This blog accompanies James Morris’ Historical Journal article Locating the Wallachian Revolution of 1848

Archives are dusty places. Bundles of paper carry the accumulated debris of their creators and successive readers. When I left the Romanian Academy Library in Bucharest every lunchtime, after the archives closed for the day, I found a film of dust coating my laptop keyboard and screen. It seemed appropriate to the study of a place that no longer exists, that can only be found in old books and old maps, and which nineteenth-century travellers described as polluted with a ‘thick, black dust’ that hurt the eyes and the lungs: Wallachia.

In German, to be in der walachei is to be out in the middle of nowhere, but in the mid-nineteenth century this small principality stood at the meeting point of two empires. Sandwiched between the Ottomans and the Russians, Wallachian intellectuals looked west towards Europe for their future, and in 1848 they shared in the continent’s revolutionary upheaval.

What began in Sicily with a protest against Bourbon rule soon morphed into a European event with the fall of Louis-Philippe in Paris in February. Revolutions followed in many of the major European cities: Berlin, Vienna, Rome. The tide reached Bucharest in June, but a Wallachian revolution could not take the same course as events elsewhere. There were no universities in the principality. Urban populations were predominantly artisanal rather than industrial, and the bulk of the people were peasants. To succeed, a revolution needed to appeal to their interests. The new revolutionary government offered what many had dreamed of: freedom from their landlords and their own little piece of land.

But the Wallachian revolution differed in another way from contemporary events in Europe. It took place in an unusual geopolitical context. The principality was not only caught between the Ottomans and the Russians, it was also subject to both: a vassal state of the Ottoman sultan and guaranteed by the protection of the Russian tsar. Russian involvement in 1848 is limited in most historical accounts to the intervention in Hungary during the spring and summer of 1849, and the Ottoman state seldom features in the tumultuous narrative of the revolutions. Events in Wallachia bring both empires into the story of 1848. Other revolutions took place within empires. None save the Wallachian crossed the borders of two rival powers. Revolutionary leaders called their work an act of internal regeneration, but to succeed they needed international recognition and support.

The revolution could not live by Wallachia alone. Its size meant the principality’s new government had to balance its own plans with the vagaries of Great Power politics, and Wallachia’s unique geopolitical status offers a novel perspective on the interplay of national, imperial, and European politics during 1848. Other revolutionary leaders could afford to ignore outside forces. The Wallachians did not enjoy that luxury. This article explores how the Wallachians attempted to weather the revolutionary storm and balance the sometimes-competing interests of nation, empire, and Europe.

Read James’ full article here.

Main image credit: Wikimedia: Wallachia 1789.jpg