The recent two-hundredth anniversary of the Greek Revolution of 1821 has brought back to the historiographical forefront, as well as to the forefront of public dialogue, the great age of revolutions, particularly shaped by the influences and repercussions of the French Revolution on the European continent and beyond.
If the bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989 coincided with the upheavals that followed the collapse of totalitarian regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, the Greek bicentenary coincided with other global challenges that the ideals and theoretical propositions of the era of revolutions are called to confront.
The third revised edition of this monograph, examining the reception of the ideas of the French Revolution in Southeastern Europe and their functioning within the ideological traditions of the region’s peoples, raises anew a series of questions whose clarification may allow a better understanding, particularly of the transition of Balkan societies towards the political thought of modernity, as expressed by nationalism and the questioning of the prospects for freedom.
In the pages of the book, the author presents a historiographical dialogue between interpretative frameworks and theoretical discussions prompted by the bicentenary of 1789, and the testimony of the historical trajectory of the Balkan peoples during the age of revolutions, as recorded in the forging of a revolutionary mindset, the liberal critique of the French Revolution, and the rise of Balkan radicalism from the revolutionary initiative of Rigas Velestinlis to the Romanian uprisings of 1848.
