The contract was eventually cancelled, but, caught between the Assembly's position and the Russian authorities, on March 4, 1844, Bibescu dissolved the Public Assembly with the approval of Russian Emperor Nicholas I. When elections for the body were convened in November 1846, he used several means to silence opposition, thus awarding himself a subservient legislature. A clear separation between him and Romantic nationalists occurred when he ordered the refoundation of the Saint Sava College as a French-language school — based on his view that Romanian was incompatible with modernization. Two and a half years after that, Bibescu passed laws for public works and public administration. In the summer of 1844, he took a long trip through the country in order to inspect the public institutions and local authorities in the major cities. In December 1846, he was advised by Kiseleff to call for new Public Assembly elections. The elections brought a new Assembly dominated by politicians loyal to the hospodar. With this legislature, Bibescu passed several important laws, such as a new law on the Eastern Orthodox clergy, one that allowed the hospodar to approve the church budget, and a law freeing all the Gypsy slaves who belonged to the church and to the public authorities. Gheorghe Bibescu worked for better relations with Moldavia (the other Danubian Principality under Russian supervision), and, starting 1847, the two countries established a customs union, after an agreement with Mihail Sturdza, the Moldavian hospodar. This was the culmination of his attempt to remove Wallachia's traders and guilds from foreign competition ("see Sudiţi"), first manifested in his project to increase taxes on foreign goods. Bibescu also convinced the Russian government to allow him to impose some taxes on those monasteries that had been dedicated to various Orthodox centers of worship outside the Danubian Principalities' territories (the ownership issue, stringent ever since the end of the Phanariote epoch, implied that church property eluded state intervention, channelling income towards places such as Mount Athos; it was to be settled through secularization under the rule of Alexandru Ioan Cuza). In the summer of 1848, the revolution broke out. Initially, Wallachian radicals had unsuccessfully attempted to attract Bibescu to their side. They then issued the "Islaz Proclamation" of June 9, 1848. On June 11, Gheorghe Bibescu accepted the proclamation and two days later, abdicated and left the country, leaving it to be ruled by a Provisoral Government which succumbed to Ottoman intervention in September.