Page 73 - Beholding Liberty!

which it was governed and also participated in the exercise of power of “those held”, the captive society of the Hellenic nation. According to the judgement of Katartzis, this was the political entity that could not be determined solely by cultural features, religion, language and education, but primarily by its political foundation. This political entity was an imprisoned nation “subject to another more powerful one”.4 Katartzis thought about it but did not dare to say so explicitly: this enslaved nation is now mature enough for freedom.
Hence, the dream of freedom matured over time and became an object of speculation and caution regarding the prospects of realizing it, as regards the transition from the theoretical revelation and search to the political act. This change, the transformation of theory to practice, was to be carried out by a militant dreamer who originated from the intellectual environment of Moisiodax and Katartzis, Rigas Velestinles. We are now in the period of revolutions that shocked the Western world between the years 1776-1848. Rigas was the authentic representative of the revolutionary period, bearer of the most advanced and radical current of Jacobinism that emanated from the ranks of the French Revolution. Rigas, his ideas and revolutionary plans, constituted features of the phenomenon that the French historian Jacques Godechhot had called “la Grande Nation”, the spread of revolutionary France through the world. Within the climate of exaltation created by the French revolutionary ideas, the realization of the vision of freedom became for Rigas an urgent need and command, a program for life and the march toward the ultimate sacrifice.
For Rigas, the vision of freedom had a specific and precise content which was expressed in the revolutionary pamphlet in which the culture of the Hellenic Democracy was published. The ideas and cultural proposals that were included in the pamphlet, entitled New political administration
4. Dimitrios Katartzis, Τα Ευρισκόμενα, ed. K. Th. Dimaras, Athens 1960, pp. 44-46.
Portrait
of Rigas Feraios
illustration in the publication
of Julius Curtius,
Geschichte der Neu-Griechen,
vol. I, Leipzig 1827
Library of the Hellenic Parliament
The vision of Freedom 73