 The paramount cultural model was the French one, following a pattern already established by contacts between the region and the French Consulate and First Empire (attested, among others, by the existence of a Wallachian plan to petition Napoleon Bonaparte, whom locals believed to be a descendant of the Byzantine Emperors, with a complaint against the Phanariotes, as well as by an actual anonymous petition sent in 1807 from Moldavia).This trend was consolidated by the French cultural model partly adopted by the Russians, a growing mutual sympathy between the Principalities and France, increasingly obvious under the French July Monarchy, and, as early as the 1820s, the enrolment of young boyars in Parisian educational institutions (coupled with the 1830 opening of a French-language school in Bucharest, headed by Jean Alexandre Vaillant).The young generation eventually attempted to curb French borrowings, which it had come to see as endangering its nationalist aspirations.