Introduction
Scholarly literature on nineteenth-century revolutionary movements in the 1820s, 1830–1, and 1848–9 has recently experienced a promising boost.Footnote 2 This renewed interest extends far beyond the frequently addressed national case studies of France, Germany, or Great Britain: areas such as Southern Europe, until recently neglected, are now becoming centres of attention. Historians have begun to examine the Mediterranean Sea in particular not as a peripheral space but as a zone of mobility and fervent interaction of people and ideas that were not limited within this basin but influenced political discourses beyond the Mediterranean, in places such as Russia and South America.Footnote 3 Narrating this entangled and connected history of the nineteenth-century Mediterranean world would be impossible without using a transnational framework that can help explain both national developments per se and their mutual interconnections.Footnote 4 Such topics as variations in nationalism in ethnically mixed areas,Footnote 5 intelligence and the role of consuls,Footnote 6 political exiles, both high- and low-profile,Footnote 7 and (in reaction to this phenomenon) transnational policing and conservatismFootnote 8 now enjoy much closer attention in the Mediterranean context than ever before.
This article aims to contribute to these Mediterranean discussions by analysing a more specific topic, i.e., the arrival in Greece of Italian and Polish political refugees of the 1830–1 and 1848–9 revolutions. While pertinent studies have focused more on the attitude of the Greek state and society to the newcomers during and immediately after their arrival,Footnote 9 this article aims to supplement and advance our knowledge on the matter in a slightly different way. I follow recent scholarship that not only sees the mid-nineteenth century as the age of great émigrés (e.g., Giuseppe Mazzini, Karl Marx, Lajos Kossuth) but also seeks to uncover the lives of the thousands of lesser known exiles, who, after all, formed the bulk of émigré communities.Footnote 10 Accordingly, I intend to explore the human geography of the refugee groups in Greece. Furthermore, I shall focus more specifically on certain foreign fugitives and analyse their views on the country, on aims, and on agency during their stay in Greece. That way, I can shed light on certain aspects of the much wider, transnational social history of political emigration in Europe and help integrate Greece into the history of nineteenth-century European revolutions and their aftermath. The attitude of the Greek authorities vis-à-vis the refugees will be discussed too particularly to the extent it offers a deeper insight into the activities and problems of the foreign fugitives themselves.
The above aims will be achieved through a combination of archival and published primary and secondary sources. First, I take advantage of Greek archival materials from both central (foreign and interior ministries) and municipal authorities (prefecture of the Cyclades). Second, I also use a number of Austrian, British, Italian, and Belgian archival sources, since they contain police and consular reports and émigré correspondence, which can provide valuable information about the exiles’ profiles and whereabouts that cannot be found in the Greek archives. Third, although the exiles generally left only a small number of self-produced sources, I will exploit the available published primary sources, such as the memoirs and diaries of Polish and Italian émigrés, to achieve a deeper insight into their experience in Greece. The above sources will be occasionally supplemented by Greek newspapers, memoirs, diaries, and secondary literature, allowing for a better contextualization of the refugee question.
Finally, as far as the structure of the article is concerned, I shall first explore the origins of political migration in early independent Greece by looking at the Italian, Polish, and French exiles of the 1830–1 revolutions. Then I move on to the arrival of the Italian and Polish refugees of 1848–9 in Greece. In the last section, I discuss the stories of specific ‘forty-eighters’ and their relations with the Greek authorities. In this way I aim to depict different generations of exiles (1830, 1848) as well as the expectations and problems of the more numerous of them after 1848, both collectively and individually, in order to achieve a well-rounded analysis of the refugee experience in Greece.
Political exiles of the 1830–1 revolutions in Greece
After the outbreak of the Greek revolution in the Peloponnese in 1821, considerable numbers of foreign Philhellenes travelled to join the Greek cause.Footnote 11 Be they romantic fighters like Byron or outright adventurers, most were either Germans, Italians (after the suppression of their own uprisings in 1820–1), or Poles (who sought to escape Tsarist oppression).Footnote 12 Despite the downswing in philhellenic arrivals after the collapse of the philhellenic military corps following the Greek defeat at the battle of Peta in 1822, other foreign groups would periodically follow in their footsteps during European political crises and revolutions later in the century.
By the time the Greek war of independence had come to an end, a series of revolutions in 1830–1 in France, the Papal States, and Poland created new waves of political émigrés, some of whom sought asylum in the Ionian Islands and Greece.Footnote 13 The British authorities in Corfu allowed seventy-seven defeated Roman revolutionaries, predominantly of middle-class descent, to settle there. These included Francesco Orioli, later director of the Ionian Academy; Severiano Fogacci, the editor of the literary journals Ape, Florilegio, and Album Ionio; the officers Emilio and Attilio Bandiera; and the legal scholars Gerolamo Santorio, Salvatore Maria Guerra Rachetti, and Gian Francesco Lanzilli. Geographical proximity, religious tolerance, the Ionian Italophone culture, and preexisting relations with Ionian students in Italy, such as Geronimo Typaldos Pretenteris, formed a friendly environment for these fugitives.Footnote 14 Even in exile, though, they did not abstain from political activity. The Bandiera brothers used Corfu as their base for planning an ill-organized revolt in Calabria in 1844, which was promptly suppressed and its protagonists executed.Footnote 15 At the same time, in nearby Greece, where clandestine organizations such as the Philorthodox Society also plotted to expand the Greek borders,Footnote 16 the Italian revolutionaries attempted to also win followers for the Risorgimento. The years between 1830 and 1848 mark the rise of Giuseppe Mazzini and his ‘Young Italy’ and ‘Young Europe’ initiatives to spread liberal ideas across the Continent.Footnote 17 His Modenese emissary Emilio Usiglio tried to reach Greece in 1835 and again in 1837 to recruit allies, since Mazzini believed Greek irredentists would be receptive to his message. His hopes soon evaporated, though. Following a note from the Austrian embassy in Athens, King Otto ordered Usiglio's arrest and deportation before the latter managed to establish serious contacts in the country.Footnote 18
Along with these Italian exiles, the November uprising in Congress Poland (1830–1) triggered the so-called ‘Great Emigration’ (Wielka Emigracja)Footnote 19 of Polish revolutionaries, which continued after 1846, 1848, and 1863–64 (despite appearances, the exiles never numbered more than 8,000). While the great majority of the fleeing rebels ended up in Paris, where the July monarchy offered them asylum, a few arrived in Greece as well.Footnote 20 Polish interest in Greece can be traced back at least to the Napoleonic era, after the successive partitions of Poland.Footnote 21 The head of the Napoleonic Polish Legion and pro-independence agitator, Jan Henryk Dąbrowski, suggested the settlement of 12,000 Polish legionaries in the then French-occupied Ionian islands, as well as on the nearby Epirus mainland, as a means to expand French influence in the Balkans.Footnote 22 Although these plans failed to materialize, similar suggestions appeared after 1830. In spring 1831, the commander of the French troops in the Morea Antoine Virgile Schneider, proposed the establishment of a French-Polish colony in the Peloponnese staffed by the newly arrived exiles, who could thus remain in the region, replacing the French expeditionary forces (1828–31) and strengthening French influence. Schneider hoped, in particular, that the permanent presence of anti-Tsarist Polish settlers in Greece would undermine Russian influence in the country.Footnote 23 This plan too failed to work out as anticipated. The Poles aspired to be absorbed into the Greek army and civil service, but they soon encountered the poverty and meagre employment prospects of the early Greek state, as well as the unwillingness of the local Greek notables to allow Polish settlement in their lands.Footnote 24 More importantly, the rebels had to face repeated Russian pressure on the Capodistrian and post-Capodistrian administrations to cease granting asylum and to deport the fugitives, pressure Greece could hardly resist.Footnote 25 Eventually, the Poles were forced to further emigrate to the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, destinations that seemed to offer better employment opportunities.Footnote 26 Otto's government followed a similar policy, and when a Polish agent named Karocki came to Greece in 1833 to recruit volunteers for the Polish cause (like Usiglio), he was deported.Footnote 27 Exceptions, however, were possible. Andrzej Kallinski (Kaliński) was the most notable example, successfully managing to pursue a career in Greece, unlike most Philhellenes. A veteran of the 1830 rebellion, he managed to enter Otto's entourage after wandering in Europe for some years and accompanied him in Greece in 1833, becoming one of his most trusted advisors. In his unusual life, Kallinski served first Otto and then George I as royal secretary until 1893, earned considerable influence, and established a ‘dynasty’ of his own with his grandson, Andreas Roidis-Kallinskis, serving under kings Constantine I and Paul well into the twentieth century.Footnote 28
Remaining in Greece could thus be feasible for those foreigners who could demonstrate evidence of competence and loyalty despite their unlawful past, especially since the kingdom was in need of trained personnel.Footnote 29 Such was the case of François Graillard, a French Philhellene, Saint-Simonian and officer, who arrived in Greece in late 1821 and managed to rise to high military posts during the revolution. In 1829, he served as a liaison between the Greeks and the French army of General Maison in the Morea, but after Capodistria's death, he failed to prevent widespread lawlessness. After the Bavarians arrived, Graillard was appointed head of the new gendarmerie corps, and in 1835, he presented Otto with detailed plans to advance Greece's resources. Among other things, he suggested the establishment of populous colonies of foreign settlers to boost the damaged agriculture.Footnote 30 Graillard's suggestions were not put into force, partly because his Saint-Simonian beliefs, which were considered radical, resulted in repeated dismissals and reappointments between 1835 and 1848, until his final retirement in 1853. The similarity to Schneider's then-recent proposals does not seem to be coincidental, because debates were taking place in France about the emigration of the redundant workforce, which could then be used to develop more thinly populated regions such as Algeria and, in this case, Greece. Graillard's case is thus representative of the wider activity of Saint-Simonian groups across the Mediterranean after they were banned in France in 1832.Footnote 31 Much shorter were the stays of other Saint-Simonians in Greece, who were less persuasive about their loyalty and benevolent intentions. Gustave d'Eichtal was the best-known among them, setting foot in Nafplio in 1833 and, thanks to Kolettis’ patronage, being appointed secretary to the new Bureau of Public Finance (Graillard did not belong to the Bureau). Eichtal's activities, however, irritated more conservative circles in the Regency headed by Joseph von Armansperg, who engineered his removal from office and his decision to abandon Greece in 1835.Footnote 32
When the European revolutions of 1848 broke out, there was hardly any reminder of the previous generation of revolutionary exiles in Greece. Regardless of their nationalities and reasons for moving to Greece, most had left and their plans for propagating radical ideas, reorganizing the country's productive basis, or simply making a living had largely failed. The handful that remained had by then become fully integrated. By the middle of Otto's reign, though, many more foreign fugitives appeared on Greece's shores, and their presence tested the resilience of state institutions, upsetting mid-nineteenth-century Greek society.
Political exiles of the 1848–9 revolutions in Greece
The 1848–9 revolutions brought widespread political and military conflict across Europe and increased transnational mobility, creating the largest modern political migrations Europe had ever seen.Footnote 33 The Italian peninsula in particular was convulsed by a series of wars and revolutions.Footnote 34 From January to March 1848, rebels seemed to gain the upper hand in Naples and Venice, where the revolutionary Republic of San Marco was proclaimed. In January 1849, yet another revolutionary regime was formed in Rome, while the pope was forced into temporary exile. Searching for allies and aware of Greece's revolutionary past and constitutional institutions, the insurgents in Rome, Sicily, and Venice tried to establish diplomatic relations with Greece, though Otto received their emissaries hostilely in Athens.Footnote 35 Unsurprisingly, after the collapse of the revolutionary front in Italy in summer 1849, the fleeing rebels turned for asylum to (among others) Greece, whose (in their perception) illustrious past and liberal present seemed to promise favourable conditions for exiles. Furthermore, the British anti-refugee policy in the Ionian Islands and Malta motivated even more refugees to head to Greece after learning of the warm welcome their compatriots had initially received there.Footnote 36
Among the exiles, who arrived in Greece between July and October 1849, were several intellectuals who, moved by their Philhellenism and classicist background, were able to communicate smoothly with the educated upper classes in Greece. They included the poet Eduardo Fusco, the physician Pierviviano Zecchini, and the playwrights Ferdinando Rossi and Tommaso Zauli Saianni. Analogies between the Italian Risorgimento and the Greek war of 1821 featured commonly in their literary works, where they frequently paralleled their own experience in exile and the sufferings of the belligerent Greeks a few decades earlier. The Souliotes and especially their leader, Markos Botsaris, occupied a preeminent position in their poems and tragedies, followed by other famous figures like Karaiskakis and Miaoulis.Footnote 37 Furthermore, Zecchini wrote a thorough treatise entitled Quadri della Grecia moderna, in which he described contemporary Greek norms and customs. He also confronted the polemics of Edmond About and Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer, arguing that modern Greeks were not backward and were indeed worthy of their ancient ancestors.Footnote 38 On a broader level, a considerable number of Italians expressed their willingness to stay and applied for Greek citizenship.Footnote 39 At least some who could afford it started families in Greece, including the Neapolitan journalist Francesco Serao, whose daughter, the future novelist Matilde Serao, was born in Patras in 1856.Footnote 40 Upper-class Greeks sympathized with their sophisticated guests. In Patras, the distinguished Geroussis, Rigopoulos, and Drakopoulos families took an active interest in the refugees’ literary activities and assisted them financially.Footnote 41 Italian-bred Greek intellectuals were also affected. Georgios Zalokostas translated Fusco's poetry into Greek, and (according to Tasos Vournas) Emmanuel Roidis was influenced by the exiles’ anticlerical spirit in his Πάπισσα Ιωάννα (1866).Footnote 42
Nonetheless, the above contacts concerned a rather small segment of the émigrés. As Konstantina Zanou has argued, the masses of exiles after 1848, along with the formation of new states in the Mediterranean, led to the fragmentation of the previously united cultural space in the Adriatic and Ionian seas between Italy and Greece. The aforementioned intellectuals, who had been brought up in a culturally blurred environment, constituted the last such ‘Greco-Italian’ generation.Footnote 43 The pragmatic needs created by the arrival of thousands of refugees in Greece could not be resolved by amicable relations between a handful of intellectuals. Therefore, although initially the refugees were indeed well received and offered material support from charitable associations, the sheer size of the problem meant this pattern could not last long.Footnote 44 According to the interior ministry, a total of 1,109 armed, combat-trained and potentially radical refugees from Italy arrived, mostly in Athens, Patras, and Syros.Footnote 45 Including illegal migration, their total number might have exceeded 2,000,Footnote 46 though Zecchini claimed (rather excessively) that they numbered more than 3,000.Footnote 47 For the port city of Patras, to give just one example, this meant a sudden population rise of about five per cent (about 700 newcomers), enough to cause serious disturbances.Footnote 48
Unlike their refined compatriots, who could often look to wealthy patrons to support them, the bulk of the refugees struggled to survive and find employment in the midst of poor living conditions. Acute hygiene problems soon arose, due to the inadequate state infrastructure.Footnote 49 In Patras, the police reported in autumn 1849 that there were masses of wretched and unemployed Italians. Due to their miserable living conditions, the first deaths of refugees (even high-ranking ones) were recorded in autumn and winter 1849.Footnote 50 In Syros, Hermoupolis coped with similar difficulties, as many refugees had turned to beggary.Footnote 51 Additionally, the municipal hospital was quickly occupied by suffering Italians, Hungarians, and Poles, despite communal mobilization.Footnote 52 The sick émigrés further worried the local notables because their diseases, if not contained, might also infect the rest of the island.Footnote 53 Similar concerns were expressed regarding the Venetian refugees, most of whom settled in Patras and who suffered from cholera thanks to the long Austrian siege of their city.Footnote 54 In Athens, the problem appeared to be even more urgent due to refugee overpopulation and the fact that many refugees headed there in a vain search for better prospects. According to the refugees’ own accounts, poor health was widespread in their ranks and many died, homeless and helpless, because of the inability of the Athens hospital to cure them.Footnote 55
Alongside the much more numerous ethnic Italian exiles, a sizable group of Poles also found their way to Greece. Unlike the Polish insurgents in the Ottoman Empire after 1849, who had participated in the Hungarian revolution and fled via the Danubian Principalities, the Poles in Greece arrived there from Italy. They belonged to the so-called Mickiewicz Legion (or Polish Legion) and numbered about 160 soldiers upon their arrival in Greece.Footnote 56 The legionaries had fought in Rome and, after 1849, followed their Italian comrades-in-arms into exile. Led by Aleksander Izenszmid de Milbitz, they initially headed to Corfu, where the British authorities forbade them to settle, fearing that they might cause unrest, and thereafter moved to Greece.Footnote 57 In early August 1849, the Poles arrived in Patras in high spirits, confident they could march northwards through the Balkans and join the Hungarian front, which was in its final days.Footnote 58 Soon they were obliged to change their plans. On 30 August, the Hungarians surrendered and Milbitz's Poles were left with no choice but to stay in Greece.Footnote 59 At first, they benefited from the charity provided by the Greeks, and the interior ministry also employed them temporarily in road construction in Attica.Footnote 60 Yet their prospects in Greece seemed to be coming to an end because they faced the same problems as the rest of the exiles. The legionnaire Józef Rykowski recalled later their damp and unhealthy lodgings and lack of resources, while another, Michał Borucki, wrote in a letter to the leading Polish poet and revolutionary Adam Mickiewicz:
As time passes, Greece is turning even colder against us. The treachery of Görgey [the last leader of the Hungarian rebels, who signed the 1849 armistice] and the simultaneous fall of Hungary shattered our dreams and brought us to an extremely unpleasant condition. You had to look for a job in such a poor land, while, especially in the villages, the locals clearly disliked us.Footnote 61
This revealing witness, who also sheds light on how the lower strata in Greece behaved toward the exiles, appears to be representative of the general mood among the Poles. Those among them who possessed technical skills attempted to work as artisans in Athens, but these efforts offered limited success.Footnote 62 Meanwhile, during their time in Greece, twelve Poles died from illness.Footnote 63 Confronted by such dead-ends, the remaining legionaries started emigrating to the Ottoman Empire by 1850–51, in search of brighter employment prospects.Footnote 64 By early 1852, Milbitz himself was one of the few remaining, probably thanks to his connections to wealthy Athenians, but, as we shall see below, even he eventually followed the same route as his compatriots.
The exiles and the Greek government: general attitude and individual aspects
The Greek authorities were not unmoved by these distressing conditions. Although the Kanaris government had shown an active interest in the refugees in summer 1849, their number was emptying the state coffers. Otto and his ministers had to face a pressing dilemma: the liberal legacy of the 1821 revolution and the 1844 constitution had attracted numerous revolutionary fugitives to Greece, whom the state had no means to sustain and was also essentially unwilling to keep offering hospitality in the long run. Otto and his Court had looked with anxiety at what happened in Europe in 1848, fearing for the stability of the Greek throne.Footnote 65 The arrival of the exiles from Italy soon thereafter only increased this insecurity, while the logistical deadlock they created did not leave many policy alternatives apart from that of a conservative withdrawal. Moreover, lacking employment, the exiles often wandered around cities, posing risks to both security and hygiene and rendering additional measures imperative. The Greek cabinet began to adopt clear anti-refugee measures on 22 August 1849, when interior minister Christidis forbade future refugee settlement in Athens for the first time, while later, the prohibition was extended to cover Patras and Syros. This restrictive agenda culminated in the closure of the borders to new refugee arrivals altogether in early October 1849.Footnote 66
Among the top echelons of government, the motive force behind this new policy was queen Amalia, who from 1850 to 1852 frequently acted as regent, with enlarged decision-making powers, because Otto was often abroad.Footnote 67 In harmony with the likeminded Austrian ambassador Friedrich von Ingelheim, Amalia scolded minister Christidis for his initial carefree policy, while also highlighting the geopolitical consequences of accepting the émigrés.Footnote 68 She underlined that such naïve notions of philanthropy might have grave consequences for the country's future. In addition to the increase in public spending, the Great Powers, on whose goodwill Greece depended, might see the granting of asylum to so many outlaws in a negative light. Instead, the queen insisted, the government needed to turn away the exiles and ignore pro-refugee public opinion, hoping that the Powers might reward Greece for this lawful behaviour.Footnote 69
For this reason Amalia was frightened when a French fleet approached Piraeus in 1850, because she thought the French had arrived to punish Greece. She came to this conclusion especially because the French ambassador in Athens, Édouard Thouvenel, had been lobbying the Greek Court to adopt a stricter anti-refugee agenda.Footnote 70 Even more alarming was Russia's aggressive reaction to the matter. In October 1849, the Russian minister in Athens, Persiany, notified the Greek government that the Tsar would not tolerate Greece becoming a hub of revolution.Footnote 71 More specifically, St Petersburg threatened that it would force Greece to repay its loans to Russia, withdraw its diplomatic staff, and order Russian subjects to leave the country, should Greece continue to accept foreign fugitives.Footnote 72 The Greek government could hardly resist this ultimatum; in any case, it had by then no intention of attracting further foreigners. Russian pressures continued in 1850, with demands for the deportation of the Polish refugees from Greece, but the Greek foreign minister responded that they had engaged in no criminal activity on Greek soil and there was therefore no legal basis for prosecution.Footnote 73
After early 1850, a new cabinet led by the conservative admiral Antonios Kriezis (1849–54) and backed by Otto blocked new arrivals and transport within Attica, increased monitoring, and obstructed political activities among the refugees.Footnote 74 Furthermore, it started coercing those already settled into emigrating again by covering their travel expenses, mostly to the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 75At a domestic level, the police aimed to limit unlawful behaviour and sporadic municipal violence by increasing patrols in Athens and Patras, where most exiles resided, and placing secret agents among them to obtain intimate knowledge of their endeavours.Footnote 76 Finally, the interior ministry began conducting censuses on the exiles, so as to gather precise data on their numbers and occupations.Footnote 77
With settlement in the cities becoming gradually ruled out, the refugees had to engineer new solutions if they wished to stay in Greece. One alternative was to turn to the smaller towns, or to head for the thinly populated countryside and try cultivate its resources. Having such ideas in mind, Venetian refugee Marco Antonio Canini, who had arrived from Rome in mid-August 1849, described in a letter to his friend Niccolò Tommaseo, himself in exile in Corfu, the wretched condition of the Italians and Poles in Athens. Canini suggested the establishment of an Italian agricultural colony in the Isthmus of Corinth. He wished to form a joint stock company in order to gather funds for the project, and he planned for the settlers to use their technical skills to build a canal across the Isthmus.Footnote 78 An Italian committee was brought together to advance this cause, manned by the refugee notables Massimino Allé from Rome and Giuseppe Clementi and Andrea Meneghini from Padua. Canini was initially confident about his scheme, since the proposal had earned the approval of the Athens chamber of commerce and attracted the support of several Italians, and he aspired for even more to later join him.Footnote 79 Nonetheless, this ambitious undertaking failed to materialize due to a lack of funds and an unwillingness among the Greeks to contribute financially.Footnote 80 A bitter Canini kept writing to Tommaseo that the Greeks no longer felt sympathy for the Venetians, since all of them struggled to gain access to the same scarce resources of the land.Footnote 81 In Syros, where Canini afterwards moved, a similar plan to organize an Italian community in Ano Syros also failed, due to the antipathy of the conservative native Catholics.Footnote 82
Living in poverty and running rapidly out of choices, the exiles realized that Greece was really a very different place from the one in their philhellenic fantasies. Encouraged by the Greek government after 1850, they began to seek French, British, Belgian, and American passports in order to sail for the richer Ottoman Empire, Western Europe, or USA, where many of their co-nationals had already found refuge.Footnote 83 The gradual numerical decline of the émigré communities transformed both relations between the Greek authorities and the exiles and those among the exiles themselves. Their remnants formed closer communal bonds in order to overcome their everyday adversities, whereas the Greek government felt strong enough to begin prosecuting seemingly radical collective initiatives, as well as specific individuals deemed perilous to the regime. In November 1850, a group of Italians in Athens founded a society of mutual assistance to cope with their pressing problems, though political discussions must have taken place. Moreover, the leaders of the society, the Pole Alexander Milbitz and the Italian Francesco Gherardi Dragomani, had notable revolutionary pasts.Footnote 84 The fact that the refugees seemed to have become politically organized, along with suspicions of contact with leading Greek liberals such as Pavlos Kallergis and Giannis Makrygiannis, led the government to act openly against the group. With the support of Amalia and the Austrian and Neapolitan ambassadors, the police banned the association in early 1851, despite refugee protests.Footnote 85 The participating Italians were threatened with deportation if they continued to associate politically. Thereafter, the shrinking émigré communities seem to have largely withdrawn from open political activities. For example, they appeared indifferent when, in 1852, the wandering Romanian forty-eighter Alexandru Golescu attempted to establish a local branch of the Central European Democratic Committee in Athens and to publish a newspaper propagating the revolutionary fraternization of the Balkan peoples with the Italians and the Hungarians.Footnote 86
The foreign refugees lacked access to local networks that would have allowed them to negotiate a kinder treatment, and were thus easily isolable victims. Other Italians, with deeper roots in the country and more adequate connections, thrived better. One of them was Antonio Morandi, a veteran Bolognese rebel who, after murdering the police director of Modena in 1822 and escaping arrest, settled in Greece two years later. Thereafter he returned to Italy to join the uprisings of 1830 only to be arrested by the Austrians and Venice and later on escape from his prison in late 1831 with the help of the local French consul.Footnote 87 Hoping to make his pursuers lose track of him, Morandi fled yet again to Greece, where he started a new career as a gendarmerie officer.Footnote 88 Nonetheless, even this position was not destined to be permanent. The Bolognese adventurer left his post to join the Italian revolution in 1848, but later returned to Greece along with the other refugees.Footnote 89 In Patras, he was arrested as an army deserter, thanks to a request from the Austrian embassy and the hostility of certain ministers. He was then imprisoned for six weeks in Akronafplia in 1850, but subsequently released after the successful mediation of the rest of the cabinet and his patroness Amalia, otherwise the most adamant opponent of the exiles.Footnote 90 Morandi settled thereafter in Athens, where he maintained ties with notable Greeks and Italians, as well as with the French and Piedmontese consuls. At that time, the Austrian ambassador kept him under constant surveillance, as he was suspicious of Morandi's past and potential future plans to provoke turmoil.Footnote 91 Yet no direct action was taken afterwards against him, and he was allowed to continue living in Athens. After Italian unification, Morandi finally repatriated to Rome, where he petitioned for an imperial pardon for the crimes he had committed on Austrian soil and passed away a few years later.Footnote 92 Morandi's recurrent movement between Italy and Greece can be seen as proof of the liberal and radical bonds between the two countries in the given period. It also carries evidence however of the still poorly structured and manned Greek public administration in the 1830s and 1840s. Insufficient police surveillance and the shortage of trained personnel left ample opportunities for outlaws such as Morandi (and others after 1848) to settle and even thrive in Greece particularly if they had access to the right connections among the native political elites as well as to influential foreign representatives.
Nonetheless, there is evidence to suggest that by the early 1850s, the state was engaged in a serious effort to police more extensively potentially dangerous groups and individuals. After all, even the well-connected Morandi himself was imprisoned at least for a short time. Understandably, most of his newly-arrived compatriots, who were also isolated from the local power networks, faced much gloomier prospects. In February 1852, the Austrian embassy informed the government that Milbitz and his Polish comrades were organizing a conspiracy to overthrow Otto and establish a Balkan republican federation.Footnote 93 These accusations were naturally exaggerated; Milbitz's group was probably but one radical, though weak, association among several then in Greece.Footnote 94 Although the royal couple found these revolutionary visions laughable, the police reacted instantly.Footnote 95 The Poles, as well as Greeks who were considered their associates, such as Makrygiannis and Theodoros Negris, a prominent Athenian, had their houses searched. Revolutionary proclamations were indeed confiscated.Footnote 96 This provided adequate justification for the rapid deportation of a total of thirty-six Poles and Italians accused of conspiratorial activity (including Gherardi-Dragomani), while Makrygiannis also faced a trial.Footnote 97 The official government position that state security was threatened was hardly seen as credible by the liberal opposition, yet more conservative observers were persuaded.Footnote 98 Of these, the war minister Spyromilios even engineered a monarchist coup using the ostensible peril posed by refugees as a pretext to abolish the constitutional regime and restore absolute monarchy. However, his plans were quickly revealed and forestalled under dubious circumstances before he managed to take any action.Footnote 99
The 1852 deportations were the largest operation against the exiles to that date, proving that the state was capable of limiting their actions. The Austrian ambassador, however, kept insisting on an even stronger anti-exile policy.Footnote 100 His pressure obtained new footing after February 1853, when an abortive Mazzinian uprising in Milan and an assassination attempt against the Habsburg emperor shocked the crowned heads of Europe.Footnote 101 Otto and his ministers became more suspicious of the remnants of the émigré communities, renewing the general prohibition on new refugee arrivals in March.Footnote 102 Two months later, a fugitive from Calabria, Oronzio Spinazzolla, was arrested for theft but, based on his confession, charged as an accomplice for conspiring to murder Otto.Footnote 103 As with Milbitz, the accusation was barely tenable, but its very existence indicates the insecurity of monarchical regimes across Europe after 1848. Trying to lighten his sentence, Spinazzolla turned in several of his old comrades. His testimony led to the arrest of Livio Zambeccari, a high-profile Anconese revolutionary who had once employed Spinazzolla as his secretary.Footnote 104 The Austrians had been watching Zambeccari while he lived in Patras after 1849. Seizing the opportunity, the Austrian embassy began actively lobbying against him.Footnote 105 In August 1853, after a few months of imprisonment, Spinazzolla was deported from Greece; Zambeccari followed him shortly afterwards.Footnote 106
Conclusion
The deportations of Spinazzolla and Zambeccari were the last significant incidents involving foreign refugees. Afterwards, the Crimean War and the question of Greece's involvement in it monopolized the attention of the Greek government and press, as well as of the foreign ambassadors, and the very few remaining exiles became irrelevant.Footnote 107 In this respect, Greece seems similar to countries like the Ottoman Empire and Switzerland, where the forty-eighters found refuge right after 1849 before moving on to more permanent destinations such as Britain and the USA.Footnote 108 The few exiles of 1830 had already encountered indifference, if not hostility, in Greece—a rather unsurprising outcome in a country ravaged by a decade-long war. Later, not unlike the Philhellenes of the 1820s, the originally hopeful émigrés of 1848–49 became disillusioned with the meagre resources available to them and the Greek reality that seemed to bear little resemblance to the idealized land of Thucydides and Botsaris. A few well-educated exiles managed to cultivate amicable relations with the Greek elites, but they were exceptions. The great majority of their less privileged compatriots faced nothing but gloomy health and employment prospects, which eventually pushed them to further emigrate.
It was not only the limitations of the Greek job market but also the conservative attitudes of Otto and ministers that made the living conditions of the exiles unbearable, forcing them, directly or indirectly, to leave. Individuals such as Milbitz, Morandi, Gehardi-Dragomani, and Zambeccari suffered purges even though their ability to damage the monarchical regime or alter the status quo was minimal. Yet it should be strongly emphasized that Otto's behaviour was not notably different from that of his contemporary fellow monarchs. As Eric Hobsbawm has noted, the fear of revolution lasted for many years after 1848 and, especially during the immediate post-revolutionary period, governments were vigilant against anything that might resemble upheaval.Footnote 109
In this way the emergence of state policies after 1848 that aimed at suppressing revolutionary movements contributed to the marginalization of the more inclusive forms of nationalism and national solidarity.Footnote 110 Moreover, although the 1848–49 revolutions were genuinely European in terms of their geographical reach, they were also responsible, as Christopher Clark has noted, for ‘de-Europeanizing’ the revolutionary movements across Europe.Footnote 111 This means that the initial (and rather superficial) fraternization of the ‘March days’ of 1848 was soon replaced by various rivalries and clashes among ethnic and social groups, which had not been visible before, such as the June days in Paris or the conflict between Germans and Czechs in Bohemia. This ‘de-Europeanization’ effect and the counter-revolutionary state trajectory that followed thereafter, obstructed transnational revolutionary collaboration and led to the fragmentation of previously coherent cultural spaces, as Konstantina Zanou has argued.Footnote 112 That was the case in Italy and Greece, whose mutual bonds of transnational political friendship, formed in the 1820s and 1830s, were damaged after 1848.Footnote 113 As ‘intellectual bridges’, brought up in the early nineteenth century in a culturally mixed ‘Greco-Italian’ milieu, gradually passed away, the links between the two countries and cultural-linguistic spaces weakened.Footnote 114 Although outbursts of romantic solidarity continued sporadically in the later nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, with Garibaldini volunteering in the Greek revolts and wars of 1866–69, 1897 and 1912–13, these remained rather isolated phenomena reflecting a bygone era.Footnote 115 In this slow process of ‘estrangement’ between Greeks and Italians, the revolutionary exiles in Greece of 1830, and above all of 1848–49, acted instrumentally, representing both the culmination and the beginning of the end of this transnational political friendship.