CBSE Class 10 Social Science Advanced The Rise of Nationalism in Europe Notes Set 01

The Rise of Nationalism in Europe

Introduction

In the nineteenth century nationalism became a powerful force that changed both the political map and the thinking of Europe. The old multi-national dynastic empires gave way to nation-states. This chapter follows how a feeling of belonging together, a shared history and a common culture grew into nation-states in the period after the 1830s.

1.1 The Dream in Frederic Sorrieu's Painting

The French artist Frederic Sorrieu pictured his dream of a world of democratic and social republics in a series of four prints. The first print shows the following.

1. A long procession of men and women of every age and class from Europe and America walks past the statue of Liberty and pays homage to it.
2. The figure of Liberty holds the torch of Enlightenment in one hand and the Charter of the Rights of Man in the other.
3. In the foreground lie the broken symbols of absolutist rule.
4. In this utopian vision, the peoples of the world are grouped as separate nations, each recognisable by its flag and its national dress.

1.2 The French Revolution and the Idea of the Nation

Steps taken by the French revolutionaries

Before the Revolution France was a realm ruled by a monarch. The revolutionaries tried to build the feeling that the people themselves were the nation. They did this in the following ways.

1. The ideas of la patrie (the fatherland) and le citoyen (the citizen) stressed a single community whose members had equal rights under one constitution.
2. The royal flag was replaced by the tricolour. New hymns were written, oaths were sworn and martyrs were remembered, all in the name of the nation.
3. The Estates General was chosen by the body of active citizens and renamed the National Assembly.
4. A single centralised administration made the same laws for every citizen living inside the territory.
5. Internal customs duties and dues were removed, and one system of weights and measures was introduced.
6. Regional dialects were discouraged; French as spoken and written in Paris became the language of the whole nation.
7. The revolutionaries declared that France had a mission and a destiny to free the peoples of Europe from despotism.

The Civil Code of 1804 (Napoleonic Code)

Napoleon carried the reforms he had made in France into the lands he conquered.

1. His code ended every privilege based on birth, made all citizens equal before the law and protected the right to property.
2. In the Dutch Republic, Switzerland, Italy and Germany he made administrative divisions simpler, ended the feudal system and freed peasants from serfdom and manorial dues.
3. Guild restrictions in towns were removed.
4. Transport, communication and banking were improved. Peasants, workers, traders and businessmen welcomed these changes.

Criticism of French rule

In the conquered regions the local people reacted in different ways. At first they were enthusiastic, but this turned into hostility when they saw that the new administration did not bring political freedom. Heavier taxes, press censorship and forced recruitment into the French army for Napoleon's wars outweighed the benefits of the reforms.

1.3 The Making of Nationalism in Europe

In the middle of the eighteenth century there was no Germany, Italy or united Switzerland. These lands were broken into kingdoms, duchies and cantons, each ruled by its own rulers over people of many kinds. The people spoke different languages, belonged to different ethnic groups and did not think of themselves as one community. The only common bond among them was loyalty to the emperor.

The aristocracy and the new middle class

1. The landed aristocracy was the dominant class in society and politics. Its members owned country estates and town houses, spoke French (the language of high society and diplomacy), were often related by marriage and shared one way of life that cut across regions. They were few in number; most Europeans were peasants.
2. In western and parts of central Europe, factories and trade made towns grow, and a commercial class producing for the market came up.
3. Two new groups arose: the working class and a middle class of industrialists, businessmen and professionals. Among the educated, liberal middle class the idea of national unity, together with the end of aristocratic privilege, became popular.

What did liberal nationalism stand for?

1. The word liberalism comes from the Latin liber, meaning free. For the new middle classes it meant freedom for the individual and equality of all before the law. In politics it meant government by consent. After the French Revolution it stood for an end to autocracy and the privileges of the clergy, a constitution and representation through parliament.
2. Equality before the law did not mean the right to vote for all. Only for a short time, under the Jacobins, did all adult men vote. Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women and men without property organised movements to demand equal political rights.
3. In economics, liberalism meant free markets and the removal of state limits on the movement of goods and capital, which the rising middle class strongly wanted.
4. Napoleon's arrangements had turned many tiny principalities into a confederation of 39 states in the German region. Each state had its own currency and its own weights and measures, so trade needed slow and tiring calculations.
5. In 1834 Prussia took the lead in forming a customs union, the Zollverein, which most German states joined. It removed tariff barriers and cut the number of currencies from over thirty to two. Railways added to mobility and tied economic interests to national unity. The economist Friedrich List said that its aim was to bind the Germans together as an economic nation.

A new conservatism after 1815

After Napoleon's fall, conservatives wanted to keep the established institutions of state and society, such as the monarchy, the Church, social hierarchy, property and the family. They did not want a return to the society of the days before the Revolution. Napoleon's reforms had shown them that modernisation could make a monarchy stronger and its state power more efficient.

The Vienna Congress, 1815

The European powers that had defeated Napoleon met at Vienna in 1815 and drew up a settlement, the Treaty of Vienna, intended to undo most of the changes caused by the Napoleonic wars. The main points were:

1. The Bourbon dynasty, thrown out in the French Revolution, was brought back, and France lost the lands Napoleon had annexed.
2. A ring of states was set up around France to stop it from expanding again: the Kingdom of the Netherlands (including Belgium) in the north and Genoa added to Piedmont in the south.
3. Prussia received new lands on its western border and Austria was given control of northern Italy.
4. The German confederation of 39 states created by Napoleon was left as it was.
5. In the east, Russia received part of Poland and Prussia received part of Saxony.
6. The chief aim was to restore the monarchies that Napoleon had overthrown and to set up a new conservative order in Europe.

Criticism of the conservative regimes

1. The regimes set up in 1815 were autocratic. They did not tolerate criticism or dissent and tried to suppress anything that questioned their right to rule.
2. Most of them passed censorship laws to control what newspapers, books, plays and songs could say, because these carried the ideas of liberty and freedom linked with the French Revolution.

The revolutionaries

In this period a revolutionary was a person committed to opposing the monarchical systems set up after Vienna and to fighting for liberty. Most revolutionaries also thought that creating nation-states was necessary for that fight.

Giuseppe Mazzini was born in Genoa in 1807 and joined the secret society of the Carbonari. At the age of 24 he was exiled for trying to start a revolution in Liguria (1831). He then founded two more secret societies, Young Italy at Marseilles and Young Europe at Berne, whose members were young men from Poland, France, Italy and the German states. He believed that God meant nations to be the natural units of humankind, so Italy could not stay a patchwork of small states. It had to be made into one unified republic within a larger alliance of nations; only this could be the basis of Italian liberty.

1.4 The Age of Revolutions, 1830 to 1848

As conservative governments tried to strengthen their grip, liberalism and nationalism came to be linked with revolution in several places. The revolutions were led by educated, liberal, middle-class nationalists, including professors, schoolteachers, clerks and members of the business middle class.

1. France, July 1830: The Bourbon kings, who had come back with the support of the conservatives, were overthrown by liberal revolutionaries, who set up a constitutional monarchy under Louis Philippe.
2. Brussels: The July Revolution set off an uprising in Brussels, and Belgium broke away from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands.
3. Greece: Greece had been part of the Ottoman Empire since the fifteenth century. The growth of revolutionary nationalism in Europe encouraged a Greek struggle for independence, which began in 1821. The Greek nationalists were helped by Greeks living in exile and by many West Europeans who admired ancient Greek culture. Poets and artists praised Greece as the cradle of European civilisation and built up public opinion against a Muslim empire. The English poet Lord Byron raised funds, went to fight and died of fever in 1824. The Treaty of Constantinople of 1832 finally recognised Greece as an independent nation.

Romanticism and national feeling

1. Wars and conquests did much to arouse national feeling, but culture, art, poetry, stories and music also played a part.
2. Romantic artists and poets criticised the worship of reason and science. They gave importance to feeling, intuition and mystical emotion, and wanted to build a nation on a shared heritage and a common cultural past.
3. The German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) said that the true German culture was to be found among the common people, das Volk.
4. Folk songs, folk poetry and folk dances were collected to bring out the real spirit of the nation.
5. The stress on the local language and the gathering of folklore was meant not only to recover an old national spirit but also to carry the nationalist message to a mostly illiterate audience.
6. Poland had disappeared as an independent state, yet its national feeling lived on through music and language. Karol Kurpinski glorified the national struggle in his operas and turned folk dances such as the polonaise and the mazurka into nationalist symbols.

Hunger, hardship and popular revolt

1. The 1830s were a time of great economic hardship. Population had grown enormously in the first half of the century.
2. In 1848, food shortages and widespread unemployment drove the people of Paris onto the streets. Barricades went up and Louis Philippe had to flee. The National Assembly declared a republic, gave the vote to all adult men above 21 and guaranteed the right to work. National workshops were opened to give jobs.
3. In 1845 the weavers of Silesia rose against the contractors who gave them raw material and orders for finished cloth but cut their payment sharply.

1848: the revolution of the liberals

In February 1848 in France the monarch gave up the throne and a republic based on universal male suffrage was declared. In other parts of Europe that had no nation-states yet, liberal middle-class men and women joined their demand for a constitution to the demand for national unity.

The Frankfurt Parliament. Many political associations in the German regions came together at Frankfurt and decided to vote for an all-German National Assembly. On 18 May 1848, 831 elected representatives walked in a festive procession to take their seats in the Frankfurt Parliament, which met in the Church of St Paul. They drafted a constitution for a German nation headed by a monarchy that was answerable to a parliament.

Why it failed.
1. Friedrich Wilhelm IV, King of Prussia, rejected the offer and joined other monarchs in opposing the assembly.
2. As the aristocracy and the army grew stronger in opposition, the assembly lost its social support. The parliament was dominated by the middle classes, who rejected the demands of workers and artisans and so lost their backing.
3. Giving political rights to women was a disputed matter among liberals, and women were not allowed to vote in the election to the assembly.

Results.
1. Conservative forces managed to crush the liberal movements of 1848 but could not bring back the old order.
2. After 1848 the autocratic monarchies of central and eastern Europe began to bring in the changes that western Europe had already made before 1815.
3. In 1867 the Habsburg rulers gave the Hungarians more autonomy.

1.5 The Making of Germany and Italy

Germany: can the army be the architect of a nation?

1. Nationalist feeling was strong among middle-class Germans, who tried in 1848 to join the regions of the German confederation into a nation-state ruled by an elected parliament. This attempt was put down by the monarchy and the army.
2. Prussia then took over the leadership of the movement. Its chief minister, Otto von Bismarck, who followed the policy of blood and iron, planned the process with the help of the Prussian army and bureaucracy. Three wars over seven years, against Austria, Denmark and France, ended in Prussian victory and completed unification (1866-71).
3. In January 1871 the Prussian king William I was proclaimed German Emperor. On 18 January 1871 an assembly met in the unheated Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Versailles to proclaim the new German Empire under Kaiser William I of Prussia.
4. The new state put strong emphasis on modernising its currency, banking, legal and judicial systems.

Italy unified

1. In the middle of the nineteenth century Italy was divided into seven states. Only one of them, Sardinia-Piedmont, was ruled by an Italian princely house. Even the Italian language had no single form and varied from region to region.
2. In the 1830s Giuseppe Mazzini worked out a programme for a united Italian republic and set up the secret society Young Italy to spread his goals. The revolutionary uprisings of 1831 and 1848 failed, so the task passed to Sardinia-Piedmont under King Victor Emmanuel II, who aimed to unite the Italian states through war.
3. Chief Minister Cavour, who was neither a revolutionary nor a democrat, made a clever diplomatic alliance with France. With it Sardinia-Piedmont defeated the Austrian forces in 1859. Besides regular troops, many armed volunteers led by Giuseppe Garibaldi joined in. In 1860 they marched into south Italy and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and won the support of the local peasants, which helped them drive out the Spanish rulers. In 1861 Victor Emmanuel II was proclaimed king of united Italy.

The strange case of Britain

1. In Britain the nation-state came about through a long process, not a sudden revolution. There was no British nation before the eighteenth century; people thought of themselves first as English, Welsh, Scots or Irish.
2. As the English nation became richer and more powerful, it extended its influence over the other nations of the islands. The English parliament, which took power from the monarchy in 1688 after a long conflict, was the tool through which a nation-state with England at its centre was shaped.
3. The Act of Union (1707) between England and Scotland created the 'United Kingdom of Great Britain'. In effect England imposed its influence on Scotland, the British parliament came to be dominated by English members, and Scotland's own culture and political institutions were steadily suppressed.
4. Ireland met a similar fate. It was deeply split between Catholics and Protestants, and the English helped the Protestants to gain control over a mostly Catholic country. After a failed revolt led by Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen (1798), Ireland was forcibly made part of the United Kingdom in 1801.
5. A new British nation was built by spreading the dominant English culture. The Union Jack, the national anthem (God Save Our Noble King) and the English language were actively promoted, while the older nations survived only as junior partners.

1.6 Visualising the Nation

1. Artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gave an abstract idea like the nation a form by personifying it: the country was shown as a person, usually a woman.
2. The woman chosen did not stand for any real woman; she was an allegory that gave the idea of the nation a visible shape.
3. In France the figure was named Marianne, a common Christian name, to suggest a people's nation. Her features came from Liberty and the Republic: the red cap, the tricolour and the cockade. Statues of Marianne were put up in public squares to remind people of national unity, and her image appeared on coins and stamps.
4. Germania became the allegory of the German nation. She is shown wearing a crown of oak leaves, because the German oak stands for heroism.

Common symbols used in such pictures

1.7 Nationalism and Imperialism

1. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century the big European powers were using the nationalist hopes of subject peoples to advance their own imperial aims.
2. After 1871 the worst source of nationalist tension in Europe was the Balkans, a region of varied geography and peoples (modern Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Greece, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia, Serbia and Montenegro) whose people were broadly called Slavs. Much of it was under the Ottoman Empire.
3. Romantic nationalism spread in the Balkans while the Ottoman Empire was breaking up, which made the region explosive. One by one its European subject peoples broke away and declared independence.
4. Throughout the century the Ottoman Empire tried to strengthen itself through modernisation and internal reform, with very little success.
5. The Balkans became a zone of fierce conflict. The Balkan states were jealous of each other and each hoped to gain territory at the others' expense.
6. At this time the European powers were fiercely competing for trade, colonies, and naval and military strength. Russia, Germany, England and Austria-Hungary each wanted to check the others' hold over the Balkans and to extend its own control. This led to a series of wars in the region and finally to the First World War. Nationalism joined with imperialism brought Europe to disaster in 1914.
7. Countries that Europeans had colonised in the nineteenth century began to oppose imperial rule. These anti-imperial movements were nationalist because they all fought to build independent nation-states, and they drew strength from a sense of collective unity formed in the struggle against imperialism. The idea that societies should be organised as nation-states came to be accepted as natural and universal.

Timeline

Important Dates and Events