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Alex R. Tipei, "Unintended Nations: How French Liberals' Empire of Civilization Remade Southeast Europe and the Post-Napoleonic World" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2025)
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Alex Teppei about her book titled Unintended France's Empire of Civilization, Southeast Europe and the Post Napoleonic world, published by McGill, Queen's University Press in 2025. Now, this is really interesting because obviously a lot of things happened after Napoleon was defeated and we can talk about the French Empire in all sorts of different places and times. One place I think that we don't necessarily often talk about it, though, is in Southeast Europe pretty early on in the 1800s, or I guess, mid-1800s, and focusing on Christian, Greek speaking Elites in places today that we would call Greece or Romania. That's not necessarily usually where we think about French imperial efforts. I mean, for one thing, because they were relatively informal, we'll talk about what that means. So it's a really interesting place to look at questions of empire, of influence, of nation building, of nationalism. There's a lot for us to get into here. Alex, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. Alex Teppei
Thank you for having me, Miranda. I'm really excited to be here.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I'm very pleased to have you. And could I ask you to start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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Dr. Alex Teppei
Sure. So I am a professor at the University of Montreal, where I teach in both the History department and the International Studies program. And I'm a specialist of 19th century Europe and I do transnational history. And I'm particularly interested in the connections that link France and Southeast Europe, as you noted, the spaces that we now think of today as Greece and Romania to one another during that period. Why I decided to write this book. This book has been with me for a really long time. It started out once upon a time as a dissertation. And I think in some ways I used to joke that in some ways this book was an attempt at self psychoanalysis because I grew up in the Midwest, in the states in the 80s and 90s, and my dad was a Romanian immigrate. And he was very insistent that rather than learning Romanian at home, I would learn an important language like French. And then when I got to college and later grad school, I became very interested in this idea of French influence and its sort of durability over time and space. And that led me to this sort of question of what concretely is French influence? And as you noticed noted, I think one way of sort of reframing it is to think of it as informal empire, in a sense, because influence kind of implies this very vague and positive, altruistic even sort of relationship. Whereas the story is more complicated, I think.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yes. And definitely more interesting. Was there anything else you wanted to add?
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Dr. Alex Teppei
No, I think. And then over time, you know, as you might imagine, the book sort of evolved as I found different actors and traced them out and was able to see what they were doing and how these back and forth, back and forth exchanges between individuals in the Danube and principalities, areas that become the Greek state and France evolved in the 18, teens, 20s, 30s, 40s. Yeah.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Obviously a project always evolves from wherever it starts, but that's helpful to understand kind of the Origins of the project. The other bit of introduction that I think we probably want to cover is a really key term that you talk about in the book, Civilization speaks, or civilization speak, right, as kind of one unified concept. What is this?
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Dr. Alex Teppei
So civilization speak was kind of a term I came up with as a way of talking about a kind of package of ideas, projects, technologies that the figures I'm looking at on both sides of the continent engaged with. So it was a set of discursive practices that were really tightly linked to a notion of civilization and a way that they began to mutually understand and rethink this notion of civilization. I talk a little bit in the introduction about how this isn't the civilization that we think of when we think of, say, Condorcet or other Enlightenment era figures in the sense that it's not as quite universal or utopian in a way, but it's not the civilization that we associate with the mission civilisatrice of the French Empire later in the 19th century. It's. It's one of what I think are several intermediate steps between those two concepts that we tend to be more familiar with. And so there's sort of a constellation of discourses linked to this, and then also a host of modernizing projects and technologies. Right. So a lot of these figures are really interested in modernizing the economy, modernizing society through things like the creation of schools, the creation of hospitals, prisons, the codification of practices and laws. And so civilization speak became kind of a way of talking about the way that these actors, these men, and they're mostly men, really sort of referenced this whole sort of constellation of ideas, practices and institutions.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay? So it's a useful sort of bucket for a whole bunch of things that otherwise we may not put together. So that's really useful. Now, the subtitle of the book says, in the post Napoleonic world, which obviously gives us some sense of kind of when we're talking about. And obviously with France's empire of civilization, the other part of the subtitle, Southeast Europe, that gives us kind of the other part of where we are. But how much would it be an overgeneralization to say that kind of all these discussions are happening in France and they're all happening after Napoleon.
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Dr. Alex Teppei
So I think that maybe in that respect, the subtitle is a tad misleading. The book actually starts during the Napoleonic period, and it starts with sort of things that are thrown into flux during this moment. And in the first chapter, I talk, for example, about how the failed campaign, Bonaparte's failed campaign in Egypt really pushed People not only in France were not only Frenchmen to rethink this very notion of civilization. Right. These guys are kind of, like, surprised and disappointed that, you know, people didn't rise up and collaborate with Napoleon, that they didn't wholeheartedly want or embrace French civilization, so to speak. And so it makes them sort of rethink the limits of civilization. But at the same time as this is going on, they're in dialogue with, for example, Graecaphone thinkers like Adamantios, Corais and others, who then also take a cue from this and participate in this dialogue, trying to kind of rethink the way that Greece might fit into or an idea of Greece might fit into this notion of civilization. I should remind everybody, including myself, that there was no Greek state at this moment. So this is really sort of a process that starts, you know, during the Napoleonic era that builds on older scientific, political discussions about the relationships between different people, about what civilization is, what modernity is, you know. And I think in some ways, the Napoleonic experience does provide sort of a moment, a catalyst where different sort of people in different geographic locations in. Who have different sort of positions within society, the political and scientific world can come together in a new way. But it's not sort of a just reaction to Napoleon and his armies marching across Europe. It's a much more intricate sort of process that goes on in this period and then continues afterwards, into the 1820s, 30s, and 40s.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's helpful to understand. And this is not just happening in France, right?
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Dr. Alex Teppei
No, it's not just happening in France. And I think we. We sometimes forget that, you know, some of these. A lot of these figures who are very well educated, fairly well off, materially speaking, at this time, are fairly mobile, not only physically, they travel between places, but also in terms of their epistolary relationships. They're writing to each other, they're publishing in different places, and they're reading what one another have to say. Right. So the kind of centers in my book that I focus on, which is sort of one network that I've traced out, and it's not the only network that I could have traced out. It happens to be the one that I found and that I tracked, you know, the most sort of, you know, in the most detail, but that this sort of network links people in Paris to people in Yash and Bucharest in today's Romania, as well as people who come, especially after 1830, to Greece, to Naftion and then Athens, what becomes the Greek state, as well as those in Istanbul in the Russian Empire. And places farther afield that kind of see themselves as part of an overlapping set of intellectual and cultural communities.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's definitely a helpful reminder. And again, kind of reinforces where we're talking about. Let's get into then, some of the things that they were discussing in person and through these letters, you've mentioned the idea of, you know, quote, unquote, civilizing. What were some of these actual policies that were being imagined by these liberals to do that, and to what extent was kind of what they were imagining happening in other places similar to what they thought should happen within France itself?
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Dr. Alex Teppei
So it's sort of a overlapping or two pronged process. Where in France after 1850, after Napoleon's defeat, you have a group of moderate liberals who at first managed to play an important part in politics, but very quickly become part of an opposition. And they're very concerned not only for their own political position and regaining political power, but they're also concerned for the very institution of the constitutional monarchy. And so what they start to do as they're particularly as they're pushed out of offices in the, you know, late 1810, early to 1820s, is they start to think of these public private endeavors they could do that will remake French society in the image of their own ideology, which is very much grounded in this idea of civilization as progress, civilization as a forward march, as both sort of, you know, process and outcome. So they start to create these organizations where they're going to create institutions to civilize the French masses. So in particular, I track how they built a number of schools, mutual method schools. So these are these schools where you can educate hundreds, even thousands, theoretically, of children by using one teacher. So they're very economically efficient. They'll give, you know, the working classes a basic education, which will not only sort of contain them, but will also make them useful modern workers. They talk very explicitly, for example, about the way students will move around these classrooms, will replicate their maneuvers on the factory floor. So this is sort of like really practical training, and it's also sort of an ideological training, because there's an idea of there's a very limited meritocracy available in these schools. They're not going to get the education that the sons of these moderate liberals are going to get. They're not going to go to Elise, they're not going to go to university, but they're going to have some possibilities for moving up a hierarchy, for example, by working as student monitors or helping the instructor teach these students over time and possibly even earning a very small income. From this. So these institutions, like schools, other disciplining institutions that they invest in, including insane asylums, hospitals, prisons, are also supposed to sort of replicate and reinforce liberal ideology in France. The idea here is also too, that if these liberals can, through these public, private sort of cooperations, create these institutions and show how effective they are, then their viewpoint, their reform program will be embraced more broadly and that this will help them return to political power. So on the one hand, you have this very sort of concrete domestic agenda. At the same time, these French liberals are really worried about France's status in Europe and the world. We're talking about a period of diplomatic and military weakness. France has, you know, a war, indemnity, opposed, imposed on it. The other powers are really watching French politics closely at this time, intervening to some extent. And so the liberals really want to also prove that France has status. And the way that they think of to do this is to sort of say, well, we might not be the same kind of military or diplomatic power that we were a few years ago, and we might not be that in the foreseeable future, but we can remain a civilizational center, we can remain a cultural and scientific capital. So they hit upon this idea that they can also export, right, all of these techniques and technologies for modernizing, for disciplining people, and that by doing so they can increase their own legitimacy. Right? So if their programs are copied somewhere else, that's proof that they're desirable, that's proof that France remains a center of development, of science, of culture, so on and so forth. And so they become very, very interested in exporting all of these ideas and technologies. Again, I do put a lot of focus on the schools, because the schools are really a means of reaching out and like touching people throughout the social strata. And they are particularly interested very quickly in allies in the Greek speaking world because they can sort of use the idea that GRA elites want to use their models that the heirs of the people they see as the descendants of the originators of civilization, a civilization that the French, in their mind or in their rhetoric, have now perfected, that this will give them an increased sense of legitimacy. They're helping to restore civilization to the place that it had been at its origin, had been its hearth, you know, so to speak. And so they quickly sort of zero in on this sort of discursive relationship that they can build with Greek speakers across southeastern Europe. And I should also note too, that again, during this period, there's no Greek state, there's no Romanian state, but rather you have, you know, Big swaths of southeastern Europe that are part of the Ottoman Empire. And you have the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, which become part of modern Ro Romania, where a lot of the elite are culturally graphophones. They're very plugged into these broader Greek speaking networks and they see themselves as part of an omogeniao or like a shared sort of, you know, cultural, linguistic, religious group that are tied together across the region and also throughout the Ottoman and even Russian and Austrian empires.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hmm, okay. Really interesting. To understand the scope of all of this, I would imagine this therefore leads to some debates around kind of how to try and do all these things at once. So what kinds of projects were they prioritizing? Why? And was it kind of the same things in both the foreign and domestic sphere?
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Dr. Alex Teppei
So what they. One thing that they did is there was they created a series of associations or associated. Right. So we have like the Society for Elementary Education. Then there's also, as a kind of umbrella organization, the Society for Christian Morals. Right. And so each association would kind of take care of a particular project, right? And they would be sort of charged with, its members, would be charged with perfecting their methods. They would hire experts, consult with experts, they would produce reports and so on and so forth. And then also in attracting membership both in France and beyond France, Right. And so they would recruit people to finance these projects and oversee them. And what happens sort of is that in doing this, and they also create a whole sort of, how should I say, like a whole sort of system for making sure. For enforcing perfect sort of mimicry of all of these methods. Right. So one thing that's really important to the leaders of these organizations is that as they're disseminating their technology, whether it's in, say, Brittany or whether it's in Yash, they want to make sure that the methods they have established are meticulously followed. Now, it's questionable to what extent they're actually meticulously followed in practice, but the idea is that if they're not perfectly, you know, conform in one place and another, that that will undermine the sort of idea that they've really hit on these methods, scientific, modern methods of civilizing the masses in France, returning civilization to places where Greek speakers live as well as to places farther afield. Right. So there's a lot of effort put into making sure that people follow these methods very minutely. And when materials, for example, for these schools or treaties about how to organize a hospital are translated into other languages, they have a whole sort of elaborate system. I think anybody who's, you know, ever worked at an institution in academia or otherwise, you know, will kind of resonance where you have the translation is done. Then there's a committee form to comment on the translation, there's a committee form to comment on the commentary on the translation and so on and so forth, before they approve it. And then publicize it in the journals that they produce, which are shared with all their members. Publicize it, in other words, periodicals, both in France and beyond, and sort of let the entire world know that, look, our methods are so useful and so efficient that not only are they being applied here, but they're being, you know, minutely copied in all of these other places. And therefore, that helps us, you know, that allows us to argue that these are the best methods for civilizing France, the world, for modernizing, so on and so forth.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I can see how they would think that would be effective. I can also see how that might really annoy people. So to what extent did they succeed in getting, you know, people outside of their French liberal circle to want to do this?
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Dr. Alex Teppei
So this is something that sort of changes over time. And one thing that I talk about in the book is, for example, the first. The first Greek language mutual, mutual method school, for example, that's established in southeastern Europe, is created in Yash, in the principality of Maldavia, by a gentleman named Nikolai Rossetti Rosnovano. Now, Rossetti Rosnovano is like a young boyar who is culturally a graopone. He's multilingual, et cetera, so on and so forth. And he comes to France in 1818 on a trip that he describes as sort of a voyage of discovery. So what he wants to do is to find models that will help him modernize Iash Maldavia and southeastern Europe more broadly. And he's not interested in doing this because, you know, he's interested in bringing modernity to the region. He's interested in doing this because he's looking for ways to increase his own political and also economic power in particular. And he becomes very Interested in things like regional reading, the great works of political economy at the time of seeing different, you know, organizations that have created models for promoting industry, for promoting all kinds of reform agendas, and so on and so forth. So he falls in with this group of French liberals through the relationships that he has in these larger Greek speaking networks. And he goes to visit their model school and he's really impressed by it. And he decides this would be a great thing to introduce in IAS and to proliferate throughout the region. So he hires a Greek speaking pedagogue who's already been training in France to translate the materials that have been created for these schools. There are charts that hang on the walls that allow children to work together. There are, you know, sort of books, the books for instructors that explain the technique. And he engages this gentleman, Yorgos Kleobolos, to translate all of these materials. And then he goes back to Yash and waits for Kleobolos to show up. A few months later, Kleobolos's materials go through this whole process I just described where, you know, the French liberal organizations read his translation. They think about ways to improve the method itself itself. They publish about it. They, you know, lather, you know, lavish him with praise in their journals and, you know, are so grateful to Cleo Volos and Rossetti Rosnovano for returning civilization this way to the place that had been its origin point, in their view, right? Because they really are conceiving of anywhere Greek speakers live as Greece at this point, right? So once the school gets off the ground, you also see that French liberals are writing private correspondence to Rossetti Rosnovano and they're really nervous because they haven't heard from him and they want to know, has the school opened? Have you started teaching kids? What have you done? Are you following our methods? Right? And they remind him ad nauseam in these letters, like, you must perfectly follow the method, otherwise it won't work, so on and so forth. So finally, Rossetti Rosnovano writes back several months later and he, he reassures, you know, his French interlocutors. He says, the school has opened. We already have, you know, over 100 pupils. There's also a teacher training course that Cleo Volos is leading, and the students from there are going to spread out across the region, which they do, and Rossetti Rosnoveno provides them with materials for their schools, letters of introductions, and even a small sum of money. So he reassures them and he also uses this opportunity to flatter them. So he talks in his letters, too, about how he has these fond memories of France as the most civilized of countries. He compares civilized France to barbaric Maldavia. Because for Rossetti Rosno, vano flattering the French this way and playing into their rhetorical expectations about these relationships, it doesn't really cost him anything. There's no, you know, price for him to pay to do this. What he does is he really shores up these relationships with these French patrons that not only have given him this technology, but might prove to be useful to him in the future, might somehow invest in Maldavia, might provide political support. At several points during his career, Rossetti Rosnovano and his father both occupy various posts, including treasurer of the principality. At different points, they each tried to become prince. So these are sort of investments in the future in the sense that come at a very. At very minimal cost to him. This sort of changes later when, in 1821, shortly after Rossetti Rosa Nevado creates his school, the Greek War of Independence breaks out, first in the principalities and then in the peloponnese. And within 10 years, we have the formation of the early Greek state. The Greek state is dependent on the great powers, France and England and Russia in particular, for its continued existence, for its recognition as an independent state, and also dependent on them materially for loans, for investment. And the state doesn't have money to really build up any kind of infrastructure either. Transportation, physical infrastructure, educational infrastructure, although leaders of this state, like I, the first governor of an independent Greece, see these as really key projects in terms of creating a viable polity. So they end up dependent on these kinds of initiatives. And we see, for example, capital Distrias then has a number of exchanges with these liberal French organizations and their representatives. And so one thing that they do, for example, is in the Greek state, they offer to finance a printing of charts and other materials for Greek schools. But in order for this to happen, Kapodistrias has to make sure that the schools will follow the French model, right? That they'll follow the model laid out by these liberals. So to this end, he hires somebody to translate a textbook for teachers that really lays out every possible detail that you could imagine for these schools. What the classroom should look like, how thick the wood in the table should be, what time students should start, how they should be punished or rewarded for their behavior, how they should behave, what order they should do their lessons in, so on and so forth. He appoints a member of one of these organizations who actually is physically in Greece at this point, to oversee the translation and publication of this. The charts are again reviewed in Paris and in the printing, too. On the charts and other materials, you know, it's noted that they're financed by, you know, the Parisian Society for elementary Instruction. So what this means here is that there's a greater cost in a sense, because as Capo District is dependent on this support, this gives French liberals leave to dictate how the school system should be set up, how students should learn. It lets them insert themselves and this idea of French patronage into school houses at the same time. So the stakes of these relationships change over time as the geopolitical context shifts around these figures.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that makes sense, given that rather a lot is happening geopolitically at this point. And I wonder if we can talk about one of them in particular, which is growing calls for Greek independence. How does that interact with all the civilization speak?
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Dr. Alex Teppei
So, as I was saying before, you know, this is a moment when, in 1821, the Greek War of Independence breaks out. And it's really a surprising moment. First of all, before the War of Independence, there are different sort of plans and schemes and ideas about what an independent Greece would look like. And it's really not the Greece that we know today or that appears in, you know, the 19th century on the map. You have a lot of elite, you know, Greek speakers, a lot of elite Orthodox leaders in the Ottoman Empire and farther afield, who are sort of imagining perhaps a resurrected Byzantium or an Ottoman Empire that's now controlled by Orthodox Christians. You also have a lot of other powers, particularly regional powers like Russia, who are interested. Catherine the Great had a Greek project or a Greek plan, is how we often talk about it, where she imagined, you know, installing one of her children as an emperor of a resurrected Byzantium, to put it very succinctly, or what, so to speak. But so there's. There's this very different conception of what Greece might be and what Greece looks like at the time. And a lot of people really support this idea of incrementalism. Very few of these, you know, Greek speakers who are intellectually engaged, who are well known across the continent, or who are politically important. Many of them work within the Ottoman Empire, many of them work for the Russian Empire or have interests in other parts of Europe. They're not thrilled with the idea of revolution. Some people, like Adamantius Poiries, who I mentioned earlier, lived through the French Revolution itself and were really taken aback by the horrors of the terror. Others think that revolution is just A bridge too far. And so they believe in this idea of incrementalism. So these modernizing project, like creating schools, modernizing the economy, they see that as a step to greater autonomy and eventually maybe independence. Others think that, like Capodistrias himself, before he becomes governor for a long time, supports this idea of diplomacy, will help bring about an independent Greece, or will lead to the decline and potential replacement of the Ottoman Empire. So there's a lot of different ideas, and then this kind of ragtag group of revolutionaries pop up in 1821. They've been discouraged by a lot of these more well known, more well placed, wealthier Helenophones across the continent. And yet they lead this insurgency that, you know, starts in the principalities coming from, you know, Russia, and then also is joined by a revolt in the Peloponnese. And this is a really surprising moment. And so what we see happening too is on the one hand, you have people trying to raise troops on the ground. And when they're trying to raise troops on the ground, they draft these speeches and proclamations that really refer to things that are meaningful for people in the region. So they talk about this as a war of Christianity, for example, a war being fought amongst brothers against this, you know, Muslim force. Whereas when they address European audiences who they're hoping will intervene in the war or provide diplomatic or monetary support, they turn to this idea of civilization that has been worked out in a lot of these exchanges, right? And so they talk about Greece as being the origin point of European civilization. They talk about this idea that France and the other European powers, particularly the West European powers, owe Greece a civilizational debt, right? And so they have to help the Greeks achieve their autonomy or independence. And what happens is that these two discourses become overlaid over time, right? Because this idea of Greece as civilized, Greece as the origin point of European civilization, Greece as a place that has been deprived of its civilization and just wants to return to its correct course of development becomes really a justification.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
For.
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Dr. Alex Teppei
Greek independence that has a lot of rhetorical discursive importance, given that in this kind of post Napoleonic context, there's an idea of trying to maintain the status quo of, you know, not breaking apart legitimate empires, including the Ottoman Empire. So this really becomes a powerful rhetorical tool. But as it becomes a justification for Greek independence itself, it also becomes overlaid on the development of the Greek state domestically when it does get autonomy and then independence in the late 1820s, early 1830s.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, this is very interesting to again, talk about a transition here, right? We started with the transition before Napoleon, after Napoleon, or during and then after. We're talking about another transition here. Obviously. Greece becoming independent, though, doesn't just kind of take away all support from France. It's not like France suddenly goes, yeah, never mind. We're not as interested anymore. The civilization speak is still relevant. But how does that work when you're no longer talking about kind of liberals just writing letters? You're talking about, like an actual sovereign state.
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Dr. Alex Teppei
So. So, yeah, so that's a really great question. So what. What happens too, is like, as I started to say with this example about the schools, right? This becomes a way for the French to really intervene and shape the development of the Greek state and shape its relationship to the rest of the world. So another aspect of a lot of this is that during the War of Independence in particular, both public figures in France as well as those on the ground in Greece or their representatives abroad are really trying to pitch Greece as this place of potential investment, of potential wealth, not only for Greeks themselves or people who would then become Greeks themselves, but also for potential patrons abroad. Right? So there's this idea that we can invest in Greece, we can create wealth here. And a lot of people talk about it as an America in Europe as a sort of El Dorado. For example, Dominique de Fort de Pratte, who was an ambassador for Napoleon, he's a clergy member, but he also writes a number of pamphlets, I mean, a huge number of pamphlets about diplomacy. He sort of chastises, you know, his readers and says, why are we going and looking for riches in the Americas when they're here in our backyard? And if we had an independent Greece, then those people would be likely to collaborate with us. They would want our help, they would want our investment because we would be helping to civilize them and return them to the European fold. Right. Others, like Constantine Polyhoney, writes a pamphlet at the beginning of the War of Independence. And similarly, he too makes this connection between the Americas. He also kind of foreshadows a little bit this idea of like, you know, potential exploitation in Algeria. He sort of says, if. If you make. Help us make Greece independent, then it'll be ripe for you to be involved with economically, politically, so on and so forth. It will become an ally to. To the West European powers in particular. A lot of these guys are targeting more and more over the course of the war, France and England, as Russia has not intervened, as many of them had initially maybe expected. So there's really a pitch that's made that because the Greeks want to be civilized they want to work with societies, cultures, groups they see as civilized. And so in some ways, they're offering themselves up as potential economic colonies, as potential political colonies in this informal sense. They're proposing that in order to get to leave one imperial context, they would very happily submit to a more informal relationship. And even at one point during the war, the several Greek leaders propose, you know, putting themselves under British protection, then under joint protection, so on and so forth. So there's this real sort of idea that if one is to. If they become independent, then this will create opportunities for everybody. So on the one hand, there's. How should I say, a real sort of willingness on the part of leaders on the ground themselves. There's a real interest on the part of French liberals in particular, also in other groups throughout Europe. But French liberals also feel that they've already lost out on potential economic opportunities in Latin America, for example, during the Age of Revolution, because they feel the British have cornered those markets. They feel that they have lost out on economic opportunities with the loss of their empire in the Caribbean. And so they start to see Greece as a place where they might be able to recoup some of those losses. What happens is this idea of civilization and civilization speak sort of facilitates this relationship because these civilizational discourses see Greece both as the origin point of civilization. So the French owe the Greeks a debt for their own civilization that developed supposedly from the civilization of Greek antiquity, but also Greece as the limit or the frontier of civilization. The Greeks haven't developed correctly. They have to return to the path of civilization. So for that, they need guidance, they need tutelage. And France is in a position to offer them that. Right. But also in a position then to sort of discipline them and say, well, if you don't follow our models, if you don't build schools the way we suggest, if you don't organize your hospitals the way we suggest, then you're not going to become civilized again. So it becomes also a disciplining, discursive tool and creates this unequal power dynamic between. Between the two, if that makes sense.
- [41:11]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
It does make sense, and it's helpful to understand.
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Dr. Alex Teppei
Four, I use it.
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Dr. Alex Teppei
Are you. Are you playing me off? That's what's happening, right?
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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- [41:48]
Dr. Alex Teppei
My name is Kayla. My husband and I use his email address to access the New York Times. Each day we compete for who gets to do connections. Sometimes I log into the app and I discover that he's already finished connections that day. And I'm like, Jonah, it was my day. And he's like, I know, I just couldn't resist. You would do us a huge favor if we got to log in as a family with separate emails. I really think our well being as a couple depends on it. Thanks for looking into this, Kayla. We heard you introducing the New York Times family subscription.
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Dr. Alex Teppei
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- [43:06]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Having talked though, about Greece, now, we did mention right at the beginning that you also discuss Romania in the book. So is anything you've told us about Greece, is that similar at all to what's happening with Romania?
- [43:17]
Dr. Alex Teppei
Yeah. So what happens if you, if you remember, you know, I was saying, for example, the first of, like these schools that I track, for example, are created in Yash, in what is today Romania. Right. And there's a proliferation of schools in Romania as well. There's also another institution. So we have the start of all these institutions before or as the Greek War of Independence is getting off the ground, really. And in the intervening years, and then a couple of other things happen in the principalities. So first of all, as I was saying before, a lot of the elites in the principalities think of themselves as graphophones or as part of these bigger circles. Some of them are what the Romanian historiography traditionally calls Phanaria Greeks. So people with ties to Istanbul, their power source comes from their networks and their connections in Istanbul. And some are native boyars or native elites. Right. People whose power and power and prestige and economic Capacities are tied more closely to the land, but they share a common culture often, and they also. They study in many of the same institutions. So before 1821, two of the most important institutions of higher learning in the Orthodox worlds are in the principalities, the princely academies of Bucharest and ias, right? There's also a number of organizations. The Greco Dacian Society for the Advancement of Enlightenment, which helps publish a newspaper, a journal, Hermes the Scholar, are all sort of based in and around the principalities and the networks there. After 1821, first of all, there's a huge migration of individuals to the new Greek state, right? So there's a lot of the professors and intellectual leaders who are associated with the academies. They leave them and they go to help build this new state in Greece, right? In what becomes the Greek state, there's also a Russian occupation that takes place that has a really strong emphasis on trying to modernize. And it picks up on a lot of these projects that local leaders had first initiated in. In collaboration with their French partners. So the mutual method schools, also the building of infrastructures, so on and so forth. So you have, like, these two things that are happening at once. You have the occupation with the modernizing impulse. You have a lot of people who leave the principalities, and then you have the people who remain who are sort of left without their former mentors, business partners, friends, sometimes family members. And they sort of think, well, what do we do? Because we. We thought that we would be included perhaps in this larger idea of a Greece or an orthodox Ottoman Empire or resurrected Byzantium. And now here we are. There's this tiny, what's often called in the historiography, the Greek rump state that nobody had expected, that had never been anybody's intention or plan during the war. Even people are talking about a Greece that goes to the border with Russia or to the Danube, at least that includes perhaps Istanbul. And so instead, you have this tiny Greece, and then you have the principalities that kind of remain as these Ottoman vassal states. So people who had been involved in these same projects, involved in this proliferation of schools, creation of transportation infrastructure, modernization of medical care, with the idea of modernizing in pursuit of this incrementalist idea of autonomy, eventual independence or regime change, are left sort of with this question of how do they continue these projects? What do these projects mean in this new context? How can they reconfigure them? And so they sort of hit on this idea of, well, if the Greeks have this legitimacy, created this legitimacy for themselves by sort of situating themselves as an origin point of civilization, connecting themselves to this supposed Hellenic past. We can also do something similar. We can talk about the fact that here, perhaps we are Romans, right, that the local language is a Latin language, that the region was conquered by Rome, you know, that we're sort of the limit of the Roman Empire, and that, like the Greeks, we too are Christians. So they also have this tie that we're Christians, we have a link to antiquity. And those really become two of the main pillars, I probably should have said earlier, of this notion of civilization, a tie to antiquity and a Christian, Christian religious ethic or. Or morality and spirituality. And so they start to mobilize these ideas. And even in the 1820s, that we see leaders from the principalities who travel to Istanbul and are writing dispatches to French and British diplomats, trying to sort of push for greater autonomy of the principalities, trying to bring it into the Russian occupation. And you can almost kind of see them in their work, like, you know, trying to clarify and articulate this idea, you know, so Yuan Tatu, for example, writes a letter where he talks about how, you know, this is a Roman land, that we speak a Romance language. And then he kind of very quickly backtracks a little the next paragraph, and he says, well, even, you know, in Ovid's time, it was the end of the empire. So I know we don't associate it with this, but he's trying to find a way to introduce this sort of notion of Christianity and an ancient lineage that will bring legitimacy to claims of autonomy and independence. So as this is kind of being reformulated, you also see these same actors creating all of these institutions, schools, journals, a real investment in print culture, creation of theater, creation of all these things, to then go out and instruct people, which we also have, like a corresponding parallel story in Greece, that they're Romanians, right? That they speak a Romance language, that they have something in common with people in Valakia, have something in common with people in Maldavia, that they represent a kind of community. And so they use all of these tools that were created in this back and forth initially, were then arrived in the region through this back and forth initially with French liberals in order to start to disseminate a developing notion of a Romanian identity. And so it's these same tools that let them create an idea of Romania and then later argue for and demand independence, autonomy, and eventually independence in the century, later in the century.
- [50:39]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Really interesting to see how tools that were not designed for that end up getting used in that way. You did mention though Algeria very briefly earlier. So I wonder if we want to talk more about that now while we're doing some comparison. Is there any way in which what you've told us about Greece and Romania is also related to what's happening with Algeria?
- [50:59]
Dr. Alex Teppei
Yeah, and so I think what happened. So the kind of. The main argument is to. Or one of the main arguments here is that because of these tools that are really meant initially as modernizing projects and that fit into different people's agendas, right? So the French liberals have a clear agenda. They want to bolster the constitutional monarchy, they want to return to power, and they want to further France's prestige. The elites in southeastern Europe, they want, you know, to work towards incrementally some kind of independence initially. They want to bolster their own economic and political power as well. And over time, then they transform these into tools of nation building. But this is why the title is Unintended nations, because they're not the tools that were meant for that initially. So then what happens, too, is that these, as we've sort of talked about, become not only ways of creating these unintended nations, but also of entrenching this sort of French informal empire institutions through which French liberals and others can exercise sort of soft power. And as we talked about a little bit earlier, the French are particularly. The French liberals are particularly interested in this in the immediate post Napoleonic period, where they're deprived of, you know, their military and diplomatic heft on the continent in 1830, the Liberals come to power, and at the same time, they inherit this kind of scattershot invasion of Algeria. And one thing that we sort of see happening is that you have this civilizational discourse that has been sort of modified and developing in the context of these exchanges with graphophones and later Romanian speakers in southeastern Europe. And you have this sort of return to formal empire that's thrust upon them, in a sense. And so what we see is that, first of all, they continue using many of these same tools. So you see the introduction of mutual method schools, you see. See the introduction of other technologies in Algeria itself. But you also see the way that the same discourse that sort of said, oh, the Greeks merit independence, or the Romanians might merit independence because they have a tie to antiquity and they're Christian work to justify in this context, a formal imperial conquest, right? And it's a real sort of switch in the liberals rhetoric, where before they're talking about how formal empire is sort of wasteful and so on and so forth, but here they can use. Use many of the same discursive tools to say, well, but the Algerians are not Christian and they're linked to antiquities, tenuous. They don't care about the Roman ruins that they have there. They don't care about that. They don't identify with that at all. And they need, you know, to be civilized, perhaps, but it's not clear that they can be civilized, these imperial subjects, the way that the Greeks might eventually. So, you know, these other Southeast European partners of the French liberals have the potential to become full civilizational actors where the parameters of the civilizational discourse that they've worked out with each other have prevented the Algerians from doing exactly the same thing. So this becomes a way where these discourses are again modified to fit the context and to create a justification for this return to formal empire.
- [54:38]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it's a really interesting comparison. Once we bring Algeria in, it kind of illuminates some of these factors, particularly where similarities are seen or not seen. So thank you for adding that to our discussion. If we come then, to kind of putting all of these things together, is there anything in particular you most hope readers take away from the book?
- [55:00]
Dr. Alex Teppei
Well, I. I'm not sure how good of a job I've done of sort of making these things shine through in our discussion, but what I really hope that they'll take away from the book is, you know, sort of several interrelated things. I think, first of all, what I tried to show is the way that things are contingent. Right. If the Greek war of independence had not broken out, then these relationships might have been very different. And then these technologies and tools and discourses that I, you know, put under the umbrella of civilization speak might not have ever been employed to create these unintended nations. Right. Or if during the July revolution or right after the July Revolution, liberals hadn't inherited this, you know, invasion of Algeria, maybe these same discourses and tools wouldn't have been applied there. I think I also want people to take away the way that related to this idea of contingency, the way that, you know, the identities and positions and needs of people are fluid. Right. So, you know, for Rossetti Rosnovano, it cost him very little to praise the French and to describe them as far more civilized than him or the society he came from. But for Kapodistrias, it cost a great deal more, and the way that they framed it changed over time in relation to these exchanges and the greater context. And I also think that I want people to really see the way that domestic concerns in different places as well as broader continental, domestic or regional concerns, as well as broader continental, international or even global interests create this real interplay and that it's really hard to understand fully one without the other. You know, I could have just told the story of French liberals and their civilizing designs within France. How do they want to make the working classes, the urban poor, less dangerous? How do they want to further their own ideology and position through this? But you don't really see the whole story unless you also think about what are they trying to do abroad, how are they trying to reinforce France's position? But then that also forces you to sort of understand, well, why, you know, as you ask why, why are these guys, you know, going along with these kind of annoying demands of the French liberals to, to follow their methods, to see them, or to publicly acknowledge them as a civilizational center. And so I think that when you see how all these different parts come together in this way, I hope that it will give readers also an appreciation of like, what transnational history, which has become sort of a buzzword in a way these days, but what transnational history, when it really does seriously take on different perspectives from different geographic locations, from different chronological positions, and using different kinds of archives and different kinds of languages, what it can really do and how it can create a new sort of sense of a narrative that we may, we may already know, but don't really see the full picture without putting it in this bigger context.
- [58:18]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Always like a bit of bigger context. That's always a useful thing to understand. So thank you for telling us about it in this particular time and place, leaving me with just a final question of what might you be working on now that this project that's been with you for a long time is finally complete?
- [58:35]
Dr. Alex Teppei
Well, right now, today, right now I'll be working on my, my lecture for tomorrow, but, but once I finish that, I actually have sort of two projects going. One is that I'm part of a European Research Council funded group and we're working on a transnational history of corruption in Central Southeast Europe. So it's a group of about eight researchers and it's a little bit sort of of the flip side of civilization speak in a way, whenever anything is positive or good that you want to sort of bring to the region, it's civil, it's, you know, represents civilization, modernization, so on and so forth. And whenever anything is bad, it represents a form of corruption. So we're very interested in tracking the way that different political actors across the region and in, in relation to one another in relation to others farther afield, used acquis, accusations of corruption during this period of change in the late 18th through the mid 19th century. And then I've also started recently working on a project of my own, which I'm tentatively calling Empirical Plunder, where I want to look at the scientific expeditions that France sent to Greece during the War of Independence, Algeria during the Conquest, and then later in the 19th century to Mexico. I think most of us know a lot about Bonaparte's scientific commission in Egypt, which was the model for them, but there's actually a lot less written on these other expeditions and little that kind of brings them into dialogue with each other. So by doing that, I kind of want to look at the way that science was used and conceived of during these expeditions. Who had the authority to do science to make scientific claims? How did people sent on the expeditions, Frenchmen sent on the expeditions, collaborate with people on the ground, especially in Greece and Mexico? How did they view one another? What were the role in these expeditions in furthering what we might call development projects today, such as, you know, the creation of roads, but also the contracting of loans and the creation of international networks of finance. And also how these expectations or how these expeditions contributed to the development of race science and helped again over the course of the 19th century, reframe civilizational discourses. So it kind of starts a little bit where where this book left off and continues by using the scientific expeditions as a lens for continuing to trace some of these interactions and dynamics and discourses into the mid and late 19th century.
- [61:27]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, lots to draw on from this project then, and best of luck with your work going forward.
- [61:32]
Dr. Alex Teppei
Thank you. Thank you so much.
- [61:34]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Any listeners who want to learn more can of course read the book we've been talking about titled Unintended France's Empire of Civilization, Southeast Europe and the Post Napoleonic world, published by McGill Queen's University Press in 2025. Alex, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [61:49]
Dr. Alex Teppei
Thank you for having me, Miranda.
- [62:03]
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- [62:16]
Dr. Alex Teppei
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