The Rise of Nationalism in Europe

1. Chapter at a Glance

In 1848 the French artist Frédéric Sorrieu made a series of prints imagining a world of "democratic and social republics": peoples of Europe and America, grouped as nations by their flags and national dress, march past the Statue of Liberty, offering homage to her. The idea that people should be organised into nation-states — states in which most citizens share a sense of common identity and history — grew in nineteenth-century Europe. This chapter traces how the French Revolution spread nationalism, how liberals, romantics and revolutionaries fought conservative regimes, how Germany and Italy were unified, how Britain was formed, how nations were visualised, and how nationalism turned aggressive and led towards the First World War.

2. The French Revolution and the Idea of the Nation

The first clear expression of nationalism came with the French Revolution of 1789. Political and constitutional changes transferred sovereignty from the monarch to the body of French citizens: the people would constitute the nation and shape its destiny.

• Ideas of la patrie (the fatherland) and le citoyen (the citizen) stressed a united community with equal rights under a constitution.
• A new French flag, the tricolour, replaced the royal standard; the Estates General was renamed the National Assembly.
• New hymns, oaths and martyrs were commemorated; a centralised administrative system made uniform laws for all citizens; internal customs duties were abolished and a uniform system of weights and measures adopted.
• Regional dialects were discouraged and French, as spoken in Paris, became the common language.
• Revolutionaries declared it France's mission to liberate the peoples of Europe from despotism, and Jacobin clubs spread in other countries.

Napoleon's reforms

Napoleon destroyed democracy in France, but administratively he made the system more rational and efficient. The Civil Code of 1804 — the Napoleonic Code — did away with privileges based on birth, established equality before the law and secured the right to property. In the Dutch Republic, Switzerland, Italy and Germany he simplified administrative divisions, abolished the feudal system, freed peasants from serfdom and manorial dues, removed guild restrictions in towns, and improved transport and communication. Businessmen welcomed uniform laws, standard weights and measures and a common currency. But people soon turned hostile because of higher taxes, censorship and forced conscription into French armies.

3. Making of Nationalism in Europe

In the mid-18th century there were no "Germany", "Italy" or "Switzerland" as we know them, only kingdoms, duchies and cantons. The Habsburg Empire that ruled over Austria-Hungary was a patchwork of regions and peoples speaking German, Hungarian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Croat, Italian and Romanian. A landed aristocracy dominated socially and politically, while the majority were peasants. Industrialisation created a new commercial class and a working-class population, and among the educated middle classes the ideas of national unity grew.

Liberal nationalism

Liberalism (from the Latin liber, free) meant freedom for the individual and equality before the law; politically, government by consent, the end of autocracy and clerical privileges, a constitution and representative government through parliament. But early liberals gave voting rights only to property-owning men; women and men without property were excluded. Economically, liberalism meant freedom of markets and abolition of state restrictions on the movement of goods and capital. In 1834 a customs union, the Zollverein, was formed at the initiative of Prussia and joined by most German states; it abolished tariff barriers and reduced the number of currencies from over thirty to two, and a network of railways stimulated mobility.

A new conservatism after 1815

After Napoleon's defeat in 1815, European governments followed conservatism: preserving traditional institutions — monarchy, the Church, social hierarchies, property and the family — while accepting some modernisation. At the Congress of Vienna (1815), hosted by the Austrian Chancellor Duke Metternich, Britain, Russia, Prussia and Austria undid most changes of the Napoleonic wars: the Bourbon dynasty was restored in France, states were set up on France's borders to prevent future expansion, and the German Confederation of 39 states was left in place. Autocratic regimes imposed censorship and did not tolerate criticism.

The revolutionaries

Liberal nationalists formed secret societies to train revolutionaries. Giuseppe Mazzini, born in Genoa in 1807, became a member of the Carbonari, was exiled in 1831, and founded Young Italy in Marseilles and Young Europe in Berne. He believed nations were the natural units of mankind and that Italy must be a unified republic. Metternich called him "the most dangerous enemy of our social order".

4. The Age of Revolutions: 1830–1848

• July 1830: in France the Bourbon kings were overthrown and a constitutional monarchy with Louis Philippe at its head was installed. Metternich remarked that "when France sneezes, the rest of Europe catches cold." The July Revolution sparked an uprising in Brussels, leading Belgium to break away from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands.
• Greek War of Independence (from 1821): Greeks fought the Ottoman Empire, supported by West European poets and artists who saw Greece as the cradle of European civilisation; the English poet Lord Byron died in 1824 while fighting. The Treaty of Constantinople (1832) recognised Greece as an independent nation.

Romanticism and national feeling

Romanticism was a cultural movement that criticised the glorification of reason and science and focused on emotions, intuition and mystical feelings. The German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder claimed that true German culture lay among the common people — das volk — and was revealed through folk songs, folk poetry and folk dances. In Poland, partitioned by Russia, Prussia and Austria, language became a weapon: when Russian was imposed after a failed 1831 uprising, the clergy used Polish for Church gatherings and religious instruction. Karol Kurpinski celebrated the national struggle through operas and music, turning folk dances like the polonaise and mazurka into national symbols. The Grimm brothers collected German folk tales, seeing this as part of the fight against French domination.

Hunger, hardship and the revolution of liberals (1848)

The 1830s were years of great economic hardship: population rose, there were more job-seekers than jobs, and small producers faced stiff competition from cheap machine-made goods from England. In 1845 weavers in Silesia revolted against contractors who had drastically reduced payments. In 1848, food shortages and widespread unemployment brought the people of Paris onto the roads; Louis Philippe fled, a National Assembly proclaimed a Republic, granted suffrage to all adult males above 21 and guaranteed the right to work.

At the same time, educated middle-class liberals demanded constitutionalism with national unification. In the German regions, elected representatives met at the Frankfurt parliament on 18 May 1848 — 831 members took their places in the Church of St Paul. They drafted a constitution for a German nation headed by a monarchy subject to a parliament. When the crown was offered to Friedrich Wilhelm IV, King of Prussia, he rejected it and joined other monarchs to oppose the assembly. The parliament was dominated by the middle classes, who resisted the demands of workers and artisans and lost their support; troops dissolved it in 1849. Women were denied voting rights and could only watch from the visitors' gallery. Though conservatives suppressed the 1848 movements, they could not restore the old order: monarchs began granting changes, serfdom and bonded labour were abolished in the Habsburg lands and Russia, and in 1867 Hungarians were granted more autonomy.

5. The Making of Germany and Italy

Germany — "blood and iron"

After 1848, nationalism moved away from democracy and revolution and was mobilised by conservatives to promote state power. Prussia led German unification under its chief minister Otto von Bismarck, using the Prussian army and bureaucracy. Three wars over seven years — with Denmark, Austria and France — ended in Prussian victory. In January 1871 the Prussian king, William I, was proclaimed German Emperor in a ceremony at the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. The new German state emphasised modernising currency, banking, legal and judicial systems, and Prussian practices became a model for the rest of Germany.

Italy — many paths to unity

Italy had been divided into seven states in the mid-19th century; only Sardinia-Piedmont was ruled by an Italian princely house. The north was under Austrian Habsburgs, the centre under the Pope, and the south under the Bourbon kings of Spain. Even the Italian language had many regional and local variations.

• Mazzini sought a unitary Italian republic, but revolutionary uprisings in 1831 and 1848 failed.
• Then King Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia-Piedmont tried to unify Italy through war. Chief Minister Count Cavour — neither a revolutionary nor a democrat, and who spoke French better than Italian — engineered a diplomatic alliance with France; Sardinia-Piedmont defeated Austria in 1859.
• Armed volunteers under Giuseppe Garibaldi (the Red Shirts) marched into South Italy and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1860 and drove out the Spanish rulers with the support of local peasants.
• In 1861 Victor Emmanuel II was proclaimed king of united Italy; Rome was added in 1870. Many peasants were illiterate and unaware of the liberal-nationalist ideology; some believed "La Talia" was Victor Emmanuel's wife.

The strange case of Britain

In Britain the nation-state was formed not by a sudden revolution but through a long process. The English parliament, which had seized power from the monarchy in 1688, was the instrument through which a nation-state with England at its centre came to be forged. The Act of Union (1707) between England and Scotland created the United Kingdom of Great Britain, and Scottish culture and institutions were suppressed. Ireland, deeply divided between Catholics and Protestants, saw a failed revolt led by Wolfe Tone and his United Irishmen (1798); Ireland was forcibly incorporated into the UK in 1801. New symbols — the British flag (Union Jack), the national anthem (God Save Our Noble King) and the English language — were promoted.

6. Visualising the Nation

Artists represented nations as female figures — an allegory, where an abstract idea is expressed through a person or thing. In France the female allegory was named Marianne (a popular Christian name), with the red cap, tricolour and cockade as symbols of liberty and the republic; her statues were set up in public squares and her image appeared on coins and stamps. Germania became the allegory of the German nation; she wears a crown of oak leaves, as the German oak stands for heroism.

7. Nationalism and Imperialism

By the last quarter of the 19th century nationalism became a narrow creed with limited ends. Major European powers manipulated the nationalist aspirations of subject peoples to further their own imperialist aims. The most serious source of tension was the Balkans — a region of geographical and ethnic variation (modern Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Greece, Macedonia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia, Serbia and Montenegro) whose inhabitants were broadly known as the Slavs. Much of it was under the Ottoman Empire; as the Ottoman Empire disintegrated and romantic nationalism spread, the region became explosive. The Balkan states were jealous of each other, and the big powers — Russia, Germany, England and Austro-Hungary — competed for control. This led to a series of wars and finally the First World War (1914). Meanwhile, colonised peoples elsewhere took up the idea of nationalism to oppose imperial domination, each developing its own anti-imperial nationalism.

8. Master Table: Key Terms

9. Master Summary Table

Chart — German currencies before and after the Zollverein:

10. Mind Map

11. Tips and Tricks

12. Important One-liners

• Frédéric Sorrieu made prints of a world of democratic republics in 1848.
• The Napoleonic Code was issued in 1804.
• The Zollverein was formed in 1834 under Prussia.
• Duke Metternich hosted the Congress of Vienna.
• Mazzini founded Young Italy.
• Greece became independent by the Treaty of Constantinople, 1832.
• Herder praised das volk.
• The Frankfurt parliament met in St Paul's Church in 1848.
• William I was proclaimed German Emperor in 1871.
• Victor Emmanuel II became king of united Italy in 1861.
• Marianne symbolised France; Germania symbolised Germany.

13. Previous-Year-Pattern Questions with Detailed Answers

14. Quick Revision Summary