Between Barbarism and Civilization: The Image of the Inhabitants of Dalmatia under Napoleon (1806–1813) from the French Perspective in the Mediterranean Context

Abstract

The article analyzes the image of the population of Dalmatia in the Napoleonic era. The analysis is mainly based on documents produced by the French administration of Dalmatia between 1806 and 1813, when the province was first part of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy and from 1809 belonged to a separate entity of the French Empire, the Illyrian Provinces. The study analyzes the picture of Dalmatian society that the French drew for practical administrative purposes and places it in the broader context of the concepts of the Balkans and Eastern Europe and, in particular, the environmental and historical peculiarities of the Mediterranean region. The article shows that the tensions between the settled population on the coast and the semi-nomadic pastoral communities in the Dalmatian hinterland, which was a characteristic phenomenon of the Mediterranean world, had a great influence, at least in the Dalmatian context, on the formation of ideas that later became part of the image of Balkan backwardness and other ideas about the Balkan region that took shape in the Age of Enlightenment.