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 elected by a body of active citizens.
• Hymns were written, oaths sworn and martyrs honoured, all in the name of the nation.
• One central administration made the same laws for every citizen in the country.
• Customs duties and dues inside the country were ended, and one set of weights and measures replaced the many in use.
• Regional dialects were discouraged, and the French of Paris became the language of the whole nation.

The revolutionaries also declared that France had a mission to free the other peoples of Europe from despotism, which meant helping them to become nations. As news of events in France spread, students and other educated people in European cities started Jacobin clubs, and their meetings and campaigns made ready for the French armies, which went into Holland, Belgium, Switzerland and much of Italy and Germany in the 1790s. So the revolutionary wars carried the idea of nationalism abroad.

Napoleon and the Civil Code of 1804

Napoleon Bonaparte came to power in France, and in 1804 he made himself emperor. The republic therefore ended in a monarchy, but Napoleon saw his work as modernising the administration of the countries he ruled, and he put in place many of the revolution's principles. These were the changes he brought, in France and in the territories he controlled.

The Civil Code of 1804, usually known as the Napoleonic Code, ended privileges based on birth, made everyone equal before the law and secured the right to property, and it was carried into the regions under French control. In the Dutch Republic, Switzerland, Italy and Germany, Napoleon made administrative divisions simpler, abolished the feudal system and freed peasants from serfdom and manorial dues. Guild restrictions were removed in the towns. Transport and communication systems were improved, and peasants, artisans, workers and new businessmen enjoyed a new-found freedom. Businessmen and small producers in particular saw that the same laws, standard weights and measures and one national currency would make it easier to move goods and capital from region to region.

The reaction to French rule

In the areas he conquered, the reaction of local populations to French rule was mixed. At first the French armies were welcomed as bringers of liberty in Holland and Switzerland and in cities such as Brussels, Mainz, Milan and Warsaw. The welcome soon turned to hostility, because the new administration brought no political freedom with it, and higher taxes, censorship and forced service in the French armies, which were sent to conquer the rest of Europe, seemed to outweigh what the reforms gave.

Napoleon's armies were defeated at Waterloo in 1815, which ended his rule. Yet the idea of the nation, and of a citizen with rights under a constitution, had spread across the continent and could not easily be reversed.

How the nation was pictured

The nation is an idea and does not have a body that can be drawn, so artists personified it. In the French case the nation was imagined as a woman, Marianne, who stood for the ideals of liberty and the republic. Her features were drawn from the symbols of the revolution: the red cap, the tricolour and the cockade. Statues of Marianne were put up in public squares, and her image was stamped on coins and stamps, so that the people had a common figure to recognise.

A series of four prints made in 1848 by the French artist Frédéric Sorrieu shows how people at the time imagined a world of democratic and social republics. In his picture, the peoples of Europe and America pass in a long train by the Statue of Liberty, each carrying its national flag, and they offer homage to her. The image reveals the belief that nations would live as equals once monarchies had fallen.

Why the revolution mattered to later nationalism

The French Revolution taught three things that later nationalists used. First, a state belongs to its citizens, not to a ruler. Second, a common language, laws and symbols can make a people feel like one community. Third, a nation can be created by a deliberate effort, with schools, flags, hymns and a central administration. The revolution also taught the opposite lesson, that armies fighting in the name of liberty could be experienced as foreign conquerors, and that a nation's freedom had to come from its own people.