620 Chapter XXVI
the Swedes,” wrote Lord Grenville in 1798, “more than half the people there, par-
ticularly in trade, are as great Jacobins as Rewbell or Talleyrand, and the Govern-
ment is little better.”^17 (It must be admitted that Grenville’s category of Jacobins
was fairly ample.) In Spain, now allied to France, the “Jansenist” Jovellanos was in
office, and a flurry was created in official and ecclesiastical circles, early in 1798, by
a letter written by Bishop Grégoire of the French constitutional church. Thousands
of copies were disseminated in Spain and Spanish America. Grégoire called the
Inquisition a disgrace to the Catholic world, and urged enlightened Spaniards to
get rid of it, at a time when “the cry of liberty sounds in both hemispheres” and
“the revolutions begin now in Europe.”^18
Alarms and rumors filled the air when it became known that Bonaparte, trans-
ferred from his command of the Armée d ’Angleterre, had embarked with a huge
fleet at Toulon. Not only Wolfe Tone, but Pitt and Grenville, believed him to be
headed for Ireland. Fersen was told by Jacobi, a Prussian diplomat, that the French
were really going to the Crimea, “to support Poland and revolutionize Europe by
stealing in at the back door.”^19 It was true that a final uprising of the Poles against
the partitioning powers had occurred only the year before, that Kosciuszko passed
through Paris in 1798, and that the Polish Legion in Italy, despite the peace with
Austria, still hoped to press on into Eastern Europe.
The French landed in Egypt in July 1798, and the modern period of Egyptian
and Ottoman history is often dated from that event. The French Revolution, as
Bernard Lewis has said, was the first European movement to exert a strong influ-
ence on the Moslem world, precisely because it did not appear to be Christian.^20 At
the same time the Christian, Greek, and Balkan parts of the Ottoman Empire
were thrown more open to revolutionary influence from another direction.
By the treaty of Campo Formio France annexed the Ionian Islands, formerly a
possession of Venice. They were Greek- speaking communities, lying close to the
western coast of Greece. In these “Gallo- Greek departments” the processes of
“municipalization” and “departmentalization” soon began to work; that is, the old
institutions began to disintegrate, and members of the old ruling families (includ-
ing in this case Count Capodistrias of later fame) fled from the country, seeking
aid from Britain or Russia. On the Greek mainland, late in 1797, patriots from
Athens, Macedonia, Epirus, and Crete, meeting secretly in the Peloponnesus, ap-
pealed to Bonaparte to send troops to liberate them from the Turks. In June 1798
Rhigas Velestinlis, who had written a constitution for a Hellenic Republic, was
executed with seven accomplices by the Ottoman authorities at Belgrade.^21 A few
months later, at Ancona, an Adriatic town in the Roman Republic, the French
17 Dropmore Papers, IV, 349.
18 R. Herr, The Eighteenth- Century Revolution in Spain (Princeton, 1958), 417.
19 Dagbok, May 15, 1798.
20 B. Lewis, “The Impact of the French Revolution in Turkey,” in Journal of World History: Cahiers
de l ’ histoire mondiale, I (1953), 105–15.
21 A. Dascalakis, Rhigas Velestinlis, la Révolution française et les préludes de l ’ independance hellénique
(Paris, 1937); M. Mangourit, Défense d ’Ancóne et des départements romains... aux années VII et VIII, 2
vols. (Paris, 1802); S. Pappas, “L’agence du commerce français d’Ancône 1798–99” in Acropole, VII
(1932), 124; J. Lair and E. Legrand, Documents inédits... Correspondances de Paris, Vienne, Berlin,
Varsovie, Constantinople (Paris, 1872), 21. On southeast Europe see Chapter X X above.