Adamantios Korais, in his famous Memoir (1803), aimed to highlight the fundamental significance of the French developments for the Greeks, noting that, especially after 1789, "national vanity gave way to the behavior of a people preparing to transform into a nation": to gain political self-awareness and to claim independent political existence.
This book seeks to illuminate a critical, albeit largely unknown aspect of this particular process: the French presence in the Ionian Sea, from the summer of 1797 to the spring of 1799, and its broader consequences for the world of the Greeks.
At a first level, we focus on the end of the long-standing Venetian domination in the Ionian, but primarily on the new political, administrative, and educational institutions, as well as on key conceptual issues that arose from this: on the ways of perceiving the rupture, on the conceptual shift and semantic broadening of critical terms (citizen, place, virtue, law, homeland, nation), and on the new reading of historical time – particularly the politicization of antiquity.
At the same time, we monitor the rapprochement of the Ionian with the Greek core: after centuries, the two worlds begin to converge, due to the developments of the present, but mostly because of the hopes of the future.
The upheaval of 1797 and the death of Venice, the complete disruption of balances in the Eastern Mediterranean, the arrival of France at the fringes of the Sultan's territory, and the revelation of Rigas's plans – concentric circles that emerged from 1789 – led to the explosive dissemination of new ideas within the world of the rayahs.
The Orthodox Church, within the framework set by the Ottoman Empire and with discourse akin to that of the Catholic Church, fiercely opposed the new ideas, interpreting the contentious terms in its own way: freedom, virtue, equality, homeland.
This acute confrontation expedited the next great step of the Greek world: the conceptual autonomy of the Greek nation from the Orthodox nation.
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