imported works are to be found in old papers. In Vienna, which in the second half of the 18th century was a great city, there were available most of the important works by French authors in published translations, nor were translators wanting in the Roumanian Principalities themselves, where the spirit of Voltaire and Rousseau was largely spread and one among the poets of the old regime, Conachi, gave a Roumanian rendering of Pope’s «Essay on Man », which had naturally first been translated into French.
The Revolution had not the great echo which might have been expected however. Some songs, a few pamphlets, and that is all.
Napoleon had no sense for the ever-increasing national spirit of the South-Eastern European States. For him all these countries were but means of satisfying his intricate and changing policy of alliances with Russia or Austria. He recognised the annexation of both Roumanian territories to the Empire of the Czar. French influence was not to be renewed and strengthened by this greatest of all epics. It was later when French classicism had supplanted the moribund philosophy that the noble cry for liberty of Rhigas and Salomos was to be heard.
Not only was the new French poetry translated by the best representatives of the new Greek generation and especially by the younger set in Roumania (Eliad, Alexandrescu, Alexandri, Negruzzi and Bolintineanu), but the romantic ideas, the new sentimentality, the ardent enthusiasm, the feverish imagination of the poetry invaded and permeated politics. The struggle for liberty against the Russian menace, the noble outburst for the reunion of all the Roumanian provinces were due, no less than the Greek aspirations to the reestablishment of the Byzantine Empire, to French romanticism.
