This project investigates the transnational conceptualisation and diffusion of moderate liberal thought in Mediterranean Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. It explores moderate thinkers’ formulation of a third political way for the future of Europe between revolution and reaction, by focussing on the writings and correspondence of political thinkers across Spain, Portugal, Piedmont and Greece. While historians have largely neglected the study of moderation theory by regarding it as an unoriginal and self-serving strand of thought, this project’s overarching argument is that moderation theory was an original strand of liberalism, which southern European thinkers, in dialogue with their French and British counterparts, conceptualised and implemented as an alternative to the political challenges of the revolutionary age.
By studying moderate liberalism from a transnational perspective, this project contributes to a recent body of historiography that regards the Mediterranean as a zone of contact, which produced alternative forms of state-building, nation-formation and ‘modernity’ to those originating in the northern Atlantic world. It rejects Fernand Braudel’s view of the Mediterranean’s promiscuousness as a remnant of the early modern world. Instead, it contributes to recent studies that see the Mediterranean’s geography of the ‘in-between’ as a modern phenomenon, where nations and nationalist movements were conceptualised transnationally. As historians have recently pointed out, the Mediterranean was an area in which nations developed mutually, rather than separately, and where Greece’s and Italy’s processes of national unifications were in constant dialogue with external models and cultures. Michel Espagne has called such transnational form of nation-building a nation ‘no longer national’. According to this interpretation, the formation of Mediterranean nations was especially influenced by exogenous factors, such as the Spanish liberal uprisings of the 1820s, Philhellenism and the Christian Enlightenment.
Historians traditionally have not considered the Mediterranean to be a centre of intellectual exchange in the nineteenth century and have regarded the circulation of ideas as moving from northern Europe towards the south – from the northern Atlantic to the Mediterranean. This project contributes to a recent strand of historiography that aims to revaluate the intellectual significance of the Mediterranean in modern history. First, by adding the Mediterranean to the narrative of the age of revolution, it maintains that nineteenth-century Europe should be understood as both an age of revolution and an age of moderation. Second, by looking at European history from the south, this project seeks to uncover different political cultures and alternative interpretations of state-formation that can further our understanding of nineteenth-century Europe.
The project has two main objectives. First, it aims to create a new body of knowledge on nineteenth-century moderation theory through the completion of a monograph, provisionally entitled Age of Moderation: Liberal Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1814-48. Second, it aims to provide an analysis of the transnational intellectual search for an alternative path to the nation-state and modernity to the one provided by the revolutionary tradition of 1789. This objective will be achieved by completing the monograph, as well as two journal articles. The first article, entitled ‘Inventing a Moderate Risorgimento Hero: Victor Cousin and the Myth of Santorre di Santa Rosa’, will analyse the ways in which the French moderate liberal Victor Cousin turned the personal story of his late friend, the Piedmontese revolutionary Santorre di Santa Rosa, into a moderate example for Piedmontese patriots to follow in their quest for Italian unification. Part of the primary research for this article was already conducted at the Victor Cousin Archive at the Sorbonne Library in Paris. The article will be submitted to The Historical Journal in December 2024. The second article will be an exploration of the nineteenth-century view of Greece and Italy as sister nations. It will be titled ‘“We Italians must look upon Greece as our mother country”: The Idea of a Greco-Italian Sisterhood in the Age of Mediterranean Revolution’ and will be submitted to the Journal of European Ideas in 2025.
