CBSE Class 10 Social Science Rise of Nationalism in Europe Notes Set 05

The French Revolution and the idea of the nation

In 1848 the French artist Frederic Sorrieu drew a series of four prints imagining a world of democratic and social republics. In the first print, people of Europe and America of every age and class march past the Statue of Liberty and pay homage to it. The dream shows how strongly the idea of the nation was linked with liberty and democracy in the nineteenth century.

Modern nationalism began in France. After 1789 the revolutionaries tried to build a sense of collective identity among citizens. They replaced the king with the idea of the citizen and the nation, introduced a tricolour flag, a new national anthem and hymns, and commemorated martyrs. A central administrative system and uniform laws, weights and measures were set up for all citizens, and French became the common language of the nation.

Napoleon later brought many parts of Europe under French control. His Civil Code of 1804, known as the Napoleonic Code, ended privileges based on birth, established equality before the law and protected the right to property. It also abolished the feudal system and simplified administrative divisions. These reforms were welcomed in some areas, but heavy taxes, censorship and forced conscription made French rule unpopular.

Europe before nationalism

Mid-eighteenth-century Europe had no nation-states as we know them. Germany, Italy and Switzerland were patchworks of kingdoms, duchies and cantons, each with its own ruler, and people spoke many languages. Landed aristocrats were the dominant class. Industrialisation then created a new middle class of industrialists, merchants and professionals, who wanted liberal ideas to be put into practice.

Liberalism meant freedom for the individual and equality of all before the law, with government by consent. In economic matters it stood for free markets and the removal of state controls on trade. A step towards economic unity was the Zollverein, a customs union formed in 1834 under Prussia's lead, which abolished tariff barriers among many German states.

Conservatism and the age of revolutions

After Napoleon's defeat in 1815, the great powers met at the Congress of Vienna under the Austrian chancellor Duke Metternich. They restored the Bourbon monarchy in France, set up buffer states on France's borders, gave Prussia new territories, gave northern Italy to Austria and part of Poland to Russia. These conservative regimes were autocratic and tried to suppress criticism, so many liberal-nationalists went underground. Giuseppe Mazzini, an Italian revolutionary, founded Young Italy in Marseilles and Young Europe in Berne.

Revolutions followed in 1830 and 1848. The Greek war of independence against the Ottoman Empire (settled by the Treaty of Constantinople, 1832) gained support from Europeans who admired ancient Greece. The 1830s were also years of hardship: population growth, unemployment, competition from cheap machine goods and high food prices led to uprisings. In 1848 liberal middle classes demanded a constitution and national unification, and the Frankfurt Parliament drafted a constitution under a monarch. It failed because the Prussian king rejected the crown and troops dispersed the assembly. Women had taken part actively but were denied voting rights.

Unification of Germany and Italy

After 1848 nationalism passed from liberal democrats to conservative state power. In Germany, Prussia's chief minister Otto von Bismarck used the army and bureaucracy to unite the country through wars against Denmark, Austria and France. In January 1871 King William I of Prussia was proclaimed German Emperor at Versailles.

Italy was divided into seven states, with Sardinia-Piedmont the only one ruled by an Italian princely house. Cavour, its chief minister, led the movement with diplomacy and a French alliance, while Giuseppe Garibaldi led his Red Shirts into southern Italy and won peasant support. In 1861 Victor Emmanuel II became king of united Italy. Britain's path was different: the English parliament took power from the monarchy in 1688, and the Act of Union (1707) joined England and Scotland, with Ireland forcibly added in 1801.

Imagining the nation and its limits

Artists personified nations as women: Marianne for France and Germania for Germany. Romanticism, folk songs, language and poetry also stirred national feeling, as when Polish identity survived through music and the Polish language. In the late nineteenth century nationalism became narrower and intolerant. The Balkans, where the Ottoman Empire was breaking up, became a zone of rivalry among Slav nationalities and great powers, which helped to bring on the First World War.

Worked examples

1. Why did the Frankfurt Parliament fail? It was dominated by the middle class, which ignored workers and artisans, and it depended on the Prussian king, who refused the crown and sided with other monarchs; the army then dissolved it.

2. Name three steps taken to create a French national identity. The tricolour flag, the new anthem and hymns, and uniform laws and a common French language.

3. Why is Bismarck called the architect of German unification? He built up Prussia's army and won three short wars, against Denmark, Austria and France, which led to the proclamation of the German empire in 1871.

Quick Check Questions