Nikolas Pitsos

PERCEPTIONS FRANÇAISES DES OCCUPATIONS MILITAIRES ET DES REVENDICATIONS TERRITORIALES SERBES ET MONTENEGRINES PENDANT LES GUERRES BALKANIQUES DE 1912-1913

This paper aims at studying how Serbia and Montenegro had been perceived by French society during the 1912-1913 Balkan Wars. Through the exploration of newspapers and diplomatic archives, French views of Serbian and Montenegrian military occupations as well as their territorial claims in the case of Ottoman Macedonia and the delimitation of Albania’s boundaries, are discussed. Next to ideological orientations, geopolitical stakes and personal affinities, state propagandas played an important role in the way these events were echoed and framed within French public space. French newspapers turned themselves into a battlefield where Balkan agents or their supporters within French society, tried to put forward their own arguments in terms of ethnolinguistic, historicist or civilisationist approaches, in order to promote their interests and gain moral support among French citizens.