How to Make Friends and Influence People: Elementary Education, French “Influence,” and the Balkans, 1815–1830s

This article challenges the notion of French “influence.” It traces a network of like-minded reformers in France and the Balkans that came together in the early nineteenth century to further popular education. Examining interactions between actors in a cultural, scientific, and political center (France) and their allies on the periphery (in present-day Greece and Romania), the article reassesses these relationships, revealing the extent to which French individuals and organizations depended on such partnerships. Conceiving of joint Franco-Balkan reform agendas as programs of development, it offers a model and a vocabulary for the study of French soft power in post-Napoleonic Europe.

Publisher: Cambridge University Press