This chapter explores and interprets the long revolution of the 1860s (1862–1875): a ‘context-breaking liberal moment’ that featured a revolution, a Constituent Assembly, a change of dynasty, a new constitutional system and a crisis over defining the scope of parliamentary jurisdiction. During and after this moment political institutions were reconfigured and the monarchy was put on a new institutional footing. In short, the way of ‘doing’ politics was radically transformed. By paying due attention to ideas as drivers of political change and to the role of the jurists in forming these ideas, the chapter demonstrates that what ultimately made this crisis a legitimacy crisis – and indeed, gave the revolution its language – was the way in which the king’s rule increasingly came to be seen as a de facto usurpation of power that had unsettled the balance of the constitution and was breaking the contract with the nation. In other words, the critics of the monarchy were essentially building on the moderate liberal ideas that had developed in the preceding years.

Chapter 5 shows that the claim that the Greek Bavarian-led state was undermining the formation of the nation was further radicalised when scholars, and in particular Nikolaos Saripolos, took on international law and addressed directly the curtailed sovereignty that the Great Powers had imposed on Greece. The chapter argues that if we want to understand the Greek discussions on international law, we need to consider two things: first, the place of the Greek kingdom within the regional legal order that had been formed in the Eastern Mediterranean since the 1830s; and second, the ways in which from the late 1840s onwards (and especially during the Crimean War) this order was being redefined by European powers and in particular by Great Britain. In this context, a number of interventions in the domestic affairs of the state by the guarantor powers made people like Saripolos realise that the fictions on which the international position of Greece was based had to be revised. They also led to claims that the monarchical policies were jeopardising the already precarious place of Greece in the geography of civilisation, and possibly its very political existence.

Chapter 4 demonstrates that the recommendations that favoured state intervention were coupled with a different way of thinking about political power: its nature, its sources and its organisation. The intellectual éminence grise behind this was Nikolaos Saripolos, who, after coming to Greece and being elected to the Law School in 1846, was to become the country’s leading constitutional and international law scholar. Being mindful of the revolutionary tradition and fusing together several different intellectual currents (Rousseau, Doctrinaires, the monarchiens, Benjamin Constant), Saripolos changed the terms of constitutional thinking by drawing on the revolutionary idioms of natural rights and national sovereignty. This was a liberal, governmental discourse that spoke in terms of sovereignty as self-rule and of the state as a moral person with rights in the international arena. As the chapter demonstrates, for Saripolos – as well as for the economist Ioannis Soutsos – the state in the form it then took had become an obstacle to the formation of the nation and was undermining social cohesion.