Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/159



FRENCH INFLUENCE IN SOUTH-EASTERN

EUROPE

It is commonly accepted that French influence in Eastern Europe concerns Russia and Poland first and foremost. This is an erroneous conception.

Russia was subject in the 16th century to English influence, mainly evident in the commercial intercourse subsisting between the two countries and English trading with the Arctic Sea, Archangel and elsewhere. Peter the Great pursued western ideas which were partly Dutch and partly Swedish, and the Russia of his time was nothing more or less than a patchwork of Germanic design. Only under Catherine the Second, and without reference to the real needs of Russian society itself, the French of the 18th century became the teachers of the already Europeanised higher-classes of the Russian Empire. It was the imposition of an overwhelming — one might almost say overweening— imperial personality and not a necessary phase in the development of this society. The little Princess of Anhalt Zerbst, despite her German origin, introduced the Parisian philosophy.

In Poland, French customs, the French language and literature were first introduced through the casual marriage of a princess of French blood, de Nevers-Gonzague, with the two kingly brothers on the throne of Poland, Wladislaw and John Casimir (the latter of whom retired temporarily to Paris and had his first burial place in the