The Rise of Nationalism in Europe: Class 10 History · Chapter 1

A world of nations

Every Independence Day, people across India hoist the same tricolour and sing the same anthem, though they speak many languages and live very different lives. They feel they belong to one nation. Around 1750, almost nobody in Europe thought like this. People were the subjects of a king or an emperor, loyal to a ruler and a region rather than to a nation. This chapter tells how that changed during the nineteenth century, and why the change brought both freedom and war.

A good way in is a picture. In 1848 the French artist Frédéric Sorrieu published a set of four prints showing his dream of the future: a world in which every people governed itself as a democratic and social republic. The first print shows a long procession of the peoples of Europe and America winding past a statue of Liberty. Read it like a puzzle, and four clues stand out.

• Who is far ahead? The United States and Switzerland lead the march, well past the statue: by 1848 they were already nation-states.
• Who has just arrived? France, carrying its revolutionary tricolour, has reached Liberty's statue. The statue holds a torch, the light of reason, and the charter of the Rights of Man.
• Who is hoping? The German peoples follow with a black, red and gold flag, though no united Germany existed in 1848. Their flag stood for a liberal hope: one German nation-state under a democratic constitution. Behind them walk Austrians, Italians, Poles, the English, the Irish, Hungarians, Russians and others.
• What lies broken? In the foreground lie smashed crowns, sceptres and other emblems of absolutist monarchy, while Christ, saints and angels look down from the clouds as a sign of brotherhood between peoples.

Sorrieu's print captures the big change of the century: the rise of nationalism and of the nation-state. Strong states were not new. For a long time Europe had states in which a central government held supreme power over a clearly marked territory. What was new was the claim that a state should belong to a nation: a people who feel they share an identity, a history and a common descent, and who are citizens rather than subjects. That feeling was not ancient. It had to be built, through the efforts of leaders and ordinary people and, often, through struggle.

What, then, makes a group of people a nation? In 1882 the French thinker Ernest Renan gave a famous lecture at the Sorbonne in Paris on exactly this question.

1 The French Revolution and the Idea of the Nation

Before 1789, a peasant in Brittany and a merchant in Marseille had little in common except their king. They spoke different dialects, obeyed different local laws and paid different tolls. France was already one large territorial state, but it belonged to an absolute monarch. The Revolution of 1789 changed the owner. It declared that sovereignty, the final authority in the state, belonged to the citizens. The people, not a royal family, were now the nation and the masters of its future.

Declaring this was easy; making people feel it was harder. So the revolutionaries began, almost at once, to build a shared French identity. Play Fig. 1.2 to see their tools, grouped into four kinds.

• Ideas. The words la patrie (पितृभूमि, the fatherland) and le citoyen (the citizen) stressed a single community whose members enjoyed equal rights under a constitution.
• Symbols. A new tricolour flag replaced the old royal standard. Patriotic songs were written (one of them, La Marseillaise of 1792, is France's anthem today), oaths were sworn in public and martyrs of the Revolution were honoured, all in the nation's name.
• Institutions and one system. The old Estates-General was turned into an elected National Assembly. A centralised administration made the same laws for every citizen, abolished internal customs duties and dues, and adopted one system of weights and measures (the metric system).
• Language. Parisian French was made the standard tongue of the whole nation, and regional dialects were discouraged.

The revolutionaries also gave France a mission abroad. France, they said, had a duty to free Europe's peoples from tyrants and to help them become nations as well.

During the revolutionary wars of the 1790s, French armies marched into Holland, Belgium, Switzerland and much of Italy, carrying the idea of the nation with them. They often found friends waiting. Inspired by news from Paris, students and educated middle-class people in many European cities had formed Jacobin clubs of their own, and their campaigns had prepared the ground.

Napoleon's reforms and how Europe saw them

Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in 1799 and made himself emperor in 1804. Politically this was a step back: monarchy returned, and democracy in France was dead. In administration, though, he built on revolutionary principles, because a rational, efficient system made his state stronger. He then carried these reforms into the lands his armies conquered.

• The Civil Code of 1804, usually called the Napoleonic Code, swept away privileges that came from noble birth, made all men equal before the law and protected the right to property. French officials applied it in the lands France ruled.
• In the Dutch Republic, Switzerland, Italy and Germany, local government was reorganised into simpler units, feudalism was swept away, and peasants no longer had to serve as serfs or pay dues to their lords.
• In the towns, guilds lost their power to decide who could practise a trade.
• Everywhere, roads, postal services and other communications got better.

Many groups gained. Peasants, artisans, workers and new businessmen were freer than before. Traders and small manufacturers noticed something more: business flowed better where there was one law, one set of weights and measures and one currency. That lesson would later make them champions of national unity (see Section 2.2).

Feelings about French rule changed over time. Early on, in Holland and Switzerland and in cities such as Brussels, Mainz, Milan and Warsaw, many people greeted the French troops as liberators. Then the bill arrived. People paid higher taxes, read censored newspapers and saw their sons forced into French armies to fight Napoleon's wars across Europe, and they still had no political freedom. For many, the costs came to outweigh the reforms, as Fig. 1.3 shows.

2 The Making of Nationalism in Europe

Look at a map of Europe from the mid-eighteenth century and you will not find a single nation-state of today's kind. The lands we now call Germany, Italy and Switzerland were split into kingdoms, duchies and cantons, each ruler with a territory of his own. Eastern and central Europe were ruled by autocratic monarchs whose subjects often spoke different languages, belonged to different ethnic groups and felt no common culture.

The Habsburg Empire, ruled from Vienna, shows how mixed such a state could be. Three groups dominated it: German speakers, who formed the nobility of the Alpine lands (the Tyrol, Austria, the Sudetenland) and of Bohemia; Magyar speakers, about half the people of Hungary, where the rest spoke assorted dialects; and the Polish-speaking nobles of Galicia. The empire also held Lombardy and Venetia, whose people spoke Italian. Under the dominant groups lived a mass of peasant peoples, among them the Slovenes of Carniola, the Croats in the south, the Roumans (Romanians) of Transylvania in the east, and the Bohemians and Slovaks in the north. Play Fig. 1.4: what held such an empire together?

Differences like these did not easily produce political unity. Where, then, did nationalism and the dream of nation-states come from? To answer, we need to look at who held power in European society and who was rising to challenge them.

2.1 The Aristocracy and the New Middle Class

At the top of society on the continent stood a small landed aristocracy, which held both social and political power. Its members lived remarkably alike from one region to another. Far below them, and far more numerous, were the peasants. The comparison below sets out who was who.

The challenge to the nobles came from the towns. Wherever industry and trade grew, in the west and in parts of central Europe, towns swelled and a commercial class appeared that earned its living by making goods for the market. Factories created a working class. They also created middle classes of industrialists and businessmen, joined by professionals such as lawyers, doctors and teachers. England led the way from the later eighteenth century; France and parts of the German states followed in the nineteenth, while in central and eastern Europe these new groups stayed small until late in the century. Their educated, liberal members were the people most attracted to two linked goals: ending aristocratic privilege and uniting the nation.

2.2 What did Liberal Nationalism Stand for?

In the early nineteenth century, the call for national unity marched together with a set of ideas called liberalism. The word comes from the Latin liber, meaning free.

• Freedom and equality: freedom for the individual and the same law for everyone.
• Government by consent: rulers should govern with the agreement of the governed.
• No autocracy: an end to rule by an all-powerful monarch and to the special privileges of the clergy.
• Constitution and parliament: a written constitution and representative government through an elected parliament.
• Property: private property must be protected and could not be taken away.

Did equality before the law mean that everyone could vote? For most liberals it did not. Look at France, the first experiment in liberal democracy:

That is why, for more than a century after the Revolution, women and men without property kept campaigning for equal political rights, including suffrage, the right to vote.

In economics, liberals wanted free markets: the state should not block the movement of goods and capital. For the growing middle classes this was a strong demand, and the German lands show why. Napoleon had swept away hundreds of tiny German territories, and after 1815 there were 39 German states in a loose confederation. Each kept its own currency, its own weights and measures, and its own customs posts. A trader taking a cartload of goods across German territory had to stop again and again to pay duty, often charged by weight or size, and then convert between local units. Even the elle, a measure of cloth, stood for a different length in different towns.

No wonder the new commercial classes wanted one economic territory, with no barriers inside it, where goods, people and money could move freely. Try the toll-post model in Fig. 1.5 to feel the problem for yourself.

Prussia took the lead. In 1834 it brought most German states into a Zollverein (German for 'customs union'). Inside the union, goods crossed state lines without tariffs, and the jumble of more than thirty currencies shrank to two. Railways, spreading fast from the late 1830s, made travel and trade quicker still. Once traders' profits depended on one big German market, economic interest became an argument for political unity. This economic nationalism fed the wider national feeling of the time.

2.3 A New Conservatism after 1815

Napoleon's final defeat in 1815 put conservatives in charge across Europe. They had learnt a surprising lesson from him: modern methods could strengthen a king instead of weakening him. A modern army, an efficient bureaucracy, a lively economy and the end of feudalism and serfdom all made an autocratic state more effective. So most conservatives did not try to rebuild the world before 1789. What they defended were the old pillars of state and society: the monarchy, the Church, the ranks of society, property and the family.

Who would decide Europe's future after Napoleon? The four powers that had beaten him together (Britain, Russia, Prussia and Austria) sent delegates to a congress at Vienna in 1814–15, hosted by the Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich.11Metternich was Austria's foreign minister during the Congress and became its chancellor in 1821. The textbook calls him the Austrian Chancellor, Duke Metternich. Their aim, written into the Treaty of Vienna of 1815, was to reverse most of what the Napoleonic wars had changed. Play Fig. 1.6 to see the main decisions.

Taken together, the decisions served one purpose: to put back the monarchs whom Napoleon had toppled and to build a new conservative order in Europe.

How did the new autocratic regimes keep control? Mainly by silencing critics. Any criticism of the ruler was treated as an attack on his right to rule. Newspapers, books, plays and even songs were censored, above all anything that recalled the liberty and freedom of 1789. Liberals did not forget the Revolution, though, and a free press became one of the loudest demands of the liberal-nationalists who opposed the new order.

2.4 The Revolutionaries

With censors and police watching, open campaigning was dangerous, so many liberal-nationalists went underground. Across Europe, secret societies trained young revolutionaries and spread their ideas in hiding. Their enemy was the order created at Vienna: they wanted to bring down the restored monarchies and win liberty, and most believed that freedom would be complete only when each people had a nation-state of its own.

The best known of them was the Italian Giuseppe Mazzini, born in Genoa in 1805. As a young man he joined the Carbonari, a secret revolutionary society, and in 1831 he was forced into exile for plotting a rising in Liguria. He went on to found two more underground societies: Young Italy, in Marseilles, and later Young Europe, in Berne, which drew young radicals from Poland, France, Italy and the German states.22A print of the time dates the founding of Young Europe to 1833 (the date in the textbook's picture caption); its founding pact was signed in Berne in April 1834.

For Mazzini, nations were part of God's plan: each people was meant to form its own natural unit. A divided Italy of small states and kingdoms went against that plan. It had to become a single republic, joined in a wider brotherhood of nations, because only unity could make Italians free. His example inspired secret societies in Germany, France, Switzerland and Poland. Conservatives feared him, since he attacked kings everywhere and preached democratic republics; Metternich called him the most dangerous enemy of the social order.

3 The Age of Revolutions: 1830–1848

Who led the revolutions of these years? Not peasants or factory hands, but the educated middle-class elite: professors and schoolteachers, clerks, and merchants and others from the business class. As conservative governments tightened their grip, these liberal-nationalists turned to revolution in the Italian and German states, the Ottoman Empire's provinces, Ireland and Poland.

France struck first. In July 1830 its liberal revolutionaries overthrew Charles X, king of the Bourbon dynasty that had been restored after 1815, and put Louis Philippe on the throne as a constitutional monarch. Within weeks Brussels rose too, and Belgium broke away from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands that the Vienna settlement had created. No wonder Metternich is said to have remarked:

One struggle stirred educated people right across Europe: the Greek war of independence. Why should a war in a corner of the Ottoman Empire matter so much in Paris and London? Partly because of how Europeans saw Greece. Poets and artists hailed it as the cradle of European civilisation, admired its ancient culture and rallied public opinion behind its fight against a Muslim empire. Greeks living in exile sent help, and so did many West Europeans. The English poet Lord Byron raised money and went to fight himself.

3.1 The Romantic Imagination and National Feeling

Think of how a patriotic song or poem can move you more than a page of facts. Nineteenth-century nationalists understood this well: alongside wars and treaties, culture shaped national feeling. The Romantics, artists and writers of the early nineteenth century, were suspicious of the Enlightenment's faith in cold reason and science. Feelings, intuition and a sense of mystery mattered more to them. Above all they looked to the past: a nation, they believed, grew out of a common heritage that its people could feel together.

The French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix took up the Greek cause in The Massacre at Chios (1824), a huge canvas about the killing of Greek islanders on Chios in 1822. He did not paint the battle. He painted its victims: exhausted, wounded families, mothers and children in the foreground, helpless beneath an Ottoman horseman. Rich, vivid colours pull the eye to their suffering. A viewer in Paris was meant to feel pity and anger, and to take the side of the Greeks.

Where should one look for a nation's soul? Not in palaces, said Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), a German philosopher, but among ordinary country people, das Volk. Their songs, poems and dances carried the Volksgeist, the spirit of the nation. Recording that folk culture before it vanished became a patriotic duty.

Folk tales and the vernacular, the everyday spoken language, had a practical use as well. Besides reviving what people saw as an ancient national spirit, they could reach people who could not read. Few could read a pamphlet, but almost anyone could listen to a story or sing a song in their own speech.

Poland is the clearest case. Between 1772 and 1795, in three stages, Russia, Prussia and Austria carved Poland up among themselves until no Polish state was left. What survived was a people with its music and its language. Operas and music by the composer Karol Kurpiński celebrated the national struggle, and the polonaise and the mazurka, once simply folk dances, became symbols of the nation.

Language turned into a battlefield. Under Russian rule, Polish was pushed out of the schools and Russian imposed in its place. After an armed rising against Russia was crushed in 1831, many Polish priests answered by holding church gatherings and teaching religion only in Polish. Many priests and bishops were jailed or exiled to Siberia for refusing to preach in Russian. Speaking Polish became an act of defiance against Russian rule. Fig. 1.8 sums up the three routes.

3.2 Hunger, Hardship and Popular Revolt

The 1830s were years of great hardship in Europe. Three pressures came together:

• Too many people, too few jobs. The population grew enormously in the first half of the century. Job seekers outnumbered jobs, and people from the countryside poured into cities, where they crowded into slums.
• Competition from machines. Small producers in towns could not match cheap machine-made goods imported from England, which had industrialised earlier. Cloth was the worst case, since on the continent it was still made mostly at home or in small workshops with few machines.
• Old burdens in the countryside. Where nobles still held power, peasants struggled under feudal dues and obligations.

Add a jump in food prices or one bad harvest, and poverty spread quickly through town and country. 1848 was such a year. In Paris, hunger and joblessness drove crowds into the streets; they threw up barricades, and Louis Philippe fled the country. The new National Assembly made France a republic again. Every man aged 21 or more could now vote, the right to work was guaranteed, and national workshops were opened to employ the jobless.

3.3 1848: The Revolution of the Liberals

1848 brought not one revolution but two. Beside the revolts of the hungry ran a revolution of the educated middle classes. In France it had already won in February: the king abdicated and a republic was proclaimed with votes for all men. Where there was no nation-state yet, in Germany, Italy, Poland and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, liberal men and women had a double programme: a constitution and national unity. The unrest of the poor gave them their chance to push for both.

In the German lands, political associations of middle-class professionals, businessmen and well-off artisans met in Frankfurt and resolved to elect a National Assembly for the whole of Germany. It opened on 18 May 1848, when hundreds of elected deputies walked in a festive procession to the Church of St Paul in Frankfurt.44The textbook gives the number of deputies as 831. Counts differ, because members came and went during the assembly's life. Follow what happened next in Fig. 1.9.

Why did it collapse? Look at who stood against it and who was left to defend it. Against it stood a king who would not take a crown from an elected assembly, and other monarchs, nobles and generals who were regaining their confidence. For it stood almost nobody. Its middle-class deputies had brushed aside the demands of workers and artisans, so these groups had no reason to save it. When troops were sent in, the assembly had to break up.

Look again at the gallery in the figure. The women there had earned a place in the hall: for years they had run their own political clubs, started newspapers, and marched and spoken at liberal meetings. Yet they had no vote in the elections to the Assembly, and inside St Paul's Church they could only watch. Within the liberal movement, women's political rights were a bitterly divisive issue, as three voices from the time show.

Did 1848 achieve nothing, then? Not quite. The old order could not simply be restored. Kings had learnt that crushing one revolt only prepared the next, and that some reforms were the price of peace. So the autocracies of central and eastern Europe now adopted changes the west had made before 1815: serfdom and bonded labour ended in the Habsburg lands (1848) and in Russia (1861), and in 1867 the Habsburgs granted the Hungarians a large measure of self-rule.

4 The Making of Germany and Italy

After 1848, nationalism in Europe parted company with democracy and revolution. Conservative statesmen learnt to use national feeling for their own purposes: to build up the power of the state and to dominate Europe. The way Germany and Italy were finally unified shows this clearly.

4.1 Germany – Can the Army be the Architect of a Nation?

The failure at Frankfurt taught a hard lesson: German unity would not come from parliaments. The monarchy and the army, supported by Prussia's great landowners, the Junkers, had crushed the liberal attempt of 1848. Leadership of the national cause now passed to Prussia itself, and to the man who became its chief minister in 1862, Otto von Bismarck. He built Germany with the Prussian army and bureaucracy, as his most famous words promised.

Between 1864 and 1871 Prussia fought and won three wars, against Denmark, Austria and France, and each victory brought more German states under its control. Play Fig. 1.10 to watch the new state take shape.

The new empire was born on enemy soil. On 18 January 1871, with the war against France not yet over, King William I of Prussia was proclaimed Kaiser (emperor) of Germany in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, near Paris. The audience was made up of German princes, army officers and Prussian ministers, Bismarck among them; no elected representatives of the people took part. Holding the ceremony in the palace of the French kings was a deliberate humiliation of France.

Prussia dominated the new Germany. Its king was the emperor and its chief minister became the imperial chancellor. As the empire modernised Germany's currency, banking, laws and courts, Prussian ways of doing things often became the model for the rest of the country.

4.2 Italy Unified

Italy's problem looked like Germany's: one people divided among several dynastic states, part of it ruled by the multi-national Habsburg Empire. There was not even one standard Italian language, only many regional varieties. On the eve of unification, in 1858, there were seven states:

In the 1830s Mazzini spread his plan for a single Italian republic through Young Italy, but revolutionary risings in 1831 and again in 1848 failed. Leadership then passed to a monarchy: Sardinia-Piedmont, whose king, Victor Emmanuel II, meant to unite Italy by war. Piedmont's ruling class had its own reasons, since a united Italy would bring them economic growth and political dominance.

Three very different men did the work. Count Camillo di Cavour, Piedmont's chief minister, was a cautious aristocrat, no revolutionary and no democrat; like many rich, educated Italians, he was more at home in French than in Italian. His weapon was diplomacy: he won France as an ally, and in 1859 their joint armies beat Austria. Giuseppe Garibaldi brought armed volunteers, who fought beside the regular troops in 1859; in 1860 he led them south, won over the peasants of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and drove out its Bourbon kings. Victor Emmanuel II took the prize: in 1861 he was proclaimed king of a united Italy. Play Fig. 1.11.

A kingdom of Italy now existed, but did Italians? Most people could not read, and liberal-nationalist ideas meant nothing to them. In the south, peasants who had cheered Garibaldi had often never heard the word Italia at all. A Piedmontese statesman put the remaining task in a phrase:

4.3 The Strange Case of Britain

Britain is sometimes held up as the model nation-state. Its story, though, has no barricades, no Frankfurt parliament and no Bismarck. Ask someone living in these islands in 1650 who they were, and they would have said English, Welsh, Scottish or Irish, never British. Each of these ethnic groups had its own culture and political traditions. A British nation grew only slowly, over more than a century, and it grew around England.

England's growing wealth and power let it extend its influence over its neighbours. Its key tool was its parliament, which had won supremacy over the monarchy in 1688 after a long struggle. Play Fig. 1.12 to see the steps.

Scotland and Ireland paid a heavy price for union:

• Scotland (1707). The Act of Union created the United Kingdom of Great Britain. On paper it was a union; in practice English members dominated the new parliament, and England's influence prevailed. A British identity grew at the cost of Scotland's own culture and institutions. When the Catholic clans of the Highlands rose to assert their independence, they were crushed with great brutality. Highlanders were then banned from speaking Gaelic or wearing their traditional dress, and many were forced off their land.
• Ireland (1801). The English backed Ireland's Protestants in ruling a mainly Catholic country, and crushed Catholic revolts. In 1798 Wolfe Tone's United Irishmen rose against British rule and failed. Three years later Ireland was forcibly made part of the United Kingdom.

What held the new nation together was English culture, presented as British. Its symbols were pushed hard. The Union Jack of 1801 combined the crosses of St George (England), St Andrew (Scotland) and St Patrick (Ireland), with nothing for Wales; God Save the King became the national anthem; and English pushed aside Gaelic and Welsh. Scotland, Wales and Ireland lived on only as junior partners.

5 Visualising the Nation

In India you may have seen Bharat Mata, the nation pictured as a mother; the next chapter tells her story. European artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used the same idea. A king can be shown by his portrait, but a nation is an idea, with no face of its own. So artists personified it: they gave the country a human form, usually a woman's. She was not any real woman. She turned an abstract idea into something people could see, recognise and love. Such a figure is an allegory.

The idea was not new. French revolutionary artists had shown Liberty, Justice and the Republic as women, each identified by her objects, much as Indian images identify a goddess by what she holds. You could spot Liberty by her red cap or a broken chain; Justice wore a blindfold and held a pair of scales. Nineteenth-century artists applied the same method to whole nations.

In 1848 the painter Philipp Veit made a large Germania on a cotton banner, to hang high above the deputies in Frankfurt's Church of St Paul, where the parliament met. She stands upright and calm. Every object she carries or wears is a symbol, and together they make an argument about what the new Germany should be. Use Fig. 1.13 to decode them one at a time.

6 Nationalism and Imperialism

Compare Sorrieu's print of 1848, with its friendly procession of nations, to Europe thirty years later. The generous, liberal-democratic hopes of the early century had faded. In their place came a narrower nationalism that cared only for its own nation's interests, distrusted its neighbours and was quick to reach for weapons. The great powers, meanwhile, exploited the national hopes of Europe's subject peoples to serve their own imperialist ambitions.

After 1871 the worst danger zone in Europe lay in the south-east: the Balkans, a region of varied landscapes and many ethnic groups. It covers what are today Greece, Albania, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovenia. Many of its people were Slavs, and the textbook groups the region's inhabitants broadly as Slavs. Much of the Balkans was ruled by the Ottoman Empire. Why did it become so explosive? Four forces worked together.

• A sick empire. The Ottoman state spent the century trying to modernise and reform itself, and largely failed. Its European subjects slipped away one after another, each declaring independence.
• History as a weapon. Romantic nationalism taught each Balkan people to base its claims on nationality. Each pointed to a past in which it had been free, before foreign conquerors took over, so its rebels felt they were reclaiming a freedom lost long ago.
• Rivals next door. The new Balkan states envied and feared one another, and each wanted to grow at its neighbours' expense.
• Great-power rivalry. Russia, Germany, Britain and Austria-Hungary were already competing for trade, colonies and naval and military strength. In the Balkans each tried to block the others' influence and expand its own.

The result was a string of Balkan wars, and then a world war. The spark came in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, on 28 June 1914, when a young Bosnian Serb nationalist shot dead Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Within weeks the great powers were at war. Nationalism, joined to imperialism, had led Europe to disaster.

Europe's empires also planted the seeds of their own end. In the lands they had colonised during the nineteenth century, people began to resist foreign rule. Their movements were nationalist too: they aimed at independent nation-states, and the experience of fighting imperial rule itself gave them a sense of being one people. Each movement grew its own kind of nationalism rather than copying Europe's. Even so, by the twentieth century almost everyone took it for granted that the world should be divided into nation-states. India's freedom struggle, the subject of the next chapter, is one such story.