hand, a Russian protectorate was established, and the provinces remained in Russian military occupation up to 1834, pending the payment of the war indemnity by Turkey.  The ultimate aim of Russia may be open to discussion.  Her immediate aim was to make Russian influence paramount in the principalities; this being the only possible explanation of the anomalous fact that, pending the payment of the war indemnity, Russia herself was occupying the provinces whose autonomy she had but now forcibly retrieved from Turkey.  The Reglement Organique, the new constitutional law given to the principalities by their Russian governor, Count Kisseleff, truly reflected the tendency.  From the administrative point of view it was meant to make for progress; from the political point of view it was meant to bind the two principalities to the will of the Tsar.  The personal charm of Count Kisseleff seemed to have established as it were an unbreakable link between Russians and Rumanians.  But when he left the country in 1834 ’the liking for Russia passed away to be replaced finally by the two sentiments which always most swayed the Rumanian heart:  love for their country, and affection towards France’.

[Footnote 1:  Sec P. Eliade, Histoire de l’Esprit Public en Roumanie, i, p. 167 et seq.]

French culture had been introduced into the principalities by the Phanariote princes who, as dragomans of the Porte, had to know the language, and usually employed French secretaries for themselves and French tutors for their children.  With the Russian occupation a fresh impetus was given to French culture, which was pre-eminent in Russia at the time; and the Russian officials, not speaking the language of the country, generally employed French in their relations with the Rumanian authorities, French being already widely spoken in Rumania.  The contact with French civilization, at an epoch when the Rumanians were striving to free themselves from Turkish, Greek, and Russian political influence, roused in them the sleeping Latin spirit, and the younger generation, in constantly increasing numbers, flocked to Paris in search of new forms of civilization and political life.  At this turning-point in their history the Rumanians felt themselves drawn towards France, no less by racial affinity than by the liberal ideas to which that country had so passionately given herself during several decades.

By the Treaty of Adrianople the Black Sea was opened to the commercial vessels of all nations.  This made for the rapid economic development of the principalities by providing an outlet for their agricultural produce, the chief source of their wealth.  It also brought them nearer to western Europe, which began to be interested in a nation whose spirit centuries of sufferings had failed to break.  Political, literary, and economic events thus prepared the ground for the Rumanian Renascence, and when in 1848 the great revolution broke out, it spread at once over the Rumanian countries, where