The Age of Revolutions: - As conservative regimes tried to consolidate their power, liberalism and nationalism came to be increasingly associated with revolution in many regions of Europe such as the Italian and German states, the provinces of the Ottoman Empire, Ireland and Poland. These revolutions were led by the liberal-nationalists belonging to the educated middle-class elite, among whom were professors, school- teachers, clerks and members of the commercial middle classes. The first upheaval took place in France in July . The Bourbon kings who had been restored to power during the conservative reaction after , were now overthrown by liberal revolutionaries who installed a constitutional monarchy with Louis Philippe at its head.
‘When France sneezes,’ Metternich once remarked, ‘the rest of Europe catches cold.’ The July Revolution sparked an uprising in Brussels which led to Belgium breaking away from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. An event that mobilised nationalist feelings among the educated elite across Europe was the Greek war of independence. Greece had been part of the Ottoman Empire since the fifteenth century. The growth of revolutionary nationalism in Europe sparked off a struggle for independence amongst the Greeks which began in .
Nationalists in Greece got support from other Greeks living in exile and also from many West Europeans who had sympathies for ancient Greek culture. Poets and artists lauded Greece as the cradle of European civilisation and mobilised public opinion to support its struggle against a Muslim empire. The English poet Lord Byron organised funds and later went to fight in the war, where he died of fever in . Finally, the Treaty of Constantinople of recognised Greece as an independent nation.
. The Romantic Imagination and National Feeling The development of nationalism did not come about only through wars and territorial expansion. Culture played an important role in creating the idea of the nation: art and poetry, stories and music helped express and shape nationalist feelings. Let us look at Romanticism, a cultural movement which sought to develop a particular form of nationalist sentiment.
Romantic artists and poets generally criticised the glorification of reason and science Fig. — The Massacre at Chios, Eugene Delacroix, . The French painter Delacroix was one of the most important French Romantic painters. This huge painting ( .19m x .54m) depicts an incident in which , Greeks were said to have been killed by Turks on the island of Chios.
By dramatising the incident, focusing on the suffering of women and children, and using vivid colours, Delacroix sought to appeal to the emotions of the spectators, and create sympathy for the Greeks. and focused instead on emotions, intuition and mystical feelings. Their effort was to create a sense of a shared collective heritage, a common cultural past, as the basis of a nation. Other Romantics such as the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder ( - ) claimed that true German culture was to be discovered among the common people – das volk .
It was through folk songs, folk poetry and folk dances that the true spirit of the nation ( volksgeist ) was popularised. So collecting and recording these forms of folk culture was essential to the project of nation-building. The Grimm Brothers: Folktales and Nation-building