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560 TJN DEBAT : LES MENTALTTfiS COLLECTIVE3 4

pałace in Yienna) or to ask painters immortalize “the mail in St. James’s Park”. It -will successfully take the place of ‘Thistoire historisante”, lightly bantered by Lucien Febvre, which payed a greater attention to the movcments of imperial troops in South-East Europę than to economic actmty and culturai life in villages and cities. But in order to reach this scope it will have to scrutinize collectiye feelings and States of mind, and also mental clichćs recunent in imperial decisions and nowadays ih. world atlases and handbooks, labels which indicate less a specific trait and morę a comfortable attitude in writing history. I mean labels like : “Byzantine duplicity and cruelty”, “Byzantinism” — which does not describe a sophisticated way of thinking but a kind of tricky discussion — , “Oriental lethargy” — as opposed to “European” dynamism — , “the Balkanisation of an area”.

Yery rewarding are the studies on periods of shifts sińce they may discoyer how the culturai and temporal levels worked at a given moment and how collective attitudes and representations changed from one decade to another. An important period of changes was the endjof the 18thcentury — the beginning of the 19th century. To phenomena common to Europę in the age of industrialization specific trends are here to be Ipken into consideration, like the movement lor national and social self-assertion of all peoples in South-East Europę.

Living conditions gradually improved everywheTe in Europę in the 18theentury and intellectual life went on scrutinizing ever morę syste-matically the materiał sides of existence. Bomanian intellectual actiyity showed less evidence of such tendencies. The multitude of armed conflicts in the 18th century that took place on Bomanian soil account for it_k These conflicts and the external interyentions in the governing of the Danubian Principalities had a part to play in the increase of the Phanariot princes’ instability. There were also a long series of great epidemics which were hard to eradicate. A conlemporary account describes how several villages in ^ara Birsei (Birsa Land) in Transylvania, were isolated during the 1756 plague. The medical assistants who were sent there died and the epidemics caused many deaths at Z&rne§ti, Poiana Marului, Holbav, Scheii Brasovului. The isolation was gradually removed as the epidemics was lesd powerful ®. There were also natural calamities, such as fimine, locust invasions, floods and earthąuakes. There was a big earthąuake, on the 14th of October 1802 which caused the high Col£ea

⁸ The fol|pwing part of the article relles raostly on : Ule Corfus, Insemn&rl de demult, Ed. Junimea, 1975 ; Cartea oeche romdneascd jn colecfttle Bibllotecll Centrale Uniuersitare Bucu-reętl, Bucure?ti, 1972; Florian Duda?, Cartea oeche romdneascd tn Bthor, Oradea, 1977 ; $coala ardeleand. Anthology by Florea Fugarlu. voI. I—III, Bucureętl, 1970; the texts published in our book Coordonate ale culturti rom&neęti tn secolul XVIII, Bucure^ti* 1968 ; Octayian §chiau, C&rturarl    cdrft tn spaflul romdtnesc medieoal, Ed. Dacia, 1978; Vladimir Diculescu, Viata

cotidland a    Rom&neętl tn documente, 1800—1848, Ed. Dacia, 1970; Paul Cernovodeanu

Soctetatea feudald romdneascd odzutd de cdldtort strdlni, secolele XV— XVIII, Ed. Academiei, 1973, and our articles: L*lmage de la France dans les pajjs roumains pendant les campagnes napolconlennes et le Congrbs de Vlenne in Nouoelles itudes d^$histotre, III, 1965, National and European Consciousness tn the Romantem Enlightenment in Studies on Voltatre and the eighteenth century, 55, 1967, Die Lekidre ais soziale Pflichl in Buch- und Verlagswescn im 18. und 19. Jahr-hundert, Berlin, Ulrich Camen, 1977.