The Rise of Nationalism in Europe — Notes

Before 1789 Europe had no nation-states: dynastic empires such as the Habsburg Empire held together peoples of many languages only through loyalty to the ruler.

The French Revolution (1789) transferred sovereignty from the monarch to the people. To create a collective identity the revolutionaries:

• spread the ideas of la patrie (fatherland) and le citoyen (citizen): one community of equal citizens governed by a constitution;
• adopted a tricolour flag in place of the royal standard;
• turned the Estates General into the elected National Assembly;
• composed new hymns, took oaths and commemorated martyrs in the name of the nation;
• set up a centralised administration with uniform laws, abolished internal customs duties, and adopted a uniform system of weights and measures;
• discouraged regional dialects and made the French of Paris the common language.

They saw it as France's task to free other European peoples from autocratic rule. Students and the middle classes formed Jacobin clubs elsewhere, and French armies carried nationalism abroad in the 1790s.

Napoleon ended democracy in France but spread revolutionary principles. The Civil Code of 1804 (Napoleonic Code):

• abolished privileges based on birth, established equality before the law and secured the right to property;
• was exported to the Dutch Republic, Switzerland, Italy and Germany.

Other changes: simplified administrative divisions; feudal system abolished and peasants freed from serfdom and manorial dues; guild restrictions removed in towns; transport and communication improved; uniform laws, standardised weights and measures and a common national currency helped businessmen and small producers.

Reaction. At first French armies were welcomed in many places as bringers of freedom. The welcome soon gave way to resentment because of higher taxes, censorship and forced conscription into the French armies.

Liberalism (Latin liber, free) was the creed of the new middle classes: individual freedom, equality before the law, government by consent, a constitution and representative government, and the inviolability of private property. In practice the vote was usually limited to property-owning men; women and men without property were excluded. Economic liberalism meant freedom of markets and no state restrictions on the movement of goods and capital.

The German lands had 39 states with their own currencies and measures. In 1834 the Zollverein, a customs union led by Prussia, abolished tariff barriers and reduced currencies from over thirty to two; a railway network followed.

Conservatism after 1815 stressed tradition: monarchy, Church, social hierarchy, property and family. At the Congress of Vienna (1815), hosted by Austrian Chancellor Duke Metternich, Britain, Russia, Prussia and Austria tried to undo the Napoleonic changes. The regimes were autocratic and used censorship.

Revolutionaries worked through secret societies. Giuseppe Mazzini (born Genoa, 1807) was exiled in 1831 and founded Young Italy (Marseilles) and Young Europe (Berne).

• July 1830, France: the Bourbon king was overthrown; a constitutional monarchy under Louis Philippe was set up. An uprising in Brussels led Belgium to break away from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands.
• Greece: part of the Ottoman Empire since the fifteenth century; war of independence from 1821; support from Greeks in exile and West Europeans who admired ancient Greece; the poet Lord Byron raised funds and went to fight, dying of fever in 1824; the Treaty of Constantinople (1832) recognised Greece as independent.
• Romanticism: emotion, intuition and shared heritage. Herder located German culture in the common people (das volk). The Grimm brothers collected folk tales. In Poland, partitioned by Russia, Prussia and Austria, Karol Kurpinski made folk dances (polonaise, mazurka) national symbols, and the clergy kept using Polish as a form of resistance after Russian was imposed; a rebellion in 1831 was crushed.
• Hunger and hardship: population growth, unemployment, migration to slums, competition from cheap English machine-made goods, feudal dues on peasants and rising food prices. Weavers in Silesia revolted against contractors in the mid-1840s.
• February 1848, Paris: food shortages and unemployment led to barricades; Louis Philippe fled; a Republic gave suffrage to all adult males above 21, guaranteed the right to work and set up national workshops.
• 1848, the liberals' bid for a nation: middle classes demanded a nation-state on parliamentary principles. The Frankfurt Parliament (Church of St Paul, May 1848) drafted a constitution and offered the crown to Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, who rejected it. Opposed by the aristocracy and military, and having lost the support of workers and artisans, it was disbanded by troops. Women could only watch from the public gallery.
• After 1848: serfdom and bonded labour were abolished in the Habsburg lands and Russia; the Hungarians gained more autonomy in 1867.

Germany. After 1848, Prussia led the movement for national unity. Chief minister Otto von Bismarck, with the Prussian army and bureaucracy, fought three wars in seven years, against Denmark (1864), Austria (1866) and France (1870–71). In January 1871 the Prussian king William I was proclaimed German Emperor at Versailles. The new empire modernised its money, banks, laws and courts, often on the Prussian pattern.

Italy. Italy was divided into seven states: the north under the Austrian Habsburgs, the centre under the Pope, the south under the Bourbon kings of Spain; only Sardinia-Piedmont had an Italian princely house. Mazzini's Young Italy aimed at a unitary republic, but revolts in 1831 and 1848 failed. Leadership passed to Sardinia-Piedmont under Victor Emmanuel II. Chief minister Cavour, a cautious statesman rather than a revolutionary, allied with France and defeated Austria in 1859. In 1860 Garibaldi led armed volunteers into the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and, with peasant support, drove out the Spanish rulers. In 1861 Victor Emmanuel II was proclaimed king of united Italy.

In Britain the nation-state was not the result of a sudden upheaval but of a slow process spread over centuries. People had seen themselves as English, Welsh, Scottish or Irish. The English nation, growing in wealth and power, extended its influence. In 1688 the English Parliament seized power from the monarchy. The Act of Union (1707) joined England and Scotland in the United Kingdom of Great Britain; Scottish culture was suppressed (Highland Scots lost the use of Gaelic and their traditional dress; many were expelled). Ireland, deeply divided between Catholics and Protestants, saw a failed revolt by Wolfe Tone's United Irishmen (1798) and was forcibly incorporated in 1801. A new British identity was promoted through the Union Jack, the national anthem and the English language.

Artists represented nations as female figures: an allegory (a person or a thing that stands for an abstract idea). The female figure did not stand for any particular woman; it gave the abstract nation a concrete form.

• Marianne (France): popular Christian name; red cap, tricolour, cockade; statues in public squares; image on coins and stamps.
• Germania (Germany): crown of oak leaves; painted by Philip Veit in 1848 and hung in the Church of St Paul where the Frankfurt Parliament met.

By the last quarter of the nineteenth century nationalism became narrow and aggressive, serving the limited aims of states; nationalist groups grew intolerant of each other, and the big powers used subject peoples' nationalism for imperial aims.

The Balkans (today's Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Greece, North Macedonia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia, Serbia and Montenegro) were a region of many landscapes and many peoples; many of their peoples were Slavs. Much of the region was under the Ottoman Empire, which was breaking up. Romantic nationalism led one subject people after another to break away. The new states claimed overlapping territory and were fiercely jealous of each other. Russia, Germany, England and Austria-Hungary competed over trade, colonies and naval and military might, each trying to extend control over the region. A series of wars followed, ending in the First World War (1914).

Colonised peoples also took up the idea of the nation: anti-imperial movements developed their own kinds of nationalism.