One idea runs through this entire chapter, and it does two very different jobs depending on when you catch it. Sovereignty belongs to the nation, not the monarch — the idea itself never changes. What changes is what it is used for.
Born in the French Revolution of 1789, this idea started life as a citizen's claim against a king: the people, not the crown, decide the country's destiny. For the first half of the nineteenth century, that claim inspired popular movements across Europe to imagine, and then build, nation-states of their own.
Then the job it was doing changed. Once unification was won, conservative states began harnessing the very same idea to mobilise loyalty behind themselves. By the century's end, it had turned into something closer to a weapon, a force stoking rivalry between rival empires. This chapter traces one idea from a citizen's liberating claim to an empire's tool — the same idea, doing opposite work at different moments.
In 1789, the French Revolution did something no European government had done before. It transferred sovereignty away from the monarchy and placed it in the hands of a body of French citizens, who would now constitute the nation and shape its own destiny. This is the first clear expression of modern nationalism in Europe — a specific, dated legal and political transfer of who gets to decide.
An idea this abstract needed something concrete to carry it to every citizen. The Revolution built exactly that: la patrie, the fatherland; le citoyen, the citizen; and La Marseillaise, a marching anthem sung to carry the new identity into the street. Together, these symbols forged one shared national identity out of what had, until then, been a patchwork of separate, local loyalties. A village's loyalty, a guild's loyalty, a province's loyalty — all now folded into one.
The Napoleonic Code of 1804 turned the Revolution's principles into enforceable law. It abolished privileges based on birth, established equality before the law, and secured the right to property for every citizen, not just the nobly born.
Napoleon did not keep this code inside France's own borders — he exported it into every territory he conquered: Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and the German states. The Revolution's legal principles now travelled well beyond the country that had produced them. They travelled into exactly the lands that will turn out, a little further on, to have no unified nation-state of their own to carry those principles home to.
Picture a French artist, Frederic Sorrieu, producing an allegorical print in 1848 — an imagined vision of nationhood, invented rather than witnessed. In it, the peoples of Europe and America march together in one long procession past the Statue of Liberty, each nation represented, each moving toward the same destination.
This image opens the chapter's own account of European nationalism for a reason: it hands you a question to sit with. How did people imagine nationhood, and how much of that imagining shows up here? Sorrieu's procession is the chapter's standard example of that imagining, the picture nineteenth-century Europeans were painting of themselves before most of the nations in it actually existed.
Before 1848, it is worth being precise about what Europe was not yet, because the word "Germany" or "Italy" on a map of this period is misleading. What are now Germany, Italy, and Switzerland were still collections of separate kingdoms, duchies, and cantons — no single government ruled any of them as one country. Meanwhile, multi-national dynastic empires — the Habsburg empire, the Ottoman empire among them — ruled many different peoples under one crown, with no single "nation" standing behind either throne at all.
Europe's educated middle classes had a name and a programme for what they wanted instead: liberal nationalism. Three demands sat at its core — constitutionalism, freedom of the press, and national unification — bundled together with one more: the abolition of aristocratic privilege.
Notice what is bundled here: this was never only a demand to unite scattered states into one nation. It was, in the same breath, a demand to change who held power inside that nation once it existed.
Europe's conservative powers had watched the French Revolution and Napoleon reshape the continent, and in 1815 they met at the Congress of Vienna to reverse as much of it as they could. The Bourbon dynasty was restored to the French throne, and France's own boundaries were cut back, with a ring of buffer states set up around it. The thirty-nine-state German Confederation, meanwhile, was deliberately preserved rather than unified.
Restoring the old map, though, did not restore the old loyalties. The idea of the nation had already spread too far to be put back in its box by a treaty. The Congress could redraw borders, but it could not undo what 1789 had already taught a generation of Europeans to want.
Political unification was not the only route available, and Germany's own states found an economic one first. In 1834, the Zollverein, or German Customs Union, joined most of the German states together, eliminating internal tariff barriers and standardising weights and measures across all of them.
The chapter's own phrase for what this did is worth keeping exactly: economic integration preceded political unification. The Zollverein did not cause the wars that unified Germany decades later — it built the economic bond among the German states that a later political unification would simply complete.
The Vienna settlement did not hold as firmly as its architects hoped. Between 1830 and 1848, a wave of revolutions tested it repeatedly: the July 1830 uprising in France, then Greek independence in 1832. A much larger, near-simultaneous round of liberal revolutions followed in 1848, across France, the German states, Italy, and the Austro-Hungarian empire. Each wave asked the same underlying question the Vienna Congress had tried to close: who actually gets to decide a nation's fate?
During the 1848 revolutions, liberal middle-class delegates gathered at the Church of St Paul in Frankfurt with a serious, concrete goal. They meant to draft a constitution for a single, unified Germany, headed by a monarch who would answer to a parliament. It is tempting to assume that an assembly this determined, meeting this openly, must have succeeded.
It did not. The attempt collapsed when the Prussian king rejected the crown the elected assembly offered him — Europe's most sustained liberal, popular attempt to build a unified nation-state from below had failed. German unification, when it finally came, would be won by an entirely different route: conservative Prussian power.
German unification, once the liberal parliament had failed, was achieved instead by Prussia's own conservative leadership under Otto von Bismarck. His strategy, which he himself named "blood and iron," was a sequence of wars, not votes. Prussia fought Denmark in 1864, Austria in 1866, and France in 1870-71 — and the German Empire was proclaimed at Versailles in 1871.
Set this beside the failed Frankfurt Parliament and the point sharpens: Prussia's army, not a parliament's vote, unified Germany. The nation-state Frankfurt's delegates had drafted on paper in 1848 was built, two decades later, by an entirely different kind of power.
Italy's own path to unification began, like Germany's liberal attempt, with a popular vision: Giuseppe Mazzini's Young Italy movement. It stood for unification driven by popular revolution, a republican programme with no crowned head's diplomacy or army behind it. Set this vision against what actually achieved unification, next, and a pattern from Frankfurt repeats itself.
Mazzini's popular vision alone did not unify Italy. What did was Camillo Cavour's diplomatic statecraft — including an alliance with France against Austria — followed by Giuseppe Garibaldi's armed volunteer campaign, which marched into South Italy in 1860. In 1861, Victor Emmanuel II was proclaimed king of a newly united Italy.
Diplomacy, then an army, then a monarchy: Italy's unification, like Germany's, came from a pragmatic power-holder's route rather than the popular movement that first imagined it. The same shape happened twice — an idealistic popular vision giving way to whoever could actually deliver the result.
Britain's own path to nationhood looked nothing like either of these. There was no revolution here, and no war of unification. The Act of Union of 1707 joined England and Scotland to form Great Britain; after suppressing an Irish revolt, a further Act of Union in 1801 incorporated Ireland as well.
The new British state that resulted was built around one dominant English culture that absorbed the other ethnic groups within it. A slow union and absorption under an already-standing crown — unlike Italy's new monarchy forged in war, or Germany's failed parliamentary vote.
Three different routes just produced three unified or newly forged national identities — Germany's, Italy's, Britain's — and each one needed a way to make the abstract idea of "the nation" visible. Nineteenth-century Europe reached, again and again, for the same device: a female personification. France became Marianne, embodying liberty; Germany became Germania, embodying heroism.
Each figure carried her own specific attributes, and the attributes are where the meaning actually lived: broken chains, an oak-leaf crown, a sword, an olive branch, a tricolour flag. The same device — a woman's body standing in for a nation — carried a different meaning depending on which attributes she was given.
Female allegories were not the only way nationalism reached for culture. A wider movement — cultural Romanticism — cultivated the same idea through folk material: nationalists collected and published folk songs, fairy tales, and vernacular literature. They also treated folk music and dance themselves as living expressions of a nation's own spirit. The Grimm Brothers' collections of German folk tales are the best-known example; Natesa Sastri's folk-tale collections, gathered in Madras, show the same instinct at work far outside Europe.
It would be easy to finish this chapter believing nationalism is always a force for democracy and liberation. After all, that is exactly what it had been through the first half of the century, in France, in Germany, in Italy. That belief does not survive what happened after 1871.
After German and Italian unification was won, the same nationalist sentiment that had campaigned for liberty and unification turned narrow and aggressive instead. It was harnessed now by conservative governments and states for militarism and imperialism, not for the popular freedom it once campaigned for.
Nowhere did this turn concentrate more dangerously than in the Balkans, a region under the declining Ottoman Empire where competing nationalisms collided directly on the same ground. Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, and other peoples of the region each pressed rival nationalist claims on territory the weakening Ottoman state could no longer hold together. This was a region of small, contested nationalisms about to matter far beyond its own size.
Nationalism, once it had aligned itself with the imperial rivalry running between Europe's great powers, led to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Trace the whole arc back to where this chapter began. The idea that entered European history in 1789 as a citizen's claim against a king had, by 1914, become bound up instead with the ambitions of empires against each other. One idea carried two opposite jobs across a single century.
Nationalism entered European history in 1789 as a claim that sovereignty belonged to the citizen, not the crown. That idea inspired liberal, popular movements to imagine, and then try to build, unified nation-states through the first half of the nineteenth century.
But the routes nations actually took to unification differed sharply from what their own popular movements first imagined. Prussia's conservative wars settled Germany, not a liberal parliament's vote. Italy came together through Cavour's diplomacy and Garibaldi's popular campaign, a mixed route that fell well short of the republic Mazzini alone had imagined. For Germany and Italy both, the idealistic, popular vision that opened the story rarely turned out to be the hand that finished it.
Britain needed no such vision to begin with — its neighbours were simply absorbed, slowly, under a crown that was already standing.
By the century's end, that same idea of the nation — once a citizen's liberating claim — served narrower, more aggressive purposes instead. Its rival claims in the Balkans sat among the sparks of a war that consumed the whole continent. The idea's own arc was now complete, from one citizen's claim to one empire's weapon.