In 1837, Niccolò Livaditti captured in vivid colours Moldavian society at what was in many respects a turning point. Of all the portraits he painted, that of the Alecsandri family is the most well-known, and the one most analysed by researchers due to the contrast it illustrates between the old and the new, between Ottoman and European material culture. The Alecsandris belonged to the middle layer of the boyar class, holding posts in the second rank of the Phanariot and post-Phanariot administration. Assembled under the painter’s gaze, they pose for posterity in their best clothes. The father, the vornic Vasile Alecsandri, has dressed in his orange silk anteri, with a shawl of striped cashmere around his waist. Over the anteri he wears a cüppe of blue atlas, trimmed with mink, and on his chest he has hung his two decorations, generously awarded by the Russian Empire (the crosses of Saint Anne and Saint Stanislas). His wife Elena (née Cozoni, with Greek family roots) and their daughter Catinca are dressed in the latest fashion. Their dresses are low-cut in the Biedermeier manner, leaving their shoulders bare, they are decked with gold and precious stones, and their hair is carefully styled, with ringlets caressing their cheeks. Catinca seems to have interrupted the melody she is playing on the piano to look towards the painter; her fingers still touch the keys. Her mother holds a letter from their elder son, also Vasile, a student in Paris. His younger brother Iancu poses in the uniform of the local militia. The uniform and the sword are the new attributes of Romantic masculinity and the dream of families with any degree of prosperity.1
In a second portrait, also by Livaditti, painted in 1845, we find that Iancu has followed a military career and is now a major and a princely adjutant. Vasile Alecsandri the elder has remained faithful to the hierarchy of ranks and kept his Ottoman garb, while Vasile the younger, back from his studies, poses in the black frock coat fashionable in Paris, thus expressing his adoption of ideas of change and revolution.2
Niccolò Livaditti – The Alecsandri Family: Vornic Vasile Alecsandri, his wife Elena, his son Iancu, and his daughter Catinca, 1837, National Museum of Art, Bucharest
Niccolò Livaditti – The Alecsandri Family: Vornic Vasile Alecsandri and his sons Iancu and Vasile, 1845, Art Museum, Iaşi.
The two portraits provide us with information about nineteenth-century Moldavian society, but also about the destiny of the painter Livaditti himself. Born in Trieste around 1802, Niccolò came from a relatively well-off merchant family. His parents, Diamandi and Vasiliki Livaditti belonged to the Greek diaspora in Trieste, and were actively involved in charitable works centred around the Orthodox parish of San Nicolò.3 On his death in 1809, Diamandi left a considerable fortune to his wife, Vasiliki, and their six children (Cristoforo, Constantino, Evguenia, Alessandro, Niccolò, and Caterina): 40,000 florins, two houses, and a number of shops. Niccolò grew up in a world that was multi-confessional, multilingual, and diverse from a regional and social point of view, in which tolerance was an important factor in the acceptance of the other: ‘a haven for men and commerce’.4 It has been said that Niccolò’s marriage to Carlotta Cianchi was not well received by her family, as Carlotta’s mother, Medina Celli, a Catholic of Spanish origin, did not wish to see an Orthodox brought into the family, and that this led the couple to leave for the Orient. However, it is unclear how much truth there is in this story, particularly given that such mixed marriages were not uncommon in Trieste society.5 The reason for Niccolò’s departure seems to have been quite different. Starting from the 1830s, political and ideological tensions sparked nationalist debates, leading the members of this mixed community to position themselves on one side or the other.6 Having aligned himself with Giuseppe Mazzini and the ideas of the Carbonari, Niccolò had to go into exile to save himself from the reprisals of the Austrian authorities. So he went for a short period to Istanbul, the exotic mirage of Romantic artists. From there he arrived in 1832 in Iași, where he settled for the rest of his life.7 As the painter of the urban elite of Iași, Niccolò gradually became integrated in the Moldavian community, helped by his Orthodox faith, but also by the interest shown in his knowledge by a public more and more attracted by artistic and cultural manifestations. Sharing the same values as many of the young Moldavians recently returned from studies abroad and other foreigners who, like him, had found a refuge in Moldavia, Livaditti found a propitious environment in which to raise and educate his children, to build a house, and to ensure a future for himself. His paintings may be seen as a great stage, on which Moldavian society presents itself, with its people, costumes, landscapes, ideas, and complex trajectories in a time of considerable social, cultural, and political challenges.
Through the prism of multiple biographies, this book has shown how people coped with historical changes, succeeding (or not) in constructing a home, in fashioning a way of belonging to a community, to a set of values, in finding a homeland. As I have shown, Dimitrie Foti Merișescu, born in Bucharest but of ‘Greek’ parents, was a part of these cohorts of mobile people caught on the road by the new ideological movements that were to construct the nationalisms of the nineteenth century. Learning Romanian in his neighbourhood school, ‘stammering’ some Bulgarian picked up from his Bulgarian classmates, speaking Greek at home, he would reinvent himself in the context of the national movements of the years 1840–1848 to seek a place in Moldavian intellectual circles, offering them the narrative of his life. Only that, as Konstantina Zanou has observed, cleavages were deepening and formerly fluid borders were starting to become rigid, institutionalizing forms of belonging, languages, and confessions.8 Thus Merișescu appears in the administrative classification now as a Bulgarian, now as a Greek, even though he bought ranks and places in social and political networks, rising to the position of member (cilen) of the law-court in Piatra-Neamţ.
Many of the characters of this book were direct witnesses of war and revolution events, particularly in 1821, and later in 1848. I draw attention to just two of the episodes that profoundly marked south-east European society, contributing to the crystallization of liberal ideologies and the birth of national states. However very little reflection of these events is to be found in their writings. For Elena Hartulari, Filiki Hetaireia and Tudor Vladimirescu’s movement in Wallachia meant exile and extreme poverty. The entry of the Ottoman army, summoned to re-establish order, led the Hartulari family to take refuge ‘in the German land’ (Suceava, in Habsburg Bukovina), leaving their house and goods in Iași prey to looting and fire.9 Nor did the revolt of the Greeks, the Wallachians, or the Serbs arouse any emotional reverberation or display of patriotic enthusiasm in Cernea Popovici. On the contrary, he reaffirmed his Ottoman allegiance and did what he could to keep his life and his personal belongings safe. Moving on to 1848, Dimitrie Merişescu’s manor became a refuge for the younger members of the family when liberal ideas took hold in Moldavia, but he was far too closely connected by affection, friendship, and obligations to the old elite and the old political structure to let himself be carried away by the liberal movement of the young forty-eighters. As for Iorgu Hartulari, in spite of his mobility, his multilingualism, and his intelligence, he remained firmly bound to the authoritarian prince Mihail Sturdza and far from ideas that, indeed, did not represent him. Displaying ‘a certain indifference’,10 my characters adapted to the new times, stepping back into the shadows of history, while others, interconnected by education, language, and social status, liberal in spirit and animated, to a large extent, by admiration for French civilization, prepared to take centre stage.
The army, and the numerous foreigners brought in to put military reforms into application contributed to the reorganization of societies and the establishment of ‘new orders’.11 Between 1830 and 1878, the world of southeastern Europe underwent profound changes. The revolt of the Serbs led in the end to the formation and recognition of a Serbian state; the Greek revolutionaries carved out a country for themselves; and the Principalities and Bulgaria passed through the Crimean War and then, with the Russian–Ottoman War of 1877–1878, gained their independence.12 Throughout the period, old-regime hierarchies allowed liberal ideas to shape the ‘new order’. Of course, all these transformations took place at different paces and involved different members of society.13 They must also be seen in an international social and political context, taking into account the changes and political developments going on not just in the Ottoman Empire but also in France, Russia, Austria, and Britain.
In the Principalities, the Organic Regulations created the premises for social advancement through education. As all over southeastern Europe, there was a pressing need for professionals, and the princes of the Organic Regulation period were eager to send boyars’ children abroad for study and training. Vasile Alecsandri was one such student. He arrived in Paris together with other young men, with the mission of studying in order to be of use to the ‘homeland’. The princes’ initiative was paralleled by many private initiatives, as boyars and prosperous merchants rushed to enrol their sons in prestigious schools in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, or Geneva. Just a decade earlier, such a move had not been well regarded, either by princes or by the Porte. For example, in 1825, when the grand postelnic Filip Lenș decided to send his three sons to study in France, he needed the agreement of Prince Grigore Ghica of Wallachia and the support of the French consul in Bucharest, Hugot. The consul wrote that the boyar ‘Philippe Linchou’ (Filip Lenș was the grandson of Thomas-François Linchou) had managed to amass a considerable fortune and to acquire an enviable position in society due to his direct relations with the Ottoman Empire. His choice of Paris and of the institution run by M. Lemoine was not at random, as international political circumstances enabled him to take advantage of his French roots and invest in a French education for his heirs.14 As Hugot would also observe, Lenș’s example was quickly followed by other boyars. Education abroad offered young men a different sort of knowledge, both through the use of a new language, French or German, and through having access to another kind of sociability. Gradually, they would come to question the institutions, hierarchies, and social conditions of their homeland.
‘C’est le mérite qui est la vraie distinction,’ writes the young Mihail Kogălniceanu, sent to study in Berlin by Prince Mihail Sturdza together with the prince’s own sons. He came from a family in the second rank of the boyar class, which had risen through holding offices in the state administration. ‘La naissance n’est rien; c’est un don qui est très mauvais dans certaines circonstances,’ he continues, addressing his sisters and reflecting on the collapse of the old symbols of social distinction. ‘Toutes ces distinctions, toutes ces chimères, toutes ces aristocraties ont disparu,’ is the verdict of this young student in the frozen Berlin of 26 November/8 December 1835.15 Mihail Kogălniceanu was somewhat hasty in his judgments regarding the end of an era, however. The boyar class was reorganized by princely decrees of 10 March 1835 for Moldavia and 12 May 1837 for Wallachia. Social status still counted for advancement in the state administration, despite the introduction of the principle of meritocracy.16 Theoretically, any young man with education might obtain a post in the bureaucratic apparatus, but in practice, employment depended on social origins, on one’s place in the hierarchy of ranks, and on inclusion in a network. Another Moldavian, who belonged to the same second level of the boyar class, but had not been fortunate enough to study abroad, saw things differently. For Gheorghe Sion, Moldavian society operated according to well-established mechanisms, in which social hierarchy and networks were still dominant in 1844:
At that time, indeed not much knowledge, ability, or learning was required for someone to reach the high positions. He had to have either the prince’s protection, or the resonant name of an aristocratic family to acquire posts or ranks.17
The road towards the new order involved many backward steps, reversals, and reformulations of the old. Southeastern Europe was going through a complicated process of separation from an Ottoman political system towards a reformulated system that could achieve as broad a participation in politics as possible.18 Seeking to put aside the old order and bring in the new, Sion joined young Alecsandri and Kogălniceanu in the revolution of 1848. In the shadow of the Organic Regulations, a circle of intellectuals (mainly sons of boyars or of prosperous merchants) had taken shape that promoted liberal ideas and national ideologies, as had happened elsewhere.19 The revolutionaries of 1848 burned the Arhondologia (the book of boyar ranks) and the Organic Regulations, the symbols of a society based on privilege, and hastened to proclaim ‘justice, equality, fraternity’. However, to succeed, they needed more than passion and a new vocabulary. There had to be as large as possible a mass of educated people who could understand the new rights and participate in upholding the new institutions. Education was indeed beginning to play an important role in society. The greater and greater number of young people sent abroad to study, the opening of pensionnats everywhere, and most importantly, the growing number of foreign professionals called to contribute to the construction of the modern state provide incontestable evidence of this. All the same, the level of literacy remained low for a long time, and this did not favour reform or modernization.20
Foreigners of various origins had played their part in the modernization of the southeast European states, but in return for their help they demanded the right to be part of the community. Legislation adapted to this situation, in an attempt to create the necessary framework for their social absorption. The law codes of Ioan Caragea (1812–1818) in Wallachia and Scarlat Callimachi (1812–1818) in Moldavia took little notice of the status of foreigners: there were certain provisions for their naturalization, but we do not yet know to what extent these were applied in the everyday practice of justice.21 As the Principalities began to construct a national identity and to seek elements useful for political legitimation, the need was felt for legislation on the status of foreigners. All through the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth, there were no letters of naturalization. A foreigner who came to Wallachia or Moldavia would become ‘naturalized’ gradually by going through a series of stages: settlement in a local community, practising a trade, marriage to a local spouse, establishment of fiscal residence. Assimilation and integration into the social fabric constituted a further stage; it might take several generations for this new belonging to become imprinted in the memory of the community, but it generally happened without the need to produce letters or certificates. The Phanariots were always interested in increasing the number of tax-payers and ensuring a stable population that could be easily counted in fiscal conscriptions. For both demographic and fiscal reasons, they thus encouraged the settlement of foreigners, and they had no interest in creating a complicated juridical framework that would make it harder for foreigners to become established members of the host community.
The Organic Regulations provided for two paths to naturalization: one fast, but without political rights, and the other more difficult, but giving access to political life. Enrolment in a corporation and the payment of taxes were sufficient for a foreigner to be included in the ranks of the ‘locals’ (pământeni). This measure was no more than a continuation of the Phanariot policy of increasing the number of tax-payers and knowing who they were by means of registration. A foreigner wanting to enjoy ‘political rights’ (drepturi politice), however, would have to make an application to the National Assembly (Adunarea Obștească),22 providing information about his ‘capital’, ‘other wealth’, ‘occupation’, and ‘proof that he is useful to the state’. It should be added that the foreigner had to be Christian and to have lived in the Principalities for ten years. The law then provided that, after investigation by the Assembly, the application be directed to the prince, who would decide whether or not to grant naturalization (variously termed naturalizaţie or împământenire at the time). Marriage to ‘a local noblewoman’ (o pământeancă nobilă) was no longer considered sufficient grounds for obtaining citizenship. It brought a reduction of the required period of residence from ten years to seven, but the other elements were still needed for acceptance among the ‘locals’ with political rights.23 Once the law was passed, naturalization files started to appear on the agenda of the National Assembly.24 However the number of foreigners who applied for official naturalization was not very large. An examination of the meetings of the Assemblies (of Moldavia and Wallachia) over a period of ten years has brought to light only a few dozen files. The procedure was a difficult and costly one, requiring not only knowledge of the information necessary for compiling a file, but also time and money. The candidate had to go to Iași or Bucharest to hand over the documents necessary for their economic and social identification, together with letters and ‘attestations’ on the part of the local community regarding their behaviour and ‘useful acts’.25 How many out of all the foreigners in the Principalities formally became ‘locals’ in this way is not known. Many found a home in these new states that had broken away from the Ottoman Empire, and naturalization by way of daily life was by far the more accessible method of acquiring the right of residence in Moldavia and Wallachia. This seems have been the route taken by Niccolò Livaditti, as I have so far found no formal naturalization application or letter in his name. In 1858, when the painter died in Iași and a succession file was compiled, there is no mention of the matter. His heirs were already part of the community: his wife, Carolotta Livaditti, a descendant of the Florentine Cianchi family, had converted to Orthodoxy and was known as Maria, while their children—Aglae, Alexandru, and Achille—were prominent in Moldavian artistic life in the second half of the nineteenth century.26
The status of subject of a foreign power offered significant advantages in a period in which France, Britain, Prussia, Russia, and Austria were struggling to impose their influence in an Ottoman Empire that was also undergoing profound transformations.27 It was in this context that Filip Lenş rediscovered and re-evaluated his French ancestry. As a great boyar of the first rank, according to the Organic Regulation classification in Wallachia,28 he constructed a detailed genealogy of the noble Linchou family, including French and Spanish aristocrats. On this basis, he became a candidate for the Wallachian throne, on which occasion he was reminded that for all his impressive French roots, he had been ‘Romanian’ for too short a time for him to dare to aspire to such an honour.29 A genealogy became an important instrument in the process of social identification, required even by the Organic Regulations in their provisions for the drawing up of registers of boyars (arhondologii), which called for ‘documents and charters’ (documente și urice) from those who were not among ‘the families of ancient nobility’ (familiile cu învechită evghenie).30 The genealogical thrill went through the whole of society, as people hastened to collect and put together, as if in a jigsaw puzzle, documents (sometimes invented), diplomas, coats of arms, family trees, and ancestral portraits, copied from the votive murals in the narthexes of churches to adorn the walls of salons and cabinets.31 All this playing with the past was inspired by European Romanticism and was part of the construction of a national ideology32.
After the removal of the Phanariots, the ‘Greeks’ were no longer considered a danger, and they were left to get on with their lives. Furthermore, with the establishment of the Greek state, Greek migration slowed down and changed its direction. Many of the Phanariots who had settled in Moldavia or Wallachia were at the forefront of public life, holding important posts on the political stage. They had constituted the principal threat, as expressed in various ways for a century in the complaints of the boyars.33 Now, however, it would have been hard to push them aside, as through active matrimonial strategies they had become mixed with the very boyars who had formerly contested them. Just as Merișescu, Hartulari, and Văcărescu had roots somewhere in the region of Epirus, Thessaly, or Macedonia, so did nineteenth-century nation-builders such as Alecsandri, Kogălniceanu, and Sion. At the same time, foreign subjects continued to pose a challenge: the problems raised by their status and the attempts to find juridical solutions contributed to the debate around naturalization and citizenship. The new ‘danger’ identified by the modern state was the Jews. It was around them, and under international pressure, that legislation on citizenship and naturalization would take shape in the United Principalities.34
Inevitably, the process of modernization in southeastern Europe also involved the status of women. They took advantage of the visibility offered by the new forms of sociability to take their place in the public space of cultural debates. Contacts and material and cultural exchanges with western Europe accelerated towards the end of the eighteenth century, and even more in the nineteenth. Elite women proved to be important agents in the spread of ‘European’ tastes in fashion, gastronomy, education, social behaviour, and knowledge. Through travel and education, women gradually emerged from the domestic space to take an interest in their representation in society. The differences between Elena Hartulari and her daughter Maria are vast. Elena was content to remain in the background of social representation, navigating in the shadow of her husband, whom she served faithfully, supporting him materially, emotionally, and socially in all his actions. Even her memoirs are about Iorgu Hartulari, and she never tires of praising the economic, linguistic, and social abilities that enabled him to build up an extensive property portfolio. When she became the mistress of this portfolio, Elena was lost. Together with the patrimony, she had also taken charge of business ventures that spread and supported one another like tentacles anchored in networks and informal institutions. Elena was unable to acquire the symbolic capital that Iorgu had held within these networks and institutions. She did not know how to work with people and institutions. Her daughter, Maria Hartulari (formerly Cănănău, formerly Cracti) could adapt quickly to any context, manipulating people and institutions to attain her goals and defend her rights.
Writing about women and their roles in the Wallachian society of the Organic Regulation period, Ion Heliade Rădulescu attributed to them a major role in the raising of the ‘good citizen’: ‘Woman is our first teacher, woman is the first occupation of our youth, woman alone is capable of making all the joy and misery of our manhood.’ All the same, the road to the emancipation of women and their assumption of public roles would be a long and tortuous one, and it would take not just activism on the part of women but also a consensus in society. The Hartulari women laid a stone in the foundations of the reconstruction of women’s roles in society; education and perseverance would add the rest. But not overnight, as Rădulescu remarks: ‘It is madness for someone to imagine that he will set the world right with his shoulder; however this should not stop him from doing his duty.’35
See Sorin Iftimi, ‘Societatea moldovenească de la jumătatea secolului al XIX-lea în portretistica lui Niccolo Livaditi’, in Sorin Iftimi, Corina Cimpoeşu, Marcelina Brînduşa Munteanu (eds.), Niccolo Livaditi şi epoca sa (1832–1858. Artă şi Istorie (Iaşi: 2012), 47–52.
Ibid., 74–75.
It seems that Diamandi Livaditti together with another two brothers came from the Morea around 1772. See David Do Paço, ‘La creation de la communauté grecque orientale de Trieste par Giuseppe Maria Mainati (1719–1818)’, in Valérie Assan, Bernard Heyberger and Jakob Vogel (eds.), Minorités en Méditerranée au XIXe siècles. Identités, identifications, circulations (Rennes: 2019), 31.
Reill, Nationalists who Feared the Nation, 81.
Jeana Gheorghiu, ‘Un pictor moldovean din secolul trecut: Nicolò Livaditi’, Viaţa Românească, 31, 8 (1939): 50–57.
On the effervescence of these intellectual currents around nations and nationalism in the first part of the nineteenth century see Isabella Maurizio and Konstantina Zanou (eds), Mediterranean Diasporas: Politics and Ideas in the Long 19th Century (London: 2015); Zanou, Stammering the Nation; Reill, Nationalists who Feared the Nation.
Iftimi, Niccolo Livaditi—viaţa şi oprera (1802–1859), 19–20.
Zanou, Stammering the Nation, 209–214.
SJAN, Iaşi, Colecţia Gh. Ghibănescu, MS 164, f. 52v.
Mathieu Grenet shows that Philhellenism did not ‘take hold of’ everyone and characterizes the lack of reaction of the Greek diaspora in Venice as ‘une certaine indifférence’. Grenet, La fabrique communautaire, 339.
Ali Yaycioğlu, ‘Janissaries, Engineers and Preachers. How Did Military Engineering and Islamic Activism Change the Ottoman Order?’ Revue d’Histoire du XIXe Siècle, 53, 2 (2016), 19–37; Ali Yaycioğlu, ‘Guarding Traditions and Laws-Disciplining Bodies and Souls: Tradition, Science, and Religion in the Age of Ottoman Reform’, Modern Asian Studies 52, 5 (2018), 1542–1603.
On the ‘Eastern Question’ see Lawrence P. Meriage, ‘The First Serbian Uprising (1804–1813) and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Eastern Question’, Slavic Review, 37, 3 (1978), 421–439; Dimitris Stamatopulos, The Eastern Question or Balkan Nationalism(s). Balkan History Reconsidered (Vienna: 2018); Mark Mazower, The Balkans: A Short History (New York: 2000); Barbara Jelevich, History of the Balkans (Cambridge-New York: 1983).
Marie-Janine Calic, The Great Cauldron. A History of Southeastern Europe (London: 2019), 196–251; Frederick F. Anscombe, ‘The Balkan Revolutionary Age’, Journal of Modern History, 84 (2012), 576–606.
Hurmuzaki, Documente, XVI, 17–18, 25 May 1825, Bucharest.
Mihail Kogălniceanu, Scrisori către surorile sale, ed. Petre V. Haneş (Bucharest: 1934), 62–63.
Paul Negulescu, George Alexianu (eds.), Regulamentele Organice ale Valahiei şi Moldovei (Bucharest: 1944), 139–147.
Gheorghe Sion, Proză. Suvenire contimpurane (Bucharest: 1956), 418.
Diana Mishkova, Balkan Liberalisms: Historical Routes of a Modern Ideology, in Roumen Daskalov and Diana Mishkova (eds.), Entangled Histories of the Balkans. vol. 2: Transfers of Political Ideologies and Institutions (Leiden: 2014), 99–198.
Calic, The Great Cauldron, 259–265.
On education in other regions see Calic, The Great Cauldron, 260; Ružica Popovitch, ‘The Education of Women in 19th-Century Serbia’, Serbian Studies: Journal of the North American Society for Serbian Studies, 29, 1–2 (2018), 137–150.
Constantin Iordachi, ‘From Imperial Entanglements to National Disentanglement: The “Greek Question” in Moldavia and Wallachia, 1611–1863’, in Roumen Dontchev Daskalov and Tchavdar Marinov (eds.), Entangled Histories of the Balkans. vol. 1: National Ideologies and Language Policies (Leiden: 2013), 116.
The National Assemblies were created under the provisions of the Organic Regulations. They consisted of forty-two members in Wallachia and thirty-five members in Moldavia (including members by right—the metropolitan and bishops—and members elected from among the boyars). They amended and voted on legislative projects sent to them by the respective princes and drew the princes’ attention to problems of public interest by means of reports. Regulamentele Organice, Chapter II, 9–12, 180–184.
Regulamentele Organice, 131, article 379, chapters 1–5.
Naturalization files were not on the agenda in every session. For example, for the session 1831–1832, I have found a single such file, and none for the following session, 1832–1833. The numbers increased as information spread, and the procedure became better known. Analele Parlamentare ale României (Bucharest: 1892–1903), VII/1, 28, 34, 36, 39, 44, 40; VIII/1, 335–338, IX/2, 23, 25, 26, 28, 39, 57, 60, 63; X/1, 358, 362, 372, 373, 375, 377–379, 381.
See the documents presented by Serghei Şuşanopulo in the session of 20 December 1831. Analele Parlamentare, II, (Bucharest: 1892), 15, 390–392.
Iftimi, Niccolo Livaditi, 28–29.
Ariel Salzmann, ‘Citizens in Search of a State: The limits of Political Participation in the Late Ottoman Empire’, in Michael Hanagan and Charles Tilly (eds.), Extending Citizenship, Reconfiguring States (Lanham, Boulder, New York, Oxford: 1999), 37–66.
Analele Parlamentare, II, 171, Assembly of all boyars of the first rank, in the session of 8 November 1831.
Ibid., XII/1, 7. ‘The late father of Filip Lenj being of French stock, he lived in this country as a Frenchman, until the end of his life; consequently, this son, that is the vistier Filip is born French and only begins to be Romanian from the time when he himself recognized his subjecthood to the ruler of this country, married a local noblewoman, and settled in this country, where he also took public posts.’ Session of 26 November 1842.
Mihai-Răzvan Ungureanu, ‘Genealogia ca expresie a definitiei sociale a boierimii moldoveneşti în epoca regulamentară’, Arhiva Genealogică, III (VIII), 3–4 (1996), 107–136.
See in this connection the extraordinary genealogy constructed by the Sturza (Sturdza) family and read in the session of the National Assembly on 5 March 1842. Analele Parlamentare, XII/2, 1066–1069.
Joep Leerssen (ed.), Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 2018).
Georgescu, Istoria ideilor politice româneşti, 220.
Silvia Marton, ‘“Aici e vorba să dăm ceea ce avem mai bun: naţionalitatea”. Naturalizare, cetăţenie şi românitate în parlamentul României (a doua parte a veacului al XIX-lea)’, Annals of the University of Bucharest / Political science series, 8, 35–51.
Ion Heliade Rădulescu, ‘Femeile sau cugetul acestei foi’, Curier de ambe sexe, 2 (1837), 43–48.