Marinos Papadopoulos Vretos is a distinctive case of a public intellectual who was active between Greece and France during a critical era: the one defined by France's diplomatic move in founding the École d’Athènes (1846), the rejection of philhellenic schemata in the West and the start of miso-philhellenism’ from 1850 onwards, until the collaboration of Greek intellectuals and Hellenists – mainly French – for the promotion of Greek studies in France in the context of the Association pour l’encouragement des etudes grecques en France (from 1867). He provides an unexplored example of a conscious and steadily self-promoting multipolar mediator, with the objective of transferring the cultural identity of modern Greeks by spreading it through various kinds of printed cultural products.

Born in British-occupied Corfu in 1828, he lived for most of his life in France. His father was the scholar, bibliographer and diplomat Andreas Papadopoulos Vretos (1800–1876), well-known in French intellectual circles. From 1836 to 1841, Vretos, residing in Paris, studied at French schools, acquiring in this way an important asset for his future course: an excellent knowledge of the French language. He received a degree from the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Athens (1849) and went on to study law at Pisa.