502 Chapter XX
Austrian monarchy, so recently an exemplar of fast- moving modern enlighten-
ment, entered upon the course that would make it, until 1848, what impatient
liberals called the China of Europe.
An Addendum on Southeast Europe
There is room for only a few words on Southeast Europe beyond the Hapsburg
borders, that is, on Rumania, Greece, and the Balkan countries, all of which, except
the Dalmatian coast, then lay within the Ottoman Empire. Even the Moslem
parts of that empire felt an immediate impact of the French Revolution.^44 Newspa-
pers were published in French at Constantinople, for the use of the foreign com-
mercial and diplomatic colony there, but various Turks were able to read in them
the news from Paris; and the French invasion of Egypt in 1798 not only brought
in new ideas but produced an emergency which forced the issue of Westernizing
reform upon the imperial government. It is said that the French Revolution was
the first European event to make a positive impression upon Islam, precisely be-
cause it did not come to the Moslems as a Christian movement, of a kind which
their religion would require them to oppose.
The Christian peoples of the European parts of the empire were subject to many
diverse influences. In part these were internal, as when, with the growth of trade in
the eighteenth century, Greek and Serbian traveling merchants developed a net-
work of habitual contacts throughout the Balkans, Hungary, and Rumania. Along
these lines of exchange new ideas traveled also, and by the end of the century a
kind of revolution of knowledge and communications had occurred, from which
the political movements of the following generation were to come.^45 External influ-
ences were miscellaneous. Recently, in the Rumanian People’s Republic, historians
have tried to show that there was a Russian progressive influence at this time. In
Moldavia, Russian soldiers during the Russo- Turkish war smuggled in manuscript
copies of Radishchev’s Voyage from St. Petersburg to Moscow, which, it is said, were
openly sold in Jassy.^46 There were German influences also. In the last decades of the
century over a hundred Christian Balkan merchants went annually to the Leipzig
fair. Colonies of South Slavs and Greeks in Vienna made that city a cultural center
44 B. Lewis, “The Impact of the French Revolution on Turkey,” in Journal of World History, I (1953),
105–25; L. LaGarde, “Note sur les journaux français de Constantinople à l’époque révolutionnaire,”
in Journal asiatique, vol. 236 (1948), 271–76; E. de Marcére, Une ambassade à Constantinople: La poli-
tique orientale de la Révolution française, 2 vols. (Paris, 1927); and, for Egypt, J. Godechot, La Grande
Nation: l ’expansion révolutionnaire de la France dans le monde, 1789–99, 2 vols. (Paris, 1956).
45 See the long and remarkably illuminating article by T. Stoianovich, “The Conquering Balkan
Orthodox Merchant,” in Journal of Economic History, X X (1960), 234–313; L. Stavrianos, “Anteced-
ents to the Balkan Revolutions of the Nineteenth Century,” in Journal of Modern History, X XIX
(1957), 335–48, and id., The Balkans since 1453 (New York, 1958). I am indebted also for much infor-
mation to Professor Peter Sugar of the University of Washington, Seattle.
46 S. Vianu, “Quelques aspects de l’influence exercée par la pensée progressiste russe sur la société
roumaine de la fin du 18e siècle,” in Academie de la République populaire roumaine, Nouvelles études
d ’ histoire presentées au Xe Congrès des sciences historiques, Rome 1955 (Bucharest, 1955), 285–97. The ar-
ticle shows more French influence than Russian.