The Revolutions of 1848 and the Making of Nation States in Italy and Germany

• Nationalisms: Political (France) vs. Cultural (Germanies)
• liberal nationalism of Carl Schurz (Reminiscences excerpt on Bonn in 1848)
• German cultural nationalism
  • Leopold von Ranke, historian, expressing the meaning of German cultural nationalism in 1836:

    A national spirit lived within each German despite the absence of a unified German state:

    “Germany lives in us. We enact it . . .we cannot escape it. The mysterious something the informs the lowest among us precedes any form of government and animates and permeates all its forms.”  

• divine right nationalism of Giuiseppi Mazzini (1805-1872) another version of cultural nationalism in the absence of a unified state
• authoritarian nationalism of Otto von Bismark (1815-1898), "realpolitik" (realistic power politics)
• Liberalism: John Stuart Mill
• Conservatism: Joseph de Maistre, Metternich
  • Christian Revival: Liberty Trees versus Penetential Crosses during the Restoration (1820s-1830s) (Civry)
  • Christian missions abroad (Saguna)
• Democratic Republicanism: Victor Hugo, the author of Les Misérables (1862)
• Socialism and Communism:
  • Utopian Socialism: Robert Owen, St. Simon
  • Revolutionary socialism: Marx and Engels
• Feminism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Flora Tristan, the Pankhurst Sisters

Revolutions of 1848: liberal, nationalist movements from "below" that failed

• Germanies: Bonn, Berlin, Dresden, Stuttgart, Munich, and Baden
  • Frankfurt Assembly, 1848-1849
• Austrian Empire: Vienna, Prague, Budapest (Louis Kossuth)
• Italy: Milan, Florence, Rome, and Palermo
  
• See the account by Roberts, including the chronology of events, pp. 402-05

National Unifications from "above" that succeeded through war and diplomacy

• Italy 1859-1870
  • Camillo Cavour (1818-1861)
  • Victor Emmanuel II King of Piedmont and then of Italy
  • Garibaldi
  • 1861 Kingdom of Italy created
  • 1866 Annexation of Venetia enlarges the kingdom
  • 1870 Incorporation of Rome and Papal State completes the unification
  • Map
• Germany 1860-1871 Map
  • Otto von Bismark, the Iron Chancellor (1815-1898) of Prussian and then the German Empire. Unification by "iron and blood."
  • 1860 annexation to Prussia of Schleswig-Holstein seized from Danmark with Austrian approval and support (See Map.)
  • 1866 Austro-Prussian War results in the incorporation into Prussia of the northern German states into what was called the North German Confederation (1866-1870); Prussia's alliance with Italy, which was struggling to recover Venetia from Austria, provoked the war; southern German states allied themselves with Austria.
  • 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War, orchestrated by Bismark, resulted in the unification of the remaining German states (Bavaria etc.) into the Second German Empire in 1871, proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on January 18, 1871.
  • 
  • The harsh terms of the Treaty of Frankfurt ending the war required France to cede the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine and to pay an huge indemnity ( about 1 billion dollars) within three years, which it did. These terms created a longing in France for a war of revenge. This became part of the background for World War I.

   

States make Nations

• State-supported schooling & the institution of mass education
  • state-supported primary schooling in Prussia (1833) Spain (1857), Italy (1859), England (1870), France (1881-2)
  • national curriculum in united Germany was established in 1872. Every student in the new state studied the same material, the same history, etc.
  • In France, the instructors who were trained in state schools in very large numbers beginning the 1880s, were installed in new and existing schools in all parts of the country, including remote villages. The national curriculum was uniform and regimented to the extent that it was said that all students were each day on the same page of the state supplied textbooks.
  • [See Roberts, pp. 459, 461, 475-76, 422]
    • See map of the statistics on rural primary education in 1876-77, a primary source that indicates the keen and growing interest of the newly-established Third Republic in spreading secular education. The defeat by the Prussians in 1870-71 brought an end to the Second Empire of Napoleon III (nephew of Napoleon) and the establishment of a new Republic. Part of the defeat, leaders believed, was the result of Prussian school masters inculcating in their charges both better education and a fundamental sense of German national patriotism. (Click the image below for a larger map.)
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• State-supported employment (postal service, public administration, teachers).
• Military service through conscription.
• Use of newspapers to disseminate news with a nationalist emphasis.
• Use of monuments to invoke the "glorious past" of the "nation."

Battle of Nations (1813) memorial in Leipzig Germany (started in 1871 right after the unification of Germany, but not complete and inaugurated until 1913.