Europe: A History (167 page)

Interestingly, the abstract nature of music invited a wide range of reaction to the same scores. A composer like Chopin could appeal not only to listeners who were well attuned to his political message but equally to others who were totally oblivious. There was no contradiction between the national and the universal aspects of his genius. The deliciously ambiguous emotional qualities of his bitter-sweet Polish melodies were woven into alternating moods of rousing protest and melancholic languor. For some, he translated Polish history into notes on the keyboard; for others, he conjured up poignancies of a purely personal and intimate character. As Robert Schumann said of perhaps the most famous piece by Chopin, the ‘Revolutionary Étude’, Op. 10 No. 12, it spoke of ‘guns buried in flowers’:

In the world of opera, national myths were yoked to stupendous sounds to form musical dramas of unequalled power. An audience which has watched and listened, riveted to their seats, during a performance of Mussorgsky’s
Boris Godunov
or Wagner’s
Ring
lose all concern for the rights and wrongs of history. National operaties is a field where the magnificence of the music only seems to be enhanced by the unlikeliness of the libretto,
[NIBELUNG] [OPERA] [SUSANIN] [TRISTAN]

That the growth of nationalism was closely intertwined with the modernization of European society is undeniable. Indeed, some historians of the Marxist persuasion go so far as to insist that the correlation was absolute. ‘The basic characteristic of the modern nation and of everything connected with it’, writes one of them, ‘is its modernity.’
³¹
This sort of assertion spoils a good case by overstatement. Political oppression could be every bit as effective as socio-economic modernization
in stimulating modern nationalism; and there are several instances of precocious national movements which were well developed long before modernization took hold. What the modernizing processes certainly did do was to change the nature of existing nationalisms, and to expand their social constituency beyond all previous limits. ‘The Transformation of Nationalism’ in the prime era of Europe’s modernization after 1870 was a reality which few would want to refute.

Nationalism also underlined an important distinction between ‘civilization’ and ‘culture’. Civilization was the sum total of ideas and traditions which had been inherited from the ancient world and from Christianity, it was grafted onto the native cultures of all the peoples of Europe from the outside, to form the common legacy. Culture
(Kultur
in the German sense), in contrast, grew from the everyday life of the people. It was made up from all that was specific to a particular nation: their native speech, their folklore, their religious deviations, their idiosyncratic practices. In earlier times, civilization had been extolled and culture despised. Nationalism now did the opposite. National cultures were extolled, and common civilization downgraded. The educated, multilingual, cosmopolitan élite of Europe grew weaker; the half-educated national masses, who thought of themselves only as Frenchmen, Germans, English, or Russians, grew stronger.

Theorizing about Nationalism has not abated with time. Among the ideas in vogue in the late twentieth century, one would have to consider the above-mentioned sociological link between Nationalism and Modernization: the psychological concept of the Nation as ‘an imagined community’, to which uprooted or newly educated individuals chose to belong: and the notion of ‘Invented Tradition’—the mechanism whereby nascent nations created their own mythologies. It is interesting to note that each of these very contemporary ideas can be found in the writings of a little-known Polish socialist and social theorist, Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (1872–1905).
³²

The passions of nationalism inevitably fuelled conflict. Almost all parts of Europe contained ethnic minorities whose popular nationalisms were bound to clash with the state-led nationalism of the authorities. In Britain there were three potential separatist movements; in the Russian Empire there were seventy. Even in the German Empire, which was remarkably homogeneous from the ethnic point of view, long-running conflicts emerged in the former Polish provinces, on the Danish border in Schleswig-Holstein, and in Alsace-Lorraine,
[ELSASS] [SLESVIG]
Important conflicts also arose between leaders of the national movements and leaders of liberal or socialist opinion who either disagreed with nationalism
per se
or objected to the priority given to national goals.

Russia was a case in point, where the imperial state-building of the Romanov dynasty came into conflict not only with the non-Russian peoples of the Empire but also with the popular nation-building sentiments of the Russians themselves. In the old Muscovite heartland, the ‘Empire’ lived uneasily alongside the ‘Nation’. Imperial institutions based on the court, the nobility, and the bureaucracy operated like a foreign occupying power within a largely peasant society with which
they had little in common. Emancipation of the serfs only postponed the frustrations of this peasant nation, whose life was based on the village commune and the Russian Orthodox Church. The failure of early nineteenth-century attempts to launch a vernacular Russian Bible, which could have served as the foundation-stone of a modern national culture, has been seen as crucial.
³³

As the decades passed, nationalism frequently assumed a more truculent tone. National movements which had started as part of the liberal crusade against reactionary dynasties became frustrated when their demands could not be fully realized. Hence in the last quarter of the century, the ‘old liberating and unifying nationalism’ frequently gave way to an intolerant strain of ‘integral nationalism’. Talk began about the expulsion of minorities, and of the ‘treason’ of anyone not conforming to the nationalists’ own dogmatic definition of their community. (It was in this negative sense that the term ‘nationalism’ entered general currency in the 1890s.) Germany was to be for Germans alone, ‘Romania for the Romanians’, Ruritania for the Ruritanians.

It was in imperial Germany, perhaps, that the ideas of
Blut und Boden
or ‘blood and soil’ took deepest root. But it was in France that integral nationalism found its most coherent advocates, in the writings of Maurice Barres (1862–1923) and of Charles Maurras (1868–1952), co-founders in 1899 of the movement
Action Française
. For them, France was for Frenchmen alone, and for loyal, native-born, Catholic Frenchmen at that. Barres, Deputy for the Moselle, spent his career fighting for the return of Alsace-Lorraine from Germany. His book
Les Déracinés
(The Uprooted, 1897) gave a label to the idea of rootless and hence worthless elements of society. It would soon be turned against the Jews, amongst others.
La Colline inspirée
(1913) advanced the notion that Catholicism and true Frenchness were inseparable. Maurras took a leading role as an anti-Dreyfusard, and later as a supporter of Pétain in Vichy France. His language became so extreme that in 1926 his writings were placed on the Catholic Index.

Integral nationalism affected all the national movements of the
fin de siècle
. In addition to Germany and France, it made a deep impact in Poland, where the National Democratic Movement of Roman Dmowski (1864–1939) was very characteristic of the trend. In Italy it was inherent in the activities of the irredentists, such as Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938), who were trying to prise Trieste and South Tyrol from Austria. In Russia it led to the rejection of all who did not conform to the identification of Russianness with Orthodoxy. In Great Britain it could be observed among all who equated ‘British’ with ‘English’. In Ireland it was represented both by the stance of many Protestant Ulstermen, who saw no place in Ulster for Catholics, and by the extreme tendency among Irish Catholic nationalists, who regarded all protestants and Anglo-Irish as agents of alien domination. Among Jews it could be observed in the wing of Zionism which saw Palestine not just as a refuge for oppressed Jews but as the land for a ‘Jewish State’, where non-Jews would have to live on sufferance.

Much depended on the political environment within which the various national movements were obliged to operate. Some political theorists have been
tempted to place the ‘moderate, humane, and liberating’ forms of nationalism in Western Europe, and to lump the nationalisms of Eastern Europe into the intolerant, ethnic category.
³⁴
This classification is patently unjust. There are many instances of intolerant, ethnic nationalism in Western Europe, from the IRA to the Flemish Fatherland Front. Many national movements in Eastern Europe have included both so-called ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ elements. The labels simply do not fit. What is true is that the autocratic empires of Eastern Europe inhibited nationalism of the liberal type, encouraging violent opposition from all sources. Whereas popular nationalism was given full rein in most parts of Europe in the fifty years after 1870, many of those peoples who found themselves under the control of the Russian Empire had to postpone their hopes of liberation for nearly a century. This delay was due more to the nature of successive Russian states than to the inherent characteristics of their captive peoples.

The Italian national liberation movement was in action for three-quarters of a century before its objective was achieved in 1871. It is known as
il Risorgimento
, ‘the Resurgence’, after a newspaper founded in 1847 in Turin by its most effective leader, Count Camillo di Cavour (1810–61), Prime Minister of Sardinia. But its origins lay among the secret independence societies, among them the famous Carbonari, who launched the abortive revolts in Naples (1820), Turin (1821), and Rome (1830), and the
Giovane Italia
or ‘Young Italy’ of Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72). Mazzini, national revolutionary and prophet, spent much of his life in exile, in Marseilles, Berne, and London. He created a national ideology, roused his compatriots from apathy, and called on sympathetic rulers, like Charles Albert of Sardinia, to support them. ‘A nation’, he declared, ‘is the universality of citizens speaking the same tongue.’ In 1834 he founded an international branch of his campaign, Young Europe, which trained a network of conspirators for preparing democratic constitutions all over the Continent.

1848, the Year of Revolutions, brought Italy to the forefront of the eruptions sweeping Europe. Independent republics were proclaimed in Venice and Rome. Sicily and Naples turned on their Bourbon monarch, Ferdinand II. Charles-Albert launched a ‘Holy War’ on Austria, hoping to benefit from the revolt of Milan. All were crushed amidst the counter-attacks of General Radetzky and the merciless bombardments of ‘King Bomba’. Mazzini’s slogan, ‘Italia farà da sé’ (Italy will do it alone), had failed. His romantic associate Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–82), who had fought both in Rome and in Venice, fled to South America.

Conditions improved a decade later. Cavour’s Sardinia was converted to the Italian cause as the best means of dislodging the Austrians. After the fine performance of Sardinian troops in the Crimea, Napoleon III asked quaintly, ‘What can I do for Italy?’ and a Franco-Sardinian Pact was duly signed. France undertook to support Sardinia in the north against Austria, whilst continuing to defend the Papal States in the centre. Three wars later the game was complete. In 1859–60 the victories at Magenta and Solferino assured the success of the Franco-Sardinian attack on Austrian Italy, whilst the sensational private expedition of Garibaldi’s ‘Thousand’ redshirts assured the fell of Sicily and Naples. Plebiscites in Parma,
Modena, and Tuscany all voted for Italy; France took Savoy and Nice; Austria still held Venetia; and with French help the Pope still ruled in Rome. But in May 1861 an all-Italian parliament at Turin proclaimed Victor Emmanuel II (r. 1849–78) King of Italy. In 1866, with Austria at war with Prussia, Italy contrived the cession of Venetia. In 1870, with France at war with Prussia, Italy seized the remainder of the Papal States and confined the Pope to the Vatican. Except for the Trentino (South Tyrol) and Istria, the Kingdom of Italy was complete. Cavour was dead; Garibaldi retired to the Isle of Caprera; Mazzini, the republican, still in exile, was heartbroken. (See Appendix III, p. 1304.)
[GATTOPARDO]

The progress of the German national movement resembled that of its Italian counterpart in all essential respects. It began amidst the enthusiasm of the ‘War of Liberation’ of 1813–14 and the secret societies of the Restoration period. It met its greatest setback in 1848, when an all-German assembly was convened only to be disbanded. It reached its goal in 1871, when the King of Prussia was converted to the cause.

In the period before March 1848, known as the
Vormãrz
, the futility of the German Confederation became self-evident. Its Diet declined into little more than a court of appeal. It was still preoccupied in settling debts from the Thirty Years War. The article of its constitution requiring each of the German princes to convene a parliament was observed or ignored at will. Liberal initiative was stifled by the princes’ right to annul legislation and to call in outside assistance. In 1848–9 Germany was set alight, like France and Italy, with risings in Vienna, Berlin, Cologne, Prague, Dresden, Baden, and elsewhere. The national Vorparlament which met in St Paul’s Church in Frankfurt drew up a constitution for a future German Empire. But it could not put any of its deliberations into effect. It was deeply divided by the question of Schleswig-Holstein. It could not decide whether Germany should be confined to German ethnic territory or should include all of the Austrian Empire, which was predominantly non-German. It offered the Crown to Frederick-William IV of Prussia, who turned down an honour ‘that smelled of the gutter’. It broke up in July 1849 amidst recrimination and repression. (See Appendix III, p. 1303.)