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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 April 2025
This response to the Annales’ forum on my Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions focuses on the Southern framework of my analysis, on the place of the Greece case within this context, and on the chronology of the age of revolutions. It highlights that the term “South” was adopted by the revolutionaries themselves in Portugal, Spain, Piedmont, and Naples—but not in Greece. It argues that a comparative framework enables us to explore the Greek revolution not only as a war of independence but also as a moment of political apprenticeship. Finally, it suggests that this Southern focus invites us to reintegrate what Franco Venturi termed the “first crisis” of the ancien régime in the 1760s and 1770s into the chronology of the age of revolutions.
Cette réponse au forum des Annales consacré à mon livre Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions est centrée sur le point de vue méridional de mon analyse, sur le cas de la Grèce dans ce contexte et sur la chronologie de l’âge des révolutions. Je souligne que la notion de « Sud » a été revendiquée par les révolutionnaires eux-mêmes au Portugal, en Espagne, au Piémont et à Naples, mais pas en Grèce. J’avance l’idée qu’une approche comparatiste permet d’envisager la révolution grecque non pas seulement comme une guerre d’indépendance, mais aussi comme un moment d’apprentissage politique. Enfin, je suggère que cette optique méridionale nous invite à intégrer ce que Franco Venturi a qualifié de « première crise » de l’Ancien Régime (1760-1770) dans la chronologie de l’âge des révolutions.
This response was first published in French as “Écrire l’histoire des révolutions dans l’Europe du Sud : quelques remarques rétrospectives,” in “L’âge des révolutions. Forum autour du livre de Maurizio Isabella, Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions,” Annales HSS 74, no. 4 (2024): 811–20, doi 10.1017/ahss.2025.10.
1. Maurizio Isabella, Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023).
2. Maurizio Isabella, Risorgimento in Exile: Italian Émigrés and the Liberal International in the Post-Napoleonic Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Alessandro Bonvini, Risorgimento Atlantico. I patrioti italiani e la lotta internazionale per le libertà (Bari: Laterza, 2022).
3. Michalis Sotiropoulos, ed., Philhellenism and the Greek Revolution of 1821: Towards a Global History (London: Routledge, forthcoming); Daniel Gutiérrez Ardila, “La République de Colombie face à la cause des Grecs,” in Las independencias hispanoamericanas. Un objeto de historia, ed. Véronique Hébrard and Geneviève Verdo (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2013), 305–20.
4. Javier Fernández Sebastián, “Cádiz, Oporto, Calcuta. Ecos bengalíes de las revoluciones ibéricas (1820–1823),” in A Revolução de 1820. Leituras e impactos, ed. Miriam Halpern Pereira et al. (Lisbon: ICS, 2022), 323–43, here p. 342; Christopher A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 42–49.
5. For new important insights, see Juan I. Neves-Sarriegui, “Iberian Constitutionalism in Asia: The 1821 Revolution in Portuguese Goa,” Journal of World History (forthcoming). See also, for the Philippines, Abisai Pérez, “‘Philippine Indios Were European Constitutional Spaniards’: Filipino Reception of the Cádiz Constitution, 1813–1814,” Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints 68, no. 1 (2020): 29–55.
6. For a global southern perspective on the period, see Sujit Sivasundaram, Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire (London: William Collins, 2020).
7. According to an interpretative framework suggested for the 1848 revolutions by Claire Jane Pettitt in her Serial Revolutions, 1848: Writing, Politics, Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). For a critique of this approach, see Daniele Di Bartolomeo, “Rivoluzioni in serie : Di Bartolomeo legge Pettitt,” Storica 87 (2023): 159–73.
8. See Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein, eds., Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).
9. On preexisting mobilities, it is now essential to read Guillaume Calafat and Mathieu Grenet, Méditerranées. Une histoire des mobilités humaines, 1492–1750 (Paris: Points, 2023).
10. An interpretation reaffirmed by Paschalis Kitromilides, Enlightenment and Revolution: The Making of Modern Greece (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). For a reappraisal of the liberal credentials of the new Greek case that goes beyond this framework, see Michalis Sotiropoulos, Liberalism After Revolution: The Intellectual Foundations of the Greek State, c. 1830–1880 (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
11. See also Dimitris Dimitropoulos, Λόγος γυναικών; Δέκα στιγμιότυπα από τα χρόνια της ελληνικής επανάστασης (Athens: Antipodes, 2022); Vassiliki Seirinidou, ed., Όψεις της καθημερινότητας στην επαναστατημένη Ελλάδα (Athens: Bank of Pireus, 2022).
12. A helpful assessment of this literature is now available in Jeanne Moisand and Mathilde Rossigneux-Méheust, introduction to “Le genre de la mondialisation,” special issue, Revue d’histoire du xixe siècle 68 (2024): 9–23.
13. Costituzione degli Stati Uniti d’America, trans. Angelo Lanzellotti (Naples: s. n., 1820); Anastasios Polyzoidis, Προσωρινόν πολίτευμα της Ελλάδος. Και σχέδιον οργανισμού των επαρχιών αυτής αμφότερα επιδιορθωμένα και επικυρωμένα υπό της δευτέρας Εθνικής Συνελεύσεως εν Άστρει οις έπονται το Πολιτικόν Σύνταγμα της Βρετανίας και το των Ηνωμένων Επικρατειών της Αμερικής. Μετά της διατυπώσεως του Συνεδρίου αυτού, εξ αγγλικών και γαλλικών συγγραμμάτων μεταφρασθέντα υπό Αναστασίου Πολυζωίδου [Provisional Polity of Greece. And a Plan of the Organization of its Provinces, Revised and Ratified by the Second National Assembly in Astros, Accompanied by the Political Constitution of Britain and that of the United States of America. With the Proceedings of their Congresses According to English and French Treatises, Translated by Anastasios Polyzoidis] (Messolonghi: Mestheneos, 1824).
14. Franco Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1768–1776: The First Crisis, trans. R. Burr Litchfield (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), ix. The quotation is from the preface to the American edition of Settecento riformatore, vol. 3, La prima crisi dell’Antico Regime, 1768–1776 (Turin: Einaudi, 1979).
15. Mark Mazower, The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe (New York: Penguin Press, 2021), 51–52; Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe; Vasilis Molos, “Forms of Resistance,” in The Greek Revolution: A Critical Dictionary, ed. Paschalis M. Kitromilides and Constantinos Tsoukalas (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021), 100–19, especially pp. 109–11; Ada Dialla, Η Ρωσική Αυτοκρατορία και ο ελληνικός κόσμος (Athens: Alexandria Publishing, 2023).
16. For the debates around the famines, see also Franco Venturi, Settecento riformatore. L’Italia dei lumi, 1764–1790, vol. 5, La rivoluzione di Corsica. Le grandi carestie degli anni sessanta. La Lombardia delle Riforme (Turin, Einaudi, 1987).
17. Isabella, Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions, 428–38. On the eighteenth-century events in Madrid and Palermo, see José Miguel López García, El motín contra Esquilache : crisis y protesta popular en el Madrid del siglo xviii (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2006); Simona Laudani, “Quegli strani accadimenti.” La rivolta palermitana del 1773 (Rome: Viella, 2005).
18. A new interpretation of the 1848 revolutions is now offered by Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World, 1848–1849 (London/New York: Penguin Allen Lane, 2023). For a global reappraisal of 1848, see Quentin Deluermoz, Emmanuel Fureix, and Clément Thibaud, eds., Les mondes de 1848. Au-delà du printemps des peuples (Ceyzérieu: Champ Vallon, 2023).