o_19heefouak9i9v4do11ac41pi7a.pdf

SAKIS GEKAS
The arrival of the French army brought a new approach to governance. Among
the French military staff that came to the islands was the Italian doctor and historian
Carlo Botta (1766-1837), who joined the Napoleonic army in Italy and wrote
the first natural and medical history of Corfu, where he stayed for a year 27 . This
was the first systematic study on the impact of the environment on health, it is an
important source for the living conditions in the late eighteenth century and had a
profound impact on the intellectual life of the islands. In the first years of the nineteenth
century, the Ionian intellectuals participated actively in the political life of
their islands, as these passed under the aristocratic rule of the Ottoman-Russian
protectorate of the Ionian Republic (1800-1807). Francisco Zullatti, for instance,
founder of the ‘Agronomical Society’ in Kefalonia, was the secretary of the comission
that proposed the reforms of the 1803 constitution 28 .
During the same period and as part of the political and social changes introduced in
the early nineteenth century print culture came to the islands. First in Corfu, in 1800
and then later in 1809 in Zante when the British occupied the island. The ‘government
printing office’ as it was named was one of the first in the whole region of the Eastern
Mediterranean, until the 1830s when Muhammad Ali opened a similar one in Cairo
which published his goverment newspapers. In Corfu several newspapers were published,
‘Monitore Ionio’, 1803-1811, and Gazzetta Urbana since 1802, ‘L’ anno’ and the
literary magazines ‘L’ Ape’ and ‘Mercurio Literario’. The Ionian Academy, founded in
1808, during the French occupation (1807-1814) was the culmination of the previous
educational associations 29 . The Academy was an example of the gradual emancipation
of collective organization from the political power of the Council and the control of public
life by few individuals and the old structures of the establishment. The Academy
prioritised ‘the perfection of agriculture, manufacture, commerce, the increase of public
and private wealth in the islands and the promotion of science…and the progress of letters’.
Among the first initiatives of the Academy was the gathering of statistical information
for the islands. This is the first time the need to record the productive capabilities
and the population of the islands was acknowledged and the first time measures had
been taken to promote this aim. The work was completed by Stylianos Vlassopoulos
and published in the book Statistical-Historical Information on Corfu 30 . In the Ionian
Academy the 28 members were of equal status, while membership in the Council was
not compulsory 31 . By the early nineteenth century the gradual disengagement of such
associations and their members from the old structures of (political) power in Corfu was
27 Carlo Giuseppe Gulielmo Botta, Storia Naturale e medica deli Isola di Corfu, Μιλάνο 1798.
Jordan D. Fiore, ‘Carlo Botta: An Italian Historian of the American Revolution’, Italica 28, 3
(1951), 155-71.
28 Σπύρος Λουκάτος, Η Επτανησιακή πολιτική σχολή των Ριζοσπαστών, Argostoli 2009,
p. 75.
29 Π. Χιώτου, Ιστορικά Απομνημονεύματα Επτανήσου, vol. 6, p. 230-1.
30 Στυλιανός Βλασσόπουλος, «Στατιστικαί-Ιστορικαί περί Κερκύρας Ειδήσεις», Κερκυραϊκά
Χρονικά 21, 1977, πρώτη δημοσίευση 1822.
31 Π. Χιώτου, Ιστορικά Απομνημονεύματα Επτανήσου, vol. 6, p. 230-1.
~ 310 ~