Page 194 - Beholding Liberty!

194 BEHOLDING LIBERTY!
so, the anonymous author of the Hellenic Nomarchy (1806) write about Rhigas. The anonymous author, in fact, not only dedicates his work to the memory of Rhigas, but also actively seeks to appear as his ideological successor and political heir, when he praises nomarchy, the rule of law, as the best system of governance, under which “everyone enjoys liberty when the laws enacted by all provide for it, and, in complying with these laws, everyone complies with their own will and is free. Liberty, therefore, is to abide by the laws; in a word, liberty is the rule of law itself” (Hel- lenic Nomarchy, Italy 1806, p. 15).
The framework of pre-revolutionary political thought in the Greek world was considerably en- riched by the constitutional restrictions tested in the administration of the Ionian Islands in the wake of the centuries-old Venetian rule. Somewhat paradoxically, these attempts to introduce constitutional governance in a part of the Greek world did not emerge on the horizon of history under the occupation of the Ionian Islands by the French Republic (1797–1799), a period during which the Ionian people expressed their expectations of liberty and social reform both militantly and resoundingly through the widespread use of French revolutionary ritual. On the contrary, con- stitutional governance was introduced in the Ionian Islands with the three constitutional drafts proposed by the Russian protection in the years 1800, 1803 and 1806. These three political pro- posals represent the earliest attempt to introduce constitutional rule on Greek territory in mod- ern times. Without a doubt, all three systems of governance – especially the first one, of 1800, of course, to which the governments of the tsar and the sultan agreed – were strictly oligarchic and illiberal. Nevertheless, the mere fact of introducing the principle of constitutional rule in the Greek world was greeted with enthusiasm by Greek thought, which was fully conscious of the symbolic significance of the normative model of political legitimacy associated with constitu- tionalism. Thus, the elder statesman of the Enlightenment, Eugenios Voulgaris, a Corfiot himself, hastened to greet the event by dedicating his Homeric Antiquities, in 1800, “to the Ionian republic of citizens”; in 1802 Adamantios Korais dedicated the Greek edition of Beccaria “to the fledgling Septinsular Hellenic polity in high hopes”.
Ultimately, the United States of the Ionian Islands were not governed by these oligarchic con- stitutions, which were annulled by the French reoccupation of the Ionian Islands by Napoleon’s imperial troops in 1807. The Constitution in force in the Ionian Islands under British protection was the one drafted in 1817 by High Commissioner Thomas Maitland and ratified by the British Crown. The frustrations associated with that Constitution involving the expectations and de- mands of liberal constitutionalism were the main trigger for the rise of Ionian radicalism, which eventually led to the union of the Ionian Islands with the kingdom of Greece in 1864.
Arguably, constitutionalism as a normative model and as hope for liberty had nurtured pre-rev- olutionary Greek political thought and paved the way for the constitutional initiatives of the decade-long liberation struggle. Indeed, the necessity of establishing constitutional rule in revo- lutionary Greece was voiced by insurgent Greeks since the earliest months of the Struggle.
REVOLUTIONARY CONSTITUTIONS
In the course of the first year of the Struggle, establishing a constitutional government became a key demand of the insurgent people, voiced by the improvised representative bodies assembled in various locations in 1821. This is how regional forms of government emerged during the first year of the Struggle in many different parts of the Greek world. These forms of government were as follows: