The Rise of Nationalism in Europe
The age of revolutions, 1830-1848
Explain how culture, hardship and liberal demands drove the revolutions of 1830-1848.
1830: France sneezes. Liberal-nationalists, mostly from the educated middle class (professors, teachers, clerks, traders), led revolts across Europe. In July 1830, liberals overthrew the Bourbon king in France and set up a constitutional monarchy, with Louis Philippe as king. Metternich said: 'When France sneezes, the rest of Europe catches cold.' Soon after, a rising in Brussels led Belgium to break away from the Netherlands.
Greece wins freedom. The Ottoman Empire had ruled Greece since the 15th century. Its war of independence began in 1821. Greeks in exile helped, and so did many West Europeans who admired ancient Greek culture as the 'cradle of European civilisation'. Poets and artists rallied support; the English poet Lord Byron raised money and went to fight, dying of fever in 1824. The Treaty of Constantinople (1832) recognised Greece as an independent nation.
Culture builds the nation: Romanticism. Nations were made not only by wars but by art, poetry, stories and music. Romantic artists valued emotion and feeling over cold reason, and wanted a shared cultural past as the base of a nation.
- Herder said true German culture lived among the common people (das volk); folk songs, poems and dances showed the spirit of the nation (volksgeist).
- The Grimm brothers travelled from village to village collecting folktales, first published in 1812. They saw this, and their German dictionary, as resisting French domination.
- Poland, carved up by Russia, Prussia and Austria, survived through music (Kurpinski turned the polonaise and mazurka into national symbols) and language: when Russian was forced on schools, priests used Polish in church, and many were jailed or sent to Siberia.
Hunger and revolt. The 1830s were years of hardship: population grew faster than jobs, people crowded into city slums, small producers lost out to cheap machine-made goods from England, and peasants carried feudal dues. A bad harvest meant widespread poverty.
- 1845: Silesian weavers rose against contractors who had cut their pay; the contractor called the army and eleven weavers were shot.
- 1848: food shortages and unemployment brought Parisians onto the streets. Louis Philippe fled. A Republic gave the vote to all adult men above 21, promised the right to work, and set up national workshops for jobs.
1848: the liberals' revolution. Where nation-states did not yet exist (Germany, Italy, Poland, the Austro-Hungarian Empire), middle-class liberals demanded a constitution, a free press, freedom of association and national unity. In the German lands, 831 elected representatives met in the Frankfurt parliament (Church of St Paul) on 18 May 1848. They offered the crown of a united Germany, limited by a parliament, to Prussia's king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV. He refused and joined other monarchs against them. The middle-class members had ignored workers' and artisans' demands and lost their support. Troops broke up the assembly.
Women left out, and what changed. Women had joined the liberal movement in large numbers, formed associations and started newspapers, yet they were denied the vote and could only watch from the visitors' gallery at Frankfurt. Liberals were divided: Carl Welcker said women belonged at home, while Louise Otto-Peters wrote that 'Liberty is indivisible!'
The liberals were crushed in 1848, but kings saw that the cycle of revolt and repression had to end. So serfdom and bonded labour were abolished in the Habsburg lands and Russia, and Hungary got more autonomy in 1867.
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