CBSE Class 10 Social Science

## Europe before nation-states Before the middle of the nineteenth century there were no nation-states in the sense we now use the word. Europe was a patchwork of kingdoms, duchies, empires and small states, and the people of central and eastern Europe lived under autocratic monarchies whose subjects did not share a language or a culture. The Habsburg Empire, ruled from Vienna, held German-, Magyar-, Czech-, Polish-, Italian- and other-speaking peoples under one crown. What tied them together was loyalty to the emperor, not a sense of belonging to one nation. A **nation-state** is a state in which most of the citizens, and not only the rulers, come to feel that they share a common identity and history. That feeling had to be built, and the French Revolution of 1789 was the first great attempt to build it. ## The French Revolution of 1789 France in 1789 was a monarchy in which political power lay with the king. The Revolution transferred sovereignty from the monarch to the body of French citizens, and it announced that the people would form the nation and shape its destiny. From the start the revolutionaries used a set of measures and symbols to create a feeling of collective identity among the people. - The idea of **la patrie** (the fatherland) and **le citoyen** (the citizen) stressed that a community of equals lived under one constitution. - A new French flag, the tricolour, replaced the royal standard. - The Estates General was renamed the National Assembly and was…