The Rise of Nationalism in Europe

This chapter traces how nationalism emerged in nineteenth-century Europe and replaced the multi-national dynastic empires with nation-states. It opens with Frédéric Sorrieu's 1848 vision of a world of democratic and social republics, then shows how the French Revolution of 1789 gave the first clear expression of nationalism and how Napoleon carried its ideas abroad through the Civil Code of 1804. It explains the patchwork of dynastic states, the rise of the liberal middle class, and what liberal nationalism, economic liberalism (the zollverein) and the new conservatism of the Congress of Vienna (1815) stood for. It follows the age of revolutions from 1830 to 1848 — the July Revolution, the Greek war of independence, Romanticism, and the 1848 revolution of the liberals and the Frankfurt Parliament — and then the unification of Germany (Bismarck) and Italy (Cavour and Garibaldi), the strange case of Britain, the visual allegories of the nation (Marianne and Germania), and finally the turn of nationalism towards imperialism and the Balkan tensions that led to the First World War. It is a foundational chapter of the Class 10 History (India and the Contemporary World II) Board syllabus.