My great-great-grandfather was rich enough to send his sons to study in France. But when they would return for a summer break, he would make them toil on the fields like common peasants Fieldwork was hard, like *actually* hard, and they, of course, protested, but to no avail

Part of the hardship resulted from the fact that you needed to do pretty much all of the work during the very short agricultural season. So, you have a murderous summer toil, and pretty much nothing to do for the rest of the year

I do not have any statistics on hands, but my general impression is that the (very narrow circle of the rich) Tatars who sent their children to study abroad, sent them to France in like 100% of cases known to me (While the Russians, on the other hand, regularly went to Germany)

Perhaps, part of the reason was the gravitation field of the broader Ottoman/Levantine cultural space. As the Ottoman high culture gallicised, so did the culturally dependent Tatar one Back then, educated Tatars (mentally) lived in the same cultural space as Istanbul and Cairo

They were reading news from Istanbul and Cairo, following the trends of Istanbul and Cairo, and if they caught up with the idea that French is somehow cool and important, they probably picked it from Istanbul and Cairo

Here lies the paradox: of all the Western powers, France was (overall) the most hostile to the Ottomans, Turkey, Turkish nationalism whatever BUT No other Western culture impacted & terraformed the Turkic world remotely to the same degree as French

The actual memespace of the Turkic/sh nationalist movement was *extremely* gallic, and the entire worldview largely shaped after the French-provided mental models (If Russian nationalism developed as a copy of German one, the Turkish nationalism developed as a copy of French)

So, whereas the gallomania of so many Tatar intellectuals may seem weird, in retrospect ("Every educated person has two fatherlands: first his own, and then France!"), it can be largely explained by the cultural gravitation of the Ottoman world, rather than anything else

That also explains the role played by the Tatar intellectuals in the early Turkish republic: they could make an impact, because they spoke the same language as the actual political & military elites, and the language was French, and the references were French, too

French metaphors, Jacobin lore - that is what connected literati from the Middle Volga and the rulers of the Turkish republic, facilitating their communication & cultural connection (In the earlier era, it would have been Persian, but circa 1900 the things have changed)