The Rise of Nationalism in Europe

1. The dream of the nation: Sorrieu and Renan

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• Frédéric Sorrieu, 1848: four prints of a world of 'democratic and social Republics' — peoples of Europe and America march past the statue of Liberty (torch of Enlightenment, Charter of the Rights of Man), shattered absolutist symbols in the foreground. Nations appear by flag and costume: USA and Switzerland lead (already nation-states), France (tricolour) at the statue, then the German peoples with the black-red-gold flag — a liberal hope, since no united Germany existed; Christ, saints and angels symbolise fraternity among nations.
• Concept distinction: the modern state (centralised sovereign power over a defined territory) long pre-existed; a nation-state requires the majority of citizens to share a common identity and history — forged through struggle, not existing 'from time immemorial'. Ernst Renan (Sorbonne, 1882, 'What is a Nation?') rejects common language, race, religion or territory as the basis: a nation is 'a large-scale solidarity', its existence 'a daily plebiscite'; nations are a guarantee of liberty.

2. The French Revolution, Napoleon and the idea of the nation

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• 1789 — the first clear expression of nationalism: sovereignty passed from absolute monarch to the body of citizens. Identity-making measures: la patrie and le citoyen; the tricolour replacing the royal standard; the Estates General renamed the National Assembly; hymns, oaths, martyrs; uniform laws; internal customs abolished; uniform weights and measures; Parisian French the common language. Declared mission: 'liberate' Europe from despotism — spread by Jacobin clubs and by French armies entering Holland, Belgium, Switzerland and much of Italy in the 1790s.
• Napoleon's contradiction: he destroyed democracy in France yet rationalised administration on revolutionary principles. Civil Code of 1804 (Napoleonic Code): no birth privileges, equality before the law, right to property — exported with simplified administrative divisions, abolition of feudalism/serfdom and manorial dues, removal of guild restrictions. Businessmen saw uniform laws, standard weights and a common currency would ease trade.
• Mixed reception: welcomed first in Holland, Switzerland, Brussels, Mainz, Milan, Warsaw → hostility as taxation, censorship and forced conscription outweighed the gains (the Zweibrücken print shows French soldiers as oppressors).

3. Old order, new classes and liberal nationalism

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• Mid-18th-century Europe had no nation-states. The Habsburg Empire was a patchwork: Tyrol/Austria/Sudetenland, Bohemia (German-speaking aristocracy), Italian-speaking Lombardy and Venetia, Hungary (half Magyar), Galicia (Polish aristocracy), plus subject peasant peoples (Bohemians, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats, Roumans). Only tie: allegiance to the emperor.
• Classes: a numerically small landed aristocracy (estates + town-houses, French for diplomacy) over a peasant majority (west: tenants/small owners; east: serf-worked estates). Industrialisation (England from the later 18th c.; France/German states in the 19th) created working and middle classes — national unity was an idea of the educated, liberal middle class.
• Liberal nationalism (liber = free): individual freedom, equality before the law, government by consent, constitution, representative parliament, inviolable private property. Its limit: property-based male suffrage — only the Jacobins briefly enfranchised all adult males; the Napoleonic Code restored limited suffrage and made women legal minors under fathers/husbands.
• Economic liberalism: the 39 German states each had currency, weights, measures — Hamburg→Nuremberg (1833) meant 11 customs barriers at ~5% each; the elle of cloth varied from 53.5 to 65.6 cm by city. The zollverein (1834, Prussia's initiative) abolished tariff barriers and cut currencies from over thirty to two; railways knitted markets. Friedrich List: the zollverein should 'bind the Germans economically into a nation'.

4. Conservatism after 1815 and the revolutionaries

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• Conservatism: preserve monarchy, Church, hierarchy, property, family — but no return to pre-1789: modernisation (modern army, efficient bureaucracy, dynamic economy, end of feudalism/serfdom) could strengthen autocracy.
• Treaty of Vienna 1815 (Britain, Russia, Prussia, Austria; host Metternich, Austrian Chancellor): Bourbon restoration; buffer states around France — the kingdom of the Netherlands including Belgium, Genoa added to Piedmont; Prussia gained western lands and part of Saxony; Austria got northern Italy; Russia part of Poland; the German confederation of 39 states left untouched. Autocratic censorship followed; press freedom became the signature liberal demand.
• Revolutionaries: repression drove liberal-nationalists into secret societies; nation-states were seen as necessary to liberty. Giuseppe Mazzini (b. Genoa 1805): Carbonari; exiled 1831 for a rising in Liguria; founded Young Italy (Marseilles) and Young Europe (Berne); believed God intended nations as the natural units of mankind — Italy must be one unified republic. Metternich called him 'the most dangerous enemy of our social order'.

5. The age of revolutions: 1830, Greece and the Romantic imagination

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• July Revolution 1830: Bourbons overthrown; Louis Philippe constitutional monarch. Metternich: 'When France sneezes, the rest of Europe catches cold' — the Brussels rising followed and Belgium broke from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands.
• Greek war of independence (struggle from 1821 against the Ottomans): backed by exiled Greeks and philhellenes who saw Greece as the cradle of European civilisation; Byron raised funds and died of fever (1824); the Treaty of Constantinople (1832) recognised Greek independence.
• Romanticism: against the cult of reason — emotion, intuition, a shared cultural past as the nation's basis. Herder: true German culture lay with the common people — das volk; folk songs, poetry, dance carried the volksgeist; folklore-collecting recovered the national spirit and reached the illiterate. Grimm brothers: folktale collection (1812), 33-volume German dictionary; saw French domination as a threat to German culture. Delacroix's Massacre at Chios (1824) stirred sympathy for the Greeks.
• Partitioned Poland (Russia, Prussia, Austria): Kurpinski's operas made the polonaise and mazurka national symbols; after the crushed 1831 rebellion, the clergy made Polish a weapon — priests and bishops jailed or sent to Siberia for refusing to preach in Russian.

6. 1848: hunger revolts and the revolution of the liberals

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• Backdrop: population growth, unemployment, urban slums, small producers crushed by cheap machine-made English textile imports, feudal dues, bad harvests → pauperism. Silesian weavers' revolt, 1845 (journalist Wilhelm Wolff's account): contractors slashed payments; weavers sacked the contractor's mansion; eleven weavers shot when he returned with the army.
• February 1848, Paris: barricades; Louis Philippe fled; a Republic with suffrage for all adult males above 21, a guaranteed right to work, national workshops.
• The liberals' parallel revolution: in Germany, Italy, Poland and Austro-Hungary, the middle classes fused constitutionalism with national unification. 18 May 1848: 831 elected deputies convened the Frankfurt parliament in the Church of St Paul; their constitution — a German nation as monarchy subject to parliament — was offered to Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, who rejected it. Dominated by the middle classes, the parliament resisted workers' and artisans' demands, lost their support, and was disbanded by troops.
• Women in 1848: active in associations, newspapers and demonstrations, yet denied the vote — admitted to St Paul's only as gallery observers. The set debate: liberal deputy Carl Welcker (men and women made for 'different functions') vs feminist Louise Otto-Peters ('Liberty is indivisible!', 1849) and an anonymous 1850 reader ('the stupidest cattle-herder possesses the right to vote, simply because he is a man').
• Aftermath: conservatives won but conceded — serfdom and bonded labour abolished in the Habsburg dominions and in Russia; Hungarians granted more autonomy, 1867.

7. The making of Germany and Italy

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After 1848 nationalism shed its association with democracy and revolution; conservatives mobilised it for state power.

• Germany — 'can the army be the architect of a nation?' The 1848 liberal initiative was crushed by monarchy, military and the Prussian Junkers (large landowners). Prussia led unification: Otto von Bismarck, with the Prussian army and bureaucracy, won three wars over seven years — against Austria, Denmark and France. On 18 January 1871, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, Kaiser William I was proclaimed German Emperor; the Reich modernised currency, banking, legal and judicial systems on Prussian models.
• Italy: seven states; only Sardinia-Piedmont under an Italian princely house — north Austrian, centre Papal, south under the Bourbon kings of Spain. After Mazzini's failed risings (1831, 1848), unification fell to Victor Emmanuel II. Cavour — 'neither a revolutionary nor a democrat', spoke French better than Italian — made the French alliance that defeated Austria (1859). Garibaldi led the Expedition of the Thousand (1860) into the south — ~30,000 'Red Shirts' with peasant support. 1861: Victor Emmanuel II proclaimed king of united Italy; Rome joined only in 1870 when France (guarding the Papal States) withdrew. Elite character: southern peasants thought 'La Talia' was Victor Emmanuel's wife.

Figure	Role
Mazzini	Carbonari; Young Italy (Marseilles), Young Europe (Berne); risings failed 1831, 1848
Cavour	chief minister of Sardinia-Piedmont; French alliance; Austria beaten 1859
Garibaldi	Red Shirts; Expedition of the Thousand, 1860
Victor Emmanuel II	proclaimed king of united Italy, 1861
Bismarck	Prussia; three wars; Reich proclaimed at Versailles, Jan 1871
Friedrich Wilhelm IV	Prussian king who refused the Frankfurt crown, 1848

8. The strange case of Britain

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• The 'model' nation-state formed by long-drawn process, not revolution. Before the 18th century there was no British nation — only ethnic identities: English, Welsh, Scot, Irish. The English parliament, which seized power from the monarchy in 1688, forged a nation-state centred on England.
• Act of Union 1707 ('United Kingdom of Great Britain'): English influence imposed on Scotland — Scottish culture and institutions systematically suppressed; Catholic Highland clans repressed, forbidden to speak Gaelic or wear national dress, many driven from their homeland.
• Ireland: the English helped the Protestant minority dominate a largely Catholic country; after Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen failed (1798), Ireland was forcibly incorporated in 1801.
• A 'British nation' was propagated through dominant English culture — Union Jack, 'God Save Our Noble King', English language — the older nations surviving as subordinate partners.

9. Visualising the nation: Marianne and Germania

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• Artists personified nations as female allegories — the abstract nation in concrete form (as Liberty had her red cap and broken chain, Justice her blindfold and scales).
• Marianne (France): a popular Christian name underlining the people's nation; attributes of Liberty and the Republic — red cap, tricolour, cockade; statues in public squares; coins and stamps.
• Germania: crown of oak leaves (the German oak = heroism). Philip Veit's 1848 banner hung over the Frankfurt parliament; Hübner's fallen Germania (1850) mourned the crushed revolution; Clasen's Germania guarding the Rhine (1860). Britannia sits atop the globe in the empire-celebrating map — domination as national pride.

Attribute of Germania	Significance
Broken chains	being freed
Breastplate with eagle	strength of the German empire
Crown of oak leaves	heroism
Sword	readiness to fight
Olive branch around the sword	willingness to make peace
Black, red and gold tricolour	flag of the 1848 liberal-nationalists, banned by the Dukes of the German states
Rays of the rising sun	beginning of a new era

10. Nationalism, imperialism and the Balkans

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• After 1871 nationalism lost its liberal-democratic idealism and became a narrow creed with limited ends; nationalist groups grew intolerant and war-ready; the Great Powers manipulated subject peoples' nationalism for imperialist aims.
• The Balkans — the most serious tension after 1871: ethnically varied (modern Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Greece, Macedonia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia, Serbia, Montenegro), inhabitants broadly called Slavs, largely under a disintegrating Ottoman Empire whose reforms had failed. Nationalities broke away one by one, using history to claim 'long-lost independence'; the Balkan states were mutually jealous, while Russia, Germany, England and Austro-Hungary contended over trade, colonies and naval-military might → a series of wars and finally the First World War. Nationalism, aligned with imperialism, led Europe to disaster in 1914.
• The idea travels: colonised countries developed anti-imperial nationalist movements, their unity forged in confrontation with imperialism; European nationalism was nowhere replicated, but the nation-state became accepted as the natural and universal political form.

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Exam angles

Prelims:

• Chronology: 1789 Revolution → 1804 Napoleonic Code → 1814–15 Vienna → 1821 Greek struggle begins → 1830 July Revolution + Belgian breakaway → 1832 Treaty of Constantinople → 1834 zollverein → 1848 revolutions + Frankfurt parliament → 1859–1870 Italian unification (kingdom 1861, Rome 1870) → 1866–1871 German unification (Versailles, 18 Jan 1871) → 1905 Slav nationalism → 1914. British thread: 1688, 1707 Act of Union, 1798 Wolfe Tone, 1801 Ireland.
• Person–role pairings: Metternich — Vienna host, 'France sneezes'; Herder — das volk/volksgeist; Grimms — folktales, dictionary; List — zollverein economics; Renan — 'daily plebiscite'; Sorrieu — 1848 prints; Louise Otto-Peters — 'Liberty is indivisible'; Kurpinski — polonaise/mazurka; Delacroix — Massacre at Chios; Veit/Hübner/Clasen — Germania images; Wolff — Silesian account; Byron — Greek war (plus the unification table in §7).
• Allegory–attribute: Marianne (red cap, tricolour, cockade) vs Germania (oak crown, sword with olive branch, black-red-gold, broken chains, eagle breastplate, rising sun) vs Britannia (seated on the globe).
• Chapter-defined terms: absolutist, utopian, plebiscite, suffrage, conservatism, ideology, ethnic, allegory, feminist.
• Traps (mark FALSE): "Frankfurt crown offered to Bismarck/William I" (it was Friedrich Wilhelm IV) · "Belgium broke from France" (from the Netherlands) · "Greece independent in 1821" (treaty 1832) · "Italy complete in 1861" (Rome 1870) · "zollverein created one currency" (two) · "Napoleonic Code enfranchised women" (it made them minors) · "Vienna dissolved the German confederation" (left untouched).

Mains:

• 'Nationalism, aligned with imperialism, led Europe to disaster in 1914' — liberal-democratic idealism becoming a narrow intolerant creed after 1871; the Balkans as case study.
• Compare German and Italian unification: army-and-diplomacy from above (Prussia, Junkers, Bismarck) vs movement + monarchy (Mazzini–Cavour–Garibaldi); why 1848's liberal route failed and conservatives finished the task — and its elite character ('La Talia').
• Culture as nation-builder (the chapter's own question): Romanticism and volksgeist (Herder), folklore and language (Grimms; Polish clergy after 1831), music (Kurpinski), art (Delacroix, Sorrieu).
• Liberal ideology and its limits: the 1848 liberals' political, social and economic demands vs their exclusion of workers and women (Frankfurt gallery; Welcker vs Otto-Peters).
• Britain as counter-model: nation-state by long process and suppression of Scotland and Ireland, not revolution; the closing frame — anti-colonial nationalisms were inspired by, never replicas of, the European model.
• The French Revolution's identity-making toolkit (flag, citizenship, uniform law, common language, hymns, martyrs) as a template for how states manufacture national identity.