The Messiah and the bourgeoisie: Venizelos and politics in Greece, 1909–1912

Abstract

The mercurial rise of Venizelos, the most prominent Greek statesman of this century, has been a hotly debated issue of modern Greek history. The tendency until recently has been to explain his success in terms of social changes, and to see the rise of the Liberal party as the triumph of modernizing bourgeois forces in early twentieth-century Greece. This article, however, compares Venizelos both with the generation of politicians which preceded him, and with his leading contemporary, Gounaris. It argues that Venizelos's enormous popularity hinged upon his response to the nationalist, quasi-messianicfervour which gripped Greece after its humiliating defeat by Turkey in 1897. Parliamentary government came to be seen as passive and elitist, political parties as causes of national decline. Using his rhetorical skills and the press, Venizelos presented himself as the agent of national regeneration. His attitude towards class politics, and to the very idea of political parties, was complex and ambivalent. Hence, his rise should be interpreted, not in terms of a simple Marxist or whiggish schema, as the product of Greece's bourgeois revolution, but as the expression of a new more confident nationalism, which reinforced the personality-centred quality of Greek politics.

“Not To Be Taken Personally”: Tracing Six Decades of Scholarship on Personal, Personalist, and Personalized Political Parties (1960–2021)

“…Some publications from the 1990s acknowledged that personalism has a history and frequently referenced Charles de Gaulle and his personal party UNR-UDT (see Cairns, 1965) during the 5th Republic as a relevant antecedent (Ignazi, 1996; Raniolo, 1998). Yet, the Général was not the first modern personalist party leader, as is visible in the literature on Greek and Cypriot political parties (Adams and Cottrell, 1966; Christophorou, 2001; Legg, 1973; Mazower, 1992; Mouzelis, 1985). Mazower traced the phenomenon to 1910, when Elefterios Venizelos modernized Greek politics by organizing an ideological party independent from strongman affiliation.…”