CBSE Class 10 Social Science The Rise Of Nationalism In Europe Notes Set 03

These CBSE Class 10 History notes for Chapter 1 The Rise of Nationalism in Europe cover the social background of early European nationalism, liberal nationalism and the Zollverein, the Vienna Congress and the revolutionaries, the age of revolutions (1830-1848), Romanticism, the unification of Germany and Italy, how artists visualised the nation, and the unusual case of Britain.

The Making of Nationalism in Europe

In the mid-eighteenth century, there was no single country called Germany, Italy or Switzerland. Each was instead divided into kingdoms, duchies and cantons, each with its own ruler. Eastern and Central Europe were ruled by autocratic monarchs over vast territories with very diverse populations, who did not think of themselves as sharing a common culture or identity — making political unity difficult to achieve.

The aristocracy and the new middle class: European society was broadly divided along these lines. The aristocracy — a small but powerful, hereditary, landowning class — was united by a shared way of life across regional and national boundaries, owning both country estates and townhouses. After the decline of feudalism, a new middle class came to prominence: traders, industrialists, businessmen and professionals, along with a new working class. It was among this educated, liberal middle class that ideas of national unity gained popularity, especially after the abolition of aristocratic privileges.

Liberal Nationalism

The word ‘liberalism’ comes from the Latin root liber, meaning free. Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on liberty, the consent of the governed, and equality before the law; since the French Revolution, it had come to stand for representative government through a parliament. Liberalism's demands varied across three spheres:

Social sphere: liberals fought for individual freedom and equality before the law, seeking to free society of class privilege and birth-based status, and called for the abolition of bonded labour.
Political sphere: liberalism stood for equality and freedom, and for government founded on the consent of the governed.
Economic sphere: liberalism promoted free markets and the removal of government restrictions on the movement of capital and goods.

In the 18th century, as trade expanded, a strong middle-class demand grew for an end to obstacles such as numerous currencies and uneven systems of weights and measures — for example, a unit of measurement called the elle had different values (5.7 cm in Frankfurt, 55.1 cm in Mainz, 53.5 cm in Freiburg), making trade and calculation slow and confusing. To overcome such obstacles, theZollverein, a customs union, was formed in 1834, initiated by Prussia and joined by most other German states. It abolished tariff barriers and reduced the number of currencies from over thirty to two, aiming to bind the German territories together economically as a step toward national unity.

New Conservatism After 1815

After Napoleon's defeat in 1815, European governments were driven by a spirit of conservatism — a political philosophy that stressed tradition, established institutions and customs, and preferred gradual change over sudden upheaval. Conservatives supported monarchy, the Church, social hierarchy, property, and the family.

Representatives of the major European powers — Britain, Russia, Prussia and Austria, who had together defeated Napoleon — met at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to draw up a peace settlement for Europe. Its main aim was to undo most of the changes Napoleon had brought and to restore Europe's monarchies. The Bourbon dynasty was restored to power in France, which lost the territories Napoleon had annexed. New states were set up, including the Kingdom of the Netherlands (which included Belgium); Genoa was added to Piedmont; Austria gained control of northern Italy; Russia was given part of Poland; and Prussia received part of Saxony.

The Revolutionaries

After 1815, fear of repression drove many liberal nationalists underground, and secret societies sprang up across Europe to train revolutionaries and spread their ideas. Most revolutionaries opposed monarchy and fought for liberty and freedom, seeing the creation of nation-states as a necessary part of that struggle. The Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini founded two such secret societies: Young Italy, in Marseilles, and Young Europe, in Berne, whose members were young like-minded men from Poland, France, Italy and the German states. Mazzini believed that a true nation-state could survive only when power rested with the people, not with monarchs or the aristocracy.

The Age of Revolutions: 1830-1848

In Italy and the German states, where conservatives worked to consolidate power, liberalism and nationalism became closely associated with revolution; revolutionary groups also formed within the Ottoman Empire, Ireland and Poland, usually led by liberals from the educated middle-class elite.

The July Revolution, 1830: the first major uprising broke out in France in July 1830, when liberal revolutionaries overthrew the restored Bourbon king and installed a constitutional monarchy — a monarch bound by a written constitution — with Louis Philippe at its head. This revolution, in turn, inspired the people of Belgium to break away from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, of which they had become part in 1815.

The independence of Greece: Greece had been part of the Ottoman Empire since the fifteenth century. In 1821, inspired by the growth of revolutionary nationalism elsewhere in Europe, the Greeks began their struggle for independence, supported by Greeks living in exile and by many West Europeans who admired and sympathised with ancient Greek culture; poets and artists glorified Greece and mobilised public opinion in its favour. The English poet Lord Byron organised funds for the struggle and went to fight in it himself, dying of fever in 1824. The Treaty of Constantinople, in 1832, finally granted Greece its independence.

The Romantic Imagination and National Feeling

Romanticism was a cultural movement that sought to develop a particular kind of nationalist sentiment. Romantic artists and poets generally criticised the glorification of reason and science, focusing instead on emotion, intuition and mystical feeling, and tried to build a sense of a shared collective cultural past as the basis of the nation. The German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder argued that true German culture was to be found among ordinary people, expressed through folk songs, folk poetry and folk dances, which he believed carried the true spirit of the nation. Collecting and celebrating such vernacular, local folklore was meant not only to recover an ancient national spirit, but also to carry the nationalist message to a largely illiterate public. The composer Karol Kurpiński, for example, celebrated Poland's national struggle through his operas and music, turning folk dances like the polonaise and mazurka into nationalist symbols; after Russia occupied Poland, the Polish language was forced out of schools and replaced everywhere by Russian, making language itself a site of nationalist resistance.

Hunger, Hardship and Revolt

The 1830s brought great economic hardship to Europe, driven by rapid population growth that put pressure on jobs, as there were more job-seekers than employment available. People migrated from rural areas into overcrowded city slums, and small urban producers faced stiff competition from cheap, machine-made imports from England. Where aristocratic privilege still survived, peasants continued to owe feudal dues and obligations, and the enclosure of land stripped many farmers of the ability to grow their own food. In 1848, severe food shortages and widespread unemployment brought people onto the streets of Paris; Louis Philippe, head of the constitutional monarchy, fled France. The National Assembly declared France a republic, granted suffrage (the right to vote) to all adult men above 21, guaranteed the right to work, and set up National Workshops to provide employment. These upheavals affected the social, economic and political life of the whole continent, and ushered in a long period of hardship and conflict.

The Revolution of the Liberals and the Frankfurt Parliament

Liberal middle-class men and women pushed for a nation-state built on parliamentary principles: a constitution, freedom of the press, and freedom of association. In Frankfurt, a large number of political organisations gathered to elect an all-German National Assembly; on 18 May 1848, 831 elected representatives marched to the Church of St Paul in Frankfurt to take their seats in the new Frankfurt Parliament. The constitution it drafted envisaged a German nation headed by a monarchy answerable to parliament; the imperial crown was offered to Friedrich Wilhelm IV, King of Prussia, but he rejected it and joined other monarchs in opposing the elected assembly. The middle class dominated the Parliament, and a large number of women took part in the wider liberal movement, forming their own political associations and founding newspapers, even though they themselves were still denied the right to vote in the Assembly's own elections.

Though conservative forces managed to suppress the liberal movements of 1848, they could not fully restore the old order: in the years that followed, the autocratic monarchies of Central and Eastern Europe began introducing reforms — including the abolition of serfdom and bonded labour in both the Habsburg and Russian territories — that Western Europe had already adopted before 1815. The 1848 revolution itself, though, ultimately failed: Friedrich Wilhelm IV refused the imperial crown, the Frankfurt Parliament was dissolved, ruling princes crushed the uprisings with military force, and the German Confederation was restored by 1850. After 1848, nationalism in Europe increasingly drifted away from its earlier association with liberalism and revolution. The Habsburg rulers, for their part, granted greater autonomy to Hungary in 1867.

The Making of Germany

Nationalist feeling continued to spread among middle-class Germans, who in 1848 tried to unite the German Confederation's many regions into a single nation-state under an elected parliament. This liberal initiative was suppressed by the combined forces of monarchy and military, backed by Prussia's large landowners (the Junkers); from then on, Prussia took the lead in the movement for German unification. The process demonstrated the dominance of Prussian state power, and the new state placed strong emphasis on modernising currency, banking, and the legal and judicial system, with Prussian practices often becoming the model adopted across Germany.

German unification was led by Prussia's chief minister, Otto von Bismarck, with the help of the Prussian army and bureaucracy, over three wars fought between 1864 and 1871, ending in Prussian victory. In January 1871, in a ceremony at Versailles, Kaiser Wilhelm I of Prussia was declared German Emperor. Unification established Prussian dominance over the new German Empire, which went on to adopt common currency, banking, and legal and judicial systems across its territory.

The Making of Italy

Like Germany, Italy too had a long history of political fragmentation among dynastic states, with only Sardinia-Piedmont ruled by an Italian princely house; the north was under Austrian Habsburg control, the centre (the Papal States) was ruled by the Pope, and the south (the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies) by a Bourbon dynasty. Mazzini's secret societies, Young Italy and Young Europe, provided early inspiration for unification. Italy's unification was then carried out chiefly by three leaders:Count Camillo Cavour, chief minister of Sardinia-Piedmont, who used skilled diplomacy with France to defeat Austria and liberate northern Italy; Giuseppe Garibaldi, who led a corps of armed volunteers known as the Red Shirts to defeat the Bourbon rulers of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and liberate southern Italy; and King Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont, who took over the Pope's territories and completed the unification of the peninsula. In 1861, Victor Emmanuel II was proclaimed King of a united Italy, and in 1871, with the French withdrawal from Rome, the city became the capital of the new Kingdom of Italy.

Visualising the Nation

Artists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries faced a particular challenge: while a ruler could easily be represented through a portrait or statue, a nation had no single person to depict. Nations were therefore commonly personified as female figures — not meant to represent any real woman, but to give an abstract idea concrete, visual form. In France, this figure was named Marianne; in Germany, Germania.

In 1848, the French artist Frédéric Sorrieu prepared a series of four prints imagining his vision of a world made up of ‘democratic and social republics’. In the first print, the people of Europe and America march in a long procession, paying homage to the Statue of Liberty, carried by a female figure holding a torch of enlightenment in one hand and the Charter of the Rights of Man in the other, while the broken remains of absolutist symbols lie scattered on the ground. The peoples of the world are shown grouped as distinct nations, identified by their flags and national costumes, with the USA and Switzerland leading the procession, followed by France, the German states, Austria, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Lombardy, Poland, England, Ireland, Hungary and Russia, while Christ, saints and angels look on from the heavens, symbolising fraternity among the nations of the world.

The French philosopher Ernst Renan argued against the idea that a nation is simply defined by a shared language, race, religion or territory. For Renan, a nation is instead the outcome of a long shared past of effort, sacrifice and devotion — a heroic history and common glories form the social capital on which the idea of the nation rests, and a shared will in the present, built on shared memories and a shared desire to achieve still more together, are the real conditions of being a people. He described a nation's existence as "a daily plebiscite" — a continuous, ongoing choice by its people — and argued that the existence of nations guarantees liberty, which would be lost if the world had only a single law and a single master.

Such allegorical images used recurring symbols, each with its own meaning: broken chains for being freed; a breastplate bearing an eagle, symbolising the strength of the German empire; a crown of oak leaves for heroism; a sword for readiness to fight, often shown with an olive branch wound around it, for a simultaneous willingness to make peace; the black, red and gold tricolour, the flag of the liberal nationalists in 1848 (banned at the time by the rulers of the German states); and the rays of a rising sun, symbolising the beginning of a new era.

The Strange Case of Britain

The primary identities of the people of the British Isles were originally ethnic ones — English, Welsh, Scottish or Irish — each with its own distinct cultural and political traditions. There was no single ‘British’ nation before the eighteenth century. As the English nation grew in wealth and power, it extended its influence over the other nations of the islands: the Act of Union of 1707 between England and Scotland created the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain’, effectively allowing England to dominate Scotland, and the new British Parliament was henceforth dominated by its English members. After the failed Irish rebellion of 1798, led by Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen, Ireland was forcibly incorporated into the United Kingdom in 1801. Symbols of this new British identity — the Union Jack as the national flag, "God Save the King" as the national anthem, and the English language — were actively promoted across the new United Kingdom, while the cultures of the other nations within it became subordinate to this new, dominant ‘British’ identity.