arena by writing to Walewski, Talleyrand, Napoleon, Clarendon, Palm-
erston, and Queen Victoria:
[. . .] it is known and accepted by everybody that a nation who dares not
manifest itself is a nation which is not yet ripe for liberty. The Western
powers cannot do anything for us unless forced by us; but even if they
could, they would not, unless we give them palpable evidence that we
want and we deserve to be a nation. They need to have a nation on the
Danube, not a powerless Kingdom. [. . .] Walewski, the English papers,
the Débats, Le Pays, the Journal de l’Empire, La Patrie, Le Constitutionnel,
27
Mircea Rosetti died in 1882, at the age of only 32. He was outlived by both his
parents.
28
C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti 1: 164.
302 july 1856
Le Siècle, everybody, every journal is urging you incessantly to do so:

Tout dépend de vous-même [sic].29
Louis Ulbach, of the left-wing Revue de Paris, did invite contributions
from sympathetic analysts and members of the Franco-Romanian cir-
cles. Paul Bataillard sent his study “La Moldo-Valachie dans la mani-
festation de ses efforts et de ses voeux.”30 Like Michelet’s Legends a
few years earlier, and like Quinet’s more recent Les Roumains, this
text, based on oral contributions from Romanian sources, was clearly
a vehicle for the unionist political objectives of the Rosetti-Brătianu
left-wing group. Armed with the latest issues of the Moldavian union-
ist newspapers Zimbrul31 and Steaua Dunării, supplied by the group,
Bataillard wrote an impassioned protest against the control, censorship
and military occupation which Turkey, Russia and Austria imposed on
the two provinces, in connivance with the two ruling princes and the
conservative elites. Rosetti and his peers’ epic journey to the Balkans
in the winter of 1853 earned a reference, as did the opportunity missed
by Turkey to arm the Romanians during the Crimean War. Austrian
abuses, such as the recent interception by border police of couriers
bearing memoranda from the Romanians to Walewski in preparation
for debates in Congress were specifically singled out.32 Bataillard’s text
was also an appeal for the return of the exiled forty-eighters at a time
when the exiles themselves felt under pressure to obtain visas and
return home in time for the vital debates and decision-making fac-
ing the nation. “On the absence or the return of these men depends a
people’s descent into discouragement or rebirth into hope”, Bataillard
wrote in support of the exiles, who used his text to present themselves
29
Ibid., 219.
30
Published in the review’s issue of 1 July 1856, 32: 416–56. Al. G. Golescu-Albu
provided much of Bataillard’s documentation, as shown in Fotino 1: 226. Cf. also
Fotino 4: 145, note 1. Paul Bataillard’s contribution to the pro-union movement
has been credited in Romanian historiography: e.g. Nicolae Iorga, “Un colaborator
francez al Unirii Principatelor: Paul Bataillard”, Analele Academiei Române, Memori-
ile Secţiunii Istorice, 3rd series, mem. 7 (3 February 1923): 1–14, and Olimpiu Boitoş,
Paul Bataillard et la révolution roumaine de 1848. Contribution à l’histoire des rela-
tions franco-roumaines (Extrait des “Mélanges de l’École Roumaine en France.”, Paris,
1930).
31
Zimbru = bison or aurochs, the ancient heraldic emblem of Moldavia. Both pub-
lications, a focal point for pro-union groups, were suppressed by the Moldavian law of
the press of September 1856. Steaua Dunării continued as l’Etoile du Danube in Paris
from 22 November/4 December 1856. See Documente privind unirea Principatelor,
ed. Bodea, 3: xviii–xix.
32
Bataillard, “La Moldo-Valachie”, 433.
july 1856 303
as the Romanians’ sole legitimate representatives, recognized interna-

tionally in 1848.33 Rosetti himself signed in the Revue de Paris from
July 1856 to January 1857 as “correspondant pour la Roumanie.” This
time, the main target of his by now notoriously ruthless pen was no
longer Russia, but Austria and Prince Ştirbey’s “Austro-Wallachian”
government. In the aftermath of the Congress, France was the one
great power from whom the Romanians expected support for the re-
entry of their nation into European history:
France must immediately restore the Romanians into all their rights to
autonomy, she must open the doors of their homes to the exiled patri-
ots, she must force the caimacams to change their ministers and their
Austro-Russian administrators, and grant freedom of the press and of
association to a country which needs such indispensable freedoms at a
time when it is called upon to debate maturely and freely on the institu-
tions it needs to create. Above all, France must watch over elections to
assemblies of the nation’s representatives and ensure that they comply
with all the pre-conditions required by the Treaty of Paris.34
Robert Colquhoun’s now open and unequivocal support for the anti-
union camp must have felt like a personal betrayal to Rosetti. Britain,
he wrote, “has joined the enemies of the Romanians.” Only Thouvenel
in Constantinople had remained ‘faithful’ and kept up the pressures for
the return of the exiles and the departure of the Austrians.35 In France,
the Romanian émigrés were now confident of enjoying political support
in the highest political circles. The cabinet, Napoleon III himself, news-
papers close to the government, as well as Louis Béclard, the French
consul in Bucharest, previously much-maligned by Golescu-Albu, all
came out openly in favour of the union, as the exiles were reporting
to each other. Lucien Bonaparte, Prince of Canino, and his son, Pierre
Bonaparte, were among the names circulated as possible candidates to
the throne of the future unified state.36 There remained however, one
major obstacle: predictably, the British cabinet was against a French
candidate, as well as, more broadly, against the union itself.37 In Con-
stantinople, Stratford Canning was indeed busy outlining the British
33
Ibid., 418.
34
Marin Bucur, “C. A. Rosetti – ‘Le correspondant pour la Roumanie’ de la ‘Revue
de Paris’ (1856)”, Revue roumaine d’histoire 22, 1 (1983): 68, citing from the Revue de
Paris, 1 September 1856: 457–8.
35
Ibid., 69.
36
Fotino 4: 155.
37
Ibid., 161, and 155.
304 july 1856
anti-union view to a harassed Ottoman government, undercutting the

parallel pro-union efforts of the French ambassador, Thouvenel. At
least once, in private, Stratford admitted that the union would be to
the benefit of the two Principalities, yet publicly, in the heated atmo-
sphere in Constantinople, he remained a vigorous anti-unionist.38
38
Cf. Stratford, letter to Colquhoun, 16 February 1856, quoted in T. W. Riker,
“The Concert of Europe and Moldavia in 1857”, English Historical Review 42 (166)
(1927): 232.
6 OCTOBER: THE BRIGHTON MEETING
I feel sure that these Princ.[ipalities] will bring us to

grief.
Lord Cowley to Clarendon, 8 June 185539
Both before and during the Congress, questions and motions were put
forth in the House of Commons and in the Lords requesting the Aus-
trian evacuation of the Principalities and permission for the refugees to
return. Austen Henry Layard, who had met Dumitru Brătianu in 1853,
Arthur Otway, the MP for Stafford at the time, and John Roebuck, the
radical independent MP for Sheffield, were the ones who usually initi-
ated debates on these and related issues. The anti-Russian Whig, Lord
Clanricarde, and Lord Lyndhurst, the law reformer, seconded them
in the upper house. However, a shift in Russia’s attitude to the union
placed the propagandists in a difficult position. In what appeared to be
a well-calculated strategic move, Russia decided to join France in sup-
porting the Romanian liberals’ unionist agenda, and British politicians
consequently withdrew their support, unwilling to associate Britain to
a policy co-sponsored by the tsar and by a nation recently defeated in a
major European conflict, in which so many British lives had been lost.
Layard, who had been hugely influential in liaising with the Turks and
in introducing Brătianu into British liberal circles, gradually distanced
himself, presumably because his own business interests in the Near
East made it difficult for him to sustain a cause which would have
diminished the Ottoman Empire. When he lost his Aylesbury seat in
the 1857 general elections, his support for Brătianu effectively ended.
After the abdication of the old-regime ruling prince of Wallachia,
Barbu Ştirbey, on 7 July 1856, the public pronouncements in favour
of the union became increasingly outspoken. Alexandru Dimitrie
Ghica, a former ruling prince, was appointed caimacam (governor).
Nicolae Golescu believed that he was favourable to the return of the
exiles as well as to the unionist cause. His brother, Ştefan, believed
exactly the opposite, especially given the caimacam’s close relations to
39
Lord Cowley to Clarendon, quoted in John M. Knapp, Behind the Diplomatic
Curtain: Adolphe de Bourqueney and French foreign policy, 1816–1869 (University of
Akron Press, 2001), 244.
306 1856
the anti-unionist British Consul, Robert Colquhoun, who, as shown,

was now a nemesis of his former protégés.40 Rosetti and the radicals
had distanced themselves from the consul, and Effingham Grant had
already left his post as consular secretary in 1855 to devote himself
entirely to his real estate business.
In the face of British opposition to the union, Dumitru Brătianu
reverted to his former subversive tactics, and once again cultivated
radical networks contacted via the European Democratic Central
Committee. For British reformers and radicals, forming links with
foreign republicans and freedom-fighters in exile was a way of putting
into practice one of their cherished political convictions, namely that
“efforts to extend freedom and rights at home and on the continent
were [. . .] interdependent” and that undermining reaction and despo-
tism in the world was a way of ensuring a better international climate
for reforms at home.41 This alliance of forces led directly to an episode
which represented the peak of the exiles’ propaganda campaign in
Britain: the Brighton meeting of 6 October 1856, a symbolic gathering
of British sympathisers aiming to “propagate a feeling in favour of the
union of the two principalities.”42 Brighton was chosen partly because
Arnold Ruge, a collaborator of Marx and German representative in
Mazzini’s European Committee, who had been a British national since
1855, had settled there with his wife, and partly because of its strong
radical tradition as well as its proximity to London.43 The local liberal-
radical alliance, comprising the lawyer Montagu David Scott, the par-
liamentary Liberal candidate for East Sussex, John George Dodson, as
well as another prominent local figure, William Coningham, future
MP for Brighton, offered their support in organising the meeting. For
Coningham, siding with the pro-union movement must have held
added piquancy as a means of settling a recent score with the pro-
Turkish, anti-unionist David Urquhart. The men had been co-founders
of the “Association for the protection of Turkey and other countries
from partition” in 1854, but had fallen out over matters relating to
the association’s funding. To the great delight of the press, there had
been an argument, the threat of a duel and a day in court, but the
40
Fotino 1: 231, 233, and Fotino 4: 164.
41
Turner, Independent Radicalism, 95.
42
“The Danubian Principalities”, Daily News, 18 October 1856.
43
Hope, “Dumitru Brătianu”, 35.
6 october: the brighton meeting 307
affair petered out when Coningham withdrew from the association.44

Arnold Ruge enthusiastically advertised the meeting in the local press
throughout the summer of 1856. The Brighton Herald of 27 September
carried a highly sympathetic appeal, meant to mobilise the English
public, a public which, by then, had become quite expert in using the
ever-expanding opportunities for pressurizing its political class:
Therefore, to keep the English Government in the right line, the English
people must advocate now the union of Moldavia and Wallachia, and
not go to sleep upon the laurels of the last war, whilst the fruit of it is
lost by shuffling, intrigues and deceit.
The Union of the Roumanish [sic] nation is the most important of all
the conditions of peace; it is at the same time the best guarantee of its
lasting. Never has Russia attacked the Turks by sea, always by the way
of the Principalities. Unite them, and you stop up that road against the
northern disturber of the peace of Europe.45
In the final days prior to the meeting, Brătianu, Ruge and his wife,
Agnes, left no detail to chance: the Romanian tri-coloured flag – sent by
Brătianu – and the Union Jack were both hoisted on the neo-classical
façade of the imposing Brighton Town Hall. Some papers reported
significant numbers in the audience, given the general lack of public
concern for the affairs of little-known corners of Europe, but there
are no figures to indicate how full the Town Hall’s capacious meet-
ing room actually was. Apart from the above-mentioned speakers, the
radical MP for Birmingham, William Scholefield, and the journalist
Horace St. John, political editorialist for the Daily Telegraph, were also
present. In the audience was Alexandru Dimitrie Ghica, Wallachia’s
new governor. Other invited personalities, including Lord Brougham,
William Gladstone and John Roebuck, sent apologies and, in the lat-
ter’s case, a very sympathetic letter to Arnold Ruge, published in The
Brighton Gazette of 9 October. Its tone was calculated to appeal to the
British patriotism of the Palmerston era:
It is my earnest wish that the influence of England may be used in sup-
port of freedom and good government in the Principalities, and I am
delighted to find that the public are beginning to take an interest in
the destinies of these hitherto unfortunate countries. They might be
made a means of checking the despotism which is supported by Russia,
44
Cf. for instance “The duel that was not fought” in the Bristol Mercury of 27
January 1855.
45
308 1856
Austria and Turkey. An independent and free people placed between

their Empires, would, if supported by England, greatly aid the advance
of civilization in the East, and go far to check the ambition of Russia and
Austria. The only hope of justice to the Principalities is in England, every
other nation that has any influence upon their well-being is an enemy of
freedom and liberal institutions.46
In the face of British reluctance to endorse the pro-unification volte-
face of Russia, Ruge had argued in an earlier article of 4 October that
the new Russian position was nothing more than a strategic ruse des-
tined to create in Britain precisely that political reserve and caution.
His argument that the Austrians and the Russians were the real com-
mon enemies of the Ottomans and the Romanians and that a strong,
unified Romanian state under a hereditary prince was in Turkey’s best
interests, was to be reiterated by Brătianu himself over the coming
months.47
Towards the end of the Brighton meeting, the lawyer Montagu Scott
moved a resolution asking the British government to commit itself to
the union of the five million Romanians, a union already agreed on in
principle by Lord Clarendon at the Congress of Paris. He was cheered
when he declared that Britain had not fought in the Crimean War to
see one tyranny replaced by another in the Principalities. John George
Dodson, the future Liberal MP for East Sussex and later Lord Monk-
Bretton, who had visited the Principalities on his way to the Crimea,
and had lectured widely on these “Neo-Latin” countries – the term he
used to distinguish these Romance-language areas from the Slavic sea
surrounding them – seconded the motion. He uttered a lengthy and
highly acclaimed speech in which, prophetically, he championed not
simply the project of union between Wallachia and Moldavia – in the
downscaled variant demanded lately by Brătianu and Rosetti – but
also the inclusion of the nearly one million Romanians in Bessara-
bia, as well as those of Transylvania and Bukovina. This represented
a much wider agenda, ultimately aiming at the creation of a Greater
Romania, only to emerge after World War I.48
According to the Brighton Gazette, the Brighton meeting was brought
to a close by an unscheduled speaker, a Mr. Matthews, mechanic and
46
Ibid., 38.
47
Ibid., 36–7.
48
Ibid., 39–40. Dodson’s speech was published in the Brighton Gazette of 9 October
1856.
Chartist, who declared himself pleased that “Brighton had the honour
of being the first town to express itself on this subject, which robbed
the government of the excuse that there was no popular movement
to support the Romanians.”49 The proceedings ended joyfully with
three cheers for the union of Wallachia and Moldavia. Within a week,
every national newspaper in Britain had carried copious reports of the
meeting, largely based on the Brighton Gazette. Informed by Brătianu,
Rosetti, still in Paris, wrote glowingly on 10 October to Ion Filipescu
in Bucharest, in his customary mix of Romanian and French:
[. . .] England has turned again in our favour; and we hope that, aided
by public opinion, we will bring back the Cabinet into supporting the
Union and recalling Mr. Colquhoun, who is constantly sending reports
that are not only against the Union, but also against us.
Last Monday, we had in Brighton a large meeting at the hôtel de ville.
All day long, the Romanian flag flew on the hôtel de ville and in the
evening the city was festooned with tri-coloured lights.
There were many good speeches, and four enthusiastic hurrahs for the
Union, and the assembly voted unanimously for a petition to be sent to
the Queen demanding the Union. Day by day, England warms to the
idea of Union, and we are certain of being able to organise three more,
larger, meetings in Liverpool, Manchester and London.
Now, brother, you should kindly sit and write a memoir addressed
to each of the three allied powers: F[rance], Eng[land] and Sard[inia],
protesting against all the injustices done to us over the last six months
and to demand the Union, [. . .].50
Yet, the press in Britain was not as overwhelmingly positive on the
subject of the union as the Romanians wished to believe. Even news-
papers of a liberal orientation such as the Liverpool Mercury carried
negative assessments of the prospects for unification in Romania, a
further proof that Russia’s support for the unification had harmed the
unionist cause. “Without denying that there is a certain plausibility in
the notion of uniting provinces which, in race, religion, language, and
social habits, have so much in common as Moldavia and Wallachia”,
ran the paper’s editorial of 1 October 1856, “we will say at once that
we view with extreme distrust any scheme on such a subject which
labours under the double disadvantage of being urged by Russia and
opposed by the Porte.” Having brushed aside the Romanians’ claims as
a cultural nation, the anonymous analyst expressed fears that a putative
49
Ibid., 40.
50
C. A. Rosetti, Corespondenţă, ed. Bucur, 222. Emphases in the original.
310 1856
independent kingdom of Romania would become a “most convenient

focus for Russian intrigue and a comparatively safe and easy prize
for Russian cupidity”, forgetting that, as Ottoman-controlled separate
provinces, the Principalities had been precisely that. If they read this
article, Rosetti and his friends must have been puzzled and chagrined
to learn that what the author termed the “unionist party” in the Princi-
palities without further distinctions, was “indebted to Russian instiga-
tion for much of its zeal in the cause of a pseudo-nationality.”51
The projected further meetings never took place. The promoters
of Romanian unification collided head-on with the Urquhartites and
the related public foreign affairs committees, which disapproved of
any threats to Ottoman territorial integrity and of any appearance of
collusion with Russia. The Newcastle Committee for Investigating the
Action of Diplomacy, chaired by the Urquhartite George Crawshay, an
ironmaster from Newcastle and a personal friend of David Urquhart,
wrote an open letter in which he accused “the genteel democrats of
Brighton” of encouraging the separatist tendencies of the Ottoman
dominions, thereby “doing their best to hand the trade of the Dan-
ube over to Russia.” The letter was published on 18 October 1856 in
Urquhart’s Free Press, the weekly mouthpiece of the foreign affairs
committees, themselves created in 1854–55 by David Urquhart, with
funding from Crawshay and from James Grant, the editor of The Lon-
don Morning Advertiser.52 The attack triggered a three-month-long
public exchange between Horace St. John, William Scholefield, Arnold
Ruge, and Dumitru Brătianu on the one hand, and the Urquhartites on
the other, an exchange in which British interests on the Danube and
in the Near East were vehemently debated.53 Brătianu, Rosetti and the
other Romanian radicals, alongside the other expatriate nationalists,
must have been bemused by some of Urquhart’s wilder claims which
turned them from freedom-fighters into allies of Russia’s anti-Turkish
51
“The New Eastern Difficulties”, Liverpool Mercury, 1 October 1856. For similar
views, cf. “The Danubian Principalities”, Daily News, 18 October 1856. The anti-union
shift marked a change of tone in otherwise sympathetic periodicals.
52
Hope, “Dumitru Brătianu”, 41–2.
53
For a fairly recent assessment of Urquhart’s political career and controversial
opinions, see Miles Taylor, “The old radicalism and the new: David Urquhart and
the politics of opposition, 1832–1867”, in Currents of Radicalism: popular radicalism,
organised labour and party politics in Britain, 1850–1914, ed. Eugenio F. Biagini and
Alastair J. Reid (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 23–43.
policies.54 Urquhart, who may have regretted his youthful military

contribution to the achievement of Greek independence, was now
wary of policies which might have further weakened Ottoman power.
His reputation among the Romanians was mixed. Many were baffled
by his views, but for pro-Ottoman moderates such as Ion Ghica, he
was an “apostle of the union of the Principalities”. In the Free Press
of 1 December 1855 he had a published a blueprint constitution for
the Principalities, in which he advocated a union of the two provinces
in the person of jointly elected prince and advanced some interesting
ideas about a streamlined administration. However, more controver-
sially, he also spoke of the appointment of an Ottoman general as head
of the Romanian army and of a total integration of the country within
Ottoman imperial structures.55
In an open letter published in the Daily News of 18 October and the
Times of the 25th, Dumitru Brătianu invoked the ancient treaties con-
cluded by the Romanians and the Turks which guaranteed the rights
and immunities of the Principalities as semi-autonomous provinces.
He attempted to defuse the conflict with the pro-Turkish faction, by
explaining that the union was not a plan directed against the suzerain
Ottoman Porte:
We desire the union because we are one people, homogeneous, identical
as no other people in the world are or can be; because we have the same
origin, root, language, and religion, the same traditions and history; [. . .]
We especially desire the union because it already exists in our hearts,
because we have the conscience of our common destinies and of our
identical mission.56
Brătianu concluded, rather disingenuously, by assuring his British
readers that a united Romania would wish to “live in good friend-
ship with the Turks.”57 On 5 December 1856, Dumitru Brătianu wrote
directly to Lord Palmerston, further arguing against British fears that
a united Romania might become a Russian puppet state. The British
54
Sheffield Free Press, 246 (15 September 1855): 5, quoted in Gregory Claeys,
“Mazzini, Kossuth, and British Radicalism, 1848–1854”, Journal of British Studies 28
(July 1989): 254. Cf. also Geoffrey Nash, From Empire to Orient: travellers to the Mid-
dle East, 1830–1926 (London, 2005), Ch. 2: “David Urquhart and the Patronage of
the East”, 62.
55
Bodea, “David Urquhart”, 51–5. The Constitution was reprinted in The question
is Mr. Urquhart a tory or a radical? answered by his constitution for the Danubian
Principalities (Sheffield: I. Ironside, 1856): 4–10.
56
57
Ibid.
312 1856
government continued to hesitate. The French pro-union stance, pub-

licised in the Moniteur of 5 February 1857, only served to further alien-
ate the British from the cause of a unified Romania. France was not
supposed to make unilateral public judgements on the matter.58 The
campaign to win ‘the hearts’ of the British commercial classes in the
North was also losing ground. In spite of press propaganda, the hostile
campaign launched by Crawshay’s Newcastle Committee on foreign
affairs dashed any hope of further meetings in the North. Although
“the radical strongholds of the industrial north” had traditionally sup-
ported the Hungarian, Polish and Italian national causes, they now
appeared unwilling to do the same for the Romanians, whose cause
was likely to undermine British trade interests on the Danube and in
the Near East, fears nurtured copiously by the Free Press.59
58
59
1857
[. . .] I can see the great difficulties that we have to

overcome, but I keep hoping, I believe in our success.
Rosetti, letter to Marie, 15 August 185760
Pressure for the exiles’ return prior to the elections for the ad-hoc
assemblies continued to mount in the winter of 1856–57. The return
from Paris, London and Asia Minor of the exiled revolutionaries had
constantly been on the agenda of their sympathisers and campaigners
in the West in the 1850s. The Moldavian liberal-oriented Prince Grig-
ore Ghica had authorised the return of the Moldavian exiles as early
as 1855. The less radical of the Wallachians had been allowed back by
Prince Ştirbey around the same time, but even under the more relaxed
governorship of the caimacam Alexandru Dimitrie Ghica, entry was
still refused to the ‘reds’, who had become an electoral hazard.61 As
shown, Rosetti, the Golescus, the Brătianus had largely contributed
to their own elevation to mythical status by endorsing and distribut-
ing the texts of Michelet, Bataillard and other supporters, and were
now being talked about at home as the legendary leaders of 1848, the
only men of real political stature likely to become the rallying point of
the new national consciousness. Arthur Otway had raised the issue of
their return in the Commons as early as 18 July 1856. The intercession
of Lord Palmerston and Stratford Canning in Constantinople did not
produce any tangible results.62 Dumitru Brătianu pressed the point on
Clarendon and Walewski in memoranda sent on 6 February 1857. A
few days later, on Clarendon’s demand, Brătianu supplied a list with
the names of the exiles and other relevant information. In March the
issue was raised again in the Commons by the same Otway, eliciting
firm promises from Palmerston. Whether as a result of British pres-
sures or not, the much-awaited Ottoman visas were finally stamped on
the exiles’ passports in April 1857. In May 1857 Alexandru Golescu-
Albu was finally at home in Bucharest, urging his friends still abroad
to encourage the formation of philo-Romanian committees, modelled
60
61
Cojocariu, Partida naţională, 237–8.
62
314 1857
on the philo-Hellenic committees, and lobby for the exiles’ return in

time for the coming elections.63
While the Wallachians still fought for return visas in early 1857,
the Moldavian pro-union activists were campaigning at home in
their newly formed unionist committee, against the not inconsider-
able opposition of anti-union government officials and conservative
land-owners. Similarly to Marie Rosetti’s case, being a foreign national
was found to be an advantage, and the British and French consuls in
the Moldavian ports Galaţi and Brăila lent their support: Andrei V.
Ionescu, an important merchant and leading member of the union-
ist committee, was granted a ‘British subject patent’, which enabled
him to carry and transmit correspondence and pro-union manifestoes
which would have been intercepted otherwise.64
On 15 April 1857 Marie and Rosetti had separated at St. Quentin,
in north-east France, on their separate ways towards the same ulti-
mate destination: Bucharest, Wallachia. She and the children travelled
via Budapest, and further on, probably via Belgrade. Clues from the
Rosettis’ correspondence suggest that Charles Arène was still in the
picture, at his old post at the French consulate in Belgrade. Whether,
after their acquaintance in 1854, they had had further contacts remains
unknown, but in 1857 he still facilitated the passage of the exiles’ let-
ters through Belgrade. Rosetti himself returned for a while to Paris,
awaiting the official announcement of the exiles’ amnesty or at least
the authorization for the return and the issuing of appropriate travel
documents. In his last days in Paris, he said his good-byes to Michelet,
Bataillard, Ubicini, as well as to the shoemaker and fellow-conspirator
Hallegrain.65
Marie arrived in Bucharest in early May and, setting up home tem-
porarily with her brother Effingham, started a vociferous campaign to
obtain re-entry visas for the returning exiles. Having obtained Aus-
trian transit visas, Rosetti and Dumitru Brătianu left Paris shortly
afterwards, leaving the younger Brătianu, Ion, behind, presumably
as strategic back-up. A few words should be said on the epilogue of
the court saga involving the younger Brătianu, who had been sen-
tenced to three years’ imprisonment on 16 January 1854 for his role
in the ‘Hippodrome’ plot against Napoleon III. On 10 June 1856, the
63
Fotino 4: 201.
64
65
Letter of 20 April 1857, in C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti 1: 169–70.
1857 315
Garde des Sceaux had recommended the suspension of the remain-

der of his sentence. “It was his nationality and opinions widespread
in his country rather than an instinct for disorder which prompted
him to associate himself with the men of the demagogical party, who
exploited for their own interests the inexperience and the exalted sen-
timents of Bratiano”, the rationale for the decision read. His “conven-
able” attitude and the “sincere regrets which he keeps professing” now
recommended Ion Brătianu for pardon in the eyes of French law.66 The
recommendation was followed up by the Parquet de la Cour Impériale
de Paris, whose representative added his own geographically confused
contextualisation of the ‘Bratiano case’: “The Moldo-Wallachians,
because they dream of a Roumelia [sic!] or a Romania free from the
Turks and the Russians, feel duty-bound in France to be of the party
so foolishly called the party of progress and liberty, hence their more
or less direct association with the pèle-mèle of demagogic agitators
[. . .].”67 Pardon was finally granted on 1 July 1856. The future Liberal
Prime Minister of Romania was now free to put his turbulent youth
behind and start his political career in his troubled country, but his
past as a – largely innocuous – conspirator and anarchist would con-
tinue to haunt him.68
The governor of Wallachia, Alexandru Dimitrie Ghica, and the Aus-
trian authorities were reluctant to grant the necessary re-entry visas.
Marie, as a British national, was instructed to drop names (e.g. Clar-
endon) and issue threats: if denied entry, the exiles, Rosetti indicated,
were going to return to London and Paris and “will have at least the
satisfaction of exposing to the eyes of Europe the chicaneries that an
empire such as Turkey employs in dealing with poor exiles, and of
showing how the Treaty of Paris is applied in Romania. Tell them that
the rumour here is that this is the personal victory of the Austrian
consul. Tell them, in addition, that the nation will never believe that it
has gained freedom of speech as long as those devoted to the country
are still in exile.”69 Clarendon did intervene and was successful in put-
ting pressure on the Austrian authorities, who finally issued the visas.
66
Arhivele Naţionale, Bucharest, Fonds Brătianu, Dossier 596, Memorandum
No. 3676 s. 56 of the Ministère de la Justice, Direction Criminelle, 2e Bureau.
67
Arhivele Naţionale, Bucharest, Fonds Brătianu, Dossier 596, the Parquet de la
Cour Impériale de Paris, Memorandum to the Garde des Sceaux, 30 June 1856.
68
Ibid., Ministère de la Justice, Direction des Affaires Criminelles et des Grâces, 2e
Bureau, Secrétariat Général, Registre S. 56, Nr. 3676, 20 June 1856.
69
316 1857
In the end, it was the Wallachian governor who mounted the stron-
gest resistance to the exiles’ return.70 “You must not be afraid of using
strong words”, Rosetti advised his wife. “You must demand above all
that they at least state on whose authority it was that we were sent
into exile, and who now opposes our return; they must not be allowed
to evade a direct question. Who was responsible for sending us into
exile? [. . .] there was no ferman to this effect, and who is preventing us
from returning, when Turkey herself has now issued us with passports
for the Principalities?!”71
Finally, by June the amnesty of the exiled revolutionaries became
official. “I am mad with happiness at the thought of seeing you all
back in our beloved homeland”, Zinca Golescu wrote to her sons.72
However, on arrival at Turnu-Severin, on the Danube, with Turk-
ish and Austrian visas stamped in their passports, Brătianu, Rosetti,
Nicolae and Ştefan Golescu learned that the customs had not received
instructions to allow them in. They lingered in the port of Ruschuk
from early May to 7 July 1857, while Marie, their friends and allies
campaigned for their safe return. Zinca sent packets of tobacco, home-
made jams, tea, a game of chess and pillows.73 Given his radical cre-
dentials, Dumitru Brătianu’s return was fiercely opposed by the British
Consul, Colquhoun, as well as by the Austrians and Turks.74 By now,
in Romania itself, the four had acquired martyr status and their return
was being demanded en masse. The group’s almost uncanny ability to
mobilize the masses was going to remain a constant in their subse-
quent political careers. The town of Piteşti, home territory to Dumitru
Brătianu, even made a gift of a house to its famous son to enable him
to be entered on the electoral registers as a propertied candidate for
the Ad-hoc Divans.
It was just another in a long series of very frustrating, unproductive
episodes in the exiles’ lives. The caimacam was still unwilling to allow
them in, in spite of a petition signed by thousands and presented to
him on 8 June 1857 by a delegation led by his own nephew, which he
declined to receive. The petition read:
70
Letter of 9 May 1857, in ibid., 172–3.
71
Ibid., 174. Emphases in the original.
72
Fotino 4: 204.
73
Ibid., 1: 236.
74
Ibid., 4: 198.
1857 317
They [the Romanians] come to ask from Your Highness to allow the
return of the Exiles, as a precondition for putting the past behind them,
as a sign that they all think of the common good and are ready to leave
aside all party spirit. They [the exiles] have endured eight years of exile;
their families are suffering and we are the interpreters before Your High-
ness of their pain and wishes.
In support of this demand we declare that: whatever else could be said
of their acts, nobody will deny that they have not been entirely inspired
by their love of the country; the Treaty of Paris has fulfilled many of the
aims for which they suffered; these are all encompassed by the art. V of
the Treaty which granted freedom to all, especially as solemn promises
were made before the Congress that the country would be consulted
freely, in a spirit of unbiased justice.
In order to fulfil her new mission, our Homeland needs the enlight-
ened patriotism of all her sons. One single exception would be regarded
as a bad omen. Let therefore our exiled brethren return.75
The European Commission in Bucharest in its turn received a petition
on 29 June, which invoked similar legal arguments. The temporary
character of the initial Ottoman ferman of 1848 which had sent the
forty-eighters into exile and the fact that the exiles had never been
tried and convicted meant that they had retained their full rights as
Romanian citizens and were therefore entitled to take part in the
country’s general elections.76 As the campaign continued, Rosetti
wrote to Marie on 17 June, summarizing their nine years in exile. He
reminisced fondly of the morning when his daughter was born and
the revolution started:
Embrace tenderly that beloved child who is now nine years old; tell her
that I count her years by the years of my exile; that her birth marked
the birth of an entire people; that the skies clouded over afterwards, but
that the dawn must keep its promise and fulfil the hope it heralded.
Consequently, she is duty bound more than anyone else to become a
woman.77
Finally, in early July 1857, the “martyrs for the Romanian nationality”
were allowed to re-enter their native land.78 By 10 July, the remaining
exiles had returned from Paris, Constantinople and other locations.
75
From the memorial volume Lui C. A. Rosetti (1816–1916) la o sută de ani de la
naşterea sa, Volum comemorativ închinat de “Democraţia”, Revista cercului de studii
PNL (3rd edn., Bucharest, June 1916), 278–80.
76
Ibid., 280.
77
78
Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu 1: 69–70.
318 1857
Downplaying the men’s symbolic capital, in its issue of 16 July, the

Moldavian newspaper l’Etoile du Danube caricatured Ottoman and
Great Power fears over their return: “Here it is, then, this elite legion
of the Romanians of Wallachia, comprising only some twelve persons,
yet able to inspire such terror in Turkey!”79 Western and Ottoman
caution vis-a-vis this small of group of exiles was, however, com-
mensurate to the disproportionate influence that this “general staff of
the revolution”80 exercised on public opinion at home. Marie Rosetti
described the men’s triumphal arrival in the Danubian port Giurgiu
in a letter to a friend in Paris. As they touched the soil of their home-
land for the first time in nearly ten years, they were welcomed by del-
egations of merchants, students, priests, peasants, and schoolchildren,
who covered their carriages in flowers. Zinca Golescu herself, “that
noble and sublime mother”, welcomed her sons at the Field of Liberty
(Câmpia Libertăţii) in Bucharest, one of the most symbolic sites of the
revolution of 1848, where a tri-coloured banner had been hoisted to
mark the occasion.81
Marie was pregnant again and, as the Rosettis had no home of
their own yet, she was staying with their friends, the Cantacuzinos, at
their estate at Rîfov, not far from the capital city. Writing to her from
Bucharest a few days after his return, Rosetti told her:
What pleased me most was that I was so warmly greeted in the streets by
the men of the people. I was also told that the merchants are considering
electing me as their staroste [elder]. Others insist on giving me a house
in Bucharest because they say that I stand a good chance of being elected
[to the Ad-hoc Assemblies] – which would mean a lot, although I am
tempted to refuse for several reasons.82
Rosetti was gradually re-gaining possession of his life. He and his
brother-in-law, Effingham Grant, agreed – regretfully – to dissolve
their business partnership on 27 July: Rosetti remained sole owner of
the former “Rosetti-Grant Establishment” pending payment of out-
standing debts to Grant. “So here I am, the owner of a bookshop, a
printer, journalist and deputy in spe . . .”, he wrote to his wife.83 He
79
From the memorial volume Lui C. A. Rosetti, 282.
80
The phrase was used in private correspondence by the moderate liberal Ion
Bălăceanu. Quoted in Documente privind Unirea Principatelor, ed. Bodea, 3: xx.
81
Letter dated 5 August 1857, in Lui C. A. Rosetti, 281.
82
Letter of 10 July 1857, in C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti 1: 198.
83
Ibid., 201.
1857 319
did not eventually reject the merchants’ offer and was indeed elected
elder of the merchants’ guild as well as deputy for Bucharest in the
Ad-hoc Divan on behalf of the National Party on 5 August 1857. His
newspaper Românul, which he resumed on 21 August, was to become
the main channel of the party, the nucleus of the future Romanian
Liberal Party. He was looking for a family home and was hopeful for
the future: “[. . .] even back in ’47 I could not have looked for a home
for us with more ardour and love than I am now! And I am going to
find one!”, he promised his wife.84
84
Letter dated 21 August 1857, in ibid., 202.
THE ELECTIONS
The British envoy to Wallachia, Sir Henry Bulwer Lytton, appointed to

the European Commission on 23 July 1856, was a former secretary of
embassy in Constantinople and Paris and minister-plenipotentiary in
Madrid and Washington. As he took up his new post, he brought with
him diplomatic finesse and experience. French-educated and with a
flamboyant character, he had a liberal orientation and, as suggested by
his support for the Belgians against the Dutch in 1830, was potentially
sympathetic to the cause of ‘oppressed’ nations. It was a profile likely
to inspire confidence in Romanian political circles and, as a result, Bul-
wer Lytton and his wife, Georgiana, did establish cordial relations with
a number of high-society families in Bucharest. He did support the
cause of the exiles’ repatriation, but was, at the same time, a defender
of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire.85 According to his instructions
from the Foreign Office, the commissioner was to follow “a strictly
impartial course” in attempting to “accommodate the true interests
of the Danubian Principalities with the rights of the Sultan.”86 Bulwer,
who was personally inclined to think that the dangers posed by the
union were exaggerated, was warned by the Foreign Secretary, Lord
Clarendon, that an independent, unified Romania would lead to its
annexation by the Russian empire.87 Under pressure, Bulwer prepared
a report, commissioned by Clarendon, in which he tiptoed uncomfort-
ably around what was, he knew, the pet cause of his Romanian liberal
hosts. “While union under a foreign prince would create an effective
barrier against foreign intervention”, Bulwer wrote on 15 April 1857,
“such an innovation would be too much like a betrayal of Turkey to
be desirable at the present time, and, in short, the disadvantages of
Union would overbalance the advantages.”88 Yet, faced with realities
in situ, he reported back to the Foreign Office on 4 September 1857
that “almost every man in the Principality is or says he is in favour of
85
Fotino 4: 170.
86
Documente privind Unirea Principatelor, ed. Valentina Costake, Beatrice Mari-
nescu and Valeriu Stan, vol. 7: Corespondenţă diplomatică engleză (1856–1859)
(Bucharest, 1984), 110.
87
Ibid., 111.
88
T. W. Riker, The Making of Roumania (Oxford University Press, 1931), 87.
the elections 321
uniting the two Principalities under a Foreign Prince.”89 In effect, in

October 1857 the Ad-hoc Assemblies of Bucharest and Iaşi adopted
a common programme on behalf of the entire nation, asking for the
union of Wallachia and Moldavia into an autonomous, neutral state
under a foreign ruler. Bulwer sent the Foreign Office two memoirs
on the question of the union: a Report on the Danubian Principalities
and a Project of Form of Government. The seventy-eight-page report
in its final form was registered at the Foreign Office much later, on
5 June 1858, and the second memoir was published separately on
1 July 1858.90 In the Report, Bulwer grappled rather awkwardly with
the fact that the Principalities had presented the European Commis-
sion with a joint programme, making it difficult for the European
powers to consider them separately, as would have been his choice.
At the same time, Bulwer recognised that union without independence
under a ruler appointed by the Sultan, who would have retained the
right to veto his appointee’s policies, would have been “odious and
unjust” to the Romanians.91 Bulwer found the joint election of a native
prince – the solution ultimately adopted in effect by the Romanians
in January 1859 – equally problematic, given the factious nature and
instability of the Romanian political scene.
Irrespective of Romanian expectations and in parallel with Bul-
wer’s uneasy reflections on the matter, France and England had in fact
already agreed by the Pact of Osborne of 9 August 1857 on allowing
in principle a loose administrative union of Moldavia and Wallachia,
a union conceived differently by the two powers. While France did
not preclude an eventual full union, as suggested by a letter of the
French foreign minister, Count Walewski, to the French ambassador
in Vienna, de Bourqueney, Britain stopped short of such radical plans,
and adhered strictly to its position of 1856: the Principalities were to
have separate princes and governments, and were only to be treated
as a loose federation in matters of common interest.92
89
Fotino 4: 567.
90
Valeriu Stan, “La réorganisation des Principautés Roumaines au milieu du XIXe
siècle vue par Sir Henry L. Bulwer”, Revue roumaine d’histoire 31, 3–4 (1992): 215–33.
Bulwer’s report and his “Project of Form of Government” are held at the National
Archives in London under PRO/FO 97/416, FO 881/797 and PRO/FO 881/694.
Stratford Canning’s memoirs are held under the pressmarks PRO/FO 78/1093 and
78/1258.
91
Ibid., 219.
92
Ibid., 222, notes 26 to 30. Cf. There is no written record of the Osborne Pact
itself. For the complex diplomatic transactions at the time of the pact, see T. W. Riker,
322 1857
Bulwer’s rather convoluted project was never presented to the next

session of the Congress of Paris, which opened on 22 May 1858.
According to the British representative at the Congress, Lord Cowley,
“no scheme, short of granting union, would satisfy the Principalities,
and he did not believe that Great Britain should take the responsi-
bility of backing anything that proved so unpopular as to be prob-
ably unworkable.”93 The position adopted ultimately by Britain with
respect to the Principalities was shaped by two memoirs on the issue,
dated 2 December 1855 and 23 March 1857 respectively, by the British
ambassador in Constantinople, Stratford Canning, who was consis-
tently and deeply hostile to the idea of union, but who, nevertheless,
was ready to accept the compromise solution of a “uniformity of insti-
tutions” in the place of full union.94
Most sources indicate overwhelming support for the union in
both Principalities and among all social classes, including a far from
politically apathetic peasantry.95 Elections for the Moldavian Assem-
bly in mid-August 1857, rigged by the anti-unionist authorities, were
annulled and a second ballot overwhelmingly returned candidates of
the pro-union National Party. The press exerted its power once more:
it was Kogălniceanu’s paper l’Etoile du Danube which exposed the
electoral fraud, seriously irritating the anti-union British government.96
It would appear that Stratford Canning himself was no stranger to the
affair.97
In Wallachia, all the ‘men of 1848’ were elected to the Ad-Hoc
Assembly on 21 September/3 October 1857. Nicolae Golescu was
Vice-President, while Dumitru Brătianu, Rosetti and Ştefan Golescu
were among the Assembly’s secretaries. The overwhelming presence
in the Assembly of radicals and of former forty-eighters could not fail
“The Concert of Europe and Moldavia in 1857”, English Historical Review 42 (166)
(1927): 227–44. Cf. also Harold Temperley, “The Union of Romania in the private
letters of Palmerston, Clarendon and Cowley, 1855–1857”, and idem, “Four docu-
ments on the future of Roumania by Henry Stanley, D. Brătianu, Lord Palmerston
and Albert, Prince Consort, 1855–1857”, Revue historique du sud-est européen 14, 7–9
(1937): 218–40 and 241–2.
93
Riker, The Making of Roumania, 8, 161.
94
Stan, “La réorganisation”, 221.
95
96
Pericle Martinescu, Costache Negri (Bucharest, 1966), 161–4 quoted in Drace-
Francis, The Making of Modern Romanian Culture, 171.
97
Beatrice Marinescu, “La position des diplomates et émissaires britanniques
envers le mouvement unioniste des Principautés”, Revue roumaine d’histoire 11, 2
(1972): 278.
the elections 323
to attract criticism from members of the European Commission. In

the Commission’s session of 29 October, the Austrian Commissioner
Liehmann von Palmrode declared that he thought it was his duty to
remind his colleagues that, of the nine members of the Wallachian
‘Divan’, whose crucial mission it was to draw up a memorandum for
the future organisation of the Romanian state, seven had been forty-
eighters, and therefore, hardly Austria’s favourite choice. Dumitru
Brătianu, especially, who had garnered the greatest number of votes,
was singled out by the Austrian diplomat as particularly unsuitable for
his new position. As Mazzini’s collaborator, he had co-signed “several
proclamations and other incendiary writings with the avowed objec-
tive of turning Europe upside down . . .”, Liehmann complained.98 This
time, the Austrian protest carried no weight and the appointments
were allowed to stand. Despite the official Russian policy of support
for the Romanian union, the Russian commissar Konstantin Basily was
nevertheless equally worried by the weight of the forty-eighters and
radicals in the Assembly: “These exalted men already have a consider-
able majority, for they have been able to attract in their orbit deputies
from the cities and from rural communes”, he reported to the Russian
Foreign Minister, Aleksander Gorchakov, on 6/28 October 1857.99
In late 1857, Nicolae Golescu and Dumitru Brătianu were back in
Paris and London, this time no longer as exiles, but as the official
envoys of their emerging nation. As the general elections of 1857
removed from the political arena a number of parliamentarians such
as Austin Layard, John Forster, Arthur Otway and Thomas Milner-
Gibson, all of whom had been supportive of Brătianu’s campaign, the
relay was passed on to new ‘philo-Romanians’, William Gladstone in
particular, who had already corresponded with Brătianu in 1856.100 On
10 September 1857, not yet in office, he wrote to Lord Aberdeen to
protest against what he thought was by now an outdated pro-Ottoman
bias in British foreign policies.101 Brătianu had kept up with his con-
tacts in Britain, Evan Eyre Crowe, the former editor of the liberal Daily
News, and Joseph Archer Crowe, who had covered the military opera-
tions on the lower Danube for The Illustrated London News in the
98
99
Marian Stroia, “Rusia şi românii de la Războiul Crimeii la Unirea Principatelor:
sinteza unei atitudini”, in Războiul Crimeii, ed. Silvan Ionescu, 88.
100
See letter dated 5 August 1856 in Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu 2: 128.
101
John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (London, 1905–7), 637.
324 1857
summer of 1854.102 After the Congress of Paris, Eyre Evans Crowe had
been commissioned by Dumitru Brătianu to travel to Bucharest and
assess the wishes of the Romanian nation as the ad-hoc assemblies
convened to elect candidates and organise elections in both Walla-
chia and Moldavia. It was to an already converted Evans Crowe, on a
visit to Constantinople in late August 1856, that Ştefan Golescu had
made an exposé of all the reasons why France and Britain should sup-
port a unified state on the Danube: the French spirit could intellec-
tually colonise it and English ships would bring the benefits of free
trade and navigation.103 These were not new arguments and today, the
exiles’ overlapping pamphlets, articles and private letters on this sub-
ject sound repetitive and slightly obsessive. Yet, this insistence was
due to the exiles’ feeling that nothing could be taken for granted in
a hostile environment. In addition, they appear to have believed that
repetition was bound to shift that recently-discovered entity, public
opinion, which, in turn, would directly influence decision-making in
the Cabinet. It was an endearingly optimistic view of the mechanics
of lobbying in the early days when ‘public opinion’ appeared easier to
define than in subsequent ages.
Eyre Evans Crowe and his son chose not to publish in the popu-
lar dailies, but in two of the most influential of the Whig and radi-
cal quarterly periodicals: the Westminster Review and the Edinburgh
Review.104 The two unsigned articles, ostensibly reviews of works on
Romania published in 1856 by Vasile Boerescu, Paul Bataillard and
Cesar Bolliac, were in fact brief expositions on why “the Roumans
should have the sympathy of Englishmen” and outlined the national
party’s main demand: union under a foreign prince.105 Eyre Evans
Crowe’s Edinburgh Review article also attempted to reassure a Brit-
ish audience little inclined towards revolution by downplaying the
radicalism of Romania’s would-be leaders (i.e. Rosetti and his allies):
prosperity and political stability, he argued, would soon tame the reds
and reconcile them to the status quo.106 Of the two, Joseph Archer’s
102
For their contacts with the exiles in Vidin in early 1854, see Part Two, p. 267
and p. 283.
103
Fotino 4: 148–9, 168.
104
Ellis Archer Wasson, “The Whigs and the Press, 1800–50”, Parliamentary His-
tory 25, Part 1, (2006): 71–2.
105
“The Danubian Principalities”, Westminster Review (April 1857): 9, in the British
Periodicals Collection II online database.
106
“Roumania”, Edinburgh Review (April 1857): 430, in the British Periodicals Col-
lection I online database.
the elections 325
piece in the Westminster Review was the more analytical, as well as less
mindful of diplomatic kow-towing: “Turkish imbecility” was the chief
cause why the Principalities were still an under-developed vassal, with
an inferior infrastructure, an unfair tax system, no banks and no army,
instead of a strong, modern state. The younger Crowe recorded in his
Reminiscences that his piece “created some sensation” and served to
make him even more “obnoxious” to Palmerston.107
107
Joseph Archer Crowe, Reminiscences of Thirty-Five Years of My Life . . ., (London,
1895), 138. Cf. also Eric D. Tappe, “E. E. and J. A. Crowe and the Rumanian Union:
some unpublished letters of 1857”, Slavonic and East European Review 41, 96 (Dec.
1962): 138, 141.
1858
THE CONGRESS OF PARIS AND THE UNION
OF THE PRINCIPALITIES
Debates in the Wallachian and Moldavian Ad-hoc assemblies, where

for the first time in Romanian history the peasants were represented,
were often locked in cross-class conflicts over future reforms and leg-
islation.108 Deemed to have evolved into sources of political and social
disorder, these bodies were dissolved by the Porte in January 1858,
but the report resulting from the referenda they had overseen was
approved and signed by the European Commission in March–April.109
Dumitru Brătianu infused fresh funding and new energy into his cam-
paigning. On 4 May 1858, Gladstone delivered an hour-long speech
in Parliament, urging a motion in support of the union of the Danu-
bian Principalities and the creation of a viable buffer state as a barrier
against Russian expansionism:
I say the union of the Principalities is the ardent desire of the people of
those territories. I am anxious to make good that proposition, because,
although it is not conclusive upon the question, yet I speak in the British
House of Commons – I speak in that assembly to which I will not say
alone, but to which almost alone, every lover of liberty in the world has
now to look for the vindication of his rights – and implore the House of
Commons to do full justice to the wishes, to the rights and interests of
these people, if those interests be compatible with justice and the welfare
of Europe.110
In addition, Gladstone invoked the pledge made at the Congress of
Paris by both Count Walewski, the French foreign minister, and by
the Earl of Clarendon as foreign secretary, for the wishes of the Roma-
nians to be respected, a pledge which was now causing considerable
embarrassment to Britain. Lord Cecil, MP for Stamford, John Roebuck
and Lord John Russell, among others, supported Gladstone’s motion
which, however, was opposed by the parliamentary heavy-weights
108
Peasant delegates had about one fifth of seats in each assembly. For peasant
demands, see Hitchins, The Romanians, 1774–1866, 289–91.
109
Dan Berindei, Epoca Unirii (Bucharest, 2000), 67.
110
For the full text of Gladstone’s speech, see Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 3rd
series, 110, 4 May 1858. Cf. Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu 2: 220–2.
the congress of paris 327
Benjamin Disraeli, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and by Lord

Palmerston himself. As deliberations at the Congress of Paris were still
in progress, the House was urged to do nothing that could be seen to
influence them. Gladstone’s motion was defeated. “Made my motion
on the Principalities”, he noted in his diary. “Lost by 292:114 and with
it goes another broken promise to a people.”111 Replying to letters from
Romanians expressing gratitude for his efforts on their behalf, Glad-
stone wrote to Brătianu on 14 July 1858: “I am well convinced that the
cause which we pleaded was a just one and I trust it may yet please
Providence to prosper it.”112
The blueprint agreed upon at the Convention of Paris on 19 August
1858 has been described as a “clumsy piece of machinery.”113 It left
the Principalities formally under Ottoman suzerainty, without spe-
cifically granting them the right to unite, but provided them with a
broad autonomy, which allowed them to pursue their own policies
without Ottoman interference. It also called for elections – by indirect,
restricted suffrage – to assemblies meant to nominate candidates to the
thrones of Wallachia and Moldavia, to be elected for life. Crucially,
the Congress also stipulated the creation of a joint legislative body, the
Central Commission, which was to convene at Focşani, on the border
between the two provinces, to debate matters of common interest, such
as customs, and joint postal and telegraphic services. The Commission
was to include eight Wallachians and eight Moldavians, half of whom
were appointed by the princes, and half by the assemblies. Noble ranks
and privileges were abolished and citizens were declared equal before
the law, a vindication of the principles of 1848. There were heated and
protracted debates around the name to be given to the new state. The
choice fell on the cumbersome “United Principalities of Moldavia and
Wallachia”, which suggests both the hybrid nature of the new creation
and the promise of future union.
The Convention maintained property qualifications, and franchise
was therefore restricted to wealthy landowners and the upper middle
class. In Bucharest, for example, only 308 individuals out of a gen-
eral population of around 120,000 had voting rights, and the electoral
111
The Gladstone Diaries, ed. H. C. G. Matthew (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1978),
5: 295.
112
Full text in Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu 2: 222–3.
113
Riker, The Making of Roumania, 178. For further details, see Leonid Boicu,
Diplomaţia europeană şi triumful cauzei române (1856–1859) (Iaşi, 1978), esp. Ch. 3:
“O soluţie hibridă”.
328 1858
campaign became a fierce battle for every single vote which could be
obtained, via protest and contestation if necessary.114 The campaign
had hardly started in November 1858, when Dumitru Brătianu trav-
elled to Turin and Paris, where he had meetings with Count Cavour,
the Sardinian Prime Minister, and with Napoleon III. Talks focused
on Austria’s sphere of influence in East-Central Europe, and Brătianu
assured Cavour that the Wallachians were ready to support their fel-
low Romanians in the Banat, Bukovina and Transylvania should they
take up arms against Austria. Succumbing to the famous Bonapartist
charisma, Brătianu mused on his past dealings with the Emperor dur-
ing his exile: “It’s a good think I did not meet him when I was busy
conspiring against him, or he might have won me over!”115
Throughout these momentous months of electoral agitation, the
Romanian radicals remained locked in an intense power struggle
with the moderates and the conservatives. Ion Brătianu and Rosetti
in particular were constantly attacked by the conservative opposition
as the most provocative of the radicals, as the démo-socs of Romanian
politics, around whom rallied the protests and claims of peasants and
artisans.116 The Romanian union saga did ultimately end with the elec-
tions of 24 January 1859 which famously led to the de facto union
of the two provinces. The technical ruse employed by the Romanians
overtly complied with the requirements of the Paris Convention: Wal-
lachia and Moldavia held separate elections, but they chose to elect
the same ruling prince in the person of the Colonel Alexandru Ioan
Cuza.117 The Romanian liberals had “spoiled” the “agreeable calcula-
tion” of Vienna and Istanbul, commented the Daily News rather jubi-
lantly on 1 February.118 The Austrian foreign minister, Count Buol,
received the news with the abrasive comment that the double election
was the result of machinations by the “party of disorder and anar-
chy”, the party led by the exiled men whose return to Romania he
had fiercely opposed.119 There was a minor crisis when Austria and
Turkey temporarily withdrew their consuls from a country whose will
to union they would eventually be compelled to accept.
114
Berindei, Epoca Unirii, 77.
115
Din arhiva lui D. Brătianu 1: 78. Cf. also Berindei, Epoca Unirii, 77.
116
For the electoral battles and complex manoeuvrings of 1857–59, see esp. Berin-
dei, Epoca Unirii, Chs. 4–5.
117
The union would be formally recognized by the powers in 1861.
118
Daily News, 1 February 1859, “Turkey”.
119
Berindei, Epoca Unirii, 95.
the congress of paris 329
Dumitru Brătianu became the Wallachian Foreign Minister in the

new government led by his fellow forty-eighter Ion Filipescu. The out-
spoken Brătianu was finally able to give a retroactive thumbs-down
to the ancien régime. The man who, as an exile, had been subjected
to various forms of surveillance in Paris, London and Bucharest, was
influential in promoting one of the first decisions taken by the new
government: the suppression of censorship. However, his work at the
Foreign Ministry was cut short by the new prince, who, giving in to
the suspicions of the new assembly vis-à-vis the “men of ‘48”, took
over the foreign minister’s portfolio himself. The forty-eighters’ rela-
tions with the new prince started on a wrong footing and were never
going to be cordial, especially as Cuza became increasingly, at least
in the eyes of the radicals, from “people’s prince” a Bonapartist auto-
crat with little time for political pluralism. After the fall of the Nicolae
Golescu cabinet in July 1860, none of the forty-eighters and former
exiles ever held another political function during Cuza’s increasingly
authoritarian personal reign. The coup which led to the prince’s down-
fall on 11 February 1866 was largely the work of the “red sect”, Rosetti,
Brătianu and their political allies, who believed that Cuza had outlived
his initial role. To a significant extent, his election had been intended
simply to provide the technicality on which union would eventually be
achieved. Characteristically, but quite disingenuously, Rosetti referred
to the coup as the “revolution of 11 February.”120
120
Bucur, C. A. Rosetti: mesianism, 240. W. E. Mosse has also accredited a reading
of the coup as revolution in “England, Russia and the Rumanian Revolution of 1866”,
Slavonic and East European Review 39, 92 (Dec., 1960): 73–94.
EPILOGUE
AFTER EXILE
. . . the port is far away, and we are still in exile.

Rosetti, letter to Jules Michelet,
2 November 18631
Back from exile in 1857, Constantin Rosetti took part in all the major
political battles of the day in Romania’s emerging modern state, in
which both political institutions and political behaviours had to be
constructed afresh. He became one of the founders of the National
Liberal Party in 1875 and, while ostensibly resigned to living in a mon-
archy, remained passionately engaged with his youthful dream of a
‘social Republic’.2 Not temperamentally attuned to the political prag-
matism demanded by the state-building processes, he never gained
a prominent political place, although he occupied ministerial posi-
tions in the various Liberal governments of the 1870s and 1880s and
remained a vigorous journalistic voice for the opposition. Românul,
the paper he had started in Paris, became the chief press organ of the
Liberal Party, rallying the faithful in difficult times. Although circula-
tion never exceeded 2–3,000 copies, the paper was hugely influential
and became a bête noire of the Conservative party whose own Timpul
[The Time] lagged behind both in print-runs and impact.3 Rosetti
remained equally active in freemasonry and in the 1860s still signed
off his editorials in the paper with the old Masonic salutations of 1848:
“dreptate şi frăţie”, “salutare şi frăţie”, justice and brotherhood, greet-
ings and brotherhood.4
Rosetti continued his activities as a publisher and entrepreneur.
Soon after his return to Romania, he initiated the Mutualist Society
of the Printers of Romania, later called the “Gutenberg Society”, pro-
moting a cause which had always been dear to his heart. He was often
directly involved in fund-raising for the society, as well in defending
1
Bucur, Jules Michelet şi revoluţionarii români, 235.
2
For the rationale given by Rosetti for supporting constitutional monarchy see
Paul E. Michelson, Romanian Politics 1859–1871: from Prince Cuza to Prince Carol
(Iaşi, Oxford, Portland, 1998), 41.
3
Drace-Francis, The Making of Modern Romanian Culture, 172.
4
334 epilogue
the freedom of the press.5 His anti-governmental articles and his pug-
nacious attitude led to his arrest in 1863 and to the suspension of
Românul between 1864 and 1866. The ruling Prince, Alexandru Ioan
Cuza, was “never a very enthusiastic advocate of a free press”, accord-
ing to Paul E. Michelson’s understatement.6 In a lecture delivered in
Paris shortly after Rosetti’s death in 1885, his republican and freema-
son friend Louis Ulbach, no stranger to censorship himself, narrated
how, when the paper was suppressed, its resourceful director started
sending subscribers blank pages with only the paper’s title, “Românul”,
printed on the masthead. Ulbach commented suggestively that there
could have been nothing more threatening to the regime than “this
silent newspaper biding its time.”7 But while the political press was
being muzzled, Marie and Constantin Rosetti wrote and published
jointly the short-lived Mama şi copilul [The Mother and Child] a
sentimental educational periodical, which had originated at Marie’s
initiative as Romania’s first periodical on social and family themes.8
Significantly, it had Marie’s name on the frontispiece as director of
the publication.9
Rosetti’s politics was not without contradictions. A republican, he
nevertheless took part in organizing a plebiscite for the monarchy as
Minister for Education and Church Affairs in 1866.10 He remained,
nevertheless, a bit of a ‘Jacobin’ to the end of his life and never wan-
dered too far off his self-assumed role of ‘nation’s martyr’. His politi-
cal fundamentalism alienated many, as it had done during exile. It is
easy to dismiss Rosetti as a slightly neurotic, volatile and inconsistent
public figure, and even his chief modern editor and biographer, Marin
Bucur, found a tone of gentle mockery hard to resist.11 Long before
Bucur, Nicolae Iorga had perhaps captured Rosetti’s true nature and
5
For further details see Valeriu Stan, “C. A. Rosetti, mărturii inedite”, Revista
istorică, new series, 2, 5–6 (1991): 313–21.
6
Michelson, Romanian Politics 1859–1871, 70.
7
Louis Ulbach, “C.-A. Rosetti”, Revue politique et littéraire, 2 (11 July 1885):
46–54, 51. (later reprinted as C. A. Rosetti, Paris: Société des deux Revues, 1885).
Ulbach had been the director of the Revue de Paris between 1853 and the journal’s
suppression in 1858.
8
9
Mama si copilulu, Diariu de duminică, 1 (4 July 1865).
10
11
See mainly Bucur’s previously cited C. A. Rosetti: mesianism şi donquijotism
revoluţionar (Bucharest, 1970).
after exile 335
his brand of emotional politics more accurately when he called him

“a vigorous sectarian and noble poet of politics.”12
Rosetti never totally left behind the old adventurous ways of doing
politics which he and his peers had sometimes indulged in during exile.
In June 1864, Rosetti was arrested and questioned for his involvement
the so-called “Frigyesy Affair”. The Hungarian radical émigré Gusz-
táv Frigyesy, an envoy of Mazzini and friend of Garibaldi’s, had been
campaigning on Romanian territory for the creation of a regiment of
volunteers to be used in an attack against Austria or Russia. The attack
was to be coordinated with Mazzini’s parallel military operations in
the Veneto area. The interrogation revealed Frigyesy’s contacts with
Rosetti, who, owing to his connections in high places, had facilitated
the issuing of a passport under a false identity for him. The conspira-
tors were granted an amnesty by Prince Cuza in July 1864, but the
incident shows to what extent Rosetti remained essentially an opposi-
tion figure and a bit of an adventurer intent on challenging the estab-
lished regime with the pen and the sword.13
In 1870 Rosetti went into a second, voluntary, ‘exile’ in France
during the Franco-Prussian war, at a time when he opposed Prince
Carol of Hohenzollern’s personal regime.14 Whilst in Romania there
was short-lived and easily suppressed republican agitation, in France
Rosetti fought on the republican side and deplored the war as an
assault on republicanism and democracy in letters to Marie.15 Yet, as
an eye-witness, he was critical of the Paris Commune in action.16 His
and his peers’ instinctive and lovingly nurtured francophilia must have
been sorely tested from the 1860s onwards when, with the arrival of a
Hohenzollern prince, Romania entered the German political orbit at the
expense of the fading French and Napoleonic sphere of influence.17
12
Nicolae Iorga, Oameni care au fost, 2: 226–8, quoted in Vasile Netea, C. A. Rosetti
(Bucharest, 1970), 392.
13
V. Stan, “C. A. Rosetti, mărturii inedite”, 314. Major Frigyesy later had the com-
mand of a Hungarian legion in Garibaldi’s army in the war of 1866. Cf. Lajos Lukács,
Chapters on the Hungarian Emigration, 1849–1867 (Budapest, 1995), 168.
14
Carol of Hohenzollern was called to the Romanian throne after the abdication
of Prince Cuza in 1866.
15
C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti, Introduction, 1: 7.
16
Alexandru Mamina, “O definire a liberalilor radicali în contextul războiului franco-
prusac din 1870–1871,” SMIMod 13 (1999): 158.
17
For Romania’s shift in alliances see the brief but informative article “Rumanian
Unity” by Paul E. Michelson in William E. Echard, ed., Historical Dictionary of the
French Second Empire, 1852–1870 (Westport, Connecticut, 1985), 582–4. For the
336 epilogue
Rosetti’s correspondence with his wife after their return maintained

the warm, affectionate tone which was to a large extent almost an out-
come of shared hardship and exile, after the rather passionless court-
ship of the 1840s. It also reveals an active and dedicated public man
doubled by a family man partly defeated by financial difficulties and
parental disappointment. Sophia Liberty (Liby), the little girl born on
the day revolution started in 1848, lacked any intellectual calling, and
remained whimsical and demanding, defying Rosetti’s hopes that his
children would never need material “wealth, because I will give them
moral and intellectual riches.”18 Two of the Rosetti sons, Vintilă and
Horia, were big spenders and equally disinclined to study, while a
third, Mircea, had a chronic condition which required constant care
and died young, ahead of his parents.19 The memory of their French
mentors gradually dimmed, but endured. In 1863, still under Cuza’s
reign, Rosetti wrote to Michelet to apologise for not having written
earlier. In his confession at that time there are echoes of Michelet’s
own self-perception as an internal exile in Napoleon III’s France:
[. . .] it is six years now since we arrived in our Patrie, which you ren-
dered back to us, and yet we have not sent one sign of life, not even a
letter to tell you: Maîtres, we have arrived into a safe port, we need your
help to start building. [. . .] Hélas! This is because the port is far away,
and we are still in exile.20
Rosetti would have liked to surround himself with kindred spirits as
well as reward the people who had showed solidarity with the exiled
Romanians in the fateful decade of their European wanderings. His
rather extravagant plans of 1866 to have Quinet installed as Romanian
Minister for Education and Bataillard as head of the National Archives
in Bucharest remained unrealized.21 However, the old allies were sym-
bolically rewarded with an honorary Romanian citizenship. On 4
July 1866, Michelet, Quinet, Ubicini, Bataillard, Saint-Marc Girardin,
Gladstone, Layard and Roebuck became citizens of a nation which
they had helped into being.22
wider context of the post-Crimean international system, see W. E. Mosse, The Euro-
pean Powers and the German Question, 1848–1871 (New York, 1969).
18
Entry for 16 August 1849, in Rosetti, Diary, 284.
19
20
Rosetti to Michelet, Bucharest, 2 November 1863, in Bucur, Jules Michelet şi
revoluţionarii români, 235.
21
Letter to Bataillard, 4 June 1866, in Bucur, C. A. Rosetti: mesianism, 54–5.
22
T.-G. Djuvara, Edgar Quinet, philoroumain, 60.
after exile 337
In later life, Vintilă and Horia Rosetti attracted their aging but
untamed father into the extremist-anarchist circles they frequented in
Italy, an orientation which contributed to the estrangement between
Rossetti and Brătianu as well as to fresh attacks against the ‘red’ Rosetti
in the conservative press.23 Rosetti died in 1885 and was outlived by
Marie by eight years. She never emerged from the ‘shadow’ of her
better-known husband. Today still, her fame rests on her role as revo-
lutionary muse (in Rosenthal’s portrait), ‘follower’24 to her exiled hus-
band and devoted mother. Yet, while her symbolic capital has been
recognised and streets and high schools in Romania bear her name,
her actual life after 1859 remains largely uncharted and she deserves a
new appraisal. A recent study of nineteenth-century Romanian women
awards her only one modest entry, and, to my knowledge, there is only
one short modern biography of her.25 Such are the hazards of access
to often elusive Romanian-language sources, a recent essay on Euro-
pean women’s participation in the revolutions of 1848 omits Marie
Rosetti altogether, but mentions Ana Ipătescu, who had a symbolic,
but ultimately minor, role in the events of 19 June when she rallied the
Bucharest crowds in support of the provisional government.26
Like Marie Rosetti, Hermione Quinet (née Asachi), who survived
her husband by twenty-five years, needs to be rescued from an unde-
served posthumous fate as merely a “veuve abusive”, heavy-handed
editor and fierce gatekeeper of Quinet’s work.27
Ion C. Brătianu rose to the highest echelons of power in the new
Romania created by the Congress of Paris in 1856. A key founder of
the National Liberal Party, and a more pragmatic man than Rosetti
and than his own brother, Dumitru, he steered the party and the
country through the tumultuous years which saw the independence
in 1877 and the creation of the Kingdom of Romania in 1881. Despite
23
24
“Suiveuse”, Nancy L. Green’s term quoted in Sylvie Aprile’s overview of French
women who followed their proscrit husbands in exile, in Le siècle des exilés, 165.
25
Alin Ciupală, Femeia în societatea românească a secolului al XIX-lea: între public
şi privat (Bucharest, 2003), 69. Elisabeta Ioniţă, Maria Rosetti (Bucharest, 1979).
26
Gabriella Hauch, “Did Women Have a Revolution? Gender Battles in the Euro-
pean Revolution of 1848/49”, in 1848: A European Revolution? International Ideas
and National Memories of 1848, ed. Axel Körner (London, 2000). C. D. Rosenthal
is mentioned once in the collection, but Rosetti, the Brătianus or the other Moldo-
Wallachian leaders are not.
27
She died in 1900.
338 epilogue
ultimately divergent political paths, the Rosetti and the Brătianu

households were close. When he became prime minister of Romania,
Ion Brătianu had no home of his own in the capital city Bucharest,
only a property in the village Florica, the only estate left to him after
the sale and estrangement of the family lands. Rosetti often put his
friend up in Bucharest to enable him to attend to state affairs. Brătianu
reciprocated by accommodating the never financially comfortable and
frequently homeless Rosettis at Florica, where Rosetti was happy to
work in the vineyard. The entrepreneurial premier produced wine
commercially on his estate.
Like Rosetti, Ion Brătianu remained a ‘closet’ republican, but forged
a working relationship with King Carol, and was a key player in nego-
tiations which placed Romania within a Mitteleuropean system of
political alliances in the face of a British and French relative with-
drawal from the Balkans. His foreign political choices – especially a
rapprochement with former ‘arch-enemy’ Russia in the anti-Ottoman
war of independence of 1877 – were often criticized, as were his author-
itarianism, the iron discipline he tried to impose on his party and the
often unorthodox manner in which he promoted and enacted new
legislation. His equally controversial handling of the rights of the Jew-
ish community in Romania in the 1860s and 1870s was easy to exploit
politically and did not ingratiate him with political circles abroad.28
On 21 March 1867, as Minister of the Interior, Brătianu adopted a
‘law on vagrancy’ aimed at preventing impoverished Jews from set-
tling in Moldavian towns and villages. Owing largely to migration
from Austrian-occupied Galicia, Moldavia had a 300,000-strong Jew-
ish community. In the capital, Iaşi, out of 50,000 inhabitants, 30,000
were Jewish. Additional measures promoted by Brătianu in order to
prevent Jews from leasing lands and public inns were presented by the
liberals as initiatives designed to encourage native trade and indus-
try at the expense of migrants, who were often foreign nationals. The
Moldavian middle-class entrepreneurs were often unhappy with what
they perceived as Brătianu’s “moderation” in this matter, while Great
Power representatives complained about the “fanaticism” of his anti-
Jewish measures. Ghosts of conspiracies past were revived as politi-
cal weapons for present-day crises. The largely farcical ‘Hippodrome
Affair’ was brought up whenever it was deemed convenient to keep
28
This may partly explain the dismissive tone of Pierre Antoine Perrod in Jules
Favre: avocat de la liberté (Lyon, 1988). See Part Two, note 406.
after exile 339
the Romanian government, and especially Ion Brătianu, in line. “Men

whose chief abilities lie in leading revolutions and overthrowing gov-
ernments are never good at governing”, complained the French minis-
ter for education on an official visit to Bucharest on 10 July 1867, and
Prince Carol duly accepted Brătianu’s resignation on the 28th. In June
1868 a reinstated Brătianu had to sign a protocol for the return and
compensation of the expelled Jewish groups.29
Old friendships forged in exile fell victim to the controversies engen-
dered by the Jewish question in late nineteenth-century Romania.
Armand Lévy, who was catholic, but of Jewish extraction, campaigned
vigorously alongside the former forty-eighter Adolphe Crémieux for
the rights of the Jewish communities in South-Eastern Europe and
the Middle East from the 1860s onwards. The Romanian discrimi-
natory legislation was a source of disappointment for the erstwhile
French friend of the liberals now in power. This was compounded by
an attempt on Lévy’s life by a Romanian right-wing fanatic in 1885,
followed by Prime Minister Brătianu’s decision to have him expelled
from the Romanian territory.30
In Romania itself, Brătianu’s involvement in the ‘Hippodrome’ plot
was perhaps not taken as seriously as in France, but was often used for
polemical purposes. In Conservative attacks against Liberal ministries
in the 1880s, he was often referred to as “the famous conspirator of
the Opéra Comique and the Hippodrome” and a “friend of the sym-
pathetic escargots of Mr. Jules Allix.”31 The allusion was to the ‘snail
telegraphy’ proposed by the eccentric Allix, a member of the Hippo-
drome plot who also took part in the Paris Commune later, and was
often described as slightly, though innocuously, deranged.32 This was
29
Apostol Stan, “Începutul liberalismului şi constituirea Partidului Naţional Lib-
eral”, in Istoria Partidului Naţional Liberal, ed. Şerban Rădulescu-Zoner (Bucharest,
2000), 26, 32–3.
30
Carol Iancu, “Races et nationalités en Roumanie: le problème juif à travers les doc-
uments diplomatiques français (1866–1880)”, Revue d’histoire moderne et contempo-
raine, 27, 3 (Jul.–Sep. 1980): 391–407. On the understudied Lévy, see also Pawel Korzek,
review of Jerzy Borejsza’s The Secretary of Adam Mickiewicz (in Polish) (Warsaw,
1969), Annales. Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 3 (1972, mai-juin): 779–83.
31
Mihai Eminescu, the Romanian late Romantic poet, publicist and editor-in-chief
of Timpul [The Times], the Conservative periodical, in “Noi am fost aciia care am
imputat . . .”, Timpul, 20 November 1880, in M. Eminescu, Opere, 11, edited by Dimi-
trie Vatamaniuc (Bucharest, 1984). Online open access at www.eminescu.petar.ro, no
pagination [accessed on 19 September 2010].
32
Maxime du Camp, Les Convulsions de Paris, (Paris, 1883), 2: 245. Ernest Alfred
Vizetelly, My Days of Adventure: the fall of France (1870–71) (London, 1914), 134–5.
340 epilogue
little more than character assassination meant to discredit Brătianu by

associating him with a group of people who were all, it was implied,
out of their minds.
In 1880 the tables were turned against the former anarchist and
conspirator, now Prime Minister, at a time when newly-independent
Romania was uneasily trapped between the Central Powers and its
former anti-Ottoman ally of 1877, Russia. As he left the Senate on
the evening of 3 December, he was attacked by a knife-wielding man,
quickly outmanoeuvred by the prompt reflexes of one of Brătianu’s
fellow-politicians. The would-be assassin was alleged to have acted in
collusion with a minor Moldavian political group called the Party of
National Democracy, which championed a Romanian-Russian alliance
and was rumoured to have links with the Russian secret police.33 The
small party, led by Grigore Mihai Sturdza, dissolved itself in the after-
math of the assassination attempt, and the attacker was sentenced to
hard labour.34 The unhurt, but shaken, Prime Minister received unani-
mous public expressions of support from friends and foes alike and
was presumably left to ponder – in his mature years – the uses of
political assassination.
The Romanian National Liberal Party, officially created in 1875
under Ion Brătianu’s leadership, is today widely credited with creat-
ing the political and financial institutions of Romania as a modern
state. It founded the National Bank and the country’s main credit and
industrial structures, with a support base which included members of
the intelligentsia, lower middle classes and lower land-holding gentry.35
This was not dissimilar to developments in what has been termed the
‘sectarian’ West-European liberalism in the period, but in Romania,
and perhaps in Eastern Europe more generally, this close nexus of eco-
nomic control, status-orientation and privilege was established over a
33
Ion Bulei, Conservatori şi conservatorism în România (Bucharest, 2000), 21,
note *.
34
Grigore Mihai Sturdza (1821–1901), from one of Romania’s ruling families, com-
pleted mathematical and military studies in Paris and Berlin, and served in the Ottoman
army after 1848 under the name Muhlis Pasha. He later became a Conservative senator
and deputy in unified Romania. Cf. C. A. Rosetti către M. Rosetti 1: 81, note 4.
35
Victoria F. Brown, “The Adaptation of Western Political Theory in a Peripheral
State: the Case of Romanian Liberalism”, in Romania between East and West: histori-
cal essays in memory of Constantin C. Giurescu. ed. Stephen A. Fischer-Galaţi et al.
(Boulder, Colorado, 1982), 269–301, 284. Brown’s essay is an analysis of the strengths
and weaknesses of the Romanian liberals’ economic practices in the period, as well as
of the kinship and differences between West- and East-European liberalism.
after exile 341
much shorter period of time and against a backdrop of comparative

economic backwardness. In addition to such ‘short-cuts to capitalism’,
the way in which the Romanian Liberal Party cut itself off from the
peasants and the industrial workers, its espousal of extreme practices
of capitalist self-sufficiency and protectionism which deprived the
country of much-needed foreign capital, as well as the increasingly
resented “collusion between entrepreneurs and politicians”36 exposed
it to attacks by Liberal and Conservative opponents alike, and led
to endemic political instability. By 1882, over a period of five or six
years, there had been twenty cabinet reshuffles, alliances and divisions
amongst dissident splinter groups, as well as more or less shady nego-
tiations and uneasy deals with the Conservatives. Ion Brătianu became
highly adept at such political manoeuvrings, which ended up alienat-
ing some his closest allies, including his own brother, Dumitru, whose
rather puritanical moral rectitude was not attuned to the demands of
the new political pragmatism. The elder Brătianu may have lost his
forty-eighter’s beard, but had remained to a large extent a romantic
revolutionary with a Manichean view of public life, a man of virtue
who preferred a stoical, impoverished lifestyle rather than succumb to
the new Liberal Political-entrepreneurial call of ‘Enrichissez-vous’.
In his portrait of Ion Brătianu, R. W. Seton-Watson referred to the
irreconcilable temperamental differences between the erstwhile forty-
eighters formerly united in exile: “He himself was a man of high
character and wide sympathies, but he considered that the some-
what doctrinaire ideals of his brother Dimitrie and their old associate
C. A. Rosetti were ill adapted to the iron age upon which Romania
was entering [. . .]”37
The deterioration of youthful alliances was perhaps a sad epilogue to
the ‘heroic’ epic of friendship in revolution and exile which had united
these men during their youth, but which fell victim to the confronta-
tional spirit of party politics. The old solidarities gradually collapsed
in the 1880s under the strain of disagreements over governance, elec-
tions, constitutional reform, social, economic and national policies.
The issue of suffrage proved central to these divisions. In 1883 Con-
stantin A. Rosetti proposed a widening of the electorate through the
introduction of a single electoral college composed of all individuals
36
Ibid., 288.
37
R. W. Seton-Watson, A History of the Romanians from Roman Times to the Com-
pletion of Unity (London, 1934), 355, quoted in Brown, “The Adaptation”, 287.
342 epilogue
who could read and write, but his motion was turned down by Par-
liament.38 The Liberal Party’s endless foot-dragging in this matter ulti-
mately led to the departure of both Rosetti and the elder Brătianu.
In 1885, the dissident Liberal group led by Dumitru Brătianu con-
cluded a rather unnatural merger with the Conservative opposition
led by Lascăr Catargiu and Gh. Vernescu. Two leading Liberals, and
former forty-eighters, Rosetti and Mihail Kogălniceau, also joined
the newly created united opposition to Ion C. Brătianu’s governing
party.39 Under constant hammering by the opposition, Ion Brătianu’s
cabinet resigned on 19 March 1888, to be replaced by a Conservative
government. In 1890 the Brătianu brothers negotiated a reunification
of the Liberals in parallel with a personal reconciliation which healed
some, though not all, of the rifts in old family ties and friendships. Ion
Brătianu died on 4 May 1891. Dumitru succeeded him briefly as leader
of the liberals before his own death on 8/20 June 1892. In Rosetti’s old
newspaper, Românul of 10/22 June, the now widowed Marie reflected
on their old friendship and wondered sadly: “He was a dreamer, but
will his beautiful dreams ever be realised?”40
Zinca Golescu died in 1879, in the same year as her son Ştefan, hav-
ing outlived two other sons, Alexandru (Albu) and Nicolae, as well as
some of her grand-children. Her support for the Romanian diaspora in
the 1850s made her an emblematic female figure in modern Romania,
and the manor at Goleşti became a genuine site of national memory.
The Golescu brothers and cousins were influential in securing a posi-
tive outcome for the plebiscite which brought Carol of Hohenzollern
to the throne of Romania in 1866 and strengthened the country’s still
shaky union. It was at the manor of Goleşti that the new prince spent
his first night when he arrived – incognito, for fear of Austrian opposi-
tion – accompanied by Ion Brătianu, to take up the throne of his new,
troubled kingdom. He subsequently gallantly commissioned a copy of
a portrait of his seventy-four-year-old hostess as a young woman and
placed it on a wall in his new mountain residence at Castle Peleş as a
tribute to this mater patriae.41 The Golescu brothers and some of their
38
Daniel Barbu, “Hainele cele noi ale statului. Liberalismul românesc între două
revoluţii: 1848–1917”, Xenopoliana 13, 1–4 (2005): 65.
39
Anastasie Iordache, Dumitru Brătianu: diplomatul, doctrinarul liberal şi omul
politic (Bucharest, 2003), 322.
40
Ibid., 343.
41
Ioana Pârvulescu, În intimitatea secolului 19 (Bucharest, 2005), 115.
after exile 343
cousins, including Alexandru G. Golescu (Negru), were all active in

the 1860s in various ministerial, parliamentary and diplomatic posi-
tions. It may have been due to their experience of surveillance and per-
secution in exile that the former forty-eighters remained remarkably
impassioned defenders of civic freedoms, and in particular of the free-
dom of the press and of correspondence. As Minister of the Interior in
1867 Ştefan Golescu sent a circular to the country’s prefects demand-
ing a strict observance of the confidentiality of private correspondence
and the free distribution of the press in the provinces.42 The penalty for
opening private correspondence was up to one year’s imprisonment.
He may have had in mind his mother Zinca’s past protests against
the violation of the “most intimate confessions of the heart” when the
Austrian secret police opened their letters in 1851.43 Ştefan and Nico-
lae led short-lived cabinets in 1860 and 1861, and promoted full inde-
pendence from Ottoman domination, but their active political lives
practically ended after 1870–71, before independence was realized.44
The long years of exile and their country’s turbulent history had taken
a toll on the health of the Golescu men who died, all unmarried and
all prematurely aged, between 1873 and 1882.
The new political realities in the United Romanian Principalities cre-
ated an ultimately unbridgeable rift between the anti-unionist British
Consul in Bucharest, Robert Colquhoun, and his erstwhile Romanian
protégés. It was perhaps in recognition of the fact that he was now
out of step with the new country that he was recalled from his post
after twenty-four years in service and transferred to Egypt in 1858. In
1865 he retired after a distinguished career in diplomacy. Earl Russell
accepted his resignation, but wrote to say that he had recommended
to the Queen that he be granted the honour of Knight-Commander
of the Order of the Bath. “I have the satisfaction of acquainting you
that you leave office in possession of the respect and confidence of
Her Majesty’s Government”, the Prime Minister wrote on 31 August
1865.45 Colquhoun retired to his estate at Fincastle (Perthshire), where
he died in 1870.
42
Anastasie Iordache, Revoluţionarii Goleşti (Bucharest, 2002), 332.
43
See Part Two, p. 203.
44
For a complete list of their ministerial positions, see the Introduction to the
present study, p. 12.
45
Fraser, The Chiefs of Colquhoun, 2: 244–5.
344 epilogue
Z
It has become almost commonplace today to say that the revolutions of
1848 in Europe should not be judged on what they accomplished, but
on what they promised, that they were “the turning point when history
failed to turn” or that they marked the “end of romanticism”. While it
is possibly true that their defeat led to a shattering of hopes and illu-
sions among the European left, the events also marked a watershed in
terms of the expectations it created. The increased efforts towards a
widening of the franchise and the model of an active citizenry unafraid
to challenge the state led to at least one important consequence: the
comprehensive politicization of European societies.46 For all the con-
tradictions and the controversial aspects of their post-exile careers,
the generation of Rosetti and the Brătianus has to be credited with
introducing this new political culture into Romania, a culture which
encouraged political participation and the people’s right to confront
their political class. It was to a large extent a lesson they owed to their
mentor, Michelet, himself a victim of an intrusive, over-controlling
state. His message to his Romanian disciples had been a liberal one:
the individual had the civic right to reflect on and place checks on
the power of the state, he had a right and a duty to “think politics
over.”47 In what follows, I shall summarize a few of the themes which
have emerged from the interactions of the texts used as sources in this
account.
46
Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Dieter Langewiesche, “The European Revolution of
1848”, in Europe in 1848, ed. Dowe et al., 6.
47
Bénichou, Le Temps des prophètes, 42.
THE USES OF THE PRESS
Communication was crucial in the Romanians forty-eighters’ life in

1848 and in exile. Letters from and to the families left behind, open
letters to the press, postal services and couriers provided much-needed
conduits of information and emotional support. Even picaresque epi-
sodes such as the colourful ‘Hippodrome affair’ of 1851 were built
around a printing press and a printed manifesto.48 On 27 June 1848,
when the Romanians met at the Field of Liberty in Bucharest to see
their revolutionary banners blessed, the four horses draped in tri-
coloured ribbons and carrying Henric Winterhalder’s printing-press
must have been an arresting sight.49 It was also prophetic. Not only
for the increasing powers of the press across Europe in the century,
but also for the main connection between the Romanian soon-to-be
émigrés and their transnational support networks: the power of the
written word, whether in their intercepted private correspondence
or in Românul, the Daily News and the Revue des Deux Mondes. The
historian Nicolae Bălcescu was presumably speaking for an entire
generation when he wrote in 1846 that “hope for the future civiliza-
tion lies” not in the “spirit of conquest” as in Napoleon’s time, but in
the “communication of ideas amongst nations, which is one of the
benefits of commercial relations between peoples.”50 In 1848, in exile,
and later in government and in opposition, the Romanian radicals
made freedom of the press one of their main causes and mounted a
spirited defence whenever it was threatened. In a recent study, Alex
Drace-Francis has demonstrated the rather paradoxical centrality of
print in the nation-building processes of what was a traditional society
where, as late as 1899, rural illiteracy levels were situated around
85 per cent.51 The events of 1848 in Wallachia and the resilience of
48
See Part Two, p. 242 sqq.
49
See Part One, p. 81.
50
Review of Louis Aimé-Martin’s L’Education des mères de famille in Foaie pen-
tru minte, inimă şi literatură, 4–5 (1846) reproduced in Antologia gîndirii româneşti,
Secolele XV–XIX, ed. C. I. Gulian (Bucharest, 1967), Part I, 269. Foaie pentru minte was
the supplement of Gazeta de Transilvania. See Part One of the present study, p. 74.
51
Such illiteracy rates place the Romanian Principalities in the same group as Egypt
and Turkey rather than Central-European countries. Drace-Francis, The Making of
Modern Romanian Culture, 41 sqq.
346 epilogue
Rosetti’s newspaper Românul show that communicating via the print

media became as important in Romania as elsewhere in Europe. The
forty-eighters found that “[e]diting a journal was considered at least
as patriotic as leading the National Guard or acting as chief repre-
sentatives of the Wallachians to the Sublime Porte: this was as much
a ‘Revolution of the Intellectuals’ as any other in Europe that year.”52
There is evidence which shows that, when propaganda commissars
carried copies of the paper or printed copies of governmental docu-
ments into the countryside in 1848, it was less the meaning of the texts
that mattered as the mere sight of printed pages, which never failed to
impress the peasants.53
Recognition by the state of the challenge to its authority from writ-
ten communication was reflected in the surveillance, heavy censorship
and other limitations imposed on the mail and the press in mid-nine-
teenth century, notably in France and Austria. In Britain attitudes to
the print media evolved in the opposite direction: by mid-century,
the repeal of the stamp duty and other ‘taxes on knowledge’ had cre-
ated an expanded newspaper market and a widening readership, as
reflected in the eighty-five million newspapers sold in 1851.54 The
power of the press to actually shape public opinion and determine
policy was a matter of intense debate in the mid-nineteenth-century,
as historians of the press have shown.55 The specific weight of public
opinion in foreign affairs is notoriously difficult to assess and often
remains elusive. Yet, what ultimately matters is the importance that
people themselves at the time attached to the press and to public com-
munication in general.
The Romanians lived in exile in Paris and London in a period
widely seen as the heyday of newspaper influence and, as seen, they
quickly grasped the opportunities offered by increased circulation and
expanding readership. For a long time, exile made it impossible to put
into practice Michelet’s suggestion that a generation of talkers should
be replaced by men of action.56 The exiled men’s political activities
essentially consisted in a war of words and what may appear as a futile
52
Ibid., 138.
53
Ibid., 139.
54
Hampton, Visions of the Press, 28.
55
For the situation in Victorian Britain, see, for example, Aled Jones, Newspapers,
Power and the Public in Nineteenth-Century England (Ashgate, 1996), 87–97 and pas-
sim, as well as Hampton, Visions of the Press, esp. 26–39.
56
See Introduction, p. 9.
the uses of the press 347
expenditure of energy and passion in texts, counter-texts and inter-

texts. One may be tempted to speculate on whether all the lobbying
and the pamphleteering in which the Romanian diaspora engaged in
the 1850s did actually have an impact on the vital decisions negotiated
at the Congress of Paris in 1856. However, this may be less important
for understanding that generation of Romanian politicians than the
fact that they were determined not to remain “inarticulate onlookers”
to processes which affected the future of their nation.57 Exiled from
a country in which they had no voice and inheritors of a system in
which decision-making was the prerogative of Russia and the Otto-
man Porte, they used the press in France and Britain in order to wage
their battle from abroad. Their plight was echoed by the experience
in exile of Quinet, Ledru-Rollin, and the other republicans who used
the print media to oppose the Second Empire and Emperor Napoleon
from afar.58
Before and at the time of the Congress, the Rosetti-Brătianu group
managed to ‘hire’ some of the most brilliant pens in France, almost
monopolising the French liberal, republican and left-wing press to
channel their pro-union message. The Revue des Deux Mondes, for
example, which published Quinet’s Les Roumains in 1856, had a print-
run of only around 12,000 in the mid-century, but its audience was
the educated, Orléanist liberal intelligentsia and the paper’s author-
ity was commensurate with this group’s power to influence opinion.59
Explaining Romania and the Romanians to this section of the French
intellectuals was clearly regarded by the exiles as worth their while
(and their money), which shows that fashioning public opinion via
the written word was now seen as a politically efficient tool. The other
opposition newspapers which offered support to the Romanians in the
1850s, the moderate republican Siècle and the radical Presse, had sig-
nificant circulations, which ranged in 1857 between 30,000 and 40,000
copies daily. They were highly influential in endorsing the democratic,
nationalistic and anti-clerical opinions which tied in with the Roma-
nians’ nation-building propaganda at the time.60
57
Riker, “The Concert of Europe and Moldavia in 1857”, 229.
58
The exile “quits his country to flee repression – whether it is death or imprison-
ment – but also to gain freedom of expression and wage from abroad the battle against
the regime that oppressed him [. . .].” Aprile, Le siècle des exilés, 8.
59
Charle, Le Siècle de la presse, 96, 107.
60
Irene Collins, The Government and the Newspaper Press in France, 1814–1881
(Oxford University Press, 1959), 139.
348 epilogue
In Britain, the Daily News, arguably one of the most independent

of the dailies and constantly supportive of the Romanian cause, had
daily sales of over 5,000 copies by the mid-1850s.61 The Wallachian
radicals have sometimes come under attack for paying foreign journal-
ists who wrote ‘friendly’ articles or placed material in the press – hence
the term ‘hire’ used above – but they made no secret of this practice
and their correspondence abounds in references to the actual sums
collected for this purpose. Eyre Evans Crowe, for instance, was paid
a significant sum of £40 out of a monthly propaganda budget of £60
for placing supportive articles in The Post in 1856.62 Information on
the rates of pay of freelance journalists and correspondents in mid-
Victorian Britain appears to be hard to come by,63 but the work was
presumably precarious and, in any case, our own modern rules of pro-
fessional journalistic conduct do not necessarily apply to that period.64
The sums paid serve to show that the exiles were under considerable
pressure to secure the subscriptions and donations required for pub-
licity, but we should not necessarily presume that this was a murky
‘cash for influence’ case.
It is self-evident that the growing number and increasing circula-
tion of newspapers contributed to the afore-mentioned politiciza-
tion of society, broke down geographical and social boundaries and
internationalized politics in an unprecedented way. The new speed in
communication created a single European space of information which
united West and East and helped internationalize issues, ideologies
and movements.65 In spite of censorship, surveillance and the inter-
ception of mail, as shown in preceding chapters, the Romanian forty-
eighters became adept at smuggling and disseminating information
across great distances, from London and Paris to Bucharest, Habsburg
Transylvania, Belgrade, Constantinople and the Middle East.
The exiles’ main journalistic objectives were fourfold. Firstly, they
felt that they had to publicize their own account of the events of 1848
61
This came second only to the Times, which dominated the market. Bob Clarke,
From Grub Street to Fleet Street: an illustrated history of English newspapers to 1899
(Ashgate, 2004), 230.
62
Radu R. Florescu, “The Rumanian Principalities and the Origins of the Crimean
War”, Slavonic and East European Review 43, 100 (Dec., 1964): 62 note 53. For the
activities of Eyre Crowe in support of the Romanians, see Part Three, pp. 323–25.
63
This suspicion was confirmed to me by Professor Brian Maidment, a specialist
in Victorian printed media.
64
Cf. the objections raised in Mihai Cojocariu, Partida Naţională, 233–6.
65
Haupt and Langewiesche, “The European Revolution of 1848”, 3.
the uses of the press 349
and justify ‘their revolution’. They had to tiptoe uneasily around the
issue of Ottoman suzerainty and the ultimate goal of unification, and
they had to dispel West-European disquiet over their presumed ‘com-
munistic’ or anarchistic intentions. As shown, social and land reform
were gradually relinquished in favour of an emphasis on nation- and
elite-building.
Secondly, they needed to establish the correct ethnic affiliation of
their nation, often mistakenly believed in the West to be Slavic. This
was closely linked to the anti-tsarist press campaign which they sup-
ported and fed with inputs into the written work of Jules Michelet,
Armand Lévy, Paul Bataillard, and David Urquhart, for example.
Thirdly, they wanted to legitimize themselves as the government-in-
waiting of the future Romania. They had a remarkably strong genera-
tional sense of mission from very early on. Addressing the Romanian
students in Paris in November 1848, just as the forty-eighters embarked
on their decade in exile, Dumitru Brătianu spoke about the need to
build on their common awareness of being “the founders of Romania’s
renaissance.”66
In the fourth place, especially during and after the Crimean War,
they adroitly placed their political blueprint for the future Romania
into the public domain. Ridding their country of Ottoman control,
Russian protectorate and Austrian interference became the over-riding
goal of their propaganda in the West. This involved campaigning and
supporting an allied war against Russia in 1853–4 which collided with
the peaceful internationalism of the Cobdenites and the Manchester
School, yet produced, as shown, paradoxically positive results.
After exile, in the new post-Crimean Romania, the liberal-radical
group continued to defend the freedom of the press. In 1859, when
the conservatives proposed a motion in favour of further restrictions
on the press in the Wallachian Assembly of Deputies, Ion Brătianu
objected, saying that one could not “treat a people as one would treat
a schoolgirl whose innocent mind has to be shielded from reading this
book or that book.”67 This position was vindicated in 1862 with Prince
Cuza’s Law Concerning the Freedom of the Press.68
66
1848 la români, ed. Bodea, 1: 329.
67
Românul, 24 February 1859, reproduced in Ion C. Brătianu, Acte şi cuvîntări, ed.
G. Marinescu, and C. Grecescu (Bucharest, 1938), 1, Part 1: 257–62.
68
Drace-Francis, The Making of Modern Romanian Culture, 116–7.
THE ‘PEOPLE QUESTION’
In 1847 the East-Central Europeans attending Michelet’s lectures at

the Collège de France heard their mentor’s uneasy reflections on the
unhealthy divorce between the “privilégiés du loisir, du savoir” and “les
hommes du travail”, between the intellectual elites and the workers.69
Around the same time, Rosetti described himself as the defender of
the villagers and of the small artisans against the “ghosts of the feu-
dal past.”70 Ledru-Rollin steered the French provisional government
towards adopting universal suffrage in 1848. The Romanian provi-
sional government of 1848 steered clear of universal suffrage, but prac-
tised a type of plebiscitary and ritualistic politics which secured it wide
popular support throughout the events of 1848–9 and even beyond.
Moldo-Wallachian pamphlets at the time imported and disseminated
French theories of the contractual nation and the ‘sovereignty of the
people’, yet, as shown, in practice the electorate remained limited and
universal suffrage was only adopted in 1918.71 The June Days in Paris
and the aborted work of the Property Commission in Bucharest in
August 1848 are only two examples of how the ‘people’ was ‘betrayed’
by its intellectual leaders in that crucial year of European history. The
historian and radical forty-eighter Nicolae Bălcescu condemned the
failure of the provisional government to deliver on its promise of mak-
ing the Romanian serfs not only free men but also property-owners.
“The revolution of 1848 was a revolution for the people, not a revolu-
tion by the people”, he wrote in 1851. The initially enthusiastic people
who embraced the cause were subsequently betrayed by a “weak gov-
ernment” of “burghers and educated young men”.72 In spite of this,
the level of popular support for the revolution was constantly high,
69
Cf. Part One, p. 47.
70
Ibid.
71
For comparison, Greece adopted universal male suffrage in 1844, France, Swit-
zerland and Germany in 1848, and Romania, Italy, the UK and Poland in 1918. See
Serge Noiret, “Electoral Systems” in Europe Since 1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of
War and Reconstruction, ed. John Merriman and Jay Winter (Detroit, 2006), 2: 953–6.
For Nicoale Bălcescu’s reflections on popular sovereignty, see Stanomir, Naşterea
constituţiei, 223–30.
72
“Trecutul si prezentul”, Junimea română 1 (Paris, 1851), reproduced in Antologia
gîndirii româneşti, ed. Gulian, 283–4. Cf. Durandin, Révolution, 144.
the ‘people question’ 351
even though statistics are patchy and a great number of sources speak
merely of “many” people, “crowds” and “significant numbers” of par-
ticipants. Numbers of peasant delegates – three per village – arriving
in the capital, Bucharest, ahead of the arrival of the Ottoman envoys
in July 1848 ranged between “a few hundreds” and 12,000–15,000,
according to widely disparate contemporary estimates.73 The tsarist
commissioner Alexander Duhamel estimated in January 1849 that
“the peasants . . . enthusiastically embraced the cause of the revolution;
most probably, around ninety per cent of the population is now in
sympathy with the artisans of the troubles and the disorders.”74 Other
witnesses speak of a crowd of some 40,000 people who reinstated the
provisional government after the Odobescu-Solomon anti-revolution-
ary conspiracy.75 How could such support be explained? Did printed
and spoken propaganda work better in Bucharest than in Paris? Or
were the crowds in Wallachia more supine and easier to manipulate?
Was the failure of the Property Commission due to lack of political
will or to the pressures of Russian and Ottoman military interven-
tion? Those were days of heady enthusiasm, and the peasant delegates
arrived in the capital city with tri-coloured banners and talking of the
“constitution.” Yet issues of franchise as well as of peasant dues and
land ownership remained unsolved in the longer term, even after the
former exiles had come to power. Although, as seen, peasants had
their own representatives in the consultative assemblies of 1857, the
Paris Convention of 19 August 1858 imposed a heavily restricted fran-
chise. Only “a few thousand persons, mainly large landowners and the
upper middle class”, had the right to vote.76 The Constitution of 1866
was also based on income and as a result, only some 20,000 individual
out of 5 million could vote, a restrictive system which could not fail
to have a negative impact on land legislation.77 The land law of 1864,
which made peasants legal owners of their lands, failed to pre-empt
the fragmentation of plots through inheritance and the gradual deteri-
73
Apostol Stan, Revoluţia de la 1848 în Ţara Românească: boieri şi ţărani (Bucha-
rest, 1998), 109, 137–39.
74
Revoluţia de la 1848 în Ţările Române: documente inedite din arhivele ruseşti,
ed. Ion Varta (Chişinău, 1998), 478, quoted in Marian Stroia, Între Levant şi Europa
modernă: impact extern şi mentalitate tradiţională în spaţiul românesc (Bucharest,
2006), 194.
75
Berindei, Revoluţia română, 169. Cf. Part One of the present study, p. 82.
76
Hitchins, The Romanians, 1774–1855, 293.
77
Paul E. Michelson, “Romanian Liberalism, 1800–1947: definition, periodization
and a research agenda”, Xenopoliana 13, 1–4 (2005): 10. See note 91 below.
352 epilogue
oration of peasant lives. In addition, the inadequacy of the agricultural

contracts of 1866–1872 was blamed for establishing a system often
described as “neo-serfdom.”78 The violent peasant uprising of 1907 was
going to be the culmination of peasant unrest in nineteenth-century
Romania.
78
For further details see Henry L. Roberts, Rumania: political problems of an agrar-
ian state (Hamden, Connecticut, 1969), esp. 8–21.
THE USES OF EXILE
In his correspondence, Rosetti often amuses himself with classical allu-

sions to his experience of exile: he becomes Ulysses to Marie’s Calypso
and to Ion Brătianu’s Telemachus in letters to Marie.79 Rosetti’s and
his peers’ letters also abound in moments of despair, mourning for
premature deaths caused by exile and indignation over the inevitable
political divisions and squabbles of the diaspora. However, their texts
remain short and pragmatic, the emotional effusions curbed and the
verbal interchanges channelled towards organizational and strategic
matters rather than towards theorizing or lamenting exile.
The memoirs, life narratives and fiction of the revolution of 1848
in Romania have not yet formed the object of a dedicated study simi-
lar to Sylvie Aprile’s study of the literature of exile in Second Empire
France.80 Aprile found out that, in the life narratives of the French
proscrits, exile was often presented, not surprisingly, as a form of
social death, a space of absence, stillness, suspension of action and
confusion of identities. Her findings suggest that the exiled French
republicans, whether in the Channel Islands, Switzerland, Belgium or
Britain, tended to congregate with groups of co-nationals and that an
‘internationalism of exile’ did not exist. Without going into a detailed
comparison of the two considerably different types of exile (the Wal-
lachian exile of 1848 vs. the French proscrits of 1852), it would appear
that, in spite of similar economic pressures and social isolation, the
Wallachians placed a greater emphasis on the transnational solidari-
ties afforded by cosmopolitan Paris, and, to a lesser extent for their
group, by London. Creating and maintaining transnational networks
appear as some of the central concerns of these texts, from which
exile often emerges as a cohesive force: while it separated individu-
als from their countries, it also created new forms of internationalist
79
Letters dated 25 and 26 November 1853 in C. A. Rosetti to M. Rosetti 1: 63–4.
80
Aprile, Le siècle des exilés, esp. Ch. 9: “Politiques de l’exil”, 179–206. Such a study
would have to include, for example, Souvenirs et impressions d’un proscrit, par J. Héli-
ade Radulesco (Paris: Impr. de Prève, 1850), as well as the partly published memoirs
of Nicolae Pleşoianu and A. Christofi. Undoubtedly, the archives hold more such ms.
texts. See Part One, p. 76, note 175. For Transylvania, see Nicolae Bocşan and Rudolf
Gräf, eds., Revoluţia de la 1848 în Munţii Apuseni: memorialistică (Cluj, 2003).
354 epilogue
solidarity which brought together people as diverse as the Greek-born

Sami Pasha of Vidin, Michelet, Quinet, the Romanians Brătianu and
Rosetti, the Guernsey-born Marie Rosetti, Mazzini, Arnold Ruge and
lesser known republicans such as Ange Pechméja. The support they
offered each other was often of a very practical nature and may have
involved no more than humble tasks such as circulating money and
letters, providing accommodation and food, or dropping names, but
such support was crucial.
Exilic solidarities and the growth of print culture often came together.
There are many examples in the preceding chapters which show how
the printed word linked centres of exile such as Jersey, London, Brus-
sels, Veytaux, Geneva, Bursa and Kütahya, turning them into a “com-
mon home for the European left.”81 This somewhat contradicts some
of the conclusions of Sylvie Aprile who, in the afore-mentioned study,
argued that there was significant distrust between the East-Central
European and French diasporas in mid-nineteenth-century Europe
and that strictly national agendas collided with the ideal of left-wing,
republican and revolutionary internationalism.82 Even though macro-
historical projects such as a pan-European insurrection, a “répub-
lique universelle” and the Saint-Simonian “United States of Europe”
remained theoretical, there were pockets of transnational resistance to
authoritarian states which could be quite effective on a smaller scale, as
the Romanian case study outlined in this narrative has suggested.
The shared experience of exile made the more reflective of this cos-
mopolitan group realize that individual and national identities are
fluctuating entities which can be given or constructed, assumed or
relinquished, inverted or reinforced. When he left France for a vol-
untary exile which lasted eighteen years, Quinet travelled with a false
passport bearing an assumed Romanian name, “Groubesko”, and in
the company of an old Romanian friend of his wife’s.83 “We are all
Romanians”, he seemed to say, all united in this common experi-
ence of being thrown beyond one’s national borders and having to
invent a new self. The correspondence between Jules Michelet and
Dumitru Brătianu and the shared life in Nantes of the Rosettis and
the Michelets also led to a realization on both sides that the helpers
could turn overnight into social pariahs and that, instead of a ‘French-
81
Victor Hugo to Alexander Herzen, July 1855, in Durandin, Révolution, 258.
82
Aprile, Le siècle des exilés, 170–4.
83
Durandin, Révolution, 209.
the uses of exile 355
ness’ or a ‘Romanian-ness’ which could be taken away randomly by

a princely decree, there was a supra-national identity available to the
exile as a space of reflection on what it means to be a ‘European’, a
man of the ‘left’ or a ‘republican’.
Like Quinet and Hugo, when offered a chance to return to his home-
land, Rosetti opted for voluntary exile rather than for compromise with
a corrupt regime. In a text entitled “Russia”, written in France in 1853,
he encouraged those who shared that refusal: “Tyranny, spoliations,
confiscations, prisons, exiles, assassinations, we are stronger than all
of these!”84 There was dignity and strength in exile, as shown in the
many testimonies of the French proscrits who refused offers of pardon
and amnesties. Exile could be a positive educational, existential and
political experience, claimed Victor Hugo: “proscription strengthens
the ideas, cleanses the parties and aggrandizes the men. Let us then
rejoice in our pain, for we are the soldiers of progress and the servants
of an idea.”85
The East-Central European exiles in Paris and London were mainly
the recipients of support from sympathetic individuals and groups, but
these exchanges could work both ways. As shown, mid-nineteenth-
century ‘Russophobic’ opinion in Western Europe was significantly
strengthened by the exiles from the ‘East’. Trans-national contacts
could also have paradoxical side effects. In Britain, for example, the
presence of continental refugees and especially the impact of the very
popular Hungarian leader, Lajos Kossuth (starting with his highly
publicized visit in 1851), led to a shift in radical and Chartist attitudes
to European revolutionary movements and to foreign affairs in gen-
eral. A link was formed in the thinking of many between the defence
of local government and domestic freedom(s) on the one hand, and
support for democratic movements abroad on the other. But while this
endorsed British working-class and left-wing sympathy for the conti-
nental freedom-fighters and encouraged greater awareness of foreign
affairs, it also paradoxically strengthened the case for reform rather
than revolution at home. Gregory Claeys has argued that Mazzini’s and
84
Antologia gîndirii româneşti, ed. Gulian, Part I, 422. The text was published in
Rosetti’s newspaper Republica Română, no. 2 of 1853. See Rosetti’s request for that
issue of the paper to be smuggled into Wallachia in Part Two of the present study,
p. 257.
85
Aprile, Le siècle des exilés, 152.
356 epilogue
Kossuth’s anti-socialist views tempered the radicalism of the Chartists,

thus helping “the cause of stability and consensus in Britain.”86
The Moldo-Wallachians became quite adept at building close-knit
pressure groups in European exile by cultivating every form of socia-
bility available to them. The Collège de France is one example, and
so is the Radical Club in London, which in 1838 included Mazzini,
Thomas Milner Gibson, Thomas Perronet Thompson and the philo-
Romanian Elias Regnault among its members.87 As shown, they were
all connected to the Romanian cause. Mazzini’s European Democratic
Committee may appear like a cell of hot-headed guerrilla leaders and
spies, but it also provided a neutral space where ‘enemy’ groups such
as the Romanians and the Hungarians could air their grievances. Such
national and pan-European solidarity networks were based on sub-
groups connected via close family, liberal, republican and Masonic ties
which have been under-studied in the historiography and often remain
obscure. Their members tried everything from insurrection and secret
society plots, to open diplomacy and lobbying, and ended up creating
a “form of international revolutionary solidarity”,88 which is perhaps
their most important legacy.
86
Gregory Claeys, “Mazzini, Kossuth, and British Radicalism, 1848–1854”, Journal
of British Studies 28 (July 1989): 225–61.
87
D. J. Rowe, ed., “The Radical Club, and other papers”, in London Radicalism 1830–
1843: A selection of the papers of Francis Place (1970), 71. URL: http://www.britishistory.
ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=39491 (Date accessed: 27 September 2010).
88
Durandin, Révolution, 128.
LIBERALISM IN ROMANIA
In 1848–49, Rosetti, the Brătianu brothers, the Golescus, and their

associates did not use the word ‘liberal’ to define their political ori-
entation.89 Neither did they have a crystallized doctrine or polished
political platforms. The Islaz Proclamation, an over-ambitious radical-
liberal program, was, as seen, soon engulfed and overtaken by events,
surviving as a constitutional blueprint for better, quieter times. ‘Forty-
eightism’ (paşoptism), the closest the radicals came to an ideology in
the 1840s, was a mixed, experimental bag of ideas on constitution-
alism, representation and sovereignty in which its promoters were
searching for the political repertoire of a new age.90 As seen, exile and
marginalisation led them to abandon reflection on the pragmatics of
government and law and to concentrate on national propaganda and
elite-building. For a decade they could bask in their self-assumed role
of golden revolutionary youth grooming itself for power in the future
Romania. As shown, many of the intra-group solidarities established
by the Moldo-Wallachians in exile were negatively affected by politi-
cal realities at home once the former exiles assumed power. However,
the Wallachian radicals proved enormously resilient and dominated
Romanian political life throughout the second half of the nineteenth
century. Their reputation in Communist times was unanimously posi-
tive: it was the time when streets in Bucharest received the names of
Rosetti, Quinet and Michelet.
A critical approach to Romanian liberalism emerged after 1989 and
is still to a significant extent work in progress.91 In 2005, an important
issue of Xenopoliana, the journal of the “A. D. Xenopol” Academic
Foundation in Iaşi, launched a well-argued and polemical appeal for
89
The British Consul Robert Colquhoun had, however, referred to them as ‘liberals’
in one of his dispatches to the Foreign Office. See Part One, 70.
90
For an overview of ‘forty-eightism’, see Gîndirea românească în epoca paşoptistă
(1830–1860), ed. Paul Cornea and Mihai Zamfir (Bucharest, 1968–1969), 1, “Studiu
introductiv”.
91
Recent contributions include: Apostol Stan and Mircea Iosa, Liberalismul politic
în România de la origini până la 1918 (Bucharest, 1996) and Şerban Rădulescu-Zoner,
ed., Istoria Partidului Naţional Liberal (Bucharest, 2000).
358 epilogue
a wide-ranging research project on liberalism and the liberals.92 There

are many conundrums to solve. Did they create the institutions of
a modern democracy or an authoritarian regime backed by a party
oligarchy?93 Did they oppose universal suffrage because they believed
the masses were not ready for it, or because they feared that Prince
Cuza might manipulate it to install an authoritarian, personal regime?
Did they continue to be the champions of the ‘people’, as they claimed
in 1848, or did they succumb to one of the essential contradictions of
liberalism, that between individual ‘freedom’ and mass ‘democracy’?
What was the Liberals’ role in blocking the creation of trade unions
and in disenfranchising the peasants in the 1866 Constitution? How
did their liberalism tie in with their protectionist economic projects
which ultimately retarded growth, or with the intrusive state which
“created abundant new opportunities for corruption and governmen-
tal misdeeds”?94 Why did the erstwhile friends of Rosenthal and Win-
terhalder and the emancipators of Romania’s Jewish population in
1848 promote anti-Jewish legislation in the 1860s?
92
Xenopoliana – Buletinul Fundaţiei Academice “A. D. Xenopol” (Iaşi) 13, 1–4
(2005), a special issue entitled “Liberalismul românesc: tendinţe, structuri, persona-
lităţi”, ed. Liviu Brătescu and Ovidiu Buruiană. The issue includes an English-language
bibliographic and research summary in the afore-mentioned essay by Michelson,
“Romanian Liberalism, 1800–1947”, 3–19, alongside important Romanian-language
contributions.
93
Daniel Barbu and Cristian Preda, “Building the State from the Roof Down”, in
Liberty and the Search for Identity: liberal nationalisms and the legacy of empires, ed.
Ivàn Zoltán Dénes (Budapest, 2006), 372, 375.
94
Michelson, Conflict and Crisis, 111.
CONCLUSIONS
Increasing newspaper print-runs, intrepid couriers, stereotype print-

ing and even the introduction of the telegraph or the creation of the
Reuters agency in 1851 would probably not have been as effective as
they were in the Romanians’ ten-year exile without one essential, but
largely imponderable dimension: the solidarity networks in which they
became embedded. The intense Rosetti frequently glossed in his diary
over the idea that friendship and love were weapons against the arbi-
trariness of political power, the discontents of modern life and, ulti-
mately, against death.95 Marital, social, republican, radical, anarchist or
Masonic, it was friendship and companionship which fed the survival
mechanisms of Rosetti and his fellow-exiles during a crucial decade of
political repression. It was a sense of generational, moral and intellec-
tual solidarity that united individuals as diverse as the French repub-
licans, the Italian anarchists, the British radicals, and the East-Central
European liberals of mid-nineteenth century Europe.
Alfred Dumesnil recognized the power of this connection when
he wrote to Ion Brătianu in July 1852, assuring him that he contin-
ued to work for the “Romanian cause”. The least he could do was,
he wrote, to “leave behind a monument to our friendship, which is
going to tell our children how much we have loved each other and
how sincerely we have done so. This is all we have got, but it will
haunt the future.”96 It is this sense of generational mission and of the
small, individual life playing itself out on history’s big arena that this
narrative has attempted to capture. This is very much in the spirit of
Jules Michelet’s own “intimate method” which highlighted individual
actors’ representations of events as ‘mirrors of the age’. “Tacit saw only
himself in Rome, but it was the real Rome”, he wrote in his diary on
27 October 1834.97 In other words, what an English radical or Char-
tist from Manchester thought of the Romanian Principalities in the
1850s, or what the Romanians themselves thought about the Russian
95
Entry for 9 April 1846, in Rosetti, Diary, 133, and passim.
96
Letter from Alfred Dumesnil to Dumitru Bratiano, 10 July 1852, in Michelet,
Correspondance, ed. Le Guillou, 7: 124.
97
Quoted in Viallaneix, “Postface”, Cours au Collège de France, 2: 721. Cf. also my
Introduction, p. 13.
360 conclusions
or Austrian ‘Eastern’ policies or about Magyar hegemony can say as

much about their age as diplomatic quid pro quos or ideological con-
structs. If historical and political biography needs to be rehabilitated,
as Lucy Riall has argued recently, it will have to be on the basis of a
recognition that it is legitimate to seek historical ‘truths’ by juxtapos-
ing “the life lived with the life imagined”.98 The personal texts used in
this account reflect the ways in which exile and contact with France
and Britain contributed to the self-fashioning of the forty-eighters
into a liberal elite and a government-in-waiting. They foreground the
reflections, emotions and prejudices of Romania’s first generation of
Liberal politicians as young men in a hurry, forced to choose between
multiple nation-building projects and “multiple selves”99 under the
pressure of events. There were choices to be made between the initial
idealism of the socially inclusive Proclamation of Islaz (1848) and a
pared-down project which sacrificed the social to the political. Both
in exile and after 1857, other sacrifices were made: Michelet’s lessons
on the union of workers and students, the vision of a class-less society,
the land reform, an extended suffrage, the ‘social republic’, all were
jettisoned temporarily as so much ballast in the heady flight towards
national union and freedom from foreign domination. These issues all
came back with a vengeance when the former exiles assumed political
power, and some of the less savoury political choices they made then
often altered their youthful solidarities.
The women in the Romanian-French ‘circle of friends’ were sensi-
tive to the portent of major, if still vague, political upheavals in the
latter part of the nineteenth century. “No-one can know the future”,
Marie Rosetti wrote to Adèle Dumesnil in September 1850, “but I have
a sweet vision that in the future our destinies will be further inter-
twined, that the great events which are about to bring joy to the world
in general, will also bring joy into our small, individual lives; your joys
and mine will come from the same source.”100 My group portrait of the
forty-eighters as young men has captured them in this brief moment
of romantic solidarity and faith and as such it may be blamed for its
occasional lapses into involuntary ‘hero worship’. The word ‘heroic’
98
Lucy Riall, “The Shallow End of History? The Substance and Future of Political
Biography,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 40, 3 (Winter 2010): 394. I am grate-
ful to Alex Drace-Francis for bringing this article to my attention.
99
Ibid., 381.
100
Marie Rosetti to Adèle Dumesnil, Paris, 18 September 1850, in Documente
inedite, ed. Bucur, 73. (the entire letter is on pp. 73–4).
conclusions 361
seems appropriate in more ways than one. Irrespective of the power

struggles and intrigues of that fateful decade, most of the members of
the liberal group, moderates and radicals alike, shared an expectation
that the heroic image of the Romanian past which they had dissemi-
nated in the Western media deserved a no less heroic future. Living
in the age of the modern press, they quickly grasped the fact that the
construction of this future depended to a great extent on the ways
in which they handled ‘communication’: with their own party and
peers, with the opposition and with the emerging civil society. Their
exilic interactions with the French and British press and with an often
hostile public opinion confirmed their already entrenched belief that
using the press was central to modern political practices. One can read
their handling of the press in two ways: either as an expression of their
attachment to the core liberal values of freedom of speech and opinion
or, more negatively, as their readiness to manipulate the public dis-
course and create a “culture of discourse” for its own sake, removed
from the institutional and legal realities of the political nation. Future
research will undoubtedly chart their journey from “soldiers of prog-
ress” to “professionals of modernization.”101
101
Victor Hugo, cited on p. 355 above, and Barbu, “Hainele cele noi ale statului”,
57.
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INDEX
Ad-hoc Assemblies: Great Power protests with Jules Michelet, 54, 196–9; as
against election of former forty- envoy to Transylvania in 1848, 90–2;
eighters to, 322–3; peasants as envoy to London, 127, 130;
represented in, 326. See Ad-hoc memorandum to Lord Palmerston
Divans (1849), 130–1; Documents concerning
Ad-hoc Divans, 286, 298, 316. See the Question of the Danubian
Ad-Hoc Assemblies Principalities. Dedicated to the English
Arène, Charles: support given to Parliament (1849), 131–2; as member
Romanian forty-eighters by, 267, of Mazzini’s Central European
314 Democratic Committee, 190–2;
Asachi (Asaky), Gheorghe: and exchange of open letters with Daniel
publication of Edgar Quinet’s Les Ira’nyi, 191; outline of Romanian
Roumains in Romanian, 297; and history in correspondence to Jules
Moldavian separatism, 297–8 Michelet, 198–9; attempt to create
Asachi (Asaky), Hermione, 176; Romanian legion in the Crimean
marriage to Edgar Quinet, 178, 337. War, 254–7, 263–7; and pro-
See Quinet, Hermione Romanian campaigns in London, 258,
Austrian monarchy: postal ‘interception 282, 298, 301, 305–12; role in
stations’ in the, 203–4; and ‘Brighton meeting’, 306–10; as
occupation of Wallachia (1854–57), Foreign Minister of the Romanian
276, 278; and opposition to the return Principalities (1859), 329. See also
of Romanian exiles, 293. See also Crimean War; Rosetti, Constantin
Boyacı Köy, Turco-Austrian Brătianu, Ion (Beppo): studies in Paris,
Convention of, and Godkin, Edwin 52; and Freemasonry, 53; involvement
Lawrence in ‘Hippodrome Affair’, 236; trial
in ‘Hippodrome Affair’, 242–50,
Bataillard, Paul: as ‘philo-Romanian’, 314–5, 339–40; article ‘Naţionalitatea’
94–5, 207–8; friendship with (1853), 236–7; Mémoire sur l’Empire
Alexandru Golescu-Negru, 94–5; d’Autriche dans la Question d’Orient
pro-Romanian publications of, 153–6; (1855), 281–2; founder of Romanian
“La Moldo-Valachie dans la National Liberal Party (1875), 337;
manifestation de ses efforts et de ses controversial policies as Prime
voeux” (1856), 302–3. See also French Minister, 338–9; assassination attempt
press against (1880), 340; and Romanian
Bălcescu, Nicolae: as mediator in liberalism, 340–2. See also Favre,
Romanian-Hungarian conflict in Jules; ‘Hippodrome Affair’; Paris,
Transylvania, 164–70, 199–200; and Romanian newspapers in
project of ‘Danubian Confederation’ Britain: hospitality to European refugees
rejected by Kossuth, 199–200 in, 193–5; Louis Blanc on hospitality
Birkbeck, William Lloyd: The Russians to refugees in, 194
in Moldavia and Wallachia (London, British press: and the Romanian cause,
1849), 131 228–9, 348, and passim
Boyacı Köy, Turco-Austrian Bulwer Lytton, Sir Henry: as British
Convention of, 276; Western protests Commissioner to Wallachia (1856),
against, 276–7 320; Report on the Danubian
Brătianu, Dumitru: family background Principalities (1856, 1858), 321;
of, 51; studies in Paris, 51–2; and Project of Form of Government (1856,
Freemasonry, 53; correspondence 1858), 321
378 index
Câmpineanu, Ion: opposition to Russia and, 260–2; Austrian role in, 269–70;
and arrest of, 28, 30 Suggestions for the Assistance of
Canning, Sir Stratford (Viscount Officers in Learning the Languages
Stratford de Redcliffe): opposition to of the Seat of War in the East (1854)
Romanian exiles’ return, 256; (Müller, Max), 271; Messieurs les
opposition to the union of the Cosaques (Paris, 1854–5), 271–2; and
Romanian Principalities, 293, 294, Austrian occupation of Wallachia,
303–4; role in the union of the 276; end and outcomes of, 285–8. See
Romanian Principalities, 322 also Boyacı Köy, Turco-Austrian
Cobden, Richard: non-interventionism Convention of; Godkin, Edwin
of (1853), 231–2; Russia by a Lawrence
Manchester Manufacturer (1836), Crowe, Evan Eyre: “Roumania” (1857),
231 324
Collège de France: Romanian students Crowe, Joseph Archer: support for the
at, 9, 39, 180, 182, 243, 350; history Romanian cause during the Crimean
of, 43; lectures of Jules Michelet War, 267–8, 283; “The Danubian
at, 43–50, 162–3; political agitation Principalities” (1857), 324
at, 162–3; suspension of Michelet’s
course at, 208; revocation of Michelet, Duhamel (Dyugamel), Alexander
Mickiewicz and Quinet from, 215 Osipovich, General: as Russian special
Colquhoun, Robert G.: connection envoy to the Romanian Principalities,
to the Grant family, 19; education 75, 98, 104, 108
of, 70; becomes Consul-General in Dumesnil, Adèle: and Romanian
Bucharest, 70–1; support to exiled diaspora in Paris, 175–6, 178, 180
Wallachian forty-eighters, 8, 116, 119, Dumesnil, Alfred: and Romanian
158, 215; assessment of Constantin diaspora in Paris, 175–6, 178, 180
Rosetti, 71; instructions from Lord
Palmerston (1848), 74; on censorship Eliade Rădulescu, Ion, 7; role in the
of the press in the Romanian Wallachian Revolution of, 1848, 75–6,
Principalities, 74; positive assessments 80, 89, 96, 109; as member of the
of Wallachian revolution of 1848, Wallachian provisional government
84–5, 107; recognizes Wallachian (1848), 80, 83: and tensions with
provisional government in 1848, Wallachian radicals, 76, 109, 111, 163,
89; on Russian influence in the 176, 185, 256, 265, 275; Mémoires sur
Romanian Principalities, 73, 99; and l’histoire de la regénération roumaine
diplomatic protection to Wallachian ou sur les évènements de 1848
revolutionaries, 100–1; on Russian accomplis en Valachie (Paris, 1851),
occupation after the Wallachian 110–11; pro-Ottoman stance of, 256;
revolution of 1848, 104–5; opposition Souvenirs et impressions d’un proscrit
to the union of the Romanian (Paris, 1850), 353
Principalities, 293, 303; transfer to Exile: and political alignments of
Egypt, 1858, 343; death of, 343 Romanian forty-eighters, 175;
Congress of Paris (1856): and the Hungarian, Polish and Romanian
Romanian Principalities, 298–300 refugees in (Turkey, 1849), 175–6;
Congress of Paris (1858): and the union Romanian refugees in (Bursa, Asia
of the Romanian Principalities, 327–8 Minor), 183; and diplomatic
Crimean War, the: prelude to, 225–33; pressures for the return of the
role of Romanian Principalities in, Wallachian forty-eighters, 313–18;
226, 259; Daily News correspondent international solidarities in, 353–6,
in Bucharest during the, 227, 268; 359. See also Turkey
Polish legions in, 252–3; attempt to
create a Romanian legion in, 254–7, Favre, Jules: and defense of Ion Brătianu
263–7; military campaigns in, 259, in ‘Hippodrome Affair’, 247
270–1, 285; public opinion in Britain Fonblanque, Albany, 267
index 379
Fonblanque, Thomas De Grenier: correspondence of intercepted by

facilitates correspondence of Austrian authorities, 203–4. See also
Romanian exiles, 267 Racoviţă, Constantin
France: as second homeland for Golescu, Nicolae, 8, 12, 61; as member
Romanians, 10–11, 32 and passim of Wallachian Provisional
French press, the: and the Romanian Government (1848), 80; 89, 96, exile
Principalities, 153–6, 191, 347; in Bursa, 115; pro-Romanian
protests against Russian occupation of campaign in Britain, 227–8, 323; 282;
Romanian Principalities in, 160. See election to Ad-hoc Assembly (1857),
also Bataillard, Paul 322; as Romanian Prime Minister
(1860), 329; 343. See also Golescu
Ghica, Ion: as mediator in Romanian- family; Golescu brothers
Hungarian conflict in Transylvania, Golescu, Ştefan, 8, 12, 76; as member
164–70 of Wallachian Provisional
Girardin, Saint-Marc: Souvenirs de Government (1848), 80: 101, 215,
voyages et d’études (1852), 25–6; 254; and attempt to create Romanian
221–2 legion in the Crimean War, 263, 265,
Gladstone, William: and support for the 270, 316; 276, 295; election to Ad-hoc
Romanian cause, 323, 326–7 Assembly (1857), 322; 324. See also
Godkin, Edwin Lawrence: Golescu family; Golescu brothers
correspondent for the Daily News Golescu, Zoe (Zinca): family
during the Crimean War, 268, 278; background of, 116–7; exile in
History of Hungary and the Magyars Transylvania (1849), 149–50; role in
(1853), 278; reporting on the Austrian financing the Romanian diaspora, 8,
occupation of Wallachia, 279–81. 156; death of, 342. See also Golescu
See also Boyacı Köy, Turco-Austrian family
Convention of; Crimean War Golovin, Ivan: Russia under the Autocrat
Golescu, Alexandru C. (Albu): Nicholas the First (London, 1846),
assessment of the Wallachian 129–30
revolution of 1848, 184, 187; Gorchakov, Mikhail Dmitryievich
assessment of Wallachian role in the (1793–1861): as commander of
Transylvanian revolution of 1848–49, Russian troops in Bucharest, 271–2
184–5; proposals for the organization Grant, Effingham: birth of, 19; as
of the Romanian diaspora, 185–7; secretary at British Consulate in
views on Louis Kossuth in private Bucharest, 8, 19–20, 259, 273, 306;
correspondence of, 200–1; criticism of as business associate of Constantin
Hungarian ethnic policies in private Rosetti, 22, 119, 318; and support
correspondence of, 229–30; on the to Romanian forty-eighters, 8, 101,
Romanians being ‘abandoned’ by the 116, 119, 157–8, 173, 188, 203;
Great Powers, 284 engagement and marriage to Zoe
Golescu, Alexandru G. (Negru): Racoviţă, 187–8
criticism of Hungarian ethnic policies
in private correspondence of, 144; Hallegrain, Charlemagne: and
correspondence with Paul Bataillard, ‘philo-Romanian’ activities in Paris,
204–5, 207; proposals for organization 112, 125
of Romanian diaspora, 215–6; 256, Herzen, Alexander: positive views on
343. See also Bataillard, Paul Russia’s role in history, 210–11, 219;
Golescu brothers, the: education of, 8, exchanges with Jules Michelet, 211–2,
117; ministerial roles of, 342–3. 219, 240
Golescu family, the: house arrest of ‘Hippodrome Affair’, the: amidst
(1848–9), 116–19; roles of women in, conspiracies against the Second
117–8; harassment by Ottoman and Empire, 244–5. See also Brătianu, Ion
Russian authorities (1848–9), 173; and Favre, Jules.
republicanism of, 174, 188; private
380 index
Kogălniceanu, Mihail, 6, 73; ‘Dorinţele Michelet, Athénaïs: and the Romanian

partidei naţionale’, 87–8; and diaspora in Paris, 42 and passim
newspaper L’Etoile du Danube, 322 Michelet, Jules: lectures at the Collège
Kossuth, Lajos: as leader of the de France, 43–50, 162–3; admiration
Hungarian revolution of 1848–9, 74, for Marie Rosetti, 41, 84, 101–3,
136; and the Romanians of 234–5; and the ‘philo-Romanians’,
Transylvania, 144; exile in Turkey, 56–8; Légendes démocratiques du
172; Projet de l’organisation politique nord. “Madame Rosetti” (1853–5), 61,
de la Hongrie (1859), 201–2; meeting 101–3; account of arrest and escape of
with Dumitru Brătianu, 253; the Wallachian forty-eighters, 101–3;
‘Kütahya Constitution’, 254; views on correspondence with Dumitru
the Romanians in private Brătianu, 51–6, 218–9; “Principautés
correspondence of, 202; impact in danubiennes. Madame Rosetti (1848)”
Britain: 355 serialized in Le Siècle (1853), 204,
234–6; correspondence with
Lamartine, Alphonse de: as patron of Constantin Rosetti, 208–9; revocation
the Society of Romanian Students in from the Collège de France (1852),
Paris, 41, 59, 71; as 215; “Les Martyrs de la Russie”
Foreign Minister in 1848, 63–5; (1853), 238. See also Légendes
Manifesto to Europe, 63–4 démocratiques du nord. “Madame
Layard, Sir Austen Henry: support for Rosetti”
the Romanian cause, 227–8, 231, 305; Moldavia: separatist movement in,
motion in support of the Romanian 297–8. See also Asachi, Gheorghe
Principalities (1853), 231
Ledru-Rollin, Alexandre: Wallachian Organic Statutes, the (1831–32), 68–70;
revolutionaries and, 122–25; exile of, and the ‘additional article’, 28, 42,
162 52, 69; public burning of (1848), 97,
Légendes démocratiques du nord. 103–4
“Madame Rosetti” (1853–5) Osborne, Pact of (1857): and the union
(Michelet), 17–8, 61, 101–3; sources of the Romanian Principalities, 321
for, 211–2; publication and impact of,
238–40. See also Michelet, Jules Palmerston, Lord (Temple, Henry John,
Lévy, Armand: La Russie sur le Danube third Viscount Palmerston): and the
(1853), 236; role in the Wallachian Wallachian revolution of 1848, 87,
unionist movement, 295; and the 127; and the East-Central European
‘Jewish Question’ in Romania (1885), revolutions of 1848, 128, 133–4;
339 support for Russian intervention in
Liberalism: in nineteenth-century Hungary and Transylvania (1848),
Romania, 357–8; 360 151. See also Brătianu, Dumitru;
London: as a place of exile for European Colquhoun, Robert G.
republicans and anarchists, 189. See Paris: foreigners in, 33; Poles in, 36–7;
also Mazzini, Giuseppe Romanians in, 37–8, 41–2; as place of
exile, 178; police searches at
Mazzini, Giuseppe: and the activities Romanian exiles’ homes in, 204–6;
of the Central European Democratic Romanian newspapers in, 125, 207, 236
Committee (London, 1850), 189, Paşoptism: as programme of the
218; and the Romanian members of Romanian forty-eighters, 358. See also
the Central European Democratic under Liberalism
Committee, 190; and newspaper Le Pechméja, Ange: and support for
Proscrit (Paris, 1851), 192–3; mail of Romanian cause, 267; L’oeuf de
opened by the British General Post Kneph. Histoire secrète du zéro
Office, 195; and support for (Bucharest, 1864), 267
anti-Austrian activities in Wallachia, Press, the: the Romanian forty-eigthers’
283 uses of 345–9; 361. See also French
press; British press
index 381
Quinet, Edgar: the Romanians in Paris Party, 333; role in “Frigyesy Affair”
and, 57–8, 66; defense of Romanian (1864), 335; death of, 337
Principalities (1849), 161–2; marriage Rosetti, Marie: birth of, 18; marriage to
to Hermione Asachi, 178; revocation Constantin Rosetti, 60;
from the Collège de France (1852), correspondence with Jules Michelet,
215; Les Roumains (1856), 296–7; 179; ‘legend’ of, 181–2, 234; editor of
exile, 354 Mama şi copilul (1865), 334, 337. See
Quinet, Hermione: the Romanian also Michelet, Jules; Rosenthal,
diaspora in Paris and, 42; marriage Constantin Daniel
to Edgar Quinet, 178–9; translator of Rosetti, Mircea Charlemagne: birth of,
Silvio Pellico’s On the Duties of Men, 180; illness of, 336
179. See also Asachi, Hermione Rosetti, Sophia Liberté (Liby): birth of
as narrated by Jules Michelet, 17–8,
Racoviţă, Constantin: arrests and 336. See also Légendes démocratiques
deportation of by Russians, 118, 224, du nord. “Madame Rosetti”
260. See also Golescu family Rosetti, Vintilă Jules Ştefan: birth of
Revolutions of 1848, the: in Wallachia, (1853), 223
67, 75–89, 93–112; the failure of the “Rosetti-Winterhalder Establishment”,
Property Commission in, 350–1; the: role of in financing exile, 119–20.
popular support for, 351; the Islaz See also Winterhalder, Henric; Grant,
Proclamation and, 76–9, 357, 360; Effingham
in Moldavia, 77–8, 86; Polish agents Russia: influence of in the Romanian
in the Romanian Principalities and, Principalities, 24, 26, 69, 73, 159–60;
86–7, 98, 172; in Hungary, 136–9, perceptions of in the West, 30, 38–9,
164–70; in Transylvania, 90–2, 129–30, 209–10; intervention of in
139–53, 164–70. See also Hungary and Transylvania (1849),
Transylvania 148–51; and refugee crisis (1849),
Romanian (Danubian) Principalities: 169–70; and occupation of Wallachia
history of, 3–6. See also Congress of during Crimean War (1853–54),
Paris; Crimean War 227, 276; opposition to the return of
Rosenthal, Constantin Daniel: and the the Romanian exiles, 293. See also
Wallachian revolution of 1848, 81–2, Golovin, Ivan; Herzen, Alexander
88; portrait of Marie Rosetti as
Revolutionary Romania (1850), 182; Saint Sava College, the (Bucharest): role
death presumed suicide, 205 of Transylvanian professors at, 141
Rosetti, Constantin: family and Sami, Pasha of Vidin: sympathetic to
background of, 20–1; education of, the Romanian cause during Crimean
21–2; and Freemasonry, 40; War, 264–5, 266
admiration for Anita Garibaldi, 170; Stuart, Lord Dudley Coutts: and Poland,
marriage of, 60, 121; Pruncul român, 29–30; and protests against Russian
77, 82, 97; Românul (Paris, occupation of the Romanian
Bucharest), 125, 237, 333–4, 346; Principalities, 95, 132–4; support
republicanism of, 163, 180, 334, for the Romanian cause, 227–8, 258;
rejection of amnesty (1851), 202; death of, 258–9
death of new-born son (1852), 216;
sharing exile with Jules Michelet Transylvania: status of Romanians in,
(Nantes, 1852), 217–19, 223–4; 139–41; Romanian-Hungarian
Republica română (Paris), 236, 263; tensions in, 141–50, 151–3, 164–70;
attempt to create Romanian legion in ethnic conflict in, 146–50, 151–3,
the Crimean War, 254, 263–75; 164–70; refugees from in Wallachia,
reflections on marriage, 254–5; as 147–8; Russian intervention in (1849),
deputy in Ad-hoc Divan (1857), 319; 148–9; Wallachian exiles in, 149–50;
role in coup d’état of 1866, 329; as Hungarian-Romanian negotiations
founder of the Romanian Liberal over (1849), 164–70
382 index
Turkey: and Convention of Balta-Liman Voinescu II, Ion (Jean): as Foreign

(1 May 1849), 159–6; and political Minister of Wallachia (1848), 81,
asylum to Hungarian, Polish and 95–6; protest against Russian
Romanian refugees (1849), 168–70, occupation of Moldavia, 95–6;
172–3; Hungarian, Polish and correspondence with Jules Michelet
Romanian refugees in (1849), 175–6 (1853), 237–8; funeral of, 291–2. See
also Ubicini, Jean Abdolonyme
Ubicini, Jean Abdolonyme: assessment
of Wallachian Revolution of 1848, Wallachia: historical background, 3–6.
110–1; Mémoire justificatif de la See also Romanian (Danubian)
révolution roumaine de 11/23 juin Principalities
1848, 93, 110, 121–2; “La Question de Winterhalder, Henric: role in the
l’Orient devant l’Europe” (1854), 268; Wallachian Revolution of 1848, 8–9,
funeral oration at the death of Ion 81; role in financing the Romanian
(Jean) Voinescu II, 291; “Provinces diaspora, 119–20, 134; arrest of, 159;
d’origine roumaine” (1856), 294 rumoured death of, 162;
Urquhart, David: and opposition to expulsion from Wallachia, 217. See
Russia, 30, 128–9; England, France, also “Rosetti-Winterhalder
Russia, and Turkey (1834), 31; and Establishment”, the
opposition to the union of the
Romanian Principalities, 306, 310

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A Circle of Friends

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List of Figures ..................................................................................... ix

STUDENTS AND REVOLUTIONARIES

Jules Michelet, “Madame Rosetti”, 1855 ......................................... 17

1849, Paris: Early Days in Exile ....................................................... 115

1851: London. Mazzini’s European Democratic Committee ...... 189

THE RETURN OF THE EXILES

A Republican Funeral ....................................................................... 291

After Exile ........................................................................................... 333

Bibliography ........................................................................................ 363

Fig. 1: Map of the Romanian Principalities, Transylvania and

B. A. R. = Biblioteca Academiei Române (The Library of the

I would like to thank staff at a number of research and academic librar-

[. . .] a monument to our friendship, which is going

a leading Romanian liberal.4 The huge cortège comprised intellectual

The present narrative refers to the Romanian (or Danubian Princi-

In both principalities, the Prince was aided by a twelve-member

The early nineteenth century in Romanian history was a crucial

they turned to capitalist forms of entrepreneurship and to civil service

study of ‘hard facts’ as one of subjective perceptions of facts seen from

In Romania, the main leaders of the revolution of 1848 belonged to

arrived in Bucharest from Vienna at the age of twenty in 1828, and

and political patronage in Europe was and had to remain unparalleled.

[. . .] apart from the Oriental usage of offering pipes, sweetmeats and

revealed as he told the troubled ‘biography’ of this correspondence in

Notes on the text

The name ‘Romania’ to designate the territories of the two Principali-

STUDENTS AND REVOLUTIONARIES

These fragments on the revolution of 1848 in Bucharest, the future

four younger siblings were to be baptised. A Scotsman whose family

thorough knowledge of Office Routine, a perfect knowledge of French,

co-owned and co-administered with his friend Henric Winterhalter

plagued for decades by tensions between its old high-ranking ‘boyars’

was ineffectual and failed to improve the country’s administration,

On 20 July 1837, a number of deputies in the National Assembly of

was by co-opting her into international agreements regarding the sta-

the London Literary Association of the Friends of Poland from its

Le monde est un Sahara qui n’a qu’une oasis: Paris!

quality for persons who felt overwhelmed by the constraints, contra-

Visitors from England and America, with a different set of political

recorded foreigners residing in hotels and chambres garnies, excluding

Institut Saint-Casimir, founded in 1846 to welcome homeless, aged

as well as the equally controversial Adam Mickiewicz, that these young

second wife of Edgar Quinet. The personal connections being thus

professor himself had to ask the school administrator to remove the

his writings to captivate almost without reserve at least one section of

Nations, great or small, are indestructible, Michelet believed: “Those

France is charged with the mission of giving peace to the world – he

[. . .] le vent qui vient de France se fait sentir de loin.

protested against the inclusion of the Russian-sponsored ‘additional

members of the 1848 provisional government and as future liberal

forty thousand members of lodges nationwide, Adolphe Crémieux, the

political mission. Having travelled to England, Germany and Italy, the

by Michelet’s description of the “fédérations provinciales”, based on

him with a collective letter with all their signatures. “. . . Unaware of

pendence of civilized Europe.”126 This reply, civil though it was, was,

are presented as sacrifices made willingly for the sake of consolidating

Le pur évangile a vaincu. La République que nous