Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [147]
From the beginning of the Greek revolt in 1821, books and pamphlets had begun to appear against the “cruel Turks” and their savagery in Greece. After Byron’s “martyr’s death” at Easter 1824 in the citadel of Missolonghi, in western Greece, there was a sudden increase in the publications devoted to the Greek cause.58 France in particular was gripped by the drama of the Greek revolt. Paris had for many years been a gathering point for expatriates and exiles, including the pioneer of the revival of the Greek language Adamantios Korais, who spent most of his adult life in the city; he died there in 1833. Some, like Grigorios Zalykis, were closet revolutionaries who also served the Turks—he was first secretary at the Ottoman embassy in Paris from 1816 to 1820. Minas Minoidis taught Greek in the city and also acted as an interpreter to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Paris was the first European capital to receive news from this Greek “colony.”
The emotional appeal of Hellenism was powerful, but we should not forget that French artists had more mundane motives for the sudden flood of images of the war in Greece that they produced. Napoleon’s empire had provided a multitude of commissions for artists, while printmakers and retailers had made a living from selling copies of famous paintings to a wider public. After 1815, artists who had found a ready market for battle scenes were looking for new subjects. The outbreak of the revolution in Greece itself was much more stirring than a rising in the Danubian principalities.59 All the political factions in France, from Ultramonarchists to Liberals and former Bonapartists, supported the Greek cause. Those who hated revolution quelled their misgivings: the Ultramonarchist newspaper Le Drapeau Blanc concluded that “they [the Greeks] are Christians who want to shake off the Islamic yoke, therefore it is good.”60 It was also a wonderfully romantic cause, exotically Oriental. Women dressed à la Turque once again, but now in the politically correct Greek colors of blue and white.
The sudden efflorescence of paintings and prints that followed the start of the war in Greece thus had a variety of “triggers.” The French press presented highly colored accounts of Ottoman atrocities. On May 27, 1821, Le Constitutionnel reported that it had been officially decided in Constantinople “to slaughter all the Christian subjects of the Ottoman empire”; by July 24 this had become a plan of the Ottomans to wipe Christianity from the face of the earth. The Gazette de France of May 25, 1821, had compared the Turks to bloodthirsty wild beasts, a “mob attacking every Christian without any distinction.” Ironically, at that time, in the Peloponnese, the Greeks fitted this stereotype better than the Turks. There were one or two depictions of Turks being killed, and an ode by Alphonse Dupré on the capture of Tripolitsa by the Greeks on October 5, 1821. But the vast majority of the images presented the conflict in very simplistic Hellenophile terms. The cross was omnipresent, set against the emblem of Turkish power, the pasha’s horsetail standard. Usually the latter was cast down into the dust, as in an unfinished sketch by the Lyonnais painter Pierre Revoil. His War in the Morea or, The Triumph of the Labarum (a labarum is a cross and flag combined) showed the pasha’s standard lying at the feet of the fierce-eyed Greeks, with the cross looming above. Conversely, in the Disaster at Missolonghi, Charles Langlois’ painting depicts the horsetails advancing on the fleeing Greeks.
The symbolism proliferated as time went on. After the invasion of the Peloponnese by the well-trained Egyptian troops commanded by Mehmed Ali’s son Ibrahim Pasha, acting for the sultan Mahmud II, the Greek armies were shattered and their strongholds