Original scientific paper
IMPERIAL IMAGINARY OF THE „LOYAL SUBJECT“. LUJO MATUTINOVIC ON THE KINGDOM OF ILLYRIA FROM THE GULF OF TRIESTE TO THE MOUTH OF THE DANUBE (1811)
Drago Roksandić
orcid.org/0000-0002-1923-2958
Abstract
An open point in the history of professionally trained military officers at the end of the 18th and at the beginning of the 19th centuries
are those ones who originate from Central European, Mediterranean and South-East European borderlands. The author’s hypothesis is that they should be investigated as actors of intellectual exchanges, as well as constructions of „imaginaires“, which might have creative effects in epochal changes taking place in their countries of origine, along with changes all over Europe and in the world after the French revolution. Among those military officer there is a distinctive group of them, originating from Venetian Istria, Dalmatia and Albania (today’s Boka kotorska in Montenegro). From 1797 to 1814/1815, they used to change their citizenship – better to say legal status – several times due to provisions of peace treaties (1797, 1805, 1809, 1814/1815). Being obliged to (re)adjust themselves to changing imperial realities and aspirations - without renouncing their native identities – they attract particular attention. One of them, Lujo Matutinović (Krf, October 26, 1765 – Split, August 1, 1844), who used to be Venetian maggiore, French
maréchal de camp and Austrian Generalmajor, wrote an extensive Essai sur les Provinces illyriennes et sur le Monténégro in Paris, in 1811, devoted to the Emperor Napoleon I, which is exceptional by its content and implicit project of the Kingdom of Illyria, streching from the Bay of Trieste in the Adriatic up to the Black Sea’s mouth of the Danube River. The Essai anticipates some phenomena and developmental logics which are relevant up to today.
Keywords
Lujo Matutinović; Illyrian Provinces; Napoleon I; protonational imaginaire; Pokrčje
Hrčak ID:
248875
URI
Publication date:
31.12.2017.
Visits: 1.366 *