The Morea expedition (French: Expédition de Morée) is the name given to the land intervention of the French Army in the Peloponnese between 1828 and 1833, at the time of the Greek War of Independence, with the aim of expelling the Ottoman-Egyptian occupation forces from the region. It was also accompanied by a scientific expedition mandated by the French Academy.
After the fall of Messolonghi in 1826, the Western European powers decided to intervene in favour of revolutionary Greece. Their primary objective was to force Ibrahim Pasha, the Ottoman Empire's Egyptian ally, to evacuate the occupied regions and the Peloponnese. The intervention began when a Franco-Russo-British fleet was sent to the region and won the Battle of Navarino in October 1827, destroying the entire Turkish-Egyptian fleet. In August 1828, a French expeditionary corps of 15,000 men led by General Nicolas-Joseph Maison landed in the southwestern Peloponnese. During October, soldiers took control of the principal strongholds still held by the Turkish troops. Although the bulk of the troops returned to France in early 1829 after an eight month-deployment, the French kept a military presence in the area until 1833. The French army would suffer about 1,500 dead, mainly due to fever and dysentery.
As had occurred during Napoleon's Egyptian Campaign, when a Commission des Sciences et des Arts accompanied the military campaign, a scientific commission (Expédition scientifique de Morée) was attached to the French troops and placed under the supervision of three academies of the Institut de France. Directed by the naturalist and geographer Jean-Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent, nineteen scientists representing different specialties in natural history, archaeology and architecture-sculpture made the voyage to Greece in March 1829; most of them stayed there for nine months. Their work proved essential to the ongoing development of the new Greek State and, more broadly, marked a major milestone in the modern history of archaeology, cartography and natural sciences, as well as in the study of Greece.
Context
Military and diplomatic context
In 1821, the Greeks revolted against centuries-long Ottoman rule. They won numerous victories early on and declared independence on 1 January 1822. However, the declaration contradicted the principles of the Congress of Vienna and of the Holy Alliance, which imposed a European equilibrium of the status quo, outlawing any possible change. In contrast to what happened elsewhere in Europe, the Holy Alliance did not intervene to stop the liberal Greek insurgents.
The liberal and national uprising displeased Metternich, chancellor of the Austrian Empire and the principal political architect of the Holy Alliance. Russia looked favourably on the insurrection due to its Orthodox religious solidarity and its geostrategic interest (control of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus). France, another active member of the Holy Alliance, had just intervened in Spain against liberals at Trocadero (1823) but held an ambiguous position: Paris saw the liberal Greeks first and foremost as Christians, and their uprising against the Muslim Ottomans had undertones of a new crusade. Great Britain, a liberal country, was interested in the situation of the region, primarily because it was on the route to India and London wished to exert there a form of control. Finally, for all of Europe, Greece represented the cradle of Western civilisation and of art since antiquity.
The Greek victories had been short-lived. The Sultan had called for aid from his Egyptian vassal Muhammad Ali, who dispatched his son Ibrahim Pasha to Greece with a fleet and 8,000 men, and later added 25,000 troops. Ibrahim's intervention proved decisive: much of the Peloponnese was reconquered in 1825; the gateway town of Messolonghi fell in 1826; and Athens was taken in 1827. The only territory still held by Greek nationalists was in Nafplion, Mani, Hydra, Spetses and Aegina.
A strong current of philhellenism had developed in Western Europe, especially after 1826 and the fall of Missolonghi, where the poet Lord Byron had died in 1824. Many artists and intellectuals such as François-René de Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, Alexander Pushkin, Gioachino Rossini, Hector Berlioz or Eugène Delacroix (in his paintings of The Massacre at Chios in 1824, and of Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi in 1826), amplified the current of sympathy for the Greek cause in the public opinion. The European powers eventually decided to intervene in favour of Greece—a Christian vanguard in the Orient—whose strategic location in containing Muslim expansion was obvious to those political powers. By the Treaty of London of 6 July 1827, France, Russia and the United Kingdom recognised the autonomy of Greece, which remained a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire. The three powers agreed to a limited intervention in order to convince the Porte to accept the terms of the convention. A plan to send a naval expedition as a demonstration of force was proposed and adopted; subsequently a joint Russian, French and British fleet was sent to exert diplomatic pressure against Constantinople. The Battle of Navarino (20 October 1827) resulted in the complete destruction of the Turkish-Egyptian fleet.
In 1828, Ibrahim Pasha thus found himself in a difficult situation: he had just suffered a defeat at Navarino; the joint fleet enforced a blockade which prevented him from receiving reinforcements and supplies; and his Albanian troops, whom he could no longer pay, had returned to their country under the protection of Theodoros Kolokotronis' Greek troops. On 6 August 1828, a convention had been signed at Alexandria between the viceroy of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, and the British admiral Edward Codrington. By its terms, Ibrahim Pasha was required to evacuate his Egyptian troops and leave the Peloponnese to the few Turkish troops (estimated at 1,200 men) remaining there, but he refused to honour the agreement and continued to control various Greek regions: Messenia, Navarino, and Patras as well as several other strongholds—and even ordered the systematic destruction of Tripolitza.
Meanwhile, the French government of Charles X was beginning to have doubts about its Greek policy. Ibrahim Pasha himself noted this ambiguity when he met General Maison in September. Eventually a pro-Greek liberal movement, inspired by what was then happening in Greece, began to develop in France. The longer France waited to act, the more delicate her position vis-à-vis Metternich became. The ultra-royalist government thus decided to accelerate events. A proposal to send a joint land expedition was made to Great Britain, which refused to intervene directly. Meanwhile, Russia had declared war against the Ottoman Empire and its military victories were unsettling for Great Britain, which did not wish to see the Tsarist empire extend too far south, and compelled it to not oppose an intervention by France alone.
Intellectual context
Enlightenment philosophy had stimulated Western Europeans' interest in Greece, or rather in an idealised ancient Greece, the linchpin of classical antiquity as it was perceived and taught in academe. Enlightenment philosophers, for whom the notions of Nature and Reason were so important, believed that these had been the fundamental values of classical Athens. The ancient Greek democracies, and above all Athens, became models to emulate. There they searched for answers to the political and philosophical problems of their time. Works such as Abbé Barthélemy's Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis (1788) served to fix definitively the image that Europe had of the Aegean.
The theories and system of interpreting ancient art devised by Johann Joachim Winckelmann influenced European tastes for decades. His major work, History of Ancient Art, was published in 1764 and translated into French in 1766 (the English translation did not appear until 1881). In this major work Winckelmann initiated the tradition of dividing ancient art into periods, classifying the works chronologically and stylistically.
The views of Winckelmann on art encompassed the entirety of civilisation. He drew a parallel between a civilisation's general level of development and the evolution of its art. He interpreted this artistic evolution the same way that his contemporaries saw the life cycle of a civilisation in terms of progress—apogee and then decline. For him, the golden age of Greek art had been the pinnacle of artistic achievement, culminating with the career of the sculptor Phidias. Further, Winckelmann believed that the most beautiful works of Greek art had been produced under ideal geographic, political and religious circumstances. This frame of thought long dominated intellectual life in Europe. He classified Greek art into four periods: Ancient (archaic period), Sublime (Phidias), Beautiful (Praxiteles) and Decadent (Roman period).
Winckelmann concluded his theory on the evolution of art with an explication of the Sublime period of Greek art, which had been conceived during a period of political and religious liberty. His theories idealised ancient Greece and increased Europeans' desire to travel to contemporary Greece. It was seductive to believe, as he did, that 'good taste' was born beneath the Greek sky. He persuaded 18th-century Europe that life in ancient Greece was pure, simple and moral, and that classical Hellas was the source from which artists should draw ideas of "noble simplicity and calm grandeur". Greece became the "motherland of the arts" and "the teacher of taste".
The French government had planned the Morea expedition in the same spirit as those of James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, whose work it wished to complete. The semi-scientific expeditions commissioned and financed by the Society of Dilettanti remained a benchmark: these represented the first attempts to rediscover ancient Greece. The first, that of Stuart and Revett to Athens and the islands, took place in 1751–1753, and resulted in publication of The Antiquities of Athens, a work mined by architects and designers for models of a refined "Grecian" neoclassicism. The expedition of Revett, Richard Chandler and William Pars to Asia Minor took place between 1764 and 1766. Finally, the removal by Lord Elgin of half of the surviving marble sculptures of the Parthenon, as well as sculptures from other buildings, and their transport to Britain at the beginning of the 19th century, had inspired further philhellenic longing for the cultural glories of ancient Greece: it now seemed possible to build vast collections of ancient art in Western Europe.
Military expedition
Much of the information concerning the Morea expedition comes from the direct testimonies of Louis-Eugène Cavaignac (2nd Engineer Regiment and future Prime Minister of France in 1848), of Alexandre Duheaume (Captain in the 58th Line Infantry Regiment), Jacques Mangeart (co-founder of a printing company and of the Franco-Greek newspaper "Le Courrier d'Orient" in Patras in 1829) and Doctor Gaspard Roux (Chief Medical Officer of the expedition) who all took part to the military expedition.
Preparation
The Chamber of Deputies authorised a loan of 80 million gold francs to allow the government to meet its obligations for the expedition. An expeditionary corps of 13,000–15,000 men commanded by Lieutenant-General Nicolas Joseph Maison was formed. It was composed of nine infantry regiments distributed in three brigades commanded by the maréchaux de camp Tiburce Sébastiani (brother of Marshal Horace Sébastiani, soldier, diplomat and minister, 1st brigade), Philippe Higonet (2nd brigade), and Virgile Schneider (3rd brigade). The Chief of the General Staff was General Antoine Simon Durrieu.
Also departing were the 3rd Chasseur Regiment (1st brigade, 286 men, commanded by Colonel Paul-Eugène de Faudoas-Barbazan), four companies of artillery (484 men, with 12 battery pieces for sieges, 8 for campaigns, and 12 for mountains) of the 3rd and 8th Artillery Regiments, and two companies of military engineers that included 800 sappers (combat engineers) and miners.
A transport fleet protected by warships was organised; sixty ships sailed in all. Equipment, victuals, munitions and 1,300 horses had to be brought over, as well as arms, munitions and money for the Greek provisional government of Ioannis Kapodistrias. France wished to support the first steps of free Greece by helping it developing its own army. The aim was also to gain influence in the region.
After a brief and energetic proclamation by General-in-Chief Nicholas Joseph Maison was read to the companies assembled the day before boarding, the first brigade left Toulon on 17 August; the second, two days later; and the third on September 2 in a second distinct convoy. The general in command, Nicolas Joseph Maison, was with the first brigade, aboard the ship of the line Ville de Marseille. The first convoy was composed of merchant ships and was escorted by the frigates Amphitrite, Bellone and Cybèle. The second convoy was escorted by the ship of the line Duquesne and by the frigates Iphigénie and Armide.