The European Revolutions of 1848 and the Danubian Principality of Wallachia

This thesis uses the Wallachian Revolution of 1848 as a window through which to see and study questions about time, revolution, national and European identity, personal and popular sovereignty, and the relationship between central and local interests in mid- nineteenth-century Europe. It argues that liberal intellectuals in the two Danubian Principalities thought about their national pasts and futures in European terms during the 1840s and re-imagined the idea of Europe from the periphery. It was only with the outbreak of revolution across Europe in 1848 that they began to think of changing the present. Popular sovereignty lay at the heart of the revolutionary programme. Opportunities to participate in national politics were opened to rural and urban populations alike, and these changes mirrored those across the continent during the revolutionary year. The history of Southeastern Europe should not be viewed as divorced from that of the rest of Europe. Debates on peasant emancipation and land mirrored those about the right to work in France, and both were connected to ideas of political sovereignty. To be sovereign as a whole, the people needed to be sovereign as individuals, which meant they needed the means to sustain themselves. In a city like Paris this meant they needed the right to work. In the agrarian context of rural Wallachia it meant they needed land. But while the general European revolution spurred the Wallachians to act, it also hindered their chance of success. The grand unified revolution broke apart, and counterrevolutionary forces picked them off one by one. A joint Ottoman-Russian occupation followed for Wallachia. The revolutionaries had attempted to Europeanise the principality. They took local concerns and transformed them into national debates. The counterrevolutionaries reversed these trends. They provincialised the principality, imposed new state apparatuses of control, and divided local grievances from national politics. It was not a return to the pre-revolutionary order. It was the creation of a new order that could preserve something of the character of the pre-revolutionary era while responding to the changing needs and circumstances of Wallachia.Pigott Doctoral Studentshi