The Bavarian Regency: What Greeks Called Their Own Government

There is a test for how a government is experienced by the people it governs, and it lies in the words they coin for it. When the subjects of a regime reach for the same grammar they once used for foreign occupation, they are telling us something the official record will not. The first government of independent Greece failed this test decisively. Its rule was captured, and has been remembered ever since, in a single manufactured word that assimilated the new national administration to the old imperial one. To recover the meaning of that word is to see the founding decade of the Greek state as many of its inhabitants saw it — not as liberation completed, but as one foreign authority exchanged for another.

Vavarokratia

The term is Vavarokratia — “Bavarian rule.” Its construction is the whole argument. Stathis Kalyvas records how the reputation of the regency that governed Greece after 1832 sank so low that its rule was fixed permanently in a coinage built on an ominous model:

“a process that became encapsulated in the term used to describe it ever since: Vavarokratia”

— Stathis N. Kalyvas, Modern Greece: What Everyone Needs to Know®, pp. 39–40

The word was formed on the pattern of Tourkokratia — “Turkish rule,” the standard term for the centuries of Ottoman occupation. The suffix carries the charge: to name a government -kratia on that template is to file it under domination, not self-rule. The population that had just fought a war against Ottoman rule found, within a few years, that it needed the same linguistic frame for the administration installed by its European liberators. The state-building of the 1830s and 1840s, conducted by Bavarian officials and diaspora Greeks, disarmed the very warlords who had fought the revolution and provoked continuous local rebellions. The people did not experience the arrival of the Wittelsbach court as the culmination of their struggle; they experienced it as another kratia, and they said so in the word they made.

The three most powerful governments in Europe

The scale of the external effort behind this regime was not hidden from contemporaries. George Finlay, who lived through these events and wrote their history from the inside, watched the young king Otto land at Nafplio in February 1833 and recorded the diplomatic weight assembled behind the boy. His sentence is unsparing in its arithmetic of power:

“The three most powerful governments in Europe combined to establish him on his throne.”

— George Finlay, History of the Greek Revolution, Vol. II, p. 294

Three empires, to seat one teenager over one small kingdom. And the peace their combination was meant to secure did not follow. Finlay, who admired neither Ottoman nor Bavarian rule, chronicled the disorder that persisted under the regency. Brigandage surged rather than subsided; insurrections broke out in Mani and Messenia; a wave of outrages in 1835 met not redress but indifference from the regent Count Armansperg, whose response Finlay records with cold precision:

“For six weeks every day brought news of some new outrage, but Count Armansperg turned a deaf ear to all complaints.”

— George Finlay, History of the Greek Revolution, Vol. II, p. 352

This is not the aftermath of a liberation but the administration of a disorderly province. The “liberated” kingdom required military expeditions to suppress brigands inside its own borders, and the Bavarian regent governed the resulting grievances by ignoring them. Independence, on Finlay’s evidence, had not ended the violence; it had merely changed the authority presiding over it.

The heterochthons and the missing sovereignty

The Bavarians did not rule alone. The civilian side of the new state was staffed heavily by Greeks from beyond the kingdom’s borders — diaspora figures, Phanariots, westernizing newcomers — and the state needed a word for them too. In the volumes assembled by Mazower and by the editors of the Critical Dictionary, the term is heterochthons: the men who ran the state’s politics were, quite literally, not from the land they governed. Mazower notes that Alexandros Mavrokordatos was “a heterochthon in the new language of the day” (The Greek Revolution 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe), while the Critical Dictionary describes the civilian leadership as “the ‘newcomers,’ who broadly represented the modernizing (that is: Westernizing) wing in Greek politics” (eds. Kitromilides & Tsoukalas, p. 378). The very existence of such a word is diagnostic. A state that has to distinguish, by a special term, between rulers native to the place and rulers imported into it is a state whose governing class was substantially not of the people it ruled. The word marks a seam in the nation that the later narrative would seal over.

If Bavarian officials held the executive and heterochthons filled the ministries, where did the “nation” stand as a source of authority? For most of Otto’s reign, nowhere constitutionally. Michalis Sotiropoulos dates the transfer of real sovereignty to the nation not to the founding of the state but to a much later moment — after an anti-royal revolt had deposed Otto altogether. It was, he writes,

“the constitution as finally promulgated in 1864 transferred”

— Michalis Sotiropoulos, Liberalism after the Revolution, p. 242

— power to the nation, shutting the king out of constitution-making for the first time. National sovereignty, on this reading, is not a gift of 1821 or 1830 but an achievement of 1864, wrung from the monarchy three decades after the state was founded. And even then the sovereign “nation” was the electorate of a small kingdom, not the vast imagined Hellenism the irredentist doctrine invoked.

The founding decades of the Greek state thus resist the tidy story of a people freed and self-governing. The government was Bavarian, its administrators were newcomers who needed a special name, its rule earned the same suffix as the occupation it replaced, and the nation did not become constitutionally sovereign until an uprising forced the point in 1864. The most eloquent witness is the vocabulary itself. A people does not coin Vavarokratia for a government it feels to be its own.