Adamantios Korais, in his famous "Memoir" (1803), wanting to highlight the fundamental importance of the French developments for the Greeks, especially after 1789, noted that "national vanity gave way to the behavior of a people who are preparing to transform into a nation": to acquire political self-awareness and to claim independent political existence.

This book attempts to shed light on a critical, but largely unknown aspect of this specific process: the French presence in the Ionian Islands, from the summer of 1797 to the spring of 1799, and its broader consequences for the world of the Greeks.
At a first level, we focus on the end of the long Venetian rule in the Ionian Islands, but mainly on the new political, administrative, and educational institutions, as well as on crucial conceptual issues that arose from it: the ways of perceiving the rupture, the conceptual shift and semantic expansion of critical terms (citizen, place, virtue, law, homeland, nation), the new interpretation of historical time - the politicization, especially, of antiquity.
At the same time, we observe the approach of the Ionian Islands to the Greek core: after centuries, the two worlds begin to converge, due to the developments of the present, but mainly due to the hopes of the future. The upheaval of 1797 and the death of Venice, the complete disruption of the balances in the Eastern Mediterranean, the arrival of France at the borders of the sultan's dominion and the revelation of Rigas's plans - concentric circles born out of 1789 - led to the explosive spread of new ideas in the world of the rayahs.
The Orthodox Church, within the framework defined by the Ottoman Empire and with a reasoning corresponding to that of the Catholic Church, strongly opposed the new ideas, conceptualizing the controversial terms in its own way: freedom, virtue, equality, homeland. This acute confrontation hastened the next major step of the Greek world: the conceptual autonomy of the Greek race from the Orthodox race.