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]
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    • 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.
• Universal franchise
• Suppression of competing institutions: Bismarck's Kulturkampf to reduce the influence of the Catholic Church and Catholic Center political party; his efforts to weaken the socialist political party (SPD); the French 3rd Republic's effort to weaken the influence the Catholic clergy and to make secular state-sponsered education mandatory.
• 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.